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Yeeeaaaahhhh, sorry about that.

Dusty 1 Comment

I would like to apologize for my disappearing act. Main cause was NaNoWriMo, which I did manage to complete, but which took all of my writing time and much of my other time in the process. And even though it ended four weeks ago, I still haven’t had much time for words, because I’ve had to grade everything my students have written. Which is, it turns out, quite a lot. I haven’t even been reading — only finished two books in the last month or more.

But this will all end. This isn’t even a post, just a notification to anyone who follows the blog and actually reads what I write. I plan to complete Twelve Days of Blogging for Christmas, starting on the 25th and going through the 6th of January (Which is actually 13 days, but this isn’t the time to get into that.), and then after that, I hope to continue blogging several times a week, if not every single day. I have ideas for themed posts and categories and things, and though I’m sure some of them won’t work out, I think many of them will, and there should be more content on this blog worth looking at.

I also plan to finish my NaNoWriMo novel, which is a sequel to an already-finished novel, and then I will be publishing both. And advertising, on this blog and anywhere else I can.

So if you do like my writing, hang on: in six days, you’ll get plenty. And maybe next year, you’d like to buy a book full of my writing. I hope you will.

 

Thanks for sticking with me this far.

 

–Dusty

The Not-So-Great Pyramid

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I need to be delicate with this one.

I have a thing I want to talk about, and I intend to be critical of that thing. But there are people involved, people I know (at least tangentially) and I don’t want to criticize them. Well, I do, but not terribly harshly; they are a product of our society. It’s our society I want to talk about. But there may be some people caught in the crossfire.

But then, I doubt they read my blog. So let’s just have at it.

I have recently had several encounters with pyramid schemes. Mostly through Facebook and Twitter posts, comments from the sorts of friends I feel I need to qualify as Facebook friends — my wife’s cousin, people associated with people I know but who have never met myself, or those I have met but am not necessarily friendly with. And at least one former student whom I would count as a friend even in a non-electronic sense.

I have no doubt there are others that I do not see, either because I do not see their posts, or because they do not post about this when they fall victim to it. I’m sure there are several. Because while pyramid schemes and get-rich-quick scams are as old as money, as old as sloth, as old as impatience — and that’s pretty goddamn old — I think there are more of them, now. I think we are seeing something of a perfect storm of influences and trends in our society that has thrown a great feast before this particular monster’s maw, and it is chuckling while it digs fatly into the mounds of fresh meat, chewing and swallowing and then crapping out greater quantities even than it takes in: because this beast expands, you see, and covers everything it touches with filth.

All right, that’s probably overstating it. But I like the image. I’m picturing a grossly fat Sphinx, its jowls dripping with blood, and it brings its head down and opens wide, and people — like my Facebook friends — just walk right in. And behind it? A Great Pyramid of shit.

Anyway, enough of the metaphors. A pyramid scheme is when a company sells a terrible product of some kind, generally water filters or kitchen knives or vacation condo timeshares, but it employs a particular trick: this company’s major profits do not come from customers; rather the profits come from new employees. Either the new employees need to pay for “training,” or “licensing,” or both; or the new employees need to purchase the goods they then have to resell. Or all of the above. It’s called a pyramid scheme for two reasons (at least it should be two reasons): because the flowchart has to expand with each level — the shmuck who starts the company has to find at least two suckers to pay him, and then they have to turn around and find two new suckers to recoup their losses, because the best way to make a profit at this company is to bring in new hires, and then those four suckers have to find eight, and so on down as far as it can go, and generally speaking, each level profits from all of the levels below it, so even if the guys in Level 3 do manage to get rich quick, they aren’t as rich as the people above them. That’s the first reason, the real reason. The other reason, the should-be-true reason, is because the pyramids were built by slave labor for the narcissistic pleasure of exactly one guy: the Pharaoh. For everyone else involved — and we’re talking tens of thousands of people — the Pyramids were nothing but shit, formed into blocks and stuck together with blood and sweat.

Yeah, there’s an image. Maybe I can use that on the poster for my Self-Actualization seminar.

Pyramid schemes are not illegal because their claims are true: if you can get two new people to come work for the company, you will get a bonus, and you will earn a piece of their income if they make any, just as part of your income gets kicked up to the people who brought you in; and if you spend $500 on crappy products that, in theory, you can sell for $5000, then you will make a tremendous profit. Never mind that the people above you already made their profit, because you spent $500 buying crap that isn’t worth $50. They don’t say that the crap almost certainly won’t sell — who the hell needs a water filter other than the one you have in the fridge already? Who buys a $500 knife set from a traveling salesman when you can buy everything at Costco, or online? — but then, they don’t need to; as long as they aren’t actively lying, they aren’t committing fraud, and if you’re foolish enough to think that paying out $500 to buy water filters that you have to sell door-to-door is a better way to earn money than working for minimum wage, then caveat emptor. Or rather, caveat venditor: let the salesman beware.

No, wait — I was right the first time. These people are buyers. They are consumers. They are at the bottom level of this pyramid of crap, with the weight of all that came before pressing them down into the mud.

But these companies are absurd. They’re absurd: I remember a student back twelve, thirteen years ago got into one of the water filter ones, and tried to sell me; I had bought cookies from students before, and boxes of fruit for the holidays, so I said I’d look at his catalog — but the freaking things started at $300. And needed to be installed. Okay, first, I rent my house, so there’s no way I’m donating a high-quality (I assume from the price. Right? Makes sense, right? Who’d charge that much for a piece of crap?) permanent water filter to my landlord; and secondly, have you not heard of Brita? I never bought anything. But he got a real job at a restaurant, and I tipped him when I ate there; honestly, he probably made more off of that than he would have from the water filter — though I’m sure the level above him was disappointed in both of us.

So why are there so many? Why am I seeing more and more of these?

Partly it’s because we live in a capitalist society. There have always been snake-oil salesmen. There have always been people who take advantage of others. Read Huck Finn and think about the Duke and the King, how they exploit both Huck and Jim, and each other, shamelessly from their first arrival on the raft until they finally get tarred and feathered — and when he sees that final justice, Huck feels sorry for them, and wishes he could help them. So this is nothing new.

But there are new elements. I think part of it is the Great Recession, especially when it was brought about largely by the last string of get-rich-quickers, the home loan industry. Ten, fifteen years ago, these people who now sell products for these companies probably worked for Joe Don Bob’s Big Home Howdy Howdy Mortgage Ranch Yee-Haw! Ltd. Same principle: pay the company for your “training,” and then work on commission, which in theory allows you to get rich, but actually makes those above you rich, and you only make money if you find people even more foolish than you were for taking the job in the first place; in 2004, that was people who believed they could get a home loan for a house they could not in any way afford, because they’d just flip it before the balloon payment came due. And it worked, at first — because there was the next group of suckers looking to get in on the action, and who were willing to buy the flipped houses, because they were going to flip those puppies, too.

Except for one thing: at some point, you run out of suckers. And since each new level is the new base of the pyramid, when the new level isn’t large enough or strong enough, the whole structure collapses. Though I’m not sure how the metaphor works that way: I guess if you imagine the whole pile of shi- I mean stone — being lifted up on thin struts, propped up by sticks and old rebar, so they can slide new stones in underneath before they jack those up along with everything atop them, until finally the jacks fail and it all comes down like the world’s worst game of Jenga — yeah, that works.

So we have an economically depressed society, one in which college is now too expensive for people to want to go at all, even if they know what they want to study and don’t need to get rich quick; one in which traditional sources of employment have almost entirely vanished, and everyone who lost their jobs in the collapse has had to jerry-rig a half-dozen different incomes — they teach an extension class, and sell beaded pillows on Etsy, and do aromatherapy consults, and throw Tupperware lingerie parties, and also, sell some water filters and timeshares (20% off if you buy both!). And since all of those people are college graduates, it makes education seem even less useful, even less worth the cost. Which just makes the problem worse: because that means that there are more and more people without education, so they aren’t perceptive enough to understand why this sweet new deal being offered them is too good to be true, and they can’t find a good job anyway, without a degree — so why not?

Enter the people I know who have bought into these schemes. They are all high school graduates, but none of them are college graduates. (To show that I know college is not a panacea nor always vital for success, one of the people who got hit up to join a pyramid scheme laughed at the whole thing, and he doesn’t have a college degree, either. What he has is a decent paying job he likes, and a clear and perceptive intelligence, so the get-rich-quick spiel bounced right off and slunk away into the gutter to find someone more desperate.) And here is the part that actually makes me angry, and was the impetus for this particular blog: those people, the ones who take these jobs, they work hard at those jobs. Harder than I do at mine, without a doubt — longer hours, certainly. They are proud of this, and their loved ones are proud of them for it. Hell, it’s even turned into memes:

 

Again, this is nothing new; the country was founded on that Puritan work ethic, which teaches that our role in life is to work, until we die and go to Hell. (Thanks, Puritans! Jesus, why couldn’t we have been founded by Taoists? Or Transcendentalists? Or free love hippies, or something? Why did it have to be freaking Puritans?)

And here’s my problem. If you’re that willing to work hard, if you understand that real effort is the only thing that brings success: THEN WHY THE HELL DIDN’T YOU WORK HARD IN SCHOOL?

Why wouldn’t you put your effort into something that is genuinely valuable, and not just because you make money from it, but in every way that something can be valuable? Education makes you a better person, living a better life, in a better world. Why did you pass that up in favor of cold-calling every phone number on a list to ask strangers if they want to buy your product — a product you don’t even really understand, if it’s, say, a timeshare, and which, I don’t doubt, your involvement with stops at, “You’re interested? Great, let me transfer you to my supervisor, who is actually a trained and licensed real estate broker, because he’s higher up the pyramid; but at least by transferring you, I made five bucks. Just fifty more buyers, and I’ll pay for my training certificate!”

If you’re willing to spend five, ten, twenty years building your business empire, why the hell wouldn’t you start with four years of college — studying, oh, I don’t know, maybe BUSINESS? Or even two years of trade school, so that you can have a good-paying job of some kind while you plan your entrepreneurial masterpiece? Maybe you can even base said magnum opus on something valuable, some genuine skill you acquired, instead of some bullshit like scammy real estate?

Maybe if these people had paid attention when the class read Huck Finn, they’d know that the We-Buy-Homes-Cheap company is the Duke and those water filter people are the King. So why didn’t they read the book?

Because they couldn’t see the value in something that genuinely has it: but they think they see value in a pyramid made of shit. I guess because the pyramid is tall.

