"Bookends, Baby! Don't do it!"

Just now I turned on ESPN's NFL Countdown for the second or third time all season and saw Cris Carter and Keyshawn Johnson discussing the Detroit Lions.
As you may or may not know, the Detroit Lions are in the running for the title of "The Worst NFL Team in History." In the fifteenth week of a seventeen week season they have yet to win a game, and their chances for going 0-17 are looking solid. The question posed to Messieurs Carter and Johnson: How would you fix the Lions for next season and turn them into a winning team?
Mr. Johnson fielded the question, saying he would hire a great new general manager and fire everyone currently associated with the team including the security guards. As he elaborated on the rest of his plans, his remarks were punctuated by Mr. Carter's periodic interjections--
"Don't get a pair of bookends like us," he said, alluding to the fact that Messieurs Johnson and Carter are both former star wide receivers. "Don't forget this is Middle America. These are hard-working blue collar fans, and they wanna see hard working men on the field. You need to build the running game and the defense so these fans can have something they can relate to."
For those of you not familiar with football, this might be meaningless and boring, but he was in essence saying that working people would rather watch slow moving games where lots of people get hit, instead of up-tempo games with lots of passing and high scores.
Mr. Carter strikes me as out-of-touch with the thoughts and feelings of Middle America, and I wish that he would refrain from speaking for people with whom he is unfamiliar.

Economics! Hurray!

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. The end of the semester is here, and I'm waist deep in economics tests, papers about the election, papers about post-colonial West Africa, and the like.
This is perhaps old news, but if you haven't heard This American Life's two episodes on the economic crisis they are more than worth your time:
The Giant Pool of Money
Another Frightening Show About the Economy

Thanksgiving!

This, my only Thanksgiving post, goes back to 2004, the first year of my blog. This week Dad and I will head down to see Grandma yet again. I'm not sure yet what the food situation will be-- will she put out some lunch meats and cheese, will I cook, will we go to an over-priced restaurant-- all that is certain is that i will hate it.

He Shall Speak Peace Unto the Vegan
For Thanksgiving dinner my sister and father and I drove two hours to visit my Grandmother in Chesapeake.
"Pick a nice restaurant," we told her, "the sky's the limit!"
So Grandma picked a place called the Founder's Inn.
It turns out that the Founder's Inn is owned and operated by Pat Robertson.
I was unhappy that my father's $150 was going to such a person, as I'm sure he was, but the restaurant was actually very nice. The waitress didn't try to share the good news with us, and the food was no less delicious for the proprietor's craziness. There was a large buffet, with normal Thanksgiving food like stuffing, and also less common things like oysters, which I tried and liked. There was a bit of a line, but Grandma and I both enjoyed the buffet thoroughly. Dad enjoyed it a little less, because it was overpriced and he was paying. Sarah enjoyed it not at all, because she is a vegan.

We knew this ahead of time, of course. Dad got a copy of the menu in advance to make sure it was vegan-friendly.
"Look, succotash. Mashed potatoes, stuffing, salad. This should be fine right?"
Not being vegans, or even vegetarians, neither of us thought about things like chicken stock in the succotash, or cheese in the salad.
These things leapt out at Sarah though, who sat down after her first trip through the line with a plate of fruit and two rolls. My Grandmother, who was not paying, began whining and complaining about how if we were being charged such a large sum Sarah ought to have something more substantial to eat.
"No, don't worry about it," said Sarah. "I'm used to places like this never having anything for me. If we told them I was vegan they wouldn't even know what that meant. I'll eat something later."
But Grandma wouldn't shut up, and I tried to calm her down.
"Grandma, Sarah's used to this, don't worry. It's alright."
"Sure, it's alright for you," she said, and got up to get herself a plate of free roast beef and mashed potatoes. Partly for Sarah, partly for Grandma, I went and asked a server if they could make something vegan for my sister.
"She's a vegan, so no animal products. No meat, no milk, no butter, no cheese."
"What about eggs?"
"Nope."
"Chef Gerald, this is Dave, do you copy?" the man said into his walkie-talkie. "We've got a situation here with a guest who can't eat any meat or dairy. Yeah. I know. Could we do something for her?"
Ten minutes later the nice man brought my sister a plate of over-seasoned asparagus and charred peppers. Grandma, Dad and I all beamed at Sarah.
"Look at that!"
"That looks great!"
"How wonderful!"
The man smiled and wished us a Happy Thanksgiving, glad, in the spirit of the season, to have humored a hippie freak. My Grandmother finally stopped complaining about how Sarah had nothing to eat and began complaining that our cousin had married a Mexican. Sarah pretended to like her food. "It's awfully salty," she frowned, but, noticing that we were frowning back, added, "but I really like it!"

A Revolutionary New Strategy For Winning 'The Culture War'

Driving with my friend Lynsey this evening, politics came up. It does sometimes.
Lynsey said: "I hate when people say they want the government not to interfere with their lives economically, and then ask for it to regulate everyone's beliefs. That makes my head explode."
I thought about this, and had what I think is a extraordinary idea.
"That's because they want the government to force everyone to believe what they believe, so government interventon becomes okay to them. And we (liberals, moderates, people with compassion, people who think) have been fighting back the wrong way. We've been saying 'Keep the government out of our personal lives,' and it hasn't worked. We need to go further, Lynsey."
"Surely, you don't mean!"
"Yes! We need the government to force fundamentalist Christians to become gay!"
I really think this could work- the Christian Right would immediately start railing against government social intervention, and then the left would stand back and say, "Alright by us." Government would be out of people's personal lives, and we, the righteous and the sane, would win.
I'm writing my Congressman tomorrow, and I hope you do likewise.

Okay Nick: Yay Obama! Yay!

Long-time reader Nick Bognar writes:
Wow, four hundred reactions to your professor, and yet the most important presidential election of the last hundred years doesn't merit a blog entry. Bigot.

Really Nick? More important than 1932? More important than 1968? The election was important surely, but let's not indulge in CNN-style hackery that throws all historical perspective out the window in the name of making current events more "exciting." God I hate that crap.

I wrote about my experience at the polls on election day. You want more? Okay, I'm excited to have a President who gives a good speech, but a little afraid that people, myself included, are going to end up disappointed and more cynical than ever.
It makes me warm inside that creationists everywhere are frustrated and angry and quoting Bible verses in their efforts to cope with the "scary direction our nation is headed in."
And I remember talking to a black coworker named Maurice last January, and how he said that white people would never let a black man be President ever. I wish he hadn't quit so I could engage him in a "See-my race-isn't-so-bad-after-all" conversation, even though I still kind of believe that my race might be that bad, in spite of who our President is about to be.

Election Day

1. By 9 o'clock the lines were not bad at the polls, and I didn't have to wait at all. On the way in I passed a few people soliciting.
"Would you like a Democratic ballot?" they asked.
"Oh no thank you," I said, "I am well-informed and don't vote at the whim of some party. I am the part of the system that works."
Emboldened, I continued down the sidewalk towards my polling place, prepared to turn away two more chipper looking young professionals in raincoats. I began to say "No thank you," but was cut off.
"I'm Kim Gray and I'm asking for your vote today," said the one, pressing a pamphlet into my hand.
"Charles Samuels, asking for your vote," said the second.
I'd never met actual politicians who wanted me to vote for them before. And I had not prepared as well as I'd thought. I'd done no research at all for the school board and city council races that these two wet and friendly people were participating in.
I entered the hospital to vote, found the lines pleasingly small, and went right into a booth with a touch-screen, another first for me. I made all the choices I'd researched, and then stared for a minute or two at the choices for City Council and School Board. The thought of them smiling at me in the rain seemed to represent a fine thing about our system- that people wanting political power should first be made to grovel. Maybe if these people were willing to dress up in nice clothes and stand in the rain for hours smiling at people they deserved my vote. On the other hand, I had no idea what either of them stood for, and not wanting to give my support to someone who for all I knew could support feeding stray cats to the homeless I left those two boxes unchecked. Or untouched, or whatever it is you would say in a digital age. Then I went to see if Starbucks would make good on an offer for free coffee on election day.

