I haven't written anything in awhile.
Not for lack of trying but every time I sit down at the keyboard nothing pops into my head. Zero. Nada. I sit and stare at the wall in front of me trying to remember a salacious tidbit that passed through my brain the night before as I was nodding off into the ether. Oh, I always think, that's a good one. I better write it down because I'll forget it by the morning. Then I close my eyes again without writing it down, wake up the next morning and, of course, it's gone.
I don't know if that's a good thing or bad, but when I started this blog it was to exorcise a few demons that had been plaguing that near-ether sleep. And as those demons morphed from my anxiety regarding a woman I had been dating to a renewed fear of where our culture was headed under GWB's administration and then into nostalgic ruminations of my youth in Ohio's fourteenth largest city, I think I came to a few realizations about myself.
And maybe my pinpoint stare at that wall in front of the laptop means one specific thing: I have no more demons to purge.
The anxieties of growing up in a mixed household--English Methodist and Slovenian Catholic--have dissipated into a middle-aged guy's don't-give-a-shit-about-life's-measly-little-problems-cuz-it-will-all-work-out-in-the-end new outlook on life. If it weren't such a shitty tune, I'd probably embrace Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry Be Happy" as my new theme song. But I picked Bob Marley's "Three Little Birds" instead because it's infintely cooler and representative of the older, cooler me.
I still have plenty of thoughts; sometimes so much so that I could fill up another blog full of useless entries. But, those musings are more trivial and pedantic.
Not that the bald hoohaw of a forty-something woman isn't trivial, but perhaps more relatable than what a forty-something year old man thinks about the current state of the Republican Party. Or his hometown. Or even moreso why the disparately poor in my hometown vote Republican, an act of social hari kari against their very own best interests.
In June of 2009 when I wrote that first entry, to an anonymous world, it seemed the proper thing to do.
Cheap therapy, I guess.
I got to dump everything I had been feeling and questioning onto an audience that I didn't know. An occasional friend or acquaintance knew it was me; when I went to a restaurant or bar and heard people say that they liked my last entry, it felt kind of good that other people my age could relate to what I was going through. There were sympathetic female ears out there and once Voldemort and I broke up for the last time a few of those sympathetic ears turned into sympathetic one night stands. And, then again, a few of them made me breakfast the next morning. So I guess it worked out to be some physical therapy as well, topped off with lightly-toasted wheat bread and some Smuckers jam delivered by a forty-something with a bald hoohaw. Had to bring that full circle for the slow readers of the bunch. Now may I move on?
I've gone back and read a few of the early entries and have cringed at the hyperbole and other grammatical abortions for which I wholeheartedly take responsibility; sorry for massacring the mother tongue like that. I also can't believe how frank I was in some of them. If I was overly-honest I apologize. I want to say sorry to the ex whose hoohaw I unfavorably compared to a pair of dead sperm whales rotting in the September sun. Perhaps your cooch smelled like that but I was a little too eager to point it out to the blogosphere. Hah, I just realized that I used the word "eager" when discussing her beaver. Sorry again.
Anyway, I've learned a great deal about myself in those three years since the man cave rumbled for the very first time. I was so in love with our newly-elected president then. I felt a surge of good energy for the first time since GWB took the White House in 2000. I thought prosperity and change were just around the corner. Well, looking back it seems that the change never came, and a few of us have grown more prosperous; those that we've deemed the "1%" have seen their bottom line grow at the expense of most of the rest of us.
I'll continue to write when something new and interesting comes to me, but I just don't feel the need to purge anything that often anymore. Maybe this has ran its course; my need for fulfillment has grown inward and my need to try and convert any Republican-leaning friends or strangers has dwindled. My hometown only has so many stories to tell and outside of a few that may get me in trouble with the law I think I've told 'em all. The angry young man has, I think, turned into the mehhhh? middle-aged man.
I'll leave you with a few tidbits that I've gleaned while writing "Rumblings From the Man Cave" over the last few years.
1.) Women feel sympathetic to a guy whose crazy girlfriend dumps him and gets back together with him again and again. Write about it; it'll get you laid more than once.
2.) When you really want to emphasize something use italics. It really works.
3.) Yeah, Smuckers-on-lightly-toasted-bread-as-breakfast-in-bed is better when delivered to you by a naked woman. Even if she is too old to have a bald hoohaw.
4.) Man caves should have a tank of frickin' sharks underneath them with frickin' laserbeams attached to their frickin' heads. Mine doesn't; just a ten-year old German Short-Haired Pointer that sleeps about 22 hours a day and looks at you with a mildly-annoyed stare when you tell him it's time to shut the lights off in the cave and proceed to move upstairs to let the serious canine snoring begin.
5.) My hometown, although technically a shit hole quickly headed for the seventh level of Hell, is still my hometown and I love her even if she needs her stomach stapled, an intervention for the three-pack-a-day, percocet, straight vodka habits, and violently kicked off both WIC and welfare. See how the italics work? Mark my words: Elyria, Ohio will make a comeback. Of course, I may be dead before that happens but she will rise from her post-industrial ashes, a phoenix perhaps even kicking and screaming the whole way to a glorious service-industry rebirth.
6.) A dear friend's death is something that you never get over. It will be three years this August that Roxanne left us. I still think about her every day; writing about her in the early days of this blog was the one thing that gave me peace and, although it didn't extinguish the pain of her death, this blog made it a little more bearable.
7.) Writing about my best friend, Jeff, has made me remember things that I had almost forgotten; memories that were tucked away in that ether came back to me while thinking of things to write about. Which, in turn, helped strengthen our friendship. I've realized that there are very few people that can make a true difference in your life...a friend like Jeff certainly has made a difference in mine. Even if his politics are fucking whacked.
8.) Be frank with yourself. Write about it to the point of embarrassment, ridicule and even the risk of being "defriended" on Facebook. The cream, as they say, will rise to the top.
9.) Surround yourself with positive people. If you do that, your outlook will become brighter. Adversely, cut the energy vampires out like a cancer. They'll kill you faster than that flesh-eating virus to which the poor grad student in Georgia is rapidly succumbing.
10.) Cool titles can make up for a crappy blog entry.
11.) Never wear jeans to a job interview. Unless of course you're rocking a suede blazer and a vintage pair of sneakers.
12.) Always write stuff down before you forget it because, well, you know the rest...
13.) If you write negatively about an ex-girlfriend prepare for a whole bunch of angry comments from her and her friends.
14.) Dude? Combovers, really? It's the twenty-first century, bald is in. If a woman who was a teenager when Nixon was president can shave her nether regions like Kojak then a male chrome dome is okey-dokey.
15.) Forty-something is the new twenty. So that must mean twenty-something is the new Romper Room. See how that works?
16.) Sometimes criticizing a famous author's books can get a response from them. When you get their attention, which was never my intention to begin with, good things can come from it. BTW, John Gray is a genius and very helpful. After conversing with him a light bulb the size of the Grand Canyon went off over my head.
And lastly:
17.) Embrace the ether.
*
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Saturday, April 7, 2012
Three Foot Bubbles
I think I've learned a pretty valuable trait over the last few years.
Let me preface that first by telling you that I was a relatively shy kid; a wallflower at most junior high dances who kept to myself in fear of saying or doing something that I perceived would be monumentally unforgiving in the echelons of high school politics.
Like most of us, I slowly came out of that post-adolescent shell, and now find myself able to carry on conversations with total strangers while I wait in a line at my grocery store.
But one thing of which I've always remained cognizant is someone's privacy. I've always thought it presumptuous to barge into someone's business or their sociologically-sound three foot bubble. Do ya know what "bubble" I'm talking about? That space that's inherently mine? It starts at the tip of my nose and extends out about thirty-six inches; I'll give you permission to enter it once I know you're not a stark-raving lunatic or the halitosis that you may be suffering from could render a nuclear warhead moot, knocking it out of my airspace by merely being near your biohazardous breath.
But, as a photographer, I've learned that sometimes social conventions need to be ignored if there's an opportunity to get a great shot or experience something unique.
When I shot Bill and Hillary Clinton in 2008 I threw conventional wisdom out the window. I went up on the stage, uninvited, and decided to try and shake his hand and snap a few images. I mean, what's the worst that could've happened? Other than the twenty or so secret service guys that could have tackled me, smashed my camera, and tossed me in the pokey it seemed like a smart thing to do.
And it worked. No secret service anal probes were forthcoming, I met the ex-president, invaded his three-foot-bubble, shook his hand and got some great closeups.
I've adopted that mantra ever since and have passed on that wisdom to my son: nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Go for it. Even if you think the girl you want to go out with is out of your league you still owe it to yourself to ask her out. If she shoots you down at least you tried. And if she does? Fuck her! Who does she think she is to deny herself the greatness that is you?
So I attend a local comedy club a few times a month. I've struck up a relationship with the club manager. I've shot about a half dozen comedians in the last year. I usually e-mail their website in advance and attempt to make contact a few months before they make their way to Cleveland. We talk on the phone and I'll set up a shoot with them while they're here on a four-day weekend.
I've had some fun, got to meet some big names in the comedy world, and have taken some great photos.
But Thursday night was a little different.
Dave Foley from "Kids in the Hall," "Newsradio," and the lead voice in Pixar's "A Bug's Life" was in town. My buddies and I went to the show, looking forward to a beautiful night out, even though Opening Day was Thursday and about a million people had converged into Cleveland to watch the Tribe fall to Toronto in what has just hit the record books as the longest Opening Day game in major league history.
So we saw his act. Dave killed; his comedy stylings are right up my alley. His act carefully meandered form topic to topic and hit many of the same issues that I relish: atheism, politics, and the lack of pubic hair on most women.
Apparently, when he first got married a few decades ago the jungle bush was still in fashion. After his second divorce a few years ago and re-entry into the dating world, the bush had all but disappeared. He, like myself, feels that it's kind of strange to be going down on a smooth hoohaw; almost like you're banging a kid. And that's kind of creepy. I miss the hirsute '80s. Not the jungle bush mind you, but the Playboy-circa-1985-bush that is sorely a thing of the past, like laserdiscs, Circuit City and a relatively-sane GOP.
So I met him after the show, took a few photos with him, and then my buddy Jeff asked him if he wanted to join us for dinner. I was a little reticent to get that personal, but he said he was hungry and would love to hang out with us.
Twenty minutes later we're in the Greenhouse Tavern ordering dinner and bullshitting about how he got hired as the voice of the lead ant in "A Bug's Life."
Within minutes the conversation turned away from showbiz and into politics. We then segued into religion and how we atheists are the most under-represented people in our society. We agreed that I would never have a shot at a political office in this country because of my whole stance on God. I got a Dave-Foley-knock-the-rock for that one. We ate wings that were baked in duck fat. Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor and "Blazing Saddles" entered the discussion. The manager came out and gave us on-the-house expensive ice cream and custard desserts. We drank a few more beers and then headed over to Flannery's and the stickiest, most disgusting floor I've ever walked upon. Opening Day had taken a toll on the linoleum and my footfalls felt like strips of velcro were attached to my feet.
So we drank some more, he gave us his cell phone number and we ended up leaving him in the company of a few other Clevelanders with the reassurance that he would get back to his hotel room unmolested.
As we stumbled back to the parking garage one of the guys admitted that Dave was a regular guy, just like us. Of course he is, except the fact that I don't get residual checks from Pixar or royalties from "Newsradio" reruns or DVD sales. All kidding aside; he's totally down to earth and a very likable dude.
