Mophunquis

letter to senators feinstein and boxer

2011-07-13T17:33:00.000-04:00

Senator,

I was shocked and dismayed to hear that our Department of Defense has denied a request by the families of seven missing fishermen to dive the wreck of their charter boat.

From what I've read it's a money issue, which I find ludicrous given the circumstances.

First of all, this is the Department of Defense, the one department of the U.S. government that will never be short on funding.

Secondly, these are 7 American citizens, 2 of which are Veterans of our Armed Forces, and the DoD won't provide the opportunity to bring some closure to their families?!

As a U.S. citizen I'm embarrassed for my country today. As a U.S. taxpayer I'm frustrated to see my tax dollars not being put to use where they would be doing tremendous good.

No doubt, Senator, if one of the missing were a relative of yours, you wouldn't rest until he or she was found. However, the families of the missing 7 face the possibility of never knowing the fate of their loved ones as long as the wreck at the bottom of the Sea of Cortez remains unexamined.

When I think of the defense of our country, I think of the Marines and their famous motto, "Never leave a man behind."
It's embarrassing our Department of Defense does not espouse this motto as our men in uniform do.

Please, on the families' behalf, lobby to have the DoD dive the wreck.

In doing so, you'd also help at least one of your constituents restore his faith in his country.

Sincerely,

Todd Cincala

my friend's father and 6 others are missing at sea

2011-07-06T23:38:00.004-04:00

Please help us find them. Here's the latest news report on their story, which has made national coverage.

The families have set up a Facebook page as well as a PayPal account for any donations you can spare to help in the search effort. Here are instructions how to contribute:

We are so appreciative of everyone's support. We hate to ask, but if you are able, we would appreciate any donation to help fund our search and rescue efforts. The funds will go directly to the people on the ground.

Here's how to make a donation:

Go to http://www.paypal.com/.
You will need to login to your personal PayPal account or you will have to create your own.
Once logged into PayPal, click on Send Money tab.
In the TO: field, type FindOurFathers2011@gmail.com.

THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH!

Note: it will show that the funds are being sent to Cheryl Wong, a good friend of the family! THANKS CHERYL!

wtf bird

2011-06-27T23:43:00.007-04:00

At no time in my life before today did a bird ever fly into me.

I was walking home, up the hill from the shuttle stop at 24th and Castro, when a bird looking just like this one winged my shoulder. By 'winged my shoulder' I mean exactly that. He swooped in from behind and clipped my shoulder with his wing.

Startled I paused, catching the bird out of the corner of my eye as he flew past, before continuing up the hill. As I did, I tried to recall if I had ever been hit by a bird before.

After a moment I realized I had not. In fact, the only time I could remember even hearing of somebody being struck by a bird was in a Seinfeld episode when one flies into Elaine's head in Central Park, edifying her conviction that she had a big head, just as her boyfriend had told her. (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss does have a big head.)

Struck by the novelty of the event, I was reminded of the time I saw a squirrel fall out of a tree onto the sidewalk before me, and I was just about to put this freak occurence in the natural world on the shelf next to that one when, a block later, the same bird flew into my shoulder again.

"What the fuck, bird!" I shouted.

Fortunately I wasn't near a schoolyard when I uttered my obscenity (unlike my encounter with the squirrel) but an older lady walking her dog had just passed me, going downhill. I noticed her looking up the sidewalk at me as I spun around, trying to see where the bird had gone.

I could see that it had flown up to the eave of a house lining the street and was perched there, looking down at the sidewalk. Anticipating another dive bomb at my shoulder, I ran up the block.

Two facts that help explain my schoolgirlish reaction:

1) Whenever I remember any of my dreams (a fortunately seldom occurrence) I'm always being pursued.

2) My greatest fear is being consumed by tiny, little mouths. (The scene in Jurassic Park (2?) where the guy who likes to zap dinosaurs with a Tazer gets eaten by a pack of the little ones he zapped -- that's my worst nightmare. To be eaten by many small things. If given the choice, I'll always choose to be chomped in half by a Great White before, say, being dropped in a pool of piranha.)

As I ducked under the awning of the shop (a pet shop) on the corner of the block, I started to wonder whether it was one black bird or if I had been mistaken -- that there were two, and if so, how many more were there? Instantly Hitchcock's The Birds came to mind, and I began to wonder how safe I was seeking shelter beneath the awning of a pet shop in that case.

There was a bus stop on the corner. I dug my iPhone out of my pocket and quickly checked the bus schedule. Another wasn't due for more than 10 minutes.

I bolted across the street and crossed through the dog park there, thinking all the dogs and fetching going on might scramble a flock of birds' radar. It did. The rest of the way up the hill, every three steps turning crazy Ivans, I didn't see a single bird following me.

When I got home, my girlfriend asked if I had been wearing anything shiny. It had been my first thought once I was certain I was no longer under attack. I was wearing a black jacket, with black zippers. No jewelry, ever. Nothing reflective that would have caused a bird to spaz the way I'd seen my friend Ambrose's bird Murphy absolutely lose its shit in front of the mirror in its cage.

Now that I'm clear, and calm, I'm pretty sure it was just one bird. No evidence to suggest more. But I'm still baffled as to why I got dive-bombed. I walk the same route home from the shuttle stop every day. Was wearing nothing shiny and exciting. Can't think of any reason why I'd get hit twice in two blocks by a bird.

Unless it was trying to tell me something. Be the bird on my shoulder. The little bird that told me.

Maybe it was trying to say quit the job at Apple. Move away from San Francisco. Leave that girlfriend of yours.

Nah, I don't think so. To any of the above.

But what then could it have been trying to say?

wine in a hammock time

2010-06-09T00:14:00.004-04:00

Click here for the slideshow.

check, check

2010-05-23T18:21:00.010-04:00

I'm truly astonished by my friends who are married and/or have kids -- every single one of them -- because I cannot comprehend how they have time to do anything. Yet they do. They are able to pursue careers full-time, go out to dinner, travel on vacation and do other time-intensive shit like read novels and learn foreign languages WHILE maintaining their marital relations and/or raising their child(ren). Absolutely phenomenal.

I can't even find the time to post a blog entry each month.

This is the first weekend I've had that hasn't whipped past before I knew it. So I'm taking these moments to pause and recap all that I've been doing, knowing that the next opportunity to write a blog post won't be coming along until God knows when.

In the last month and a half, I've been spring skiing with Scott and Rob for the first time in years (here we are, at the Ice Bar on the backside of Alpine Meadows during the last weekend of their ski season.) The following weekend, I celebrated the opening of yachting season out in Tiburon with Ben and Megan, who were in town visiting from New York. After they left, I spent all day drinking Mint Juleps with strangers after going to Golden Gate Fields to place losing bets on the Derby (and spending the rest of the weekend recovering.) Then I coordinated with my brother in Manhattan to fly home to Pittsburgh to surprise mom for Mother's Day. The weekend after that, I went over to Jon and Kim's for an evening of burgers, scotch whiskey and watching their daughter Franny show off her gymnastic skills on their living room furniture. This weekend, I visited Carv and Janine to eat Three Amigos burritos and play with their son, Liam the Destructor. Next weekend, I'm off to St. Helena to spend Memorial Day in wine country with Rob and Kate.

In June I'll even have less time at my disposal. I'll be entering the MFA program at the University of San Francisco. On top of my work responsibilities and my own writing (I pushed past the 100-page mark of my memoir manuscript last week) I'll have additional critical writing to do, not to mention a shitload of reading. So I doubt I'll have much else to be writing here in the coming months. Maybe I'll post an occasional critical writing assignment, or a chapter or two from the memoir.

poultry night

2010-03-21T02:24:00.010-04:00

I wanted to begin this blog post with a picture of the sky here on Twin Peaks. Alas, my camera sucks. Every attempt of mine to capture an image of the sky in all its awesomeness failed as badly as the crap picture of the city lights from my window in my previous post.

Instead, I lifted this shot from davidyuweb's flickr photos to give you some idea of what I'm talking about...

...it's the kind of sky you get when a pissed-off wizard is standing on a mountaintop.

I thought this image of the Twin Peaks skyline characterized my mood after returning from an open mic poetry reading a few weeks ago. When I moved into my new place, I vowed to seek out the various open readings in the city. The first I attended was at a bar in the Mission District on my way home from work. Oddly enough, I knew the bartender tending bar that evening -- Zoe. I knew her from when I last lived in the city almost ten years ago. Then, she worked at the Mauna Loa in Pacific Heights. Running into her was odd luck, and kismet that it happened to be on poetry night. She offered a perspective on poetry that I found interesting.

"We call it 'poultry night'," Zoe said, referring to her and the other bartenders.

"Why is that?"

"Oh, I don't know," she said.

While talking to her, I got the sense that this deprecating name didn't have to do as much with a dislike for poetry as it did with the less than tipping-friendly crowd that it attracted.

"You know what you should do? You should serve wings during 'poultry night'. I'd like to see poets try to read their verse while their audience was sucking away at chicken bones," I said. "It would separate the wheat from the chaff."

"You know, some of the poets are fun to hear," she said, "but most I'd rather not listen to."

"I hear what you're saying," I said.

After participating in one of the more forgettable poetry readings I've attended, I found myself thinking about Zoe's perspective and the reasons underlying its salience. There have been many essays written about the "death of poetry" or the "problem with poetry." They pose arguments in a myriad of meandering vectors that end up pointing toward one commonality -- either an implicit or explicit critique of our post-post-modern culture (Should I add another 'post-' to that? I don't know. I haven't been on a campus in a couple of years.) for either a) not being able to appreciate the nuanced art poetry is, and/or b) discouraging would-be poets from the practice by enticing our best and brightest creative minds in other directions. How many great poets have we lost to the advertising industry? Or screenplay writing? Or iPhone app development?

While reading an older essay of Stephen Dobyns, I began to wonder if the problem doesn't lie in how we try to cultivate an interest in poetry. Having had this interest cultivated at an early age, this is not a question I've really ever considered. I've been consumed with a nonfiction project these last few months and removed from thoughts about poetry, though. When I decided to return, having let too much time pass since I'd last read a poem or about one, I picked up Dobyns' essay. I read him with the understanding that his love and knowledge of poetry would inspire me as it had done before. So I was shocked to find myself disagreeing with him vehemently upon reading his analysis of the French poet, Jean Follian.

The poem he analyzes is "The Women Who Sew Livery" (in translation by W.S. Merwin). Here's Merwin's translation of the poem:

When night falls
the women who sew livery
stop and wait to be given the light they wish for.
The town is covered with snow,
it is then that they sing
and the passer-by hears in the birdless street
the warm clear voices rising
from those girls who make clothes for valets
and he goes off sad and alone
to phantom dinners.

I've read and re-read this poem (and typed it out here, as well) and for the life of me, I can't set this poem alongside the poetic genius Dobyns ascribes to it. The way he reads into it, you'd think this was a masterpiece -- and I would, too. Back in the day when I was a student, if Dobyns was my professor and discussed this poem in class the way he does in this essay ("The Passerby in the Birdless Street" in his Best Words, Best Order) I would think I was lacking in some crucial regard, that I didn't have the insight or capability to comprehend what this great poet Follian was expressing in his simple verse.

Fact is, this poem does nothing for me. And it's not because I don't understand it. (I understand it all too well after Dobyns' essay.) It's not lost to me through Merwin's translation (I know Merwin translated it as well as anyone could). I can place myself in the context and time period of the poem. I even agree with the argument Dobyns' is making in the essay -- that poetry educates the emotions, and in doing so provides us an invaluable service. It serves to remove human beings from their own existential isolation by linking them in an empathetic way through language to a better understanding of the human condition. It helps us understand others and ourselves better by tapping at our root humanity.

But I think Follian's poem sucks. I think many better poems could have been substituted in its place and provided stronger examples for his argument. When I was a student, I would be inclined to write a paper refuting the praises Dobyns touches this poem with (for example -- the line "and he goes off sad and alone" -- tell me that there isn't a creative writing professor, anywhere, that wouldn't red-marker the fuck out of this line if submitted by one of his or her students.)

That line is unimportant, though, so is the poem and Dobyns' reading of it; what's important is what I realized about a lot of the education in the art of poetry that I received -- that since the form more than any other is governed by the emotive, what is 'cliche emotive' and 'nuanced emotive' is entirely a subjective argument. I've had some colossally shitty poetry professors who've argued like lawyers for poems guilty of poetic atrocities, and I nodded my head in class to their arguments. And I wasn't the only one. Perhaps this is what sucks about poetry -- its arbitrariness -- but it's also what initially attracted me to it -- the fact that it is a lawless proving grounds where, like blog writing, anything goes. Maybe now that I'm getting older poetry seems too lawless; perhaps a sheriff needs brought into town. Total stinking dogshit can be argued to be sweet, sweet French pastry, and eventually you just want to give up arguing. You break down, throw up your hands and concede, "OK I'll eat this dogshit pastry now." I think this is what underlies the problem with poetry and why our night is disparaged as 'poultry night'.

Éirinn go brách

2010-03-17T23:03:00.007-04:00

While driving home this Saint Pat's I was pining for some clover.

A parking spot opened in front of my neighborhood bar, and I pulled over.

Had a Guinness, a corned beef sandwich and listened to Where The Streets Have No Name.

Struck up a conversation with a shamrock who fell off her bar stool in pain

Either because she was too drunk, or I was too boring and sober.

photo courtesy of bitchdujour.com

Now that I've settled into my own, into a new apartment in a new city, I finally have the time to do more than simply post photos with a caption as I've done with my last couple of blog postings.

(Btw, this is my desk, overlooking the city lights at night. I've always yearned for an apartment with this kind of view. Hopefully I'll be able to afford this place long enough to someday take it for granted.)

I intended to write this post about a rare thing for the poetman -- poetry. However, I had to comment upon something I heard on the radio before I get around to doing that.

I now reside in San Francisco and work for a dot.com in Mountain View 40 miles south on the Peninsula. Due to my commute, I've found myself listening to NPR in the mornings. If there is any benefit to an hour-long drive to work everyday, it's listening to National Public Radio's broadcasting.

After having worked for major network's news station in Pittsburgh, I appreciate the quality of NPR's news reporting all the more. Not only is it not sensationalized to a nauseating degree (as is all of mainstream news media reporting) but it is legitimately intelligent. They broadcast news the way it should be. You step out of the car and something you've heard during their news broadcast remains with you afterward. Unlike mainstream media that attempts to replicate an action/adventure cinematic experience in its newscast (thus the emphasis of "live" or "action" or "breaking" news) NPR gives something so rare in media today -- a perspective that is conducive to philosophical thought. You're left thinking about where you stand personally, on one issue or another, in relation to society, culture and/or the world at large.

Immediately a few news reports come to mind:

There was an insightful interview with a North Korean national who escaped that fucked-up part of the world. What I found most interesting in the interview is that the individual did not bemoan the squalid and repressive conditions of his homeland, but rather the shattering of the illusion under which he had lived for so long and taken for granted. He believed -- BELIEVED -- that the North Korean standard of living was superlative to the rest of the world's, especially the decadent West's. Only upon leaving did he realize he had lived his life under the guise of propaganda and saw, for the first time in his life, what he had taken to be true had all along been false. It's a perspective you don't get from a mainstream broadcast. It was authentically emotional. Shakespearean. Human.

There was a NPR reporter covering the catastrophe in Haiti who, in mid-newscast, lapsed and showed something so rare in news reporting -- a fissure in his objective reporting demeanor and (gasp) an genuine emotional reaction to the sheer magnitude of the suffering and despair there, epitomized in the sight of a bandaged girl whose broken body waited in a long queue of wounded outside a medical facility. Listening to Jason Beaubien's report, I felt moved in a way no other reporter's reporting has ever been able to.

This particular blog post, though, was inspired by something else -- something that hit closer to home than North Korea or Haiti, personally. It was a report on a survey taken of young people in America; its findings supplemented previous studies that had established reading and writing is on the decline among our young people (17 and under).

This latest survey focused specifically upon blog reading; the results of the survey showed even this type of reading and writing has fallen out of favor with young people. Respondents to the survey complained that blogs not only took too much to write but also took too much time to read. Overwhelmingly, our young people prefer to express themselves -- and read the expressions of others -- through social networking sites and through texts between their cell phones.

If this is the case, really ... how much less dire are our straits than any third-world country's?

you are the wind beneath my ears

2010-01-18T03:09:00.001-05:00

2010

2010-01-02T10:58:00.002-05:00

...and we still don't have flying cars.

We. Suck.

be good for goodness' sake

2009-12-19T10:40:00.008-05:00

Except for the rarest of instances, when I happen upon a good or a service that perfectly corresponds to a family member, friend or lover, and it's within the acceptable price range for giving to that person, and available for purchase then and there, and not on back-order, so when you present the present, you get to see its revealing in that person's company -- you get to experience the immediacy of his or her reaction to the gift, which confirms exactly how correct you were in thinking -- yes, that is the perfect gift for x ... except for those rare instances, I fucking hate shopping.

And I know how very original I am for expressing this sentiment during the holiday season. This is the time of the year when you hear even people who were born to shop say how much they hate it -- even people for whom a "Born To Shop" T-shirt would make the perfect gift outlined in the scenario above.

But most people don't really hate shopping. People rail against the crowds in the stores, the traffic, the hundred-million other things they have to be doing that have yet to be done... but these don't get to the heart of the problem. In fact, with online shopping, there's no excuse to bitch about these things anymore. Anything can be obtained and shipped for free from Internet retailers for the most part during the holiday season. Anyone who doesn't opt to do so, and bitches about how terrible their experience at the mall was, needs the opposite of a sympathetic ear. It's as indefensible to bitch about your shopping experience at the mall as it is to bitch about how cold you are after doing something like shoveling your driveway with nothing but your slippers on.

But people can legitimately bitch about the struggle of trying to buy perfect gifts for those nearest and dearest to them. Because it is hard. It requires effort, and there's an undeniable pressure in making the right selections. Even for those who are easiest to shop for. Because the perfect gift requires insight, creativity... it's when shopping transcends shopping and becomes art. And art's tough to make... or, at least, make well.

For those family members that are farther removed, you have justifiable reason to bitch about the compulsory nature of holiday gift-giving. Though you see these people only once a year at the family holiday get-together, you've got to buy something for them. Ask anyone visibly stressed in the final shopping days of shopping, and after sighing, they'll say something along the lines of "I still have to get something for Uncle Joe, my Aunt Audrey, Dave and Lorrin ... and Ryan, I almost forgot Ryan. What do you get for a six-year-old boy nowadays, anyway?"

In response to the holiday absurdity, a group exists -- the members of which all fly into a pre-designated city each Christmas season dressed in Santa's best and carouse, creating "santanarchy" by behaving in very, unSanta-like ways. You can learn more at SantaCon.info.

I would likely be one of SantaCon's regular attendees if not for the fact I'm compelled to return to my parents' house each year. It is something I look forward to doing -- in large part because we don't buy one another Christmas gifts. It's a relatively firm holiday pact. No one buys anyone else presents because, if you do, you make everyone else feel like an asshole. And making your family members feel like assholes is, well, just not in the spirit of the holiday, unless perhaps your family stars in its own reality TV show.

That doesn't mean we don't unwrap gifts, though. The unwrapping of gifts has been a tradition we've held onto, and though it has waned since the years I was looking forward to things like Star Wars figures and new video games, that joy is still there.

My mother goes through a closet full of drug company giveaways she and my father hoarded whenever they would attend some drug conference as a tax-free holiday. Things like Immodium mousepads, plastic Prilosec paper clip holders, Zantac solar-powered calculators, etc... Each year my mother spends hours wrapping this junk up to look like authentic presents and puts it all under the Christmas tree. Then, bombed on nog and wine at the tail end of our annual Christmas Eve celebration, we tear into the gifts under the tree, sardonically crying out how shit like the Viagra oven mitt is exactly what we'd been hoping Santa would bring.

hmb

2009-11-04T13:47:00.024-05:00

I first saw the acronym for Half Moon Bay on a white, oval-shaped bumper sticker -- the same kind you've perhaps seen with the "OBX" for North Carolina's Outer Banks. (I hate seeing the OBX stickers, especially on cars nowhere near the East Coast let alone North Carolina.)

My favorite of these stickers indicates an affiliation with Pittsburgh -- it reads "N'@" which refers to the superfluous Pittsburghese colloquialism, "n'at." It is used with amusing frequency among native Pittsburghers. Here it is in context:

"What are yunz guyz doin' this weekend?"
"I dunno... maybe goin' dahntahn for the Three Rivers Arts Festival n'at."

(The "n'at" is an abbreviation of the phrase, "and all of that." So, in this context, "n'at" would translate as "and all of that which is associated with the Three Rivers Arts Festival (e.g. eating street food, listening to live local music bands and strolling through the artists' vendor tents pursuing the same local artwork you see every year at the Arts Festival).")

Strangely enough, shortly after seeing this bumper sticker and thinking of "N'@" in context, I attended the Half Moon Bay Art & Pumpkin Festival. It was among the first of the things I did upon my arrival to Calif., and the least memorable given its striking similarity to the Three Rivers Arts Festival in Pittsburgh. I suppose these festivals are the same everywhere -- lots of local residents mulling about, looking at local artwork and listening to local bands who lack the talent necessary to shed their "local" designation.

Unless they get moist for enormous gourds and/or have a sexual attraction to being stuck backed-up in traffic for hours as the population of a tiny beach town swells to 200k+, I don't see what compels those who flock to the festival year after year. (By the way, pumpkin-flavored beer = gag.)

I'm more optimistic for the next big event on the horizon here -- Mavericks. For a span of 24 hours, the Pacific Ocean churns out 30+ foot waves off the coast of Half Moon Bay. Surfing's creme de la creme wait on standby for the maverick waves, ready to travel to HMB at a moment's notice once they start crashing sometime between Halloween and Thanksgiving each year.

I've been warned not to get my hopes up, though. It is not as much of a spectator event as one might think. The waves break on a reef about 1/4 mile offshore so, I presume, without some high-end optics there won't be much to watch except the surfers being towed out to the waves. (Since 1/4 mile is a long paddle to catch a wave, jetskiers tow the surfers out to catch them.)

I don't really need to see Mavericks; mere proximity to the ocean is enough for me. My hosts' Rob and Kate live in an oceanside housing development. You can see the Pacific from their living room window, beaming in the sunlight and brooding in the moonlight. Lately, it's been rumbling at night as its cauldron churns in Mavericks' birth pangs.

My hosts' community is adjacent to the Ritz-Carlton HMB, and my favorite activity is strolling down to the cliffside hotel to watch the sunset over the Pacific. Cloud banks on the horizon refract its light, making its orb appear analog in its last moments. No longer round, it looks like a tiny pyramid on the horizon, then a dot that finally blinks over the edge.

On the weekends bagpipe music accompanies the sunset, and a crowd of hotel guests gathers along a fence at the cliff's edge, drinks hanging in hand. What's most striking about these Pacific sunsets is the immediacy with which the sun finally disappears into the ocean. It speeds up suddenly at the very end, and is gone. There is a solemnness to the hotel guests as the horizon fades to black, and they walk back from the cliff edge. It's not just the somber tones left in the air by the bagpiper, but also an unconscious association made between the sunset and the human condition ... or simply sadness that a day of vacation has come to an end.

Though the sun is gone, the ocean remains, pulsing at the dark shore. It's this sense of a large mass in constant motion that I like about proximity to the ocean -- it curbs the disturbing stillness of night and pushes you with a bit more urgency into wakefulness the next day. Sometimes it presses into your sleep, leaving you contemplating the unfathomable in the morning.

my small breasts and i

2009-10-09T00:06:00.034-04:00

I've been meaning to write about a couple of my friends' novels (Man Martin's Days of the Endless Corvette and Jamie Iredell's Prose. Poems. A Novel.). However, I'm on the verge of relocating west, and I'm busy with the many details involving the act of relocating, one of which prompted this blog post.

In California, I'll be staying with some good friends who had inspired previous blog posts (see umbrolli cutco and the wizardry of toto). In preparation for my visit, I decided to watch some BBC America so that I don't go through the television-viewing equivalent of "the bends" as I shift from my predominantly American sports-related TV watching to my hosts' particular viewing preferences. (As a guest in someone's home, it's really the very least you can do.)

While doing this, I came across a BBC documentary that shares the same name as this blog post. The documentary centers around a group of British women and the difficulties they have in living with their small breasts.

One is a petite Asian IT professional in her late 20s who approaches resolving her breast issues in a ridiculously proactive way. She opts not to consider breast augmentation surgery (which she is quick to say she would have no problem affording if she so chose to do so) in favor of using a vacuum pump apparatus in conjunction with herbal supplements in order to enlarge her bust. She takes her herbal (I love how the Brits pronounce the 'h' in 'herbal') supplements daily and affixes the pump apparatus (consisting of two plasticine cups attached by tubes to a vacuum-generating machine that looks like a cable box) to her tits while she sleeps at night. She lives with her boyfriend, who is "supportive" of his girlfriend's quest for bigger breasts, despite the fact they currently sleep in separate beds due to her nocturnal attachment to her breast pump.

She laments the inability to cuddle with her bf at night and the nuisance of the pump apparatus. As an IT professional who travels on business trips frequently, she talks about the inconvenience of carrying the added luggage of the apparatus (which weighs 7 kilos) on her trips and having to explain its function to airport personnel when passing through security. However, she is committed to not having the body of a pre-pubescent teen so she deals with these problems because of the encouraging results she's seen. A great deal of her portion of the documentary is footage of her standing in front of her bathroom mirror, trying to ascertain how much breast mass she has gained from her regiment.

Another cleavage-deficient woman on the show is in her early 20s and is one of the more attractive women I've seen. If she was a few inches taller, she would be indistinguishable from a professional model -- an occupation for which a large bust is not considered an asset at all. Regardless, she is disgusted with her "little girl's" body, so much so that she is considering registering with the Web site, myfreeimplants.com, where women who don't have the money to buy breast implants get donations from men who do, in exchange for photos and letters chronicling their breast enlargement experience. (Btw, I am not making this shit up. Go ahead and look at the Web site yourself.)

