This is coming to you on a Wednesday instead of your accustomed Thursday, but please don't panic. Well, maybe do panic, I don't know. If expecting new posts here at a certain time has become something of an article of faith with you, O Multitudes, a little panic may be in order. As long as it leads to some serious self-examination. Or if you're having or nearing the point of a serious automobile accident as you read this, go ahead and panic then as well, but only after you've piloted your vehicle to safety. I know all the big press is given to the campaign against texting while driving, but blog reading while driving, that should be an implied proscription at the very least. It's the silent killer that nobody likes to talk about, like colorectal cancer or equine syphilis. Nothing ends a conversation faster than asking about how somebody got equine syphilis.
Besides, I'm uncomfortable with the idea of you having faith in me. It's hard enough having three children looking up to me, expecting not only life advice but a constant example, in my every word, thought and action, on what it is to be an adult American male. There's so much pressure already to build their self-esteem, develop a healthy respect for women,* instill the basic value of money and hard work and to remember, say, not to drape your balls across a sleeping stranger's face in public, no matter how hilarious and necessary it may seem at the moment. The last thing I need is the guilty responsibility of your own expectations of me. I realize it's my own fault for being a) fucking awesome and b) clockwork-regular, but it's possible you're reading too much into my reliability. The awesome part I can't really help. It's one of those things you're born with that makes people notice, like freckles or dwarfism or gay. The chronological dependability, I'm afraid, is just the outward expression of my obsessive-compulsive tendency toward repeat behavior. In short, me being here every week is less a soothing counterweight to your abandonment issues than it is a symptom of my full-speed mental illness.
Or, I guess I shouldn't rule out the soothing counterweight thing. Maybe if those two things dovetail nicely together, I shouldn't dismiss the serendipity. Codependency has "depend" right in the middle of it. In which case, rely away. I'm your rock.
Unless I have shit to do. Like this week, for example. Tomorrow you will definitely not be able to rely on me. At all. I would give you a hint as to what it is I'm doing, but I've spent the last several paragraphs laying out a scenario of unhealthy and frankly inappropriate mutually instigated antisociality, so I'm a little reticent with the clues. I don't want to narrow it down too much except to say no one is likely to contract equine syphilis over the course of the evening. I've heard initial exposure renders you immune.
---
*well, the hot ones.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Unfriended
I've already warned my son that the day is coming, and soon, where he will hate me, everything I stand for and everything I stand with, nearby or on. I thought I was being clever (and, serendipitously, better rested than most) by choosing very carefully not to stand for anything in particular. As an act of purely spiteful pre-emption, I've made an effort never to be seen in his presence making a clear or conscious choice that might betray any partisan affection he might one day reflexively denounce in an effort to mark out his space in the world in the standard antifilial contravention whereby adults are (eventually) made. It's made ordering in restaurants a challenge.
A conspiracy of feng shui, the current limits of spatial dimensions and gravity has robbed me of total freedom of self-actualization in this though, as I find it difficult to avoid things to stand next to entirely or, more troublesomely, on. Yes, it turns out that no matter what your intent or conviction, this world is always going to stick you with something. It's the curse of human reason and sensory perception that we're limited to function in a mental universe of glommy, sticky association, rendering us always vulnerable to sidelong and indirect attack. Even if I were able to deny him the anchor points by which he may drag me down, he'll hate the town he's from or the schools he's forced to go to or, most cruelly, the things of himself that most remind him of me. He carries that shit everywhere he goes, man. What chance does a guy have? Sure, sometimes I half wish he were blind just to give me a fighting chance, but he'd just figure out a way to despise me purely by smell. Which, since I've taken up leather tanning as a hobby, I wouldn't entirely blame him for.
This weighs on me now as the boy, just this week, in an act of brazen defiance, has crossed the Rubicon of teen-dom. That's right, I'm the dad of a 13-year-old. The good news is, he still likes me. I'm hoping that only having him here half the time as part of the joint custody agreement with his mother will blunt or at least stave off some of the pointier spears of hormonal vitriol, no doubt aimed but as yet unthrown. Between that and all the noncomittal sex with strange women... I was on the fence about it at first, I'll admit, but this divorce business seems to have paid off in the end, in shocking, almost anti-facebook levels. Dividends on top of dividends. And sometimes also on top of dividend's drunk old college friend visiting from Colorado.
We're in the lull before the storm, before the cascade of testosterone and self-awareness pours from the opening skies, but although my original defense plan may have failed, I do have a Plan B. It involves lots of porn. See, there are no child-rearing strategies in place for people my age for avoiding porn. When I was a kid, you had to have a brave enough friend with dark enough downy, pre-facial-hair facial hair to convince a liquor store owner to sell him a copy of Oui if we wanted our porn. Not really that hard to regulate, as far as parents are concerned. The ubiquity of internet porn (with its ingenious, mostly undetectable hiding place in Magic Bolts of Invisible Electricity) is a completely different animal. Like an angry rhinocerous. No idea why, but it's the first thing that thrust itself into my head.