There’s also this: our society has always believed that physical labor is harder, and therefore more Puritannically admirable, than mental labor. It isn’t necessarily enviable, because people who don’t have to spend eighteen hours a day digging fence post holes don’t want to switch to doing that, but we have always admired the people who can do it. We admire people who have three full-time jobs, even if their combined income is a fraction of our own. Those people work hard. And God bless ’em for it. Salt of the Earth. At least they’re not taking charity, right, Puritans?

You know, I’ve never had a serious physical labor job, like digging ditches or picking fruit. But I have done physical labor — I was a janitor and maintenance flunky for five years in college — and I have done home improvement type stuff, for hours at a stretch, out in the hot sun. So I understand how brutal physical labor can be.

I’ve also taught high school English for sixteen years, and in the process, I’ve written four novels and several hundred blogs and book reviews. So I understand mental labor, too. And while a full day of hard work in the hot sun leaves me completely drained and empty and torn, like the plastic wrapper after you take it off the Twinkie, that exhaustion is nothing compared to what it feels like to spend eight hours grading essays on June 15th when grades are due at 4pm. That kind of tired is the kind of tired where you don’t get brain-dead, and you don’t want to just sleep for days; you’re so tired you get angry. You don’t want to sleep, you want to punch things, starting with your own brain for getting you into this mess. It’s a whole different kind of tired, because it’s a whole different kind of hard.

So my point is: if we admire laborious hard work so much, why the hell don’t we admire those who put in the genuine effort to study, and really study hard, and learn? Why do we think it’s better to put in eight hours at an office — or in a ditch — than it is to put in eight hours at a library? Imagine how much better off we all would be, if the people who work so hard to sell shit, and pile up shit for their bosses to sit on top of while they, the hard workers, squelch around underneath, suffering and dying while they just keep adding more shit, like Giles Corey in The Crucible calling for “More weight!” if he then put the stones on his own chest until he died — imagine if all of those people who work for these ridiculous goddamn companies (And the biggest pyramid scheme of all, by the way, is the United States military — but that’s a topic for another day) could actually produce their own original ideas. Imagine where we would be then.

If you actually put in the effort to read all of this, that is.

Those of you who have half a dozen water filters in boxes behind your couch? I know you didn’t.

Take Your Time

Dusty 2 Comments

If I could pick the time I would live in, I would go back a hundred years, and live then. I would be born in 1874, and would now be in 1916. That would be my time.

I decided this a while ago, when I realized that all of my professional aspirations would have served me just as well in the early 20th century, if not better than now. As a schoolteacher then, I wouldn’t have been paid much better than now; but I would have gotten more respect, I think. And I could have paddled my students when they made me mad. More importantly, being a professional writer was, I think, easier then, as there were more people who read, and thus more room for people who wrote. I would be happy continuing on with teaching if I could also have my work published and purchased and read, and I think that would have been simpler back then. There’s also nothing that would have stopped me from owning a shop that sold books and coffee in 1916.

But there are other factors that keep adding to this. I’m healthy, so I don’t care much about the loss of modern medicine; I hate driving fast and I’m not a fan of flying – but I love trains and I would love to take a ship to Europe or the Caribbean. I actually like wearing suits, especially with vests, and hats; though I admit the nonexistence of air conditioning would be tough. I don’t use the telephone very much; I prefer letters. I’ve actually tried to get people to join a written correspondence with me, but nobody keeps it up.

Nobody has time.

I would like to have time.

That’s the main thing, actually. I mean, sure, I like writing on a computer. I like video games. I enjoy having reliable electric power, and recorded music, and broadcast television, and things made out of plastic. Knowing what I know about politics and history, I would not want to live through the World Wars or the Great Depression or the epidemics of influenza and typhoid and smallpox. Though I do wish that the wackiest political candidate now was Teddy Roosevelt, with all his crazy ideas about national parks and the value of exercise. I could not imagine my life without my wife, and if I were alive a century ago, she would not be; if she were, her life would be far more miserable, as a woman without equal rights, or the opportunity to get into art school and do what she loves (though knowing my wife, she would have found a way even back then to be an artist). And of course, she probably would have died in childbirth, as most women did, and I would give anything up to be sure that didn’t happen, including living today in this loud, fast, illiterate world.

But if we can step away from that reality – and since we are talking about traveling in time, we’d better – and just talk about the general shape of life, then yes, an argument could be made for the late 19th/ early 20th century over the 20th/21th. (A note: my word processing program didn’t recognize “21st” as a designation requiring the letters be turned into superscript; but “21th” was no problem. Technology.) And it’s largely because of time and speed. Here – I’ll try to keep it short, so it doesn’t take too much of your time.

I like to take my time. I like moving slowly, and being thorough. Even in the video games I enjoy, I prefer the ability to wander around and explore, the opportunity to re-do a task until I get it right, the power to decide when I go on to the next challenge; I prefer long strategy games and life simulation games because of that. I love puzzles. I like reading books more than short stories, though I enjoy reading an entire newspaper or magazine. I prefer walking or riding my bike over driving. I like the opportunity to think while I am doing other things, and so I like activities that I can pause to consider. It’s the biggest problem my students have with me as a teacher: we take forever to get through a piece of literature, because I’m constantly stopping them to talk about what we just read. They want to get through stuff, and I want to understand every little bit of it.

But that’s also what makes me a good teacher. And it’s what makes me a good writer, and a good reader/reviewer: I take my time. I think about things as I go. I don’t write a lot of drafts for most of my work, but it’s because I think about everything I’m going to say before I say it, and then while I’m writing it. I’ve been thinking about the general shape of this piece for a couple of weeks now, though it has morphed from a screed about Harambe memes, to a rant about Twitter, to this. Which I have started, stopped, and restarted once already.

I can go fast. And I can see the appeal of it. I’ve mowed a lawn using both a push mower and a motorized one, and the push mower is far more annoying; I was only able to do it because I could have music piped directly into my ears through an MP3 player or a radio with headphones. I love being able to write these pieces and then put them instantly in front of a potentially world-wide audience. I do like microwaves and hot water heaters and instant coffee machines.

But generally speaking, the appeal of going fast is to have more time for other things; and if those things are made to go fast as well, then life becomes one frantic screaming headlong tumbling rush. We turn into Alice falling down the rabbit hole: out of control, no idea which way is up or how much time is actually passing, and we never touch the sides, nor reach bottom. We get lost in the chaos, without anything to hold onto. There has to be something that we take slowly, something that we enjoy spending as much time as possible doing; then there is a reason to get through the rest of the day quickly, in order to spend more time doing that one slow thing. The problem with our modern world is that we seem to not have that slow thing, most of us: most of my students, children of their time, simply spend many many hours doing quick things: they scroll through Facebook and Twitter and Instagram; they text and chat and IM constantly; they play videogames all day long, frequently hopping between two or three different games at the same time, playing simultaneously on the computer and on the phone; they spend hours watching videos, everything from full-length movies to six-second Vines. While they are scrolling and chatting and playing games. They spend so much time doing things quickly that everything feels rushed, everything feels late, everything is done at the last minute and under high pressure. They don’t even take the time to sleep.

I would rather sleep. I would rather wait for things – give me a book, or a piece of paper and a pen, and I can wait forever. And in terms of doing things quickly to get to other things, I’d rather not do those things at all. My goal in life is not to accomplish everything when I am young so that I may have a long quiet time at the end of my life; my goal is to avoid or eliminate all of the things I don’t want to do, so I can spend all of my life doing things I want. I haven’t been able to do that yet. But I’m still working on it. I think I’m making progress. Slowly.

I’m not very good at going fast. So I do have a Twitter account, and I do Twit (If it was Tweeter, then the verb would be Tweet; but it’s Twitter. Hence.), and I enjoy it; but not enough. I only Twit once a day or so, most days, and so I don’t get a lot of followers. The same goes for this blog: I can’t find a subject worth talking about at length every day, and I don’t like posting short quick things, and so I don’t get a lot of followers. But that’s okay: because I would rather have readers. I would rather post something at length once a week or so, that a dozen or so people actually read, than post a new sentence every hour and have ten thousand people scroll past it and smile when they do. I’d rather have comments than likes. I’d rather have people come back to read more of my writing than have a post of mine go viral. Don’t get me wrong, I like the likes, and I’m grateful that there are people who think me interesting enough to actually follow on this blog or on Twitter; but if I could trade all of that for some published work, or a weekly column, even if it was in a small newspaper or magazine, I would do it in a heartbeat.

There: that’s something I would do quickly.

I had an interesting week on Twitter, which was part of the impetus for this blog. I live-Twitted several cracks about the debate between Clinton and Trump on Monday night, and that was fun. I do have some followers, mostly my students, and they get a huge kick out of me being on Twitter – which is an ego boost, I will readily admit. Though it sort of freaks me out that the response can sometimes be instantaneous: I have one student that, when she likes or retwits my twits, she does it within a minute of my posting it. It makes me nervous: because sometimes the speed of something like Twitter leads to bad judgment, or truly terrible typos and Freudian slips and malapropisms that may never be lived down. As we learned from the 3am version of Mr. Trump this past week, as well. I’ve been badly burned by my rapid writing, because the posts that nearly got me stripped of my license to teach in Oregon were done without much forethought, in the heat of the moment, and that ended up badly; too, the actual report that led to my blogs being discovered came from a Facebook post. So social media makes me nervous. I like the ability to write what I want to say, and then step back and think about whether it is a good idea to say it or not; there’s a blog post about Hillary Clinton sitting on my computer, where it will stay, because writing it got me too annoyed and I turned much too insulting. But there are no drafts for Twitter. I post things, and I have deleted things after I posted them; but if they already got retwitted, then it’s too late.

Then on Wednesday, one of my favorite authors, Christopher Moore, twitted a Trump joke: “Yo daddy so orange, they push his face in the dough to make jack-o-lantern cookies.” And I quickly twitted back “Yo daddy so orange they use his dandruff to make Tang.” I was ecstatic when I saw Mr. Moore liked and retwitted my post. For a moment I thought it might go viral, or that I’d get a whole swath of new followers; but really, the excitement was that Christopher Moore, whose writing and especially whose humor I have tremendous respect for, liked my joke. That was nice. So on Friday, when I saw one of my favorite comedians, Patton Oswalt, twitting back and forth with several other people about the Alt-Right version of Star Wars – jokes about the Sand People being illegal immigrants and Han Solo not being a real hero because he was captured, and so on – I thought of a good one, and I twitted it to Mr. Oswalt. Hoping for the same response.