Before registering, though, she visits a boob doctor to become more acquainted with the breast augmentation procedure. He recommends an ideal cup size for her skinny frame and gives her instructions on how to simulate the experience of owning a larger set of knockers. According to his instructions, she boils a pre-determined amount of couscous and dries it out. After allowing it to cool, she divides the couscous into two mounds and packs them each into a piece of hosiery, which she then ties off, snipping away the excess hosiery with scissors, leaving her with two faux implants to put in her bra. These allow her, pre-surgery, to become accustomed to the weight of carrying the extra boobage, as well as gauge reaction to her new beamers while walking around in public.

The camera follows her through the streets of London, sporting her homemade implants in a tight top. They not only look real, and huge, but the knots where the hosiery has been tied off make her seem like she has hard, thumb-sized nipples, as well. Her faux bust proceeds to stop traffic. Giggling, she points out the gawkers and is all too amused by how her couscous-enhanced blockbusters are disrupting the pedestrian street scene.

Up to this point, the documentary has been nothing but supportive and understanding of these women and their particular struggles with their body image issues. Here, though, it finally suggests the ridiculousness of these girls' obsession with their lack of tit. As she walks down the street -- shaking her fake howitzers and turning heads left and right -- nonchalantly, she says that this, of course, is not why she wants bigger boobs. This kind of attention is an unwanted side-effect, she says, at which point the driver of a van pulls over to the curb and asks her if she has a boyfriend.

All the while, the makers of the documentary have chosen the Stone Roses song, "I Wanna To Be Adored" as the soundtrack playing through this segment. For those of you unfamiliar with the song, its lyrics consist of the following:

I don't have to sell my soul / He's already in me. / I don't need to sell my soul. / He's already in me. / I wanna be adored. / I wanna be adored. / I wanna, I wanna / I wanna be adored. / I wanna, I wanna / I gotta be adored.

I had planned to wrap up this post by asking how these attractive and otherwise intelligent women could become so deluded that they see themselves as ugly because they lack a robust bust? Is it a personal obsession? Are they damned, as the Stone Roses song suggests, with their vanity attributed to the Devil (He) inside of them? Or is the superficiality and materiality of our postmodern society to blame for these women not being able to see themselves for the beauties that they are?

Then I realized that I was making an assumption in this questioning -- that these women are, in fact, beautiful. One could argue they are not, and that presupposition would entail a different line of questioning.

However, I personally could never make such an argument, and I realize it is because of a superficial bias all my own -- I am entirely too attracted to hearing British women talk about their breasts, big or small, to speak about them objectively. (Btw, there is another BBC documentary "My Big Breasts And Me" dealing with the flip side of the coin.)

I always found the British accent to be alluring, but when discussing this topic of conversation in particular, it's simply irresistible. Perhaps I need help with this infatuation as much as they do. Maybe there's a Web site out there for me to turn to.

g-20

2009-09-23T07:09:00.014-04:00

What made leaving the news station easy was the thought of returning to California. What made it even easier was the Group of 20 summit.

When the White House announced that Pittsburgh was selected as the host city for the G-20 summit, not only did the White House press corps laugh but the news station also got its panties in a bunch at the prospect of what was to come. Unlike the swine flu and Jacko's death, the G-20 summit is not a blockbuster national story that the station will have to spin to localize. It's an international blockbuster, and all Pittsburgh's. Its biggest story ever... until, of course, the next biggest story ever comes along.

It was a slow, moving freight train I saw coming in the distance, and I waited, and waited, until the end of August, and then proceeded to step out of the way. It's just now rumbling by.

After I left the news station, I tuned out completely. I didn't pick up a newspaper except to read the sports section. I didn't watch the news, nor visit the station's Web site to see what's been happening. (I didn't write any blog postings since that time, either. Work elsewhere -- on finding a new job, on writing a memoir -- is more responsible for my blog negligence, though.)

Now that I've stepped aside, I've begun slowly to read the newspapers again, and I'm thinking the G-20 summit may just live up to the hype it's receiving. I've read and heard some wild reports of things to expect from the protesters who have converged upon Pittsburgh. Previous meetings of the Group of 20 have provided a venue for protest groups such as The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army to voice their deliciously insane opinions.

David Cheskin/AP

Bands of protesters are apparently congregating in camps in the city's parks like bands of Merry Men, awaiting the conference and their chance to do their warped Robin Hood impersonations for an international audience. I've read numerous businesses -- Starbucks, Target, Whole Foods, Trader Joe's -- are being targeted for various corporate policies or opinions expressed by corporate officers. Based on prior G-20 summits, they'll be throwing balloons filled with piss and shit at the minimum wage workers in these businesses, in an effort to affect change in their corporate practices -- thereby proving to all you anti-Darwinists out there just how similar we, in fact, are to our monkey cousins.

My old boss mentioned that he'd heard city police officers have been instructed, while on patrol, to look out activity in the basements of abandoned homes where anarchists are reportedly hosting bomb-making and shiv-fashioning classes for their acolytes.

I have to remind myself how quickly uninteresting even the most exciting story becomes once it becomes your job and ceases to be a spectator event you can, at any moment, get up and walk away from. The allure of the G-20 consequences -- both positive and negative -- makes me forget this. What a potential boon for the city! How potentially catastrophic if, among the piss-and-shit throwers, there's a bonafide Lex Luthor who intends to unleash some grand-scale wickedness for all the world to see!

In all likelihood, though, the world's leaders will come and go from the city, and the pluses and minuses of their visit will add up to close to zero. There will be no boon to herald on high, nor catastrophe to lament. But the news will try to make it seem like it was one way or the other, regardless.

Fortunately I no longer have to bother -- I can sit back, watch (or not watch) and hope for the best while I busy myself with my relocation West.

tax-free shopping. and bears.

2009-08-17T11:03:00.002-04:00

My friend found this poster on the wall in a London tube station.

(wtf?)

the death of michael jackson

2009-07-21T09:19:00.029-04:00

Step aside swine flu. As far as over-hyped headline news goes, Jacko's death has no peer. The station bent over backwards trying to localize this mega-event. We got local Jacko fan reaction throughout the city immediately following his death. We got video of local mourners contributing flowers, letters and old album covers to a makeshift memorial set up outside the Mellon Arena -- the venue where Michael Jackson's last performed in the city. We got sound from a woman who had been at the show (back in 1990-something) and how it changed her life forever. We also got sound with a local DJ speaking about his iconic status and speculating there would never be an individual artist more influential in pop music. We also interviewed a couple who had tickets to see his next scheduled performance in London and how, with his death and the concert's cancellation, their year is now ruined.

Before Jackson's memorial service, we got our mike in front of Jackson's personal trainer, Lou Ferrigno, who just so happened to be in town for some sort of health-awareness event, but the Hulk was too distraught by the news to comment upon the tragedy. We covered Jackson's memorial service in Los Angeles live along with every other local news station, as well as live-streamed the video on our website. We got same-day fan reaction from university campuses and Hill District barber shops and from the owner of a guitar store who provided good video of an impressive collection of Jackson memorabilia. We got a before-and-after exclusive with a local resident who won the lottery for a ticket to Jacko's memorial service. Days later, she was still wearing the wristband needed to access the pen of humanity from which she viewed the memorial and, with tears in her eyes, told our reporter she had no intention of ever removing it.

Some might accuse me of being insensitive by referring to Jackson by his derogatory nickname "Jacko," and they might be right, but not because of any particular animus toward the King of Pop. Granted, I've never been a Michael Jackson fan, even before a team of plastic surgeons did his bidding and turned him into an effeminate, aracial marionette. Even before the pedophilia fly flew into his soup.

(I'd like to repeat what the comedian Ron White had to say about the pedophile allegations against Jackson. He told a stand-up audience that Jackson slept at night with a life-sized doll of a Boy Scout in his bed. White mentioned that if it became public knowledge that he (White) slept with a life-sized doll of a naked woman in his bed, people would think he was fucking it. And they'd be right.)

Even if I had been so thrilled by Thriller and dreamed so ardently of Billie Jean that I could look past his freakishness, I still wouldn't be a MJ fan any longer -- in large part because I am working on the front line of one of the networks responsible for over-sensationalizing his death, and I am more privy than most to the scope of the ludicrousness surrounding it.

Here's a fun fact -- for days after the memorial, we had a link up on our Web site to the Los Angeles Mayor's Office Web site where you could make a donation to help the city of Los Angeles pay for Jackson's memorial service. They received somewhere in the neighborhood of $19K in donations from Jacko fans via the Web site. Reportedly, it cost $47K just to provide lunch for those participating in the memorial service the day of the event. $47K for lunch alone.

When asked by co-workers if I donated money to help pay for the memorial, I told them I refused to on the grounds that the city had chosen to go with a 24 karat gold coffin for Jacko. If they had chosen a more reasonable 18 karat coffin, I said I would have been more amenable to making a donation.Oddly enough, there were some co-workers of mine who did not immediately perceive that I was joking when I said this.

To see how worked up so many people are about Jacko's death makes me think I am lacking something essential in my makeup. There is a capacity I apparently do not have, and perhaps if I did have this capacity, I wouldn't think our society is as flat-out demented as it is leading me to believe.

So I've sat and thought about Jackson and the phenomena that inspire all this grief. This thought process led me to scroll through Jackson's discography, back to the days before he was King of Pop when he was only 1 of 5, and I became conscious of the fact that a calendar year was attached to each album. Taken as a whole, his discography spanned the history of most of his fans' lives. The fans that prostrate themselves before his image at curbside memorials are those who grew up with his music and see their lives in relation to it. Each album in his discography is a dot plotted on their own life's time line. They are touchstones as relevant to them personally as they are collectively to his fan base. This is why album sales spike upon a popular musician's death -- not only is there an urge to relive the artist (now dead) through his music (which survives) but there is also the urge of the fan to embrace one's own historicity occasioned by the artist's death.

In this light, one can view the event as an opportunity for an individual to reflect upon one's life in a society that offers fewer and fewer of such moments of introspection. For a short while, the inexorable march forward of the present pauses, maybe even opening a large enough window of time to do something like write a poem. And that's never a bad thing, regardless how trite the poem might be.

the wizardry of toto

2009-07-09T08:54:00.020-04:00

Of the possible trips I could take now in life, which would give me cause to recall my first sexual experience, a trip to the bathroom would seem the most unlikely.

It is the most ordinary trip that can be taken and, thus, hardly an occasion to provoke the same conflicting emotions your first time having sex did. The jump-out-of-your-skin excitement. The crawl-into-a-hole nervousness. I remember feeling as if I had to wrestle past two people in the hallway before I could pass through the bedroom door. I was a wreck by the time I slipped between the sheets with Wendy as a teenager. In retrospect, I’m amazed I was able to conquer my emotions and get down to the business of losing that which is never to be found again.

Maybe a trip skydiving for the first time, or even para-sailing would possibly recall that tense thrill. But a trip to the bathroom? No chance. No fucking way.

That was before I was introduced to my friend Rob’s new toilet, the Toto Neorest.

I mean that exactly as I say it -- Rob escorted me into his bathroom and introduced me to the toilet, like we were at a cocktail party. The Neorest automatically raised its lid as I approached, as if to say hello.

Neanderthal man retreats before the obelisk, innately fearing that which he doesn’t understand, and I stepped back away from the Neorest with his same apprehension.

Rob proceeded to rattle off the Neorest's features: the proximity detector, the seat warmer, the wall-mounted control panel, and the conspicuous lack of a toilet paper dispenser.

Warily I stepped back into the Neorest's proximity so Rob could show me each button on its control panel and describe its function. As he did so, I came to understand why there was no need for a toilet paper dispenser. The buttons controlled a jet stream of water that shoots up from the rear of the toilet basin; they regulate the intensity of this stream, which can also be adjusted to pulsate or oscillate according to personal preference. Once the jet stream had washed your bottom clean, there was another button to control a drying mechanism from inside the basin, again adjustable to one’s preferences.

I asked about a button on the control panel that illustrated a jet stream shooting at a reverse angle -- from the front of the basin backwards. Rob mentioned this was ‘for the ladies’ and recommended that I not push it. (Later, I would be tempted to ... but, in the end, I'd be able to restrain myself. My struggle with the temptation reminded me of the following classic Ren & Stimpy clip:)

He did recommend that, as a Neorest novice, I should use the ‘soft’ jet stream setting. If I was feeling daring, I was welcome to use the ‘regular’ stream, though he cautioned I might find it a bit intrusive. I was also encouraged to play with the buttons adjusting pulsation and oscillation if I felt like experimenting.

“If at any time you feel uncomfortable with what the Neorest is doing,” Rob said, “you can press this large, orange button for manual shutdown.”

The fact that Neorest could possibly do something to my ass that necessitated installation of a ‘panic’ button compelled me to step back away from it again. I declined Rob’s offer to ‘take her for a spin’ and, later that evening after dinner, opted to use the good ol’ American Standard in his home’s downstairs bathroom.

However, the next morning, after some strong coffee, I found myself standing outside the Neorest's bathroom doorway. To say my nervous excitement was analogous to that of my first sexual experience would be (admittedly) hyperbolic, but a similar feeling was there, albeit muted.

But that was where any similarities between the two experiences ended. There was nothing similar about the two afterward. In fact, I found myself wishing that my first sexual experience had been as gratifying as that with the Neorest.

With its lid opening upon my entry into the bathroom, and its seat warm to greet my ass cheeks as I sat down, my apprehension passed quickly. Neorest put me at ease that first time together in a way Wendy never had even attempted. I had remained tense in her company throughout our mutual deflowering.

And after I was through, Neorest knew exactly what to do. On the recommended 'soft' setting, its jet stream of water was just forceful enough to get the job done. What is truly amazing is that it hit its target with laser-guided precision from the outset, with no need for calibration. Nary a trickle of water misguidedly splashed a butt cheek. Really, I cannot stress enough how impressed I was by its accuracy. The drying mechanism was sufficient, too. I had to dab my backside with a little tissue afterward, but that hardly detracted from the experience.

Neorest did its job professionally and tenderly, and made my first experience shitting with it a memorable one. It now makes me wish I had my first sexual experience with someone other than Wendy, an older woman who knew what she was doing, maybe a prostitute even.

dick swinging in wind

2009-06-18T20:20:00.034-04:00

I'm planning a trip to California. Each time that I do, I think back to my first time there. I drove from New York to San Francisco with Carv, my college roommate sophomore year, and I'll never forget driving-thru an In-And-Out Burger outside Hercules(, Ca.) and hearing, for the first time, the voice of the intercom attendant ask me, "You want fries with that, dude?"

I think of how, over lunch, I asked Carv's brother Thomas what to do in case of an earthquake, and he instructed me to head for the nearest exit at the first twitch of a tremor. As fast as humanly possible, he said in all seriousness, knocking aside children and the elderly as necessary. He told me to find an open space outdoors, away from anything that could topple upon me, and curl up in the fetal position until the shaking stopped.

I think of when I challenged Carv's friends' each to come up with a single image that best captured the essence of CALIFORNIA. The most memorable answer: a pick-up truck filled with lawn mowers and Mexicans.

And I think of my very first excursion upon visiting the San Francisco peninsula. Our mission objective stood atop a cliff off Highway 1. There were NO TRESPASSING and U.S. MILITARY signs all over the place, but not a soul around. Just an abandoned military bunker built into the cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It was one of several such installations built by the military, fearing a mainland attack after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

(I found this picture online, taken in the '70s or '80s, of a WWII bunker off Hwy 1. It might be the one Carv and I sought out, but if not, it's close enough to give you an idea.)

It may seem a strange excursion choice for Carv to suggest to a guest visiting the West Coast for the first time. However, it was totally in line with Carv if you knew him. One of the things that I always admired about him was the way he tends to militarize anything he does. For example, in college, we didn't go to the supermarket; we went on a grocery acquisition mission. To go check out a party was a keg reconnaisance sortie, etc ... Any action, once militarized, carried that much more weight of purpose. There was the illusion of lives in the balance in every activity. In short, it made even stupid shit seem important.

Also, it may have been that this first choice of excursions was meant to dash the notion of San Francisco that I'd had -- that most have -- as it being the gay nexus of the universe, more gay than even Vassar campus. Nothing could be farther from gay than visiting an abandoned military installation, right?

Or we may have (probably) just been drinking beforehand and thought it was as cool a place as any to check out with a good buzz going.

And it was cool. Imagine looking out through a hole in the bunker wall, sized to the diameter of a howitzer's barrel, and see pristine Pacific blue. And looking out and imagining what the soliders manning the bunker must have been on the lookout for -- the Japanese navy massing on the horizon during WWII.

Fucking cool.

Like the shitstupid sophomores we were, we decided it'd be awesome to climb down to the base of the cliff and see if there were any sea lions or tortoises swimming in the rocks below. Dressed in shorts, T-shirts and Tevas, we proceeded down a cliff face that, in retrospect, demanded repelling gear. We got about a third of the way down before we realized we couldn't go any further. And when we started to climb back up, we realized it was even more difficult to go back up than continue going down.

So we scaled the face of the cliff sideways until its steepness relented, and slowly but surely, down we went. The sun was cooking us against the rock, and fatigue was setting in, but Carv solidered on like he was a commando assailing Hitler's Eagle's Nest, and I fed off his conviction. I tried to ignore the sound of the waves slamming against the cliff below. Having only been to beaches in New Jersey and North Carolina before then, I wasn't used to hearing how fiercely the ocean interacts with a cliff. And I certainly wasn't accustomed to seeing this interaction from 60 or so feet above, scarily over my shoulder just beyond my sandal heels.

At the base of the cliff there was scrub brush and seaweed through which we scrambled and, like two frogmen, emerged upon the beach. Only then did I experience what I imagined California to be like-- the cloudless sky blue, a strip of beach wending down along the coast, the ocean lashing at its flatness with a tidal pulse.

Except no people. I imagined on such a perfect day, people would flock to this place. But except for a few people off in the distance, no one was taking advantage of this deserted island-grade stretch of beach. When I mentioned to Carv how I'd be down here swimming every day, he encouraged me to take off my sandals and walk along the water. Only then did I realize it was brutally cold. Carv explained the water current along the California coast originated in the Aleutian Islands and, being Alaskan, was fucking cold ...

which reminds me of a joke told by Carv's brother ...

A polar bear and his son, a polar cub, are sitting on an ice floe in the Arctic Ocean, and the cub says to the bear, "Daddy, am I a polar bear?"

The bear looks at his son, smiling. "Of course you are. We're both polar bears."

Some time passes, and the son turns to his father again, pulling at his fur. "Daddy daddy, are you sure I'm a polar bear?"

"As sure as sure can be!" the bear laughs. "You're my son. I'm a polar bear; you're mother's a polar bear. So that makes you a polar bear, too."

Some more time passes. Once more, the son pulls at his dad's fur. "Daddy daddy, are you really sure I'm a polar bear?"

"Yes!" the father exclaims, exasperated, "Not only are your mother and I polar bears, but our parents -- your grandparents -- were polar bears, too. And their parents before them! And their parents before them!

"For Neptune's sake why ..." the father begins to ask, calming himself down, "Why do you keep asking this question? What makes you think there's even the slightest possibility that you are not a polar bear?"

The cub looks up at his father.

"Because, daddy, I'm fucking cold."

... so, Carv was explaining to me how the ocean didn't warm up until you got farther south down the coast of California. We were making our way down the beach, and when I looked up next, the beachgoer we'd seen earlier in the distance walking toward us was now pretty much on top of us.

I don't remember anything more about the beachgoer, except to say that he was a dude who was obviously in shape by the tone of his muscles -- and that his dick was swinging like a rope in the ocean breeze as he passed us, smiling.

Then, as if they materialized out of thin air, like in the old SNL commercial for Bud Gay, naked dudes were everywhere on the beach. Naked dudes lying on beach towels. Naked dudes throwing a frisbee. Naked dudes rubbing suntan oil into one another's shoulders ...

Carv and I went from speed-walking to a flat-out sprint in less time than it took for a swinging dick to swat both inner thighs. We ran as if naked dudes were raining down upon the beach from above, parachuting with their dicks flapping like weather socks in the wind as they descended.

When we finally left the gay beach in a cloud of sand, found the staircase to the road above and climbed into Carv's car and drove away, I don't remember exactly what I said to Carv. Something along the lines of ... "Is this the first place you take all your friends who've never been to California?"... or "No, you were right about San Francisco ... it doesn't hold a dick in the wind to how gay Vassar is."

Whatever I said, though, of this I'm sure -- it wasn't nearly as funny as Tom's polar bear joke.

squirrel falling out of tree

2009-06-02T08:48:00.009-04:00

Walking home from the nearby Giant Eagle supermarket this morning, I saw a squirrel fall out of a tree. It fell directly in front of my path, exactly one concrete square ahead of me on the sidewalk. And it fell on the concrete from a low-hanging branch, with a fur-muffled thwack.

(This squirrel photo was actually copyrighted
by a douchebag who spends his free time
photographing squirrels and chipmunks.
On principle, I refuse to credit him here.)

I laughed audibly. I don't particularly like squirrels, ever since Vassar, where they roamed the campus without fear and, more irritatingly, with a sense of entitlement. However, my laughter's source was not in malice. I had no wish for a large predatory bird (a Giant Eagle?) to swoop down and snatch the fallen rodent. Nor did I find joy in the small animal being hurt, because it wasn't. In a blur of brown fluff, it righted itself and scurried off uninjured, for the base of the tree from which it had fallen.

Rather, I laughed because I looked in its rodent eyes and saw my same surprise of it falling from the tree before me reflected therein. Its eyes said, "I can't believe I just fell." Or maybe more precisely, "I can't believe I just fell where you (a human being) could see me fall." As if it had just broken some squirrel code -- don't ever let the tall, two-legged ones see you fall.

It scurried off -- not out of fear or instinct -- but because it hoped no squirrels in neighboring trees witnessed its fall. And if they did, an ultra-quick exit from the scene might -- just might -- erase the faux pas from their memory. The same way you quickly righted your chair in the 5th grade, after leaning back on two legs and falling backward in the middle of class.

At least that's what I was thinking when I crossed the last street before my block and caught the curb with the lip of my Teva toe. It wasn't enough to trip me up, but it did jostle the coffee cup in my hand just enough to belch a few beads of hot coffee out from its sipping lid, over its rim and down into the soft skin between my thumb and forefinger.

It didn't burn badly enough to trigger my dormant fear of coffee somewhere buried in my subconscious, but it was enough of a nuisance that I shouted "Fuck!" out loud. And, to my immediate left, a playground full of grade-schoolers stopped playing at recess, and their teachers stood and lasered their gazes into my face.

I rushed home like the squirrel back to its tree. Stupid squirrel. Stupid poetic justice.

the pleasure chest

2009-05-17T19:21:00.019-04:00

I traveled to New York recently. Not only did I get to see some very dear friends, and have the opportunity to eat and drink well with them, but I also got to remember what it is about the city that I love and miss so much.

It's no one thing in particular. It's the snatching grasp of relief upon finding no line for a taxi at the airport upon arrival. It's a group of black teenage girls practicing a cheer on the corner of Smith and Hoyt while a man old enough to be their grandfather stands and watches, puffing on a cigar. It's eating affogato for dessert for the first time in a cozy Brooklyn restaurant. It's finding old MTA card in your wallet with $5 left on it, but then discover it expired yesterday, and just as you're about to pitch it, a subway attendant asks for the card out of the blue and changes its expiration date for you.

I could live there again; I would live there again; and I think it wasn't so bad working a dead-end job for a private investigator there. It had its moments, like when I had to go out and buy several hundred dollars worth of lubricating jelly for a case we were investigating. Actually the investigation had concluded; the case was on the verge of going to court, and our client's intellectual property lawyer needed product samples purchased from a local retailer to present as exhibits.

Our client (a large, family-oriented manufacturer of consumer goods -- think baby shampoo) did not like the fact that another company was selling flavored sex jellies under a name similar to their own. So I needed to buy only "Doc Johnson" brand lubricants. I did this on a Tuesday after a slice of Ray's pizza for lunch. I walked uptown on 6th Ave. to The Pleasure Chest.

Shortly after 1 p.m. on a Tuesday seemed as innocuous a time as any to visit an adult variety store and purchase several hundred dollars worth of lubricating jelly. As it turns out, I was mistaken.

The adult shop was packed wall-to-wall, and not with the perverts you'd expect to find doing weekday porno and sex toy shopping. They were almost exclusively women -- almost exclusively mother-daughter pairs to be exact. And they looked wholesome -- Midwestern wholesome -- as any group of mothers and daughters I'd ever seen. They could have just as easily been perusing designer clothing in the aisles at Macy's.

There was a giggling mother helping her teenage daughter try a pocket vibrator in her Jordache jeans. There was one teenager asking another if she would ever wear a string of golf ball-sized beads like the one she had dangling from her fingers.

As I made my way through the aisles of the store, I pushed past two mothers trying to decide between different models of inflatable Chippendales. At the very back, a daughter was asking her mother what the pinky-sized hook-like appendage jutting upward from the base of a modest-sized dildo was for. Her question went unanswered as her mom, wearing a blown-out expression, examined another, less modest-sized dildo named "The Bulldozer."

I went entirely unacknowledged by anyone in the store as I proceeded to fill an entire shopping basket with tubes of warming sex cream, "Sin-amon" flavored oil, and glow-in-the-dark gel. As I made my way to the counter, without a stray eye lifting in my direction, I wondered if I may have wandered upon some truly depraved mother-daughter nympho-cult that was ballsy enough to meet in the light of day right under normative society's nose. I wished (more than I wished for any thing at any time before or since) that I had gone to high school wherever these teenage girls went to high school.

I had already developed a pretext for why I was buying so much sex lube with a corporate credit card if the cashier were to have asked -- I was a production assistant for Hand Over Fist Films -- but the cashier rang me up for $300+ as stone-faced as if I was buying groceries at Garden Of Eden.

"Is this your typical Tuesday afternoon crowd?" I asked.

