Green Like Me

I have spent a lot of time in my adult life talking about things I hate, like coconut, other people’s kids, Eskimos, and the environment. Now I am going to write about those things. Well, I am going to write about one of those things. I am sure I don’t need to explain the rest of them. You understand.

The environment is not really that great, and I am tired of people trying to convince me that it is.

Historically, Americans have seen progress as a good thing. This is our legacy. It makes sense. For millions of years, human beings were nothing more than large, clever animals. Sure we could talk, but birds can do that. We could make and use tools, but chimps and otters do that. There was nothing particularly special about human beings until we learned to master fire, burned down a forest, and put in a Starbucks. That is when progress was born. And to this day, as intelligent and highly organized as we imagine ourselves to be, the only thing that separates man from beast is mastery of our environment. All other animals live and die at the mercy of their environment. They are powerless to do anything other than adapt to changes, or die. Not us. While the other animals get their asses kicked daily by fundamental changes to their environments, we made the whole world our bitch.

Hell. Yes.

That’s why we are cool.

But lately our culture has become bent on the notion of being “green.” We think every tiny thing we do must somehow involve saving the environment. It took a really long time for this to happen. It started with hippies. I blame the hippies. As the baby boomers began to realize exactly how massive a failure their little counter-culture experiment had become, some of them got jobs. Many of them didn’t want a real job, so they became teachers. Those teachers began spewing their hippie propaganda all over kids like me. It was us, generation x, the kids who went to school in the seventies and eighties, who got the guilt treatment about how awful we were being to the earth. The hippies told us it was true, and we believed them.

Stupid hippies.

Unfortunately, another common American trait is that few of us ever question the things we were taught as children. Now that we are the target demographic, eagerly awaiting our turn to control the world once the last of the baby boomers have driven their RVs into the sunset, generation x continues to believe, and teach our children the same hippie propaganda we learned as kids.

The problem is that it is all bullshit.

We never stopped to think about it. Conservation and environmentalism in any form seem intuitively positive to us. So we never really think a thing through. If something seems “green” we like it, no matter what.

At first I started saying I hate the environment because I thought it was a funny thing to say in the face of everyone in my generation being so concerned about whether or not there was a recycling bin next to every trash bin in the entire fucking world. There were protests about it when I was in college. I didn’t really hate the environment, I just thought the people who were so bent on saving it were stupid, and I wanted to make fun of them. That’s what I do. See at the time I noticed what I thought were some fundamental flaws in their philosophies as they related to their demands. For example, the recycling bins were made of plastic. This amused me. I thought that a desire to recycle materials was necessarily reflective of an overall desire to reduce pollution and man’s impact on the natural world. So it seemed odd to me that you would produce vehicles to aid in such efforts which are constructed from a material which is particularly good at polluting the environment, both in its production and in its existence, particularly the spectacular ability plastics have to clutter up the natural world for projected millennia. I also thought that eventually the pseudo-activists pushing for such things would realize their own contradictions, and the matter would resolve itself in coming decades when we all laughed together about how funny the nineties were with all the flannel shirts, Doc Martens, and crazy ideas like recycling.

But I was wrong. I was wrong about people realizing the inherent contradictions in recycling. I was also wrong in assuming that the desire to recycle was a manifestation of a broader concern about man’s impact on the natural world. Apparently the desire to recycle is only a desire to recycle.

It has been demonstrated over and over again, by researchers and investigative reporters, that all the recycling we do, of cans, and glass, (and now even plastics), paper, etc., all the time we spend sorting it (when it could otherwise be “business time”) and placing it in those big plastic containers in front of our houses on trash day, is in vain. We know this. I don’t even need to explain it because you can Google it quickly. It is a fact, that the energy used to process the materials collected in all of those recycling bins creates more pollution, and a greater ultimate impact on the environment than would the production of the very same new materials. Also, recycling is way more expensive, and a total pain in the ass.

But we do it anyway, even though we know it is bullshit, because our teachers told us to, and we loved those old hippies.

Strange right?

Now I really do hate the environment. But I have a healthy respect for it. I am afraid of the earth. I don’t generally spend a lot of time trying to protect things I fear. As a Darwinist, I believe that this world created us, and when it wants to, just as it has done to so many species before us, most of which we will never even know about, the earth will kick our asses. It isn’t the other way around. I don’t believe that global warming is something humans can control, and consequently, I don’t think global warming is something we can cause either. I saw Al Gore’s stupid PowerPoint presentation. But I know the difference between a correlation and a causal relationship. I also like to think I know propaganda when I see it. But what I definitely know is how little we really do know about anything, let alone our own planet and how it works and changes over time. We are not nearly as smart as we think we are. I think it is vain and short sighted for us to think that we, a bunch of clever apes who learned to burn shit down, have the ability to destroy a planet that created us, which existed long before we did, and which will exist long after we are gone. The earth could simply erase us any time, or we could erase ourselves, and in a hundred thousand years, maybe less, there would be no noticeable trace that we had ever existed.

You don’t have to believe what I write. You probably shouldn’t anyway. I am notoriously misled.