All in all it was a great night: my buddy Jeff was all smiles, Todd had a good time, and I was content that there were other people in the world that held the same beliefs that I did. I forgot to mention that a hot twenty-seven year old with awesome red hair asked me for my number.
And I even got my Bug's Life blu-ray case autographed.
*
Let me preface that first by telling you that I was a relatively shy kid; a wallflower at most junior high dances who kept to myself in fear of saying or doing something that I perceived would be monumentally unforgiving in the echelons of high school politics.
Like most of us, I slowly came out of that post-adolescent shell, and now find myself able to carry on conversations with total strangers while I wait in a line at my grocery store.
But one thing of which I've always remained cognizant is someone's privacy. I've always thought it presumptuous to barge into someone's business or their sociologically-sound three foot bubble. Do ya know what "bubble" I'm talking about? That space that's inherently mine? It starts at the tip of my nose and extends out about thirty-six inches; I'll give you permission to enter it once I know you're not a stark-raving lunatic or the halitosis that you may be suffering from could render a nuclear warhead moot, knocking it out of my airspace by merely being near your biohazardous breath.
But, as a photographer, I've learned that sometimes social conventions need to be ignored if there's an opportunity to get a great shot or experience something unique.
When I shot Bill and Hillary Clinton in 2008 I threw conventional wisdom out the window. I went up on the stage, uninvited, and decided to try and shake his hand and snap a few images. I mean, what's the worst that could've happened? Other than the twenty or so secret service guys that could have tackled me, smashed my camera, and tossed me in the pokey it seemed like a smart thing to do.
And it worked. No secret service anal probes were forthcoming, I met the ex-president, invaded his three-foot-bubble, shook his hand and got some great closeups.
I've adopted that mantra ever since and have passed on that wisdom to my son: nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Go for it. Even if you think the girl you want to go out with is out of your league you still owe it to yourself to ask her out. If she shoots you down at least you tried. And if she does? Fuck her! Who does she think she is to deny herself the greatness that is you?
So I attend a local comedy club a few times a month. I've struck up a relationship with the club manager. I've shot about a half dozen comedians in the last year. I usually e-mail their website in advance and attempt to make contact a few months before they make their way to Cleveland. We talk on the phone and I'll set up a shoot with them while they're here on a four-day weekend.
I've had some fun, got to meet some big names in the comedy world, and have taken some great photos.
But Thursday night was a little different.
Dave Foley from "Kids in the Hall," "Newsradio," and the lead voice in Pixar's "A Bug's Life" was in town. My buddies and I went to the show, looking forward to a beautiful night out, even though Opening Day was Thursday and about a million people had converged into Cleveland to watch the Tribe fall to Toronto in what has just hit the record books as the longest Opening Day game in major league history.
So we saw his act. Dave killed; his comedy stylings are right up my alley. His act carefully meandered form topic to topic and hit many of the same issues that I relish: atheism, politics, and the lack of pubic hair on most women.
Apparently, when he first got married a few decades ago the jungle bush was still in fashion. After his second divorce a few years ago and re-entry into the dating world, the bush had all but disappeared. He, like myself, feels that it's kind of strange to be going down on a smooth hoohaw; almost like you're banging a kid. And that's kind of creepy. I miss the hirsute '80s. Not the jungle bush mind you, but the Playboy-circa-1985-bush that is sorely a thing of the past, like laserdiscs, Circuit City and a relatively-sane GOP.
So I met him after the show, took a few photos with him, and then my buddy Jeff asked him if he wanted to join us for dinner. I was a little reticent to get that personal, but he said he was hungry and would love to hang out with us.
Twenty minutes later we're in the Greenhouse Tavern ordering dinner and bullshitting about how he got hired as the voice of the lead ant in "A Bug's Life."
Within minutes the conversation turned away from showbiz and into politics. We then segued into religion and how we atheists are the most under-represented people in our society. We agreed that I would never have a shot at a political office in this country because of my whole stance on God. I got a Dave-Foley-knock-the-rock for that one. We ate wings that were baked in duck fat. Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor and "Blazing Saddles" entered the discussion. The manager came out and gave us on-the-house expensive ice cream and custard desserts. We drank a few more beers and then headed over to Flannery's and the stickiest, most disgusting floor I've ever walked upon. Opening Day had taken a toll on the linoleum and my footfalls felt like strips of velcro were attached to my feet.
So we drank some more, he gave us his cell phone number and we ended up leaving him in the company of a few other Clevelanders with the reassurance that he would get back to his hotel room unmolested.
As we stumbled back to the parking garage one of the guys admitted that Dave was a regular guy, just like us. Of course he is, except the fact that I don't get residual checks from Pixar or royalties from "Newsradio" reruns or DVD sales. All kidding aside; he's totally down to earth and a very likable dude.
All in all it was a great night: my buddy Jeff was all smiles, Todd had a good time, and I was content that there were other people in the world that held the same beliefs that I did. I forgot to mention that a hot twenty-seven year old with awesome red hair asked me for my number.
And I even got my Bug's Life blu-ray case autographed.
*
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Tear-Stained Courage
Don't laugh at me for the story that I'm about to share.
Okay?
I was doing some Spring cleaning recently. I opened my singular bedroom window, letting in a gush of fresh air, turned up the stereo to hear a "Spring Cleaning 2012 Playlist," and commenced with my just-written To-Do list. I dove headfirst into my massive bedroom closet with a few boxes in an attempt to do a whole "Keep" and "Donate" afternoon.
As I went through some heirloom clothes I found some shirts that I've kept for years because they reminded me of a younger, more hip part of my life. Have you ever kept items of clothes around just because? You know, stuff you wouldn't be caught dead wearing in public (like a Milli Vanilli concert shirt that was hip in the early '90s but now just a sad reminder of how lame most of the pop culture from that era truly was), or my old Blockbuster Video polo shirts from Hawai'i? Those bright red shirts instantly bring back a flood of memories, both good and bad. The saddest part is their size: Most of the shirts from that part of my life were a mere "Large" and wouldn't fit me on a dare with $100 dangled as the prize money if I could get my gut into one without ripping the seams from the almost-antique piece of heirloom cloth.
Along with the Billy Joel "River of Dreams" concert shirt and the stack of twenty-seven Hard Rock Cafe t-shirts from all over North America, the Blockbuster memorabilia were dumped into the "Keep" box.
As I moved a large plastic tupperware box containing my National Park site flyer collection I came across the singular touchstone from my youth. The one thing, excepting my cats and dog, that I would grab in a mad dash out of my burning house if it were ever to catch on fire.
My teddy bear.
He was a tattered affair, a bedtime companion that accompanied me on the first few years of my life. His eyes were missing, one of his ears had fallen off close to forty-five years ago, and his nakedness was apparent as the fluff had flaked off like dandruff from being dragged everywhere by me. He was my constant companion until kindergarten and responsible for, most certainly, the scariest experience of my young life.
I think there are very few certifiable geniuses in the entire human history of our planet. We can all agree on a few of them such as Einstein and Oppenheimer, even though their areas of expertise were used to make weapons that have done anything but elevate our race. Mozart instantly pops to my mind as one of the most significant individuals to ever trod this Earth. Maybe Beethoven as well. Stephen Hawking gives me the willies, but his mind has gone to places that his body surely can't. I suppose the cave man that happened upon fire and decided that a dead mammoth tasted better if you applied some flame to the carcass could be considered an early genius, but his grunted name has been lost to the ages. The same with the dude who first thought rotting, fermented grapes tasted good.
For my money one of the greatest minds of all time has to be Bill Watterston. You may have never heard of him but his creation epitomizes the glory of childhood. The simplicity of his art speaks volumes of what it's like to be a scared little boy, afraid of the dark, impending adulthood, and the loss of innocence.
I'm talking, of course, about Watterston's fevered imagination and his Frankenstein-like creation. The greatest comic strip of all time: Calvin and Hobbes.
As I read that strip I saw so much of myself in the little boy whose best friend was a stuffed tiger doll who sprang to life when no one else was around. Their discussions about girls, Chocolate-Covered-Sugar-Bombs (Calvin's breakfast fuel of choice) and even the meaning of life were brilliant; Watterston really understood the human condition and nailed the singular experience of being a precocious boy who was perhaps too smart for those around him.
The strip was funny, honest, and a window into the mind of a five-year old kid just struggling to get through the fears and anxiety of life.
So how does my teddy bear fit into all of that?
Looking back through the filter of time, Teddy, my constant companion, was more than a stuffed animal. He was my sounding board and pacifier, something I could hold on to when I was scared during a thunderstorm or needed a little extra TLC.
My grandma lived on the east side of Cleveland when I was small. A twenty-five minute ride of today took almost ninety minutes in the 1970s. There was no freeway then; a series of backroads interspersed with one or two four-lane highways meandered the fifty or so miles to my grandmother's house. Getting there was circuitous and not a trip that we made very often.
So one Spring day my mom packed my four-year old self and my baby sister into our 1968 blue Pontiac. It was steel both in and out and outfitted with a black leather dashboard. She rolled up the windows and smoked Marlboros with us in the back seat. As my little sister slept for most of the journey I was regaled by tales of Troy and its wooden horse. Of King Arthur and Lancelot. Pompeii and Vesuvius. Teddy and I sat listening, intently, through a haze of cigarette smoke as my mom wound the eighteen-foot long metal car over the river and through the woods.
To grandmother's house we went.
Teddy was glued to my left arm. I carried him everywhere I went. My grandma asked if she could hold him. Reluctantly, I gave him up but only after the assurance that she'd give him back. Quickly.
She looked at his tattered left ear and his nakedness. She said it wasn't decent for a bear to be undressed for the entire world to see. A master crochet artist, she knitted him a new ear and a blue pair of overalls that fit his little body perfectly.
She handed him back to me with the promise that his ear would make him a better listener, even if it didn't match the other one. I smiled and hugged her for making such helpful modifications to my companion.
As we prepared to leave my mother asked me to help get my little sister ready for the long voyage back to the west side of town. She then asked me if I had to go to the bathroom. I put Teddy down and obliged, realizing that I probably couldn't hold it for the long journey back home.
I went to the bathroom and then helped my mom with Jennifer.
Five minutes later, and my young bladder now empty, I opened the heavy steel door of the Pontiac, crawled into the back seat and laid down. Ninety minutes later I awoke from my nap as my body lurched from the motion created from my mom pulling our tank of a vehicle into the long gravel driveway. I sat up, stretched and reached out for Teddy. My young heart leapt into my throat when I couldn't find him.
OH MY GOD.
Where was he?
I instantly panicked and cried to my mom. He's gone, I repeated over and over. I ignored my baby sister as my little heart raced like a hummingbird. My life was over. Teddy was missing.
It was the first, and probably scariest, crisis of my life.
My mother carried Jennifer into the house, attempted to calm me down and made a phone call to my grandmother.
I was panicked. My mind was racing. How would I survive without him?
Sure enough, when I went to the bathroom ninety minutes before and all of fifty miles from my current location I had left Teddy on my grandpa's blue chair. And there he sat, still waiting for me to retrieve him.
My mom handed me the telephone. With the tear-stained courage of a terrified four-year old, I begged my grandmother to take extra special care of him. I needed to know that she would keep him away from Bobo, their poodle.