"No," the cashier sighed. "Sex In The City tour."

Apparently the adult shop had been featured in an episode of the show, and their next stop was the Gray's Papaya hot dog stand above which I used to live. A scene from the show had been filmed there, as well. On the way out, I noticed their charter bus parked along the curb, and my dream of a depraved mother-daughter nympho cult was dispelled. The world returned to making sense, kind of.

But, really, my job working for the private investigator didn't get any better than that, and I forget that about city living, as well. It's as two-faced as a deceitful lover -- for every thing you cherish and remember there's another you beg in your weaker moments to forget. The oppressive heat of the summer. The difficulty inherent in escaping on the weekend. The people oh so many fucking people all the time. Ugh.

I think next time I need to travel back to California.

sick and tired of the swine news

2009-04-29T09:13:00.013-04:00

When a story like the swine flu dominates headlines nationally, the pressure to localize the news story makes the prospect of going to work each day grim. i've seen photos of the steelworkers who used to labor the mills along the rivers in this city-- those of the workers at the end of a shift, with expressions of utter dejection, soot-faced, exhausted and knowing the same waits for them the following day. minus the soot, i share their end of day labor expression.

Yesterday a woman reported symptoms akin to those found in swine flu, and Allegheny County sent a swab sample of her sinuses to be tested for swine flu. This was the headline news story, until the news broke that her sample tested positive for the influenza virus but was still inconclusive for swine flu. This was "breaking" news-- an Allegheny Co. woman had the flu, and it might be swine flu.

Why suspect the swine flu? Because the media's supersaturated coverage of the swine flu story has sensationalized this story enough to have everyone who listens too closely behaving like a hypochondriac. And if that's not enough, as is the case with this bullshit headline story (which, btw, I wrote, albeit with a figurative gun to my head) the news spins it to fit their needs. The story said not only did she test positive for flu and inconclusive for swine flu, but she also has "a travel history to Mexico" which does not mean she'd recently been to Mexico. It means she's been there before at some time in the past, that's all. Big deal.

What's crazy is it's not intentional to over-hype and fearmonger to this degree as the conspiracy theorists claim -- it's simply natural after those responsible for reporting the news become conditioned to working in an over-hyped and sensationalized environment, which the news station is. To be in the newsroom reminds me of the bees you see, close-up in the hive, under the camera lens of a Discovery documentary-- how they are flitting around and crawling over one another on the honeycomb. Busy. Fucking. Bees.

They've been so busy it hasn't occurred to anyone at the station yet to use their new favorite news tool, twitter, as a way of keeping the viewers up-to-date on the spread of the virus. This actually would be a sound application of technology, if the virus was the threat it's being made to be (which it isn't) and wouldn't be just another tool in the fearmonger's toolbelt (which it would be).

It'll be like a bear swatted the hive when I go in today; the first confirmed death from the swine flu in the U.S. was reported-- an infant in Texas. I'm just going to imagine my cubicle in the station is a hexagonal cell in the honeycomb, and I'll occupy this space and tolerate the buzz just like the steelworkers tolerated the heat and soot, until it's time to go home, and drink.

Here's a poem I wrote some time ago while living in New York for which I've developed a renewed appreciation of late.

Local Newscasters

My friend in TV says they’re all
drunks, every last one of them
from the evening crew to the morning
news first at 5AM.

Some show up sauced for work
like the rush-hour traffic girl
who booted a bellyful of bloody marys
her last time up in the helicopter.

Ask anyone in makeup how much
foundation the meteorologist must wear
to seal the gin inside his pores
before he goes on-air, and

listen for the lisp of the sportscaster
who outed himself after too much
champagne this year at the station’s
Christmas celebration.

Consider their lives spent
sticking to the cards, reporting the facts
in a rented suit and a voice paved
smooth over regional accent,

all in exchange for recognition
in line at the supermarket, maybe
an invitation to speak to the graduating
class of some local high school.

As proof, my friend points
to the anchorman, elbows
weighing down the end of the bar,
sipping his whiskey staring

into the mirror like a camera
obscura -- at the inverse of a person
he never knew. The person
we see on Channel 2 everyday.

best commercial ever

2009-04-17T08:27:00.002-04:00

the hilarity is self-evident, and on so many levels.

"Booty is booty."-- Sir Mix-A-Lot

consider David Foster

2009-03-20T09:25:00.028-04:00

Wallace, RIP. I am on the verge of finishing reading his last collection of essays entitled, Consider The Lobster. I've been reading the book like Charlie eats Wonka chocolate, limiting myself to only a few pages each day in order to prolong the experience. Last night I splurged and plowed through the collection's title essay in one read, and this morning I've got a Wallace hangover, which is precisely the opposite of a regular hangover, in that my mind is spooled up and sparking out in all directions.

This is Wallace's great gift to his readers. His prose confers upon the reader the experience of the author's wonderful thinking-- which is hyper-intelligent, expansive and surprisingly accessible. Reading him reminds me of the stream-of-conscious writing exercises we would do in early writing workshops. His writing leaves you thinking it's just rolling out from under his pen, but is so erudite and intellectual that it can't possibly be. It has to have been labored over and revised over and again and not even attempted until a rigorous groundwork had been laid down first. Exhaustive research on the subject matter must have preceded the writing, and then only slightly less exhaustive research upon a myriad of subjects tangential to the subject at hand, so that, by the end of the essay, you consider the author to be not only an expert on the subject, but also an entire solar system of subjects that orbit around it.

Yet, Wallace gives you the impression through his voice that he's just writing off the top of his head. His shorter essays, like "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed," could believably have been written sometime after he ate breakfast and before he took his morning shit. He's that good.

In addition to his diction's wizardry, there's also the way that he transcends the subject of his writing that I find so appealing. I was struck by this quality in his first collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. The title essay was written for Harper's; it was supposed to be a magazine article about the experience of taking a cruise. It was supposed to be, you know, a travel piece. What it ended up being was not only an article fiercely critical of the cruise ship experience, but also profoundly critical of contemporary culture in general and what we conceive "vacation" to be.

He reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson this way, who was also paid by x publisher to write about y event and then, essentially, wrote whatever the fuck he wanted to write about. However, where the media event became merely the backdrop behind Thompson's political rants and chronicling of his drug-and-alcohol abuse, the event is a nexus for Wallace that he not only explores exhaustively, but around which he also discusses whatever seems to come to mind, no matter how far-flung that whatever might be.

"Consider the Lobster" (the essay) starts as a piece of reporting on the Maine Lobster Festival for Gourmet magazine; it ends up moving from his own witty observations about the lobster festival to an examination of the festival-as-an-experience in general. He explores the ethical question of whether we can be morally justified in killing and devouring another sentient being that experiences pain, and how we rationalize our responses to this question. DFW admits himself to being unsettled that he can't justify his own appetite for animals anymore than a) he'd developed a taste for them and b) it would be inconvenient not to eat them.

Perhaps my favorite essay in the collection is "Authority and American Usage," a review about a reference book-- the Dictionary of Modern American Usage by Bryan Garner. Its opening line is thoroughly DFW: "Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of US lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a near-Lewinskian scale?"

Here Wallace is at the top of his game. He proceeds to just goes nuts on the topic. His stated plan in the essay is simple enough; the essay is a review (like any review) meant to suggest why you should (or shouldn't) buy the book being reviewed. In order to explain why you should or shouldn't, though, he says he has to put the book into context. He then proceeds to summarize the historical context of English usage in America (no small feat) and familiarizes the reader with the major camps (Prescriptivist vs. Descriptivist) and key shifting points in contemporary usage debates, in order to then make his argument for the book and its worthwhile contributions to the field. And he does it in such a way that this very SNOOTy topic of conversation holds your interest, even if you care as much about your own language usage as you do... say, the French.

He makes it interesting not only by drawing upon your attention with good writing -- by hitting the hot-button "near-Lewinskian" issues in usage and writing about them in an interesting way -- but in two other ways, as well. He personalizes the topic and generalizes it.

This is applicable to all of his essays-- not only does he know his shit, and write well about it, but in writing about it, he makes it his own and enables his readers to make it theirs, as well. In a nutshell, this is why DFW is great.

In "Authority and American Usage," the essay is filled with (footnotes of) personal anecdotes of his childhood and his mother's insistence upon correct usage, and hearing these particular insights into the writer's early years increases the reader's interest in his writing and the topic of usage. DFW then takes his fleshed-out understanding of usage and applies it to common parlance, to pop culture, to academic usage (I love how he attacks the phenomena of Political Correctness,) and (most illuminatingly) to politics, and beyond... it is here that he shows you how the lexicographical debates engaged in by a cloister of SNOOTs in these dense reference books actually have heavy load-bearing consequences in the nitty-gritty of everyday life, and he makes you (the reader) at the very least pause and look into the mirror and ask yourself, "Have I ever really thought about how I use the language that I call my own?"

DFW's ability to enact this pause in the reader makes him a great writer-- not merely "this generation's best comic writer" as J. Keirn-Swanson, of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, blurbs on the back of my paperback copy of his book. He may be the generation's best comic writer, but to laud him as such when he is so much more than comic in his writing, well... it's just flat-out irresponsible for Keirn-Swanson to characterize him this way.

I compared DFW and HST above, but in doing so, I didn't mean to suggest an equivalence in their writing. The contrast is stark. HST was gonzo journalism, the 60's counter-cultural literary equivalent to, say, today's shock jockeyism of Howard Stern. HST did not engage his subject matter like DFW in its journalistic writing, nor did he engage himself and his readers in its subject matter, as well.

I thought to compare the two writers because 1) they got paid to write pretty much what they wanted to and 2) they both killed themselves. The latter must have been at the forefront of my thoughts. Wallace's death in September last year passed here without mention in this blog, and after reading his last essay collection, I felt compelled to comment upon the man.

With HST, we lost a larger-than-life personality and celebrity that transcended the medium (journalism) in which he wrote. With DFW, we lost something larger. He not only transcended his medium, but he sought to transcend humanity through his writing, as well. He was less a great writer than he was a great philosopher who brought his wisdom and keen insight upon the world to us via the written word.

In praise of DFW, in my copy of Consider the Lobster, David Lipsky, on NPR's All Things Considered, is quoted as saying, "After reading him, I feel buzzed-up, smarter-- I'm better company."

While HST's death surprised few, given his uncompromising train-wreck lifestyle, DFW's death was truly tragic. I've read that it was a straying from his anti-depressant medication that led to his suicide, so his death can be viewed as largely accidental. I like to think of his death this way. I like to think of him as having slipped and lost his footing while doing our culture's heavy lifting, thought-wise.

I like to think if he hadn't slipped, and continued to write, we'd continue to gain a better understanding of ourselves, to be better company to one another. I think we lost as close to an Atlas as can arise in our time, and in a world that is increasingly less and less comprehensible, his absence will be sorely missed.

why twitter makes nothing better

2009-03-05T10:01:00.017-05:00

I am still working for the news station, and thankfully so, given the declining state of the economy. Yesterday, in our afternoon news meeting, one of the meteorologists was bent out-of-shape when he discovered the news director wanted him to begin regularly twittering his weather updates.

I couldn't understand why. Perhaps he's just sick of jumping through all of the hoops being placed before him. In the 6 months I've been in the news biz, I've seen the duties of the station's meteorologists increase significantly as the station jumps head-first into every new media trend. The station has a (free) subscription text message service for weather and school closing updates. Each meteorologist has their own blog. The station has a facebook presence to which they have to contribute content. And now they've got to twitter, as well.

But I don't understand his adversion to having to twitter weather tweets. Since weather is so variable in nature, the science of meteorology fails with regularity to predict what is going to happen outside. When the prediction falls well short of the mark, I've seen the emails we get from viewers and loggers-on to our site. "Anyone could do your job." "A blind-folded monkey throwing darts at a weather map could give me a more accurate forecast." "You said there was going to be a light dusting of snow; I'm looking at half-a-foot on the ground right now, and it's still snowing!"

Meteorologists often have their science questioned and are dismissed as unfounded prognosticators whenever their forecasts go awry. So why wouldn't a meteorologist want an immediate way to get the latest change in the storm tracker out to people, in 140 characters or less? It's a quick eraser for the forecasting pencil. "The snowstorm isn't moving through the area as initially projected; expect 4 to 6 inches, up to 8 in higher elevations." (99 characters)

If I were a meteorologist, I'd want to twitter for two reasons. 1) The technology allows for changes in the weather to be addressed more quickly than my next scheduled email update or TV broadcast. 2) It provides yet another reminder to people how important the weather (and, in turn, my existence as a meteorologist) is. Win, win.

Making changes to weather forecasts is one of many useful applications for twitter. We've seen, in this past prez election, how useful twitter is in quickly disseminating information re: candidates for office. Performing and non-performing artists use twitter to remind fans and friends of upcoming gigs, showings, readings, exhibits, etc. Any marketing event or product or press release gains that much more of a audience if twittered with a tweet.

But, on the whole, twitter makes nothing better, insofar as society and our culture is concerned, and not just because talking about twittering tweets makes you sound like Elmer Fudd.

The advent of texting has the current generation (Generation "teXt"?) treating English language and grammar with the same, wanton disregard that mortgage lenders have been dispensing loans for the last decade or so. The advent of facebook (with a nod to MySpace, as well) has succeeded in bringing out the inner-sociable narcissist in all of us. And Twitter, in effect, has combined the two, in a soft-serve swirl cone that everyone seems to be licking and loving nowadays.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Twitter Frenzy

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

(By the way, if you'd like an insight into why precisely we're in the shit we're in, economy-wise, watch the 60 Minutes report on World Savings here.)

While I agree with old man Stewart's reasons for shaking his fist at Twitter, my own gripe with the fad stands upon poetical grounds. Twitter, as I see it, is yet another nail in poetry's coffin. Not only because it is another techno-distraction to swerve our attention (and more importantly, our children's attention) from the page and thoughtful consideration of language, but twitter celebrates those character traits that are a bane to poetry, culture and society, in general.

... I was planning to continue here, by identifying those traits, arguing by way of example, etc., but it's almost dinner time, and my bottle of wine is calling from the kitchen... perhaps I'll get back to this later.

on hockey spectation

2009-02-24T17:23:00.018-05:00

Our family has been season ticket holders for the Pittsburgh Penguins since 1972, the year I was born. Our two (kick-ass) seats in section C25 of the Civic Arena are one of very few extravagances my parents indulge in. Every year the season ticket price goes up, especially with the team selling out 90+ games now in a row. This year, each seat jumped from $66 to $71.50 per game. And with every increase, there is heart-aching about the rising cost of the seats and talk of giving up the tickets. However my parents' love of hockey always wins out over their frugality. As their son, and an often-recipient of these tickets, I'm pleased it does.

No live sport holds my interest like hockey. Unlike football or baseball, the game runs unbroken by innings or changes of possession. It's fluid like basketball, but more so, since it has fewer fouls and interruptions of play, and is more graceful, given that the players are constantly skating on a sheet of ice. (However, I know of not a single poem about hockey, while there are several fine poems about basketball, e.g. Slamdunk by Yusef Komunyakaa. I tried to write a hockey poem once, and put myself in the penalty box for the attempt.)

A basketball fan I know argued that his game had at least as much grace as hockey, and I found his argument laughable. I told him there is simply no comparison. (Though, after giving it some thought, I agree an argument could be made that each sport's players exhibit a similar grace in playing their respective sports. However, I maintain that, for spectation, there is no comparison.)

Hockey is art performed to the hushed scrape and clatter of skate and stick on ice. Basketball is nothing but a constant chase of squeaking shoes and an incessant banging of a ball upon hardwood.

In response, my basketball aficionado friend countered by saying, "At least you can follow the basketball."

This is the no. 1 complaint of a stranger to the sport of hockey -- "I can't follow the puck." -- and it's also what makes the sport as unique as it is. Besides hockey being a blend of grace and bare knuckle violence, it is the only sport that makes a demand upon those who choose to watch it. You must make a conscious effort to follow the puck. Period. And once you begin making this effort, you develop a sort of Zen mastery as a spectator -- you begin to see the puck without seeing it. You intuit where the puck is by the movement of the players in relation to it.

By requiring the spectator to actively engage in the act of spectation, the sport chooses its own fans. It embraces those willing to be mindful and attentive and, in turn, repels those who are not. Those who the sport deems unworthy are denied the privilege of seeing moments like this:

Not only does the sport reward you with this kind of eye candy, but it also (used to) punish you for failing to give your rapt attention. (This applied to fans in the stands before they began draping nets above the boards to keep stray pucks from flying into the crowd.)

As a young lad I became accustomed to seeing spectators bleed in the stands from errant pucks. It was as if the game took it upon itself to remind the crowd of its one requirement-- you must watch the puck. Just as the Greeks explained lightning as a consequence of Zeus's anger -- the god hurling bolts down from Olympus in a rage -- I explained a puck striking a distracted spectator in the face as the game exacting its vengeance upon the unworthy. If the businessman two rows ahead of me had been watching the game instead of schmoozing the client next to him, he wouldn't be bleeding into an usher's towel.

Now that the nets are up over the glass, though, the game can no longer make the unworthy bleed. Without fear of being struck by flying pucks, fans can drift in and out of attention to the game with impunity.

This has sullied spectation of the sport. How many times I've found myself seated next to a teenager, texting his friend on the other side of the arena while the game is being played, and wished a puck would somehow find its way over the glass and remove the foremost bridgework from his mouth.

No longer is the sport played for a pious audience that, under its breath, is earnestly hoping for a puck to come screaming through the air at them. Because they're ready for it, have been ready for it and would catch the frozen disk of vulcanized rubber in a heartbeat, though it may dislocate a knuckle or two in order to do so. Now, it's become a haven for the business-schmooze. For the techno-distracted youth. The unworthy. Remove the nets. Let them bleed.

37 is a prime age

2009-02-04T19:37:00.009-05:00

When I get sick it's rare, but always severe and always at the worst time. Until just recently my last bout with the bug was four or five years ago when I went to visit Carv in San Francisco. He was living in the Marina among the sanfranimals, and I spent the long weekend shivering beneath a pile of blankets on his living room couch.

This latest flu torpedoed my birthday, my birthday dinner and the Steelers record 6th Super Bowl win. And I had to go in to work, to boot.

I'd go through it all over again, though, if it meant missing my father's retirement party yesterday. It was an occasion I didn't think there would be much to. I thought this, I now realize, because I had never been privy to my father's life as a doctor. I had been to his office on occasion when I had been growing up. I knew a few of his associates, a few of his secretaries... but I had no understanding of how many lives he had intimately touched as a gastroenterologist.

And this was the running joke throughout the retirement party... exactly just how intimately a gastroenterologist touches people's lives. The party was held in Suburban General Hospital, and the dinner served was (unsurprisingly) hospital food. How I managed to keep my meal of overdone steak, overcooked asparagus and burnt rice down while listening to jokes about peptic ulcers and perforated colons is a testament to how special of an evening it was.

In addition to seeing my father in his element, who reveled in being the man of the hour, and my mother's obvious joy at his side, my own personal joy came from hearing from the doctors, nurses, patients and hospital staff who showed up to wish him a happy retirement. It came from gaining the knowledge that there was a group of people who admired him as much as I did, and who also testified to how much of a pain in the ass (no pun intended) he can be. Especially on the topic of politics. They also mused incredulously, like my mother, about what the hell he was going to do with all his free time.

In short, I became aware of a kinship I had with a group of complete strangers, and this I was not expecting.

Neither was I expecting the hospital to name its GI lab after him, plaque and all on the wall.

I'm feeling much better today, and my father's retirement party is responsible for this. Same goes for my birthday, which went unacknowledged here, and being a year older, too. I credit my dad's party for this, as well.

here we go

2009-01-23T09:54:00.001-05:00

apres-holiday three-way, pt. 3

2009-01-12T14:42:00.007-05:00

Where Hoagland concerns himself with the operation of three poetic tools—image, diction, rhetoric—at work in the poem, Stephen Dobyns advocates analyzing three different contexts—emotional, intellectual, and physical—in a poem in his essay, "Metaphor and the Authenticating Act of Memory."

I thought of applying Dobyns’s approach to this poem after reading Hoagland’s analysis. They are two different approaches, but complementary. And this poem lends itself well to both.

Dobyns begins his essay with a definition of art. “A work of art, such as a poem, seeks to communicate with a reader,” he says. He contends that an understanding of artistic communication can be reached by thinking about the relationship between the three types of context and the events in a poem.

Just as Hoagland contends that extraordinary poems employ all three altitudes—image, diction, rhetoric—Dobyns contends they employ a balance of emotional, intellectual and physical contexts. He argues that when one of these contexts is exaggerated, the poem breaks down. “For instance, when the intellectual context is exaggerated, the poem tends to become emotionally barren; and when the emotional is exaggerated, the poem becomes sentimental.”

Goodman’s “Birthday Cake” employs all three contexts in a balanced way, just as the poem employs the tools of image, diction and rhetoric in what Hoagland calls a “fluctuating alloy” in its “savagery and sophistication.”

The poem shifts from a predominantly emotional context in the first stanza to one that is predominantly intellectual in the second, and then predominantly physical in the third. I say predominantly because, in each stanza, there is also another (sub)context at work.

Now isn't it time
when the candles on the icing
are one two too many
too many to blow out
too many to count too many
isn't it time to give up this ritual?

The first stanza of the poem has a strong emotional context. Hoagland identifies strong emotion being conveyed in the rhetorical questioning here, as well. However, I read the poem differently than Hoagland; I don’t see the emotional tone as being childish and resentful as he does. Rather, I read the tone as being one of frustration, not resentment—the tone of a stammering old man, who could just as easily be complaining about the number of stairs up to his apartment as the number of candles on his cake, for example.

There is also a physical context to this stanza which, as Hoagland points out, is conveyed through the poet’s diction. He argues the poet’s repetition, and his decision to break the lines unevenly, support his reading of a childish, resentful speaker in the poem. However, I think the stanza’s diction better supports a reading of the tone as an older, frustrated one. Its language re-enacts the heaving of one’s lungs, huffing and puffing, in an effort to blow the candles out, and being unable to. Because they are too many, too many, too many… What is implied here is that a task that the speaker used to master—the task of blowing out candles at a birthday—is now one that has mastered him. This physical re-enactment of breaths being taken in the poet’s speech supports a reading of the emotion being expressed here as frustration.

With this frustrated, breathy first stanza, the poet turns us neatly into a second, entirely different context in the second stanza, turning on the word “although” where the speaker seems to catch his breath.

although the fiery crown
fluttering on the chocolate
and through the darkened room advancing
is still the most loveliest sight
among our savage folk
that have few festivals.

As Hoagland notes, the words flow lucidly and articulately here where they were broken and underscored through repetition in the first stanza. This gives the stanza an intellectual context; the speaker is speaking authoritatively in making judgments about “our folk.” It states we are “savage,” have “few festivals,” and judges emphatically that, of these few, the birthday cake celebration is the “most loveliest” of them.

There’s also an emotional (sub)context here. I disagree with Hoagland’s reading of the speaker’s emotion shifting here from being childish and frustrated to being sympathetic and culturally-minded. Here I believe Hoagland is stretching in his perceived resonances and associations in making this claim.

I don’t see a shift in tone here, except for a brief moment with the judgment of the cake; the double-superlative “most loveliest” does stick out here. Here the speaker sees the cake with a childish wonder, as if it were his first memory of a birthday cake. However, it is a fleeting memory; it stands in contrast to the rest of the poem's tone. The final few lines suggest this. As readers, we can’t get too enthused about the “most loveliest” sight of the birthday cake because it’s only the best of the "few festivals" our "savage" people have to offer. It’s as good as it gets, but it ain’t that good.

Where Hoagland reads the beginning of this stanza as being evocative of a communal, tribal scene, I read it as being wickedly ominous. The “fiery crown …through the darkened room advancing” is downright spooky, especially if you read it as not the fiery crown advancing, but rather the darkened room advancing, shadow encompassing, the symbolic advancing of the ultimate darkness that terminates old age—death.

After pausing to give us the only bright spot in the poem, the speaker returns to the frustrated tone of the poem in the first stanza.

But the thicket is too hot and thick
and isn't it time, isn't it time
when the fires are too many
to eat the fire and not the cake
and drip the fires from my teeth
as once I had my hot hot youth.

The image of the “fiery crown” that the speaker pauses to praise in the second stanza is now a “thicket” that is “too hot and thick.” The repetition of thick in this line, and isn’t it time in the next, re-establishes the emotional context of the first stanza.

However, the speaker’s frustration finds a resolution here where it was previously unresolved. The first stanza ends with a question mark, as if the suggestion to give up this ritual was a matter of debate. This stanza ends in a period, implying there is no debate. It is time “to eat the fire and not the cake.”

The emotion is acted upon here, and the act of consuming the fire gives this stanza a predominantly physical context. The line “and drips the fires from my teeth” suggests an animal hunger motivates this act, the fire dripping (like blood) not burning (like fire) from his teeth. It’s primal, and as such, a fitting act for “our folk” who the speaker earlier characterized as savage.

By consuming the candles on his birthday cake, the speaker succeeds in resolving the conflict underlying the frustration expressed in the first stanza. He can’t blow them out; they are too many; he’s too old to perform the task required of this ceremony. But, by eating the fire instead of cake, he symbolically devours his old age. Paradoxically, the speaker consumes what is consuming him.

And if we read the poet himself as the person who is speaking in the poem, then we can read this poem itself as an absurd, virile act that defies old age. Here, at its conclusion, I find myself in agreement with Hoagland when he says “the aging king of his ego eats his own crown, affirms his virility and concedes his absurdity all at once.”

However, in the savage act of eating the fire, it is not “his absurdity” that he concedes, but rather the absurdity of “our folk.” Our absurdity. Humanity’s. It is the finite aspect of our human existence, and our unwillingness to accept youth's loss, to be mastered by mortality, that is being defied by this poem.

