What will it take?

(Update Post Election-  being undecided is now irrelevant.)

I was having a difficult time making up my mind about the next post for this blog.  I guess that makes me an "undecided."  

Having declared at least that much , I expect a series of calls from the presidential roboconvincers  in a matter of min.... hold on, I have to take this call, it could be my big break...Where was I?

Mmmm...Pecan for me!!!

(What happened to that hat, anyway?)

At this point?

Are you kidding me? 

What could cause one to be an undecided voter, after the full on assault of this season's campaign?  OK, maybe I watch too many news programs, but really, how could you not have an opinion?  I'm almost ranking you beneath the people who seriously think Obama is a Muslim (I've heard he's a muslin, and in that case I would vote for the woolly McCain).  I almost believe that if you suspect that Barack Fitzgerald Delano Quincy Hussein Obama is a Muslim you should be disqualified to vote.  Or that you don't know enough about Obama, either.  He's been going to a Christian church forever, you idiots.  And I don't remember Islam being forbidden in the constitution.  Most of them are not even terrorists, to my understanding. That must be a disappointing tablet of truth to swallow.  

So if you don't know enough to make up your mind, shame on you.  The guy has a website.  The guy has been campaigning for 4 years!  The guy had an infomercial! There's more out there about this fella than the all the other presidents combined!  And McCain has been in the news for years after he got out of Vietnam.  He has a track record and a philosophy, scandals, and political success, and his votes reflect them.   He has been speaking in front of a television forever, so if all you can remember is POW and Deputy Dog (excuse me, Maverick) , you should be ashamed. Get off your lazy ass and do your homework! Turn on the radio, the TV, read a paper, look at some body's lawn sign, for god sake.  Keeping your head lodged in your ass is not guaranteed in the bill of rights.  As a matter of fact, I think it's expressly forbidden in the 7th amendment.

Commie! Although I don't recall seeing this at the Bolshoi.

I just think that voting is a responsibility, and not just something you do with a few minutes free after work.  Homework is our responsibility as citizens of a democracy, I believe, and anyone who doesn't agree with this, doesn't appreciate this right.  Isn't that a "real" American?  Isn't it "really" American to defend our rights, and our right to choose? People fought and died for the right to make this vote, and our experiment has observers from all over the world, particularly this election.   We are an example, whether we like it or not, and should not dismiss that lightly. Lives here and around the world depend on demonstrating our values and not buying into every line of crap that comes down the political sewage pipe.  Don't waste the opportunity you've been given by giving voice to such nonsense.

 

This is just as likely true, or maybe more so.

To say Obama is Muslim is to insult Americans who value our democracy, as well as likely a veiled racist excuse.   Not enough experience, okay, I don't agree with you.  But Muslim?  Go home, the lever is off limits to you!!! I thought I had lost my idealism after the supreme court decided the last presidency, but it has come back, and I'm afraid my slip is showing.  I believe in our example to the world, and I don't believe it is our guns which speak for these standards. 

Who says idealism has to be uninteresting?  This is a dangerous object in an ideal world.  I actually slipped on a peel once.  In the interest of full disclosure, I didn't think it was funny at the time.  

I found the panels of undecided on the networks after the debates to be unconvincing.  I also found the panel people who confessed to having decided during a debate to be both predictable and foolish.  

The registered Republican who "decides" to vote for McCain, or the registered Democrat who "decides" on Obama knew all along, and no they have forfeited their opportunity to appear at the following debate.  Really?  You didn't know?  How much weed could you possibly smoke?  

The panelists should have had a buzzer sound effect at that moment of decision, and the floor should have fallen out beneath them. Their 15 minutes had officially ended by choosing a candidate.  They probably didn't total the full fifteen minutes they were guaranteed by the constitution.  I wonder if they will see the rest in a rebate check.

Obama and Palin on the campaign trail.

How did she get that thing past secret service?

I thought about things that could likely go undecided by the people who where undecided about this election.  These people could be:

1) Undecided whether they are gay or straight.

