The Musings and Misadventures of Matthew MacVane

Yep.

2011-02-27T20:55:00.002-05:00

So I told Dad no. Because, lets face it, it was time. Recently I’ve become employed. Its been about 27 hours. I haven’t had my first day of work. But I went into the job interview with my lucky tie and my intelligent-affable-engaged face that I wear to job interviews. I realize that job interviewers want a significantly thinner applicant to gingerly slide himself into the chair with arms across the desk from them, but since I seem to continue to be fat I figure intelligent, affable, and engaged is the trifecta of qualities they might be willing to accept from an otherwise fat interviewee. It would seem that I was correct for I was hired and miracle of miracles for two dollars an hour over their normal starting pay. The JD is paying dividends even as I move away from the practice of law. Like I said I have been employed for less than two days and the prospect of the imminent change in my financial standing has made me giddy with the modicum of power that comes with not being completely destitute. I boldly announced to my housemates, dad and step-mom Stacey, that I would pay to have the dumpster returned. The dumpster left during the recent period of financial attrition. It was money that could not be afforded and so the dumpster went away and the trash removal in the house became yet another labyrinthine process. The bags pile up in the alcove next to the kitchen until dad takes the dump truck to Farmington where there is still a dumpster that we have the use of and if I have failed to be alerted to the fact that the dump truck was to be driven to Farmington then the trash does not go out. Nor do my father’s ever mounting collection of corona boxes. I am an integral cog in this machine, which I learned over the Christmas holiday. I discovered on my return from my eight days away that, indeed, bags of trash do not leave this house unless by my own hands. So seeing this problem and in light of my new found wealth I made the magnanimous gesture to have the dumpster returned on my dime.

Of course now that I am actually in a position to contribute I should but I have some problems trying to figure out what my end of the nut should be around here and more over at the age of 28 shouldn’t I just save up and get out? It is an interesting question because I can definitely take care of some expenses that would otherwise have to be triaged if I left to pursue my own living arrangements. And what does it say that I sponged off my father and his wife when I was insolvent but the second I was able to pay my own way I took off and left them with no great reduction in cost. I use little electricity, I use the water that collects while I am waiting for the shower to warm to flush the toilet and shave out of a cup of water, it isn’t like the cable bill gets cheaper if I move out, and let’s face it there isn’t much of a space issue in this seventeen bedroom house.

On the other hand there are things that my father does that drive me crazy and I should get the fuck away from him. He hasn’t filed a corporate tax return in four years. In the normal run of things that isn’t my problem but he has made it my problem. “Matt we got to work on this.” Damn it I don’t know how to file your subchapter S corp. tax returns. Even if I was H or R Block I don’t think I would be able to help him because the mishmash of bank statements and receipts that he handed me isn’t so much financial documents as they are evidence in a future federal case that anyone who has been in a position to touch will be implicated in. I want to help my father but I don’t want to be a named defendant with him. And it is always “We” as if he has at any time contemplated a role for himself in this saga, which he hasn’t. “We” means that he tells me to do it and I spend the hours and hours going through the stack of incomplete records trying to generate an end document that doesn’t make some fastidious IRS agent sit up and bay like a dog on the trail of some wounded creature. I mean he says he has generated nothing but loses in the last several years and I believe him, I was around while he was doing it, but I have no idea how to make a tax return out of what I have and every couple of days he will look at me meaningfully and tell me that tomorrow or the next day we need to sit down and do some work on these taxes and I want to scream at him to unfuck himself. This isn’t my problem goddamnit. But at the very least I recognize it as a problem and in the next couple of days before I start this job I am going to put my shoulder into it, because I am the adult child of an alcoholic and I can’t escape the need to try and save my father. God help me. So yeah I will try to do something about this situation because, as I said, it is an actual problem. What isn’t an actual problem is the garden. The garden is not an actual problem in any way, shape, or form. No, it really isn’t. My father has been an agriculturalist for some time now. He plants a large garden every year, somewhere between two and a half and three acres of garden. Over the many years I have been enlisted in this process. But the thing is I don’t give a shit about his gardening. I don’t care about his garden or the goats he is raising or the bunnies or the ducks. My father’s many agricultural endeavors are his hobby not mine and I don’t want to be dragged into them. I have hobbies, I blog. I do not encourage my father’s participation in my hobby. He doesn’t read my blog, as my repeatedly characterizing him as a delusional narcissist amply attests. Whenever I have been foolish enough to try to summarize a blog that I have written to him, his eyes roll to the back of his head and he completely zones out and I am newly reminded that indeed things I think are interesting or important other people don’t even give a shit about and fuck it man, good for them. We are all free to pursue our own interests. But that isn’t good enough for Dad he needs to draft me into his exhausting, labor-intensive, time-consuming hobbies. And I am loath to help for two reasons; first I really don’t like working in the garden or with the livestock. I don’t and never did. Second, he is pursuing this money losing hobby while at the same time focusing less and less on his money losing business. I think I would be able to accept the four years of back tax returns if I didn’t have to think about the fact that he was becoming an expert in making goat cheese in some of those years. Shit makes me want to tear my hair out in bunches. You know it is his Titanic and if he wants to rearrange deck chairs that is entirely his business but if he thinks I am going to help him he has another think coming. So I was downstairs in late February, twenty five hours after getting a job and deep in the heady planning of how I am going to get this train back on track, make some money, lose some weight, find the love of a good woman, write the great American novel, build my dream home complete with secret passages and a survival shelter, have a couple of sons; one that is a little bit softer than my brother John and one that is a little bit more disciplined than me, maybe a daughter, take skiing back up, learn piano or guitar, take singing lessons, actually master Spanish, learn to draw, (My dad just called me on my phone from downstairs, the movie “Sometimes A Great Notion” is on television. It is based on the novel by Ken Kesey and it stars Paul Newman and Henry Fonda as father and son non-union loggers trying to make a living in the Pacific Northwest during a strike. It was the first film ever to be shown on HBO. Dad called me because he knew that I would want to know and it is hard to explain the duality of our relationship… I rejoin the story several hours later having sat with my father, drank, and watched a movie about intergenerational conflict. My recent employment as a salesman has set off a train of thought that has terminated for my father in the unrememberable name of a man who produced some motivational sales tapes in the 80’s which my father can not remember the title of either and it was absolutely imperative that we try to use the Google to unsuccessfully resurrect the name in his memory. The bullshit thing about this is that we have done this before, this exact same guy. I have spent many hours of my life doing this same activity. Sometimes his clues are fairly specific and others are extremely vague. For instance I was once asked “who is that guy that has that show” I remember staring at him and pondering a moment and then saying, “Inside the Actors’ Studio with James Lipton” and Dad said, “Yes that is the one”. It was terribly disconcerting and there may indeed be some subjective validation involved but it seems looking back on it that at the time I was positive of the answer. Not that I was guessing but like I had looked into his mind and found the context that he had omitted and was able to form the answer in my own mind. I hate to believe that I am that attuned to my father but at the same time I can’t reasonably chock it up to the randomness of a guess given all the guys with shows but often the magic does not work. We have spent hours on end looking for the names of songs. “Who sings it” “I don’t know” “Give me five words from the song that come in a row” no help, this is a man who for thirty years thought the words to The Year of the Cat were “Thrown away your choice and lobster ticket” they aren’t. “You know Matt, like you are on a package trip and you got a beef ticket and a chicken ticket and a lobster ticket.” No, dad. Nothing like that.)* learn a marshal art, be less given over to sloth and torpor, meet new people, do new things, be more a part of the world. Not that I don’t have a great time on a Friday night writing to you good people. It is fun and I derive a lot of satisfaction from it but Jesus I need to get out more; this whole situation is a little more pathetic than not. So in any case these are the thoughts that were milling about in my mind when dad says to me, “You should plan on helping me out in the garden this summer.” And for a second my natural instinct to just limp along with a plan that might never come to fruition was strong and palpable. Hell, he’s old, I am fat, one of us might be dead come summer. But at the respective ages of 61 and 28 one of us has to grow up. So I said “No, I don’t want to do that.” So dad comes back at me that he needs me to help him and I explained very calmly that he doesn’t need to plant a garden so, no, he doesn’t need me to help him; he can buy tomatoes like everyone else. He tells me that he just needs me to run the backhoe, I said it is a large garden, because he can’t be climbing up and down on it all day. Surprisingly I did not take the prospect of riding around on a piece of heavy machinery while my father hurls harsh invectives at me over the roar of a diesel engine to be a sweetener in the deal. So I finally put to rest my future potential involvement in my father’s agricultural endeavors, I am not going to be gardening, I am not going to be feeding animals, I am not going to be helping in the exciting new goat’s milk soap endeavor my father is contemplating, yes that is a thing that is presently in the hopper. There is a very large interstice in the plan between investing a great deal of time and energy into the making of soap from goat milk in the basement and the getting $25,000 which is needed so that several pieces of property that my father has owned for most of his life aren’t taken for property taxes. Yes that part of the plan is vague as are many other stages but I know for certain that the first stage is clearing a soap manufacturing area in the basement which will involve the moving of many old appliances that are stored in the basement. I think I will go as far as to move the appliances because I actually like moving appliances. I like moving appliances and firewood and snow. Those are three things I never really mind doing. But after that I will not be making any soap, Donald “Tyler Durden” MacVane.

As a final thought, it would be wise for political commentators who wish not to be thought of as complete assholes to refrain from continually making the mistaken conclusion that because Massachusetts borders New Hampshire and Mitt Romney was the Governor of Massachusetts, that Mitt Romney has a better chance in the FIRST FUCKING PRIMARY IN THE COUNTRY WOOHOO than any other Republican. Yes Mitt Romney is ahead in the polling a full year before the contest is to be waged. And yes Massachusetts does border New Hampshire. But, no, there is no correlation between these two disparate facts. If anything being from Massachusetts, which Mitt Romney isn’t, he’s from Michigan, isn’t ever a benefit when courting the good graces of the people of the state of New Hampshire. We are a curmudgeonly xenophobic people by nature and nothing gets our hackles up worse than people from Massachusetts. On any given Friday afternoon in the summer the people of New Hampshire turn into a group of deranged obscenity spewing avatars of pure hate as they sit on route 16 and count the license plates from Massachusetts. In the White Mountains there is a trail and if you go up this trail 7/10th of a mile you will find a turn off and if you follow the turn off you will come to the Emerald Pool. The Emerald Pool is a pristine, mountain fed, naturally occurring, 17 foot deep, pool of water that is the most beautiful and clear shade of green. My mother, brother, and I first went to the Emerald Pool when I was 9 or 10 and I have gone back ever summer since then. But the last six or seven years have been hit or miss because of a disturbing trend of people from Massachusetts being there, with Styrofoam floating noodles and other silly shit like that. The people of Massachusetts are an invasive pernicious species in New Hampshire and if Mitt Romney is doing well in polls it is because the Republicans of New Hampshire understand that 1) he is really from Michigan, 2) while Democrats bury their losers, Republicans run them again next time, 3) so glaring are the many fold handicaps of the other likely choices that they are willing to overlook the fact Mitt Romney lived in Massachusetts for a time.

*. While I was trying to dig up the term “subjective validation” I came across an article on Wikipedia titled List of Cognitive Biases. If you are as interested in thinking about the way you think as I am you should give it a look because it is a hoot. I am not being fatuous. I really think a list of cognitive biases on Wikipedia is something to get excited about and when I am done writing and have published this for you nice people to read I am sure I am going to spend an hour reading all about cognitive biases.

Official 2011 State of the Union drinking game rules.

2011-01-25T07:11:00.003-05:00

2011 State of the Union live blog and drinking game is sponsored by Schlitz, the beer that made Milwaukee famous. Schlitz, just the kiss of the hops. And living at your parents' house. Living at you parents' house, it is a lot worse than having your own place and a lot better than being homeless.

Rules:

Take a drink when:
Obama says “jobs”
Obama says “folks”
Obama says “our military families”
Obama says “hard-working Americans”
Obama says “across the aisle”
Biden claps but Boehner doesn’t.

Take two drinks when:
Obama says “don’t ask don’t tell”
Obama says “loose nukes”
Obama says “bailout”
Obama says “already working”
Obama says “with Speaker Boehner”
Obama says “my lovely wife Michelle”
Obama says “Sasha and Malia”
Boehner claps before Biden
Camera shows Eric Cantor talking to someone during the speech.

Take three drinks when:
Obama says “gun control”
Obama says “Sargent Shriver”
Obama says “Daniel Hernandez”
Obama says “Malia and Sasha”
Boehner claps but Biden doesn't.
Obama is interrupted by someone shouting from the crowd

This game is designed for a man weighing over three hundred pounds. Results may vary. 4M assumes no liability. Play at your own risk. Don't sue me. I have no money.

A Few Things.

2011-01-25T04:31:00.002-05:00

So yeah this afternoon I woke up naked after getting a call from a number I didn’t recognize and I stumbled to look out the window to see if my stepmother’s car was still in its space or if she was out and about. If she is home on her day off I like to give her the run of the downstairs. I don’t want to get in her way if she is cooking or cleaning or watching television. She works, she deserves to enjoy her day off without me being under foot cooking chicken fingers, which is an unenjoyable place for the cooker of chicken fingers as well. But if she has left the house for some amount of time I may furtively venture downstairs, make a sandwich, do the dishes, and go about my day. I didn’t see Stacy’s car but I did see some jackass making a snowball and getting ready to throw it at the window. It looked a lot like my brother John, uncanny really but my brother John doesn’t have a 1970’s-era-porno-or-any-era-cop mustache. But the man did look a lot like John, maybe it was bizarro John, I was still waking up. Then what I know about my brother and the likelihood that he might very well have intentionally inflicted this reddish-blonde atrocity on his own face finally woke up and I was about to go to the window and tell him not to throw the snowball but I couldn’t because I was naked and it is a big window. I walked through the room picking up pants and shirt as I went and it was then that I heard the loud thud of the snow ball against the side of the house. I hurried downstairs and opened the door and saw this guy Sam, who I had every reason to expect was in Ithaca, New York and not, as he clearly was, on my doorstep. Sam had worked with my brother at the Public Defender’s Office last summer and had been a fixture on our juggernaut trivia team. But like many vestiges of a New England summer he vanished at the specter of September and I remember that he was to spend a semester abroad but if I were to think of him at all I thought of him endeavoring joylessly at his final year at Cornell Law. But here he was and I adjusted to that reality as quickly as I could. I shook his hand and invited him in. My brother was somewhere looking for his phone so that he could call me to unlock a door that was merely stuck, he joined us presently and we kibitzed as people who have previously been familiar with one another are want to do upon reintroduction. My blog came up and my brother wished to give me some criticism about my follow through. He found it annoying, and I completely sympathize with him, that I make promises regarding up coming blogs but those blogs materialize with greater or less frequency than they ought to. I apologized to him and I tried to be sincere, despite the fact that his mustache is ridiculous and it makes sincerity difficult to muster. Seriously, it is like talking to someone who is earnestly and without pretense holding a rubber chicken. The mustache is certainly a more valid facial hair choice than the Civil-War-era-cavalier goatee that he has worn in the past. But the mustache lacks the open guileless quality of his two-toned, patchy, hipster beard. Plus the mustache makes him look a lot like a taller younger version of our father, which is just unsettling. But indeed you my readers have every reason to be miffed about the fact that blogs promised are not blogs delivered. And I feel bad about that but this is art not commerce. I write what I feel and when I don’t feel like writing I don’t. So yeah read my blog but do it with the kind of bitter resenting guard that will protect you from my prevaricating. Read it like the child of some shitty absentee father who has many times before promised that he will take you to the ball game, amusement park, or camping trip but invariably shows up hours late saying that he needs to help this nice lady find her dog and he will have to take a rain check on your planned excursion. Remember it isn’t about you kid, dad really wanted to take you to those places, at the very least dad wanted to be the kind of dad that wanted to take you to those places, but dad is kind of a fuck up and follow through is his fuck up kryptonite. More over time keeps moving and by the time I get to a topic that I wanted to discuss when it was topical it no longer seems very important. For instance I started this blog on Friday and now it is Monday and I really wanted to discuss Gabby Giffords and the petty guttersnipes who less than two weeks after she was shot and before her rehab potential has even been adequately assessed want to talk about her stepping down from her office. I give Governor Jan Brewer a lot of credit for telling those vultures to shut up. I said in my last blog that after the shooting I tabled my Civil War blog for the foreseeable future. At that time I had made it all the way to 1856 in my discussion of a war that did not begin in earnest until 1861. But 1856 was an important year for the Civil War. It was the year that blood started to run in Kansas. If you are familiar with the history of the mealy-mouthed compromises that slave and free states made during the course of the 19th century you may know that each time the compromise seemed to disadvantage slave holders they were renegotiated. It was decided in 1824 that except for the proposed state of Missouri slavery was not to exist in the new western territories north of the 36th parallel. And this was all well and good until the next time a territory was about to become a state. Then the slave state constituency in congress decided that really Kansas and Nebraska should be able to decide if they wanted to savor the joys of slavery despite what the federal government or long established compromise said. And so the Kansas-Nebraska Act was signed into law saying that those respective territories would be able to decide for themselves whether or not slavery would be legal in their respective states. What followed is very much what you might expect, the territory of Kansas was flooded by abolitionists and slave-holders hoping to sway the outcome of the eventual decision on slavery. With so many people who were so ideologically opposed to one another in a place where there was almost no civil law enforcement or military it didn’t take long for the two factions to just start killing each other. It is from this situation that John Brown, the most famous and beloved domestic terrorist in our nation’s history, arose.

Now it is perhaps natural to look back on the political atmosphere of the 19th century as being entirely slave/abolition oriented the fact is that for most of the time there was a strong proslavery lobby that was matched by a rather wishy-washy group of northerners who simply couldn’t be bothered to fight with the south about their darkies. The northerners had strong manufacturing interests to service and as long as southern cotton picked by slaves could be turned into northern textiles made by white immigrants who really has the time and energy to screw around with slavery? Liberals. Liberals can always be trusted to turn a blind eye on what is practical or profitable in the interests of what is morally right and to do so in the most arrogant, high handed, and shrill manner possible. And what state can be counted upon more than any other to produce the most arrogant, high handed, and shrillest liberals in the land? Massachusetts. Such was the case with Senator Charles Sumner. Charles had spent his political career looking for a group of people that he could agree with most of the time and eventually he found that group of people in the Republican Party, a party that was made up of the good people of this country that had decided that all they really cared about was ending slavery. Charles Sumner was incensed by Kansas-Nebraska Act and on two consecutive days in May 1856 he took to the floor of the US Senate to rail against the bill and its authors, Stephen Douglas, who he compared to Sacho Panza, and Andrew Butler of South Carolina, who was compared to Don Quixote. Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina, who was also Andrew Butler’s nephew, took exception to Sumner saying of Senator Butler that he had taken "a mistress who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean, the harlot, Slavery" as well as other uncomplimentary things. Congressman Brooks sought out his friend Congressman Laurence Keitt of South Carolina to discuss dueling etiquette but was assured by his friend that, since dueling only occurs between social equals and Sumner was no gentleman, it would suffice to just beat Sumner with a cane. It was the next day that Brooks and Keitt entered the nearly empty senate chamber and approached Sumner at his desk. Brooks accused Sumner of libeling South Carolina and Andrew Butler and as Sumner was standing to address the two Brooks began beating him over the head with a cane. Sumner fell to the ground and was partially obscured by his desk that was bolted to the floor and Brooks continued to beat what part of him was accessible from that vantage. Eventually Brooks tired of this and simply tore the desk out of the floor so that he could beat Sumner with greater ease. Blinded by his own blood Sumner staggered to his feet and tried to escape up the aisle but collapsed. Brooks stood over Sumner and continued to beat his senseless body with the cane until the cane broke. Of course the good people of conscience that wanted to stop this entirely lopsided beating flew to aid Sumner but were dissuaded by Keitt who was wielding a pistol and admonishing possible Samaritans to, “Let them be.”

Sumner would not return to the Senate floor for three years while he recuperated from his injuries and dealt with the lingering effects of post traumatic stress. Despite his inability to attend to his Senate duties, the people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts would re-elect him and allow his seat to stand empty rather than replace him. They were of the mindset that Charles Sumner’s empty chair could represent the people of Massachusetts better than anyone who was not Charles Sumner. Apparently he would walk with a cane and wake up screaming for the rest of his life which did not stop him from working tirelessly in Lincoln’s cabinet during the War of Southern Stupidity or there after as a senator. So for those who want Gabby Giffords to step down, shut up! That is something for her and the people of Arizona to decide when they are damned good and ready to decide it.

As an after thought, Preston Brooks resigned his congressional seat, saying that he had no intention of disrespecting the Senate by beating one of its members in the Senate Chamber. The people of South Carolina have long suffered from a terminal inability to recognize irony. After the savage beating of Charles Sumner his constituents and wrong thinking people all over America sent him canes to replace the one he broke against the unconscious body of Charles Sumner. He was also re-elected for reasons passing understanding. Following the beating Brooks was denounced on the floor of the United States Congress by Congressman Anson Burlingame of Massachusetts as “the vilest sort of coward”. Knowing Preston Brooks as well as we do you might be shocked by his response to this. Rather than beat Burlingame with a cane when he wasn’t suspecting it (after you get a reputation for beating unsuspecting people with a cane is harder and harder to find people to beat with a cane that aren’t suspecting it) he challenged Anson to a duel saying he would face Burlingame, “In any Yankee mudsill of his choosing.” Anson being a sissified, effete, New England liberal said, “Bring it on motherfucker” with a crazy look in his eye that one develops by looking out the window at snow for 9 months out of the year. Burlingame was not just receptive but entirely eager to shoot at Preston Brooks and to allow Mr. Brooks to return fire and as the challenged party he decided that they would duel with rifles on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls so as to flout the American laws against dueling.* Seriously, a duel with rifles at Niagara Falls? Most badass thing ever. It isn’t just badass it is cinematically badass. How has the rifle duel at Niagara Falls never been in a John Woo movie or at least a Michael Bay movie? Preston Brooks was reportedly dismayed not just by Burlingame’s unexpectedly enthusiastic response but also by the fact that he was supposed to be a really lethal shot. So Preston Brooks decided the best thing for him to do was just shit himself with fear and mumble something about how he wasn’t going to try to cross “hostile territory” in order to satisfy his honor. Preston Brooks would go on to die of croup in 1857. Laurence Keitt would die from wounds received at the Confederate victory at Cold Harbor in 1864. Burlingame went on to be a diplomat and would die in Saint Petersburg Russia in 1870. The man who out lived them all was of course Charles Sumner who died in 1874, in his bed.

*. In most properly constituted duels the challenged party gets to pick weapons and location. This is a hell of a handicap for the challenger and is meant to dissuade challengers from proceeding with duels which they are otherwise half-hearted about. Famous examples of duels which did not go forward because of clever weapons choices included, sledgehammers, howitzers, sausages with cholera in them, and pitchforks full of pig excrement. One anecdote that has been ascribed to various people including Edgar Allen Poe is that upon being challenged by a taller and physically stronger opponent the challenged insisted that the combatants use battle-axes and fight in a dark basement with a low ceiling.

Part I of I.

2011-01-20T04:17:00.001-05:00

So yeah, I was working diligently on my Civil War piece and I had made it to the part where Senator Charles Sumner was savagely beaten on the floor of the United States Senate by Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina in 1856. Then there was the unfortunateness that happened in Tucson and well I kind of lost the taste for talking about the regional, social, and political divisiveness that has characterized our national discourse for the last three hundred years. It will come back of course, it is an appetite of the mind which I gluttonously indulge in and like all my many vices it may lay dormant for a time but it will come back with an animalistic ferocity that will not be ignored. But for the time being it sleeps.

Two Saturdays ago I spent all day crying. I woke up late, went to the bathroom, sat down at my computer, went to facebook, saw what had happened, turned on the news, and for the next ten hours I was sobbing or weeping or wiping one errant tear after another from my eyes. I spent a full hour on my knees crying and praying. I prayed for the wounded and I prayed for the dead and I prayed for the gunman and I prayed for God to cleanse my heart of the hate and confusion that I felt. At first I prayed in the words that are my daily prayer to the God I believe in, “Oh Lord, whose name I do not know and whose nature I cannot understand, make me an instrument of your will and give me the strength to do the things I must.” But eventually I lapsed into the prayers of my childhood and I imbued each word of the Our Father and the Hail Mary with every drop of my imperfect faith that I could muster. And for what it is worth when I started praying Gabby Giffords was said to have been dead and when I stopped she was alive again. So thanks God. But I kept crying anyway. In fact I hadn’t cried like that since Benazir Bhutto was murdered in 2007. If you are unfamiliar with Ms. Bhutto she was the last greatest hope for the country of Pakistan. She was twice elected as Prime Minister in the 90’s but was removed both times for what could be fairly called trumped up corruption charges. After the second instance of this she went into exile in Dubai fearing that she would be executed by her political enemies in the same manner that her father, who had also been removed from the Prime Minister Office years earlier and had been subsequently hanged from the neck until dead based on the spurious charges of the military government that had deposed him. When the Pakistani government was at its worst, when it had closed the presses, removed members of the Supreme Court, detained reporters and lawyers, and suspended the already fundamentally flawed constitution of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto returned from exile to try to lead her people to a better tomorrow. I became familiar with this situation from reading a National Geographic article in the Laundromat at Woodfords Corner in Portland. During this debacle the Pakistani Bar had begun to militantly protest the actions of President Musharraf and the article I was reading had a picture of a Pakistani lawyer throwing a rock at a tank. Which to my way of thinking is the best example of the bravery and integrity of lawyers since, well, forever I guess. There is Atticus Finch, who is not strictly speaking real, but there are not a great number of examples in our popular culture that extol the nobility of the legal profession and so I have decided to elevate the rock throwing Pakistani lawyer to the position of my personal role model. I surreptitiously ripped the picture from the magazine and I now have it on the wall in my office. In any case Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan and someone immediately tried to kill her but that attempt failed. A few weeks later after a political rally a man approached the limo she was getting into and fired a gun at her but evidently she was not shot. The assassin then detonated a bomb and a Scotland Yard investigation of the incident concluded that she was killed when the explosion caused her head to be thrown against the roof of her car. I cried then because Pakistan truly is the biggest problem in the tempestuous area we refer to as the Middle East. It is a problem that exists at the nexus of extremism, terrorism, nuclear armaments, political corruption, Afghanistan, and Iran. Bhutto was the best hope for that problem getting any better and in that most broken of countries they destroyed their best hope for their future. I remember thinking at the time, “What kind of place must that be where they kill the best and brightest?”

Oh well. So I was in court yesterday engaged in an actual trial as an actual attorney for an actual client and I actually won and that was great. And that is basically all I am going to say about it because of my strict rule about not discussing my work as an attorney here on 4M. However, I can say this without getting into any trouble; I don’t sleep before I go to court. I don’t sleep at night generally. My sleep schedule is what it is. It hasn’t been good since I was in high school. My average day is like this, I wake up between noon and two, I go downstairs and clean the kitchen and do the dishes before my step-mother gets home from work, I look for work online, fill out job applications, screw around on facebook, listen to music from four until eight, then either I go to my room and lay down or I don’t. This is really the biggest decision in my daily life. If I lay down I normally spend an hour reading before I nod off. If I don’t go to sleep I watch Countdown with Keith Olbermann followed by The Rachel Maddow Show. If I have gone to sleep I will normally wake up between the hours of 11 and 2. This is normally dinner time. During dinner and in the time there after I catch up on my television viewing by watching my favorite shows streamed illegally online. The oddest thing about the illegally streamed television shows is the number of ads that you have to contend with before you can actually get the show to play. There are plenty of “Congratulations You’re A winner” pop ups but there are also ads from SC Johnson Wax products and Chevy trucks and an entire litany of reputable businesses who have found a way to reach the audience of misanthropes and thieves that have decided to end around the legitimate venues in which copyrighted materials are normally viewed. It kind of makes me angry. You know I am at that site doing something I am not suppose to and if the hackers and data miners of the world want to try to scam me while I am there that is par for the course, we are both bad people doing something bad and turn about is always fair play. But what the hell are GMC and Palmolive doing there? It is like bumping into your Priest in the woods near a highway rest stop, at least that is what my brother says. There should be some honor amongst America’s corporate giants. How is the CEO of Bristol Meyers Squib going to explain advertising on a site that is illegally showing televisions shows when he bumps into the CEO of NBC Universal at some crazy Eyes Wide Shut sex party? Maybe that is why they wear the masks. Oh well. Of course the after midnight hours are also when I do the bulk of my writing. Between the hours of five and seven I will work out, shower, eat a light breakfast and then go to bed, where I will spend one to two hours reading. Then I wake up and do it all again. This monotony is broken by the occasional call from my father asking me to come downstairs and help him with something or asking me to run out and get him beer. That is all well and good. But on days before I go to court I don’t sleep. I woke up at two in the afternoon on Monday and stayed awake until eight at night on Tuesday. I tried to sleep Monday night but couldn’t. I tried to grab some sleep Tuesday morning before my afternoon trial but couldn’t do that either. I tried to sleep when I got home from trial at three in the afternoon but couldn’t. So I filled out this application for a gas station job that I had picked up the night before when I was out buying cigarettes and I dropped it off back at the gas station. Dad came home and I sat and had a beer with him trying to unwind but found that I was still pretty wound up. So I decided to switch to the hard stuff, Jenkins rum. If you don’t live in New Hampshire or haven’t been to one of our many conveniently situated New Hampshire Liquor Stores you may be unfamiliar with the powerhouse liquor brand that is Jenkins. This distillery, located in Londonderry, makes the well version of every liquor known to man and they are all available on the bottom shelf of every aisle in every New Hampshire Liquor Store in the state. Jenkins makes Zhenka vodka (Zhenka is a Russoized version of the name Jenkins, in reality it is a Greek name that is equivalent to the Russian name Evigeny, which is equivalent to the name Eugene, which has the same root as the word eugenics, and it means “well born”, which you aren’t if you are drinking Zhenka vodka). 80 proof handles of Zhenka vodka are the fourth best selling spirit in the state of New Hampshire falling behind handles of Captain Morgan, Smirnoff, and Bacardi Superior. It bests all other vodkas besides Smirnoff as well as an impressive cadre of other name brand liquors, which don’t have going for them what Zhenka has going for it. Indeed, even with all their marketing and prestige how could Absolute, Grey Goose, Jim Beam, Jack Daniels, Jameson, Skyy, Vox, Gordon’s, Tanqueray, Bombay Sapphire, Kaluha, Baileys, or Jose Cuervo ever expect to compete seriously with Zhenka, because Zhenka has a winning strategy. It only costs $9.99 per 1.75 liters. I checked (you must imagine the level of hope that I had while I was running this down but alas it was not to be) and it is slightly more expensive than paint thinner but really only just. It would have been so much funnier if it was cheaper but what are you going to do, those are the breaks. Like I said around here I try not to just make things up, jokes are important, facts are slightly more important. So yeah I broke into the medicinal bottle of Jenkins rum that my dad was keeping under the sink and I poured myself a rum and diet cherry Pepsi. I have gone to diet soda as a way to try and not die quiet so quick, and I have gone to cherry Pepsi as a way to mask the taste of aspartame. You can say all manner of horrible things about high fructose corn syrup, one good thing you can say about it is it doesn’t taste like aspartame. The first drink I made was a rich and opaque brown color. The fourth looked as if a clear liquid had once seen the color brown and decided to add a suggestion of it to its physical appearance. It you were to look at it at a certain angle in a certain light you could make out the soupcons of caramel, something that was neither rum nor snow, for by the fourth I had depleted our stock of ice and had resorted to a practical and pragmatic solution, for which New Englanders are known the world over. You might rightly point out that snow would, because of its composition, melt much faster than an ice cube especially in the presence of that much alcohol and the result would be a rather watery experience indeed. You may well be correct but by the fourth drink I wasn’t giving it much of a chance to melt. It was after the two beers and four rum and Pepsis and not having slept for thirty hours that I decided that not only could I sleep but that I must. It was five hours later that I encountered a phenomenon that apparently is common amongst the sleep deprived drunk. I was dreaming and I won’t bore you with the details but I awoke with a start from it, only I didn’t. I was suppose to, I tried to, but I didn’t. I was laying flat on my back, which is not my normal mode of sleep but I guess because of the alcohol I was able to become recumbent without sleeping on my side as I normally do. Sleeping on your back, in addition to being sleep deprived and drunk, also makes the problem I was having somewhat more likely. The problem is called sleep paralysis and apparently it is something that most people experience at least once in their lives. This was not the first time I had sleep paralysis. But I would say it is the fist time I have had it in the last seven years or so. It is characterized, as the name suggests, by waking suddenly and finding that you can’t move and it is, in a word, terrifying. Sleep paralysis can be accompanied by auditory and visual hallucinations, feelings of anxiety and paranoia, and, I guess if your conscience is especially clean or if God just likes you, a feeling of euphoria. It feels a great deal like you are being held down and because of it is the basis for a legion of folk tales and urban legends, including hags, witches, incubi, ghosts, abductions alien and otherwise. The very word nightmare is derived from the experience. Night: Time when normal people sleep. Mare: Old English, demon that sits upon the chest of the sleeping and suffocates them. It is also said to be a precursor to out of body experiences. I didn’t have an out of body experience but I did have a marked anxiety especially when I found that I couldn’t speak. I was certainly alone in the dark but I talk to myself almost every moment when I am alone and not being able to do that made me very anxious. I am not ashamed to say I very much like the sound of my own voice. In fact I am trying different ways to enunciate the sentence, “I very much like the sound of my own voice” right now. I try it softer and louder, with more gravel in my throat and less, higher and lower, I try it holding my nose to see if I can wash that nasal quality out of it which is the hallmark of the New England accent. So yeah there I was lying motionless and feeling really scared when I did what I always do in times of high stress, I went to sleep.

God, Galileo, Newton, and Bill O'Reilly.

2011-01-07T06:51:00.004-05:00

So I am hard at work at my civil war piece, unfortunately I have chosen as a starting point the taking of the first African slaves by Europeans so it will be a while before I am finished. But this is recruitment week and I feel the need to keep giving people fresh content. Now for reasons of my own I am a deist. I am not an atheist nor am I agnostic. I earnestly believe in a God. I have no solid information on the nature of that God but I believe in it. My belief in God came from a lot of interrogation and soul searching and study. It is founded in the fact that I can not otherwise explain the why of the universe. Science, reputable well accepted science, will tell you that energy becomes matter and matter becomes life and life becomes increasingly complex and complex life, and this is an observation aside from what has necessarily been empirically proven, becomes increasingly socialized. And there truly is no why about that happening. In fact it is fairly counter intuitive. A Universe of chaos should endure in chaos until it reaches a state of complete entropy. But here we all are. Where it would be tidier and more stable to have nothing there is something.

Recently Stephen Hawking said that it was possible for events like the big bang to be caused by gravity and its more confusing cousin super-gravity. Of course no one knows if he is bullshitting because he is just that much smarter than everyone else. But even that idea that there is a force in the, I guessed you call it omniverse that snaps entire universes into existence and sends them on this journey of evolution until, in the vast expanses, creatures arises with the ability to look back into the space that surrounds them and ask why they are here and what are they suppose to be doing. Gravity is a force that connects all matter in the universe. It connects me to you right now and as I move farther away from you it has less of an effect but it never drops to zero. It connects me to you and us to particles of dust in the rings of Saturn and black holes caused millions of years ago by the death of a star whose light we still see and the light as it travels in both particles and waves is acted on by gravity. And apparently the stuff can snap universes into existence. Kind of sounds a lot like God to me. It is a testimony to the synthesizing ability of my mind, or to long undiagnosed psychosis, that I was able to merge my scientific understanding with my moral understanding and construct a God of my own that I believe in as a force external to myself. But that is where I am with God and I try to respect everyone else’s conception of God. I tend to disagree with dogmatic religions. I’ve done a lot of thinking about God and I can’t imagine why God wouldn’t want me to eat shellfish. I don’t like shellfish but I don’t know why God, the creator of the infinite omniverse, would have a dog in that fight. And so I don’t have any rules in my personal or religious moral code that are not justified by a better reason than “God doesn’t like it”.

Okay time to rein it in. So I believe in God and I came by this belief by actually thinking about the world as it is presented to me. I respect people, of whatever denominations, who have tried to grapple with the conflicts that their religion might pose with a natural world that they cannot seriously refute. What I don’t respect is Bill O’Reilly. The other day Bill had on the dumbest atheist in the world. I can say this with confidence because this particular atheist allowed himself to be out argued by Bill O’Reilly when Bill was being, whatever he might be on other evenings, gobstrikingly stupid. I have met and been friends with a great number of atheists and can say that while they may occasionally indulge in contempt, vanity, dismissiveness, arrogance, and a species of small mindedness unique to them, they are generally people that because of their contempt, vanity and arrogance rarely allow themselves to get caught looking on a question of science. I used science to construct my conception of God so in my personal religion there is no conflict between God and science. My work with God is about answering why questions with why answers. My work with science is about answering how questions with how answers. Atheists try answering why questions with how answers and then they have to partition off some part of their mind to create a separate way to infuse meaning into their lives. Because lets face it the idea of no God is pretty scary. A universe unmanned, no one is tending the fire, no one is steering the ship. We really are just hurtling through a space that is mostly nothing on a giant rock. You really got to respect that because atheists are able to confront a universe that only has as much meaning as they are able to invest in it and they don’t just kill themselves. That is why I don’t call religious people “people of faith” because everyone who woke up this morning and didn’t just kill themselves are people of faith.

So that is atheists, they invest a lot into science because it is something at the very least they can believe in. So Bill says to this particularly stupid atheist that “I’ll tell you why [religion is] not a scam, in my opinion. Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that. You can’t explain why the tide goes in.” I want to assure you that facts are important here at 4M. I kid around a lot, like about my brother John possibly being a serial killer and that is just good clean fun. But I like to think you get the jokes and that you know when I am presenting something as a fact. When I present something as a fact I like it to be factually correct, which is why the civil war piece is taking a while to write; I want to at the very least have the dates and locations correct. My guarantee to you, my constant reader, is that if you try to pass off something I have said on this blog as your own no one will be able to call bullshit on the accuracy of your appropriated statement. No one is going to be able to say that Lyndon Johnson didn’t piss on his secret service agent, or that Peter Minuit didn’t buy the island of Manhattan from the Carnarsee Tribe, or any of the anecdotes or historical tidbits that are found through out 4M aren’t true. I am proud that everything on here is as objectively correct as a subjective writer can make it. So I assure you that I am not cropping out any part of the O’Reilly quote that might help to exonerate him of extreme stupidity. The interview goes on and this issue is pursued and the straw atheist never is able to come back with the simple answer to this statement which is that the how of the tides is explainable. If Bill had been advancing the argument that the why of the tides is unexplainable I would be impressed with his nuance and I would give him credit for it, except if he did that I probably wouldn’t have written this blog. No Bill thinks the tides are a mystery not to be explained by modern science. Or by the science of say the 17th century, which is when the first really solid explanation of how tides work was presented by Sir Isaac Newton. Newton discovered that the gravitational effect of the moon caused the tides. Later this was improved upon and the smaller variations in the tides were explained by the further effect of the sun. But primarily the moon’s gravitation and the rotation of the earth with respect to the moon cause our daily high and low tides. It isn’t even that complex. To explain it to an eight year old would not be that difficult. Literally the questions of why is the grass green and the sky blue are harder to explain. Both would require a complete discussion of the nature of light and the visible spectrum and how human sight works and one of them would require a pretty thorough talk about photosynthesis and chlorophyll and the carbon cycle. The tides are comparatively easy to explain. There is gravity, a force that attracts stuff in the universe in a relationship that grows stronger the more massive something is and the closer something is. The moon is big enough and close enough to the Earth to make all the water in the oceans lean slightly in its direction. And as the Earth spins and new parts of the oceans begin to face the moon the water pulls in that direction. Three sentences Bill. It isn’t the Riddle of the Sphinx, which is also pretty easy to explain.* The ability of science to explain how things happen is pretty strong. Now of course I am shocked by the sheer stupidity of it all. Which is the liberal in me. But as a person who believes in God and has worked on his faith and asked hard questions and tried to answer them I am offended by the lazy and complacent and joyous ignorance of this man. The natural world is miraculous and the more I understand it the more miraculous it becomes. But this man’s faith is justified by his ignorance of something which while miraculous is not particularly mysterious. I guess it isn’t the worst reason in the world to believe in God, but it is still pretty piss poor as far as reasons go.