Through a balance of emotional, intellectual and physical contexts, “Birthday Cake” effectively does what Dobyns says a poem should do—effectively communicate with a reader. It communicates a metaphysical truth about humanity, and the reader recognizes it in the poem, even if he or she cannot articulate why. Not until I sat down (and labored) to analyze this poem could I begin to articulate why I liked it. I could only say, “this poem fucking rocks.”

This is what great poems do.

apres-holiday three-way, pt. 2

2009-01-09T09:00:00.004-05:00

In his essay, “Altitudes, a Homemade Taxonomy,” Hoagland discusses three poetic tools which he calls “altitudes.” These are 1) image, 2) diction and 3) rhetoric. In calling these tools “altitudes” he is speaking figuratively about them, suggesting in this metaphor that one tool is “higher” than the other – image being the lowest altitude, rhetoric being the highest, and diction somewhere between the two.

Now, Hoagland is quick to stamp out the contention that he is talking about a hierarchy in poetic craft here. By no means is he suggesting that a poem fashioned primarily by image-making is inferior to one which relies more upon employing the tools of diction or rhetoric. Rather, by speaking of these tools as “altitudes,” he is suggesting the hierarchy of accessibility intrinsic to these tools.

As I stated in pt.1, Hoagland upholds “Birthday Cake” by Paul Goodman as a poem that employs all three of these tools successfully. In doing so, the poem has, in Hoagland’s words, not only a “great visceral force and urgency” but also “intellectual precision” and “rhetorical persuasiveness.”

The poem’s force and urgency is generated primarily by the poem’s use of imagery. Image is a poetic tool that that confers, as Hoagland says, “unmediated communication.” Take this central image in the poem, “Birthday Cake”:

…the fiery crown

fluttering on the chocolate

and through the darkened room advancing

Of this image Hoagland notes how it is “perceptually intense.” In other words, it’s readily visualized and accessible. Imagery is immediately gratifying because, as human beings, we are visually-oriented. In very few words, Goodman is able to create an image that is instantly perceived and understood.

However perceptually intense Goodman’s images are in the poem, they do not work alone upon the reader. His imagery works in conjunction with diction in the poem to work upon the reader at a different (“higher”) level, as well.

Hoagland defines diction as “speech that is consciously making reference to the history of its usage.” In the second stanza of “Birthday Cake,” we can see how the poet’s conscious choice in words works with the image he presents the reader.

although the fiery crown
fluttering on the chocolate
and through the darkened room advancing
is still the most loveliest sight
among our savage folk
that have few festivals.

The image of the cake, alone by itself, is a powerful one; however, the poet chooses the metaphor “fiery crown” to describe its candles. He chooses to describe our folk as “savage” and calls, by inference, a birthday party a “festival.”

Hoagland argues that the speech the poet is using here is not at all arbitrary. It is, rather, consciously being employed to work associatively upon the intellect of the reader. He says that words such as fiery, crown, savage and festival work together to evoke “feudal resonances of crowns and fire are communal and sacred.” The darkened room suggests “a cavernous, pre-electric setting” where savage folk gather for warmth and comfort.

One may or may not agree with Hoagland’s interpretation of the poet’s diction, or whether the poet was consciously making his decisions in his speech throughout the poem, but one cannot refute that the poet’s diction puts the reader’s intellect to work. His diction in this stanza works with his image of the birthday cake, causing associations and resonances to percolate in the mind of the reader.

The poet is also expressing an opinion about birthdays, as well. In this way, Hoagland argues, the poem possesses a rhetorical persuasiveness. At first glance, after the first stanza, it seems predominantly to be advocating a course of action.

Now isn't it time
when the candles on the icing
are one two too many
too many to blow out
too many to count too many
isn't it time to give up this ritual?

What the poet seems to be saying here is relatively straightforward—why do we even bother with birthdays? As Hoagland says, this rhetorical question implies its answer—“Yes, it’s time to give up this ritual.” He also notes the poet’s diction here—through its “repetitive simplicity” and it’s “run-on syntax”—underscores this contention. Twice he’s asking “isn’t it time” to give it up. The candles on the cake are “too many … too many … too many.” It suggests “feverish emotion,” a frustration with getting old.

However, with the second stanza, the rhetoric shifts. The image of the birthday cake prompts this shift, and the poet calls it “the most loveliest sight / among our savage folk / that have few festivals.” The second stanza argues for the ritual where the first stanza argues to do away with it. Hoagland understands this shift in rhetoric from “an aging, childishly resentful speaker” to one who “sympathetically recognizes” its use and “considers the welfare of the culture as a whole.”

The third stanza steps back from this more considerate, sympathetic stance once again to childish, emotional one:

But the thicket is too hot and thick
and isn't it time, isn't it time
when the fires are too many
to eat the fire and not the cake
and drip the fires from my teeth
as once I had my hot hot youth.

Once again Hoagland points out we have the same broken, run-on syntax in the first stanza and repetition “isn’t it time, isn’t it time” here. However, while the diction is similar, the rhetoric—what the poet is arguing—is markedly different. Instead of the ruminative “self-pity” found in the rhetorical tone in the first stanza, here the tone is angry and forceful, and the poet advocates action, creating an undeniably strong and forceful image – eating the fire of the candles instead of the cake. “Here,” Hoagland argues, “the aging king of his ego eats his own crown, affirms his virility and concedes his absurdity all at once.”

Having shown Hoagland's approach to poetry in general, and this poem in particular, I will next summarize Dobyns's approach to poetry in pt. 3. Then I will give my reading of "Birthday Cake," using Dobyns's approach as a means of entry into the poem.

apres-holiday three-way, pt. 1

2009-01-07T16:09:00.011-05:00

As I return to a nog-less mindset and clarity after the holidays, I've immersed myself in reading about poetic craft in order to overcome the holiday-induced lull in my writing. Nothing jumpstarts the creative process for me more than reading poetry analysis. I will also be attending the Associated Writers & Writers' Programs (AWP) conference in Chicago soon, and my mind needs a bit of tuning to the topic of poetic craft beforehand.

I've been picking through Best Words Best Order by Stephen Dobyns and Real Sofistikashun by Tony Hoagland-- two collections of essays, I now realize, I should have purchased the minute they came into print.

These two collections offer two different, but similar, ways of approaching a poem. I'd like to bring these two approaches to the same poem, a poem that Hoagland discusses in his essay, "Altitudes, a Homemade Taxonomy." It is a poem I'd never read before, written by a poet, Paul Goodman, with whom I was previously unfamiliar. I am thankful for Mr. Hoagland's introduction to both. Here is "Birthday Cake" in its entirety:

Birthday Cake

Now isn't it time
when the candles on the icing
are one two too many
too many to blow out
too many to count too many
isn't it time to give up this ritual?

although the fiery crown
fluttering on the chocolate
and through the darkened room advancing
is still the most loveliest sight
among our savage folk
that have few festivals.

But the thicket is too hot and thick
and isn't it time, isn't it time
when the fires are too many
to eat the fire and not the cake
and drip the fires from my teeth
as once I had my hot hot youth.

In pt. 2 of this posting, I will summarize what Hoagland has to say about the poem in discussing his three "altitudes". In pt. 3, I will summarize Dobyns's approach, who understands a poem to be an emotional-intellectual-physical construct. I will apply his approach to "Birthday Cake" and, in doing so, provide an alternative way of reading "Birthday Cake."

In these three blog entries, I hope to relay how complementary, in general, the two approaches to reading poetry are while, at the same time, showing how each offer a different perspective in perceiving the same poetic gem.

More importantly, though, I want to approach the poem from different perspectives for the same reason you have sex using different sexual positions-- solely for pleasure's sake. I want to get under the poem's skin and, in doing so, become one with it as much as humanly possible.

Like Hoagland, I think it's a pretty extraordinary 18 lines. My birthday's coming up, too, so there's some personal proximity to its theme. But really, I think the poem just fucking rocks, and I'm eager to understand why exactly this is and share this understanding with anyone who cares to listen.

the perfect holiday storm

2008-12-10T15:53:00.015-05:00

In working for a news website, not only do I try to churn out my headlines with a little literary panache when I can, but I also try to understand our product. The news. What makes it what it is, when and where it is and how and why it happens.

A couple of weeks ago, I was amazed by the number of truly bizarre news stories that came up during the course of my work day. I was convinced it must have been a full moon, and after consulting an astronomical table, I realized I was wrong. The region may have been ground-zero for some other kind of major astrological event that was affecting people's behavior -- involving the alignment of planets and stars and shit like that -- but I didn't look into it because I don't dig on that stuff. And I'm lazy. I just dismissed the day as a fluke and moved on.

Since that first day of noted weirdness, though, I've noticed there have been progressively more. Sure, there's been some ebb and flow day-to-day, but undeniably these last couple of weeks, local news has been trending bizarre. And after much thought and consideration, I've concluded the holidays are to blame.

The most sane of us go a little crazy during the holidays; in turn, we should expect the most insane of us go absolutely fucking monkey nuts.

However, it's not the insane who generate the news. While the crazies may be responsible for its juiciest headlines, stupidity -- not insanity -- is the great engine that churns out the commodity we call news.

And more than any other time of the year, over the holidays, people are stupid.

The vast majority of what is packaged as news is generated by the actions of careless and/or ignorant people. If the country were stocked with responsible and educated people, there would be very little news to report.

Without people like the woman who used a cigarette lighter to help her search for a ring she dropped between her couch cushions, and then subsequently burned her house to the ground along with three other homes...without people like her, I wouldn't have a job.

So what is it about the holidays that makes people so dumb? I've identified a number of factors that come into play, creating a sort of perfect, news-generating storm.

One that should come as no surprise is the weather. At any time of year, weather strongly influences the news. Today, for example, it is cold and rainy, and the news is certain to be dominated by house fires and weather-related accidents-- the accidents caused by stupid drivers who drive in rain-turning-to-sleet as if they're behind the wheel of a video game, and the house fires caused by stupid residents who do things like toss their dirty lingerie too close to the space heater in the bedroom.

Stupidity and bad weather are always a great newsday combination, but add these to the holiday season, and it becomes a veritable headline smorgasbord.

The holiday season adds two crucial ingredients to the cauldron-- traveling and family.

Traveling on its own, added to stupidity and bad weather, it's throwing gasoline on a fire... no more need be said. However, surprisingly, it is family that I contend is the most catalytic element in the equation. Because family involves tolerating family, and its whole web of stresses and strained relations. And that-- for more than less-- means drinking. Oftentimes heavily.

So, during the holidays, the ordinarily stupid people in the world are not the only ones making the news. Otherwise responsible and intelligent people are also making stupid decisions and acting carelessly because they're momentarily struck dumb by the crucible of the holiday season. They crumble under the pressure of dealing with bad weather, dealing with hectic travel in this weather, and then having to deal with family once they get there.

May you all have a happy and healthy holiday season, and remain out of the headlines in your local newspaper.

a prayer for mumbai

2008-11-29T08:45:00.007-05:00

On 9/11/2001 Tina called to ask why airplanes were flying into buildings here. She was overseas in Mumbai, and I didn't know what she was talking about. I hadn't yet heard about the terrorist attacks. I was at work with my head buried in my computer. Fifteen minutes later, I was being evacuated from my building. Like most people around the world, I spent the following days watching CNN.

On 11/26/2008 Tina called again. She told me she was fine and not to worry. Again, just like 9/11 more than seven years before, I didn't know what she was talking about. I hadn't yet heard about the attacks. I was just getting out of work this time around, and when I went home, I again spent the following days watching CNN.

Tina is my emergency alert system, and I trust her intuition and insight into unfolding events more than any news service. I also trust my girlfriend's take on what matters and what's relevant in any given situation, emergency or not. It comes as no surprise then that I trust what I'm hearing from her, in Mumbai, about what's happened there.

There are two things she talked about that I haven't heard here.

1) She says reports there claim up to 40 or so terrorists involved in the attack and not the 10-15 reported here, and the coordination behind and the money invested in the attacks was tremendous. Again seemingly more so than the reporting here suggests.

Watching CNN, and how they talk over the same footage, running on a continuous loop until they get their hands on something different, has a hypnotic effect. While they are ushering experts before the microphone to talk about al-Queda connections, etc. and answer the same inane questions, the viewer watches this same footage over and again. The building on fire. The hijacked police car driving down the road. The body picked up in the street. And what new details are mentioned are often lost by the mind-numbing format of what's been scrolling in front of your eyes.

Tina mentioned that satellite phones were found in the possession of the terrorists which they used to coordinate their attacks. In the case of those who stormed the Taj, two had booked a room in the hotel in advance to use as a command base throughout the attacks. Another two had been working as kitchen help in one of its restaurants so they had an intimate knowledge of the hotel's layout. I hadn't heard any of these details come out in reporting and, if they did, they were probably lost in the constant stream of looped video footage. Instead, I heard them talking about investigators sifting through the terrorist's "pocket litter," one of those terms that news reporters end up falling in love with and repeating ad nauseum.

2) The terrorists were thoroughly cold-blooded and diabolical in their disregard for human life while executing their plan.

This statement goes without saying, but it lacks any punch without specifics. In a chilling story, this is what Tina provided me. Unfortunately she did this last night before I went to bed, and I was unable to sleep soundly throughout the night with the images I had afterwards in my head.

In the Taj, they were apparently executing hostages with grenades instead of bullets. She told a story of how a couple of terrorists in the hotel room tied up a group of hostages, wolfed down plates of biryani taken from the hotel kitchen to keep up their strength, and then left the hotel room, dropping a grenade inside the door before exiting.

On one hotel floor alone, 20 dead hostages were found.

While watching TV, I kept seeing these explosions going off inside the hotel, wondering why they were indiscriminately tossing explosives around like crazed maniacs in a video game. The television coverage fueled this misconception, running text banners like "Terrorists Lobbing Grenades From Hotel Roof." The explosions were not indiscriminate, though. More likely than not, each one of those blasts marked the horrific death of a roomful of hostages, bound and gagged, whose last sight was a terrorist leaving the room and a grenade rolling across the floor.

Grenades were being lobbed outside the hotel, as well, but again not indiscriminately. They were apparently being dropped from the roofs and a transom overpass that ran above the street, connecting the main hotel to its tower wing. They threw grenades, from above, into the street crowds below to perpetuate the chaos outside on one hand as well as keep any vehicles -- emergency responders or otherwise -- from approaching the hotel on the other.

I didn't mean to come off seeming overly critical of the television coverage here. The TV stations are just doing the best job they can. My frustration is not with the reporting but with the real evil that exists in the world, and how it has reared its head yet again. It makes the global economic crisis look mild in comparison, not to mention the energy crisis, the environmental crisis of global warming, the dietary crisis of a fat America, etc ... or any of the many personal "crises" that we get consumed with on a daily basis that can't even be called crises in comparison.

My frustration is that someone I love is suffering in the wake of senseless violence that's all too close to home, and I'm not there for her. I'm in the midst of the holiday of thanksgiving with a tremendous amount to be thankful for, but I can't be thankful right now, not with the knowledge that this evil has once again announced its intention to make our world a living hell.

I pray for Tina, her family, friends, the people of Mumbai, India, and the rest of the world today. I pray that the horror of events in the past few days brings us closer together as human beings, as the horror of 9/11 did, and I pray this strengthens our resolve to confront and obliterate those who would act with such disregard for humanity. I pray with a faith that our common humanity will one day bind us indivisibly and make such terror and suffering an impossibility in our world.

to spit or not to spit on sarah jessica parker's head

2008-11-11T18:17:00.026-05:00

My current apartment in Pittsburgh is nice. The neighborhood is safe, affluent and youthful. The cost of living is affordable. The proximity to my family is convenient. On paper, it's all good.

Off paper, it's maddening.

A lot of it is personal. I grew up here. I can't drive familiar roads here (and they're all familiar) without thinking about how I drove the same roads in my high school days. I can't shake the feeling, as I'm driving, that I should be chain-smoking out a cracked window and bullshitting with friends about which of the shy girls in our class is most likely to be a wild animal in bed.

So, in part, it's my fault. This city will always be backward to me because I can't help reliving my past here. In this sense, I can't live in Pittsburgh in the present tense. However, it's not all my fault. The city kinda sucks on its own, too.

I remember seeing how the city had been portrayed in the movie Wonder Boys while I was living in San Francisco and wondering why the hell I had ever decided to move across country. I convinced myself that Pittsburgh was a hip, artsy haven that I had simply not explored enough in order to find my niche. When the tech bubble burst in 2000, and I couldn't find a Bay Area job, I moved home with a knavish excitement.

Shortly after returning, the illusory cinematic vision of the city was dispelled. In less than 2 years, as soon as the opportunity presented itself, I moved to New York City once again.

My first apartment of my own in NYC was little better than the apartment I had occupied several years earlier in Greenpoint. Instead of being in a rundown building abutting the BQE, this apartment was located in the Gray's Papaya building in Manhattan's West Village.

The corner apartment on the 2nd floor (pictured here) was still FOR RENT when I moved into my studio on the 4th floor in 2002. This apartment was still vacant when I moved out in 2004, and I would be surprised if it isn't still vacant today.

Gray's sells the city's cheapest hot dogs and is open 24 hours a day. The pervasive smell of hot dogs in the building was undercut by the smell of nail polish remover from the beauty salon on the 2nd floor. In this photo, notice the wall slots for A/C units in each apartment. The waft of hot dog/acetone found its way in, year-round, even up on the 4th floor, even with an A/C unit installed and packed with insulation like the one in my apartment was.

What also got in was a tremendous amount of noise. Both day and night, Gray's was mobbed by locals, NYU students, shoppers at the Barnes & Noble across the street, tourists on foot and by the busload and the beggars who subsisted off their spare change. Even late night (early a.m.) you'd find a line outside its door, mostly loud and drunken college students and club goers. The club goers particularly vexed me. They inspired this early poem:

Swear Eggs

Club closes 4 a.m.
Its horde disgorges
four floors below.

Vampires suck last drops
before a long return home
to slum coffin silence.

Moonroof open howling
hip-hop subwoofer
shakes the panes.

An empty forty
vacuum pops, skyhook
shot from the sidewalk.

Awake my bloodshot
eye pried from sleep
watches on

unblinking
four floors above
through drawn curtains.

An egg cools in my palm;
a word written
in black upon its shell.

I’ve got a dozen
ready to hurl from a
styrofoam carton mouth.

Four floors below
car doors close, engine revs
trails off.

Eggs intact
until morning, until I make
a hateful omelet.

The traffic added to the noise, as well. Not only was there the honking thoroughfare of Sixth Ave. to deal with, but W. 8th itself was noisy, too. It was an uneven brick street over which any car with any undercarriage issue-- e.g. a problem with its shocks, a low-hanging muffler or oil pan-- banged and clattered, echoing all the way down the block. Now that I think about it, this could not have been much different than the cacophony I put my mother through, playing with the pots and pans as a tot.

I remember the day that the city, as if answering the solemn curses from inside my studio, decided to pave W. 8th Street. You'd think the smell of wet asphalt blending with hot dogs and nail polish remover would be an intolerable, trifecta stank. However I embraced the stench, even during a hot hot summer, knowing it was temporary, that it would provide a smooth surface over which cars would motor silently, and I would soon be able to sleep blissfully throughout the night, not waking up with each passing beater of a car, each time thinking there was a stranger banging around in my kitchen.

Once the paving job was finished, I had about two weeks of the most pleasurable sleep imaginable until a local motorcycle gang took a fancy to its smooth surface. It became their 4 a.m. drag-racing spot, three or four nights a week.

The solemn curses resumed inside my studio.

My time there sounds awful now, as I've written here, but that apartment was the launchpad for my poetry writing. I hadn't written a poem since Vassar until then.

Also, despite the noise and smells, I came to love New York City there.

I loved the Italian barbers I went to on Christopher Avenue who kept an up-to-date stack of Playboys and Hustlers as reading material for their customers. And how they cleared out one barber's station during the holidays every year to keep a complementary full-bar for its customers. (I learned the hard way that a certain barber there hit the Amaretto pretty hard while on duty.)

I loved playing pool at the Crow Bar with its signed sixties rock n' roll memorabilia in the bathrooms and wooden crows perching in the rafters over the pool tables. And how its ghoulish female owner apparently had a story behind each piece of memorabilia that invariably ended with her giving a rockstar blowjob.

I loved the microbrew bar/restaurant around the corner with the NFL package where I could watch the Steelers play with sound on the TV in the corner. And how bizarre it was watching a game there one weekend with a group of a dozen or so deaf Steelers fans, how ironically loud were the finger-cracking and palm-smacking of their gesticulations in conversation.

Most surprisingly I found myself in love with the city the day they filmed a segment of Sex In The City on my block.

I say "most surprisingly" because with the popularity of the show, there was a horde of people roped off along West 8th Street, and I had to show some guy ID with my address on it just to walk down my block. And I am allergic to hordes of people, especially the kind of people who would tolerate being herded together to get a glimpse of the making of a show like Sex In The City, which you would literally have to strap me in, Clockwork Orange-style, to watch.

Apparently, in this episode, the girls go slumming for a hot dog at Gray's Papaya. The director's chairs for the actresses were set up along the wall outside Gray's Papaya, and as it turns out, Sarah Jessica Parker's chair was placed directly below my studio window. (This is a picture of her attending the premiere of the cinematic rendering of the show. However, she could have just as easily been walking off the set as a witch in one of the Narnia movies in this dress.)

From inside my apartment, I heard the crowd cheer, and when I went to my window to look outside, I could see that Sarah Jessica Parker had arrived at the scene.

As I leaned out the window and saw her seated directly beneath me, I was overcome with the urge to spit on her head.

I paused to deliberate whether or not I was the kind of person who spits on celebrities' heads, and I concluded I was not, but I could easily be one, and would perhaps never better have an opportunity than now, so why not?

By the time I decided to spit, though, I was being addressed by a film crew member from the street.

"I'm sorry," the crew member said through a bullhorn. "Is this light bothering you?"

There was a floodlight aimed at my side of the building from across the street, but it didn't quite reach my window. It was close enough that it might have annoyed me, though.

"If it is, we'll move it for you," she said through the bullhorn.

The crowd hushed, and the shoot seemed to stop as the crew waited for my response.

"No, no, it's fine," I yelled out my window, loud enough to be heard, and the production crew resumed its work.

Because of the little bit of consideration shown by this crew member, I am not a celebrity spitter today.

Such politeness, reaching up to my studio apartment window, after so much noise and vulgarity had wafted through its pane, totally disarmed me. No longer did I despise the crowd outside, the crew and stars of the show; I sat back down on my couch to watch television, feeling like I'd just spoken with next-door neighbors I'd known for ages. For the first time in New York, I felt like I belonged in the city. I felt at home. At home without a past, only the present and future.

a constituency of one

2008-11-03T09:26:00.022-05:00

My ballot is an 18-year-old virgin. Now 36, I've been of-age to vote the last 18 years, and I've chosen to abstain from doing so in every presidential election that's taken place in that time.

I've never cast a vote for President of the United States, and tomorrow, Nov. 4, I'm inclined to abstain once again.

It's not that I'm undemocratic (with a lower-case "d'). I've cast my ballot for candidates in other national, state, county and city government positions. However, I've never pulled the lever for the big one. Until recently, I've never paused to examine just why this has been the case. Then again, until recently, I haven't been so tempted to give up my vote to a presidential candidate.

Obama's been the first for whom I've considered unlocking my political chastity belt.

Like so many, I was moved by a politician in a way I'd never been moved before when I heard the speech Obama gave at the 2004 DNC. That speech marked the emergence of a charismatic figure in the Democratic party that it hasn't seen since JFK. (Some might argue 'ol Bill was pretty charismatic, but who wouldn't agree now that, even in his heydey, he's just plain sleazy in comparison to Obama? And for those of you who would argue for Hillary's charisma?... please.)

Obama's speech to the DNC didn't move me nearly as much as a speech he made earlier this year, though. While campaigning against Hillary for the party's nomination, he delivered his "A More Perfect Union" speech.

I was more moved by this speech not because of its subject matter--race--but rather the way he confronted the topic and the context in which he confronted it. Afterwards I realized that, whenever I'd heard any other politician speak on the topic, I had received a canned preparation of words. Hearing Obama was like eating fresh pasta for the first time instead of the spaghetti in the cardboard box. I had never heard a politician speak so genuinely, so openly, about anything. And here this man was, speaking this way about the most live-wire topic there is in our culture.

Obama decided to speak candidly on the topic of race not just to a convention of fellow Democrats at a time when he was out of the national spotlight like he did with his speech at the 2004 DNC. No, he took it upon himself to address the nation on the topic while he was maintaining a tenuous lead in his bid for his party's nomination. In three words -- how fucking ballsy!

Even if he hadn't delivered in his speech (and he did,) I would have admired him nonetheless for doing what he felt he had to do, regardless of the consequences. That speech fixed him in my opinion as a genuine character. That action supported his description of himself as someone who only got involved in the race at the time that he did because he sought to bring an end to politics as usual in Washington.

The genuine singularity of his character put the spotlight on his opponent, Hillary, and how she lacked the same authenticity. How some people support her with the fanaticism that they do is a mystery to me, especially after this year's race for the nomination, when her Machiavellian self was put on display. Everyone watched as she continually "redefined" herself during her campaign while Obama remained a rock in comparison. The closer she came to her inevitable defeat, the more quickly and radically she changed herself. Hillary shed tears, shot guns, danced (awfully) and threw back shots of Wild Turkey and everything else under the sun to try to appeal to whatever group of people she was speaking to at the time. She reminded me of how the T-1000 morphed into every form it had ever taken in its death throes at the end of Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

After knocking off the most ruthless Democrat in the party for its nomination, I expected Barack would have it easy against McCain. And, really, he has. However, what I did not expect is how disillusioned I would become with him in the process.

His golden image in my eyes started to lose its lustre when Hollywood scorned the Clintons and threw its support behind him. As a general rule, I distrust celebrity endorsements because they are celebrity endorsements, i.e. endorsements given by people who, for the most part, live lives completely out-of-touch with reality. They call it la-la land for a reason, and once Obama began receiving all his celebrity endorsements, I began to question the viability of his proposals.

