Words That Aren't

The sudden feeling of mortification one experiences when recalling an embarrassing moment from their past.

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Once, when I was about twelve, I challenged an older boy to a dance-off in order to impress a girl.

I was on a cruise with my parents, and had met the girl at the ship’s After-Hours Kids’ Dance Club®. She’d given me my first kiss just the night before, and yet there she was… enveloped in the long arms of an older boy with a prominent adam’s apple and a chinstrap beard.

I boogied my way, devastated and betrayed, toward the swaying two and in a brazen misfire of gallantry, challenged the boy to a dance-off.

The ensuing gyrations I inflicted upon that room, and the psychological scarring they wrought have never fully left me.

This was nearly 20 years ago, and yet I can still hear the song that I danced to. “100% Pure Love” by Crystal Waters. And I still crumple under identical humiliation when I recall how I’d danced not to the song’s scummy, jangly beat… but to its lyrics. How I’d writhed back, to the middle, and around again. How I’d splashed my hands up in spastic multiples of 10 to somehow represent the notion of 100%. And I recall, oh how I recall, after I’d awakened from my desperate, flailing display – my terpsichorepisode – how the girl fixed a hateful glare on me with eyes as wide and horrified as her mouth.

When you hold the door for one person, but get stuck holding it for everyone else.

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When I was a little boy, my parents instilled in me an almost psychotic dedication to courtesy. They insisted that no matter the situation, I should always aspire to be a gentlemen. As a result I am a priggish dandy, compelled beyond his will to hold every door I see, and bless even the mousiest of sneezes.

The other day, while heading out to get lunch, I held the door for a rather wobbly older woman. As she turned to thank me, she was engulfed within a stream of strangers – opportunistic parasites, all – who flooded brusquely through the door, and toward the rest of their day. No one even looked at my direction, let alone said thank you.

The old woman, was never seen again.

And here’s the thing: I held the door anyway.

And this produces the most interesting irony. My dogmatic dedication to courtesy has been instrumental in the development of a lodged and bitter dislike of people. Because this has happened a ton of times. This wasn’t a one-off. I’ve lost dozens of old ladies to this behavior. DOZENS. I can’t bear to lose one more…

Do you do this? When you see some poor schmuck hold the door for someone, do you actually drop your shoulder and charge through like a runningback? Because if you do: I mean this… you might be evil. I don’t even really believe in evil. But if you turn someone’s kind gesture of common, courteous humanity into an opportunity to… what… not open a door? You’re a goddamn monster and should be studied by scientists.

Because the thing is – it’s not just rude or thoughtless. It actually turns the kind gesture onto itself. Because you tried to hold that door for someone to be nice. But now that you’re stuck standing there like a putz… spending down your seconds on this planet to help the moral gutter trash of society… you have to run the most brutal calculus in your head and figure out which person you’ll stop holding it for. Have you ever done this? Have you seen the shock on their face? The look of abject betrayal in their eyes? Like you just stabbed them in the fucking heart. And everyone around you assumes the worst of you? That you stopped holding it for them because of some random, unimportant difference? Race. Gender. Haircut. Hat. Nose shape. Maybe you’re not as neurotic as I am (more’s the pity; I’m a fucking delight), but these are the things I worry about every single time I let go of that handle.

Do you see? Do you see? DO YOU SEE WHAT YOU HAVE WROUGHT UPON THIS EARTH?

We should bring back dueling…

A state of ceaseless and gathering excitement over one’s own ideas.

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For the better part of a decade, I spent my nights in the back of a New Jersey diner, frothing with excitement to talk to my friends.

Night after night we’d sit at our regular table, and one by one we’d slip into spouts of jittery, over-caffeinated babble, every sentence enjambed together by, “one sec…” hand gestures and dramatically semicolonic drags from a Camel Light.

We were fresh to college – swimming in new ideas… and desperate to show them off to one another.

We criticized movies and books, made political pronouncements, lobbed clunky new philosophies back and forth like a frisbee… and always a little more loudly whenever a pretty girl happened by.

I’m willing to bet that not a single word I spoke in those years made a jot of sense. Not one idea was original or creative or new.

But goddamn were they delightful to create, share, and behold.

Sometimes I miss being young.

The sad, fossilized french fry you find wedged in the footwell of your car.

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Ever eaten one? Admit it you coward.

…

Of course you have.

The spread of disease caused by people’s irrational and baseless skepticism over vaccination.

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I wrote and published this word years ago. At the time it was a response to a generation of gauzy, wealthy, suburban moms refusing to vaccinate their children against preventable diseases, because of their belief in the widely-disproven link between vaccines and autism. At the time, it was a pet peeve… a baffled lamentation that privileged people with no critical thinking skills would imperil their neighbors because of some idiot information on the internet.

My god. I had no idea what was coming.

