The Nervous Breakdown

You're Jammin' Me

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:43 GMT

GRAND BLANC, MI-

This post was deleted by the "left wing" community of DKos. I therefore repost it here, a much more friendly site.

Unlike most on the left, I have no problem with the wiretapping bill. The only reason freedom of speech was ever semi-granted by the Founding Fathers is because they knew (in their infinite wisdom, except when not diddling or horse whipping their slaves) that no one listens to anyone, minus themselves, anyway. "That's just old Clem. He don't mean no harm."

The passage of ISA Amendments Act of 2007, or S.B. 2248, or WTF #10563, has rattled a few people but otherwise been ignored by those rattling their babies' toys, wondering when to start the first French, piano and Latin lessons, as well as preparing the now-babies of the future to become overconfident, preening adults.

But there is something we can do besides complain. Lord, I hate complainers. If I never heard another complaint, I would forever stop complaining.

Let's, then, accentuate the negative. An effective proactive response to any action against the Executive Branch, or our knee-wobbled Congress, amounts to a wolf crying, "Human!" No one cares. They can't be bothered. They're busy.

I suspect most of us still have phones, even if we can only afford pre-paid minutes. In our pockets and hands and cars and even underwater while scuba diving, we have power. We are the people, or we are the people (revisit Taxi Driver). If not, I wonder what we are. We'd better prove it to ourselves because those damn dirty apes are ready.

Here's the plan. Join with me, won't you? Don't waste your time on telethons. Jerry Lewis, it's over. Hire a head shrinker, and I don't mean a psychotherapist.

Whenever picking up the phone, wait for an inappropriate pause and say something suggestive of but not exactly a threat...just enough to draw the ear of someone who looks like Harrison Ford at the beginning of Apocalypse Now.

Example: "I'm going to my favorite bar on the Lower East Side, and I've got a bomb in my pants." Or, "This is Azzam Mahmud. I am positive and convinced that you would provide me with the solution to a money transfer deal valued at U.S. $13 Million and subsequently a joint business venture involving detonation work."

Before freedom of speech was dismantled -- and it's been happening in far more important ways than wiretapping -- no one listened to anyone. Hate all you like on the President of the Poor Choice in Ranch Society; no one cares about that, either. They've heard it before. They've said it themselves or believe otherwise (and there's no convincing them that the moon is not the devil's white eye, waiting for us to sign the contract, for hell is located beneath Promontorium Kelvin, Lat: 27.0°S, Long: 33.0°W, Diam: 50 km, Depth: 1.88 km, Rükl: 52).

It's time to act, and I mean that in the literal sense. We can jam the wiretapping in seven-to-ten strokes, if a 100,000 Americans would simply use their cell phones to some kind of purpose, for once. All they need do is call someone, anyone, and say, "If not for laws and the fact that I don't have a terminal illness, I would blow Bush's head off with a sniper rifle. But, of course, I am hobbled by my lack of being hobbled, though it could always be worse."

Is that so much to ask? While calling home from Blockbuster to discuss this night's debate over whether to watch 300 or The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, throw in something like, "Let's rent every 9/11 movie, for inspiration."

We all want free speech, but when we lose it, speech matters more. Not only that, but we can get our free speech back any time we like by jamming the NSA. Okay, so a terrorist plot or two slip through. 9/11 generated created so much business that it bolstered free enterprise. The terrorists always do us a favor; they just take the long way there. We, on the other hand, need utter only a sentence or two and delude ourselves that something will change. For now, and perhaps ever, that's the best we can do in this imperfect life. After all, nobody ever said life was fair, except parents, teachers, coaches, politicians, and just about everyone not preying on the underclass, which would be a third of the nation's population.

A Story Starring Zac Efron as Deux ex Machina and a Burmese Python as Itself

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 05:51 GMT

GULF BREEZE, FL-

Over the weekend I visited the local zoo for the first time since moving to Gulf Breeze in February.

Our zoo has kind of a silly name. It's called The Zoo - Northwest Florida.

(I tried calling it the Northwest Florida Zoo once, but was promptly corrected. It's The Zoo - Northwest Florida or nothing.)

Before we left Utah, I was excited to learn Gulf Breeze had a zoo. I promised myself I'd visit early and often.

Once we got here, though, with one thing and then another, The Zoo visit kept getting postponed.

But I decided to go last week when my boss told me The Zoo is in danger of closing.

The land it's on still isn't paid off, Mike explained. Plus it suffered substantial damage during hurricanes Ivan and Dennis. Also, it's never received public funding, making the other financial struggles all the more difficult.

I was shocked when I heard about the lack of public funding. So far as I know, that's almost unheard of for a U.S. zoo.

Back in Utah, the Salt Lake County Zoo, Arts, and Parks program was really robust.

I like starting sentences that way. "Back in Utah," we did it this way. "Back in Utah," blah blah blah. Really endears me to my new neighbors.

Before going to The Zoo, I read up on it.

It turned out my boss had left out one little detail regarding its travails.

Namely, that The Zoo - Northwest Florida was recently the victim of a scam.

The nature of the scam was that someone contacted The Zoo pretending to represent Zac Efron, one of the stars of High School Musical.

This person claimed the kids wanted to help out. Plans were made for a big fundraiser.

The staff of The Zoo - Northwest Florida projected that proceeds from the fundraiser would be enough to get the zoo through the end of the year.

Everyone was happy.

Then the hoax was revealed.

I feel terrible admitting this, but I think that's kind of funny.

It's so ... plotted.

As a person who has trouble devising plots, I'm always delighted when one falls in my lap.

Maybe I'll write a High School Musical script about the kids putting on a fundraiser to save The Zoo.

The pathos of the story is that one can sense how desperately The Zoo staff must have needed a deux ex machina in order to be so easily taken in by some random person.

So, if you're a panhandle resident, please contact your council members or commissioners about getting the zoo some funding, so they can take proper care of the animals, and Zac Efron doesn't have to save the day.

In the meantime, let's go to The Zoo.

The first thing you'll notice about The Zoo is that there's a snake undulating into view.

And you'll be glad your husband isn't present, because he's not fond of snakes.

You, though, are willing to take them on a case by case basis.

And this one seems very good.

It's a Burmese python. The zookeepers seem to be taking it out for a drive.

They encourage everyone to get close to the snake, so you do.

Or maybe she gets closer to you.

And you keep getting closer, until one of the zookeepers says, "Ma'am, you'll want to step back a little."

For a while the zookeepers let us pet the python.

But eventually they pick her up and carry her away.

I had new fiction recently at The Raving Dove. Please stop by and check it out.

The Failed Proof of an Equation for Home, Which May be the Fault of a Writer with Poor Math Skills, or the Fault of Putting Colors into a Formula

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:36 GMT

SARANAC LAKE, NY-

When the sum of a place is made up of three lines on a topographic map, four promises to yourself (two of which you've already broken), a graying man you call your father, and two dozen shades of green in June, it makes you wonder if you got the equation correct.

Two times, en route to my father's house last Saturday, I caught myself saying, "I'm going home."

I had to backpedal, correct myself each time so the person I was talking to, who knew I lived in New York, could understand I only meant I was visiting my father in Vermont.

Home.

How much of that word is habit? How much of it truth?

Enough truth, I suppose, to tattoo two of this place's maple seed pods onto my back.

Enough truth to have the homing buzz kick in again.

I tend to visit my childhood stomping grounds in cold, bland months now, when the landscape is either brown or white, when the mountains rise in some manner of magnificence, but the valley feels hard, like the life I remember there.

So it shocks me each time when I arrive in summer—I think it means to do this—when I round a certain bend and the river valley opens up before me, softer now, and some homing instinct imprinted low in my belly sends a rush of signals to my fingers, my toes, my breasts and my twitching thighs.

Sometimes, I swear, it hits my ovaries, as well.

I try to blink it away.

And then, I let it pull me home, into the driveway, up the path, past the hydrangea bush that has engulfed half the front stoop, and into a sturdy wooden chair at the kitchen table.

I sink into silence.

Into grass.

Into a rainy night.

Into a bed where I sleep for 10 hours straight.

When I stumble down the stairs, the rain has eased.

We walk the dogs through the pines, into the hayfield that runs down to the river.

(The river about 10 years ago.)

I wear a pair of my father's rubber boots, which are too big; the heels flop to the ground and drag with each step.

He motions to the lower part of a S-curve in the swollen river.

"You used to be able to draw a straight line from here to those trees," he points.

Water now occupies that line.

My father guesses the current has eaten 100 ft. of river bank and farm field in 30 years.

Nearly brown from the new rain, from farm fields and streams emptying ruptured contents into its vein, the dark-hued liquid moves downriver with deceptive speed.

Imagine the sand, the loam, the grass, the pebbles, stones and bundles of clover that have gently caved in, bit by bit, that have found new repositories: on the opposite shoreline, on the river bottom, in a farmer's field 100 miles south.

A silent migration.

The lines on the map—the one thing I counted as static in this equation—are no longer correct.

It might be time to admit, I do not "do" math.

I do not know the equation to this place, only the force of its magnetic pull and push.

Pull and push.

Push

and

pull.

JENNIFER DUFFIELD WHITE also calls the Adirondack Mountains of New York home. When not muddling over the notion of belonging and place, she plays, edits and writes from her official place of residence. You can contact her here on the comment board or on her MYSPACE PAGE.

The Best Little Camera in Maryland: My Fisheye View of the World

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:52 GMT

COLUMBIA, MARYLAND -

Every Christmas, my mom asks my brother and I for a list of things we'd like. It's never anything huge - we're a really simplistic family - but little things we think of that we'd never buy for ourselves.

My big little thing, the thing I'd love to have but would never buy for myself, was a fisheye camera.

I love photography and have, in the last couple of years (with thanks to The Nervous Breakdown and Jilly's gentle prodding), gotten back into the grain of taking photos of just about everything. It was my hope that by having a fisheye camera I'd be able to take photographs that presented a completely different view of the world.

So, on Christmas morning, wrapped in warm pjs and heavy wool socks (New Hampshire, in case you were not aware, is friggin' cold in December and my parents have wood floors which conduct zero heat) and fighting with my parents' dog for space in front of the Christmas tree, my dad handed me a rectangular box wrapped in shiny paper.

Could it be? I wondered.

My dad looked far too pleased with himself for the box in front of me to be anything else and when I unwrapped it, the lens of a silver fisheye camera stared up at me from brightly colored packaging. I may have squealed with delight and frightened the dog. It's the little things, sometimes, that bring me the greatest joy (there was also a very awesome light switch plate cover with my favorite painting on it: Tournee du Chat Noir). It's always been that way in my family.

It took me forever to finish the first roll of film, but a couple of days ago I dropped it off for processing and it arrived today, complete with a CD of its images so I wouldn't have to spend the better part of an afternoon fighting with the scanner here in my office.

I held no expectations of my little camera - all I asked of it was that it work...and work it did. I'm including a few of my favorites from that first roll of experimental film. Now that I know what I'm doing, hopefully the second roll will come out even better.

St. John's campus in Annapolis, Maryland

Dragon boats at the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, Maryland.

Overcast day on Federal Hill in Baltimore, Maryland

Sunset over the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, Maryland.

Long shadows in Annapolis, Maryland.

Winter in our backyard, here in Columbia, Maryland.

Climbing Mountains

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 07:40 GMT

DANBURY-

I'm not sure when I first fell in love with books about mountain-climbing. On the surface of things, my love makes no sense. I hate heights. I hate being cold. And the idea of being without proper toilet facilities for more than the length of a short camping trip gives me the screaming willies. So from where comes this strange love?

I think it has to do with the fact that mountain-climbing is the perfect metaphor for all great human aspirations. And for me specifically, I think it must have to do with being a writer. Writing, itself, is like scaling a peak. And trying to get published after one has written, well, a lot of writers will tell you that Sir Edmund Hillary had it a lot easier. What's a little frostbite compared to mountains of rejection letters?

But write we do and aim to be published we also do. We also occasionally drink wine, after which we write our friends emails - OK, we drail them - asking, "Gee, I know I'm almost 46 years old and the best shape I'll ever be in was over a decade ago, but do you think there's still a chance I could climb Everest?"

Seriously, some days when you are a writer, hiking 29,028 feet into the thinnest of air seems preferable.

In "Everest," Walt Unsworth writes of the men who assailed that mountain: "Three things they all had in common: faith in themselves, great determination, and endurance."

Sounds like a bunch of writers to me.

In "Alone to Everest," Earl Denman speaks for himself: "I grew up with an ambition and determination without which I would have been a good deal happier...but the target was set high and each rebuff only saw me more determined to see at least one major dream through to its fulfillment."

OK, he speaks for me too.

In Nick Heil's "Dark Summit," at one point the author seeks to inhabit the mind of a climber near the top, making the decision whether to go on or not: "If crossing the last section of ridgeline appeared difficult - and what didn't at such altitude? - even more difficult would be returning to the world down below with this business unfinished. The summit wasn't the end of the journey, but it was its culmination - the cure for the thing that had gnawed inside him for so long. What folly to think that anyone climbs Everest for the views, or the thrills, or the bragging rights, or, vaguest of all, because it's there. What's there is this: the chance to be worthy of your own dreams."

So now we've dispelled the "because it's there" myth.

Recently I finally read Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air," a book that many would say all other Everest accounts are measured by. I don't know why I put that one off for so long. Perhaps I was worried it might disappoint? Disappoint, it did not, despite that some library patron before me sought to ink out all the "naughty" words, replacing them with G-rated synonyms. (You really gotta wonder about some people. There are men and women dying on the mountain in brutal conditions, but they shouldn't be allowed to say "fucking"? What fuckwittery.) The book is every bit as gripping as others have said it is (although my favorite book on climbing disasters remains James M. Tabor's "Forever on the Mountain").

But as I read, something began to gnaw at me, an idea that had been percolating beneath the surface of all these accounts I'd read, and then it finally hit me: None of these people, at least the ones who made it to the top, were happy.

Krakauer himself writes of his summit experience: "Reaching the top of Everest is supposed to trigger a surge of intense elation; against all odds, after all, I had just attained a goal I'd coveted since childhood. But the summit was really only the halfway point. Any impulse I might have felt toward self-congratulation was extinguished by overwhelming apprehension about the long, dangerous descent that lay ahead."

And really, read enough of these books and you realize that it's not just the "How the hell do I get down from here?" little problem that characterizes the summit experience, but a genuine sense of anticlimax. This points to one thing, a thing that maybe we've all known all along but keep forgetting: It's not arriving at the destination, Stupid. It's the journey. It's every moment of the journey.

Back in my days working as an independent bookseller, I had a favorite customer that I've written about often in the past: Mr. Hanrahan. Mr. Hanrahan was a blue-eyed, steel-haired, wire-glasses-wearing natty dresser who one day walked in wearing - gasp! - jeans and a T-shirt. I asked him what was up and he said it was the first day of his retirement. I'd never even known what he did for a living so we started talking about that. Turns out, he'd worked for NASA back in the day when they put the first man on the moon. Mr. H talked about what an amazing time it was, how the whole country was behind what they were doing and how anywhere they went they were treated as heroes; bought a lot of free beer, too. Naturally, being the insensitive boob that I am, I asked if life was a disappointment after all that glory; if attaining greatness, peaking so young, had meant that nothing else could ever match that experience. He was confused by my question. He said that, no, that he'd always known that there would be other challenges in life - different, to be sure, but they'd be new and it was all good.