But I am not all bad. I do a number of green things myself.

I ride an electric train to work every day. Not that kind of electric train, a big one. I ride Sacramento’s municipal light rail system. Public transportation is considered very green because of its perceived efficiencies. Multiple people on a single vehicle is way more efficient than a bunch of individual cars on the road, right? Maybe. I started riding the train because I am cheap and lazy. My new job doesn’t pay for parking downtown. So riding the train is much cheaper and easier than searching for and ultimately paying for parking. It was hard for me to decide that damaging the environment had just become too expensive for me. I guess life is full of trade-offs. I like to ride outside of typical commute hours when the trains are mostly empty. A train is way bigger than any car, and sometimes I am the only person riding. That is my favorite. I like to think about how much coal is being burned at the local power plant to produce all the electricity it takes to run that train for the 25 or so miles I ride, with all the stops, and making cars wait at intersections when we cross, idling all those emissions into the air. And then it just keeps going after I get off, even if no one is on it. Riding the train is awesome.

When I am not riding a huge train alone, I drive an old truck with a lot of miles on it. Again, I do this because I am cheap and don’t want to make car payments. I plan to drive it for as long as I possibly can. I know this doesn’t seem particularly green, but consider that driving an old car is the ultimate form of recycling. I maintain that even though my truck is huge, and gets terrible gas mileage, and that I never have anything to haul around and it probably doesn’t even make sense for me to have a truck, I am creating far less an impact on the environment with my old truck than you are with your new hybrid. But I am glad you have a new car. Do you know how much energy it takes to make a new car? Those shiny new things aren’t made from recycled materials, and they are almost all plastic! I love to think about all the chemicals that go in to manufacturing new cars, with all their toxic pollution and industrial waste. I maintain that I could drive my truck around, all day, every day, for the next ten years, getting 12 or 13 miles per gallon, and I would still have less an impact on the environment than the manufacture and sale of a single “fuel-efficient” new car, even a hybrid. I loved that last year everyone thought it was so good for the environment to turn in cars that already exist, to purchase new cars that had to be manufactured. Awesome. That was plastic recycling bins all over again. And then we just dumped all those old cars in a landfill or something. Sweet. That was good for the environment. And what happens when the hybrids wear out? What are we gonna do with all those giant batteries with all their toxic chemicals? Those will be good for the environment also when we dump them in a landfill. Because by then we will all want electric cars, to be as green as possible. I am sure no one will conveniently forget, as mentioned above, that the vast majority of electricity in this country, which we will use to charge all those even bigger batteries in our electric cars, is produced by oil and coal-burning power plants. When mine stops working I will probably just buy another old truck and drive it as long as I can, because I am an environmentalist.

I carry and use a re-useable aluminum water bottle. I do this mostly because I ride the train at odd hours, and I figure I can bash a crack head in the face with it if one gives me any trouble. Aluminum water bottles hurt more than plastic ones. Any impact this may have on the environment is purely coincidental, but still worth mentioning.

I shop at Costco where there are no plastic grocery bags. That’s right bitches. I go to the biggest store I can find with no windows to buy a lot of shit I don’t need and will ultimately throw away anyway. There are so many lights on in Costco that even on the brightest sunny day my eyes never need to make that awkward adjustment – you know the one I mean. Plus I never have to wonder what the TVs might look like in my house, running the risk of wasting fuel to return one because the picture wasn’t huge enough. Costco conveniently keeps all of the televisions turned on inside the store all the time. Now that’s thinking green.

And lastly, I urinate outside any chance I get, particularly if I have been drinking. This saves a lot of water, not to mention chemicals that are used to treat waste water, and it helps feed plants and grasses to produce more oxygen. I think this is a guy thing. It feels good to take a leak outdoors. It is almost primal. Maybe it is our way of marking our territory. A lot of us do it all the time and the people around us have no idea, particularly women, because it is more fun to keep it a secret from them. Also, it is super convenient, and a simple little reminder about how awesome it is to be a guy, which is a human being, who cares about the environment.

So You Want to Watch Grown Men Play With Each Other...

I don’t watch sports. You should just know that about me right away. I don’t read about, talk about, or concern myself with professional sports in any way. I am not one of those guys. I don’t know what kind of guy I am. But I am not a sports guy.

It isn’t that I have anything against sports. I can sometimes see the appeal. I would never suggest that there is anything wrong with being a sports fan. It just doesn’t interest me. A large part of this is because it hasn’t been my example. My dad doesn’t watch sports. Neither of my grandfathers ever followed sports. Sports mayhem is not a trait that has been transmitted through masculine lines in my family. I guess we were always just more interested in other things.

I played sports as a kid. I was way into soccer. I ran track for a while. I played on the school football team in middle school. I often played football and basketball with my friends. It just didn’t hold my interest well enough to carry me into adulthood as a sports fan.

And in case it hasn’t occurred to you yet, I will just tell you, this makes me very different from other men my age. I spend a fair amount of time in pubs. I don’t watch the games. Most of my friends are sports fanatics. I rarely meet another guy who doesn’t think he absolutely needs a huge plasma TV on which to watch grown men play with each other in high definition. I don’t even watch the Super Bowl. It is just another Sunday to me.