2. Picking the kids up from school the other day I heard two first graders discussing the Presidential race:
"McCain is bad cause he wants to destroy the environment."
"Yeah. Baracka Obama has the most votes."
"Yeah, if Obama gets any more votes he will win."
"If I was countiing votes, I'd be like 'McCain, a thousand votes. Forty votes. six hundred votes.' Then I'd be like, Baracka Obama, infinity times a million google votes!"
"Hahaha yeah."
Then a kindergartner on the second row told everyone that Obama was not a Christian, putting me in an awkward spot.
"I don't want to hear any talk like that."
"But it's true, he isn't."
"No, that's a lie," I told him knowing full well I probably just called his Dad a liar, "people say mean things that aren't true sometimes about candidates because they don't want them to win, but that's bad. If you disagree with someone that's fine, but you have to be honest."
I then kicked myself for the next two days for talking about not being a Christian as though it were a bad thing. If I ever have kids they're gonna believe in Santa way longer than they believe in Jesus.

Mugging Part 2

"What did he look like?" asked the police officer. He was anxious to start chasing after the guy who had robbed me, and I could hear his dogs barking in the back of his police SUV.
"Well, he was black," I felt uncomfortable saying that, ""and he had dreads. I mean braids."
"Was his skin dark?"
"No, but not light either. Kinda in between."
"What was he wearing?"
"I don't know, a baggy coat?"
"What did the gun look like?"
"It wasn't a revolver. And it was shiny."
"How long ago was this??"
I looked at my phone.
"Fifteen minutes at this point."
"Fifteen?!" he exclaimed, and stormed off in the direction the mugger had run.
I called the bank before I called the police. I assumed my wallet was gone, that the most important thing was to keep him from getting at the money in my bank account. So I called Wachovia, and then the cops, who sent 7 cars in less than a minute and brought those angry dogs in the SUV. Now they were annoyed with me for being a stupid civilian and waiting to call them.
"Always call the cops first," said another, nicer cop who was taking my statement.
"Getting here quickly is our best chance of catching these idiots," said another.
"Yeah, sorry about that. I guess I fucked up."
"Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm a cop," he said. "I would know what to do. But if I wasn't a cop, if I was just an normal person like you, I'd probably have done the same thing. Don't feel bad."
I finished filling out my statement and headed back to the strangers' porch where I had stopped to use the phone. They had hidden their beer because they were underaged. They offered me a ride home, but I told them I wanted to walk the rest of the way. "It's not like I have anything left to steal," I told them.
I like walking in the Fan, and I don't think I'm going to stop. I'll just be more nervous while I do it.

"You Get Your Shit Took."

I was walking home from my friends' house tonight, as I often do, when I heard a voice behind me and turned to see who it was. It was a man with a gun.
"What do you have in your pockets?" he asked.
So I started to get things out of my pockets, but he was impatient.
"Give me your wallet," he said.
I fumbled with this, so he stuck the gun in my face to make sure I would do it. I did.
"Get down on the ground," he told me.
"Okay!" I said, hoping not to get shot.
"Stay there, don't get up," he said. I did not get up.
When he was gone, I went down the street, and stopped at some strangers' porch to breath and tell them about being mugged. They were really nice about it, and when I called the cops roughly the entire Richmond police department showed up. They had dogs and everything. I told a lot of people what had happened, and they all agreed that I had not called soon enough, and that my ability to describe the mugger was poor. Then I went home and started worrying about credit fraud.

"White People Are Nuts"

Saturday my friend Kelsey and I found a woman’s purse in the parking lot at Kroger. Being decent people, we decided to try to get it back to its owner. I opened the wallet to find the owner’s name and address, while Kelsey got the cell phone out and started trying to find a good number to call.
As we did this, a middle-aged black woman pulled her car up next to us.
“What are you doing with a woman’s purse?” she said, angrily.
“It was abandoned in this shopping cart,” I said.
“We’re trying to find information so we can get it back to the owner,” said Kelsey.
The woman eyed us suspiciously.
“Just going through a woman’s wallet, mm mm mm,” she said, shaking her head.
“I would want someone to go through my wallet,” I said, “if it meant I got my wallet back.” I was mad. I felt that I was doing a nice thing, and that this lady who suspected me of being a thief was a stupid bitch. Kelsey dealt with the situation much better:
“Maybe we should just take this into the service desk,” he said.
“You better do that,” said the woman, as though she would call the police if we didn’t.
Kelsey took the purse inside, and I stayed outside with the groceries, while the rude woman drove away.

I thought about how suspicious she had been. I remembered a co-worker, Genesa, and a conversation in which she told me she was afraid of white men.
“Black people are more likely to rob you, sure,” she said, “but that’s all they do. You get your shit took. Big deal. Now a white man, if he pulls a gun on you, you don’t know what kinda weird shit he’s going to do to you. You might end up with your teeth in a maracca and your balls stapled to a tree—it could be anything. White people are nuts.”
I also seem to remember that conversation started with her saying I reminded her of Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Someday I hope I can be judged by the content of my character, and not by my the color of my skin/scraggliness of my beard.

Aphorism

Just now my economics professor uttered the following:
"In the long run we should all be happy; it's getting to the long run that we have to suffer through. You'll know the long run when you get there."

Sandwich Lady

Just now I was waiting for my sandwich, and the woman behind the counter, who is cross-eyed, shouted to a girl next to me. She was holding the girl's order slip, which had extra instructions scribbled in the margin.
"Hey excuse me! Does this say 'No cheese,' or 'Mo' cheese?" asked the sandwich lady, not exactly rude but clearly in a hurry.
"No cheese," said the girl.
"Okay," said the sandwich lady.
She makes good sandwiches.

People Watching

One thing I never realized I missed about school is that it exposes you to all kinds of interesting people you would never meet otherwise.
Just now as I waited to go into a class I saw a girl in a shirt that said "Fashion is not a luxury" explaining casually to a friend that over the weekend she got angry at her boyfriend and sprayed him in the face with a can of air freshener. How does one witness such a thing and then go focus on economics?

David Foster Wallace Knew Why I Was Angry

On Sunday I found out that David Foster Wallace had killed himself while I was eating stuffed peppers and watching professional football at Jon’s house. I was upset by this, but I tried not to let it bother me. I was in a social setting after all, and the aforementioned peppers were really good, and it was easy to focus on the brighter side of things, though I will say I think I was noticeably grumpier for the rest of the afternoon. To say someone's death made me "grumpy" sounds horrible, but there it is. It's not like I knew the man.

A couple of hours and several beers later we were watching the post-game show on CBS, and I was re-expressing my oft-expressed wish that the cast of CBS’s NFL Sunday would get sucked into a black hole. They were all slapping each other on their backs, and smirking, and pretending to have just the best time anyone ever had, and I hated them for it. I always hate them for it. And I expressed that angry wish, and I guess I’d been expressing a lot of angry wishes that afternoon, because Jon said something along the lines of “I wish you wouldn’t get so angry all the time about what is really nothing at all.” And I didn’t know what to say, because I knew that on a level he was right, but I also knew that on another level I was right. I just didn’t know how to express why it is that the CBS NFL Sunday cast makes me so angry. So I conceded the point and tried to cheer up.

Today I was looking at Slate.com, as is my wont, and reading their obituary of Mr. Wallace, and I came across a quote from the first book I ever read by him, on an airplane to LA in 2003, and it perfectly expressed what I should have said about Boomer Esiason, Shannon Sharpe, et al. I went home and looked it up-- in the essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again,”-- a passage about what Mr. Wallace referred to as “the Professional Smile,” which I think most football fans would have to agree runs rampant most Sunday afternoons on CBS and Fox.

“An ad that pretends to be art is—at absolute best—like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill’s real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.”