I guess that's really the key when you get right down to it: It all really is just a constant glorious journey, with every moment counting for something, and no one peak overshadowing it all.

So, tell me about your own aspirations. What are your goals? Have you achieved them already? Did it make you happy? Did you set new goals? Do I have to do any more work today?

Be well. Don't forget to write.

Discover The Magic Of Compound Interest, Get A Broker, Remember The Rule Of 72, Retire A Millionaire, Don't Be A Sailboat Without A Rudder And Other Pearls From Adult Community Education

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 11:01 GMT

By My Little Pony

SAN ANTONIO, TX-

Fundamentals of Investing meets Tuesday nights in Room J113 at Sandra Day O'Connor High School on the east side.

Sandwiched between J111 (the scantly attended Build Your Own Drip Irrigation System) and J115 (the chockablock Flipping Properties Made Easy (despite the national housing downturn, Texas will post price gains in '08)), Room J113 is painted penitentiary gray except for the door and door frame, both of which are a shade I've heard my mother refer to as burnt sienna. Across the hall in J112 is a class tantalizingly titled Unintended Consequences.

The course opens with a vague but provocative question: "Do you realize you are living through a time period of major, revolutionary change?"

It's hard to pinpoint what change we're talking about here. iPhones? Oil prices? The first African American presidential nominee?

"We're living longer, spending more and saving less," comes the grave response. "But the days of traditional employer-funded retirement plans are going fast."

Restless legs and busy fingers begin to settle.

"Fact is, you are going to be responsible for your own retirement, and that's scary. But it can be done."

Don, our antediluvian instructor, is missing an ear and a sizable chunk of the right side of his head where an ear is supposed to be, as though he bore the brunt of a massive sledgehammer whack. Amazingly, his speech is unimpaired and actually quite pleasing; he has the sweet drawl of a Texan granddaddy. Don's personal uniform consists of high waisted khakis, a black leather belt, substantial white K-Swiss sneakers and a short-sleeved forest green polo shirt with the words Adult Community Education embroidered in white thread above a tiny pocket. He is a retired air force officer and former professor of industrial psychology, including 12 years at the University of Puerto Rico. He would describe his own personal investment style as "ultra, ultra conservative."

Don tells us we can become millionaires if we want. He is going to teach us the basic concepts, principles, research techniques and vocabulary we need to become millionaires and the rest is up to us.

A huge mastodon of a man enters J113, out of breath and sweating moderately. Summer has just officially started but it's been in the upper 90s for weeks. He stuffs his enormous self into the tenth grade desk behind me despite twenty five alternative seating options available. His huffing rustles the back of my hair and I want to move, but more than that I want to seem equanimitous and polite so I stay put.

Don tells us that over the course of...the course, we will need to do some serious thinking about our living, and our lives. His reliable fumbling with English lends spice to an otherwise bland subject.

No answers are right or wrong, he continues. Maybe we want a Porsche. Maybe we want a skiing chalet in Colorado. Maybe we want to spoil the grandkids.

What we don't want, he stresses, is to be a sailboat without a rudder.

"Here's your Bible," he says, tossing a Standard and Poor's Security Owner's Stock Guide on the tiny tablet of each small desk.

The man behind me's breathing has slowed to normal.

Financially, romantically, occupationally - I've always been a sailboat without a rudder.

Before Don no one had ever put it quite that way, as such a bad thing. A thing not to be.

A laissez faire approach to life has served me well so far with a few notable exceptions, exceptions that have in all honesty propelled me here, to J113 and the woolly world of purposeful personal finance.

What do I what do I what do I want?

Retiring a millionaire sounds pretty good. I will aim for that.

In order to retire a millionaire at age 65, Don declares, you have to get cozy with the Rule of 72, a mental shortcut for estimating compound interest. Albert Einstein may or may not have called compound interest "one of the most powerful forces in the universe". And while Einstein was a physicist not an economist you get the drift: compound interest is a big fucking deal. It's how you accumulate wealth.

The Rule of 72 looks like this: Years to Double = 72 / Interest Rate and sounds like this: Money doubles every 8 years if it grows at at rate of around 9% per year.

So, in order to retire a millionaire at age 65, you must have the following rather huge amounts tucked away in "growth vehicles" (stocks, bonds, mutual funds, appreciating raw land, whatever) earning around 9% each year.

Stay with me.

And brace yourself:

Age 25 $31,250

Age 33 $62,500 (see? it doubled in 8 years)

Age 41 $125,000

Age 49 $250,000

Age 57 $500,000

This rudderless sailboat finds herself slightly behind schedule.

Don instructs us to fill out four trees' worth of soul-sucking paperwork apparently lifted from various banks and brokerage houses: Financial Goals Worksheet, Income & Expenses Worksheet, Personal Net Worth Worksheet, Personal Risk Assessment Worksheet.

While we grapple with zeros and negatives and generally disappointing numbers, Don buoys our spirits. Most people with big houses and new cars every year are not wealthy, he lectures, pacing the length of the double whiteboards. They just have a high income. There's a big difference between the two, he insists, though you can't always tell in a consumer-oriented society like ours. Wealth is what you have in assets, not what you spend. Wealthy people make their assets beget assets.

Over the course of...the course, besides "Remember The Rule of 72", we learn Don's other favorite maxims: "Make Assets Beget Assets" and "Make An Agreement With Yourself" (to pay off the balance in full each month on any credit card, to save 10% of each paycheck, to pour savings into growth vehicles, to get a living will).

"Do you mean we should be saving 10% before taxes or after taxes?" the woman I suspect is a Russian bride asks.

"Yes," Don responds.

She repeats the question louder, slower, taking his age in to account.

"I...said...yes," Don bellows back.

The Russian bride cringes and the rest of us exchange impish grins. "Anything and everything you can," he insists. "If you can't do 10%, how much can you do? 1%? Whatever you can. As much as you can. Financial advisers will tell you this over and over. Do 10. 10 is the baseline. Try to get to 40. I want to see you get to 40!"

It's fun to see Don show emotion just because it's so rare; his emotion, and fun, in this class.

Every now and again a chorus of laughter from one of the other rooms will echo off the cement walls and a silent but palpable wistfulness pervades J113. The learning taking place in our room is the sobering, serious kind that sucks while you're doing it and rocks in retrospect.

The weeks go by.

Don teaches us to decode the NYSE composite list in Barron's, the differences between common and preferred stock, how to read annual reports, questions to ask your broker. After the lexicon's been broken down, retiring a millionaire seems so idiotically simple even the teenagers whose desks we're borrowing could do it.

One night we come to class and he's written a list of local brokers on the board. Nothing wrong with a discount broker like the ones online, Don says, but me, I like to know the person I'm giving my money to.

Time to put knowledge into action, he enthuses, then spends thirty minutes explaining warrants.

I am financially terrified.

During breaktime I hang around the classroom, hoping to get Don alone. After weeks of hangnail-picking research plus two Sundays on the living room floor with a calculator, I know who I want: mostly Pfizer and Medtronic (which both happen to be on sale at the time of this writing) and (because I personally can tolerate some risk and I love the company) Continental Airlines. Pfizer's an interesting case because it has a direct purchase plan, meaning you can cut out the broker altogether and just buy stock directly from the company itself with no enrollment fees.

"Don," I begin, summoning my fledgling investor confidence, "I really want Continental."

He shakes his dented head. "I wish you'd pick a different sector. Or buy Southwest."

"But Continental's nearly bottomed out," I venture. "It's so cheap."

"They could go bankrupt," he points out.

"The American government won't let all its airlines go bankrupt," I reason.

"Not all of them," he concedes, "but which ones will survive?"

"I don't know," I say weakly. My classmates are filtering back into the room and making their way to their desks. "How do I know?"

Don purses his lips and shoves his hands into his khaki pockets. "Well, you'd have to watch closely and see how they respond to the fuel crisis. Watch how quickly and how deeply they cut costs. See if they get rid of the unions. That would be a good. Then they'd have to get rid of their retirement packages. And so on."

"OK," I whisper.

"It's gamble-y," he finishes.

A shadow falls across the tablet of my desk as the kodiak of a man behind me raises his hand. "Yeah, what about what everybody says, 'buy low, sell high'?" he asks.

Don approaches the front row of adolescent furniture and plants himself there, crossing his heavily sun spotted arms. "Do you have the guts?" he suddenly shouts. The class is riveted. "Do you have the guts to buy when everyone's selling? Then do it!Go ahead! Buy GM!"

The old adage works, he says, but most people don't have the stomach for it.

My favorite of Don's accidental neologisms typically follows a group illumination, like when he asked if we'd ever really thought about the fact all public utility companies in the United States are monopolies.

"Bonds in utility companies? Come on! Think they're going out business any time soon? Know any house that doesn't need a plug?"

Our class is full of copious note takers, me clearly in the frontrunning, though I'm writing about the class not about investing, but no one knows that and besides, when Don says this about municipal bonds everyone stops writing even me and looks up in wonder.

Taking in our expressions he casts his most charmingly confused English phrase upon us:

"Am I whipping your appetite yet? Huh?"

Don totally whips my appetite. I want bonds. Now. A lot of them. Why didn't I even think about this shit before? Off course, rudderless sailboat.

As it turns out municipal bonds mature in like 5 years and since I'm not a U.S. citizen (and only Allah knows if I'll ever be) I don't have that kind of time. Instead I decide to contact the guy at Wachovia recommended by Don.

We meet in his office on my lunch break. We agree that stocks are the best option for my particular situation and he opens my account. I give him my money and he gives me a nice smile.

Don is not satisfied with this. All class every class he continues to pull the existential anxiety trigger. Now we know how to retire a millionaire. What about when we retire? What are we going to spend the fruits of our labor on? We must think ahead.

"You have to figure out what you want," he commands from the front of the room, sometimes fixing his dour, deeply lined gaze on me. "Put some direction in your life. What do you want?"

I look out the classroom window to a) avoid Don's beady squint and b) check if a metaphorical answer might be sitting around the football field.

Nope.

It's likely the people who carve their goals and rewards in stone do achieve results faster and more fully than those of us who trawl the seas rudderlessly, happily visiting unexpected atolls. Me, I'm not convinced it's necessary or even prudent to set in concrete what you want if you find yourself (as I do) in immigration limbo.

But there's no denying how genuinely thrilling it is to go to bed knowing your money is working for you.

Hopefully your appetite is whipped, at least a little.

TNB does not endorse any of the financial information or advice in this post. Clearly, taking financial advice from an anonymous pony is capricious at best. Pay off your credit card and sign up for a class in your own community.

Just In Time for Summer: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, ,

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 05:16 GMT

MILTON, FL-

1. Why We Went

A couple of Fridays ago when I got home from work, my husband Kelly said, "Matt wants us to go tubing with him tomorrow."

Matt is Kelly's coworker. They've become friends.

Until Matt, I'd never seen Kelly make a new friend before. I used to think it was because he was shy, or didn't want new friends.

Now I realize it's because he felt like crap pretty much the whole time we lived in Utah.

Kelly was never hot on living there. And after his son Kody moved out of state, he expressed his desire to leave regularly and emphatically. I was the one who insisted we stay so long.

Now I feel sort of guilty about that.

So if Kelly, via his new friend Matt, wanted us to go tubing, then tubing it was.

2. The Sun, the Sun ...

I was not without misgivings, however.

Most of my misgivings concerned the sun.

Four or five hours is a long time on the water in the sun, especially for someone whose legs are sort of blue from lack of exposure.

But there was nothing to be done for it.

Kelly wanted to go tubing, and so we went.

3. Cleopatra's Barge

At first all was well.

It was a hot day. The water felt great. And for the first time in my life, I understood what Coors Light is for.

Evidently Coors Light is for drinking while you float down the river in a tube, because for the first time in my life, it didn't taste like piss.

We drifted past little docks with paths leading away from them back into the woods, presumably up to someone's unseen house.

We fantasized about living in such a house.

Sometimes as we floated along on our tubes, a canoe cut a path among us.

In some of these, both parties paddled, but others were set up like miniature Cleopatra's barges, with a man paddling from the stern while a woman reclined in the bow.

The women in our party roared their approval at this arrangement.

Periodically, as we rounded a bend in the river, we'd come upon a sandy bank. People clustered along these small beaches, eating, drinking, smoking, having a good time.

4. Heart of Darkness

Eventually, though, the atmosphere took a Joseph Conrad kind of turn.

Now when we rounded a bend in the river, we were as likely to see people fighting as partying.

Standing in the water near one beach, two men, both wearing red swim trunks and baseball caps, shouted and shoved each other.

Maybe they were fighting about rights to the outfit.

Around the next bend, pairs of men yelled and shoved each other, too. They were with the same group as the Red Shorts, and making fun of them. Even as I watched, though, the shoving between two of them went from joking to serious.

I guess one of them joke-shoved too hard.

5. Jurassic Park

There was something really interesting about drifting past these angry tableaux. It was like being on an amusement park ride. The velociraptor lunges at you, but then you ride on past and wait for the next thing to look at.

6. A Separate Peace

The next thing to look at turned out to be drunk people climbing to the top of a pine tree and jumping out.

The water they were jumping into was only about four feet deep.

This worried my husband, who has a scar on his forehead from the time he dove into unfamiliar water and hit an anchor. He didn't want someone else to experience a similar fate.

Kelly moved over to the side of the river where the jumpers were. "It's only this deep," he showed them, pointing to the spot where the water hit him, for emphasis.

In retrospect, I think that was really sweet. At the time, though, I felt a little impatient.

"Oh just let them jump and break their heads already, so I can start CPR," I thought crossly.

CPR had been put in my head by a woman from our group, who announced "I'm CPR certified!" as soon as she saw the people in the tree.

One of them in particular evoked A Separate Peace. As he climbed, a branch cracked under his feet. He cried shrilly, "My glasses! I'm losing my glasses!"

Oh Christ, I thought, that's the one. But he managed to jump to safety.

We disanchored ourselves from the bank and continued downstream.

7. The Pre-Raphaelite

Then the miasma that had overcome the river population at large infiltrated our group, as one of the couples we were with started bickering.

The source of their strife was Canoe Girl, who sat by herself in shallow water, next to a canoe.

(The real source of their strife was, of course, Coors Light. Let us take a moment to remember the fabled words of Homer Simpson: "To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems!"

But the ostensible source was Canoe Girl.)

The woman accused her husband of flirting with Canoe Girl. She lamented Canoe Girl's tight young body, which had not borne two children, as had her own.

"What, the 12-year-old?" her husband asked, puzzled.