No, instead of being terrified of porn, I've decided to embrace it. The way people charged with removing bears from residential neighborhood trees have embraced the tranquilizer dart. I'm hoping he'll be so intoxicated by the lure of nudity-on-demand, he'll be less likely to realize the only thing standing between him and his happiness, man, are me and my outdated, old-person ways and probably fascism.
The trick is not to let on about my own appreciation for internet porn, potentially putting him off it. But there's another benefit of my failed relationship with his mother: we were married for 12 years. Nobody knows better how to hide a porn habit than I do.
A conspiracy of feng shui, the current limits of spatial dimensions and gravity has robbed me of total freedom of self-actualization in this though, as I find it difficult to avoid things to stand next to entirely or, more troublesomely, on. Yes, it turns out that no matter what your intent or conviction, this world is always going to stick you with something. It's the curse of human reason and sensory perception that we're limited to function in a mental universe of glommy, sticky association, rendering us always vulnerable to sidelong and indirect attack. Even if I were able to deny him the anchor points by which he may drag me down, he'll hate the town he's from or the schools he's forced to go to or, most cruelly, the things of himself that most remind him of me. He carries that shit everywhere he goes, man. What chance does a guy have? Sure, sometimes I half wish he were blind just to give me a fighting chance, but he'd just figure out a way to despise me purely by smell. Which, since I've taken up leather tanning as a hobby, I wouldn't entirely blame him for.
This weighs on me now as the boy, just this week, in an act of brazen defiance, has crossed the Rubicon of teen-dom. That's right, I'm the dad of a 13-year-old. The good news is, he still likes me. I'm hoping that only having him here half the time as part of the joint custody agreement with his mother will blunt or at least stave off some of the pointier spears of hormonal vitriol, no doubt aimed but as yet unthrown. Between that and all the noncomittal sex with strange women... I was on the fence about it at first, I'll admit, but this divorce business seems to have paid off in the end, in shocking, almost anti-facebook levels. Dividends on top of dividends. And sometimes also on top of dividend's drunk old college friend visiting from Colorado.
We're in the lull before the storm, before the cascade of testosterone and self-awareness pours from the opening skies, but although my original defense plan may have failed, I do have a Plan B. It involves lots of porn. See, there are no child-rearing strategies in place for people my age for avoiding porn. When I was a kid, you had to have a brave enough friend with dark enough downy, pre-facial-hair facial hair to convince a liquor store owner to sell him a copy of Oui if we wanted our porn. Not really that hard to regulate, as far as parents are concerned. The ubiquity of internet porn (with its ingenious, mostly undetectable hiding place in Magic Bolts of Invisible Electricity) is a completely different animal. Like an angry rhinocerous. No idea why, but it's the first thing that thrust itself into my head.
No, instead of being terrified of porn, I've decided to embrace it. The way people charged with removing bears from residential neighborhood trees have embraced the tranquilizer dart. I'm hoping he'll be so intoxicated by the lure of nudity-on-demand, he'll be less likely to realize the only thing standing between him and his happiness, man, are me and my outdated, old-person ways and probably fascism.
The trick is not to let on about my own appreciation for internet porn, potentially putting him off it. But there's another benefit of my failed relationship with his mother: we were married for 12 years. Nobody knows better how to hide a porn habit than I do.
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Virginia Dare
I'm not supposed to admit this, but white people aren't actually magic. And if there's a determined conspiracy out there to prop up Honkitude at the expense of the brown man, I certainly haven't been invited to the meetings. I think a lot of the freak-out amongst pale-skins in post-racial America is that all white people are painfully aware of this fact. The psychological trauma of this unhidden truth comes with the realization that the things it seems most like we have a particular aptitude for--and I'm talking here about the directed exploitation of peoples of non-European cultural proclivity and perhaps visibly overtaxed in the melanin department--we're pretty sure just about anyone else could just as well if not better.
This only really becomes troubling when suddenly there are more of them than there are of you. It's frightening enough to be faced with the reality that only 50% of our current presidents are white. Now there's a very real demographic component to go with the institutional one.
Even now, though, the problem remains a theoretical one as the Gathering Brown Horde is mostly in the form of bendy, slobbering infants. But it's only a matter of time before that group grows up, en masse, into something totally unintelligible to modern white America: multilingual. Self-motivated. Achieving without privilege. Most likely raised, for some period of their childhoods, in the kind of poverty even children can comprehend, so lacking the massive burden of smug entitlement most of us spend much of our free time admiring in the handy storage compartment we keep it in, up our own asses.