But I didn’t get it, because, it turns out, someone else had twitted the same joke (Darth Vader: “You know, if Leia wasn’t my daughter, I’d probably date her”) ten minutes before I did. That person got hundreds of likes and retwits; I got none.

That’s too fast. In ten minutes, my joke went from funny and appreciated, to derivative and ignored. In other words, to make that joke and be successful at it, I would have had to be ten minutes faster – most easily accomplished by obsessively following Twitter feeds and looking at trends and hashtags. But that is not something I want to do. I don’t want to spend hours jumping from thought to thought to thought, cudgeling my brain into coming up with something funny or interesting, in less than 140 characters (Because you have to leave room for the hashtag!), faster than other people can come up with it. If I was already famous then I would have an instant audience and I could twit things at my leisure that they might appreciate; but then I run the risk of twitting idiocy and having all of my followers instantly know about it and spread it all over the twitterverse. Like Mr. Trump. Or Jaden Smith.

I would rather take my time. I would rather think of something original to say, or create a new perspective on an old problem, than follow trends. Particularly because: had I been the one who came up with the joke ten minutes earlier, and gotten the likes and retwits, I would have been forgotten ten minutes later, when the next person thought of the next funny joke. I don’t want to be that fast, and I don’t want to be forgotten that soon.

I think that’s the impetus behind the Harambe memes. Now, to be clear: while some memes are funny, I generally can’t stand them. They represent the lowest common denominator, which is why they spread so widely and catch on so quickly. Sometimes they’re genuinely funny – like some twits in the twitterverse – and frequently they are cute, because cute is one of the lowest common denominators; but they are always the worst form of the argument, when they are about serious topics, and they are always reductive and simplistic and generally obnoxious to one group or another. My favorite use of memes is in messing with my students: because they don’t expect me, their middle-aged English teacher, to use memes, so when I do, there’s a disconnect that I find more amusing than the meme. But for most meme-people, the humor is unpredictable: it’s impossible to say which meme will catch on and which will not. There are people whose lives online revolve around making memes; some of them are good at following and capitalizing on trends; some are good at making trends; all of them are stuck in an endless cycle of rapidity, catching onto jokes that rise and fall in instants, and the fame that comes with originating the joke following the same arc. A year or two ago it was a frog on a unicycle with the tagline, “Here comes dat boi – Oh shit waddup!”

Then it was another frog – no reason in the meme world – named Pepe, with a depressed look in his half-lidded eyes and his downward curving lips (He has had a recent resurgence when it came to light that Pepe is now popular with those who make vile racist memes, because they dress Pepe up as the minority they wish to denigrate. Yup. Funny stuff.).

 We have also gone through a caveman Spongebob, several images from a video of Shia Lebeouf, far too much of the wrestler John Cena, and recently a strange obsession with Rick Harrison, the star of Pawn Stars.

At one point it was Harambe. The gorilla in the Cleveland zoo who grabbed and held a child who got into his enclosure, and was shot and killed by zookeepers trying to protect the boy. It was a sad story that rapidly caught the attention of the country, particularly online, because it hit so many buttons: children’s safety and violence and the treatment of animals.

Harambe memes caught on partly because the biggest audience for memes is teenagers, and teenagers revel in mocking other people who take things too seriously, which is how the outcry over Harambe was seen – people weren’t concerned with the Syrian refugee crisis, or about the murders of African-Americans committed by police officers, they were concerned with the death of one gorilla – and partly because one meme-creator had an idea: a stupid and crude and absurd idea; and so of course, that’s the one that caught on. The idea? Men flashing their genitals as a tribute to the gorilla. The tagline was “Dicks Out For Harambe.”

Yeah: it’s kind of funny. Put in the right absurd context – a job interview, a political appearance, a Christmas special – the absurd notion is amusing. Because it touches on a taboo that people often find absurd anyway, the issue of public nudity, and also touches on the absurd obsession that most men have with their own genitalia, it got even more traction. And it had its usual run as the most popular meme of the moment. I’m sure whatever meme-maker came up with the line had a sharp uptick in followers or likes or reposts, and I’m sure he or she (Probably he) was gratified and possibly enriched by the increase in ad revenue. The popularity has ended now – thankfully – and I rarely see “dicks out” jokes any more. There was a brief resurgence when another great ape, the gorilla Bantu, died owing to a mistake in a medical procedure, but the slogan “Balls Out for Bantu” was apparently too derivative even for meme-fans, and it never caught on the same way. One of my former students twitted a picture to me, of a poster that some (probably apocryphal) English teacher had on a classroom wall that showed a gorilla’s face and the slogan “Books out for Harambe,” which he said I should put on my wall, but when I told him that there wasn’t enough No in the world (A dick joke AND a meme joke? Oh, sign me up!), another of my students took my side: evidence that the meme is largely dead. When even teenagers don’t think you’re funny any more, there’s no place left for you in the meme world.

But I still see Harambe memes. Now they have changed. Now they are about the gorilla being remembered; now the absurdity is in someone crying over the idea that Harambe’s death will be forgotten. Again, mocking people for taking things too seriously, or at least the wrong things too seriously – but now it is without the lowest common denominator. No dicks in this joke. So this one is less absurd, which makes me question why it is so popular.

So I wonder: how much do people who make memes, who spread memes, worry about the thought of being forgotten? How much of this latest spurt of temporary fame is about this genuine fear? In a world where the attention span covers approximately six seconds or so, where this week’s star is the “Damn, Daniel” guy and next week’s star is Rick Harrison and the “Damn, Daniel” guy is gone from people’s memories forever – what is the point of trying to reach the top? The second you do, you fall right back off, and you probably never make it back up again.

That’s exactly what I’m talking about. (And I realize now that I have gone on longer than I intended; I would apologize, but I’m never actually sorry for using a lot of words) When life is about going as fast as possible, then life, too, goes as fast as possible – which is really damn fast. And that may be exciting, but it also gets us to the end before we know it. And whatever that end is, whether it is obscurity or nothingness or even eternal paradise: it won’t be exciting, and it won’t be fast.

I would rather write than trend. I would rather be read than laughed at. I would rather read and consider than get through things. I would like to take my time.

What Happened Yesterday

Dusty 2 Comments

I’ll tell you what should have happened yesterday: nothing. It was a half-day for me at work, while the students (the juniors and seniors, at least) had a workshop on college and financial aid. My wife and I had a pretty good lunch (Better for me than her – Whole Foods burritos>Whole Foods sandwiches, it turns out) and an excellent dinner (Oregano’s pan pizza>anything to be found in Whole Foods), and a nice relaxing afternoon. We drank coffee. I read a book. She organized her studio more, and then worked on a drawing. We took our dog Samwise for a pleasant walk, and I got to spend a nice hour with our cockatiel, Duncan, as he climbed around on my shoulders and whistled happily and chewed on pieces of paper, while I played silly video games. We watched a little TV, and then went to bed, and slept well.

What we didn’t do yesterday was: wake our children; bathe our children; dress our children; feed our children; drop off our children; pick up our children; entertain our children; discipline our children; argue with our children; have the traditional “Go to bed!” fight with our children; clean up after our children; or worry about our children. Or any of the thousand and one things that parents do every day with and for their children. (Including love their children, play with their children, and be proud of their children and amazed by their children.) We did none of that yesterday, and we will do none of it today, and none of it tomorrow.

Because, you see, my wife and I have no children. As should be clear, this is by choice: had we wanted children, we would have children, because, as gets pointed out to me every single time I say that my wife and I have no children, it is possible to adopt children. (Have you ever gotten so tired of hearing an obvious point made that you just can’t summon the energy for sarcasm any more? Well: if you have children, then probably, yes.) We have not adopted children because we do not want children. She has never wanted children, and has known this from a young age; she told me very early on in our relationship – around the third date or so – that she would never want children, and if I did, then we should go our separate ways. As you can tell, I did not choose children over the love of my life.

My feelings about children have historically gone like this:

Stage 1. I am a child, and I don’t like it very much. Sure, my mom makes grilled cheese for me whenever I want it, but I also have to eat broccoli, go to school where the other kids pick on me, and deal with my parents when they are mad at me or disappointed in me – but when I’m mad at them or disappointed in them, I have to deal with it myself, because I have to learn patience. I get to have toys but they don’t do what they did in the commercial, and I am forced to participate in activities I really don’t like, like team sports. Because they are good for me.

Stage 2. I am a young adult, sexually active and terrified of the idea of children, because I don’t want to give up my plans and my dreams just because I get a girl pregnant. I am also aware that, while sex is a whole lot of fun, the young women with whom I have all this fun are really not people I would want to spend my life with, or raise children with. I ignore the fear and the awareness of reality in order to continue enjoying sex because I, like every other teenaged boy, am a moron.

Stage 3. I meet the love of my life. Pretty much from the first moment, I am aware that this is the best and most wonderful woman I have ever encountered. This is the woman I want to spend my life with. She is, literally, everything I have ever wanted in a partner. And she presents this fact to me: I can have her, or I can have children, but I cannot have both. I choose her.

Stage 4: I am happy with my choice.

That’s it. Notice there is no point where I hold a child and realize that this is the thing that would give my life meaning, as it has given meaning to others’ lives. (I have held a child. Once. I thought, “Man, this thing is small. I better not drop it.”) Notice there is no point where I spend lots of time with little children and realize how awesome they are. Notice there is no point where I think that my sacred duty to God and the human race is to go forth and multiply. Notice there is no point when I know that I must produce an heir to carry on my name and my legacy. This moment in Stage 3 where my love presents me with this choice? It took me about fifteen seconds. (I have gone back and thought about it since, and it has never taken me more than about fifteen seconds to confirm my choice.) It was not a difficult choice. There was nothing on the other side to balance it. I have never had a desire to have children, and I feel no loss for not having had any. None at all. Not ever.

I have been open and honest about this for years, now. I talk to my students about myself and my life, and they quite naturally ask if I have children, and I say “No.” Over the years I have learned to say it with a shudder and a frightened look. Not because I am actually afraid of having children; I have been told quite frequently that I would be a good father, and I would. I’d be a miserable father, but I’d be good at it. (Like teaching. Except it would never, ever end.) I’ve learned to say it with a shudder and a look of terror because then my students don’t pursue the topic. In the beginning when I’d simply say, “No,” I would be forced into this conversation:

“Are you going to have any?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want them.”

“Does your wife want them?”

“Even less than I do.”

“What if you change your mind?”

“I won’t.”

“What if she changes her mind?”

“She won’t.”

Two possibilities now.