I don’t know how he thinks we predict the tides, he must assume that there is a longshoremen down at the docks that inspects the entrails of a chicken every morning to divine when the water will come in and go out again. In fairness Galileo got the tides wrong too but he was put under house arrest for screwing it up and there is no such hope regarding Bill. The story of Galileo and the tides is instructive so I will discuss it briefly. Galileo had a pretty big set of swingers because he thought he was right and Aristotle was wrong. Aristotle had an idea about everything and he wrote them all down and for about 2000 years Aristotle was the definitive authority on just about everything scientific or philosophical. Aristotle is like Freud or Babe Ruth. He doesn’t hold a lot of unbroken records but the records he had were many and they lasted a long time. Galileo was swinging for the fences trying to disprove the fact that the Earth is stationary. It isn’t. The Earth spins on its own axis, rotates around the sun, and glides along the outer rim of the Milky Way. The very universe is expanding and possibly moving through a medium in which other universes float and it is entirely possible that our universe might collide with some other universe that is out there minding its own business and we have no idea what happens when that happens, which helps to make my weight loss goals seem insignificant. So Galileo was right and he was fighting against people that were wrong. But with science it isn’t enough to just be right and yell the loudest, unless you are Richard Dawkins, who I have described as being naturally selected to be the smuggest man on the face of the Earth. He had competition but that only made him stronger and his genes will endure to become even smugger still as the trait is valued and passed on. It doesn’t exactly work like that, but almost. Galileo needed proof and more than proof he needed a way to formulate his proof so that he could appear not to be dumping on an entire system of the universe that said that the entire universe revolved around the Earth. It was important that he not just come out and say that the geocentric view of the solar system was complete crap because the Catholic Church had invested a lot of time and effort supporting the view that the Earth was stationary. They had made compromises. At the time of Galileo was working the Church had moved away from the Ptolemaic model in which the Earth was stationary and in the center of the universe with each heavenly body occupying an individual orbit around it. You can imagine doing your eighth grade science project about the solar system except instead of illustrating the beautiful fluidity of the solar system where each planet revolved around the sun the movements of all the heavenly bodies must be explained with the caveat that the Earth is neither revolving nor orbiting. People did build models of this by the way and they are gruesome and confusing and planets will stop in mid-orbit and do a tight little curly-q before proceeding on their regular course. The prevailing model of the time found Mercury and Venus orbiting the sun, which orbited the Earth. Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus orbited in larger circles around both the Sun and the Earth. They were really trying to bend over backwards to make the thing work. Galileo thought he had the better side of the argument and he did and how he chose to make his point is not unfamiliar to us. This was a long time ago but there is nothing new under the sun. People have been fucking and eating and trying to prove each other wrong for a long while and we find a great deal of repetition in history. Galileo wrote a book and in this book there are three characters. First Salviati: the brilliant man who is going to argue for the Copernican view of the solar system. Second Sagredo: an intelligent layman who is portrayed as being disinterested in the debate. Third Simplicio: even in Italian you should be able to pick up the implication of this name, he is a rather slow witted proponent of a geocentric universe. That is right, Galileo organized a panel of fictional people, stacked the deck in his favor, and proceeded to eviscerate the poorly formulated argument of the ill-equipped opponent he had created. Bill O’Reilly doesn’t do anything new on his show every night, people have been doing what he does, and vastly better than him, for a very long time. So the book is called The Dialogue and a dialogue does indeed take place and through the course of the book Galileo refutes objections about an Earth that moves, like why all our hats don’t fly off. I could explain why all our hats don’t fly off but I assure you we are moving very fast and somehow it all works out. And he pokes holes in the Ptolemaic models, like why do the moons of Jupiter act the way they do if we are stationary and the similar complaints that had gone unaddressed by the prevailing model of the solar system. And most of his arguments held up rather well over time. But then the wheels really came off the wagon. As Einstein would generously say centuries later, “It was Galileo's longing for a mechanical proof of the motion of the earth which misled him into formulating a wrong theory of the tides. The fascinating arguments in the last conversation would hardly have been accepted as proof by Galileo, had his temperament not got the better of him.” Galileo did the thing which zealots and ideologues of every stripe and hue will eventually do, he started speaking bullshit. He got too wrapped up in winning the argument to make sure that he was right in the particulars of his own theory. His reasoning went like this, that the movement of the earth generates tides the way that water will slosh around in a bucket that is moving. Nothing more complicated than that. Of course the water wouldn’t do that for the same reason that all our hats don’t blow off. But the man really wanted to be right, you know? And he was working without a full understanding of motion and gravity. Although, this didn’t handicap his contemporary Johannes Kepler who posited that the moon caused the tides and that the orbits in a heliocentric solar system would be elliptical and not circular. Galileo thought Kepler was an asshole.

Now of course it is one thing to be wrong, another to be vehemently wrong, and still another to be vehemently wrong while placing the espoused beliefs of the Pope into the mouth of an idiot who gets his lunch ate by an author surrogate in your smartass book that you wrote in 17th century Italy. Galileo was put under house arrested and his work was banned by the Vatican for three hundred years. It was a tough beat. The moral for the day: you can be wrong for the right reasons, right for the wrong reasons, win all the time if you can find a slightly stupider person to argue against, and if you can’t find someone stupider than you to argue with, then you can always just make them up.

*. It is a man. He crawls as a baby, walks as an adult, and uses a cane as an old man. Boom, I just saved Thebes.

A Commemorative Travesty

2011-01-06T03:45:00.002-05:00

My brother, if no one else, is clambering for part three of my blog which started a couple of weeks ago with me at a bus stop. Unfortunately the temporal space in which part three would have existed has expired. To write part three now would be to revisit a time in my life that I have moved on from. Indeed part three of that particular blog has gone the way of chapter nineteen from Sideways Stories of Wayside School, the eight appendixes of The Illuminatus Trilogy that were to be printed in Heaven, and Mel Brooks’s History of The World Part II. I promised to write it, I intended to write it, I failed to write it, I am sorry. The Bible, another work of literature that has a distinctly unfinished feel in many places, says that all have sinned and fallen short of the grace of God. So, you know, fuck it.

Moving right along. I have no problem with kitsch. Bric-a-brac and I are on good terms. And if you are one of those special people that are compulsive about buying the As Seen On TV stuff I feel no particular amount of contempt for you. Great steak knives might make your life measurably better. Consumerism can have both short and long term psychological benefits. I got some money for Christmas from my loving mother and step-father and I went right out and bought some new bedding. For some reason I feel more purposeful waking up in a bed that has pillow cases that match. Previously one was black, one was green, one was black and white striped, and one was wrapped up in a red and white sheet. It was kind of tough to feel like your life is going anywhere waking up in a bed like that. Maybe four is too many pillows. Don’t know. I sleep with two behind my head and I wrap my arms around the other two and when I wake up in the morning I have no feeling in my hands, which makes taking a morning piss a special type of challenge. Also my IPOD touch is normally stuck to my body in the morning, which is probably why I didn’t hear its alarm go off. There could be a barking Pomeranian wedged underneath me, I wouldn’t hear it. My body is a perfect acoustic dampening system. Throw me on top of most anything and I will pretty much muffle any sound that it might want to make, and most things you throw me on top of are going to want to make some sounds. But we were talking about buying shit and I am all in favor of that, provided you have the money. If you really want a Hummel figurine and you got the scratch to pay real Hummel figurine prices well do it man. I reserve judgment on all manner of stuff. A real crystal cross that will project an image of the Lord’s Prayer when you hold it up to the light; buy. A blanket with sleeves; buy. A juicer; buy. A rotisserie cooker; buy it, set it, and forget it. A set of plates from the Franklin Mint with Norman Rockwell pictures on them, are you fucking kidding me, the priceless Americana of Normal Rockwell finally available in plate form on an installment plan, giddy-up, giddy-up lets go. Buy a chia pet, either because you think it is cool to own a chia pet or because you think it is ironic and cool to own a chia pet or just because you like chia pets. Whatever, I am not here to investigate your motives. Buy gold if you want. I tell you it isn’t a good thing because gold sold on television is a racket. There is no way you will ever get anyone to pay what you just paid for that gold but if you got a little Scrooge McDuck in you and you just need some gold go right ahead. Don’t do it because the American dollar is going to tank and become worthless like the currency of a central African nation. The day the American dollar is worth nothing is the day that gold becomes this heavy stuff that you can throw at the mob who is trying to break into your house and steal your canned goods. Gold is not something that is going to become a functioning medium of exchange in the apocalyptic hellscape that will exist after the complete fall of the United States economy. In a situation where money isn’t worth anything the things which will be worth the most are: guns and ammunition, food, fuel, water, medicine, technical expertise, cunning, guile, and women of childbearing age; all of which will be used as mediums of exchange should the American dollar fail, stock up. But if you want to buy gold, please don’t let me stop you.

The other day I saw something to buy on television and I was pretty much appalled. About ten years ago there were these really impressive skyscrapers in New York and they were destroyed by terrorists acting under a plan that to this day strains credulity. There were a million things in this plan that could have gone wrong and really in all fairness each should have gone wrong in succession. With the amount of bailing wire and duct tape that was holding this particular terrorist plot together the would be martyrs should have stacked failure on top of failure until they got so discouraged with the plan that they simply marched themselves into the FBI building in Washington and surrendered to the receptionist on duty. Unfortunately their stupid planned worked and none of the legion of things that should have gone wrong did. And even when they made mistakes that should have alerted the vast network of local, state, federal, and international agencies that collaborate, at least in theory, to prevent these types of things from happening no one was able to figure it out in time and so 19 men proceeded to murder a couple of thousand people on a truly lovely September morning using airliners and the stupidest plan ever.

I just got a little lost thinking about that day. It was so strange. I went to class in the afternoon, Environmental Conservation 535, and there were fighter jets in the sky and no one knew where the fucking president was. There were no numbers at that time but they said that 40,000 people went to work at the World Trade Center everyday, so that number 40,000 was kicked around a lot. I guess we were some species of lucky that the number was eventually much lower. And we were all together, the people in my dorm crowded into the lounge to watch the coverage, and an entire nation united it is grim disbelief and pain and anger and sadness. And then we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and by that time we weren’t very united at all and that was a special kind of pain. I wound up with the better part of that argument in the end and like everyone else that questioned what the hell we were doing in those very confusing times we have the cold comfort of having been right about Iraq and torture and illegal wiretapping and a lot of other things that happen that were pretty atrocious at the time but that later just blend into the general horribleness of the era and we still all feel pretty angry about being called traitors and un-American and terrorist apologizers.

So yeah the buildings came down and people developed face cancer clearing away the rubble and toxic dust that was composed in part of the incinerated remains of Americans. In the spirit of rebirth and America The Indomitable they used some of the scrap metal from the debris to make a boat, The USS New York. So the fuckers blow up our buildings and we build a boat out of the wreckage, I am not so jaded that I can’t get behind that. Moving on. At the bottom of the WTC4, a smaller building that was crushed by the falling WTC2, there was one of the largest private precious metals vaults in the world. It was owned by a group of private banks. In this vault was 3,800 gold bars and 30,000 62.5 pound silver bars. That is one million eight hundred and seventy five thousand pounds of silver. Seven weeks after the attack, while they were still pulling remains out of the rubble, the silver was rescued. I don’t have a problem with this. Just because there is a thin layer of charred human remains and the collective sorrow of a nation covering your silver bars doesn’t mean you throw that shit out. You wash it off and move on. Moving on. So I was watching television and that as seen on television voice came on and he had a buying opportunity that I just couldn’t pass up. A gold coin featuring a silver twin towers with a silver USS New York sailing passed. The silver pieces could be made to pop up from the coin for display purposes. And here is the kicker it is made with genuine World Trade Center Silver; that is the silver that was caked in the dust of dead Americans.

The word ghoul has fallen into disuse because of the fact that cadavers for medical research are readily available and the profession of grave robbing has suffered as all illegal occupations must inevitably suffer when reasonable things are made legal. But there was a time and a place when being called a ghoul was particularly offensive and many a bright young medical career and all ability to function in polite society was cut short by the accusation of ghoulish behavior. So it is my hope that I may defame the good people of the National Collectors Mint by calling them ghouls. They broker in the selling of artifacts of the dead. They seek to exploit some of the most American of desires: to love our country and to buy shit. It is the most profane of all the great many sacrileges that have been committed against the most sacred and solemn memory held by the American people. It isn’t quite as bad as Nazi gold made from Jewish fillings or Mr. Iscariot’s 30 piece of silver, but it is bad. It lacks decorum and decency. It is kitsch milled out of human suffering and sold at two in the morning during a commercial break in a bad movie between Girls Gone Wild videos and the Shamwow. We watched as people jumped to their deaths rather than be burned alive and out of the rubble you took silver and fashioned it into hansom collectibles which you will gladly accept 30 dollars for. Go to Hell. The best part of their hucksterism, for there is always one atrocity lying just beneath the last, is that each coin contains 14 milligrams of silver and they alert us all that as the shrinking supply of ground zero silver is used up this once in a life time offer will end. There are 0.000493835467 ounces of silver in 14 milligrams of silver. I said previously that there were 30,000 62.5 pound bars of ground zero silver. That is 30,000 1,000 ounce bars. Someone can check my math on this, but that means that a single bar of those 30,000 bars would make 2,024,966 of these jack off coins. Limit five per order, place as many orders as you fucking want.

Oh well moving right along.

Part II In which I lend someone the use of my phone.

2010-12-21T14:29:00.000-05:00

Part II

We resume our tale with me standing at a bus stop. I was worried about math because you can’t make change at the bus. I had two dollars and thirty-five cents. Two one dollar bills as well as a dime and a quarter. The bus from the country farm costs fifty cents. Since I only had a dollar I was going to wind up losing an additional fifty cents when I paid the fare. Then of course their was the problem that the next bus I was going to get on cost a dollar and fifty cents and what with over paying for the first bus I would have insufficient funds for the second bus. You see how life is in ankle deep mud. There had been an anxious young man who was also loitering about and he looked as if he was going to take a bus in the near future and I was waiting for a convenient moment to broach the subject about a possible collaboration between my dollar and any possible fifty cents that he might have in a hypothetical bus ride situation that we might both take. Just as I was about to approach the young man he boldly walked towards me and requested the use of my phone. I was more than happy to oblige him in his request because I thought it might make him more amenable to my bus ride proposal. I was a bit worried because it was Monday morning and my phone sometimes doesn’t work on Monday mornings. Monday mornings are traditionally when the good people at the phone company decided that I need a reminder that they actually expect remuneration and stop allowing me to call out from my phone. Luckily, they will allow incoming calls for about a week after this, which is nice because I would hate for one of the thirty seven companies who seem to handle my various student loans not to be able to reach me. It would be very embarrassing to discover that your phone had been deactivated by loaning it to a stranger. Although I’d probably think it was hilarious if it were to happen. Luckily the phone was working. The man made his call and I didn’t listen in. The man said that his friend was going to call him back in a moment and I said that was fine by me and I then asked about the possibility of bus riding and whether we cool pool his fifty cents with my dollar so that I didn’t get short changed. The man said that he was actually waiting for a ride but he had a bus ticket that I could have and I thought that was very nice of him and accepted. Then I asked what brought him out to the county farm. He said that he had been in the rehab for five days and that he pulled a dirty urinalysis and had been sent packing. He was not, as every person that has ever failed a piss test will attest, doing drugs. But I thought that five days of abstention might not necessarily result in a clean test and shared my own experience of drug counseling and failed urinalysis, which I have detailed in and other places and times. The man’s friend called back and was apparently being detained by the police for failing to stop before taking a right on red. The man next called his father to tell him of his progress towards getting home from his failed stint in rehab. The friend called back and apparently the traffic stop was not going well and he would have to call back in a few minutes to see if he could ever come and retrieve his friend. But the bus was coming and the young man was torn about whether he should get on the bus or wait to see how everything panned out with his friend knowing that he would scarce be able to communicate with him because the phone he was using was getting on the bus. I left the boy behind at the county court complex on county farm road. One of many people who I have tried to help, it gave me a bittersweet feeling and reminded me of the phonebook. When I was in college, it was getting towards mid April and the snow was muddy or the mud was snowy; hard to say in New Hampshire. I was crossing the foot bridge behind the Memorial Union Building and I looked down into the stream below and saw a phonebook. I am oddly drawn to strange chores. I climbed down the embankment and got stuck in actual ankle deep mud. I leaned down over the stream and gathered together the soaking pulp that was the phonebook and held it as pieces of soaked yellow paper and icy water ran down my arm. And then I climbed back up the embankment. I arrived back on the foot bridge covered from my waist down in mud. I looked about for a trashcan to throwaway the phonebook. The phonebook was dripping water all over me and I could see no place to dispose of it and quite truthfully I was just sick of the endeavor so I placed the thing on the ground with the thought, “I took it this far, someone else can finish it up.” Of course the next day the phonebook was back in the river. I’d like to tell you that I went back in after it. I’d sure like to tell you that.

The bus was a fair piece down the road when I received a text message from “JW” Apparently the cops were taking his phone. How he managed to text this or any of his subsequent communications is a detail that I am sorry to say is never uncovered by me. I texted back saying that his friend was unreachable at this number but that I hoped everything went well with the cops and that he had a happy holidays. He texted back thank you. And the issue could have died there but I texted back that his friend didn’t take the bus and should still be at the county court complex. It was fortuitous that I did because JW had driven to the county lock up, which is different from the county court. So it was nice that I was able to set him straight and I could have texted later to see if everything panned out but at some point you just got to let these people fly on their own.

So that happened on the 20th of December. Which coincidentally the same date on which South Carolina seceded from the Union and I wish to discuss this at length but unfortunately I need to take a nap. My brother is coming up from Boston and together we are going to drive to Florida for Christmas with our mother. So I am planning to write my diatribe bad mouthing the traitorous bastards of the Confederacy and all their progeny while journeying through the heart of the South. Until then John Brown’s body lies a moldering in the grave but his soul goes marching on.

Part I in a series about something that happened yesterday and, eventually, the entire Civil War.

2010-12-21T11:31:00.001-05:00

Part I

So the bus that runs out to the county farm over in Dover doesn’t run but once an hour. And since I was released from jury duty shortly after its departure I was forced to loiter in the court house vestibule in my black over coat and disreputable demeanor making the sheriffs at the security check point very nervous. The county court house, indeed court houses in general along with hospitals, funeral homes, high schools, banks, and unemployment offices are all delightful places to encounter people having the worst day of their life. It is a rare and beautiful thing to see a human drop to a new depth of misery. Sometimes this is not even a very deep depth. When you have previously dipped only a toe in the pool of human pain and suddenly find your ankle submersed it comes as a shock. And like a bather in the slate gray Atlantic when the water finally hits the testicles there is a transcendental splendor in that moment of distressingly surprised confusion. Of surpassing beauty is a person who has found that they can sink no lower. Someone on the worst day of their life, when their life can get no worse is an object not just entertaining but edifying. There is no easier person to love than someone at the bottom of their existence. You have nothing to envy them nor do you desire anything from them and so you are given the opportunity to exhibit true altruism. You may give of yourself and expect nothing in return. I have been fortunate enough to in the position of helping someone through a tough time. I have also been so unfortunate as to have been the object of other people’s pity. I recommend the former.

In any case I was waiting for the bus. I hate to talk about the wealth disparity in this country and bring up the fact that the federal government decided to engage in a tax compromise that would exacerbate this disparity. I complain both because I think poverty is actually a horrible debilitating state of existence that once entered into is extremely difficult to overcome and that the disappearing middle class coupled with more and more wealth being in the hands of fewer and fewer people is counter to the those things which American’s have through the course of the 20th century come to expect as their birthright; the right to work and be paid a wage you can live on, to educate your children, to not be bankrupted by medical bills, to grow old with security and dignity. Keeping taxes at a ten year long reduced rate for the income over $250,000 (during which time not one net job was created) for the next two years, will not create jobs. Presently there is 3 Trillion Dollars in the capital accounts of private corporations in this country. Conceptually that might not mean much to you but it is actually a thing. Normally corporations don’t hold onto cash like that. They reinvest it back into the company by expanding and hiring and growing and improving the operation. But companies are discouraged from doing that because they get to keep almost all the money they make. And if you take your companies surplus and say invest in some kind of external investment like stocks or bonds and you make a profit on that you are going to pay cap gains taxes that are significantly less than straight corporate income taxes. Basically if you take two million dollars and invest it in a new business operation and in that year that operation makes 60,000 dollars in profit you are taxed 15% on the first 50,000 and then 25% on the next 10,000 and the more profit you make the higher rate that profit is taxed on. It is boring I know but I am getting to a point. At some point if you generate a lot of profit you may wind up paying as much as 35%, down from 90% in the early sixties and the 60% during the heart of the Regan administration. But if you take that same 2 million dollars and invest it for a year and a day you will pay no taxes on the first fifty thousand dollars of profit and the most you will pay in taxes is 15% and it doesn’t matter if you turn that 2 million into 200 million. Man starts off the year at nothing, goes out and works everyday, makes $50,000 he will probably pay seven grand in taxes, little bit less maybe. Man starts off the year with 2 million dollars and at the end of the year has seen a modest 5% return of $50,000, he pays no taxes. The reason we have almost 10% unemployment isn’t because the rich don’t have money to hire people, it is that the government has devised a tax structure in which those with money are rewarded for hording it. It is unwise to borrow money from foreign countries so the rich can amass larger and larger fortunes. I saw a guy on Fox News say, with a straight face, that a couple of million dollars of cash on hand wasn’t a lot of money for a person to have. As if the rich really aren’t that well off. Fair enough. I don’t feel the need to demonize the rich. They aren’t bad people. Resource hording is a natural instinct but we live in a society and greed is a social crime. And while the rich might not be really “that rich” the poor certainly are “that poor”. I am of course quite comfortable in my poverty; I am exceedingly well fed, I have a roof over my head, good cable, and a reliable internet connection. I am extremely lucky. I know there are people out there who are doing far worse than me. I see them when I ride the bus or head down to the food stamp office. If you’re rich and are absolutely incensed about these poor people who are doing nothing but sponging off you I tell you at the very least you have nothing to envy the poor. Getting back to my human misery as water metaphor, being poor is like being constantly in ankle deep mud. As good as it gets when you are standing in ankle deep mud, you are still in ankle deep mud. If you still find it necessary to reproach the poor for their shiftlessness or shiftiness take your ability to reproach someone something as payment in kind because for these people their default state is one of misery and there is no indignity that is foreign to them.

And this is what it is like to wait for a city bus. I am of course a man who long ago grew very comfortable in this ankle deep mud situation. Four years of not driving a car will do that to a person. Waiting for buses is an excellent opportunity to catch up on your reading. Also it provides me with time to practice my singing. I normally start off with all seven verses of the Irish traditional version of Whiskey In The Jar, followed by American Pie and Piano Man. But make no mistake, turning an eight mile trip into a four hour commute is a special kind of torture reserved for the poor. If you’re curious what it is like to be poor or a convicted drunk driver take the bus from your house to the supermarket and back someday, just as an exercise. I recommend you try to accomplish your regular weekly shopping. Because then you will have the wonderful experience of trying to race through a supermarket in the hopes catching the bus that is coming forty minutes after the last bus dropped you off, instead of the one that is coming two hours after you were dropped off. The only upside to the bus that comes in two hours is that it is so fucking cold at the bus stop that your frozen food won’t thaw. When I lived in Portland, I frequently would splurge once a month and take a taxi home from the supermarket. I always took the same cab. An independent named Mike who was almost always at the same cab stand out in front of the Hannaford on Forrest. He didn’t drink or do drugs but he apparently loved gambling. He also loved boxing which we talked about a lot. There are a lot of “sports guys” out there and while they know everything about baseball, basketball, football, and possibly hockey almost none of them know what a joke it was when Shannon Briggs took the decision over George Foreman that marked the end of Foreman’s career, or about Roy Jones Jr. fighting in Radio City with a broken wrist, or about what the hell happened to Oliver McCall during the second Lennox Lewis fight. But most of the time I walked or took the bus, which means that I frequently didn’t buy milk. A gallon of milk weighs 8 pounds. The bus of course comes right up to the Hannaford on Forest Avenue. It would then go in the exact opposite direction from my apartment. The bus that went towards my apartment stopped about a half a mile a way from the supermarket. So whether I was going to walk the two miles back to my house or take the bus I was still going to wind up walking like a mile to and from bus stops, which is fine. I can walk a mile or two or even three if I absolutely need to, and I can carry forty pounds of groceries strapped to my backs in a duffle bag without a problem, but I top out around 43 pounds so milk got triaged out of my shopping routine, and I suggest that if you try my “poor for a day, take a bus” scheme you will find that it is probably a good idea for you too. I find that at the end of two pages and a bit I have not yet gotten on the bus. Sorry. Especially so because I don’t particularly wish to discuss getting on the bus and the actual point of this current line of thought has very little to do with getting on the bus. And more to the point the current line of thought is not what I really want to discuss with you. There is an entire other conversation that I wish to have with you my constant readers. But for the time being I will post and continue.

Breaking News On Don't Ask Don't Tell...

2010-12-18T18:45:00.004-05:00

"Annapolis, Maryland - It is just minutes after the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" and the branches of the military are already reacting. While the Army, Marines, Air Force, and Coast Guard have all issued public statements, the tenor of which are all along the line of 'We will effectively implement any policy the civilian leadership mandates', there is a resounding quiet coming from the Navy. As of yet no public comment has been issued nor, it seems, can any single member of the United States Navy be reached for comment. It appears that no one is picking up the phone. This reporter was able to reach someone at Navy Base San Diego, the principle homeport of the Pacific Fleet, but my contact refused to identify himself and simply kept shouting 'Woohoo' before putting down the receiver. After forty seconds of techno music the line went dead."

I could go on. I have a nice little joke about the sixth fleet abandoning their on-going mission in the Mediterranean in order to occupy Mykonos, the Greek island known the world over for their thriving gay nightclubs, which anyone who knows anything about gay nightclubs knows, which certainly isn't me. The Seabees will have a beach bar up and running in 6 hours, those guys are amazing. But this isn't the time to poke fun at the Navy, I mean it is always a good time to poke fun at the Navy but I've done that already. I make fun of the Navy because my brother was in that branch of the military and I like to needle John. But as much as I am entitled to be proud of my brother's accomplishments, which is very little entitlement indeed, I am proud of his distinguished service on The U.S.S. John C. Stennis.* This is a truly joyous day. For all those members of every branch of service, in every theater of operation, performing every function in the military, from pilots to translators to sailors to combat troops who have lived a lie so that they could serve their country, this is an amazing day. It should be celebrated not just for the freedom granted to our gay service members currently serving, who can now live a life without the fear that they will be discharged for being something they can't help but be, but also for generations of gay servicemen, who died in Europe, Africa, the Pacific, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, on a thousand battle fields far from home and alienated from their very identity so that they could serve their country honorably and give their last full measure of devotion. For them we celebrate, for them we remember.

*When I named the boat my brother served on I wasn't going to talk about John C. Stennis because it would seem like I was making fun of the vessel but I wouldn't do that, I am a scrappy guy but I wouldn't pick a fight with an entire air craft carrier. Plus a joke at that point would make it seem that my avowed pride in my brother isn't sincere and it is. But it should be said that Senator Stennis was a bit of a dick. It is odd that his name has come up on this day, when the last vestige of legal discrimination has been removed from the federal government, because he was really in favor of discrimination. He was a staunch segregationist or bigot as I like to call staunch segregationists. Worse than his political stance on having an entire race of people living as second class citizens was his stance, as a prosecuting attorney, on torturing black people and using what they said while being tortured as evidence against them. When the Supreme Court overturned the conviction they didn't have to figure out whether what happened to these guys was torture. 3 of the 3 defendants were whipped and one of them was strung up by his neck from a tree, which for a poor black sharecropper in Oxford, Mississippi in 1934 was not an uncommon way to spend a Saturday night.

Hooray, Pellet Stove: The Omnibus Edition is here in time for Christmas

2010-12-17T02:28:00.004-05:00

Part I

Okay so the trick I think to successfully completing a blog entry is going to have to be keeping it under two pages. I lose interest after two pages and then I wind up abandoning the pages I have already written and nothing ever gets finished. In order to keep this entry under two pages I am going to develop a far less florid style of writing.

First, apropos to the school board shooting in Panama City, Florida, if you are a ninety pound woman with a purse you should not try to disarm a 350 pound man with a gun. At other times and in other places I have complained about the fact that three airliners full of Americans were successfully hi-jacked by men with box cutters. I still maintain that people should intervene in situations such as this rather than falling victim to the bystander effect and simply hoping that everything will just turn out alright. But I was kind of hoping that the action oriented people who would seek to save their lives and the lives of their fellow hostages would not be sexagenarian women with handbags.

Second, if you are a man sitting within five feet of a sexagenarian woman trying to disarm a 350 pound gunman with her purse, get off your ass and help. Certainly, this is not the best of all possible windows of opportunity to disarm a man intent on killing you but it is certainly a window of opportunity and while the fat brute is busy throwing the woman to the ground like a rag doll you, and perhaps some of the other men that are right there, should leap into action. Shouting, “No, don’t.” isn’t at all helpful. She already did what you are objecting to, the only thing left to do is back her play. Ultimately the only reason this nice lady from the Panama City School Board was not shot in the head was the deranged beneficence of the gunman.

Third, this most recent act of violence perpetrated by an anti-government white man should not be confused with an act of terrorism, which, as we all know, are only committed by brown people. Certainly this was an example of a person angry at taxation and the work of government seeking to make his point through violence and fear. But he is white so we do not need to think about this in the context of other violent acts which have occurred with increasing frequency over the last couple of years. We don’t need to look back on a history of home grown violence directed at local, state, and federal government to see if there might be a trend. When a crazy white man flies a plane into a federal building killing an IRS agent that is an isolated incident. When a crazy white man shoots up the holocaust museum that is an isolated incident. When a kid from the Sudan tries to light a bomb in his underwear that is obviously a threat to our national security that should concern us all, so much so that the hapless attempted bomber should not even be tried in a civilian court. Certainly, our civilian courts effectively deal with cases of child molesters, rapists, drug kingpins, serial killers, and domestic terrorists like Timothy McVeigh but how could we expect them to cope with a criminal of such devastating guile as a kid who would put a bomb in his underpants. They’re just terribly ill-equipped to confront that kind of unmitigated evil is all I am saying.

Regarding the Obama tax compromise I would like to say… Fuck it I am still too angry.

On happier news my father has engaged in one of his hilarious home improvement projects. Dad does things with out much forethought and since he lacks any semblance of patience I have normally a fifteen percent chance that at some point during a home improvement project he will give up. He may give up in the inception stages of an idea, and really that is best for everyone, because he if he doesn’t he may give up at some point after I have already had to lift heavy things while he yells at me. I have mentioned that I live in a large house. A house so large that I use a bathroom just for showering and a bathroom just for going to the bathroom. A house so large that there are rooms I forget exist. A house so large that it has been cost prohibitive to heat it. I don’t mind sitting in a forty-five degree room and any enclosed area that I inhabit for any length of time will warm itself to a livable temperature. I am a warm person; I kick off heat like a Franklin Stove. I am warm, I float, and I can pick up and move a lot of things other people can’t. These are the upsides to being as large as I am, it isn’t a great trade off but I don’t have to worry about being cold or drowning. Unfortunately and much to my surprise, I am not the only consideration to be contended with when thinking about heating this rather large house. There are also the pipes that may burst and even funnier than pipes are the ubiquitous sprinkler heads. When a device designed to gush water all over a room freezes and breaks it is a special kind of hilarious. When I was seventeen one of the sprinkler heads in an unheated mudroom froze and broke and it caused six inches of standing water to accumulate in the adjoining bedroom in the seven minutes between when it broke and when it was turned off. So dad has over the years done things to mitigated heat loss, including covering superfluous exits (number of superfluous exits: 3) with two inch solid insulation. During the early days of the external wood-boiler craze, before regulation had caught up to private enterprise, dad put a giant wood-boiler about seven feet from his property line and then built a twenty two foot tall stainless steel chimney on top of it. The wood-boiler ran for about a week before complaints were lodged against him by his neighbor. At the time when the neighbor complained to the NHEPA I asked dad if it was the same neighbor who had invited dad to a barbecue the summer before to which dad responded, “Go fuck yourself.” Dad said that indeed it was the same neighbor but that dad’s decidedly unneighborly behavior had nothing to do with the subsequent complaint and of course we will never know but I have adopted a policy of not telling the neighbors to go fuck themselves in the hopes that it might result in better relations in the future. So now there is a shiny wood-boiler with 22 foot tall chimney right outside our kitchen window (and because my bedroom is above the kitchen it is outside my bedroom window as well), which we have not used for two winters. My favorite feature of this eyesore is the guide-wires connecting the top of the chimney to the patio railing. I can’t fault the engineering of the guide-wires because the chimney hasn’t fallen over and it has every reason to fall over. So father has been searching for something that might help to heat this house since the wood-boiler debacle and recently he was gifted a wood pellet stove by his brother-in-law. When I heard rumblings that dad might install the wood pellet stove in the house I said a little prayer to myself that this project would simply blow over. If this plan was to come to fruition it would mean clearing a place for the pellet stove, moving in a pellet stove, installing a pellet stove, and then tending to a pellet stove every hour of every day for the next several months, this would of course also necessitate the constant moving of bags of pellets into the house and I knew that I would not escape any discreet part of this long arduous labor intensive process. I have arrived at the end of two pages and so I shall post and continue…

Part II

…And we’re back. I was talking about this pellet stove. I’d hoped rumors of the pellet stove were unsubstantiated. They were not, our worst fears were realized. Dad, who was excited and deeply involved not just with this current pellet stove but with all things pellet stove, began the process by which the pellet stove would enter our lives by telling me to clear a space in one of the many storage rooms for the pellet stove to go. At this point the plan was to cut a hole in an exterior wall to vent the stove. So naturally when I entered the room, which at one time was a bedroom, the furniture, which would otherwise denote a bedroom( bed, bureau, nightstand, ect.), was covered with mail, newspapers, miscellaneous papers, boxes, including 49 Corona 12 pack boxes with empty bottles in them, a wheelchair for no reason, a bed frame, 8 old windowpanes, my grandfather’s death certificate pinned between the wall and an unattached headboard, a lamp from my apartment in Portland that I abandoned in this first floor room rather than take it upstairs, some milk crates, some folding chairs, five or six buckets of paint, some empty medical oxygen tanks, a smattering of t-shirts and sweatshirts, and a very nice Radar O’Reilly style winter hat that I bought for my father several Christmases ago that I have never seen him wear… this isn’t a sentence whose structure can be understood any longer. New sentence! My plan was to move everything away from the exterior wall so that we would have a place to put the stove. Fair enough. Since most of the mess was on top of large furniture I decided the easiest way to accomplish the move would just be to push the large furniture with its accompanying clutter away from the exterior wall. Did I push the large furniture? Yes I did. Pushing heavy things, along with floating and being warm, is one of the things I am good at. Did stuff fall off the large furniture when I pushed it? Boy howdy did it ever. Did it make a real difference in the overall appearance of the room? Naw not really. After creating a space large enough to accommodate the pellet stove I went about my other business, which these days is mostly filling out job applications online and… just saw some video of some young shirtless male acrobats performing for the pope, really weird, not a good visual at all. Lost my train of thought but it doesn’t matter because nothing good was going to come after “and”.

The day after my ad hoc reorganization of the room where the pellet stove was going to go my father came home and told me that he thought a better idea than cutting a hole in the exterior wall to vent the pellet stove would be to cut a hole in the interior wall, behind which there was a 150 year old chimney that we could tap into. In the immortal words of Peter Venkman, “I love this plan, I am excited to be a part of it. Let’s do it.” I revisited the scene of my moving triumph to find that my previous successful though currently undesirable work had placed me in a position that was significantly less conducive to moving than the previous one had been. I blazed a trail through the clutter and was able to get purchase of the intact bed with its pile of clutter on top. I pushed the bed back against the opposing wall and made other adjustment as I could. I found that in order to have any hope of making ingress for the stove I would have to move 15 of the 49 Corona boxes into the hallway. These lucky 15 boxes were later moved to the back of my father’s dump trunk and made the journey to Farmington, where the latest in a long string of Igor like helpers, would throw them in the dumpster. If you are curious why I didn’t place all 49 boxes in the dump truck the reasons are three fold. First, I would hate to overfill the dumpster. Second, at some point during the unloading of the 49 Corona boxes my father’s tenants in Farmington as well as his neighbors might begin to suspect that my father is a raging alcoholic. Although once you’ve unloaded 15 boxes the implication has already been made. Third, I am lazy; you know just fuck it.

Despite my laziness I did clear an area for the pellet stove although much of the things which wound up falling on the ground during the first move had to be reorganized and re-piled and, because of this, the subtle organizational scheme that my father swears to Christ actually existed was undermined and now “I can’t find anything in here.” Seriously, what the fuck can I do right?

The next step in this process was actually the fun part. The missing tiles from the recessed ceiling made it very easy to find where the chimney was and all we needed to do now was knock a big hole in the wall with a hammer. I am aces when it comes to knocking a hole in the wall with a hammer. We found the chimney located right where it should be so my skills at knocking a hole in a wall were only briefly necessary but there would be more fun with hammers later. I should mention that my house has more rooms than working light bulbs. It is a curious position to be in. Big cold house with no lights, it is like something out of Dickens; I’m Pip and my dad is Ms. Havisham. This storage room when I first began working in there had no working lights. It had three empty light sockets in the ceiling and one with a light bulb in it that did not work. So I went and found a lamp. The lamp was probably a fire hazard as it seemed to work or not depending primarily on whether or not it likes you. It doesn’t like dad. Whenever dad touches the lamp it goes out. It isn’t a touch-lamp, it has a switch, it is just really broken. It is funny to watch dad work with the lamp because he is extremely impatient and when it flickers he gets pissed at it and then at me and that is enjoyable to watch.

After locating the chimney we found that there was a wall stud running down the middle of it which would prevent us from sticking a pipe in there. That problem was easily solved by a sawzall, which in fact saws not all but most. Then we had to knock some bricks out of the chimney and luckily I know a guy who is pretty good at making holes with a hammer. Next we inserted the pipe in the hole we created. At this point you might be wondering, if not before now, about things like building permits and code enforcement. Yes you might well wonder about those things… however we are at the end of our second page in our second installment so we will have to postpone any discussion about the legality of installing this pellet stove for a very long time, substantially longer than we will have to wait to resume conversation on less specific and sensitive details of the installation.

Part III

…What were we talking about? Building permits? No, I don’t think we were talking about that, I don’t think we were talking about that at all. No we were talking about me, my dad, and this pellet stove. You might remember that after moving a pile of clutter, twice, we had cut a hole in the wall, removed a section of a wall stud that was in our way, and banged a hole in an antebellum area chimney. At this point I began to speculate about how healthful it might be for us to pump stove exhaust into the wall and up a chimney that might very well be cracked at ever single joint. My father addressed my concerns by assuring me that he would buy me a really nice carbon-monoxide alarm. He said it with no irony and the utmost concern. It would have been very touching if it wasn’t so fucking hilarious. Next thing we needed to do was mix concrete. Concrete was invented by the Romans, it is what the Coliseum is made out of. The recipe for concrete was guarded by those who knew it and subsequently the fall of the Roman Empire lead to losing the technique of making concrete for a about 1200 years. Something similar happened to glass and acceptable homosexuality, glass was rediscovered 600 years after the fall of the Roman Empire and after 1600 years homosexuals are still striving for acceptance, any day now. It didn’t take 1200 years to rediscover concrete because the exact formula of it is really easy to make, no it is a very precise recipe and even the instructions on a bag of Quick-crete will underline the fact that you need to approach the mixing of concrete with methodical laboratory precision. My father (or should I say I at my father’s insistence, for I did all the actual stirring) mixed concrete in a giant plastic tub that had previously been used to catch rain water. The fact that he refused to take the time to clean all the leaves out of it reinforced my long held opinion that there is literally nothing that he won’t half ass. The instructions call for you to slowly add the concrete into the water until it reaches its proper consistency, dad did not do this. First he poured concrete into the bucket, added water, and then told me to go get a stick to stir it with. I left to find a stick and with my kind of amazing stick finding luck I returned directly. Then I began to mix together a solution which was at once lumpy and watery. As it began to even out dad added more concrete despite my admonition that we had no idea what the actual consistency was because there was still a large unmixed lump at the bottom of the bucket. This process continued for some time, feels like it may have lasted my entire life…

I was not convinced that we had gotten the mix right. In fact I believe my exact words were, “This still isn’t right.” Which did not stop my father from directing me to take the bucket full of concrete into the storage room so that he could begin applying it around the pipe to close the hole in the chimney. After the initial application around the pipe and wedging a couple of bricks to take up some of the negative space in the hole dad told me to go and add more concrete. Which I did… not for the last time. What impressed me most about my father’s method of arriving at something that was more concrete and less dirt soup was the manner by which he left the dirt soup consistency concrete right were he placed it, never thinking to remove it and replace it with anything that would be slightly more like actual concrete. By this method of guess and check we eventually did close the chimney up with the pipe in it in a manner that I feel less uncomfortable with than other sane people might.