I stayed out of it, but internally I had to agree with the husband that, of all the people on the river one could measure oneself against, Canoe Girl was an odd choice. Though not 12, I don't think she was a day over 17.

And while she was slim in her bikini, there was a pre-Raphaelite quality to her--pale, curly haired, melancholy--that was at odds with the stereotype of tanned, smooth haired, giggling beach girl beauty.

It's true that a couple of men from our group talked to her, but I had the impression they were more paternal than flirting--checking up on the little maiden all forlorn.

After all, one doesn't normally see just one person with a canoe. So you knew there had to be some kind of story there.

They asked if she was all right. She said, melancholily, that she was just waiting for her boyfriend.

Then the river caught us again and we drifted away.

8. ... From It We Must Run

I have to admit, I looked at Canoe Girl, too. I was trying to figure out how she kept all that pre-Raphaelite skin from burning.

By this point, there was a serious gap in experience re: Me v. Everyone Else, because I stopped at two Coors Lights, whereas everyone else had around 20.

As a result, I was entering states of ever increasing cat-like alertness as my fight-or-flight mechanism reported danger.

Of course, most of the danger was self-inflicted, as people drank too much, jumped out of trees into shallow water, picked fights with loved ones, and fried under the sun. But that didn't stop my mechanism from kicking in.

By the time we reached the halfway point I was sitting bolt upright on my tube, rather than draping myself over it in the traditional manner.

"You look like you're sailing," Kelly said.

9. Bad Girls

One is not supposed to look like one is sailing while one is tubing. I began to suspect that my super erect posture, sobriety, and catlike readiness were not endearing me to the other women in our group, none of whom I'd met before.

At one point, when the ladies were engaged in hilarity too shrill and drunken for me to participate in, Matt attempted to console me for my outsider status.

"They're bad girls, Dawn," he said. "You don't want anything to do with them."

"Dawn's a bad girl, too," my husband said at once, loyally.

Oh, dear husband. Once upon a time that was true. But by my rough calculation, it's at least 15 years since I engaged in any bad girl behavior of note.

But I couldn't think of any way to say so without appearing argumentative, and frankly the idea made me a little depressed. I smiled wanly and turned my thoughts to shade, aloe vera, and past transgressions.

*With no apologies to David Foster Wallace, 'cause after all, titles can't be copyrighted. So take that, sucker!

** Nevermind, David Foster Wallace! You know I didn't really mean it--right??

*** With two weeks' worth of hindsight I've decided maybe I would go tubing again after all, but only if I can bring a Super Soaker full of sunscreen with me.

Always Fun When the Good Guys Win: An Interview with Jonathan Evison, Author of 'All About Lulu'

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:26 GMT

LOS ANGELES-

And here's some more good news:

Jonathan Evison, contributor to TheNervousBreakdown.com, has just published his debut novel, All About Lulu, which comes to us from the fine people at Soft Skull Press in New York. The movie rights have sold, the buzz is building, and critics are calling it "a viciously funny and deeply felt portrayal of a blended family and one man's thwarted longing."

In short, it's a great story. And one worth sharing.

A few days ago, I had the pleasure of chatting with Mr. Evison about his recent life and times, and I've posted the transcript of our meandering conversation right here at TNB.

Enjoy!

-BL

BL: Tell me about Lulu. Where is your head at right now?

JE: Lulu is my "debut." (Read: I've got three other novels collecting dust under my hip-waders in the basement, and three more that I literally buried--salted the earth, the whole nine yards.) My head is in the clouds right now. I'm overwhelmed by the reception the book has enjoyed so far, thrilled to have sold the film rights, some foreign rights, and the rest of it, and trying to catch my breath before I hit the road. Thank god I've got my next novel in the can already, because quite honestly, I think it'd be hard for me to focus at this juncture.

BL: When does the book come out?

JE: It was set for release in July--and as far as print media reviews are concerned, that's the official "release"--but actually, they released it six weeks early because we had some momentum headed into Book Expo America.

BL: So it's in stores as we speak.

JE: Yes, and frankly in way more stores than I ever expected.

BL: "Momentum." Describe.

JE: Well, if nothing else, the film stuff generates a little buzz, and the option got a little coverage in L.A., shortly before BEA. Also, like yourself, I've built a pretty sizable online network in the past couple of years, so I was stacking up a decent number of pre-orders and building a lot of anticipation among my "people."

BL: Do you have any strange birthmarks or tattoos that you might like to share with our readers?

JE: I'm pretty sure I was born with a prehensile tail, and my parents are afraid to tell me. I've got this little vampire-bite-looking-thing above my coccyx.

BL: Tell me about the film rights. How did all that go down?

JE: Well, I'm blessed with amazing advocacy--the whole deal took me completely by surprise. I was actually in the Galapagos when it went down, working on my final rewrites. When I got back to Quito, I had an e-mail from my film rep telling me we had an offer.

BL: You were in the Galapagos?

JE: I live pretty large for a guy who lives on fishcakes and cheap wine.

BL: Is the film in pre-production? Have they cast it? Or was it simply an optioning and now you wait and see?

JE: They're out to directors right now, and I can't divulge any names, but I'm pretty excited about them.

BL: Jesus, man. Are you having a hard time reigning yourself in? Are you twitching?

JE: I'm just doing the same thing I've been doing for twenty years--throwing a whole bunch of shit out there and seeing what sticks to the wall. The only difference is, stuff is really starting to stick.

BL: Tactile.

JE: Yes.

BL: Where are you right now?

JE: I'm in my sweat pants in my living room way the fuck out in the woods on an island, with a beer by my side.

BL: What's it like living in a remote island hamlet? (Or do you even live in what would qualify as a hamlet?)

JE: It would qualify as island living in a 70's split-level. I love it out here. The city is only a half hour ferry ride away, and yet I can walk for miles in the woods behind my house.

BL: You bastard. I'm huffing smog in Hollywood.

JE: The basin is actually pretty beautiful if you take away all the development.

BL: Yeah. L.A. would be great if you just got rid of...L.A.

JE: In all honesty, I like L.A. quite a bit. If it were easier to get out of L.A. on a moment's notice, I could see living there again...at least part-time.

BL: Yeah. I know. I give it shit, but I like it too. I always tell people it's underrated. But when you live here, and you love the outdoors, it's impossible not to entertain fantasies of living off the grid. Grass is always greener.

JE: You ever head out to Big Pine or anything?

BL: No, not yet. Unfortunately. I hear it's great.

JE: Dude, my beagle Dave is going ape shit behind the house right now. I'll bet he's got a racoon treed or something.

BL: Do you need to tend to the situation, or does Dave have it under control?

JE: I don't like to brag, but Dave is a swingin' a big old shaggy dick. For a beagle, anyway. And no, it's all under control. Dave can take care of himself.

BL: My wife gets weirded out when dogs have giant penises. Or not necessarily weirded out, per se, but rather grossed out. The whole red rocket thing has a tendency to leave her rattled. She's thankful that our dog Walter is only moderately well-hung.

JE: It must be the smog. My buddy down there has a big old dog named Henry Higgins and he's hung like a field mouse.

BL: I'm sure we're all poisoning ourselves irreparably.

JE: Promise me all this dog dick stuff is gonna make the cut come editing time.

BL: This is our lead. This is pure comic gold.

JE: My terrier, Sparky, is in on the action now--they're both going ape shit out there!

BL: Does Sparky have a giant penis too?

JE: Mid-range.

BL: Shifting gears. I suppose our readers will want to know about your writing habits. How exactly do you work? How often? What time of day? Et cetera.

JE: I get up between 5 and 6 a.m., five or six days a week, put in maybe three hours, then a couple more, slightly less focused hours (editing usually) in the evening. I really have to stay disciplined to keep my focus, especially on a novel with forty-odd pov's that cover twelve decades, and one that has Colonel Sanders and Bigfoot in it.

BL: Discipline.

JE: Pretty easy to be disciplined when you love to do a thing. I never had problems getting up early to go to baseball practice, for that matter.

BL: And how did you find an agent?

JE: I've had four or five agents over the years, including some luminaries. But the truth is, you really need to find the right agent for you. The way I did it was counter-intuitive: I solicited editors (whom I profiled very specifically, and very thoroughly) unagented, and when I started getting bites, I interviewed seven different agents, all willing to rep me, and picked the one I liked best--the one who really connected with my work, and had a gameplan right from the get-go.

BL: How long did it take to get a sale? Soft Skull Press is publishing, correct?

JE: Well, the first offer came in pretty quickly, maybe six weeks. And yes, Soft Skull is publishing, and I really couldn't have landed at a better time and a better place. They've really been incredible in terms of support; they solicit my opinions on almost everything, and they really make me feel as though I'm partnering with them.

BL: That's great. And what about plans for a book tour?

JE: Twelve cities and growing. As for publicity, the usual blogosphere and print media route, along with some radio stuff (I used to be a syndicated talk show host). But what's really great with Soft Skull is that their street cred is gold. So there's a lot of grassroots opportunities with indie booksellers and the like.

BL: So backtracking a bit: I'm curious. You said you contacted editors unagented. How did that work out? Did you email? Call? How did you approach it? What was their response? The old adage is that most of these editors won't look at unagented books.

JE: Most things I do are counter-intuitive. Most editors don't like e-mail solicitations, either (which is how I did it). But it wasn't a carpet-bombing campaign, that's the most important thing--I knew exactly who I was soliciting, what titles they'd acquired that were apropos, etc. In the end, the work will always speak for itself.

BL: So proper reconnaissance is key. And then of course the book has to be stellar.

JE: Yes, research is huge. You can't waste people's time.

BL: What's your book about?

JE: It's about a kid growing up in a family of bodybuilders who falls in love with his new stepsister in the wake of his mother's death.

BL: How many times have you answered that question?

JE: A hundred? And I still don't like my answer.

BL: How are Dave and Sparky doing?

JE: Dave is now sawing logs on the couch next to me, and I'm betting Sparky is rooting around under the hot tub for mice. (Terriers!)

BL: It's good to have a good ratter around.

JE: Yes and no. Neurosis. The fucker won't come in at night. He just hangs out under the hot tub getting muddy.

BL: Have you tried sedatives?

JE: I've tried yelling.

BL: A lot of our readers are writers or aspiring writers. In light of your recent experiences, do you have any advice for them? Any insight?

JE: I have a little speech that goes something like this: Work your ass off until you’re too exhausted and too discouraged to go on--then work twice as hard. And quit saving those damn rejection letters--unless they’ve got some substantive editorial insight, throw the fuckers away! Burn them! Bury them! Whatever. Just release them and concentrate on the word. Don’t lose sight of why you’re putting yourself through all of the labor and suffering and isolation. If you’re doing it to be published--congratulations, you’re a douchebag. If you’re doing it because you have to, because you feel the compulsion to articulate the oftentimes inarticulate, if you’re doing it to inspire yourself and try and make sense out of the senseless, to rush at unseen truths for the sake of understanding, well, then, eventually you’ll break through--if you work hard enough. Eventually could mean fifteen years and two failed marriages and no dental insurance. It could mean driving around town in some broke-dick Datsun, dragging your bumper. It could mean eating a lot of fishcakes. A LOT of fishcakes. But you’ll break through. Also, have some self-respect--I know, I know, it’s cold out there, but seriously, you’ve got to self-identify as a writer. If you’re at party or something and someone asks you: "So, anything published?"...don’t start stammering and explaining and trying to save face. Just tell them to stick their thumb up their ass, and go find a cute girl or a cute guy to flirt with. Write to grow and understand and challenge yourself, not to publish.

BL: Alright, man. Sounds good. Huge congratulations once again on all the wonderful success. Always fun when the good guys win.

JE: Thanks so much.

Snapshot: Chasing the Ghost

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:51 GMT

THE DEEP SOUTH-

Its nearly midnight on Island Drive

lights in the trees

and all of heaven waits for me to breathe~

standing on the pedals and coasting line to line

I am chased by the ghosts

the ghosts of Jesus and Evel Knievel

of cutter girls in Underdog pants

strobe lights and cotton candy

black Astroturf and hotshot amazons

angel dogs and porcelain dolls and broken cassettes of Bobby Brown

peach icees in the runway lights

the velour of Green Broughams

redneck luchadores and Comcast evangelists

gays for the Kingdom and golden heart ugly girls

goth queens breaking open jars of bees

tweenage tweakers twirling glowsticks

Judas tied the noose

Afro-centric Apostolic gas station Pentecostal churches play that funky music white boy wipe me down

klu klux cakewalks at the middle school gym

bagboys fists up distortion pedal stomp

pork rind boogie, monster be nice

In Grime We Trust

beauty and chaos, lust and degradation, redemption and pain

and the last Ghost of all is me

900 miles high and rising

over the waters

Jesus and me, into the trees

Like Breath

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:43 GMT

By Alexander Maksik

PARIS -

We’re walking together along the trail beside the river. After a late winter the low hills are still green and there are wildflowers even now. There’s the smell of sage and dust and pine and if you look north up Highway 75 you can see mountains capped with white.

We’re bare-chested wearing sandals and shorts. It’s my father’s birthday today. He’s fifty years old, six feet tall, thin. His dark curly hair has lightened from the sun. There are patches of grey at his temples.

I’m shorter than he is with dark hair on my legs and arms, hair that my father found unsettling when it first began to appear at fourteen - a feature, which seemed to him impossible. It must have been a terrible reminder of time passing. How could this boy with the big brown eyes and the round cheeks be sprouting the body hair of a Sicilian?

Once while the two of us were on the couch watching a baseball game, my legs on his knees, he asked, laughing, “Where did all this hair come from?”

I stared at the screen.

This summer I’m back from a year in Australia. It’s the first time in six months that he’s has seen me without my shirt on and I see him register the new hair on my chest.

I’m home for a few months, living in my old bedroom. The same smells. The same posters on the wall. I know it’s my father who won’t take them down. I know that my mother would like to make my old bedroom into something else, something new. She pushes forward, she tears things apart, moves furniture around. She pulls her husband along, forces him to make decisions, spins through their house on the river, telephone to her ear, making plans.

I think about the night to come. After the three of us have dinner and a bottle of wine, after my father opens his birthday presents, I’ll put on my shoes, find a jacket and go out. I’ll meet some friends from high school at a bar in town. And after I kiss my mother good night and she goes upstairs to bed, my dad will follow me outside and stand out on the driveway.

He’ll say, “Have a nice time, sweetheart.”

And I’ll say, “Ok, I will,” and get into the old Land Cruiser that he bought from a helicopter pilot in Boise for three thousand dollars, a car that he’d wanted since he drove one in Africa twenty-five years ago where he climbed to the top of Mount Kenya. I imagine him there at the summit, his eyes clear, feeling invincible.

He was young, newly married. He breathes deeply and feels the purity of conquest, the certainty of his life. He stands there with a hand on the iron cross hammered into the stone. He feels heroic and powerless. There he was standing atop a great mountain in Africa with all the wonder and sadness of real joy.

