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

///

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.

///

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.

///

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.

///

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.

///

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.

///

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.

///

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.

///

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.

///

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.

///

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.

///

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.

///

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.

///

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

///

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.

///

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.

///

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.

///

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.

 

 

Sordid tales of sexual anxiety, misfortune, and embarrassment.

///

Okay. I’ve got an idea for you. Hold on to your butts. This one’s a doozy of a humdinger.

Open-mic… stick with me… Therapy Night.

Once a month – maybe twice – I’ll post up at some dingy bar or event space, and encourage society’s broken and bereft, demented and depressed to share their insides with strangers.

Five minutes. Open mic. Have a drink and tell me about your dad.

I’m convinced it would slay.

But then, I’m big on catharsis. Doubly-so if it’s public.

Triple if it’s pubic.

In full candor – it’s not my idea. It was a throwaway gag in a teeerrriibllee (see: wooonnndeeerrfulll) romantic comedy from the late 90s/early ’00s about a neurotic dweeb who falls in love with his best friend. It’s called “Let it Snow” and I’ve seen it probably five thousand times because my mother raised me to be a doily.

It was the maudlin opus of the implausibly named Kipp Marcus – who I’m 98% sure composed his own Wikipedia page. Bernadette Peters plays his mother and is, in accordance with every conceivable law of existence, absolutely perfect.

A then-unknown Stephen Colbert plays a minor but brilliant role. Seriously. Find this movie. Watch the whole thing. Twice. You’ll be better for it.

Extra knowledge, no charge: I adore shitty romantic comedies. Especially the vein of schmaltzy, meet-cute pap that flourished from the mid-90s to the early 00s. I consider it the height of the depth of American binnable pop culture. If you’re looking for a map to the labyrinth of my heart… look no further than what played on HBO at four in the afternoon, circa 2002.

Anyway. Back to Open Mic Therapy Night.

Here’s the thing – it scratches a bunch of my itches.

For one, I think it makes for great theater. Bad news makes always makes for the best stories. Any success I’ve had at storytelling (and I’ve had a bit) has owed to two simple and conjoined precepts:

1. When you’re being ugly, you’re being honest. And honesty is what makes people lean forward, listen, and care.
2. There is nothing more boring than someone else’s good news.

So as a form of public theater and entertainment… I think it’s a peach.

But I also think there’s something potentially healing about it.

There’s something cleansing about getting on stage and being as ugly and honest and raw as you can to a room of boozy silhouettes. Everyone gathered to swim in each other’s uglies… not celebrating our accomplishments – to dance, or sing, or tell jokes, or strip and wiggle… but our failures. The things we’re ashamed and afraid of.

Failed in love? Let’s hear it.

Got some warped sexual urges? Spill em.

Hate your kid? That’s okay, too.

Feel sometimes that the whole world is a crushing black nothing, and that we’re all just kicking around, waiting for something tragic and awful to happen if merely to confirm that you’re not crazy for feeling that way in the first place? The mic is yours.

I just love it. Everyone there, together… listening. Nodding and mm-hmm-ing. Judging. Celebrating. Commiserating. And ultimately, applauding.

It’s the ultimate catharsis.

It’s Jungian karaoke.

Guh. Sign me up.

A rapid and indiscriminate farewell made while exiting.

///

You’re tired.

Your feet hurt.

You’ve partied enough.

You don’t even remember why you came to this party.

And there’s an uncomfortably good chance you were responsible for the toilet overflowing.

Time for a hasty exit. Are you actually going to shake everyone’s hand? Hug everyone you said hi to?

No way. Huggin’s for chumps.

Bye!Solong!hugandkiss!talksoon!Loveyou!Takecare!Gottago!NahI’mtired!Goodtoseeyoutoo!SayhitoBarnoldforme!HahaIknowBarnoldissuchagreatname!NoI’dlovetostay!Yeahlunchsoundsgreat!

Door.

Car.

Home.

Netflix.

One who speaks with absolute authority, while being the authority on absolutely nothing.