I have been called a “fag” many, many times over this particular issue. Generally I don’t sweat it, because you don’t need to prove something that is true. It just becomes obvious. I have six children with two different women. I don’t generally feel a need to prove any kind of heterosexuality. But also it never really bothered me, because the idea that a man is gay because he doesn’t watch sports always seemed a little backward to me. Let me explain what I mean.

One of the newest crazes, which all of my friends seem to love, is fighting. Now fighting is not new, but I think it is enjoying a recent surge in popularity among sports fans. Boxing has been popular for many, many years. I have always disliked boxing in the United States because of its racist origins. I am not going to go into too much detail about that because you can look it up of you don’t believe me. There is nothing new about two black guys beating the crap out of each other while two white guys collect all the money. And yes, make no mistake, Don King is white.

But it seems to me that recently boxing must have become too tame for some bloodthirsty motherfuckers out there, and martial arts were maybe too gay, so they invented some other violent and crazy shit like kickboxing, professional wrestling, and the newest sensation epitomized by UFC. That’s right, the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Everyone seems to love this shit, men and women alike, except me. I hate fighting, and I don’t want to watch other assholes fight each other either. I can understand the primal fascination and all, but it seems like there is probably a good documentary on PBS at the same time, and I would rather watch that.

Don’t misunderstand me. I can and will fight when I need to. And I can get pretty mean. Just ask my ex-wife. In fact, not too long ago I had to run a couple guys off of her place on her behalf, and I didn’t think twice about getting right in their faces with some fairly menacing threats and body language. It was fun. And I could easily have gotten violent with them if the situation had called for it. But I don’t get off on watching two other guys fight on TV. That really doesn’t do it for me.

One of my friends, a woman, recently said to me as we were discussing the UFC phenomenon, “Watching half-naked, sweaty guys beat each other is just hot. It is the closest I will get to porn.” Fair enough, and I appreciate anything that turns women on, but does this mean that if she were going to watch porn she would watch gay porn?

Because frankly, gay porn is the only other medium I can think of for watching naked sweaty guys “beat” each other. Only it seems to me that before UFC, we didn’t call that a sport, we called it a “reach around.”

Okay so men like to let their inner rage come out, and watching fighting, or maybe sports in general does that for them. It makes them feel all tough, manly, and apparently not gay at all. But come on, doesn’t it seem pretty gay to want to spend all your time watching grown men play with each other? No? I guess it is just me.

You know what makes me feel all tough and manly? Spending all of Super Bowl Sunday in bed (or wherever) having mad, hot, crazy sex with a beautiful woman, and not watching the game at all.

Maybe we would see what was on PBS after it started to hurt.

But I guess I am the fag.

Wanted: One Gently-Used, Open-Minded Rebound Girl for Limited-Contact Sexual and Emotionally-Detached Relationship to Last Approximately 100 Days.

Note: I wrote this sometime around April 2007, shortly after I separated for the last time from my now ex wife. It was originally written for, and posted on an old MySpace blog I kept at the time. I still think it is funny. So I am also posting it here.

I am planning a divorce for the end of July. Rather, I am planning for my divorce to be final by the end of July. I realize that my profile indicates that I am already divorced, but that is because MySpace doesn’t have any designation for “separated.” I certainly don’t think of myself as “married” anymore, and “single” is a ruse. I need the viewers of my profile to realize at a glance that I have been around the block once or twice. “Single” just doesn’t seem to capture what I have been through.

Going through a divorce can be hard on a good man like me. I know because I have done this before. But that is a longer story and fodder for a different story. This time however, I have decided that this divorce will be much easier on me if I can manage to distract myself from the whole situation. I can think of no better way to distract myself than to get marginally involved with another woman. Such a distraction would be beneficial in many ways, all of which I will describe below.

This will not be the kind of divorce that gets ugly and nasty and drags on for years and years. It should be fairly quick and agreeable. Like I said we have done this before. My ex and I are both too tired to argue much, and we both just want to concentrate on raising these kids. We also have no assets to speak of. We should be able to have it all done easily by the summer. But I need a good woman to help keep my thoughts and attentions occupied and focused. The worst danger in this situation is for me to wax nostalgic about the old days and start begging the ex to give it another chance. Such behavior would degrade both of us. We all know men are the most likely culprits in such situations, and they almost always end in restraining orders. I don’t need that. The best thing for me is to keep my mind focused on future possibilities. I am a young(ish) man still, I am smart(ish), funny (in my own mind), and gainfully employed. Oh and I am a champion in the sack. There is no doubt about that whatsoever. So I like to think I have something to offer both to a rebound girl, and for future meaningful relationships.

I do have six children, and the amount of money I spend for child support and alimony is greater than the annual operating budget of a mid-sized corporation. They are all my children. But I have to be honest and admit something that I am not very proud of. While I am certainly their father, I can’t be exactly sure who their mothers are.