What he claims to do as president seems far-fetched, to put it mildly. Healthcare for everyone. College for everyone. Tax credits for all but the rich. And all of this in the midst of the worst economy the country has seen since the Great Depression. Ahem... pardon my skepticism.

One particular claim, for example, was that 98% of small businesses in the U.S. make less than $250,000 a year, and these businesses would receive no increase in taxes under Obama's economic plan.

I was even more surprised, upon checking the validity of this statement on independent Web sites like politifact.com and factcheck.org, that this statement was, in fact, judged to be true.

However, upon closer investigation, it's only true if viewed in a very specific way. The "small businesses" to which Obama is referring in this claim are based on individual tax returns that claim business income and expenses. These small businesses would be people that are largely self-employed. It comes as no surprise 98% of these "small businesses" make less than $250,000 because, if they made more, they'd incorporate themselves for liability purposes.

His claim that 98% of small businesses in America will not receive an increase in taxes under his plan is factually true if you are talking about the self-employed IT consultant, the mom-and-pop owners of an antique store or one of the many eBay sellers supplementing their incomes.

In other words, it is applicable only to those small businesses that account for a miniscule fraction of the GNP; it is not applicable to incorporated small businesses which are the driving force of the economy.

A "small business" like my father's before he retired, which employed nine people (five doctors and four administrative personnel) and made more than $250,000 net a year, would be taxed at the same 35% corporate tax rate under Obama as it is taxed today under Bush.

McCain's economic plan cuts this corporate tax rate by 10% across the board to 25%, small and large corporations alike. Such publications as the Wall Street Journal and Forbes magazine endorse McCain's economic plan over Obama's primarily because this corporate tax cut will stimulate the economy by making it less costly to do business, thereby encouraging business investment and entrepreneurial risk, thereby creating jobs.

...totally off topic...doesn't Steve Forbes bear a striking resemblance to the head vampire from Lost Boys?

However, by holding out his 98% of small businesses claim, and decrying the greed of corporate America, Obama has succeeded in distorting public perception of his economic plan. It also helps that he has Warren Buffet's endorsement, which he does not hesitate to hold out as a badge of legitimacy when speaking about the economy.

Alan Reynolds, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a non-partisan foundation according to sourcewatch.com, wrote a paper that appeared in the Oct. 24 Wall Street Journal, entitled "How's Obama Going to Raise $4.3 Trillion" which takes Obama's economic plan to task. To summarize, it answers the question, "How is he going to pay for it?" The answer is, simply, that he can't without raising taxes substantially across all tax brackets.

Obama doesn't have to answer this question, though, because the public hasn't demanded him to do so. Incredibly enough, neither has his opponent, and for not hammering Obama over the head on such points, McCain doesn't deserve to be elected to the office.

He had ample opportunity to do so and didn't. He also showed that he couldn't debate himself out of a cardboard box. Instead of trying to articulate the fantastical nature of Obama's promises, McCain choose to cave and allow the Republican party to dust off its old playbook and paint Obama as a Manchurian candidate for a left-wing Marxist movement that seeks to undo all things American.

McCain also allowed Obama to associate him, to the very end, with Bush. He never effectively countered Obama's claim that McCain voted with Bush 95% of the time, and that a vote for him was four more years of Bush.

Anyone with Internet access and an interest in the validity of politicians' claims knows, by checking sites like the aforementioned politifact.com and factcheck.org, that this claim is true, but again only from a very specific point of view.

Yes, he voted along with Bush 95% of the time, but only in this past year, and he did so largely in order to counter the Democratic majority in the senate along with the other Republican senators. Prior to the Democrats gaining control, McCain voted with Bush a little over 70% of the time. While this makes his voting history strongly Republican, it is hardly evidence of him walking lock-step with the Bush administration as Obama has portrayed him.

The funny thing is that, on the most substantive point (the economy) of this campaign, it is Obama and not McCain who is for "more of the same," i.e. Bush and Obama @ 35% corporate tax rate vs. McCain @ 25%.

Does McCain have a shell-shocked war buddy managing his campaign?

Obama also distorts the truth when he claims that McCain is for a $4 billion tax cut to oil corporations, and I know,...yes, it's politics, and you spin as you have to in order to win. But that's the whole point. I bought into Obama being above it all. I bought into him being the anti-politician, and in operating this way, in operating like the same politician he set himself apart from in his campaign against Hillary for the nomination ... he just doesn't charm me anymore. The hearts are no longer inflating and popping around my head when I see him.

He almost had me with his sweet-nothings, but now I can't look past the deceptions and question marks. With his spell now lifted, if I was voting for the candidate who I thought best gave the country a chance to emerge for its current woes, I'd vote McCain. However, honestly, I can't do that, either, knowing McCain's not run a good enough campaign to deserve the presidency.

So I'm re-adjusting my chastity belt.

I quoted MacNeice in an earlier post as saying, "I am damned if I am going to swallow Marx or Trotsky or anyone else lock stock & barrel unless it squares with my experience, or perhaps I should say, my feelings of internal reality."

The same applies here. Call me a prude, but I simply won't give it up for a candidate I don't full-heartedly believe in. Obama almost had me, like he's got so many now -- maybe enough for the presidency -- but I'm just not buying all the sweet talk.

smashed pumpkins

2008-10-29T21:02:00.002-04:00

Happy Halloween.

umbraphilia revisited

2008-10-22T16:44:00.037-04:00

Driving in traffic is driving in traffic. It's the same wherever I've lived in the country, with only a few exceptions. Some of the best traffic I've ever been stuck in has been in California. Getting stuck in foggy morning rush hour traffic on the Golden Gate bridge is a traffic jam more tolerable than any other, even exhilarating in a top-down convertible. I'm admittedly biased toward the bridge. From the very first time I've driven under its art deco styling, I've never ceased to feel a twinge of surreal excitement moving across the bayscape. When you're stalled in traffic on its span, you have the chance to absorb its strangeness. When it's fogbanked, the bridge looks downright otherworldly, as if you've passed through time and space in Dune.

Pittsburgh doesn't offer a structure similar to GGB that lends itself to appreciating being stuck in a traffic jam. Rather it offers a traffic behavior that I will claim is Pittsburgh in nature because I've seen it happen here often and can't recall noticing it anywhere else.

While stuck in traffic, Pittsburgh drivers have a tendency to crack open their driver-side doors and spit on the road.

It's one of those occurrences that, once you become conscious of it, you see it happening all the time in Pittsburgh traffic. I can't recall having lived anywhere else where I've seen this happen, or if I did, it happened so infrequently that I can't. It's not like every other Pittsburgh driver is hocking loogies as soon as traffic stops, but it happens often enough that you do notice the next time and say, "Damn, there's another guy spitting out his door."

Why open the door? Why not spit out the window, especially since you're stopped in traffic and don't have to worry about the wind pulling your hocker along the side of your face?

These questions led me to believe it was tobacco chew. Guys chewing and spitting their chew spit out the door. And maybe a few of the roadspitters are chewers, but I've actually opened my door to examine the spittle in question on occasion, and each time I have, it's been plain ol' regular spit.

I'd like it if it were some quirky Pittsburgh commuter superstition. Open your door, spit on the road and then traffic will start moving. Or if it had some ceremonial quality to it-- spitting outside your car door before going into work-- like how Maximus rubbed a little dirt between his fingers before he'd fight in Gladiator.

I'm more inclined to believe it's nothing more than an unfortunate regional habit that's developed over generations, like Pittsburghese or voting for the guy who the union supports.

Being stuck on the Brooklyn Bridge at night is also one of those exceptional traffic stop places. I'd go so far to say that, when I think of the archetypal New York moment, I think of sitting buzzed in the back of a taxi being driving across the Brooklyn Bridge at night.

Perhaps that's cliche New York-- you watch any movie in which New York City figures prominently, and its makers will find a way to get a scene of the BB in there somewhere--but one of my most memorable experiences, after moving to New York for my first time, involved being stuck in traffic at night on that bridge. So, cliche or not, that's epitome NYC for me.

My mid-20s, I had been living in Greenpoint (on the couch chez Oakes, Wickersham & Rasmussen) and was out at a bar in Manhattan (with at least two of those three slobs) when I met the acquaintance of a woman. An older woman. Late 30s.

I recall lying to her. I said I was a visitor to the city--not a recent transplant from San Francisco--and that I was considering getting a hotel room because I couldn't bear the thought of returning to Greenpoint to stay in my friends' dump of an apartment another night.

That's all the lying I did, though. Everything else I told her was absolutely (and unfortunately) true. Abutting the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, our apartment building did shake every time a tractor-trailer drove by. It was a sixteen-block walk from the subway, featuring one block with a White Tower parking lot that was covered with the broken glass of so many empty crack vials that it glittered beneath a full moon. There was a Vietnam vet in one of the apartments who, when feeling patriotic, would climb out onto the building's roof and discharge his firearm into the air. On the ground floor, there was a bar called Mike's where I made the mistake of asking for a Corona. I was promptly asked where exactly I thought I was and, before I could reply, told to go fuck my faggot self.

When you bring up the Greenpoint days with Oakes, Wickersham & Rasmussen, each will wax nostalgic. Those days are up there with their Skidmore college remembrances. It was a time in each of their lives before things fell into place--the job, the girlfriend-then-the-wife, the kids. Those days were the bohemian pioneer time of their lives before they settled into the responsibility of family. They were silly and slapdash and depraved and unglamorous--how disgustingly pleasurable it was to sit on that couch, in that dilapidated building, unemployed, smoking cigarettes, drinking Bud in cans, eating cold KFC out of the bucket and watching reruns of 21 Jumpstreet with Bill on weekday afternoons.

Those days weren't meant to last, and what always marvelled me about OW&R was that you got the sense they knew this, that they had already caught a fast-forward glimpse of how settled their lives would become, and they were appreciating the here-and-now, hyperconscious of its temporality . A similar spirit must govern the umbraphiles who travel the globe to snatch those fleeting moments of totality. Just like the solar eclipse geeks, OW&R behaved as if they knew they were experiencing something wondrous and fleeting in their lives, and they were going to appreciate those moments to the fullest.

Unlike them, I never possessed such wisdom or foresight. I woke up one too many mornings with my face pressed against one of their stained sofa cushions. I couldn't look beyond that immediacy. I just blew in whatever direction the wind bent me.

The night I met the older woman in the bar, the wind was my friend. It wanted to see me get laid. After telling this woman all the foul details about the apartment I was staying in, and how I didn't want to spend the money but just had to sleep somewhere else so I was planning on getting a hotel room, she said no. Save your money. I have a place for you to stay the night.

She insisted that I come home with her to Cobble Hill in Brooklyn.

We took a cab to her place, and we made out in its backseat like we had been thrown into a particle accelerator. Our faces were mashed together, all teeth lip and tongue, our booze breath holding them together like a grilled cheese sandwich.

Nowhere else in the world is such behavior more appropriate than the backseat of a New York City taxi cab.

We pulled our sandwich halves apart for a breath of fresh air, just as the cab started its way through a nighttime traffic snarl on Brooklyn Bridge. Though I'd been living in Greenpoint for a few weeks by then, I realized it was the first time I'd ever been on the BB. I remember how expansive and unforgiving the skyline of Manhattan looked on its side of the river, the pale glow of the pearl lights slung across the bridge and the graffito-ravaged rooftops that came into view on the Brooklyn side.

I could see my reflection in the window, projected out upon this scene and the dark river, and my thoughts were being pulled existentially from the cab. I was experiencing one of those moments of naked solitude before the uncaring city when I felt her hand find mine on the cab seat. I turned back to her and sought more than simply a drunken hook-up, more than companionship, more than even love-- I sought desperately just to embrace warmth. My need was necessity, animal. I would have crawled under her skin if I could've.

When we got close to her block, she began adjusting her hair and clothes, and I followed suit. The cab driver was completely unfazed by our behavior. We could have been lighting firecrackers in each other's pants the whole time, and I doubt it would have even twitched-- let alone lifted-- one of his dark, hairy eyebrows in the rearview mirror.

Once behind the door of her brownstone, where I had been anticipating another impassioned collision, the woman was surprisingly subdued. She put a finger to her lips, pointing upstairs, and initially I thought she was concerned about making noise and the neighbors. Then she showed me to what was obviously a guest bedroom and said, "Here you are. I'll be right back."

Then I began to wonder if she might be a single mother, and she had shushed me coming in the door because there was a babysitter, because she didn't want the kid(s) woken up. I had myself convinced this was the case when she re-appeared in my doorway moments later.

She handed me a clean towel from behind her back, pointed down the hall to where the bathroom was, and wished me a goodnight. When I asked if she was joining me, she said she couldn't. She had to sleep upstairs. "Please, understand," she said.

And that was it until morning.

She woke me up early, panicked, not even bothering to knock on my door before she came in.

"You're my cousin, okay? My cousin,...was it Todd?"

"Yes, Todd. What the hell are you talking about?"

Only then did I find out it was not neighbors or kids she had upstairs, but a husband, who was going to be down any minute for breakfast, and it would look suspicious if I left now.

So I had to sit there, pretend I was the wife's 2nd cousin visiting from out-of-town and eat breakfast with the married couple.

I think we had waffles.

the one great elegance

2008-10-16T10:21:00.008-04:00

This last weekend I picked up a book I had put aside for a while-- MacNeice's biography by John Stallworthy-- yes, I'm still reading it since I started mid-summer. It's unconscionable how little reading I've done lately, especially having my master's days still within grasp of memory. I was reading in excess of 200 pages a day then, and now I've finished only 200 pages of this autobiography in the span of a summer. Pathetic.

It happens during football season. My brain likes to curl up around football statistics, injury reports, player gossip, etc. and it's difficult to nudge in a more constructive direction. It's no coincidence that my brief return to reading the written word coincides with the Pittsburgh Steelers' bye weekend.

Being distracted by football is more easily done when others give you intellectual reasons for doing so. MacNeice does this for football. In The Strings Are False, he talks about "the one great elegance" in American football that sets it apart from English rugby-- the forward pass.

He writes, "To see a man feint and then throw a long impertinent pass out of the palm of his hand into a space where no one is but suddenly someone appears and ball and man are wedded at the run, is exhilarating, almost a sacrament."

Unlike TSAF, Stallworthy's biography of MacNeice's life is too exacting, to the point of over-reporting. He acknowledges this, his intent being to keep to MacNeice's writings and letters as closely as possible. You have to want to stay with him, or else the book is prone to fall upon the nightstand and not be picked up again anytime soon. Fortunately, Mac's character draws me back into Stallworthy's book, even if only for a few pages before falling asleep.

One part of the biography that I particularly enjoy is the recounting of Mac's days at Oxford. I suppose I enjoy this as much as I do because I've been to Oxford so I can more easily place myself in the scene as I'm reading. I would have liked to attend Oxford, too, and there is a bit of envy that also plays into my interest of this part of his life. Here's a photo of Christ Church I took while there in '05.

At one point, while strolling around, I was convinced I must have side-stepped a rope barrier somewhere and mistakenly wandered into a museum on campus. There were signs warning you to keep off the grass, and no one else was around. The courtyard was lined with grotesques and the place had the feel of being steeped long in history. Dumbstruck by the antique beauty of the place, I thought I had managed to walk right into a restricted area. Then a student kicked open a staircase door, talking on a cell phone on his way to class. He walked past with a backpack over one shoulder and a mountain bike over the other. And I realized that it was not a museum I had walked into, but rather, the courtyard of this kid's dorm.

Another connection I have to the passages regarding Mac's days at college is the similar approach we seem to have had to our collegiate environments. We both found ourselves out of place at college in our own, different ways. I touch upon this in my Aug. 2 entry where I first mention reading the biography.

Mac had it tough at Oxford finding his clique on campus. Not only was he an Irishman at an Englishman's university, but he was also a man among nancies. In The Strings Are False, MacNeice wrote, "In Oxford homosexuality and 'intelligence,' heterosexuality and brawn, were almost inexorably paired." This discovery "left me out in the cold and I took to drink."

Reading this about MacNeice illuminates something about his poetry Stallworthy doesn't touch upon. He's all over the mother-father relationships in Mac's poetry and the garden-tunnel imagery, etc., etc. What he doesn't address is the masculine tone of Mac's poetry and how its origin can be traced to is his being his own man (literally) at Oxford.

Left in the cold at Oxford, Mac wrote poetry that's its own. There is an independence, an authenticity, an edge to his work that I appreciate more now knowing that these traits also characterized his life. I'm reminded of a passage of his in a letter he writes to Eleanor Clark, explaining why he refuses to espouse socialism at a time when it was vogue to do so among those he associated with:

"I am damned if I am going to swallow Marx or Trotsky or anyone else lock stock & barrel unless it squares with my experience, or perhaps I should say, my feelings of internal reality."

Stallworthy quotes the following poem of MacNeice's in its entirity in his biography, and I think it's as good a representation of Mac's work as any. (Tell me, does anything sound less gay than bagpipe music?)

"Bagpipe Music"

It's no go the merrygoround, it's no go the rickshaw,
All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.
Their knickers are made of crepe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python,
Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with heads of bison.

John McDonald found a corpse, put it under the sofa,
Waited till it came to life and hit it with a poker,
Sold its eyes for souvenirs, sold its blood for whiskey
Kept its bones for dumb-bells to use when he was fifty.

It's no go the Yogi-Man, it's no go Blavatsky
All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.

Annie McDougall went to milk, caught her foot in the heather,
Woke to hear a dance record playing of Old Vienna.
It's no go your maidenheads, it no go your culture,
All we want is a Dunlop tyre and the devil mend the puncture.

The Laird o' Phelps spent Hogmanay declaring he was sober,
Counted his feet to prove the fact and found he had one foot over.
Mrs. Charmichael had her fifth, looked at the job with repulsion,
Said to the midwife 'Take it away; I'm through with over-production'.

It's no go the gossip column, it's no go the ceilidh,
All we want is a mother's help and a sugar-stick for the baby.

Willie Murray cut his thumb, couldn't count the damage,
Took the hide on an Ayrshire cow and used it for a bandage.
His brother caught three hundred cran when the seas were lavish.
Threw the bleeders back in the sea and went upon the parish.

It's no go the Herring Board, it's no go the Bible,
All we want is a packet of fags when our hands are idle.

It's no go the picture palace, it's no go the stadium,
It's no go the country cot with a pot of pink geraniums,
It's no go the Government grants, it's no go the elections,
Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension.

It's no go my honey love, it's no go my poppet;
Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.
The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won't hold up the weather.

wx ax

2008-10-07T09:40:00.023-04:00

In my short time as a writer for a news station, I've come to understand that the type of writing I'm doing is the literary equivalent of working in a morgue. The subject matter is primarily death. There is always a shooting to report. A stabbing. A fire. A car accident. Accidents are so frequently reported that they are tracked under the abbreviation, "Ax."

Oddly enough, weather is referred to as "Wx" so when you have an accident involving the weather, e.g. last week with the remains of Hurricane Whatsitsfuck - the oak tree that fell and trapped a convalescent woman upstairs in her bedroom without power, such an incident is referred to as a "Wx Ax."

The writing itself is as thankless as the work done by a mortician. With web writing, quantity is favored over quality. Strongly favored. Research tells us that most people don't read most online articles past the headline, so the primary goal of the news web page is to get as many new and fresh headlines up as possible. The story behind it need not be anything more than a few slapdash lines thrown together. If it is more, then great, just as long as you didn't take too much time writing it that the headlines on the page began to stagnate.

Like the mortician's work, the news writer's only stands out if you've noticeably fucked up. If you report the auto ax on the right street - Maple Ave. - but in Peters instead of South Fayette township, or get the number of pit bulls taken by the police from the foreclosed home wrong, or misspell the names of the two Sheraden boys who died to a house fire due to no batteries in the smoke alarms. That's when you're recognized.

But even so, mistakes such as these aren't a big deal. Just like it is with blog writing, all you have to do is edit and re-post. The big deal, as I said, is refresh, refresh, refresh the headlines.

There are only so many death and destruction headlines to write locally in a given day, though. This unavoidable fact of news life is circumnavigated by updating existing headlines on a regular basis, often when there is absolutely nothing new to report. For example, the headline "Man With Gun Arrested At Beaver Co. Obama Rally" written in the morning may well appear in the afternoon as "Beaver Man Packs Heat At Obama Rally, Faces Charges" in the afternoon. Same story, but freshened up for the news page.

This quest for freshness of headlines leads to headlines being written for events that are barely newsworthy. Fluff pieces. The fountain at a local park was dyed pink during breast cancer awareness month so the headline, "Point Park Fountain Goes Pink For Breast Cancer Awareness" is a result. That sort of thing.

Often only another web news writer can appreciate a well-written headline or story for what it is, and even then, it's not the same kind of appreciation say, a literary writer has for an other's work. News writing doesn't endure. It's gone and forgotten once the next headline has replaced it. And you don't have web news writers pausing in the middle of the day to reflect back upon an other's work and say, "Damn, I wish I had written that!" No more than I can imagine one mortician watching another work upon a cadaver and saying, "I wish I could open a chest cavity with that same effortless grace!"

I've found I deal with the death and destruction and fluff by bringing a poetic mentality to the writing of my headlines. So far it has gone unacknowledged, and I hope it continues to be overlooked by the powers that be. I take a few extra moments to exercise this mentality solely for my own amusement. It's how I get through the day. A few recent examples:

I enjoyed using rhyme in "Attempted Calf Snatch In Masontown After Three Slashed," a headline I wrote for a story about a serial animal skinner who's been sneaking onto a man's cattle ranch at night to skin his animals alive.

I could not resist the temptation (albeit in poor taste) to employ irony in writing the headline to a story in which a woman was accidentally run over by a teenager who offered to help her parallel park her car. It read simply, "Elderly Woman Run Over By Good Samaritan."

My favorite was this little bit of innuendo for a fluff piece. Two women affiliated with the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals demonstrated in Market Square recently; they showered naked in public, making an argument for vegetarianism by pointing out that some large amount of water is wasted in producing a single pound of consumable meat.

My headline read, "PETA Gets Naked In Shower To Beat Meat."

dad's home

2008-09-30T20:29:00.001-04:00

A day and a month later, looking no worse for wear, save a slight loss of hair.

The world can resume turning now.

in trust, my ass

2008-09-24T09:54:00.013-04:00

I've learned in these last few weeks that, in order to get along with my father -- really get along with him, you have to submit to his political viewpoint, i.e. Grand Ol' Party conservatism, especially during a presidential election year.

In doing so, you've got to understand that "liberal" is a bad word and be accustomed to it being used in conversation as such. For example, when my father remarks that Obama is "just such a liberal" he is, in effect, saying that he is "a clueless, socialist motherfucker."

I have no problem with liberal bashing any more than I do with conservative bashing. For me, it's as easy as taking off one baseball cap and putting on another. I see much to be bashed on either side. I always have, and this is perhaps why I've always been a registered independent.

The motto for the Independent Party of the United States of America is "I Don't Trust A Single One Of You Cocksuckers" or more simply "In Trust, My Ass."

When I visited my dad in the hospital this past weekend, it was easier than usual to pick up the bat and take some swings at the left-wing as I remembered the time a cousin of mine called him while I was there, ostensibly to wish him well.

In less than a minute they were arguing politics, conservative v. liberal.

Here my father was, just being outfitted with the IV for his chemotherapy, and my cousin's on the phone arguing, provoking, causing him to get red and start yelling. He might defend himself (being the jerkass lawyer he is) by saying my father provoked him, and he might be right, but he could have easily excused himself from the conversation, too-- "Hope you feel better, Bob. Gotta run." --instead of egging-on a cancer patient that needs exactly the opposite of irritation and conflict. Inexcusable behavior, imo. What a fucking moron.

I wished I lived in Manhattan again-just then-so I could jump on the 1,2,3 to the Upper East Side and kick the bullshit out of him.

I had intended in this post to discuss how I wish I had spit on Sarah Jessica Parker's head when I had the chance, but that will have to wait until later I suppose. Time for work.

two more guinness records

2008-09-18T08:13:00.012-04:00

To launch the 2009 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, the shortest man in the world, He Pingping, posed in London's Trafalgar Square with Svetlana Pankratova, the woman with the world's longest legs.

In addition to shortest man, He Pingping gets the record for looking like the world's greatest playa in this photo... and wearing what has to be the world's biggest shit-eating grin.

to all my friends' baby photo slideshows

2008-09-16T10:23:00.018-04:00

After reading my last entry, I realize that I've been little better in my current writing than those visitors of my father's who I found cause to criticize. These last few entries have been of a more somber nature, perhaps fittingly so, given the circumstances. Nonetheless, just as I've been encouraging my father's visitors to be more upbeat and mirthful, so will I.

On that note, I wrote a poem a couple of days ago, after getting Jon and Kim's slideshow of their child Frances at 11 months. That was the title of the slideshow, 11 months, and the first thing I thought upon receiving it was "Why not wait until Frances one-year birthday to send a slideshow?" Then I caught myself, realizing that without a child-- without even a wife yet to have a child with-- I simply cannot comprehend a couple's tendency to e-mail photo slideshows of their children whenever the desire to do so overcomes them. I've noticed this not only of Jon and Kim with Frances, but of literally every married couple I know that have recently become parents. I suppose I will not until I, too, am in their shoes.

The following poem is a frivolous attempt at understanding the desire, as well as an overt poking-fun at it. As you'll read, my thoughts regarding my father-- and how my mother poked fun at him by framing the picture of his new truck-- obviously found their way into it.

To All My Friends’ Baby Photo Slideshows

Here is a picture of my truck
just off the lot, only a couple hours old.

Here’s one of the odometer—look
at all those zeros!
                                      She’s my first
brand-new, having never known
the joy before, having always
bought used.
                             Here she is
on the road in front of the house
the day I brought her home.

This is her in the driveway,
just after a waxing. Can you see
my reflection in her door?
                                                       I swear
her paint job sheds dirt naturally,
hardly even needs a washing.

Here’s my brother
behind her wheel,

and this is my sister,
doing a Vanna White.