///

As a member of the human race with eyeballs, ears, and a functioning neocortex, I’ve developed many reasons for loathing Donald Trump. With any luck, if you’re reading this, you’ve got a few of your own. Just in case you want to borrow some, here are a few of mine. Ya know… just for kicks:

He’s a greasy flimflam man who’s conned, corrupted, and bilked thousands of people out of their money. He’s a low rent panic merchant, sowing fear and hate with abandon. He’s a hysterical, thin-skinned reactionary. A misogynistic twerp. A crooked huckster. An exultant failure. A wrath-brimmed bully. A gaudy dilettante. He’s a bigot. A brute. A sleaze. An ass. A fool.

During his candidacy alone, he:

Cheerfully advocated for torture; the construction of a border wall with no sane explanation how to fund it; he suggested our military should murder families simply under suspicion of their being related to terrorists; blithely stated that abortion should be criminalized; he’s mocked the disabled; banned journalists; he somehow remains in thrall to the misapprehension that dousing an object in gold renders it a veneer of elegance. Drunk on a cocktail of wrath, vanity, and good ol’fashioned racism he prolonged a fight with the parents of a soldier who died in service for his country; he actually called Hillary Clinton the devil, and kicked a crying baby out of one of his rallies. 

Class act, this guy.

Donald Trump is a man who stands in cross-armed opposition to the most basic civic virtues of this country. And grins.

He is a pauper of the soul.

Nothing about this is shocking. We all know about it. Because he’s been this way for as long as he’s been famous. And he’s been famous, I’m sorry to say, for my entire time on this planet.

But still… there’s something about Donald Trump that I loathe beyond all else. It rivals his vulgarity, his combativeness, his classless narcissism.

It’s his vagueness.

His sniveling, abject vagueness… and the cowardice that’s behind it.

Donald Trump has turned vagueness into the most devastating weapon of our age. Forget about the hats – vagueness was the brand of his entire campaign. And now that he won, it continues to be the grease with which he lubricates his bullshit machine.

It’s how he’s soared to such infamy… on the oily wings of sloganeering, bullshit, and innuendo.

Vagueness. It’s the sludge that’s toxified our discourse, threatened our civic order, and advanced his own personal agenda. It’s the act of a spineless, soulless twerp without purpose or conviction… and if we had even a sip of the quick spirit of our founders we’d have driven him and his nest of zealots, cranks, creeps, nazis, and goalongs into the sea with the rest of the bottom-feeders.

When Donald Trump speaks, facts evaporate. They are rendered irrelevant. Utterly. We need only know that with Trump, we’ll get the “best” of whatever’s there to offer. The very best. Better than you could ever believe. Many people say it’s the best. Many very, very smart people.

We joke about this.

Even America’s would’ve-been VP, and youth group talent show moderator, Tim Kaine has joked about this. We need not know the details of Trump’s plans. It’ll all be great. The best. Believe me.

Think of pretty much any Trump statement. He justifies every bizarre, racist, myopic, or invented truth by claiming to have heard them from, “plenty of people” or, “something I read” or, “people [who] tell me.”

When asked who he’d nominate to the Supreme Court, Trump responded: “really great legal scholars.”

When asked about his plan to cut corporate taxes in the face of our country’s $19 trillion dollar deficit, Trump said: “That’s right. We’re gonna grow the economy so much…”

In an interview with Scott Pelley, Trump mentioned how we need to “get back” jobs from Mexico, China, and Japan. “Everybody’s taking our jobs,” Trump explained. When asked how he would get these jobs back, Trump responded, confidently: “You get em back.”

Want to know about his economic team? “I have the smartest people on Wall Street lined up already.”

How will he finance civic improvements and his general attempt to “make America great again”? “We’re going to absolutely be able to pay for it. My economy will expand so rapidly– we’re going to take jobs back from other countries. And we will be able to pay for it.”

When challenged by NJ Senator (future president and captain of my soul) Cory Booker, Trump insisted: “I know more about Cory Booker than he knows about himself.”

Do you hear the innuendo? Do you see the circular logic? The bullshit. Can you smell it?There is no detail here. Not a jot. Not a comma. There’s no thinking. There’s no plan. No consideration. No dedication. No belief. There’s nary the flicker of a fucking neuron.