I get the panic. This is the last thing America needs. If you consider that a good 60% of our gross domestic product is currently wrapped up in "reality" television tracking botox-dependent glambots meeting with their scent stylists ahead of the launch of their fragrance line, we're talking about a real economic crisis in the offing.
I don't see any way out of it in the short term, though. We've tried making it unpleasant for them by happily ceding the entire laboring-class sector and then sometimes kind of being dicks. And yet they insist on coming and staying. I suspect it's either the quiet stoicism of basic human dignity in the face of so much condescension. Or maybe just that they've really really considered the alternatives.
Look, we've faced this problem before. Remember what a big deal it was to face down wave after wave of smelly Eurotrash Catholics, like the Italians and the Irish? Sure, we imported some of their less savory traditions like racketeering and institutionalized church-sanctioned child rape (respectively), but some of us get Columbus Day off and who doesn't like a green beer every now and again?
Going even further back, there was a time when the birth rate issue was stacked against us at just about 100%. But we chipped away and, with just a little elbow grease,* the Protestant work ethic** and good ole American stick-to-it-iveness,*** we wrestled the burden of control of this continent from the dusky peoples cursed to have gotten here first. We can do it again. Although I will admit the vaccines-cause-autism movement puts some of our fighting strength at risk. It would be a shame if we lost this struggle due to a case of untreatable irony.
---
*smallpox pandemic
**suspension of all moral compunctions against killing
***overwhelming technological superiority in firepower
This only really becomes troubling when suddenly there are more of them than there are of you. It's frightening enough to be faced with the reality that only 50% of our current presidents are white. Now there's a very real demographic component to go with the institutional one.
Even now, though, the problem remains a theoretical one as the Gathering Brown Horde is mostly in the form of bendy, slobbering infants. But it's only a matter of time before that group grows up, en masse, into something totally unintelligible to modern white America: multilingual. Self-motivated. Achieving without privilege. Most likely raised, for some period of their childhoods, in the kind of poverty even children can comprehend, so lacking the massive burden of smug entitlement most of us spend much of our free time admiring in the handy storage compartment we keep it in, up our own asses.
I get the panic. This is the last thing America needs. If you consider that a good 60% of our gross domestic product is currently wrapped up in "reality" television tracking botox-dependent glambots meeting with their scent stylists ahead of the launch of their fragrance line, we're talking about a real economic crisis in the offing.
I don't see any way out of it in the short term, though. We've tried making it unpleasant for them by happily ceding the entire laboring-class sector and then sometimes kind of being dicks. And yet they insist on coming and staying. I suspect it's either the quiet stoicism of basic human dignity in the face of so much condescension. Or maybe just that they've really really considered the alternatives.
Look, we've faced this problem before. Remember what a big deal it was to face down wave after wave of smelly Eurotrash Catholics, like the Italians and the Irish? Sure, we imported some of their less savory traditions like racketeering and institutionalized church-sanctioned child rape (respectively), but some of us get Columbus Day off and who doesn't like a green beer every now and again?
Going even further back, there was a time when the birth rate issue was stacked against us at just about 100%. But we chipped away and, with just a little elbow grease,* the Protestant work ethic** and good ole American stick-to-it-iveness,*** we wrestled the burden of control of this continent from the dusky peoples cursed to have gotten here first. We can do it again. Although I will admit the vaccines-cause-autism movement puts some of our fighting strength at risk. It would be a shame if we lost this struggle due to a case of untreatable irony.
---
*smallpox pandemic
**suspension of all moral compunctions against killing
***overwhelming technological superiority in firepower
Thursday, May 10, 2012
So's Your Mother
Like most parents, I've come to my surest and most strongly-held parenting convictions only concerning subjects that no longer affect my children. It sounds at best like a giant waste of energy and at worst like rank hypocrisy, but I put it down to a surfeit of time spent under the influence of Baby Boomers, the people who brought you hula hoop mania and the "Just Say No" campaign. Never before and hopefully never since will humanity see another generation so single-mindedly driven to frantic, inane hedonism and then, later, to the utter extirpation of frantic, inane hedonism for their children.
For those of you without children, and especially for those of us wearing the marketing-expedient Generation X label, I will tell you that right now, nobody knows more about parenting than Baby Boomers. Well, now they do. When they were raising the rest of us, it was a Wonder Bread and American cheese sandwich warmed up by eating it off a hot curling iron, self-babysitting watching scrambled porn while they slept off a needed small fist of valium after a loooong day of working one job at normal business hours. In fairness, being all of them divorced and having skipped most of college to hitchhike the Continental Divide, man, they really had no chance of doing anything close to what their parents had done. And even if they had the means, their parents, with their square commitment to structure, safety and basic material comfort, were anti-archetypes they wanted to avoid, partly out of contrarianism and partly out of a very practical concern that we, their children, would turn out just as lost and unfocused as they now were. It was organic, stream-of-consciousness parenting, filled with switchbacks and U-turns and jerky, jagged tangents improvising on a series of very briefly VITALLY IMPORTANT themes, drawn largely from sitcoms and filial spite. It was jazz parenting, with all the self-important smugness and volume alcohol that implies.
