My Name in Digital Lights - "Love Seat"

The good folks at WISDUMB TOOTH published my short little tale "Love Seat", which you can read by going here.

Another journal rejected this piece saying they wanted to see what the girl would say when the narrator caught up to her.  I know everyone is entitled to their opinion, but that, to me, is a rather stupid one. 

4 Points for Teachers to Consider, or: Shut the Hell Up

It’s the time of the semester I love most: the end.  This is the time when I get to wrap things up and feel a sense of completion, and when I get to plan for the next set of classes, think of what to do better, what mistakes to address, what improvements to make.  This is also the time when my colleagues decide to vent, which is a nicer way of saying bitch. 

A few essays, articles, blog posts, and Facebook rants have made their way across the Hungry Inferno radar this week, the gist always the same: students suck.  They’re lazy and they lie.  They ask inappropriate questions and have a sense of entitlement.  They show up late and miss class and then ask for extensions, all things I would never do.  Fucking assholes…

All true, but so what?  What do you hope to achieve with these rants?  Sympathy?  Fuck you; your job is hard, but you knew that going in. 

To combat this tide of bitching, I’ve composed some things that teachers, especially those who teach freshman composition, ought to keep in mind:

1.  If you remember that most people are assholes, you won’t be surprised when they act like assholes. 

I don’t always recommend pessimism but it’s a good way to not be surprised by people’s assholish behavior.  And, like most people, students can be assholes.  But they’re kids.  You’re an adult, therefore your asshole behavior is worse than theirs.  And writing a list of things that you would never have asked a professor when you were a student is the act of an asshole, asshole. 

2.  You were different than they are.

Most teachers remember what they were like as students and are amazed that the kids they instruct don’t act similarly.  I hear/read this all the time: when I was a student I was early to every class and I did all my work on time.  Of course.  You liked school.  Or you understood its importance.  How do I know this?  Because you're a teacher.  Most people who hate school don’t go into teaching.  But you did, so chances are you come from an environment that values education.  Maybe your parents exposed you to ideas and books at an early age.  Maybe they encouraged you.  Maybe they even supported you while you were a student.  And so you met the challenges and asked the right questions and developed relationships with your professors and you sought help when you needed it and did the extra credit when it was offered.  But if you work where I work you ought to know that this is not the reality of our students.  They have grown up in very different environments.  They are used to passing a class because they showed up.  You can barely imagine the lives they have led, the things they have experienced, and the problems they have faced.  By ignoring this, or worse, making a joke about the students and their poor skills, you become an elitist jerk, fulfilling a stereotype about  college professors.  Nice work.

Also, question the material you use in the classroom.  Personally, I think all English classes ought to use poetry, literature in translation, and avant-garde fiction, but clearly that’s not allowed in ENG 101.  And I never expect my students to give a shit about the things that interest me.  So maybe you grew up reading books.  Maybe you loved Salinger or Kerouac or Jane Austin when you were their age, but there’s a very good chance that your students couldn’t give a rat’s ass.  Maybe your love of Salinger or Kerouac or Jane Austin led you to go from high school to college to grad school.  Then you started teaching after a long time in academia.  Maybe you don’t understand what life outside academia is like.  Maybe you worked during school making cappuccinos or clerking in a video store.  But that’s not the experience of most of your students.  Keep in mind that Paulo Freire’s banking concept of education cuts both ways.  Thus, it might be to your and your students’ benefit to consider material that will engage and challenge, rather than alienate. 

Which leads me to my next point…

3.  Times have changed.

If you grew up when I grew up and studied when I studied, you may notice that things have changed.  There’s this thing called the Internet.  There are these gadgets called Smart Phones.  We can debate the merits of these gizmos later, but one cannot deny that these iThings have created a new problem, or, if you prefer, they exacerbated a pre-existing problem.  In short: all these devices have cultivated a culture that values speed and convenience.  One of the downfalls of this is that young adults, already an easily distracted lot, are often unfocused.  Email and Blackboard don’t help, as these technological tools further the idea that instructors are always only a few keystrokes away.  Office hours are, essentially, stretched beyond the times posted on your door.  So if a student expects you to answer an email at nine PM, you can’t fault them completely.  They are online constantly.  They are tweeting and texting as if doing so were a physical necessity.  They are in constant contact with their family and friends.  And they think this is normal.  Of course when we were students we had none of these options.  We knew that a meeting with a teacher had to be set up in advance and held during a specific timeframe.  And while students today need to understand that you are not required to reply to their requests immediately, you shouldn’t be surprised when these kids, raised on social networks and YouTube videos, assume you’ll always be online.  It’s a bitch, but what isn’t? 