At this point we moved cinderblocks into the house and the easiest way to talk about that process is to say that I moved cinderblocks into the house. We set up the cinderblocks so that the stove would have something to stand on and then we went and got the stove. I hate moving things with my father. It isn’t that he is impatient, a poor communicator of what he envisions happening, or a person lacking any understanding of physics, geometry, or spatial relationships. It is that he is all of those things at the same time. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that as he loses his patience his ability to communicate what he is trying to accomplish and his ability to discern what is actually possible in a physical sense also become worse. As we set out to move the stove from the back of the truck onto the dolly the only question I had was how he wanted the stove oriented when we finally put it on the dolly. This was complicated by his use of words like “front” and “top” to refer to the sides of the large black non-descript cube that I had never seen before and, at the time, I still had not seen because it was dark. You might ask why we would move a large black cube in the dark and I would refer you back to previous comments made about my father and his irrational fear of the neighbors. Ambiguity continued until I began questioning my father like he was a hostile witness. “This” and I placed my hand on the side facing me “is the front?”
“Yes, no. the front is the other side.”
“So this is the back?”
“No.”
And so on… until he got so pissed that he dragged the thing off the back of the truck and nearly dropped it on the ground. I am shamed faced to say it but the actual installation of the stove went rather swimmingly after this point. The pipes fitted together nicely. There was no back draft of smoke coming out of the chimney and all was right with the world. The next day Dad even came home with a brand spanking new carbon-monoxide alarm for my room, yep Christmas comes early to little Matty MacVane.

But of course the installation of a pellet stove is just the beginning of any pellet stove involvement one might have. Once the thing is hooked up and plugged in there is the endless process of feeding the beast. There are forty pound bags of pellets to be carried into the house, which I prefer to carry three at a time. The weight is less of an issue than trying to navigate the tight corridors, piles of precariously stacked clutter, and other obstacles that have been erected between the truck and the stove. If I can cut the number of trips from the truck to the stove from 3 to 2 I will definitely carry an extra forty pounds. Once the bags of pellets are within arms reach of the stove, the pellet hopper has to be filled and kept full and for this purpose I make two or three trips down to the storage room between the hours of midnight and six in the morning. It was on the second day of the stove being installed that I went downstairs at 3:00 AM and encountered my father just as he was entering the living room. We conversed and found that we were both on our way to the pellet stove so we decided to accompany one another in our travels. Upon our arrival in the storage room we found that the stove was not working. An aside: I have long been of the opinion that, really, the chief virtue of a woodstove is that it is of itself. It is neither electrical nor plumbing. The things that can go wrong and render a woodstove useless are minimal. The chimney can become obstructed but really other than that a woodstove, providing you have wood, oxygen, and an ignition source, will always work. If the power is out, the woodstove will work. If the pipes freeze the woodstove will work. Global fossil fuel Armageddon? If you have an ax, a woodstove, and a strong back you will be able to watch the fall of civilization from the warm comfort of your heavily fortified living room. Apparently those who designed the pellet stove did not care about anything I just said. The woodstove is electrical… I have no idea why. It has an electrical igniter which may or may not be a completely stupid idea. And it has an electric auger that feeds the pellets into the stove, which is definitely a stupid idea. It would take nothing to make an auger that is not electric but apparently no one has seen their way clear to that yet. Which is weird because if you were to type “pellet stove auger” into Google, Google will helpfully suggest the addition of one of the following words or phrases; jam, jammed, broken, stuck, not working, won’t turn, problem, or giant piece of shit, so the failures of the electric auger are well documented. So yeah in our particular circumstances the auger was indeed jammed, there was a jam, a problems of sorts, in so much as it was not working and wouldn’t turn because it was stuck resulting from the fact that it was a giant piece of shit. My father’s greatly diminished patience drops to nothing at around 3 in the morning and more to the point when something is not functioning the way it ought to be his patience appears very much in deficit. Which was a very long way of saying that dad was pissed. Just really angry. The first thing we did was shovel all the pellets out of the hopper so that we could gain access to the auger. Once the hopper was empty dad began working in grand primate fashion with a butter knife trying to loosen any stuck pellets from the auger’s train. If you have ever seen a monkey use a stick to get ants out of an ant hill it looked a lot like that, with the exception that the monkey in the ant hill situation normally does not look angry to the point of being deranged. I don’t know where the vacuum came from but it certainly was there and I was called upon to use it to suck loose pellets out of the way of the auger. Having never used the mysterious room-of-requirement disappearing-reappearing vacuum it took me a moment to find the on-button. I found the on-button with in a minute but in that minute my father watched me with a look of disgust and contempt that only the truly irrational angry can convey. Having found the on-button I discovered that the vacuum was not plugged in and I handed the cord to my father because the only outlet accessible to me was already occupied by the stove plug and the lamp, which I have spoken about before and will revisit presently. There was, I believe, with the same childlike belief that one might have in the healing and beautiful spirit of Christmas, another outlet behind the 34 remaining Corona boxes but now was not the time to try and find it. Dad took the plug and then complained about the fact that I couldn’t make the vacuum run without plugging it into the wall, a skill that he evidently thought I should have developed at some point. Then he complained about the fact that I was down checking the stove at the same time when he was waking up to check the stove, which was a problem that I could complain about as well but didn’t because I am not crazy. It was at this moment when dad’s rage was at its zenith, while he had the vacuum cord in one hand and the faulty lamp in the other and was simultaneously berating me about even being there, that the filament in the light bulb finally broke. Now we were standing in the dark…

Part IV

…When we last saw our heroes they were standing in the dark (which is in fact something that you can't see, it is a really unimpressive visual even in your mind's eye. Imagine two guys standing in the dark... Okay now imagine there are three of them and a clown and a dragon and a wizard and a set of identical twins and a double amputee painting an exact replica of Mark Rothko's "Yellow and Orange" with his feet. You'll notice the latter imagining is not significantly more visually interesting than the former because it is fucking dark and you can't see any of that interesting shit). One of our heroes is fuming and monumentally pissed about being in the dark and the other is stifling a laugh because the first is monumentally pissed about being in the dark. The moment the light bulb filament broke I left the storage room. One might wonder how I was able to extricate myself from the cluttered room without the use of my eyes. Yes you might well wonder about that. It is one of my superpowers; buoyancy, warmth, strength, being able to walk around in the dark without bumping into anything. Unlike the first three powers which I have discussed the ability to walk around in the dark is not a product of me being really fat. It is just something that I have worked on quite a bit in my life. I grew up in a large dark old folk’s home. I currently live in a large dark house. I’ve had ample practice. By the time dad yelled at me to get out of his way so that he could leave the storage room I was already seventy feet down the hall turning on the nearest available light. You may wonder how my father missed the fact that I had walked away from him in the darkness. Indeed you may be curious on that point. I don’t make a lot of sound when I walk. It defies expectation but it is true, I am extremely stealthy. I move through the silky blackness of the dark with the silent strength, grace and confidence of a jungle cat. So on and so forth. Dad went in search of a light bulb but I knew there were light bulbs on top of one of the stacks of Corona boxes, but underneath a foot and a half of loose paper, in the storage room and before dad returned I had screwed one into the lamp and another into one of the empty sockets in the ceiling. I suppose I could have stopped dad from going off on his own but at this point I thought we might need a break from one another. I plugged in the vacuum and used it to remove the pellets that were stuck down in the auger. Dad came back into the room with a light bulb in his hand and demonstrated the kind of dissatisfaction that only a person who has completed a successful though ultimately unnecessary errand can show. He got back to work with the butter knife now practically stabbing at the auger while I vacuumed up the pellets that he was knocking loose. When the auger appeared complete unobstructed dad turned the stove back on but we found that still the auger would not turn. Dad fiddled with the control panel on the side of the stove but still the auger would not move. Dad then decided that the best thing to do was to use the butter knife as a pry bar and see if he could induce the auger to move. This was a resounding failure and dad concluded that the stove had “Shit the bed”, a colloquialism that the MacVane’s retain from their days as elder care providers. This is the time when I decided to actually try and get the thing to work. You may wonder, and you do that frequently I notice, why I was not trying to get the thing to work before and the reason for this is that any efforts I might make before the stove was declared utterly un-functioning would inevitably be sited as contributing to the stove breaking. Indeed, in subsequent retellings of the story my father would definitely eliminate any other possible causes of the malfunction. Nothing has ever “just broke” with Don MacVane. People break things and my father has a comprehensive list, on which his name does not appear, of everyone who has ever broken anything belonging to him.

We are close to the end of our tale so I will take a brief moment to describe the penultimate example of how people, not my father, break things belonging to my father. We were in the woods one day cutting wood. We had been frequently in the woods cutting wood during the period in which this story occurs. During our many trips into the woods, because of the use of the tractor to move firewood from where we were cutting to where the truck was located, a large mud hole had developed along the tote road. My father wished to address this problem and came up with the idea of laying logs into the mud hole to give the tractor something solid to move over. The success of this plan as well as the danger actually presented by the mud hole were very dubious things in my estimation but when dad gets the bit in his teeth about something I find it is best to keep my mouth shut. Dad cut several logs and we placed them behind the bucket on the tractor. Your John Deere tractor is not meant to have a load placed behind the bucket. It is not designed with that at all in mind. This is evinced by the fact that the arms connecting the bucket to the rest of the tractor are covered in tubes carrying hydraulic fluid to and from the bucket. But it wasn’t my tractor and if dad wants to use it the wrong fucking way who am I, OH FOR THE LOVE OF GOD who am I, to tell him that he is going to break his tractor? His son, his frequent companion, someone who has repeatedly forewarned him about courses of action that any sane human being and quite a few dolphins could recognize as being doomed from inception, someone who has seen what ill-shapen fruit springs from the diseased orchard of Don MacVane’s plans, but I digress excessively. The short version of this story ends with the bucket of the tractor not working because a hydraulic coupling broke because we put six hundred pounds of logs where they weren’t suppose to go. Whose fault was this? It was mine because when we were using the tractor in a way that was antithetical to its design I wasn’t careful enough. There is apparently a right way and a wrong way to do something that you aren’t suppose to do in the first place and obviously I had done it in the wrong way. This was the first time that I told my father, “You can’t half ass something enough to make it a whole ass.” In case you are wondering, and I am sure you are not, the land bridge he made over the mud hole didn’t work either. Against my advice, for in this instance I deigned to give my opinion, dad had laid the logs into the mud so that the length of each log was perpendicular to the course of the road. He placed round logs into slippery mud and made a tractor treadmill. The tractor wheels would spin, the logs would spin, the tractor would go nowhere.

Back to early morning repairs on the pellet stove. A stove which does not work cannot work less so I felt at ease with rolling the dice to see if I could fix it. Step one of fixing the stove: Unplug it. Step two of fixing the stove: Plug it back in. The auger began to turn and the train carrying the thought that the stove was fixed and the train carrying the thought that I am a smart ass who would benefit greatly from a good yelling at collided all over my dad’s face. I dumped a bunch of pellets into the stove and told dad to wake me if he had any more trouble. Since this first epic battle with the stove there have been several others and they have come to fit very snuggly into my everyday life. Having something that breaks constantly in your life gives it a soupcon of unpredictability and adventure, which is quite diverting.

I am so happy this “two page and publish rule” has panned out. For the first time since July, I feel as if I was able to write something that I am not completely disgusted by. My constant readers may look forward to my upcoming blog about the 150th anniversary of South Carolina trying and failing to leave the Union, which should appear in the early morning of December 20th, my non-cynical non-denominational celebratory Christmas blog due out on the 24th, and my post New Years Eve apology blog which will be written as soon as I know who I have reason to apologize to for transgression committed during my New Years Eve bender; late afternoon on the 1st, early morning on the 2nd at the latest. Until next time, may the spirit of the season be with you all. XOXOXOX, Matthew

Part IV

2010-12-17T01:35:00.006-05:00

Part IV

…When we last saw our heroes they were standing in the dark (which is in fact something that you can't see, it is a really unimpressive visual even in your mind's eye. Imagine two guys standing in the dark... Okay now imagine there are three of them and a clown and a dragon and a wizard and a set of identical twins and a double amputee painting an exact replica of Mark Rothko's "Yellow and Orange" with his feet. You'll notice the latter imagining is not significantly more visually interesting than the former because it is fucking dark and you can't see any of that interesting shit). One of our heroes is fuming and monumentally pissed about being in the dark and the other is stifling a laugh because the first is monumentally pissed about being in the dark. The moment the light bulb filament broke I left the storage room. One might wonder how I was able to extricate myself from the cluttered room without the use of my eyes. Yes you might well wonder about that. It is one of my superpowers; buoyancy, warmth, strength, being able to walk around in the dark without bumping into anything. Unlike the first three powers which I have discussed the ability to walk around in the dark is not a product of me being really fat. It is just something that I have worked on quite a bit in my life. I grew up in a large dark old folk’s home. I currently live in a large dark house. I’ve had ample practice. By the time dad yelled at me to get out of his way so that he could leave the storage room I was already seventy feet down the hall turning on the nearest available light. You may wonder how my father missed the fact that I had walked away from him in the darkness. Indeed you may be curious on that point. I don’t make a lot of sound when I walk. It defies expectation but it is true, I am extremely stealthy. I move through the silky blackness of the dark with the silent strength, grace and confidence of a jungle cat. So on and so forth. Dad went in search of a light bulb but I knew there were light bulbs on top of one of the stacks of Corona boxes, but underneath a foot and a half of loose paper, in the storage room and before dad returned I had screwed one into the lamp and another into one of the empty sockets in the ceiling. I suppose I could have stopped dad from going off on his own but at this point I thought we might need a break from one another. I plugged in the vacuum and used it to remove the pellets that were stuck down in the auger. Dad came back into the room with a light bulb in his hand and demonstrated the kind of dissatisfaction that only a person who has completed a successful though ultimately unnecessary errand can show. He got back to work with the butter knife now practically stabbing at the auger while I vacuumed up the pellets that he was knocking loose. When the auger appeared complete unobstructed dad turned the stove back on but we found that still the auger would not turn. Dad fiddled with the control panel on the side of the stove but still the auger would not move. Dad then decided that the best thing to do was to use the butter knife as a pry bar and see if he could induce the auger to move. This was a resounding failure and dad concluded that the stove had “Shit the bed”, a colloquialism that the MacVane’s retain from their days as elder care providers. This is the time when I decided to actually try and get the thing to work. You may wonder, and you do that frequently I notice, why I was not trying to get the thing to work before and the reason for this is that any efforts I might make before the stove was declared utterly un-functioning would inevitably be sited as contributing to the stove breaking. Indeed, in subsequent retellings of the story my father would definitely eliminate any other possible causes of the malfunction. Nothing has ever “just broke” with Don MacVane. People break things and my father has a comprehensive list, on which his name does not appear, of everyone who has ever broken anything belonging to him.

We are close to the end of our tale so I will take a brief moment to describe the penultimate example of how people, not my father, break things belonging to my father. We were in the woods one day cutting wood. We had been frequently in the woods cutting wood during the period in which this story occurs. During our many trips into the woods, because of the use of the tractor to move firewood from where we were cutting to where the truck was located, a large mud hole had developed along the tote road. My father wished to address this problem and came up with the idea of laying logs into the mud hole to give the tractor something solid to move over. The success of this plan as well as the danger actually presented by the mud hole were very dubious things in my estimation but when dad gets the bit in his teeth about something I find it is best to keep my mouth shut. Dad cut several logs and we placed them behind the bucket on the tractor. Your John Deere tractor is not meant to have a load placed behind the bucket. It is not designed with that at all in mind. This is evinced by the fact that the arms connecting the bucket to the rest of the tractor are covered in tubes carrying hydraulic fluid to and from the bucket. But it wasn’t my tractor and if dad wants to use it the wrong fucking way who am I, OH FOR THE LOVE OF GOD who am I, to tell him that he is going to break his tractor? His son, his frequent companion, someone who has repeatedly forewarned him about courses of action that any sane human being and quite a few dolphins could recognize as being doomed from inception, someone who has seen what ill-shapen fruit springs from the diseased orchard of Don MacVane’s plans, but I digress excessively. The short version of this story ends with the bucket of the tractor not working because a hydraulic coupling broke because we put six hundred pounds of logs where they weren’t suppose to go. Whose fault was this? It was mine because when we were using the tractor in a way that was antithetical to its design I wasn’t careful enough. There is apparently a right way and a wrong way to do something that you aren’t suppose to do in the first place and obviously I had done it in the wrong way. This was the first time that I told my father, “You can’t half ass something enough to make it a whole ass.” In case you are wondering, and I am sure you are not, the land bridge he made over the mud hole didn’t work either. Against my advice, for in this instance I deigned to give my opinion, dad had laid the logs into the mud so that the length of each log was perpendicular to the course of the road. He placed round logs into slippery mud and made a tractor treadmill. The tractor wheels would spin, the logs would spin, the tractor would go nowhere.

Back to early morning repairs on the pellet stove. A stove which does not work cannot work less so I felt at ease with rolling the dice to see if I could fix it. Step one of fixing the stove: Unplug it. Step two of fixing the stove: Plug it back in. The auger began to turn and the train carrying the thought that the stove was fixed and the train carrying the thought that I am a smart ass who would benefit greatly from a good yelling at collided all over my dad’s face. I dumped a bunch of pellets into the stove and told dad to wake me if he had any more trouble. Since this first epic battle with the stove there have been several others and they have come to fit very snuggly into my everyday life. Having something that breaks constantly in your life gives it a soupcon of unpredictability and adventure, which is quite diverting.

I am so happy this “two page and publish rule” has panned out. For the first time since July, I feel as if I was able to write something that I am not completely disgusted by. My constant readers may look forward to my upcoming blog about the 150th anniversary of South Carolina trying and failing to leave the Union, which should appear in the early morning of December 20th, my non-cynical non-denominational celebratory Christmas blog due out on the 24th, and my post New Years Eve apology blog which will be written as soon as I know who I have reason to apologize to for transgression committed during my New Years Eve bender; late afternoon on the 1st, early morning on the 2nd at the latest. Until next time, may the spirit of the season be with you all. XOXOXOX, Matthew

We are close to the end of our tale so I will take a brief moment to describe the penultimate example of how people, not my father, break things belonging to my father. We were in the woods one day cutting wood. We had been frequently in the woods cutting wood during the period in which this story occurs. During our many trips into the woods, because of the use of the tractor to move firewood from where we were cutting to where the truck was located, a large mud hole had developed along the tote road. My father wished to address this problem and came up with the idea of laying logs into the mud hole to give the tractor something solid to move over. The success of this plan as well as the danger actually presented by the mud hole were very dubious things in my estimation but when dad gets the bit in his teeth about something I find it is best to keep my mouth shut. Dad cut several logs and we placed them behind the bucket on the tractor. Your John Deere tractor is not meant to have a load placed behind the bucket. It is not designed with that at all in mind. This is evinced by the fact that the arms connecting the bucket to the rest of the tractor are covered in tubes carrying hydraulic fluid to and from the bucket. But it wasn’t my tractor and if dad wants to use it the wrong fucking way who am I, Oh God who am I, to tell him that he is going to break his tractor? His son, his frequent companion, someone who has repeatedly forewarned him about courses of action that any sane human being and quite a few dolphins could recognize as being doomed from inception, someone who has seen what ill-shapen fruit springs from the diseased orchard of Don MacVane’s plans, but I digress excessively. The short version of this story ends with the bucket of the tractor not working because a hydraulic coupling broke because we put six hundred pounds of logs where they weren’t suppose to go. Whose fault was this? It was mine because when we were using the tractor in a way that was antithetical to its design I wasn’t careful enough. There is apparently a right way and a wrong way to do something that you aren’t suppose to do in the first place and obviously I had done it in the wrong way. This was the first time that I told my father, “You can’t half ass something enough to make it a whole ass.” In case you are wondering, and I am sure you are not, the land bridge he made over the mud hole didn’t work either. Against my advice, for in this instance I deigned to give my opinion, dad had laid the logs into the mud so that the length of each log was perpendicular to the course of the road. He placed round logs into slippery mud and made a tractor treadmill. The tractor wheels would spin, the logs would spin, the tractor would go nowhere.

Back to early morning repairs on the pellet stove. A stove which does not work cannot work less so I felt at ease with rolling the dice to see if I could fix it. Step one of fixing the stove: Unplug it. Step two of fixing the stove: Plug it back in. The auger began to turn and the train carrying the thought that the stove was fixed and the train carrying the thought that I am a smart ass who would benefit greatly from a good yelling at collided all over my dad’s face. I dumped a bunch of pellets into the stove and told dad to wake me if he had any more trouble. Since this first epic battle with the stove there have been several others and they have come to fit very snuggly into my everyday life. Having something that breaks constantly in your life gives it a soupcon of unpredictability and adventure, which is quite diverting.

I am so happy this “two page and publish rule” has panned out. For the first time since July, I feel as if I was able to write something that I am not completely disgusted by. My constant readers may look forward to my upcoming blog about the 150th anniversary of South Carolina trying and failing to leave the Union, which should appear in the early morning of December 20th, my non-cynical non-denominational celebratory Christmas blog due out on the 24th, and my post New Years Eve apology blog which will be written as soon as I know who I have reason to apologize to for transgression committed during my New Years Eve bender; late afternoon on the 1st, early morning on the 2nd at the latest. Until next time, may the spirit of the season be with you all. XOXOXOX, Matthew

Part III

2010-12-16T23:33:00.003-05:00

Part III

…What were we talking about? Building permits? No, I don’t think we were talking about that, I don’t think we were talking about that at all. No we were talking about me, my dad, and this pellet stove. You might remember that after moving a pile of clutter, twice, we had cut a hole in the wall, removed a section of a wall stud that was in our way, and banged a hole in an antebellum area chimney. At this point I began to speculate about how healthful it might be for us to pump stove exhaust into the wall and up a chimney that might very well be cracked at ever single joint. My father addressed my concerns by assuring me that he would buy me a really nice carbon-monoxide alarm. He said it with no irony and the utmost concern. It would have been very touching if it wasn’t so fucking hilarious. Next thing we needed to do was mix concrete. Concrete was invented by the Romans, it is what the Coliseum is made out of. The recipe for concrete was guarded by those who knew it and subsequently the fall of the Roman Empire lead to losing the technique of making concrete for a about 1200 years. Something similar happened to glass and acceptable homosexuality, glass was rediscovered 600 years after the fall of the Roman Empire and after 1600 years homosexuals are still striving for acceptance, any day now. It didn’t take 1200 years to rediscover concrete because the exact formula of it is really easy to make, no it is a very precise recipe and even the instructions on a bag of Quick-crete will underline the fact that you need to approach the mixing of concrete with methodical laboratory precision. My father (or should I say I at my father’s insistence, for I did all the actual stirring) mixed concrete in a giant plastic tub that had previously been used to catch rain water. The fact that he refused to take the time to clean all the leaves out of it reinforced my long held opinion that there is literally nothing that he won’t half ass. The instructions call for you to slowly add the concrete into the water until it reaches its proper consistency, dad did not do this. First he poured concrete into the bucket, added water, and then told me to go get a stick to stir it with. I left to find a stick and with my kind of amazing stick finding luck I returned directly. Then I began to mix together a solution which was at once lumpy and watery. As it began to even out dad added more concrete despite my admonition that we had no idea what the actual consistency was because there was still a large unmixed lump at the bottom of the bucket. This process continued for some time, feels like it may have lasted my entire life…

I was not convinced that we had gotten the mix right. In fact I believe my exact words were, “This still isn’t right.” Which did not stop my father from directing me to take the bucket full of concrete into the storage room so that he could begin applying it around the pipe to close the hole in the chimney. After the initial application around the pipe and wedging a couple of bricks to take up some of the negative space in the hole dad told me to go and add more concrete. Which I did… not for the last time. What impressed me most about my father’s method of arriving at something that was more concrete and less dirt soup was the manner by which he left the dirt soup consistency concrete right were he placed it, never thinking to remove it and replace it with anything that would be slightly more like actual concrete. By this method of guess and check we eventually did close the chimney up with the pipe in it in a manner that I feel less uncomfortable with than other sane people might.

At this point we moved cinderblocks into the house and the easiest way to talk about that process is to say that I moved cinderblocks into the house. We set up the cinderblocks so that the stove would have something to stand on and then we went and got the stove. I hate moving things with my father. It isn’t that he is impatient, a poor communicator of what he envisions happening, or a person lacking any understanding of physics, geometry, or spatial relationships. It is that he is all of those things at the same time. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that as he loses his patience his ability to communicate what he is trying to accomplish and his ability to discern what is actually possible in a physical sense also become worse. As we set out to move the stove from the back of the truck onto the dolly the only question I had was how he wanted the stove oriented when we finally put it on the dolly. This was complicated by his use of words like “front” and “top” to refer to the sides of the large black non-descript cube that I had never seen before and, at the time, I still had not seen because it was dark. You might ask why we would move a large black cube in the dark and I would refer you back to previous comments made about my father and his irrational fear of the neighbors. Ambiguity continued until I began questioning my father like he was a hostile witness. “This” and I placed my hand on the side facing me “is the front?”
“Yes, no. the front is the other side.”
“So this is the back?”
“No.”
And so on… until he got so pissed that he dragged the thing off the back of the truck and nearly dropped it on the ground. I am shamed faced to say it but the actual installation of the stove went rather swimmingly after this point. The pipes fitted together nicely. There was no back draft of smoke coming out of the chimney and all was right with the world. The next day Dad even came home with a brand spanking new carbon-monoxide alarm for my room, yep Christmas comes early to little Matty MacVane.

But of course the installation of a pellet stove is just the beginning of any pellet stove involvement one might have. Once the thing is hooked up and plugged in there is the endless process of feeding the beast. There are forty pound bags of pellets to be carried into the house, which I prefer to carry three at a time. The weight is less of an issue than trying to navigate the tight corridors, piles of precariously stacked clutter, and other obstacles that have been erected between the truck and the stove. If I can cut the number of trips from the truck to the stove from 3 to 2 I will definitely carry an extra forty pounds. Once the bags of pellets are within arms reach of the stove, the pellet hopper has to be filled and kept full and for this purpose I make two or three trips down to the storage room between the hours of midnight and six in the morning. It was on the second day of the stove being installed that I went downstairs at 3:00 AM and encountered my father just as he was entering the living room. We conversed and found that we were both on our way to the pellet stove so we decided to accompany one another in our travels. Upon our arrival in the storage room we found that the stove was not working. An aside: I have long been of the opinion that, really, the chief virtue of a woodstove is that it is of itself. It is neither electrical nor plumbing. The things that can go wrong and render a woodstove useless are minimal. The chimney can become obstructed but really other than that a woodstove, providing you have wood, oxygen, and an ignition source, will always work. If the power is out, the woodstove will work. If the pipes freeze the woodstove will work. Global fossil fuel Armageddon? If you have an ax, a woodstove, and a strong back you will be able to watch the fall of civilization from the warm comfort of your heavily fortified living room. Apparently those who designed the pellet stove did not care about anything I just said. The woodstove is electrical… I have no idea why. It has an electrical igniter which may or may not be a completely stupid idea. And it has an electric auger that feeds the pellets into the stove, which is definitely a stupid idea. It would take nothing to make an auger that is not electric but apparently no one has seen their way clear to that yet. Which is weird because if you were to type “pellet stove auger” into Google, Google will helpfully suggest the addition of one of the following words or phrases; jam, jammed, broken, stuck, not working, won’t turn, problem, or giant piece of shit, so the failures of the electric auger are well documented. So yeah in our particular circumstances the auger was indeed jammed, there was a jam, a problems of sorts, in so much as it was not working and wouldn’t turn because it was stuck resulting from the fact that it was a giant piece of shit. My father’s greatly diminished patience drops to nothing at around 3 in the morning and more to the point when something is not functioning the way it ought to be his patience appears very much in deficit. Which was a very long way of saying that dad was pissed. Just really angry. The first thing we did was shovel all the pellets out of the hopper so that we could gain access to the auger. Once the hopper was empty dad began working in grand primate fashion with a butter knife trying to loosen any stuck pellets from the auger’s train. If you have ever seen a monkey use a stick to get ants out of an ant hill it looked a lot like that, with the exception that the monkey in the ant hill situation normally does not look angry to the point of being deranged. I don’t know where the vacuum came from but it certainly was there and I was called upon to use it to suck loose pellets out of the way of the auger. Having never used the mysterious room-of-requirement disappearing-reappearing vacuum it took me a moment to find the on-button. I found the on-button with in a minute but in that minute my father watched me with a look of disgust and contempt that only the truly irrational angry can convey. Having found the on-button I discovered that the vacuum was not plugged in and I handed the cord to my father because the only outlet accessible to me was already occupied by the stove plug and the lamp, which I have spoken about before and will revisit presently. There was, I believe, with the same childlike belief that one might have in the healing and beautiful spirit of Christmas, another outlet behind the 34 remaining Corona boxes but now was not the time to try and find it. Dad took the plug and then complained about the fact that I couldn’t make the vacuum run without plugging it into the wall, a skill that he evidently thought I should have developed at some point. Then he complained about the fact that I was down checking the stove at the same time when he was waking up to check the stove, which was a problem that I could complain about as well but didn’t because I am not crazy. It was at this moment when dad’s rage was at its zenith, while he had the vacuum cord in one hand and the faulty lamp in the other and was simultaneously berating me about even being there, that the filament in the light bulb finally broke. Now we were standing in the dark…

Part II

2010-12-16T00:15:00.004-05:00

Part II

…And we’re back. I was talking about this pellet stove. I’d hoped rumors of the pellet stove were unsubstantiated. They were not, our worst fears were realized. Dad, who was excited and deeply involved not just with this current pellet stove but with all things pellet stove, began the process by which the pellet stove would enter our lives by telling me to clear a space in one of the many storage rooms for the pellet stove to go. At this point the plan was to cut a hole in an exterior wall to vent the stove. So naturally when I entered the room, which at one time was a bedroom, the furniture, which would otherwise denote a bedroom( bed, bureau, nightstand, ect.), was covered with mail, newspapers, miscellaneous papers, boxes, including 49 Corona 12 pack boxes with empty bottles in them, a wheelchair for no reason, a bed frame, 8 old windowpanes, my grandfather’s death certificate pinned between the wall and an unattached headboard, a lamp from my apartment in Portland that I abandoned in this first floor room rather than take it upstairs, some milk crates, some folding chairs, five or six buckets of paint, some empty medical oxygen tanks, a smattering of t-shirts and sweatshirts, and a very nice Radar O’Reilly style winter hat that I bought for my father several Christmases ago that I have never seen him wear… this isn’t a sentence whose structure can be understood any longer. New sentence! My plan was to move everything away from the exterior wall so that we would have a place to put the stove. Fair enough. Since most of the mess was on top of large furniture I decided the easiest way to accomplish the move would just be to push the large furniture with its accompanying clutter away from the exterior wall. Did I push the large furniture? Yes I did. Pushing heavy things, along with floating and being warm, is one of the things I am good at. Did stuff fall off the large furniture when I pushed it? Boy howdy did it ever. Did it make a real difference in the overall appearance of the room? Naw not really. After creating a space large enough to accommodate the pellet stove I went about my other business, which these days is mostly filling out job applications online and… just saw some video of some young shirtless male acrobats performing for the pope, really weird, not a good visual at all. Lost my train of thought but it doesn’t matter because nothing good was going to come after “and”.

The day after my ad hoc reorganization of the room where the pellet stove was going to go my father came home and told me that he thought a better idea than cutting a hole in the exterior wall to vent the pellet stove would be to cut a hole in the interior wall, behind which there was a 150 year old chimney that we could tap into. In the immortal words of Peter Venkman, “I love this plan, I am excited to be a part of it. Let’s do it.” I revisited the scene of my moving triumph to find that my previous successful though currently undesirable work had placed me in a position that was significantly less conducive to moving than the previous one had been. I blazed a trail through the clutter and was able to get purchase of the intact bed with its pile of clutter on top. I pushed the bed back against the opposing wall and made other adjustment as I could. I found that in order to have any hope of making ingress for the stove I would have to move 15 of the 49 Corona boxes into the hallway. These lucky 15 boxes were later moved to the back of my father’s dump trunk and made the journey to Farmington, where the latest in a long string of Igor like helpers, would throw them in the dumpster. If you are curious why I didn’t place all 49 boxes in the dump truck the reasons are three fold. First, I would hate to overfill the dumpster. Second, at some point during the unloading of the 49 Corona boxes my father’s tenants in Farmington as well as his neighbors might begin to suspect that my father is a raging alcoholic. Although once you’ve unloaded 15 boxes the implication has already been made. Third, I am lazy; you know just fuck it.

Despite my laziness I did clear an area for the pellet stove although much of the things which wound up falling on the ground during the first move had to be reorganized and re-piled and, because of this, the subtle organizational scheme that my father swears to Christ actually existed was undermined and now “I can’t find anything in here.” Seriously, what the fuck can I do right?

The next step in this process was actually the fun part. The missing tiles from the recessed ceiling made it very easy to find where the chimney was and all we needed to do now was knock a big hole in the wall with a hammer. I am aces when it comes to knocking a hole in the wall with a hammer. We found the chimney located right where it should be so my skills at knocking a hole in a wall were only briefly necessary but there would be more fun with hammers later. I should mention that my house has more rooms than working light bulbs. It is a curious position to be in. Big cold house with no lights, it is like something out of Dickens; I’m Pip and my dad is Ms. Havisham. This storage room when I first began working in there had no working lights. It had three empty light sockets in the ceiling and one with a light bulb in it that did not work. So I went and found a lamp. The lamp was probably a fire hazard as it seemed to work or not depending primarily on whether or not it likes you. It doesn’t like dad. Whenever dad touches the lamp it goes out. It isn’t a touch-lamp, it has a switch, it is just really broken. It is funny to watch dad work with the lamp because he is extremely impatient and when it flickers he gets pissed at it and then at me and that is enjoyable to watch.

After locating the chimney we found that there was a wall stud running down the middle of it which would prevent us from sticking a pipe in there. That problem was easily solved by a sawzall, which in fact saws not all but most. Then we had to knock some bricks out of the chimney and luckily I know a guy who is pretty good at making holes with a hammer. Next we inserted the pipe in the hole we created. At this point you might be wondering, if not before now, about things like building permits and code enforcement. Yes you might well wonder about those things… however we are at the end of our second page in our second installment so we will have to postpone any discussion about the legality of installing this pellet stove for a very long time, substantially longer than we will have to wait to resume conversation on less specific and sensitive details of the installation.

Insert Creatively Ironic Title Here Part I

2010-12-15T21:00:00.003-05:00

Return

2010-11-09T07:12:00.001-05:00

“Pull up your head off the floor, come up screaming.
Cry out for everything you ever might have wanted.”

Every time I sit down to write I find that I don’t have the endurance to make it to the end of what I am trying to say. My space bar is broken. So writing anything of any appreciable length is a lot like running a marathon with a pebble in your shoe. Maybe it is because I don’t know what I am trying to say. Maybe it is because I don’t really have anything to say right now. The seasons have changed, the leaves are mostly off the trees. I sleep all day. I don’t know what to do with myself anymore. My friend is a Russian Major and he said he had to write a story in Russian for one of his classes. I told him that would be easy, just write the Russian word for despair, over and over again, for about five hundred pages. Then in smaller type write the Russian word for hope. Then right another five hundred pages of despair. Dostoevsky would have called it genius.

The most recent remake of King Kong was horrible. There was one redeeming moment in it. The cabin boy of the boat that is going to Skull Island is given a copy of Heart of Darkness thinking that it would be an entertaining sea adventure. Later as he is engrossed in the book he picks his head up and says to the man who loaned it to him, “It’s not an adventure story, is it?” No it’s not. Watership Down is not a story about cute rabbits. As of late I have been feeling like the well-fed rabbits in the warren with the snares. I am not sure what the snares are yet but I believe that I may have one around my throat. I’ve been so tired. I am so afraid. I don’t think I’ve ever been this afraid before. Then again I’ve never much wanted anything for myself. Don’t be scared for/of me. This might just be what I sound like when my unexercised will begins to slowly creak into motion.

My friend Billy asked me not too long ago if I believed in heaven and I said I don’t. Heaven doesn’t really make much sense to me. I don’t know why I would want to spend eternity anywhere doing anything. Life is so brief but even it is often boring and tedious. I can’t imagine how boring and tedious heaven would be. Would I have a job in heaven? Would I have appointments to keep and people to see and goals to achieve? I don’t know what would be worse, an eternity filled with busy work or an eternity filled with nothing to do. Neither is preferable to there just being a warm nothing on the other side of death.

I am sorry it is not funny, although it might be hilarious. Don’t know. The writing is not always what I would have it be but sometimes, almost always if I let it, gives me what I need. I have to shave. I am in court this morning. No return of mine has ever been considered triumphal, but I am back and I will try to write more often.

Happy Birthday To Me!

2010-07-20T04:59:00.000-04:00

Well it has been a long time in between blogs and I must apologize. Life has been getting in the way as of late.

I would like to begin by saying that if you are a ginger you shouldn’t wear Celtic green. Nothing looks worse on a ginger than bright green. Red hair, pasty skin, and freckles naturally clash with green. They also naturally clash with all primary colors. Wear earth tones and move into a deep cave far away from the harsh rays of the unforgiving sun.

Next I would like to say that the directional in your car should be applied before you begin breaking for a turn. Once you have applied your breaks and slowed to twenty miles an hour I have already figured out that you are turning. I have already spilled my beverage on myself, sworn at you, pressed the horn on my steering wheel, rediscovered that it doesn’t work, sworn at the non-working horn, and sworn at you again. The directional should be the first indication that you are turning, not an after thought that you put on after having slowed to a stop immediately before the turn.

Yesterday was my birthday. I turned 28. It was a big day full of lots of excitement. It began, as most days do, at midnight. I was sitting on a retaining wall commiserating with my boss and the other security guards at the campground. There has recently been an employee shake up on the staff of hired goons that patrol the campground. One of the top three goons was fired. Leaving only two goons remaining on staff. Another security guard was hired placing me in the position of being the third best goon on staff. My boss fired my former co-worker after he had called in for the sixth time in three weeks. On the Wednesday after the firing I came in from my two days off and the owner of the campground called me over to his house, which is located on the campground, and asked to speak with me. I was sure someone had turned me in for touching myself under the bridge. Hey, don’t act like you never played with yourself under a bridge when you were suppose to be working. Being a hired goon is lonely work and you do it mostly in the dark and anything you can find to do to pass the time is your own business.*

I pulled up to the boss’s house in my golf cart and my boss was waiting for me on the lawn. My boss believes in Jesus. Not like, “Yeah I believe in Jesus.” But like, “I go to prayer meetings on Wednesday because I can’t go seven days between worshippings of Jesus.” So I pull up and my boss is about to go to his Wednesday prayer meeting so he is wearing a nice pair of pants and a white shirt with a small-embroidered American flag on the chest and he is holding a bible. It was at that moment that I thought that I should really work for a more morally ambiguous group of people. The boss walked over to me and he asked how I was doing and I said fine and then he said, “I just wanted to tell you what happened with Paul (the newly unemployed security guard). I didn’t want you to be influenced by any hearsay without telling you my side of the story.” Gee my boss is a nice guy. He just wanted to explain his position regarding the dismissal of one of my co-workers. He wasn’t going to yell at me about taking trash from home and throwing it into the camp’s dumpsters, or suggestively staring at the teenage girls in their swimsuits, or sneaking cigarettes while I am suppose to be working, or drinking with the campers, or stealing a camper’s dog and tying it up in the woods only to bring it back after it has been reported missing so I can take credit for finding it, or striking children who talk back with my flashlight, or stealing food out of campsites after everyone has gone to bed, or sitting outside peoples tents and listening to their intimate conversations until they say, “Do you hear something? It sounds like someone breathing heavy” and then running into the woods, or my sweating problem, or cracking open the time clock and advancing the numbers so I can leave an hour early.** Needless to say I was relieved. I looked at my boss, square in his honest, guileless face. It was hard to believe that such a simple and good man did exist in the world. I smiled at him, “What happened to Paul? We know what happened to Paul. He didn’t come into work. I was wondering when you were going to fire him. I lost money on betting when he was going to be fired. I had him getting fired two weeks ago in the office pool. If you had sat him down and gave him a stern talking to about his absenteeism and told him that you were going to fire him the next time he called in on some flimsy pretext he wouldn’t have made it five days without calling in again. This is just addition by subtraction. You have nothing to explain to me about why Paul doesn’t work here anymore. I worked with the man and could figure out why he wasn’t here anymore. When I found out he had been fired I was not shocked!” My boss was a little wide-eyed. He thanked me for understanding his position. And I told him we were good before driving away in my golf cart thinking that the day would come when he would call me to his house to discuss the camera that was found in the ladies’ shower but it would not be today.***

I digress. So Josh, the Christian kid that works security with me, the new security guard Ryan, my boss, and I were all hanging around by the entrance at midnight and I turned 28 years old. After a little while the group broke up and my boss headed to bed. He radioed me from inside his house. I picked up my walkie-talkie, “Yes, John?” “It is 12:07, happy birthday Matt.” I went for a walk around the north end of the campground and avoided hassling anyone. Then I went down into the southern quadrant of the campground and met up with Josh who was talking to some people who were still awake and needed to be told to be quiet. This particular group of campers had been to the grounds a few weeks ago and they were pleasant drunks even when I had to hassle them about being quiet and they know my name despite the fact that I don’t know theirs. When I walked up to them they said happy birthday and shook my hand and offered me a drink, which I refused. As a security guard I get offered drinks all the time and I have to refuse. On two separate occasions this week I was offered bribes. Once in the amount of 10 dollars and once in the amount of 20 dollars. I refused both attempts at graft, although in a free market I should be able to take both the 9 dollars an hour I get paid to do my job and the 20 dollars that someone offers me not to do my job. Josh and I stayed for 20 minutes talking with the campers and exchanging anecdotes before heading back to the office. A series of campsite near the office was the home of 16 fathers who had taken 35 kids camping for the weekend. The kids were loud and the fathers were drunk and loud so we went to tell them to be quiet. As we approached the campsite one of the teenage girls on the site told us not to walk where we were walking because they had been having a gum spitting contest. I shined my flashlight at the ground near my feet. Sure enough there was a shit ton of gum just littering the entire area. Wonderful. I stepped gingerly away from the area and then told them that they needed to be quiet. Then my fellow goon and I shared a, “I hate these fucking people” look before departing the area. When the group became loud again we returned to tell them to douse the fire and go to bed for it was long after one in the morning and they had exhausted our patience. Several hours before all this the entire campsite, all 51 people, had gathered at the edge of their campsite to play a practical joke on passers by. They had tied a fishing line to a stuffed animal and when unsuspecting people went to examine the animal they would reel in the stuffed animal thus startling the person involved. I didn’t like this joke because it involved 51 people sitting perfectly still and quiet at the edge of the plaza where the office and security shack is. It was kind of creepy. They were like the birds in the that Alfred Hitchcock movie that I can’t think of the name of right now. They sat there motionless for quite sometime and each time I had to make a pass by them I found it more and more disconcerting. Then while I was on the other side of the plaza from them I got a call over my radio that there was a car driving up the road adjacent to the campground and that the car was honking their horn and shouting obscenities into the campground. It was my job to run across the plaza and get their plate as they passed the entrance. So I started running. That is when the 51 motionless people at the edge of the plaza started laughing at me. Well fuck you is all that I thought and I ran a little faster. I arrived at the road just before the car crested the hill. I stepped out into the road and the vehicle slowed to a stop. I couldn’t read the front plate so I stepped out of the way so they could drive away and I could get a look at the rear plate. The passenger rolled down the window and said, “Fuck you fat man” and drove away. If your license plate number is New Hampshire 240 2612 then I hope you fall down a flight of stairs and lay there for days, unable to get help.