I wish I could write something that good.

Crazy Andrew

Recently I talk to myself-- the by-product of living alone. Perhaps I am slicing onions, and I think of something a co-worker did that irritated me, and perhaps I say "What a stupid asshole" to no one in particular.
Or maybe I am watching football, and I think of something embarrassing I did in the seventh grade. And maybe I voice this embarrassment with a loud, "What a fucking stupid little kid I was."
This happens with alarming frequency, and has become enough of a habit that I forget when I am doing it. More than once I've taken a walk and emerged from a reverie to realize I'd been muttering to myself as the passing homeless eye me with suspicion. I don't know if this means I am crazy, but I do wonder about the future. Maybe when I'm seventy the neighborhood kids will be too afraid to trick-or-treat at my house.
I remember an old schizophrenic man who lived in my neighborhood when I was a boy, who the kids all called "Crazy George." He lived in a ramshackle old house with peeling paint and once when my father parked a car near him he exploded at us, then muttered something barely intelligible about "Motherfuckers and their cars. Shit-- cars. Horses. Fuck." This could be me, in perhaps as little as twenty years.

The other day I was dining at Carytown Burger and saw one of my sister's friends. Friendly guy that he is, he came over to my table to say hello. We spoke for a few minutes, and I said it was good to see him, and he said the same and went on his way.
Awhile later I had finished my meal, and stopped by his table on the way out.
"Hey, it was good seeing you man," I said to him and stuck my hand out.
I guess he's not much for handshaking because he stuck his hand up in the air in a sort of awkward half-wave and grinned.
Taken aback by this unusual gesture, I gave him a high five. Nobody knew what to say after that, so I turned to leave. As I did so, I heard myself say aloud, "I feel weird." The table erupted with laughter as I walked away. Motherfuckers and their handshakes. Shit-- high-fives. Fuck.

Bias

I was in the midst of a class discussion, but I had yet to speak. We were talking about a legend from West Africa that has been passed down orally for hundreds of years, and the question being put to us concerned it's reliability as an historical document. Having sworn an oath to participate in class discussions, I raised my hand and was called on.
"I had serious problems thinking of this as an historical record," I said, trying my best to sound like I wasn't an idiot. "How can you believe something that is passed down orally like this? Even if people are trying to be as honest as they can, everyone has a bias that's going to creep in. And over generations, don't biases just build on top of each other? How can we know that any of this is true at all? And all that stuff about shooting someone with an arrow tipped in a white rooster's comb. Am I supposed to take that to be historical fact?"
Someone else raised her hand and pointed out to me that I was missing the symbolism of the story, which I'll grant her even though I noticed she didn't seem to know what the rooster's comb symbolized anymore than I do.
But now discussion was picking up, and people were starting to rebut what I had said, and I stopped raising my hand before responding.
"There are lots of instances of this sort of legend being used as historical evidence. The Odyssey for example. Archaeologists have found Troy."
"Yes," I said, "but nobody believes that Odysseus actually fought a Cyclops."
"A lot of people take the Bible literally," someone else said.
"Yes, and those people are crazy," I said without thinking.

"You really said that?" my friend Cara asked me later when I told her the story. "What happened? What did people say?"
"There was some nervous laughter, and the Professor kind of smiled uncomfortably, and then class was sort of over anyway, so we all left."
"Weren't you afraid of offending anyone?"
The truth is that I didn't think before I spoke and the moment after I called fundamentalists crazy I did get very nervous that I had offended someone. But I didn't say that to my friends.
"I guess I assumed that nobody who would be offended would be in the room. I guess I figured fundamentalists don't take classes. It's not like they have any interest in learning or rational thought."
And another friend abruptly changed the subject, without looking at me. I realized that she was offended that I was being a bigot, and I further realized that I had been perfectly aware that I was being one. It occurred to me that being aware of it didn't make it okay.

New Weekly Series: The Simple Homespun Wisdom of Professor Johnson

Tonight I had another in a series of exceptional political science classes with a Professor Johnson. After last week's class in which he uttered several memorable lines including, "It's easy to romanticize the Indians now that they aren't scalping people," I decided that his many insights were worth sharing with the general public. I am, after all, paying tens of thousands of dollars for this education. The least I can do is share.

Notes from September 4, 2008

7:35 pm
Professor Johnson highly recommends the book Hardball by Chris Matthews. It is full of “funny anecdotes.”

7:56 pm
Professor Johnson thinks we should abandon New Orleans because “Mother Nature is taking it back."
Nobody wants to blame Mother Nature, because “you can’t vote her out of office.”

8:03 pm
Professor Johnson wants to know “what kind of freak doesn’t have health insurance?”

8:12 pm
“New York has 17 million people. If a few get shot, hey, what’s the big deal?”

8:50 pm
“In rural areas you shoot somebody cause they slept with your wife.”

8:52 pm
“It’s 2 am, you’re in the house, you weren’t invited. What are you doing here? Oh, you must be here to get shot.”

9:02 pm
As a small boy, Professor Johnson had a dog named Tiny.

More next week!

PS- In the interest of not failing this particular class, I'm giving the man an alias. Professors love Google I'm told.

YOUR BUSINESS IS REJOICING!

A Thursday morning last fall found me in a middle school auditorium, reliving painful adolescent experiences of alienation. Once a year our company gathers its many employees together to bestow awards, listen to a motivational speaker, and of course pray. This year’s big inspirational to-do took the form of a mock pep rally, something the planners no doubt thought would be fun and kitschy. We all wore colored shirts to represent our different sites (mine was orange!), and we drove out to a middle school in the West End where my bosses took the stage and led cheers, which I was told it was important I participate in no matter how silly or degraded I might feel because company morale depended on my positive attitude, and so I stood, teeth clenched in a half-smile, plastic megaphone at my lips, hollering in a way I hoped was sincere. Hollering stuff like, “WE’VE GOT SPIRIT YES WE DO, WE’VE GOT SPIRIT HOW ‘BOUT YOU?!?!?!”
Abruptly, a young woman took the stage and began to sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” a cappella and badly. A hush fell over the auditorium as she sang, and, while her thin, unappealing voice struggled to keep on pitch, the sound of my group’s snorts and sobs was hard to miss. We sat shuddering, heads bowed and faces covered, trying desperately not to look at one another. We knew full well that if we did look at one another we would be overcome with laughter, and that this poor girl on stage might burst into tears and run away. Not laughing at her was one of the hardest things I have ever done, and I only half succeeded. As I shuddered, tears streaming down my face, a new employee who was sitting next to me gently touched my arm.
“Are you okay?” she asked me, genuinely concerned. I nodded that I was, but couldn’t speak for fear of what might come out. She seemed like she might put her arm around me, but I held up my hand to stop her, and we both listened to the bit about the pretty little bluebirds awkwardly.
If “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” weren’t bad enough, it was followed by a very solemn and completely indecipherable prayer—an earnest mumbling that began with a request for bowed heads and ended bizarrely with the words “It is finished.”
At this point the President herself took the stage and proclaimed excitedly, “Today is all about you!” She seemed very pleased and excited by this idea, and, as she went on talking her passionate management-speak, I tried to decide whether she was manipulative or just extremely out of touch. I was sitting in a middle school auditorium dressed in an orange baseball shirt with my name on the back. I had yelled into a plastic megaphone that I had “spirit.” Later I would listen to a minister give a talk about his folksy personal philosophy about overcoming adversity and it’s roots in Popeye cartoons that he was sure most of us were too young to remember. As I listened to him earnestly declaim, “I yam what I yam,” I couldn’t help but think that I had never spent two hours that were less about me.