2) Undecided which rest room to use.

3) Undecided whether they like Brussels sprouts or not. 

4) Undecided how to change a light bulb (This group has provided hours of humorous and not so humorous material to the vaudeville crowd, and still can be used in a nursing home routine).

5) Undecided whether or not you are the mother of your own child.  

6) Undecided whether or not they may have isued the fart that impresses their nose.  

(I include number six  only because once when we were kids, one of my many siblings passed gas, and although we had a general consensus about the "dealer" my mother suggested that perhaps the one who "dealt it" was unsure about the dealing.  I was immediately suspicious of this possibility. I mean, how could you not know?  (I seem to gain a greater understanding of that woman the older I get)  I suppose I also included it because I seem to be fond of the body function metaphors, particularly concerning politics.

If you can be undecided at this point, who knows what might slip past you?

THE DEALER

"I ate broccoli before my shift!  Film at 11!"

Making it up

It's fall, and I think back to a seminal moment in my childhood.  I sat in the small makeshift sandbox in our backyard, and traced roads on the mounds I'd made.  I was having conversations with myself in an improvised language I was working on.  To be fair, it was really just a pile of sand that conveniently sat over the cesspool cover.  I suppose it was easier to leave the sand there than destroy grass every time we had to pump out the leeching pool (From a family with 7 children, this seemed as common an experience as the change in seasons).

I seemed to have lumped every experience in my memory to this seminal moment.  Layers upon layers of childhood times, that only peeled off on occasions when the winds blew just right.  As I walked to my car in the late afternoon, I felt the chill and the fading light was just as it had been every year at this time.   Someone had lit their fireplace and the north wind was just turning toward us, pushing the skittering leaves across the street.  The scene came to me from somewhere within, bursting into my senses.   I rolled it around in my mind, letting the flavor of the memory reveal itself to me as a vaguely familiar meal will.  Certainty comes first, followed by a sort of reaching or grasping to try to take it all in before the experience fades away.

I heard my own voice in my ears the way I did in that backyard,  felt my mouth shaping out different combinations of sounds.  It was the feature of language creation I was playing with.  I remember trying to vary up the sounds so that it didn't sound like a fake language, and then I tried to keep track of each sound so that if I was having a conversation with myself, I wouldn't refer to the same sound combinations too much, but enough to make it sound as if I was talking about something (whatever that sound would signify).  In these conversations with myself, I would practice all the elements of expression I could think of, such as surprise, curiosity, anger, impatience, disagreement, joking, relief, etc.  I remember watching Andy Kaufman's character "Latka" on the TV series "Taxi" and thinking, that seems familiar.  I knew he was probably wrestling with the same problems I had in making it sound like a real language without actually speaking one.  

I wonder who might be amazed 

at my Sandbox Language skills?  

Hmmm?  

I don't know how old I was exactly, because I believe that seminal moment is actually an amalgam of a few years of my life, and the only sign posts of the memory are the changes of the features in the back yard in my mind.  My parents renovations to the back yard are recorded with the memory, and so I can tell from the position of the garbage pails, or the height of a certain tree roughly when it might have occurred, with the help of the family album. 

I seemed to have been obsessed with the nature of conversation, at least that's the way my memory reports it to me.  My entire family would squeeze around this tiny table with benches, 9 of us, most nights for dinner.  During the meal, I remember battling for butt cheek space with one or another of my siblings on one of the end benches, but that ended when most of them cleared out after dinner.  My parents were both smokers when I was young, which certainly wasn't uncommon in the late 60s.  

After dinners was for smokers a wonderful time to light up, and for my parents to talk without the kids hovering over them.  My parents would sit across from one another, elbows on the table, the smoke drifting lazily from the cigarettes that never left their fingertips.  They would talk to each other about many things, I think.  I don't remember the subject of the conversation, and I seem to remember not listening to what they were saying.  