She assured me that no harm would befall Teddy and she promised that we'd be reunited very soon.
I thanked her and, trembling, gave the phone back to my mom.
A day went by.
And then three.
Life was unbearable without Teddy.
I missed him and needed him.
I begged my mom to go back to grandma's so we could get him.
We couldn't. My young sister was sick and we had to remain homebound until she was better.
Another few days passed as slowly as a century.
Finally, my grandma made a special trip to Elyria to reunite me with my bear.
When grandma pulled into my driveway and stepped out of her Bonneville, I rushed outside and grabbed him from her. I don't think I've ever hugged something or someone so tight as I hugged my bear that day. His spartan new crocheted overalls looked good. She had even washed him for me and didn't use any bleach, a hallmark of my grandma's house until the day she died. If you needed to sanitize something, there wasn't anything a little (or sometimes a lot) bleach couldn't fix.
I kept Teddy around my room as I got older. By the third grade or so his place in my bed had given way to a berth on my dresser. By the sixth grade and the onslaught of puberty he had been relegated to the closet.
And at forty-five, during a marathon Spring cleaning, that's where he still is. His blue jumpsuit is a little musty and his new ear is tattered as well. But he's a keeper.
As I inspected him last week a strange thought occured to me. Outside of my years at college and a year in Hawai'i, Teddy has been with me for my entire life. As my head hits the pillow every night, he's still less than ten feet from me, occupying his berth in my closet.
I suppose when I die he'll be cremated along with me and our ashes will spend eternity together.
Just as it should be.
*
Okay?
I was doing some Spring cleaning recently. I opened my singular bedroom window, letting in a gush of fresh air, turned up the stereo to hear a "Spring Cleaning 2012 Playlist," and commenced with my just-written To-Do list. I dove headfirst into my massive bedroom closet with a few boxes in an attempt to do a whole "Keep" and "Donate" afternoon.
As I went through some heirloom clothes I found some shirts that I've kept for years because they reminded me of a younger, more hip part of my life. Have you ever kept items of clothes around just because? You know, stuff you wouldn't be caught dead wearing in public (like a Milli Vanilli concert shirt that was hip in the early '90s but now just a sad reminder of how lame most of the pop culture from that era truly was), or my old Blockbuster Video polo shirts from Hawai'i? Those bright red shirts instantly bring back a flood of memories, both good and bad. The saddest part is their size: Most of the shirts from that part of my life were a mere "Large" and wouldn't fit me on a dare with $100 dangled as the prize money if I could get my gut into one without ripping the seams from the almost-antique piece of heirloom cloth.
Along with the Billy Joel "River of Dreams" concert shirt and the stack of twenty-seven Hard Rock Cafe t-shirts from all over North America, the Blockbuster memorabilia were dumped into the "Keep" box.
As I moved a large plastic tupperware box containing my National Park site flyer collection I came across the singular touchstone from my youth. The one thing, excepting my cats and dog, that I would grab in a mad dash out of my burning house if it were ever to catch on fire.
My teddy bear.
He was a tattered affair, a bedtime companion that accompanied me on the first few years of my life. His eyes were missing, one of his ears had fallen off close to forty-five years ago, and his nakedness was apparent as the fluff had flaked off like dandruff from being dragged everywhere by me. He was my constant companion until kindergarten and responsible for, most certainly, the scariest experience of my young life.
I think there are very few certifiable geniuses in the entire human history of our planet. We can all agree on a few of them such as Einstein and Oppenheimer, even though their areas of expertise were used to make weapons that have done anything but elevate our race. Mozart instantly pops to my mind as one of the most significant individuals to ever trod this Earth. Maybe Beethoven as well. Stephen Hawking gives me the willies, but his mind has gone to places that his body surely can't. I suppose the cave man that happened upon fire and decided that a dead mammoth tasted better if you applied some flame to the carcass could be considered an early genius, but his grunted name has been lost to the ages. The same with the dude who first thought rotting, fermented grapes tasted good.
For my money one of the greatest minds of all time has to be Bill Watterston. You may have never heard of him but his creation epitomizes the glory of childhood. The simplicity of his art speaks volumes of what it's like to be a scared little boy, afraid of the dark, impending adulthood, and the loss of innocence.
I'm talking, of course, about Watterston's fevered imagination and his Frankenstein-like creation. The greatest comic strip of all time: Calvin and Hobbes.
As I read that strip I saw so much of myself in the little boy whose best friend was a stuffed tiger doll who sprang to life when no one else was around. Their discussions about girls, Chocolate-Covered-Sugar-Bombs (Calvin's breakfast fuel of choice) and even the meaning of life were brilliant; Watterston really understood the human condition and nailed the singular experience of being a precocious boy who was perhaps too smart for those around him.
The strip was funny, honest, and a window into the mind of a five-year old kid just struggling to get through the fears and anxiety of life.
So how does my teddy bear fit into all of that?
Looking back through the filter of time, Teddy, my constant companion, was more than a stuffed animal. He was my sounding board and pacifier, something I could hold on to when I was scared during a thunderstorm or needed a little extra TLC.
My grandma lived on the east side of Cleveland when I was small. A twenty-five minute ride of today took almost ninety minutes in the 1970s. There was no freeway then; a series of backroads interspersed with one or two four-lane highways meandered the fifty or so miles to my grandmother's house. Getting there was circuitous and not a trip that we made very often.
So one Spring day my mom packed my four-year old self and my baby sister into our 1968 blue Pontiac. It was steel both in and out and outfitted with a black leather dashboard. She rolled up the windows and smoked Marlboros with us in the back seat. As my little sister slept for most of the journey I was regaled by tales of Troy and its wooden horse. Of King Arthur and Lancelot. Pompeii and Vesuvius. Teddy and I sat listening, intently, through a haze of cigarette smoke as my mom wound the eighteen-foot long metal car over the river and through the woods.
To grandmother's house we went.
Teddy was glued to my left arm. I carried him everywhere I went. My grandma asked if she could hold him. Reluctantly, I gave him up but only after the assurance that she'd give him back. Quickly.
She looked at his tattered left ear and his nakedness. She said it wasn't decent for a bear to be undressed for the entire world to see. A master crochet artist, she knitted him a new ear and a blue pair of overalls that fit his little body perfectly.
She handed him back to me with the promise that his ear would make him a better listener, even if it didn't match the other one. I smiled and hugged her for making such helpful modifications to my companion.
As we prepared to leave my mother asked me to help get my little sister ready for the long voyage back to the west side of town. She then asked me if I had to go to the bathroom. I put Teddy down and obliged, realizing that I probably couldn't hold it for the long journey back home.
I went to the bathroom and then helped my mom with Jennifer.
Five minutes later, and my young bladder now empty, I opened the heavy steel door of the Pontiac, crawled into the back seat and laid down. Ninety minutes later I awoke from my nap as my body lurched from the motion created from my mom pulling our tank of a vehicle into the long gravel driveway. I sat up, stretched and reached out for Teddy. My young heart leapt into my throat when I couldn't find him.
OH MY GOD.
Where was he?
I instantly panicked and cried to my mom. He's gone, I repeated over and over. I ignored my baby sister as my little heart raced like a hummingbird. My life was over. Teddy was missing.
It was the first, and probably scariest, crisis of my life.
My mother carried Jennifer into the house, attempted to calm me down and made a phone call to my grandmother.
I was panicked. My mind was racing. How would I survive without him?
Sure enough, when I went to the bathroom ninety minutes before and all of fifty miles from my current location I had left Teddy on my grandpa's blue chair. And there he sat, still waiting for me to retrieve him.
My mom handed me the telephone. With the tear-stained courage of a terrified four-year old, I begged my grandmother to take extra special care of him. I needed to know that she would keep him away from Bobo, their poodle.
She assured me that no harm would befall Teddy and she promised that we'd be reunited very soon.
I thanked her and, trembling, gave the phone back to my mom.
A day went by.
And then three.
Life was unbearable without Teddy.
I missed him and needed him.
I begged my mom to go back to grandma's so we could get him.
We couldn't. My young sister was sick and we had to remain homebound until she was better.
Another few days passed as slowly as a century.
Finally, my grandma made a special trip to Elyria to reunite me with my bear.
When grandma pulled into my driveway and stepped out of her Bonneville, I rushed outside and grabbed him from her. I don't think I've ever hugged something or someone so tight as I hugged my bear that day. His spartan new crocheted overalls looked good. She had even washed him for me and didn't use any bleach, a hallmark of my grandma's house until the day she died. If you needed to sanitize something, there wasn't anything a little (or sometimes a lot) bleach couldn't fix.
I kept Teddy around my room as I got older. By the third grade or so his place in my bed had given way to a berth on my dresser. By the sixth grade and the onslaught of puberty he had been relegated to the closet.
And at forty-five, during a marathon Spring cleaning, that's where he still is. His blue jumpsuit is a little musty and his new ear is tattered as well. But he's a keeper.
As I inspected him last week a strange thought occured to me. Outside of my years at college and a year in Hawai'i, Teddy has been with me for my entire life. As my head hits the pillow every night, he's still less than ten feet from me, occupying his berth in my closet.
I suppose when I die he'll be cremated along with me and our ashes will spend eternity together.
Just as it should be.
*
Paddy O'Furniture
Well, another Saint Patrick's Day is upon us and that means, really, just one thing for me: In less than a week Spring will officially be upon us.
Thank Christ.
We've gotten over the Daylight-Savings hump, the first mile marker that the Vernal Equinox is right around the corner. My confused perennials are popping up through the ground and the two bald eagle nests that I routinely monitor with my binoculars have yielded both mama eagles sitting on however many eggs waiting to be hatched into an awaiting world.
I used to live in an apartment complex years ago; the property manager of the 267-unit facility had her suite directly across the courtyard from me. One day, in early February, she was breaking out her lawn furniture. She was a recent South Florida transplant; her husband was from Northeast Ohio and they had moved to Cleveland the prior summer so he could work in his father's large auto dealership.
As she was preparing to put up her large table umbrella and flower pots, I succinctly asked her what the hell she was doing? I thought that she was planning some kind of crazy Valentine's Day dinner with her hubby.
She retorted that Spring was coming and she couldn't wait to get back outside. I snickered and told her that Old man Winter had a good six or eight weeks up his crafty sleeve. Defeated, she sighed, bitched about the horrible weather and hung her head as she put her patio furniture back in the attached storage unit.
Two days later a massive snow storm hit. Six months later, under the threat of divorce, she dragged her husband back to the warmer climes of the Sunshine State.
I understood her hate, her downright loathing of Cleveland's weather. The dark, dreary days that make our town grayer and gloomier than Seattle or London have given me the notorious affliction known as S.A.D.
I become snowbound by mid-January. My mood becomes all Eeyore-like by Valentine's week and I'm ready to commit hari kari by the first game of the NCAA tournament.
Cleveland, sporting a large Irish population, hosts the third-largest St. Patrick's Day Parade in the country. Bet you didn't know that, did ya? Only New York and Chicago have more festivities than here on the South Shore. As I write this, several thousand revelers are lining the way along Superior Avenue, sporting green hair, green face paint, and enough green clothing to be seen from the international space station. The amount of green beer served this morning at various kegs-n-eggs celebrations across Northeast Ohio will soon give way to rivers of gloppy green vomit along the parade route. Ah, never say that Clevelanders don't know how to party.