It's Not a Shovel

When I was fifteen or so my parents went away for a week in July and left my sister and I with an old woman named Jeanette. I railed hard against this, to no avail.
“Sarah’s too young to be left alone for a week,” they said, “Jeanette’s coming mostly for her sake.”
Mostly.
Jeanette, like many older people, believed that the only manners that mattered were those of others: other drivers, other church-goers, other restaurant patrons, other people whose respect she had earned because she was born a substantial amount of time before them. Her own manners she neglected. Something about not having much time left makes people feel entitled to spend what time they have thinking exclusively about themselves—only one reason of many why people over sixty should be barred from holding public office, but I digress.

At fifteen I began learning how to cook, and one night while we were with Jeanette I made dinner. I microwaved frozen corn, baked some potatoes, and pan-fried some pork chops. I put garlic powder and salt and pepper on the pork chops, the way I always did, and because they were thick I cooked them slowly over low heat.
As I cooked, Jeanette watched. She didn’t trust me, and when she saw how I was cooking the pork chops she adjusted the heat on the stove for me.
“You’ll never get those cooked without some sizzle in the pan,” she told me.
“No, you’ll burn them,” I told her.
“Young man, you aren’t going to make me sick with undercooked pig flesh,” she said, and set the knob to high heat.
Later at the dinner table Jeanette admitted that the pork chops were burned, which made me feel a little better. Then, as though to make up for the lapse, she told me to stop using my fork like it was a shovel.
“But I’m growing,” I said, defusing the situation as best I could.
“Growing sideways, maybe,” said Jeanette.
It’s amazing how I can forget so much about childhood, but still remember that conversation perfectly. I remember where I was sitting, and I remember the look on her face as she spoke. It wasn’t a mean look. Most people don’t try to be mean, they do it by accident, by failing to think about things outside of themselves. At the time I didn’t know that, and I looked carefully at Jeanette’s face to find some hint of dislike or anger. All I saw was a stupid old woman, just like millions of others, only this one was friends with my parents. Seeing that she spoke not out of anger but unable to recognize the motive, and being too stupid myself to know better, I put my fork down and forced myself not to eat anymore. It was burnt pork anyway.
She did many nice things for me after that, but I don’t remember many of them. If I saw her on the street tomorrow, I don’t know if I would be civil.

From the Shores of Cape Hatteras

I was drinking a beer on the beach, as is the custom, feet a-propped, borrowed umbrella fending off the harsh ultra-violet rays, a fine and gentle breeze caressing the old cheek, when I was confronted not unexpectedly by one of man’s basest urges. I rose from my seat.
“What’s up, Andrew?” inquired a near-by friend, she who lent the umbrella.
“I have to pee,” I told her, “and I don’t like the looks of the ocean.”
The natural thing to do, of course, when at the beach and needing to relieve ones self, is to head out into the sea and let your micturition disperse there. Everyone does this. I had done it myself the three days before this, and all had been well. But now, as I mentioned to my friend, the sea was a good deal angrier than in days past. It was with a good deal of apprehension that I approached the surf..

It wasn’t bad at first. I got a few feet out, and the waves were a little strong, but nothing unmanageable. I headed a little further out, and my head went under a couple of times, but I bobbed back up, and was soon far enough in to lower the old swimmers’ trunks.
I had brought one pair of trunks only, you see, and had no desire to piss into them. So I lowered the trunks, exposing the necessary apparatus, and began getting down to business. Only the business refused to be got down to.
One has to be relaxed if business is to be got down to, and relaxation doesn’t come naturally when every ten seconds or so another great honking wave is bearing down on you and you have to doggy paddle like crazy to keep your head above surface. Add to that lowered trunks, an exposed apparatus, and the close proximity of young ladies in bikinis, and relaxation becomes well nigh impossible. What if some great surge of water up-ended me, exposing God knows what to the eyes of total strangers, all of whom would know doubt point me out to their friends. I’d be discussed at dinner, “that stupid bearded jerk,” whose “huge pale ass” seared itself onto their mind’s eye, making causal dining at the Froggy Dog impossible even three hours later. It was as I imagined this particular scenario that the big one hit me.
My head was not merely pushed under, but pushed to the ocean floor, upon which I slammed my chin, thus prompting me to open my mouth and take in several gulps of salt water. As I struggled to right myself, to little effect, I remembered the words of my friend Allison on the trip down. Getting off the phone with her family, she said, “My dad wanted everyone to be sure to watch out for the undertow.” We'd laughed at this—Oh concerned parents, HA!—but now the irony struck me as unbearable. I'd never encountered an undertow before, but this was surely it, and soon my lungs would fill with water and I'd be some sad story that Gene Cox would report to an uncaring Richmond, Virginia on Channel 12.
But it was no undertow, and moments later I did right myself, maybe thirty seconds later but it felt far longer. I also managed somehow to hold onto my trunks, and I staggered out of the ocean clutching them as though some new wave might come up onto the sand and try to rip them from me.
“Are you ok?” the friends asked.
I don’t remember what I said. Not stopping to towel off, I limped off in the direction of the beach house: hair mussed, nose be-snotted, desperate for some calm indoor facility where I might relieve myself without drowning.

When the Bug Hits, That's the Time to Scratch It

I was tired from a day with my sister and her husband (then boyfriend) in their town of Blacksburg. He was a graduate student there, and she lived with him, and they both hated it. As we drove down the street we would point out to each other the various morons and idiots of Blacksburg, with explanations of what was particularly moronic or idiotic about them. She showed me the places she liked to go, the store where she worked, the people she was friends with, and I tried my best to take in all these things and to be polite and friendly, which is always more effort than anyone wants to admit.
Lying down to sleep on the air mattress, I was just beginning to doze when I felt a tickle on my right ear. I moved to scratch it. There was another tickle. I put a finger to my ear to examine the situation further, and without meaning to pushed a beetle deep into my ear canal. I then began to scream.
“SARAH!” I screamed, “SOMETHING'S IN MY EAR! SOMETHING'S IN MY EAR!”
My sister was really very good-natured and helpful for a person who has just been woken by a brother running into her bedroom at 2 in the morning, yelling something unintelligible about his ear. She calmly listened to what I had to say, my head all the while tilted to the right and twitching manically, my whole body shuddering with each movement of the bug against my eardrum.
“Do you know what ear-candling is?” she asked me.
“NO, WHAT THE FUCK, I DON’T, ARRRGH, KNOW WHAT IT, FUCK, IS,” I hollered at her as nicely as I was able.
Ear-candling is, as my sister explained to me, a process by which ‘toxins’ are removed from the ear using a hollow candle made from paper coated in wax. You put the small end in your ear and light the other end, the idea being that somehow the burning creates some sort of vacuum that draws things out of your ear. Later I would research this further to find that the ‘toxins’ which accumulate at the bottom of the candle are actually the ashes of the candle itself, that the process removes nothing from your ear whatsoever, and furthermore risks dripping hot wax into your ear and is therefore quite unhealthy, but at the time my sister knew only that ear-candles were supposed to suck unwanted things out of your ear. I was skeptical, but in no position to argue.
I laid down on my side, right ear up, and my sister inserted the ear candle and set it aflame.
“I DON’T, FUCKCRAP, THINK THIS IS WORKING” I told her.
“Hold still!” said Sarah, “It won’t work if you don’t stay still and let it burn.”
“GODDAMN, IT’S HARD TO LAY, FUCK, STILL WITH THIS BUG IN MY HEAD, HOLYCHRIST,” I told her.
The ear-candle burned down. My sister cut it open and showed me the ashes that were supposedly toxins from inside my ear, but no bugs. The powerful ear-candle vacuum had proved no match against this mighty beetle, his six legs still dancing a gigue on my eardrum. Quackery exhausted, we proceeded to the hospital.

I sat in the waiting room for what felt like several days. It is understandable now why a hospital would see “bug in ear” as a relatively low priority, but at the time, with the filthy little bastard still wriggling away in my head, the holdup seemed like criminal negligence.
I watched as some upset frat boys came rushing in to check on a friend with alcohol poisoning. They were refused admittance to their friend’s room, and so began to call the nurse who had refused them a bitch and a whore and the probably one or two other misogynistic words they knew. My sister whispered something cutting about how members of Greek organizations are somehow less capable of showing emotion in their voices than normal people, how they might say “My friend died in a car crash” with the exact same inflections as “I burned the steaks.” But I was in no mood to appreciate her wit.