I got off work at 1:50 and I got into my car, which I have named Caroline. I gave it a woman’s name because it is temperamental and inconstant. The transmission doesn’t so much work and most of the time it won’t leave first gear. Plus it is prone to other calamities like a broken fuel pump and a torn break line. I was driving down the road, not doing the speed limit when I was pulled over by the Rochester Police Department. I was only stopped for a few minutes before I was allowed to go on my way with a warning but it is never fun dealing with the police in the middle of the night.

I arrived home, made a sandwich, and watched an installment of the Horatio Hornblower miniseries that is constantly available on You Tube. If you like stories about courage and cunning set against the backdrop of the English Navy during the Napoleonic War then I recommend the Horatio Hornblower miniseries. It is vastly better than Master and Commander plus it is longer by about 12 hours and if you are 28 years old and mired in the gross tediousness that has become your life you are going to want a distraction that lasts more than 2 hours. I went to bed around five in the morning and awoke at 8:30 in the morning. I had promised that I would come listen to my fellow goon preach at the weekly Christian service that is held at the campground. I arrived at the campground and walked into the movie theater that was serving as a church for the morning. Because I was at some point a catholic the first thing I did was get down on my knees and cross myself and move my lips like I was praying. When I had done this for a decent interval I got up and sat in my chair. The service lacked the structure I had come to expect from a catholic mass but it was also extremely short, so it had that going for it. I returned home and watched more Hornblower. When Horatio had again conquered his own self-doubts and frustrated the intentions of the French Navy I decided it was time to get on with the rest of the day.

I got back into Caroline and drove over to Acton to go swimming. I swam out into the middle of Horn Pond and splashed around for a while. I spent sometime floating on my back. I am exceedingly boyant and can float without the use of any extra devices. I swam across the pond and on my way back I got a cramp in my leg. “Oh no” I thought, “I am going to drown because I got a cramp while swimming.” Then I remembered that I float at chest level without moving a muscle so all I had to do was stay still and let the cramp sort itself out, which it did. I am never going to drown, it simply isn’t possible.

I got back into Caroline and drove up to Portland. It was a beautiful drive through Acton, Sanford, Alfred, and Arundle. I got on the turnpike in Biddeford and as soon as I got on 95 I pulled over to the side of the road because Caroline was stuck in first. I turned off the car and waited a moment. Then I started the car threw it into drive and pounded the gas. I felt Caroline go from first to second, from second to third, and finally into fourth I left the shoulder and rejoined traffic. It was a pleasant drive up to Portland and when I got into town I went and visited my friends and former classmates Jason and Kate, who are living in sin on Munjoy Hill. They have a really nice apartment and we discussed life post law school, which is the third most depressing conversation that I had that day. There we were, three lawyers talking about being on food stamps. I had a Popsicle with them and then bid them a fond fair well for it was getting close to four and I had a dinner date with my mother and her friend Debby. Debby has been a fixture in my life since my birth and it was nice to see her. She moved to Ellsworth up by Bar Harbor so I don’t get to see her too often.

We had a nice meal and mom told me about the 28-year-old nurse at the campground where my mother is working as the head nurse and how she is trying to ruin mom’s life. My mother, who is eternally young but still old enough to be the mother of a 29 year old, had taken a job as a nurse at the sleep away camp that my sister is going to this summer. The job has been somewhat more strenuous than was initially advertised. For one she has to manage other nurses. My mom likes being a nurse. She doesn’t like being an administrator. Unfortunately she is too good at being a nurse and has too much experience so she is forced to take a managerial position wherever she goes. She also is in the position of having a roommate for the first time in 18 years and apparently that roommate is a 28-year-old drunken slut. My words, not mom’s. Mom would never say that. Mom just said that her roommate was 28-years-old, was drunk all the time, and like to slut around. She didn’t say that either but it is possible for a person to draw the inference from what mom did say. The alcohol abuse and the constant bringing home of one unfortunate man after another could have been tolerated but apparently mom’s roommate and mom have been engaged in a battle of wills and the roommate has resorted to psychological warfare. As it was told to me, my mother’s camera went missing, an exhaustive search was mounted and no camera was uncovered, the search continued and the camera turned up in a place that had been searched previously without finding the camera there. The natural implication is that mom’s cabin mate had taken the camera out of spite and brought it back in such a way as to elicit confusion and frustration from my mother. That evil bitch… the roommate not my mother. After mom had finished the story I advised her that when dealing with crazy people the best thing to do is not let it rattle you because then you have already lost the mind game. It was good advice and it was something that I would need to remember several hours later. Big hugs and kisses from mom and Debby and then they went their own way, which I believe included a trip to the Christmas Tree Shop to buy bric-a-bracs.

I stayed behind at The Great Lost Bear, which was my favorite bar when I was in law school and is the thing I miss most consistently now that I don’t live in Portland. If the Bear is my favorite bar then my favorite time to be in the bar is Sunday afternoons when my friend Kristina is working. Kristina is everything that a bartender should be; cheerful, effervescent, empathetic, and she has a bust on her like the prow of one of the frigates from the Horatio Hornblower miniseries. (Sorry Kristina, I wouldn’t mention your substantial endowment but I had that Horatio Hornblower reference kicking around in my head and it wouldn’t go away. I am so ashamed of myself that I decided to make my apology parenthetical instead of an endnote.) Kristina just graduated from law school and she is about to take the bar. Her situation was the basis for the second most depressing conversation of the day. If there is anything more depressing than current lawyers lamenting their career prospects it is a person killing themselves studying for the bar, fighting through all the work they must do and anxiety they must endure, knowing that even if they pass their reward is the opportunity to lament their career prospects. In truth it is tough to characterize any conversation with Kristina as being depressing because she is such a sunny person. Indeed my life simply seems brighter and much more liveable when I am in The Great Lost Bear and Kristina is serving me beer.

At about 7:30 my dad called me and wished me a happy birthday and asked when I would be home. Taking stock of my position I found that I had been drinking in moderation, that I was not feeling drunk, that my motor skills had yet to suffer from the beer that I had drank, and that I would prefer to go home now before the beer got ahead of me and I wound up sleeping in Caroline in the Bear parking lot. Kristina gave me a bill that appeared to have omitted a few beers that I remembered drinking and being happy with my good fortune I tipped 60%. I got into my car and went down Forrest Avenue to get on 95. It was a gorgeous evening and all was right with the world. The sun was setting just as I crossed the Fore River and the sky was a beautiful shade of orange. Caroline had actually managed to find and stay in fourth gear, which was the best birthday present of all. I was so contented with my life that at the toll plaza I paid for the guy behind me. The young man in the new Volvo chased me down and waved thank you though he looked puzzled at why the unshaven fat man in the beat up Chrysler would pony up a dollar for him.

I arrived home a little before nine. My brother pulled into the parking lot just after me and we walked into the house together. I grabbed the leg of a roasted chicken that was in the refrigerator and sat down at the table to eat. John was microwaving a roast beef sandwich that he had brought home. Dad was in his underwear with a half empty beer in one hand and a half full beer in the other. He was having a problem with a tenant and he wanted to expound on the problem to my brother and I, ostensibly to ask for legal advice. I asked if the tenants were perhaps trying to pursue a defense of retaliation against his attempt to evict them.**** At this dad got really pissy and began the process by which he throws a giant fucking fit. John said, “I am not going to play this game with you. I know what game you are playing and I am not going to be any part of it.” It was a bold gambit on John’s part, really, but a cursory understanding of my father and his tantrums would make clear that it was doomed to failure. Dad climbed on to his high horse, which gives him adequate height to climb up on his cross, and he started in on how he had made a lot of sacrifices for us and he needs some legal help and what with two sons who both studied law he should be able to ask for help. Keep in mind that my initial reaction to his stated problem was to ask a question that would help to illuminate the legal terrain so that I could give him competent advice in so much as it is appropriate and legal for me to do so. Keep also in mind that his reaction was to complain that he didn’t know and that he was pissed that I even tried to help him. John came back at dad because John had only taken one years worth of tuition from my father at the beginning of his undergraduate career and that he has since “loaned” my father money in excess of the amount spent on tuition. Dad, like every dead beat I have ever know myself included, became indignant about being reminded of the substantial amount of money that he owed his son and dad could not believe that John would bring up the money now while dad was berating us about the joint uselessness of his two sons. John tried to say that it wasn’t about the money it was about… “You’ll get every cent of that money back! You’ll get every penny!” “Dad I don’t care if you ever pay me back that money it is just that…” “Every penny! You don’t have to worry about…” Dad was so agitated at this moment that I probably could have made him bet me a thousand dollars that John was going to get that money back in some fixed but not short period of time. I would of course win this bet but never receive the money. Dad said that he wasn’t going to talk about anything but the weather with the two of us from now on. Then he stopped yelling. I looked at John, “Hot today.” “Yeah and sunny” “It was cloudy earlier but it really turned out nicely.” “Yeah it was a little humid but not hazy.” “Oh every thing is a big goddamn joke to you two.” And dad began to lament his situation further and John pointed out that all the decisions that lead up to his current situation were made by dad and it certainly wasn’t John’s fault. Dad then said, “Look what you are sitting in. Decisions I made built all this.” Dad pointing out that his decisions had resulted in an empty seventeen-bedroom house, devoid of tenants or any economic viability was not perhaps the endgame he had envisioned in his own mind. My step-mother came into the dining room and complained of the noise and dad apologized and said that from now on we were just going to talk about the weather. John and I again discussed the weather but this just made dad not talk about the weather some more. Stacy came back in and said that we needed to stop and that John and I should go to our rooms. I was indignant because I had not engaged in the arguing much until this point and I was a little upset that dad had to throw one of his tantrums on my birthday but I remember what I had told my mother. Don’t let the crazies rattle you or else you lose the mind game. I went upstairs and my brother and I kibitzed about how crazy my father is; a situation that, according to my brother, has absolutely no impact on his peace of mind or well-being. So unaffected by my father’s insanity is my brother that a full twenty-four hours later he was still talking about how it has absolutely no impact on him. Riiiiiiight.

Having only slept a few hours after working the night before I was tired and went to my bedroom to go to sleep. It had been a good day of simple pleasures; the company of people I like, moments of light solitude, a few drinks, a few laughs, a nice meal, good weather, good scenery, even the crazy bullshit with my father seemed well placed and well proportioned. Life is good in this most perfect of all possible worlds.

*. I don’t actually play with myself under the bridge.
**. I don’t actually do all of those other things.
***. I wouldn’t even know how to install a camera in the ladies’ shower. Maybe the guys at Radio Shack could help me.
****. Retaliation is a defense in an eviction proceeding. The landlord tries to evict for some stated reason and the tenants defend by saying that those reasons are not genuine and are only be raised as a pretense to evict after the tenants have made legitimate complaints to the landlord about the habitability of the dwelling or other non-voidable right they might have in the property.

Worker's Lament!

2010-06-28T21:42:00.001-04:00

So I wake up and I go to work and I come home eight hours later and I sit down and I put my head in my hands and I take a breath and I stand back up and change my clothes and go to work and eight hours later I come home and eat something and go to sleep and wake up four hours later and do it all again. That is most days for me now. I pass myself on the stairs and I look tired to me. Seriously all I want is pity. My family is overjoyed with the fact that I am being worked like a rented mule for eighty hours a week. I hate it and I wish they would just say, “That really sucks. Sorry.”

I wonder if Sisyphus ever follows the boulder back down the mountain, positions himself behind it, puts his shoulder into it and says, “This time I am really going to derive some satisfaction from moving this giant motherfucker.” Probably not, he probably sees the painful futility of his actions and resents like hell the boulder and everything connected to it. That is how I feel about my status as a wage slave. I hate it and I find it ridiculous. I hate my gas gage, it is like a barometer of the repetitive insanity that is my life. Every other day I have to pony up some money to buy gas and the needle floats to somewhere between half full and empty and I am reminded that when I was broke I never needed money. Now that I am working I need money ever-single day. I hate working. My feet are a mess of blisters from walking around the campground as a security guard. My arms are covered in bug bites. The skin on my face is all dried out from the sweat. I hate children that shout, “Hey security guard”. I hate the people I have to tell to be quiet during quiet hours. They are either really apologetic or really belligerent. And more often than not I walk ten feet away and they get loud again and I hang my head or cast it imploringly towards the heavens and say, “Yep.” I hate the teenagers I have to deal with and how they have this attitude like they have the world by the balls and they have nothing but contempt for the security guard. Listen buddy, you don’t even know. I was you. Look how that turned out. This world is going to grind you into a fine dust. That light is going to slowly fade from your eyes and eventually you are going to be as dead inside as the rest of us. Try to have fun while you still can. My job as a test grader at a company that grades tests has less of the painful physical exertion and dignity robbing interactions with the public but it still is a job.

I miss the long leisurely days of being unemployed. I miss spending six consecutive days watching the entire series run of a television show that isn’t even that good. I miss deciding whether I was going to do the dishes at 11 or 12 or 1 or Tomorrow. I miss blogging. I miss having the energy to blog. I miss checking Facebook a hundred times a day and commenting on people’s statuses that I don’t even really know. I miss sleep. Long hours of sleep. Sleeping 12 hours, waking up, taking a piss, and then sleeping for four more hours.

Mostly I miss the unreality of unemployment. It is a light existence and the burdens you carry are mostly theoretical. Most of the problems I had as an unemployed person still exist and now they are compounded significantly by the slog of working. The grind. It could be worse. It could be fast food.

There is so much I would like to write about. Soccer refs, oil leaks, generals, but I am too fucking tired. I think I’ll get a day off in July.

Other People's Children!

2010-06-06T21:58:00.001-04:00

This is a big house that I live in. It sits on top of a big hill in Somersworth, New Hampshire. Somersworth is a border town, like Tijuana. It borders Maine and you can see the lobster eaters pile across the border everyday to buy cheap cigarettes, liquor, fireworks, and tax-free stuff at Wal-Mart. On a clear day I can walk up into the attic, look out an eastern facing window and watch the sun rise up over some hills in Berwick. There is nothing so life affirming as a sunrise. It is coming around again. A new day. Do with it what you like.

The moon is moving away from the earth at a rate of about an inch a year. The continental plate that India sits on is pushing into the continental plate that the rest of Asia sits on at a rate of about two inches a year. There is oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico at a pretty brisk clip. Time passes and things change or they don’t, I guess.

I am a lawyer/security guard trying to do the best I can. I had to hassle kids all night Friday. I don’t like hassling kids. Kids scare me and I would prefer to leave them to their own devices. You have to understand I use to get beat up a lot by kids and I know I am significantly bigger than I use to be but still there is some post traumatic stress. They called me names, they knocked out some of my teeth, they chased me, and I still have a little anxiety about kids. When did it become unacceptable for an adult to tell a kid to stop doing something he was not suppose to be doing? I had to hassle some kids on Friday because it was 10:30 and the jungle gym was closed and all minors had to report back to their campsites. I had to tell the kids four or five times to remove themselves. I didn’t yell. I told them in a stern but even tone that it was time to get off the jungle gym. I think I said “scoot” at some point. You know I wanted to tell them to get off the fucking jungle gym and get back to their neglectful fucking parents. But I didn’t. After I cleared the jungle gym, I sat down to ponder where exactly I had gone so horribly wrong in my life. I was sitting on this picnic table when a man walked up to a campsite near to where I was sitting and addressed a man who was camping there and told him to walk any excess children he had at his campsite back to the campsite they would otherwise belong at because the security guard was being a jerk. At this I stood up and stepped forward. I figured either the man didn’t notice that I was sitting in the dark near at hand or he did, and either way he was trying to communicate something regarding me and I thought I would give him the opportunity to speak with me directly. The man came up to me and told me not to yell at the kids. I don’t know why parents are like this. Obviously I hadn’t yelled at the kids. If I had yelled he would have heard me yelling. I am an ace yeller. I can yell so loud that it sounds like the world coming to an end. I spoke with the children. But the children had obviously engaged in some manner of exuberant hyperbole, as children often do. Children lie. Children lie rather frequently. Children distort or their view is naturally distorted. Children are a lot like Fox News. The parent then told me that if a child was doing something I didn’t like I should find the child’s parent and tell them to deal with the child. Sounds like an awful lot of legwork on my part. It is a big campground. It is 60 acres. I am not going hunting for the adult that is legally responsible for the kid who is doing something wrong. It is hard enough keeping a dry shirt in this job without working up a sweat looking for someone to tell a child to stop doing something. I told the parent that I had been very polite to the children as I told them a half dozen times to get off the jungle gym. I have no emotional stake about the kids being on the jungle gym. It is just my job and I did it in the same halfhearted spirit I do everything that I get paid 9 dollars and hour to do. In fact when one older brother started dragging his younger brother off the slide by his arm I interceded and told him that he didn’t need to pull on the kid just take your time and get back to your campsite. I remember being a kid and every adult had license to speak to me about my behavior. My father wasn’t around a lot of the time and the staff of the old folks home not to mention the residence all had carte blanche to speak to me about what I ought and ought not to be doing. I never in my entire childhood had either of my separate parents remonstrate an adult in front of me for telling me to do something or not do something. I think my mom once gave me five across the eyes on my seventh birthday in part because I had disrespected an adult who was telling me to behave myself. It takes a village to raise a crazy, unruly, rude, obnoxious, hyperactive, ignorant child.

My stepmother pulled this shit on me a little over a year ago. She was watching this 12-year-old for one of her friends and he was a child like I have just described. Seemed nice enough but he was a kid. When the kid’s mother showed up I was in the kitchen getting something to eat. My stepmother, my father, and the kid’s mother were in the dining room. My father was talking about something, I don’t remember what, and the kid was behind him mimicking him. I walked over and told the kid that what he was doing was really disrespectful and it was a really good way to earn a whack up the side of the head. The kid knew I wasn’t going to hit him; he wasn’t stupid, just rude, ignorant, and hyperactive. I knew how he felt, no one was paying any attention to him and he thought he could entertain himself and perhaps somebody else if they chose to take notice of him. But my father is a 60-year-old man and he doesn’t need to be mocked by a 12-year-old boy. Well when the boy and his mother had left my stepmother yelled at me. She seemed really intent on me not talking to a kid who was obviously doing something wrong. To my knowledge I was the only one who ever spoke to him, never mind disciplined him for being a putz. I defended my position and said that I reserve the right to talk to any kid who is being a putz in my presence. My stepmother excused herself from the area of the house that my father and I were in and my father, like many a servile, weak, and whipped married men before him, told me to just agree with her and promise to never do it again so that his life could be easier. I am sorry that I could not oblige my father in this request. My stepmother came back and yelled at me some more and I told her I thought she was wrong. She yelled at me some more and issued ultimatums and I told her I thought she was wrong. She yelled at me some more and told me to not talk to kids who were being bad and did I understand her and I did but I was going to carry on doing exactly what I knew to be right. She eventually blew herself out and I continue to maintain my original position.

Children aren’t fragile little eggs, they fucking children, they can stand being told what to do by someone other than their parents. And if you are a parent and don’t think that is true than put a leash on the little fuckers and keep them within 15 feet of you at all times. Don’t free range the bastards to run unencumbered in the world were some adult with more time than sense might choose to correct them when they are doing something they aren’t suppose to be doing.

Where did the years go!

2010-05-30T04:05:00.002-04:00

Running late today. It is already after three in the morning on the 30th of May. And I would have loved to get this out there before now. Thing is I have this job now. I hate jobs. I hate working. I don’t like it and never have. I don’t like leaving a place I don’t like being and knowing that in another 16 hours I have to return. It isn’t that I think I am above working. I think everyone is above working. Many people in my life have told me that I can’t just not work, which even a cursory investigation into reality would prove untrue. I could walk out my front door, lay down in the middle of the street, not move a muscle, and eventually someone would find me and I would be taken care of after a fashion so long as I didn’t say anything and pretended to be catatonic. I could fake an injury convincingly and get on social security. Hell I might not even need to fake an injury, I might be in such bad condition as thing currently stand that I could get on the dole based on my own merits. Then people tell me that it is immoral not to work, as if there is anything moral about wage slavery. Getting paid as little as possible so that someone else can turn a profit. I don’t blame the bosses, landlords, and various owners of the means of production. It is their job to get as much labor out of an employee while paying them as little as possible. Just so long as the bosses understand that it is my job as an employee to do as little work as possible while trying to get paid as much as I can. Don’t look at me like that. It isn’t my system. Someone else drew it up and I am sure they made a shit load of money. I don’t want to participate in it but unfortunately it is too late to just get off this insane capitalistic bus ride. I really need to figure out how to insure my life and then convincingly fake my own death. Mom could collect the insurance, pay off my student debt, and I could go live a life of quiet solitude on some public land. I don’t want much out of life. I’d like to be left alone and to not have to go to a job. I don’t really want or need anything else that money could buy.

Oh well. I didn’t come here to talk about work. I came here to talk about this clock.

Countdown To Kyle and Jenn's Wedding

The Clock of Inevitable and Unstoppable Happiness. You may remember that the CIUH measures the time between now and when my friends Jenn and Kyle get married. You may also remember that the CIUH is formatted to display the total time units as opposed to remaining time units. It tells you how many days until the wedding or how many hours until the wedding or (my personal favorite) how many seconds until the wedding. Right now we are looking at 31,479,910 seconds until Jenn and Kyle tie the knot, around what they will tie the knot I have no idea. So yesterday at noon the CIUH underwent a very large change. An entire unit of measurement was completely removed from it. In addition to the number of days, hours, minutes, and seconds until the blessed event the clock use to also count down the years. But there are no more years left. There are 364 days, and a little over 87 hundred hours, but not a single year to speak of. Time has moved swiftly and the CIUH has marked time’s progress most effectively. It truly is an amazing device. For instance if you will notice it is on this blog entry, which is pretty fabulous to begin with. But wait, it is also on this blog entry here:

http://musingandmisadventures.blogspot.com/2010/04/tick-tock-tick-tock.html

That is right, the CIUH can be in two places at the same time… kind of like God. The CIUH will not countenance any argument or plea. It simply ticks off each successive second. It has no pity or empathy or mercy… kind of like a Republican nominee to the Supreme Court. But why should the CIUH contemplate pity or empathy or mercy when it is only marking time until such a wonderful and beautiful event as the union between such wonderful and beautiful people? It shouldn’t but more to the point, it won’t. Each happy minute shall tick away until the happiest and most fulfilling minute arrives. And until it does the clock will tick. Through venue searches, conversations with florists, dress fittings, tuxedo fittings, arguments about shoes, horribly embarrassing bachelor parties, even more embarrassing bachelorette parties, the extremely fun task of wrangling family, and the even more fun task of wrangling extremely obnoxious friends, the clock will tick. Until there are no more days left to count, and no more hours and no more minutes, which will occur sooner than any of us can possibly imagine.

Car!

2010-05-22T02:10:00.000-04:00

Wow it has been a long time. I’ve not been feeling it recently. It started when my computer died and I had to reinstall windows and the massive loss of work that occasioned. Now I can’t find my song. I am not by my nature a musical person. I sing badly, can’t play an instrument, and according to my brother I have too much neck in my whistle. I always thought, without any evidence to support the contention, that there would be something in my life that my brother would not criticize me for. I kind of thought that thing would be whistling but John proved me wrong. John has returned home and has since spared no effort to ride me about everything I do in my life. He bitched about my lack of employment. I had always thought myself stoic enough to simply allow constant nagging to just slide off my back but evidently this is not the case because I have a job interview next week. I am a little upset about this because I think it incentivizes all the wrong sorts of behavior. If all it takes to get me to do something is a guy walking into my bedroom every morning and waking me up by calling me a giant piece of shit then there is really no reason for people to not do that. My acquiescing to this type of behavior sets a bad sort of president. By all rights I should remain unemployed until such time as people learn to stop bitching at me about being unemployed but that would be a bit self-injurious and I already engage in far too much self-injurious behavior for my own good. Oh well.

So yeah I can’t find my song. My writing song. The song that kind of encapsulates my mood and helps me find my focus. I am open to suggestions.

Apropos of nothing, one of the side effects of Cialis is delayed backache. Do you think that might have something to do with the fact that taking Cialis normally occasions a multi-hour, chemically-induced hard on. I am not a doctor, I am actually a doctor but not a medical doctor, but maybe the fucking causes the backache. Could be, I don’t know, I am just looking for horses and not zebras. The commercial tells you to ask your doctor if you are healthy enough for sex. I would think that a doctor telling a man that he isn’t healthy enough for sex would be an excellent way for a doctor to get his nose broken. If I was a doctor in that position I would insist on handcuffing the patient to a gurney before I gave him that level of bad news. Could backfire, patient might pick up the gurney and try to hit you with it, at which point you might have to reevaluate whether or not he is healthy enough to have sex, because picking up a gurney and using it as a weapon is pretty physically taxing. Using a gurney as a weapon could be more strenuous than sex depending on who you are having sex with, is all I am saying…

So last week I had to go to court on Tuesday, and that was fun. It all started the night before when, as I was preparing for bed, my brother came in to ask me if I wouldn’t mind waking up twenty minutes earlier than I had planned so I could drive him to the bus station. I don’t know how long John had entertained the idea of me driving him to the bus station the same morning I had to go to court. But I was informed of the plan ten hours before hand. I said sure because after all the car I would drive to court in was paid for by my brother and saying no would have been pretty dickish. I didn’t sleep at all that night, because I had to go to court in the morning and I still find that to be a pretty nerve inducing experience. I woke Johnny up at the appointed time and we piled into the car and I headed off to the bus station. It should be mentioned at this time that there was a bureau in the back of the car. John had taken the car to Boston on Monday to move some things out of this apartment and he had left the bureau in the backseat where it obstructed the entire rear window of the car. John had been nice enough to warn me about the “dresser-car” the night before and on the way to the bus station he made repeated jokes about “dresser-car”. They mostly consisted of John saying “dresser-car” and gesticulating wildly. It was pretty funny but it doesn’t translate well to the written format. John asked me to go to Dunkin Donuts so that he could feed his addiction to over priced coffee and it was as I was pulling into the drive thru that John noticed he didn’t have his phone on him. We didn’t go back for it and that will become relevant several hours later. So I dropped John off at the bus station and headed over to Springvale for my court appearance.

I feel weird because I really want to tell you all about the case I am working on. I think it can be done without breaking professional confidences but still I am a lawyer and I don’t think I should really talk about it because it would seem unprofessional. It probably is unprofessional. I am not really hung up on being professional. But some things are just beyond the pale and I guess I am going to make a blog related ruling that I am not going to talk about my cases. Which is sad because my first criminal case is fucking hilarious and random and the course that it has taken is kind of atypical.

So hours later I return to my home. I was exhausted. I hadn’t slept the night before and the morning’s work had been kind of taxing. I plopped down in my chair to think about the day and to consider my next move, which I think was going to consist of drinking and falling asleep before six o’clock. John Facebook messaged me. He was wondering what I was up to. I said nothing. Crablike, John walked sideways into asking me if I wouldn’t mind terribly driving to Boston to pick him up. I would mind terribly. Been a really long day, it started yesterday afternoon. Dresser in the back of the car. Ecetera. John said that he could move that dresser out of the car by himself and he didn’t know what my problem was. I told him I could move that dresser out of the car by myself as well, if it was my dresser, which it certainly wasn’t. Of course this is all foreplay to me driving to Boston. It was a foregone conclusion. I was going to pile into the car and drive to Boston but I needed my brother to appreciate the fact that I didn’t want to. Unfortunately, while I am a bit of a novice when it comes to catholic guilt, my brother is a grandmaster and he practiced his ninja guilt judo on me. He told me not to even bother. He would spend the night in Boston, take a bus home, grab the car, drive to Boston, pack up his remaining shit, and drive back to New Hampshire. I did the count on this plan and found that it was dumb and worse than dumb it was unreasonable. The most efficient plan was for me to come and get him and I can’t argue with reason and efficiency. I told him I would come and get him. He said no. I said yes. He said no. I said yes but the message was not delivered because the jackass had logged off of Facebook. I was in possession of a solid no. A normal human being could have walked away at this point. Unfortunately I am not a normal human being. This had become a contest of wills and strangely the only way for me to prevail was for me to do exactly what my brother wanted in the first place. Whoever invented guilt was an evil genius, I think it was my Grandmother.* First order of business was to extricate the bureau from the car. I pulled the car around to the back door and I proceeded to try and dislodge a five-drawer dresser from the backseat of a Chrysler. I didn’t so much remove the dresser from the car as the car gave birth to the dresser with me as a midwife. Congratulations Mrs. Cirrus it is a 90 pound dresser with all of my brother’s shit still in it. I left the dresser hanging out back of the house and hopped into the car and started driving. You may remember that I bought the Chrysler with my brother’s money so that he could have a car when he came home for his summer job. Since I purchased the car I have been plagued by apprehensions that the car will eventually blow up. A couple of weeks after I purchased the car I became aware of an ongoing problem where in the transmission would slip into neutral while I was driving and then go into first without any hope of it coming out of first again without stopping, turning the car off, and waiting a couple of minutes. Even then there is no real guarantee that it will not do the exact same thing a couple of minutes later. Normally if I can get the car into fourth it will stay there without any complaint and the engine will run like a top. Of course this will all eventually change. The longer the transmission problem goes unaddressed the more strain it will put on the engine and eventually the engine will seize or blow a head gasket, but it was only a $1400 car and putting a 1000 dollars into it to fix the transmission just seems terribly stupid. Do I feel bad about buy my brother a lemon, you bet I do. So I get on route 16 headed for I-95 and the car drops into first and I have to keep going with it tacking out around 5000 rpm until I get through the Dover Point Toll. At which point I pull off into that little parking area just after the toll and I stop the car and wait a couple of minutes, then I start it, quickly throw it into drive, and bury the gas pedal. I shot out of the parking area going 50, feeling the transmission find each new gear until it gets into fourth, then I set the cruise control and hope like hell that I don’t have any problems at the Seabrook Toll, which I didn’t. The car behaved itself all the way to the Tobin Bridge. At which point I was forced to drive through Boston with the car never going into second. I called my brother from the road but he didn’t pick up, so I left an exuberant message telling him to go fuck himself and I was coming to get him and to be ready. When I got into Boston I found his apartment while only getting lost once. I pulled into a resident parking space and called him again and told him I had arrived and could he please come out of his apartment because although I knew I had the street right I had no idea what actual building he lived in. I called again and again but no answer. I called dad and asked for John’s address. I went to his building but I couldn’t figure out what unit he lived in so I returned to the car wondering what the fuck I was going to do. I pulled out my IPod touch and found an open wireless network that I could make use of.** I Facebook messaged John and told him I was outside. A few moments later I saw him amble onto the sidewalk from out of his building. I waived him towards the car and when he arrived we had a brief philosophical debate on offer and acceptance, the battle of the forms, and the mailbox rule as it pertains to him asking me to come down and then telling me not to and then logging off Facebook.*** Then I ask him why he isn’t answering his phone and he reminds me that he left his phone in New Hampshire. I could have been aware of that but it had been a really full day. John piles his stuff into the car and I make him drive home. On the way home he informs me that he plans on buying another car because the one I bought is a giant piece of shit and I can’t argue with his rationale because he is completely right. Moreover he is going to make of me a gift of the car that I bought, which I can be only so happy about because he has just described it as a giant piece of shit.

The next day I awoke early after sleeping for twelve hours. I went downstairs and did the dishes then I proceeded to clean my bathroom and when that was done I remembered that I hadn’t eaten in the last thirty-six hours. I’d been busy. So I made myself a sandwich and salad and retired to my upstairs living room. My brother came in with his patented knock and enter. Not knock, wait for response, and enter; knock and enter with one fluid motion. I yelled at him because I don’t want my brother knocking and entering. I live in my upstairs living room. It is where I eat, write, dry off after showers, and masturbate. My brother has never caught me masturbating. For two boys to grow up in the same house and for one to never catch the other in the act of self-abuse is a real accomplishment. I don’t want to break the streak now at the age of 27.**** John apologized and asked for my phone. He then told me that the car I had bought him had just stalled out on the way to Concord. Ahhh fuck, so I am the asshole huh? I hate it when that happens. So John calls dad, who is over in Farmington. Dad hooks the trailer up to the dump truck and heads over to Somersworth to get John and me so we can all go pick up the lemon. John had abandoned the situation in a kind of classic John way. He came, informed me of the problem, and immediately disappeared on business of his own. He had decided to walk down to a local car dealership to buy another car that wasn’t stalled out on the way to Concord, which would be a vast improvement on the other car he owned. Dad called me to tell me he was coming and I told him that I didn’t know where the car was, where the keys to the car were, and where John, the man with all these pesky answers, had gone. I called John and left a message him about the myriad of issues we were having. He called me back and told me that he was a couple of miles away but he would run home and be here in about twenty minutes. I told him to stop showing off and that dad was going to be driving by him in a couple of minutes so why not just call dad and ask him to be pick up. That is what happened and a little while later I got a call from John telling me that they were parked down the street and I should come and join them. So I exited the house and saw that indeed the truck was parked at the end of the street. It was a little ways away. I could have walked there in a minute. But people were waiting for me so I decided to run. I don’t run. I am not a runner. I saunter, I amble, I meander, I walk briskly occasionally. I don’t run, I am a lot like the car I bought for my brother. But I can run, after a fashion. So I start running and you must now be reminded that I live next door to an elementary school. Have you ever had a hundred kids simultaneously point and laugh at you? I have. I distinctly heard one kid say, “Hey look at the fat guy running!” Did I give that kid the finger? That might have happened. Hey if you are old enough to ridicule a running fat guy then you are old enough to get the finger from a running fat guy. Don’t judge me.

So I squeezed into the truck next to my brother and the MacVane boys were off to get the car. It had conveniently stalled out in Durham on the hill right next to Wagon Hill Farm. If you went to UNH you know exactly were that is. The car was facing downhill, which was great because it wouldn’t start and if you have to push a car you might as well push it downhill. Dad parked downhill of the downhill facing car and John and I set up the ramps to the trailer. One ramp is made of good American steel. The other ramp was made out of a board that replaced the other good American steel ramp that went missing last time we had to move a car. John got into the car to steer. The car doesn’t have power steering. Actually the car doesn’t have a radio. It has power steering, the power steering just doesn’t work. Yeah, I know I bought a really shitty car, I am really sorry about that. So dad and I try to push the car onto the trailer and the board breaks and the car rolls off the trailer and we are back to square one. Dad pulls the trailer forward and we give it another go with much the same result. Then it was dad who suggested we unhook the trailer from the truck. The trailer is a lever with its wheels as fulcrum. If we were to unhook one side of the lever from the truck and put the weight of the car on the other end of the lever it would naturally seesaw towards the car and at that point pushing the car onto the trailer would be easy. So we unhook the trailer, push the car on to the ramps, and down goes the car end of the trailer. We had of course neglected an easily ascertainable feature of a class-one lever; if you push down on one end of it the end on the opposing side of the fulcrum will go up. So the trailer hitch jumped up and took out the rubber grommet holding in one of the truck’s break lights. Fair play. We drop the car off at the mechanic’s, which was the guy who originally sold me the car, which should have been some sort of warning that it might need to be fixed frequently. I told the mechanic to figure out what was wrong and give me a quote before fixing it. I got a call later in the day telling me that it was the fuel pump and a new pump was going to run me a couple of hundreds dollars. I opened my wallet and moths would have flown out but they had died of starvation long ago. I told the mechanic that I would be around to pick up the car later and thanks for all the help. The mechanic told me that he might be able to find a used part that would work and that would reduce the price significantly. I told him to give me a call when he had figured the cost out. Meanwhile John went and bought another car, which was fundamentally better than the one I had bought. Later the mechanic called to inform me that indeed he had found a used fuel pump and he had been so happy about finding it that he immediately installed it without telling me how much it was going to cost me. So I wound up getting some money off my father to give the nice man and putting the rest on an installment plan that will last the rest of my life.

Oh well, life is good. My brother is home and as much as I delight in giving him shit (which is only slightly less than he delights in giving me shit) it is good to have him around. He mentioned to me the other night, as I drove his new car home from the bar, that the air around here smells sweet. It does. All the time, but especially in the spring. The New Hampshire tourism board should use that as a marketing campaign, “New Hampshire, At Least It Doesn’t Stink”. It is a huge quality of life thing; when every breath you take tastes clean, verdant, and sweet life can’t be all-bad.

*. Which grandmother? Could be either one. They were both pretty good at it.

**. Thanks Mom, I love my fucking IPod touch. It is my favorite thing in the world. I don’t know how I lived without it. I can’t read a book anymore unless it is on my IPod. It is a sickness.

***. These are all contract terms. Offer and acceptance is pretty much the corner stone of any contract. If there is no offer there can be no acceptance. If there is no offer and a corresponding acceptance there can be no contract. The battle of the forms is a specific problem relating to offer and acceptance. Two companies deal with one another; one makes an offer using a boilerplate standard form contract. The other accepts using his own boilerplate standard form contract. The two contracts are contradictory but the two companies deal with each other anyway as if there had been offer and acceptance and later a problem arises and it is an issue of who’s boilerplate contract wins out. The Mailbox Rule is a rule governing offer and acceptance. An offer is made when the offer is received by the person to whom the offer was directed. Alternatively an acceptance is made when the acceptance was dropped into the mailbox. Offerer wants to withdraw offer from Accepter, calls Accepter and tell him he was only joking about offer. Accepter says screw you I already dropped acceptance into the mail, we have a contract. It is actually Offerer and Offeree but that gets plenty confusing and can lead to ocular strain when you try to purge the evil that has possessed your brain by gouging out your own eyes with a corkscrew.

****. In the many years that John and I shared a bedroom did I ever catch him in flagrante delicto? If I did it would have been more than a decade ago and what would be the point of mentioning it here, where it could be very embarrassing to him personally, unless I caught him doing it on my bed and I STILL WAKE UP SCREAMING?

"MacVane is the new Tolstoy"!

2010-05-06T08:11:00.002-04:00

Hi ho there. It is MacVane welcoming back my friend Erica who wishes to discuss two books she's been reading and in the course of doing that I get favorably compared to Tolstoy. If there is anyone else who would like to submit a blog entry that favorably compares me to Tolstoy or any of the other great writers in history please do so.