Today things are terrifyingly different… and infuriatingly the same. We’re two years into a pandemic that’s killed over 5.5 million people around the world. Vaccination, like everything in this star spangled toilet, has become politicized. Figures on the right have cynically stood against vaccination to appease their paranoid, imbecilic base. And figures on the left (myself included) have become haughtily embittered toward them all.

I just read a news update that Glenn Beck – remember that toad? – has reacquired Covid. It’s in his lungs now. He’s been a steadfast anti-vaxxer. And I now must waste the brainspace on the moral calculus over whether or not I should feel sorry for him. I feel like I should. I think it’s right for me to feel sorry for him. But the truth is: I don’t. I don’t care about him or his life. I think he’s a cynical monster whose hubris and nihilism got other people killed. It’s only fair it kill him too.

Being alive is fucking exhausting.

A reference or allusion made purely to draw attention to the intelligence of the speaker.

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The worst thing about not being an English teacher anymore is that it’s now near-impossible to quote a poem without sounding like a complete asshole.

I taught lit classes for years. I recited, discussed, debated, analyzed, and harangued my students with some of the most lush, complex, and wonderful language ever written. And as a result, I now associate certain feelings or events with lines from Tennyson, Eliot, or Mary Oliver. It’s a bookish reflex.

It’s not meant to sound haughty. It’s not meant to seem intelligent. No more than a person quoting some sitcom catch-phrase means to sound commonplace or dopey. Those are just the words I like the most.

And yet… I see the inescapable truth:

I’m kindof a supercilious putz.

Fuff.

The rote and meaningless portrayal of solemnity.

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One of the strangest things about getting older is watching entropy do its thing. Not just to my own body (such that it is)… but to all things. It’s eerie and sad to see an event so vivid for you, pale and diminish over time into just one more little thing that plunks dumbly off the young. As someone who was 20 years old on 9/11, I’m always a little shocked to remember that for young people, 9/11 has an ever diminishing return on significance. Never was this concept more clear than when I was a teacher.

Every year, on the day, I’d assign my students an essay or article about it – most often Tom Junod’s Falling Man which I recommend you read – then spend the entire class discussing it, their own experience of the day, and what those experiences have come to mean now. It was a hit at first. But as the years and semesters wore on, their memories grew fuzzier around the edges, their experiences less immediate, until finally I hung it up and just moved on to the next thing.

I was in bed when the first plane hit. It was right at the start of my sophomore year of college. I was living in my first apartment. Off campus. Very adult. Very exciting. My roommate woke me up to tell me there’d been some accident in New York; I should come see. We spent the next thirty minutes watching the tower smolder in the background as we gathered our things for class. Then the second plane hit. At some point we sat down and watched them both collapse on television. We watched it all in near silence. And then, knowing no other alternative, we grabbed our bags and went to class.

It’s bonkers in retrospect, but then everything is bonkers in retrospect. Absolutely nothing had prepared us for something so upending and uncanny. On campus, the students drifted dutifully from class to class; teachers half-taught their lessons, half-counseled their kids; classmates sat in silence, entranced by the dream of it all, until their cellphones rang, and they’d explode from the room to answer it. My university would cancel classes later in the day, of course. But for a few hours that morning, we all drifted together.

Eight years later, I took a job teaching at that same university… and every September the sights and smells of campus autumn did their Proust thing. Threw me right back to that morning. Only then, when I’d drift into class on 9/11… I’d have to teach something. Chaucer, most likely… September is always time for Chaucer. I wanted to understand 9/11 as the social metaphor it was becoming. We were already two wars and countless atrocities in… 9/11 had come to mean so much already that I wanted to know what my students made of it – the remembrances, the rhetoric, the vinyl towers silhouetted on windshields, the magnetic American flag bumper stickers, the anthems and the bonfires… and always the thrumming, insistent creed that we Never Forget. That’s the one that always got me. The one I never got. I assigned a short essay on the meaning of that phrase – Never Forget. Something like, “Why do we say never forget, and not always remember?” The answers I received were varied and vivid. Conversation lasted all class long. At least in the early years. 

I’ve always found Never Forget a troubling phrase. It always rang so hollow to me – to expect a unified response to something we all experienced together, yes… but ultimately, terribly alone. We commemorate as a society, sure. But we remember alone. We mourn alone. We look for meaning alone. It’s a lonely business, being a person.

There’s something tiresome, and to me deeply disrespectful about how quickly we commodified 9/11 – the bumper stickers, t-shirts, and decals, the syrupy gifs and memes and schlocky slogans all insisting upon a certain tone of how to remember. Or, rather, how we must refuse to forget. 