Finally, I was shown to an exam room where an awkward man calling himself Dr. Livingstone examined me.
“Well,” he said, looking into my head with his standard doctor’s ear inspection device, “that’s a great big bug you’ve got in there.”
He left and came back with some water.
“This is going to be wet,” he said.
I lay down on my side, and he filled my ear with water. A few minutes later, the bug was still doing cartwheels, and I was still shuddering and yelling stuff like “MOTHERFUCKING ASSFUCK” and “HOLY FUCKING COCKSHIT,” so Dr. Livingstone upped the ante and filled my ear with hydrogen peroxide. This time the bug crawled out, and Dr. Livingstone flicked my ear with his finger in a most un-scientific way, sending the little guy sailing across the room.
“You can stomp on him if you like,” he said.
The bug was indeed big, much bigger than I had thought. We put him into a Ziploc bag so I could show my sister, who was asleep in the waiting room.
While Dr. Livingstone wrote out a prescription for ear drops I noticed a pair of tweezers lying on the counter.
“Was that the next step?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, “but we try not to go that route. Sometimes the bug’ll grab hold of your eardrum when we do that, and there’s a good chance he’ll rip it.”
I didn’t stamp on the bug—my sister set it free, “the right thing to do” she said. Fucking vegetarians. She took a picture though, my bug on the sidewalk next to a quarter to give it scale. It looked harmless enough sitting there, and the pain in my head was gone. I felt as if I'd awoken from a nightmare, excited to tell bored friends about some crazy shit that had happened in my sleep.

Last night I dreamt of Randy Moss.

I dreamt it was the eighth round of my fantasy football draft, and somehow nobody had taken Randy Moss, or incredibly, Tom Brady. I was the only one to realize this, and found myself trying to pick between the two. My great dilemma, I remember vividly, was trying to think of a way to get both. I knew that since they were on the same team, I couldn’t take one without alerting my friends to the availability of the other. Was there some way I could get both, some cunning stratagem I could use to secure both the best fantasy football quarterback and the best fantasy wide receiver? Perhaps wait and make my pick when everyone else went to the bathroom, which they apparently might do as a group, this being a dream. Before I could make my decision I was confronted with some child from work who had a problem I barely remember, but which probably had to do with crayons and pinching.
Looking back on it, I obviously should have taken Brady.

Sleepover Diary—Wrap-Up

I fell asleep around 5 am. I was back up at 6, before all my lame-ass co-workers who went to bed at 12. Parents started picking kids up shortly thereafter, and I helped them find their kids, their kids’ shoes, their kids’ sleeping bag covers, whatever needed finding. An older girl who had gone to bed with her hair curled like she was headed to some sort of elementary school prom stumbled out to meet her mom bleary-eyed, half awake, her hair now poofed out in a great frizzy white-girl afro. A little boy limped up to his mom on one flip-flop, blue goo stuck in his hair, and wrapped his arms around her waist. Parents walked up to shake my hand, asking,
“Awake yet?”
“Have fun?”
“When’d they finally turn in?”
“Late night?”
Many of them actually said thank you, which was unexpected, but gratifying.
After they left my co-workers and I spent half an hour putting the building back together, and then went to Cracker Barrel for breakfast. Then I went home and slept for six hours, waking up at four and feeling like a vampire.

Sleepover Diary 4

4:05 am
The quiet is broken only by a single cricket who somehow got inside and is chirping to himself. That, and the sound of a six year old hitting his friend in the head over and over with a large inflatable bat that he won as a carnival prize. I take the bat away, but the cricket chirps on.

Sleepover Diary 3

3:30 am
The green on light of the coffee pot is staring at me, daring me to have another cup. I'm debating it, unsure if I'll want to give in and sleep later. It reminds me of the first time I tried to pull an all-nighter, in college.

I put off a paper until the last minute, and found myself calling the professor to ask for an extension. I planned to use my grandfather's recent death as an excuse- callous maybe, but I told myself grandpa wouldn't mind and I was probably right. But the professor didn't care. "You weren't in class for the discussion on Monday, " he says, "no extension."
So I resolved to stay up all night and finish it. I locked myself into the music lab where I wrote all my papers, and sat down with a 24 ounce coffee from 7 eleven. I never drank coffee, and I poured in lots of Irish Cream sweetener to make it palatable.
After fifteen minutes or so the coffee was gone, and half an hour after that I was yawning. And hell, I felt like a break anyway, so I walked back to 7 eleven for another 24 ounce coffee.
And an hour later another. 72 ounces of coffee now in me, I sat down to work in earnest, only to find that I couldn't keep a single thought in my head, they seemed to be coming in packs of five. At one point I re-read what I had typed and found a sentence with no articles that seemed vaguely to be about tuna salad. So I gave up, and decided to sleep. Ah, but 72 ounces coffee will brook no sleep, and I lay in bed sweating, listening to my heart race until about 5:30, when I fell asleep. I woke four hours later, and when I urinated it smelled like Irish cream.

In spite of all of that, I am going to have another cup.

Sleepover Diary 2

3:00 am
"I've already told you three times, if I come back you are all coming out to the green to sleep separately. Now whisper. You know how to whisper? Whisper. I mean it. Or else."
And I move on to the next room, where a girl is pretending to snore, loudly.
"SNOOOORRRRRRGHHHH....... SHHHHHHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEWWW.... SNOOOOORRRRRRRGHHHH.....SHHHHHHHHHHHHEEEEEEEWWWWW...."
I stand there for five minutes to see how long she will do it, and for five minutes she doesn't stop. When I walk away I hear giggling.

From the Archives: What Happens When I Try To Write Fiction

This is a fragment of a story I wrote several years ago. I was hanging out at my friend's Katie and Cara's apartment, and they stepped out to go to the store. I stayed behind, and wrote a story to pass the time. When they got back I read it to them. As I recall, Katie laughed, but Cara didn't really say much.

Rather than fry his bananas, he elected to give them to Goodwill where they would be of use. He was sad when the Goodwill truck came around and told him that they didn’t trade in foodstuffs.
“If you have any old furniture or clothing we could take that.” said the buxom truck driver.
“Well, I do have this chair I don’t really want.”
He invited her in, and they dined on tea and bananas until late in the evening when he tried to put the moves on her, but she declined.
“I feel kind of full, and might be sick,” she told him.
So they met the following evening, and this time they had sex before they ate, and he was pleased. She was kind of non-plussed, but she didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so she kept quiet about it.
After the sex they went to the park and bought some hotdogs, which they ate with sauerkraut, not because they liked it but because it was German. They then stumbled over to the local art museum to look at paintings and found it closed. So they sat down to chat.

“I don’t know how they expect to stay open if they are going to be closed on Mondays.”
“They don’t charge for admission really, it’s kind of a state-funded thing.”
“That is no excuse.”
‘”I blame the Republicans. They are always cutting funding for things.”
“My aunt is Republican.”
“Really?”
“Oh don’t worry, I’m not one. I’m an independent.”
“Most of the independents I know are too ill-informed, whether due to stupidity or laziness, to form an opinion about political issues.”
There was a long silence interrupted only by a small dog that ran by at full speed barking it’s head off.
“I wonder what his problem is.”
Following the dog a moment later was a man on a bicycle riding fast and screaming. They couldn’t make out much of what he said, but the word “allegorical” was clear. As the man crossed the street he was struck by a VW Bug. The man flew high into the air, and pieces of his bicycle flew all over the street. Katie got out of the car and started to apologize, but the man took off running after the dog. He called something back. It was also hard to make out, but the word “allegorical” was still clear. He mispronounced it the same way he had the first time.
She looked at him, and he shrugged.
“He mispronounces allegorical.”
“Yeah.”
“The other day I was at work, and there was a man buying hot cereal, and he told me that I reminded him of his cousin. Jonathan. That was his cousin’s name.”
“That’s so great.”
He walked her home, not knowing he would never see her again. The next day she stowed away aboard a whaling vessel headed up the Mississippi toward the Great Lakes where, the Captain maintained, a large population of clever whales had been hiding for many years.