I’ve had a lot of free time these last four and a half months now that grad school is out of the way. No more classes to run to after student teaching or weekends consumed by papers, unit plans, and DEFINITELY no more reflections. Reflections are required in every class and I’m reflected out. There’s nothing left in me to see or share. Everything I read had to be accompanied by a written reflection. How did this chapter make you feel? How is this chapter going to help you employ Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligences in your classroom? Enough! I want to read a book and NOT write about it. I want to have a weekend that doesn’t involve 2 group meetings at the library on our Costa Rican Rainforest Unit Plan. I now have that time and boy, do I suck at using it. I should be going out, dating, socializing only I seem to have forgotten how. I’m probably the most boring soon to be 25 year old in the Greater New York area. All but one of my friends is in Boston and there are zero romantic prospects here because, remember, I work in what is still a predominantly female profession. The majority of my aforementioned Bostonian friends are in relationships, which further complicates things because I have no single people to hang out with. To summarize: Grad school is done; I’m boring and failing miserably at fixing the problem.

The speck of hope here is that I did manage to complete a few books from my extensive “must read” list. I even read two at the same time since I have that much free time. The two I decided to engage in a ménage a trois were Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Love Letters of Great Men compiled by Ursula Doyle. This ended up working out quite well and even made me feel a tad better about my own romantic failures in a more ways than one.

Tolstoy is verbose. What he took roughly 800 pages to say could have been completed in 500. In short, it’s Gone with the Wind set in late 19th century Russia. Parts of it had little to do with the plot in my opinion. That entire middle section regarding the farming endeavor? Yeah, I skimmed through that. It had nothing to do with Madame Karenina and my interest was waning by the comma. Oh, the comma’s. No one told Tolstoy that one sentence does not equal one paragraph. My 7th grade English teacher would have had red pen all over that business.

Tolstoy was indeed verbose, but without the flowery language I don’t think I would have enjoyed the book in its entirety. Tolstoy is not Tolstoy without a few extra hundred sentences or so on a hunting expedition. It’s his style and must be accepted as such. The same goes for some people I know. Take Matthew MacVane for example. He’s rather wordy but the language he chooses in his blogs harnesses the reader’s attention. Matthew’s story regarding how he inhaled a tack would not have been the same without all of the asterisks and background information. Same goes for the scene in which Tolstoy depicts the horse races and Anna’s reaction when her lover falls off his horse. He could have just said where she was seated and that she was shocked but no, that doesn’t make for good writing. Tolstoy had to tell me at least 3 times where Anna was sitting in relation to everyone else in the damn track and the layout of the entire track as well as the history of the horse races. Even after including all of this information Tolstoy provided more information via (wait for it) asterisks! Like empanadas are the new cupcakes and unicorns are the new Chuck Norris, MacVane is the new Tolstoy. Asterisks, unite!

Because Anna Karenina was such a tedious read I decided to have a little something going on the side. Beneath the asterisks and farming jargon Anna Karenina is in fact a love story of sorts so I decided to make my side action a quick, romantic pick. I chose Love Letters of Great Men, which was inspired by the movie Sex and the City. Carrie quotes the book early in the movie and it comes back again toward the end in Big’s romantic gesture to win her back. After the movie was released women across the nation flocked to bookstores looking for this compilation only to be told it was fictitious. Enter Ursula Doyle. Ms. Doyle took it upon herself to comb through history to find love letters written by influential men such as Darwin, Twain, Byron, and Henry VIII. You know who wasn’t in there? Tolstoy.

I read a few love letters to break up the Russian farming encyclopedia otherwise known as Karenina. My past year and half was monopolized by grad school and left no room for romantic endeavors of my own so I decided to live vicariously through these men and their loved ones. As I read them though, I realized these great men had some terrible luck with women and Oscar Wilde’s case, men. They failed not for lack of trying but because the human race was as devious and adulterous then as it is today. Society thinks men and women in earlier centuries were more faithful and that our behavior today is shameful. I’ve read various articles that state we as a society don’t value fidelity and love the way our forefathers did. Clearly, they did not know the biographies or read the letters of William Congreve, Alexander Pope, Alfred de Musset, Robert Burns or Lord Byron. For a 144 page book it certainly is dripping with drama.

William Congreve was a dramatist that had an affair with the married Arabella Hunt. Ms. Hunt was married to James Hunt for a brief 6-month period. Why, you ask? Turns out Mr. Hunt was actually a cross dressing widow named Amy Poulter (Doyle 9) this is the stuff Maury only dreams of. So even though Arabella got her marriage annulled, she never remarried. Congreve went on to have affairs with two other women and had a daughter with one of them. Next to that I think society is looking pretty tame.

Alexander Pope was a lot of things: a poet, essayist, etc. What he was not was healthy. He was a charming man but as a cripple his profound feelings for women were often not returned. This guy is a champ. This must be where the “nice guys finish last” statement comes from because despite his efforts, he never married. He writes to one of his many ladies (20), “…were I a handsome fellow, I should do you a vast deal of good: but as it is, all I am good for, is to write a civil letter, or to make a fine speech.” He pours his affection on this woman, sprinkles it with self-deprecation and gets what? A couple of pen pals.

I feel his pain; unrequited love sucks. OK, I’m not in love but I was definitely interested in this guy up until recently. He’s an incredibly good looking, sports junkie, Ivy graduate and he’s single. I couldn’t put it together either. I tried using my feminine wiles, sports knowledge and self-deprecating humor and I, like Mr. Pope, am striking out. I haven’t gotten so much as a double take or a slightly flirty comment. No-thing. I’ve begun to think he’s out of my league or he’s generally not interested in what I’ve got going on. So I, unlike Mr. Pope, am calling it quits with this one.

Me and Mr. Pope may have bonded over our unreturned love but one great man I cannot identify with is Robert Burns. He and Nancy Maclehose corresponded under the pseudonyms “Sylvester” and “Clarinda” (The next pair of pets I own will be named in their honor, with names like that how can you not?). The kicker here is that Rob, being the womanizer he was, impregnated “Clarinda’s” servant Jenny Clow. If that wasn’t enough he had Jean Armour as the hypotenuse of this triangle whom he impregnated, twice. Eat your heart out, Maury. Apparently adultery left deeper tracks during the 18th and 19th centuries. Now we can just delete that, “key under doormat, gf leaves @ 7” text. Oh, technology: we’d still be treacherous without you but you make it easier to hide.

Alfred de Musset is a blend of the men I’ve listed so far. He corresponded with a woman friend named George Sand (pseudonym for a ridiculously long French woman’s name) who was cross dresser and he professed his love to her but she had led de Musset to believe he had no shot with her. They ended up becoming lovers and took a romantic trip to Italy that ended the romance as quick as it started (97). He laments, “I am an idiot to deprive myself of the pleasure of seeing you the short time you still have to spend in Paris, before your departure for Italy, where we would have spent such beautiful nights together, if I had the strength.” Falling in love with a friend sucks, especially when your friend is rather promiscuous. George here ended up being mentioned in someone else’s love letters later in the book. We’ve all been there, had feelings for a friend that didn’t quite work out. A situation I’ve found myself in for the past few months but with a different fellow. He’s a friend, we chat a lot, and I’m starting to, “What if?” the situation. What if something is there? What if it isn’t? Do I lose a friend? When is it worth it to risk the friendship? I don’t have a trip to Italy to find out. I believe that he would be in it primarily for hooking up; our conversations have me doubt the possibility of this blooming into any sort of relationship. Hmm, what if I cross dress? What if I date a cross dresser? One of those needs to work.

I only want to mention Lord Byron because of his fantastic effect on women. His lover, the married Caroline Lamb, was so irate with him that allegedly while at a party she tried to stab herself with a knife and then with broken glass. I’m curious to know why she didn’t stab him. She must have been channeling Anna Karenina.
These great men are not just great because of their accomplishments but because they did it amid the infidelity, pregnancies and cross dressing going on behind the scenes. This is what I’m doing in my unlimited free time, reading the People magazine of the late 19th century. I read about other people’s crazy romantic entanglements because I have none of my own; however, there’s hope. Seeing that these great men were troubled equally, if not greater, than myself has led me to believe that I, too, can have an unfaithful, cross dressing lover that will stab himself.

Two books, both alike in dignity, I managed to finish and lay this scene: I read two books for pleasure, two books that required no response, no nothing, only my divided attention between the two and I still manage to reflect. Damn grad school and its progressive ways. I am destined to be boring. When I should be out, I’m writing about the fact that I’m not out. I suppose I identified strongly enough with these books that a reflection was necessary but I hope this is not a trend. I’m currently reading Life of Pi and seeing that I have no experience being Indian nor stranded on a boat with a wounded zebra, an orangutan and a tiger, I think I’m good.

A lot to think about!

2010-05-06T07:52:00.000-04:00

Somewhere on the costal plains of Northern France, several thousand years ago, sat a Neanderthal man named Randy. Randy was sitting there on one of the beautiful spring days of the abbreviated ice age spring watching the progress of a migrating mammoth herd. His friend Tom came up and sat next to him. “Hey Randy, what is up.”

“Not much Tom”

“You know everyone in the tribe has noticed that you are spending more and more time out here looking at the migrating mammoth herd and less and less time scavenging and foraging and well we are all kind of concerned.”

“Damn it Tom, I am 23 years old I think I have earned the right to spend the twilight of my life doing whatever I want to do without having everyone in the tribe being up my ass about it. I don’t know why we even live in tribes.”

“Because if we didn’t we would be eaten by wolves and lions.” For lions were a problem in Northern France during the last major ice age, go ahead look it up.

“I don’t know that it is worth it.”

“Well still you are part of the tribe and we are all pretty concerned.”

“Tell the others that I am thinking.”

“Can I tell them what you are thinking about?”

“Well Tom it sounds a little crazy but… I am thinking about eating one of them.” And with that Randy pointed to the herd of mammoths.

Tom looked at the herd of mammoths and then he turned and looked at Randy, “Randy, you know they are bigger close up?”

“Yeah Tom, I know they are bigger close up. But still I am going to figure out a way to eat one of them.”

“Randy that is ridiculous. There is no way you are going to be able to kill a mammoth and even if you managed to kill a mammoth you couldn’t eat all of it.”

“I could eat some of it now and some of it later and I would share some, but it isn’t about the eating or the killing, I just think my life should be about more and maybe if I could kill and eat a mammoth it would be.” Randy had inadvertently discovered existentialism.

“Randy, there isn’t anything more. We move from place to place, we scavenge, we forage, occasionally we hunt some medium-sized antlered creatures, we sleep, we breed, we die at 30, there is nothing else.”

“What about Mike, who paints on the cave walls, he seems to think there is something else?”

“Mike is an asshole, everyone knows that.”

Randy looked at the mammoth herd. Mike was an asshole there was no disputing that. He sure did have a lot to think about.

On an unrelated note I have been thinking about something for the last several hours, at some point somebody had the idea to build a cage that a man could fit inside. You can call it a cell if you want but it is basically just a man-sized cage and at some point someone had to have that idea. I mean the first order idea must have been murder, if you don’t like someone enough or you fear them enough to want to put them in a man sized cage then the obvious first impulse would be to just kill them. Killing is so much more definite and quick. I mean killing someone for all practical reasons is better at achieving many of the same ends as putting someone in a man cage. Somewhere along the line it became necessary or preferable to keep people alive and that is when somebody thought of the man cage. Huh.

So I wrote previously about the search for information about the tenant at the boarding home who had a name that was remarkably close to the name of a man recently indicted for molesting children. I received a call back from the reporter who wrote the story, who was really nice and helpful, and he told me that the newspaper is run through a spell checker that automatically changed the last name of the defendant in his story so yes indeed the man living at the boarding home and the man in the story are one in the same. Great. Just wonderful. Doubt still looms about his guilt, which is a nice way to keep me from condemning the guy out right. Dad is taking it kind of hard. He likes the guy, liked the guy, doesn’t know how he feels. If there is one thing my father doesn’t deal well with it is internal conflict and indecision. But the revelation that the helpful kid that has been assisting him with the goats and bunnies may be a sexual predator has kind of rocked him to his core. There isn’t a lot of wiggle room in the social and moral need for condemning and shunning child molesters. There is no apologizing or rationalizing child molestation. It is something that is truly of itself. There is no way to warp your mind and make it okay. It isn’t something that just happens. The normal mind doesn’t understand the impulse, it cannot conceive of the motive, it doesn’t want to, and if even for a second it could it would be repulsed and horrified at itself. If one doesn’t wish to be a moral relativist he must at some point draw some line that will distinguish between what is simply bad or wrong or unfortunate and that which is truly evil. And screwing with kids is truly evil. But this guy doesn’t strike me as being truly evil and to reconcile the alleged crime with the potential criminal leaves me feeling cold and sick.

Oh well, I got problems of my own. My computer threw me a blue screen of death the other day and I was forced to format my hard drive and reinstall windows. I lost a pretty big chunk of my novel that wasn’t saved. Not a problem, I’ll have a lot of fun rewriting those pages. Life goes on, nothing is perfect. And I have some cases that I am working on and those are fun. And the lilacs are blooming, and nothing can be very wrong in the world when the lilacs are blooming. It is morning, I think it is going to rain. I bet it is going to be beautiful. So much to do. I got a lot to think about.

Possible Pederast!

2010-04-30T13:23:00.001-04:00

I think I may have mentioned here, as well as to various law enforcement agencies and more than one probate judge, that my father is crazy. Yesterday I drove him down to Sears to return a water pump. Which wasn’t him being crazy. While we were in the car I mentioned that if he would buy a couple gallons of gas I would bring the lawnmower up from the basement, fill it, and cut the grass. It is part of my on going campaign to prove my usefulness to my father and his wife while I take up unused space in the seventeen-bedroom house. So yeah, I asked dad to get gas and I said I would cut the grass this weekend. Dad responded that I shouldn’t cut the grass this weekend because that is when people are out and about in the neighborhood and… And nothing. That was an evil in and of itself. My father fancies himself the object of a vendetta by the neighbors. He thinks about the neighbors and what they are doing and how they are plotting against him and what he must do and not do to side step their nefarious schemes to have him… No idea, no idea what he thinks they are going to accomplish. It isn’t like they can drive us out of business, no one lives here. Even if there was some horrible trap being laid for him, how can me cutting the grass on the weekend possibly contribute to it?

So that is my father’s baseline for crazy. Nothing particularly going on and that is his crazy level. That is his level of narcissistic paranoia on a Thursday at 2 o’clock in the afternoon on a drive to Sears with his son.

Today has been somewhat more stressful for him. One of the residents of the boarding home in Farmington may have suffered a stroke. That is a deeply personal thing because we have been taking care of this man since I was in high school and he is part of the gang and we love him. It is also an issue that may have long term effects on the bottom line of the boarding home and that cannot be far from my father’s mind. So dad’s level of anxiety ticks up a bit and with that there is an exponential increase in his insanity. So next thing that happens is that another resident of the boarding home points out to my father that a recent article in the local paper identifies a man who has been indicted for sexually assaulting children and that the name of the man in the article is one letter off from the name of yet another resident of the boarding home, that the man in the story and the resident at the boarding home are the same age, and that the man in the story and the resident seem to share a past address in Rochester. At this point my father would not be out of line in assuming that he is, perhaps, sheltering a man who has been recently indicted for child molestation. Fair enough, wouldn’t be the first time we had a child molester in the house.* So dad calls me with this information and asks me to find out if the guy in the article and the guy in the house are the same guy and I am more than a little exasperated because the easiest way to resolve this doubt is to simply walk down the hall and ask the guy. But dad doesn’t want to do that. He think that I am like Chloe from 24 and I have access to information that would help me know with any more certainty than him whether our resident is also an accused child molester. I want to be helpful of course, but couldn’t I just cut the fucking grass.

So I hang up with dad and I go to the Foster’s online and I read the story and yeah there is a legitimate concern here and dad isn’t completely off base in his first order assumption. Step two, I go looking on the internet for something from the grand jury that returned the indictment, or a docket schedule, or anything else provided by the Strafford County judiciary or attorney and there is nothing. They don’t have enough people working for Strafford County to answer the phone when it rings so the hope that they would have a website where helpful documents are posted for the benefit of curious people is way beyond a reasonable expectation. Step three, I get on the phone and call the Strafford County District Attorney’s Office. Guess what, they are not very forth coming with information about the accused child molester, even to the extent of confirming the name of the accused child molester was spelled correctly in the paper. I was crafty when I called and said I knew a man who was identical in all the particulars to the man identified in the paper with the exception of one letter in his last name and I wanted to know if there had been a mistake made by the paper. But they still wouldn’t help me. So I decided to call the reporter who wrote the story. Why not right? I had been put on task to get to the bottom of this issue and despite the fact that it could have been resolved by an uncomfortable but brief conversation between my father and his tenant I was bound and determined to get an answer. The reporter was not at his desk and I left a message that said in the particulars the same thing I said to the DA’s office and asked for a call back. Then I called my father and told him that my investigation had not born any fruit but that I thought it was reasonable to assume that since a Google search of the tenant’s name placed him at the same previous address as the defendant in the child molestation case it was probably a pretty solid case for them being the same guy. Dad, was initially happy with my efforts but became rather upset with me when I told him that I had made some calls with regard to the issue and that I had divulged some pretty generic information about my position and reason for calling. “I wanted to get information not give it out.” Well dad perhaps you are unfamiliar with how a conversation works. Most people do not surrender information upon request without first eliciting from you your reason for wanting the information. Not always true, “where is the bathroom?” “What time is it?” “Are you really a guy dressed like a woman?” are all socially acceptable examples of when you can ask for some information without giving up your reason for wanting that information. But “Is the guy you indicted for child molestation really this other guy?” Is the kind of question that tends to raise some eyebrows and it kind of demands some manner of explanation.

My father is proud of saying that he is outcome driven. This is a fucked up way to live; because you can get a good outcome, like having two sons in law school, from fucked up methods, like being an unmanageable crazy pain in the ass of a father. The fact is he is not outcome driven, he is driven by crazy, but occasionally when I am feeling up to it I try to push against the crazy just to keep my upper body in shape. In this instance I pushed against the crazy by citing the outcomes of my actions, which were nil. The cops aren’t coming to kick down the door. Reporters aren’t crawling over the lawn. This is an insignificant event in the life of the newspaper reporter as well as the district attorney’s office. They got a call from somebody looking for clarification on something. A three paragraph blurb in the paper that might have a spelling error. Happens a hundred times a day I am sure. But dad would have none of it. What if this guy is a fugitive? Well if he is a fugitive then we turn him in right? We certainly aren’t trying to house fugitives accused of child molestation. Right? And even if there is a parade of horrible which is to come regarding this possible alleged child molester, the only thing I could have done was expedite it, and that still isn’t at all likely. But dad was still pissed at me and said that he never should have brought this problem to me. Exactly, now we agree on something. You should have gone to the tenant about it and had him address your concerns because it would have been definite and simple and most importantly would have left me alone. Seriously, I JUST WANT TO CUT THE GRASS.

*. When we were running the old folks home, we had a guy there that had raped his granddaughter. He had gone to prison for several years and when he got out he was infirmed. He was confused and couldn’t walk right and had cataracts. He use to shit himself. I had to clean shit from and bathe an incestuous rapist. Which is an experience that I find helpful in my work as a criminal defense attorney.

Hygiene!

2010-04-29T16:50:00.002-04:00

So I am vain. No point in pretending I am not. I know I don’t have a lot to be vain about. Still, I like my face. I think I have a not unpleasing countenance. I think I have nice eyes, a well shaped and proportioned nose, good cheeks, and a not completely obscured chin. Everything else on this body is going to shit, despite ardent efforts to eat better and exercise but I am holding out a lot of hope for my face. So yesterday I found a little red dot on the tip of my nose and I was upset about it. It is distracting. It is right there at the front of my face. Just a tiny little speck of red. I don’t know how it got there or what its intentions are but I don’t like it in the least. It is just a half a centimeter to the right of center on the tip of my nose and I hate it. It isn’t a pimple or a blemish or a scratch or a rash, it is just some manner of sub-dermal evil that has manifested as an almost too small to notice red fleck. This will not stand. If I leave it alone it may go away, or it may invite friends over and I may wind up looking like Boris Yeltsin. You know I have problems with the face, one of my eyes is slightly larger than the other, I have a faint scar on my right cheek, left over from an incident when I tried to shave as a child, I have another scar on my bottom lip and a mole that doesn’t cause much of a ruckus. I take the imperfections in stride, I chalk them up to character and I would almost miss them if they were gone. But this little red speck is an interloper and it must be dealt with. I am not a dermatologist. I don’t ever pretend to be. But my sense is that I can solve this problem with little more than a sewing needle, rubbing alcohol, and a lighter. You may have perhaps guessed my plan. I am going to stick a needle into the tip of my nose and see if I can lance this little red dot out of existence. Excuse me while I do that…

Okay I am back and Jesus did that ever hurt. I don’t know how many nerve endings I have in my nose but it is too many for my comfort. The first part of this little endeavor was to get my hands steady enough to fit the tip of the needle into the exact pore where the red dot did reside. Holding a needle up to your own face and looking at it in the mirror does not make your hands any steadier than they otherwise want to be. So I get the tip of the needle into the end of my nose and now I have to push it in and this is not a natural act. This is self-inflicted pain and there is a large part of my brain saying, “Stop that you colossal idiot. That is your own face.” But like so much good counsel that I have been the recipient of, I complete ignored it. So I push the needle into my skin and I get to experience the odd sensation of watching my own eyes dilate as I begin to experience the sharp stabbing pain of a small needle going into my nose. The look in those eyes says, “Boy your really are this dumb aren’t you?” Yes absolutely. They say it doesn’t take very much pressure at all to break the skin. But I’ll tell you when you are the one controlling that pressure it takes a lot of will to get up to that much pressure. So I break the skin and there is a fresh wave of amazing pain and my eyes water a lot. No I didn’t cry. It is just that my eyes got really watery and then the water from my eyes rolled down my cheeks. And that wasn’t sobbing, that was my special manly breathing exercise that helps me control the really horrible amount of pain that I just wreaked upon myself. So I take my hands away and now I have a sewing needle lodged in my nose. Okay, okay. So I just have to pull that out then and we will be all set. I gingerly remove the needle from my own face and I get a little bead of blood, which I wipe away, and lo and behold the little red dot is gone. There is of course a lot of discoloration, I guess you’d call it bruising, but that will go away of its own accord in a couple of days. But hey, beauty like this is worth suffering for.*

What else is going on around here? Oh, I got my business cards and they are amazing. They are on 100% cotton paper. I have to thank my brother John for paying for them and my brother and my mutual friend Ben Jenness for printing them. They say “Matthew MacVane, ESQ.” And right below my name it says “Lawyer”. I like them a whole lot, and there are a lot of them. I am never going to need to buy business cards for the rest of my life, so I got that going for me, which is nice.

Also I have reached page 120 in my long languishing first novel. I am moving at a bit of a snail’s pace but it is coming together nicely. The novel is about an eccentric millionaire who runs an island resort and a mystery involving a guest that assaults one of the island children and is summarily executed for the crime. But how is the island’s doctor involved in the crime and how is he connected to the guest’s daughter who has come to claim her father’s body? What will become of Manny, the head of security, when he lobbies to become human prey for Petrov, the wealthy Russian who has come to the island to engage in people hunting? What role will Kurt, the unaffected trust fund junky, play as the mystery unfolds? And how will the island’s proprietor react when his flawed but strict moral code is challenged by love and betrayal? Will right be done though the heavens may fall? Okay that is enough talking about my unfinished novel. Nothing worse than a guy who calls himself a writer boring people with the details of his unpublished, uncompleted, first novel.** Plus it gives my brother the opportunity to do his imitation of Stewie Griffin from Family Guy giving Brian shit about his novel.

“Look at the bright side, you have some new material for that novel you've been writing. You know, the... the novel you've been working on. You know, the... the one, uh, you been working on for three years. You know, the... the novel. Mm, got something new to write about now. You know, maybe... uh, maybe a main character gets into a relationship, suffers a little heart break. Something like uh, what... what you been, you just been through. Draw from the real life experience. Little uh, little heart break. You know... work it into the story. Make those characters a little more three dimensional. Little, uh, richer experience for the reader. Make those second hundred pages really keep the reader guessing, what's going to happen. Some twists and turns. Little epilogue, everybody learns the hero's journey isn't always a happy one. Oh, I look forward to reading it.”

I don’t object to my brother doing that, it is actually pretty funny in a “whoa I am really horribly pretentious and pathetic” vein. But I do feel the need to limit his opportunities.

*. I am really sorry if you found this little segment disturbing or unsettling or disgusting. I do some distrubing stuff when left to my own devices. The fact that I feel the need to write and publish about it is, of course, a whole other disturbing problem. Like a few months back I duct taped myself. I was curious. I have been watching people duct taped in television and movies my entire life and it never seemed reasonable. I mean how tough is it to get a piece of duct tape off of your own mouth without the use of your hands? Turns out it wasn't tough at all. Took me eight seconds to dislodge a duct tape gag. I might have an exceptionally strong tongue, I don't know. And sticking a rag into my mouth (calm down it was clean) only helped my time.

**. Actually it is worse when a guy who calls himself a writer disturbs people by relating the story of how he stuck a sewing needle into his own face, but I think it is really splitting hairs at that point.

Tick, Tock, Tick, Tock!

2010-04-29T01:04:00.004-04:00

So, I was wrong. Wrongy wrong. Like whoa that was extremely wrong. I was wrong about offshore oil drilling. I said I don’t care, and all of a sudden I care. I am an idealist and I choose to believe what people tell me. People tell me that nuclear power is a safe as it can practicably be and I accept that. I don’t worry about a reactor going into meltdown the way it did at Three Mile Island. The scientists and engineers say that they have built in safeguards and redundancy that make a meltdown nearly impossible and I say nearly impossible is good enough for me. After all Europe has been running on nuclear power for a long while without any incidents. I looked into offshore oil drilling, I watched the movie The Abyss, and found that I was contented with the environmental risks of drilling for oil in the ocean. There are safeguards and redundancies and things should not be able to go catastrophically wrong. Well, this week, things went catastrophically wrong with an offshore oilrig. It blew up and killed people, which was still not it going catastrophically wrong. It burned and fell into the ocean, which was also not it going catastrophically wrong. It then proceed to continue to pump oil into the ocean at a rate of 1,000 barrels a day, which is when it started going catastrophically wrong. That wasn’t supposed to be able to happen. And the thing that was supposed to keep it from happening is like 5000 feet below the surface of the ocean. And apparently the scientists and engineers, who I put such faith in, didn’t contemplate how to fix a problem that might occur in a mile of water. So the scientists and engineers have an idea. A dome, it’s a dome that will go over the broken wellhead and collect the oil and pump it into a storage facility until we can come up with a better idea. Of course something as great and necessary as this dome is going to be doesn’t already exist, we have got to create it now, while the 1,000 barrels of oil a day pour into the Gulf of Mexico. How much oil is that, well the most helpful way I have heard of thinking about it is that the spill is roughly the size of Ohio right now. The spill is about twenty miles off the coast and when it hits the coast it is going to coat the rocks and sand and wildlife and that is bad. So the United States Coast Guard is trying to figure out how to keep the oil slick from spreading and amongst the several ideas that they have is to simply set the ocean on fire. Oh my god. What an amazing idea. It will of course causes a toxic column of smoke to rise into the air and the oil that is left behind is thicker and harder to clean up, but on the plus side they are going to set the ocean on fire and I am a little giddy about that idea. Like when we bombed the moon. I am kind of a misanthrope.

On to a much happier note. My friend Jenn, the writer of the hilarious and insightful blog Insert Witty Title Here as well as a contributor to Skirt.com, is going to get married on May 29, 2011 to my friend Kyle, with whom I used to get high in my car and is now one of the member of my juggernaut trivia team, The Liberal Friends of David May. I could not be happier for these two kids and I wanted to do something nice for them, especially Jenn who has a tendency to be the frenetic partner in the relationship while Kyle tends to be somewhat more laidback. So I have created this clock.

Countdown To Kyle and Jenn's Wedding

This clock that is counting down to May 29, 2011 at noon.* It is always counting. If Jenn were to wake up at 3 in the morning and check the clock, it will still be counting down. It counts down when Jenn and Kyle are asleep. It constantly and inexorably counts down the minutes until Jenn and Kyle’s entrance into connubial bliss. Not just the minutes but also the seconds. Tick, tick, tick, and just like that we are three seconds closer. What a great idea is this clock? Jenn has stated on her recent blog post that May 2010 is going to be a wedding planning free month for her and I think that is a good idea, relax you have plenty of time. Just look at the clock. Certainly, you have less time than you previously had and indeed the clock demonstrates a ceaseless march towards zero-hour, but certainly there is plenty of time. Of course I can’t guarantee that this will always be true, for like Doc Brown in Back to the Future, I must think fourth dimensionally. You, the reader and possible future fan of 4M, may be reading this blog for the first time in June of 2011 and if you are, welcome, and I hope the midterm elections went the Democrats’ way. And if you are reading this in the not so terribly distant future the clock has already struck zero. Jenn and Kyle are already married, the ceremony was magical, Jenn looked beautiful, and everything went off with out incident except for the very unsteady and possible personally embarrassing wedding toast I made. So congratulations to Jenn and Kyle on their future happiness, which may have already occurred depending on what the clock says.

*. You've no Idea what a giant pain in the ass it was to find a clock that I could get to work on blogspot. But I wouldn't let it go, I worked through the problem for Jenn and Kyle, such is my love for them. You'll noticed I had the clock formatted into "total per time unit" as opposed to the more conventional "remainder per time unit". So instead of it being w days and x hours and y minutes and z seconds it is w days or x hours or y minutes or z seconds. As I said this is not standard but is of course more instructive. I wouldn't want the happy couple to be in doubt about exactly how many seconds are left until they are joined into a state of absolute and perpetual union, forever, until death. Originally the clock was black and blended seemlessly with the background of 4M but that seemed dreary and a little morbid. So I changed it to this nice sunny orange kind of color, html color FF9900, and the font to a cheery lilac purple color,9933CC. If you're going to do something, might as well do it right.

Dead Rabbit!

2010-04-22T17:13:00.002-04:00

I am not depressed. I know what depressed feels like and it doesn’t feel like this in the least. I have been depressed and I will be depressed again, like so depressed that I can’t pick my head up or move. But right now I am not depressed. I am experiencing a period of my life that is frustrating and exhausting and I am occasionally frustrated and exhausted but I am also feeling purposeful and motivated and occasionally really happy. The last couple of days I have been experiencing an existential crisis, which is both frustrating and exhausting. It involves my family and I will neglect to chronicle exactly what happened because I have been told that my blogging about the things that my family does to me and how that makes me feel is vicious and spiteful and is completely the product of me being entirely selfish. That last sentence comes off terribly passive aggressive and I get that but I got nothing else right now.

“The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is humility: Humility is endless.” T.S. Eliot.

When I am angry with people I reflect on the fact that humility is endless. I am a pretty defensive person. I don’t like being confronted or challenged. It is probably a huge part of why I became a lawyer. There are people in my life that I like to be confronted or challenged by less than normal and not surprisingly it is these people that are most active in laying a grievance at my feet. When they do this I get defensive and the normal faculties that I use to regulate and assess my conduct stops working and I become engaged in justifying and defending my position. Invariably when the argument is over my ability to take an honest look at myself re-engages and I try to assimilate all the new criticism that I have been given. I start with what I know to be the facts of my life. My set of facts is different from everyone else’s and I try to allow for the fact that my own perception may have been horribly clouded. This is the beginning of humility being endless, admitting that you may be completely wrong about the way you have perceived things. The motives you may have imputed on to others may not be their real motives. Your own motivations may not be as pure as what you’d like to believe. As hard a look as you have taken of yourself might still have large gaping blind spots that conceal some uncomfortable truths. If I want to think that someone has been criticizing me because of some deep seeded insecurity that they won’t admit to and might not even be aware of, I must also admit that I may have my own neurosis that make it impossible for me to fully understand my own mind and how it works. Humility is endless. I trust my own faculty of reason a great deal and so it is difficult for me to question it. But it is a tool like any other tool and I can put it to use by trying to understand myself and also by trying to obfuscate a true understanding of myself. I don’t think I am trying to hurt anyone with my blog. But I have so much anger and insecurity working like a constant subroutine in my mind that I can’t be sure of how I am warped by it. When I write I do so to expurgate my feelings and to get them out of my head. For the last three days I have been trapped in a constant argument with myself, the only person I can effectively argue with about myself without getting really defensive about it, about who I really am and it is extremely painful thing to have going on in your mind. Doubt is painful, certainty is not. Certainty is also useless for a person who really wants to know what the fuck he is and why he does the things that he does. You never get to be certain in life. Humility is endless. The longer you are certain of something the longer you get to build upon it as a foundation for things which you may or may not be certain of and over time the structural flaws of your certainty may become apparent. So I have to live in painful, painful doubt all the time. I don’t get to know anything for certain. I think many thoughts and feel many feelings and many of them are contradictions or inconsistencies. Some of them are horrible and evil and unattractive and I have to reconcile myself to the fact that I am the kind of person that has those thoughts and feelings without feeling horrible about them. There are things that are done to me and I have to think about how I feel about them, and I have to have some feelings about what I think about them, and I have some thoughts about the thoughts and feelings I just had, and I have some feelings about my new thoughts, and you can imagine how what that would be like in your head after a couple of days; chasing the truth down a rabbit hole of messy emotions and confusing thoughts. And there are people in my life that find it more convenient to believe that I don’t have those thoughts or feelings, but instead find it easier to believe that I am simply a self-justifying sociopath without any real regard for anyone else in the world. And I must entertain that as a possibility. Oh well, I have gone on too long about this.

While my existential crisis has been going on I haven’t just been sitting around drinking in the dark, although that does sound terribly appealing to me right now. On Tuesday I had to help my father kill our pet rabbit Holly Hop, which was certainly diverting. We are not veterinarian inclined pet owners, especially when it comes to end of life care. The process of pet euthanasia in my family includes a drive to the woodlot, a gun, and a shovel. Holly Hop, it is believed, had suffered a series of strokes. The first being back in November or October and the most recent depriving her of the use of her entire hindquarter. All winter she has had problems hopping because of some paralysis in her rear feet. But she was quick enough to hop over and eat Tostitos out of my hands and since she was up and able to take nourishment the problem was a non-issue. But then last week she completely lost the ability to hop or walk or crawl and so it was simply time to take a drive out into the woods. My father informed me of his intention to kill the bunny and I was upset but felt it was my responsibility to accompany my father and be there for him and Holly at the last moments. Step one of the process was getting Holly into the car. Dad had gone over to Farmington in the morning to tend to his goats, I was going to take Holly with me and meet him on route 16 at the appointed time and we would all go up to the woodlot together. Holly has a really large cage and I have a medium sized car so the process of getting the cage, with bunny in it, into the car involved a lot of physics and geometry but it was decided by my stepmother that it would be best to leave Holly in her regular cage rather than upset her by trying to relocate her into a pet carrier. I was sympathetic to this idea right up until the point I was trying to wedge the cage into the car and then I became slightly exasperated with the entire proposition. But lets not turn the situation into one of the trials of Hercules, I got the bunny into the car and we set out for the woods. I met my father and he loaded the gun and shovel into the trunk of the car and together we road in relative silence up to the woodlot, because we were sad and because the car does not have a radio.* When we arrived at the woodlot I carried the gun and the shovel and dad took Holly Hop. The earth was a little wet and I slipped into a bottom less mud puddle, which caused my right boot to fill with cold mud. The boot filled with mud did not become significantly more comfortable when it warmed to body temperature. We arrived at the spot where we had buried our previous rabbit Jax, who had died of natural causes. Dad laid Holly out on the some leaves and I began digging a grave. Digging a grave in the woods of New England is a lot more difficult than you’d imagine. There are tree roots everywhere and where there are no roots there are rocks, big ones and little ones. For some reason dad had brought a small gardening shovel and it didn’t make the job of digging a suffiecently deep grave any easier. Dad took a turn digging and I got down on my knees to clear the larger rocks out of the way. Dad mentioned that it would be easier if we had the tractor and the backhoe, which is why he owns a tractor with a backhoe because he thinks of it at moments like this. All I wanted was a larger shovel and a larger shovel would have done it but dad is kind of preposterous about using the tractor for things where other tools would be suitable and appropriate. We dug a three and a half foot deep hole figuring that was probably going to be good for the Holly. Then it was time for the gun.

Some of my readers may be more sensitive than others and if you think you might find a depiction of shooting a family pet to be too graphic for you I would skip ahead to the next paragraph. So dad takes the gun, which is a break action .22 caliber rifle. And points it at Holly’s head. He said, “we wouldn’t do this if we didn’t love you.” Just then Holly moved her chin up so dad had to readjust his aim and so the hard part took about three seconds longer than it should have and those are long seconds. Dad pulled the trigger and it was a muted popping sound. Holly went rigid and then spasmed and dad reloaded and put another one in Holly’s head. Her hind feet, which had been motionless for a couple of days were still tensing and kicking in a slow rhythm. There was vascular bleeding from the gunshot wounds, which meant that her heart was still pumping and I told dad to hit her again. He told me that she was dead, and certainly she wasn’t feeling anymore pain with two bullets having cleared out the contents of her skull but the heart does go on. Dad put a third bullet into Holly’s head and she stopped twitching and she stopped bleeding. I put a hand on her side and her heart had stopped. I pulled out a big black trash bag and dad picked her up and put her inside of it. I lowered the bag into the grave and put her blanket in on top of her. Then we covered her over with dirt. There was a stone wall near at hand and dad and I took some manageable but still largish rocks and placed them on top of the grave to mark its location and to dissuade coyotes from trying to dig it up.

So yeah, that happened. Then yesterday I took one of the residents of the old folks home to the foot doctor, which is not particularly interesting. When I was done with that I decided to head over to the Strafford County Jail and talk with a client of mine who is currently in residence. I don’t know how much is appropriate or professional to discuss about my trip to the jail but I think I can tell you this and not get into any trouble or even enter on to an ethical gray area. I finally got to say to a corrections officer, “Is it necessary that my client be in handcuffs?” and I actually got the CO to take the cuffs off. Just like in the movies. Red-letter day for me, really. But the corrections officer sergeant had some words for me about bringing my lighter and my cigarettes into the jail, because evidently those are contraband. Sorry, I am pretty new at this. But still I felt like I got some things accomplished and I was feeling pretty good about myself and then while I was still in the parking lot of the jail I got a call from someone in my family and that shot my good feeling in the head three times and buried it in the woods. Oh well, sorry the blog has been such a downer lately. I will try to perk it up a little next week. Thanks for reading.

*. Hey asshole, did your really need to take the stock Mopar radio out of the Chrysler Cirrus before putting it up for auction? I bet that is in your garage right now or in the basement collecting dust. What were you thinking? “Hey man this shit picks up AM and FM bands, I just can’t let that go.”

Few Things!

2010-04-14T20:30:00.000-04:00

Okay so a couple of things.

First, recently I am having a really hard time not listening to pop music of the eighties. Why the hell am I listening to Big Country’s seminal work of eighties pop, In a Big Country, right now? No idea. Why is Laura Branigan the next thing on my play list? No idea. But it is and I cannot stop myself. You can’t go through your late twenties listening to Men at Work unless you are going through your late twenties in the Reagan Administration. Toto’s Africa shouldn’t be my power song right now but it is. I need some help. I have engaged in a lot of behavior in the past that I thought dangerous and detrimental but nothing has been so straight up scary as my recent fixation with music of the eighties. It is the popular music of the most disposable decade in the history of America but there it is salvaged from the scrap heap and playing on my computer. When did I download Eye in the Sky by the Allan Parson Project? I must have been high or drunk. But why am I listening to it now is a question so troubling that I must put it far from my mind. The heart wants what the heart wants and evidently my heart wants to listen to crap right now.

Second, Father William Ventura, from St. John The Evangelist Church in Chelmsford Massachusetts was arrested over the weekend in Nashua, New Hampshire for soliciting prostitution. I would just like to say, “Good for you Father William.” Seriously, way to seek out an age appropriate partner, who wasn’t a parishioner or their child, to have sex with. You are setting a pretty commendable example to your brothers in the priesthood. Father William has been placed on a leave of absence and I think that is good, because this man needs to go on a speaking tour. He needs to make the rounds of the diocese and talk up the many advantages of prostitution. Some of the congregation was shocked and why wouldn’t they be; a man in his late twenties swore off women for life, that is pretty fucking shocking. But hey come to find out he was seeing prostitutes on the side, so I am officially un-shocked. The priesthood has had a long and illustrious tradition of utilizing prostitutes and I am glad to see that Father William is trying to bring sexy back. Work that black shirt, the dog collar, and flowing vestments. In all honesty Father William, I know things look bad now and they might continue to look bad for a while. It is tough getting out of a hole that you dug yourself into but late at night when the demons crowd around you and you are haunted by your failings just remember, at least you didn’t abuse a school full of deaf children. Also thank you for visiting beautiful tax free New Hampshire.