I was more interested in how they behaved during the conversation.  I pretended to be an involved listener, too.  I would turn my head toward the speaker, leaning on my elbow also, and switching my hands when the other would speak.  I watched their mouths, and the movement of their hands.  My father didn't move much, seeming to me to conserve energy on every flick of the cigarette or sip of his coffee.  My mother exclaimed with her hands, brushing aside subjects with the flick of her wrist.  She would point at the thing she was talking about, and ask a question with her opened palm, pausing to drink from the end of the cigarette now and again.  The smoke swirled with emphasis.  Special effects, I think now.

Doctors depriving their children 

of a delicious second hand smoke snack. 

For Shame!

So this is what grown ups did!  I would memorize this and pass as one of them very soon indeed. I tried to study as long as I could, until the clouds of smoke pushed me from the room, covered my mouth and nose until I had to flee into another room.  I suppose that was a good enough reason to smoke if you were an adult in a bunkhouse of children.  I don't think a child safety gate would have worked better to keep the room clear of us.

I took the conversation practice in the sandbox with me to school, and I remember adding accents to the sounds, particularly British accents.  I told my mates in third grade that I was born in London, and though they didn't really believe me, or know what England was, they weren't sure if maybe I was telling the truth.  I remember that my teacher Miss Destephano, sitting at her desk behind my buddies,  seemed to be very thoughtful as I spoke.  I thought she was interested in my story, but I believe now that she was trying not to laugh.  She is out of focus in the memory, my two friends friend named John are close and in focus, trying to disprove my English birth.  I am grateful now to Miss Destephano for her restraint in not ratting me out.  I kept the ruse going for a few months, or so I remember.  I would forget myself on occasion and drop the accent, but would explain this slip by mourning the loss of the accent the longer I lived in America.   Part of me would love to coach that younger me in making a more convincing story, as I feel I had the accent down then, probably better than I can do it now.  Righto.  I would pretend to have broken limbs and forget leg to limp on as well.  It all seems like quite a lot of work as I write about it now.

My Humble Birthplace

A very rural part of London

As a study aid I would watch a British television program called "The Galloping Gourmet."  I would mimic the host Graham Kerr (I needed to google this information to get his name, I never knew it).  I believe whatever accent I had at the time was his.   I would run around the The St. Joseph the Worker blacktop in a kind of gallop, and the kids would laugh at this, but I believe this was moving into a kind of satire rather than an imitation.    The accent they seemed not to notice, the cretins.  

Kerr-Unlikely Hero.  Did he really gallop?  

Why didn't he answer my fan mail?

As I said earlier, the north wind blew in for the first time last night, and the reminiscence of m old  verbal gymnastics tumbled back into my mind.  I imagine myself in this photo of my younger son Kieran,  bundled a bit in a pile of leaves, listening and creating sounds and practicing the verbal rhythm of relationship.  

Time to head home, to my wife and my two sons, two with very different ideas on conversation and making things up.  Evan speaks only when he has to, or mouths the same tones and syllables like candy that never loses it's flavor.  When we are in the car he will sometimes catch on some sound and insist on it to the window,  and I wonder if this conversation is meant for another, or simply for his own ears or mouth to feel.  But often we are silent, and I will reach back and place my hand on his shin to communicate my awareness of him.  

Kieran will bring me upstairs to his room where all his toy trains are, and want me only nominally involved.  It is okay with him that I bring a book for the times he doesn't need me.  It's during these moments that I hear him having the same kind of conversations I had as a boy, with all the different tones and melodies of what I believed was the point of conversation. The trains will talk with one another, and warn each other, and scold each other, or congratulate one another for escaping one close call or another.   Sometimes we will just crash the trains off the table, and we will make a host of different sounds of exclamation.  He is a big fan of the reaction as well.