Enemies

I was not popular in middle school. I was a nerdy little boy, always trying to endear myself to a teacher, or proclaiming my indifference to what other people thought, or talking about the violin. I only listened to classical music, a source of great tension with my peer group. I remember one nice girl trying to understand my musical taste: “Have you heard the theme song to Fresh Prince of Bel Air? You’d probably like that—there’s violins in it.”
Yes, I fell into a trap that my parents, like so many other well-meaning adults, had set for me. I was convinced that if I would only “be myself,” then friends would follow. In truth, this strategy doesn’t apply to middle school. Nobody is themselves, and those that try are mercilessly torn down until they conform.

Early in my middle school career, before I’d been beaten into a certain amount of conformity, I knew a boy named Jermaine, and we hated each other. Jermaine was in my gifted class, and he would roll his eyes at every word I spoke, and I would do the same. When I sucked up to our teacher he would call out to the class that I was doing it. When he asked to go to the water fountain in order to go to his locker and get a piece of candy, I would announce his true intention to the teacher. To him I was a sniveling little ass-kisser, and he called me “Fat-ass.” To me he was a bad kid, a rule-breaking future criminal who probably stole from the school store, and I called him “Douchebag,” something I heard my father say while he drove sometimes.
Our class took a field trip to Baltimore to visit some ridiculous seminar for sixth graders at Johns Hopkins University. The trip involved a stay at a hotel in Baltimore’s inner harbor, and Jermaine was put down as my roommate, to our mutual dismay.
We approached our hotel room bickering and arguing about petty things, tired and cranky from a long bus ride. Before I turned on the light Jermaine ran in and jumped on the bed, and immediately cried out.
“What is it?!” I cried, turning on the lights.
The bed he had jumped on was soaked in urine.
We found our teacher, who secured us a new room, and while we waited discussed what a shitty hotel we were staying in.
“What kind of hotel has pee on the beds?” I asked him.
“A crappy-ass hotel, that’s what kind,” he answered.
Crappy-ass. I liked that.
Later, in our new room Jermaine let me see an X-Men comic he had bought after dinner.
“Wow, did that guy just kill Magneto?” I asked him.
“Nah, they always try to make you think somebody died but they always come back like an issue later,” he told me.
We discussed video games, television, movies, and discovered we had lots of mutual interests. Then Jermaine went to the phone. Before I could ask what he was doing, he picked up the receiver and punched in four random numbers. There was a pause while it rang, and then a voice said “Hello?”
“BIAAAHTCH!” yelled Jermaine and hung up.
This was the greatest thing I had seen in my entire life. We didn’t stop laughing for several minutes, and then I had to try it. Four random numbers, and--
“BIAAAHTCH!” I yelled.
We rolled on the floor.
“BIAAAHTCH!!” we yelled into the empty stairwell.
“BIAAAHTCH!!!” we yelled running down the hall past open doors.
“BIAAAHTCH!!!!” we called out on the bus the next day.
How we didn’t get in trouble for doing this is a mystery to me, but we didn’t.
When we got back to Norfolk we said good-bye, and went our separate ways.
The next Monday at school I saw him in the hall. Neither of us said hello, but we grinned at each other, and though we were never exactly friends, we didn’t hate each other either. I would kiss the teacher’s ass, and he said nothing. He would go to his locker for candy, and I said nothing. And when his friends started to pick on me, he changed the target to someone else. Friendship might have been unrealistic, but peace was enough.

Out of Touch

Walking down the street toward Strawberry St. Market, I crossed paths with two young men going in the opposite direction. They didn’t notice me, as they were deeply involved in their own conversation. One was distraught, and his friend was consoling him.
“Man, I couldn’t believe it,” said the one, “I made out with a fat chick, and I didn’t even fuck her!”
“I know man. It’s okay. You’ll get her next time,” said the other.
Bewildered, I got my coffee, all the while wondering—“Is that normal? Is that how people are and I just don’t know it?”

In Memory of Nick Bognar

I called my friend Nick to talk about Clay and his horrendous poem the other day. Nick was in the same speech class with me where Clay wowed us with his line about patriotism, and he remembered the poem “The Game of Life.” We chatted awhile and reminisced about days gone by, and Nick said if anyone ever wrote a poem like that about him he hoped he would be dead and wouldn’t have to hear it. I said, “Shit, Nick—I’ll write that poem right now!” To which he replied, “Awesome, nothing would make me prouder!”
It was decided that the poem would be about Nick’s new cat and the cat allergies Nick has been struggling with since acquiring it. The poem presupposes that Nick has died from his allergies, choking to death in the night for the cat that he loves.

Coughing, coughing through the day
I love my kitty anyway

My kitty’s dander makes me sick
A sick that makes my mucus thick

He nuzzles me, his coat is soft
His purring sets my heart aloft

Coughing, coughing through the night
I love my cat with all my might

I love my cat with a love that’s true,
But I’m dead now, my face is blue

From choking on my own thick snot
My kitty’s love I still have got

Jesus walks beside me now
And when he talks it sounds like “Meow.”

Alex Ross = The Shizznit

You should go here and read this. It made me wish I wrote it: therestisnoise.com
And then you should go buy the book, cause that rules too.

The Game of Life

“Patriotism… is the essence of identity,” said the boy in the wheelchair at the front of the classroom. “Can anyone tell me who said that?”
He didn’t realize that the rules of the assignment did not allow for questioning the audience. The audience knew it though, and nobody answered.
“Does anybody know?” he asked.
“Uh, no, I don’t know,” said one boy. The rest of us shook our heads.
I think Clay, the boy at the front of the room whose cerebral palsy confined him to a wheelchair, had expected a chorus of wrong answers—“Churchill!” “Benjamin Franklin!” “Thomas Paine!” “Jefferson! It must be Jefferson!” – and the lack of enthusiasm seemed to discourage him.
“I said it,” he finally said, proudly.
We all looked at each other. “I guess I should have figured that,” I whispered to a friend nearby.
Clay was an awkward case. On the one hand, he had a terrible disability and was certainly rising above it the best way he knew how. He was active in a number of clubs and extra-curricular activities, extremely opinionated, a personality around the school that was easily recognized by upper and lower classmen alike. On the other hand, he was also a total prick. His outspoken opinions frequently bordered on fascist, and “Patriotism is the essence of identity” was fairly typical, though only hinting at the militant xenophobia I had come to expect from him. Furthermore, and I know how terrible this sounds, he was constantly holding up his disability to those around him and asking to be congratulated for it.
“Yes,” his speech went on, “You might not think of it to look at me, but in spite of my physical disabilities I do a lot of thinking, and that quote is by me. That’s a thought that I had. And if you are willing to give life your all, you can have great thoughts of your own.”
After the speech was over Clay asked us what we thought, and we told him we didn’t think question and answer was allowed in the body of the speech, that maybe he should keep his questions rhetorical. He didn’t seem to know what rhetorical meant, and didn’t want to bother with it.
“But what did you think of the quote?” he wanted to know, “Weren’t you surprised that I came up with that?”
“Well, it doesn’t actually make a lot of sense,” someone ventured. “Isn’t identity kind of a personal thing? And I know that for a lot of people patriotism doesn’t enter into their sense of identity at all. And should it? Isn’t saying that your country defines who you are kind of dangerous?””
Clay got a little mad at this point, and there was a bit of heated discussion before our teacher brought us back on task.

