Fonzia: The "Born Too Late" Syndrome

Growing up in the 70s, I was constantly made aware by people who had grown up in the 60s that I had been born too late … and missed out on being a hippie, I guess. Being raised where I was, I probably missed out on going to Vietnam.

The few hippies in our small town were pretty tame. I recall the girl who played church organ wearing a gigantic peace-sign necklace – the size of a car’s steering wheel. That was about as hippie as kids got around there. I do recall the Protestant minister’s son being a bit out there. We once spied him, naked on the hill in the cemetery, lounging with his similarly naked girlfriend in the mid-day sun, probably stoned out of his mind, too. Caused quite a stir. The point being kids like that were not the norm – they were considered unusual in our small town.

A phenomenon that’s been lost with instant media is the very slow path that trends used to move on in America. In other words, it took forever, literally a few years, for cultural trends to be acceptable in rural areas that were probably commonplace in more urban areas years before. You open a yearbook from my high school from 1969, and you will see unironic crew cuts and bouffant hairdos. Open one up from 1974, and it will look like Woodstock. The kids from 1969 were certainly listening to all that great music and well aware of hippie culture. It was just a huge leap of faith to dress and act that way in a rural area, where sizable numbers of young guys were going off to fight in Vietnam. Hippies were by and large the product of the middle- and upper-middle-class – these people weren’t around so much in our rural area. You’d find occasional small-town hippies, but they would be greatly out-numbered by, well, for lack of a better word, normal people.

I can even recall vestiges of this in the 90s. In New York, white kids decked out in hiphop gear with many going the full “wigger” route and pretending they were ghetto gangstas. It’s one of America’s greatest mysteries, to me, that this whole time period and way of being has pretty much been glossed over and ignored in pop culture. I thought these kids were creepy and offensive -- ultimately racist, too, in that I grasped they’d never accept black culture to the extent of actually living in or genuinely respecting it, and that they’d abandon this morbid façade by their mid-20s, if not long before then. I think I’ve stated before that their lack of sincerity regarding an issue as serious as race relations was something I found offensive and misleading. You want to paint a star on your face and wear platform shoes in 1974, that’s one thing. Pretending you were not just black, but a deeply offensive, buffoonish caricature of black circa 1994, struck me as total insanity … and I felt pretty much alone in that belief as no one ever seemed to discuss the issue, especially in a way that would question the white kids’ motives or genuine understanding of race.

But I do recall, circa 1993 or so, walking in a mall back home, where the whole hiphop thing had yet to sink in there, and seeing some kid decked out in full fashion, which meant he looked like he was wearing a particularly gaudy pair of pajamas, shuffling through the mall, and you could tell how deeply self-conscious this kid was in that no one was dressed like him, and people were “looking at him funny.” He was way ahead of the curve, and I was mildly let down when I went to a high-school football game a few years later, probably 1996, and saw more than a few kids doing their dumb gangsta-hoody thing with the size 52 pants and untied, over-sized sneakers, the creepy Limp Bizkit, backward baseball hat and vestiges of bad facial hair, god, what a morose time that was for kids – basically indulging in flash cards of an empty culture that had nothing to do with them. I think that’s my problem with a lot of teen trends, and that one in particular: kids are coerced into favoring a temporary culture that has nothing to do with them or their ways of life, when they should be creating their own cultures based on these two things. It’s the culture of marketing as opposed to the culture of humanity, and it sucks the life out of America, not to mention every other country it touches. It’s as bad or worse than fast food and is just as corporate in its intent.

But getting back to the concept of being “born too late” – that was the whole point of 60s kids laying their trip on us 70s kids. Our culture was junk in comparison. Never mind that there was plenty of junk culture in the 60s, too. I usually find people crowing over superiority of culture based on the decade they were kids generally have nothing to do with the creation of any sort of culture: they blindly followed whatever was put in front of them at 15 and decided that was that. The cries of superiority sound more like insecurity, which is exactly what they are. There was a lot of great music in the 60s. A lot! More than in the 70s. But there was a lot of great music from that decade, too. Frankly, I thought the 50s were even more revolutionary, and in terms of folk and the blues, at a minimum, were the basis and roots of most of what has followed since. If I had to choose a decade to revisit to see the first signs of these cultural shifts, I’d surely choose the 50s and see the flowering of electric blues and then rock and roll. In my mind, that’s a few thousand times more exciting than the 60s.

But the whole “born late” ruse seems like something aimed at the young – directed at them by older generations and always meant as a negative critique of the younger one. And you’ll find some kids who play along, claiming they were born too late. (And thus missed out on some great trend, which probably was great fun at the time, but came and went, and woe unto anyone who clings to those memories as opposed to leaving them comfortably in the rear view mirror.) These kids are really trying to say they can’t stand the current teen culture foisted on them, and I can’t blame them for that. When you’re in your 40s, or probably even your 30s, you’re thinking more about dying one day, not being born too late. You’ve swam out to the deep end, where you’re a lot closer to other people drowning. Teens and 20s, that’s the time of insecurity, to wonder why you couldn’t have been born in 1954 instead of 1984. If it makes you feel any better, you probably would have been an asshole in either decade.

I came across a single the other day on youtube that struck me as being a bit odd: “I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker (with Flowers in My Hair)” by Sandi Thom. Apparently, this song was a huge hit in the UK and a few other parts of the world, but not here just yet. I actually like the way the song sounds – it’s pretty novel for someone in the music industry today to make such a bare-boned song and have a hit with it. But the lyrics gave me angina. More of that mildly self-loathing “weren’t things better before I was born” mentality.

I came up with a word for that a few years ago: Fonzia. Taken from the name “Fonzie” --the cool greaser character played by Henry Winkler from the hit 70s TV series Happy Days. This show was 50s nostalgia, roughly 20 years after the fact, aimed largely at a teenage audience that wasn’t even born in the 50s. Ergo, people being made to feel nostalgic for an era that they hadn’t even been alive in. Thus, Fonzia, a sort of baseless nostalgia lacking roots in any real emotions or memories.

I think Sandi Thom has Fonzia in spades. I checked her website to see she was born in a small fishing village in Scotland and is now 26 years old, meaning she was born in 1982 (the year I graduated from high school). If she has any childhood nostalgia to ponder, it’s people with symmetrical haircuts and gigantic white t-shirts emblazoned with “Frankie Says Relax,” white-people dancing to bad synth pop.

Thus, I can’t blame her for feeling nostalgic for cultures of an earlier era. Which she gets all wrong, but who’s keeping score. I’ll print out the lyrics to “I Wish I was a Punk Rocker” below and give you my running interpretation:

Oh I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair
In 77 and 69 revolution was in the air

Of course, punk rockers didn’t have flowers in their hair. Punks hated hippies, or at least claimed to. And I am certain that hippies hated punks – most people did. Punk didn’t happen en masse in America, although you started seeing many more punk-rock kids by the early 80s when punk had become an established sub-culture around urban areas. It was a rare kid who dressed punk, or even liked punk music, in my rural area in 1982. I was one of the few kids in my high school who had Clash albums and the Sex Pistols album – most of my friends didn’t know what the hell I was talking about when it came to punk, nor did they care. Most punk music, I didn’t know myself, and could sense that stuff like Talking Heads and Elvis Costello wasn’t punk music. (They were too good and had real talent.) The situation was different in the UK in 1977, but even then, I suspect people are now pretending there were punks all over the place when they were much more of an anomaly in the overall culture – the same way every British artist of any sort you meet carries on about “bloody Thatcher,” yet the woman was routinely re-elected for years on end. Who were those invisible millions who kept voting her in?

Revolution surely was in the air of 1969, but it came to naught. It came to even less in 1977. This was a passing fashion for most people. Not meant to disparage them or their beliefs. Simply stated, revolutions did not occur. The mildly wealthy kids who shucked their nice lots in life temporarily … eventually eased back into them and became what they were meant to be – reasonably wealthy people looking to stay reasonably wealthy. If that sounds cynical, it isn’t meant to be. It’s the way of the world! Most people become what their parents were, or make serious efforts to raise themselves even higher financially. Nothing wrong with that. Just doesn’t jibe with this whole “revolutionary” stance. Which most people quietly put away in a trunk in the attic some time in their 20s. Like watching a girl go from nose and eyebrow piercings, to a nose ring, to a tasteful diamond stud in her nose, just to a plain, unadorned nose, once she realizes there aren’t many 32-year-olds wearing face jewelry.

I was born too late and to a world that doesn't care
Oh I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair

The world would have cared no more or less in 1969, 1977 or 2007.

When the head of state didn't play guitar

I guess this is a swipe at Tony Blair for being a musician. Is the implication that life was better in that pre-rock era when heads of state had nothing to do with art or music? It probably wasn’t.

Not everybody drove a car

In 1969 and 1974, most people in the UK who could drive were driving cars. Not sure what that’s supposed to mean? You have to go back another 50 years or so to find a time when a recognizable number of people didn’t get around in cars.

When music really mattered and when radio was king

Music really matters now – no more or less than it did in 1969 or 1974. (The question is does it really matter to you, and the answer, unfortunately, is "no" for many people as they age, which is a shame.) Radio was king, but by the 70s, it was pre-programmed lists determined more by marketing strategies than taste or natural appeal. There was a very small window in the late 60s into the early 70s where some DJs on the FM dial in America (and I guess people like John Peel in the U.K.) had influence enough to make or break songs, and taste enough to be excellent at their jobs and have tremendous reach for playing new music. The bulk of the industry has almost always been pre-programmed, heavily-marketed music that large record companies want to succeed. That’s still true today, as much as I wish it wasn’t. And you could argue that for a time in the mid-60s, AM radio was such that just by playing what was popular, they featured a beautiful cross section of pop music that’s still being played today. That was a great time for music. I was in diapers. Much like I don’t miss shitting them, I don’t miss those days. Live long enough, and you see diaper-shitting on the horizon again.

When accountants didn't have control

OK, so I can agree with this one! In her view of musical history, there was a time when music was more controlled by tasteful people who nurtured talent. This is very true, but again, by 1977, with the industry growing exponentially since 1969, it was growing less true by the day. If punk caught on at all, it was thanks to billionaires like Richard Branson and his record label pushing it. The accountants were gaining control in 1969 and surely had it by 1977. Good-to-great music still managed to get made, just like today.