My position in this endeavor is simple. I need a woman who will enjoy my company, my rhetoric, my drinking, and my emotional outbursts. I can offer a good time sometimes, lots of laughs, plenty of late night phone calls, awkward text messages and obscene email.

My rebound girl should be free of husbands and jealous boyfriends. Emotional baggage is fine because I will be too self-absorbed to ever deal with it. She should be confident, because I like confidence, unless she compensates for a lack of confidence with loose sexual practices, which would be okay also. Having kids is a plus, because it brings a level of maturity I appreciate, but it is not really necessary because I will never meet her kids. Also she will never meet my kids. I don’t want to involve them in my “dating scene.” They didn’t ask for that. Oh and I spend a lot of time with my kids. So this relationship will be mostly a distanced one, which brings up another important point that needs some explanation.

I was married long enough that I am still at a point where sex with other women seems a little “gross” for lack of a better term. I don’t mean any offense by that. And I suspect I will get over it pretty quickly in the right situation. It is just that I have not been that close to another woman for a long time. And this explains the “limited-contact” sexual relationship described above. I am very interested in phone sex for example. I am interested in exchanging dirty emails and text messages. I might even try cyber sex. And if she has dirty self portraits to share with me she moves right to the top of the list. If she takes dirty self-portraits specifically for me – she wins. And if some of those dirty pictures could be “accidentally” emailed or sent to the ex wife’s cell phone, I would not be disappointed. But that is just childish.

If she lived near one of the two cities where I live it would be ideal. But since I don’t necessarily plan on having actual sex with her, it is possible we would never need to actually meet. So living near me is not critical.

Planning a divorce also means that I am planning a divorce party. And this party seems the perfect setting for a breakup. In the interest of honesty I am disclosing here that such a breakup will likely occur. I know that after spending a hundred days with a gem like me she will likely have fallen head-over-heels in love with me, but this is important. And being in love with me will only strengthen the drama of the situation. I couldn’t ask for more than that. Of course said breakup could be called off at any time if I fall in love with her. I am a fair man.

If you, or any woman you know is interested, please send a relationship resume with cover letter and references. All applicants will be considered, but only the hottest and smartest ones will be contacted for interviews.

The Hamster Surrendered

Sometimes it is really important to know when you are defeated. Sometimes it is a good idea to quit while you are still alive.

We moved to Utah in 1999, days after I completed my Master's degree in San Jose. We had been planning it for a while. After spending the first few years of our marriage in California, and having a couple kids while I gave teaching high school the old college try, we decided that Utah might be a better place to live. California at the time seemed too crowded, too expensive, and we weren't sure what our future there might look like. By way of contrast, my older sister had been living in Salt Lake City the last several years and had done pretty well, even as a single parent. She had been able to buy a house and everything. But now she was back in California to be closer to my parents. Utah seemed like the land of opportunity. We also knew it to be a nice community that was friendly to children. We already seemed a little strange in California for having two kids so close together, and only being in our early twenties. Utah was full of big, young families. We knew we wanted to have more kids, so Salt Lake City seemed like the place to be. We moved into the house my sister had not yet sold.

If you have never been there, you should know that as far as cities go Salt Lake City is a very nice one. It is beautiful. Set against a backdrop of ten-thousand foot rocky peaks, it is one of the cleanest and most easy-to-navigate cities in the country. It is a very nice place to visit during any season.

But you might not want to live there.

The only reason I say this is that Salt Lake City is the home-base of a culture that can be pretty difficult to interact with for any extended period of time. I am not talking about religion. If you only remember one thing you read in this essay, you should remember this. Never confuse Utah Mormon culture with any kind of religion. Utah culture and Mormon doctrine are completely separate. It turns out that Utah is actually one of the United States of America. It is unfortunate however, that the Mormons who live in Utah don't know that they are not really Mormon anymore. This is mostly because members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (The Mormons) who were born and raised in Utah have likely never read the Book of Mormon, nor studied their religion in any meaningful way. The good people of Utah, a majority of who claim to be Mormon, have been "phoning it in," religiously speaking, for the last hundred years or so. They don't really work at it. They don't think they need to.

Utah Mormons have created a culture that is very prescribed. They have created a culture that defines where they should live, what they eat and drink, and what movies or TV shows they can and can not watch. Their culture clearly defines the kinds of people they can and can not be friends with, what they should wear and drive, and who they should vote for in each election. They have created a culture that dictates everything they may ever wonder about, leaving them free to spend all their time thinking about nothing at all. If they do ever find themselves in doubt, all they need to do is pick up the newspaper, or tune in to any other local media source, and they will be told what they need to know. It is beautiful. Life is so simple for Utah Mormons.

The problem is that their religion doesn't tell them any of these things. Seriously. Go get yourself a copy of the Book of Mormon. Read it cover to cover. Then come back and tell me if anywhere in that book it says that you shouldn't have a cup of fucking coffee. It isn't in there. And therein lays the problem. Six or seven generations into the original "settlin" of the Great Salt Lake Valley by Mormon pioneers from the Midwest, these people are on autopilot. Because they all share the same culture, and they all share the same religion, and their parents all shared this same culture and this same religion, they have completely confused the culture with the religion. It is purely inductive reasoning, and it is human nature. If you are born and raised a Mormon in Utah, as a matter of conditioning, it is nearly impossible for you to see the difference between your culture and your religion. They can't help it. It would happen to the rest of us if not for that crazy first amendment. This kids, is the reason our constitution wants us all to have different faiths. We need something to fight about, to keep it real.
But I digress.