Third, I just set up a blog for my father so that he can badmouth his tenants for the benefit of other landlords. It is called Landlord Defense League and the countdown to a defamation suit begins now.

Fourth, it is tax day and once again I have spent an entire year without reducing any income to my undisputable possession. Maine Bar rules require me to fill out a Maine tax return and that is fine but I want the Maine Bar to ruminate on the fact that I was a lawyer for more than two months in 2009 and made no money. Point of fact I had to pay them money, that was never actually mine, for the privilege of not making any money as an attorney.

Fifth, I had to fill out an extension for my dad and his wife’s taxes. Dad can’t get his shit together in four and a half months to do his taxes. This is me being very generous in my characterization because he also has a stack of 2006-2008 taxes, inclusive, still to be done. That means that he actually can’t get his shit together in 3 years and four and a half months. By the way there is no polite way to tell your stepmother that she might want to consider filing an individual return instead of filing jointly because you have a sneaky suspicion that your father might, at some point, spend sometime in a federal prison for tax evasion. Apparently Leavenworth is very nice for three months out of the year. Best estimates for my father’s success in a federal prison, if he survives the first two weeks he will be running that place in a month.

4M Welcomes Back Ms. Erica!

2010-04-14T17:37:00.003-04:00

So my friend Erica shoots me a facebook chat the other day about how she has a blog entry that she would like me to publish on 4M but she is a little scared to ask me to publish it. I tell her to go ahead and ask me, what is the worst thing that could happen? So she asks me and I, always eager to encourage someone else’s efforts at expression unless they are wicked dumb, said yes. Then came the caveat emptor. It is about pooping yourself. My response to that, “Bold topic choice.” Certainly it wasn’t anything that I would write about and that is saying something because I will write about almost anything. My opinion is that pooping yourself is something between you, your God, and the gas station attendant that has to change the trash bag in the men’s room where you threw out your boxers. In such circumstances it is appropriate to remove the trash bag and, if the bottom of the can is clean enough, to leave money before putting the trash bag back. Something between 5 and 7 dollars is what is expected for something like this. If the bottom of the trashcan is filthy you can go to the counter and just hand the attendant the money. But don’t say what it is for; they know and won’t ask. If they are new and haven’t been properly trained they may ask and you just say, “You’ll find out” and leave without giving a forwarding address. Maintaining your anonymity is part of the bargain. So yeah, here is Erica’s really cringe worthy blog about soiling one’s self. Enjoy.

I haven’t written anything in quite some time for fear that my postings may detract from Matthew’s recent accumulation of fans. He has been so kind to allow me to post via his site since I’m too lazy and tech challenged to have my own. I decided to write once more because the Easter brings out the best in me and my family and I have only just recovered enough from it to write about it. My family on my father’s side is Italian, which should more or less explain everything. We drink a lot and drop the final vowels in words like “proscuitto” and “calamari” and add them to words like “let’s” a la Mario and Luigi. We eat A LOT and are boisterous while we do it. We embrace just about every stereotype every of Italians. Go ahead, make fun of me, I don’ta care.

Stereotypes aside, we also epitomize the Italian family because we take our holidays seriously; primarily Christmas Eve* and Easter. While we take the traditions seriously, our conversations during these holidays are another matter. Most families have lines regarding appropriate topics of dinner conversation. Things like “poop”, “smegma”**, and “Nancy Pelosi is a disgrace to Italians everywhere”*** probably aren’t passed around with the potatoes and asparagus at most family dinners. We are so far past the lines that they look like dots. As one could assume this makes it problematic when bringing in outside members. For example, one Christmas Eve my cousin’s boyfriend (now husband), Mike, joined us for the first time. Between bringing the food out, organizing seats, and general volume levels I was pretty certain he was having second thoughts about his relationship with my cousin. There he was, a grown thirty something year old man standing petrified against the wall, waiting for the chaos to ebb. Only it didn’t. At an Italian meal, the amount of food involved is directly related to the excitement level. As more dishes were brought out, the more heated our “conversations” got and Mike looked like he wanted nothing more than to drown himself in his glass of Cabernet. Surviving an Italian holiday as an outsider is the mark of true love and Mike passed the test. I’m slightly terrified for the day I bring someone to our family gatherings. Actually, it is quite possible that due to this I will end up with nine cats and knitting needles.

Family events such as this take place twice a year with my father’s side. During Easter, ten of us gather near Wilmington, North Carolina for a long weekend of alcohol infused merriment that is nothing short of amazing. Most of the hilarity can be attributed to my cousin Dennis. Dennis is going to be 21 this year but acts like an 8 year old. He’s from Jersey, loud, has bulging biceps, about 8 carats of cubic zircona in his ears and would be happier as an extra on the Jersey Shore than in college. We’re aware of how ridiculous he is, really, we are.

Dinner goes something like this: we sit down to my aunt’s fabulous home cooked meals with gorgeous views of the sun setting over the creek. Then Dennis moons someone and farts. As a result of this Dennis’ bodily functions are a major topic of our dinner discussions. Over a lovely dinner of steak and potatoes one evening, we decided to question Dennis’ Facebook status from a few days ago that simply read “pooped in my pants”. We thought this was Dennis being silly. We should have known better. He most definitely defecated in his pants.

“So I was in the dollar store and I had this fart and I was trying to hold it in. I realized I couldn’t hold it so I tried to do it quietly. I unclenched and I ended up pooping my pants.”

Between the ten of us we were laughing so hard we were a) crying b) short of breath c) both of the above. And it gets better, “I had to walk out of the store like this because it was dripping down my leg.”

He hunched over and hobbled around the table as if fecal matter was running down his leg. Of course it couldn’t end there though. This story was followed by how his roommate also crapped himself. Dennis wanted to set his roommate’s fart on fire and as he prepared to light up, a brown spot appeared on the roommate’s boxers. Needles to say the chocolate trifle my aunt had made for dessert was no longer appealing.
Deciding that perpetuating the poop jokes was a good idea, my other cousins and I decided to make him an “Easter basket” consisting of anti-diarrhea pills and a bucket for his ride back to school. The plan was short lived though, his mom found the goods in the garage. This is the problem with cramming the 10 of us in one house: privacy and secrets go right out the window and usually at the most inopportune times. Like at 7:15 in the morning. Being woken up by the sound of the coffee grinder, two spastic dogs running on the tile floor and my cousin, her husband, my aunts and uncles debating the merits of mini lap tops, yeah, I got no sleep. It’s one of the cons to sleeping on the couch in the living room. Another is that Dennis’ favorite place to fart is the couch. Farts I can deal with, the major drawback are the amount of windows and sliding doors. During the day they provide lovely views but, come night time, I keep having visions of a serial killer in a raincoat rap on the glass door with a hook and carving me up like an Easter ham. This only became an issue after I found out the teen horror flick “I Know What You Did Last Summer” was filmed in the town****. When we found this out 2 years ago Dennis decided to scare his sister, my cousin’s girlfriend, and I while we were hanging out in the hot tub. It was like a blooper scene from “I Know What You Did Last Summer”. There we were, 3 girls in a hot tub, gossiping and giggling when all of a sudden we heard the bushes rustle. We saw someone round the corner in a raincoat with a fisherman’s hat. Most normal people would have begun to panic, however, as this guy was under 5’6” we knew it was Dennis so we screamed, but with laughter.

Other more enjoyable things were filmed in town; most notably “Dawson’s Creek”. How my family settled in the same place that “Dawson’s” was filmed is beyond me. It’s probably a good thing they ended the show before we made a habit of visiting. Imagine Joey and Dawson preparing to have a romantic, moonlit kiss only to have the take interrupted for the 12th time due to someone shouting “Dammit, I pooped myself!” in the background.

Defecating in ones pants is pretty terrible but thankfully I can say (knock on wood) that it hasn’t happened to me. Lots of things happen to me, but not that. Like the other day I had a particularly bad day. Everything that could go wrong in the 45 minutes before heading to work went wrong. I woke up late, broke the zipper on my dress, dropped the contents of my makeup bag, lost a 20 dollar bill and my sunglasses, and forgot my lunch. Oh, I was also late for work. So just a really craptastic morning and to top it off I had to deal with 6th graders. I firmly believe the majority of 6th graders are not ready to be placed in middle school and are a bunch of babies. I’m also a tad bitter since I got hit in the face by a 6th grader during a game of Dodgeball. So I was filling in for a 6th grade English class and I was helping this one kid fix a paragraph in his essay. He had a lot of questions and was beginning to bug me. Kid, I can’t write the paper for you. When I thought I couldn’t take one more question from him he asked, “Do you know anyone that tried to set a fart on fire?”

Before bursting into laughter I had to think: Why would a 6th grader EVER think it’s OK to ask the teacher about farts? Do I look like a woman with that kind of knowledge? Should I be insulted he asked me that? What do I even say to that?
“Come visit my family next Easter, you can sleep on the couch.”

*. Christmas Eve is a major holiday in Italian households. People continue to fight me on this but in Italian, German, and other major European countries this night is equal to, if not more important, that Christmas Day itself. So yes, it IS a holiday and it’s taken seriously. As soon as the last Tupperware lid is snapped on the Thanksgiving leftovers the menu for Christmas Eve is planned. The 7 fish dishes, copious amounts of pasta, turron (nougat), struffoli (known to non-Italians as the “munchkin pyramid with sprinkles”) are important but wine, that’s a necessity. Wine is the key to getting through Italian meals. We’re so loud that only continuously flowing wine will allow you to manage and keep you from plugging your ears with cannolis. Plied by wine, we get into about one political debate every year and usually one other hilarious thing happens. Last year we were having a discussion about ethics and my cousin’s ridiculous Pennsylvania accent became more and more pronounced to the point it was a southern drawl. So we all spoke in southern drawls for the next 20 minutes. It’s pretty much my favorite time of year.

**. Hi, it is MacVane. I have a really strong constitution. I grew up in an old folks home and I have had to wake up in the middle of the night and clean stuff that would make people just throw up from their toes up. I don’t get motion sick, I am not afraid of needles, I am not afraid of dying, I am not afraid of failure, poverty, isolation, dogs, spiders, heights, crowds, blood, or enclosed spaces. There are in fact only two things that I really can’t deal with in any productive way; the word smegma and amputees. The word smegma and amputees are really the only two things that have ever put me off my feed. Anything else I can pretty much eat through. I discovered the fact that I am not able to deal with amputees when I was ten. Mom took us to a bean supper at a Church and I was eating across the table from a guy with one arm and I was really upset about it. “The guy isn’t whole. Parts of him are missing. Parts of me could go missing.” I found it really, really upsetting and I wasn’t eating and Mom just thought I was being finicky or difficult because that was kind of my modus operandi. When I got out into the parking lot I broke down crying because the sight of a person damaged in that way was just a little too much for me and I have never been able to get over it. My problem with the word smegma is somewhat of a recent discovery. About two weeks ago I was having dinner with my father and step-mother and dad was talking about his goats and about how some of the females where in heat and how the smegma was thick and that was the end of dinner. I mean we have never been a delicate or genteel family but for the love of God, could we avoid thick goat smegma conversations at the dinner table. Not much of a line in the sand but there it is. Also on a note of ridiculousness my father recently lost a baby goat, one out of a set of triplets. It died because it was the runt and it couldn’t get compete with his siblings for food and it was sickly to begin with. I am completely well adapted to the capricious nature of life on a farm because a long time ago I had to become well adapted to the capricious nature of life at an old folks home. 19 people died in my house while I was growing up there. One Easter morning someone died and by six o’clock that night someone else died. And my dad gave the situation a patient shrug and drank an extra beer and moved on with his life. But he has been really torn up about this goat. I asked him about it the other day, trying not to sound accusatory, “Hey dad, we lost like two dozen people in the course of the 25 years we’ve been in business and I have never see you this broken up about any of them as you are about this goat.” Dad responded that he didn’t just let any of those people die, but he could have done more to save the goat. I let it rest although I think I could have offered some evidence regarding more that could have been done for some of those people and the fact that the goat was as well cared for as any runt goat has any right to expect. Jesus dad drove over to Farmington in the middle of the night, brought the goat back to Somersworth, and bottle-fed the damned thing. That is better treatment than he gave his own sons on several separate occasions. Point of fact the argument that precipitated my parent’s divorce revolved around my father’s negligence in taking as good care of me when I was sick as he did with that goat. I digress.

***. That one is from my dad’s youngest sister, the uber conservative.

****. “I Know What You Did Last Summer” was a slasher film that took place in a quaint seaside town. That seaside town happens to be near Wilmington, N.C. I only found this out because two years ago my uncle was asked to join the band accompanying the town production of “Guys and Dolls”. My uncle is a music genius and plays the violin, sax and clarinet perfectly and will take any opportunity to play his instruments. Being the supportive family we are, we went to see the production. Before the show started, some woman talked about the history of the town theatre and how it was used in many movies, including IKWYDLS. Wracking my brains trying to remember what scene could have possibly taken place in the building I look around for clues. A quick glance behind me reveals a balcony with iron railings. There’s the scene where Sarah Michelle Gellar is winning the town beauty pageant or something else deserving of a tiara and her boyfriend, Ryan Phillippe, is standing in the balcony watching. As the pageant continues, SMG spots the killer in the balcony and proceeds to watch her boyfriend get murdered in the balcony. SMG starts crying and the crowd thinks she’s happy she won. Oh, SMG, just be lucky Dennis isn’t farting in your face.

A Contemplation of Future Scars.

2010-04-12T03:11:00.003-04:00

He searched in the mirror
Looking for a place
Where a scar would go nicely

Perhaps across his chin
Vaguely evocative of Harrison Ford
Or along his cheek bone
A clean straight dueling scar

One of those that intersect the eyebrow
Would add an air of mystique
Without detracting from his looks

A Chelsea smile would be a bit much
And also he wouldn’t be able to eat soup
For quite sometime.

Maybe thinking small,
How about a Phantom of the Opera burn,
Or the jagged reminder of a dog mauling.
Or just the creases and lines and weathering
Of too many years of hard living.

He shook his head and smiled,
What nonsense,
To choose the location
Of what only misfortune
Could place upon your face.

“Although”, he thought,
“I would look rakishly handsome
with a dueling scar.”

There will be blog!

2010-04-10T10:19:00.003-04:00

Can I explain something that seems to have eluded a great many people? It has to do with the oil. The oil that is still in the ground, the oil that is out of the ground and on the open market, the hypothetical oil that might be in the ground, the hypothetical oil that might someday be out of the ground and on the open market. You’ll notice that I have listed the oil existing in only two states, under ground and on the open market. Those are in fact the only two states that oil will exist in. You might say, “But Matthew oil certainly is in transit at some point? No, the second oil comes out of the ground it is instantaneously comodified. It is measure by the barrel and a price is set upon it. “Why are you wasting my time, Matthew, talking about the life cycle of oil? Don’t you have some amusing anecdote that would be personally embarrassing for you to recount?” Yes, I have tons of them. I am making new ones everyday. I had to go to Casual Male today to buy a belt. I could certainly do three pages on the indignities of going to a fat and wide man’s store. But I won’t do that right now. Maybe tomorrow if you’re good. If you are going to read this blog occasionally you have to eat your vegetables. This is one of those vegetable blogs about oil and oil exploration and it will not be hilarious. Maybe it will, I can’t really say right now. Might go someplace hilarious but I can’t guarantee that it will and at the moment I am not even thinking about trying to make it hilarious.

So yeah oil… Oil comes out of the ground and you might wonder how that happens. Well in the olden days some Daniel Plainview looking guy would come along and screw over some farmer and get the mineral rights to his land real cheep and set up derrick and strike oil. If you were really good at this you got rich real quick. If you weren’t, you didn’t. That first generation of guys that got really rich were hardscrabble dirty men living by their wits. Their children were the children of hardscrabble dirty men who had lived by their wits. Their grandchildren were soft apathetic complacent bastards that had no interest in being hardscrabble or living by their wits, they don’t even respect those qualities. Luckily enough by the time it got down to the grandchildren, these huge oil company had hired some Harvard Business School types who were really interested in running an oil company so that they could someday rear a pack of complacent trust fund grandchildren.

The biggest challenge facing an oil company, other than how to count the huge piles of fucking money that just stack up around the office, is finding new sources of oil that they can exploit to the exclusion of other oil companies. Now in recent years there has been a lot of talk about opening up The Artic National Wildlife Reserve to oil drilling. Don’t say exploration, they aren’t exploring, they are drilling. It isn’t like if they find oil they simply claim the discovery of it and name it like they are fucking Ponce de Leon. They hook the derrick up to a pipe and start sucking the oil out of the ground. About ANWR, I don’t care about the caribou. I don’t care about them at all. I just like the idea of the human race not marring every single square inch of the planet just because we can. I think not drilling in ANWR is a nice little overture to that idea. You know like, this frozen wasteland at the top of the world with caribou and bears and where human beings can barely exists, we won’t screw with that. The jungles, the deserts, the rest of the entire of state of Alaska, the Bearing Sea, the entire state of Texas, the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic Coast Line, just not this desolate cold piece of nothing. We can certainly leave that alone can’t we or are we complete without restraint? Thankfully President Barack Mandingo Obama hasn’t yet caved on the drilling in ANWR.* But he has decided that he is now in favor of ending the long standing moratorium on drilling along the Atlantic Coast and that is completely fine with me. I don’t care. On certain things I don’t have a position and this is one of them. But I would like for people to get why this doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because foreign oil is essentially the same as domestic oil. Oil drilled in Kuwait is just like oil drilled out of Texas. It is the property of whatever oil company digs it up and they will sell it to the highest bidder. When we talk about drilling off the Atlantic Coast, we are not talking about the government drilling for oil and selling it to the citizens of the United States at some reduced rate. We are talking about giving oil companies a crack at digging for oil so that they can sell it to us or China or anyone else for the going rate for a barrel of oil. There is a theory that more domestic oil, increases supply, slackens demand, and drives oil prices down. But that would only occur in a world in which oil companies compete, which they don’t. Strictly speaking the competition portion of capitalism no longer exists.** Competition does not exists when there is a limited supply and an unlimited demand, which is the current state of the oil market. So what we are talking about here is not drilling for oil in the Atlantic as a way to help the American people generally, it is just something that will help American oil company specifically. Certainly it will help American oil executives a lot and it will create some jobs for American oil workers but as far as some broad based benefit conferred on to the people, no it won’t do that. “But Matthew, doesn’t foreign oil come from Middle Eastern countries and aren’t Middle Eastern countries bad?” Yeah some of the largest oil deposits are found in South Central Asian and Northern Africa but interestingly it isn’t where we get most of our oil. Most of our oil comes from North America. About 42% of our oil comes from our own country. The other 58% comes from other countries. About 7% of our oil comes from Canada. They are our largest oil supplier. Next, not surprisingly, is Mexico. And yes next is Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, but after them it is Venezuela and Columbia and Brazil. Most of our oil comes from the Western Hemisphere, probably because it is easier and thus cheaper to get it here from there. The idea that our use of foreign oil is a huge security risk for our country is apocryphal. Mostly because while the foreign oil comes from foreign countries, it is sold to us by corporations and corporations, as I have pointed out before, believe in no God, recognize no patriotic loyalty, exist exclusively to make money, and can live forever. And again there is some minimal benefit from buying from American corporations because they theoretically pay American taxes and employ American people, but it doesn’t result in cheaper gas. Don’t get on a jag about domestic oil and our national security or energy independence. We are never going to drill our way to energy independence, we don’t have that much oil and we never will and we have less of it every day. So yeah go ahead and drill in the Atlantic but be realistic, this is about oil companies making a shit ton of money and that is fine, that is what oil companies were made to do. But it isn’t about you as consumer, or you as an American.

On another note Justice John Paul Stevens has announced his retirement today and I just want to say, President Obama I am available. I would be a bold choice for the bench. I would have a really tough nomination battle but it would be worth it because I am just what the Court needs right now. All the interest groups are going to be clamouring that we need an Asian or another woman or an openly gay judge but I am what we really need, a white liberal man. There is no one more liberal than a white liberal man. There is no one else that was raised in an atmosphere of privilege, comfort, and entitlement that has repudiated all of it in favor of being a self-righteous almost Arthurian fighter for other people’s rights. Only the white liberal man can assume the white man’s burden and make it his business to raise up all the people who aren’t white men. There is no zealot like a convert and there is no convert like a white man who has become liberal. Minorities, somewhere along the way, had to face the fact that there are members of their group that may be undeserving of their help. But the white liberal man is not troubled by thoughts like that. Their world has gone unchallenged by personal adversity and they are thus allowed to be idealistic. And right now I can hear my mother, through time and space, reading this and saying, “That is the problem, you liberals don’t deal with reality.” Yeah, being an idealist isn’t serviceable in most walks of life but the Supreme Court needs a couple of idealists just to keep everything honest. A court of nine pragmatists would quickly devolve into Lord of the Flies. We need somebody who is willing to stand there and make the argument that we need to protect prisoners and terrorist suspects and accused child molesters, and members of labor unions and people who aren’t huge corporations, and kids that hold up signs that say “Bong Hits For Jesus” and black people and handicap people. And the best person to do that is a self-righteous, bleeding heart, white liberal man. In addition to my political, ethnic, and gender qualifications I am, you know, like, a lawyer and stuff. I am a civil libertarian. I believe in criminal courts for terrorists. I believe in reading Miranda to suspects. I believe that water boarding is torture and that torture is a crime. I believe that the writ of habeas corpus should be extended to everyone. I don’t believe the executive branch has as a wartime power the authority to declare someone an enemy combatant and hold them indefinitely. I believe Roe v. Wade was a bad decision but that it is not going to be overturned. I believe the dormant commerce clause gives the government an almost plenary power in this day of an almost completely integrated national economy. I believe money isn’t speech. Money in politics is almost always bribery. I believe in the absolute separation of Church and State, except for Christmas decorations because those are pretty. So yeah, I am available. Fair warning: I have a criminal record, a substance abuse problem, and I once said that, “Jesus was kind of a dick”. I can’t guarantee much but I can say that I will write funny dissents. There will finally be someone on the left to write funny and scathing dissents the way that Scalia does on the right. Also I promise to be active on the bench. Clarence Thomas went three years without asking a question during oral arguments. Three years and he didn’t have a thing to say to any of the lawyers that came before him to argue a case. I will be significantly more active than that. So yeah, President Obama I can be reached through my blog or on facebook.

*. I want to make it perfectly clear that I am not making fun of Barack Obama for being black. I am in fact referencing something I wrote during the campaign that is in my notes section on Facebook. The note follows:

“The people over at Fox love to bring up the fact that Barack Obama's middle name is Hussein. They like to say his full name as if there is some really salient political point to be made from the fact that his middle name is the same as the last name of a man whose country we invade on flimsy pretext. My advice for the Junior Senator from Illinois is that he change his middle name from Hussein to Mandingo. I don't necessarily believe that trading a name of a tyrant for a name that evokes the idea of a strapping slave's interracial affair with the slave master's wife will be unsettling for less people, there maybe a shift in the people it does offend but I don't think the demographic will grow. Still I think it would be a lot funnier and the anchors at Fox would look even more foolish trying to put the dour emphasis on Mandingo that they now put on Hussien.”

**. This is not entirely true. Competition exists in one discrete area of the economy: fast food dollar menus. The value of fast food has gone up as the consumer price has gone down. A decade ago if you wanted a chicken sandwich you were going to put yourself out by at least three dollars. Now every major fast food chain has a chicken sandwich on the dollar menu and there is earnest effort by all the fast food to have the best one-dollar chicken sandwich on the market. But that is it. Health care providers don’t compete, oil companies don’t compete, retailers don’t compete, wholesalers don’t compete. Wal-Mart has undercut every other retailer in the country, which is competition of a sort but having taken the entire market share that use to belong to smaller regional retailers and failed larger national chains, they are now free to charge what they want and they do. There is actually another area of the economy that is competition laden: illegal drugs. A black market is a perfect capitalist free market. Accordingly over the last thirty years, during the war on drugs, purity has gone up and cost has gone down. Better drugs cheaper is the primary effect of our war on drugs.

Moot Court!

2010-04-08T12:42:00.002-04:00

So yeah, yesterday was an interesting day. It started for me around two in the morning, which is just when I am waking up now a days. It is not the best sleep schedule in the world but it is what I am doing right now and it normally gives me plenty of daylight to accomplish my limited goals. I went for a walk and did some sit-ups. Yes, I occasionally exercise, try not to act shocked. Then I watched some television and did some research on estoppel. Then my father called me. I picked up the phone, which was my mistake. Nothing good ever comes of me answering the phone. I never pick up the phone and hear, “Hey Matt this is God, just wanted you to know that I love you and I know things are tough but you’ll get through it.” Or “Mr. MacVane there is a large sum of money that you are entitled to and we have placed it in a giant sack on your front porch.” No, calls I get are normally things like, “You owe us money and if you don’t give it to us we’ll ruin you.” Or in the case of a call from my father, “Matt, I need you to do some inane errand that I could do for myself but choose not to because it is easier for me to pawn it off on you.” Because I am under employed people think my time has no value and that drives me crazy. Particularly, it drives me crazy coming from my father because he has spent his life building an empire and over the course of the last decade has run that empire into the ground by focusing on small-scale goat and rabbit farming. Seven properties, hundreds of acres of land, and the man spends his days fucking around with goats. Hey it is his life and he can do whatever he wants but when you choose to do something that frivolous you cede the right to give people shit about not doing anything with their time. I am out here flying without a net. I am trying to start a law practice with no start up capital, no office, no business cards, no fax machine, no copier, no malpractice insurance, and no one I feel comfortable bothering for advice.* I am just kind of treading water in the deep end and aside from the practical challenges of this life I am living, the constant level of anxiety is a slow crushing force in my daily existence. While I am dealing with that I live in my father’s house and I am surrounded by people who like to imagine that my life is easy. Everyone fights their own little wars and I try to be respectful of the burdens that other people carry but for some reason everyone assumes that I am unencumbered by such burdens.

Oh well, so dad calls and he wants me to go over to the Strafford County Sheriff’s Office and pay them some outstanding debts that he has incurred by having them serve eviction notices. So I say no problem and I go downstairs and get into my car.** We got to back this up a little bit. I am broke. Not like my debts exceed my cash on hand. Like I have no money. Like a postage stamp is beyond me at this point. Like my belt broke last week and I am holding my pants up with a length of rope.*** Yeah. So I really wanted a pack of cigarettes because I find that my life doesn’t seem quite so hopeless if I can just have a pack of cigarettes. So I dumped out the change jar and found that I had enough quarters to buy the cheapest pack of cigarettes in the world. Thank you God for saving me the indignity of having to buy a pack of cigarettes with a shit load of dimes. I had just put all these quarters in my pocket when dad called. Back to the car. I drove down to County Farm Road, went to the Sheriff’s office, and walked on up to the metal detector. I took out my phone and my IPod and then I felt the ten pounds of change I was carrying and I looked at the metal detector. “Excuse me Sergeant”, I always call members of the military and law enforcement community by their proper rank “Will change set that thing off?” “Yeah.” So I am scooping quarters from out my pockets and into the little dish. “That’s a lot of change.” “Yeah Sergeant, but it is change you can believe in.” So I walk through the medal detector and don’t set it off, which is just great, and I take my belongings from out the dish but my keys are withheld because there is a little grooming tool on them that has an inch and a half long knife on it. Could I kill someone with that? Sure, if I had a couple hours and they didn’t fight back. I, as a 6’ 350 pound man, pose more of a security risk than my penknife is ever going to pose. I see cops calculating the sheer mass when they look at me. Gee he is going to be tough to get on the ground and once he is down it is going to be my problem to get him back up again and that might not be the easiest thing in the world either.**** So I do my business with the Sheriffs and I get back to the car and tell dad that the mission has been accomplished. Dad tells me that he is headed back to the house and that we are going to leave for Boston when I get there.

Yesterday was my brother’s moot court for his trial advocacy class and I was going to be a witness and dad and Walter, one of the guys from the boarding home in Farmington, were going to be jurors. Walter is one of the special people and he is kind of frenetic and talkative and generally has the attention span of a ferret on rave drugs. There has been a long string of Walters at the Garnet House going back many years and they are always great guys who eventually sin egregiously against my father’s sense of obligation and leave or are banished. So I try not to get attached to any specific Walter that passes over my transom. Walter tells anecdotes without a point and repeats jokes that weren’t funny the first time and can’t go five minutes without pointing out a television or moped or shirt that he wants and will buy the second he has some money. I find small talk really taxing. I am sorry I know how that sounds and I am really sorry but there is no getting around it. I know that small talk is how most people validate the existence of other people in their group but I can’t carry on a conversation that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. It is why when someone calls me to firm up details about a going out or meeting up or something that they want me to do, I rush them. People want to agonize and go back and forth about something, which is something they should have done before picking up the phone and bothering me. I just want to accomplish the goal of the call, which is to ascertain enough information so that we understand each other and then hang up. The best person in the world for me to talk to on the phone is my friend Jason Rayne. When I was still living in Portland we would call each other and have conversations that went like this. “You want to meet for a beer?” “Yes.” “See you at the Bear.” Entire conversation from hello to goodbye lasted twenty seconds. Any conversation that isn’t going to last several hours has no business lasting more than a minute. Salient details are all I want, everything else you can work out on your own time. My dad is famous for this, like with the errand to the Sheriff’s was a two-minute conversation. “Matt I left a check on the counter I need you to take it to the Sheriff’s office.” “Okay.” That should have been the end of it but it wasn’t there was all sorts of extra stuff about how to drop something off at the sheriff’s department and where the sheriff’s department is and the entire back story to the check and I don’t need any of that. One would think that one of the benefits of being smart would be that people would take for granted that you know what the fuck you are doing but it isn’t. People still treat you like an idiot and it is just really frustrating.

So Walter is trying to engage me in conversation all day and I am trying to be engaging but it is really painful for me. I know that sounds snobbish and arrogant and I am plenty ashamed but I can’t help it. Small talk is really painful to me and it always has been and it is one of the ten thousand reasons that I don’t have a lot of friends. For the record if you’ve just met me and found me to be cold and aloof it is not because I don’t like you or don’t respect you as a human being or think that you aren’t worth my time and energy it is just that I have yet to cultivate a way to talk to people that lies between, “Hi” and my entire life story and since I learned a long time ago that I can’t tell every person I meet my entire life story I wind up being kind of curt and taciturn. But it was a beautiful day in Boston. My dad, Walter, and I walked around the common and looked at the various memorials around the State House and took in the history and the architecture and the obscene amount of beautiful women that just walk the streets of Boston.***** I have spent a really long winter in my room and there are no beautiful women in my room. Occasionally they come in by way of the wireless router but nothing fleshy and life sized. Actual beautiful women remind me that I am really poor breeding stock and I should really do more to look better. Despite the shame and self-loathing that occasions seeing a really attractive woman in a summer dress I still like seeing them and there were plenty of them out and about yesterday.

As it got to be time for John’s moot court we made our way over to the Suffolk Superior Court House and up to the 9th floor. The moot court problem that John was doing was one I had worked with during my trial advocacy class so I was already familiar with the part I was going to play, Eddie Felton bar fly and material witness in a murder case.****** It should be mentioned that when I did my moot court problem John was on the jury and couldn’t see his way clear to convicting the guy I was prosecuting. So any hard time I might have given John, as a witness, should rightly be considered reciprocity. John’s partner did the opening and I thought she did a fair job although I didn’t agree with her and my brother’s theory of the case. The case is a murder trial being defended by assertion that the killing was justifiable as self-defense. Like all moot court problems there are things that go for the defense and things that go for the prosecution. In this particular case the defendant shoots a guy, with whom he had previously argued, outside of the bar they both frequent. The prosecution argues that the defendant planned the murder and was waiting outside the bar for the victim. The defense argues that the defendant was leaving the bar when the victim came outside to accost him and tried to attack him at which point the defendant shots the man in self defense. My job as a witness was basically to establish that the defendant left between 5 and 6 minutes before the victim and the defendant had no reason to be standing in the street with a gun when the victim finally exits the bar. I am hindered on credibility by the defense witnesses that say that I am best buds with the victim and I have an ax to grind. So I get up on the stand and I am asked who I am and I say I am someone else because I am roll playing. John asks me if I live alone and I say no I live with my wife and children and a dog named muffin and a parakeet. The judge doesn’t like me already. It is a real Suffolk Superior Court judge and he has no sense of humor. It is a moot court case, we should be able to have a little fun, hell a real trial should be just a little bit fun. John gives me that pained exasperated look that he gives me when he thinks I am really ruining his life. I’ve seen that look a lot in the last twenty years. So I get into my narrative, who left when and why and what happened after they left and what happened after I heard the gun shot and which way the defendant ran after the patrons of the bar saw him standing with a gun over the dead body of William Jones. John has this big diagram of the street where the bar is and he really wants me to show the jury where I was and where the defendant ran on the diagram. “Mr. Felton, would you find it helpful to use the diagram to show in which direction the defendant ran?” “No.” Sorry John, I would not find that helpful in the least. I have a general antipathy towards demonstrative exhibits. I think that they are useless only when they aren’t being confusing and deleterious to the smooth functioning of the case. You want to know what direction the defendant ran; away, he ran away. He didn’t run towards the group he ran away from the group of patrons. What about that concept requires the use of a diagram? Truthfully all John needed to do was ask the right question. I wasn’t having any trouble describing what happened so I wouldn’t find it useful to use the diagram. What you want to ask me is, “Mr. Felton would you please show the jury on this diagram where you were and where the defendant was?” Sure Mr. MacVane if you think the jury is a bunch of fucking idiots and need things drawn out for them I would be more than happy to oblige you in thinking that the jury is a bunch of fucking idiots. John doesn’t ask that question instead the Judge intervenes and says that he thinks it would be good to show people with the diagram, which really isn’t his job, at all, ever. I go up to the diagram and notice that rather than labeling things, which would have been helpful to both the idiots on the jury and the idiot who is testifying, there are a bunch of Velcro tabs where corresponding but absent labels ought to be. “So where were you?” I look like a guy who has no idea but has a one in ten chance of guessing right. “I was here.?.” Yeah okay step one done. “And where was the defendant.” I have a one in nine chance of getting that right. The defendant is this blank Velcro tab or this blank Velcro tab is a streetlight. “The defendant was here.?.” “And which way did the defendant run?” “North.” And thankfully there is a compass on the diagram and not a blank Velcro tab where the compass ought to be. I sit back down and finish the narrative and explain how I knew it was between five or six minutes between when the defendant and the victim left based on the song Piano Man being on the jukebox in the time between. And so John is done with his direct. Now it is time for cross. John wanted very much for me to be a witness without bias, just here answering questions. He didn’t want me to get defensive on cross, which I will now admit is not something I am capable of doing and in all fairness I don’t think it is something John could have done either. All the defense witnesses that are going to be called are going to try to make me out to be biased and the defense attorney is going to try to make me look biased on cross and I don’t care if it is roll playing I am defensive when people interrogate me. In my own mind I reconciled that my character was telling the absolute truth and had nothing to worry about but that didn’t stop me from getting my hackles up. I assumed a fighting posture. My shoulder crept up around my face and I grew so entirely tense that I was like a giant clenched muscle. I got a bitter taste in my mouth from the adrenaline and I was in full fight or flight mode. I kept trying to relax. Just let go and unclench but every time I tried to shake the anxiety out of my arms or un-constrict my neck I would go right back to a defensive posture. Can’t help it, it is just how I am wired. Plus all the nervous movements I was making in an attempt to loosen myself up were making me look like a crazy person and John was giving me the same, “Why must I have a brother that constantly tries to ruin my life” look, which didn’t help at all. I need to learn to relax and John needs to learn how to sooth someone who needs to relax. A look that says, “Everything is going to be okay just calm down” should be added to his repertoire.******* In fairness he might have that look but is entirely incapable of giving me that look. But I am answering the questions as they are put to me and I am maintaining my story and I haven’t slipped up yet. Defense Counsel is having a really hard time because my answers are not what he wanted and he can’t find a way to get me to say the thing he wants me to say. We get to the time frame between when the two men left the bar and he is going to try and impeach me with my prior inconsistent statement that I made to the police after the shooting when I said it was 2 or 3 minutes and not 5 or 6. Which doesn’t matter because if it was 2 minutes then the defendant still should have already been half way home and not out front waiting for the victim but it is an inconsistency and the guy needs to try and impeach me with it. So he asks, “When you gave your statement to the police you knew it was really important to give accurate details” “No, when I gave my report to the police it was after thirty people had just witnessed Merle Rausch standing over the body with a gun in his hand and I didn’t think anything I said to the police would be in the least bit necessary.” The judge said I was being non-responsive and my answer was stricken, which I think was unfair because if a person asks me what I was thinking at the time I should be allowed to say what I was thinking. Later John accused me of being ridiculous, which is his most frequent and harshest condemnation that he levels against me, and said that no one would ever really say that. Obviously forgetting that I am somebody and I would definitely say that. Seriously, you know me, I could definitely say that and be in a position to have it be the truth. Hey man, the guy was standing over the body, ran away, admitted killing the guy and a bunch of people saw it. What could it possibly matter if I low-balled the time frame when each man left? Plus, I’d be at a bar and cops with their notebooks would only be keeping me from my next beer and why would I exert myself to give them the exact minutia of the events, when the guy is so obviously guilty. I think you could see how I’d do that.

Aside from me twitching like a mad man and being a bit confrontational the cross went pretty well until I was asked in what direction the body was oriented. I transposed north and south. His feet were north, his face was south. He fell towards the defendant who was south of him and I botched that and I am really sorry. On the plus side John was able to get up with his nifty blank diagram and redirect me to the appropriate answer. Again this could have all been cleared up by the defense attorney asking if the victim fell as if he was moving towards the defendant. I could have said yes to that without a problem. But no one asked me that question. You know what is something that no one would ever actually say? “The victims feet were north of his head.” That is ridiculous. People don’t ever talk like that.

The rest of the trial went well and John gave a closing that came on like Gangbusters. No notes, that’s my boy. He got up after the defense counsel, gingerly moved the podium from out of his way because when a man is working like him he needs some room to work, and just laid into the last thing out of the defense attorney’s mouth. Here, you see these words, are these your words, how’s about I choke you with your own words? Oh Johnny was beautiful for about seven minutes standing in front of that moot court jury. He was flying. Course it didn’t hurt that he borrowed some of the closing that I would have given if it had been my case. The credit is all to him because he was amazing.********

We ran short on time and the jury didn’t get a chance to deliberate. After the critique of the trial we headed down towards Boston Commons and looked for a place to eat. John, as is John’s habit after doing extremely well at something, was full of self-recrimination and apologies. We arrived at the Beantown Pub and on our way to a table a screw came out of my glasses and I lost a lens, which was retrieved by a very nice young fellow in a Celtic’s t-shirt. By this time I was pretty tired. I had been awake for 18 hours, done a lot of walking, and because I was hanging out with my dad I couldn’t smoke.********* Plus, although I love my brother and I am very proud of him and all his accomplishments, I find it irritating to watch him do well.********** He’s the Harlem Globe Trotters and I am the Kentucky Colonels. I am running a box and one and he is pulling boom boxes out of his Afro and dunking with a ladder. Plus he is never gracious in victory. He can never just be like I am awesome and I have done amazingly well at something. He has to beat up on himself and get all neurotic about it. No victory lap. No quiet moment of just savoring his success. Just, these are the thousand things I didn’t do right before moving on to the next dragon he needs to slay. Little brother can’t compete and really isn’t trying but it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t genuinely piss me off to see him achieve. John decides to give me some shit about not helping him more as a witness. Especially involving his fucked up diagram. And I mention that the first time I put a witness on the stand she was a schizophrenic with multiple personality disorder and witnesses are not always helpful and don’t always give you exactly what you are looking for. John pointed out that I was not schizophrenic and I should have just helped him. Which completely doesn’t address my point about this being a learning exercise and being able to adjust in the moment. But we had a generally good meal, which John paid for and it was a wonderful evening.

As a last thing, on the way home we had to drop off Walter back in Farmington. This meant that we had to drive passed Somersworth and then turn around. Dad said that originally he intended for me to leave my car at Weeks Traffic Circle in Dover so that he could just hop off the highway drop me at my car and bring Walter home. I was in the back seat and I was exhausted. I can’t sleep in cars while they are moving. I also don’t sleep on trains, planes, couches, or anywhere else that isn’t my bed in my bedroom. I got one place where I sleep and everywhere else is for being awake. Occasionally, if I have to, I will sleep in my car but that is only if I absolutely can’t make it to my bed. I’ve never had a problem with motion sickness but the fact that my glasses were broken and everything was all fuzzy combined with the speed made me a little queasy and on edge. We were on route 16 and dad made like to pull off at the Dover exit. He was just going to drop me and then bring Walter back but I told him that I wasn’t going to make his and Walter’s night twenty minutes longer just so I could get home before everyone. So we pressed on. At the Rochester toll there were two toll booth attendants hanging out in the one booth that we pulled up to and dad was being his normal charming and gregarious self. “I don’t know who to give the money to.” And I said, “Just give them the money.” Dad told me to calm down. It was midnight already and I had cashed in my opportunity to get off this merry go round in order to be considerate to my fellow passengers. Now my father was wasting my time in a manner that I would not allow myself to waste his. Of course I apologized later for being snippy but for the love of God when I am trying to be considerate can people please meet me half way.