Tonight, he’ll stand outside in the driveway, and the sprinklers will beat time, and the moon will be half full, and I’ll start up the car and turn on the radio. I’ll ignore the vague feeling of irritation. It’s not as if I’m going off to war. Why can’t he just say goodnight? Though I know the answer somehow.

And he’ll stand in the driveway in his slippers and his robe. He’ll want to say something about the choke, about not flooding the engine. He’ll catch himself. And instead he’ll watch me glide up the driveway, slow at the street, turn left and vanish into the night.

We turn down off of the main trail where it begins to cut away from the river. I lead us along a small path, which ends at a rocky bank. The river has made a sharp turn here and left a deep green pool. Above it a knotted rope hangs from a tall Aspen. The bank descends fast.

I drop my towel on the rocks, grab the rope and climb atop a pile of felled trees. I lean back pulling the rope to my chest, taking in all the slack. I jump and sail out above the water, where I let go and plunge through the air breaking through the surface. My father watches me fall.

When I come up for air I’m down stream with the current. Grinning, I pull myself onto the bank and walk back towards my dad, my skin drying fast in the sun and warm wind.

My dad smiles at me, proud. He dives head first off the bank and lets the river take him.

The afternoon my parents were to arrive in Sydney, I got to the airport early. In the cab on the way there I imagined how I’d appear to them. My hair was nearly to my shoulders; I was tan and strong from surfing everyday. I wore new clothes.

Waiting outside customs I thought about myself, about what they would think of me, their son with his long hair and his suede jacket. I leaned against a pillar and waited with limo drivers holding signs, men nervously shifting bouquets of flowers from hand to hand, mothers holding babies.

Then the doors slid open to reveal my parents. My mother looked mostly the same, big brown eyes; beautiful, explosive, bright, hair cropped a little shorter, deeper lines at her eyes.

But my father, for the first time in my life looked old. He was pale from the Idaho winter, tired from the flight. There was more gray at the temples, more gray everywhere. Even his skin seemed gray. So shocked by the sight of him, I didn’t immediately go towards them. Having been so prepared to be observed, it threw me off to find that I was the observer. The sight of my father scanning the busy terminal for his son briefly paralyzed me.

All morning I’d been imagining this moment but not once had it occurred to me that it would be my father who had changed. And in realizing this I also realized that not once in my entire life, not in twenty years, not really, had I considered for an instant my parents would ever change.

I watched them: My mother grinning slightly, squinting into the crowd. And my father, mouth slightly open, chin tilted upwards, eyes darting from side to side. Finally, I stood up straight and smiled at them. Immediately they saw me, my mother’s jaw dropping at the sight of my long hair. My father strode quickly towards me and we hugged each other hard. Whatever plans of aloof cool I may have had were gone. Holding my father, I felt briefly as if I were holding him up.

Nearly immediately he looked healthy and young again. Once he had spent a day on the beach, smelled the air, swam in the ocean, slept, run along the cliffs at Coogee, he no longer appeared frail.

Six months later we’re standing side by side on the log pile. I have the rope pulled tightly to my chest.

You just lean back, you make sure you pull both your feet up right away and let the rope take you. When you get out over the pool you let go. Easy.”

“Be careful,” he says.

I glide out over the pool, and drop. When I come up I say, “Your turn, old man.”

He’s still standing on the logs.

“I think I’m going to skip this.”

“Oh come on,” I say. By now I’ve climbed up next to him and placed the rope in his hands. “It’s not difficult. I mean if you’re not old.”

“I have a bad feeling about this.”

“Ok,” I say, “Let’s go home and play cards grandpa.”

He exhales loudly, looks at me and shakes his head as if admonishing both of us. He tightens his grip on the rope. He leans forward keeping his feet planted on the logs. He reaches out and up with both arms as if he’s reaching for something lost, something far away, as if he’s standing on a chair straining for something too high to touch.

His weight transfers outwards - arms, shoulders, chest and, only when they have to, his feet come off the log so that they swing fast beneath him making a gentle sweeping arc from log to sky. It’s as if he’s preparing a backflip but he is preparing nothing. He is entirely passive, waiting for this thing to be done.
The first lesson he ever taught me about fielding a ground ball is to charge. Go towards it. Act. Do not be acted upon. The first rule of all sport. The first rule of everything.

His feet swing upwards higher into the air. He’s still clutching the rope as it slackens and when he begins to fall it snaps tight and tears from his hands. He falls through space. He could be piloting a rocket, roaring upwards through the atmosphere.

But he is falling down.

When he hits the shallow water his arms are still extended upward. The back of his head slams hard against smooth round river rock.

I look down at him. He’s unconscious, eyes closed, the water pulling gently at his body. His head is resting on the stones while he trembles slightly with the current. He looks delicate, fragile as if at any moment he might vanish. He looks like a body in the water, a body caught in an eddy after floating for hours.

He looks dead.

I leap from the log an scramble down to him. In the moment it takes for me to get there, he’s slipped further into the water so that the weight of his head on a single stone serves as the only anchor. I slip my arms through his and pull him onto the bank.

There is a moment of absolute quiet. I’m kneeling. I’m holding my father. I’m looking down on him. There is a small trickle of blood from the back of his skull.

The three of us used to go camping in the summers when I was still a boy. We’d set up a large army camp tent at the edge of a lake. There was a cooler in the back of our old Toyota Corona, a green Coleman stove and a lantern. At night we’d sit around a fire and drink hot chocolate. And then my father would take me to the edge of the lake to look at the stars.

The two of us would stare silently up at the sky. Eventually I’d get cold and impatient. He’d always insist on staying a little longer. It smelled of pine trees and smoke.

“You have to always remember to wait,” he told me once. “You have to think about where you are before you can leave.”

“I will. I do.”

We’d turn back to the low fire and walk slowly toward my mother and our camp. The three of us would sleep heavily together, side by side.

His eyes flutter open. The first thing he sees is my face looking down at him. He sits up slowly. I put my arm around his shoulder. He breathes deeply. He touches the back of his skull. He looks at the blood on his fingers and raises his eyes to mine. There’s something foreign in his expression, something I’ve never seen in his face before.

Terror.

Slowly we walk along the trail towards the house where my mother will be reading.

We’re silent for a while. I can’t shake the dull, heavy sound of his body hitting the rocks or the sight of him lying unconscious in the water. I hold tightly to his shoulder.

At the house my mother looks at the two of us.

We put him in bed and call his doctor. He should have a CAT scan. Concussion maybe. Bring him in today.

My mother shakes her head. “What in the fuck were you thinking?”

She touches her hand to his cheek. She waits until somewhere in his expression she finds something; assurance perhaps, and then she walks downstairs to make him some tea.

I sit on the edge of my parents’ bed. I touch a warm washcloth to the back of his skull where he’s been bleeding. We sit in silence looking at one another, my father smiling weakly, the color drained from his face.

That night I stay home. The two of us walk slowly to the edge of the driveway. The moon is half-full. The air smells of wet grass and clay. For a few moments we stand together looking up. And then we turn and walk back towards the house lit up pale.

The next morning he wakes with a pounding head. The fall has given him some bruises on his back, a sore neck. The doctor calls. None of his vertebrae are cracked; his spine is unharmed.

But swept away by the river, along with the slight bit of blood that trickled from his head, was also his sense of smell. As his skull cracked against the stone it was gone, flowing from his body like water, like blood, like breath.

ALEXANDER MAKSIK is a fiction writer, poet and freelance journalist living in Paris. His writing has been published in France, the UK and the United States. Most recently he's written for Nerve.com, Crate, The San Antonio Express-News, Inkwell and Explorer Guides. He's just finished his first novel. You can read his poetry and fiction here: pont-des-arts.blogspot.com. And you can reach him here: akolyamaksik@gmail.com.

The Idiosyncratic Parody of Automobile Eroticism and the Ravishing Gratis of Hopeless Information

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:08 GMT

MANCHESTER, ENGLAND-

"We already know that the world is far more complex, and strange, and beautiful than we thought."

Albert Einstein once said that, but in the office where he conjured up the thesis of relativity ("thou shalt not involve one's self in irrelevant 'stop n chats' on the street, thou shalt not ask a man how his family is unless completely necessary, thou shalt not take your shoes off at a dinner party"), and routinely ordered his wife Mileva, by contract, to deliver "three meals a day" and make sure that his desk was 'for his use only', the hapless enemy of Aryans could never predict that time cannot heal the gradual degeneration of beauty.

Right. And what has any of this sentimentality got to do with mecaphilia, the sexual attraction to cars?

We're getting off colour here. Michael Richards made the same honest mistake, and look where that savage Israelite is now; very little hair, washing cars, bursting through the car doors doing impressions of himself when he didn't hate blacks (but not the cars of blacks, that would be an awful entry in Al Sharpton's diary, too much irony even for a leader of traditionalism). What's the score here? What's next?

A simple study into Paraphilias is not easy viewing. Most websites on the internet will fill your head with graphic imagery and occult details that you could never hope to understand, and why not? Indeed. Why not? The internet has been no good since Tom started writing things on schoolboards about social networking and pothead transgenders from Texas started weeping openly on camera about the sudden demise of Britney Spears, innocent children searching for immediate facts on the Greeks, hounded by perverts offering them a share of their Nigerian fortune and blonde paraplegics being anally penetrated by thoroughbred stallions. But shit, the world is run on mindless perversions, so who are we to question the money that feeds a man's children?

Chremastistophiliacs get off on the thoughts of being robbed.

Harpaxophiliacs are turned on by burglary.

Iatronudiacs are fond or exposing themselves to physicians.

Nasophiliacs feel strong lusts for their partners' nose.

But what happens when you start up your 1962 Beetle one morning and the front end of the car suddenly puts a large tent in your pants? What to do when you wake up in the middle of the night to upset all of the neighbourhood cats by blasting semen all over the bumper of your black Trans-Am?

Danger, is what happens (enjoy, my fair readers; enjoy my gift to you, my returning gift, my myhr and frankincense of apology for being away for a while):

Anyone want 500 pounds of gruel? (Pickup only)

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 11:53 GMT

By Steve Dupont

BIRMINGHAM, AL -

Right. So I'm enjoying a leisurely breakfast the other morning, tapping away at a new column for Gonzo Politico over a bowl of New and Improved Old World Corn Gruel, when this god-awful beeping sound nearly caused me to dump steaming hot gruel in my lap (And, you don't have to be Einstein to figure out that: Gruel + Groin = Unbridled Obscenity).

You know the beeping sound I'm talking about. The one that indicates the backward locomotion of a freight carrying vehicle. Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!

Upon further investigation, I was actually rather excited to discover the vehicle in question backing into my own driveway. I couldn't recall having purchased any oversized consumer goods lately, so I thought maybe a large and very generous gift was aboard this vessel. A pinball machine? A trampoline? A Nordic Track home fitness system? A dune buggy? A giant chocolate Jesus sculpture?

I left my steaming hot bowl of New and Improved Old World Corn Gruel -- like Ike Turner leaving Tina on a motel room floor -- and raced outside to claim my oversized booty.

He he. I just said "oversized booty." He he ...

Anyway, so I get out there just as the delivery dude is hopping down from the cab -- a 50-ish, haggard looking dude who bears a striking resemblance to Gary Busey. In fact, chillingly so ...

That is to say, the dude had freakishly large teeth and was rather ... not disagreeable, per se, but ... volatile in his temperment. After all, the exchange between us started out well enough. It just went sideways awfully quick.

"Hey man," I said. "How's it going?"

(no answer as he unlatched and flung open the back door of the truck)

"So, whatcha got for us today?"

"Gruel."

"Say again?"

"Gruel. It's like grits or oatmeal or something."

"I know what it is ... I just wasn't expecting ..."

"You gonna refuse delivery?!"

"No, it's fine, I mean ..."

"You think I like lugging around 20-pound bags of gruel all day?! If I don't unload 'em here I'm just gonna hafta unload 'em back at the depot! And explain why I come back heavy! Gas ain't cheap you know!"

"Tell me about it. It's mostly cause of dollar devaluation, but they never tell you that on the news."

At this point Mr. Faux-Busey just stares at me, as if attempting to telepathically melt my face.

"So do you want the f--king gruel or what?!"

"Yeah, sure, I mean, I don't want you to get in trouble at the Gruel Depot or anything."

At this point Faux-Busey just smiles this kooky, maniacal smile. Kinda like this:

(I'm sorry to have to include not one, but two, Gary Busey photos in this post, but I'm telling you -- the dude looked just like him! In fact, maybe it WAS him! His voice was very different though, so probably not, unless he was acting! Busey is an actor you know!)

Long story short, I now have a wall of gruel in my driveway. 25 bags, each weighing 20 pounds, for a grand total of 500 pounds. And not only that, but Mr. Sunshine himself, Faux-Busey, is coming back next month with ANOTHER 500 POUNDS OF GRUEL!!!

See, despite the fact that I hold a degree in English from a prestigious and very expensive American university, me don't read so good. Especially things written by lawyers in their fancy-dancy lawyer writin'. For example, my contract with the Old World Corn Gruel Corporation (OWCGC) for the sponsorship of Gonzo Politico. Upon closer examination, it clearly states that I shall receive X dollars per month or -- the key word there being OR -- the equivalent in OWCGC product, as deemed appropriate ... blah blah blah.

Turns out Old World Corn Gruel is even more economical when purchased in bulk! Who knew it was even available in 20-pound bags?

You want?

Of course, I already called every food bank and soup kitchen within a 50-mile radius and nobody will take the stuff! I felt like George Costanza in the "Muffin Stump" episode. Folks are all like, "You want to donate 500 pounds of WHAT?! Why don't you donate it to the zoo for the hippos to eat or some sh-t."

Ouch.

As much as I'm sore at the OWCGC, that one cut me deep. Real deep. This isn't hippo feed, ladies and gentlemen! This is Old World goddamned Corn Gruel! One of the most nutritious AND delicious foodstuffs available on the market today! Dare I say tantalizingly toothsome!

So it's right here for the taking. If you've got a pickup truck or a Chinook helicopter and can swing by ASAP (before it rains -- chance of T-storms tomorrow!) this treasure trove of nature's goodness can be yours -- absolutely FREE OF CHARGE!

I could eat all the gruel myself, by the way. Easy.

I'm only doing this because I care about you.

STEVE DUPONT is the author of Therein Lies the Probem, a novel, and many online columns including the brand new Gonzo Politico. His official Internet headquarters is at SteveDupont.com.

Rotate the Crops

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:35 GMT

by Paul A. Toth

GRAND BLANC, MI-

How tired of thinking, how sawed off my seeing, how heard my hearing, how tasteless my tasting, how senseless my ability to smell, how unfeeling what I touch. Just the same, so easy to relearn how to think, see, hear, taste, smell, touch. It's only a forced illusion, a child's card trick. Yet this deception serves as a thicker pair of glasses, a re-tuned hearing aid and...an artificial brain, nose and tongue.

Rotate the crops, Kierkegaard wrote (laugh, but I have ethics; I keep the neighbors at bay and love them when they're on the other side of the ocean). I may not believe in a god, but I know fear and trembling. They're hobbies of sorts, the kind that irritate oneself for the want of something better to do. But if the crop is the imagination, yes, rotate it, a degree, 360 degrees, or some degree between.

