I read an article from the Huffington Post this morning about why women should not get involved with attractive men. It was all in reference to the Weiner scandal, and cited a bunch of previously published information about how attractive men are statistically more likely to be unfaithful and how the happiest couples tend to be those where the woman is more attractive than the man. It all sounded terribly reasonable to me, so I shared it on Facebook.
A friend later mentioned to me that though she didn’t disagree with the analysis she thought the whole situation was particularly unfair to women. She reasoned that because beautiful women can, and often do, find themselves attracted to all manner of men, the hot ones and the ugly ones, less attractive women were more likely to suffer because even ugly men believe they can score a hot chick, and will hold out for that rather than settle for the company of a great personality.
I also found her assessment to be reasonable and true. I do think it is fundamentally unfair that ugly women suffer. I am not going to change my own behavior or anything. Guys like me tend to reap the most benefit from the egalitarian nature of beautiful and intelligent women. But I did spend some time thinking about it sympathetically, and I have developed a plan that we as a society can implement to help make everyone happy, hotties and uggos alike.
The first thing we need to recognize is the most obvious conclusion drawn from the research cited on the subject. Attractive men are the worst people in the world. They are all terrible, and they should suffer for their good looks. It is critical that we, as a nation, accept this natural and obvious fact. It is the only way for us all to win.
The next step is a critical one which will involve significant cultural engineering. We need to make sure that all beautiful women only involve themselves with ugly men. Some beautiful women already love ugly men, so we are part of the way there. Women like Shannon Tweed, Julia Roberts, Christie Brinkley, and Mia Farrow, for their selfless willingness to bang ugly dudes, need to be celebrated as shining examples of feminine beauty and grace. This, in combination with the systematic demonization of all attractive men should create significant enough social pressure that all beautiful women will pair up with ugly guys. A nice additional step might be a media propaganda campaign promoting fat, bald guys as the world’s greatest lovers, and the men most prized by beautiful women worldwide. I for one, as a patriotic American, could really get behind something like that. We must do what it best for the greater good, and what is best for the country.
The final step really takes care of itself. Once attractive men are successfully demonized, and hot chicks and ugly guys have entered into an exclusive agreement, hot guys will go all in for ugly chicks. And it is about time our ugly chicks got what they deserve. They have long suffered under the oppressive regime of attractiveness. Now they get their pick of all the hottest dudes. And we all live happily ever after.
Everyone wins.
You’re welcome.
Thursday
Friday
Dumb Notions about Humans as Animals - Part 1 of several
My mother thinks I am a nice guy. At least I think she does. Her whole attitude toward me seems to be sympathetic of a nice guy who has somehow been taken advantage of. She really seems to believe this no matter how many times I tell her to shut the fuck up and make me a sandwich.
I am charming. That is a fact.
It is interesting to me that pleasant and intelligent women don’t seem to always be aware of the qualities in a man to which they are attracted. Perhaps they are aware, but are not willing to admit. I could respect that. Mystery is a quality men find attractive in women, though we aren’t typically aware of it, and wouldn’t admit it if we were.
There is a biological basis for all this.
Women always say they like nice guys. They vehemently work to dispel the notion that “nice guys finish last.” Single women seem to constantly wonder why they can’t find a nice guy. The truth is they probably can. There are a lot of nice guys out there. And women probably really do like nice guys. Unfortunately though, they are not actually attracted to nice guys. And that is the key. The qualities in men that women say they want, and actually believe they want, are not necessarily the qualities they are actually attracted to. Human beings can use logic and reason to imagine the qualities they think would make a good mate. We do this all the time. But logic and reason cannot overcome biology. The kind of person we think we want to find, may not be someone to whom we are physically attracted.
This is the reason dating web sites never work the way we want them to. This is also the reason therapists are so popular and earn so much money.
I contend, and I am obviously not the first to do so, that women believe they want to find a nice guy who is responsible, caring, and sensitive. Unfortunately women are attracted to men who are confident, intelligent, strong, and aggressive.
Why is this so? Because we are Great Apes. And we are slaves to biology, evolution, and natural selection.
In our culture, more often than not, men who are caring and sensitive are not very confident or aggressive. Also, unfortunately, in our culture, being confident and aggressive almost always makes you an asshole. Women believe they want to be with nice guys. But they are attracted to assholes. They can’t help it.