Never Forget has always been too easy to say, and too cheap to deliver. It requires nothing more than obedience and obeisance. It calls upon no action. Demands no reflection. Summons no change. It urges no understanding of its cause, nor instruction for how best to prevent its recurrence. Never Forget demands nothing but our static, silent, horrified appraisal. It’s a symbol, sacred in the public imagination… yet entirely devoid of any meaning. It’s content. It’s branding. And a brand is just a false promise, written in the language of sincerity, to sell you something you don’t need. Because if you really needed it… nobody would have to tell you. You’d just remember.  

For those too young to remember 9/11, it will no doubt vanish into the horizon soon enough. You can’t forget something you couldn’t remember in the first place. But for the rest of us? What will we do with these two decades of perspective? What do we do with all of… this?

If the last 30 minutes I spent on social media are any indication, we’ll do the same stupid things we’ve done for the last two decades. Those on the nihilistic, online right will continue to pornography it – wring it out for every hoot and holler of cheap applause, huff themselves dizzy on racist, violent, jingoistic urge. And those on the nihilistic, online left will do what they tend to do – snark and snarl from a safe distance… diminish it just enough to stand on, so as it give them the illusion of being bigger, and hopefully snatch a few seconds (clicks, shares, etc.) of attention.

What dreadful people we’ve turned out to be. Not all of us, sure. But enough of us. 

All this to say: If you’re sad today, I’m sorry. If you’re sad every day, I’m sorry for that too. And I don’t blame you. It’s sad when people are cruel to each other. It’s sad when people die. It’s sad when we hurt each other. And it’s sad we never remember to stop. 

Engaging in political incitement and violence on behalf of another’s cause without purpose, understanding or repercussion.

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If you are white, and you are inciting violence at a protest, you are putting black lives at risk.

If you are white, and you are rioting, you are putting black lives at risk.

If you are white, and you are looting, you are putting black lives at rick.

If you are white, and you are not listening, you are putting black lives at risk.

If you are white, and you hurl a brick, deface a building, shatter a window, push a cop… you aren’t doing it for anyone other than yourself. Any violence you bring will not be revisited on you – but on the black lives you claim to value and support.

You want to throw something? Throw your fucking money.

Donate to the Black Visions Collective.

Donate to the George Floyd Memorial Fund.

Donate to The Bail Project.

Donate to Black Lives Matter.

Our job is not to throw punches. It’s to listen, support, and protect. Shut the fuck up, get in line, and if necessary take the hit for your neighbors.

The physical principle wherein a diner’s choice of entree will remain uncertain until the moment the waiter asks them what they’d like to eat.

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It starts so simply.

“I’m going to have the chicken.”

And then.

“Or maybe the fish?”

And with that, I hurl into into the labyrinth. With that, I go quite mad.

Am I the Andrew who orders chicken? Or the Andrew who orders fish?

Maybe I am both. Perhaps neither.

I dither in silence – chicken or fish, chicken or fish – while my dining companions continue on in time. They raise their wine glasses. Toast to life and spacetime.

A whiff of oblivion curls through the air.

No! No, I have ordered before. I have eaten. I shall eat once more.

O! But to decide? Do I want chicken? Do I want fish? Couldn’t I have both?! I can be the kind of man who orders two entrees at dinner. I wouldn’t even need two plates. Just spoon the one onto the other in a pile before I go mad. Oh no. Oh god. I will remain at this table forever – trapped and starving at the crossroads of chicken and fish – I am the parched and brutal horizon twixt sky and sea that stretches on, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Nothing to be done.

The universe has cracked. Time rolls over my eyes like a stone.

Where is the waiter? Where is the waiter? Only the waiter can pull me from this oblivion. WAITIER. WAITER. WHERE IS THE WAITER.

And then, like a gasp, I realize the horrible truth.

I have waited. I am waiting. I shall wait.

The waiter.

The waiter is me. 

The fear that the obscure name or reference you just dropped was either incorrect or mispronounced.

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When I was a sophomore in college, I spent an entire class period pronouncing, “Goethe” phonetically.

I found out later when I said “Go-thhhh” to my father who, in his characteristic charm informed me, “It’s pronounced ‘Gher-teh,’ you dickhead.”

I still crumple from the shame.

A horrific event that happens over and over and over and over again.

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Of all the words I’ve made, this is the one I’ve reposted the most. As such, this essay is the one I’ve rewritten, edited, scooched, amended and adapted the most as well. Says something, doesn’t it?

You reach a point when you realize that life, history, and even the world itself are a long, arduous, gorgeously told tale of utterly stupid and entirely avoidable tragedies.

And the hardest part of that lesson is to know that we never seem to learn from it.

Santayana said we would repeat history if we don’t learn from it. But watching George Floyd die teaches me that history teaches us nothing more than how to watch the same cheap and wicked things more quickly, with greater efficacy, and from a greater distance. We learn how to recycle the same abuses, faster.

This week, we all watched a white police officer kneel on George Floyd’s throat until he died. Think about that. You watched a police officer murder your neighbor. George Floyd was murdered. And we watched.