Here’s all of us together,
taken by my neighbor,

and this is my neighbor and I,
arm-wrestling on her hood.

Here I am, filling her up
for the first time down
at the Get-Go — $3.79 a gallon
is just insane!

                              The way she guzzles it, too,
costs an arm and a leg, and I know
it ain’t getting any cheaper
as she gets older.
                                     Here she is
in front of the house again,
but later in the day

when her cherry-red is
more a deep-maroon.
                                               Here’s another of her
odometer: 1,000 miles
on the dot.
                         When she started getting close
I started keeping my camera in her glovebox.
(I had to pull over onto the shoulder
to take the picture the day she turned.)

Can you believe how quickly the mileage goes?
Before I know it, I’ll be taking her in
for her first tune-up.
                                            We leave Friday
on our first trip to the lakehouse—look
at the glint in her grillwork there—doesn’t it
look like she’s smiling?
                                                 Like she already knows?
It’s only for the weekend, but the camera’s
still in the glovebox.
                                             I’ll e-mail you another
slideshow, first thing Monday morning.

vitamin h

2008-09-13T14:59:00.006-04:00

My father's longtime business partner, Dr. Phillips, visited my dad shortly after he began taking up residency in the hospital. He brought him a portable DVD player and a collection of DVDs to watch. My father thanked him for the gift, but Phillips informed him that it wasn't a gift. "It's a prescription," he said.

The collection of DVDs were Phillips' favorite comedies, and he instructed my father to watch them as regularly as he would take medication. He wasn't being flippant, either. He was dead serious. He informed my father that he had been reading up on the treatment of cancer patients, and he had come to believe that humor is as important as any of the other myriad treatments he is receiving in order to crush the bug.

Over these last couple of weeks I've seen the wisdom of my father's partner's words. There is nothing that seizes up my chest more than people who visit and speak with my father as if they're never going to have another chance to do so. The soft, doleful tone of their voices. Their uber-expression of concern. People lock into this form of response to serious illness, and like Phillips, I've come to realize it does nothing to make him feel better.

However, humor does.

As sad and concerned as anyone, my mother realized this from the very beginning. She knew to take her worries and concerns with her to church-- not to the hospital to be with my father. This was exhibited in the first items she had me take to decorate his room. Both were framed photographs-- one was a picture of the dog; the other was a photo of the pick-up truck he had recently bought.

She said, "Tell him I thought he'd want reminders of the things that mean most to him."

He got a good laugh out of that.

Of all the the well-meaning cards and gifts he's received, none has done as much good as Phillips' gift, except maybe this one card, given to him by our family friends, the Drogowskis.

The cover is this photo:

The inside reads: "Please, for everyone's sake, get better soon."

tough as steel

2008-09-08T08:28:00.017-04:00

It's much easier to write about passing thoughts, or past events, than it is to write about this sort of thing. My father's received his 4th chemotherapy treatment yesterday, and I suppose the reason I'm able to write today is that he looked absolutely fine when I visited him with my brother afterwards. It's not so difficult to write when there is optimism to be expressed, and there is. Really he looked no worse for wear than when he was initially admitted to the hospital, and to see him the same as I've always seen him was encouraging.

The saying goes that doctors make the worst patients. I'm assuming it was a doctor or nurse that was treating another doctor that first came up with this saying, and in my father's case, it's easy to see why. When he was first admitted, my dad had a complaint about the manner with which the medical staff had inserted his IV. He bemoaned the layout of his room and how it shouldn't be such a chore wheeling his drip into the bathroom with him. These smaller complaints, of course, spoke to the larger complaint he has about the corporatization of medicine and how he was happy to have gotten out of the profession while the getting was still good. Recently, he started asking his doctors for copies of his own blood work to review.

Though it may be difficult for a medical professional to treat another doctor, it's even tougher to be a family member of a hospitalized doctor. Just to step out of the elevator into the cancer ward, I have to pump myself up, drawing upon what little internal strength I have in order to float a smiley face down his hall. The matter-of-factness with which my dad talks about his condition, though, pops my positivistic balloon. Yesterday, when I commented upon how good he looked, he smiled and said, "Just wait. It's going to get a lot worse in the next week."

He then proceeded to tell my brother and I what a healthy person's white blood cell count, red blood cell count, and platelet count is-- then, he told us what his counts were. He gave us an overview (in layman's terms) of what was being done to his body-- how the chemotherapy treatments were "the hammer" that were meant to smash "the bug" in his bone marrow, leaving his immune system paper-thin in the process.

He did say his doctors had been encouraged by his response to his treatment, and that they were optimistic that his immune system would rebound, but my father undercut this optimism by pointing out there's a chance the hammer might not succeed in smashing the bug. And even if it does, either way, he said, "I'll be getting a lot worse before I get better."

My brother sat against the wall, looking into his lap. He was not accustomed to my father's frankness regarding his condition like I was.

Fortunately, my brother and I had decided to visit the afternoon of the Steelers' first game against the Texans. Soon, father, son & son were busy watching and commenting upon the game, and we fell into a conversational groove that moved us past my father and his condition. It was as if his hospital room scenery were a backdrop that was removed by unseen stage hands. We talked about the ceremony before the game, honoring Dwight White, Ernie Holmes and Myron Cope. I criticized my brother's love for Tom Brady, the quarterback for New England, and tangentially for A-Rod, the third-baseman for the Yankees, and I used both criticisms to call my brother's Pittsburgh fandom "deeply flawed." My father laughed as I ribbed my brother; he even got in on the act by saying Tibor had been living too long now in New Jersey. The only thing missing was the beer and pizza.

The Steelers crushed the Texans in their home opener, much like I hope the chemo "hammer" is crushing the "bug" in my father's bone marrow. Here's one of the five Steelers sacks in the win.

I did not discuss it with my bro, but I felt a deeper connection to the team and the city after our visit with dad. The Steelers' success on the football field lightened the mood in his hospital room, and I like to think the optimism we all felt about the team this season was infectious. My brother and I left the hospital at halftime happy and confident about my father's condition when we both were feeling tentative and a bit scared before.

No wonder this city embraced the success of the Steelers so tightly in the '70s when the steel industry collapsed here. They needed something to cheer for, to be positive about. I now understand that better than I ever thought I could.

change in direction

2008-09-05T11:54:00.006-04:00

Just as my writing here shifted from concerning my waking thoughts to relating memoir-ish stories of my past, it is shifting once again. It is shifting back to my waking thoughts, which are no longer of the whimsical, musing variety. Rather, my thoughts have turned to my father, who was hospitalized a week ago after having been diagnosed with acute promyelocytic leukemia.

I didn't know what this meant. I had heard of leukemia before, but for whatever reason I thought it was a children's disease. The diagnosis confused me, and the medical name scared me. The medical name for everything sounds scary. If you were told you had acute viral nasopharyngitis, you'd think you were fucked and didn't, in fact, have a common cold.

Dumb shit that I am, I didn't realize leukemia was a form of cancer-- a non-medical name I did understand that brought me the polar opposite of comfort.

The mention of the c-word and a loved one's name is simply devastating, especially to someone like myself who's lost several loved ones to cancer. No member of my family that had cancer survived it, and this only made the devastation worse. Only after a great deal of heartaching and tears and frustration and anger and several sleepless nights did I come to understand a few things that brought me to a level of comfort that I can now sit and write about this episode of my life.

First of all, the c-word is no longer unspeakable. There are plenty of cancer survivors, and once I was able to get over my initial hysteria I could find examples of cancer survivors everywhere I looked. Lance Armstrong. Mario Lemieux. My girlfriend's mother. My neighbor's husband across the street.

Secondly, though the medical name initially terrified, I researched it and came to understand that this particular form of leukemia is extremely treatable and, when caught early on, has a high (better than 90%) total remission rate.

Thirdly, they caught it very early. Fortuitously, my father was having his blood monitored every month for a high-blood pressure medication that he had been taking so, when his white blood cell count began to drop, his doctor noticed it immediately. After a few blood tests, the leukemia was identified, and he was in the hospital before any symptoms appeared other than a touch of fatigue.

Today was his third chemotherapy treatment, and he looks as fine as he did the day he was admitted, albeit a bit more subdued.

As he undergoes his therapy, I will continue to write here in sympathy. This blog will remain my cancer log until he pulls through.

shrike

2008-08-27T08:26:00.021-04:00

The shrike (specifically the loggerhead shrike) is the name of a bird that I read about this summer in the paper and, after doing so, immediately wanted to find a place for in a poem. Here it is in this photo taken by Jon Gavin at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

The loggerhead shrike is often mistaken for a songbird, but the two couldn't be more different. Physically, the way to distinguish the two is by the hooked beak on the loggerhead shrike. Unlike the songbird, the shrike's beak is curved at the tip, like a bird of prey.

It's curved this way because it is...a bird of prey....a bird of prey so sadistically violent it has earned the nickname, "the butcher bird."

The shrike uses its hooked beak to break the necks of its prey--small lizards and other small birds--and then impale its paralyzed victims upon sharp branches, thorns and barbed wire.

Not only is the bird distinguished by the manner in which it kills its prey, but also by the sheer amount of killing it does. The article in the paper that I read (I wish I had saved the photo) showed one little shrike that had killed 40+ lizards, birds, and insects. It pictured the shrike and a stretch of a barbed wire fence in the background, along which the shrike had impaled all these creatures in a row.

The loggerhead shrike lacks the talons other predatory birds have with which to tear its prey apart, and this explains why it impales its prey-- in essence, it turns its victims into popsicles from which to peck at and sustain itself. However, as was mentioned in the article, the loggerhead variety of the shrike kills far more than it could possibly eat. It posits that the bird kills as many creatures as it does, and puts them on display, in order to show female shrikes what a vigorous and strong potential mate it is.

So, where the songbird sings to attract a mate, the shrike kills. How deliciously evil--this was my first thought, but then I wondered how evil is that, really? When all the killing is done, all the guy shrike is doing is trying to impress the girls. Aren't they the evil ones by being impressed with such carnage?

I read somewhere about a type of bird that seeks out shiny objects, e.g. scraps of aluminum foil and colorful bits of ribbon and cloth, to weave into its nest in order to attract the ladies. Are these birds any different from the shrike, essentially, in their behavior being a means to the same end?

And how different is the natural world in comparison to our own? I am reminded of a Dave Chappelle comedy sketch -- at about four minutes in, he delves into the question of materiality and male/female relationships -- in which he says (albeit in much coarser language) than a man would live in a cardboard box if only that would be sufficient to attract a potential mate. However, men live in nice homes, drive expensive cars, and pursue the lucrative careers with which they are able to obtain these things because this is what women find attractive.

Are then the material girls who are impressed with our society's dragons really that much different than female shrikes?

How I got from ornithology to Dave Chappelle I really don't know...it's early...i need a cup of coffee...

workforce rejoined

2008-08-24T08:43:00.009-04:00

I received word last Wednesday that the NBC affiliate in Pittsburgh has agreed to compensate me monetarily for writing, editing and managing content on its website. So my fellow comrades, beginning tomorrow, I will be rejoining the workforce after a prolonged hiatus. No doubt, the time and energy that I have to do blog writing will lessen; however, I will endeavor to keep at it to the greatest extent possible.

When I find that my desire to do so is waning, I thankfully have several places in the blogosphere to look for inspiration. One is C. Dale Young's blog, Avoiding the Muse, the link to which I have had listed in my blogroll for some time. It is a one-stop shop for links to all kinds of writing relevant to the world of poetry, and by maintaining this shop with the diligence that C. Dale does, he has made himself a friend of the poetman from afar.

At one point I was in close proximity to the man. We shared a van from Bread Loaf to the Burlington airport last year, but I didn't introduce myself. I would have liked to, being both familiar and appreciative of his poetry, but I was content just to nod off during the long drive after drinking like a writer the previous night at the conference's send-off party in The Barn.

I passed up the opportunity to introduce myself at the airport, as well. After so many consecutive days of being literary at Breadloaf, I had already dimmed the lights in my head. Instead of introducing myself to yet another poet, I hung all of my hungover attention over a fantasy football insert I found in my copy of USA Today. (Am I the only one who always feels compelled to purchase a copy of USA Today whenever I'm in an airport?)

I woke up this morning and swore to myself that I would continue writing a poem called "Shrike" that I've put aside since my very first blog posting two months ago, but I've wanted to mention C. Dale's blog for some time and how useful it is in keeping abreast of what it being written about poetry, among other things. Also, I recently read a poem of his that reminded me of the beach at Half Moon Bay near to where Rob & Kate live. It's also close to the first beach I visited upon my first trip to San Francisco-- a story I intend to relate in a future post. I mention it now to serve as a reminder to do so later. Here's the link to "Infidelity" by C. Dale Young.

robert frost's bed

2008-08-19T09:08:00.050-04:00

My friend Tanya sent me this picture of Annex House, my residence for 11 days last year up at Bread Loaf. She is up there now, doing her second tour of poetry duty, and now that this year's conference is in full-swing, I find myself mentally projecting myself there. I opted not to apply again this year, thinking I'd be preparing to pursue yet another college degree and busy situating myself around yet another college or university campus. If only I had known then that I'd travel to India, change my life's plans, and not presently be working, I'd like to think I'd be there now.

Having never attended a writers' conference before, I did not know what to expect from Bread Loaf. I only knew it was the oldest and most prestigious writers' conference in the country, but since I'd never been to any other conference, I could not put this into perspective. Only once I received my information packet in the mail was I able to do so, to some small degree. I was shocked to learn that writers had been gathering at this retreat in Vermont for 82 (now 83) years--longer than the Pittsburgh Steelers (celebrating their 75th anniversary last season) had been playing professional football. I also learned the current recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry was going to be in attendance; here she is, Natasha Tretheway (right), drinking on my porch with Tanya (left), who has just informed the preeminent poet that she has a nice butt.

The one thing I did know about Bread Loaf, going into the conference, was that it had been parodied as "Wordloaf" on the Simpsons. And to answer Homer's question at the end of this clip, no. Bread Loaf does not have an open bar (which would be truly crazy the way writers drink) except for the party in The Barn at the very end of the conference (which was truly crazy the way writers drink). There was a cash bar that served beer and wine on a daily basis in The Barn, but it only opened in the evenings, late enough after dinner that my friends and I were forced to go into town to do some occasional shopping. Here's Maria with a couple of baby Heineken keggies and a cart full o' bottles and boxes of wine.

While there, my internal odometer rolled back to my college days, and just as then, after my afternoon classes, I liked to have a couple drinks before dinner. I had very little problem finding people like Maria who were of the same inclination. Our core crew was Maria Nazos, Tanya Jarrett, Jamie Iredell, and myself. We would sit out on the porch before and after dinner, and shoot the literary shit. Other attendees and faculty would pass by the porch, join us for a cocktail, stick around for awhile and then move on. It became an institution-- the porch at Annex House-- where you could be sure to get a drink, bum a smoke, hear a favorite poem recited, recite a favorite poem yourself, e.g. the best 9/11 poem ever written-- Martin Espada's "Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100" --engage in a discussion on poetic craft, hear Vincent "the baardvark" recite a spoken word poem in which he geniusly rhymes "Lake Wobegon" with "Pokemon", tell your best drunk story, listen to someone else's most disgusting sex story, watch a half a dozen people standing on top of the boulder in the field across the road which was the only place on the entire mountain where one could get a lick of cellular telephone service, have your picture taken by Adam Grabowski, skip a creative nonfiction reading at the Little Theater in order to listen to Jamie recite a poem recounting the evils of each and every one of his ex-girlfriends, hear Ames sing "I Had My Beer Goggles On", watch Laura challenge Maria to a beer-shotgunning contest and then shit-talk about her victory afterwards, participate in a late-night recite-a-poem-from-memory smackdown with Ilya Kaminsky, Major Jackson, and Matt Hart among others, admire the sunset shining in the mask of beer sweat on Jamie's face after drinking half a case of PBR, see Eavan Boland walk by on the sidewalk and feel your poetic soul pulled by the gravitational weight of her presence, or sit back in a rocking chair and just fucking rock.

Or you could hear one of several different accounts of what happened to me at the Frost summer house, a mile and a quarter off the Bread Loaf campus. The following is the definitive account.

Most of the rooms on Bread Loaf campus are doubles, including those in Annex House. The informational packet that an attendee receives upon acceptance to the conference forewarns you of this fact. I had my reservations about sharing a room with a total stranger. The last time I had been assigned a roommate was my freshman year in college, and he turned out to be a total cocksucker. However, I took some comfort in the knowledge that the staff at Bread Loaf makes every attempt to pair up compatible attendees at the conference. As it turns out, it couldn't have been a more perfect fit with Alex (far left in this picture).

A rugby player, a fiction writer, a helluva storyteller, a drinker, a nasty farter, and an all-around funny and personable guy, Alex was a more suitable roommate than I could have imagined. We bonded from the start, and with him, I attended one of the conference's first get-togethers-- a BBQ and Frost lecture on the grounds outside Robert Frost's summer house near Bread Loaf campus.

The highlight of this excursion was the opportunity to see Frost's summer residence first-hand. A national historic landmark, the house was tiny and must have been cramped even for Frost, who I learned (much more first-hand that I would have liked) was a surprisingly diminutive man. Emerging from the confines of this quaint dwelling must have made the natural landscape surrounding it seem all that much more grandiose and enthralling for Frost. The house consisted of four rooms: a small sitting room, a narrow kitchen, an almost airplane-sized bathroom, and a single bedroom. In the bedroom there was a small window, a framed poem hung on the wall, a nightstand, and a single bed. Robert Frost's small, single bed.

Alex and I had been the first to enter, and we breezed through the house while those behind us were proceeding at a thoughtful, museum-ish pace. They were still noting the titles on Frost's bookshelf in the sitting room, and weighing the quaintness of its few pieces of wicker furniture, by the time we had swept through the place and were standing in Frost's bedroom.

Only once I saw the size of the bed in that room did I realize how tiny this giant of American poetry actually was. The mattresses in the bunk bed that I used to share growing up with my brother, while on vacation at our family's obsessively fish-themed lakehouse, seemed queen-sized in comparison.

The bed was against the wall, to the left of the door as you entered the bedroom. I was overcome with the inexplicable urge to sit on the edge of the bed. For whatever reason, I wanted to place my feet on the exact same spot on the floor where Frost would have placed his, waking up each day, in an effort to connect spatially with the poet. At least this is how I rationalized the urge after the fact.

With utmost care and gentleness, I sat. Alex was watching as I did so, nervously. Nothing happened. The bed, though small, was sturdy, and I let the bed frame take the weight of my ass. I mused upon my feet and grinned up at Alex. Outside we could hear people walking from the sitting room into the kitchen, at which point the expression on Alex's face told me that I should probably get up.

I reached back with my left hand, to help push myself up, when the back corner of the mattress dropped through the bed frame with a bang. I fell backwards atop my arm, my legs flying up spread-eagled in the air over the edge of the bed frame where they had been planted. Looking up from between my knees, I saw Alex standing over me, horror-stricken, as if I had just spontaneously given birth or asked him to lick drops of Tabasco off my perineum.

In an exhibition of behavior most unfitting a good roommate, not to mention a UK rugby player, Alex ran out of the room like a scared little girl.

Fortunately, for me, two of the first people he elbowed past, in exiting the little house, were Maria and Adam, to whom I am both truly indebted. Adam immediately extended a hand to help me up, and Maria barred entry to the bedroom, managing the scene. When someone asked, "What happened in there?" she responded, "Nothing!" and abruptly shut the bedroom door.

Panic-stricken, I got on my knees before the bed and began to examine what I could do as a means of damage control. Once there, I realized what had happened; the mattress rested on three pegs in the bed frame where there should have been four. The peg in the bottom right hand corner was missing, so when I had pushed back on the mattress with my left hand, it dropped through the frame and hit the floor.

I simply pulled the mattress back up so it sat level on the three pegs there. Like that, the bed looked untouched, except for its mussed covering which I smoothed out (carefully) with the palm of my hand. Then Maria opened the bedroom door to several astonished faces, and we walked out, trying to look deadpan. I must have looked like I had just had a physical altercation with Robert Frost's ghost.

The house that had initially seemed so small was now palatial and labyrinthine as we struggled through the querulous crowd that packed its square footage. Once through and out the door, nature had never before been so expansive and inviting. I took a deep breath of fresh, fresh air.

Immediately I found Alex, who was busy telling a group of people on the lawn outside the house how his roommate just broke Robert Frost's bed. After first questioning his manhood, then the content of his character, and finally calling him "chipmunk nuts", I put my arm around my roommate and confided to him that, if I had been in his shoes, I would have in all likelihood exhibited no less panic and cowardice.
As it turns out, the experience served as a boon for our Annex Porch get-togethers. People that perhaps wouldn't have stopped by did, just to meet the idiot poet who "broke" Robert Frost's bed.

While writing this, I was saddened to come across this article in the Middlebury newspaper detailing how on December 28th, four months after my attendance at Bread Loaf, the house was severely damaged in the wake of "a large, underage drinking party."

This passage from the article describes the damage that was done:

Police say vandals shattered a window to gain entrance to the farmhouse and proceeded to destroy tables, chairs, pictures, light fixtures and dishes, torch wicker furniture in the fireplace to warm the unheated building, discharge two fire extinguishers and urinate and vomit inside the building and on the surrounding property.

Surprisingly, Frost's broken bed is not included in this list of damaged furniture. Perhaps the reporter missed this detail, or maybe the horde of drunken teenagers, despite all their pissing and puking, had declared Frost's bedroom off-limits during their party, thereby preserving its sanctity and exhibiting a modicum of respect and common decency for the poet that I, by sitting upon his bed, had managed to lack.

I hope the bed remains there, as is, its mattress resting on three pegs, awaiting the next destructively over-curious poet to sit upon its edge...

mophunquis, pronunciation of

2008-08-18T11:23:00.013-04:00

A few of the few readers of this blog have inquired about, or commented upon, the pronunciation of its name. Most assume it's pronounced moe-FUN-keys, and I suppose that is the pronunciation I had in mind when I first thought up the name.

Perhaps, if you're a little Frenchy, you might pronounce it moe-FUN-key, with the "quis" enunciated as it is in the Marquis (mar-KEY) de Sade.

Or you could go with either of the variants moe-FUN-kwis or moe-FUN-kwiz. (Personally I like to imagine the latter pronunciation, spoken with a thick Pittsburgh accent that sneaks a "g" sound between the last two syllables, as in... Yunz check aht dat website, moe-FUNG-kwiz?)

Or you could opt not to pronounce the "ph" pairing with its customary "f" sound and pronounce the first two syllables of the word, mop-HUN, and end with whatever variant of "quis" you so desire.

Or you could think of some other pronunciation altogether that I cannot in my geeking-out with the word, and that pronunciation would be as correct as any other.

The point is, there is no definitive pronunciation, just as there is no definitive definition of the word. The name of the blog was chosen to be as unconstrained as the writing herein.

Saying that, I wouldn't even term the kind of writing I'm doing here to be blogging, per se. As I've been writing, I've moved beyond my stated intention of recording my awaking thoughts. I've noticed my thoughts, and commentary upon present-day events, have occasioned me to revisit my past. As one reader mentioned, several of my blog posts read like excerpts from a memoir.

I've decided to continue in this fashion here, loosely weaving my past experiences into my day-to-day thoughts, with the intention of writing in a new form altogether which I will call the "blemoir" because a) memlog sounds bad and b) I kinda like how Blemoir sounds like the name of a Lord of the Rings character.

In a future post, I'll flesh out what I mean by "blemoir" in greater detail, but for the time being, that will have to wait. I am anxiously waiting to hear back regarding my most promising job opportunity to date, and until I've heard one way or the other about this job, I'm compelled for some reason to keep my thoughts regarding all things mophunquis in check.

ice cream & coffee

2008-08-14T08:22:00.014-04:00

In addition to saying, I want to drive a choo-choo, I have also in my lifetime uttered the statement, I want to drive an ice-cream truck. I told my girlfriend this (to her absolute horror) shortly after being fired from my first job after college.

Unlike my choo-choo comment, though, I didn't say the latter purely in jest. For a few moments I entertained the possibility of this modest occupation. Its attraction lay in its innocence. My first job after college was tending bar in an Italian gentleman's club with not-so-subtle Mafia connections; the thought of peddling soft-serve to children in the community seemed ethically (not ethnically) cleansing after serving top-shelf liquor to retired criminals.

The idea lost its appeal, though-- not because I suddenly realized how foolish it sounded, nor because its mere suggestion sent my girlfriend running for the hills. Rather, I realized that it would be required, as an ice-cream truck driver, to listen to the same tinny, music-box jingle all workday long, and that this would erode my sanity, in all likelihood turning me into a serial killer over time. At the very least I'd become some weirdo, lingering around schools and luring girls into my basement.

So I've never seriously considered a career driving anything. Also (it must now seem apparent) I've never seriously been career-driven.

Up until recently, what I have been is experience-driven, dropping any sort of commitment whatsoever at the first opportunity to experience something new and different. From my current perspective I can see that I had been wired this way since childhood. As a baby, I've been told that I never had a favorite toy and, if I did, it never remained a favorite for very long. I lost interest in toys altogether at an early age and turned my attention to objects that were specifically not meant to be handled by me. I liked to get into the kitchen cabinets and swing pots and pans around. I liked to stack things, too, out of the pantry, especially things that didn't look like they could be balanced on top of one another.

No doubt my mother is the constant worry-er that she is today because I was the heavyweight champion of destructively over-curious babies. She made the mistake of losing sight of me once while she was making coffee. (I had always been drawn to the brown bubbles that percolated in the transparent nipple at the top of our old coffee pot.) My mother must have had her back turned to me, perhaps answering the phone, the day that I scaled the kitchen cabinet and succeeded in grasping a hold of the pot's electrical cord, pulling it close to get a better look. Though the scar has now faded, you can still see where the coffee scalded my left forearm as a child.