His every sentence is the rank exhaust of a mind unburdened by thought, consideration, or expertise.

He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And what’s worse… he doesn’t care.

Donald Trump knows about, cares about, and understands nothing. Nothing. He’s an idiot. And were this a different time, a different country, and I suppose were human beings not the dullards they seem so dead set to be… this would be an issue. But he wears his idiocy with gaudy confidence. Absolute, unquestioned, ironclad, fulminating confidence.

And this is what makes him so powerful.

Consider how cowardly this is. The cruelest cowardice. The kind of cowardice that, during wartime, would get you fucking shot. Trump uses this rhetorical vagueness to elide. To slither. To slime his way away from any responsibility for what he says or does. He’s turned the entire country on its head. He’s fomented racial, cultural, and religious fury. He’s urged violence at his rallies. He’s raging, insisting we tear the whole system down around us… yet is bereft of any plausible reason as to why, or any suggestion for what’s to be built after the rubble is swept away.

This is the linguistic equivalent of giving a pistol to an eight-year-old.

This is rhetorical terrorism.

And as such, it renders Donald Trump an enemy of this country, its principles, and its people.

He is a traitor to anyone who thinks, or cares, or loves.

Donald Trump is your enemy.

Let us be rid of him.

And soon.

All things being equal: the most simplistic explanation is the one most likely to be believed.

///

Okay. This is gonna be nuts.

I am going to prove the principle of Hokum’s Razor to you. And weirdly enough, there’s no better example of it than the word itself.

Stick with me, k?

Hokum’s Razor is a verbal riff on two things:

First – the word “hokum” which is a fun way of saying “nonsense.”

And Second – Occam’s Razor – the 14th century philosophical precept which most of us think means something like this:

“All things being equal, the simplest explanation tends to be the right one.”

Here’s the thing: That’s not what Occam’s Razor says.

It’s actually a line from the movie “Contact,” and is a slightly fancified way of putting this generally held scientific principle:

“When there are two competing explanations for an event, the simpler one is more likely.” 

Unfortunately, this principle also is not Occam’s Razor. It’s actually another simplification of an entirely different statement:

“We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.”

This… also… is not Occam’s Razor. William of Ockham didn’t write that statement. Isaac Newton did. In his own reinterpretation of Occam’s Razor. Even friggin Newton wanted a chance at rewriting the goddamn thing.

So… what the hell is Occam’s Razor? Naturally, there are several different statements that scholars say are William of Ockham’s words. And, surprise surprise… they’re all in Latin.

I’m gonna give you my favorite one. Not that I read Latin. I don’t. It’s just the most impressive-sounding one. It it is:

“Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem”

Translated into English, this means – and I’m not kidding:

“Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.“

Like, really. That’s what it means in English. Don’t complicate shit… As if he knew people were going to spend centuries quoting and misquoting him.

Please join me as I soak in this perfect, bonkers irony.

 

As I was saying…

Do you see how I inadvertently proved my own point? I didn’t do this on purpose – I realized it after the fact.

I could have based the definition to Hokum’s Razor on that statement… on Occam’s actual Razor… but I didn’t. Because that statement (despite its precise language) is actually far more complicated a thought than Contact’s definition – “All things being equal, the simplest explanation tends to be the right one.”

Occam’s Razor is too tough an idea. Too unforgiving. It’s a precept often used by physicists to strip away faff, metaphysical irrelevancies – as strict and as serious as a carpenter’s rasp.

It’s too complicated.

I’m not smart enough to really understand it.

So I chose the simpler one.

And this… I think… is why we’re fucked.

We’re fucked because I’m dumb. And because I’m right.

When faced with a complex set of circumstances… most people will choose to believe whatever’s easiest to understand. Because the vast majority of us just don’t have the time for nuance. True complexity makes us itch. Even the moderately educated, and reasonably intelligent among us (hello!) don’t want to dedicate ourselves to the mastery of a concept.

We’re happy just to fudge it.

And that, I’m sorry to say, is why Donald Trump was destined to be our president.