Another symptom of our instant access culture is that these before mentioned unfocused brats are (guess what) unfocused.  This presents a challenge, one that all teachers have had to address, but now it’s worse than ever.  Well, at least worse than it was when you were their age.  This doesn’t excuse their lack of focus but at least try to address the problem, not the symptom.  How to address the problem?  Engage, engage engage.  Consider ways to make your lectures a little more tech savvy and interactive.  PowerPoint slideshows, the occasional video, and group work go a long way.  You’ll likely still have a few bored students texting, but bitching about it on Facebook won’t help.

4.  What’s behind your decision to teach?

I get it.   You’re frustrated that no literary agent will look at your manuscript, which would allow you to snag a book deal, which would allow you to teach MFA students how to write turgid, dull MFA novels.  But until that happens, you’re stuck teaching freshman comp.  I know how you feel because no literary agent will look at my manuscript.  But while I know very well that I am a goddamn genius, I don’t expect anyone else to know this.  And I know that, until my genius is properly introduced to the world, I have to remember that these classes I teach, which are not always the classes I might want to teach, are populated with students who deserve a teacher without a fucking ego.  Remember also that these students are not writers.  They may tweet and text ‘round the clock, but they don’t give a shit about comma splices and thesis statements.  They should and they need to if they are going to pass your class and most classes ahead of them, but they need motivation from an invested instructor who doesn’t talk shit about them behind their backs.  One day you’ll get to teach MFA students how to write like Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith, but until then remember who they are, not who you wish they would be.

  

I am not a perfect teacher.  Not by a long shot.  But I know this, so I let go of my ego.  I also know that my life outside of my job should not interfere with my time in the classroom. 

Okay, rant over.  Go back to your summer vacation. 

Alive and Twitching

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Eleven years ago I stopped eating meat.  It was easy.  People often ask: how did you do it?  Answer: I stopped putting cooked animal flesh in my mouth, that’s how.

Quitting meat was easy because I was tired of eating it.  It didn’t make me feel good anymore and while I admit that some of it was still appetizing, thirty years of steak burritos, sausage pizzas, beef sandwiches, and White Castle burgers was enough.  I was done.

If you quit something, you’ve got to be ready.  You cannot quit because you think you should or because someone tells you it is the right thing to do.  If a part of you is still enjoying the thing you quit, you won’t be a quitter for long.

When I quit smoking, I was still enjoying it.  Still, I quit despite the realization that I was in love with cigarettes.  But they certainly did not love me back.  More and more, I was feeling winded from each smoke.  A nasty cough and phlegm problem followed me through each day.  I could smell the stink on myself, in my clothes and hair.  I felt diseased.  But I loved smoking.  I loved the way it  complemented breakfast.  I loved how it made alcohol stronger.  A shot, a beer, a smoke.  That’s the natural order of things, and when the city decided to ban smoking in bars, I took it as a sign that the universe simply did not want me to smoke anymore.  That and the wheezing. 

Quitting smoking was hard, sure, definitely not the same as quitting meat.  Whereas not eating meat was simply a matter of just saying no, cigarettes had a tighter grip on me.  Stopping was a slow process that required cessation rather than the old cold turkey.  But I’m off the coffin nails.  I feel much better, thank you, and I am well aware that one single cigarette is enough to get me back on them full time.

Sum total, I smoked for a solid thirteen years.  I dabbled in high school, started for real in college, quit in the late nineties, picked it up again in the mid-aughts and kept it going until 2008, the year of the before mentioned smoking ban.  While some people maintain their habit longer, I scattered mine. But I made up for the gaps, trust me.  My brother likes to say that I packed a lifetime of smoking into a few years.  This is because I smoked so many goddamn cigarettes in a single day.  My average was a pack and a half, though I could easily venture into two packs a day if I had nothing else to do.  In the summer of 1995 when I was unemployed and people were dying from the heat, I had nothing else to do and, miraculously, enough money for two packs of cigarettes a day (that is, when I wasn’t bumming them from my friends).

My point: I tend to do things in abundance.  It’s an Italian thing.  When I cook, I cannot simply cook for one or two people.  My small meals become gargantuan.  Not so bad when you’re hungry but a problem when you’re smoking.  Two packs a day can also become three quite easily.

As difficult as quitting smoking was, and it was, I did it without too much trouble.  I cannot say the same for coffee.  Without a doubt, I am a caffeine addict.  I go mad without it.  I get headaches if I am not doused in caffeine by noon. (Once upon a time, I had to have some form of caffeine in my system by 9 AM.  I’m getting better.)  I first tasted coffee when my grandfather gave me a sip of his morning batch.  It seemed pleasing then, but there was enough sugar and cream in it to make it palatable to a child.  If you’ve read Bukowski’s Ham and Rye you may remember his description of his first taste of wine.  For him, it was rapturous.    I’ll always remember my grandfather’s coffee the way some people recall their first drink, not because, like Bukowski, I was hooked from that day on but because it seems like such an important rite of passage to being the kind of man I saw in my grandfather, the kind I wanted to emulate. 