Of course now that they have grandchildren, you can't imagine how loaded with unsolicited ideas they are about how those grandchildren should be brought up. In fairness, Baby Boomers had a tendency to overbreed just a tiny bit out of the recommended range for both their income and personal patience level, so they found themselves quite harried when the kids were in the house. It was only after the nest was emptied that they found a reasonable amount of free time to consume all the self-help books and Oprah Winfrey Shows necessary to render one a Great Unassailable Authority in the realm of child rearing. I do accept the helpful evolutionary social-cycle model of elder wisdom, but I have to say it would be a lot less galling if the person now telling me about the link between juvenile brain development and proper nutrition hadn't also at one time in the very rememberable past been an enthusiastic proponent of Froot Loops for dinner.
Thus painfully aware of the type and severity of the reaction unsolicited parenting advice can engender, I tend to keep myself to myself, as it were, when it comes to those coming up behind me in the parenting ranks. But I'm beginning to understand the difficulty of just shutting the fuck up for those who preceded me because I am now, quite by accident, a Great Unassailable Authority on parenting for people with children younger than my own. The smug condescension, it turns out, is an unavoidable by-product of the act of parenting. The trick is learning how to feel that tickle in the back of your throat to vomit out tips on pacifier-weaning and having the presence of mind to swallow it, and hard.
Every once in a while, the ongoing debate about parenting styles erupts into the public square however, and I do feel I have enough social cover to address my personal experience and gathered wisdom to no one in particular and without specific judgment. Except maybe for Alicia Silverstone. Boundaries are OK, lady.
First of all, as far as the debate over "attachment parenting" goes: almost fully exposed breasts in the public domain. Already a positive.
Is it cancelled out by having someone who looks like a registered voter attached to it? Yeah, kinda. But still: boobs!
I worry sometimes that my positions can be too nuanced, so let me see if I can firm up some of the shades of gray for you: nobody fucking knows anything. Outside of some fucked-up religious cults or the entire state of Utah, you don't get single-minded parenting data in enough volume to present any reasonable conclusions. Even if properly polled,* there's no way to actually track how or what people are applying in terms of practice with their children. And frankly they can't be trusted to answer in the first place. I can tell you definitively that so much of parenting is situationally reactive that the combination of instinct, parental history and temperament drive almost everything. It's very possible that I'm fucking all of this up on every conceivable plane, but I will tell you sincerely that it feels like I'm doing OK. The only way to know if you've been a good parent is if your children grow up and the number of people they kill is less than two. They don't have to be something great like president or Michael Jordan or Jason Bateman, they just have to not be a serial killer. And you can only know that when they turn out not to be serial killers.
And even if they are a serial killer, you can see their siblings, raised by the same people in largely the same way, somehow are not serial killers. So who fucking knows?
The only thing we can know for sure is if we find two siblings who both turned out to be serial killers and then decide, as a society, to not do whatever is their parents did. It's a lot more likely that we're going to get anywhere with a process of elimination rather than spontaneous ideogenesis. Baby steps, people. Which should be taken in shoes with ample ankle support and on flat, uncarpeted, uncluttered, even surfaces.
----
*yes, we'll wait...
For those of you without children, and especially for those of us wearing the marketing-expedient Generation X label, I will tell you that right now, nobody knows more about parenting than Baby Boomers. Well, now they do. When they were raising the rest of us, it was a Wonder Bread and American cheese sandwich warmed up by eating it off a hot curling iron, self-babysitting watching scrambled porn while they slept off a needed small fist of valium after a loooong day of working one job at normal business hours. In fairness, being all of them divorced and having skipped most of college to hitchhike the Continental Divide, man, they really had no chance of doing anything close to what their parents had done. And even if they had the means, their parents, with their square commitment to structure, safety and basic material comfort, were anti-archetypes they wanted to avoid, partly out of contrarianism and partly out of a very practical concern that we, their children, would turn out just as lost and unfocused as they now were. It was organic, stream-of-consciousness parenting, filled with switchbacks and U-turns and jerky, jagged tangents improvising on a series of very briefly VITALLY IMPORTANT themes, drawn largely from sitcoms and filial spite. It was jazz parenting, with all the self-important smugness and volume alcohol that implies.
Of course now that they have grandchildren, you can't imagine how loaded with unsolicited ideas they are about how those grandchildren should be brought up. In fairness, Baby Boomers had a tendency to overbreed just a tiny bit out of the recommended range for both their income and personal patience level, so they found themselves quite harried when the kids were in the house. It was only after the nest was emptied that they found a reasonable amount of free time to consume all the self-help books and Oprah Winfrey Shows necessary to render one a Great Unassailable Authority in the realm of child rearing. I do accept the helpful evolutionary social-cycle model of elder wisdom, but I have to say it would be a lot less galling if the person now telling me about the link between juvenile brain development and proper nutrition hadn't also at one time in the very rememberable past been an enthusiastic proponent of Froot Loops for dinner.