Later that year, a basketball coach at our school died of cancer. There was a memorial one day in the gym, which was renamed in the coach’s honor. His widow was there, and several members of the school board, and the superintendent of schools spoke. Naturally our principal spoke too, and as he did I saw Clay’s mechanized wheelchair hum to a stop behind him.
“And now,” our principal announced, “The student council president will read a special poem by one of our own students, dedicated to the memory of Coach ______.”
And the SCA president stepped up and read Clay’s poem, “The Game of Life.”

“Here we go full court press
Oh no, I have to rest

I cannot rest now, I have a game
A game that might build our fame

On me my kids depend
This GAME I don’t want to end

I have to win this fight
I have to make it through the night

This is hard its true
But somehow I’ll get through

Here we go full court press
Oh no, I have to rest

I am tired, I fought to the end
On the Lord I now depend.”

And everyone solemnly bowed their heads. Few would have admitted it, but I believe a lot of people left that gym thinking differently about cerebral palsy.
“Why does a disability give you a right to have your doggerel read into a microphone at someone’s memorial service?” I imagine them thinking., “And why didn’t they find someone from the school literary magazine to write a poem? Aren’t they at least marginally more qualified?”
That’s certainly what I was thinking, but some thoughts aren’t appropriate to share. Clay taught me that. That, and that patriotism is the essence of identity.

I Suppose YOUR Favorite Movie is Titanic

Recently I was at my friends’ house, drinking a beer and trying too hard to be funny, when my friend Amy handed me a copy of Entertainment Weekly.
“Here,” she said, “you’ll think this is interesting.”
This issue of Entertainment Weekly ranked the top 100 everything of the last 25 years—top 100 TV shows, top 100 albums, top 100 books, top 100 plays, videogames, movies, etc. As is always the case with such things, I found myself howling at certain choices the editors had made. For example the greatest television program in the history of television programs was rated #11, behind the likes of Lost and Friends. I shook my fist and gnashed my teeth, and other people in the room decided to go get another drink or see how the grill was doing.
But then of course, there were the things I felt they had got right. Among these, Pulp Fiction was rated as the number one movie of the last 25 years.
“Can’t argue with that!” I thought, tipping my imaginary cap to the editors.
It reminded me of an anecdote from several years ago, when I went to purchase that excellent movie on VHS. I had received some horrible over-sized sweater from my grandmother, and had taken it back to Target for store credit. Target’s always got some great deals on movies, and I found Pulp Fiction, most important movie of the last 25 years, for the low low price of $9.99. Giddy with the thrill of a bargain well hunted, I approached the register.
“I’d like to purchase this video please!” I told the cashier, my eyes full of the innocence and sugar plums.
“Alright then,” said the cashier, a woman not unlike Lunch-Lady Doris. She regarded my purchase. She held it up at arm’s length, looking over her spectacles.
“Hmmm,” she said, “I don’t hold with this trash.”
(I realize I am taking creative liberties with the story, but I want to stress that she actually called my purchase ‘trash.’)
I looked back at her, agape. She returned my gaze, a look of certainty in her wrinkly eye-balls.
“Trash,” she said.
“It’s not trash actually. I don’t buy trash.” I told her.
Unimpressed, she bagged my purchase, and I fantasized about reporting her to her supervisor, but knowing all the while I wouldn’t follow through. I hope that somewhere she is looking at Entertainment Weekly right now, high arbiter of popular culture, and reconsidering her opinion.
“Trash.” What a stupid bitch.

Championship Fun Team

The children have four weeks of school left, and that means my day care will become a day camp. The foundation of day camp is the small group—each teacher has fifteen or so children that they are personally responsible for, and these fifteen eat lunch together, have quiet time together, sit together through announcements, and compete together for points. Yes, we have competitions, and the kids answer trivia questions, run relay races, and build model skyscrapers to earn points for their team. The team with the most points at the end of the summer is the winner, and receives an extravagant prize, in addition to the glory that winning your daycare’s summer contest brings.
One of the first acts of summer camp is picking your team’s name, and many people let their kids do this. The kids get together and brainstorm names, and then vote on the one they like best. This results in team names like “The Shining Stars,” “The Super Stars,” and “The Star Olympics,” all of which were team names my first summer. I can’t deal with a star-based name, so I help the kids out. I brainstorm the names, and then they pick which one they like best. They still get input, and they end with a way cooler name. Like “The Ninja-Pirates” my team’s name from my first summer.
Here now, a list of ideas for this summer’s team of champions:

The Vampire-Samurai
The Zombie-Bears
The Jedi-Donkeys
The Sumo-Dwarves
The Mongol-Sharks
Captain Ahab’s Surf-Nazis
Revenge of the Belligerent Hummingbird
Velociraptor MBAs
The Sullen Pre-Adolescents
The Doctors of Philosophy
The Cobra Kai
Team Jesus
Benji Compson’s Freedom Commandos
Championship Fun Team


Postscript--
My team didn't like my choices. They decided to go with the name "Chapter Imagination." I'm kind of embarassed, but letting them pick their name was the right thing.

God Weighs Like A Thousand Pounds

There is a boy in my program, aged eight, who is a terrible know-it-all, but who also lacks any self-confidence. He's always telling people things that he knows, and then repeating them over and over saying "Right? Right? The Sun is like a million degrees hot, right? Isn't it? Don't you know that? You know it, right?"

There is a girl in my program, aged six, who is repeating kindergarten and who is almost completely detatched from reality. Last year this girl composed and performed a song for our entire program with the lyrics, "I like fish/ in my dish/ MY NAME IS CHRISTOPHER ROBIN!" (you have to shout the last part). She is sweet, but also exceptionally dirty. You'll watch her dig her hand down her pants, and then she'll run up to you and try to put same hand on your face. You recoil, but at the same time you worry that you're hurting her feelings by shunning her.

This boy and this girl were discussing theology earlier this week when I picked them up from school.
"What?" the boy said, "You don't know about God? He's like the most best person ever. If you don't like him, it means you like the devil. God's really big, and he knows everything, and he's really really good and can do anything he wants."
"Yeah," said the little girl, her hair tangled, her face a mask of dirt and snot, "and he can turn himself into a tiger."

Trivia Time

Everyday we meet in the main commons area for announcements. Our director tells the kids about upcoming events—days off from school, field trips, art classes—and gives stern warnings about pulling the nets off the soccer goals, flushing plastic cups down the toilet, and so on. Then she dismisses the kids by group for homework. Most days she does this with a trivia game based on the children’s t-shirts.
For example, she calls a boy up who is wearing a Pokemon t-shirt. She asks if anyone in the group can identify the Pokemon pictured on the shirt. The child who successfully does this gets dismissed with his group to homework. It’s a small thing, but it gives them a feeling of accomplishment.
The other day my director was off, and I did announcements. When the time came to dismiss I tried the trivia game. I looked out on the sea of children with their hands up, half of them making an eager hooting noise and coming up off the ground onto their knees, so desperately did they want their t-shirt to be chosen. I looked them over, desperate for something I could make trivia of.
My eyes lit on a particularly well-behaved girl, and picked her. She’s a good kid, and it made me happy to see her face light up when I called her name.
Her shirt had the word “Gymnast” written across it.
I thought as everyone waited for my question. Nothing came to mind.
“Who…, uhm, who…, who can name a famous gymnast?” It was the best I could think of, and I instantly wished I’d done better. What adult can name a famous gymnast, let alone a bunch of elementary aged children? Still, maybe someone would luck out and remember Mary Lou Retton.
“Trevor?” I called, and Trevor put his hand down and a look came over his face that I recognized as the look of someone who wanted the spotlight but had nothing to say. After a few seconds I called another named.
“Balance beam?” queried a little girl.
“No, I’m sorry, I meant a person not an event,” I explained.
Hands were dropping as kids realized the question was too hard, the opportunity for success unmasked as an opportunity for embarrassment. I began thinking of how to change questions gracefully, but a kindergarten girl raised her hand and I called on her.
“Abraham Lincoln,” she said confidently.
I thanked her for trying, and ended up letting her group go for sitting nicely. You’ve got to take what you can get.