You'd think such a traumatic experience would have inhibited my curiosity, but as I got older, I only gave my mother bigger reasons to worry and collected scarier scars. At the very least, you'd think I'd have been put off coffee, but like most in our hyper-caffeinated country, I'm totally addicted. I have developed a hyper-sensitivity to hot coffee, though-- like that at Starbucks, which is served at a temperature just below that of magma. I can't grip my cup with any degree of comfort without one of those cardboard oven-mitt thingies. Or maybe I'm just being a wuss after being a danger to myself for so long...

...speaking directly to this point is the poet C.G. Hanzlicek, in the following poem from his collection, Calling the Dead, which I am reprinting here totally without his permission...

"To Be A Danger"

Just once I'd like to be a danger
To something in this world,
Be hunted by cops
And forced into hiding in the mountains,
Since if they left me on the streets
I'd turn the country around,
Changing everyone's mind with a word.

But I've lived so long a quiet life,
In a world I've made small,
That even my own mind changes slowly.
I'm a danger only to myself,
Like the daydreaming night watchman
Smoking his cigar
Near the dynamite shed.

bee-CAW-zuh

2008-08-12T08:22:00.034-04:00

Yesterday I returned to Pittsburgh after yet another trip to Lancaster, my second in three weeks, and fortunately this post is not a recounting of the experience driving home. I attended my friend Mark's mother's 65th birthday party, and as with every trip I make to Lancaster, I enjoyed myself immensely. There is a palpable ease that comes with being in the company of longtime friends. Simply passing time with Mark & Adrienne, even if we're just watching TV, is worthwhile, just as it is with my friends Rob & Kate. If I had a job that caused me as much stress as my girlfriend Tina's job does (or any job whatsoever for that matter) I would be visiting them for the sole purpose of maintaining my sanity. Just to keep my stress meter out of the red, I would find cause to seek out their company, even if just to watch Harold & Kumar escape from Guantanamo Bay.

Just before I left this past Saturday to visit them, I completed a test assignment for a freelance writing job that I've applied for. It involves producing content for a particular company's websites. The test assignment was to write a general information piece for one of its online education clients, which describes to a potential online student what a Bachelors in Business Administration degree is...what courses are typically required, what skills are acquired...very basic stuff. In doing my research for the test assignment, I discovered that the BBA is also known as the Bachelor of Science in Business Administration (BSBA) degree, and I wondered how different my life would be if I had pursued a Bachelor in Science rather than my Bachelor of the Arts.

According to every standardized test that I've ever taken, my aptitude in math and science far exceeds my verbal aptitude. How would my life be different today if I had embraced this natural proficiency rather than playing around with words like a kid with fingerpaints? Would I have a job right now? A wife and family? Be a homeowner? (marriage, carriage, and mortgage -- note: the common denominator in these three words) Would I be markedly further along in the game of life than the individual described in this poem I wrote more than four years ago?

Me

Your problem is
You don’t know how old
You are, or if
You do know
You’re in denial.

You can only sit for so long before
You can’t sit any longer; the phone
You should see it for the corpse that it is, but
You don’t.

You keep thinking it will jump to life any minute with something for
You to do, interesting, and when it doesn’t
You press buttons, coax friends like coma patients for a little something visceral
You know they can no longer provide.

You have not yet come to terms with what
Your life has become;
You no longer belong in a convertible while
Your friends’ SUVs ease off exit ramps, turn signals blinking. Somehow

You never learned the art of coupling; coagulation was never
Your forté; now that
You’re alone, lone passenger on the highway
You have no one else to blame for not being parked in a garage, in a home
You own at the end of a cauterized cul-de-sac.

You only have
Your hair tossing about
Your still baby-face,
Your cheeks pinched capillary pink by the breeze,
Your eyes full-on bloodshot, staring into
Your rear-view mirror staring back at
Me.

Again the question of nature vs. nurture. Though my mind was wired (now atrophied) for math and science, my experiences in high-school led me away from embracing this aptitude. As I recall, the definitive point of departure came by way of Ms. Martin in my AP Chemistry class--not Mrs. Martin, as she would quickly correct you if your tongue slipped in that direction. Nor was it Miss Martin; there was nothing miss-y about her. She was a blunt tool of science instruction and, as such, had the personality of a beaker (not the Beaker--the Henson muppet--who had loads more personality.)

She was controversial, though--a character trait that is often mistaken for "having a personality." (Think of a person you would call "controversial" and ask yourself, "Is there really anything more to him or her than that?") Ms. Martin was controversial bee-CAW-zuh her zealotry for science, and all things scientific, was coupled with an abhorrence for the arts and all things artistic. The first meeting of our AP Chemistry class began with her saying, "If you kids don't apply yourselves seriously to studying this material now, you'll end up going to college and becoming English majors."

Of course, she could not have anticipated the scope of her error. She was most likely oblivious to the fact that I was an editor (in one capacity or another) in every publication (except yearbook; too pop) on campus, that I would in a few short weeks win our class's English award, that I had all but proudly declared my intention to major in English at college. (Ironically enough I wouldn't do so, but that's another story.)

She could not have known how her words, in effect, weaponized me.

I began by targeting certain members of our class that had laughed at what she said. I looked past the incorrigible brown-nosers who couldn't help but laugh when they sensed the teacher was attempting a funny. (I could recognize them immediately, having been an incorrigible brown-noser myself, up until my sophomore year and my intellectual expansion sessions with Jon.)

Instead, I targeted those in the class who truly seemed to share her perspective. The absolute scientists. The next generation of Oppenheimers who needed to be checked early on in their careers. This was how I rationalized sabotaging the chemical solutions in their lab drawers before class when no one was around, substituting acids for bases, etc... until I realized I was doing nothing more than creating a nuisance, and not the cataclysms that I had envisioned occurring during lab period. Nothing ever blew up or corroded through a desk because I had no access to the chemicals needed to do so; they were always locked in a cabinet behind a locked door in the back of the lab.

Without chemical weapons at my disposal, I resorted to conventional guerrilla warfare. In our class, each lab station had a pressurized sink that shot a laser-thin stream of water from its faucet directly down into its drain. One day, with John Michael (my lab partner-in-crime), I loosened the nut at the base of one of these faucets, causing its chrome pipe to launch skyward when its hapless user (I forgot who I had targeted back then) turned the water on. Utterly stunned, the poor poindexter flailed in shutting off the geyser of water that was erupting from his lab station, causing his (and his lab partner's) textbooks and notebooks to be soaked beyond legibility.

Neither John nor I were fingered for the crime, but Ms. Martin had begun to suspect me as the culprit bee-CAW-zuh I had developed an increasingly combative attitude in class. Also I was the person that everyone in the room would turn towards, trying to hide the smiles on their faces, whenever she said one word in particular.

Ms. Martin was a native Bostonian, but her accent was somewhat difficult to discern until she pronounced this one word. In brainstorming conventional means to disrupt the class, I happened to notice how this word was inflected differently than I had ever heard it before, and I called John Michael's attention to it. We began to share smirks across our lab station, each time she used the word in explaining something in class.

Soon enough, the two of us had the entire class keyed on to her pronunciation of the word. It had become a game--even among those who didn't find her zealotry overbearing--to try to ask questions evoking a response that included this word. If you could get her to say bee-CAW-zuh twice in responding, you would bring the entire classroom to its knees, and this became a goal recognized as worthy of achieving, even among the most serious scientists in the class.

More so than any of my other classroom tactics, this was the most consistently effective disruptor. I took an added pleasure-- as a fore sworn English major -- in knowing that this chaos was being achieved using linguistic, rather than chemical, means. How apropos.

The day when she said bee-CAW-zuh four times in responding to a single question (asked in earnest, not as a joke, regarding a homework assignment - thus making it even funnier) it was like watching a dam break. With each bee-CAW-zuh, each face in the classroom cracked some more, until every one finally crumbled in laughter with its fourth utterance. Dumbfounded, Ms. Martin had no clue what everyone--even her prized coterie of favorite students--could be laughing about. All she knew was that I had to be at the bottom of it and told me so in private, after class. And though she had no proof, scientific or otherwise, I received detention.

From that point on, every time someone audibly snickered at a stray bee-CAW-zuh uttered during class, Ms. Martin dismissed me on the spot to see Mr. Hall with a detention slip. My game had developed a life of its own, running amok, a juggernaut beyond my control. The new game became who could get Todd detention. Even John Michael, that turncoat, laughed once at my (literal) expense, thereby sending me off from class with a detention slip. In the end, I received detention more times in that class alone than I had received in all of my other classes combined throughout four years of high-school.

Once the AP exam date drew near, Ms. Martin had the class motivated and prepared. No one even smiled anymore whenever she said bee-CAW-zuh; it had simply become because in their ears. Everyone was too focused on getting at least a 3 on the AP and the tangible reward of testing out of a required class in college. Her mantra had finally sunk in. She had won.

In turn, I had stopped receiving detention, and I had ceased devising means by which I could disrupt the classroom. I had no hope of getting a 3 on the AP test; that was certain. But I could still get a B in Ms. Martin's class, and I convinced myself that this was a goal worth attaining.

On our last day of class, I rose my hand and told this to Ms. Martin before everyone in the classroom. I told her that I was even inclined to seek out tutor help and, if I put my nose to the grindstone, I thought I'd be able to eek out a 3 on the AP exam. With everyone looking at me, absolutely dumbstruck, I confided that I had had a dream the previous night. I told her that, in my dream, I didn't go onto college and become an English major. I told her that, after studying with her, I was going to become an engineer.

After saying this, for the first time that I looked at her, I saw a human being. Her face reddened. Her eyes watered. She told me, in front of the class, that that is precisely what a teacher lives to hear. She then proceeded to ask me what kind of engineer I intended to be when I went to college. Structural? Electrical? Chemical?

"None of those," I said. "I want to be a train engineer."
"A what?"
"A train engineer," I said. "I want to drive a choo-choo."

She was so upset with my response, and the laughter that immediately filled the lab afterwards, that she forgot to give me a detention slip after dismissing me from the room.

Now that I think about it, I had no longer been upset about her derogatory comment regarding English majors at that point. Nor did I mind the detentions, which had given me a bad-apple Breakfast Club cache. I said what I did simply because I didn't want her to win, and though I had been weaponized, it's no excuse for me being the lesser person I had been in allowing myself to be. (?) If that makes sense... I need a glass of wine...

why i blog

2008-08-07T13:22:00.015-04:00

Getting back to why i blog-- the topic I brought up, and then abandoned, in my morning biertje posting-- there is something unique and enticing about writing in the blog form. It's special, in part, because it is a paradoxical sort of writing--a writing that is at once both private and public, and as such, very contemporary.

We live in a culture that has increasingly erased the line between private and public--not only technologically, with the state monitoring and recording private conversations and consumer preferences, etc., but socially as well. Socially, this is reflected in our mirror, the television. The popularity of reality TV shows, which offer the viewing public a look inside the walls of a house into people's private lives. Shows like Jerry Springer, where the public (and the studio audience first-hand) gets involved (often vocally, if not physically) in a couple's private domestic squabbles. American Idol might be the best example, though. People are no longer content to simply sing their favorite songs in the privacy of their showers; they want to sing them and be judged by the American public. And the American public wants to judge and watch the performer's private hopes and dreams be fulfilled or (even better) dashed by harsh criticism and/or the vote of the watching public.

So it is no surprise that blogging--as a form of expression that is both private and public-- is popular. What is a surprise is that I have embraced it. And in order to understand why that is, it's necessary to look closer at its paradoxical form.

It's a private sort of writing insofar as it is essentially personal. It is a person's "web log," and the content of its dated entries is necessarily of personal interest to the blogger. It may record only brief summaries of what was done with each day, or it may go into the explicit detail characteristically found in a personal diary or journal. Its point of view may be very self-centered (like this blog) or it may be farther removed (like my friend Megan's blog) in speaking more professionally or academically to a larger audience. However, regardless of its content and the point of view taken by the blogger, the blog writing is of some personal interest to the blogger, or else the blogger simply wouldn't bother. And in being personal, the writing is private to a greater or lesser degree. Something private--a personal interest, a political opinion, a sexual orientation, etc.--is revealed either implicitly or explicity about the blogger in a blog's published postings.

It's public in that the postings are published, and published with immediacy. As soon as I click on the "Publish Post" button at the bottom of the screen, this blog entry will be viewable to whomever wants to read it in the blogosphere. The degree of immediacy with which it is published is within the blogger's control, however. I could save my blog entry as a draft and wait as long as I wish before publishing it, or I could choose not to publish it at all.

Every aspect of each posting publication is also under the blogger's control. It's not like each post is published like the newspaper, fixed in print, on every front door step in the morning. It can be edited, whenever and however the blogger wants, and re-published, re-named, and re-edited again. The scope of its publication is also controlled by the blogger. It can be restricted to a small audience of a few close friends, or it can be expanded to a worldwide audience using various means, such as meta-tagging, bloglisting, flickr-ing and shit I haven't even begun to start looking into.

It is the malleable nature of this published form of writing that I find so appealing. It provides a freedom of expression that is restricted in any other form of writing. You can write freely in a traditional diary or journal, but it is solely private. Only under rare circumstances (e.g. the diaries of celebrities) does such writing find publication and a public reading. Any other form of writing is not free--be it academic, professional, literary, etc.-- because it requires the writer to obey particular conventions for each type. Only writing that obeys these conventions (or flaunts them in some genius manner) has a chance of publication through traditional channels. Try, for example, to publish an essay without a bibliography in an established academic journal. You can't. The act of citing one's sources in an essay is a convention that must be obeyed in academic writing.

Liberated from traditional forms and traditional publication channels, blog writing can be whatever the blogger wants it to be. It can be a log of your daily activities (as many blogs are) or it can focus only on particular aspects of your day (what I ate for breakfast) or on particular subjects (politics in the office) or it could be a blog about the most bizarre shit you can imagine (a record of how many drops of Tabasco you lick off your significant other's perineum in a given day.)

Blogging is a multimedium so you have the additional freedom to do things like drop a medical diagram of a cunt into your text on a whim or link to another webpage for a definition of a term like perineum. You can say words like cunt, as well as all of George Carlin's other dirty words you can't say on TV. You can be self-referential in your blog and provide a link back to your very first blog posting in which you mentioned George Carlin. You can describe things however you want to, even the act of blogging, with words that you make up yourself (mophunquis) You can choose not to use punctuation if you don't want to,, or use it twice as often,, shift tenses however you felt like doing, and no editor will mark your words with a big red pen. Yu cahn mispell evry wrod inne ai sentance rong. And the posting is still going to be published whenever you click the red button.

(click)

intellectual expansion pack

2008-08-02T11:56:00.026-04:00

As I'm writing this, my friend Jon (Oakes, not Carver) is driving the turnpike west from NYC for a visit. It's been awhile since I've seen him, and I'm looking forward to his company. Not only is he one of my oldest (high-school) friends, but he's also one of the few with whom I can converse about artistic and literary concerns. I only hope he doesn't experience an accident like I did my last time traveling westbound on the PA turnpike. Here he is, this picture taken by me while we were in Finland during a layover on our high-school arts exchange trip to the USSR back in 1990.

I've been reading Jon Stallworthy's biography of Louis MacNeice, which I find to be a thorough recounting of the poet's life. It dovetails nicely with MacNeice's autobiographical The Strings Are False, which I read some time ago. In particular, the biography does a great job of describing MacNeice's relationship with his high-school friend, Anthony Blunt, and his influence upon MacNeice from their days at Marlborough.

(I wish I still had my copy of The Strings Are False to read alongside this biography, but I gave it away to Bob Rainey, an Irish poet who I met after reading at the Dactyl Foundation in Soho (wtf happened to the emerging poets series here btw?). He was visiting NYC from Belfast, which he told me has a wonderful poetry scene, and after hearing his poetry at Dactyl--well-read, self-effacing, and genuinely moving--I have every reason to believe this is true. When he mentioned that he'd not read MacNeice before, I gave him my copy of TSAF (which I happened to have just finished) on the spot. This was after we read at Dactyl and were drinking across the street at Toad Hall, where the three of us --myself, Bob, and his American girlfriend-- were sitting at the corner table when Mike Myers and his wife came in and sat down at the bar. It was one of a handful of celebrity sightings for me while living in NYC... I must remember to dedicate a later posting to the time I met Uma Thurman...)

Anyway, reading about the friendship between MacNeice and Blunt reminded me of my friendship with Jon in high-school. Just as MacNeice found Blunt to be an inspiration to his work, as well as a compatriot in defying the establishment (as much as a preacher's son could) in his schooldays, I found the same in Jon. Without him around--to act as a soundboard for my writing--to drive my interest into different avenues, such as art, and see how creative expression in different mediums can speak and influence one another--to provide a sense of being a part of a larger artistic community and not feel as isolated and alone in a stuck-up, rich-kids' high-school--I simply wouldn't have been the same moderately confident, moderately out-going person that left high-school for college.

Instrumental to our high-school bonding were our "intellectual expansion" sessions. This was the name Jon gave to the nights I'd stay over and we'd drink fat glasses of his step-dad's whiskey, smoke Merits out his bathroom window, and talk pure rot--really nothing very intellectual about most of our conversations; we were in high-school, and these evenings more often than not devolved into thoughts of the girls we knew who could perhaps be coaxed up to the back door of Jon's house late on a Friday night. Occasionally, though, once the effort of trying to convince girls to risk curfew in order to drink cans of Rolling Rock in Jon's bathroom proved Quixotian, we found ourselves talking about our creative endeavors, and we succeeded in convincing ourselves that these set us apart from the high-school herd. We only wore the sheep's clothing required by the school dress code; outside the fences and walls we were a roving pack of reckless artists, who emulated Bukowski and Miller and Pollack, and sought out the visceral and authentic in life while the herd chewed its cud and regurgitated the norm.

Just like Jon and I, MacNeice and Blunt kept in touch after their formative grade-school years together, though going on to different colleges-- Oxford and Cambridge, respectively. At Oxford, MacNeice went on to meet a cast of other characters who would influence his writing in even more profound ways, perhaps the most prominent of these being W.H. Auden and Dylan Thomas. Here is where any similarity between MacNeice's life and my own ends. While I, too, went on to meet a cast of characters in college, I would hardly describe their influence as profound in a literary sense.

At the beginning of my sophomore year at Vassar, I attempted to draw together a pack of like-minded writers by starting my own campus literary journal, "Prototype." I announced the first meeting of the journal in the college news daily. I made posters advertising the meeting that I hung outside the student center, the library, and the cafeteria on campus. These were either graffito-tagged or torn to shreds. I made new posters, only to have them vandalized or destroyed outright again. I learned through the grapevine that editors and staff members of the current, established campus literary magazine, Helicon, were responsible for these actions. As soon as I heard this, my initial discouragement became genuine satisfaction. I was already threatening the establishment; this was only the tip of the iceberg.

When I hosted the first meeting of Prototype magazine, my large, double dorm room was packed with interested students. Apparently, word of the Helicon staff's vandalism of my posters had circulated and soured many people's opinion of their magazine. They had come to check out the competition, divine its artistic mission, and see if it ascribed to their aesthetic. And this is where I lost them.

Where soda, cookies & cupcakes were served at Helicon's first meeting (I had been in attendance, my freshman year) I opted for a gallon jug of dago red wine and nothing but, served with a sleeve of styrofoam cups. When I was asked about my aesthetic by an inquisitive attendee, I pointed at the jug on my coffee table. That was it.

I had had big hopes for the meeting. Not only was I counting on meeting people like Jon to whom I'd be linked from that day on, people with whom I could share an artistic sensibility as well as a case of Piel's, but I was also hoping to meet the editorial and artistic types that would do the heavy lifting of the magazine. They'd edit, design, and layout while my cadre of like-minded writers and I would provide its raw materials in fits of inspiration. I had already naively envisioned this happening; my title was to be "founder/consluting editor." That's no typo. Consluting.

Not a single person joined me in drinking from the jug of red wine. Granted, it was a weekday afternoon, but I still expected a few people to do so. At least one. There was not one to be had, though, and perhaps there was a Wystan Auden in attendance or a Dylan Thomas (well, if Dylan had been there, he most certainly would have drank wine; he most probably would have been drunk when he arrived) but I would never know. I decided if no one else was going to drink, then I would drink for the lot of them. A large, uncomfortable silence developed around me as I stopped answering questions about the magazine and proceeded to drink a full cup of wine for each person there in attendance. The meeting ended when I started muttering to myself and dribbling red wine on my shirt. My roommate Jon (Carver, not Oakes)-- being the good roommate that he was-- joined me in drinking afterwards and hearing me out as I kept mentioning Vassar's 65/35 ratio of women-to-men and asking him if he knew just how many pussies that meant went to our college.

Until now I didn't realize it, but from that moment on, I really didn't do much writing throughout the rest of college. The little writing that I did was done in a vacuum and very little of it ever saw the light of day. In fact, for the next decade (from 1992 to 2002), I didn't bother to write much at all. Where MacNeice's writing blossomed after high-school, mine wilted. Not until after I moved to NYC for the second time in my life did I start writing again with any frequency, and I would never find myself in a pack of like-minded writers as I had once aspired to. Not until Bread Loaf, which I attended almost a year ago, did I even come close.

umbraphilia

2008-07-27T06:56:00.011-04:00

Before anyone else I know personally, I'd trade places with my friend Scott. He's my friend Rob's brother, and simply put, he is living a life I envy.

Scott is no longer a member of the workforce. After graduating from Stanford, Scott got in with Yahoo! on the ground floor, back in the day when there were actually investors who wouldn't put their money into the Internet start-up because it was named so frivolously. Scott vested himself fully in his employee stock options, worked into his late 30s, and decided that he could retire comfortably a couple of years ago.

Now he travels Asia and Europe full-time, visiting far-flung family and friends as whimsically as someone with an unlimited international calling card might phone them. Part-time, he maintains a blog "Where's Scott?" chronicling where he goes and (often exclusively) what he eats and drinks when he gets there.

Like many, I've spent more time than is healthy wondering what I would do if I had the money. Scott has the money, and he does exactly what I would do if I were in his position-- anything he damn well pleases.

I've always wanted to spin a globe, close my eyes, stop it with my finger, and call my travel agent with my other hand, not looking at where my finger is pointing until asked, "What is your destination, Todd?"

I've always wanted one of the many dingy, aluminum-sided houses that you find in Pittsburgh, but with a Hefner-esque, grotto-style basement beneath. It would have a conversation pit with plush, Italian leather chairs and enough fauna and flora so that you couldn't see the walls or ceiling. The sole source of light in the basement would be the blue fluorescence of an enormous fish tank as its centerpiece, which would be tended exclusively by a staff of half-a-dozen 18-year-old girls. I would recruit them from the local high-school through listings in community and church flyers, avoiding online classifieds that might come off as sounding creepy and perverted. I would pay them $50 an hour, and they would only be asked to work for a couple of hours a day after-school. There would be no uniforms required, and their only job would be to comply with my requests to feed the fish some fish flakes whenever I tapped one of them on the forehead. My only other requirement would be for my employees, when they left the job, to list their job title as "Fish Feeder" on their resumes, and (I would insist upon this) list me as a professional reference.

I would do this for the simple reason that if I had the money, I could do anything I damn well please. Since I grew up vacationing in a lakehouse with an obsessively fish-themed decor, if I want to provide fish feeders with professional references, and I've got the money, then so be it.

I've always wanted to witness a total solar eclipse, too.

According to today's paper, the next solar eclipse will be occurring in a few days on August 1st. Its path will arc from eastern Canada, across Greenland, and into northern China. Though air quality is supposedly going to bollocks-up the Olympics to the southeast, the atmospheric conditions northwest of Beijing near the Mongolian border are projected to be favorable for eclipse watching. At least, that's what "Mr. Eclipse" has to say on his website. By the time I get around to publishing this post, though, it'll already be too late to switch your travel plans.

The last time you could see a total solar eclipse in North America was 1991 when it could be viewed on the beach of the Baja peninsula. I remember reading accounts of the viewing. In the path of the eclipse--precisely underneath where the moon passed in front of the sun--the beach at mid-day became dark as night. To the north and south, you could see people off in the distance, still sunbathing and swimming in the ocean. At that specific viewing spot on the beach, though, you experienced cosmic sunblock. How wonderfully surreal that must have been.

I was not surprised to read afterwards that there are clubs of "eclipse chasers" who travel to all corners of the world (even Antarctica) to witness these "moments of totality" first-hand. There is even a travel website that caters to those either curious about, or addicted to, the experience.

If I had the money, I could see myself joining one of these "umbraphile" clubs and spanning the globe with its members. In fact, it wouldn't be much different than spinning a globe to choose my destination randomly; I would just be allowing the sun and the moon, instead of my finger, to determine where I was going. The only drawback, of course, would be that I would have to deal with being in a club whose membership, I'm sure, includes a good percentage of new-age whack jobs who'd be preaching to you the whole time about how some astrological energy was flowing through them. Or they'd just be total astronomy geeks, like Mr. Eclipse & friends, pictured below:

Yes, they are drinking beer, but notice it's Corona--and you just know they're smiling not because they're loaded, but because they're giddy about drinking a beer named Corona while observing a solar eclipse. You can see that none of the three poindexters has even taken a sip, and you can be sure that every one of those pieces of equipment is a telescope of some sort; not a chance in hell one of them is a tripod-mounted bong.

my morning biertje

2008-07-25T18:01:00.020-04:00

Anyone who knows me knows how strange it is that I've taken up blogging. To sit in front of the computer outside of work, as long as I do now, is simply out of character for me. I don't dig on the Internet and technology, in general. In fact, every hard drive of every computer I've ever owned, dating back to the first Macintosh I used in college, has been named, "Technology Sucks."

So I wanted to examine my recent embrace of web-logging and try to understand what about this particular sort of writing has caused me to take this uncharacteristic turn. Obviously there is a direct correlation between my frequent number of blog postings this month and my lack of job (+blog = -job) but I suspect there is more to my interest than simply having nothing else to do. When I eventually rejoin the workforce, I'm betting that I'll still be blogging like I was born to.