Thus painfully aware of the type and severity of the reaction unsolicited parenting advice can engender, I tend to keep myself to myself, as it were, when it comes to those coming up behind me in the parenting ranks. But I'm beginning to understand the difficulty of just shutting the fuck up for those who preceded me because I am now, quite by accident, a Great Unassailable Authority on parenting for people with children younger than my own. The smug condescension, it turns out, is an unavoidable by-product of the act of parenting. The trick is learning how to feel that tickle in the back of your throat to vomit out tips on pacifier-weaning and having the presence of mind to swallow it, and hard.
Every once in a while, the ongoing debate about parenting styles erupts into the public square however, and I do feel I have enough social cover to address my personal experience and gathered wisdom to no one in particular and without specific judgment. Except maybe for Alicia Silverstone. Boundaries are OK, lady.
First of all, as far as the debate over "attachment parenting" goes: almost fully exposed breasts in the public domain. Already a positive.
Is it cancelled out by having someone who looks like a registered voter attached to it? Yeah, kinda. But still: boobs!
I worry sometimes that my positions can be too nuanced, so let me see if I can firm up some of the shades of gray for you: nobody fucking knows anything. Outside of some fucked-up religious cults or the entire state of Utah, you don't get single-minded parenting data in enough volume to present any reasonable conclusions. Even if properly polled,* there's no way to actually track how or what people are applying in terms of practice with their children. And frankly they can't be trusted to answer in the first place. I can tell you definitively that so much of parenting is situationally reactive that the combination of instinct, parental history and temperament drive almost everything. It's very possible that I'm fucking all of this up on every conceivable plane, but I will tell you sincerely that it feels like I'm doing OK. The only way to know if you've been a good parent is if your children grow up and the number of people they kill is less than two. They don't have to be something great like president or Michael Jordan or Jason Bateman, they just have to not be a serial killer. And you can only know that when they turn out not to be serial killers.
And even if they are a serial killer, you can see their siblings, raised by the same people in largely the same way, somehow are not serial killers. So who fucking knows?
The only thing we can know for sure is if we find two siblings who both turned out to be serial killers and then decide, as a society, to not do whatever is their parents did. It's a lot more likely that we're going to get anywhere with a process of elimination rather than spontaneous ideogenesis. Baby steps, people. Which should be taken in shoes with ample ankle support and on flat, uncarpeted, uncluttered, even surfaces.
----
*yes, we'll wait...
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Can I Get A Skeleton?
Now that the grand and inevitable wave of frothing, unbridled human enthusiasm has stampeded Mitt Romney to the Republican nomination, parading him through outreached, ecstatic hands to the crown of the Capitoline Hill, where he will be girded with laurels before probably being murdered by the Praetorian Guard in favor of an Illyrian dirt-worshipper who promised them good land in Pannonia to retire on. The Roman metaphor was a mistake, I'm seeing that now. Everything I know about it I saw on HBO. Which I know the Romneys have never seen. It's all paganism and fucking over there.
Before the first fly hand landed on the beached political corpse of the ruddy and baleen Gingrich, the mixed media onslaught from Team Romney had already begun, assuring us that, despite anything we may have heard, Barack Obama has failed at everything on every level that he has attempted, considered, conceived of, assented to, consented to, was consulted on, signed, acknowledged or heard of.
If you're wondering what kind of nuanced, delicate rapier fencing we can expect over the next seven months, to wit:
Romney told the Chantilly audience that people ask him how he would handle the economy differently than Obama. "I say, 'Well, look at what the president has done, and do the opposite,'" he said to applause.
Maybe "to wit" wasn't the right word choice. Months and months of this, which is funny for about 2.5 minutes, but considering a 24-hour news cycle even more amplified than it was the last go-round with twitter and tumblr and facebook and everything else achieving a full-masted thrust of social penetration, I have to spend a few minutes considering if it's philosophically consistent to be simultaneously a Luddite and use a sensory-deprivation chamber.
It seems amazingly tedious and here I am annoyed and turned off three weeks before Memorial Day, but look, this is what we get for electing a pro-terrorist Kenyan socialist Muslim/atheist. We're fools for not seeing it coming.
Now on top of everything else, Obama has to deal with the EXPLOSIVE! news of the release of STEAMY! excerpts from his college girlfriend's diary!
Right away, as trumpeted in every headline, the word "sexual" appears right there in the story! About the president! I turned 18 in 1992. The Clinton years were formative for me, in more ways than one. I know where this is going...