George Floyd is just one of thousands of black men murdered with no cause – none – by members of an institution that in one breath assures it’s here for our protection, while it threatens and even takes life. Demeans and humiliates while demanding respect. Acts flagrantly, without cause or control while demanding obedience.

I believe in law, and justice, and the need for control.

Which is why I do not believe in the police.

George Floyd’s life mattered. But even more than that, George Floyd’s life was his. It was not someone else’s to take away.

His life didn’t (shouldn’t. doesn’t.) require my nor anyone else’s insistence to demonstrate its worth. His value as a person was (should have been. is.) self-evident.

George Floyd mattered. Black lives matter.

That white people – hi, I’m a white person – cannot bring themselves to understand and say and value that statement matters too. It makes us accessories. It means we share the guilt.

The withering and degradation of one’s national pride.

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Eligible citizen looking for something new that just feels like home. 38. Professional(ish) male. Non-smoker. Loves reading, hiking, baking bread, movies with and without subtitles, constitutional democracy, and the rule of law. Has a dog and a cat. Not interested in religious extremism, grinning stupidity, or fascism. Seeking same. 

The bumbling, directionless gait of the lost, the elderly, and those staring into their smartphone.

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You know when you’re walking…

Let’s say you’re at a mall or something. And you’re kinda angry to be there because malls are horrifying and gross and way too goddamn big and they smell like depression dabbed in cologne… and you’re trying to just get a goddamn pair of khaki pants (you refuse to call them chinos, because who authorized that name change?) but to do that you have to sift your way through a clot of sneering, obnoxious teenagers who slurp Orange Juliuses with the blithe indifference of a creature too blinkered and boring to be aware of its own mortality, and they’re all standing in a henge of kiosks hocking bright, cheap tchotchkes – bubblegum colored weaves! The Zero-G Yo Yo! Some crappy RC helicopter emblazoned with the Albanian flag! – and once you finally lace your way through, you’re pleased because you see the store ahead of you… but there, directly in your path, is some pocket-sized grannie with a sky blue knit cap who’s shuffling from foot to foot, not even looking where she’s going, just slowly floating along like some lost and derelict moon drifting aimlessly through space… and you try to go around her, but she oozes in your path, and so you dart a bit left, but she lurches that way too, and you find yourself on the balls of your feet, waltzing with some woman who doesn’t even know you’re there… and everything’s making you mad, but you can’t really be mad at everything so instead you just funnel all of your frustration at the back of this little old lady’s head even though you know deep down that she doesn’t deserve it, and she’s hopefully really sweet (but she’s probably a little racist) and you say, “Lady…” but not as under your breath as you had intended, and she jumps a bit and turns her head and looks at you with eyes that say, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I used to be so much faster…” and it puts a chill to all your hot blood, and you stop for a moment and think of how stupid you are to get so frustrated – to be in such a hurry all the goddamn time to get wherever it is you think it’s important to go… so you blink, and you say, “I’m sorry,” and she smiles, and then you walk into the store buy your pants…

That ever happened to you?

White people’s obsessive persecution complex in response to multiculturalism an economic justice

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I try to avoid extreme positions. It’s not that I don’t have extreme feelings; nearly all of my feelings are extreme. Ask anyone who’s watched me talk to or about my cat. I’d compose arias to the little goblin if I could. But in nearly everything else, I strive to stay somewhere in the middle… for perspective if no other reason. I’m a centrist in my politics. A relativist in my morals. And a moderate on nearly every subject except Shakespeare (I know), astronomy, and sandwiches.

And my cat. He’s the best. 

But there is one absolute I’ve developed over the years – something ironclad:

Rich white people need to stop complaining about their own victimization.

Immediately.

I say this as a straight, white man of the upper-middle class born in the 1980s. When it comes to the span of human history, I’ve won the goddamn lottery. Everything has been handed to me. I’ve wanted for nothing. I’ve experienced personal pain and tragedy, of course. I’m human. But in nearly every respect, life has offered to trim the crust from my sandwiches from the moment I slipped into being.

Fellow white people, dudes mostly… here’s the deal: We’re not victims. Not at the hands of racial and economic justice, anyway. We can’t be – it’s fundamentally impossible for us to be so – because the very mechanisms of victimization were built by people like us long ago, belong to us to day, and ultimately turn and churn for our benefit. We are the beneficiaries of a broken, unjust system built on denying equal access to justice, money, land, and basic human dignity. For further reference, I urge you to either consult the whole of human history, or just look around the world right now. Both the past and the present are the footnotes to this concept. I urge you to consider them.

I’m not going to say someone can’t be rich – I don’t know enough about economics to really understand the ramifications of such a concept. And I’m not saying that a white person can’t be proud of their cultural heritage. I’m an Italian-American, and I’m super happy about it. I get to wear black and be neurotic and just fundamentally make better meatballs than you do. It’s tons of fun. But here’s the thing, y’all. White people can’t claim victimhood. Ever. That’s the cost of owning pretty much everything… you don’t get to whine when your ownership is criticized. We could dismantle the mechanisms of white supremacy. We could offer reparations for what our ancestors took through force. But we don’t. And therefore we can’t claim the dignity of victimhood. It’s that simple.