Alas, with today's wearing of the green and three whole days in a row of sunshine and 70+ degree weather I think we'll soon be seeing the end of winter.
At least until Easter and the snowstorm that usually follows.
But by then my SADness has evaporated. The chill of the night air is pretty much gone and my bedroom window is cracked open just enough to let the fresh Spring gusts of a Lake Erie breeze into my house. The crisp, fresh air envelops me as the last stale vestige of Winter's air are pushed from my condo.
And the mountains of slushy, four-day old snow that have kept my patio furniture company have melted away to the yellow and purple blossoms of Spring flowers on my patio.
Springtime in Cleveland, there's nothing quite as refreshing. I rejoice, like Pagan festivals of old, as Gaia erupts and I know that for the next six months I'm free of a crippling SADness.
Now if only we could get rid of the stifling July heat.
*
Thank Christ.
We've gotten over the Daylight-Savings hump, the first mile marker that the Vernal Equinox is right around the corner. My confused perennials are popping up through the ground and the two bald eagle nests that I routinely monitor with my binoculars have yielded both mama eagles sitting on however many eggs waiting to be hatched into an awaiting world.
I used to live in an apartment complex years ago; the property manager of the 267-unit facility had her suite directly across the courtyard from me. One day, in early February, she was breaking out her lawn furniture. She was a recent South Florida transplant; her husband was from Northeast Ohio and they had moved to Cleveland the prior summer so he could work in his father's large auto dealership.
As she was preparing to put up her large table umbrella and flower pots, I succinctly asked her what the hell she was doing? I thought that she was planning some kind of crazy Valentine's Day dinner with her hubby.
She retorted that Spring was coming and she couldn't wait to get back outside. I snickered and told her that Old man Winter had a good six or eight weeks up his crafty sleeve. Defeated, she sighed, bitched about the horrible weather and hung her head as she put her patio furniture back in the attached storage unit.
Two days later a massive snow storm hit. Six months later, under the threat of divorce, she dragged her husband back to the warmer climes of the Sunshine State.
I understood her hate, her downright loathing of Cleveland's weather. The dark, dreary days that make our town grayer and gloomier than Seattle or London have given me the notorious affliction known as S.A.D.
I become snowbound by mid-January. My mood becomes all Eeyore-like by Valentine's week and I'm ready to commit hari kari by the first game of the NCAA tournament.
Cleveland, sporting a large Irish population, hosts the third-largest St. Patrick's Day Parade in the country. Bet you didn't know that, did ya? Only New York and Chicago have more festivities than here on the South Shore. As I write this, several thousand revelers are lining the way along Superior Avenue, sporting green hair, green face paint, and enough green clothing to be seen from the international space station. The amount of green beer served this morning at various kegs-n-eggs celebrations across Northeast Ohio will soon give way to rivers of gloppy green vomit along the parade route. Ah, never say that Clevelanders don't know how to party.
Alas, with today's wearing of the green and three whole days in a row of sunshine and 70+ degree weather I think we'll soon be seeing the end of winter.
At least until Easter and the snowstorm that usually follows.
But by then my SADness has evaporated. The chill of the night air is pretty much gone and my bedroom window is cracked open just enough to let the fresh Spring gusts of a Lake Erie breeze into my house. The crisp, fresh air envelops me as the last stale vestige of Winter's air are pushed from my condo.
And the mountains of slushy, four-day old snow that have kept my patio furniture company have melted away to the yellow and purple blossoms of Spring flowers on my patio.
Springtime in Cleveland, there's nothing quite as refreshing. I rejoice, like Pagan festivals of old, as Gaia erupts and I know that for the next six months I'm free of a crippling SADness.
Now if only we could get rid of the stifling July heat.
*
Friday, March 9, 2012
A Daily Dose of Wonderful
There's a certain breed of people to which I've given a name, kind of like a biology taxonomy. Perhaps they should be given their own genus because they walk among us like the daywalkers in a cheap horror flick.
Here you are: impigritás nosferatu.
I even looked that one up.
I've dubbed them "energy vampires" and, just maybe, you may know the creature of which I speak.
Sunlight doesn't hurt them.
Garlic doesn't have any effect on them; I had dinner with one of them and they woofed down a big Olive Garden pasta dish that reeked of garlic.
And they survived to complain another day.
They're the people in your life that are responsible for ninety-plus percent of the undue drama that harangues your existence. You know, the ones that call you at three ay-em with their newest crisis? Those that berate you when you tell them that things will be fine and, even though the DVR didn't record all of last week's "Gray's Anatomy," the world will--drum roll please--surely go on.
Fictional crises.
I've had a few people in my life like that and painfully toiled over what decision to make. Do I stay in their life as a, hopefully, positive force or do I cut them out like a cancer? In most cases, I've realized that a scalpel is the best and only tool to make my life infinitely better.
I have a "friend" that has been a train wreck for as long as I can remember. I've spent many hours, beers and years counseling her. Whenever we get together it's the same old story; she's the eternal victim of circumstance, fate and happenstance.
And she, of course, relishes the role.
Her Facebook status updates are the doomiest-and-gloomiest thing this side of a tornado ravaging a neo-natal wing of a children's hospital. Last week, after the horrible events at Chardon High School, she posted one of her famous rants about how intensely horrible her life is and how everyone that she reaches out to mercilessly belittles her. Expecting a flood of sympathy, she was astonished when another friend of hers told her to suck it up and have some compassion for the real tragedy that was unfolding in Chardon, less than an hour's drive from the imaginary disaster of the daily derailing of her crazy train.
Her response to the admonisher? A good eight paragraph rant about how, even though there were puddles of blood and spent bullet casings in Geauga County, her problems mattered just as much as those of the dead and dying.
How do you put that into context? How do you frame that in a way that some miniscule bit of compassion can be given to a woman with so little compassion for others?
I've come to the conclusion that you really can't. You need to put aside any pity you may have for the vampire and do what must be done: Face the situation with a clarity and focus that lets you understand what type of creature you're truly dealing with.
I've learned that people like her aren't really friends. They're like a plague of locusts that descend upon a poor farmer's crop and devour everything within their reach. Once the food has been obliterated they move on to the next field without so much as a thought to the devastation they've left behind.
They have little care for you or your problems, and only want a sounding board that will make them feel better about the wanton destruction that they've created behind them. In her case, I've seen a good fifteen years of bad decisions, finger pointing, and an inability to fess up to the self-made fuck-ups in her life both major and minor.
They judge your ability and loyalty as a friend when you can't call them back at a moment's notice to help them deal with their newest crisis. They blame you for the disasters that they've created. They try to gain sympathy for a lifetime of bad decisions.
And, gulp, if you tell them that maybe some of the issues in their lives have been self-inflicted, you've committed a cardinal sin: Asking them to, for once, take some personal responsibility for the damage they've done to themselves and the family and friends around them.
She either refuses to believe that her actions are the root cause of her misery or she lacks the emotional maturity to deal with the maelstrom around her. I truly believe that she's not happy unless she's miserable. But, of course, her misery must feed like a derelict nosferatu on those around her. Dammit, she's miserable and she's gonna make sure that any creature within earshot will partake in her drama.
After posting a Facebook update yesterday regarding my experience at a local grocery store, I received a verbal battering ram from my "friend," the conductor, engineer, ticket-taker, steward, baggage-handler and even the guy-who-shovels-the-coal-into-the-steam-engine-that-makes-the-whistle-blow on her crazy train.
The cashier that was ringing me out had to be, easily, in her mid-eighties. She was shrunken, hard-of-hearing, and moved at a snail's pace in moving my items across the scanner. My heart bled for this woman; I asked myself why she was here, standing in front of a computer, ringing out my milk and bread when she should be enjoying her golden years in a less physically-demanding situation. I tried to make light of the posting, saying that this poor woman was so old she was sitting in the booth next to Lincoln's at Fords Theater the night he was shot. I almost said that I'd seen rock formations at the bottom of the Grand Canyon that weren't as old as this poor lady, but felt that might cross a line.
It didn't matter.
My friend ripped in to me, telling me I was an ass for "judging" this woman. I wasn't quite sure how I was judging anyone, responding to her comment by saying that it was unfortunate that anyone had to be on a retail sales floor at her age. It went on for about seven or eight more comments in the thread. Most of my other friends were sympathetic to the old lady's plight and understood that I wasn't judging anyone.
Not her. I was making an assumption, she said. Maybe so...but seeing this woman struggling with the burdensome weight of a loaf of bread told me that she wasn't there to keep her body spritely and her mind tack-sharp. She said that she didn't feel any sympathy for this woman and that she thought it was great that this octogenarian was earning her keep rather than slouching at home like other slackers who didn't want to work.
My head shook slowly from side to side while I pondered how many senior citizen slackers really existed in our society. I even snickered as I thought that comment was more in line with a Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum campaign pledge. Good God, I thought. I hope GOP campaign staffers don't randomly read through Facebook pages because it might occur to them that working-slacker-octogenarians should become the Right's poster children after they finish their scorched earth campaign to obliterate women's health care choices.
So tonight she went into one more of her sympathy rants. She said something to the effect of:
"Today has been a horrible day and tonight is going to be a horrible night."
So I was eager to respond. What could I say to point out to her that her Eeyore-like outlook on life was just getting, well, ridiculous?
I shot back with this nugget:
"I had a great day today and will have a great night tonight. I'll bet other people also had a great day. Stop being so judgemental."
It had the effect I desired.
About ten minutes later the infamous noun-that's-become-a-verb happened to me.
Yep.
She defriended me on Facebook.
It worked. It looked like I'd be rid of the litany of apocalyptic posts that come my way on an hourly basis.
But I didn't get off that easy. Within a few minutes a flurry of texts came my way. She reminded me, several times, what an ass I was. How uncaring I've always been and that I only think about myself. Apparently, she has forgotten about the many times I've put gas in her car over the years because she's had no money to buy fuel or groceries. Or the countless conversations regarding her singular place in the universe.
Here you are: impigritás nosferatu.
I even looked that one up.
I've dubbed them "energy vampires" and, just maybe, you may know the creature of which I speak.
Sunlight doesn't hurt them.
Garlic doesn't have any effect on them; I had dinner with one of them and they woofed down a big Olive Garden pasta dish that reeked of garlic.
And they survived to complain another day.
They're the people in your life that are responsible for ninety-plus percent of the undue drama that harangues your existence. You know, the ones that call you at three ay-em with their newest crisis? Those that berate you when you tell them that things will be fine and, even though the DVR didn't record all of last week's "Gray's Anatomy," the world will--drum roll please--surely go on.
Fictional crises.
I've had a few people in my life like that and painfully toiled over what decision to make. Do I stay in their life as a, hopefully, positive force or do I cut them out like a cancer? In most cases, I've realized that a scalpel is the best and only tool to make my life infinitely better.
I have a "friend" that has been a train wreck for as long as I can remember. I've spent many hours, beers and years counseling her. Whenever we get together it's the same old story; she's the eternal victim of circumstance, fate and happenstance.
And she, of course, relishes the role.
Her Facebook status updates are the doomiest-and-gloomiest thing this side of a tornado ravaging a neo-natal wing of a children's hospital. Last week, after the horrible events at Chardon High School, she posted one of her famous rants about how intensely horrible her life is and how everyone that she reaches out to mercilessly belittles her. Expecting a flood of sympathy, she was astonished when another friend of hers told her to suck it up and have some compassion for the real tragedy that was unfolding in Chardon, less than an hour's drive from the imaginary disaster of the daily derailing of her crazy train.