Because on the one hand we had Hillary Clinton who (despite it all) is a sober-minded, dedicated policy machine. She’s a seasoned states-person, and a strict rationalist who understands and thrives on the complexities of the issues facing this country and the world at large.

And then there’s Donald Trump. He promised to, “Make America Great Again.”

Just as Bush distorted, packaged, and sold the War on Terror… because, “They hate us for our freedom.”

Just as religions elide their inconsistencies… because, “God works in mysterious ways.”

Just as the NRA will continue to obstruct gun restrictions… because, “the only thing to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

Because the world is way too much to think about… and questions keep us up at night.

Because ignorance truly is bliss.

When a culture becomes inured to terror.

///

A police officer kneels on a man’s throat for nine minutes. The man pleads for his life. He dies.

A man checks into a hotel room with an arsenal slung over his shoulder. He opens his window and fires into a crowd of over 20,000 people. He wounds over 500. When it finally ends, he’s killed 59.

A man walks into a gay bar in Orlando and murders 49 people with an assault rifle. One he purchased legally.

A boy shoots his mother. Drives to an elementary school. Murders six adults. 20 children.

We have a name for this. Those with something to lose refer to it by innuendo. Those who wish to be accurate call it “terrorism.”

Odd how routine it all is, and how we all respond our own particular portrayals of grief – each one sickeningly familiar:

We post messages of sorrow and outrage to social media. Many lead to arguments which lead to nowhere.

Our leaders confess their heartache and frustration. Pundits and essayists ferret out what’s to blame.

One by one, our late-night funnymen (and woman!) added their newest statements of sorrow, bewilderment, outrage, and solidarity.

The NRA, sniffing blood in the air, responds with their standard position of moral cowardice and reptilian self-interest.

That death can be so near, so simple, so sudden and so terribly violent – that indeed is terrorism.

That we’ve become so accustomed to it, however, the slaughter of our neighbors, and the unwillingness or inability of our systems to muster even the barest action against it… that, I propose, requires its own term.

I call it “horrorism.”

I’ll explain…

When I was in college, I had this really wonderful Gothic Lit professor. He was born for the role – lean and hollow-cheeked… gaunt… a morbid yet ultimately benevolent weirdo who looked effortlessly like Edgar Allan Poe. He lectured to the middle-distance, never once meeting his students eyes, and spoke in a dreamy, faraway croak. His office was a book-strewn crypt, bathed in amber light, in the basement of my campus’ oldest and most thoroughly begargoyled building.

Oh, and his surname was the Italian word for dark.

All of this is true.

I was probably 19 when I took his class. Which, I’m sorry to say, was quite a while ago. And while most of his lectures have faded over time… one lesson sticks with me: the difference between terror and horror.

Now to you or me, terror and horror are pretty interchangeable. Were there some distinction to be drawn, it’d surely be a tedious and pedantic one. We can swap those terms in conversation without any major derailment of understanding. For example: as a borderline arachnophobe, it doesn’t really matter what I call the feeling I have about, say, a spider crawling up my leg – the outcome remains the same: I will rip off my clothes and set the couch on fire.

But there is a distinction to be drawn. And while it might seem fusty and academic… I would argue it is essential.

This is it: Terror comes first.

Terror is fear in the future tense. It’s the anticipation of violence and death. In slasher movies, Terror is what you feel as a coed pads through a dark hallway… it’s the shred of the orchestra as she reaches for the blood-smeared doorknob.

Horror is what she sees once she opens the door. Terror comes first. Horror comes after. Horror is terror, realized. It is terror in its present tense. It’s what we’re left to live with once our fears have come to pass.

To paraphrase my Gothic Lit professor: Terror is the smell of a corpse in a dark room. Horror is what you see when you finally turn on the lights.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, as of September 13th, 2017, there have been 43,363 incidents (by which they refer to shootings).

253 of those incidents were classified as Mass Shootings.

10,818 people have been killed.

511 were children.

I have not calculated the newest numbers into these figures. But the death count will most certainly rise. Probably in a day. Maybe in an hour. If you’re curious, here’s a link.