A few years later, when I was old enough to decide that yes, I wanted to drink this stuff and, fuck it, I was old enough, I paid attention to the ways people took their coffee.  My dad took it black, which struck me as bold.  My mother skipped the sugar but added cream.  I tried to do the same but missed the sweetness, so I compromised—I drank it black with sugar (black as hell, strong as death, sweet as love).  And I watched my mother brew a pot.  The end result was a bit weak, so I played with her recipe of two scoops, upping it quite a bit.  The result was black sludge.  It didn’t drip into the pot so much as it thudded.  You could slice it with a knife.  Delicious.  I called it a pot of Joseph, it being too intense for the diminutive “Joe.” 

My mother began to notice that the coffee grounds were disappearing at an alarming rate.  She saw the used filter in the basket of the Mr. Coffee, grounds spilling over the brim and falling into the pot.  Coincidentally, I had begun to smoke unfiltered cigarettes, the tobacco often getting into my mouth.  Both of vices required that I spit out some of their excess.  Oh, my poor dentist.

I stopped drinking coffee at one point.  Actually, a few times.  Often I take it too far, like the smoking, and often it hurts.  So I decided that my stomach being so sensitive, I ought to stick to green tea, much easier on the constitution.  So I quit.  Why not?  I’d quit things before.

There is no comparison between quitting meat or smoking and quitting coffee.  Quitting coffee is a million times harder.  Day one of no coffee was horrible.  Day two was rotten.  Day three was miserable.  I could go on.  I have a thesaurus and could easily find enough synonyms, but I think you get the point.  It sucked.  Fucking sucked.  I had withdrawal symptoms: headaches, anxiety, irritability, and irrational thinking.  I saw reminders everywhere: people with their goddamn Starbucks cups; ads on the sides of buses for Starbucks; Starbucks, Starbucks, ubiquitous Starbucks.  That shit was everywhere, the reminder that I need only walk a block or two in any direction and there would a place to get me a goddamn cuppa java. 

The pounding headaches continued for weeks.  Really, it took a solid month of not drinking coffee before I felt stable.  Green tea, a delicious drink I still enjoy, provided some caffeine but it wasn’t even as sufficient as methadone is to a heroin addict.  Life without coffee made no sense whatsoever. 

But I quit.  It took a lot out of me, but I was off the stuff. 

A year passed.  Cassandra and I met some friends for lunch.  After, we walked down Milwaukee in the Wicker Park area, looking at the bodegas and shitty furniture stores that have closed down to make way for hipster shops.  We went into a Mexican bakery to get some pan dulce.  Almost immediately I smelled the coffee, a simple pot of Folgers with some cinnamon added.  That smell… my god, it was amazing.  Cassandra got a cup to go.  I decided to do the same.  Just one cup, I said.  What harm would that do?

It was a short trip from one cup at a bakery to an after dinner espresso to full relapse.  Soon my morning was not complete until I pushed the plunger on a French press.

After a year or so of mild to intense consumption, I quit again.  This time, I said, it would stick.  Green tea.  And a lot of Red Bull.  But then it occurred to me that drinking seven cups of green tea and a Red Bull every day was probably just as bad as three cups of strong coffee. 

Coffee, used here as a blanket term, presents itself in so many forms.  Say I’m tired of the standard drip cup.  Well, there’s espresso and milk and all the combinations.  And there’s a pour over coffee, which I had never heard of, which was enough to get me out of the house.  I had to try it.  And then there are the massive drinks that defy logic, like the Zombie at the Pick Me Up Café, a stunning combination of two cups of coffee and three shots of espresso topped with steamed milk and whipped cream served in an oversized mug.  The name implies a drink strong enough to wake the dead, and indeed it is a helluva dose of thunder.  And there’s the gourmet shops with their espresso shots yielding rich crema that houses all that caffeine, the greasy spoon diners where you might as well drink it black it’s so damn weak, Dunkin Donuts, purveyor of a consistently good cup of Joe and stale pastry, the oft mentioned Starbucks, the McDonald’s of highbrow coffee, and, well, McDonald's who recently decided to enter the classy coffee competition but really ought to stick to their run-of-the-mill cup which was always pretty good.  There’s Intelligentsia, rapidly becoming a chain in this city, servers of damn fine coffee but, sadly, staffed and patronized by hipster douche bags.  The bookshops have closed, the record stores have scaled back, but the cafés are alive and twitching. 

And with so much variety, after giving up so many other things, why not indulge in coffee?  Why not, indeed. Sip... Ah...

To end this, because I honestly have no idea how else to end this, I’d like to share a little ditty that my Grandfather introduced me to, just as he introduced me to coffee.  Enjoy. 

To Be or Not To Be a Man

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Conversation between Jeffrey Lebowski and Jeffrey Lebowski:

“What makes a man, Mr. Lebowski?…Is it being prepared to do the right thing, whatever the cost? Isn't that what makes a man?

“Hmmm... Sure, that and a pair of testicles.”