And the media couldn't buy your soul

They still can’t, but I appreciate the gesture she puts forth. At least her heart’s in the right place.

And computers were still scary and we didn’t know everything

I never found computers scary. I found Computer Science classes scary, although I wish now I would have taken a few and added that to my list of talents. But computers, man, once it was clear how to use them, I embraced them completely. Most people did. I take it she’s being sarcastic with the “we didn’t know everything” line – good for her.

When popstars still remained a myth

Probably the best point she makes. Pop stars appeared more in magazines and on album covers than the blanket coverage they now get thanks to MTV and then the internet. There was a mythology around pop and rock music that made physically seeing stars perform, even on TV, much more exciting back then.

And ignorance could still be bliss

Again, one of those weird lines that makes no sense. Ignorance could always be bliss, even in 1469.

And when God Saved the Queen she turned a whiter shade of pale

Nifty use of Sex Pistols and Procol Harum lyrics. A word on invoking The Sex Pistols. I suspect if Johnny Rotten heard this song, he’d break into a sarcastic, loose-limbed hippie/sufi dance, waving peace signs and rolling his eyes before stalking out of the room in a profane rage. The song’s sunny pop sense is more Bay City Rollers than Sex Pistols, and I mean that as a compliment. Watching her video, if you put a can of Coke or Pepsi in her hand, the look and feel of the video would perfectly mimic your average soft-drink commercial.

When my mom and dad were in their teens

She was born in 1982, the year I graduated from high school. Meaning her parents, unless they were banging straight out of the gate, were probably born in the late 50s, maybe early 60s at the latest. I’d wager they were too young to be full-on hippies, and too old to be punks – and probably would have been neither in a small Scottish fishing village. I’d wager her parents were into glitter rock if I had to take direct aim at the timing of their youth. They might have been Bowie and Roxy Music fans, assuming they grew up liking pop music, maybe even into prog rock like Yes and Genesis. Plenty of great British rock was made in the early 70s: The Faces! Her mother was probably a Bay City Rollers fan, which I wouldn’t hold against her. (I would be in heaven if her parents had totally neglected pop music and sat around in musty kitchens playing Scottish reels on bagpipes and violins while watching the rain fall sideways.)

and anarchy was still a dream

Anarchy is just about always a dream, and meant to stay that way. Generally speaking, if you’re in a situation where anarchy rules these days, bad shit is happening. Not the utopia of intelligent, compassionate people fulfilling their individual destinies with no governmental control. If that period of history has existed anywhere in any culture in the history of mankind, I’d like to know about it. Johnny Rotten sang, “I want to be anarchy,” but you know he was full of shit – in a good way, of course. But full of shit, nonetheless.

and the only way to stay in touch was a letter in the mail

Yeah. Phones didn’t exist in 1969 or 1977. We used smoke signals and carrier pigeons.

When record shops were on top
and vinyl was all that they stocked

Record shops sure were on top for a very long time, probably up until the mid 1980s or so. But they always stocked much more than vinyl. When I was a kid in the 70s, there were eight-track tapes, and then cassette tapes, which people gravitated towards when portable and car stereos came into being. Vinyl had a nice long run, probably about three or four decades of being the main physical product in the music industry. But time marches on. I’ll never go back to vinyl and don’t miss it. Maybe the art work associated with albums, but that’s it. I’m extremely wary of vinyl enthusiasts who weren’t around when vinyl was the main game in town.

and the super info highway was still drifting out in space

I’m not sure how long the internet has been around, but I gather it goes back in some form back to the 70s. Still, the idea of mild negativity being associated with the creation of the internet is just a bad, misleading concept in my book. It’s much more beneficial than it is negative.

kids were wearing hand me downs

I’m assuming poor kids still do.

and playing games meant kick arounds

I’m sure you’ll still find kids playing football/soccer in the UK of their own free volition. Granted, I get her point about the age of video-game zombies, but let’s give credit to kids who still don’t zone out with an X Box for four hours a night.

and footballers still had long hair and dirt across their face

Every time I watch a soccer match, I’m always seeing a few players on the pitch who look like hippies.

I was born too late to a world that doesn't care
Oh I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair

You weren’t born too late, Sandi, but in light of this song, I strongly suggest you cover “Drop Kick Me Jesus through the Goal Posts of Life” by Bobby Bare. Country music. Loved by people who think hippies and punks always have been assholes. Gives you a whole new demographic to tap into, and seeing as how pretty you are, an opportunity to float a video to CMT. And you’d be better off feeling Fonzia over Hank Williams songs that are better written and more lasting than much of what went down in the 60s and 70s. Look at the big picture, lassie!

Fred's Manhattan Adventures

Fred and I went to Penn State together back in the mid-80s. (Not his real name – all names have been changed to protect the guilty.) Upon graduation, I putzed around the home county for a few months, then had an ill-fated detour to Venice, California that wouldn’t pan out for me. Fred immediately moved to Manhattan upon graduation and got a low-level editing job at a major women’s magazine.

I’ve lived in New York City for over 20 years now, and am willing to call my living experience “New York City.” I spent just shy of 10 years in the Bronx, and have now surpassed that time in Astoria (Queens). Have gone to work every week day in Manhattan. I know my way around, even in parts of Brooklyn, where I’ve never lived. Some Manhattanites get peeved when 718 folks refer to themselves as New Yorkers, or living in New York City. I’ve lived in New York City; that’s how the five boroughs are defined. Frankly, my living experiences in “off” neighborhoods has greatly enhanced my view of the city in ways not possible in higher-end Manhattan neighborhoods. (By the same token, I have no experience of higher-end Manhattan life, and feel fine not having it.)

My point here? Manhattin living is not what most people think it is. A lot of people move there because they feel outcast where they were living. In some cases, that's legitimate. In others, those people cast themselves out because, frankly, they don't belong anywhere, and I don't mean that as a backhand compliment. I often refer to Manhattan as The Island of Broken Toys, copping a reference to that forsaken land in the Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer TV special, filled with broken Jack in the Boxes and such.

People move there and adopt a new set of values based on every conceivable stereotype you could have about “city folk.” The worst is the mildly antagonistic attitude. People who will put forth like they’re going to hit you, but if you actually cut to the chase and hit them, you’ve just entered the pantheon of Hitler and Genghis Kahn in their world view. I don’t find that half-assed intimidation novel or endearing – it grates on me. I’ve had the pleasant experience of meeting native Manhattanites who are very down-to-earth, rational people. But something about transplants, particularly from the immediate suburbs, and their dire need to impress upon everyone how deeply “New York” they are, has always rubbed me the wrong way.

Fred wasn’t like that, and I’m guessing he still isn’t. He married a woman from Staten Island back in the early/mid 90s (can’t recall the exact year), and they moved to the Washington DC area to continue their careers in journalism and start a family. Via Fred, I got some crucial insights into both the world of journalism and life in Manhattan, as he lived there for a few years, save the brief stint where he moved out to Staten Island. The world of journalism looked like burning hell to me. The world of Manhattan looked a little better, but still wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

I believe Fred used The Village Voice to get himself into some strange roommate situations when he first moved there circa late 1986. Living with total strangers was a very collegiate endeavor, so I guess doing so with a new job in a major city wasn’t much of a stretch. All I can remember of this time period is him telling me he lived with some snotty vegetarians down near the Holland Tunnel and didn’t get along with them. It’s troubling to think that in Manhattan, you have people living for decades, sometimes their entire adult lives, in these morose roommate situations, where they live with people they don’t know, or even like, for years on end, simply because their rent is so heinous that they have no choice but to rent out a room, generally in a small two-bedroom apartment, or more often, a one bedroom, where they’ll maintain the bedroom and rent out the living room to a stranger.

All just to live in this magical place! Yeah, I know it’s bullshit. You do, too. But that’s how people live here. Or you’ll get the six girls fresh out of college living in a three-bedroom, each paying four figures to have no privacy. You encounter living situations like this constantly in Manhattan where the quality of life for the people involved must be near zero.

I visited Fred a few times just before moving here myself in the fall of 1987. And those trips were invigorating. New York at that time still had vestiges of that punk/new wave vibe, particularly in the East Village. You could feel it – there was an excitement to being there. If you want good cultural reference points, watch Something Wild by Jonathan Demme, or put on a Ramones album. That’s how it felt. We’d wander around the Village at night, drinking cans of beers from paper bags, just seeing what would develop as we walked. I still recall wandering into Dan Lynch’s blues bar just off 14th Street, and being shocked to find the lead guitarist that night playing in a closet just off the stage.

But looking back … I don’t know how he or his roommates handled all that. The main apartment I recall Fred living in was a small two bedroom in a newer building in Hell’s Kitchen, which was still very much a shithole neighborhood at the time. (It still has rough edges near the public housing areas, but is nowhere near as ragged as it once was.) We’re talking lower 40s, west of 9th Avenue. He had two roommates: Dana, a woman who had worked with us on the college paper, and Lydia, a wealthy girl from Puerto Rico who knew Dana. They got the bedrooms. Fred slept on a futon in the living room. They had one bathroom. I recall visiting with Brother J while there were two other friends visiting Dana. It was insane. Of course, we spent nearly all our time out walking around the streets and didn’t have much time to cohabitate – we only slept on the living-room floor that night and left the next day.

Those kind of temporary living situations seem normal when you’re fresh out of college. I can’t imagine tolerating them now! But when you first move to a city, in my case I was thinking about moving there, you’re in love with it. You see the good in it, feel the excitement of simply being there. It’s enough just to walk around at night. While I don’t think that vibe has left New York, it just isn’t the same anymore. Manhattan is overflowing with the wealthy now. The music venues, at least the best ones, have funneled out to various parts of Brooklyn. That wonderful, punky vibe … gone. Gone as CBGB’s. A lot of the East Village has been bought out by NYU, to create student housing and such. You can’t be working or middle-classed and live in white Manhattan unless you luck into a very sweet deal. It didn’t happen much then – it happens even less now. The place is much more dull as a result. Critics often focus on the "disneyfication" of Midtown, but it holds true all over white Manhattan.