Kieran last fall

These days, I work late more than I would prefer, and my family has not established a pattern of dinner that was so much a part of the childhoods of my wife and I.   I wonder if it is the fond memory for both of us it is supposed to be, at least for myself.   It certainly could be a bit heated and overcrowded, but not always,  I remember.  Perhaps my difficulties with it are in the more recent past, with the early issues with Evan and food.  He is fantastic of late, experimenting with all sorts of food, and sitting there eating with devotion and relish.   I am out of sorts here, perhaps.  The early dinner has vanished from my repertoire, and it was a standard for almost my whole life.  Hard to know how that shifted so much.

But now the weather has given its cue, and everyone is now in from the yard a bit earlier. The clothing is just starting to stay on our Evan, who rejoices in nudity at every opportunity.  I wonder how this will all work. When do the conversations start to have thread?  When will we stay on a topic at dinner, or even have one?  With no cigarettes between us, will the adults get a word in edgewise?

Some of my best friends are Idiots

This story circulated among a parent group of  children with autism:

According to the Huffington post (this is repeated everywhere almost verbatim)-

In his new book, "Why We Suck: A Feel-Good Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy and Stupid," the joke-slinging "Rescue Me" star writes about the brain disorder:

"There is a huge boom in autism right now because inattentive mothers and competitive dads want an explanation for why their dumb-ass kids can't compete academically, so they throw money into the happy laps of shrinks . . . to get back diagnoses that help explain away the deficiencies of their junior morons. I don't give a [bleep] what these crackerjack whack jobs tell you - yer kid is NOT autistic. He's just stupid. Or lazy. Or both."

Hmmmmm....

I still don't want to buy your book, Dennis. In fact, I won't even read it for free at Barnes and Noble. Ok, I had no plans anyway, I'm into a DNA Genome kick lately. Dennis would be a book on tape selection, at best. But it's too late now.

No Soup for you!

Studying my Gene Sequins,

but the Shoes are to die for!

Not enough easy targets fer ya, Dennis? 

OK, I wish I could get more outraged at these dumb comments, but the flood of cheap shots about Autism keep coming. Presidential hopeful John McCain mixed them up with the Sunnis the other day. But that's forgivable.  He's got a lot on his plate.  

I have an idea about people who make comments like this, and how they form their opinions. I hope my thought is a little better informed than Dennis Leary's.  But being informed is not part of his act, is it?

Did he read this trick is in a publicity stunt manual? Was he attacked by a gang of Autists and their parents and was put off by their cruel indifference to him?  Did he not get enough eye contact for his liking?  What did these folks do to you?  It seems like a sucker punch, if it didn't sound so much like the usual boiler plate accusation.  It's like the Pope denouncing evil.  It's part of the required schtick for the roll.

Did your editor do any googling with your words, and notice this mug staring back at you?

Know Your Ignoramus:

Michael Savage

Leary's spiel was  stolen directly from this sleepy looking fellow, and it wasn't funny when he said it, either.  Although I like the word "boom" used to describe the rise in incidence of Autism diagnosis.  I imagine a bunch of kids holding their ears, which is a common sight when groups of these kids get together.  

I've  been paying attention because my beautiful 5 year old son has a diagnosis of Autism, and he could give a crap about what either of you say, but I know it could affect him, the lies that you spread for your own purposes (to get a laugh, reaction, to bully, something else to yell about, etc).  Seems to be a boom on target practice on these kids.  When did they start handing out free hats?

Crisis of the Imagination

The thought on people like Savage, Leary and their ilk:

They have stopped thinking.

They have made a decision about something they read in the paper or heard about that they didn't want to have to deal with, and so they try to dismiss it as fraud or unreal. I understand disordered thinking, and cognitive disorders.  But distortions based on arrogance and at the expense of those possibly unable to defend themselves strikes me as bullying and cowardly.

I'm want to list a number of misguided cliches (or comedy sketches if you are Dennis Leary) that are out there which I think have this same dynamic, and which exploits the group it claims to understand.  These claims of understanding are disingenuous and attempts to serve only the speakers ends.  They are ways of letting oneself off the hook, or providing an excuse to disregard.

1) Some of my best friends are gay/black/insert group here.