***

Last Sunday, my second favorite TV show, Mad Men, came back on the air.  (Those who know me already know what my number one is.)  Whenever this occurs, the media and the viewers get a little crazy with the Mad Men tie-ins that take the shape of cocktail specials, parody commercials, theme parties, and books.  Yes, there are books and classes devoted to the themes of Mad Men, though the most compelling idea to come from them that I’ve seen (and I’ve not been looking) has to do with the way the show traces the evolution of 50s norms into 60s reality.  The times they did-a change, and the show does a fantastic job of illustrating all of that.

Of course, many watch the show for the clothes and, I imagine, to peak into a world where a guy could still sexually harass a woman with impunity. 

I admit that I watched all of the last two seasons of the show prior to the start of this most recent semester.  I wanted to go into the classroom with a bit of Don Draper’s attitude.  The classroom is mine and I am in charge, or so I chanted.  If a student acts up or fails to hand in assignments on time, I’ll get Draper on their ass.  They will be dealt with just as Draper deals with his underlings, and they will fear and respect me. 

The idea that I model my ideal self as a teacher (or, apparently, disciplinarian) after a fictional character is somewhat outlandish.  Nevertheless, this is how many of us go through our days: reinforcing norms and performing our gender roles.  Don Draper is a masculine symbol, not merely for his incredible looks (those belong to John Hamm, actually) but for his attitude.  When he tells a client off, the client second-guesses himself.  He rules the conference room.  He commands respect.  He takes no shit.

***

John Hamm, by the way, used to be a teacher.  I wonder how Draper he was?

***

In this very classroom where I fail to emulate Don Draper, I do discuss an essay by Gary Soto called “To Be a Man”.  The reader makes an assumption about the contents just from reading the title.  One imagines Soto will deconstruct masculine behavior and make a comment about the unfortunate men who adhere to socially mandated expectations.  Surely the conclusion will be that men ought to adopt a more compassionate persona that allows them to be in touch with their feelings, this being as much of an affectation as the hyper-masculine, machismo drooling troglodyte.   

Actually, Soto’s essay deals with his vision of what it means to be a man, or his vision when he was a young boy.  He saw his father barely conscious in his chair in front of the TV after a long day of hard work, a beer at his side and not a word leaving his mouth.  This image of defeat compelled Soto to decide that being a man looked like too much work, so he decided to become a hobo, that being the only other option.   The essay ends with a bit about Soto’s life as an adult: steeped in academia, he watches men at faculty cocktail parties acting distinctly unmanly.  This is the opposite of the blue collar laborer.  The difference being huge to Soto, the other men are oblivious to the dichotomy as they laugh it up at the cheese plate. 

But is there simply this dichotomy, this pair of mutually exclusive possibilities?  Can a man be both the soft, pampered elitist and the hard drinking worker?  Are we doomed to be only mouth-breathing lugs or touchy-feely types?  Must we choose between asshole and Alan Alda? 

I reject all this.  At least I wish I did.

In a perfect world, I would be John Wayne reading poetry, drinking beer and eating brie.

***

As I was conducting all sorts of business yesterday, I somehow (yeah, right) stumbled onto my Rate Your Professor rating.  A whopping two entries were found, both agreeing that I am “chill,” whatever the fuck that means.  Cassandra interprets this to mean that I do not come off as an uptight, inflexible authoritarian there to torture the luckless students.  Rather, I am laid back and, thus, approachable, able to get my students to relax and pay attention, contribute, engage.  I hope this is true, but my reading of these seemingly positive evaluations is that I take it too easy on these students and ought to assign a lot more work.  Fuck chill: I ought to be Don Draper.  Draper is cool, but not chill. 

***

Cassandra has said more than once that she is glad I do not care about sports.  There’s no way she could endure the sports lover’s bullshit refrain: “I just want to see what the score is.” 

My lack of sports love marks me, in someone’s eyes I’m sure, as less than manly.  Men like sports.  Men also eat meat, preferably steak.  Men drink beer.  Well, one out of three ain’t bad.

(By the way: that Cassandra, the finest of all women, has opted to share her life with me is evidence that one need not be a sports lover to be a happy man.  Still, I experience the inverse of the male-female sports plight when it’s World Cup time.)

***

Of course, not all men eat steak, drink beer, and love sports.  Some of us eat tofu, drink whiskey, and love books.  And some of us act less like men and more like boys.  And some like sex with men and not with women.  Some think John Wayne was a lousy actor and terrible archetype (not me, of course).  Some get no excitement whatsoever from fast cars.  Some of us can barely change a light bulb much less the oil in our cars.  Some of us sit up worrying not about our careers but about the nightmare of being alone in an unforgiving universe.  Some of us would sooner eat glass than have children. 