Fred’s apartment was just a generic, no-frills place, like many college-town apartments, that happened to be in midtown Manhattan, therefore the rent was grossly inflated. The neighbors were either like them or just weird. Some nights, Fred would be woken up by a clanking/whirring/moaning sound coming from the ceiling. It sounded like people were having sex with a vacuum cleaner while they lifted weights. It was the kind of sound that had you thinking, “Forget about two in the morning: when on earth could anyone make that kind of obnoxious racket and think it was normal?!”

I moved to New York around this time, finding a place in the Bronx very quickly and staying there for a long time due to the cheap rent. I recall Fred being one of the few white people who would visit me up there and not be freaked out by the distinct lack of other white faces. He was good like that – that sort of informality and acceptance served him well, as it has me. You have to be that low key if you want to survive in a rough neighborhood: keep a low profile, not get rattled, act like you belong, and you will belong in some strange sense. I caught bigoted verbal abuse on occasion in the Bronx, but that’s as bad as it got for me.

All the while, Fred worked at his crappy editorial assistant job at the women’s magazine. His bosses tended to be neurotic and often crazed. He worked 10-12 hour days routinely. As anyone who has worked for a major monthly magazine can tell you, closing week is a monthly hell they all go through. He told me he slept on his boss’ office sofa many a night, as it made no sense to go home for two hours and come back. Understand, he was being paid a pittance to begin with. If you factored in the hours he worked, he was probably making minimum wage.

It seemed like a thankless, shitty grind he was putting himself through, but I see now he had to go through this editorial boot camp to push himself to the next level. And in my eyes, the next levels didn’t look so hot either. Most editorial staffs of any publication are run like absolute shit: people working insane hours, generally for editors who have no business being editors, who usually get the positions due to nepotism or returned favors. Even if you get good editors by chance, the departments are often structured so that you will often get screwed with serious, unpaid overtime, as it’s considered a grand privilege to make a living by writing stuff you really don’t want to write. I don’t mean to single out or disparage Fred and his experience – I saw this happening with everyone who worked editorial in Manhattan. It made no sense to me why these people had to make their lives so miserable just to have a “creative” job, usually in places that had routine, inexplicable lay-offs.

So you had Fred going through this insane “sorority house run amok” vibe at work all day, then coming back to a living space where had no privacy, and not even a door he could close on the world and have his own little area. I don’t know how he did it. But I do know he got along well with Dana and Lydia, which helped a great deal. Some of Dana’s friends were annoying. I recall one girl, from Ohio, who was the nicest person when I first met her, but a year later, was Ms. “fuck this/fuck that/ayy/whassa matter for you” type phony-ass New Yorker that I didn't want to be around.

Another was a blonde floozy, the most insincere person I’ve met, who was always on the hunt for a Manhattan stud boyfriend. Think she worked with Fred at the harpy gulag. I still recall her purposely bending over at a party to show off her ass to a group of guys in a way that was missing only a spotlight on her. For some strange reason, I also distinctly recall her, Fred and I going to an NYU party, and when we approached (we were all about 24-25 years old), some smokers loitering in the lobby blurting, “Oh, man, here comes some old people.” Old people at 25! I recall feeling “old” at the time when those NYU twerps offered up their sage appraisals. There was a band playing that night who really, truly sucked – a situation we ran into whenever musical acquaintances extended an invite. The hardest part was being non-committal when they asked you how they were; the truth was they sucked donkey dicks and should have been banned from even handling small appliances, much less musical instruments.

Fred had some odd friends, too. We all did. When you’re in your 20s and fresh out of college in a new city, you tend to band together with whoever will have you, and that’s generally like-minded individuals and their friends, a floating web of old college friends and their new friends. I can’t even recall their real names, so I won’t use fake ones, but there were two guys who lived down in Alphabet City in a crappy building … that probably now is a luxury apartment. But back then, man, what a dive, in a part of town that felt like Mars to any sane person, and one of the guys was a painter from suburban Philly. Great guy in general, but had a large blind spot about his art, still recall him going into some soliloquy about “Icarus, flying too close to the sun, his wings, melting” over some painting that looked like Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song record label on the side of a van. Fred and I just gave each other a “what the fuck” look and let it go. We were all over-estimating our talents back then.

The guy’s roommate was a very sweet Buddhist. Religion warning: when you meet white Americans who claim to Buddhist, you can assume they’ve been to college. May well be vegans, too. Probably from the suburbs. I never met any Buddhists in rural Pennsylvania. Would probably meet them in rural Oregon. I’m leery of Buddhists as a result – tend to pick up on a patina of bullshit around their beliefs, the same way I would around many Born Again Christians. You live in an urban area, it gets mildly tiresome to run into what amount to Born Again Buddhists, people who weren’t raised in that culture or with that belief, but came to it later in the life, generally after reading Kerouac or having a revelation at a campus beans-and-rice social. I recall this guy being a fellow volunteer coach in Fred’s gritty Chinatown Little League baseball group (they played on an over-crowded asphalt playground often covered in broken glass), and chanting when his team got ahead, because he didn’t want to openly express a desire for his team to win. (Buddhists should not be coaches.)

Another friend of Fred’s was Nancy, a mousey girl who had the lease on a huge apartment on 96th and Broadway and was also famous for playing some odd instrument, something like the contrabassoon. She was always having a breakdown over her lot in life, or errant boyfriends, or insert twentysomething girl problem here. She encapsulated the archetypal Manhattanite to me. Someone who had the lease on an incredibly cheap, huge apartment, probably on the wrong side of Broadway at that time, but still a great piece of real estate, and she was about as in control as a dog chasing its tail. I can’t recall how she got that place, inheritance or what. But what I recall most is Fred telling me of various tear-filled lunches and phone calls where this woman was on the verge of falling apart or pondering suicide. She was basically a nice person – I remember humming a Paul Simon song to her, her grabbing my arm and breathlessly exclaiming, “you have perfect pitch” – but she seemed as fragile as an egg in the middle of Broadway.

Then there was the troubled gay anarchist who drove like a maniac and seemed like “axe murderer” might be a viable career option. Next. (If I implied Buddhists are full of shit, don’t even get me going on Anarchists. Let’s just say the association of belief systems like these with college is never wrong. You won’t find anarchists and Buddhists in a factory, unless we’re talking Ben & Jerry’s.)

When Fred, Dana and Lydia moved out of that place in Hell’s Kitchen, they teamed up with one of Dana’s friends, Arthur, and got a small two-bedroom place in Chelsea, right on 23rd Street if I remember correctly. Arthur was a strange guy – sorry to be oxymoronic when describing any Manhattan male. Apparently, he was openly gay, with his friends and family, but still was incredibly uptight. He’d always be in some bitchy mood that seemed to be unrelated to any form of reality – just the way he was.

And horrible taste in music. I recall one party, trying to slip on a mix tape Fred and I had put together, we’re talking 2-3 hours into a party, everybody flying. Within seconds of hearing a note of music that wasn’t programmed by him, Arthur flew over to the cassette deck in a rage, pulled out our cassette and jammed his own back in. I can’t recall his exact tastes, but he might have been the only gay Huey Lewis fan in America. His taste was pedestrian, at best. (I don't recall Arthur liking or disliking me -- he probably thought I was a bland straight white guy. As I may have noted in the past -- I am more than comfortable being portrayed this way by people I don't like!)

The guy was constantly depressed. I have no idea what was wrong with him – would be novel to pin it all on his sexuality, but I don’t think that had anything to do with it. All Fred knew was he had to be in the same room with him constantly; they had bunk beds, with Arthur taking the top bunk.

The last time I told Fred about this, he claimed not to have remembered. But I distinctly remember him telling me of an incident where he woke up in the middle of the night, only to see Fred’s doleful face gazing at him, leaned over the edge of the top bunk, apparently staring at him for what must have been hours. It wasn’t a gay thing – it was more likely a “locate best spot in Fred’s skull for drill bit” thing. Fred asked him if anything was wrong, and got a monotone “no” in response. It has to be an unnerving experience to know a deeply troubled person is staring at you in your sleep.

Fred’s life with Arthur and crew at the 23rd Street location was filled with moments like that. It’s one thing to live in Manhattan with relative strangers, but to live with one who turns into a huge pain in the ass has to be another circle of hell. I can’t recall how long they lived there – not long. I think after that Fred did a brief stint at a dumpy, very small two bedroom apartment in the East Village with a stranger, and then he moved out to Staten Island to work, and thus met his future wife.

I do recall both of us seeing Arthur one time after that. He and Dana had moved into a small one bedroom on Sullivan Street (West Village) with a bathtub in the kitchen. That’s something you see a good bit in older Manhattan apartments – former tenement buildings with the bathroom in what would later become the kitchen. Guess the old adage “don’t shit where you eat” didn’t apply to Manhattan real-estate mavens.

Anyway, one New Year’s Eve, Fred and I were at loose ends and took up an invitation for a party at Dana and Arthur’s place. We must have been 28 at the time – on the cusp of leaving our 20s, literally and figuratively. New Year’s Eve, we figured, look out, big party, lots of people, here we come!

It was one of the more miserable experiences of my 20s, and one of the key reasons I rarely go to New Year’s Eve parties anymore. Fred and I showed up. I think three other people did. Just a flop of a party, that wouldn’t have mattered if we all could have admitted it, broke open a bottle of wine, and just had fun hanging out. But that seemed like a physical impossibility with Arthur, who stalked around in a blank, dark mood denoting the failure of the event. Arthur was blasting some crappy 90s dance music that made everything feel even more hollow. I recall one of the women who showed up turning on the TV for some reason, and Arthur flipped out on her that she’d do something like that at one of his parties. I recall getting the fuck out of there before midnight, which was a huge insult, but at that point, man, I didn’t care. A subway ride back to the Bronx on the 1 Train was preferable to the vibe in that apartment. I recall a hispanic woman vomiting on that train ride, and her two male companions laughing at her as she struggled to wipe down her pants and shoes. It was that kind of night.