Possibility #1:

“What if it happens by accident?”

“It won’t.”

“But what if it did?”

“It won’t.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“But you can’t be sure!”

“I’m sure.”

“But what if it did?”

Continue until I get exasperated and explain that I have 100% medically induced assurance that there will be no accidental pregnancy in my marriage; or until I tell students to stop prying this far into my personal life. (I had this conversation several times, and never did the person arguing – almost always a girl, usually one of the ones that desperately wanted to be a mother – realize that they were asking me either, “Do you have sex with your wife, and if so, how?” or “Would you and your wife be willing to abort a fetus in order to maintain your childless state?” Never did they think, “Maybe this is too personal a topic.” No, they just wanted to know what I would do if we had an accidental child. Really, they wanted to hear me say, “Then we’ll have a baby and we’ll love the baby because BABIES!” Though I will say that I have told my more recent students about these past conversations, and several of them have been appalled that a student would try to pry this far into my personal life, particularly my marriage and sex life.)

Possibility #2:

Student gives me a knowing look that is so annoying that, even as a pacifist and a professional educator who would never inflict harm on a student, still makes me want to punch them right in the eye, repeatedly. Student says, “You’ll change your mind.” Student nods and smirks smugly. I roll my eyes or heave a sigh and move on, slowly unclenching my hands.

(In both of these possibilities, at some point, someone will point out, “You know, you can adopt children.”)

So now, rather than go through these conversations any more, I bug my eyes out, curl my lips in horror, and say, “Oh God, no!” when they ask idly if I have children. Or if I’m feeling less dramatic, I simply say, “Nope, and I don’t want any. I don’t like children.” My students are generally puzzled as to why I would become a teacher, then, but there are several reasons, which I have explained in the past in various ways: one, I really like English; two, I teach high school and generally don’t think of them as children; three, I don’t have to take my students home with me at the end of the school day. It has gotten easier over the years as I have moved out of the most common child-bearing years, though I expect I will still have to say these things for as long as I keep teaching and talking about myself; and I expect I will still get some students – usually girls – who act as though this is a sad state of affairs, who think that I am missing out. But then, teenagers are self-centered, and judge other people only from an egocentric point of view: because I want children, they think, everyone must want children. That’s why Teenaged Me couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t like Metallica and Alice in Chains.

No, wait – I still don’t understand that.

But I do understand why not everyone would want to be a high school teacher, and not everyone would want to live in Tucson, and not everyone would want to have pets, or play video games, or keep a blog. Those are my choices, not everyone’s. I get it. No problem.

So here’s the thing that did happen yesterday. A friend of mine posted a status on Facebook that read, “I’m getting a pet monkey!” No way! I thought. Several other people had commented to the same or similar effect, and so I wrote, “It’s not real unless there are pictures. Or poop in your hair. Or, preferably, both.” Because I’m a smartass, and my friend is a smartass, and I wasn’t really sure this was true – but as another friend of ours posted, “If this was anyone else, I’d call bullshit.” The monkey-getting friend is fearless enough, and unusual enough, to get an actual pet monkey. And she doesn’t usually lie or pull tricks.

But she was tricking us this time. Shortly after I commented, I got a personal message from her that read (and I apologize for spoiling the gag), “Hi! Since you commented or liked my last status you have to pick from one of the following and post it as your status. This is the 2016 Breast Cancer Awareness game. Don’t be a spoil sport. Pick your poison from one of these and post it as your status. 1. Just found a squirrel in my car! 2. Just used my kids to get out of a speeding ticket. 3. How do you get rid of foot fungus? 4. All of my bras are missing! 5. I think I just accepted a marriage proposal online?! 6. I’ve decided to stop wearing underwear. 7. It’s confirmed I’m going to be a mommy/daddy. 8. Just won a chance audition on America’s got talent! 9. I’ve been accepted on master chef.10. I’m getting a pet monkey! Post with no explanations. Sorry, I fell for it too. Looking forward to your post. Don’t ruin it. (Don’t let the secret out). And remember it’s all for 2016’s Breast Cancer Awareness.

Dammit! I thought. Suckered me! But I liked the joke. I decided to play along, though I don’t normally do these chain things. I looked through the options, smirked especially at #7, and then went with “I’ve decided to stop wearing underwear.”

But then I thought about it. The point was to get a response, right? The biggest response possible, the largest number of people commenting or liking the post? Everyone who knows me knows that I don’t have children; everyone who has known the adult me knows that I don’t want them. Every single one of my former students, who make up the majority of my Facebook friends, knows my feelings about children. There is not a single class that has not heard me say, several times, that I don’t ever want to have children of my own. (I didn’t think about the fact that my own childhood friends only knew me in Stage 1 or Stage 2, and so may not be aware of my current feelings on the matter; ditto with people I’ve known more casually, like former neighbors. But there aren’t that many of them on my friends list, anyway.) So if I posted the thing about being a daddy, they’d all be confused, right? They’d be curious? They’d comment on the post. I should do that one.

I thought about it. I also thought about doing the America’s Got Talent one, because lots of people know I sing and rap and do goofy voices and such. But finally, I decided that #7 would be the funniest. So I deleted the status that said I had given up underwear, and posted, “It’s confirmed. I’m going to be a daddy.”

I won’t say all Hell broke loose, because it didn’t happen quickly; but over the course of the day, Hell overflowed its banks and flooded around me. And, what’s much worse, it flowed around my wife. I made another mistake in thinking she would think it was funny and I didn’t tell her what I had done, nor ask her if she was okay with it; I let her find the status on Facebook without warning. And so her reasonable and correct response was to comment, “What the fuck?” She actually thought that I had discovered, when I went out that morning to check on our sulcata tortoise Neo, a clutch of tortoise eggs; exactly this thing happened with our iguana Carmine, on the day she became Carmelita (Those were iguana eggs, though, not tortoise eggs. Just to be clear.). I admit that I was annoyed by that response, because I thought she had ruined the gag, and now, with my wife commenting “WTF?” (And then adding a second comment after we spoke that read, “Okay, now I get it. Had me worried, there.”), I thought everyone would know that the status wasn’t real, and no one would comment, and I wouldn’t get to pass on the gag to anyone.

I was wrong. Again. Because by yesterday afternoon, I had received 64 likes/reactions, and a dozen or so comments. Some of the reactions were surprise, but most were likes or loves. Some of the comments were, “Say what, now?” or “You got a new pet?” but many of them were, “Congratulations! You’ll be a great dad.” And to my great regret, my wife got four personal messages from various people offering her more personal congratulations. (At least one of those, who knows my wife well enough to have discussed the issue with her, offered them tentatively, and was relieved to hear that it wasn’t true.)

Why do I regret that? Because I know what my wife has been through over the years as a result of her conscious decision never to be a mother. Whatever grief I have gotten from students, or from other adults (far less frequent), or from my parents, she has gotten a thousandfold. Because she is a woman, and therefore, she is the one who is supposed to want children. That’s what she’s for, our society seems to think. I think my parents, who never-not-once spoke to me about children when I was a child or a young adult, just expected my future wife-person to be the one to convince me that I should have children; they were a bit shocked when they learned that my choice of wife-person would not come with grandbabies. My wife, like every other intentionally childless woman, has dealt with a lifetime of questioning, and interrogation, and nagging and pestering and prodding and invading. She has suffered disapproval, and disappointment, and pity, and even contempt. And even though I knew about all of that, and am indirectly the source of some of it because my parents want to be grandparents and blame her because they are not (Even though I have a brother – and isn’t the eldest son the one responsible for production of heirs? I’m supposed to be the dissolute black sheep, dammit!), I still chose to post that I was a daddy, rather than saying I was commando for life. That’s why it was an idiotic thing to do, and why I call the slow flood of reactions to this little joke a mistake. I shouldn’t have done it. I’m sorry for it.

But I have to say this: it wasn’t all my fault. I shouldn’t have used that joke, but all of you people need to stop doing this. Just stop.

Stop thinking that children are the greatest blessing that ever came, or ever will come, into every person’s life. If they were in your life, that’s fine, congratulations; but there is no reason to assume that is true for everyone.

Stop thinking that a woman’s primary role in life is to become a mother: a woman’s primary role in life is to be herself.

Stop thinking that a woman without children is less of a woman, or is somehow fundamentally unhappy or unfulfilled because she has no children. People are different, including women. We are capable of being happy even without making use of every single one of our organs. Do you think someone is fundamentally less human because they had their appendix removed? No? Then stop thinking it just because she may have a uterus that has never carried a child to term. And by the way, do you pity me because my testicles have never produced a child, and therefore the organs that apparently make me a man have never been used for their single intended purpose? No? Then why pity my wife?

Stop pitying people who do not have children. We are not sadder because of that. You may pity people who wanted to have children but couldn’t, but anyone who has never had a child chose not to – because it is possible, it turns out, (Who knew?) to adopt a child, which means childlessness is a choice. Choice makes us human and independent; not pitiable.

Stop thinking that everyone’s life is made better by children just because yours was. Stop thinking that everyone needs to have children in order to have a purpose, or a sense of accomplishment or fulfillment, or that everyone needs to know the love of a child to understand love, just because those things were true for you. That’s the way that children think.

Stop thinking that people need to have children in order to leave a legacy after we die. My legacy will be my writing. It will be my only legacy, because any people I made would be their own people, not extensions of me; what an egocentric thought, to believe that you live on in your children.

Stop thinking that people need to have children in order to have someone to take care of us when we are old. My wife and I will take care of each other, and should I have to go on alone, I will take care of myself. When I can no longer take care of myself, I will die. Which is where I am heading, anyway.

Stop asking people when they will have children, why they don’t have children, why they don’t want children. You don’t hear that people are having children and then ask, “Why?” now do you? When you hear that people have children, do you ask, “When will you be getting rid of them, after college or when they turn 18?”

Stop thinking that a person’s fecundity is public business. It never ceases to amaze me that people will ask complete strangers about their pregnancies. Especially that thing where people actually put their hands on a strange woman’s abdomen if said abdomen happens to be distended by a pregnancy; think about what would happen if you did that to a woman who wasn’t pregnant. Like if you asked if someone was going to lunch, and then put a hand on their stomach and said, “Going to fill this up?” HOW FREAKING WEIRD IS THAT? Why does anyone ever think it’s okay in the case of pregnancy? And again, ever grabbed the woman’s husband’s penis and asked, “And is this the organ that made that baby?”

Stop believing that I need congratulations, or that you should be happy for me, should I ever produce offspring.