Aggressive males are alpha males, and in the animal world they are leaders, and generally make better providers and protectors. This is why women are attracted to assholes without even knowing it. Biology is telling them that the asshole is likely to be a better protector and provider. Biology tells them this by making them tingle a little more in the right places when they are with assholes than when they are with nice guys. Even if women know logically that assholes will hurt them. They just can’t help it.
We are not as evolved as we think we are.
I am charming. That is a fact.
It is interesting to me that pleasant and intelligent women don’t seem to always be aware of the qualities in a man to which they are attracted. Perhaps they are aware, but are not willing to admit. I could respect that. Mystery is a quality men find attractive in women, though we aren’t typically aware of it, and wouldn’t admit it if we were.
There is a biological basis for all this.
Women always say they like nice guys. They vehemently work to dispel the notion that “nice guys finish last.” Single women seem to constantly wonder why they can’t find a nice guy. The truth is they probably can. There are a lot of nice guys out there. And women probably really do like nice guys. Unfortunately though, they are not actually attracted to nice guys. And that is the key. The qualities in men that women say they want, and actually believe they want, are not necessarily the qualities they are actually attracted to. Human beings can use logic and reason to imagine the qualities they think would make a good mate. We do this all the time. But logic and reason cannot overcome biology. The kind of person we think we want to find, may not be someone to whom we are physically attracted.
This is the reason dating web sites never work the way we want them to. This is also the reason therapists are so popular and earn so much money.
I contend, and I am obviously not the first to do so, that women believe they want to find a nice guy who is responsible, caring, and sensitive. Unfortunately women are attracted to men who are confident, intelligent, strong, and aggressive.
Why is this so? Because we are Great Apes. And we are slaves to biology, evolution, and natural selection.
In our culture, more often than not, men who are caring and sensitive are not very confident or aggressive. Also, unfortunately, in our culture, being confident and aggressive almost always makes you an asshole. Women believe they want to be with nice guys. But they are attracted to assholes. They can’t help it.
Aggressive males are alpha males, and in the animal world they are leaders, and generally make better providers and protectors. This is why women are attracted to assholes without even knowing it. Biology is telling them that the asshole is likely to be a better protector and provider. Biology tells them this by making them tingle a little more in the right places when they are with assholes than when they are with nice guys. Even if women know logically that assholes will hurt them. They just can’t help it.
We are not as evolved as we think we are.
Wednesday
The Epidemic of Self Worth
Self-esteem, that is, the tendency to like oneself and find confidence in ones own traits and abilities, is enjoyed far too rarely among women and girls in the United States. This lack of self-esteem is an epidemic problem. It often pains me to consider the consequences that have been suffered as a result of this social problem.
Most men, and many women, don’t recognize this problem, and worst of all, many who do recognize it fail to see it as a problem at all. But in my view this plague of self-loathing has profoundly and negatively affected some of my favorite things in life, things we all value. Sex, the arts, politics, philosophy, comedy, science and technology have all been crippled by a lack of self-confident women as participants. Did I mention sex? I mention it specifically not only because it is so important to me, but because it may also be a major factor in this whole equation. I suspect that sex with fully self-actualized, confident woman might be the best sex any man ever had. Sadly, many of us will never know. We are too stupid to find out because we actually think the opposite is true. More on that in a minute.
Girls don’t like themselves.
This is the first problem in the self-esteem equation. The second problem is that girls lack confidence. But the whole problem really begins with little girls not liking themselves. Somehow, and the reasons for this are very much open to speculation, our little girls grow up learning that there is something inherently wrong with them. They learn from their fathers, or from their mothers, or from television, or magazines, or any number of other sources, that being a girl is not as interesting or important as being a boy. Little girls seem to learn this whether it is taught to them specifically or not. They seem to learn and believe this regardless of race, ethnicity, or income level. This notion is so pervasive in our culture that girls seem to learn that they are somehow inferior, or less valued than their brothers, or boyfriends, even when measures are taken to avoid exposing them to the idea, or when they are specifically taught otherwise. Any problem that is more pervasive and persuasive than the influence of ones parents should be considered a serious problem indeed.