I don’t know what that was. Whether it was an ugly demarcation point where previously partying people suddenly had it shoved in their faces that they weren’t quite that popular anymore. Or a bad night to attempt gathering the tribes as most people had previous plans. All I know is it was the last time I saw Arthur. Not to mention Dana and Lydia. But whatever New Year that was, must have been 1992 or 1993, it rang in a change, a sort of kiss-off to that “must hang out in Manhattan all the time” routine I had going for the past six years.

Since then, I’ve really ditched the “circle of friends” thing. That’s something that will hold true through your 20s and into your early 30s. But right around then, people start splitting up, either naturally or forcefully. Some get married, or have kids, or move, or all three. Some just check themselves out of your life, either a slow fade or a geronimo-jump from your plane. And you do the same in return. The people who have kids scarcely have time for themselves, much less that sort of extended hang-loose time that was a staple of our 20s.

Hell, I’m single, and I choose not to have that kind of spare time. Weekends, I’d much rather do the requisite yard work around the landlord’s property, my laundry, groceries, gym each day, big Sunday meal that will feed me through the next few days. In olden times circa 1990, Saturday or Sunday would be spent oozing ever so slowly out of a mild-to-terrible hangover. I never could stand that feeling of a wasted day to get over the previous night’s drunken revelry – it just never seemed worth the trouble. I surely don’t mind going out for a few drinks. But the concept of being on a 2:30 am subway train, on one hand drunk off my ass, on the other wary and cautious as I know I’m a prime target to get robbed, just doesn’t sit well with me. I’ve done it enough times to know there’s nothing out there at 3:00 am. I used to think there was some magical, late-night world that would open up and show me all its charms, but there never was.

So, life goes on in New York City, those strange days of my first few years here seem like a very distant memory. I often have the same disconnect with my Penn State days, but with college, it's mostly because I'm never physically there, haven't been there in years. With New York City, I'm still there, and it's still there, but the city changes so fast, and sometimes slowly over the course of years and shifting real-estate sands, that you can live here the whole time and quietly lose that sense of physical connection to memories. It's a strange phenomenon, but I surely feel it now. All I know is I had a hell of a time recalling some of the above people and episodes.

Secret Millionaire

Just got back from a Christmas visit to Pennsylvania, where one of the hot topics was a recent episode of the Fox reality TV series Secret Millionaire which featured the town of Shenandoah, just up the road from us. The concept behind the series is to take a millionaire and place that person in an impoverished environment so he can “see how the other half lives."

I hadn’t seen the episode, and the concept sounded disgusting to me. You can wikipedia Shenandoah to get their demographics -- unfortunately, they don’t have crime rates listed. You’d see something very odd, actually with that part of Pennsylvania in comparison to urban areas with similar (or higher) per-capita incomes. You’d find the crime rates to be radically lower than what you’d find in urban America. People think the sky is falling when felony crimes occur back there, but in reality, crime is much less of an issue than you’ll find in most places in America.

Shenandoah has always had the image of being a rough town. My father told me the story of his father going to a banquet at the best hotel in Pottsville, the county seat, honoring World War I vets – this must have been in the late 1940s or so. The big controversy was a table full of Shenandoah vets stole all their silverware and had to give it back. Like many people back there, I’ve always referred to the place as Chendo for short, and 462 for the area code. The natives take a perverse pride in the hard image. But in reality, you pass through neighboring towns like Girardville, Mahanoy City, Tamaqua, Ashland and such, and those towns are a little rough around the edges, too. This happened to most small towns in Pennsylvania once shopping malls rolled in throughout the 1970s: the downtown areas fell apart as business centers.

I suspect the producers of the show picked Shenandoah because it made the papers this summer when a bunch of kids beat an illegal Mexican immigrant to death one night, and there was some controversy in the amount of time it took the local police to arrest the kids – which may have been the problem of determining prosecutable charges for X number of kids or may have been incompetence and racism – I don’t know. Whatever the case, they’ll go to trial soon, and the media machine will kick into high gear again over this issue. Shenandoah is less than half an hour south of Hazleton, the town that’s attempted to ban illegal immigrants and received much press and scrutiny as a result. A much better Secret Millionaire episode would have been to drop a hispanic millionaire into Hazleton, publicize that he came from Ecuador and spoke no English, and see how that panned out.

(Sidenote: I've since learned this episode was filmed last spring, i.e., before the murder took place. So I'm even more curious as to why the producers chose Shenandoah.)

But they picked Shenandoah which, in my opinion on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of rank poverty and unlivability, is about a 3, with 10 being unlivable. It gets a lot worse than Shenandoah, or any town in the Coal Region of Pennsylvania. The general reaction in the paper was outrage, particularly regarding how the montages showing the “poverty” of the region focused on the absolute worst the place has to offer: an infamous huge abandoned coal mine, some burned-out houses that haven’t been knocked down (which are eye sores all over the region …) minor displays of graffiti (graffiti in rural Pennsylvania is practically non-existent in comparison the mounds of graffiti I see routinely in the New York area) …

… and a few households that need some work, to say the least. I got news for you – I know people with homes in similar disarray. It’s rarely a money issue – it’s a personal lifestyle choice. One that I don’t make for myself – I like keeping my place in order – but I’ve been in more than a few homes that would give Sanford and Son a run for their money. The apartment this episode’s millionaire moved into in Shenandoah, all I could think was I would kill to have a similar living space in New York. Cruddy wallpaper? Mold? Dirty floors? I got news for you – a weekend of cleaning and house repair eradicates these issues. Bugs are easily taken care of. Anyone with minimal effort could have refurbished that place into a nice little apartment.

What’s more, a few months ago, I was in the apartment of a coworker who makes over a quarter million dollars per year – in a Manhattan luxury building with a doorman. I got news for you: his living space wasn’t much bigger than mine, and mine was cleaner and more homey. Of course, his location in Manhattan leaves him with a monthly nut that’s about 5-6 times the size of mine. But that’s how people are in Manhattan – they live in tiny little boxes of apartments that are a joke most places in America, but have convinced themselves that “everyone wants to live here” when reality is most people don’t. (And I am fearful that this previously working-class neighborhood I’m in now in Queens is going down the same shit road in terms of phony, over-priced exclusivity and “location, location, location” issues, thanks to twentysomething suburban WASPs moving here in droves, and local real-estate scumbags perpetuating this strange sort of acceptable racism related to grossly inflated property values due to the new landed white gentry.)

As for the locals’ sense of outrage, christ, give it a break. That area has suffered from a strange, totally unnecessary inferiority complex for decades now. You can’t say anything critical about the place without locals crawling all over you, as if you don’t recognize heaven when it’s right in front of you. The Coal Region isn’t heaven. I love being from there, love going back there on a regular basis, but the reality is I’d have a hell of a time finding good work back there. Granted, doing so with a job that paid anywhere over the mid-50s would be living like a reasonably wealthy New Yorker, as real estate and taxes are much, much cheaper back there.

But gainful employment, or lack thereof, has always been a major issue with the region, and probably the main reason why I moved out in my 20s. Frankly, I like the lifestyles of most people back there: laid back, no-nonsense, friendly in a good, genuine way. If other people don’t like it, or look down on it … who gives a fuck? Does it matter? Of course, it doesn’t. Take my word for it, these people should be elated that moneyed douchebags are looking down on them. Because, as I’m finding in Queens, if those moneyed douchebags take a sudden shine to your neighborhood, it will be a matter of time before they move in and force you and every other sane person out in favor of their exclusionary lifestyle that requires a much higher income.

But I digress. I just watched that episode of Secret Millionaire on the Fox website (it's Episode 5) and found myself strangely touched by it. Sure, the producers played a bad trump card with the montages of feigned poverty and destitution – the area is nowhere near that bad or hard. But the overall tone of the show was to focus on locals doing good, and they found some genuinely good people who could use a few thousand dollars to move forward with their charitable causes, which was fine by me.

The millionaire was a cheerleader for the Baltimore Ravens who, as my brother sagely surmised, might have sucked the right dick and won the lottery: she married a rich guy. (And I wonder if this guy saw her strutting her wares on the sideline of a Ravens home game and made his move, no doubt making it clear how much money he had straight out of the gate. Aint that America ... Big Pink Houses for you!) The show didn’t touch enough on this, but there was minor friction between her and her mother, who came from a humbler background in western Pennsylvania. (Her mother joined her on this odyssey to live in Shenandoah for a week.) Basically, this woman came from a town that probably wasn’t much different than Shenandoah, especially with its Slavic background, and you could tell by how she dealt with the locals that she felt at-home with them. Her mother could have passed for any random fiftysomething Potato Bomb (Coal Region slang for a woman of Slavic or Irish lineage who puts on double-digit poundage after the birth of her first child and children thereafter) with her short hair cut, mall glasses and sweaters. (I should also point out her mother had that look of rural kindness and understanding I know well from back there.)

The odd part of all this, of course, is the cheerleader could have left her suburban Maryland town and, within 15 minutes, been in living conditions that would have made Shenandoah seem like Shangri-La. Of course, those wouldn’t have been white people, the neighborhood would have had an astronomical crime rate in comparison, and I think if you watch a few episodes of The Wire, you’ll get the drift of the kind of neighborhoods that exist a stone’s throw from her wealthy suburb. I think that’s also why the locals back in PA resent the show – this woman could have encountered much worse poverty and hard times a few miles from her home as opposed to hundreds of miles away in Pennsylvania.

What made the show worthwhile was a few of the locals this woman decided to help with big checks. In particular was the woman in Frackville operating what looks like a dog grooming place, who took it upon herself to buy groceries routinely for people having a hard time financially. I don’t know her personally, but her grooming shop is one door down from a nice Italian place, the OIP (Original Italian Pizza), where I’ll often have dinner with two old high-school friends when I go back. What this show doesn’t touch on is that I gather the owner of the OIP is probably making a fortune, as are a lot of business owners back there. The friends I have dinner with? One is making six figures as a plant manager in Harrisburg (he drives an hour south every morning on Route 81), the other making a good salary as a draftsman and a three-figure-per-hour figure in her spare time as a caricature artist. One of my brothers is making a great salary at a hardware warehouse after being there for about 10 years. Two guys in my small hometown are lawyers making six figures. More than few of my high-school classmates I met at the last reunion are well into six-figure territory with their jobs. Shenandoah? My friend who lives there, the plant manager, has a kid going to near-by Bloomsburg University … for almost no charge if he maintains a 3.0 GPA. The town has an endowment set up so that any kid who wants to can get a practically free college education if he really wants it.