That gun violence of this magnitude can inflict itself on so many people without warning or reason – that it could happen to any one of us at any moment: that’s terror.

That even in the face of such unimaginable violence and sorrow – that this terror has become normalized by the feckless self-interest of our leaders, that we would rather fight about this online than see it changed in the world, that  billion dollar industries in this country thrive on the harm we cause one another, that millions of Americans would hold their desire to own a machine gun above another person’s right to not be murdered by one, that we could witness the murder of children and somehow be unmoved: that’s horror.

If we’re going to have to live with this as our new reality – I think it’s only fitting that we give it a name.

The fear of violence inflicted on us is terrorism.

But our inaction is a different kind of violence altogether.

Inaction is a violence we inflict upon ourselves.

It’s time we call it what it is.

A dull, listless, and generally uninspired manner of speech or writing.

///

A few years ago, I was in a play. It was a Shakespeare play, and so I was as intolerable as you might expect – bursting around the room in fits of empurpled monologuery.

One evening at rehearsal, the director and I we’re discussing a certain scene I shared with another actor. Now, there are two things that are important to know here:

1. I didn’t understand what was happening in the scene.

2. The other actor and I didn’t like each other.

The other actor didn’t like me because, well, you’d have to ask him. I assume it’s because he thought I was difficult and obnoxious… both of which are fair observations about my personality.

I didn’t like the other actor because (aside from being a dull, tiresome human being) he didn’t bother to actually understand the words he was saying. He didn’t care to know. In truth, he didn’t really even seem to like Shakespeare all that much. He just liked being looked at. He’d have been just as happy standing up and eating a ham sandwich… so long as he was doing it on stage. Now, that’s a totally understandable experience… to get a thrill out of acting and performance (being noticed by other people). But comeon, man. Show a bit of bloody respect for the author – if nothing else, he’s the one who’s allowing you to get on stage in the first place.

Anyway.

So I’m talking with the director… and I’m trying to work out what the hell is going on. And the other actor’s sitting across from us, rolling his eyes and checking his cellphone.

After a minute or two it all clicks, and I realize what the scene is about. “Oh!” I say, “It’s a farce! I get it now!”

And the director claps me on the back and says, “Yes! Exactly,” and we exchange a pleasantry or two and then he walks away to help someone else.

I turn back to my scene partner, apologizing for the delay… and he glares at me and sneers:

“Why do you have to use big words?”

“Excuse me?”

“You. You use big words a lot. ‘Farce’ what’s that about?”

“But… the scene is a farce. Farce is the word you use to describe a farce…”

“It’s a big word.”

“It’s five letters long… how is that a big word?”

“I think you’re just being pompous.”

(and then I said something totally pompous)

“Well, no. I’m not. If you want to be technical… I was being pedantic. NOW I’m being pompous.”

///

Here’s the problem I have with this whole scenario:

Why is using a word… any word… a bad thing? How could that possibly be?

Why is an active and deliberate love of language, and more pointedly the use of a specific word anything other than wonderful? Words are always an opportunity. They can be anything – terse, clear, and simple… or something more florid… a overgrowth of phonemes and beautiful, wondrous syllabary. Words should be understood, studied, poked and prodded… and should always be celebrated. Anything else is a waste.

Or, to put it another way: Why am I pompous just because you don’t understand what I’m saying?

We are blessed to have our language. It’s the greatest invention – almost magical – how it takes even the most complex thought or idea, transmutes it into sound, wafts it through space and time and into your ear where it jangles an armature of impossibly tiny bones which sends crackles of energy through your nerves and into your brain where it’s molded back into an idea – all faster than you can think.

Words are thoughts suspended in glyph and song. They are magic. They are science. And with more words than any other language in the world, English itself is overwrought with bountiful opportunity. Lexicographically fecund one might (I might) say! Why don’t we dive in and swim and frolic and enjoy our language for its every syllable?

Shame on you for using the phrase as blank and odious as “big word” to diminish or deride.

Words are only big to people with small minds.

One held captive for a time by an insurmountable amount of snow.

///

 

I’m a sucker for a snow day.