So stop. Stop debasing yourselves with the term. And please bring a swift end to the theatrics of it all. We’re not benighted. We’re not beset. And we’re not at war. Not yet.

It isn’t “class warfare” until your head is in a basket.

Until then, it’s just people trying to get their share of the pie.

One who is forced to play a sport, regardless of their loathing for it.

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Recently, while chatting with some guys at a party, I drifted into the dire shoals of sports-talk. The conversation had started innocently enough, reminiscing about youth and school and all of its attendant horrors. It was light, snappy party patter. Good stuff. But then a guy (who looked like a Brad but wasn’t a Brad) steered the topic toward his glory days in intramural soccer. I should have confessed my lack of interest and authority on the spot, but I was wine-soaked and foolish, and so I feigned understanding. This was an error. The more he went on, the deeper I delved for convincing lies, volleying through his remembrances with clueless chirps: Oh, totally. Tell me about it, man. Pssh, soccer… right? 

When the inevitable finally occurred, and he handed the subject back to me, I choked. Utterly.

Here’s a little free advice for you: When asked your position on the soccer field, “center-left” is not an acceptable answer.

I had outed myself as an anathelete – a tragic, grade school softboy – fellas who don’t take the field, so much as are taken by it… cajoled by well-meaning parents and concerned guidance counselors who, in my case, viewed my stubborn disinterest in group sports not so much as a personality trait, but as a problem to be cured via immersion-therapy. Despite a volley of protests, I was signed up for baseball and soccer, both the indoor and outdoor varietals. Gloves and shinguards were purchased. Ballcaps were donned. Back yard practice drills were run by my enthusiastic father, and scored to my own chorus of protracted, Victorian sighs. To this day, those temperate harbingers of Springtime – blooming dogwoods, sunparched dirt, the woody smell of fresh-cut lawns – make me anxious and itchy and inescapably sad.

For I am an anathelete. An inside cat. A scrabble player. A man more likely to attend a ball than hustle for one.

At the time I resented my parents for this – my enforced conscription into the dreaded boys of summer. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve developed enough empathy to understand how frightening it must be to raise any child – let alone a sour, solitudinous lump like me. I was an odd kid. I had friends, but not many. I lacked the easygoing nature required to play well with others. I was an only child… which is to say: a cerebral weirdo, more interested in chatting with adults over coffee than playing games with kids. It’s only natural that in their desperation they’d draw comparisons between me and the closest child they could find – which, in my family was my cousin, M.

M. is the closest thing I’ll ever have to a sibling. We were born six weeks apart, and thus our parents formed a social unit, spending weekends and vacations together, raising the two of us in tandem. There are photo albums chronicling our shared infancy – each of us strapped screaming inside our baby-carriers, beside our drowsy and exhausted mothers; M. and I as toddlers, costumed in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles regalia, our postures frozen mid-kata, our hands flattened into pasty karate chops; our fathers possess the requisite blackmail photos of us in the bath, arraying our army men in an execution line along the tub edge, plunking them one by one into the suds.

As time wore on, M. and I began to grow in different directions. I mean this literally. Come the pubescent years, M. brototroped into a more traditionally male form. (NB: By “traditionally male form” I do not mean to suggest that I condone this particular view of masculinity. I merely mean to describe the thinking of the time. Gender is a fluid concept. The patriarchy is a cancerous system of dehumanizing power which must be torn down. Black Lives Matter. All that stuff.) M. took an intense interest in sports, becoming a capable wrestler and soccer player. He had the full scope of the athletic carriage – a muscular frame, a quiet, single-minded focus and dedication to practice, and an inherent team spirit. M. had the inexhaustible desire to hustle, to score, to raise his fist in the air and hold it aloft like a torch to light the way of his own athletic excellence.

My own career as a soccer player was spent sulking. If I did run, it wasn’t so much toward the ball as it was away from a bee. At this phase of my little-league career, roles of play were still democratized; Children were rotated from position to position, outfield one game, pitcher the next. My coach – a beardy Episcopalian of inexhaustible patience – did his damndest to keep me in right field where I belonged… but the time eventually came when I was called to service amid the infield. This poor man had to dress me in my catcher’s armor… belting the plastic carapace around my myriad bruise-and-breakables… explaining to me that, should a runner attempt to take the plate, it would be my responsibility to protect it with my whole heft. I don’t recall my exact response… but it was certainly some version surely you jest, only adjusted to the 4th grade reading level.