In the Frackville portion of the show, the kind-hearted woman who buys groceries drops them off at what might be the only “bad” block in all of Frackville. (A friend of a friend just moved there and has been outraged at the town’s comparatively enormous tax base to other towns in the region.) I know that stretch of houses, right next to Boyer’s supermarket. One of my high-school English teachers, and his wife who taught in another school district, live just down the block, literally 20 yards away, in what looks more like an average suburban neighborhood. He was making around $70,000/year before he retired (remember, with summers off), as was his wife, and living in a house that probably had a property value of about $80,000, which they had paid off years ago on a mortgage that was half that current value.

This is poverty? Christ’s sake, if only that were true, and this was as bad as it gets in America! The cheerleader got a job in a supermarket in Mahanoy City – this used to be a stop on the line on my bus’ local route, but has since been bypassed it because it's on a hard-to-navigate side street. It’s a nice little market – clean, probably selling the same products this woman uses in her Maryland mansion. She could just as easily have gotten a McJob at the Walmart in St. Clair or Shamokin, or even better, Redner’s employee-owned supermarket on the edge of Shenandoah which, I guarantee you, is virtually identical to any supermarket she uses in her high-end suburban paradise. It was a bit disingenuous of the producers not to acknowledge or film things like this in an effort to make the area seem as down-trodden as possible. The truth is if you have a nice house and a good job in that part of Pennsylvania, you can have a lifestyle that will be virtually identical, even in terms of consumerism and all its products, to this woman’s life in Maryland.

What should they have done differently? For one thing, there are small coal patch towns around Shenandoah that appear much more ragged. I’m thinking Shaft, William Penn, Lost Creek, etc. You’ll find normal houses there, and series of crooked row houses, houses that literally lean like the Tower of Pisa and have coal banks in the backyard. What’s even more bizarre: these houses probably have a property value of less than $20,000. In front of some of these houses, you’ll see new SUVs of the type the cheerleader and her millionaire husband probably own. The car costs more than the house. And some of the shanty houses will have a satellite DISHes attached to them and 42-inch widescreen TVs in the living room.

This is how America rolls these days: even poor people can pretend they’re wealthy with these sort of bizarre product placements, most likely purchased unwisely on credit. Or, maybe some of the guys in those houses are pulling in $60K a year at some higher-end manual labor job they’ve stuck with for decades, and they just don’t feel like moving, or upgrading their homes in any recognizable way.

It’s always a different story – sometimes sad, sometimes just as I’ve described. All I know is Shenandoah – or any town in the Coal Region – isn’t that bad a place to live. You can see this in the show when the cheerleader and her mother drive around. The streets are clean. You look out their car window as they move, and you see well-kept lawns and homes. I recall things being much more basic and gritty from my childhood there in the 1960s and 70s. Now? I go back there and sometimes feel like I’m visiting a suburb, missing that deeply rural vibe that was so strong in my childhood. Of course, that’s still there, too. I’ve just traveled more since then and can see the vestiges of suburbanism creeping up ever so slowly on the place. And I’d rather not see it at all, as I know what it implies (a lifestyle requiring greed, which is the antithesis of my life these days, ergo why I often feel alien in urban environments, where money just walks around, as the saying goes).

Part of my routine when I visit back there is to drive my mom around on Saturdays to do her afternoon errands: bank, dollar store, drug store, gas station, and always end with pizza at the Pizza Place in Frackville. Almost every time, she’ll drag along a garbage bag filled with empty soda cans. Why? Because there’s a woman who lives at the top of town in Ashland who works for a local animal shelter, one that depends on donations to survive and also has an ongoing aluminum drive wherein they encourage people to give them their cans so they can trade them in for money. So Mom collects all the family’s empty soda cans and delivers them every Saturday. Doesn’t sound like much? It probably keeps at least a few stray dogs and cats in their pens alive in terms of food and services provided for directly by this. I'm just glad the producers of the show didn't see her in her windbreaker and funny hat, dragging those cans out to the car, otherwise they might have portrayed her as a bag lady. When reality is she's living comfortably off Dad's pension and her Social Security, in a clean, good-sized house with a nice backyard. The producers of the show did a great job of masking that far greater reality of the Coal Region.

The Missed Bus

Well, it’s another one of those weird-ass Christmas seasons. Of course, the weirdest-ass of all was Dad passing away 12/23/04, and dealing with all that entails over the next few days. This one got off to a flying start when the bus that was supposed to pick me up at Port Authority this morning at 7:30 (I got there around 6:50) didn’t arrive.

Maybe it did. At some point around 7:45, a Port Authority employee came around and announced our bus was delayed “for an hour and a half” due to a traffic accident in a crucial in-bound lane leading to the bus station. I thought, you know what, I’ve been standing here close to an hour, I’m going to go take a long walk (in the 38-degree drizzle that has been our weather most of the day), come back around 8:30, and see what the story is.

I did. The bus line I take shares a gate with other Pennsylvania bus companies, and the ongoing issue with the 7:30 bus is another bus that leaves at 8:00 going to the Harrisburg area. Invariably, there will be maniacs lined up for that bus at 7:00 or earlier, since I’ve gathered that bus line is more crowded. Usually not an issue – we’re talking a line of 20 people, at tops, and when it’s announced to the line of people that the 7:30 bus is leaving, it usually shakes out nicely so that less than 10 people get on my bus. You can always tell the first-time riders, as they're shocked to find they're standing in a single bus line for two different buses, but such is the cheapness of Pennyslvania busing companies that they can't afford their own gates.

But on Christmas Eve. Shit. The line was about 100 people long, easily, I’m certain with about a 60-40 mix of their bus/my bus people. I was about eighth in line and had struck up a conversation with an older guy in line in front of me who was waiting for the 8:00 bus.

When I came back at 8:45, cold and wet but at least more clear-headed, the line was a little longer, he was still there. Man, what’s going on, I asked. He said that in the interim, they’d been told all buses would be on at least a two-hour delay due to this mysterious accident. Which did not make the news (I checked). I looked around, and that whole area of Port Authority, every gate had a huge line of people snaking from it, all in the same boat. Thousands of pissed-off people stuck in a small space on a very serious travel day. I just shook my head, muttered fuck it, got back on the subway train and came back to my apartment. When you’re repeatedly told “an hour and a half or two hours” for all buses, that’s vague bus terminal speak for, “We don’t know what in the hell is going on.”

Back here, I took a nice, long nap, did some laundry rather than taking it back in PA (which I’ll hopefully get to tomorrow morning), and did some key house cleaning, vacuuming and mopping, which always makes my place smell fantastic and puts me in a better mood, especially when I return from a trip a few days later and get that lemony fresh smell. I went to the gym and got some Chinese food afterwards – may as well make use of what’s basically a “free” day instead of grumbling and feeling like a piece of shit.

I could have made some more money and simply gone back to work. But the guy I work for turns into a horse’s ass when he’s in office before a long vacation (which he will go on tomorrow for two weeks). Got a minor dose of that yesterday, which was bad enough to have me thinking, you know what, I’m scheduled to be out today, I know he’s going to be carrying on like a five-year-old, I got plenty of stuff I can do for myself in lieu of making a few dollars more.

Even if my bus had been on time, man, I should have learned my lesson long ago, that traveling the day before any major holiday is a shit trip – and this one had all the warning signs leading up to it. The big one was dealing with the snitty gay guy who goes home once every five years. I state that like a stereotype because I only run into this kind of person during the crowded holiday seasons on the bus, and the snitty gay guy who goes home once every five years is a hallmark. The snitty gay guy who goes home once every five years is never on any bus but one that leaves either the day before Thanksgiving or Christmas.

I guess he’s going home to remind himself why he fled whichever rural area to stay in New York City the rest of his days, and you can tell he has a sort of grim determination about the trip he’s about to make, maybe to deal awkwardly with bad parents, or run the risk of seeing people he knows can’t stand him for being gay, or even worse, running into people who harassed him earlier in life for being gay. I don’t know their stories – all I know is these guys never go home unless they have to, and you never see them on a bus, say, in the third week of April, or at any other time.

He’s always well-dressed, mid-30s or older, wears glasses, and I’m guessing that he works in the fashion (or some other creative) industry. Chatty in a way that suggests if you’re not dropping the names of high-end Manhattan markets and shops, then you’re out of the loop, but he’ll cut you some slack, because he’s going back home to be among vaguely rednecky people like you, so may as well get used to dealing with people who hear the phrase “sun-dried tomato” and think “I wish I could punch you, hard, with impunity.”

I wouldn’t want to be stuck in a broken elevator with the snitty gay guy who goes home once every five years. Take my word for it, being stuck in Port Authority Bus Terminal on Christmas Eve, waiting on a bus that is destined to be hours late, is virtually no different. He’s right next to you, and neither of you can move, lest you lose your place in line. Luckily, this guy only wanted to talk travel, what I knew about traveling along the line, since he picked up that I traveled it a lot and knew it pretty well. All in all, this guy wasn’t so bad. Unlike previous snitty gay guys who pitched fits like spoiled divas over the most minor of inconveniences (shouldn’t there be ropes around here so people could form lines easier, oh god, look at all the luggage that hispanic woman and her two kids have, isn’t it a little hot in here, at least too hot for cashmere, etc.). Still, it felt good to bolt the place and go for a walk, although when I came back, he was still there, rolling his eyes, hand perched on hip, radiating bad vibes like a fluorescent light.