*. About the business cards, my brother is a very generous man but there is a hitch in his generosity. He tends to give gifts that require a lot of work on the part of the recipient to make whole. The most famous example of this is the spite gift he gave my father and stepmother a couple Christmases ago. John had recently gotten out of the Navy and was flush with capital so he decided to buy a pool table for my dad. Does my father play pool? No. Did he want a pool table? No. Stacey, my dad’s wife, had mentioned in jest that she wanted a pool table and my brother thought it would be funny, if not terribly expensive, inconvenient, and cumbersome, to buy a pool table for her. Two days before Christmas my brother walked into my room and announced that we were going to buy a pool table. He would pay for it and all I had to do was shop for it and get it here by Christmas. I thought this to be a horrible idea. First I knew that I was not going to be able to have a pool table delivered and installed before Christmas. I also knew that my failure to get the pool table here by Christmas would be an ongoing theme for the remainder of the holidays. I was going to take a lot of abuse over this. Of course this was all on top of the fact that no one wanted or needed a pool table. But hey what am I going to do? So I found a pool table for the right money and it was really nice and I ordered it and they said that they would get it here by the 28th of December. And I told John and he was incensed. I had ruined his perfectly good spite gift. Christmas comes and John gives Stacey and dad a print out of the pool table and mentions that it would be here already except for my massive failure to get one-day delivery on a pool table on Christmas Eve. We go to my uncle’s and John recites the story again complete with my ruining his brilliant Christmas gift. It occurs to me that this entire gift idea may just have been entirely for the purpose of making me look like an asshole. I look at my uncle and ask him if he knows what it is like to have an older brother who thinks he has never done anything right in his entire life. We both looked at my father and my uncle just smiled and nodded. So the day after Christmas my brother walks into my room and announces that he is leaving to go to Washington State because he can’t deal with my father anymore. I don’t blame him. Dad can be a challenge to anyone’s patience. But I enquired about the pool table delivery and how was I going to manage the hundreds of pounds of slate slabs that would be arriving in a few days without his help. John had no answers for this and seemed genuinely unconcerned about the mess he had just dumped on me. Fair enough, long story short, pool table got delivered and I dealt with it, and no one ever uses it. It just takes up space downstairs in one of the many unoccupied rooms. So yeah, that is the deal with John and gifts. This last Christmas, which was three months ago, John said he was going to get me business cards. Great, thank you, I really need business cards, seriously John what a wonderful idea. Idea isn’t the problem, execution is the problem. John asked me what I would want on the cards and I said my name, address, phone number, and a picture of a wizard with a crystal ball in his extended hand and a dragon. Then I thought seriously about the message that might send to potential clients and my colleagues in the legal community and I decided that the dragon should be breathing fire. Then I thought about it again and I said nix the wizard and dragon. Just Matthew MacVane Esq. Attorney at Law. John and I discussed it and I decided that instead of “Attorney at Law” it should just say “Lawyer” an idea that I am still not so sure about but I think I like it. So John puts the order in with a friend of ours from High School who does graphic design and who has an ancient press that puts out some really nice product. Then nothing happens for a while. The guy who is making the cards asks me about paper and color and I am like “White, off white is also good.” I just need cards with my name on them and I don’t need to over think this. But there is more back and forth between the guy and me about thickness and do I want them extra thick. Meanwhile John, is like, “What is the deal with the cards?” And I explain the problem. And he makes it my fault for not staying on top of the situation and I say, “Hey you were going to give me business cards for Christmas. If I said I was going to give you a house for Christmas and just dumped a bunch of lumber and a bag of nails in your front yard I would not have given you a house.” So that is where things stand with my business cards, right now there is still some issue with the paper. So yeah.

**. About the car; I bought it, John paid for it. I drive it, but it is his. This is yet another example of my brother’s beneficence. John fronted $2,000 so that I could buy a car with the understanding that I would drive it until he got home and there after he would use it for his summer job with the Public Defender’s Office. This gesture has been invaluable and I cannot not thank him enough because it makes the business of being a lawyer a lot easier. The first thing that happened with this arrangement is that I couldn’t find a suitable car. John wanted something that was good on gas and I wanted something that I could get in and out of. There is no overlap in that Ven diagram. Moreover, I was now responsible for buying the car, which means that I assume all responsibility for the car turning out to be a lemon. So I test drove a bunch of used cars and never found anything that I was willing to trust. I knew that when the car I bought inevitably had a problem it would be better that I died before taking my first breath than have to deal with John and the immense amount of grief that I was going to take for screwing him over, which is exactly how this whole thing was going to be framed. I am more than a little psychic, trust me on this. Eventually I went to my mechanic and he put me in a Chrysler Cirrus and gave me a deal on the future labor costs for fixing it. The car has no radio, one of the doors doesn’t open, and the power steering doesn’t seem to work but it runs and goes and breaks so what more can be asked of me? So every time I go out to the car I think, is this the time? Is this the time that it won’t start, or the transmission falls out of it, or that it just bursts into flames? And if it bursts into flames I hope I am in it. I will light a cigarette and pray to God that John is so overcome with mourning his baby brother that he will give me a pass on screwing up his car situation for the summer.

***. Seriously, my belt broke last week and I am holding my pants up with a length of rope. I have actually been dropping some weight so I put an extra hole in the belt and undermined the structural integrity of the strap of leather and low and behold it just broke while I was standing around at this funeral that I was at last week. I was talking to one of the bereaved and all of a sudden my belt wasn’t tight around my waist anymore. So I pulled it off and stuck it in my pocket, which confused the person I was talking to but they were polite enough not to mention it.

****. This is why I never resist arrest. I know that they are going to take me down and it is going to hurt but more than that I know that once I am on the ground I am going to be handcuffed and I can’t get back to my feet without the use of my arms. This is why I am always polite to the police during an arrest and I make two simple requests. Don’t put me on the ground and cuff my hands in front of me. On the rare occasion that I am taken into custody the police have been very cooperative because they understand that I am not trying to be difficult, I am just trying to meet them half way.

*****. Favorite monument of the day is of course the copper relief of the fighting 54th Massachusetts Volunteers and their brave commander Colonel Shaw. All of whom died during a futile assault on the island battery of Fort Wagner during the Civil War. The all black 54th were volunteered for this charge that had almost no chance of succeeding by their white commander and we are suppose to think that is a good thing because it proved that minorities make for good cannon fodder, a lesson that the U.S. Armed Forces have never forgotten. For the record Fort Wagner was never taken by force by the Union during the Civil War. It was abandoned, not in any small part, because the rotting flesh of the dead Union soldiers that they buried around the fort tainted the fort’s well. Shaw and his men were buried in a mass grave, which was eroded by hurricanes and their remains have been bequeathed to the cold gray Atlantic.

******. My law school peeps will remember Eddie Felton as a material witness for the prosecution in State v. Merle Rausch. One of the delightful things about having a brother in law school is that he winds up doing a lot of the same shit I did and I get to relive it through him. This is not to be confused with the phenomenon of me actually reliving certain portions of my life, which has been occurring for the last decade now. After a night of hard drinking I awoke to find that I was reliving an episode of my life from when I was fifteen. I had, like Billy Pilgrim, become unstuck in my own time line. I move forward and backwards through my own narrative, impotent to make better decisions or change the outcome of my life. For instance I know that I die when I am forty-two following a fall in the shower. I snap my neck on the side of the tub. Every time I slip out of my linear time line and wind up in that shower about to die, I think “Here it comes.” And then I drop the washcloth, try to catch it as it falls, lose my footing, and snap my neck on the side of the tub. Every time my last thought before I die is, “That sounded just like a tree branch breaking.” I would really like my last thought to be better than that but there it is. I have lived it a hundred times and every time, like an idiot, I think, “That sounded just like a tree branch breaking.” On the plus side, by the time I die in the shower I have managed to get into pretty decent shape, so I have that to look forward to.

*******. By the way I have that look. It starts with impassive eyes devoid of urgency. Make eye contact then a slight nod of the head, as in, “Your doing fine”. Doesn’t matter if it is true, people need to think they are doing fine or else they are only going to get worse. Then both hand held out, palms down, below the chest and a gentle patting motion. Like you are softly testing the give of a pillow. “Slow down and be calm.” If you want to be a trial lawyer, you need to cultivate that look, because a lot of witnesses don’t react well to being on the stand.

********. All the credit is his except for the little amount of credit I reserve for myself. Ummm, yummy credit, hmmm num num num, delicious.

*********. Dad knows I smoke because occasionally, especially after I have spent six or seven hours writing and smoking, I smell like smoke. But I don’t smoke in front of him. It is part of a long-standing arrangement of denial that goes on in my family. Dad knows I know dad knows, I know dad knows I know, but we all pretend like we don’t know. My brother smoked a lot of weed in high school. Not John, some other brother that I have that isn’t going to law school. Lets call him Nhoj; he is apparently Indian, dot not feathers, probably adopted, we don’t ask questions around here. Nhoj use to come home high on a nightly basis, grab the leftover meat from dinner out of the fridge, and would sit and eat and drink whole milk and he never gained an ounce. Shockingly he discovered Atkins before anyone else. Anyway, one time I was hanging out with dad and my friend Billy and we were discussing a tree up to the high school that dad wanted to prune. I could explain that set of circumstances but it seems superfluous. I’ll use the short hand; dad is crazy and wanted to prune a tree that didn’t belong to him. So we were talking about this and Nhoj walked in all high like he did every day and we told him about what we were talking about and he was all for the idea. So we all went downstairs, grabbed the pruning pole and hopped into the truck. Nhoj was in the passenger seat; Billy and I were in the back. Dad opened the passenger side door and looked at Nhoj. “What are you doing, I am drunk. You’re driving.” So Nhoj gets behind the wheel and takes the keys in hand and on two consecutive attempts completely misses the ignition with his hand. Dad looks at him and says, “Are you drunk?” Nhoj says no. “Are you high?” “What, no.” See up until that time Nhoj thought he was getting away with it. No, in reality we all knew and chose to ignore it. The denial is so bad in my family that when I got arrested for drunk driving I didn’t want to tell my father, hoping that somehow I could simply shine on having a license until I got it back. I didn’t know it was going to be four years. But I told my mother. Mom was concerned because I was quite literally on the verge of killing myself. However, I had told her that I was not telling my father and she wasn’t going to tell him either. Nothing should have been easier than not telling my father because they don’t talk. It isn’t like they call each other regularly and chat and since mom lives in Florida it isn’t like they would run into each other at the Wal-Mart. My mother’s overwhelming concern for my welfare drove her to contact my father. She had conveniently forgotten that I said I wasn’t going to tell him or thought that by the time she spoke with him I must have already told him because she opened with “I am worried about Matthew and how he is handling this whole drunk driving thing.” So mom calls me later and explains that she let the cat out of the bag but that it is okay because… wait for it… dad has agreed to act like he doesn’t know. It is a sickness in this family. Really what the fuck. “Well, mom, um, won’t dad know that I know that he knows.” No because she agreed to not tell me that she told him. Mom is like 0 for 1000 on keeping secrets. Dad, much to his credit, was able to pretend that he didn’t know for three days before I decided that it was time for this depraved farce of family dysfunction to end.

**********. This may make me sound like a bad brother but John openly says that he does not love me and that I am ridiculous. So a little, or a lot, of sibling envy is not the worst part of our relationship.

Easter!

2010-04-03T07:13:00.004-04:00

My sister Dana and my Mother have lodged complaint about my use of the word fuck(1). From now on out I will be numbering my fucks(2) so as to not get carried away.

Well Easter is upon us again and as with every Easter since time out of mind we are left to ponder the mystery of faith: what exactly does a rabbit have to do with eggs and what exactly do rabbits and eggs have to do with a first century Judean carpenter, turned rabbi, turned rabble rouser? Growing up I never really understood Easter and no one made any really big effort to explain it to me. I was told that Christ, who I had been familiar with from Christmas, had been put to death, that he suffered and died for my sins, and that after a respectable period he came back to life, freaked his friends out, and then ascended bodily into heaven. After a lot of exhaustive research I can say that Jesus didn’t die for my sins. First I wasn’t even born yet. Hadn’t committed any sins. It would be several hundred years before I would even have the ability to commit a sin. When I looked into the situation a little more deeply I found that the entire concept of sin had been dreamed up by the same people that were trying to sell me on a way to expunge my sins and that seemed a little dodgy to me. I don’t trust people who tell me that I have a problem that I didn’t know about and they are the only ones that have a solution for me. Sounds like they are selling snake oil or restless leg medicine. Side effects may include: guilt, shame, and having to wake up early on Sundays.

After reading the source material I discovered that instead of dying for my sins, Jesus actually died because he pissed off the people in charge. Pissing off the people in charge has been a leading cause of death since forever and it remains a contributing cause of death right up until today; just ask Martin Luther King or Benazir Bhutto. It was a standing rule during the first century that regardless of the hundreds of religious and secular mandates that a person must observe the one sure fire way to wind up in some serious shit was to upset the Romans. The Romans simply put didn’t fuck(3) around. They would march into a place, set up a garrison, and collect taxes from the indigenous people for the honor of being part of the empire. For a lot of people that seemed not to be a horrible occurrence. The Romans would build you some roads, a sewer system, irrigation, and you would get the opportunity to trade with and be a part of the largest economic system the world had ever known. All of a sudden a guy in Jerusalem could sell his dates and olives to a guy in Crete who could sell them in Rome to a Celt or a Gaul and it was a pretty nifty system and a lot of people were able to turn a nickel on it. Most of the conquered people took the situation in stride. Why try to fight the Romans? Might as well try to drain the ocean by using a bucket with a hole in it. So an uncomfortable status quo was adopted in most places that the Romans would be kicking around in their fancy armor and togas but so long as there were no problems they were going to allow local government to rule most of what went on in everyday life. The Romans were not particularly interested in who stole who’s sheep or which God you prayed to or anything of that general nature; they just couldn’t be bothered because there were orgies to attend and things like that. What they hated was uprisings and things that might lead to uprisings. And if they found out that you were engaged in that kind of conduct they were going to have more than a talk with you about your decisions.

The Romans marched into what is now Israel about 60 years before the birth of Jesus and found the local populace somewhat more difficult to deal with than other people they had conquered. First the people of Judea, Galilee, and Samaria as the areas where then known were monotheists, which was just unheard of at the time. Worse than believing in only one God the people of this area believed that the land they were standing on had been given to them by that one God and at the time of the gift there had been no mention of an occupying Roman Army coming in and telling them to pony up tribute. So deeply ingrained was the idea that their land was given to them by God that in the millennium between their exodus out of Egypt and the arrival of the Romans they had done a lot of work killing and enslaving the people who, through some clerical error of God’s, were already living there. In case you are wondering it is this legacy of ethnic cleansing that has made the Jews extremely unpopular with their close neighbors in the Middle East. The Old Testament of any hotel Bible will tell you all about the various people that were put under the knife by the Jews with the aid of their God during this long period of establishment. This gave rise to a certain expectation amongst the people of Judea, Galilee, and Samaria that in times of crisis a man would rise up from their midst and with the aid of God lead them against their enemies to triumph: see also Moses and King David. So since the occupation of the Romans many believed that a hero was coming and there were a great many people willing to assume that mantle. The Romans did what we as Americans would do, they set up a guy they thought they could deal with as the leader of these people and made it that guys problem to keep the olives and dates moving into the flow of inter-empire commerce. These Roman puppets ruled with varying effectiveness for about a hundred years until the Great Jewish Revolt that resulted in the destruction of the Second Temple and a great number of Jew fleeing their home land not to return for two thousand years. During that hundred years between occupation and outright revolt the legitimacy of these rulers, who were at times referred to as “The King of the Jews”, was questioned and challenged by the people who really didn’t like being a satellite of the Roman Empire. There were failed uprisings lead by bold if short sighted young men and there were mystics in the desert saying that the end was near and that a new kingdom was coming, and there was this carpenter kicking around saying that he was the Son of God and that he was here to bring the new kingdom.

You have to understand, back then, saying you were the Son of God was something you might actually get away with. Hercules was of course the Son of a God as was Perseus. Their father Zeus was also the Son of a God. At the time Augustus Caesar was claiming that since Julius Caesar had been made a God and he had been adopted by Julius Caesar he was also a Son of God. The ancient world was littered with people making claims about their divine parentage. So Jesus was knocking around performing some pretty cool miracles and getting a nice response from the crowd and like any would be messiah of the time he decided to take his road show to the biggest venue he knew, which was Jerusalem. After a warm reception from the populace upon his arrival in the Big Date… Big Olive… Sandy City… City that never sleeps accept on the Sabbath and during High Holidays… whatever the nickname for Jerusalem was back then Jesus decided the best thing to do was to go to the Temple. There is only the one Temple in all of Judaism. Old school Judaism called for sacrifices to be made and the one place for old school Jews to make sacrifices was at the Temple. To facilitate the making of sacrifices you needed some livestock and if you are really interested in the particulars of how you would choose the livestock and carry out the sacrifice you can read Leviticus, which deals extensively with the details.* So you are living out in the boonies and you decided you need to make one of your three annual sacrifices so you go to the Temple. You show up with your Roman coinage and it needs to be converted into Jewish coinage, which were a lot like Disney Dollars. See Rome had a monopoly on the minting of coinage but in order to do business at the Temple you needed to use Jewish currency. So you had Roman currency accepted everywhere except in the Temple and Temple currency that was accepted nowhere but in the Temple. So you need to buy a cow to sacrifice and in order to do that and throw some money to the guy who was going to be conducting the sacrifice you had to go to a moneychanger, conveniently located in the courtyard of the Temple along with guys selling animals for sacrifice. The money changer would take your currency that was good everywhere, give you money that you could use only at the Temple and pocket a percentage for himself while kicking some money up to the priests. So Jesus pulls up and saunters on into the Temple and finds all this commerce being engaged in and he makes himself a whip out of some cords and uses the whip to stampede the livestock. He runs the livestock right into the moneychangers thus ending the day’s business. Jesus thought the livestock sellers and the moneychangers and by extension the priests and high priests who allowed these industries to thrive in the Temple were running a racket. Jesus didn’t like it when people ran a racket in the house of God.**

Now this was all during the lead up to Passover, which is a Jewish High Holiday, and people were pouring into Jerusalem to see family and go to the Temple and the populace of the city swelled, which made the Romans really nervous because there was plenty of dissent amongst the people and an uprising could easily break out. Point of fact there had been a small uprising in the months proceeding Jesus’s arrival and the Roman administrator, a guy named Pontius Pilate, had removed himself from his normal place of residency to Jerusalem so he could monitor the situation, but we’ll get to him later.

Jesus returns to the Temple later in the week and begins to teach there and is asked by the priests on what authority does he 1) Offer teachings that dramatically expand and in some cases depart from what is canonical at the time and 2) come into the Temple, cause a ruckus, and break things. Jesus doesn’t answer the question but instead makes the Temple rabbis look stupid by putting them in a position where they have to answer, “I don’t know” to some questions of faith.*** Well that was about the final straw for the religious leaders at the Temple and later that week they arrested Jesus and tried him. Jesus was tried several times, twice by the priests of the temple, once by Herod, once by Pontius Pilate, and once by the mob. The particulars of these judicial activities are not terribly interesting accept in so much as Jesus does a lot of obfuscating and is generally uncooperative.
“Are you the Son of God?”
“Some people say I am the Son of God.”
“Do you say you are the Son of God?”
“Yeah I guess if I was pushed for an answer, I am the Son of God.”
“Are you the King of the Jews?”
“If you say so.”
“What if I don’t say so?”
“I don’t know, are you not saying so?”
“What do you teach?”
“Ask my students.”
“Did you say the Temple would be destroyed and that you would build a new temple.”
“I was speaking of a metaphorical temple”
“Did you say that you come not to bring peace but a sword that will cut father from son and daughter from mother?”
“Metaphorical sword!”****
“Did you say that there will come a kingdom greater than the Roman Empire?”
“Metaphorical kingdom… maybe actual… lets call it metaphorical for the time being.”

The religious leaders thought Jesus to be guilty of blasphemy and accordingly wanted him put to death. They took him to Pilate who thought that he was probably innocent of blasphemy but maybe guilty of fomenting an insurrection and so had him scourged. The scourge is many small leather whips bound together with steel hooks on the ends. It sinks into the flesh and then rips it apart when pulled out. If you have ever seen The Passion of the Christ you will notice little pieces of flesh flying off when Jesus is getting scourged. For this reason alone The Passion deserve its Best Make-Up Oscar. The Romans didn’t invent the scourge specifically to deal with Jesus. Lots of people got scourged. It was a common thing. There was a Roman whose full time job was to scourge people and he could get all the overtime he wanted because the Romans scourged with the same detachment and frequency that American police hand out parking tickets.

After they had really taken it to Jesus they put a crown of thorns on his head and taunted him by calling him the King of the Jews. There after he was brought out before a crowd and Pilate gave the crowd the choice between setting Jesus free or setting Barabbas free. Barabbas is believed to be a freedom fighter or terrorist, depending on how you want to look at it, who killed someone during an anti-Roman riot. In the choice between Barabbas the terrorist and the guy who came into the Temple and knocked things over and spoke in confusing and often contradictory metaphors the Middle Eastern crowd definitely had a favorite. “Free Barabbas!” Pilate was a little taken aback, “Are you sure? I mean, yeah, Jesus certainly is a dick but he is mostly a harmless dick maybe a little crazy but Barabbas is a murder.” “Free Barabbas!” “Okay I am done with you people, I won’t be responsible for killing Jesus.” “Let his blood be upon us and, while we are at it and since it cannot possibly have any negative impact over the course of the next two thousand years, on our children.”*****

Jesus, was led away to his place of execution. There were three people executed that day, which was a Friday before a long weekend. That is how you build an empire, no slacking off. Friday before a long weekend I call in sick, these guys crucify people. But since it looked like rain and who wants to get wet the soldiers in charge of his execution speared him to wrap things up.

Let’s stab this one in the side for morning is breaking outside my window and I have other things to do. The point is this; Jesus was a mystic at a time when there were mystics like Honi HaM’agel The Circle Drawer, freedom fighters like Barabbas, messiahs and nationalists and crazy men standing in rivers and people who said they were the sons of gods.****** Jesus may not have been the Son of God. He may just be another in a long line of good and honorable men carrying forward the proud tradition of pissing off the people in charge. That would be venerable enough for now we live in a time of mystics and messiahs and nationalists and terrorists and crazy men standing in rivers and a man willing to place his life in forfeit in order to illuminate a new way forward deserves respect. So he and many others may have died if not for the God made sins of man than at least for our complacency and cowardice. I do not know about miracles though I’d like to see one. I do not know about mysteries and faith though there is a sense of un-quietude that disturbs me in these early morning hours and I have my own doubts to be addressed and I long for the restless questioning of my soul to cease. Happy Resurrection Day Jesus and if you are coming back call me and I’ll come and pick you up at the airport but that is as far as I am willing to pursue you.

*. Leviticus deals extensively with two areas, 1) sacrifices and 2) things you shouldn’t eat or fuck(4). Leviticus is purported to be written by Moses during the period following the flight of the Jews from Egypt. Moses found himself wandering around a desert for forty years with a bunch of really whiney people who thought that maybe things had been better as slaves. They might have had a right to complain. They were in the desert for forty years traveling from Egypt to Israel. Distance between modern Cairo and modern Jerusalem: 264 miles. Average rate of progress: 6.6 miles a year. I am not, strictly speaking, in any type of shape but I could break 7 miles a year if I really pushed myself. Their lack of progress may not have been Moses fault. He found that many of his people were engaging in activities that were counter productive to the established goal of getting the hell out of the desert. He had climbed up on the mountain and received from God 15…*crash*… 10… 10 commandments and found that they gave a pretty good rough outline of things you should do and not do. But wandering through the desert reveals a lot of conduct that you might also want to prohibit and God decided to tell Moses some other things that people ought not to do. For Moses’s convenience God did not make him climb a huge mountain and wait around for a couple of days for each knew thing that he wanted the people to know. Instead Moses would just go into his tent and pop out again with some fresh piece of wisdom direct from God. One thing the chosen people seemed to have a problem with was screwing inappropriate things. If you are marching through the desert and you find that there is a huge argument in the middle of the group because one of the team has been screwing the sister of his wife you have to stop and address that problem. So Moses popped into the tent, spoke with God, and came out of the tent again with a litany of things that you aren’t suppose to have sex with. A complete list follows: Any one who is close family with you, no sex and don’t try to see them naked. In case you are uncertain that means no sex with dad or mom and don’t try and see them naked. Don’t try to have sex with your stepmother, that is like having sex with your dad, for some reason. Don’t have sex with the daughter or son of your father or mother whether they are someone you grew up with or some strange bastard that you just met. Don’t have sex with your grandchildren; really, there was some confusion on that and they needed to write it down so everyone was on notice that screwing your grandkids was fucked(5) up? Your half sister, because she still your sister you creepy bastard. Your dad’s sister, she is your aunt. Your mother’s sister, still your aunt. Your dad’s brother or his wife because she is still your aunt. Your daughter in law, don’t have sex with her your son won’t like it. Don’t have sex with your brother’s wife, because it is like having sex with your brother, for some reason. Don’t have sex with a mother and her daughter, or a mother and her granddaughter. I don’t know if this is to be interpreted as a prohibition against mother-daughter three ways or as a prohibition against having sex with one and then having sex with the other, for the purposes of domestic tranquility you should probably assume it is a prohibition against both.******* Your wife and her sister at the same time.******** A woman who is having her period, which I can’t believe that men needed to be order not to do this by God or perhaps God is just giving men some cover. Your neighbor’s wife. Don’t sacrifice your children to the god Moloch.********* Don’t sleep with men the way you sleep with women, which is, strictly speaking, impossible. And don’t have sex with animals, it is confusing. Moses ends his list of no sex with a warning that he knows you’ve been doing some of these things and you need to stop if we are ever going to get out of this sand-trap.

**. I think the Catholic Church is running a racket right now that involves the molestation of children, however I do not intend to stampede livestock through the Vatican because I think that would be terribly impolite and kind of a dick move. You can say what you want about Jesus but walking into the Great Temple and stampeding animals and throwing over tables is not a good opening salvo of addressing the problem and might get you nailed to a telephone pole.

***. Basically what happened is there was some issue regarding John The Baptist who can be generously described as a crazy man who use to stand in the river and baptize people on his own authority. John was a pretty dangerous guy because no one knew what he was all about and he was constantly talking about the end of the world and the creation of a new one. The people seemed to like him but the established religious authorities were just scared shitless of what the man was doing out in the river. Jesus put it to the rabbis, is John the Baptist acting in accordance with God? The rabbis had three options 1) say yes and legitimize a nut job they couldn’t control. 2) Say no and risk pissing off all the people who really seemed attached to the nut job. 3) Say I don’t know and make it perfectly clear that you have no idea what God really wants from people. They picked 3 and were subsequently made to shut up and let Jesus resume his teaching without questioning his authority to give such teachings. Lawyered!

****. See it is just like Sarah Palin. It is a metaphorical rifle that she wants people to reload and aim at the Democrats.

*****. “Let his blood be upon us and upon our children”, who the fuck(6) would ever say that. No one that is who. God did not write the Bible, contrary to popular belief. Men wrote it. God may have told it to men, the same way Sarah Palin tells someone what to write for her book but Sarah Palin did not write Rogue and the Bible was not written by God. Not only did God not write the Bible he didn’t even compile the Bible. The New Testament is a compilation, it is full of many books and letters written by many different people and some of it is contradictory and some of it is anecdotal and some of it is dicta. The Gospel According to Matthew is the only version of the passion story to include the crowd of Jews yelling, “Let his blood be upon us and upon our children.” The reason that Pontius Pilate comes out looking as good as he does is because the Bible, far from being compiled by God, was compiled by Romans. The Romans who compiled the Bible tended to let themselves off the hook for nailing Jesus to a cross and then stabbing him with a spear and, in order to do that, it was necessary to play up the culpability of some other party and since it all took place in first century Judea the obvious choice was the Jews. Of course the Jews had an opportunity to free Jesus but instead freed Barabbas so Jesus’s death is all their fault. Although, Jesus’s suffering and death was necessary for the atonement of mankinds sins and so no one is to blame except men for being sinful and specifically here the men in question are Jews... so it is all their fault. Want to go around again? Okay, buckle up here we go. Of course the entire concept of sin was created by God, which is also Jesus, who was a Jew... so it is all their fault. Want to go around one more time? No, okay moving on.

******. Honi HaM’agel The Circle Drawer, was a first century Judean mystic who could make it rain. Once he called for rain and it didn’t come so he drew a circle on the ground and sat in it and said he would sit there until God made it rain. It began to drizzle and Honi said that wasn’t good enough and demanded more. Then it began to pour. I wonder what the world would look like if he had been elevated to the rank of messiah. What if we worship someone who could make demands of God? That would have made for a fierce and fearsome middle age. Just a thing: light rain quite frequently preceeds heavy rain, so, you know, maybe not that impressive.

*******. I think this is entirely negotiable and depends on who the mother daughter duo is. In the unlikely event that I get a crack at Goldie Hawn and Kate Hudson I will make my apologies to God later. I might even take the spiritual hit for Blythe Danner and Gwyneth Paltrow.

********. Seriously Moses, a lot of hot sisters out there and if I am lucky enough, especially if they are twins, I am going to utterly disregard what you are saying.

*********. Moloch was a god that was represented by a giant statue of a man with a bull’s head. In his abdomen was a fire that children were thrown into as sacrifice. Back in the day Moloch had a lot of pull. Being anti-Moloch was a pretty controversial step but I applaud Jehovah for being so forward thinking even if I think he is on the wrong side of the homosexuality debate.

P.S. Fuck Fuck Fuckidy Fuck Fuck (7-11)

Fighting with Mom!

2010-04-01T06:37:00.001-04:00

I was accepted by Fordham University in the Bronx. My life would have been very different if I had decided to go there over UNH. My admission essay to the FU English department was about my favorite character in literature. Because I was made to choose I decided to write about a small character in a short story. I wrote about the dog in Jack London’s “To Build A Fire”. The story is not about the dog. The story is about a man traveling alone across the Yukon during a cold snap and how his feet get wet and how he subsequently fails to build a fire and dies. The man’s dog observes his owners struggles and eventually becomes the object of the man’s desperation as the prospector tries to kill the dog so that he can put his hands into the carcass to warm them enough to try and build a fire. The dog escapes the attempts of his owner and in the end walks away from the frozen body and makes his way towards the camp were his master’s buddies were waiting. My decision to write about the dog was half joke and half attempt to demonstrate my chops at writing about anything and making it prescient and salient. Obviously I impressed someone and I got in but I didn’t really want to live in a city far away from New Hampshire, the place that I love with a protectively jealous passion.

This is not the point. I don’t actually have a favorite character in literature. I also don’t have a favorite book, a favorite movie, or a favorite song. I do however have favorite passages, I have favorite openings, and favorite closings. My favorite last line is from the Adventures of Augie March, “I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor, Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains, which didn’t prove there was no America.” It places a close second to The Great Gatsby, a book that I do not like in general, “And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” The absolutely worst final line in the history of human expression is from the recent movie 2012, “No more pull-ups!” At the end of the movie after the vast majority of the worlds population has been wiped out the little girl who is the main character’s daughter tells her father that she has conquered her incontinency.* I would be touched about this little parental victory over bed wetting if the entire world wasn’t dead but as things stand at the end of the movie I found it to be cold comfort. My second favorite opening line is from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” But my favorite is from Kipling, “This is the story of the great war that Rikki Tikki Tavi fought single-handed, through the bathrooms and gardens of the big bungalow in Segowlee cantonment. Darzee, the tailor-bird helped him, and Chuchundra, the muskrat, who never comes out into the middle of the floor, but always creeps round by the wall, gave him advice; but Rikki-Tikki did the real fighting.” I like the hyperbole of it, the great war, which was fought by a mongoose against two snakes in some far flung region of the British Empire. This is not the point either. The point is I like things that are placed into epic terms. And so…

This is the story of the great war fought between my mother and I on the phone the other day. The first thing that must be said about my mother is that she is a fighter. We are all fighters. We are the Fighting MacVanes. My brother fights, I fight, my father fights, my mother fights. My mother is not a MacVane anymore and that is somewhat sad because she has so much in common with our branch of the MacVane family. We consider it fun and even a little healthy to get into occasional debates that escalate into shouting matches. My brother and I love argument so much and are both so good at it that we both wound up as English majors who went on to law school. My mother is in the lamentable position of not having anyone to fight with. My stepfather does not fight. He avoids confrontation and normally expresses his dissatisfaction through passive aggression. My half-sister is apparently the only 14-year-old girl in the history of the world who doesn’t fight with her mother. So occasionally my mother will call me looking for a fight and I will oblige her with a mental sparing session.

It is my belief that there are two types of arguments. First there are arguments that are fought seeking resolution. This is the argument form that I like most and at which I am most successful. I enjoy finding resolution. I learned to argue this way while at UNH dealing with administrators.** My formula for winning is simple, assert the topic of the argument, assert the terms on which the argument will be fought, assert your position, listen to their position, find the middle ground, claim the middle ground, get them to come to the middle ground, drag them to your side of the middle ground, declare victory. You don’t always get everything you want but you get more than what they wanted to give up and that is what success looks like on most days. The second form of argument is fought without hope of resolution and this is the kind of fights that my mother and I get involved in. There is no point in asserting the topic or terms. There is no haggling or bartering. If you go to the middle ground you will find yourself standing on the middle ground alone with your dick hanging out. It is argument as knife fighting. These are the rules of the knife fight: there are no rules. Take a position and defend it, beyond reason, beyond fact, beyond better judgment. There is no scoring or counter point, no strike or touché because neither side will consider or admit that a hole has been found in their position, that they are maintaining a logical fallacy, or that what they believed is factually incorrect. It is simply a battle of wills… and boy howdy does my mother have some will on her.

The fight began as it did in olden times with a declaration of intent to fight. I woke up early in the morning on the day of the fight and found that my mother had sent me a series of facebook messages. Message one: “Has there ever been a successful socialist society?” Like Rikki-Tikki the hair on my metaphorical tail grew bottle-brushy. My eyes shined and I grinned, “oh we are going to have that fight again.” I wrote back that it would depend largely on what was meant by “successful” and “society” and that I had seen very few successful capitalistic societies. If you don’t have a really good response always challenge the premise of the question. Message two, which was sent before I answered question one was, “Is there any reason to work hard in life? Is it better to let someone else take care of you?” I responded that it would depend on why you are working hard. Then I spent my day in anticipation of my mother’s call.

She called me, as is her habit, shortly after she left work around four in the afternoon. I looked at the caller ID on my phone and took a deep contemplative breath. Did I really want to do this again? I could very easily let this go to voicemail and take a nap. I really enjoy naps in the springtime; they are so invigorating. But no, this was my mother and she wanted a fight and what kind of son would I be if I wouldn’t let her get it out of her system. Mom has learned much from Glenn Beck. Her opening gambit was a question asked in Mr. Beck’s traditional “I don’t know I am just asking questions” style. She asked me why a socialist society is better than a capitalistic society. It was a smart move on her part because I was now forced into stating my entire position regarding socialism so that it could be pulled apart without making her defend capitalism. So I got into my whole spiel about the good of socialism; capitalism is zero-sum, it is exploitative, people should be guaranteed certain standards of existence regardless of their social utility, capitalism isn’t a meritocracy and many of those that reap the greatest benefit are not those that work the hardest, a lot of work is done by people that are tremendously under paid so that a profit can be garnered by other people, “the eye cannot say to the hand, nor the head to the feet you are not the body I have no need of you, nay much more those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary” etcetera. My mother came back at me with the fact that she has worked hard her entire life and doesn’t see why her money should be appropriated by the government to give health care to people who don’t work. I pointed out that there are about 40,000,000 people without health care and some of them do work, some of them work very hard, and some of them don’t work because they don’t have jobs and that they may be trying ardently to get jobs but simply can’t find one and if they do it will, in all likelihood, not have medical insurance as part and parcel of their limited benefit package. Mom argued that my number was inflated and said that it is only about 15% of the population that doesn’t have health insurance. I responded that the population was around 300,000,000 and that 15% of 300,000,000 is 45,000,000.***

Undaunted, Mom decided to begin to pick apart the new health care bill and all the reasons that it was no good. She talked about reasonable things like costs and the problem of the individual mandate and I made my refutations and the argument built and built until Mom advanced the theory that Barack Obama and the entire democratic party are involved in a vast conspiracy to bankrupt the country so that they can rebuild it as a socialist country and that the very public year long debate about health care was a part of that conspiracy. The argument had reached its boiling point, my mother who is a very intelligent and fairly reasonable human being had begun arguing for things that she couldn’t honestly believe in. This is where the fun happens. The idea that the President of the United States is actually involved in some heinous plot to undermine the country is not a new one to me. I had to contend with my own misgivings about the country’s executive back in the early days of the Iraq war. I never believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The U.N. inspectors on the ground said they couldn’t find any and I thought they weren’t lying to me. My mother said that the U.N. had been involved in a giant oil for food conspiracy with Iraq and had no credibility in the discussion about the existence of weapons of mass destruction. The French have contracts to service Iraqi oil equipment, don’t you know, so they can’t be trusted when they say that their intelligence agencies have come up with no proof that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. Turns out that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. None. Turns out our President lied to us or at the very least decided to remain entirely ignorant so that he could tell us something that was demonstrably untrue without lying to us. Either way we went to war without a good reason and tens of thousands of people died. While all this was happening, on the home front people were having their reasonable expectations of personal privacy violated by unwarranted wire taping and all manner of intrusion. Then came reports of Iraqi prisoner abuse and torture and there were more lies and the lies kept coming until eventually the President stop extending the courtesy of even lying to us. Yes we water-boarded, yes we have been interrogating people at C.I.A. black sites, yes we’ve imprisoned people without due process, yes to every horrible thing that it has been alleged that we did and we don’t care, what are you going to do about it? Somewhere along the way I had to ask myself, “is the President really unmitigated evil?” Not just incompetent but so callous and incompetent that he has actually become evil. Because if he and his government are actually evil then I need to fight them. Not protest or petition or organize but fight with guns. I had to ask myself if it had gotten to the point of armed insurrection because if the government is truly evil then there is nothing left to do but take up arms and try to make an end of it. Von Stauffenberg knew it, Brutus knew it, the Founding Fathers knew it; at some point there are no more words. There will be no remission but with blood. After all if Von Stauffenberg had succeeded in assassinating Hitler we would have built statues of him and we would still celebrate his birthday. Maybe I was weak and lacked the strength of my own convictions but in the end I decided that the President was not evil.**** So I put it to my mother, either A) She actually believes that the President is actively trying to ruin this country as part of an elaborate plan to make us all communists, a plan that would result in the failure of the dollar and attending food and oil shortages that would cause people to starve and freeze by the tens of thousands. Or B) she was blowing this all out of its proportions. If A then armed insurrection is the only thing to do. If B then stop being ridiculous. A moral person cannot say that they believe that someone is doing something that is going to result in an entire country being thrown into a violent, back breaking, economic depression and they choose to do nothing except not vote for them in the future. It was my nutcracker question. It would either work and mom would have to concede that okay Barack Obama isn’t really trying to bankrupt the United States or it wouldn’t work and we would tumble farther down the rabbit hole. Mom evaded the question by bringing up a conspiracy about the constitutionally mandated decennial national census. Down the rabbit we go, “How come they are making people put their names and dates of birth on the census?” Jesus I don’t know but I can’t wait for the explanation. It is because there is going to be an amnesty for all illegal immigrants that is going to be passed by the democrats in the next two years to bolster their support in the up coming presidential election. Wow! What do you do with that? There has been a lot of hubbub about the census this time around and the fact that, just as has been done in the last four censuses, illegal immigrants are being counted. This is constitutionally appropriate because Article 1 section 2 of the US Constitution calls for the adding of the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a number of years, to 3/5ths of all the slaves and no untaxed Indians. Nothing about citizenship just about how many people. The idea that the census, by asking for names and ages, is trying to set up documentation for illegal aliens who will eventually be granted amnesty may not be wholly unreasonable but it is certainly less reasonable than the alternative, that we need to know how many people there are and we’d like to know what the demographic break down is by age. Also by using a name and a birth date you can greatly reduce the number of duplicate responses, which is actually something that has plagued the census over its long illustrious history. Every time around a bunch of people that are mostly white are polled more than once. A bunch of people that are mostly not white don’t get counted at all. With a name and date of birth you can determine not only that I am a Matthew MacVane but that I am this Matthew MacVane right here and if you encounter someone looking like me with my same name and birth date you can safely assume that it is still me.*****

Next Mom decided to discuss the smugness and high handedness of the academic elite. It is her opinion that the liberal academic elite disrespect regular hard working people and have no idea what it means to work. I decided to take it as a given that liberal academic elites aren’t regular hard working people; they are, of course, just that. My mother didn’t graduate from college; she went to nursing school and has spent the rest of her life working as a nurse. I believe her to be an intelligent, intuitive, and extremely talented woman. I have never said that she is stupid. I have never even entertained the idea for a moment that she was stupid. Yet every single time we argue she comes at me with the notion that I think everyone is stupid and I am better than everyone else because I am highly educated. I don’t. I don’t care about the cultural divide between people who graduated college and people who didn’t. My best friend dropped out of college and I have never for a moment thought that it reflected negatively on his intelligence. Truth is I don’t care if you’ve never read the Iliad or if you don’t know who Alexis de Tocqueville is. It doesn’t matter. The problem with conservatives is not that they are stupid it is that they are so ideologically entrenched that they refuse to listen to reason. This week an island that India and Bangladesh have been fighting over for three decades disappeared under the rising ocean. Global warming is happening. The President of the United States was born in Hawaii and there is no valid reason to doubt that. The healthcare bill was never going to create death panels and it was completely unreasonable to believe that it would. There are valid conservative concerns about the health reform bill but conservatives decided that instead of having an honest discussion about them we would talk about killing old people and a vast socialist conspiracy and what is worse, and this is where I get a little snobby about it, they don’t know what socialism is.****** They haven’t read Marx or Engles or Lang or Hodgskins. They don’t know what Market Socialism is or Libertarian Socialism. They don’t know and they think they aren’t interested in finding out even in so far as it would help them to argue against it. They just use the word socialism the way five year olds use the word cooties. Fuck they say they believe in capitalism but they haven’t read Adam Smith. The worst part is that they treat us like we aren’t Americans. Like we are the other. I’ve questioned all my life. All my life I sought answers and when the answers seemed wrong I kept questioning. After September 11, 2001 it became patriotic to not ask questions.******* Those of us who still asked questions were called un-American. My own mother called me un-American. I was right to ask questions and I was right in my conclusions and that was cold comfort because people who didn’t want to ask questions and my own government stole my country from me. They said to me in so many words that they were Americans and I was not. They were patriotic and I wasn’t. My feeling on it are that those who aren’t highly educated are as insecure about not being highly educated as the highly educated are about not being part of the rest of America and there is a lot of abuse that goes in both directions because of those mutually exclusive insecurities.