I fear that it has become cliché, among people who know me, for me to take a cheap shot at Christianity now and then. But a whole bunch of my readers are, right now, probably thinking the same thing I am. So, given the importance of this topic, I hope that no one will consider my next statement to be a cheap shot of any kind. Some of my best friends are Christians. But, this paragraph can not pass without mention of the fact that, according to the Bible, the Old Testament in particular, there is something inherently wrong with women (lets call it say, “original sin”) and women are inferior to men. I am not blaming anyone, I am just mentioning it. My readers can draw their own conclusions about whether the Bible is to blame for our problems, or whether it is just another victim of the same prejudice that pre-dates religion itself.
Now for all of you apologists out there, save it. I am fully aware that because we are talking about the Old Testament, the same ideas are perpetuated, perhaps even to a greater degree by the Koran and the Torah. But for my money the Old Testament, particularly the protestant flavor of the Old Testament has had much more influence on American culture. Besides, I like Muslims and Jews better than I like Christians. We all have our prejudices. I like Christians better than I like Eskimos. Don’t get me started on those people.
Anyway, little girls hate themselves. It is tragic, because what happens next affects us all. Little girls grow into young women who lack confidence in their own ability to contribute to the world around them. Young women who lack confidence become people-pleasers. People-pleasing young women become victims, feeding the appetites of the worst elements of humanity, and robbing us all of significant intellectual capitol.
Social evolution has been hampered by women’s lack of accomplishment.
Oh that is a broad and controversial statement. But it is true. Were women not intellectually and emotionally shackled by their self-esteem problems (and the man always working to keep them down), they would have solved many of our cultures worst problems. Were contributions to art, academia, scientific research and social engineering balanced among the genders, we would be much further ahead as a people. It is like we have only had half a brain working on our worst problems. Oh we have accomplished great things (Blues, TIVO, the Clapper), but I am convinced that we could have accomplished so much more if we had all-along had the full compliment of our potential feminine brilliance. If it weren’t for blind faith in the Bible, we might have a cure for cancer. Okay, that was a cheap shot. (Editors note: Mike sincerely apologizes to all his Christian readers. To make it right, he will never again make the same statement until he writes something about stem-cell research.)
Why men like it
I had a friend once, who was a highly educated professional, though not particularly brilliant. Like me, he also wasn’t particularly good-looking. Also like me, he was kind-of a dick. The thing about him was, he had a really beautiful wife, who might also have been kind-of brilliant, though no human being ever had a chance to find out. She had a ridiculous lack of confidence and self-esteem. People who knew this pair always wondered how this guy scored this woman. They even had kids together. I always suspected that the reason had everything to do with her lack of self-esteem. I suspected this not only because it was painfully obvious to everyone around them (I am smart like that), but because in a private conversation once (which I will now share with all of you) he told me that he always really liked girls with low self-esteem. Ewww is right.
Men like women with low self-esteem because they can be controlled fairly easily. Let’s face it, most of us like to be in control all the time. Controlling other people can sometimes make our lives better, or easier than they might otherwise be. Our culture has some experience with this concept. We will refer to that as Slavery. But back to the more immediate topic, the problem with controlling people is that when we control someone we don’t really respect them. And when we control someone whom we do not respect we will victimize them. I am just calling it as I see it.
We all know that there is a whole class of men out there who make victimization their primary business. These are the people to whom I referred earlier as the worst elements of humanity (Mike, page 2). These people happen to also cause and perpetuate so many of the other pesky social problems that we face. We are unfortunately supporting their activities by continuing to supply fresh crops of self-loathing young women. We must find a way to stop it.
I try to keep my own daughters neck-high in self-esteem. I so badly want my little girls to avoid all of these common pitfalls. One thing that I suspect will make a difference is their relationship with me. I have not done any formal research on the subject, but I strongly suspect that there is truth in one of my postulations formulated from colloquial evidence. Women who have strong, healthy relationships with their fathers, and who feel valued by their fathers in a purely platonic way are more likely to enjoy high levels of self-esteem and self-confidence. I suspect that the reason for this is that girls who are close to their fathers in this way learn that they deserve to be loved by a man in a purely non-sexual way, just for being who they are. They also have the ability to practice flirting without risk from predators. My daughters have all my love, respect, and protection for as long as they need it. I hope very much that they continue to recognize their worth, and demand from potential partners the same kind of love and respect they get from me unconditionally. All you can do is give them tools and hope they use them properly.