I can poke fun at them because I am one of them. I was born into this Utah-Mormon, suburban, whitebread, maelstrom. But then I was raised in California where we learned that culture and religion were two different things. At a Utah high school, being Mormon means fitting in. At a California high school, being Mormon most certainly does not mean "fitting in."

I knew growing up that Utah Mormons were different from other Mormons. We spent time with the extended family in Utah each year, and I knew things were different for my cousins than they were for me. My cousins had the same friends in the neighborhood, at school, and at church. They talked about church business and goings-on with their friends at school, and around the neighborhood. Church was integrated into everything they did. I had different sets of friends at school and at church. And even though we often went to the same schools, those of us who met up at church on Sundays pretended not to know each other the rest of the week. There was a stigma connected to being a Mormon kid in California, along with a lot of stupid questions (How many wives does your dad have?). We preferred to avoid discussing the matter. In fact we all spent at least a little time trying to hide the fact that we were Mormon. This was contradictory to what we had been taught to do. Every Mormon child at that time had drilled in to them the concept that "every member was a missionary." We were supposed to be proud of who we were, talk about it as often as we could, and try to generate in other people an interest in joining the fold. Mormons recruit aggressively. I remember sitting through a history lesson in fifth grade about western expansion. When the teacher got to the part about the Mormons moving west and "settling" (never mind the people who already lived there) Utah, Las Vegas, and several places in California he asked if anyone in the class was Mormon. There were three of us. None of us raised our hands. Then he went on to tell us what was wrong with the Mormons. It was just a different environment.

So I figured that as an adult, moving to Utah would be a pretty good idea. After all, these were my people. Never-mind that I had stopped going to church when I was fifteen. I was pretty sure that I understood this culture. After-all, I was a member of the fifth generation of my family to be born in Utah. There are a lot of people in Salt Lake City who share my surname, and with our polygamous past, I am related to most of them. Utah is the motherland.

As it turned out, we didn't fit in so well in Utah. Don't get me wrong. We did at first. But then something strange happened.

The first year or so we lived in Utah everything was fine. My extended family was everywhere. I have 32 first cousins with all associated aunts, uncles, etc. They all seemed glad to have one of their long-lost sons back with a new wife and a couple new little ones. Our neighbors were some of the friendliest people you would ever want to meet. I couldn't complain about any of them. But still, something seemed strange.

Maybe it was the old man who lived across the street who each Sunday after church came home with two hookers. Maybe it was the number of phone calls that came from the local elder's quorum, inviting me out to church each week. Maybe it was the missionaries who knocked on our door so frequently. The missionaries in Utah don't go up and down the street knocking on every door the way they do other places. That would only result in twenty free meals per day and fat missionaries. Everyone likes people who already see things their way. In Utah they work by appointment. They seek specific targets. They are like smart bombs. They only knocked on our door, and often.

And the old man with the hookers is really extraneous to this discussion. He was just funny.

I have come to refer to the strangeness we began to feel after our first year in Utah as "creeping unwelcome." Allow me to explain what I mean. It is the sense that people are "too" friendly. It is the feeling that people are only pretending to like you. It is the notion that no regular person could really be as interested in the lives of strangers as these people were with us. Eventually people began to ignore us. Eventually the phone calls stopped. Eventually we didn't even get a wave from the front yard.

And then it occurred to me that every member is a missionary. They were being nice to us because they hoped to convert us. We had in fact, been teasing them. We made it look like we would be an easy win. We were a young couple with a bunch of small kids. We drove a mini-van. I wore a white shirt and tie to work most days. And after all, I had been born there, and used to be Mormon. We led them on, and now they were feeling a little betrayed. It was taking too long. They were getting pissed.

One of the joys of being a parent of small children is keeping small pets for small children. When we lived in Utah, we had hamsters. They are funny little creatures. Their usefulness as pets can be debated. Their very existence needs to be questioned. We had one "wild" hamster of questionable breeding, and one very calm and friendly hamster of preferred stock. They lived separately, because hamsters like to kill each other when you put them together. They were both boys.

The nice hamster was played with constantly. It was the kind of hamster they called "black bear." Like most hamsters it was Russian in origin, with short, fine, black hair, and it looked like a very small black bear. The mean hamster was part goat or something. It had long shaggy white and orange hair. When handled, which wasn't often, it would alternately bite the shit out of you, or sit calmly and stare you down with beady little red eyes in an attempt to dominate you mentally. And it usually worked. There were mysterious nights I cannot recall on which I think I may have done that hamster's bidding.