At this point in the argument we had been on the phone for an hour and thirty-five minutes. From here the argument seemed to be winding down. Mom had to run and I had to drink heavily and talk to someone about how crazy mom is. Mom needs an argument every once in a while to keep sane and I don’t. These are exhausting conversations and when they are done I need to be talked back down to a resting heart rate or else I have to pace back and forth for a couple of hours talking to myself, delivering what amounts to a stump speech on the virtues of liberalism. It is like a marathoner who needs to walk after the race to keep from cramping up. We were still batting back and forth the ball of regular folks verse cultural elites and I decided to mention that these tea party protestors had called Congressman John Lewis a nigger on the steps of the United States Capitol.******** Mom tried to get up in arms about me saying “the tea party protestors” and not “some asshole completely unaffiliated with the rancorous hate mongers known as the tea party protestors.” But I stopped her and I told her not to equivocate, it didn’t matter if it was one person or ten people someone called a United States Congressman a nigger while he was walking into do what he believed to be his duty. Of course it was nothing new, they called John Lewis a nigger when he was a freedom rider and they beat him. They called him a nigger when he marched to Montgomery and they beat him twice. They called him a nigger when he spoke from the same podium as King during the March on Washington. Here is a joke, what do you call a black man who has worked his entire life for freedom and equality. Nigger. You get it. Mom was really pissed at this point because she felt like I was trying to assume the moral high ground. “Look at all the horrible things they said about Bush, they burned him in effigy” But I was on the moral high ground and I wasn’t giving it up. “That doesn’t stack up to calling a black man a nigger.” “They call each other that,” was mom’s retort. Hey it isn’t like someone called P-Diddy a nigger, this is a congressman and a civil rights hero. I get the feeling he isn't throwing the word nigger around a lot. There was some unintelligible screaming on the other end of the line at this point. “They called John Lewis and James Clyburn niggers and they spat on Emanuel Cleaver and they called Barney Frank a fag.” This is mom’s Michael Richard’s moment. “Barney Frank is a fag!” And if I had the moral high ground before now I have the moral high ground with hotels on it. “Oh Jesus Mom is that the lesson you’d want me to come away with or for my sister to learn that it is okay to call someone a fag so long as they are actually gay.” Mom doesn’t think that and it is honestly the first time I have ever heard her use what is even remotely close to a racial slur in anger and sometimes people get angry and build up a big head of steam and say something horrible and we give them a pass so please give mom a pass on the momentary insanity. I gave her a pass later in the moment I was really rolling. We hear the sounds of a symphony warming up as I get ready to go into my final comment. People who know me from Senate might remember what it looks like when I start tuning up for my last impassioned soliloquy of a debate. I have never seen it but in my mind I picture that my eyes shine a little more and the nasal quality leaves my voice and my tone drops an octave and there is no stammering or searching or filler words. “Mom” I said, “you have a very comfortable life. You have worked hard. But there are people that have worked harder than you that haven’t made it as far as you. The reason you’re pissed off is you aren’t more happy and you think there are people out there that aren’t working hard that are happy. You’re not pissed off because there is someone out there sponging off what you have worked for, you are pissed off because you think there is someone out there sponging off you that is more happy than you are. You’re angry because it might be easier for someone else to get what you haven’t gotten yet. Now I love you a lot and I will talk to you later.” And with that I hung up and the pacing back and forth began.

Mom sent me an apology facebook message, which amounted to “I don’t know why I went crazy. I don’t even believe half of what I said. I am sorry” My response: “You called me looking for a fight, that is fine. We are a strange family. Love you a lot.” Even when I think she is being a little crazy I do love her a lot.

*. Jesus Christ John Cusack! Hot Tub Time Machine!? Are things really that bad? Do you need money? I’ll sell something and send you the proceeds because the guy who played Lloyd Dobler needs to be doing better work than this. Also the fear about 2012 is such bullshit. So what if the Mayans think the world is going to end in 2012? The world ended for the Mayans in the 16th century. I don’t take advice about the apocalypse from a people that couldn’t distinguish between the Spanish on horseback and Gods.

**. Shout out to David May.

***. My math was neither that quick nor exact.

****. There are two seminal films in the horror genre about your child being the antichrist. The Omen and Rosemary’s Baby. In one a father finds out that his son is the antichrist and endeavors to kill him. In the other a mother finds out that her son is the antichrist and does nothing about it. If I found out my child was the antichrist I would try my best to get him to consecrated ground and cut his head off. That encapsulates my position on the moral duty that arise during a confrontation with evil.

*****. There are in fact two Matthew MacVane. I am Matthew D. MacVane. There is also a Matthew C. MacVane. Matthew C. MacVane and I have never met. But he comes up during a google search of Matthew MacVane. He is a vastly better and cooler Matthew MacVane. He served with distinction in Vietnam. I did not. He worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. I did not. He is known in intelligence circles as “The Shadow Man”. I am not. He has negotiated the release of kidnap victims. I have not. He has a pilot’s license and a diving certificate. Until very recently I could not drive a car. He is currently the lead investigator for a private investigation firm. I am currently practicing law… after a fashion.

This is kind of interesting because initially my mother wanted to name me Sarah because she believed that I was going to be a girl. My mother didn’t get a vote on what my name was in the end because my father hopped in and took the reigns and named me Matthew. My brother is named John Garnet MacVane. John MacVane was a great uncle who was a war correspondent that did the first Allied broadcast from the beaches of Normandy. Garnet is a family name on both sides. Matthew was a name that my father heard while my mother was in labor with me. It was not a doctor’s name or the name of another anxious father in the waiting room. It was the name of a small child that was at the McDonalds near Southern Maine Medical. My father, having gone through the process of becoming a father before, decided his energy was best spent getting a sandwich while his second child was about the business of coming into the world. While at the McDonalds there was a screaming child, no more than 6 years old, and his father was chasing him and saying things like, “Matthew put that down” and “Matthew please stop”. I guess it kind of stuck in his head and when I turned out to be a boy he said I was named Matthew Donald MacVane. My mother says that at hearing the name of her second son she thought, “Matt MacVane, Private Eye.” And strangely enough there is a Matt MacVane out there that is a private eye. For the record mom’s choice would have been Andrew. Thanks Dad.

******. You see it isn’t that I think that conservatives are stupid it is that I think that crazy people are crazy. When I encountered a liberal who swore up and down that George W. Bush was a member of a shadowy cabal of business men and military leaders that used explosives to take down the World Trade Center I told him he was fucking crazy, because that is what you do when someone starts talking crazy. And if you are a Republican and you hold out any hope for your party you need to start doing the same thing. When someone says that Barack Obama was born in Nigeria and that his entire Presidency is a sham you don’t say, “Well if he’d just produce his birth certificate we could settle this.” You say, “That is fucking crazy.” When someone says, “This bill will ration care and will create government panels to oversee the rationing and those panels will deny care and even euthanize people.” Maybe you say to yourself, “that sounds pretty fucking crazy. I am going to look into it.” And look further than a guy who spends a couple hours of the day with nothing but airtime to fill on his radio show. Go online and look at one of the thousand reputable non-partisan sources. This current national divide isn’t between liberal elites and common sense conservatives. It isn’t between smart people and dumb people. It is between people that are so singularly pissed off by the fair election of Barack Obama that they no longer care if they are even making sense when they attack him and the sane. Sane Republicans who have some lingering hope for the future of their party and sane Democrats who think the that it would be best for the country if the Republican Party didn’t devolve into Bedlam.

*******. A brief comment about the attacks of September 11, 2001 and events subsequent to it that may be terribly tactless and inappropriate. We failed as a country both during and after the attacks. First, there is no reason that three airliners full of Americans should have ever been taken over by a bunch of guys with boxcutters. United 93 gets a pass for trying to retake the plane but for everyone else it speaks terribly of our citizens that they allowed themselves to be taken. Excuses can be made but none are terribly valid. We ought to be better than that. I remember a while back when there was a crazy guy shooting up a commuter train bound for New York and three men who had never met before and had no formal defense training jumped the gun man and saved a bunch of people. That is how Americans should act in a crisis; bravely and selflessly. I believe in American Exceptionalism and part of my belief in that strange idea is that we must rise to whatever horrible catastrophe is presented to us. Maybe I shouldn't judge because I have never been part of a hostage taking but if I let myself and my fellow countrymen get taken by a bunch of assholes with boxcutters and then allowed them to use the plane I was in as a weapon to kill thousands of people my last moments would be full of a lot of shame and self reproach. We are not suppose to be a country of hapless victims.

Second we failed as a country after the attack. Jon Stewart has said on several occasions on his show that we all went a little crazy after the attack and we were so traumatized and scared that we stopped acting reasonably for a while and that we should forgive ourselves for that. I respect Mr. Stewart a great deal but no, he is wrong. We fought wars to assert our right and responsibility to hold our government accountable. Long ago we decided that for good or ill we were going to run our own country and not simply surrender our will to a sovereign. We abdicated that responsibility because we were scared and that is completely unacceptable. We put our fear ahead of our freedom and it speaks horribly of us as a people. And it will happen again. It is bound to. When it does we can't do the same thing. We need desperately to be reminded that we failed to guard our freedom because we were affraid and all the wrong people used that as an opportunity, not to bring us together as a country, but to grab power and assert their own agenda. Our cowardice should haunts us forever. Tens of thousands of Iraqis died in a misconceived war that was shoved down the country's throat when they were too scared to think rationaly about what was going on and that should haunts us. And it doesn't matter that there is now a democracy in Arabia where previously there was none. If I kill a guy while driving drunk, it wouldn't make it okay if his wife wound up marrying someone richer and I got cake when I got out of prison, although I love cake.

********. I am sorry if you are offended by my use of the word nigger. I use the word and not some hyphenated version of it or some asterisks laden redacted form of it. I use the actually word for a couple of reasons. First, I am not a child and most of the people I deal with aren’t children and I don’t see the point in softening what can be an upsetting word. Second, there is a material difference between “They called John Lewis a n*****” and “They called John Lewis a nigger.” The difference that I see is that one actually says what happened and the other doesn’t. They didn’t call John Lewis a n***** they called him a nigger. Why is that difference important? Because everyone past the age of thirteen knows about the word nigger. They know how much hate is in the word. They know or can some how sense that it is the word that was shouted when the whip was cracked against a slave’s back, and it was the word shouted at lynchings, and it was the word shouted as fire hoses and police dogs were unleashed on protestors. It is a word that has been the companion to church burnings and rapes and murders and it has been a word of intimidation that has been painted on walls and carved into the flesh of people. As a white man when another white man uses the word against a black man I think it is good that I remember exactly what that white man is saying. He isn’t saying n***** and he isn’t even saying nigger, he is evoking and perpetuating a tradition of hate, violence, and oppression of which all decent white people have every right to be ashamed and we should be made to contend with that. We should not be allowed to sooth our own consciences by hiding the ugliness behind asterisks and hyphens.

April Fool's Day!

2010-03-29T18:23:00.002-04:00

Languishing, that is what my blog is doing. You deserve better as readers and I am sorry. I have an entry in the pipeline but it involves this really long argument my mother and I had on the phone about health reform and it is currently in her hands for reasons involving standards and practices. So I have to throw you guys a bone until such time as Mom gives me the go ahead on talking about how nutty I think she is. So as it is the 29th of March I thought a brief entry about the greatest April Fool’s Day prank I ever pulled would server our purposes nicely. The list of my great pranks is short because while I have a wonderful sense of humor practical jokes require planning and execution and, well… effort and you know that I am not big on effort. I met effort once when I was seven, didn’t like him very much, and the two of us aren’t on speaking terms. You’re saying, “But Matthew you graduated college, law school, and passed the bar certainly somewhere in there you and effort must have met up and got the job done, like a loose cannon getting paired up with a by the book partner who is close to retirement, who put their differences aside to get the bad guys.” No, it was all pretty much natural talent and a lot of luck. Sorry.

So this all happened during my senior year of college. I was working for UNH Housing as one of the guys that goes around and fixes furniture. My fellow students would call about a desk drawer that wouldn’t open and I and my large and lumbering friend Kellen would go to their room, impose ourselves on them, and one of us would fix the problem while the other held a clipboard and a giant set of keys. We were not the two guys that the average college girl would like to see standing in her room. Kellen was like 6’4” 280 with a giant red beard and you know what I look like. So part and parcel of my job was going into storage rooms located through out campus and retrieving tools, parts, and replacement furniture. It was a couple of weeks before April Fool’s Day and I was in such a storage room digging around for something when I found a doorknob lock. It wasn’t much, just a forged piece of steel with a hinge at the top that could close around a doorknob and lock in place making the use of the door impossible. I held the object in my hand and it kind of spoke to me. “You could definitely find something to use me for.” I think I asked my manager if I could take the doorknob lock but it is just as likely that I put it into my pocket without thinking anything about it.* I enjoy minor thievery like stealing glasses from restaurants, bibles from hotels, the coffee table from Hall House. Moving along. So the doorknob lock sat in my room for a couple weeks and I didn’t think much of it. I was just this bric-a-brac that was in my dorm room along with the other miscellaneous crap that I collect.

Now I have to mention that I smoked a lot of weed during my senior year of college. Not a little weed but a lot of weed. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I had an eight o’clock class with Lester Fisher in the English Department. Lester Fisher is the absolute coolest black man in the history of the world.** He was always dressed to the nines in light colored suites that white men can’t pull off no matter how hard they try, with a perfectly quaffed salt and pepper Afro and a gold tooth. His class was called the Beats, the Bops, and the Blues and at eight in the morning three days a week I got into my car over in area III, drove to Main Street, spent an hour learning about writers like Kerouac and Ginsberg and musicians like Monk and Parker. After class I would walk out to my car, pack a bowl, and drive around the back roads of Durham getting high or go out and park in West Edge until I got hungry. That meant that for three days a week for an entire semester I was high before noon. I got an A in that class. Kellen also smoked a fair amount of weed and since he lived off campus I found it advantageous to smoke at his house. Kellen lived in a second floor apartment with his roommate, right across the alley from the Hardware Store in Durham and of all the people I have met who smoke he was definitely the most paranoid. Every time I smoked in his apartment he would thrust towels under the door and make me exhale into half a soda bottle stuffed full of dryer sheets. But it was a comfortable if horribly dirty place to get high and I couldn’t complain. So anyway I was over smoking at Kellen’s and he took out his riot shotgun which was broken and couldn’t fire and he was talking about how he wasn’t suppose to have a gun in his apartment as part of his lease. And the practical joke came completely into focus. It was the last days of March and I decided the best thing to do was to convince Kellen he had been evicted for April Fool’s Day.

On the evening of 03/31/04 I sat in my room and drafted what looked convincingly like an eviction notice. I wanted it to look authentic but with an air of mischief that might lead my friend to, on second glance, see that it may not be genuine. To that end it was signed Sgt. William Packenwud. Kellen and I worked together and we hung out a lot so I knew his schedule pretty well. I knew he would be home at around 3 in the afternoon. So at around 2 I entered his building, posted the notice, slapped the doorknob lock on the door, and placed the key to the doorknob lock over the door jam. There was a helpful note written in red on the back of the fake eviction notice that said, “Hahaha. The key is above the door. Happy April Fool’s.” Then I went home and waited for Kellen to IM me that some asshole had punked him and how evil and brilliant that person was. So 3 o’clock came and went. As did 4 o’clock and 5 o’clock. At about a quarter to Six I got an IM from Kellen saying that something horrible had happened and I said I would come right over. So I arrived at Kellen’s apartment and he was a little out of sorts. I offered to get him high and he thought that was a great idea. While we were smoking he told me that he had come home with a bunch of groceries and found an eviction notice on his door. He showed me the notice. I made as if I was studying the document. I turned it over and read the note on the back. “That is pretty funny Kellen.” No it wasn’t Kellen had not read the note on the back. Kellen had taken his bag full of groceries and put the note in his pocket and driven around for an hour wondering how to break the news to his parents. Then he had gone and sat in the Durham Police Station parking lot for a while, trying to nerve up so that he could go in and turn himself over. His plan was to claim responsibility for the shotgun and all the drugs so that his roommate would not be inconvenienced. When he finally manned up he found that it was after business hours for the police station. Then he went back to the car and thought and waited and finally looked at the notice really carefully. “Do you have any idea who would have done such a thing?” He had no idea; he thought it was his landlord. I strung him a long for a little while longer before finally letting him off the hook. The practical joke had gone better than I could have ever hoped and it greatly out did the time I convinced one of my friends mother’s that he was receiving packages of hard drugs from a guy named Bob, which is a funny story in and of itself and ended with me almost getting arrested.***

*. There are almost no advantages to being fat. One of the limited advantages of being fat: huge pockets. I can put an unabridged copy of Moby Dick in my back pocket, which is something I couldn’t do if I wore smaller pants. Not quite a fair-trade for a greatly diminished life expectancy and a good deal of social stigma but I take my victories where I can find them and I suggest you do the same.

**. How cool is Lester Fisher? Here is how cool he is. I took three classes with him during my tenure as an English Major and he really like how I brought my A game to class discussions. On the first day of the first class I ever had with him he referenced the Barry McGuire song Eve of Destruction, and polled the class about if they knew it and I was the only one who knew it off hand and was willing to sing the first two stanzas to see if I could refresh anyone’s memory. I sang poorly but he appreciated the effort.**** So in my first semester senior year I took this class called literature and photography. I don’t remember what the catalog write up for the class was but it turned out to be some hellish endeavor of the professor trying to muscle her graduate thesis about photography into an English class and there was never a clear understanding about what I was suppose to be doing. The professor gave me assignments and I did the reading and I took pictures and I did writing but I couldn’t seem to give her what she was looking for and since I couldn’t come to grips with what she wanted I stopped going. I took an administrative failure in that class and didn’t really care. However, I didn’t want to have that 0.0 anchoring my G.P.A. so I had to find a way to clear it up. Enter Lester Fisher. The literature and photography class was in the catalog as a professor’s topic choice seminar and the class number was the same as the Beats, the Bops, and the Blues being taught in the spring by Lester Fisher. All I had to do was get into that class and it would be like retaking the literature and photography class and getting an A. I couldn’t get into the class on registration day but I bought all the books and showed up to class on the first day. I went into Prof. Fisher’s office before hand and explained to him that it was my last semester and I really wanted one more go with him before I graduated and he retired, which was all entirely true. He told me the class was full but I should stick around and maybe someone would drop. Okay. I went into the class and sat in my regular chair, front row furthest from the door. The class started and Prof. Fisher was going through his litany of classroom rules. He hates yawning, people who wear hats in doors, gum chewers, people who come late, absenteeism, and people who don’t do the work. I yawned a lot but managed to do it quietly so he stopped bothering me about it. He was in the middle of his monologue and class had only been in session for two minutes, when a bewildered, confused, and contrite looking young man tried sneaking into the small classroom. Fisher stopped talking. “Sir, are you suppose to be in this class?” “Yes.” “Class starts at 8, it is 8:05, you are late on the first day. Go to the English Office and get a drop slip.” The kid turned and walked out of the room. Lester turned to me, “You’re in.” That is how cool Lester Fisher is. I don’t know whatever happened to the young man. I hope he is doing well.

***. So this was back when I was a freshman in High School. I had this friend Alan. He was the kid that got me spat on at a basketball game. His mother was a little nutty about Alan’s friends and didn’t like them calling. Alan had been away in California during summer vacation and on the day he was suppose to come home my circle of friends were out bowling and at the end of the evening we decided to call Alan to see if he was around and wanted to come and hang out. No one wanted to call and get yelled at by his mother. So, as is a reoccurring theme, I did the work that no one else was willing to do and called Alan’s house. His mom picked up and yelled at me for calling so late and asked who I was and I gave her my preferred pseudonym Bob S. Watters. She really laid into old Bob about calling too late and about how she didn’t know who I was and I should leave her son alone. Well I couldn’t take that affront sitting down, so I decided to stoke the mystery about Bob. My friends and I took a plastic bag, filled it with baby powder, put it in a brown paper bag and stuck a note on it, asking Alan to hold on to this for a couple of days, signed Bob. Then we dropped it off on Alan’s front door and walked away. The man who showed up at my door was a corrections officer who was dating Alan’s mom. Alan had ratted me out, which I should have expected because Alan was a rat. The man tried to act intimidating and said I could be brought up on charges and my father got pretty pissed about me doing something so fucking dumb. I am just a good old boy never meaning no harm. In time I was able to retaliate against the bozo corrections officer who thought he could scare me.

One night, a couple of years after the baby powder affair, my friends and I were at Friendly’s and Alan and couple more friends came in. When they had finished their meals they ran out to our car and stole the fuzzy dice off the rear view. We went in search of the fuzzy dice and this led us to Alan’s house were we confronted his mother and asked about her son’s whereabouts. She said he was suppose to be sleeping over at a friend’s house and wasn’t suppose to be at Friendly’s and if we found him we were suppose to tell him to come right home. This level of parental concern always amazed me because I use to say things to my father like, “Hey I am taking your car I’ll be back Monday.” So off we went to our friend Tommy’s house. We arrived at Tommy’s and had just pulled into the driveway when a car pulled in behind us. It was Alan’s mom’s boyfriend again. He got out of his car and I looked at him from the back seat of the car I was in. He was wearing his traditional going out to confront teenagers garb; urban camouflage pants, camouflage jacket, shoulder holster, and a big fucking gun. He opened the passenger side door. I was at that moment holding a cap gun. Why was I holding a cap gun? I am stupid, that’s why. Young and dumb and not much to do in the evenings so I had a cap gun with me. The gentleman reached into my hands and took my cap gun away and threw it into the darkness. “What is this a toy, I got a real gun right here.” At that he un-holstered his revolver and gave me a real good look at the inside of the barrel. I told him to calm down and we were just out looking for our fuzzy dice. He told us he was looking for Alan, an activity that required neither camouflage nor a sidearm but why quibble when a guy has a gun in his hand. We all went to the front door together. We were informed that our dice had been left in the car of the person that had been driving Alan around and that we could get them tomorrow. Alan was dragged off into the dark and his mom’s boyfriend took him home. The next day every occupant of the car that I was in filed police reports against the man who had pulled a gun on us and he got himself a pretty long talking to from the cops and there was some talk about him losing his job.

***. Lets be clear this was not real effort. Acting ridiculous, no matter how much exertion is involved, is never effort.

Baby Games!

2010-03-17T22:24:00.001-04:00

Okay so just an interesting thing that happened to me today. So first I like to catch things. There is no greater sense of accomplishment than what can be derived from catching things. The happiest I have ever seen Barack Obama was not when he was elected, nor when he was nominated, it was when he killed that fly during his interview with David Gregory. Killing a fly is made up of two components, catching a fly and then murdering the fly. I like to believe that it was catching the fly that put a little sparkle into President Obama’s eyes. I don’t like to believe that it was just blood lust. Could be that the President is just a sociopath that only derives joy from the murder of insects and perhaps household pets. But I think even Rush Limbaugh would admit that it was just that President Obama felt really awesome about catching the fly because he hasn’t really accomplished much else.

Catching something is fun because you actually deprive a primal force of nature, gravity, the satisfaction of completing its objective, pulling an object towards the earth. With timing, reflexes, and agility you can snatch something out of midair before it has a chance to meet up with the earth and that is great. I think it is especially great because if something hits the earth or the floor for that matter I am not very inclined to pick it up again. I will do a diving leap to snag an object that is rolling off the counter but if I don’t actually catch it, it may be several months before I bother to pick it up. Catching something is cool, picking things up off the floor is not.

So I was at the Wal-Mart spending the last of my food stamps and I was in the check out line and there was this baby in front of me sitting in the baby area of the shopping cart. The baby was playing with a set of keys. The baby’s mother was busy loading her groceries onto the check out belt and was completely oblivious to the little game that I had begun playing with her child. I took it as an inevitability that eventually the baby would drop the keys and when that happened I would get the opportunity to try and catch them. So I stared very intently at the keys and the baby stared very intently at me and I waited. The baby and I locked eyes and then we both looked at the keys. Then we looked back at each other. Then the baby dropped the keys so that they fell down through the bars of the carriage but I shot my arm out and caught them before they hit the floor.

“Yes!” Okay so I shouted “yes” when I grabbed the keys. So what if I caused everyone in Wal-Mart to stop and stare at me? So what if I held my arms over my head like Rocky? So what if I really scared the shit out of that mother? “Sorry, it is just I knew she was going to drop them and I just was waiting to catch them and I did and here are your keys back I am really sorry.” The mom handed the keys back to the baby who had caught on to her roll in the game and immediately threw the keys on the ground. The seven month old was too quick for me and I wound up batting .500 for the day. Mom decided to place herself between the baby and I as if she had pondered “How much of my baby could he eat before I started gouging at his eyes with my thumb?” It’s not cool being the weird guy that people move their children away from. But the baby waved goodbye, which I thought was pretty advanced of her.

Daylight Savings Age!

2010-03-16T01:24:00.000-04:00

So an odd thing happened today. I was standing out in front of the house waiting for my friend Kyle to pick me up and drive me to a bar so that I could play trivia. Trivia is my favorite activity. I know a lot of trivia and when free beer is on the line I know even more trivia. So I was waiting for Kyle and I was thinking about my life. Today was a kind of big day for me. I delivered service on some people that I am suing for my Uncle. I had to march into someone else’s building, walk up someone else’s stairs, knock on someone else’s door, and hand them papers saying that they were being sued. It was not something that I looked forward to doing and even though it went as well as I had any right to expect; it was still a very unnerving situation. I ruined someone’s day. I didn’t want to ruin their day. They hadn’t done anything except not pay their rent and I completely understand not paying people to whom you owe money. Hey you don’t have any money and you can’t get blood from a stone. I knocked on the door of the people I was trying to serve and a voice from inside asked who it was and I said, “My name is Matthew MacVane.” Completely useless to the person inside. So now you know the name that I am telling you belongs to me. Completely not helpful in anyway. The voice asked me to repeat myself and I said my name again. I stood there for a moment and thought about what else I might say, “Hi I am Matthew MacVane and I am trying to serve you with a law suit. Could you please open the door?” That probably wouldn’t help my cause any. The door opened and I asked the person’s name. She told me. That was the name on the summons so I figured now was as good a time as any to hand her the papers. “I am sorry but you’ve been served. Have a nice day.” I turned my back and was walking down the stairs when she said, “Yeah you have a nice day.” She seemed like she was trying not to be mean but there was enough anger in it that it sounded remarkably like, “Go fuck yourself.” I got downstairs and got into my car and my hands and legs wouldn’t stop shaking from the adrenaline. I definitely didn’t like serving people but it sure did get the blood flowing.

Tomorrow I have my first client meeting in my impromptu office that I have set up in the front room of the old folks home. It is a modest but serviceable office and there have been all sorts of problems with me setting it up. I live at home and there is a lot of compromise involved with that. I pay no rent so there isn’t like five hundred dollars of compromise a month but there is a lot of compromise and if I had five hundred dollars a month I would live anywhere but my father’s house. I would live in a modest one-room apartment if I could but I simply can’t make the nut right now. The leading compromise of living in this building has to do with my stepmother’s paranoia about locked doors and my father’s paranoia about someone coming in and stealing everything. They piggy back nicely. So the thing is I have this client that I have to meet for some court appointed work and the only place I can meet him is in the house and now there is all this grudging tension about allowing an accused criminal in to the house so I can meet with him and how all that is going to work. Well it is going to work just fine. There are going to be no problems nor can anyone point to how a problem is going to crop up. But there is a lot of passive aggression about the situation because my reasonable need to meet people I represent has come into conflict with my house mates irrational anxiety about the doors being locked constantly and not having strangers in the house.

I was out front waiting for Kyle to come get me and I was thinking about how lame and servile my life is and how I have to meet clients in my dad’s house and how I don’t work at some huge firm making serious money and actually contributing to my own survival and how I am 28 and I am way too old for this shit. Then I realized that I am not 28. I don’t know when I started thinking I was 28 but that has been the age that I thought I was for a long time now. But I am not, I am 27. I was born in July of 1982 and I won’t be 28 until July of 2010. When Kyle arrived I asked him, “If I was born in July of 82 how old would I be now?” He said 28 but that didn’t seem right and I kept asking people until I was reassured that my math was not incorrect. I am 27. It is like daylight savings time but with years. I am not a completely lame 28 year old, I am an up and coming 27 year old. I have a whole extra year that I didn’t know about to get my life in order. Who knows, I might really kick ass when I am 28. I mean I am 27 years old and I am already meeting with my own clients in my own hastily assembled office. I might actually be an established lawyer by this time next year, when I am the age that I thought I was when I woke up this morning. I know what you are thinking, “How the hell did you not know your own age?” Well lets face it after 21 it has all been a blur. My last birthday was in the middle of Bar Prep time and I didn’t really have time to acknowledge it. I don’t know I just forgot. I felt old and I inadvertently added a year to make the amount of fatigue and depression seem justified. But no, I am still a young man. Younger than I have been thinking anyway. And to top it all off my team, The Liberal Friends of David May, won tonight. So go me.

Erica Guest blogs again!

2010-03-06T01:00:00.004-05:00

Yo gang, it's MacVane,
My friend Erica has decided to grace us with another guest blog and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Since I really like it I don't feel compelled to dress it up at all so you can just dive in.

Here is the entirely different story I mentioned in my first piece; the one involving me teaching at my old middle school. There are many things people believe to be wrong with this sentence, like the teaching middle school part. Middle school is the age the majority of us have managed to block from our minds faster than we block creepy Facebook Farmers. It is an age full of insecurity and pandemonium but I chose to return to it. Maybe I’m a masochist but I sincerely enjoy children at this age unlike many of my counterparts. It is a well-known fact among teachers that middle school is the least competitive field. We are the outcasts of the teaching profession. Middle school is your Island of Misfit Toys but with gym class and brown bag lunches.

Early childhood (aka K-6) is the most competitive, then high school and then the lowly middle school positions. I’ve heard it from many middle school teachers in urban and suburban districts alike that you have to want to teach middle school, that it’s not just something you settle for. You really have to embrace these kids for the pubescent train-wrecks that they are because it’s a daily struggle to be an adolescent and maintain one’s self confidence. Give us some pom poms and call us cheerleaders. Just don’t ask us to do cartwheels.

In middle school you have to be able to motivate kids to do things that might tarnish their reputation as a ‘jock’ or ‘prep’. Things like what, you ask? Things like LEARN. There will always be a handful of perfectionist braniacs but it’s the rest of them you have to worry about. The other kids fear appearing “too smart” because heaven forbid they conjugate a verb correctly; it might clash with the Shaun White look they’ve got going. Becoming a social pariah at the middle school age leaves little chance for recovery until college. They’re pretty nasty to each other as it is. I’ve overheard the kids talk enough smack about each other that I’ve lost the energy to scold them. It’s only on the more serious infractions with which I get involved. For example, the 6th grader in the computer lab I heard tell a classmate that she was going to get raped. Yeah you read that right. Sounds audacious but sadly it’s typical of this age group. Middle school kids have this tendency to hyperbolize and not understand the weight of the words they use. Like when they accuse each other of “harassment”, “racism “and “stalking”. It’s called Middle School Student Exaggeration Syndrome. It is curable but sometimes we lose them; such as the 7th grader I heard asking his friend if Vermont was in South America. I wish I was making this up.

Social chaos aside, I want to teach middle school kids. I have no objection to teaching high school except that I’m often mistaken for one of them. When I observed at the high school, the art teacher accused me of being a student trying to park in faculty lot. Two male students tried to scam on me before the teacher got to the classroom only to find I was a student teacher. If they had slouched any lower in their chairs they’d have been reduced to a puddle of humiliation. So until I’ve put a few more years between myself and the kiddos, high school is going to have to wait.

While working with middle school kids is great fun, partially because I’m 12 years old at heart, their parents are a particular breed of insanity. I found this out during my first teaching experience at my old middle school, filling in for a Spanish teacher who had gone on maternity leave. I didn’t think much had changed with the exception of a newly constructed auditorium. Why the hell the school was built without one in the first place remains a mystery. Truth be told, it really didn’t need one but now that it’s there the district is finding reasons to hold as many assemblies as possible. What’s that you say? Angelina Jolie is adopting ANOTHER child? Let’s have an assembly!
Parents are a big backer of these assemblies; their children need to be exposed to cultural, musical and otherwise asinine events. But then parents kvetch about their children not having enough classroom time to do their work because of said asinine events. They’re a paradoxical bunch that I’ve found myself having to deal with more often than I like. There are times I’d rather throw myself repeatedly down the stairs of the auditorium than deal with the likes of overzealous parents. The first instance was Jake’s mom,

Ms. P,
We received Jake’s progress report indicating he is in the 80-89 range for the first quarter. Why is this? Jake has always been in the 90’s and this may hurt his chances of getting into private school.
Mary Manning

This is one of the more innocent e-mails but little ones such as these can be the most irritable. The blame of the child’s “failure” lies with you and you alone. Of course it will be MY fault that Jake doesn’t get into private school. Not his own fault for slacking on a 35 point project. With a heavy sigh and agile fingers, I constructed a response

Hello Mrs. Manning,
Progress reports simply indicate where your child is at the moment. He currently has an 89 average, which I’m sure will break 90 as we complete more assignments; it is only the first week of October after all.
Please let me know if you have other questions.
Ms. P

Others aren’t so easy; take the e-mail from Andrew’s mom:

Ms. P
Andrew will not be in school today as he is sick and he seemed very concerned about missing Spanish. He said, “Ms. P gets mad when people are absent.” Ms. P, you have to understand that middle school students GET SICK. It’s part of being a child and they will occasionally miss school for it. It is not fair for you to say things like this to children. It is not like they can control it. Not only is Andrew sick but he has his bar mitzvah this weekend and will not be able to do any work. He is under an incredible amount of stress and will need time to make up the work.
Susan Sheller

Whoa. My jaw dropped a fraction of an inch with every word I read. Who did this woman, this wretched woman, think she was? This has classic Middle School Student Exaggeration Syndrome written all over it. Did she honestly think I’d berate a child for being sick? When students were absent from class the most I would say was, “Oh man, that’s the third day Timmy’s been out, he’ll have a lot of work to make up.” My tone of concern may have been misconstrued as “upset”, this much I realize. But after rereading the e-mail for the trillionth time I finally stumbled upon the root of the issue. He has his bar mitzvah this weekend. Imagine “My Super Sweet Sixteen” but with yarmulkes. That’s a Westchester bar/bat mitzvah. They include but are not limited to: inflatable things to jump on, photo booths with wacky frames, and a customized sweatshirt that all invitees wear to class the next day. Moms are granted temporary insanity during these intensely stressful occasions. Curse your damn get out of jail free card Mrs. Sheller! I had words for you! Alas, I couldn’t bring myself to do it so I kept it simple,

Mrs. Sheller,
I had no idea Andrew was making his bar mitzvah this weekend, congratulations. You must be very excited. Had I known sooner I could have better accommodated him. He can have a 3 day extension on all assignments this week.
Best,
Ms. P

I still haven’t gotten used to the “Ms. P” moniker.* Being addressed as “Ms. P” by students and parents alike is strange. More exhausting than strange. I never thought I’d hate hearing my own name so much.
“Ms. P can I go to my locker?”
“Ms. P can I borrow a pen?”
“Ms. P can I take the quiz tomorrow instead?”

The answer to all of the above is “No.” You may think, “Jeez, Erica, could you be any more of a bitch?” The answer to that question is a resounding, “YES.”

Besides overzealous parents, learning names is another headache. Kids don’t like to be confused with each other so it’s best to learn their names as quickly as possible. Don’t confuse a Samantha for a Sara or you’ll get a temper tantrum on your hands faster than you can say mea culpa. They don’t seem to care that you have 95 other names to memorize because they’re self-absorbed adolescents, bless their hearts. It goes back to the issue of self-confidence. If the teacher thinks they are special enough to remember, their confidence level increases. Shaking our pom poms high, we proudly shout each name: “Give me an S, give me an A, give me an R, give me an A! What’s that spell?” “Sam—“ Dammit.

Remembering names is also something of a curse. As a young woman who eventually plans on having children, my options for male names have significantly dwindled. I can no longer name my son Dylan, Ben, Ross, Billy, Paul, Josh, Jack, Brian, Danny, Michael, Jeff, Austin, or Matthew.** Such names are too evocative of interruptive, lazy, back talking, know it all 13 year olds.

All those things aside, I find the kids endearing; slightly obnoxious, but endearing. During that first teaching experience I grew particularly attached to my 7th graders. They were an eager, enthusiastic group, they loved coming to the board to write or volunteer their skits. Their enthusiasm let me be more creative with lessons and less restrictive in my teaching methods. In other words, we were tight. I got these kids excited about a foreign language, which is like trying to get an American interested in curling. I was the cool Spanish teacher who gave out Smarties to the kids during tests because “they were a bunch of Smarties” Make fun of me all you want but kids remember that shit.

Being a perpetual cheerleader is grueling but it has its perks. I had DVD’s, candy, Starbucks’ cards, and café gift cards galore thrust upon me during the holiday season. Some of these were bribes I’m sure, others tokens of gratitude. One token of gratitude had no monetary value though and that’s the one I treasure the most. It came from three of the smartest and most adorable boys I had, my Three Amigos. They had gone to a bar mitzvah (Westchester style) one weekend and had a photo frame made of themselves for me. Two of them were pointing at the other and it was titled, ‘I’m with stupid”, which they had translated it into perfect Spanish. They presented it to me, grinning, saying “Here Ms. P, now you won’t forget us!” It took every muscle in my face to keep me from bawling. Knowing that I meant that much to them and was part of their success felt like such an accomplishment. It’s why I teach middle schoolers. The Sephora gift cards don’t hurt either.

Editor’s Notes: Hi all, MacVane here. I was so happy that Erica had written a blog about teaching. Not because I wanted to read a blog written by Erica about teaching, but because I had a teaching anecdote and I didn’t know any way to work it into my own blog. What can I say? I am a fundamentally selfish human being. I was going to put my teaching story at the top as part of the lead in but I read Erica’s piece and decided that it did what it was suppose to do as a piece of writing, it captivated the reader for as long as the writer requested the reader’s attention. So I decided to not insert myself until after Erica had finished. Now she is done and I get to appropriate her talent as a lead in to my teaching anecdote.