The truth is our daughters and sisters are not living the lives they could be living. It might be too late for our mothers. Some of them may have become part of the problem. But we need to all work together to give this some thought, and perhaps find a solution. Despite feminism, religion, and increased recognition in math classes, our girls are still learning to hate themselves. Their self-hatred is leading to an epidemic lack of self-confidence. As a consequence, we will continue to suffer from too few feminine contributions to our cultural treasure-chest, and our girls will continue to be victimized in situations that should be completely preventable.
Most men, and many women, don’t recognize this problem, and worst of all, many who do recognize it fail to see it as a problem at all. But in my view this plague of self-loathing has profoundly and negatively affected some of my favorite things in life, things we all value. Sex, the arts, politics, philosophy, comedy, science and technology have all been crippled by a lack of self-confident women as participants. Did I mention sex? I mention it specifically not only because it is so important to me, but because it may also be a major factor in this whole equation. I suspect that sex with fully self-actualized, confident woman might be the best sex any man ever had. Sadly, many of us will never know. We are too stupid to find out because we actually think the opposite is true. More on that in a minute.
Girls don’t like themselves.
This is the first problem in the self-esteem equation. The second problem is that girls lack confidence. But the whole problem really begins with little girls not liking themselves. Somehow, and the reasons for this are very much open to speculation, our little girls grow up learning that there is something inherently wrong with them. They learn from their fathers, or from their mothers, or from television, or magazines, or any number of other sources, that being a girl is not as interesting or important as being a boy. Little girls seem to learn this whether it is taught to them specifically or not. They seem to learn and believe this regardless of race, ethnicity, or income level. This notion is so pervasive in our culture that girls seem to learn that they are somehow inferior, or less valued than their brothers, or boyfriends, even when measures are taken to avoid exposing them to the idea, or when they are specifically taught otherwise. Any problem that is more pervasive and persuasive than the influence of ones parents should be considered a serious problem indeed.
I fear that it has become cliché, among people who know me, for me to take a cheap shot at Christianity now and then. But a whole bunch of my readers are, right now, probably thinking the same thing I am. So, given the importance of this topic, I hope that no one will consider my next statement to be a cheap shot of any kind. Some of my best friends are Christians. But, this paragraph can not pass without mention of the fact that, according to the Bible, the Old Testament in particular, there is something inherently wrong with women (lets call it say, “original sin”) and women are inferior to men. I am not blaming anyone, I am just mentioning it. My readers can draw their own conclusions about whether the Bible is to blame for our problems, or whether it is just another victim of the same prejudice that pre-dates religion itself.
Now for all of you apologists out there, save it. I am fully aware that because we are talking about the Old Testament, the same ideas are perpetuated, perhaps even to a greater degree by the Koran and the Torah. But for my money the Old Testament, particularly the protestant flavor of the Old Testament has had much more influence on American culture. Besides, I like Muslims and Jews better than I like Christians. We all have our prejudices. I like Christians better than I like Eskimos. Don’t get me started on those people.
Anyway, little girls hate themselves. It is tragic, because what happens next affects us all. Little girls grow into young women who lack confidence in their own ability to contribute to the world around them. Young women who lack confidence become people-pleasers. People-pleasing young women become victims, feeding the appetites of the worst elements of humanity, and robbing us all of significant intellectual capitol.
Social evolution has been hampered by women’s lack of accomplishment.
Oh that is a broad and controversial statement. But it is true. Were women not intellectually and emotionally shackled by their self-esteem problems (and the man always working to keep them down), they would have solved many of our cultures worst problems. Were contributions to art, academia, scientific research and social engineering balanced among the genders, we would be much further ahead as a people. It is like we have only had half a brain working on our worst problems. Oh we have accomplished great things (Blues, TIVO, the Clapper), but I am convinced that we could have accomplished so much more if we had all-along had the full compliment of our potential feminine brilliance. If it weren’t for blind faith in the Bible, we might have a cure for cancer. Okay, that was a cheap shot. (Editors note: Mike sincerely apologizes to all his Christian readers. To make it right, he will never again make the same statement until he writes something about stem-cell research.)