Her response to the admonisher? A good eight paragraph rant about how, even though there were puddles of blood and spent bullet casings in Geauga County, her problems mattered just as much as those of the dead and dying.
How do you put that into context? How do you frame that in a way that some miniscule bit of compassion can be given to a woman with so little compassion for others?
I've come to the conclusion that you really can't. You need to put aside any pity you may have for the vampire and do what must be done: Face the situation with a clarity and focus that lets you understand what type of creature you're truly dealing with.
I've learned that people like her aren't really friends. They're like a plague of locusts that descend upon a poor farmer's crop and devour everything within their reach. Once the food has been obliterated they move on to the next field without so much as a thought to the devastation they've left behind.
They have little care for you or your problems, and only want a sounding board that will make them feel better about the wanton destruction that they've created behind them. In her case, I've seen a good fifteen years of bad decisions, finger pointing, and an inability to fess up to the self-made fuck-ups in her life both major and minor.
They judge your ability and loyalty as a friend when you can't call them back at a moment's notice to help them deal with their newest crisis. They blame you for the disasters that they've created. They try to gain sympathy for a lifetime of bad decisions.
And, gulp, if you tell them that maybe some of the issues in their lives have been self-inflicted, you've committed a cardinal sin: Asking them to, for once, take some personal responsibility for the damage they've done to themselves and the family and friends around them.
She either refuses to believe that her actions are the root cause of her misery or she lacks the emotional maturity to deal with the maelstrom around her. I truly believe that she's not happy unless she's miserable. But, of course, her misery must feed like a derelict nosferatu on those around her. Dammit, she's miserable and she's gonna make sure that any creature within earshot will partake in her drama.
After posting a Facebook update yesterday regarding my experience at a local grocery store, I received a verbal battering ram from my "friend," the conductor, engineer, ticket-taker, steward, baggage-handler and even the guy-who-shovels-the-coal-into-the-steam-engine-that-makes-the-whistle-blow on her crazy train.
The cashier that was ringing me out had to be, easily, in her mid-eighties. She was shrunken, hard-of-hearing, and moved at a snail's pace in moving my items across the scanner. My heart bled for this woman; I asked myself why she was here, standing in front of a computer, ringing out my milk and bread when she should be enjoying her golden years in a less physically-demanding situation. I tried to make light of the posting, saying that this poor woman was so old she was sitting in the booth next to Lincoln's at Fords Theater the night he was shot. I almost said that I'd seen rock formations at the bottom of the Grand Canyon that weren't as old as this poor lady, but felt that might cross a line.
It didn't matter.
My friend ripped in to me, telling me I was an ass for "judging" this woman. I wasn't quite sure how I was judging anyone, responding to her comment by saying that it was unfortunate that anyone had to be on a retail sales floor at her age. It went on for about seven or eight more comments in the thread. Most of my other friends were sympathetic to the old lady's plight and understood that I wasn't judging anyone.
Not her. I was making an assumption, she said. Maybe so...but seeing this woman struggling with the burdensome weight of a loaf of bread told me that she wasn't there to keep her body spritely and her mind tack-sharp. She said that she didn't feel any sympathy for this woman and that she thought it was great that this octogenarian was earning her keep rather than slouching at home like other slackers who didn't want to work.
My head shook slowly from side to side while I pondered how many senior citizen slackers really existed in our society. I even snickered as I thought that comment was more in line with a Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum campaign pledge. Good God, I thought. I hope GOP campaign staffers don't randomly read through Facebook pages because it might occur to them that working-slacker-octogenarians should become the Right's poster children after they finish their scorched earth campaign to obliterate women's health care choices.
So tonight she went into one more of her sympathy rants. She said something to the effect of:
"Today has been a horrible day and tonight is going to be a horrible night."
So I was eager to respond. What could I say to point out to her that her Eeyore-like outlook on life was just getting, well, ridiculous?
I shot back with this nugget:
"I had a great day today and will have a great night tonight. I'll bet other people also had a great day. Stop being so judgemental."
It had the effect I desired.
About ten minutes later the infamous noun-that's-become-a-verb happened to me.
Yep.
She defriended me on Facebook.
It worked. It looked like I'd be rid of the litany of apocalyptic posts that come my way on an hourly basis.
But I didn't get off that easy. Within a few minutes a flurry of texts came my way. She reminded me, several times, what an ass I was. How uncaring I've always been and that I only think about myself. Apparently, she has forgotten about the many times I've put gas in her car over the years because she's had no money to buy fuel or groceries. Or the countless conversations regarding her singular place in the universe.
After telling her that it's become exhausting to be her friend she sent me this zinger:
"...u have not been a good friend. You walked out of my life after the (redacted) too. And where were u when i need someone w me for my surgery last year or around then. When things are bad for me you disappear. When they calm down there u are."
And then this one:
"Just leave me alone u will. never think outside your own thoughts and feelings and for u to say i am playing a victim role after i just opened up to u about everything going on proves more what an ass u are."
Oh yeah, apparently she got arrested for something of which she's totally innocent and is being "falsely accused of something serious." God knows what that is, but I can't afford to spend any more time trying to fix her life. And then another revelation: Due to her roommate she's being evicted from her apartment in May. Hmmm. Notice how nothing is her fault? Bad roommates, false accusations, trumped-up arrest charges and a world of conspiracies leveled at her have been the norm since, well, she arbitrarily walked into my life all those years ago.
If someone refuses to accept an iota of responsibility for their own actions, how can I help them?
The very notion is foolish and, honestly, a little arrogant on my part to even try. Almost forty years of self-created drama has been refined to a unique art form, played as a symphony by a maestro conductor.
Well, as far as I'm concerned, the crazy train has gone off the rails for the last time. Luckily I got off before it went all John McClane. Undoubtedly, she'll spin my disloyalty to those that will listen and, much like the next farmer's field, quickly replace me with someone new to voraciously devour with her imaginary anguish and overly-abundant self-pity.
So a buddy of mine called me tonight. I breathed a sigh of relief as I told him the crazy train has left the station for the last time. I'm rid of the Angel of Death and her daily doom and gloom.
I'm getting too old for the bullshit antics of myopic forty year olds who need to be given a daily dose of wonderful. Grow up. Take responsbility for what you've become.
Mayan prophecies? Global warming? Rick Santorum?
They're all nothing to speak of when you've survived an energy vampire like her.
And I didn't even need a stake or holy water to do it.
*
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
The Nuances of Hominid Grunts
A whole new lexicon has arisen over the past few years that has poached words that have, traditionally, been used as nouns. Magically, and without consulting my high school English teacher, they've been made into "action" words: verbs.
A noun, "text," that describes an electronic message, has been morphed into a word to describe the creation and sending of that electronic text message. Lo and behold, it's become the grammatically-incorrect verb "texting."
I'm somewhat of a grammar hound even though I know I make mistakes from time to time. If a grammar nazi, or my high school English teacher, read this blog they'd probably tear me apart for butchering my mother tongue on several occcasions. Come to think of it, that last sentence was a little redundant. One of my highly-esteemed high school teachers was the Joseph Goebbels of proper grammar, she was militant about similes, metaphors, and even the overwrought usage of hyperbole in many of the works we read in the 10th grade. In her mind that damn Shakespeare was a little too flowery with his allusions about love and, I guess, Juliet's private parts.
But, this is my little electronic piece of real estate so I can bitch about what drives me nuts. If you disagree, feel free to start your own blog. Anyway, one of my biggest beefs with people who routinely slaughter our language is the misappropriation of "your" for "you're."
I cringe when I see friends on the internet who routinely use this aberration of a simple contraction. It's not that difficult; if one wants to describe ownership of something, a simple y-o-u-r will suffice. If you are talking about the collusion of two words into one--a contraction--you would get "you're."
See?
Simple, right? I could have even used two separate contractions in the above paragraph to illustrate my point.
My holy grail of grammatical abortions, however, is the fingernails-on-a-chalkboard, grating use of "seen" in a sentence. I attended the same public schools as many of the people that use that hillbilly phrase in conversation and, even worse, in print.
"I seen that movie."
My teeth grind.
Really? You'd think it would just look funny when it's written down. Right in front of you, plain as day and surrounded by neon arrows exclaiming how fucked up that misplaced word looks and sounds.
Whoa. I'm getting way off track. So, texting has become a big part of our lives, and I'm afraid that the word is here to stay.
Oh well.
The bigger one, the word that affects many of our lives, has become a passive-aggressive slap in the face. In Tennessee, it was even responsible for the deaths of two innocent people, who dared to eliminate a woman on Facebook who was harassing this young couple, parents of an infant.
They dared to "defriend" a woman on Facebook who repeatedly posted offensive messages on their Facebook wall. They removed and blocked the offending young lady from any further FB communications.
In a rage, her father and an accomplice came to their home and killed them both.
Talk about overreacting...
It seems that Facebook has offered passive-aggressive personalities an ultimate fuck-you in our social media age.
Back in the old days, like 1998, if you had a problem with someone, it was customary to sit down with them and explain that they pissed you off for some reason or another.
Two rational people would talk things out, the egregious error that annoyed the offended party would be discussed, rationally, then a hug might follow and a promise to curb the offensive behavior would be given.
Both parties might leave the meeting smiling, happy that a resolution was worked out and the friendship could continue with a new level of understanding.
Today?
Not a freaking chance.
Click.
Delete.
An angry smile grows on the offended person's face; they found a way to tell you what an asshole you are without, really, having to actually tell you, ya know, face to face. Or actually talk to you.
And two weeks later, as you troll around Facebook asking why you haven't seen any posts from Kelly or Joe, you realize that you've been a victim of a sideways fuck you. Kind of like Julius Caesar wanting to stay in bed on March 15th, but realizing he had a lunch appointment with Brutus that he really wanted to cancel, but didn't want to disappoint his buddy.
You pull up the list of your Facebook friends and, much to your astonishment, a friend since the third grade is gone. Unceremoniously. Quietly. With total abandon.
Et Tu, Brute?
And then you sit in a daze, wondering WTF you did to annoy the person with whom you thought you had a solid friendship?
But I guess defriending fits into this whole idea of "social" media. I mean, really, aren't we becoming a society of stalkers and miscreants? Text messaging, e-mails, and sites like Facebook and Twitter give us the ability to communicate in a whole new way, but most of it doesn't really require the actual experience of communicating, at least not in the classic way that most of us have been indoctrinated into since the first time we uttered a word or two in the general direction of our giddy parents.
I had a buddy who, years ago, met a girl online in Kiev. As in Eastern Europe. The Ukraine. They would communicate via instant messaging and e-mails, and he told me that they were "talking." Hmmm. Talking? In my world "talking" is reserved for a face-to-face meeting or, at the very least, a telephone call.
He hopped on a plane and made the half-a-world-away journey to experience some Ex-Eastern Bloc hoohaw. He sat in her Soviet-era apartment, watching bad European TV and desperately tried to "talk" to her. Face to face. The one little impediment in their attempt to make East meet West? She spoke very little English. He spoke zero Ukranian. He thought their internet love affair could sustain a real-life meeting. He came home a week later, pissed, horny, and miffed that he didn't sample any of that blond Russian caviar.