The nice hamster was smart enough to never leave its home uninvited. It recognized a good thing, and let me tell you, as far as captive lifestyles go, a hamster's set-up isn't bad. The mean hamster was bent on extradition. He was a political prisoner as far as he was concerned. And he would not rest until the streets flowed red with the blood of the infidels. One day the mean one escaped. We were alternately relieved, because now we were not obligated to attempt to handle him, and scared shitless, because he was roaming free somewhere inside our home.

This was about the same time we began making an effort to send clear signals to our neighbors about our religious orientation. They weren't handling the mixed signals very well, and frankly, we didn't think we were being very fair by leading them on. We didn't fly a freak flag on the lawn or anything. We were more subtle. We wanted to let them know what we were about without throwing it in their faces, if you know what I mean. I started doing all my yard work on Sunday mornings, right around the time they were all driving to church. This ensured that they all saw me clearly disrespecting the Sabbath. I barbecued in the front yard on Saturday afternoons, always with a cold beer in hand. I chased off Boy Scouts every time I saw them creeping around. And we put obscene bumper stickers on the mini-van. My favorite read "I Love Mormon Pussy." You know, we wanted to send clear signals while staying under the radar.

I like to think it worked.

The hamster was missing for about three weeks when we spotted it bolting across the carpet in the basement one morning. It disappeared into the storage room. We were shocked that it was still alive. We had snakes all around our place that summer. I guess it realized that the basement was a safe little harbor. Still, it had to be feeling the stress. We had snakes drop into the window wells from time to time. A suburban Utah basement is not an easy place for a hamster to live on its own, even a mean one. We figured the kids dropped enough crumbs on the floor that it could eat pretty well indefinitely. What is it about little kids and crumbs?

Acting on a tip from the hot shot manning the register at the local pet shop, the old lady set up a trap for it with a stack of books and a bathroom wastebasket. I guess she didn't like the old spring-loaded trap I picked up from the hardware store. She caught him too. But that little bastard could not be held. He was gone in a day, and it was another six weeks before we saw him again.

The circumstances under which I next encountered that hamster were strange enough that, had I not witnessed it with my own two eyes, I would never believe it. And while I will swear to you that it is one hundred percent true and accurate just as I tell it here, I still don't expect you to believe this next part of the story.

The hamster surrendered. One morning I was making the rounds to check the status of toilet paper in each of the bathrooms. I walked into the basement bathroom, which was located right next to the storage room. I flipped on the light, replaced the roll on the holder, and turned around to leave when I noticed a small white and orange goat in my path. It was just standing there, on two feet, with its little front paws held up, staring at me. But this stare was in no way maniacal. This stare was desperate. I saw fear, pain, and exhaustion in those little red eyes. This was a cry for help. I simply reached down, and picked him up. He made no attempt to run. He did not scratch me or bite me. As soon as I held him, he looked generally relieved.

I carried him upstairs and placed him in the cage the kids had insisted remain prepared in case of his return. He spent the rest of his life there. He never bit, scratched, or practiced mind-control on anyone again. He was a model pet from then on. He knew when it was time to give up.

Later that week I was washing the car in the driveway. Two of the kids were out playing while I worked. I watched one of the neighbor kids walk by on his way to another neighbor's house. I knew from the time everyone was friendly to us that he was five years old. My daughter, who was about his same age, walked right up to him and said hello. She asked if he wanted to play with her.

Have you ever seen one little kid just plain ignore another little kid? I never had until that day. I didn't even think it was possible. This tiny little boy looked straight through her, dead-faced, and kept walking. She eventually fell away feeling confused and a little hurt. It occurred to me that no little kid learns to do that on his own. A parent has to really work hard to teach a five-year-old to ignore another five-year-old, particularly when that child's parents were no where to be seen. What must that kid have been told about us?

I figured the hamster had it right. I knew it was time to go. Within two months I accepted a new job in Texas, and we were on our way.

Utah is a really nice place to visit.

I Stabbed the Babysitter

To understand the kind of brilliant, sexy, charming, deeply intellectual and all around wonderful man I am today, it is important to know something about the kid I used to be. The purpose of this essay is to paint a broad overview of the years I spent slipping from grace.

Some of you have already read about my strict Mormon upbringing and various other adventures of my youth. Here I will not repeat these. Instead I will add new details to the mystery and relate a few bits of basic information heretofore neglected. Eventually I will re-post many of those old essays as well.

It is important at the outset of this story to note that I harbor no ill will, nor do I carry any grudge relevant to the situation described. In fact I sincerely hope that the babysitter, wherever she may be, is reading this.

By all accounts I was a good kid. I was the third child of four. I was a physical outlier. I grew up in a family of people with brown hair and brown eyes. I had blond hair and green eyes. Among my siblings I was the homecoming queen, having been voted most-likely-to-succeed, and best-dressed each year we published a yearbook. Without question, my mother loved me the best.

In school I was a shining star. I learned to read at an early age using whole language methods (phonics are for suckers). My grades could not have been better. And for many years the only reports that came home to my parents dealt in degrees of "what a pleasure" I was to have in class.