When I finally emerged from the dugout and rattled homeward, I was met with the politely stifled hysterics of the crowd. I don’t – and didn’t – blame them. I’d have laughed too at this shambling lobsterboy. I searched the crowd through the mesh of my mask and, spotting my parents, excitedly pointed to the oversized plastic jock that had been strapped on above my pants. Mom! I shouted… Look at this! And then proceeded to waggle my white codpiece to and fro. My father retold this story for years… pantomiming the waggle every time I brought a girl home.

I just never cared. Not about the game. Not about the score. Not about winning. It never mattered. That has always been my the biggest issue with sports – other than, ya know… the heat, and the running, and the shouting, and the overwhelming self-seriousness. I just didn’t think it’s important. Were we playing for money, or national pride, that would be another thing altogether. But we never were. Win or lose, we all got pizza.

These days, team sports are a distant memory. I’m in my late-30s. I am no longer culturally viable. Nobody cares that I’m even alive, let alone how well I play with others. But as I shuffle ever-farther into the mire of early-middle-age, the more and more essential physical activity becomes. If not to foster a darwinian appetite for competition, then at least to stave off my physical degradation from doughy, gentleman meatstocking to bloated corpse.

I have to exercise now not so much to build character, but to forestall death. And that’s a competition I can get behind. I’ve successfully avoided athleticism for 37 years. I had a great run sit. But the time has come to hike up my sporting apparel, don some ridiculous hat, and work up a bit of a sweat. So, this week, I signed up for a kickboxing class. I put on shorts. I ran and jumped and burpeed. I punched and kicked. I sweat and cursed and flailed around. For an entire hour I pummeled a bag, and sprinted, and melted in front of a room full of lithe, be-pony-tailed women. I exercised. I hated every goddamn minute of it. But I did it.

But here’s the rub: an hour before my class, I met some chums at a bar. Turns out this gentleman can kickbox with three glasses of wine in his belly and NOT throw up on himself.

So I got that goin’ for me…

When you blow it up, it’s evil. When we blow it up, it’s collateral damage.

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Donald Trump (I’m sorry, I’m as tired of writing his name as you are of reading it), has launched a missile strike against Syria. This was done to punish the Assad regime (a legitimately heinous clot of horror, itself) for its use of chemical weapons against its people. For the murder of his people, the Trump Administration will send over bombs.

It will not, however, allow in refugees.

This, in essence, is the Tump Administration’s foreign policy.

He is a human cloaca.

I’ve spent my entire adult life (decades at this point) listening to corrupt, self-interested nations justify the wholesale bombing of… everything. And here’s the thing:

There isn’t a justification for any of it. Never has been. Never will be.

Because bombs don’t really distinguish factions or flags or to which unhappy fiction you pray. That’s the job of the guy who pulls the trigger. And when faced with that choice, our collective failure to make the right decision over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again makes us just as awful as the regimes we’re trying to destroy.

We’re not the good guys. We’re just another version of the bad guys.

Out with nations.

In with stars.

The changes to your Netflix recommendations that correspond with sharing your account password with your girlfriend.

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There was a period of a few weeks where, no matter what I streamed, Netflix continued to offer “The Sorrow and The Pity” as my number one recommendation.

“The Sorrow and The Pity.”

A four-hour long, black and white French documentary about the holocaust.

I should have taken a screenshot and sent it to my shrink along with a demand for my money back.

That was years ago. Before I moved in with my girlfriend. A woman whose primary cinematic interests are a dead split between drag queens and sports movies.

The cluster of throw pillows scattered across one’s bedroom floor.

///

Here’s something I don’t get: Throw pillows.

Their purpose is as bewildering as their name, because when you really think about it (as I have) each betrays its own intention…

How can something that’s designed to stay in place and impart a sense of staged and timeless perfection be given a name that essentially insists you hurl it at the nearest person’s face?

This is a linguistic fallacy. Alert the gutter press! Slate! Get started on another of your penetrating think pieces! Pillows: You’re Doing It Wrong!

NB: I, of course, mean “makes one jab a pencil into their eyes, as violent auto-enucleation is preferable to reading yet another goddamn Slate article” when I use the term “penetrating.”

Anyway.

Pillows.

Think about it. Won’t you?

One who would destroy everything to prove their superiority.

///

55 years ago, we very nearly entered into nuclear war with Russia. And we avoided such calamity because the smart people in both our government and theirs outmaneuvered the crazy, stupid, and wretched ones.

And because we were lucky.

Mostly because we were lucky.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, has brought us closer to the brink of nuclear exchange than we’ve been in decades. And for no discernible reason beyond the sleazy garbage heap of his own derangement, stupidity, and ego.

He alienates our allies – insults foreign nations – categorizes whole swaths of people he does not know, lies about them, insults them, and uses the hatred he inspires against them to further whatever random, blinkered political debacle pops into his mind next.

He is the worst American. He’s the worst we have to offer. He is abject, vile, and cruel.