And he surely wasn’t alone. There was the old lady who pretends she doesn’t know there’s a line, and just wanders up to the front of the line in front of dozens people who clearly have been waiting much longer. (I nearly punched a deaf nun in the face who pulled this stunt a few years back. When she started signing me, I gave her the finger. Welcome to New York, sister!) The young hispanic guy in cocked baseball hat putting out the attitude like he’s about to take a prison bus to Rikers – like I tell fat white guys who shave their heads and grow goatees – you’re not intimidating anyone, you insecure little weasel. The clean-cut college girl, as denoted by her Ivy League sweatshirt, with nose piercing and dreads, reading her Andrea Dworkin book, going home to scoff at the capitalists paying for her liberation. The middle-aged white woman who thinks she’s going to direct traffic, but you get the vibe that when the bus rolls in, she’s going to jump line. The worst is the people you know are going to try to jump line – you can see it in their beady eyes, they’re looking for an “in” – that moment of confusion when everyone loads up, so they can hustle themselves in front of 30 people without being noticed. (And there’s always confusion when it’s announced that people are waiting in the same line for two different buses.) Save, you bet your sweet ass, I, like everyone else, notices when someone cuts in line in front of me. And I’ll give the snitty gay guy who only goes home once every five years credit – he’ll be the first one to pitch a fit when he sees cowardly shit like that going down.

This had all the markings of a very bad bus ride. There are two daily buses that travel through my part of rural Pennsylvania on that line – at 7:30 am and 3:30 pm. Could have easily come back later for the 3:30 bus. But you know what? The weather sucks, there’s a mass exodus of people leaving New York City today, traffic that would normally be bad will be at a crawl because of the rain and ice, and I can’t see myself packed like a sardine on a bus filled with these deeply aggravating people whom I never see when I take the bus home about every six weeks throughout the year. On top of which, Pennsylvania is bound to be a sheet of ice tonight, as it was this morning. My mother told me my brother had to do about 5 mph in his pick-up truck all the way home from work, and literally had to get on his ass and slide himself down the sidewalk to get to our front door. Fuckin’ A, it’s supposed to be 40 degrees and sunny tomorrow – I can wait!

Of course, I hate breaking tradition, one of which is opening presents on Christmas Eve. We tend to only get presents for Mom these days – she tends to give each of us a nice little check after Thanksgiving dinner and tells us to have fun. Not a lot of money, but surely enough to buy some cool stuff, or just to bank if necessary. I’m real sour on the concept of giving people presents they may not want, which is exactly what would happen if we tried to get presents for each other. Man, we can buy this shit any time we want as adults – the whole concept of gift giving is more for kids, who obviously should have a blast at Christmas. But as an adult, I get an empty feeling with the rampant materialism of the holidays. I wouldn’t call it depression – just the recognition that it’s only things, shit we buy, and can’t bring myself to attach any more or less value to it. If you care about people, they know it, no matter what time of year it is.

Ho, ho, ho! Where’s my Christmas variety special?

But enough. Time to kick back, watch some TV, go to bed early, and hopefully have better luck on Christmas morning with this shithead bus, which had better be close to empty and on time after all the shit I went through today. If that’s the case, I should be just in time for a full turkey dinner and afterwards one of those amazing 500-calories-per Selma’s Cookies that I bought Mom this year -- at a loss to get anything but food as people in their 70s don’t want anything, save good health and people in their lives, which is pretty much all I want in my 40s, too. And that’s pretty much all that matters for me these days in terms of Christmas. That, and a bus ride that doesn't leave me feeling homicidal.

That Song: Insert Genesis Ballad Here

I still haven’t cracked the nut on women yet, and any man who thinks he has must be delusional. You can be married for decades, and you’re still going to be in the dark on any number of issues. I’m single and don’t lose any sleep over this – I think the secret to happiness is choosing not to lose sleep over issues like this, which is probably how couples stay married for decades. Life gets situational after awhile, and you roll with whatever one you’re in at the time.

I wouldn’t know it at the time, but in high school, I was setting up patterns with women that play out to this day. Which is to say getting myself into impossible situations that are often not impossible to begin with, but reveal themselves to be in short order. The first time was trying to win away a very smart, pretty girl from her longstanding boyfriend, who happened to be a badass on our state champion wrestling team. (I’ve noted in an earlier piece how cool both of them, who did get married eventually, were at one of our high-school reunions, for which I’ll be eternally grateful.)

Since then, man, an abridged inventory: a woman who had her heart set on becoming a nun, changed her mind, then became a Born Again Christian, much to my chagrin. A flirty/artsy woman who was a great match for me, but involved sporadically with other (generally older, moneyed) guys while she couldn’t make up her mind with me. A beautiful Japanese woman whom I tutored with her English writing skills while she broke off an engagement, lost touch with, came back a year later to continue our lessons, at which time she was openly flirty, but shut me down like a lawnmower when I had the tiny balls to notice. A lesbian I had been good friends with. Don’t laugh and don’t consider me delusional: when I went through that situation, I found that a handful of guys I know meandered through the exact same scenario, although none of us panned out like the movie Chasing Amy – all any of us got was dick. Our own. In our own hands.

(Sidenote: the dramatic “this is why I love you” speech Ben Affleck’s character makes in that movie to Joey Lauren Adams’ lesbian character in their car on a rainy night, the one that convinces her to toss aside her sexuality and give this straight guy a chance … is one of the biggest loads of shit I’ve ever seen perpetuated on screen. Guys who saw that movie and declared “right on” or “I wish I could do that” afterwards have obviously never made that sort of “no bullshit, this is how I feel” speech to a woman. Here’s what really happens when you make that sort of speech, especialy to a heterosexual: the woman sits there, staring straight ahead, with her mind completely blown that you have laid everything bare and are expecting her to immediately accept or reject you in return. She will reject you – maybe not immediately, but you better believe she’ll resent the hell out of you for forcing her emotionally into a corner like that – and that one instance will probably be the first of a series of emotional ultimatums you drop on her like “truth” bombs that demand her equally impassioned, committed response. It’s more a game of emotional control than “baring your soul.” It’s the sort of shit teenagers and inexperienced guys do in their 20s, i.e., director Kevin Smith’s core audience, no matter what age they are. This shit doesn’t work in real life. If you don’t believe me, try it yourself. Jesus. Just watching that youtube clip again has my skin crawling … and I like that movie in general. If you think that scene is cool, you’re my ideological enemy!)

It’s a similar pattern every time: meeting a woman who is great in some sense, hitting it off immediately, then soon discovering her situation is weird/challenging in some way I couldn't have anticipated, accepting the challenge, and eventually losing the challenge. I would swear on a stack of bibles that I don’t search out women like this, but I must have some type of internal bullshit detector: one that draws me into a situation in which bullshit will prevail. The older I get, the less time I spend trying to make things work, based on experience. Where I’d spend months in some hazy area in my youth, I’ll now spend weeks, or days even, or sometimes don’t even go there. I’d call it snakebit, but more than anything, I just try to be honest with myself. If I’m attracted to a woman, I’ll generally go for it in some sense. If it doesn’t pan out, I’ll let it go. How this compared to some guy married for 20 years, I don’t know. You get yourself into one situation that stretches on for decades, you got a different set of problems than mine. And we all got problems!

After that first debacle of going for a girl who was taken, I was understandably gun shy about these matters. Way too gun shy – to say I didn't get laid in high school is a radical under-statement! I would find myself getting into these odd situations where I’d find myself gazing at some girl for weeks or months on end, with her gazing back. Which didn’t necessarily mean the door was open.

Such a case happened with H in my sophomore year, with her a grade ahead. A very pretty girl, smallish, smart. Dating an ape. One of the guys on the football team who was a goofball at best, but if I could go back in a time machine, would recognize him as a deeply-average kid who really wasn’t that big or tough, but had a knack for hanging out with other vaguely “bad” guys who never really did anything all that wrong. High school was all about image as opposed to action, and it worked most of the time. If I had been really smart, actually if a guy any age wants to be smart, he should ask himself why a woman he considers attractive is with a complete jackass, and perhaps draw the unfortunate conclusion that maybe she aint all she’s cracked up to be. And the even worse conclusion: why is he routinely attracted to this type of woman?

I spent months making eyes with this woman, as she did with me. All the while, dating this other guy with no end in sight. One day, an older friend in her class saw me looking at her, asked why I didn’t ask her out, told him the obvious answer, he shrugged, went over to her, told her I liked her and was wondering if she would go out with me. I was incensed at the time, but what the hell – the guy made a great point to me. What was there to lose? Chances are the answer would be no, already taken, thanks anyway, but I’d be no better or worse off than before. And that’s pretty much how this one played out – I do recall later that day, making eye contact with her as my bus pulled away from the school, and she had the saddest look in her eye, I guess acknowledging that there was some quiet bridge between us she wasn’t willing to cross. Fair enough.

How does this relate to Genesis? The whole time this quiet flirtation played out, I was listening to the Genesis album Duke which had come out that spring, and even now, just seeing that album cover makes me think of H and that quiet teenage despair. Nothing happened, but something happened. The album’s vague concept is a character – Duke – guiding a woman to stardom, with her leaving him behind when she becomes a star, leaving him older, wiser and heartbroken. Of course, I wasn’t Duke – this chick was a year older than I was and not a star – but I related to that same sense of heartbroken wisdom. You want a good “romantic failure/feel like an asshole” song to pine over, try “Please Don’t Ask” from this album. I remember playing that song over and over, and thinking, “Christ, what an intelligent song about losing hope. No bitterness. Just the truth..”

Genesis got a bad rap after Peter Gabriel left, the consensus being they were a lesser band because Gabriel was the creative focal point of the band, and probably responsible for most of those interesting stream-of-conscious lyrics. In reality, the band didn’t skip a beat. The band shared writing credits on every song. When Phil Collins took over the lead vocals, his voice sounded almost exactly like Gabriel’s. They lyrics might have changed a little, but they were still good. I guess the bad rap was they were still doing what was basically Prog Rock at a time when it was slowly fading out, while Gabriel was doing more commercial material with great success. (And I still prefer those first two more pop-oriented albums as opposed to his more experimental/world material that followed.)