I love everything about it – the peacefulness of it, the white noise that fills the house as snow tings against the windows, the slow, patient obliteration of every discernable shape outside. Getting snowed in is an event, a little bit of home theater complete with set dressing and props: the blanket cocoons and muppet movies on repeat, the stovetop cauldrons of chicken soup and half-finished board games. There’s something illicit about snow days; they feel like you’re getting away with something… or from something – the humdrum responsibilities that come with being a living, functioning human being.

Big storms throw everything into chaos. They shut down cities and ground airlines. They force the purveyors of public transportation to cancel their routes. They stuff grocery stores to bursting with the harried and the panicked… thousands upon thousands of gortex-clad people in a desperate scramble for perishable necessities – bread and eggs and milk. Big storms upend routine. Force you to stay in place. They make you sit. Hunker down. Talk. Go slow. Snow storms make you make the most of them.

And in this way, they are very much like the opening of The Empire Strikes Back.

How’s that for a transition?

I can hear you duh’ing me, Internet. Snow. Hoth. Snow on Hoth. Duh. I get it. But it’s more than that.

The first third of ESB is a great piece of storytelling. It opens on the second chapter of a massive saga by slowing things waaaay waaaay down. It takes its time to set the stage, reintroduce its characters and remind us of what they’re up against. It’s in those slow opening moments that we start to see real characters develop. We see them deepen their friendships and start falling in love, we see a hero take the next essential steps in his journey, and we get a crystal clear metaphor of just how plucky and hardscrabble the good guys really are: fresh from their big victory at the end of the previous film and with the bad guys hot on their trail, the Alliance takes a deep breath, bundles up, and carves a tiny bit of solace out of a miserable, frozen wasteworld. Good metaphor.

All of this comes about because the story, essentially, takes a snow day. It stops. It wraps itself up. It snuggles up to the people who matter most, and lets the snow fall outside. ESB is my favorite (my only favorite) Star Wars movie… due in large part to that very thing.

It takes its time.

I love taking my time. It’s my favorite way of getting where I’m going.

So, me? I’m excited about Jonas. I can see him scudding closer and closer, and I don’t mind a bit. I’m locked and loaded; got my kitchen fully stocked, two dozy cats, a girlfriend, some books, a video game, and some movies. Empire Strikes Back, naturally.

I’m staying put this weekend. And I can’t wait to see where that takes me.

 

 

A fight over who originated a certain thought, statement, or opinion.

///

The other day, while waiting for a barista (sullen, sighing, and beautiful) to put the finishing touches on my Americano (yeah, I know…), I overheard two early 20-somethings debating… something.

I didn’t actually get to hear the subject of the debate. All I could glean was that this thing was “so derivative.” On this opinion they both steadfastly agreed. It was indeed derivative. Totally derivative, actually. When and from what it was derived, who knows? They didn’t say. But boy howdy did they agree in ways numerous and emphatic, that it was not really, “as, ya know… legitimate… ya know?”

I paid for my coffee (four bucks! what?!) and listened for as long as I could, smiling. I remember having conversations like this. I remember how much they mattered.

The first time I heard anyone use that word in such a context was when I was 23 years old. I had just graduated college, and I was putting my English degree to exceptional use at a book store (RIP Borders). I was about as obnoxious as you can imagine. I spent my days condescending to perfectly friendly suburbanites, flirting with my coworkers, and wearing hats indoors. I donned ironic t-shirts and carried novels around with me for everyone to see (Lolita… because I was a romantic) and was basically your bog standard, twenty-something twit cleaving desperately at a borrowed sense of individuality.

One of my coworkers – I’ll call him Randall – was a smokey, Derrida-quoting hipster. Randall was 30 years old… he wore a lot of black. He liked his coffee cold-pressed, his movies Swedish, and his authors unpronounceable. He was preoccupied by the postmodern, and, of course, Randall was working on a screenplay. His second. Everyone at that particular Borders had their own side-projects. We were all writing something. I was pretending I wasn’t pretending to be Kurt Vonnegut. Another guy was writing a scifi epic about aliens, enslaved and harvested by an evil galactic empire in order to open conduits to “blood space” (a magical, transwarp corridor through spacetime, fueled entirely by blood… which in retrospect sounds awesome). Out of all of us, Randall was the least hopeful, the most frustrated, cynical and disengaged, entirely assured of his own obscurity, but pushed forward anyway… because it wasn’t about success… “it was about the work.”