Take a walk. Think like a biologist. Be Darwin now. It all looks different, operating within another system. It operates outside the influence of capitalism, or so inside that it's back outside again, with the cans and plastic cups -- NEVERTHELESS! -- it can be done.

Take another walk. Walk on tiptoes, or pretend to do so if suffering a herniated disc. No, don't walk on tiptoes: Danger, unless wearing a helmet. Forget toes. Rise within and see like a mountain. Whether resembling a mountain or not, a true mountain cannot see; the human has that advantage. But if the mountain could see, then its perspective would earn envy and imitation. For the human, it is different, but it can be faked, and that is enough and there is more.

Take a third walk. Walk and walk and walk. March. Keep going, walk, march. Run in front of cars. Yell racial epithets. Do it for a three years. Now a millionth the experience of a soldier is known. Once home, read Nausea; no, that title is cited only for its pointfullness. Read Camus. In America, Camus is famous, but in France, he bid a less than fond adieu. No need to worry that reading Camus will make one appear to be appearing to appear hip. Those days are gone, or these exercises need not be performed. Certain smells -- YOU KNOW THE ONES! -- remain new: Never mind the mind. It will come and it is coming but never mind that for now. Smell the smells, unless in Iraq. No one will care until the wall.

Take a hundred walks or a thousand drives. Look for weeds, crickets, cicadas (kill them on sight or sound), uppity birds, wait and wait, something is coming, like a hallucination but not quite that, something else. The mind will run beyond breathlessness, wildly or with grace, like horses. Watch out for artificial obstacles; men are always building them.

Ignore all hurdles. Jumping one only leads to the next, until retirement or a positive steroid test result. Forget retirement. Golf is a game of small, black holes amidst over-mowed lawns. Do not play games with life. This has nothing to do with life. This is about living. Let the servants worry about life; it's half their job. Pay them more. See Karl Marx in the mirror. Scary!

If all of these suggestions should fail, beat the head against the keyboard. It will fail the goal, but, just in case one goes mute, the face will display the alphabet, and a few words may be spelled by contorting the face. Better to visit the zoo. Kneel backwards behind a donkey and wait for a kick in the head from an ass. Now go Dali on this gifted moment. In the zoo, notice the burning giraffes.

Feed the giraffes.

A Letter to Myself...With the Hope that 10 Years Makes a Difference

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:06 GMT

THE FUTURE -

Dear You,

If all goes well and according to plan, you (that would be me) should receive this long lost letter on your 37th birthday, ten years after I (that would be you) sent it. It's 2008 here at the moment, June to be exact. You will turn 27 in close to three months. Exciting, I know.

It's been a rough year so far, not in terms of terminal illnesses or deaths or deep and beleaguered sadness, but tough in the sense that the life you had planned for yourself all those years earlier isn't exactly panning out the way you had thought it would. For one thing, your wardrobe isn't at all what you'd envisioned it to be...so that's mildly depressing.

You're single at the moment, stuck contemplating the unfairness of distance and intelligence while tidal waves and earthquakes and other such heat-of-the-moment news stories make your pissant problems seem tiny in comparison. Your general state of mind is apathetic...pretty much towards everything. This includes love, the state of the US economy (which is absolutely horrible, by the way - I hope things have gotten better in ten years), and the fact that your current career does little to fulfill you other than produce a paycheck and offer up something other than boredom.

It's my hope that this letter finds you in good health and with a better sense of the world about you. It's a terrible thing to be as cynical and angry with the state of things as you were at 27 and I would hate to think that I spent the next ten years growing even more cynical and angry. I hope you've fallen in love - again - with someone who loves you back and who'd move mountains to make it work. If you haven't...well...I hope you've at least gotten a dog.

Wait...you got a dog, didn't you?

Hmm...let's see...current events. Corn futures are down...porn sales are up...cats and dogs have begun living together in harmony, which may, quite well, signal the end of the world...and the answer to the question of life, the universe, everything is still 42.

Seriously, though, you're working on a novella at the moment. It's a satire about the end of the world, filled with lots of funny dialogue and ridiculous and zany characters.

(Sidebar: I apologize if this subject hits a nerve - ten years is a long time and it's completely within the realm of possibility that you're getting this just after the apocalypse. Congratulations on surviving, by the way...I hope...)

Did you get it published or did you do what you always do and file it away in that box under your bed, never to be heard from again? Pull it out and dust it off, dammit! Honestly, you survived an apocalypse! I think you can survive a publisher...

The point of all this nonsense is that it has to get better - the general pressures of life: to be someone magnificent, to do good in a world that refuses to acknowledge anything other than evil, to live a life with someone other than your best friend and fish - all of that pressure has to dissipate over ten years. If it hasn't, then dear god, woman, what the hell have you been doing?

In closing, be happy. The woman you are now is still trying to learn how to be happy...still learning to be still. So if I've learned anything in ten years, I hope to goodness that it's how to be happy...and the drums. I really, really, really wanted to learn the drums...

Love, Me

P.S. On the off chance you met him and fell madly in love, turn to your left and say hello to Luke Wilson for me... What? A girl can dream, can't she?

Six True Conspiracy Theories

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 08:00 GMT

by Paul A. Toth

GRAND BLANC, MI-

Conspiracy humbuggery plagues the Internet, but not all conspiracy theories are tricky cells in the information supervirus. Via thorough research into the Barney Milleresque filing cabinets of my imagination, and from reading blogs that remind me of why I don't document my day-to-day life, I have investigated thousands to a couple of conspiracy theories and absolutely believe everything I read when I agree with it. Therefore, I will attest that the following conspiracies are relatively factual to the best of my limited knowledge, if I remember ever having or claiming to have that knowledge.

1) AIDS DID NOT ORIGINATE IN MONKEYS. Actually, the original story is true but incomplete. What has failed to be reported is that scientists discovered a clique of monkeys deep in what remains of Africa's jungles. However, these monkeys exhibited strange behavior. They were peculiarly lethargic and often nodded out. Upon further exploration, scientists discovered used syringes strewn about the monkeys' territory. Thus, it is only known how monkeys began the spread of AIDS, not the manner in which one or more acquired the virus in the first place. Tragically, the Monkey King would not allow for a needle exchange program.

2) THE WARREN COMMISSION REPORT IS A COVER-UP. As often occurs, the cover story bears some connection to reality. There was a lone shooter, and that lone shooter was Lee Harvey Oswald. However, Mr. Oswald was not hired by the mafia or disgruntled Cubans. He was hired by Jackie Onassis.

3) JIM MORRISON IS ALIVE. Keith Richards is alive; ergo, Jim Morrison is alive. Invented sources assure me that Morrison lives in a tree near his "grave," where he laughs at those leaving graffiti. He "vanished" after having realized that he was not quite a poet, though he had his moments, especially as rendered by Val Kilmer.

4) MARILYN MONROE DID NOT COMMIT SUICIDE. Most can guess Marilyn Monroe was so narcissist that she would never have even contemplated suicide, except when Joe DiMaggio swung out in the sack. However, in a drug-induced stupor, Monroe imagined that she was her mother, then tried to breastfeed herself, only to choke on her own boob. At the time, and until now, this could not be reported, as such a tale would have contributed to a Red scare and Communist-devised fetishes meant to destroy America.

5) MARY MAGDALENE AND JESUS CHRIST HAD A THING GOING ON. Perhaps. What is certain is that Jesus told numerous lewd parables while drunk on "grape juice," all documented in the "Lost Land Scrolls," preserved in the Vatican's secret Masturbation Library.

6) FDR ALLOWED PEARL HARBOR TO OCCUR. Unlike the rock solid evidence backing the invasion of Iraq, FDR could not so easily sell the Second World War to the American public. Therefore, he indeed allowed the Pearl Harbor attack to occur. Unfortunately, that hardly marks the end of the story. FDR was also Hitler, and Tojo. Thus, he declared war on America and Japan the next day and vice versa. Hitler had remained a street artist, while FDR adopted the mustache and tyrannical powers until now attributed to innocent Adolf. The role of FDR was played by Edward Herrmann. Thus, the Greatest Generation defeated the Greatest Generation, and that is why half of the Greatest Generation is known as the Greatest Generation. The rest were bastards.

*NOTE TO "KIP": If I mix my metaphors, it's only to give you something else about which to complain, or to complain about, depending upon your opinion of Winston Churchill. Negativity obviously dominates your life by not preoccupying you. You should consult a life planner so that you may become too busy to waste time on the Internet and news from the liberal media.

I Need A Shot Of Testosterone

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:04 GMT

By Lenore Zion

LOS ANGELES, CA-

Recently, my mother alerted me to the fact that, as a child, I “really loved nursing.”

This information was delivered to me via text message. I was just sitting there, cuddling with my cat, Hege, and my phone beeped. For some reason, that afternoon my mother decided it was time for me to know that I loved to breastfeed.

It seems she had been looking at old photographs of me and had been reminded of my powerful need to feed by the size of my face in one picture in particular.

I sent her a text message in reply: “GROSS.”

Generally speaking, most people do not want to deeply consider the breastfeeding they did as babies. In fact, most people make the assumption that their personal breastfeeding experiences ended at infancy. The possibility of the nursing having continued on into the toddler years is so unpleasant that it is simply ignored.

I was given the boob in my toddler years. I don’t have conscious memory of it, but I know my mother, and I know I breastfed as a toddler.

I received another text message from my mother: “It is not gross. You are just too young and immature to understand. One day you will see how beautiful it is and you will apologize for being so callous. I know this in my bones.”

This text message creeped me out even more than the one about how much I loved to nurse. I think it was the last part that really did it. “I know this in my bones.” Everything about that sentence is uncomfortable to me. Why are my mother’s bones tuned into what my knockers will be doing years from now? Why is she so sure that I’ll change my mind completely and suddenly find breastfeeding beautiful and not yucky?

I’m not short-sighted here. I know that eventually I’ll probably grow up and have a kid or two with some poor sumbitch. And I’ll probably breastfeed those kids. And I will only breastfeed those children for one reason. Because it burns 500 calories a day.

This, however, will never change the fact that I think it’s strange and repugnant that women start manufacturing food in their tits when they have kids. Right? It won’t change my repulsed reaction to new parents when they enthusiastically describe the smell of breast milk baby shit to me. They always tell me it smells nice. Sweet. That won’t change. Right?

Why the fuck are new parents smelling their offspring’s excrement?

I’ve just returned home from my little brother’s wedding. He and his wife, Kate, got married in the nature museum in Chicago. He looked all grown up in his suit, and she was gorgeous in her dress. She’s always gorgeous, but my little brother isn’t always all grown up. It stunned me, and the thing I thought would never happen to me happened: I cried.

I cried through the entire ceremony. I cried at the reception. I wept into my friend Adam’s suit jacket, hysterically, when Ben and my mother had their dance. They danced to Dylan’s Forever Young.

She was saying something to him, and he was saying something back. I imagined it to be some sort of wise motherly advice or some memory or something mushy and sweet.

I found out later that she was staring into his eyes in a creepy way and mouthing the song lyrics to him, and he was saying to her: “I know the words, Mom. I know the lyrics. Please don’t embarrass me. I know the words. Please stop embarrassing me.”

In retrospect, of course this is what was happening. I was caught up in the moment. It’s never happened to me before. Weddings have never moved me. I felt like a robot at all the weddings that preceded Ben and Kate’s wedding.

But something changed. Now I weep.

Maybe my mother is right. Maybe soon I will discover a biological clock I never knew I had. Milky boobs will be pretty and natural and lovely and special.

I caught myself smiling at a kid in a store the other day. That probably means something. I feel like I’m in Kafka’s book, “The Metamorphosis,” only instead of transforming into a monstrous vermin, I’m turning into a girl.

Oh God,

Lenore.

I THINK I KNOW WHO OBAMA'S V.P. IS GONNA BE

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 17:04 GMT

By Brad Listi

LOS ANGELES, CA-

I think I just had an epiphany regarding the Veepstakes debate and Barack Obama's selection process in particular. I was reading the newspaper in a state of customary numbness, and all of a sudden it hit me like a thunderbolt. Please excuse me while I nerd out for a moment.

I think Barack Obama will choose one of the following two guys to be his VP:

Evan Bayh, senator from Indiana

Tim Kaine, governor of Virginia

Here's why:

1.) Both were born in the 1950s.

This, to me, is a critical point and a very basic selection criterion that isn't getting nearly enough airtime. Obama is, if anything, a completely shrewd politician with an eye on history. He's trying to win the White House and will no doubt want to cement his eventual legacy by having his vice president succeed him---a hallmark of any successful presidency. I can (almost) guarantee you that age and eventual succession is something that plays out in Obama's ambitious imagination on a semi-regular basis.

With this in mind, I don't see how Obama could possibly pick from a whole slew of sexagenarian candidates who continue to be talked about with great fervor, all of whom will be at or beyond age 70 in 2016. (I'm dealing in hypotheticals here, and assuming, for the sake of this argument, that Obama will win in November and serve two terms in office. I'm also being somewhat ageist in my evaluations, but doing so as a matter of practicality rather than prejudice. The plain truth is, a seventy-something-year-old successor is less likely to succeed in an election in contemporary American politics. The golden age range seems to be 45 to 65.)

Should age be a deciding factor in Obama's decision-making process---and I think it will be---then Biden, Richardson, Clinton, Nunn, Webb, Bradley, Clark, etc. would all be out of the running.

I see Biden as Secretary of State, as do many people. His foreign relations chops are second to none.

I see Hillary (should she decide to stay in the Senate and not run for governor of New York) playing a major role in health care legislation---or possibly even jockeying for a Supreme Court nomination.

I see John Edwards as Attorney General.

I see Al Gore as the figurehead of the environmental arm of the Obama administration. Perhaps he will be appointed "Green Czar," or some such thing. Or maybe he'll just be a trusted adviser.

2.) Both Kaine and Bayh are "presidential" and have the experience to take over in the event of an emergency.

Bayh was a hugely popular two-term Democratic governor in blood-red Indiana during the late '80s and early '90s. He has since gone on to win his Senate seat twice, and with great ease, and is very popular in his home state. Hailed by the Wall Street Journal as a "fiscally conservative Democrat" during his governorship, he built a surplus and cut taxes. Ran a very tight ship. He delivered the keynote address at Bill Clinton's 1996 convention, and as senator, he serves on the very important Armed Services Committee. Seasoned.

Kaine, while less experienced nationally, is still the chief executive of the state of Virginia, and his experience in government stretches back a long way. He was a city councilman in Richmond before becoming its mayor. He built his career in Virginia politics from the ground up and is familiar with the machinations of governance at multiple levels. He's also a staunch Catholic who in his younger years did missionary work in Honduras. Has ample God-love and knows how to speak the language of the faithful.

3.) Both Kaine and Bayh deliver votes in swing states, in important regions, and can relate well to the constituencies that Obama has trouble charming.