I bought all those post Gabriel albums, once on vinyl and re-upped on CD: A Trick of the Tail, Wind & Wuthering, And Then There Were Three, Duke, Abacab. That’s where I stopped, as Abacab was the band skulking towards the 80s pop-rock monster they would become through Collins’ far more slick solo albums. I should note that along with Duke that ill-fated spring of 1980, I was dogging two other big Genesis ballads that best represented my teenage state of perpetual blue balls and broken heart: “Ripples” and “Afterglow.” Both songs about leaving and heartbreak, both sung by Phil Collins in that post-Gabriel period. Emotionally accurate songs to play when you’re a screwed-up teenager and think your world is about to come crashing down because the love of your life is unobtainable. A drive to the convenience store to pick up milk for your Mom feels like a windswept journey on a ghost ship in the Azores. Shit like that.

I think there's a much larger story to tell in the fantasy life of 70s teenage rock fans in which their rote American surroundings are in direct contrast with the romantic imagery placed in their imaginations by bands like Genesis, Queen, Led Zeppelin, etc. All I know is there were plenty of guys driving around in Ford Pintos who thought they were on camels in the Sahara when listening to "Kashmir." Of course, drugs may have had something to do with that also. But the same mild self deception came into play with matters of the heart, too, thus we all felt like Fabio on the cover of a romance novel every now and then. Which, I can assure you, is not a good way to go through life!

Last Song at the High-School Dance

I have a hard time killing spiders in my apartment. They do good work by killing insects, particularly ants. I’m always finding ant mummies underneath an intricately-spun web. I guess the bad rap comes from a handful of poisonous spiders that can kill people, but most spiders are harmless to humans, particularly the kind that take root in the corner of a bathroom or by a window. They seem like gentle, quiet beings with a really dark side, much like cats, who also get bad raps. You have a cat around, mice are not a problem. You learn to live with the rock-star attitude, or more like a bored teenager who runs hot and cold in terms of emotions. Spiders and cats are like those friends everyone says are assholes, but you go on being friends anyway, because you see the good in them.

A few months ago, while reading on the can in the morning, I watched a spider take down an ant in its bouncing web over the course of about 15 minutes. I felt like a National Geographic camera man watching a lion take down a zebra. Should I have intervened? No, it was just nature taking its course, but I did feel odd watching a killing play out. I kill insects routinely in my place, particularly ants, but the occasional roach, too. But spiders, I can’t bring myself to kill. When I clean, I’ll knock down their webs, watch them scurry away, but invariably, weeks or months later, a web will appear again in that general area, I guess the spiders sensing that’s a good killing field for them. Wouldn’t know what to tell someone who saw those webs and assumed I was a slob – just isn’t true, and I note as much being a reformed slob who rarely cleaned.

I noted in a piece awhile back the passing of Randy Pausch, with my thoughts on death being it’s a natural part of life, whatever darkness and negativity we may attribute to it, mostly because we don’t know what happens after we die. The drama of dying violently? I can only imagine how that pans out against dying slowly from a slow-burning disease, but I can gather a few seconds of pain and confusion , and only momentary knowledge of impending mortality, can’t be that bad in comparison. But we’re trained through movies to see this as some horrific finale with entire lifetimes flashing before our eyes. Got to believe if your lights are about to go out, the only thing you’re thinking will be, “My lights are about to go out.” If you’ve ever been in abject pain, the only thing you’re thinking about is abject pain. It tends to erase all other thoughts and emotions.

I should have known I’d have questions regarding pre-conceived notions about death, having been raised in a town where the main features were a hospital on the edge of town, and a Catholic/Protestant cemetery on the hill. As kids, we used to play hide-and-seek in the cemetery all the time, particularly at night. Telling ghost stories there also worked to maximum effect.

Sidenote: I strongly doubt Catholic/Protestant cemeteries exist anymore. The concept with ours was each branch of Christianity had a side of the cemetery, divided by a rickety wooden fence painted white (that we loved to play on, particularly when re-enacting Civil War battles). Unlike a Northern Ireland set-up, one side was no more or less attractive than the other. The fence came down a few years back. Most visitors who didn’t know of the divide saw virtually no difference, and in my mind it wasn’t like the Berlin Wall coming down. Just one of those weird little markers of passing time, what with Catholic schools and churches consolidating or closing due to under-attendance. Progress or tragedy, you decide.

I’m still trying to suss out the teenage attraction to graveyards. You have the famous graves of rock stars, kids hanging around late at night, getting high and such, in honor of the free spirit’s resting place. I don’t think people make pilgrimages to these places to honor the dead. They do it to bolster the same free spirit in themselves, remembering that this person influenced them to be as reckless, and that by hanging out in a graveyard at night imbibing, they somehow share in that radical glory. But, when you get down to it, it’s just a bunch of kids hanging out in a graveyard. This is worth noting though, because I think most people seriously visiting a graveyard in daylight hours are there to remember – the kids at night see themselves as part of some spirit that hasn’t departed and simply carrying on a rebel tradition. They’re not there for anybody but themselves, which is pretty much the M.O. of youth, for better or worse.

Sometimes the kids would vandalize tombstones – happened a few times in our graveyard, and they were invariably caught, because who in the hell is hanging out in a graveyard after dark? Unless you’re very quiet and careful about it, you’ll probably get nailed. Kids would go there to get laid, too. I still recall one of my high-school friends sheepishly knocking on our door at 10:00 one cold winter’s night in the middle of the week, his girlfriend skulking in the shadows behind him, asking, uh, er, uh, if we could, uh, help him get his car started, it was, uh, er, um, up in the cemetery. I don’t think kids screwing in cars in graveyards have death on their minds – they’re simply trying to find a quiet place to fuck, a randy 17-year-old’s quandary. But probably not a good idea to use a graveyard. Again, your car is there after dark, anyone passing by is thinking, what’s a car doing in the graveyard at night and is more likely to report that to the local cops.

Kids don’t have a clue about death, which is the way it should be. I can still remember the first time someone my age died, a friend and fellow classmate in high school killing himself a year after we graduated, apparently despondent over a failed relationship. The most shocking thing I remember about the whole incident was seeing him in his coffin at the wake, how odd and unreal he looked in death, his peach-fuzz mustache still growing, or much more pronounced than I had remembered it. Afterwards, a few of us drove around listening to heavy metal tapes, our minds blown by seeing one of our own in that lifeless state, and of course, the only option at that point was to build some sort of shrine to the person, emotionally, because it is a relatively odd, special experience when someone that young passes on for whatever reason.

At our 10th high school reunion, I had a blast, despite not being Mr. Popularity in high school. That didn’t seem to matter anymore, and we were all looking at each other as young adults (28 years old) moving on from our former selves, but glad to come back for a night and take inventory, in my case realizing most of these people were fine and just trying to get through life the same way I was.

One table was set aside “for those classmates who couldn’t make it” – with a candle for each person who had died in our class. (Never mind that there were a shitload of living people who couldn’t make it – gay kids, kids who got picked on, adults who just had no urge to see anyone again from their old high school, etc.) I think there were four candles – two suicides, one girl who had a congenital heart disease, and a guy who was in an automobile accident. It seemed cheesy, but even at that age, the shrine of four candles was intimidating, a dead zone most people avoided. Rather than someone wisely saying “fuck this,” blowing out the candles and sitting at the table, that table sat there undisturbed and, I guess, when people weren’t having a blast and caught a quiet moment, looked over and thought, goodbye __________, sorry you’re not here. Nearing the end of the reunion, which felt like a high-school dance with alcohol, most of us were pretty hammered, the DJ, who had been doing pretty well all night, stopped and announced, “And now, one more song, this one goes out the classmates who couldn’t be here tonight” – and he read off the names of the four dead classmates.

And then he played “Stairway to Heaven.” There was nearly a riot. Couples stormed off the dance floor chanting “fuck this” and “you’ve got to be kidding.” It put a real damper on the evening. It was as if he had played "Highway to Hell" instead in tribute. I had a beer in each hand – last call had come minutes earlier – and all I could think was … if you grew up in the 70s, EVERY high school dance ended with two songs, in no particular order: “Freebird” and “Stairway to Heaven.” This went on well into the 80s, too. If the DJ had just foregone the dedication, he’d have ended the reunion in grand fashion. But something about tying that rock-and-roll chestnut into the passing of these four young people, must have struck plenty of classmates as offensive. (A year later, another of our classmates, who was there that night, a kid nick-named Squirrelly because he was a little guy always getting into trouble, took his life. I’m guessing at least another five or six classmates must have died since then, too.)

Man, you get older, people just start dying. Nothing grandiose about it, no great mystery about the process. When it’s happening, you know it. If you experience it enough, you can look someone in the eye who’s going down that shit road with a loved one and know how it feels to watch someone fade away. It blows, if you haven’t already surmised this. But there’s no easy way out. We tend to have these wonderful visions of ourselves quietly passing away in our sleep some time in our 80s, still sane and self-supportive, sort of kissing the world goodbye in a sweet dream, but, man, from what I’ve seen, you get ridden out of this world on a rail. The door hits your ass on the way out. Hard.

I’ll be back in Pennsylvania this time tomorrow, plenty of opportunities to go up and visit Dad’s grave, but it’s a pretty rare occasion when I do. I know Mom rarely goes up there, too, as stirring up those sort of emotions will always be too raw. It’s not so raw for me, but I don’t need a physical visit to the gravesite to hold onto that sense of passing. I’ve also noted earlier that when someone passes, they follow you the rest of your days like a shadow, the memory always there, sometimes as clear as if the person was still there, others hardly there at all. It’s a strange thing to have that sense of life carrying on with vestiges of those no longer living. A huge draw for me as a writer originally was to have my name “live on” after I die, to have people remember what I wrote years later.

But I’ve become much more a “here and now” person since and am more than content to leave behind a bag of bones and sundry items for people mentioned in my will. (Whoever gets my music collection is going to feel all right.) I know I’ve left some things behind, some words, many more actions, memories people are going to carry long after I’m gone, hopefully in a good way. Whether 50 people, or five, or five million are tapped into that, what does it matter. Legacies are for assholes, people looking to amplify their meaning in the world, to extend their power beyond their lives, and that feels meaningless to me now. It seems like you get busy living, it’s better to let other people decide what you mean to them than try to place your stamp on them. Like those kids screwing in the graveyard and blowing out the battery, with the heater on all night, listening to Journey and Styx. They surely still remember that night, and I do, too. Better than most things I've read in history books!