Because of my striking good looks, uncanny charisma, and highly advanced social skills, people around me often mistook me as belonging to another family. I can't blame them really. I was sure of it myself. Though I have seen the so called "evidence" over and over again (birth certificates, photographs, medical records - all forgeries to be sure), to this day I would not be surprised to suddenly receive a tearful email from by birth parents begging me forgiveness and the knowledge that I was not ruined by their mistake.

One family to which I am sure I was never suspected of belonging lived across the street from us. These neighbors, particularly the children, caused no end of annoyance and grief to us throughout my early youth until my parents found the sense and courage to flee to another part of the state, thankfully taking us with them. These neighbors might also claim that we caused some trouble for them. In case you have heard these rumors, I am here to tell you they amount to nothing but slander.

I and my siblings still shudder to hear the particularly unique surname of this clan and so my readers will understand when I do not repeat it here. Be sure that whenever I refer to "them", you know of whom I write.

We lived in a very typical middle-class suburban neighborhood in central California. We had a swing set and a pool. We had bikes, friends on the "block" and easy access to bus stops.

They had five kids. They had a better pool. They had tiny hills built in their font yard on which they rode tiny motorcycles. They spent weekends singing publicly. They wore matching t-shirts. I could not make this stuff up.

They went to our church, and so our parents tried to be friends with them. As a result there was frequent interaction between the families.

One problem that both of our families had to deal with in differing but similar ways was having an oldest sister. I certainly do not need to detail any of the horror and tragedy of this situation for any of my readers who grew up with this problem in their own families. It is the same the world over. My own small children are living this nightmare now. It is an absolute fact that across the vast history of human civilization, great empires have repeatedly fallen over the misdeeds of, mistreatment from, and other crimes associated with someone's oldest sister.

As if I didn't have enough trouble dealing with my own oldest sister, whom my parents usually left to baby-sit when they selfishly and mercilessly abandoned us every Friday for "date night", I sometimes had to deal with "their" oldest sister. Whenever my own was unavailable or otherwise occupied with dealings in witchcraft, black magic, and voodoo (I am sure of it), my parents would pay "their" oldest sister to torture and maim my poor helpless brother, younger sister and I.

It was on one of these nights that I took my first important step toward the dark side.

I did not want to go to bed. That was all there was to it. You have heard this story before. She was on the phone with her boyfriend, did not want to be bothered, and decided that we must all go to bed at some unreasonable time while the sun was still up. My brother and my little sister, being pious and pure, obeyed completely and without resistance. They were chumps. But God will have mercy on their souls.

I chose this night to make my stand. I was cutting an apple in the kitchen when she tried to physically compel me to my room for the duration. I would have none of it. I quickly and cautiously calculated that I was completely justified, as any man is, in wanting full control of my own destiny. With such realization came the instant enlightenment and wisdom of the aged and learned. Because, I reasoned, I had just become aged and learned, I was under no obligation to take direction from some ignorant and self-absorbed teenager. Now a free man has rights and responsibilities that must be honored and protected. Being a true American, I mentally reviewed my constitutional rights, nay my constitutional responsibility, along with my moral obligation to protect freedom and arm myself against the tyranny of the unjust, whatever grotesque form it may assume. I also realized that I was armed and she was not. So, I took the same brave and honorable action that any reasonable, moral, and ethical man must take. I stabbed the babysitter.

Realizing a need for immediate sanctuary, I ran and hid under my bed.

She called her father, who came immediately from across the street and tried, unsuccessfully, for quite some time until my own parents arrived, to root me out of my foxhole. I have always said that guerilla tactics are the ones that win wars. There is no shame in it.

She managed to stop the bleeding and get a band-aid on the back of her thumb. My strike was swift and mighty. Though her injuries did not result in her ultimate demise, they did the job. I was never again subjected by her to an early bedtime. From that time forward I could hold my head up as I rode my bike with the banana seat. She and her siblings avoided eye contact, and shuffled away when they saw me coming. They knew what was up. I was victorious in my own land.

Years later, say about two days ago, I recalled this little story with my mother. Final honor and justification often comes late for those who carry the burdens of humanity. There have been diplomas awarded to long-dead military heroes. Monuments are never built for the living. And though there have been many other reasons for me to become a legend in my own family, this one remains a favorite for all. Though my mother may not have understood at the time, she has learned much from me over the years. And although she may have suffered greatly in shame and worry these past decades, she has ultimately come to be enlightened, and no longer questions my tactics, motives, or sanity. In the end my mother said to me "she probably deserved it."

Victory is sweet.

Octopodes and Interrogation Points

--> I have a few old books I have picked up from antique stores here and there over the years. Like most precious antiques, none of them are worth any money, and truly hold little value of any kind. But they smell funny, and look important, so I keep them around. I have volumes of poetry from writers no anthology has ever known, signed by the authors. I have editions of the classics never seen at Barnes and Noble. And I have a few other odds and ends.