Anyway, we've shortened our language into a semaphore-based chit chat, abbreviating the contextual beauty of our language to a series of letters meant to parlay the gist of what we mean to the untethered party. OMG and LOL pepper our thoughts and words(?) to the point where any meaningful communication is gone. It's taken thousands of years to develop the nuances of hominid grunts, finally transforming them to a set of romance languages and less than a generation to reduce it all to a jumble of letters that resemble the shell of its former self.
It's the seminal march of progress, set to a tune of bits and bytes and sung by a hurried populace afraid to miss out on sixteen different conversations with sixteen different "friends" on three or four separate devices. Yes, we're communicating more, but we're out of touch even more. We "talk" from a relative perch of safety: A basement man cave, a warm bed or the back seat of a taxi cab, all the while staring at a glowing screen while the rest of the world whizzes by us.
I don't know about you, but being told via a text that my friend is laughing out loud doesn't have the same impact as actually hearing a deep, hearty belly laugh, shared by two friends in deep conversation or at a comedy club, experiencing something worth seeing.
And not tweeted about an hour later.
It's okay to use sites like Facebook. But never forget that they're meant to be a bead on our society, not to replace the "friends" that we have in our daily lives; the ones that want to laugh along with us or really see how our day is progressing.
And that seems to be the direction that our society is going: faceless, nameless, and, most especially, gutless.
But please don't defriend me if you disagree with me; I'm not too sure my avatar could put up with that type of rejection.
Virtually speaking, of course.
*
A noun, "text," that describes an electronic message, has been morphed into a word to describe the creation and sending of that electronic text message. Lo and behold, it's become the grammatically-incorrect verb "texting."
I'm somewhat of a grammar hound even though I know I make mistakes from time to time. If a grammar nazi, or my high school English teacher, read this blog they'd probably tear me apart for butchering my mother tongue on several occcasions. Come to think of it, that last sentence was a little redundant. One of my highly-esteemed high school teachers was the Joseph Goebbels of proper grammar, she was militant about similes, metaphors, and even the overwrought usage of hyperbole in many of the works we read in the 10th grade. In her mind that damn Shakespeare was a little too flowery with his allusions about love and, I guess, Juliet's private parts.
But, this is my little electronic piece of real estate so I can bitch about what drives me nuts. If you disagree, feel free to start your own blog. Anyway, one of my biggest beefs with people who routinely slaughter our language is the misappropriation of "your" for "you're."
I cringe when I see friends on the internet who routinely use this aberration of a simple contraction. It's not that difficult; if one wants to describe ownership of something, a simple y-o-u-r will suffice. If you are talking about the collusion of two words into one--a contraction--you would get "you're."
See?
Simple, right? I could have even used two separate contractions in the above paragraph to illustrate my point.
My holy grail of grammatical abortions, however, is the fingernails-on-a-chalkboard, grating use of "seen" in a sentence. I attended the same public schools as many of the people that use that hillbilly phrase in conversation and, even worse, in print.
"I seen that movie."
My teeth grind.
Really? You'd think it would just look funny when it's written down. Right in front of you, plain as day and surrounded by neon arrows exclaiming how fucked up that misplaced word looks and sounds.
Whoa. I'm getting way off track. So, texting has become a big part of our lives, and I'm afraid that the word is here to stay.
Oh well.
The bigger one, the word that affects many of our lives, has become a passive-aggressive slap in the face. In Tennessee, it was even responsible for the deaths of two innocent people, who dared to eliminate a woman on Facebook who was harassing this young couple, parents of an infant.
They dared to "defriend" a woman on Facebook who repeatedly posted offensive messages on their Facebook wall. They removed and blocked the offending young lady from any further FB communications.
In a rage, her father and an accomplice came to their home and killed them both.
Talk about overreacting...
It seems that Facebook has offered passive-aggressive personalities an ultimate fuck-you in our social media age.
Back in the old days, like 1998, if you had a problem with someone, it was customary to sit down with them and explain that they pissed you off for some reason or another.
Two rational people would talk things out, the egregious error that annoyed the offended party would be discussed, rationally, then a hug might follow and a promise to curb the offensive behavior would be given.
Both parties might leave the meeting smiling, happy that a resolution was worked out and the friendship could continue with a new level of understanding.
Today?
Not a freaking chance.
Click.
Delete.
An angry smile grows on the offended person's face; they found a way to tell you what an asshole you are without, really, having to actually tell you, ya know, face to face. Or actually talk to you.
And two weeks later, as you troll around Facebook asking why you haven't seen any posts from Kelly or Joe, you realize that you've been a victim of a sideways fuck you. Kind of like Julius Caesar wanting to stay in bed on March 15th, but realizing he had a lunch appointment with Brutus that he really wanted to cancel, but didn't want to disappoint his buddy.
You pull up the list of your Facebook friends and, much to your astonishment, a friend since the third grade is gone. Unceremoniously. Quietly. With total abandon.
Et Tu, Brute?
And then you sit in a daze, wondering WTF you did to annoy the person with whom you thought you had a solid friendship?
But I guess defriending fits into this whole idea of "social" media. I mean, really, aren't we becoming a society of stalkers and miscreants? Text messaging, e-mails, and sites like Facebook and Twitter give us the ability to communicate in a whole new way, but most of it doesn't really require the actual experience of communicating, at least not in the classic way that most of us have been indoctrinated into since the first time we uttered a word or two in the general direction of our giddy parents.
I had a buddy who, years ago, met a girl online in Kiev. As in Eastern Europe. The Ukraine. They would communicate via instant messaging and e-mails, and he told me that they were "talking." Hmmm. Talking? In my world "talking" is reserved for a face-to-face meeting or, at the very least, a telephone call.
He hopped on a plane and made the half-a-world-away journey to experience some Ex-Eastern Bloc hoohaw. He sat in her Soviet-era apartment, watching bad European TV and desperately tried to "talk" to her. Face to face. The one little impediment in their attempt to make East meet West? She spoke very little English. He spoke zero Ukranian. He thought their internet love affair could sustain a real-life meeting. He came home a week later, pissed, horny, and miffed that he didn't sample any of that blond Russian caviar.
Anyway, we've shortened our language into a semaphore-based chit chat, abbreviating the contextual beauty of our language to a series of letters meant to parlay the gist of what we mean to the untethered party. OMG and LOL pepper our thoughts and words(?) to the point where any meaningful communication is gone. It's taken thousands of years to develop the nuances of hominid grunts, finally transforming them to a set of romance languages and less than a generation to reduce it all to a jumble of letters that resemble the shell of its former self.
It's the seminal march of progress, set to a tune of bits and bytes and sung by a hurried populace afraid to miss out on sixteen different conversations with sixteen different "friends" on three or four separate devices. Yes, we're communicating more, but we're out of touch even more. We "talk" from a relative perch of safety: A basement man cave, a warm bed or the back seat of a taxi cab, all the while staring at a glowing screen while the rest of the world whizzes by us.
I don't know about you, but being told via a text that my friend is laughing out loud doesn't have the same impact as actually hearing a deep, hearty belly laugh, shared by two friends in deep conversation or at a comedy club, experiencing something worth seeing.
And not tweeted about an hour later.
It's okay to use sites like Facebook. But never forget that they're meant to be a bead on our society, not to replace the "friends" that we have in our daily lives; the ones that want to laugh along with us or really see how our day is progressing.
And that seems to be the direction that our society is going: faceless, nameless, and, most especially, gutless.
But please don't defriend me if you disagree with me; I'm not too sure my avatar could put up with that type of rejection.
Virtually speaking, of course.
*
Thursday, February 16, 2012
A Little Rainstorm
I've been called all kinds of things lately by people who, I guess, have a much greater bead on the pulse of America and how things really are in this topsy-turvy world.
My current monikers?
Godless.
Liberal.
Socialist.
Asshole.
Ignorant.
To a few of those assertions I'll cop, proudly. The rest? I'll just shake off without much thought and a recognition of where they're coming from.
Yep, I'm an atheist. You may shudder at that proclamation but I believe it gives me a much more objective view of the world around me. My perception isn't clouded by fairy tales, omnipotence, invisible beings, or magic underwear. When faced with a situation I look for the rational answer and, for instance, a big boat filled with all kinds of animals (except for dinosaurs and unicorns, cuz they apparently missed the gangplank that day) is just fucking retarded. It's a great story, all right. I love it.
But I also love "Star Wars."
There are so many holes in Noah's story that it, um, holds no water.
If it rained for forty days and nights and the entire world was engulfed in a deluge, to where did all this water finally recede? Scientists have looked at the issue with the water itself; they've calculated that it would take seven times more water than our entire planet contains to cover the Earth as it did in the Noah fable. If you took every drop of water: both icy poles, every ocean, river, stream, creek, wrung them dry and then took every H2O molecule tied up in every animal, plant and iceberg you'd still need seven times more.
Using computer models, they "built" an ark based on the dimensions found in the Bible and, under several computer tests, found that serious stress fractures would have rendered a boat that big unusable. Upon each computer model, the digital ark snapped in two. I guess the men that edited the Bible didn't consider that people would someday be able to test the whole cubit thing.
From a practical perspective, think of the smell of thousands of animals defecating in a relatively enclosed shoebox-shaped boat. The smell would be overpowering. My two cats stank up their litterbox after a few days; sometimes the ammonia smell is enough to choke an army. Noah's kids, the zookeepers, would have undoubtedly suffocated from the ongoing stench of ammonia and piss after forty or so days locked up in a watertight cage with precious few little windows to aerate all that elephant, camel and dormouse poo.
So, besides being a great story it's also 100% utter bullshit. Or maybe elephant shit.
If you can't see that, then...well.
Sorry for you.
Until the early 1920s, most Americans realized both testaments were fables, allegories meant to impart some lesson to the reader and inspire a fear of God and religion into the average six year-old.
Since the 1980s a fundamentalism has arisen that is now ready to overtake not just our political system, but the future of this country itself.
So call me godless, ignorant, and, especially, a liberal. I thank you for that.
How are my views so radical? How are they deserving of such scorn from so many people who have a bit more than just a moderate intelligence, are college-educated, and have seen parts of this world bigger than their hometown?
I believe in certain truths that, once again, are backed by logic, rational thought and, funny enough, a bit of Old Testament wisdom.
Unlike many of the current GOP presidential hopefuls, I pretty much believe in the words that Moses supposedly brought down from Sinai.
Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery
Gingrich has had a hard time with the whole adultery thing, yet he wants to show voters how pious he is. His relatively-recent conversion to Catholicism is, apparently, pennance enough for him. Many Catholics that I know feel as if he'd make a very moral president. He, who, publically admitted that he told his first wife she wasn't young or pretty enough to be a First Lady.
So he divorced her.
Sounds kinda Muslim-of-old, doesn't it? I wonder if he said "I Divorce You" three times and then gave her father a payment of thirty sheep as a means of squaring his matrimonial debt.
The current crop of GOP politicians are tripping over each other to try and show off their conservative street cred; their sexual counter-revolution is picking up steam and is attempting to roll back Roe-v-Wade, among other important hot button social issues. Both Oklahoma and Virginia's recently-passed legislation regarding abortion have become the nation's most restrictive abortion laws.
Why?
What is "personhood?" Does life begin at conception? I suppose that's up to an individual to decide but these Machiavellian attempts to legislate morality is scary, to say the least.