“The SEXUAL! warmth is definitely there – but the rest of it has sharp edges and I’m finding it all unsettling and finding myself wanting to withdraw from it all,”Cook wrote in her journal on Feb. 25, 1984. “I have to admit that I am feeling anger at him for some reason, multi-stranded reasons. His warmth can be deceptive. Tho he speaks sweet words and can be open and trusting, there is also that coolness – and I begin to have an inkling of some things about him that could get to me.”
And just like that, I turn the lights back up to full illumination, click off the Al Green music and go back to typing with two hands. Clinton this is not. This isn't even Hillary Clinton. At least with her I can pretend she's scissor sisters with Condi Rice or something. So maybe Obama shrugs this potential scandal off.
I did find something incredibly damning in one of his letters though, printed in part by Vanity Fair:
Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak.
Go ahead, read it again. Let it land. Yep, that's right: Barack Obama is fucking boring. This is the man at 22 years old. Writing to a woman he may want to bang again. I agree with him on just about every point of policy, and that concurrence grows to nearly 100% when considered against the Romney option as a voter variable, but... man, I don't know. This is our Barry spitting game? He can't mix in a "baby"? Like "The only viable way to illuminate the anti-fascist themes of Orwell's 1984 is an intertextual reading against Silverstein's The Giving Tree, pussycat. Also, I dig the way your rack looks in that sweater."
Come on. We already know Romney is Squaresville. He's a Mormon. Caffeine qualifies as a dangerous controlled substance. Yes, most people who run for president are boring. Anyone with that much of an overdeveloped sense of ambition has to be. And again, considered in this dyad, there's no question which candidate's got the least arboreal stick up his ass. But I like to imagine the guy I'm voting for would pull the stick out every once in a while if only to shove something else up there for a few minutes. You know, just to try it out.
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Wide-Open Spaces
I was never a Boy Scout. I was a Cub Scout briefly, but eventually the membership dues forced me out. And the Mormonism. And the ulnar palsy made knot-tying a particular challenge.
But mostly it was the Mormonism thing. I don't have a problem with people being Mormon. It's just the set of social rules that go along with it that unnerve me. For instance, somehow it's become completely impossible for gay people to hold volunteer positions in Boy Scout troops. Not just regular gay people, even the lady-gay ones now too.
There's always the implication that having gay people around children is bad because of the unsubtle implication that gays are sexual predators with regard to children, the most curious sexually-related non-sequitur since the masturbation-blindness connection was mostly disproved.* Gay people are only predators for other gay people. And even then, only for other gay people of the same gender as themselves. So already that's a fraction of the fraction that's even self-identifying as gay in the first place. Then factor in your normal variables of age, personality, opportunity, disinclination and the standard endemic percentage paralyzed and socially self-quarantined due to World of Warcraft addiction and we're talking about roughly 11 people. This is science. You can tell because there are now numbers involved. There are 11 gay people who can be considered "predatory."And are those 11 out there volunteering to lead Boy Scout troops? No, they are not. Why not? Because they're busy fucking each other raw in national park public restrooms. America's a big place, but you can bet someone else's very tender ass they're finding each other. Part of it is the pure electromagnetic pull of white-hot deviant sameness they can sense, like pigeons following along ley lines in the planetary magnetic field or felt in the minuscule wobble of the earth on its axis. Part of it is a complicated series of glyphs and symbols left discreetly in public places for others to find, like a sexy, sexy version of the old-timey hobo code. Mostly though, it's craigslist. It's the world's primary purveyor of all things cock-related. Seriously, go there right now. More cock than you can shake a... well, more than could ever hope to want, all in far, far, far too high a screen resolution.
As usual, just like in the 2004 presidential election for example, the issue of gayness is a petty, effective distraction for the things that would actually be harmful to us. Back then, in order to protect our gay citizens from the abomination of marriage,** we accidentally opted for four more years of political leadership by a painfully shallow show-pony with a put-on accent.***
But you know, that was pre-Katrina. Yeah, we had our reservations about George W. Bush, but we hadn't really given him a chance at that point to show us exactly what levels of mismanagement he was capable of. America is about allowing people the chance to experience the full range of their human potential, so long as they are white children of extreme privilege.
No, this time, the problem threatening us from which gayness is a distraction us is the threat of animals destroying us in a nuclear holocaust. This is not a joke about North Korea, mostly because making one would be an exercise in redundancy. I'm talking about salp. You know salp. They're the little jellyfish thingies attempting to undermine and destroy whole parts of my home state by attacking a nuclear power plant until it melts down. Bad luck for them they tried this little stunt on the 26th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, so we were being particularly vigilant. Of course we can't be sure what kind of animal brought down Chernobyl because the perpetrators took the clever precaution of rendering the whole area uninhabitable by human beings for the next thousand years. My guess is it was probably a deer or some trans-Caucasus variant of an opossum. Clever, insidious opossums. Non-Australian marsupials? Automatically untrustworthy. They had to be kicked out of there for a reason. And you really REALLY have to fuck up to get the Australians to kick you out. They're famous for letting people overstay their welcome almost indefinitely.