Translation: They can work Appalachia and other outposts of backwoods White America. They can work blue collar voters in the Pennsylvania wilderness and know how to speak the language of disgruntled Ohio factory workers. Virginia hasn't voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964. Indiana? Same.

Kaine helps Obama make even further inroads into Virginia, where he's already doing pretty well. Bayh puts Indiana in play and forces McCain to spend money there.

Other thoughts:

Kaine has the advantage of having been one of Obama's earliest supporters; he endorsed him before it was fashionable to do so.

Bayh was on Clinton's team---but this may actually wind up helping his cause, as Obama may choose him in a further nod toward party unification.

I see the VP selection process of 2008 as unusually important. It's always important, mind you, but this time around it seems to be even more so. There's so much strategy that goes into this choice on both sides of the aisle. Obama picks Bayh or Kaine, and maybe McCain selects Carly Fiorina or Kay Bailey Hutchinson in an effort to pull female voters out of the Democrats' camp. Entirely possible.

Again: It'll be interesting to see which candidate announces his selection first. My guess is that it's some sort of stare-down, strategically speaking. Maybe the polls will drive the process. If one or the other candidate starts to lag behind, he might announce his choice in an effort to generate media coverage and a bump in the numbers. Money, too, could factor in. The announcement is sure to provide plenty of free coverage. Which candidate will flinch first and seek to play that particular ace for (temporary) advantage? We'll see.

And what about the Latino vote? Obama did well among Latino voters in Virginia, but in most Latino states he struggled. Kaine and Bayh don't seem to have huge, overt support in the Latino community. Then again, Kaine helped deliver the Latino vote in Virginia (to the tune of an unexpected split), and Bayh is well-known and well-liked among the Clinton faithful, a constituency which does include the Latino community.

And perhaps most importantly, what does Obama think of these two guys? Does he like them? Does he feel he could work well with them? Is he comfortable with them?

Kaine? My guess is yes, considering the early endorsement.

Does he like Bayh? My guess is yes, he likes him well enough and respects his intelligence. Bayh is descended from educators, and Obama himself was a college professor. In watching them speak, the two men seem to have a somewhat similar way of comporting themselves and talking about the issues. Plus, they both hail from the same part of the country. Neighboring states. Despite the fact that he was a Clinton supporter, Bayh doesn't strike me as an offensive type of a guy, the kind of guy who would draw blood on the Senate floor and play dirty in rank and unnecessary ways. I could be wrong, but that's how it looks. I see he and Obama as compatible.

So if I were a betting man, who would I pick?

Bayh.

That's what my gut is telling me today. Unless Obama hates his guts, I think Bayh will be the choice. He's been a governor. He's been a Senator. He's been exceedingly popular in a red state. He's known as a fiscal conservative. He's seasoned. He's a Clintonite. (Unification, remember.) He serves on the Armed Services Committee. His wife is blond and pretty. His sons are named Beau and Nicholas. He's Middle America. He's articulate. He looks like a president. (This is more important than some people like to think.) He's disciplined on the campaign trail. He's a good enough speaker, better than average. He's bright. To damn him with faint praise: He's perfect vice presidential material. Somewhat Gore-like. Wonky. Good-hearted. He projects competence and lower-than-normal political ego. He's young enough. He will put Indiana and its 11 electoral votes seriously into play.

Why the edge over Kaine? I think Kaine has less national and foreign policy experience than Bayh. Less name recognition (though I doubt Evan Bayh is a household name). I also think that Team Obama believes it can win Virginia without Kaine on the ticket. The numbers there are looking favorable.

Indiana, on the other hand, is a comer. Obama's better-than-expected performance there in the primary (he lost by two points) has to make him believe that he has an outside chance there---emphasis on outside---even without Bayh.

Put Bayh on the ticket, though, and suddenly Indiana is a new game. And this plays right into Obama's "50-State Strategy" and his determination to do battle with McCain in Republican strongholds.

Bayh is young, fresh, handsome, new---but not too new. He fits Obama's central campaign tenet: Change. His record as a politician qualifies him as a model of "post-partisan" leadership and effective, competent governance. His support of Hillary Clinton gives him the opportunity to be a functional bridge between the two intra-party camps.

It's all making sense to me now. It's all becoming clear.

With apologies to Kaine, it's Bayh.

-BL

Why I'm Not Leaving the United States (2/2 Contradictory Parts)

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 06:54 GMT

by Paul A. Toth

GRAND BLANC, MI-

That's about it.

However, I suppose I must provide further details as to why I reneged on my promise to leave the country. I owe that much. Apparently, I owe everyone something. I'm pretty sure I'm collecting interest on myself. I'm definitely more interested in myself, but then, I'm a misanthrope, with four or five exceptions. As Lautreamont's Maldoror put it, we're breathing corpses. That's why I smoke.

Here, then, is a point-by-point refutation of my plan to leave the States.

The Retraction

No hurricane can come soon enough, for I live in Florida, and not by choice, exactly. Instead, I've decided to take up "water sports," i.e, being pissed upon. I've finally found a career path, so long as I videotape everything.

Nevertheless, I've abandoned my abandonment of the United States and surrendered my dream of not helping change it for the worse. "Change" has been promised. I believe all promises, knowing they will not be kept; where there is no denial, there can be no hope. On the negative side, the soon-to-be-relapsed alcoholic will be gone in a few never-ending months, but there's always an excuse, like capitalism. And a miracle of sorts could occur, with voters electing a black man...so that one of them may shoot him.

Intelligence is not despised in the United States; it would take intelligence to knowingly despise intelligence. In fact, and correcting myself, plenty of wise men and women live here, or once did. They're in the ground and put themselves there. They would have enjoyed listening to the shifting of money upwards, had their ears not fallen off. They also would have enjoyed the ambience of wealth transfer, before barbiturate overdose.

Had I left, I would have missed "free enterprise." I'm a masochist. I've wallpapered my apartment with unpaid bills. The interior of my living quarters is yellow and pink, suggesting I'm a cowardly Communist. That's not far from the truth. Yet there's nowhere else I might have found myself with more to complain about from the comfort of my glorious existence under the cape of a god especially devoted to the nation in which I occupy space. Luckily, Columbus or someone discovered America 20,000 to 30,000 years after the Indians had done so.

As to foreign "policy," I enjoy the unstoppable debauchery of global trade. Enslavement has its benefits, namely the lack of noticeable difference between itself and freedom. Globally, too, the U.S. has plenty of democracy it doesn't have to spare, though it's running out of Americans with which to spare it. And what would I do without my positive form of nihilism? Of course, nihilism erases any chance of my being a Communist, for being a Communist implies hope for a utopia I would instantly ruin by my very presence.

In any event, and having said that, and that having been said, there's no escaping the United States. Canada doesn't want us and, anyway, it's just another state, even if not quite united. Wealthier nations crush us with the euro. And it's time to wash right out of one's hair the idea of moving to a third world nation and exploiting its poverty. Everything is cheaper, yes, but jobs pay an equivalent amount less. Thus, I would have not loved America and left it, but I can only not love it.

I'm staying, but not by choice. I'm the man who can't lose his country, though I'd prefer to be the man without a country. Every plot of land on earth is a country, except the uninhabitable ones, but that will soon end thanks to global warming. Iwo Jima will be the new Manhattan and bloom with skyscrapers above the corpses of those who for some reason died upon it.

Conclusion

I shall march with the wooden soldiers. I shall listen to political speeches that mirror the one Palentine gave in Taxi Driver (theatrical release date: 1976). I shall faithlessly maintain faith in the nation of ceaseless faith. I shall salute the flag while sitting on my hands. I shall count the ever-rising number of fatalities in Iraq because that will one day allow for the construction of a wall where I may, silently or not, publicly proclaim my sorrow twenty years too late and with 50/50 hindsight. Without the pride someone else swallowed, I shall split my fare to Switzerland between tickets to various U.S. destinations, which will look exactly like "home." Wherever I lay my head is home, as the moon looks the same, and the sun looks the same, and Applebee's looks the same. I might as well go nowhere and remain in the land where weather reporters have nothing to report beyond, "Sunny and clear for the next -- one, two, four -- six months.

I am a man of habit. To take away my habit of complaining would be to take away the basis for my existence. I live so that everyone else may avoid complaining and almost enjoy family occasions and events between drinking heavily. I am proud to serve my country, even if I'd rather not.

A Contextual Anaylsis of 'Welcome to the Jungle' As it May Have Pertained to My Life in 1987

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 18:11 GMT

By Brad Listi

LOS ANGELES, CA-

There were few albums in my youth that had a greater impact on me than Appetite for Destruction, the seminal hard rock masterpiece from the late great Guns-n-Roses. Formed in 1985 in Los Angeles, Guns-n-Roses was helmed by Axl Rose, who himself had spent an ungodly youth in the bleak redneck wilderness of West Lafayette, Indiana. Appetite was the band's major label debut, released in 1987, when I was twelve years old. It went on to sell 200 million copies and produced three Top 10 hits.

This was seventh grade. Suburban Indianapolis. Indianapolis is a cow town now; back then it was really a cow town. My neighborhood abutted a giant hog farm, the stench of which was unbelievable on a hot autumn day.

Hog town.

The school bus would pick me up at around 7 a.m. I would walk to the end of our cul-de-sac and wait for it. Driver's name: Perry. I had been living in Indiana for a year at that point and still did not have very many friends. I would sit alone on the bus, up near the front, listening to my walkman. Appetite for Destruction on cassette tape. Volume on high.

Fast-forward twenty years. Recently, despite the ungodly heat, I went hiking up in the hills at sunset here in Hollywood. Now, instead of my walkman, I held my iPod. Songs were set to "Shuffle." Sweating bullets. Brutal desert heat. Smog bearing down. Up comes "Welcome to the Jungle." Great song. Always a great song. Has aged well. The entire album has aged well.

Listening to it made me laugh. Took me back in time. It amazed me to think that the song had had such context for me back in 1987. We all know the lyrics, don't we? We all know the subject matter. "Welcome to the Jungle" paints a vicious picture of a twisted, drug-ravaged, capitalist urban wasteland of vast moral decay and grim homicidal tendencies. (Otherwise known as Los Angeles.) And yet I could listen to it at age twelve, rolling past an Indiana hog farm on a coughing school bus, and feel like it was written just for me. Bleak pre-adolescence. Stranger in a strange land.

With this in mind, let us take a look at the lyrics for "Welcome to the Jungle," just for fun, and bit by bit I will try to make sense of what they might have meant to me all these many years ago....

The lyrics:

Welcome to the jungle
We've got fun 'n' games
We got everything you want
Honey, we know the names
We are the people that can find
Whatever you may need
If you got the money, honey
We got your disease
In the jungle
Welcome to the jungle
Watch it bring you to your knees, knees
I wanna watch you bleed

What it meant to me in 1987:

Welcome to junior high, you stupid douchebag. You don't know anyone. You have very few friends and you have a giant space between your two front teeth, and the girls don't want to go with you, and your spiked haircut is retarded, and why did you think it would be cool to wear yellow suspenders on the first day of school? Gym class is a Cro-Magnon proving ground helmed by men who take great pleasure in watching young boys wrassle and inflict pain and compete. The teachers here are maniacs, and they can't wait to bury you in tedium and subject you to unholy amounts of hardcore hayseed discipline. Your only reprieve---if that's what you want to call it---will come during lunch hour, when the cafeteria is filled with the heinous smells of prison-grade sloppy Joes and freezer-burned Salisbury steak. The lunch ladies will sneer at you, standing behind giant vats of lukewarm gravy. They will take your lunch money, and in exchange you will be given a tray full of bacteria and artificial ingredients. Good luck finding someone to sit with, you sorry piece of shit. And by the way: Don't get your ass kicked.

The lyrics:

Welcome to the jungle
We take it day by day
If you want it you're gonna bleed
But it's the price you pay
And you're a very sexy girl
That's very hard to please
You can taste the bright lights
But you won't get them for free
In the jungle
Welcome to the jungle
Feel my, my, my serpentine
I, I wanna hear you scream

What it meant to me in 1987:

The vice principal hates my fucking guts and stands in the hallway across from my locker and yells at me everyday because for some reason he's convinced that I'm some sort of foul-mouthed problem child who's fun to pick on, and he also hates me because I stepped on that kid's pet spider and killed it on the first day of school. I didn't realize it was the kid's pet; I thought it was just walking down the hall. It wasn't on purpose; it was just a mistake. But of course this asshole, the vice principal, he didn't believe me. There was a big crowd of people standing around this giant spider, and I stepped into the middle of the circle, thinking I was being heroic, and I jumped up and landed on it and flattened it dead, with my fists raised over my head in triumph. The kid (his name was Grant) started bawling and the vice principal came and grabbed me by the shirt collar and dragged me to this office and yelled at me for an hour. He threatened to make me serve detention, and there was a wooden paddle hanging from the wall behind his desk. This school really sucks and the only real way to get through it is to just take it day by day. To be popular you have to know people who have lived here since they were, like, born or something, the ones who know everyone and have some sort of history or legacy. And to get to know those people, you have to be good at something. Usually sports. And if you want to get a girl like Lori Weldon to go with you, you have to be really good at sports, or you have to be really, really popular for some other reason. The fastest kid wins. That's pretty much how it works. If you're really fast, and you can jump high, the chicks will go for you. They want sprinters. I'm not a sprinter. I have two friends, and one of them talks like a frog. He actually does this, which to me is sort of cool. He talks like that kid Froggy from The Little Rascals, and he doesn't give a shit about it. Part robot, part frog. A gravelly sort of sound. Dave is his name. He doesn't talk all that much, but when he does talk, he talks like a frog. We're in the same math class together. Frogs are reptiles. At least I think they're reptiles. Or maybe they're amphibians, and I can't remember if amphibians are reptiles. Anyway, I think Dave feels like a reptile, or some sort of amphibian, and that's why he talks like a frog. I can understand that, feeling like a reptile. I kinda feel like a snake or something. A serpent. A serpentine. Snakes are quiet and kind of slow, but they can be mean as hell when provoked.

The lyrics:

Welcome to the jungle
It gets worse here everyday
Ya learn ta live like an animal In the jungle where we play
If you got a hunger for what you see
You'll take it eventually
You can have anything you want
But you better not take it from me

What it meant to me in 1987:

See, that's the thing: If you wanna sit in the back of the bus, you have to be willing to get the shit beat out of you. You have to be willing to go back there and sit down and not give a shit what anyone says, and you have be willing to fight if some upperclassman decides he wants to try to kick your ass. Like Jay Leathers. That kid is insane. He and his brother Zak. They're, like, real rednecks, and Jay is probably fifteen years old and still in junior high. He and Chris Chandler are the meanest kids in the whole school. Good fighters. Chandler went to juvi last year. I think I heard that somewhere. He and Leathers are good friends because together they can scare the shit out of anyone. Even the principal is scared of them. He lets them do whatever they want, as long as they don't murder anyone. They don't even have to go to class. If I wanna go back and sit in the back of the bus, I have to be willing to deal with Jay Leathers. I think I heard that he and Zak live with their dad, who has to be some sort of maniac. Their house is out past the hog farm in the middle of nowhere, and it's pretty small and completely rundown. God only knows what goes on in there. I have no interest in mixing with these people. Jay Leathers smells like pepperoni. I'm pretty sure he's gonna murder someone someday.