I love how the GOP is backing several "personhood" amendments across the country. They are adamant that these fetuses make it full-term yet are doing their damnedest to cut funding to daycare, education and welfare programs.
Oh, they sure as hell want your "baby" to be born but don't give a damn what happens to it once it pops out of that womb.
Their religion-fueled ideology makes no sense; they embrace life, but only at its inception.
George Carlin said it best a few years before his death:
"Pre-born? You're okay. Pre-school? You're fucked."
Perfect summary of that whole debate, wouldn't you say?
I've been called a commie and, even worse by today's dialogue, a socialist.
I've ranted against these wars that have nearly bankrupted this country. The senseless deaths of young servicepeople in a fight that makes little sense to me.
They call themselves "Christians," followers of Christ. What part of Jesus' teachings, which they profess to represent, have they misinterpreted? Even their beloved Ten Commandments begs them to not kill. Unless, of course, it's in service of their god: Big Oil.
Thou Shalt Not Kill
Why did we go to Iraq? What purpose did it serve? Other than an Old-Testament-style, fire-and-brimstone ass whooping it didn't make sense. Don't spout back the GOP rhetoric that we were there to bring freedom to the Iraqi people from a horrible dictator. It was all bullshit; the drums of war beat incessantly until Bush's cronies got the war they wanted: against the Constitution of this great country. And I fear that we'll never recover from that.
God bless Halliburton.
Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me.
Unless, of course, it's profit.
Actions like "Citizens United" and other Supreme Court decisions have also violated a large part of what the Ten Commandments preached squarely against.
Our rights are being systematically stripped away while corporations are being given the rights of a dubiously-named entitlement: personhood.
It's kind of interesting that the title, "personhood" is being bestowed upon both an unborn, semi-living fetus and a faceless, non-living entity like Wal-Mart. While they both now are considered "people," they also rely upon something else for their "life." If the mother dies prior to a baby being born, then the fetus dies as well.
If a company, like Borders Books or Circuit City, doesn't make any money than they too will die.
While these wars have stripped the very moral fiber from our 200+ year national mission statement, we rally for the ongoing investment in bombs and tanks and guns to kill the infidels.
Conversely, our president wants to invest in our failing infrastructure, in bridges, roads, and environmental projects, and is roundly called a socialist. He wants to provide affordable medical care not to Iraqis or Afghans, but to fellow Americans, and he's been called, well, everything but what he should be called: a caring humanitarian.
Isn't it a president's job to take care of his people?
How can affordable health care for all be a bad thing?
When contraception is made an issue in front of congress and a debate is called with witnesses to testify about the contraceptive needs of women--the birth control pill--how can every witness, over 300 of them, be men and men only? Where is the women's view in this debate? Besides being a means to control pregnancy, the "pill" also provides medical relief to women who have such a need.
When banks, deregulated under the aegis of the GOP, have caused the biggest economic meltdown since 1929 how come not one Wall Street executive has had to answer for their actions?
When unemployment has reached record numbers how come a Republican-controlled House has stymied every attempt for the president to get something done about it?
I'll tell you why:
Because they believe that you, the uninformed voter, is stupid enough to pay attention to their little bait-and-switch games; they're well aware that their policies have brought this country to the edge of ruin.
Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness Against Thy Neighbor
They know that unemployment is out of control.
Do you remember their promise prior to the 2010 mid-terms?
Thou Shalt Not Lie
If elected, they promised to create jobs, curb unemployment and get America back to work.
Have they?
Of course not and, funny enough, many of the banks are still gouging homeowners and giving out billions of dollars of bonuses to their upper management. Did you know that these banks gave out $144 billion in bonuses in 2011? That's the second-highest figure for bonuses since 2000; the highest was in 2007. And they told the government that the federally-stipulated punitive fine of $20-25 billion was too steep of a penalty, they wouldn't be able to weather the near future with a compensatory figure that high.
More than likely it would have put too big of a dent in next year's bonuses.
Thou Shalt Not Steal
Unless, of course, it's been a practice that banks have perfected while the Secretary of the Treasury and Congress look, all-too knowingly, the other way.
So while the GOP, on both a state and national level, rant about the unborn, a woman's right to use safe contraception, and the so-called "Attack on Christianity," they've been quietly dodging the real issues such as joblessness and their cronies' mortgage fiasco.
And most people have bought it.
Let's, for one moment, give them some credibility.
I think we should allow prayer in schools. Really, you might say? You, a devout atheist?
I would say as long as it's a policy of inclusion, sure, why not?
Let little Caleb and Morgan stop and say a daily prayer. Let Samuel say his prayers in Hebrew as he rolls the Torah out on his desk. Let Rain go outside and burn incense to Mother Earth in a Wicca ritual.
But let's also let Mohammed roll out his little mat, three times a day, kneel eastward towards Mecca, and pray to Allah.
It's only fair, right?
Yet, Santorum, Perry, Gingrich, and every other GOP pundit would have a stroke over the attack on Christianity, disallowing the beliefs of anyone who isn't in favor of worshiping Jehovah.
They all claim to love this country; they tout the Constitution yet ignore most of it in their crusade against anyone of whom they don't approve. They praise the Founding Fathers and Ayn Rand, without fully understanding most of their ideology. However, they know that you and I don't really know much about Jefferson's feelings on religion. Or Rand's view of marriage.
They rail against the tyranny of an oppressive Muslim regime. Of Sharia Law. Yet their contract with America is to impose their version of Sharia on a pluralistic society, composed of millions of people with differing and equal (in the eyes of our law) beliefs.
Gays, women, abortionists, women who have had or contemplated an abortion, men that have masturbated and wasted a baby; these are the targets of the GOP. Their hate and scorn for what they don't like, and that's pretty much everyone who isn't them, has become part of their everyday dogma.
And each day it gets worse. They attempt to show their flock who is the "true" conservative by saying more and more outlandish things.
Hateful things.
For if they were true Christians they wouldn't break the most sacred commandment to any Christian who truly believes in the Old Testament faith.
Thou Shalt Not Take The Name Of The Lord Thy God In Vain; For The Lord Will Not Hold Him Guiltless That Taketh His Name in Vain
And each of these candidates, attempting to make a name for themselves, invoke the Christian God's name in vain, daily. They slander minorities, homosexuals, and women. If God created every living thing on this planet, then isn't it wrong to persecute gays? Aren't they God's creatures as well? Don't they deserve to be loved, embraced, and respected as part of His plan?
For a political party that sure as hell wants the government to be a smaller, less intrusive, laissez-faire entity, they want to instruct every little bit of your personal life. With their narrow beliefs.
Stay away from our money. Stop taxing me. We want small government, tiny enough to drown it in a bathtub. But gay people can't be happy because they're defective, one of God's fuck-ups, like a platypus.
Women? Hey, if you get raped the baby is both your assailant and God's gift to you; don't even think about an abortion. Oh, and if you somehow don't take that baby full-term due to some biological complication, we're thinking we want some proof that your miscarriage was "natural," because if it wasn't, you Godless whore, we may decide to bring you up on charges of murder.
I see through their thinly-disguised contempt. I see how they're attempting to use your faith against you. I see how they bring up hot-button social issues to disguise their crimes.
And, for that, I truly despise them.
They aren't patriotic, God-loving Americans. They're liars and charlatans. And, in an attempt to bring about their sort of fire-and-brimstone theocracy, will do and say anything to make it a reality.
They hate me. I am a godless, liberal, socialist, ignorant asshole.
Yep.
And I'm proud of that.
Because being a Christian Republican in this country, at this time in our history, is probably the worst thing that I can think of.
Much like the Noah's Ark fable, anyone who believes the GOP rhetoric as a viable alternative to progressive values is just as foolish a belief that twenty-nine thousand foot Mount Everest can be swallowed by a little rainstorm.
So you choose.
Are you one of their Chosen or someone who still has a grasp on the things that matter, like women's rights, gay rights, and the ability to decipher a path for this country that doesn't involve a wholesale disenfranchisement from reality? We have real, pressing issues that need to be discussed in a meaningful, progressive bipartisan committee. We need real (and reality-based) solutions to today's problems. For example, global warming is a reality whether you want to accept it or not.
The science backs up the conclusions, again and again.
Hundred thousand year-old ice is melting very rapidly. A large part of the Larsen-B ice shelf in Antarctica, as big as Rhode Island, broke away from the continent a few years ago. Greenland, covered in a gigantic sheet of ice, is becoming, finally, green as the ice melts away in a fashion never before experienced by humans in the history of our species. Glacier National Park, in Montana, will need to be renamed in the next fifty years or so as the majority of its glaciers have disappeared over the last half century.
Yet, most GOP politicians ignore the facts. They call it "garbage science" and refuse to believe the videos that show calving icebergs and rapidly-melting glaciers as utter nonsense, a figment of crazy climatologists' imaginations. While most scientists around the world have signed off on this crisis as a reality, a ticking timebomb that will have grave consequences for the human race if allowed to continue without further regulation to curb our impact on the planet, the GOP has ignored the data in favor of something else that is significantly more real to them: a series of routinely-edited two-to-three thousand year-old fables that may or may not have actually happened.
If we keep ignoring the facts that have been presented to us we may become keenly aware of an Old Testament reality within a hundred years..
It may not be enough of a deluge to cover Mount Everest, but I'll bet that Congress, like most of Washington and the rest of the world's low-lying areas, will be underwater.
And then perhaps, finally, Republicans will rejoice as they will have experienced a religious epiphany, right out of Genesis itself.
Isn't that what their final goal is anyway?
*
My current monikers?
Godless.
Liberal.
Socialist.
Asshole.
Ignorant.
To a few of those assertions I'll cop, proudly. The rest? I'll just shake off without much thought and a recognition of where they're coming from.
Yep, I'm an atheist. You may shudder at that proclamation but I believe it gives me a much more objective view of the world around me. My perception isn't clouded by fairy tales, omnipotence, invisible beings, or magic underwear. When faced with a situation I look for the rational answer and, for instance, a big boat filled with all kinds of animals (except for dinosaurs and unicorns, cuz they apparently missed the gangplank that day) is just fucking retarded. It's a great story, all right. I love it.
But I also love "Star Wars."
There are so many holes in Noah's story that it, um, holds no water.
If it rained for forty days and nights and the entire world was engulfed in a deluge, to where did all this water finally recede? Scientists have looked at the issue with the water itself; they've calculated that it would take seven times more water than our entire planet contains to cover the Earth as it did in the Noah fable. If you took every drop of water: both icy poles, every ocean, river, stream, creek, wrung them dry and then took every H2O molecule tied up in every animal, plant and iceberg you'd still need seven times more.
Using computer models, they "built" an ark based on the dimensions found in the Bible and, under several computer tests, found that serious stress fractures would have rendered a boat that big unusable. Upon each computer model, the digital ark snapped in two. I guess the men that edited the Bible didn't consider that people would someday be able to test the whole cubit thing.
From a practical perspective, think of the smell of thousands of animals defecating in a relatively enclosed shoebox-shaped boat. The smell would be overpowering. My two cats stank up their litterbox after a few days; sometimes the ammonia smell is enough to choke an army. Noah's kids, the zookeepers, would have undoubtedly suffocated from the ongoing stench of ammonia and piss after forty or so days locked up in a watertight cage with precious few little windows to aerate all that elephant, camel and dormouse poo.