Randall had the least hope, and therefore was the most legitimate.

It’s a common enough image, but this was in 2004. Hipsterism was still in its earlyish phase. We’d yet to reach the comfortable age of the beflanneled, urban lumberjack. There was no Warby Parker, and jeans had yet to constrict to their skinniest. People chatted on Motorola Razors about the article they just read in Adbusters. These were early days. And yet, there was Randall – perched behind the info desk at Borders books as though he’d always been there, running his hands through his hair, and staring down his nose at everything.

He was over it before being over it had even begun. And god, did we love him for it.

I adored Randall. Randall also adored Randall. So upon that rock, we built our friendship.

One night as we were closing up, the CD player (physical media – the dark ages!) chunked its way over to Madeline Peyroux’s debut CD, something I’d chosen because I’ve always been an old mom in my heart, and Peyroux reminded me a lot of Billie Holiday (who I grew up listening to… because of my mom). Within moments of her first throaty ballad, Randall slapped the CD Change button and announced to no one (by way of anyone nearby) that, “I can’t listen to this. It’s just so… derivative.” He punctuated this observation with a haughty snort, and gazed around for reply.

“Ugh,” I fidgeted, “Right? SO derivative!”

Randall nodded at me. The CD player shifted its tray. Interpol’s second album spun to life, and I trundled off to the stacks, a tower of trade paperbacks in my arms.

So, I’d ask why I did this… but we all know why I did this. I didn’t want to appear lame in front of a guy I thought was cool. My question is, why was that one CD uncool (aside from its inherent mommishness, which I do not debate) just because it was similar to another thing? I enjoyed listening to Madeline Peyroux… not in spite of her similarity to Billie Holiday, but BECAUSE of her similarity to Billie Holiday. Because there’s something sweet and romantic to her voice. Because it reminded me of the music my mom listened to in the car, or in her office, when she was trying to work her way through a problem.

Why is novelty so goddamn important? Does it really, honestly, matter that much in the end? Why can’t we be as delighted by the copy of a thing? Or at least appreciate it for the thoroughness of its approximation? Where do we learn to obsess over that one particular neurotic bugbear?

The barista handed me my Americano, and seeing that there were no open tables at the cafe, I headed for the door, past the two twenty-somethings still agreeing to disagree with everything – bouncing around through a jangly, caffeinated debate that I’d had so many times before. We’ve all had that debate. A hundred times. It’s such old hat. It’s so unoriginal. And I’d tell them that… but honestly, where’s the fun in originality?

The excavation of your living space, and slow, painstaking recreation of where the hell you put your friggin keys.

///

A recent dig spanning from under the couch cushions, to your bathroom, back to the couch cushions again shows they were in your pocket the whole goddamn time.

One who will consume anything, despite already having everything.

///

In psychology there’s this fascinating of malady… it’s called polydipsia. Polydipsia – a wonderful word… It’s Greek for “many thirsts.” Bottomless. Unquenchable. Insatiable thirst.

People with polydipsia have to be monitored constantly. If not, they’ll compulsively gulp and guzzle any fluid… drinking so much over and over they’ll essentially dilute themselves to death. Their body will fall into a terrible chemical imbalance, they’ll seize, their heart will stop, and they’ll die.

Because something in their mind can’t tell them when they’ve had enough.

A deep-fried wad of emulsified chicken sludge whose existence strains the definition of food.

///

Of all the cultural perversions perpetrated by McDonalds… none is more eerie than the standardization of the word “nugget.”

Nugget.

It’s just fucking disgusting.

A fictional female character whose peculiarities and travails seem moving at first, but ultimately lack dimension.

///

Who was the first Manic Pixie Dream Girl? Was it Zooey Deschanel? Or is she just the trope’s apotheosis?

Someone should write a history of the trend and score it to a plunking ukulele ditty.