The lyrics:

And when you're high you never
Ever want to come down, YEAH!
You know where you are
You're in the jungle baby
You're gonna die In the jungle
Welcome to the jungle
Watch it bring you to your knees, knees
In the jungle
Welcome to the jungle
Feel my, my, my serpentine
In the jungle
Welcome to the jungle
Watch it bring you to your knees, knees
In the jungle
Welcome to the jungle
Watch it bring you to your
It' gonna bring you down-HUH!

What it meant to me in 1987:

The weekend is really the only good thing. Playing Nintendo on the weekend. Soccer games on the weekend. People leave you alone on the weekend. Fucking around and drinking Mountain Dew on the weekend. It's too bad nobody gives a shit about soccer in this state. Everybody thinks soccer is for pussies here. If you play soccer, something's wrong with you. You get made fun of. It's basketball here. It's football and baseball. But even still, I like to play soccer on the weekends. It's better than going to school, sitting through classes for eight hours a day. But the problem is, the weekends are always short. Summer goes by too quickly. Every time something good happens and you get a break from school, it ends all of a sudden. The days race by and before you know it, you're standing at the bottom of the cul-de-sac, waiting for the school bus again. And then you see it coming. And then you see Perry. It just goes on like this, grade after grade, year after year. The good stuff goes too fast, and the bad stuff goes too slow. At some point junior high will end, and then it'll be time for high school. I wonder if I'll have lots of friends by then. Maybe a girlfriend. That would be weird. And then high school will probably be a little bit better, maybe. High school has got to be better. And then college. You go to college and you decide what you want to be for the rest of your life. And then after college you have to go get a job that you work for the rest of your life, which sucks. And then you work so much, for so many years, that you get old and sick, and then one day your heart just stops, and you die, and they put you in a wooden box, and they stick you in a muddy hole, where you rot with the potato bugs and the worms for eternity. And apparently you either go to heaven or hell. But either way, you're dead. Which sucks.

-BL

Brad Listi is a writer. His first novel, Attention. Deficit. Disorder, is now available in the United States and the United Kingdom. If you read it, you will tickle his fancy.

I Met Her in Sheboygan in September; I Can Still Recall the Stolen Goods She Wore*

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 07:09 GMT

By Dawn Corrigan

GULF BREEZE, FL-

One day when I was still living in Utah I was in the Highland City Planning & Zoning office. As was my wont. Because I worked there.

Anyway. One of my coworkers had the radio tuned to a country station. Suddenly from it I heard:

Many's the time I have looked in the water
And had no reflection to show

Until that moment I had no idea the Oak Ridge Boys were vampires.

This is only one small example of the many things I learned during my Year of Country and Western.

Dude! You're a vampire!

By that I mean the year I worked in Highland.

Another thing I learned is I like country music more than I thought. And it's a good thing, too, because in Highland we listened to country music nine hours a day, five days a week.

Before the Year of C&W, I thought the only country I liked was Patsy Cline and Lyle Lovett--and some people say Lyle doesn't even count as country.

But now I know I like Franklin Delano Reeves, better known as Del. His song "Girl on the Billboard" was recorded in 1965. That means it's been in the world two years longer than I have, but I only heard it for the first time a few months ago.

I feel a little indignant about that.

"Girl on the Billboard," Wikipedia informs me, is a "girl-watching, novelty-type song."

I didn't even know that was a category. Now I'm really indignant.

"Girl on the Billboard" opens

Who is the girl
wearing nothing but a smile
and a towel
in the picture
on the billboard
in the field
near the big old highway?

Isn't that lovable? All those prepositions, but we never get mixed up.

I believe that's because the sentence uses what Steven Pinker would call right-branching syntax, as opposed to onion syntax.

But I digress.

The point is, Del Reeves croons all those prepositions in one long unhurried string, and then he adds Doo da doo doo doo, and we can picture the field and the billboard, circa 1962, and it all seems so sweet I don't even mind the "girl-watching" objectification that might normally drive me a little crazy.

(Later in the song, the singer, sensibly enough, hunts down the guy who painted the billboard. His heart is broken when the painter informs him the girl "wasn't real." I can't quite put my finger on it, but doesn't it seem like there might be a lesson there for our airbrushed-girl-saturated times?)

Faith Hill, After and Before a Recent Airbrushing

During the Year of C&W, I also learned I'm scared of Carrie Underwood.

I wasn't always scared. The first 20 or so times I heard "Before He Cheats" I hummed along enthusiastically.

Then I listened to the words.

While a pacifist, I can imagine situations where I would not be opposed to the destruction of property.

However, I can't say this is one of them.

I mean, I get the whole transference thing. He treats his pretty little souped up 4-wheel drive better than he treats you, and uses it to ferry around the women he cheats with. Or hell, maybe he's doing them right there in his cute little truck.

Still, Carrie, I think it would be better to just walk away without getting a baseball bat involved.

I'm used to the song now, so it seems kind of funny. But I really was shocked the first time I listened to the lyrics.

It's a shame about the violence, too, because there are so many details from the song--the bathroom cologne, the pool lesson as foreplay--that are so spot on they're like instant cultural mythology.

Another song I heard a lot of during the Year of C&W was "If You're Reading This" by Tim McGraw.

It's an epistolary song written as a "To Be Opened Only in Case of" letter from a soldier to his wife. The chorus is, "If you're reading this, I'm already home."

The song seems very popular with military families so I guess it, erm, hit the mark with its target audience.

But whenever I hear it, I can't help thinking of another letter, this one written by David Mahlenbrock, a 20-year-old American Soldier who was killed in Iraq in December 2004.

His letter said:

"If you're reading this, I just hope it wasn't for nothing."

Exquisite Corpse just published three of my poems. I hope you'll read them. Also, my story "Dream of Heat" was selected for the Wigleaf 50, a list of recently published stories under 1000 words that the editors of Wigleaf and Chad Simpson especially liked. I suggest the list as an enjoyable way to lose an hour or two. Also also, you can listen to the 10 finalists from Opium Magazine's Bookmark Contest at KQED, here and here. Actor Jon Wolanske from Killing My Lobster read my story "The Sail" as part of the first broadcast. Thank you Jon for doing such an excellent job!

*Generated using the Country Western Song Generator, another enjoyable way to lose some time.

Goodbye Cruel World

Thu, 29 May 2008 09:54 GMT

By Steve Dupont

BIRMINGHAM, AL -

And hello GRUEL WORLD!!!

That's right, call me a sell out, but I've once again succumbed to the siren song of corporate monies. First it was the Jumex Corporation, along with the Obtuse Angle Corporation, and now ladies and gentlemen, I'm pleased to announce my unquestioning servitude to:

Have you tried this stuff yet? Talk about stick-to-your-ribs goodness for the whole family!

The old Old World Corn Gruel is really good, don't get me wrong, but the new and improved Old World Corn Gruel is, well, out of this world! See, the R and D geniuses at the Old World Corn Gruel Corporation were obviously in a pickle -- because how do you improve upon perfection, right -- but then, after what I hear was over three months of round-the-clock tinkering, they did it!

Salt! They added salt! Can you believe that? Sometimes the most genius things are just so simple.

Anyway, tragically, you may not have heard of Old World Corn Gruel yet -- because it's still only available through specialty retailers (I used to get mine from Ye Olde Gruel Shoppe and Polished Gemstone Emporium but now I get it straight from the factory, baby!). They're very particular about their channels of distribution due to branding concerns, which is understandable. They don't want to be on the big box supermarket shelves alongside all those other, inferior, brands of Corn Gruel ...

Right, so, in addition to singing the praises of Old World Corn Gruel and New and Improved Old World Corn Gruel at every opportunity, they've also sponsored a new blog I've got going on:

Gonzo Politico.

Yes, in their infinite wisdom, the marketing folks over at the Old World Corn Gruel Corporation have decided to ride the wave of all this election year excitement. And they've commissioned me to write this political column, which, again, in case I didn't mention it, is called:

Gonzo Politico.

Here's the masthead (sized down a little), which I did myself and I think is pretty freakin' awesome, considering I did it myself.

The Old World Corn Gruel Corporation really wanted it to say "The Old World Corn Gruel Corporation presents Gonzo Politico," but I pushed back. I pushed back hard (two words: hissy fit) and they finally caved.

You might guess the title is an homage to the late-great Doctor of Journalism, Hunter S. Thompson, and you'd be 100% right. The dude is right up there in my Pantheon of Heroes. Of course, despite the continued greatness of the aged Hunter, we'll always remember him as a young buck.

The man was a freakin' TITAN. You know, a lot of people think he was "suicided" possibly because of a 9/11 expose in the works ... but I digress.

My point is, read Gonzo Politico, eat New and Improved Old World Corn Gruel -- or Original Old World Corn Gruel for that matter -- and be happy.

If these things don't make you happy, well, then, I'm afraid there's no hope for you.

STEVE DUPONT is the author of Therein Lies the Probem, a novel, and many online columns including the brand new Gonzo Politico. His official Internet headquarters is at SteveDupont.com.

Our Worst Moments

Thu, 29 May 2008 08:07 GMT

By Lauren Baratz Logsted

DANBURY, CT-

When it was announced last week that Senator Ted Kennedy was diagnosed with brain cancer a few disturbing things happened outside of the obvious:

1) The cable networks gave it the kind of wall-to-wall coverage more suitable to a death;

2) I started hearing people choose to ignore the other many facts of his life, preferring instead to focus on whatever individual issues they had with him.

In terms of the latter, I heard three specific citations from three separate individuals:

1) Chappaquiddick;

2) preventing Carter from beating Reagan in 1980;

3) not exposing the Warren Commission Report as being a sham.

To all of this, I say: Are you *kidding* me?

It's not that I don't understand people's feelings or why they feel as they do, even when I don't share their mindset, but what I don't understand is holding onto the resentment, sometimes even hatred, for three or four decades or more in the face of overwhelming evidence that any life is made up of so much more than an individual's worst moment; that, in fact, we are the sum of all our moments.

Ted Kennedy, in addition to whatever other shortcomings he might have, has served the country since November 1962, just a few months after I was born. You know, with his money, he could have spent his life just sailing, never doing anything else, just another rich playboy. And while it's easy to make the argument that the wealthy get into politics for the power, what exactly has he done with that power? Has he used it to further oil-greedy friends as others have done? No, let's see...

Cliff Notes version: He's championed the rights of women and children, the poor and the elderly, favored increasing the minimum wage, been strongly pro-environment, strongly for gun control, and one of only five senators to publicly give vocal support to same-sex marriage.

Really, it hasn't been a bad use of nearly 46 years out of an individual life.

None of this is to minimize the worst moments, but it is always easier to pass judgment from the outside than to try to walk in someone else's shoes.

Recently, I've been reading Ted Sorensen's memoir COUNSELOR: A LIFE AT THE EDGE OF HISTORY, which focuses on a different Kennedy: JFK. Beginning in 1953, Sorensen worked progressively as a legislative assistant, a speechwriter and finally an advisor, Special Counsel to the President, in which capacity he was serving when JFK was assassinated on November 22, 1963.

At one point, Sorensen gets around to discussing what no doubt the most prurient among us would like him to: JFK's sex life. Despite making it obvious that JFK was so prolific in that regard, he makes former president Bill Clinton look like a monk, Sorensen refuses to divulge lurid details. Rather, he concludes:

Was JFK a moral leader? An American president, commander in chief of the world's greatest military power, who during his presidency *did not* send one combat troop division abroad or drop one bomb, who used his presidency to break down the barriers to religious and racial equality and harmony in this country and to reach out to victims of poverty and repression, who encouraged Americans to serve their communities and to love their neighbors regardless of the color of their skin, who waged war not on smaller nations but on poverty and illiteracy and mental illness in his own country, and who restored the appeal of politics for the young and sent Peace Corps volunteers overseas to work with the poor and untrained in other countries - was in my book a moral president, regardless of his private misconduct. Public officials should be judged primarily not by their puritanism in private, but by their public deeds and public service, by their principles and policies.

I would agree with that assessment.

We are never *just* our worst moments, although we are surely them in addition to everything else we are; rather, we are all our moments, the sum total of the millions of moments that make up our lives. And if we go on judging based solely on worst moments, then we will always be disappointed in the world we live in, disappointed in ourselves. It's a choice. What do we want to focus on: the occasional bad, or the - hopefully - overwhelming good? What does the balance sheet show? Frankly, I hope I'm never judged solely on my worst moment, for if I am, then I am screwed.

How would you like to be judged?

Be well. Don't forget to write.

"All The Times" Music Video (aka - We Are All Made of Stardust)

Thu, 29 May 2008 01:05 GMT

By Rich Ferguson

LOS ANGELES, CA-

As some of you may or may not have noticed

I dropped out of the Nervous Breakdown community for a little while

Mind you, I was always reading
Always commenting whenever I could
But I just wasn't writing

Let's just say there were one or two events in the past few months

That threw me into a bit of a funk

My soul had become as flimsy as the set of an old western movie
My field of sleep had become overrun with weeds and had grown very, very complicated

Putting pen to paper
Or fingers to keyboard
Seemed next to impossible

Mind you, I only say these things to try and account for my absence

The truth is, I've missed you good folks
And I want you to know that

So I guess you can say this is my coming out party
I'm doing whatever I can to get back in the game
And contribute to TNB again

And what better way for me to come out
Than to present to you good folks
A spoken word & music video
I recently created with the amazing director, Mark Wilkinson

(See below)

The track is called "All The Times"
And it's off my CD, Where I Come From

The musicians are as follows:

Paul Garrison - Guitar
Rich Mangicaro - Drums
Travis Randal - Bass

You know, this all kinda reminds me of a line
I heard someone say not so long ago:

"We are all made of stardust..."

I like that

We are all made of stardust

That's one reason I want to make myself write for TNB again
Because I love hearing what you good folks have to say
And I love sharing ideas with you

Also, deep down I realize we're all made of stardust

Mark Wilkinson the director is stardust
Brad Listi is stardust
Lenore, Dawn, Jennifer, Reno, 11:59, MLP, Kip, Greg, Claire, Eric, Rebecca, R. Kent
And all the other wonderful writers on TNB
Are made of stardust, too

So are Paul, Rich, and Travis

Those guys are definitely made of stardust

And whether you write for TNB or not
Even If you're just passing by
Quickly reading these words
Or getting ready to watch this cool video

You are made of stardust, too

And don't you forget that
I know I'm trying not to

I hope y'all enjoy the video...

The Confusion of Red

Wed, 28 May 2008 07:44 GMT

by Kip Tobin

MADRID, SPAIN

When I lived in Segovia, Spain in 1993 on a study abroad program, I saw my first bullfight.