So, besides being a great story it's also 100% utter bullshit. Or maybe elephant shit.
If you can't see that, then...well.
Sorry for you.
Until the early 1920s, most Americans realized both testaments were fables, allegories meant to impart some lesson to the reader and inspire a fear of God and religion into the average six year-old.
Since the 1980s a fundamentalism has arisen that is now ready to overtake not just our political system, but the future of this country itself.
So call me godless, ignorant, and, especially, a liberal. I thank you for that.
How are my views so radical? How are they deserving of such scorn from so many people who have a bit more than just a moderate intelligence, are college-educated, and have seen parts of this world bigger than their hometown?
I believe in certain truths that, once again, are backed by logic, rational thought and, funny enough, a bit of Old Testament wisdom.
Unlike many of the current GOP presidential hopefuls, I pretty much believe in the words that Moses supposedly brought down from Sinai.
Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery
Gingrich has had a hard time with the whole adultery thing, yet he wants to show voters how pious he is. His relatively-recent conversion to Catholicism is, apparently, pennance enough for him. Many Catholics that I know feel as if he'd make a very moral president. He, who, publically admitted that he told his first wife she wasn't young or pretty enough to be a First Lady.
So he divorced her.
Sounds kinda Muslim-of-old, doesn't it? I wonder if he said "I Divorce You" three times and then gave her father a payment of thirty sheep as a means of squaring his matrimonial debt.
The current crop of GOP politicians are tripping over each other to try and show off their conservative street cred; their sexual counter-revolution is picking up steam and is attempting to roll back Roe-v-Wade, among other important hot button social issues. Both Oklahoma and Virginia's recently-passed legislation regarding abortion have become the nation's most restrictive abortion laws.
Why?
What is "personhood?" Does life begin at conception? I suppose that's up to an individual to decide but these Machiavellian attempts to legislate morality is scary, to say the least.
I love how the GOP is backing several "personhood" amendments across the country. They are adamant that these fetuses make it full-term yet are doing their damnedest to cut funding to daycare, education and welfare programs.
Oh, they sure as hell want your "baby" to be born but don't give a damn what happens to it once it pops out of that womb.
Their religion-fueled ideology makes no sense; they embrace life, but only at its inception.
George Carlin said it best a few years before his death:
"Pre-born? You're okay. Pre-school? You're fucked."
Perfect summary of that whole debate, wouldn't you say?
I've been called a commie and, even worse by today's dialogue, a socialist.
I've ranted against these wars that have nearly bankrupted this country. The senseless deaths of young servicepeople in a fight that makes little sense to me.
They call themselves "Christians," followers of Christ. What part of Jesus' teachings, which they profess to represent, have they misinterpreted? Even their beloved Ten Commandments begs them to not kill. Unless, of course, it's in service of their god: Big Oil.
Thou Shalt Not Kill
Why did we go to Iraq? What purpose did it serve? Other than an Old-Testament-style, fire-and-brimstone ass whooping it didn't make sense. Don't spout back the GOP rhetoric that we were there to bring freedom to the Iraqi people from a horrible dictator. It was all bullshit; the drums of war beat incessantly until Bush's cronies got the war they wanted: against the Constitution of this great country. And I fear that we'll never recover from that.
God bless Halliburton.
Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me.
Unless, of course, it's profit.
Actions like "Citizens United" and other Supreme Court decisions have also violated a large part of what the Ten Commandments preached squarely against.
Our rights are being systematically stripped away while corporations are being given the rights of a dubiously-named entitlement: personhood.
It's kind of interesting that the title, "personhood" is being bestowed upon both an unborn, semi-living fetus and a faceless, non-living entity like Wal-Mart. While they both now are considered "people," they also rely upon something else for their "life." If the mother dies prior to a baby being born, then the fetus dies as well.
If a company, like Borders Books or Circuit City, doesn't make any money than they too will die.
While these wars have stripped the very moral fiber from our 200+ year national mission statement, we rally for the ongoing investment in bombs and tanks and guns to kill the infidels.
Conversely, our president wants to invest in our failing infrastructure, in bridges, roads, and environmental projects, and is roundly called a socialist. He wants to provide affordable medical care not to Iraqis or Afghans, but to fellow Americans, and he's been called, well, everything but what he should be called: a caring humanitarian.
Isn't it a president's job to take care of his people?
How can affordable health care for all be a bad thing?
When contraception is made an issue in front of congress and a debate is called with witnesses to testify about the contraceptive needs of women--the birth control pill--how can every witness, over 300 of them, be men and men only? Where is the women's view in this debate? Besides being a means to control pregnancy, the "pill" also provides medical relief to women who have such a need.
When banks, deregulated under the aegis of the GOP, have caused the biggest economic meltdown since 1929 how come not one Wall Street executive has had to answer for their actions?
When unemployment has reached record numbers how come a Republican-controlled House has stymied every attempt for the president to get something done about it?
I'll tell you why:
Because they believe that you, the uninformed voter, is stupid enough to pay attention to their little bait-and-switch games; they're well aware that their policies have brought this country to the edge of ruin.
Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness Against Thy Neighbor
They know that unemployment is out of control.
Do you remember their promise prior to the 2010 mid-terms?
Thou Shalt Not Lie
If elected, they promised to create jobs, curb unemployment and get America back to work.
Have they?
Of course not and, funny enough, many of the banks are still gouging homeowners and giving out billions of dollars of bonuses to their upper management. Did you know that these banks gave out $144 billion in bonuses in 2011? That's the second-highest figure for bonuses since 2000; the highest was in 2007. And they told the government that the federally-stipulated punitive fine of $20-25 billion was too steep of a penalty, they wouldn't be able to weather the near future with a compensatory figure that high.
More than likely it would have put too big of a dent in next year's bonuses.
Thou Shalt Not Steal
Unless, of course, it's been a practice that banks have perfected while the Secretary of the Treasury and Congress look, all-too knowingly, the other way.
So while the GOP, on both a state and national level, rant about the unborn, a woman's right to use safe contraception, and the so-called "Attack on Christianity," they've been quietly dodging the real issues such as joblessness and their cronies' mortgage fiasco.
And most people have bought it.
Let's, for one moment, give them some credibility.
I think we should allow prayer in schools. Really, you might say? You, a devout atheist?
I would say as long as it's a policy of inclusion, sure, why not?
Let little Caleb and Morgan stop and say a daily prayer. Let Samuel say his prayers in Hebrew as he rolls the Torah out on his desk. Let Rain go outside and burn incense to Mother Earth in a Wicca ritual.
But let's also let Mohammed roll out his little mat, three times a day, kneel eastward towards Mecca, and pray to Allah.
It's only fair, right?
Yet, Santorum, Perry, Gingrich, and every other GOP pundit would have a stroke over the attack on Christianity, disallowing the beliefs of anyone who isn't in favor of worshiping Jehovah.
They all claim to love this country; they tout the Constitution yet ignore most of it in their crusade against anyone of whom they don't approve. They praise the Founding Fathers and Ayn Rand, without fully understanding most of their ideology. However, they know that you and I don't really know much about Jefferson's feelings on religion. Or Rand's view of marriage.
They rail against the tyranny of an oppressive Muslim regime. Of Sharia Law. Yet their contract with America is to impose their version of Sharia on a pluralistic society, composed of millions of people with differing and equal (in the eyes of our law) beliefs.
Gays, women, abortionists, women who have had or contemplated an abortion, men that have masturbated and wasted a baby; these are the targets of the GOP. Their hate and scorn for what they don't like, and that's pretty much everyone who isn't them, has become part of their everyday dogma.
And each day it gets worse. They attempt to show their flock who is the "true" conservative by saying more and more outlandish things.
Hateful things.
For if they were true Christians they wouldn't break the most sacred commandment to any Christian who truly believes in the Old Testament faith.
Thou Shalt Not Take The Name Of The Lord Thy God In Vain; For The Lord Will Not Hold Him Guiltless That Taketh His Name in Vain
And each of these candidates, attempting to make a name for themselves, invoke the Christian God's name in vain, daily. They slander minorities, homosexuals, and women. If God created every living thing on this planet, then isn't it wrong to persecute gays? Aren't they God's creatures as well? Don't they deserve to be loved, embraced, and respected as part of His plan?
For a political party that sure as hell wants the government to be a smaller, less intrusive, laissez-faire entity, they want to instruct every little bit of your personal life. With their narrow beliefs.
Stay away from our money. Stop taxing me. We want small government, tiny enough to drown it in a bathtub. But gay people can't be happy because they're defective, one of God's fuck-ups, like a platypus.
Women? Hey, if you get raped the baby is both your assailant and God's gift to you; don't even think about an abortion. Oh, and if you somehow don't take that baby full-term due to some biological complication, we're thinking we want some proof that your miscarriage was "natural," because if it wasn't, you Godless whore, we may decide to bring you up on charges of murder.
I see through their thinly-disguised contempt. I see how they're attempting to use your faith against you. I see how they bring up hot-button social issues to disguise their crimes.
And, for that, I truly despise them.
They aren't patriotic, God-loving Americans. They're liars and charlatans. And, in an attempt to bring about their sort of fire-and-brimstone theocracy, will do and say anything to make it a reality.
They hate me. I am a godless, liberal, socialist, ignorant asshole.
Yep.
And I'm proud of that.
Because being a Christian Republican in this country, at this time in our history, is probably the worst thing that I can think of.
Much like the Noah's Ark fable, anyone who believes the GOP rhetoric as a viable alternative to progressive values is just as foolish a belief that twenty-nine thousand foot Mount Everest can be swallowed by a little rainstorm.
So you choose.
Are you one of their Chosen or someone who still has a grasp on the things that matter, like women's rights, gay rights, and the ability to decipher a path for this country that doesn't involve a wholesale disenfranchisement from reality? We have real, pressing issues that need to be discussed in a meaningful, progressive bipartisan committee. We need real (and reality-based) solutions to today's problems. For example, global warming is a reality whether you want to accept it or not.
The science backs up the conclusions, again and again.
Hundred thousand year-old ice is melting very rapidly. A large part of the Larsen-B ice shelf in Antarctica, as big as Rhode Island, broke away from the continent a few years ago. Greenland, covered in a gigantic sheet of ice, is becoming, finally, green as the ice melts away in a fashion never before experienced by humans in the history of our species. Glacier National Park, in Montana, will need to be renamed in the next fifty years or so as the majority of its glaciers have disappeared over the last half century.
Yet, most GOP politicians ignore the facts. They call it "garbage science" and refuse to believe the videos that show calving icebergs and rapidly-melting glaciers as utter nonsense, a figment of crazy climatologists' imaginations. While most scientists around the world have signed off on this crisis as a reality, a ticking timebomb that will have grave consequences for the human race if allowed to continue without further regulation to curb our impact on the planet, the GOP has ignored the data in favor of something else that is significantly more real to them: a series of routinely-edited two-to-three thousand year-old fables that may or may not have actually happened.
If we keep ignoring the facts that have been presented to us we may become keenly aware of an Old Testament reality within a hundred years..
It may not be enough of a deluge to cover Mount Everest, but I'll bet that Congress, like most of Washington and the rest of the world's low-lying areas, will be underwater.
And then perhaps, finally, Republicans will rejoice as they will have experienced a religious epiphany, right out of Genesis itself.
Isn't that what their final goal is anyway?
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