----
*I believe the actual medical conclusion there was "if you insist on ejaculating into your own eyes, we can't help you."
**I may have that wording slightly wrong.
***No, not Madonna, the other one.
But mostly it was the Mormonism thing. I don't have a problem with people being Mormon. It's just the set of social rules that go along with it that unnerve me. For instance, somehow it's become completely impossible for gay people to hold volunteer positions in Boy Scout troops. Not just regular gay people, even the lady-gay ones now too.
There's always the implication that having gay people around children is bad because of the unsubtle implication that gays are sexual predators with regard to children, the most curious sexually-related non-sequitur since the masturbation-blindness connection was mostly disproved.* Gay people are only predators for other gay people. And even then, only for other gay people of the same gender as themselves. So already that's a fraction of the fraction that's even self-identifying as gay in the first place. Then factor in your normal variables of age, personality, opportunity, disinclination and the standard endemic percentage paralyzed and socially self-quarantined due to World of Warcraft addiction and we're talking about roughly 11 people. This is science. You can tell because there are now numbers involved. There are 11 gay people who can be considered "predatory."And are those 11 out there volunteering to lead Boy Scout troops? No, they are not. Why not? Because they're busy fucking each other raw in national park public restrooms. America's a big place, but you can bet someone else's very tender ass they're finding each other. Part of it is the pure electromagnetic pull of white-hot deviant sameness they can sense, like pigeons following along ley lines in the planetary magnetic field or felt in the minuscule wobble of the earth on its axis. Part of it is a complicated series of glyphs and symbols left discreetly in public places for others to find, like a sexy, sexy version of the old-timey hobo code. Mostly though, it's craigslist. It's the world's primary purveyor of all things cock-related. Seriously, go there right now. More cock than you can shake a... well, more than could ever hope to want, all in far, far, far too high a screen resolution.
As usual, just like in the 2004 presidential election for example, the issue of gayness is a petty, effective distraction for the things that would actually be harmful to us. Back then, in order to protect our gay citizens from the abomination of marriage,** we accidentally opted for four more years of political leadership by a painfully shallow show-pony with a put-on accent.***
But you know, that was pre-Katrina. Yeah, we had our reservations about George W. Bush, but we hadn't really given him a chance at that point to show us exactly what levels of mismanagement he was capable of. America is about allowing people the chance to experience the full range of their human potential, so long as they are white children of extreme privilege.
No, this time, the problem threatening us from which gayness is a distraction us is the threat of animals destroying us in a nuclear holocaust. This is not a joke about North Korea, mostly because making one would be an exercise in redundancy. I'm talking about salp. You know salp. They're the little jellyfish thingies attempting to undermine and destroy whole parts of my home state by attacking a nuclear power plant until it melts down. Bad luck for them they tried this little stunt on the 26th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, so we were being particularly vigilant. Of course we can't be sure what kind of animal brought down Chernobyl because the perpetrators took the clever precaution of rendering the whole area uninhabitable by human beings for the next thousand years. My guess is it was probably a deer or some trans-Caucasus variant of an opossum. Clever, insidious opossums. Non-Australian marsupials? Automatically untrustworthy. They had to be kicked out of there for a reason. And you really REALLY have to fuck up to get the Australians to kick you out. They're famous for letting people overstay their welcome almost indefinitely.
----
*I believe the actual medical conclusion there was "if you insist on ejaculating into your own eyes, we can't help you."
**I may have that wording slightly wrong.
***No, not Madonna, the other one.
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Leave It to Beaver
It's getting harder and harder out to be a white English-speaking middle-class Christian-raised heterosexual male in America anymore. Sure, you hear about the supposed life of privilege and ease we're supposed to be enjoying but honestly, it's getting harder and harder to see. At the rate our culture is changing, the only claims to socially unbalanced preference left for me are in airport security lines, on bank loan applications and in my ability to browse convenience stores unmonitored. Sometimes it takes me 20 minutes to decide to buy a Kit-Kat. It's nice to know I have the leeway to consider.
Apart from those crumbs and the general, baseline-level of indifference afforded me by law enforcement, I may as well not even be a white English-speaking middle-class Christian-raised heterosexual male. Ever since Will & Grace premiered, it's been an extended horror-show of field-leveling across all aspects of culture: social, political... OK, yes, we still have the economic shades of the spectrum pretty well in hand, but how much of that anymore is just a sham tolerated by our Chinese creditors, a house of dry sticks to burn away in a conflagration of impossible debt at the moment of their choosing?