I was 20 and full of post-teen angst and mid-college confusion, sympathetic to all underdogs in the world, including bulls.

I remember being nauseated by the spectacle: a bull charges into the ring and after 20 minutes is dragged out, punctured, bloodied and lifeless.

Fat Spanish men gnaw on wet cigars and yell vulgarities or praises, depending on the bull and bullfighter.

The bulls rarely stand a chance of surviving a bullfight.

They live their lives of four to five years strolling in lush pastures, mounting as many heifers as they can, eating well and living the life of beastly kings.

The main argument from pro-bullfighting enthusiasts is that this race of bull wouldn't exist if it weren't for the spectacle of bullfighting.

This free-range existence precludes human contact.

Until....

their last day, when they are corralled into the bullring--into a bull pen--and wait in darkness.

Each time one is released they are cattle prodded (bull prodded?) down the dark corridor where they can see the light at the end of the tunnel, literally.

It rushes toward the light.

Beyond is a crowd waiting to cheer and clamor in a crazy cacophony, rooting for its death to be as elegant as possible.

Once in the ring, among the chaos and waving flags, the bull chases whatever moves.

Men dressed in multicolored attire wave their banderas.

A picador on a horse charges at the beast and drives a couple of spikes in its back, further incensing it and multiplying its confusion.

More spikes come, eight in total, and blood streams down its sides.

After 15 or 20 minutes, the bullfighter pulls out the sword and tries to deftly slide it into the precise spot where its spine opens up.

If he's successful, the sword will plunge straight through, piercing the bull's heart.

The bull will stagger and wail.

Blood now drips from its mouth and nose, is painted on its sides and trickles into its eyes.

Two or three men will surround it, wave their red banderas in front of its eyes to keep it disoriented.

The confusion of red.

The anger the bull felt while fighting will be allayed by the waving of a crimson cape until it falls to its knees.

If the bull is not completely dead, a little man in a suit comes up and pulls out a dagger, finds the proper spot in its skull and plunges. This should immediately kill it.

Sometimes they miss the proper spot and the bull screams in the immediacy of the pain and horror that it's life is about to actually end.

Sometimes they have to plunge the dagger two or three more times to make sure it's dead.

The horror.

Then, finally, it throws its head back, hitting the ground, its legs twitching its last movements.

If it was a good kill, they'll cut off an ear and give it to the bullfighter.

The chains are harnessed around one of the bull's legs and horses drag it away to be dismembered for food that people and animals will devour.

****
That was the essence of a poem I wrote at the time.

I was much younger and naive then.

I grew up wanting to be a veterinarian and felt nothing but sympathy and pain for these beautiful, intimidating creatures.

****

The patron saint of Madrid is San Isidro and with this celebration that started two weeks ago, the bullfighting season is in full force.

Every day in the papers or news you see the bullfight report.

Occasionally, you get to see a goring.

We were invited to an uncommon spectacle at Las Ventas - Madrid's famed bullfighting ring.

A Corrida de Rejones is a special bullfight performed by horse riders. The bullfighter is also a skilled horse rider who has to have precise command of the beautiful unprotected horse he's riding while at the same time able to kill the bull with a spike (rejonear).

Wesley, Brandon, Juan and I walked entered a near sold-out bullring.

Three rejoneadores take on two bulls each, in rotation.

The first rejoneador goes first and forth, the second goes fifth and the third--and best--goes third and last, finishing the day around 8 pm.

This day, the first five fights were a mixture of average to above average.

The crowd whistled (the American equivalent of booing) less often than they cheered.

Whatever angst I had felt back in college seeing a bullfight had long disappeared by the sixth fight.

To see a horse and bull charge at each other and the bull come centimeters away from tearing open the horses pristine ribcage was uncomfortable and riveting.

The rejoneador slams a spike into the charging bulls back while simultaneously directing the horrified horse away from harm and then, as the very angry bull chases after the horse, the rider turns around and touches the bull's horns with his hand or his hat.

This was impressive and somehow elegant.

Majestic barbarity.

This final rider perfectly spiked the bull four times without missing.

This infuriated and weakened the bull and piqued the crowd's support for the mobile matador.

The final four spikes were as perfect as the first four.

When the crowd's din lulled, you could hear the bull screaming as it blew out bloody mucous through its nose.

On his first attempt at killing this 600 kilogram bull (1,200+ pounds), a rapid charge between the bull and horse culminated in a perfect spike that left only the handle protruding from the bull's back.

The bull froze.

The crowd shouted a collective, deafening roar.

The rejoneador galloped on the horse around the ring.

The bull swayed.

The rejoneador took off his hat and stopped at various points around the ring, causing the crowd to somehow get even louder.

Little men ornately dressed like bullfighter helpers surrounded the bull with their pink (not red) capes.

But the bull was standing immobile, effectively dead.

It cleanly fell over on its side and vomited several liters of red into the brown dirt.

Brandon, Wes, Juan and I screamed and clapped as loudly as the Spanish mass.

The entire stadium jumped to its feet, cheering the beautiful death of the bull.

The rejoneador continued his stops at various points in front of the crowd.

People threw roses, some women through underwear and a dead chicken's body bounced on the ground.

Apparently a really good performance includes a freshly broken-necked chicken.

Minutes later we filtered out into the streets and found our way to La Vaca Argentina where we feasted on rations of Argentine beef and talked about things unrelated to bullfighting.

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Special thanks goes to Wesley Brown for the great photographs.

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Kip if now officially on a semi-hiatus from posting on TNB while he pursues a Masters degree in Spanish. At best, he will post erratically. His alter ego, Tip Robin, sometimes posts music mashes at Tip Robin's Mega Maxi Mix Mash. The real Kip Tobin can be seen in a recent internet broadcast promoting the best tortilla in Madrid. He hopes that peak oil is not happening, but think it might be. Good luck.

Bloody Stool Is Bad (and Other Painfully Obvious Medical Observations)

Sat, 24 May 2008 15:25 GMT

By Eric Spitznagel

ST. AUGUSTINE, Florida-

My grandfather was a doctor. And for at least a few hours, he was convinced that I would follow in his footsteps.

I was seventeen years old, and aside from a brief flirtation with veterinary medicine, utterly uninterested in any career that involved scalpels and touching guts. I had discovered the joys of writing snarky op-ed pieces for the high school newspaper, performing in Woody Allen plays for the drama department, and smoking clove cigarettes with my girlfriend in her bedroom as we listened to Smiths' records and complained about how much the suburbs "sucked balls." To think realistically about becoming a doctor would require paying attention in my remedial biology class, and actually taking notes when my teacher explained the difference between mitral and tricuspid valves, and applying to at least a few colleges with a reputation for academia and not just schools where I was likely to meet girls who wanted to smoke clove cigarettes and listen to Smiths' albums.

I might've been left alone to choose my own uninspired destiny, had I just managed to keep my big mouth shut. The next time somebody announces to me that they have blood in their stool, I'm not saying a word.

My grandfather may have been many things, but he wasn't an alarmist. He loved telling stories about the Great Depression and how he survived it. On the infamous "Black Tuesday" of 1929, one of the partners in his medical firm lost everything, and he committed suicide by throwing himself from the top story of their building in Manhattan. My grandfather delighted in describing every horrifying detail; how he just happened to glance out the window of his office at that precise moment and watched his partner's body float past, like a marionette whose wires had been snipped by a sadistic puppeteer.

My grandfather, now alone in his medical practice and presumably penniless, did not join the national panic. He didn't do anything. He just ignored his dwindling stocks and saving accounts and waited. “No good can come from expecting the worst,” he told his wife. It took two decades and one world war, but the stock market finally righted itself and he became a rich man (for the second time). At least amongst his immediate family, it appeared that he was a financial genius. His philosophy became our philosophy: Don’t make any hasty decisions, we told ourselves during any crisis, monetary or otherwise. Don't draw too much attention to yourself. Just wait and see what happens.

From the outside, it might've seemed like we were being rational and patient. But as somebody who has been in the middle of it, let me assure you, we weren't nearly as cunning as we looked. We were just drawing on our innate animal instinct for predator evasion. We believed that if we remained perfectly still, bad things couldn't find us. It's something that most people unlearn when they're five or six, or at least old enough to understand that hiding under a blanket won't protect you from monsters.

To be fair, a little caution now and then can be a smart move. There must be something to it, because my grandfather died a much richer man than I'll ever be. But there were times when his "wait and see" philosophy clearly wasn't the best course of action. Like, for instance, when he realized there was blood in his stool.

"Grandpa is pooping blood?" I asked. It probably wasn't the most appropriate thing to discuss during dinner, especially when my grandparents were sitting right across the table from me, but I wasn't the one who brought it up in the first place.

"He's not pooping blood," my father corrected. "There's just some blood in his stool."

I didn't understand the difference. To me, anything coming out of my anus that belonged in my veins was cause for alarm. "Shouldn't he go to the hospital?" I asked.

My mother and my father and my brother just stared at their plates. The person with the bleeding rectum, who had several medical degrees in New York State, didn't seem too concerned. And I was just a kid who still regularly masturbated into all the fresh linens in the guest bathroom. It was clear who had the intellectual high ground.

I just shrugged, refusing to feel like the fool. "Whatever," I said, making defiant eye contact with my grandfather. "If I had blood in my turds, I'd be getting my butthole x-rayed right now rather than packing my large intestines with pork chops. But you do what you want, gramps."

The next day, he checked himself into the nearest hospital. And not unsurprisingly, it was serious. Well, not life-threatening serious. Just a few polyps on his colon. Nothing that'd kill him, but if left untreated, the polyps could've become cancerous.

He told the nurses that his grandson was the one who successfully diagnosed him, and they all agreed that I had the deductive skills of a future medical practitioner.

"That kid has intuitive smarts," he told everyone who would listen. "He knew there was something wrong with me before anyone else picked up on it. If it was up to them, they would've waited until I was passed out in a pool of my own viscous fluid."

When it became clear that my grandfather wasn't going to die just yet, my family turned their attention to me. They huddled around me, whispering encouraging words about my inevitable future as a medicine man. "Your grandfather thinks you're meant for great things," they said. "You have the soul of a surgeon. You read his symptoms like an art critic studying Monet. You can see things that the rest of us can't."

And for a moment, I almost believed them. I laid awake at night and imagined myself a modern day Doctor Zhivago, but without the Russian accent or addiction to bad poetry. I could save the world with a syringe, and become one of those guys who women aren't ashamed to introduce to their mothers. "He's a doctor" sounds a lot better than "he's a struggling writer who doesn't make enough money to pay his own electric bill, but he sure can be charming if he thinks he's going to get a free meal out of it."

It took days before the spell wore off and I realized that I hadn't made quite such a spectacular prognosis. I'd told a man in his 80s to go to the hospital after discovering blood in his stool. This is not something that a child prodigy in the medical arts would say. This is something that a person not suffering from mental retardation would say.

"But your grandpa is a doctor," various members of my family would tell me. "He didn't recognize the symptoms and you did. That has to tell you something."

It did tell me something. It told me that my grandfather was a lousy doctor. Which, to anybody who'd been paying attention, wasn't major news. This was a man who had once advised my grandmother, his wife, against having surgery to remove the cancer in her gallbladder. On what grounds? On the grounds of "I don't want to talk about it!!" I'm sure he was just afraid of losing her and thought that even acknowledging the cancer's existence would mean admitting she could die. While that's an achingly romantic gesture in a partner, it might be considered a character flaw in your personal physician. You don't want your doctor to be huddled in the corner, cradling his legs and rocking himself and silently muttering, "Don'tleavemedon'tleavemedon'tleavemeohgodohgodohgodohgod."

In the weeks after he left the hospital, he continued to insist that I was put on this earth to become a doctor. And I continued to insist that I'd be the type of doctor who accidentally invents a stronger strain of drug-resistant tuberculosis. I'd be the Dr. Kevorkian who didn't intend to kill all those people. My bedside manner would be somewhere between "Whoops, my bad" and "You can't prove anything!" If I saved anybody, it would be solely because of my ability to recognize the obvious. A typical checkup with one of my patients would likely go something like this:

PATIENT: My genitals are emitting an electrical charge. And I have a lump in my armpit the size of a conjoined twin.

DR. SPITZNAGEL: Really? That's weird. You should probably have that looked at.

PATIENT: Wow, that never occurred to me. Thank you, Doctor Spitznagel. You saved my life.

Two years later, my grandfather died of a stroke. And I never predicted it. I was as surprised as anyone. Of course, I had already left home, and was safely nestled in a college dorm room in southern Wisconsin, enjoying the anonymity (and skunk weed) that comes with a liberal arts education. But even if my grandfather had managed to track me down, I'm not sure what I would've told him.

"You're feeling numbness in your left side and you've suddenly lost the ability to speak? Well gee, gramps, I don't know, that could be anything. Actually, just thinking about it has given me psychosomatic pains. Could we stop talking about it and maybe watch some TV? I'm sure it'll go away."

My prognosis would've killed him, but I still think he would've been proud of my hesitation. Just like I'm sure he was proud of the family's stoic poise at his funeral. We tried (though we didn't always succeed) to mourn him as he wished, by mourning nothing, smiling at the anxious crowd - so quick to panic, those mindless idiots - muttering to each other, "Let's not jump to any conclusions. Yes, he does appear to be dead, but we don't know anything for certain yet. Let's just wait a little longer and see what happens. Just calm down, people. Calm down... calm down... calm down..."

The Nervous Breakdown

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A Story Starring Zac Efron as Deux ex Machina and a Burmese Python as Itself

The Failed Proof of an Equation for Home, Which May be the Fault of a Writer with Poor Math Skills, or the Fault of Putting Colors into a Formula

The Best Little Camera in Maryland: My Fisheye View of the World

Climbing Mountains

Discover The Magic Of Compound Interest, Get A Broker, Remember The Rule Of 72, Retire A Millionaire, Don't Be A Sailboat Without A Rudder And Other Pearls From Adult Community Education

Just In Time for Summer: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again*, **,***

Always Fun When the Good Guys Win: An Interview with Jonathan Evison, Author of 'All About Lulu'

Snapshot: Chasing the Ghost

Like Breath

The Idiosyncratic Parody of Automobile Eroticism and the Ravishing Gratis of Hopeless Information

Anyone want 500 pounds of gruel? (Pickup only)

Rotate the Crops

A Letter to Myself...With the Hope that 10 Years Makes a Difference

Six True Conspiracy Theories

I Need A Shot Of Testosterone

I THINK I KNOW WHO OBAMA'S V.P. IS GONNA BE

Why I'm Not Leaving the United States (2/2 Contradictory Parts)

A Contextual Anaylsis of 'Welcome to the Jungle' As it May Have Pertained to My Life in 1987

I Met Her in Sheboygan in September; I Can Still Recall the Stolen Goods She Wore*

Goodbye Cruel World

Our Worst Moments

"All The Times" Music Video (aka - We Are All Made of Stardust)

The Confusion of Red

Bloody Stool Is Bad (and Other Painfully Obvious Medical Observations)

Just In Time for Summer: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, ,