It boggles my mind that we’d require further reason to pull him from his highchair behind the resolute desk and banish him from office. The last year of brainless blunder and hateful pig vulgarity have been quite enough. To say nothing of Russia, his administration’s collusion, and the fact that he’s lied more times than he’s had a hot bath.

Remove him. Now.

The endless turns one takes while searching for a parking spot in the city.

///

I spent nearly an hour trying to park my car the other night.

We’d returned from dinner with my Dad. I dropped L. off at home, chimed a sweet “love you!” and set myself to parking.

Left at the light. Nothing on this block.

Left at the next. All booked up.

Left at the light.

Maybe a right.

It went like this.

Left. Left. Right. Left. With every turn I felt more of myself slide away… my sanity fraying like a windblown flag. Left. Left. Left. On and on until the last scraps had eroded finally away.

Hope. Was there ever such a thing? Certainly not.

For the world is barren. A dead place. Bereft. A corridor of parked and empty cars. No life. Nothing stirring. Young couples loved, once. They walked their dogs and jaunted happily through the streets in well-tailored, seasonally-appropriate jackets. But that time had passed. Now dawns the age of rubber and glass.

I was born to die in that car… lost forever… left behind. Left. Left.

Left.

And then…

Abruptly, without any reason or purpose… I found a spot.

And everything was alright again.

A creepy, ghoulish, or otherwise disturbing looking child.

///

Look, I don’t hate kids.

Far from it, actually. I’m happy to report that I’ve become a man who rather likes them. They’re wonderful, and strange; they’re hungry little ids who run around all hopped up on fudge, asking uncomfortable questions and occasionally pooping themselves. How can you honestly not appreciate that?

These behaviors are the proud marks of a free creature, flaring gloriously through the black misery of the Cosmos. Kids are great. They should be celebrated. Hooray for kids.

That said…

There’s a time in every child’s life… somewhere around three, I think, when they take a turn.

They get spooky looking.

Eerie.

Their parts start growing at varied paces, making them physically syncopated and rangy. Suddenly afire with curiosity and wonder, mind overrides mien… so, when unoccupied by iPads or juice-boxes or coloring books, they often appear vacant and expressionless… leering about and gawping… their mouths faintly reddened by juice, their smiles a mushy handful of baby teeth.

I like kids. I do! But zoiks can they look damn scary sometimes.

NB: I feel it’s very important to point out that me at 8 was a SPECTACULAR example of this word.
Woof.

A person who hasn’t yet decided what they’re morally opposed to eating.

///

Two young women sit debating the dwindling ethics of sustenance.

Chicken’s out. They’re kept in those awful cages.

Beef! Ooh, but methane is a greenhouse gas. Worse than cars, I’ve heard.

Pork? But pigs are super smart; they’re basically people without any clothes on.

Soy. Wait, doesn’t that cause breast cancer or something?

Fish? … Eh. Fish.

Any act of consumption short of actually sitting outside and photosynthesizing lunch ends in an ethical cul de sac.

I over hear them while I wait for my own order. They trace their refusals back to girlhood, when they’d eaten the food their parents had insensitively plopped before them (perhaps lovingly prepared after a long day of working in a miserable job).

“Ugh,” the one says to her partner, “so gross.”

When the waiter approaches.

“Ladies? Any thoughts?”

Oh… many, Waiter. So many thoughts.

They look up from their menus and shrug.

“We’re gonna need another minute.”

Crying fully, cathartically, wildly, and without restraint.

///

The Leftovers aired its finale last night, and I lost 20 pounds of water weight directly through my face.

The Leftovers is, among so many things, a lachrymal diuretic. An ipecac for the heart. It’s an enema applied directly to the feelings.

And I loved every last goddamn drop of it.

Last night, while L. dozed beside me, I sat and watched, rapt in weepy silence – a pillow clamped in my arms, my nose a drippy faucet.

Oh, I adored The Leftovers.

I loved it so, so much.

I loved it with the same immensity I have for certain novels, or poems, or those pieces of minor key classical arrangement that detonate me into saline hysterics… like a fragile aunt at a graduation party.

I can’t think of a single piece of popular culture that’s even attempted to do what The Leftovers did, let alone accomplished it with this level of elegance and deftness and style. The Leftovers lovingly examined our most primordial anxieties – the ones we used to fashion out of stained glass, or etch into marble, or paint on cathedral ceilings. It’s a modern tale about Renaissance preoccupations – love, death, sex, and god (or his abject and crushing absence, as it were).

It’s the oldest story, told in the newest way. And I’ve spent 36 years failing to express what The Leftovers gorgeously conveyed in – all told – just under 28 hours. I cannot thank the makers of that show enough for their contribution to our culture, and to my own personal experience as a human being.