And I will stop joking about doing so.

(A final note: I hope it has been clear throughout this blog that I have avoided, or at least tried to avoid, telling people with children that they have made the wrong choice. When I myself do not know their lives and do not have direct experience with their life experiences, particularly the choice to have children, presuming that I could tell people that they should have made a different choice would be absurd. I sincerely hope that no one, with or without children, has been offended by what I have written here.

But if you have been: good.)

Take luck!

Dusty Leave a comment

I’m feeling lucky.

This morning, when I put cream into my coffee, I managed to get in just the right amount so that, when I stirred it, none slopped over the side. I’ve been failing at that recently. So this success must be a good sign of more success to come.

When I opened my laptop, there were cookie crumbs inside. Definitely a good omen. Cookies make everything better, and clearly, my laptop held onto that tiny bit of cookie just to make me smile, to remind me that there is humor everywhere, and sometimes, I get to see it. When I’m lucky.

We just moved into our new house, and while we were still in the preparation stage, we were coming over here every day after work, dropping off some things because this house is quite close to the school where we teach, and also watering the new sod we put in as a food source for our tortoise Neo. And there was a dove that had a nest in the eaves of our carport. At first, we weren’t sure she was alive, because she didn’t move much and never flew away when we drove in with our noisy people-carrying-machine; but we did see her little head tilt this way and turn that way, and so we realized that this was, in fact, a real dove that lived in our new carport. This is, for us, a lovely thing (even though – or perhaps partly because – my father’s response was “Hm. Doves’re dirty birds.” So sad.) because we cherish life, and want to keep others’ lives safe and comfortable whenever we can. So we greeted the dove every time we came, and tried not to move too quickly or make too much noise.

And then, the morning after the first night we stayed here, we heard a terrible thump. We ran to the back door and looked out, and indeed, the dove had flown into the window. We have no idea why: the window is small, and was covered with blinds on the inside, and the carport is completely open on one side. Perhaps the dove was scared by something coming into the carport and tried to escape; perhaps she had been sitting so still in her nest in the first place because she was hurt and trying to recover, and her first attempt at flight was ruinously bad. Maybe she just got caught in a bad crosswind that came up at just the wrong moment: just bad luck. All we knew was, there she lay, twitching and bleeding on the ground. Her head seemed twisted to the side, the blood coming from the top of her wing. We went away, unable to watch her suffering; I came back and checked, and she was lying still but for the tip of her tail, which still drifted up and down gently, like a leaf in the wind, like the line of light on an EKG as it shows the last beats of a dying heart. I walked away again, hoping she would die soon.

Trying not to think of this as an omen. But how could I not? Here we were moving into a new house, and the original resident was dying on the concrete in front of me. Surely we had somehow disturbed her. Maybe she was trying to escape the fate of losing her private nesting ground to loud, obnoxious humans. Maybe Nature was trying to tell us something.

But then, Toni came to me. “The dove’s still alive. She’s sitting up.” “What?!” I jumped up, went to the window — and indeed, the dove was now sitting upright, head on straight, looking around, still with blood on her wing. We put a towel into a box and I got some gloves, so we could pick her up and make her comfortable, at least; we had to do what we could for our neighbor. We went out the door, moving quickly but gently, trying not to scare her.

She took off. Flew around the carport, and then off into the bushes nearby. Later that day, she returned to her nest in the eaves; we put out some food and water, and left the towel in the box in case she needed it. But we were happy: because now it was a good omen. She was the dove that lived. So that must mean our new house was willing to accept us.

The dove left, a day or two later. Hasn’t come back.

What kind of omen is that?

Last night, a week after moving in, we were coming back from a celebratory dinner – celebratory because yesterday we finally finished moving out of and cleaning up our old rental – and as we turned into the driveway, I saw something perched on one of the rocks at the end of the driveway. As we drove by, it took off and flew. But it wasn’t the dove: it was an owl. A large and magnificent owl. It flew to our mailbox and perched there, not moving, for the next half hour, at least.

So is that an omen?

Did that owl eat the dove?

So are we welcome here, or not? Teiresias, the blind prophet from Sophocles’s Oedipus cycle, reads the actions of birds in order to know the future (He has a servant describe them to him; one of the earliest examples of an author making a great symbolic statement and then having to come up with some ridiculous bullshit to make it work. “You say he watches the birds to see the omens? But I thought he was blind, and could only see the future clearly.” “Uhhhh – there’s a servant who describes them. Yeah, that’s it. A servant. So anyway…”); what would he make of this chain of events?

We had Chinese food for that celebratory dinner, and of course I had a fortune cookie. My fortune said, “Next week, green will be a lucky color for you.” Okay. Thanks. Though I’m not sure what that signifies. Is it about money? Should I wear green? Will that create good luck for me? Should I look for things that are green, that I can take as signs, so I can find luck?

And is it going to be good luck, or bad luck?

I wanted to write that I don’t believe in luck. That’s what I meant to say. I was trying to think of a good insight for this blog, something about how luck is mostly a misunderstanding of probability, that we underestimate the chances of certain events happening, and overestimate the chances of others; that confirmation bias makes us believe we are seeing a correlation when really we’re just noticing things that fit into our beliefs (“Every time I see something green, something lucky happens!” Right: because you’re looking for green things, and when you see one, you look around for something lucky. And it’s most likely something like “Hey, I didn’t trip and fall into that cactus patch! Thanks, Good Green Luck!”). I was going to write something about the multiverse, about the infinity of possibilities that we live in, and how the particular reality we are in doesn’t show great good luck: it’s just one of uncountable alternatives, most of which are not lucky at all. There’s a great short story that I am currently hurting my students’ brains with, called “The Garden of Forking Paths,” by Jorge Luis Borges, about how reality forks as it moves into the future, creating alternate realities where things are different, sometimes coming back together as two different causes have identical effects; in the story, when this truth is pointed out the main character imagines a forest of ghosts: versions of himself and his interlocutor, living slightly different lives, some where they are friends, some where they never meet. Then the protagonist goes on with the reality he is currently living, and he shoots the other man dead. It’s a story about coincidences, and how there really aren’t any; it’s just that in the infinity of possibilities, some of the forking paths into the future seem highly unlikely, only because we don’t see the others. The chances of this one thing happening may be a million to one: but if slightly different versions of you are walking on all million-and-one paths, one of those versions will seem incredibly lucky. The others? Probably won’t even notice. I mean, do you know how many chances you have had to win the lottery? How many times you could have played and the machine would have spat out a winning ticket, just for you? Somewhere in the multiverse, that’s happened.

That’s luck. So I believe. It’s only a lack of awareness of the other instances.

Good. That feels insightful. Certainly more so than freaking astrology, which I learned was bullshit when I was told that my star sign (The uncomfortably named Cancer, which I can’t believe is still accepted blithely; because the people who follow astrology believe in signs and omens, right? SO WHY THE HELL DO THEY NOT INSIST THEIR STAR SIGN NOT BE NAMED AFTER THE MOST DEADLY DISEASE OF OUR AGE? Can you imagine if one of the signs was named “Gangrene?” Or “Sucking Chest Wound?” [To be fair, they did try to change the name at one point, but they tried to change it to “Moonchildren.” Oh, please. That’s the worst King Crimson song. Should have gone with Crimson Kings.]) showed that I was a romantic introvert, a person with overpowering emotions, who therefore drew into his “shell” to protect himself from the harshness of the world. Sure, kind of accurate. Except my brother is also a Cancer, and he is logical, extroverted, and entirely free of romanticism. So apparently Cancers are romantic introverts except when they’re not. Very handy.

So I’ll write about that. About how luck is simply one possibility that occurs, and we attach more meaning to it than we should. We almost won the lottery once, you know. Picked five of six numbers, and the sixth was – no joke – one off, a 2 when I picked a 3. If I had picked a 2, we’d have won $42 million. Since I picked 3, we won $1300. Was that good luck? Or bad luck? I know which it felt like, which it still feels like. Feels like the universe was screwing with me. Like I’m doomed to come close, but never quite reach the ultimate success.

But at the same time, I feel very lucky. Because there is one way that I feel like I have achieved the greatest of glories: in my marriage. A long series of unlikely events led me to a specific place and time where I met my wife. Who is my perfection. She is my ideal beauty, my ideal partner, my better half, my best friend, my soulmate. She is all those things, and somehow I was lucky enough to find her and capture her attention, because somehow, against all odds, I am all those things to her. (Okay, maybe not ideal beauty: she swoons whenever she sees old pictures of Chris Cornell. And rightly so. But I’m close to ideal, and that’s good enough. Still lucky.) And our paths happened to cross, and we were both single at the time, even though she had just before sworn off of long-term relationships. Lucky. And because despite my star sign, I have not yet developed a fatal cancer. (You want me to knock on wood right now, don’t you? Admit it.) Because I have been able to find my way through life to where I am right now, in this lovely new house, typing on my trusty laptop, while my dearly beloved dog dozes beside me. (Pause for petting.) I don’t think I live in the greatest country in the world, but it is a good country. And I don’t think I live in the best time in history, but it is a good time. I’m a lucky man, living a lucky life. Except for that whole Can’t-get-my-books-published-and-so-my-life’s-dream-remains-unrealized thing. But hey, at least I have this blog, right? And some people read it, and even like it. I’m very lucky.

I can’t escape that feeling, or using that word for it. Because really, luck is just a name for something we notice, but can’t explain. We like to think we can control it, summon the good kind when we need it and banish the bad kind to some dark dimension or shadow realm where it oozes around looking for someone on whom it can inflict suffering – just so long as it isn’t me! – but the truth is, we just notice it sometimes but not others. I notice my luck in discovering my life’s love; maybe I don’t notice my luck in avoiding a serial killer who almost chose me but not quite. Or, more realistically, I don’t notice my luck in being the inheritor of a planet, set in the Goldilocks orbit where liquid water and a stable atmosphere are possible, where the dominant species was wiped out by an asteroid impact that was just large enough to kill them but not large enough to kill my ancestors or to scour the Earth free of life. Still there; still lucky; but we don’t notice.

I only notice how lucky I am that I can listen to my wife’s heart beating.

If I was a religious man, I would call it a blessing; if I was more prosaic I would call it coincidence; I think I may actually prefer the term “luck.” It’s just a word, after all. What matters is the noticing.

The noticing is always what matters.

Then, this morning, even though my love told me I should write, I read instead, because I wasn’t sure how I wanted to end this particular ramble. And then my book – the good and fascinating Toru: Wayfarer Returns by Stephanie R. Sorensen (Review forthcoming) – gave me this, as the epigram to one chapter:

“To a brave man, good and bad luck

are like his right and left hand.