Some of us, if we were crazy enough to have kids, would be fucked if they were male children, as we wouldn’t want to throw a football around with them.  We would certainly experience some odd cosmic humor in the form of a little boy who loved NASCAR, baseball, and the rodeo.  We'd dread little league games.  We’d have so little to say to that child, so little in common.  We’d cook them their tofu based dishes and read them some Yeats poems only to get laughed at, derided, wounded.  We’d anxiously wait for the day when that male child grew into a male adult, age eighteen we’d hope, and left the house for good.  We’d endure some awkward Thanksgivings and painful Christmases and find excuses not to converse.  We’d grow old and see our lives mocked in the form of our child.  We’d convince ourselves that we did a good job, the best we could, and maybe make jokes about the lack of interest our child took in our interests, children being their own little autonomous beings after all—you can’t make them love what you love, you just have to love them, even if you don’t like them and they don’t like you.  We’d tell ourselves all of this but we’d of course feel like failures. 

We’d look in the mirror one day and see the giant pussy looking back.  

***

Speaking of pussy: while walking my dog, a Chihuahua, down the cruel streets of Rogers Park, I got fucked with by some real men.  They were in a large vehicle, a truck of some sort, the kind of thing men drive.  As they drove past me, one yelled: "SHOW US YOUR PUSSY, SIR!"  

My dog, while big for his breed, is still a little guy.  Perhaps I look unmanly escorting him while he sniffs the ground and lifts a leg.  Even more so while he is clad in a sweater.  But I don't give a fuck.  I love that dog.  He's the closest I'll ever come to having a child.  He is my child, goddamnit.  And what the fuck do I care if some assholes in a gas guzzler feel the need to reaffirm their wayward definition of masculinity at my expense?  I should feel only pity for these pricks. 

So while I don't care if nurturing a small makes me seem, to some, unmasculine, I nevertheless retorted in a regrettable fashion; as the car drove away, I yelled: "What would you do with my pussy, faggot?"

Masculine habits are hard to break. 

***

I was fortunate (?) enough to attend a high school where there were no girls in sight.  Catholic school, they called it.  Apparently Catholics, like some Muslims, think females are too distracting for us boys.  Thus, the women were sheltered from us and taken across the street to the girl’s version of our Purgatory.  We matriculated without any real women around, just the ones in our heads. 

But once a year the school would gather us into the gym for a pep rally.  It was during this time that our raging hormones and stupid aggression would find release.  We screamed for our football team.  Me too.  My lack of interest in school sports didn’t matter—I was being given an outlet for all the frustration that besets the average teen.  I was chubby, not terribly bright, goofy looking, unpopular, angry, awkward, clumsy, and not very masculine.  But I could scream and stomp and act every bit the macho asshole without fear of reprisal. It was great.

In our collective action, we dumb boys felt like men, never more than during senior year, the year that ruined pep rallies for the rest of the school, or so I have been told.  You see, during that last pep rally we took shit too far.  Part of it was the fault of some of my classmates, especially the one who threw firecrackers under the bleachers, but a lot of the fault rests on the shoulders of the faculty and staff who gathered us together, encouraged us to behave like savages, and then, stupidly, ushered in some of those girls from across the street.  And they dressed them up like cheerleaders, a sight I had not seen save for a few bad teen movies.  In these bad teen movies, the cheerleaders were almost always sluts.  By the twisted groupthink of a young male psyche, these cheerleaders must also have been sluts, which is what we called sexually adventurous girls we pretended to know.  Regardless, the sight of these girls, sluts or otherwise, was enough to amp up the aggression.  And then the lights went out.

If memory serves, they wanted to show us a film and killed the lights just as the projector failed.  The result: two minutes of darkness.  In this short time I was knocked from my seat, my tie was removed, someone elbowed me, a weak but effective punch was landed, I got kicked and shoved.  When the lights came up, I was at two rows below where I had been sitting, mildly wounded and really fucking excited.  

This is perhaps the ultimate moment of my life’s masculinity, in the unrefined troglodyte sense.  Stupid, violent, pointless, exhilarating.  That’s what being a guy is all about!

***

Cassandra tells me that I cannot effectively explore the masculine identity without discussing my relationship with the men of my childhood, the role models, the ones who shaped me.  I answer: I cannot effectively explore masculinity, period. 

***

I’ve heard Thanksgiving called “man’s day” as it essentially involves men watching football and drinking beer during the many hours it takes the women to cook a large meal.  And this is one of the most popular holidays in America, rivaling Christmas.  What does this tell you? 

***

Recently I watched a silly, fluffy little documentary on this subject called Mansome, directed by the annoying little prick, Morgan Spurlock.  It attempts to deconstruct masculinity but falls really fucking short.  This is in keeping with all of Spurlock’s work.  He doesn’t bite off more than he can chew; he just bites and spits it out. 