One of these books, which I have actually thumbed through one or twice, is a grammar book printed in 1879. I prize it above all the others. It doesn't only look cool, it has a unique feature that the others don't. This grammar book contains exercises which, by all modern accounts, would be material considered far too difficult fro the fragile minds of college freshman. Yet, as if to add salt to the wound created by lowered expectations of the ages, it seems to have once belonged to a child. The past was cruel indeed. But the sheer monotony and difficulty of the thing is not the reason I like it. I like it because there is a funny joke in it. Its brittle pages contain a mean-spirited, cruel little joke that has survived for over a hundred years. On the inside front cover, written in the most unconcerned pencil-based cursive of a ten-year-old child, is a little rhyme. It reads: Jack was here, so please don't fear, if you don't believe me turn here - turn to page 79. And when one accepts such directions blindly, and turns to page 79, one finds another sentence scrawled at the top of the page: you are a fool for looking. Children will never change.

My initial discovery of this limerick had me thinking. Kids these days don't use "fool" as a derogatory term nearly as often as they probably should, or as often as they apparently used to. This prompted me to explore the book a little further.

Aside from this little amusement, I noticed another funny joke about the book. As I reviewed the list of conventions popular in North American English in 1879, I noticed that question marks do not exist anywhere in the book. They do not appear in the table of contents, nor in any discussion of end punctuation. But, oddly enough, they do appear properly in many of the sample sentence diagrams, an example of which is shown below.

Are all of the filthy savages eradicated from the plains?

It seemed odd for such an important part of the written language to be missing completely from instructional materials of the time. After all, periods were there, commas, colons, semicolons (and no one knows how to use those), and even exclamation points! But as I scanned the text over and over again, I could not locate question marks. Instead I found interrogation points.

Interrogation points? Exactly.

At about this same time in my actual life, I had been reading much about recent discoveries involving the superior intelligence of common mollusks. It seems that any given octopus might be smarter than we think. This notion has been evidenced by the fact that they are routinely taught to count, and to open mason jars and remove objects. They have even been accused of, though not properly observed, sneaking out of aquarium homes, sneaking into nearby tanks of lesser fish known as "food" and devouring them on site, or carrying them back to their home aquarium to tease them mercilessly before eating them and pretending nothing had happened. They leave a wet, slimy trail on the carpet. That is just sneaky.

As I am sure you can imagine, this frightened me terribly. They seem to be plotting and scheming, qualities I had previously only feared in my fellow human beings. They can use their tentacles in manners consistent with the ways those of us at the top of the food chain might use opposable thumbs. But we don't have eight opposable thumbs! What if they were organized? What might these so called "pets" really be capable of? But I digress.

I wondered what the proper plural form of "octopus" might look like. I had already ruled out "octopussies," though that is what they will hear if they cross my path on a dark night! Again I digress.

It seems that all modern lexicons can offer are two common uses and speculations, which nobody seems to agree are correct. "Octopi" seems to be used most often, and was intuitive to me at the time, a nice plural of Latin origin, like cacti and peni. The problem is that the word "octopus" is actually Greek in origin. So "octopi" is merely a commonly accepted bastardization of a plural form. The other option is "octopuses," which though MS Word believes it, is just another, more modern bastardization, which I think we can all agree does not sound right at all.

I took the opportunity to consult the wisdom of the 1879 primer, which was obviously much closer to the ancient Greeks than I and my new enemies the octopuses were. I found an entry. And this wise volume named the plural of octopus as "octopodes." Now that is a proper Greek suffix.

I again thought about the evolutionary nature of language. I was reminded of some of my teacher friends telling me that at the lower grades, they have been teaching children to identify "talking marks" in text. This is of course, is a new name used to describe devices otherwise known as "quotation marks." I am sure that this is exactly what happened to interrogation points. At some point, it just seemed easier to call them question marks.

And so I think of my children, talking marks, octopodes and interrogation points. And I teach them the things I have learned. I want my children to know about octopodes and interrogation points.

Why is this important? Not to preserve and purity in language, I don't believe in that. Besides I use the "F-bomb" far more often than a well-educated, grown man should. I use it constantly and consistently. And we all know that excessive use of the f-word is widely and popularly considered to be a vice of the particularly ignorant, uncreative, and lazy. I may very well be all of these things. But I clearly understand and admire the changing nature of language.

It is important because sometimes we should stand against the flow. Sometimes, the things that all the people around us accept as correct and good are not necessarily correct and good. And this is a very difficult concept to teach to children. We ask them to respect authority, and chastise them when they question it. Still, we want them to understand that all of the population of Germany during WWII should have known better, though they were all just respecting authority and public opinion. We want them to know that the results polls are no way to determine your vote for any candidate in our democracy. We want them to develop principals, ethics, morals, and sound judgment. But we teach them that following the "norm" and maintaining status quo are important.

And it seems to me that there are lessons in grammar more important than subject-verb agreement and parenthetical statements (and what are those anyway?). It seems to me that octopuses and question marks, though widely accepted and rarely questioned, are not our only options. It seems to me that octopodes and interrogation points deserve to exist now as much as they ever did. There is often a need to defy convention. And even if it is not strictly necessary, it should still be done.

So I will tell my children, that of all the useless facts, crazy stories and questionable concepts they have ever learned from me, out of all the so-called "knowledge" I may spill on them over the years, they need only remember two things. If they forget everything else I ever teach them, I hope that they will always remember octopodes and interrogation points.