A Few Things I’d Love to Hear Politicians Say

I’ve pretty much given up on voting. I don’t like the process. I don’t like the choices placed in front of me. I don't like lawyers, ergo I don't like most politicians, who are lawyers. I don’t like the canned us/them mentality foisted on people with this fake Democrat/Republican, liberal/conservative garbage. When I run into people who willfully lean hard in either direction, I cringe. I know the next 5-10 minutes of my life will be a monologue of idiocy, generally from people who really aren’t that idiotic, but have chosen to be on this one issue. Because they care, man. Because they’re connected to the world. Because …

Pfffttttt. The last few weeks have provided many awkward social moments with people going off on their extreme political points of view, truly cringe-worthy stuff. I’d rather not attempt to hash out whatever goes through their minds. And I’d rather not damn them with some superior attitude, because I’m surely not above anyone. If anything, I’m choosing to disregard levels and degrees here, and just toss the whole shitpot into the sewer. If you vote, I tip my cap. I don’t vote because I can’t stand our political system and recognize the real power now lies with corporations and money, that politics are just a fancy sort of window dressing for people to pick over regarding more personal issues, like gay marriage and abortion. Have at it! I realized a long time ago, probably as a kid in the 70s, that my life went on much the same no matter who was in office. Bad shit comes your way no matter who’s president. Good things happen to you, too. If you’re going to place your mood and overall sense of personal happiness in the context of whoever holds political power, I’m more than happy to call you a bullshit artist of the highest degree.

What would get me politically motivated? I didn’t write “again” at the end of the previous sentence, because I don’t believe I’ve ever been politically motivated, despite some stern attempts at liberalism in college and shortly thereafter. Lord knows, I tried, but one too many poetry readings in stalwart “socialist” bookstores and coffee shops where I could grasp that about 70% of the people in the room were batshit crazy and as offensive as any Republican I’ve ever met, I just had to let it go. I could picture the faces of guys I grew up with in rural America, living lives that were the embodiment of socialism and the “every man” ethic, and they’d be doing this: making googley eyes and mouthing, “Let’s get the fuck out of here!”

I’m going to present a list of a few things I’d love to hear politicians say, and by doing so, hope to illustrate what I see wrong with politics, and why I’m so put off with this nonsense. Obviously, there have been times in America when political activism was essential – Revolutionary War, Civil War, etc. But I’d have to think, even if I was a Rebel soldier, I’d be sitting around a campfire with my friends in the woods outside of Gettysburg at night and thinking, later for this shit, I can’t wait to get back home to my tenant farm, assuming I don’t get a cannonball straight through my head. This is how I am. If our political system were to crumble because of people like me, I’d consider that a pretty good thing. Realistically, of course, this won’t happen for a long time, if ever, and I’m indulging the luxury of a lot of people giving a shit about something I don’t give a single shit about. Suffice to say, storming the Bastille would be one of those historical events I’d love to visit in a time machine. But without further adieu:

I don’t believe in god. Any politician who stated this would have my vote. Profess atheism. State directly that politics and religion should remain as separate as possible. Get religion out of it. Have it in your life if you need it, and I surely recognize that millions of people need it, but get it out of politics. I have nothing against religion – in fact, I’ve seen more than a few people I respect lead good lives with total faith in their given religion. But I also don’t see them at work forcing their religious beliefs into their workplace decisions – they understand religion is the core fiber of their being, simply something they are, and it carries them through life. I’m fine with that – I just don’t believe it should have anything to do directly with what people do, be it politics or whatever. Politics, by nature is a dirty business. Religion … well, it shouldn’t be, but go figure, sometimes people get some funny ideas in their head when they try to figure out what god wants, which is usually pig latin for what they want. It’s a bad mix, if you ask me.

I don’t want to get married/I like having sex with numerous partners. Bill Clinton was a pussy man. So was JFK. I suspect a lot of politicians are. Like rock and roll stars, some politicians are in it for the pussy. On a very base level, I can respect that. On a deeper level, why get married to one person if that’s the case? You love to get laid, with numerous partners. This is great! I tip my cap to you for this pursuit of horniness. But we have this insane, misleading political image that a politician must be happily married, preferably with children. If Clinton had just divorced Hilary after getting elected and stated, “I love my wife, but I love having sex with numerous partners more, and I feel like I’m in a cage. I need to get a divorce and pursue this more. Just the way I am, and I don’t mean any disrespect to anyone.” Wouldn’t life be easier with that sort of unbridled honesty? Pussy men should not get married, ever, or wait until their gun barrels cool down a bit by their mid-50s or so, like Warren Beatty.

I don’t have or want children. Much like the “happy marriage” trope – having kids seems to be a hallmark of politicians. You’re deeply suspect if you don’t have them. What’s wrong with you … you don’t like kids? I’d love to hear a politician say, “I can’t stand kids!” It’s OK! I think you get some women in politics who get so wrapped up in their jobs that they probably “forget” to have kids and are shit out of luck when they start having weeping fits at 46. But, hell, if having one takes you out of the game for at least 3-4 months, what are you supposed to do? A guy can have a kid and not skip a beat with his job. Politicians tend to use their kids as props to a nonsensical “I’m really a family guy” image that’s about as far from the truth as you can get for someone who works 14 hours a day, every day. If you’re a politician, your family is not your first priority, and that’s cool, just admit it. Plenty of people in the business suffer the same fallacy.

I don’t like working-class people. It seems like every major election comes down to this pained focus on red state/blue state nonsense, i.e., white working-class voters. Who, as we’ve seen, can be influenced to lean either way, usually depending on the economy. Your average white liberal will sit around all day bemoaning white trash, trailer-park trash, crackers, etc. … yet never once make similar statements regarding black and hispanic working-class people, because they’ve been carefully trained to never appear in any way racist, and making those kind of statements would surely brand them as such. You better believe working-class white people are acutely aware of this, no matter how dumb so many people assume they are. I propose just being honest: if you don’t like working-class people, regardless of color, just say it. Hell, I have severe problems with white upper-middle-class people and perceive their lives to be just as junky and empty as anything you’ll find in Appalachia. Save there’s a lot of emptiness you can hide with money that’s glaringly clear in a shotgun shack. But politicians have this built-in BS factor to fawn over working-class people in speeches, when reality is these people are cannon fodder, at best, or butts of jokes for supposedly sophisticated people most of the time otherwise. If a politician said, “I hate working-class people, but I need your vote, so tell me what I can do for you, and if it’s within reason, I’ll make it happen” – he’d surely have my vote.

I’m a gay/black Republican. A black co-worker, the day before this last election, was carrying on over her uncle, who was a black Republican. The general consensus seemed to be that he was completely nuts, although no one could quite say why, save a lot of people seem to believe the Democrats are wondrously open, giving, non-racist people … which I think is well-meaning bullshit more than anything else. I think of a black Republican, or a gay Republican, and think one thing: progress. For one thing, it’s a gutsy move to break out of tradition like that; for another, if you strip the parties down to their core essentials, the Republican belief in self determination should be just as appealing a message to black people as any core belief the Democrats could put forth. Of course, the Republican party has become so fouled with right-wing religious bullshit and wealth that this is sometimes hard for people to see (of course, the Democrats are just as fouled with wealth). It’s sort of alarming that so many black people are focused in on the concept that they can only be Democrats when the Democrats offer nothing more to them than Republicans do. You want to see real progress, real change, that’s going to come with black folks branching out in the Republican party and putting their own stamp on it in terms of that previously mentioned self determination. (On a more base, realistic level, this will probably also symbolize them having more money/status in society, which will be a good thing.) I can see gay people having severe problems with Republicans based purely on the stifling religious bullshit, but again, strip it down to core beliefs, and there’s something there for them if they can handle the kooks. Which, admittedly, is a pretty tall order. How religion got to be such an overt force with the Republican party, I don't know -- this wasn't always the case, and it tends to be an all-or-nothing proposition with a lot of voters, which will be putting less asses in congressional seats as time goes on.

The two-party system is reductive and unrealistic for sane people, but I can’t function as a politician without their financial backing. I can’t stand what this country has become politically. And I don’t think we’re “divided.” I think people who over-indulge in politics are clearly divided, but the greater reality here is that the assholes in America are divided, as they always were and always will be. The sane people just go on living, like the fucking Joad family in their jalopy and bunkhouses. Whether they’re poor or rich, white or black, whatever they are. I always enjoy meeting people who either are or appear to be apolitical because, surprise, you can actually talk to them like human beings and get the overwhelming sense that they’re not trying to get over on you or “feel out” where you stand on certain issues. I’m not going to hold your political convictions against you unless you create an aura around yourself that’s so stifling that the only sane option is to reject you. And this seems to be a pretty common theme with a lot of “committed” people these days. Their goal is to divide, and then discard.

I can see that the only chance an effective third party, much less a fourth of fifth, has in America is to have billionaires like Ross Perot float the money out there and run their agenda up the flagpole. In effect, they’re already dirty because the sole reason for their existence on a mass level is a staggeringly huge amount of money. There’s not much hope on a national level for a multi-party political spectrum, candidates who cross so many lines politically that you end up voting for them simply because you respect their honesty, whether or not you’re always on the same page. As it is, I feel like our political system has come down to whether you want to shop at Walmart or K Mart. And both places are selling the same shit, mostly Made in China, for varying prices that will cause you to shop at one place or the other for given bargains that strike your fancy. That’s pretty much how politics in America feel to me now. And I'm a "used on Amazon" sort of guy these days.

I’m not quite grasping what cataclysmic political changes people perceive to be on the horizon, unless they’re anticipating a full-blown Depression and the social unrest that will result. Even if Obama fails miserably, and I suspect he won’t, he’ll still be perceived as a good president. He’d have to screw the pooch royally, in ways that make Bush like Thomas Jefferson, to have history portray him in a negative light. Again, I think he’ll do fine, given the horrible economic shitstorm he’s walking into. But I’m not kidding myself about real change. Save money. Live better. Keep waiting on that blue-light special.