Stare Down

Another morning, another group of pro-life advocates outside the local abortion clinic. I stopped at the usual light there at the corner of Grove and Boulevard and saw them talking to one another.
“When is Bill getting here with the large posters of the bloody fetuses?” one of them was no doubt saying.
“Oh, anytime,” replied the other. “He had to egg his lesbian neighbors house first, but he said it wouldn’t take long.”
One of them noticed me staring, and caught my gaze. We frowned at each other for a moment, and I shook my head. I’m sure he cared deeply. As the light turned green, I reflected on how much better I was than him. You know-- cause he’s a judgemental prick, and I’m really open-minded and accepting of other people’s differences.
It’s wonderful to be sure of one’s self.

Some Wounds Never Heal

I had an idea for my dorm’s t-shirt. On the bulletin board in the hallway, just inside the main entrance to the building, our dormitory council would post the minutes from its weekly meetings, and occasionally post announcements. On this bulletin board had been posted a flier asking for t-shirt ideas, and I had a damn good one and submitted it. All my friends agreed with me how damn good it was, and since many of them lived in my buildiing I figured I had a decent shot at making my idea a reality.
The name of our dormitory was Custis Hall, after Mary Custis, our first president’s something or other.
My idea was for a simple black shirt, across the front printed the slogan “CUSTIS IS THE BUSTIS.”
I loved this idea, and lobbied it hard with all the appropriate people, as well as some of the inappropriate ones.

“Kate!” I yelled to my high school friend and dormitory council president, “Kate! I need to ask you about the t-shirt!”
“We haven’t decided yet, Andrew.”
“Well do you have any alternative ideas?”
“Yes, Krista suggested a top ten list.”
“Oh Jesus fucking Christ, Kate, that’s ridiculous. Really? A top ten list? We’re gonna be another shirt with a top ten list? You can’t be serious. I refuse to believe that you are serious. If you are serious I will take my underwear off over my head. Sincerely. Holy Christ, that’s dumb.”
“Well, Andrew, I appreciate that you fell strongly about this, but some of us on the council feel that your idea might be too, well, simple.”
“Simple?!”
“And nonsensical.”
“Excuse me please, I’m going to my room to drink a bottle of vodka.”

That week I went from door to door in our little building trying to muster support for my shirt.
“It’s a plain black t-shirt, and across the front it says: ‘CUSTIS IS THE BUSTIS!’”
“I don’t get it.”
“Well, it doesn’t exactly make sense, that's why it's good. It sounds like it means something positive, but it’s just nonsense really. It also rhymes.”
"Alright, thanks- we’re gonna get back to watching Titanic.”

I wasn’t there when the council met, I found out from the minutes posted on the bulletin board-- they decided on a top ten list. Not only that, they bastardized my idea and named their shitty top ten list, “The Top 10 Reasons Custis is the Bustis.” They seemed to think this was a compromise, but I was outraged. “CUSTIS IS THE BUSTIS,” was the complete antithesis of a top ten list-- it was a proud declaration of absurdity and silliness, a bold statement that our dorm thought for itself, a joke that felt inside but wasn’t, good and pure and hilarious on a dozen different levels, and they had taken my precious gift, wiped their unimaginative, mediocre asses on it, and gone back to watching Titanic.
With a sharpie I wrote across the minutes, “CUSTIS IS UNJUSTIS,” and stormed off to the campus center for an overpriced chicken sandwich.

Steven Soderbergh and the Second Degree Burn

“Jon, I’ve burned my hand.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Jon.
“What should I do?”
“Have you run it under cold water?”
“Yes.”
“Is it blistering?”
“I don’t know, maybe?”
“See if it blisters, and if it does a lot, then you should probably go to the emergency room. If no blistering, or not much, then don’t.”
“Thanks, Jon.”

I put the phone down, and picked up my bag of frozen peas. When I first burned myself I’d used frozen blackberries, but they had thawed, and I switched to peas. With my good hand I picked up my fork and resumed eating the dinner I had burned myself making.
I un-paused the DVD and began again to watch Andie MacDowell flail about James Spader’s tiny, sparsely-furnished apartment. She thought James Spader was a pervert, and she was unhappy about it.
As I watched I gnawed at chicken thighs, alternating with forkfuls of mashed potatoes. My hand began to get cold, so I put down the peas, leading my hand to burn and sting, so I picked the peas back up, only to put them down again a minute later. As Andie MacDowell left James Spader in an awkward huff, I went to my wallet for my insurance card. I found the number I wanted on the back, dialed it, and soon was speaking to a registered nurse with a Mid-Western accent.
“What have you done to treat your burn?” she asked me, and I told her in detail.
“Take the frozen veggies off,” she told me, “I know they feel good but they cut off the circulation to your hand and might cause more harm than good.”
The nice lady told me I could soak my hand in cool water for up to fifteen minutes at a time, “for comfort.” I should then keep it out of the water for a half-hour, to let the blood circulate. I thanked her and returned to Andie MacDowell, whose bushy-eye-browed husband was sleeping with her sister.
I was able to follow the movie while my hand soaked, but when my fifteen minutes expired, and I dumped the water, I couldn’t think of anything but my hand, which felt like I was still holding the 400 degree panhandle from two hours previous. I was vaguely aware that Ms. MacDowell’s character was divorcing her husband.
I considered chopping my hand off.
There was some fighting; not sure between whom.
With my good hand, I began smacking myself in the head.
James Spader was onscreen again, looking uncomfortable, presumably because he could see what kind of pain I was in. I looked at the clock to see that it had been less than ten minutes since I took my hand out of the water.
“I could call someone,” I thought. “Call them and talk about what, how much your hand hurts?”
Back on the TV there was about to be sex, but I didn’t care at all. It had only been fifteen minutes, but I decided I’d had my fill of blood circulating, and refilled the bowl with cold water in time to see the closing moments of the movie I’d barely followed. Things appeared to have worked out. I turned on David Letterman and waited for the pain to go away so I could sleep.
The next day I had a hell of a blister. I showed it off to many gratifying “Oohs,” “Aahs,” and “Oh sicks.” It isn’t much by way of compensation, but it's better than nothing at all.

2:30 pm

The other day I was standing outside an elementary school talking to my co-worker Yolanda while we waited for the kids to be released from school. Our conversations usually run something like this:
“Hey, Yolanda. (sigh).”
“What’s wrong, Andrew?”
“Oh nothing. (sigh).”
“Andrew."
“Okay, you’re right I am unhappy, and it’s because of this long, involved story that isn’t really all that awful, but I am overly sensitive and frequently take things more personally than I should.”
“You’re silly Andrew. Here is some helpful common sense advice that is applicable to your story.”
“Thanks, Yolanda. Oh look, here comes a kid.”

The kids trickle out one and two at a time, and the first one this particular day was a smart, red-headed second grader who’s good at getting away with doing things he shouldn’t. His friends will all get sent to timeout, or a phone call to mom, or whatever, and this boy will slip through everytime, his wide blue eyes full of innocence and this kind of "Aw shucks, I wish I could have stopped Trevor from being SO bad, but I'm only seven," look that you believe until about five minutes after it's too late to go back and punish him. Yolanda and I helped the little escape artist onto the van and continued our conversation in a more child-friendly vein, making attempts to include him.
“How was school today?” Yolanda asked him.
“Oh fine,” he said, distracted by his book.
“What’s that you’re reading?” I asked.
The boy looked up from his book, looked me dead in the eye, and said quite seriously:
“In the future, I’m your father.”
Yolanda turned to hide her laughter, but I stared back at him agape.
“Do you mean reincarnation?”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“When you die and come back as someone else. Or something else sometimes.”
“I dunno. What’s for snack?”
“French toast sticks.”
“Yay, I like those.”
“You’re a freak,” I told him, and headed back to my own van to help other, less crazy children into their booster seats.