2) Autism is fraud perpetrated by the medical industry. I know a child that really is autistic, but the rest of them are just trying to get attention.

3)Reagan spun a tale about the "Chicago welfare Queen" riding around in her Cadillac. He used the example of a woman who was defrauding the government using 80 names, 30 addresses, and 12 Social Security cards, and four dead husbands to the tune of $150k. The true number is two aliases and $8K without even stressing that this story is very far from typical. You can still hear the term being tossed around, and it should raise the red flag to you that something is about to fall out of the chute.

4) Obama is a Muslim (I think uttering this statement should automatically lock your doors on Election day).

5) President Bush said-I sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, not to make them American. Iraqis will write their own history and find their own way. (Way to go, Nostradamus!)

Each of these examples serves a couple of purposes. First of all, it allows the listener and the speaker to smugly have an opinion that is compartmentalized, and the matter can be put to rest and decisions can be made from these assumptions. Entire strategies can be devised on these assumptions that will have effects well beyond what can be seen at the time. 

There is also an Other to blame. The race, sexual preference, parents, medical industry, welfare queens, haters of freedom (that statement contradicted itself before it finished the thought). With this other to blame, we can go about our business with certainty, and write the check, cancel the program, send the soldiers. When you say that some of my best friends are whatever, you say in effect that the ones you know are the exception, rather than considering they might be the rule, or better yet, there is no rule.

The welfare queen one was put to me very well once, and then I heard the British labor secretary during the Thatcher administration reiterate it. The person who set me straight is from a country that has a much broader welfare program than the U.S. I remember essentially hitting her with the "Welfare Queen" angle, even though I didn't want to admit it at the time. She didn't let me get away with it, demanding "Who would want to be on welfare?

Pimp my Ride, Yo!!

My friend wasn't done. "The bureaucracy you have to go through, the shame of it, and the amount of effort, it's not worth it. Who wants to walk into a store and hand them food stamps if they didn't have to? It's easier to go to work, as bad as that can be. Who can navigate this system anyway?"

I have to admit I find it a daunting idea.

The British labor secretary found that the worst mistake of the Thatcher years was not finding something for these out of work folks at home to do. The lack of mission that came with unemployment created unprecedented levels of depression. If people could work, they were happier to do it than not to, studies have shown. The mistake was not creating useful work, but rather doling out to folks who sat at home.  The opportunities for retraining for other careers seem to lessen the level of frustration enourmously.

The accusation of medical fraud gives more respect to the "scammers" than you would expect from either Michael Savage or Dennis Leary. Considering the lack of respect for the intelligence of the people they are accusing, how could either of these guys think these people are capable of defrauding the system, as in the case of the medical industry, or parents, or Barack Hussein Obama? 

 I just don't think even the smartest of us schemers has that much time, or finds it worth the trouble, for any of that.  I've been thinking a lot about that pledge of allegiance and what it means to people who believe that stupid comment about Obama being a Muslum.  When did they pass that law banning Islam?  Was that an earmark?

I Know You Are, but Who Am I?

Dennis Leary can stick with his safe assumptions, which I assume he'll do even with the flack he's taking right now (Kaching!) Consider he is a button pusher type of comic, choosing a fireman as a character seems like kind of a safe bet. Oooh, fireman, such controversial figures. Who doesn't love a fireman. Please. 

That was the line of thinking I went down when I first heard it. I can character assassinate with the best of 'em. Just get me started on Dennis Leary.  I started thinking of things to pick on that I knew about him from interviews I heard.

But that's just as lazy a method of dismissing another person, isn't it?  Deconstruct 'em if you don't like 'em, that's my motto.

When my wife first read Leary's comments to me, I thought she said Dennis Miller, and I started picking Mr. Miller apart first.  It didn't sound like typical material for him.  

Catalogue #A30251

$379.99

This firesuit is constructed with indestructible self-satisfaction and fire retardant.

You should have heard what I thought about Miller's stint in the NFL playbooth.