He uses both.”

– St. Catherine of Siena

Yes. Luck may be luck or fortune or fate or chance or a forking path or an iteration in the multiverse or a glitch in the Matrix; or it may be nothing at all.

What matters is what we do with it.

Good luck.

I’m back.

Dusty 5 Comments

So first, I have to do this:

It’s been awhile.

(Now I have to do this:)

So here’s what happened.

First off, I got rejected again. This time by a small publisher, in the same city where I live. The publisher does mostly nautical fiction, action/adventure on the high seas, but they were looking to get into more fantasy stuff, as well. One of my finished books is a serial adventure about a 17th-century Irish pirate who travels unintentionally through time, with his ship and crew, to 2011. I could not think of a more perfect opportunity for them to expand into fantasy while still keeping their nautical theme and also supporting local writers; and I felt like this was the best opportunity I’ve had to get published, because it was a small press and because everything fit so well. I had visions of my book being picked up by a major house, like Stephen King’s Carrie; I had more reasonable visions of going to local book stores and fairs and shilling for my book, because that’s where I found this place, at a booth at the Tucson Festival of Books. I was going to be on the way. I sent them a query and they were interested; I sent them some chapters and they liked them; I sent them the whole book – and they forgot about me. Four weeks went by, six, eight, ten, twelve; finally I wrote them to ask what was what, and they rejected the book. They had sent it to one of their readers, and he had said it needed more action and less talking.

Okay, I know that I’m biased because I wrote the thing. But seriously: did that guy even read it? It’s nothing but action. The first chapter is the pirate’s realization that something is wrong, that he has come to a place he doesn’t understand; his first assumption is that he is in Hell. The second and third chapters are a long chase scene leading to that place, complete with a sea battle with cannons blazing and muskets barking and men dying. The next few chapters are about the pirates discovering a lavish beach house on the coast of Florida, where they end up, and assaulting it, pirate-style. And so on: the pirates mutiny and maroon their captain; they kidnap a carpenter from Home Depot and raid a Piggly-Wiggly; the captain gets into a feud with a Miami street gang. Forty chapters, and there are maybe five that don’t have an action scene.

So naturally, when they rejected the book (And offered to connect me with a content editor who could help me change everything I wrote so that other people would like it more), I assumed that the problem was me. That, in fact, I suck at writing. That my idea of action is not exciting, that I use too many words, that I don’t know what I’m doing, and that I’m not good enough to get published. Of course I had that same idea the whole time I was waiting for their reply, because after about four or six weeks, when they didn’t contact me to say that they were going to publish the book and they wanted me to come in so they could meet me; the rejection was just the final confirmation that I can’t write. That everything I’ve been working for these last twenty years was hopeless, because I’m not good enough to succeed. That’s what I thought. Of course.

Then there was this argument. A friend of mine, a former colleague that I always felt close to because I thought we shared the same ideas about teaching and society and the vital importance of critical thought and rational discussion, came sniping at me and my other friends on Facebook. He was picking a fight about the Second Amendment – this was just after the Pulse massacre in Orlando, and as usual, the gun control memes were making the rounds before they went back into their Tupperware to keep fresh for the next post-massacre discussion – and he was really shitty to people who had commented on an anti-Second Amendment video I had posted on my Facebook page. I went after him for his mistreatment of my friends who were strangers to him, and he defended his shittiness by claiming that they were so painfully ignorant that they were a genuine danger to our society, as was anyone who tried to criticize the right to bear arms. At the same time (Coincidence? Not a chance.), he posted a long rant on his page about how the quality of discourse in our society has collapsed, and now all we do is bark slogans at each other, while waving the flags of our teams – Red and Blue, meaning Republican/Conservative and Democrat/Liberal. He challenged everyone who saw themselves as a Liberal to a debate on the issue, a debate that would go on indefinitely until one person was convinced and both sides actually agreed.

I took the challenge. I am a liberal, and generally a Democrat, though mostly by default, for lack of better, more Progressive candidates to support and because the people on the Red team are fucking nuts. I have, in the past, argued for gun control and the repeal of the Second Amendment, though I am still torn on the issue; basically I think that guns are twisted machines of death, and no one should want them; but I also think that no rational person would ever drink alcohol to excess, smoke cigarettes, or drive fast, and I am generally aware that people should make their own decisions on those things – which leads me to think that maybe people should make their own decisions about guns. Guns are different because of the harm they cause to those other than their possessors; but there are better ways to reduce gun violence, particularly the end of the drug wars and real attempts to solve the economic injustices in society. So my point is that while I do oppose guns and think the Second Amendment is foolishness that has exacerbated the problem, I am also open to the possibility that I am wrong, that the right to bear arms is important and should remain, and that we should try for more practical reductions of gun violence without futzing with the Constitution.

I’ve always had great respect for this man and his knowledge and his ideas, and I wanted to know what he had to say. If anyone was going to convince me that I had the wrong stance on guns, it was this guy, I thought. So I got into the argument.

And here’s how it went. I posted an opening statement that explained why I believed that the Second Amendment is ineffective in what I thought was its purpose: that is, providing citizens the ability to be safer, and acting as a check on government power through the threat of violent revolution. I described how the Amendment made sense at the time it was written, but doesn’t now; not only because the guns have gotten too powerful to be reasonably considered safer in civilian hands than out of them, but also because the government has in no way been checked by the fear of violent revolution: government power has expanded and continues to expand, and the people with the guns are easy to placate by allowing them to keep their guns – while also turning the military into a force that no civilian population could hope to oppose. I also stated that the one source of real power was the will of the people acting in concert, and that the means still exist for peaceful revolution, and that therefore the Constitutional Amendment that protects us from tyranny is the First, not the Second.

My opponent argued that the Constitution was the perfect document, the only hope in a doomed world of barbarians and idiots, and then stated that anyone who tries to change the Constitution was one of those barbarous idiots, an ignorant child who would kill us all with his meddling. He used a colonizing spaceship as his metaphor: the Constitution was the control system, the Amendments ten golden wires, and a child yanked on them without knowing what he was doing and the ship exploded, obliterating everyone on board. He didn’t explain exactly how the Constitution was the one thing keeping us safe, nor how the Second Amendment was the linchpin holding the Constitution together; he simply presented this as the truth: touch the Second Amendment and we all die.

Then, according to the debate format that he created, we asked each other questions. He asked me a half a dozen, and then I asked him a half a dozen, and then he started asking me again.

And that went on for about three weeks. During which time, I realized that everything he was saying was condescending and obnoxious, that his entire stance seemed to be that I just didn’t know what he knew and therefore I was wrong (Which is an ad hominem logical fallacy, if we want to get specific; it doesn’t matter if I’m ignorant, it matters if your argument can hold water by itself. My ignorance of your argument doesn’t disprove my argument; only your argument can do that.), and that, no matter how much I asked, no matter how hard I pushed, he was not willing to actually explain his reasoning until, as he put it, we had gone through a whole lot of “necessary work” to get me into the proper mindset. He said that my stance was based on a faulty epistemological understanding, and he needed to change that. He wouldn’t explain how it was wrong; he just set about trying to manipulate me, through leading and obtuse questions, to the mindset where I was prepared to accept his truth as such.

When I complained about this, asking and then insisting that he simply lay out his argument rather than trying to manipulate me in this way, he said something interesting. “My goal is to change the way you think,” he said. “Everything I do is designed with that end in mind. I’m not trying to argue with you, I’m trying to change you. If you aren’t intending the same thing, an attempt to change the very way I think about the world, then why are you in this argument?”

So I quit. And it still sticks in my craw that I did, because I never actually got to the meat of his argument, never got to see the rationally explained opinions of this guy that I had had respect for. But I did not want my mindset changed, not through manipulation: every time he asked a question, I was immediately resistant: Why is he trying to get me to say this, I would think, and then I would try to find a way to slip out of what I thought was a noose, and I’d qualify and hedge every answer I gave. Which I’m sure was annoying for him, too. I could not handle his condescending attitude, either: because his basic policy was, “I know everything, you know nothing, and when I have deigned to grant you the benefit of my wisdom, you will be better for it. Now shut up and do what you’re told.” But most importantly, I realized: that is not why I entered into the argument. I really just wanted to hear his side. I didn’t care very much about changing his mind – certainly not so deeply that I was willing to plan a grand design whereby I would slowly erode his epistemological understanding of the universe in order to fill the void with my own ideas.

The whole thing was deeply depressing for me. First of all because after I quit, he crowed about his victory; which made me think that he hadn’t ever wanted to have a genuine argument, he just wanted to win, and one way to win an argument is to be such a prick that your opponent surrenders, which is exactly what happened. So I feel as though I can’t help but lose all respect for him, and now I have lost what I thought was a friend—but probably wasn’t, because he set me up to be his patsy in the first place, which shows that actually he never was a friend, which is worse because it makes me an iddiot for years, not just for entering the debate. (This is all speculation, because we’ve had no interaction since the debate; I unfriended him the minute I surrendered, and he probably thinks I’ve thrown a hissy fit over losing, and maybe I have. But that’s not less depressing.)

But secondly, it was depressing because I have always thought of myself as good at arguing: it was one of the reasons I started blogging in the first place, because I hope to be able to influence others and change the world in a positive way, by persuading people of what I see as the truth, or at least opening a rational dialogue. But if arguing, genuinely arguing, is an attempt to change the other person’s very mindset through whatever means are necessary – and I teach argument, and that is precisely what it is – then not only do I suck at arguing, but I don’t want to be good at it. I don’t want to manipulate someone’s very paradigm, I just want to make them think about another aspect of things they maybe haven’t considered. In which case – why am I blogging? If it’s not to argue and help change the world, then what’s the point? I’m not amusing enough to be comic relief from the daily grind, and I’m not a reputable expert in anything; I can’t offer a teacher’s insight into the world of education because I can’t write about my students or anything negative about school without getting in trouble. I can write book reviews, but that’s about it.

And my writing isn’t that good anyway, right? My book got rejected again. My writing is boring. Of course.

So I stopped writing blogs. It was easy: the stats on this blog showed that I got more likes and follows from the book reviews than from my essay posts; and the sometimes funny stuff I post gets ten times the views of anything else. Nobody wants to read my thoughts. Nobody wants to hear my arguments. It’s fine: I have books to write, and a life to live, with all the usual business and busy-ness that entails.