Also – it introduced me to Carrie Coon, upon whom I shall moon and pine and flutter and die until the day of my own departure. Oh, Carrie Coon. Let me sing of Carrie Coon. One of the most exciting, challenging, intense, heartbreaking actors I’ve ever seen.

And sweet. jesus. what. a. dish.

❤ Carrie Coon ❤

Okay, I’m done gushing.

Let’s get to the point, shall we?

This should surprise no one… but, I’m a crier.

I love it. I love a good cry. I’ll put on sad music, or watch a sad movie (or entire television series) just to whip myself into a lachrymal froth. I find the whole thing massively satisfying and even kinda fun.

Not about life, of course. If ever confronted with hardship or sorrow, I tend to veer all Western Philosophy and negotiate, argue, and berate myself back into relative comfort. I’m a grouchy, Liberal Arts educated rationalist all the way down to my fingernails. It’s probably my greatest emotional failing – I think I can think my way through a feeling.

But that’s about real life. Now… fake life – movies, books, music, theater (my god, theater) – that splits me open like a rotten melon. I can’t keep it together when it comes to the cultural sads. All I ever want to do is watch a tragedy and weep about it in the aisles.

So! To honor said weepiness… and The Leftovers which provided me so many nights of beautiful, sink-grappling, red-faced, hide from your girlfriend, “I just need to pee, I’ll be right back!” bathroom sobbing – here’s a list of some of those things that make me cry.

Openly.

Wildly.

With great drama and gesticulation:

Videos of dogs greeting their returning soldier parents.

Cochlear implant activation videos.

The scene where Connery dies in The Untouchables

The entire movie Summer Hours.

Same with the Clouds of Sils Maria

Every scene from The Leftovers… 

The movie/play Wit – specifically designed to make me die

The scene where John Proctor refuses to sign his name.

The song rainbow connection – I once cried while reading the lyrics aloud, and in fact, started crying almost immediately upon finding this video.

The scene where Emma Thompson loses it and puts herself back together in Love,Actually – yeah, I like that movie. Deal with it, you hipster toad.

Any scene from Certified Copy (it’s so French…)

Any scene from The Thin Red Line

This one from The Tree of Life

This one from The New World

This one from Paris, Texas

This is but a smattering. I have such an immense collection of little sobby clips.

Watch a few. Cry at work.

I do it all the time.

The arrangement of one’s parts so as to hide the greatest amount of chub.

///

I shaved the other day. This was a mistake. I say this literally.

I’ve been wearing a facefull of fuzz for a long time now. Not a beard, per se… in today’s age of wool-faced, Rabbinical sheik the best I can muster is a wispy arrangement somewhere between a sunparched lawn and a shabby bichon frise.  It’s been a half-hearted stylistic decision if ever there were one – more a lack of will than an act of it. But still… it’s been my look.

But then, a few nights ago, I decided to clean my face up a bit. What had begun as some light touchup work quickly unraveled into complete whisker teardown. I had knicked a bit too much from one side… so I had to edge a bit from the other… and on and on like this it went: left, right, left, right, buzz, buzz; trimming more and more from each hemistache until only a wee Hitlerian puff remained… bunkered, quivering and desperate, under my nose.

Naturally, it had to go.

My face is a freer place without it, for sure. Everyone’s very pleased. So pleased, in fact, it makes me wonder just how bad I looked when I had fur on my face. But it also revealed something terrifying: Good god have I have gained weight. Not an unmanagable amount. I’m not a butterball. But all of that weight lives almost entirely in an adipose halo around my face. Age has sent me shambling into an entirely new phase of decrepitude – jowliness. There’s more chin now, more throat, than my face requires. I have an overabundance of countenance. And it means only one thing – a dull thudding truth that hammers against my heart.

I have to fucking exercise.

I’ll do it. I swear. There’s a sweet muscle-boy who works at my agency who’s been just dying to help usher me into the world of athletics. He’s 23 years old – a fetus with shoes on – who “lives at the gym” and can help me “get swole.” Once I realized that adjective didn’t refer to my genitalia, I decided to find it charming. He’s offered to draw up an exercise regimen for me. “We’re gonna shred your abs, man. It’s gonna be great.”

Alright. Yes. I relent. Let the shredding commence.

I will buy sneakers. And shorts. I will wear them while I lift heavy things. I will shred my abs like so much boiled chicken. I will work my chest and trunk until it resembles a pan of muffins. I will feel the burn and shred the gnar… or whatever.

But until that time when I have lifted myself from the blobiform gutter in which I currently writhe and into the highest glittering strata of hardbodied swolness… I’ve got to do something about my goddamn face.

When I turn it, it vanishes into my neck, you see.

So for the next few weeks, I will posture myself accordingly. I will suck in my gut and photograph myself ONLY from an approved, Myspace bathroom angle circa 2003.

I will act thin. And work fat.

And I will appear, if not swole, than at least to have swelled less.

So shall it be written. And so shall I run.