One thing in Mansome that did strike me as interesting: there is a whole competitive circuit dedicated to facial hair growing.  An active competitor named Jack Passion, a dude with a Rip Van Winkle beard who has won some awards and carved out a bit of relative fame, stated (and I’m paraphrasing) that his beard is a symbol of his man’s hair while the hair on his head, cut very short, represents his boyhood look.  This struck me as worth considering.  The two sides of his male life— as a boy and as a man—find representation on his head, detailing the journey from youth to adulthood. 

While it is handy to look at a long beard and view it the way one would the rings of a cut tree, it certainly does nothing to demonstrate the maturation one hopes a dude Passion’s age would have.  And this is not to say that Jack Passion is a big child—I don’t know the guy, though he is pretty douchy in the film.  Still, if only there were a way to actually see the emotional growth. 

***

I've been lax on shaving these days, though I can't get a beard anywhere near normal length, not to mention the absurd length of Passion's.  I shave less because I am lazy and because Cassandra seems to like it.  But I am lazy.  And this is not manly.  Men do things.  They work with their hands.  They have ongoing projects, usually physical ones.  And they shave.

Shaving is a masculine ritual.  When I first started shaving I went electric.  That proved ineffective and so I switched to the razor and foam.  At the time, I asked a lot of men about their preferred method.  The answers revealed two aspects of stupid masculinity.  Those who preferred the electric razor did so because they like toys.  Men tend to dig gadgets, however impractical.  Others, the ones who still used the lather and razor, said they liked the tradition of the old style shave.  Some even went so far as to use a straight razor. Men keep traditions alive, however antiquated. 

We're so dumb.

Nature and Contempt, Holy Fear and Hogwash

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The time: just after Christmas, 2006.

The place: Taiwan, somewhere between Taipei and Taroko Gorge. 

My soft city ass was in the back of a car that didn’t seem to be in perfect working condition.  The car was traveling the winding, uphill roads along the side of a mountain.  Cassandra was beside me looking equally terrified.  In the front seat was a friend with whom I no longer speak and, to his right, his soon to be ex (I later learned that they were more or less broken up at the time but stayed together for the sake of our company).  The driver, which is what we’ll call him, seemed to be taking the curves rather quickly.  Taiwanese drivers like to pass each other, and the driver had no problem doing likewise.  If a car moved too slowly for his liking he gunned it, swerved into the opposite lane, and passed the other car.  The driver surely knew that no oncoming vehicle was approaching, but, not being in control, I couldn’t be so sure. 

To the right I saw a craggy mountainside that could have shredded the car like a cheese grader shreds Gouda.  To the left was the wide expanse of the Pacific Ocean.  We were pretty fucking high up.  The slightest veer might have sent us to a watery grave.  Of course, there were no guardrails.  (Later, after dark, we had to stop the car.  Falling rocks, the police said.  Twenty minutes later, the rocks were cleared and the cops told us we could proceed.  The rocks were cleared from the road, though there was no guarantee more wouldn’t fall from above.)

Before long, I was in the fetal position.  My heart raced and my thoughts zoomed from one bloody scenario to another.  And as I was wrestling with my mortality, the driver’s (ex)girlfriend, a sandal-wearing hippie chick with blonde dreadlocks and blue overalls, asked me if I love nature.  Being French-Canadian, her accent made the already strange question sound downright ridiculous.  I thought my terror was obvious, but maybe she couldn't tell.  In my typically smart-ass way, which I, unlike the rest of the world, find hilarious, I answered: “No, nature bores me.” 

As I was visibly scared shitless, the response was supposed to be the sort of deadpan ironic remark that Bill Murray would use to raise a dry smile.  I was curled up in a ball, for Christ’s sake.  She did not laugh.  Blame my poor delivery or maybe the cultural barrier. 

The rest of the trip was wonderful.  Sleeping in an empty room above a church, hiking through hills and spotting monkeys in trees, walking through a cave and waterfall—it was all very beautiful.  But I felt much better when we got back to Taipei. 

Taipei stank in places.  It was dirty.  There were people everywhere and stray dogs that lived on scraps.  The exhaust from the buses and cars and scooters was thick.  Most pedestrians wore masks over their mouths and noses.  The clutter of buildings was overwhelming and at times I was sure that I was lost.  Mastering the public trains presented a unique set of challenges. The map was strange, the spider web of lines leading who knows where.

I was much happier in the city among all the chaos.  But that’s just it: the chaos of man’s creation makes a certain sense to me.  The chaos of nature is infinitely scarier.  It has rules that I cannot always fathom.  It’s out of my hands.  It’s fucking frightening. 

****

When I was a wee little fucker, I used to go camping.  Well, my family used to go camping.  I went with.  What choice did I have?  

 I enjoyed it, or at least I recall enjoying it.  The memories I have are of the good times: the family and friends sitting around the campfire singing along to the radio, Maverick, my aunt and uncle’s enormous German Shepherd, running wild through the camp grounds, and, of course, s’mores. 

But now I think that I only remember the good times because that’s what I want to remember.  Surely I had fun, but the sleeping on the ground part doesn’t conjure up anything good.  I barely remember it, which is probably not an accident. 