But here’s the problem. I have a lot to say. I have a lot of opinions. My wife, whom I love more than anything and who I hope feels the same about me, and if so I’d like to keep that love, doesn’t want to hear me rant about things that don’t concern her. Things that actually matter to me do concern her, but things like how annoyed I am by Harambe memes or what I think of omens and luck signs and astrology are not matters of importance, and therefore she’s reduced to saying “Mmm-hmm” while she focuses on something important, generally her art. And while I enjoy ranting to my students, that isn’t my job, and therefore I have to limit the time I spend doing that, as I would watch how long I spent at the watercooler gossiping. Maybe there are people who could waste all day every day in doing nothing, but I think my job is important and I want to do it well. Therefore I can’t say everything I want to say. I also have to watch myself with my political opinions, because I don’t want to offend or upset or unduly influence my students.

School has been back in for a month, now, and the pressure has been building. Partly because I haven’t been writing at all, which does strange things to me; but mostly because there are now several things that have made me react, but about which I haven’t been able to talk.

And then this week I realized: what matters is speaking out. What happens after that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if I’m terrible at arguing: I’m good at discussing, and the goal I actually want to strive for is the raising of the level of discourse, getting people to discuss matters in a rational and peaceful way; whether they are convinced of the rightness of my opinion afterward doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if no one reads these essays. What matter is that I write them. It matters that I publish them because that is the most important part of the writing process, actually presenting your words to someone else. But how many people read them, like them, care about them – none of that matters.

Because I cannot control anyone else; only myself. I am not responsible for anyone’s reactions to my work; I am only responsible for my work. And for me, that has to include essays. Essays that are too long, essays that are too personal, essays that are occasionally unnecessarily angry and perhaps even profane. That’s who I am, and that’s what I do.

And it’s high time I got back to doing it.

So here I am, world. Back again on my soapbox, ranting at passersby who won’t thank me for the manic spittle I spray at them. (Sorry; got a little on you, there.) You don’t have to stop, you don’t have to read, you don’t have to respond, though you are welcome to do all three, if you wish. I will keep writing book reviews, and I will try to post funny stuff when I can. And I will also be writing whatever I want to write, because that’s the only way to be what I am.

I’m a writer. And a writer writes, always.

Me Mates are all Jemmy Coves! Wot wot!

Dusty Leave a comment

So I’m wondering: how far should I be willing to go for my friends?

Now, it so happens that the meme world has quite a bit to say about friendship — but unfortunately, as always with the meme world, the information is not very helpful.

 

 

So my  friends are people I like and do stuff with. Okay, I knew that; those are the people I call my friends anyway. But what does “do stuff with” mean? Do I have to do stuff with them in person? Because then a number of my friends probably don’t count any more, since I literally haven’t seen them, face to face, in more than twenty years. And what does “like” mean? I mean, I like cupcakes, and I like my students. But those are two different feelings. Do I have to like my friends all the time? Do I have to like everything about them? 51/49, like/dislike?

 

I like the sentiment, but I don’t know quite what it means. One of my friends had a lot of trouble finding an au pair that would actually remain reliable for more than a few months. He lives 2,500 miles away from me. How do I make that my problem? I suppose I could look through online listings of au pairs, but is that really helpful? I don’t have children, don’t know anything about au pairs, let alone good ones. Do I fly to Massachusetts to help him interview? Do I become his new au pair? And what if while he is looking for an au pair, another friend is dealing with a sick parent, out in California? And another friend, living in Louisiana, needs to find a cheap apartment?

Maybe I just tell them that I’m sympathetic and will help in any way that I can. But when I know there’s no way I can help, it feels terribly hollow to say that. I don’t feel like a friend when I can’t help. But I can’t always help. Does that make me not a friend?

Maybe it matters that this says “BEST friend?” Do we really still make that distinction? I mean, the Sims do, and 4th graders; but do we all think that way?

 

So I have to know things about someone that nobody else knows. Well, that simplifies things pretty well, because there is exactly one person in the world that I am that close to. I suppose my wife is my only friend.

So what do I tell all those losers who think I’m their friend?

(N.B.: You can’t get mad if I just called you a loser. Because:)

Now, if I don’t think it is particularly offensive to shout “F*CKNUGGETS!” when I stub my toe, should I be willing to say it in front of friends who prefer not to hear cussing? Or wait — they’re not my friends. My friends are only the ones who yell back “YEAH, HOT BUTTERED DI*K-BISCUITS!”  (Side note: I love those asterisks. I hate that they’re necessary, but I love them. So much. “Profanity? No, I meant ‘Focknuggets.’ It’s a German bar food. And ‘disk-biscuits’ is Cockney for pancakes. Why? What did you think it was?”) But what if I’m around their kids, or their aged grandparents who have taken holy orders to become Catholic nuns? (Yes, including their grandfathers. Don’t try to determine another person’s gender identity, you social fascist.) And maybe it’s that I should be the good friend, and not cuss around friends that I know don’t like cussing? Should I be considerate of my friends’ delicate sensibilities, or should they accept me for the foul-mouthed hooligan I am? In a friendship, who bends to whose standards? If others have to bend to mine, can I mess with that? I mean, can I get someone to agree to be my friend, and then punch them in the face and steal their sandwich, and then just say “Hey, that’s how real friends act. You can punch me and take my sandwich, sometime, too.”

Maybe I should just forget all of this, and when I stub my toe, yell, “Oh, dash it all, what deuced rotten luck, eh wot wot?!” Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we lived like moderns but talked like Victorians?

 

This one kind of cracks me up, because really, it makes no sense. It combines this idea of insincerity with an idea of priorities. Because it recognizes that people have busy schedules, but, it says, YOU should be THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THAT PERSON’S WORLD. Nothing else will do. Anyone who claims to be your friend, but for whom you are not THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD is a faker, a liar, a superficial person who doesn’t care about you, really care about you, deep down, where the real feelings are, underneath all the bulls*it. They just want something from you. Which apparently you, who want them to literally drop anything else in their lives in order to pay attention to you — what, you don’t want anything from them? Okay, sure.

And you represent that with Minions. The definitive image of depth and genuine human sympathy.

But again, that makes it pretty simple for me. I have one friend. My wife. All of the rest of you shouldn’t waste your time on me. Because I just want something from you.

 

But here is the meme I agree with.

 

You damn right, CM. Damn right.

 

 

The answer to all this, of course, is that it depends on the friend. With some friends, I am willing to drop most stuff, give up most stuff, if they needed me. With others, I’m willing to give up little stuff — like maybe some of my free time. Sure, I’ll do that. Other friends, I’d give up sleep, I’d give up food, money, comfort. One friend, I’d give up anything I have in this world, other than her. And I call them all my friends. On some level, that’s a problem, because a language as large and varied as English should be able to make distinctions between those types of friends; and we sort of do, because of course I don’t call her my friend, I call her my wife. That shows the differences in commitment quite handily: I would not die for most of my friends; I would die for my wife. Sure. Makes sense.

The issue is that we have grown overfond of the specific word “friend.” So fond we now use it as a bloody verb, like “text” and “impact.” Bah. According to the internet, I have over 350 friends, but if you asked me to name my actual friends, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t run out of toes. If you named some criterion like “Friends are only those people you see regularly, say, every three years,” then I wouldn’t even run out of fingers.

But we want to call lots of people our friends; that’s why Facebook uses the term. (Not that Twitter or Instagram or the various blogging/content-sharing sites are any better: the term “follower” is almost weirder and more fraught than “friend.” But one strangely warped internet term at a time, eh wot wot? Else it’ll be a fifteen puzzle! Don’t want to get the morbs. [Victorian slang here. It’s some pumpkins.]) It’s not enough for me to call her my wife — that could imply all sorts of different relationships. I have to include the description, “And she’s my friend.” In fact, I generally call her my “best friend.” Not that it isn’t appropriate, but the point is, we’re trying to bring in the term “friend” to relationships where it wouldn’t normally belong. It is now a more inclusive term, rather than exclusive — applying, in some way, to everything from acquaintances to co-workers to the love of my life.

Which means, when it comes to determining my relationship with my friends, deciding just how far I am willing to go for them, it isn’t enough to just say to myself, “He/she is a friend. Therefore I will _________ but I will not _____________.” (Sample answers: share the last cookie/die.) Where, then, do I draw those lines? If I call someone a friend, how much — let’s call it “tolerance,” since that’s generally the measure of my relationship to other humans — does that entitle them to?

I feel as though there is a simple answer to all of this, and it is, “You have to decide, on an individual basis, how much tolerance each friend gets. Put up with a friend for as long as you want that person as a friend, and then stop.” And I feel that my audience is probably thinking this, and getting bored with my philosophicality here. (Hence the Victorian slang, dash my wig! I’ll be poked up if I shoot into the brown here!) And that’s fine in theory, and I’ve probably been putting that into practice, really, for the last few years.

But I’m tired. Having to decide whether or not to stick with friends who are on the margin; trying to decide if I should encourage and support them, or joke around with them, or neither, is becoming exhausting. Even worse is pretending to be friends with people I don’t really like very much, but have some reason to pretend to be friends with, reasons like working together, or for. I used to be in the staff band with one of my administrators, and I really didn’t like the guy, though I wasn’t going to tell him that. And of course, some of the time, he was great — like when we were actually playing together. If I have a friend that is great some of the time, and crappy some of the time, how much of the time does he have to be great to make up for the crappy? Should I just get rid of any friends who are at all crappy? But what if my good friends, who get a whole lot of tolerance, have an opinion I happen to disagree with? An opinion I disagree strongly with? How crappy does that have to feel for me before they cross the line and get dumped?

I try to be forgiving with my friends. I don’t actually mind disagreements. I ended two “friendships” this past weekend, both times because the person shared a meme joking — joking — about the atomic holocausts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That was an easy call. But I have other friends who consistently mock Bernie Sanders followers, which generally includes me and several of my other friends. So now the question becomes, do I speak up when they say or post something that annoys me? Or do I ignore it, for the sake of the friendship? What about those who mock everyone who ISN’T a Bernie Sanders fan? Do I really have to decide on an individual basis, every time they say something? In an election year?

This is further complicated for me because I generally have to be careful about what I say on the internet; my past statements and profanity very nearly lost me my license to teach. And I’m friends online with many — hundreds, probably — of my ex-students. I’m pretty open to becoming friends with them, but to be honest, I don’t have a whole lot in common with a lot of them. I remember them fondly from class because they’re bright, or they worked hard, or they had interesting things to say in discussion; but now that I interact with them casually and socially, I find out things like, they only care about cars. Or they’re devoutly religious. Or they’re prickly and combative. Or they believe astrology. Or they want to vote for Trump.