Required Tailgate Reading

The Twisted Gas

The Twisted Gas

This may be an odd way to start a blog, but I thought we could start with explaining the title. A couple of women I know went to a yoga class for the first time, and found out how difficult this discipline can be. They struggled to attain all the positions suggested by the teacher of the class. It was during a particularly ligament stretching move that the title for this blog was unintentionally emitted. A loud fart burst into the peaceful atmosphere, startling both of the women. Imagine someone popping a paper bag behind your head.

Nothing but the reverberating Brrrapp indicated that anything had happened, and one of the ladies reported that this impressed her as a bit surreal. To paraphrase: " This important event had happened, and no one was reacting. No acknowledgment whatsoever. You would think someone would at least giggle or something." You'd think. My friend wondered that, if anyone did react, would they be chased from the room and scorned forever? It seemed plausible in this strange world. She never found out, because she only attended a few more classes before dropping out, finding a bit too solemn for her tastes. The other woman continued to go, despite agreeing with this opinion, and claimed that gaseous eruptions were not uncommon, although most of the participants efforts reached her nose rather than her ears. She was unclear which she preferred.

I idly wondered if there were positions in yoga meant to illicit particularly loud farts, and I suggested the name of one, the "Twisted Bird." They laughed, as this wasn't far off of the general gist of the names. The class is remembered to me only because of the title has a rightness to it. I imagined a bird with a body twisted like a towel to wring out the precious gas, and a cartoon balloon drawn near it's bottom. Then I felt pity for the poor little warbler, and helpless to unwind it's frail little body in my imagination.

Let's move on.




This bird wants nothing to do with my images, cartoon balloons, or yoga. In fact, I have very little or no idea what this bird wants. I'm serious.




I wanted to trace out some ideas I have, and maybe some impressions, because I believe I have some theories that I have not heard before. Maybe someone has blasted them into some room somewhere, but no one has seen fit to comment on them, so the idea farts remain unmentioned, glossed over by the bad deodorants and powders of our everyday efforts to hide ourselves.

I was thinking of stating some of these things more certainly than I know, but the recent financial crisis, war predictions, and the population boom of pundits and has really driven only one fact home:

The experts know nothing.

It's not that they don't have any ideas, it's just that I have read and heard so much certainty that amounts to nothing more than verbal diarrhea. The news shows attempt to squeeze as many heads on the screen as possible, the way arenas and ball fields attempt to squeeze as many stalls in the limited space between the concession stands. All of these people seem so certain, even though hindsight has shown them to be less accurate than monkeys or random numbers. The squeezing together of these folk only seems to twist the bird even more, and the air rushes out from each square with no regard for the other.


This was originally posted on a blog commenting on 50 Repoters Giving Their "O Face." My guess there is something else issuing forth! That's the last time they serve burritos in the network cafeteria!



To start off a blog with a metaphorical theme of lower body functions leaves me with little direction to go but up. Here's a guess that I've guessed would be proved wrong even as I was typing it.

I make one disclaimer, and I credit this to an overused cliche a wise and dear old friend used to tell us: "I know that I don't know." I want to add to this: "but I feel like I know, sometimes, ya know?" The feeling is an optimistic and inspired one, still.

Tennessee Williams often wrote his great works in a series of forms. It was said that he started with a short story, and if it was still in him, he worked it out in a novella, if it was still in him then, he would work it out in a play. I don't pretend to have an ounce of that talent, but I can say that mode of creativity is one to which I can relate. So I may return to ideas now and again.

The composer Alex de Grassi once introduced his piece "Turning, Turning Back" at a concert by saying:
"This is a piece I wrote. First, it needed a guitar. Then it needed drums. Then it needed a bass and piano."
"We need to play it for you tonight."

My writing and my cooking style are like that. I start it with a hunger, a need to be filled, and I look around for things it could use. I grab a little of this, a little of that, then I start to cook the ingredients. Hopefully, by the time you sample it, it's got everything it needs.

Or it tastes like indiscriminate gruel.






No animals were harmed in the writing of this post.