Even the president isn't One of Us. Technically he's at least half of One of Us, but come on. Nobody looks at him and sees Ann Dunham's boy, do they? It's hard to see our brother in there beneath the wild, anti-colonial Luo-Arabic name and that creamy, burnt-caramel complexion. And then when he speaks, it's an unnerving mixture of populist sentiment and practical realism. Give people hope to raise themselves up and seek a path to help them actually do it? If he's not careful, poor people are going to stop voting for Republicans. Then where will the rest of us be? In the unworkable magic fairlyland of Actual Equality, where people unthinkingly go around applying the ideas espoused for rhetorical effect in things like the Declaration of Independence and the teachings of Jesus Christ. Thank God we still have the Congress. They're the last bulwark against the anarchy of uncritical meritocracy, where all airplane seats are the same size and every restaurant has a salad bar. Try making sense out of a world where all the borders have been erased. Next thing you know I won't be allowed to shower disabled people with infantilizing, condescending pity and freakshow curiosity without getting yelled at. Am I not allowed any hobbies?
And now, of all places, this creeping cultural freeze-out has begun to infect the internet. There's controversy about half-naked pictures of women out there stirring up all kinds of issues about the First Amendment, good taste and the responsibilities concomitant with freedom of expression. What upsets me is less about the content than about the fact that these are pictures of women, fetishized and dehumanized, just like I likes 'em, but... not meant for my consumption at all.
It's these thinspiration pictures, for women and by women, championing anorexia... which has nothing to do with me personally at all. How is there a whole section of popular culture out there uninterested in me? Lady-pictures on the internet were given to us by God to sell us beer, help us masturbate or both. It's not an accident that Bud Light gives me an erection. Bud Light erections are the cornerstone of the American consumer economy, which is to say, America itself.
How can they just ace me out like this, insisting on having a niche all their own? Tyler Perry movies and now this. Once they start making lesbian romantic comedies, all I'll have to entertain me are back-issues of Playboy and sports talk radio. This is it. What was once our world has become a fast-eroding island. All we've got left to ourselves are the Roman Catholic church and Augusta National Golf Club. But between 100% gay population among priests and that Tiger Woods guy, I don't even know how secure I feel in those any more.
Apart from those crumbs and the general, baseline-level of indifference afforded me by law enforcement, I may as well not even be a white English-speaking middle-class Christian-raised heterosexual male. Ever since Will & Grace premiered, it's been an extended horror-show of field-leveling across all aspects of culture: social, political... OK, yes, we still have the economic shades of the spectrum pretty well in hand, but how much of that anymore is just a sham tolerated by our Chinese creditors, a house of dry sticks to burn away in a conflagration of impossible debt at the moment of their choosing?
Even the president isn't One of Us. Technically he's at least half of One of Us, but come on. Nobody looks at him and sees Ann Dunham's boy, do they? It's hard to see our brother in there beneath the wild, anti-colonial Luo-Arabic name and that creamy, burnt-caramel complexion. And then when he speaks, it's an unnerving mixture of populist sentiment and practical realism. Give people hope to raise themselves up and seek a path to help them actually do it? If he's not careful, poor people are going to stop voting for Republicans. Then where will the rest of us be? In the unworkable magic fairlyland of Actual Equality, where people unthinkingly go around applying the ideas espoused for rhetorical effect in things like the Declaration of Independence and the teachings of Jesus Christ. Thank God we still have the Congress. They're the last bulwark against the anarchy of uncritical meritocracy, where all airplane seats are the same size and every restaurant has a salad bar. Try making sense out of a world where all the borders have been erased. Next thing you know I won't be allowed to shower disabled people with infantilizing, condescending pity and freakshow curiosity without getting yelled at. Am I not allowed any hobbies?
And now, of all places, this creeping cultural freeze-out has begun to infect the internet. There's controversy about half-naked pictures of women out there stirring up all kinds of issues about the First Amendment, good taste and the responsibilities concomitant with freedom of expression. What upsets me is less about the content than about the fact that these are pictures of women, fetishized and dehumanized, just like I likes 'em, but... not meant for my consumption at all.
It's these thinspiration pictures, for women and by women, championing anorexia... which has nothing to do with me personally at all. How is there a whole section of popular culture out there uninterested in me? Lady-pictures on the internet were given to us by God to sell us beer, help us masturbate or both. It's not an accident that Bud Light gives me an erection. Bud Light erections are the cornerstone of the American consumer economy, which is to say, America itself.
How can they just ace me out like this, insisting on having a niche all their own? Tyler Perry movies and now this. Once they start making lesbian romantic comedies, all I'll have to entertain me are back-issues of Playboy and sports talk radio. This is it. What was once our world has become a fast-eroding island. All we've got left to ourselves are the Roman Catholic church and Augusta National Golf Club. But between 100% gay population among priests and that Tiger Woods guy, I don't even know how secure I feel in those any more.
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