So now what? Do I dump them? Or do I ignore the annoying foibles? For how long?

Do I have to keep a balance sheet for each of my friends? And if I do — where are the cut scores?

I also worry about myself. How much can — should — I interact with them? I am, after all, a lot older than them; if I joke along with their jokes, like a friend, does that make me seem like a creepy old guy desperate for friendly interaction? Do they think that of me? Are they just putting up with me despite my annoying habits out of some sense of obligation because I was their teacher? Of course some of them are — but which ones? If I call them on their bull*hit, does that make me their straight-up honest friend, or some hypercritical *sshole? Of course the difference is in our relationship: but what if they’re of that group of people that prefer straight-up brutal honesty? Do I assume that? Do I use my own standards, and expect them to cleave to what I think is right? Am I more friendly or less friendly if I pick fights with people? What if I say something harsh, but I add “lololololololol” at the end of the comment? Is that something a friend would do? How about an acquaintance? How about a former teacher who gave you an A? How about a former teacher who gave you an F?

I really don’t know. But I’m thinking I may stay off Facebook more, or thin out my friends list a bit, to save myself some effort. And maybe that makes me a bad friend. Maybe I should be willing to put the effort into the friendship, whatever kind of friendship it is. I really don’t know.

 

I don’t think I have a final insight for this other than: I think we should start using terms other than “friend.” I would like to suggest, as one alternative, “chuckaboo.” Wot wot? Dash my wig, I’m off to bitch the pot. I’m going to get half-rats.

 

My Wife Is Funnier Than Me

Dusty Leave a comment

Toni: “Why is it that every door-to-door Christian woman has thick ankles? And is badly dressed?”

Me: “I don’t know about the thick ankles, but I’d think they’re trying to dress plainly, sort of that humble Quaker thing. Or Puritan.”

Toni: “If Jesus didn’t want us to dress well,  He wouldn’t have made fashion designers.”

Me: “That’s a valid point.”

Toni: “If I was the King of the Universe, I’d want my people looking good when they represent me.”

Me: “So you’d, what, put them in a snappy uniform?”

Toni: “No, no uniforms — they can pick what they like, as long as it looks good on them. And they wouldn’t have thick ankles, that’s for sure. My disciples would be the best-looking people.”

***

Three in a row:

Me (Complaining about post-workout-exhaustion): I thought working out was supposed to make me stronger.

Toni: You are stronger. You don’t cry nearly as much as you used to.

 

Minutes later, in the car driving home — and apropos of nothing — she said:

“Do you think if small children were left out in the sun that they would be more likely to melt? I mean really small children. Like, new ones. Because their bones haven’t, you know, congealed yet.”

 

And then, trying to find good music on the radio, she punched buttons to get away from heavy metal screaming, and then Rod Stewart, and then Huey Lewis and the News — but nothing made her punch the button harder and faster than a few seconds of a small child’s voice as part of a radio commercial. Then, when I pointed that out, she said,

“Yeah.  There’s nothing I hate more than turning on the TV and seeing little kids talking. Or pooping. Or whatever it is they do.”

When I Was Homeless

Dusty 1 Comment

I don’t actually know this woman personally, but we’re connected, connected enough for me to find this post, and connected by enough shared humanity (of which she has too much and I not enough) for me to want to share this. And I am disconnected enough to feel guilty about sharing it, because it’s not my story, not one I could live and not one I could write. But I’m sharing it anyway because this is a story I want to keep for myself, and to give as well. I don’t know what else I can gove in return for it.
I hope you all read it.

Cat Jones's avatarBeyond the Barbed Wire

By Cat Jones

I'm all right now, but this is a story about where I've been recently. I’m all right now, but this is a story about where I’ve been recently.

People who have never been homeless don’t know shit about it. And the real problem is, they don’t know that they don’t know shit. The ignorance around this issue has real and painful consequences for people impacted by poverty. This point has been underlined to me recently, with a spate of incidents and conversations involving friends of mine whose normally compassionate natures were suddenly and inexplicably shrouded by ignorance, entitlement, and lack of understanding when it came to people who are homeless (not to mention the ridiculous spectacle of a couple of New York senators making asses of themselves by insisting we need them to limit the ability of food stamp recipients to buy “luxury items” with their SNAP benefits, as IF that were even a thing). I’ve been thinking about this a lot…

View original post 13,646 more words

The Worst

Dusty Leave a comment

You cannot appreciate light without darkness; you cannot appreciate Chris Cornell’s singing without hearing Neil Young whinge, and the tiny tickle as your eardrums begin to bleed. So as I have done four days of the best of music — and because good pedagogy tells me that teachers should give four positive comments for every negative comment — I have now earned a little negativity. So here it is. Times ten.

For this list, I’m sticking with singers who have longer careers, people who think they can sing even though they can’t. I have no doubt that there are nobodies out there, wanna-bes who won’t be, who have hyperinflated self-images and manage to record something; this is the reason YouTube exists. But for this, I’m strictly looking at successful singers who can’t actually sing. This means that all of these people have fans; usually of their music in general, but often of the singing, in specific. So I know that others will not agree with all of my choices.I sympathize, I really do. But I’m still right. These people really can’t sing. And this list is in order, with the very worst saved for the very last.

 

#10: Rebecca Black: I know, I know: it’s a cliche.  Everyone spent years ripping on this song and this singer. But as I have often noted, things become cliche because they are so frequently true that everyone makes the same observation, the same judgment, the same statement about it. An apple a day (Or at least regularly eating fruit) really does keep the doctor away. You really can’t buy love.

And Rebecca Black really can’t sing. It’s not just the song — though this might be the worst song ever written, and I’m including “Barbie Girl.” She really can’t sing.

I also realize I am breaking my own rules about people with longer careers and avoiding one-hit wonders who suck; so take this as the one who represents all of the people who become singers because they really, really want to be singers; not because they have a calling, or because they love music, or because they have real talent. They just REALLY, REALLY WANT TO. And their parents have enough money to hire a production company.

 

#9: Eminem: I said this before: Eminem is a brilliant rapper. I love his music, admire his talent and his honesty in his lyrics; the man has an incredible sense of rhythm, and a playful, innovative creativity when it comes to setting words to rhythm and rhyme. Amazing.

But oh my god, somebody tell him he can’t sing. Please? I mean, listen to this song. The rap in the verses is so smooth, so rapid-fire and yet soft and sensitive, as fits his subject, and he packs so many words in there, all in rhythm, all in rhyme, and none of it dropping back to the traditional filler syllables, like “Aw yeah!” or “Gangsta!” or something similar.

And then it turns to the chorus and he sings. And I want to run away and hide.

 

 

#8: Geddy Lee: This one’s more personal, and less likely to have other people agreeing with me. So the truth is, I really like prog rock. I’m a longtime fan of King Crimson, and I love Tool. I love the complicated rhythms, the musical virtuosity, the experimental weirdness that sometimes goes too far and keeps it from even sounding like music; I like all of that.

But I hate Rush. Can’t listen to them. Even though they are one of the premier examples of this genre: they are incredible musicians who do all kinds of weird, complicated stuff, ten and twelve and twenty minute songs, with (often pretentious, but that’s a side issue and not unique to Rush) lyrics that draw heavily from literature; all of it requiring great skill. I would love all of that. Except for this one, leeetle thing: I can’t stand Geddy Lee’s voice.

I can’t! Not even for a minute. Even as I write this, I’m listening to the song in the background, to make sure it is the one I want to use as my example, and yup: it’s driving me nuts. It’s like nails on a chalkboard. His voice is just too high, too squeaky, with absolutely no muscle behind it. I hate it. If only he had stood back and played bass and sang background for some other singer, I would probably love this band.

But he didn’t. I don’t. This is why.

 

 

#7: Bruce Springsteen: You know, I get it. I’ve known a lot of people who are Springsteen fans. He  writes good music — though it’s not really my preference, I can see the draw. And he does a great live show, sure, yes.

But the dude cannot sing. He can’t. He sounds terrible. He mumbles everything. He has to reach for every high note, and when he can’t reach it, he sings it flat and lets it trail off into silence like he meant it to sound like that. Listen: here he is butchering a U2 song. And just listen to how much better The Edge (You know, the guitarist? The backup singer in the band?) sounds than his lead.

 

 

#6: Fred Durst: This is a bad singer who needs no argument from me, other than this.

 

 

#5: Biz Markie: Worst rapper ever. Maybe that’s the gag, but it doesn’t make it any less terrible to listen to. And he sings, too.

 

 

#4: Willie Nelson: This one is a combination. I don’t like country music. I don’t like nasal singers. I don’t like singers who trail off and swallow all of their long notes. Any one of these things, I wouldn’t have much of an opinion: but Mr. Nelson is all three. Sort of the epitome of all three. (I will say that after listening to all of the other singers on this countdown, I suddenly don’t think that Willie is all that bad. I think my ears are crying.)

 

 

#3: Tom Petty: This one was tough to place on the list. Because I like a lot of his music. I sing along when he comes on the radio. But the thing is, I sing along loudly: because I can’t stand hearing his voice. I will never understand why people who have genuine musical ability, who write good songs, but who cannot sing, insist on being singers. I liked playing drums, but I was not good at it. So I stopped. I like playing basketball, too — but I don’t play that either. Because I suck. Tom Petty sounds like someone slowly opening a large, extremely squeaky door; and yet there he’s been, for thirty plus years now, squeaking and caterwauling away. Like this.

 

 

#2: Neil Young: Okay: Tom Petty I blamed for deciding to be a singer. I blame society for this one. How could anyone with functioning ears like the way this man sounds? I mean, for forty years, people bought his albums and went to his concerts! For this! FOR THIS!

 

 

 

#1 Bob Dylan: The granddaddy of them all. The reason, I believe, that so many bad singers think they can have successful careers if they can write well and perform well. And as I’ve been saying all along, I think the music is fine, some of it is great; but there is no reason — no reason — why any of these people decided they needed to sing. Why any of them could listen to themselves singing these songs and think, “Yeah — that song would suck if someone with a rich, full voice and a good tone were to sing it. What it really needs is a nasal whine, an irritating accent, and crappy enunciation. That’s the stuff!”

So thanks for that, Mr. Dylan.

Here: the top two together. I would advise you not to listen to this. Certainly not all eight minutes. It would be fatal.

 

 

And now, for the worst singer of all.

Me.

 

 

I rap badly, too.