Just after high school, I went camping with some friends.  It was a miserable weekend.  It rained the entire time.  It was cold.  In an attempt to warm up, I tried Jack Daniels for the first time, using it to wash down a nearly raw steak cooked over a weak fire.  I threw up that first night, the half-digested steak and whiskey making quite a mess on the wet ground.  The next morning, I slipped in my own sick.  My tent wouldn’t stay up.  I ended up sleeping in the backseat of my friend’s car.  It was warmer and, I figured, safer.  As a child I never considered all the things in nature that might kill me, animals highest among them.  No longer that naïve, I was petrified of the bears and wolves I imagined roamed the woods at night (not to mention the serial killers).  The car, an unnatural machine in the middle of the forest, felt safe. 

****

Like a lot of stupid men, I read Walden at a fairly young age and thought it might be great to someday leave society and live in a shack in the woods.  And then I saw The Simpsons.  Homer imagines what lofty thoughts he might have were he to live in such a manner.  His journal was dedicated to how much he missed TV. 

This idealistic view of nature and the simple life strikes me as absurd.  It’s no different than the primitivism movement in art that always bored me.  I’ve never liked the noble savage idolization, the idea that mechanized society is somehow too removed from nature and must be cured with doses of simple wisdom from people who live in the wild. 

Hogwash.

****

Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, he lived alone in the woods.

****

As great as trees are, and they are great, I prefer skyscrapers.  And campfires are cool, sure, but I’ll trade them for a lifetime of central heat and air conditioning.  You know what else is rather wonderful?  Indoor plumbing. 

****

Another great Simpsons moment: Homer is going to climb a large mountain called the Murderhorn.  His sponsor, voiced by Brendan Fraser, refers to the quest as a symbol of man’s contempt for nature. 

And that’s just it.  Man does have a certain level of contempt for nature.  Contempt and awe and fear.  Nature keeps us in check.  When we get a bit too big for our britches, Mother Nature is there to remind us that we do not own the world, we are merely renting.  And for this we must respect Mother Nature.  She’s our landlord.  But don’t we all hate landlords? 

(No offense, R.C.)

Not on My Watch

Poetry Magazine, a publication that has rejected me time and again (hoo hum), was nice enough to publish my letter in response to some E. E. Cummings bashing in a recent issue.  Read it here. I honestly can't believe Michael Robbins wrote what he did, tossing the ball right over the damn plate.  It's like he was begging someone to respond with the obvious insult.  Well, I was happy to oblige. 

Lars Iyer, Manifestos, Benchley, and the Inspiring Abyss

I'm nearly done with book one of my Jerzy Kosinski marathon (The Painted Bird, a true vision of hell), and I did promise myself I would read three more of his works in order to be truly acquainted with this writer, but I am itching to read Lars Iyer's trilogy Spurious, Dogma, and Exodus, all published by Melville House, one of the best presses in the country. 

In the meantime, I'll whet my appetite with this, Iyer's manifesto, published a while back but, you know, with all the other books, blogs, bits, and bytes bombarding me, not to mention cable and movies and, sometimes, work, I'm late to the game.  A friend once told me that writing manifestos in the age of Facebook seemed silly, and sure, I can understand that stance, but this manifesto does raise some very interesting points, though I might suggest that Iyer's condemnation of a culture that overproduces imitations of literature and publishes more books than there are readers is not unlike his claim that these works ape each other, as his criticism, though spot fucking on, is not all that new.  Robert Benchley said as much in the 1920s. 

As gloomy as this all might sound for would-be writers, critics, editors, and anyone interested in the world of books, physical or otherwise, I find Iyer's manifesto oddly inspiring.  Yes, we are on the precipice, but I happen to like the view.  In this state of reiteration and emulation, I find anything is still possible, and while I would never be dumb enough to try to create a masterpiece, I do realize that any day now someone might and that, fuck it, why not be vain enough to scribble some thoughts from time to time.  In short: Sodom is doomed to fall, but that's no reason not to enjoy the party.

Anyway, the manifesto is useful, thought provoking, funny, and provides perhaps the best advice I've ever seen for aspiring writers.  Sad, true, and duly noted. Give it a read.  What else do you have to do?

South of No North, North of No South

As of September of this the year of our lord 2013, I will have lived in the north side of Chicago for twenty years.  That’s almost half my life.  That being the case, one might conclude that I am now unquestionably a northsider.  Sure, why not?   Well… I can’t always say as much, since the south side (southwest, to be exact) roots run deep.  There are considerable differences between the two areas, though really, once you peal away the superficial, not so much.  Having spent time in both areas (though, to tell the truth, I have barely explored a lot of the real south side, at least not as much as anyone claiming to be a Chicagoan should), I've noticed a lot of the same bullshit, just presented differently.  For example: baseball separates the north and south side, represented by the Cubs and Sox.  Both sets of fans are equally obnoxious to me, and I could give a fuck about baseball these days, but I will say that the complaints about the Cubs fans (they’re a bunch of drunken yuppies) and the Sox fans (they’re a bunch of drunken tradesmen) seem pretty similar to me. 