I use the word "workforce", remembering hearing it used frequently on a local radio station (WDVE) during its weekday morning commute broadcasts. I don't remember precisely how it was used-- whether WDVE declared itself "workforce radio" or "the choice of Pittsburgh's workforce in the morning"-- I just remember how strangely socialist the term sounded. It used to make my morning commutes more pleasant, though, back when I worked in Pittsburgh for a brief time, feeling this unity with everyone else backed up in rush-hour traffic on I-279. I wouldn't be getting to the office late alone; I would be arriving late, along with all of my other comrades in the workforce.

Some feel this sense of being a part of the workforce; others don't. A while ago, when I visited my friend Jaz in Amsterdam, I got to experience the sense of how an entire city (and, by inference, an entire nation and continent) does not. After having worked in the hyper-kinetic world of advertising in New York City, Jaz found herself shocked by the lack of dedication and drive of her Dutch co-workers in Amsterdam.

There is no office culture that implies you should continue working after official business hours. Unless there is an urgent project or campaign launch requiring the presence of her co-workers, Jaz finds herself alone in a room of empty desks after 6 o'clock most days. They have no qualms about taking vacation time on a whim, even if it inconveniences their co-workers in doing so, and just try to get in touch with them once they've left on holiday. Unlike Americans, the Dutch sever their connection to the office while away, and since they get 5 to 6 weeks paid vacation (compared to our 2 to 3) on average, it could be a month until you hear from them again.

Jaz told me that it's not only the Dutch, but all of Europe that operates this way, and she left me believing that U.S. and Japanese workers make the world turn while the Europeans sit outside their cafes, drinking beer and smoking pot, wondering if they're just buzzed or if that's the world they feel turning beneath them.

In the Dutch spirit, I'm going to walk away from the work I had intended to do in this posting. I'll put it off for another time; instead I'll just post this poem:

Postcard from Amsterdam

Soaking up a chill autumn
sun in the rolling of foreign
tongues outside the café, I sip
from my morning biertje
as bicycles everywhere turn

The gears of this hub city
in simple machine motion
like a timepiece frictionless
as the Amstel flows, I steer

Lazy eyes over oude architecture
traipsing across raised-neck
gables and the sexy hourglass
shadows they stretch
into the straats below

Where the mongers
are willing to haggle while I
take tactile pleasure
in a pocketful of coins

After loosing my mind
in a shop off Leidesplein
like a kanaal boat
free from its mooring, I wobble

Over cobblestones
through the Red Light district
where the women wave
while shaving their legs
in their windows, shameless

Tourists snapping pictures
like the one in this postcard
worth little more than
a hundred, not a thousand
words as the saying goes.

bridges

2008-07-24T16:01:00.006-04:00

This was my first (and perhaps last) attempt at a prose poem:

Bridges

I meet another writer at the writers’ conference. He asks what I think of the conference so far, and I tell him I don’t have much in the way of comparison. He asks how many others I’ve been to, and I tell him this is my first. It’s my fifth, he says, and he’s curious--How you would rate this among others you’ve attended? I tell him it’s not only my first writers’ conference but my first conference whatsoever. Really? He looks me over, approximating my age. Never for work? I tell him I’ve never held a job that required conference attendance, and he looks me over again. What do you do? I tell him how I just finished studying at the University of Pittsburgh, but he doesn’t seem to care. Nonetheless he asks, Who did you study under there?

And I tell him I didn’t really study under anyone; in fact, I wouldn’t say I’ve ever studied under anyone, but there was this Asian girl I knew in San Francisco who had one breast that was noticeably smaller than the other, and when she’d ride me the nipple on the one would trace a much larger circle in gyrating than the other, and I suppose if I ever studied under anyone it was her. But I don’t remember her name, and even if I did, “study” probably isn’t the word I’d use because it’s not like it was the Rosetta Stone or the text of Ulysses; it was just a pair of cock-eyed titties. “Gawk” would probably be a better word than “study,” but you gawk at not under someone, I ask, Don’t you?

To which he replies, Pittsburgh’s a much cleaner city than most people realize, just before excusing himself to meet the famous writer he’s spotted on the other side of the hotel bar, which is, by the way, where we are—the conference’s hotel bar, which shares the name of this poem and was probably named to reflect the kind of networking that takes place at such hotel bars, at least that’s my guess until I notice all the framed photographs of New York City’s bridges upon the walls, at which point I realize I may have been reading more into the name than I should have.

accident

2008-07-23T08:00:00.005-04:00

From a few miles back, I could see the plume of black smoke in the air. It rose so high in the sky over the turnpike that, not for a second, did I think it could have been caused by a traffic accident; I was thinking someone's house near the road caught fire, or some yokel was burning a pile of tires in his backyard, when the traffic stopped moving.

As I learned more than five hours later, on the 11 o' clock news, a tractor trailer jack-knifed on the eastbound side of the pike and exploded. I was on the westbound side, a 1/4 mile back from where debris from the explosion had blown across the road, causing the five-car pileup that ground westbound traffic to a halt.

From behind the wheel of my car, I stared out my windshield with the same exhausted expression on my face that I'm certain every other driver on the turnpike was wearing. Within the first ten minutes after the traffic had stopped still, emergency vehicles of all sorts started screaming down the shoulder of the road. Fire engines. Ambulances. Tow trucks. Platform bed trucks. Police cruisers. Undercover police cruisers. They started whizzing past on the other side of the turnpike, too, going west on the eastbound side of the road. Once people saw this-- that traffic had been stopped in both directions--they started trickling out of their cars to try to get a better look up ahead, around the bend where all the smoke in the sky was coming from.

One stout, tan man, wearing an Outback cowboy hat and a U.S. Navy Seals sunglasses band, soldiered forward with his son in tow with the purpose of finding out what had happened. He was back in a half an hour, stopping at any car that lowered its window upon seeing him, in order to inform its driver and passengers what he had discovered about the accident.

I didn't lower my window for the guy. That kind of take-charge personality has always put me off. Very reminiscent of my father's. I looked to his son, wanting to sympathize with him, knowing his plight, but the kid was cut from the same cloth as pop. He was eager to contribute to his father's account of the accident, pitching-in a detail or two that his father had overlooked. Standing behind him-- where I would have had my eyes lowered and my mouth half-open in a yawn-- this kid aimed his eyes where his dad's were and kept a stiff upper lip to boot.

The three guys in front of me-- in a Dodge Ram Charger, Michigan plate, with decals over the tail lights that said something like "Nuw Ride" or "Nuw Skool" in stylized lettering-- didn't get out of their car for almost two hours. Then they all got out together and proceeded to slouch against the east-west divider, talking on their cell phones until traffic started moving again.

The cell phones were out like we were waiting for an encore at a pop concert. People were taking pictures of one another standing in the empty turnpike lanes on the other side of the divider. The lady in the car behind me had her door open, was standing on the driver seat, and was holding her cellphone up as high as she could, taking video of the black smoke in the air.

On Star Trek, I always thought "away teams" looked stupid, waving their tri-corder devices around, whenever they beamed down to a strange planet, and I think the same about people with their cellphones today. I admit to being dumb with my cellphone, too; searching the picture folder on my phone, you will find dozens of random photos-- many attempting badly to be "artsy"-- but at least I'll make an attempt to take my pictures discreetly.

As our traffic stop ran past two hours, a girl in a pair of Penn State athletic shorts, with a pawprint on each asscheek, breezed past on rollerblades. Three cars back, someone had unfolded a sunchair on the roof of their minivan and was catching the last of the late afternoon rays. A young couple (in the car one up, and to the left from me) had gotten out a mini-football and started it passing to one another in the empty turnpike lanes over the divider.

Meanwhile, a 1/4 mile ahead, corpses were being pulled by the jaws-of-life through twisted metal and burning rubber, or so I was thinking, through a mild wine hangover.

As I watched the football rise and fall in an arc between them, I realized this young couple, in all likelihood, would be having sex once they got home. If they could play catch while waiting for emergency personnel to clean up a catastrophic accident, there wouldn't be a chance of him or her saying, "I just can't...thinking of those poor people...I just can't."

She was wearing a denim miniskirt, faded at the buttocks, and I wondered if they would even bother with taking it off beforehand.

With my girlfriend in India, perhaps never moving here, I leaned over my steering wheel, jealously watching the football being passed between them. Suddenly, everyone was racing back to their cars. Traffic started moving, and at slow speed I got to see the remnants of the wreckage. It had been a box (not a tanker) trailer, in three pieces blown open like black, popped popcorn seeds. No bodies, no cars, not even the cab of the truck-- these must have already been hauled away.

Remarkably, the news next day reported that, despite the severity of the accident, there was not a single fatality. Instead of relief, or astonishment, I was mildly surprised and nothing more. I could only think that if I hadn't pulled in-and-out of a rest stop--just to have a few slow rpm moments to cool my hangover in front of my dashboard AC vent-- mine might have been one of the five cars wrecked in the wake of the explosion, and--I don't know why I think this but I do-- I wouldn't have managed to survive.

liam juhn

2008-07-16T11:35:00.003-04:00

Pictured here, at two days-old, is Liam Juhn Carver.

The process by which Jon and Janine Carver went about naming the lad is, itself, an exercise in mophunquisness. For the record, Jon wanted to name him Zod (after General Zod from Superman comics) who, according to Wikipedia, was rated by Wizard magazine as the 58th greatest villian of all time.

Zod is the kind of guy you want leading the team, spear-heading the initiative, etc... in short, Zod would be sought-after in business and social circles. By name alone, he would need to be factored into the equation, accounted for in advance... All hail Zod!... or so Jon's argument for the name went.

Janine, to her credit, put her foot down. She wanted their son's name to be a product of their collaboration. She agreed to Liam, from what I understand, because her surname "Li" could be found therein. I like to think her reasoning here was since she took Carv's surname in marriage, it would be nice to have their son's first name include the surname she gave up. So, in effect, by choosing the name Liam, Jon and Janine creatively compromised around the phallocentric tradition of the wife abandoning her surname for her husband's.

Liam's middle name, Juhn, typifies this compromise. It's parts of his father's (John) and her father's (Jun) names spliced together.

I suspect that when Liam gets a little older, he'll think it was pretty cool that his dad initially wanted to name him after the 58th greatest villian of all time. However, as he grows up, I'm sure he'll come to appreciate the collaborative effort behind his name even more.

And if he absolutely wants some bad-assitude to his name, Liam can tell people his middle name is spelled "Jhun" instead of Juhn, and thereby claim it was inspired by this character from the King of Fighters video game, pictured here.

He's got feet and fists of fury, and with a father whose as big a video game fan as Carv, no one would doubt him for a minute. All hail Liam Juhn!

mophunquis, etymology of

2008-07-14T08:50:00.001-04:00

Back in the days shortly after college, when my friends and I thought of how awesome it would be to own a bar, we came up with ideas that would distinguish our bar from any other we had been in. My friend Carv liked the idea of a bunker-style entrance so that patrons would have to dive and tumble over a wall of sandbags to enter--you know, a first-date kinda spot.

I always liked the idea of having a penalty box in the bar, off to the side, and a bartender with a ref's whistle that would be blown to call out a bar foul. He would point to the offender(s) and banish them to the penalty box. In order to insure compliance, two bouncers in zebra-striped muscle shirts would enforce the bartender's calls and make sure the offenders remained inside the box until their penalty time (major or minor) had expired, or in the event of a bar misconduct penalty, shown to the bar's exit. It would have been the kind of place you loved to get in trouble, though, and for that reason, not a practical bar idea at all.

Our bars had names, too, but I can only remember my own. Mophunquis.

Though its origin lies in the contemplation of a debaucherous haven, the name has come to take on a different meaning. It now refers to the process of thinking about things like what the perfect bar would be. It is a state of mind that the best of my friends slip into with ease, and it is with this state of mind that I approach the writing of these blog entries. If everyone were a little mophunquis (adj.) in their approach to life, I think the world would be an easier place in which to live...more jovial, more creative, more frivolous. Mophunquis.

umbrolli cutco

2008-07-13T07:41:00.003-04:00

While visiting the Bay Area this week, I watched a great deal of BBC America television programming, having stayed with my friends Rob (who spent his early childhood in England) and Kate (from Scotland). They tivo shows like Hell's Kitchen, Top Gear (brilliant), and Dragons' Den. Except for Top Gear, a show with genuinely hilarious banter between its three hosts, none of these gripped my interest and held it fast.

However, a portion of Dragons' Den inspired this post and the tangential thinking therein. For any reader as unfamiliar I had been with the show, each contestant in Dragons' Den pitches a business idea to a panel of investors (the "dragons") in the hope of impressing one or more of them enough to invest in the idea. In this particular episode, one of the contestants on the show sought enough start-up money (150,000 pounds) to get his umbrolli (British for umbrella) vending business off the ground. He intended to place a vending machine in several hundred London tube stations that sold disposable umbrollies for 2 pounds apiece.

He thought of the business idea after getting caught in the rain once on his tube commute home. With as much as it rains in London, a disposable umbrolli vending machine in each tube station sounded like a good business idea outright, but he took it a step further. He intended to sell ad space on the front of his vending machines, placing them within line-of-sight of the commuter traffic exiting each station. He estimated the ad revenue that he would generate from his machines would be 2x that of the umbrollies he sold.

Rob, Kate, and I declared the idea genius. Kate wished she had thought of it, and I was thinking the same. It really was a good idea, but it wasn't just that. As Rob correctly pointed out, when this contestant ended up successfully negotiating with the dragons for his start-up money, his success was due as much to the work that he did around the idea as the idea itself. He had proprietary rights, valuation estimates and expense projections. He had already solicited the London transportation authority and signed a 12-year renewable contract to place his vending machines in several hundred tube stations. He had an artistic rendering of his vending machine design and even had an umbrolli prototype, airbrushed with the company logo, to pass around for the dragons to examine for themselves.

Just as I was letting myself slip into Kate's envious line of thinking regarding this guy's idea, it occurred to me that if I had indeed thought of it, I would never have brought it to the stage that he was presenting it now. I got a headache thinking about the paperwork required to file the proprietary rights to the idea, not to mention the spreadsheet work involved in making all the sales projections and estimates. For the record, you'd have to force me, at gunpoint, to petition any kind of authority at all. I can't even bring myself to ask a police officer on the sidewalk for directions.

More than this ancillary work, though, what would have sunk the umbrolli idea (if it were mine) was the mere thought of having to stand before the "dragons."

I suppose I just don't have an entrepreneurial nature. Or perhaps it is a case of nature vs. nurture. After watching the show, I thought about something I hadn't thought about in years. It was the very first time that I ever made any kind of sales pitch. This early experience may have been formative in developing my general aversion to the business world.

One summer in high school, I sold Cutco knives for the Vector Marketing corporation. I went door-to-door in my neighborhood, giving my rehearsed sales presentation. It involved cutting an empty Coke can in half with a carving knife, finely slicing a tomato with a bread knife, and then scissoring through a penny with a pair of kitchen shears. Getting through the penny was the toughest part of the presentation. Though the shears managed this feat, I was never able to make it seem as effortless as it was supposed to. It always required a visible effort on my part, often requiring the use of both hands to force the shears through the penny. In retrospect, my lack of hand strength may have ultimately been responsible for my failing to meet my sales quotas, but it was not directly responsible for the aversion I developed for the act of selling.

Every week, as I recall, I was required to attend marketing meetings at our regional office, and after my first, I left wondering why I was bothering with the job in the first place. Part-pep rally, part-bitch session, part-capitalist indoctrination, these meetings conflicted with an idealistic, artistic worldview that I had already begun to cultivate.

I remember one occasion when a Marketing VP from the corporate office surprised our regional sales manager by showing up for one of these meetings. He gave a speech that could have come straight out of Alec Baldwin's mouth in Glengarry Glen Ross. He dismissed our sales numbers as pathetic, instructed us how to "go the extra mile" for the sale, and he actually pulled his car keys out of his pocket, jingling them in front the conference room. "That's my Porsche outside," he said. "Trust me, you'll never own one unless your numbers improve."

But it was the beginning of his speech that made an indelible impression upon me. The gist of his opening remarks were, "In any sport, you know who is the winner is by who has the most points on the scoreboard. Life is a sport, and the points are dollars. At the end, whoever has the most-- wins."

(I just realized why a recent Nike ad campaign has always left me feeling unsettled. I couldn't say what it put me off about it until now; it had to be their use of the tag line "Life Is A Sport," resonating in my subconscious.)

What astonished me most about his speech was the nodding agreement the Marketing VP got from almost everyone seated around me. A few actually looked like they had experienced a revelation. "Yes, life is a sport!" their expressions seemed to be saying.

Watching the "dragons" on Dragons' Den, I would have a difficult time believing that any one of them, at that early age, would not have been nodding their heads in the same situation. Their career successes in business imply an espousal of this worldview, and thus my aversion to them-- I wouldn't want to stand before the dragons now anymore than I would have wanted to be seated next to them then.

Here's a poem.

Happy Hour at the Bull Run

The businessmen,
all business in the boardroom
are all men here

after the closing bell,
after the contract’s been
Fed-Exed to the client

they brawn up to the bar,
sleeves rolled to elbows,
Windsors loose in their collars,

thick studs in lust
with the big bucks they push
to the bartender in the low-cut

top, downing pints and
throwing back shots amid high-
fives and shouts.

I try to squeeze between
their broad backs, slipping
an arm through

waving a few dollars
with so little
hope for her attention

it may as well be
a white flag, a pink hanky,
this yellow poem in my hand.

Todd Christopher Cincala

godanimal

2008-07-11T17:40:00.001-04:00

A synonym for "human". I think it describes precisely what each of us is.

human resources

2008-07-02T07:17:00.001-04:00

The decor of my family's lakehouse is predominantly fish-themed. Ducks and geese are prevalent, as well, but fish dominate. We have a fish print blanket on the sofa, fish pillows, fish-shaped coffee mugs, that awful singing Billy Bass on the fireplace mantle. We have baseball caps, keychains, and wall hangings inscribed with "gone fishin'" related wisdom.

A great deal of this fishy paraphernalia was gifted to us by an uncle who keeps his fishing boat underneath the deck of the house. He is retired now and has more time to fish so he is often up at the house when no immediate family members are using it. I was up there recently after he had just left, and when I turned on the television, it was tuned to a station broadcasting a bass fishing tournament. I watched it only long enough to learn that there are actually people making a living fishing professionally, and even more surprising, there are enough people interested in watching professional fishing for the sport to be televised.

As interested in fishing as my uncle is, I don't believe that he entertains the possibility of becoming a professional. Maybe it is something that he fantasizes about now in his retirement years, but I've never heard of him entering any fishing competitions nor expressing the desire to do so. His interest in fishing is more than just a casual one, though, at least more casual than what I would think of as casual fishing, where the fisherman is more concerned with "goin' fishin'" than actually pulling fish out of the water. I think of casual fishing as having less to do with fishing than being alone on a lake or river, ensconced in nature, and set adrift from the demands of the workaday world.

My uncle may appreciate this aspect of fishing, but make no mistake about it--he fishes primarily to catch fish. He applies tactics acquired from the professionals on TV and articles in fishing magazines. He upgrades his rods, reels and tackle to give him the latest technological edge over the gilled. He motors out of his way to specific spots on the lake that he has learned are more likely to yield a catch, and he obviously takes pride in his catches, as evidenced by the number of photographs of him, grinning as he holds fish up to the camera.

I've been traveling up to the lake more recently in an effort to escape the frustrations of searching for a job, and I recognize that my early attempts at job searching were akin to casual attempts at fishing. Having shifted my career path from academia to corporate America, I abandoned my CV for a resume, with which I had forgotten what to do. I had to re-learn how to look for a job, i.e. I had to become more professional in my approach. I've researched resume advice postings on the Internet. I've read through a Dummies book on the subject. I revised and re-revised my resume and learned how to edit my cover letters to highlight my strengths relevant to the particular requirements of the jobs to which I've been applying. In many ways, my approach to job searching is analogous to that of my uncle to fishing; though I have yet to make a catch that I can hold up, grinning. Frustratingly enough, I've barely had any tugs on the line. When there has been something there, the job has been so meager that I've had no choice but to throw it back.

More and more, I've come into contact with individuals that make a professional living in HR, and while I am doing my resume song-and-dance for them, I wonder what their jobs must be like day-in and day-out, listening to variants of the standard resume story over and again. Is their interest purely professional, or is there a casual interest in the job, as well? Is there a pleasure in getting to know the job candidates as people, or a personal satisfaction in matching a person to the perfect job in addition to the professional one?

Since I am not a "people" person by any stretch, it's difficult to imagine anyone wanting to pursue a career in HR. But people do, and they must get into it because they are "people" people. There must be a personal, or human, interest there in other people, or else you'd get into another career. The HR profession interests me insofar as it requires its practitioners to balance professionalism and humanism-- two -isms which appear to be antithetical. If you are strictly human as an HR person, you can't lay off your co-workers and be able to sleep at night. If you are strictly professional, you don't lose a wink and are as close to a functioning android as exists today.

One HR person I met with never took her eyes off my resume as I gave my hire-me spiel. I could tell what I was saying fell on wooden ears as she scanned my resume, circling and underlining my skills and the jobby buzzwords that I chocked my resume full o'. I felt like a standardized test under the grading laser's eye. Another glanced at my resume only when I paused in my spiel to say "...as you can see in my resume..." She listened intently, responded jokingly, and established such a casual atmosphere in the conference room I would not at all have been shocked if she asked if I would like to grab a drink afterwards and talk some more.

After interviewing with the latter HR professional, which was my most recent face-to-face, I wondered how many years she would last with that same jovial approach to work. She was young, and I wondered how many more hirings and firings it would take before her effervescence started to go flat. I began to wonder if she, in particular, and we, as people in general, have a quantity of humanity that is finite. A reserve of human resources that, once consumed, leaves a person inhuman-- only professional-- like that first HR person I mentioned.

I'll have to revisit the concept of finite "human resources" for a poem later, though, as I have yet more job-seeking work of my own to do, as well as a curious idea for a Ginsberg-inspired poem I've started composing called "Shrike" which I'm sure I'll find cause to speak of in a later posting.

last gasp in a vacuum

2008-06-27T11:18:00.001-04:00

For a stretch while I was working, I had gotten into the habit of waking up early to do nothing but lie still and stare at the ceiling of my bedroom. And think, or not think. I just lay there and contemplated the process of booting up to a new day. I kept a notepad on the nightstand in case something more profound than my choice of what to eat for breakfast that morning came to mind. And things did, or things didn’t. Then I got away from this routine, as I’ve gotten away from pretty much every non-biological routine I’ve ever attempted, and never returned.

Now that I’m not working, I’ve made a vow to my bedroom ceiling to return to this practice. I’ve also decided to blog my reflections upon this time spent lying in bed in the hope that the exercise may retain some of that dewy fresh quality to my morning thinking. An attempt to bottle the genie, so to speak, with the understanding that the genie is going to seem magical in nature as rarely as one’s thoughts seem worth recording in the morning. Too lazy to grant wishes, most of the time, the genie is going to just stare at the ceiling with me, debating each digital minute whether to get up or not, and wondering whether it’s Joe’s O’s or blueberry yogurt I’ll eat for breakfast.

The title of this entry was my waking thought. Actually, it was “last breath in a vacuum” but I thought “last gasp” sounded better. Not just because it’s more dramatic—a gasp instead of a breath—but also because of the vowel rhyme of “gasp” and “vacuum.” More poetic.

Lying still in bed this morning, with this title as my waking thought, one might be led to think I was contemplating death and dying. It is a theme visited by poets often, and I would imagine even more so by unemployed poets. However, an episode of Battlestar Galactica seemed to prompt this waking thought today. After watching my DVR recording of this last week’s episode, I found myself contemplating (along with my bedroom ceiling) the practice of execution by ejection from the ship’s airlock on the show.

You wouldn’t take a last breath (or the more poetic last gasp) in a vacuum; rather, your last breath would be taken from you. The vacuum would literally suck it out of your lungs. This loss of agency—you not taking your last breath but having it taken from you—would seem to confer an added disgrace upon the executed, and it would be my guess that this is one reason why a traitorous solider on the ship is to be executed in this manner, as opposed to other means.

Another being that the Battlestar is a ship, and execution by airlock ejection is the sci-fi equivalent of a more traditional punishment for mutiny, i.e. walking the plank. Though similar, airlock ejection is certainly the more dishonorable of the two ways to go. Again, it's a matter of agency. With the act of "walking the plank," the condemned takes his or her last steps into the sea; with airlock ejection, ready or not, he or she is simply blown out of a hole.

There may be some loosely analogous reasoning as to why I've never felt particularly satisfied after taking a dump on an airplane. There is a walking the plank quality to taking a shit. There is a splash and a swirling of water, and this is lacking while one is aboard a plane. Like airlock ejection, your shit is unceremoniously blown out of a hole with a vacuumous sucking of air. You don't feel as satisfied because there is a loss of agency there. You get the sense that you didn't take a shit--rather, it was taken from you.

Another thing about the episode that interested me was a paradox that it introduced—it termed itself a “mid-season finale.” This is precisely the kind of linguistic conundrum that George Carlin (who, by the way, died this week and whose passing deserves more mention than this parenthetical) would question with wild gesticulations and hyperbolic contortions of his face. How can there be a finale to the season that is only half-over? Carlin might say it would be like dying from a “mid-life fatality” or some such.

In my Intro Linguistics class at Brooklyn College, we watched an educational video discussing the marvelous nature of the English language. To my surprise, George Carlin was one of those who was chosen to comment upon the language. The others were all stuffy-sounding academians trying their damnest not to sound so stuffy; none said any one thing that I can recall now, except for George.

He said that we can combine the 26 letters in the English language in different ways to make hundreds of thousands of words. And that we can combine these hundreds of thousands of words into an infinite number of sentences, sentences which had never been constructed before. To prove his point, Carlin came up with an on-the-spot example of a sentence that had never been constructed before. It was:

"I am going over to the softball game to beat up Hitler's widow."

Our language never had a better ambassador, or shit-talker. RIP George.