Other differences: southsiders can’t imagine driving up north as, they fear, there is no place to park.  I admit, it is a problem, but one you get used to.  Now, this bothered me less in the glorious years before Daley screwed us with his parking meter privatization (I’ll never forgive him for that), but I feel that the parking, or lack thereof, is a small price to pay for living up here.  Anyway, I live in Rogers Park, which, I admit, is no parking paradise, but it’s hardly as bad as Lakeview or Lincoln Park.  And, while we’re at it, my neighborhood is hardly the yuppie-laden land my south side pals might imagine.  It’s pretty blue collar, has some crime, some danger, some fun, some great places to eat and drink, and, in many ways, feels like home.  Clark Street from Devon to Howard reminds me a bit of Archer Avenue.  But I don’t know that my south side connections get that, mainly because they never come up here.  I realized long ago that if I wanted to see my family (with the exception of my mother and stepdad and brother, who have come up many times) or my old friends, I would have to make the effort because they sure as shit were not going to.  I can count on one hand the times my extended family (love you all) has come to visit and I can count on two fingers the number of times my old friends (miss you all) have made the trek.  But that is my fault, of course, for defecting.  (Not to sound bitter or anything.  I know they all kids and jobs and lives that busy them.)

Again, parking is the issue, but another factor might be the actual length of time it takes to get up here.  Okay, I get that, but really, the drive is not so bad.  I’ve done it many times, sometimes more than once in a single weekend.  (I might ask some people to look up the word reciprocity in the dictionary.)

I don’t want to pick on my south side buddies only.  Many of my north side friends have also expressed misgivings about the south side.  In fact, I get a lot of questions along the lines of: “Is it violent?” and  “Will I get mugged?”  I remind them that I grew up in the southwest suburban area near Midway, not in the heart of Englewood, but to these northsiders, everything past the Loop is a ghetto. 

The problem has to do with representation.  The most recent example is the Showtime program, Shameless, which I have been digging lately.  While it’s good, skuzzy fun, it exists in a fantasy of Chicago, despite being mostly filmed here.  The show takes place on the “south side” which is never 100% defined.  One character referred to her neighborhood as Back of the Yards, which seems consistent with many of the street names mentioned on the program, though, in reality, the show is filmed on 21^st near Kedzie.   No matter—the actual location of the characters is not terribly important—this is fiction, after all—but there are numerous references to the “north side” that make it sound, again, as if everyone up north lives in a giant condo and has gobs of disposable cash.  The north side has plenty of shitty areas (Uptown still gets a little hairy at times), but not in the universe of Shameless.  It’s just too easy to write tales of the divide between these two parts of town, thus, when a character goes north to visit someone, the obvious choice of location is the Gold Coast.

And while we’re on the subject, there are a ton of areas excluded by the north/south split, mostly, the west side, which is never really discussed, as the Bulls and Hawks belong to everyone.  And the south side itself is composed of many different neighborhoods.  To say you are a southsider could mean you live in Bridgeport, Kenwood, Englewood, Hyde Park, or Hegewisch, for example.  So, just as the southsiders tend to cling to easy ideas of what goes on up here, the northsiders do very much likewise. 

A while ago, I posted online about my life since moving up north.  I mentioned that I used to eat steak burritos, White Castle burgers, and Italian beef sandwiches fairly regularly when I lived south.  Now I eat tofu, Thai food, and drink kefir for breakfast.  These were easy classifications, and my last trip to a Dominick’s on the south side netted me some kefir, couscous, and a fair amount of foods that I would have considered yuppie crap years back.  There’s even a Starbucks or two!  It may be happening slowly, but my old blue collar neighborhoods are going the way of the latte.

This is all to say that none of it matters.  If where you live is how you define yourself, well, there’s something wrong with you.  Not to say one ought to be complacent about or indifferent to their surroundings, but while I recognize the greatness of my city, I see how different its many pockets are from each other, which makes it hard to say I am a Chicagoan since I am really only familiar with a fraction of this town.  Okay, a few fractions, but I know better than to let such silly definitions (northsider/southsider) define me.  Nevertheless, it is somewhat inescapable. 

My old boss from the Aspidistra once told me he never would have hired me if knew I came from the south side.  When I moved here, my old pal John D.P. told me to make sure my shoelaces were tied while walking around Wrigley Field.  The tag line for the Southtown Economist used to read, “People Up North Just Don’t Get It.”  I saw a guy once on the El wearing a shirt with “US Cellular, where there’s more drive-bys than line drives” printed on it next to a Sox Sux logo.  And god knows there are far more Cubs Suck shirts worn around US Cellular.  Dear lord, how can a city so divided stand?