Why men like it
I had a friend once, who was a highly educated professional, though not particularly brilliant. Like me, he also wasn’t particularly good-looking. Also like me, he was kind-of a dick. The thing about him was, he had a really beautiful wife, who might also have been kind-of brilliant, though no human being ever had a chance to find out. She had a ridiculous lack of confidence and self-esteem. People who knew this pair always wondered how this guy scored this woman. They even had kids together. I always suspected that the reason had everything to do with her lack of self-esteem. I suspected this not only because it was painfully obvious to everyone around them (I am smart like that), but because in a private conversation once (which I will now share with all of you) he told me that he always really liked girls with low self-esteem. Ewww is right.
Men like women with low self-esteem because they can be controlled fairly easily. Let’s face it, most of us like to be in control all the time. Controlling other people can sometimes make our lives better, or easier than they might otherwise be. Our culture has some experience with this concept. We will refer to that as Slavery. But back to the more immediate topic, the problem with controlling people is that when we control someone we don’t really respect them. And when we control someone whom we do not respect we will victimize them. I am just calling it as I see it.
We all know that there is a whole class of men out there who make victimization their primary business. These are the people to whom I referred earlier as the worst elements of humanity (Mike, page 2). These people happen to also cause and perpetuate so many of the other pesky social problems that we face. We are unfortunately supporting their activities by continuing to supply fresh crops of self-loathing young women. We must find a way to stop it.
I try to keep my own daughters neck-high in self-esteem. I so badly want my little girls to avoid all of these common pitfalls. One thing that I suspect will make a difference is their relationship with me. I have not done any formal research on the subject, but I strongly suspect that there is truth in one of my postulations formulated from colloquial evidence. Women who have strong, healthy relationships with their fathers, and who feel valued by their fathers in a purely platonic way are more likely to enjoy high levels of self-esteem and self-confidence. I suspect that the reason for this is that girls who are close to their fathers in this way learn that they deserve to be loved by a man in a purely non-sexual way, just for being who they are. They also have the ability to practice flirting without risk from predators. My daughters have all my love, respect, and protection for as long as they need it. I hope very much that they continue to recognize their worth, and demand from potential partners the same kind of love and respect they get from me unconditionally. All you can do is give them tools and hope they use them properly.
The truth is our daughters and sisters are not living the lives they could be living. It might be too late for our mothers. Some of them may have become part of the problem. But we need to all work together to give this some thought, and perhaps find a solution. Despite feminism, religion, and increased recognition in math classes, our girls are still learning to hate themselves. Their self-hatred is leading to an epidemic lack of self-confidence. As a consequence, we will continue to suffer from too few feminine contributions to our cultural treasure-chest, and our girls will continue to be victimized in situations that should be completely preventable.
Friday
Word Games
While I struggle a little to finish some of the several essays I have started recently, I agreed to post more old stuff, and maybe some shorter pieces to keep something happening here.
This essay was written a couple years ago, post-divorce, but before my kids came to live with me. I still like it.
Word Games
fucking Pacific
coldest ocean in April
my kids run from waves
My friends and I play dumb word games. We play them mostly with our mobile phones. We exchange text messages. These messages contain the intellectual pieces of whatever game we may be playing.
One of the early games we invented, and my personal favorite, was screwing up clichés on purpose. We dreamed this up, like all other dumb word games, while we were drinking. The idea is that you write a cliché into a text message, but you fuck it up, either by mixing it up with some other cliché, or missing the point all together. As an example, one of us would send all of the others a text message that read
Don’t throw stones in glass houses. You'll get burned.
Or else we would send a text message referring to being "up a tree without a paddle." I think you get the idea. It really isn't very complicated.
For the record I think it is fair to mention here that some of us do use capitalization and punctuation in text messages. I don’t always do it. But I do it most of the time. Also, I have no idea the way to properly cite text messages in an essay. I am sure some college kid could tell me.
As you can imagine, this kind of game cannot go on forever. There is a finite number of clichés available to be fucked with. Speakers of English have been historically very efficient at dreaming up and using such idiomatic phrases that almost anything can quickly become "cliché." And my friends and I tend to frequently engage in a couple of specific activities. We read a lot. And we drink a lot. We are a Hemingway novel waiting to be written. We still sometimes think of phrases not previously considered, like when my buddy's new house was built from "the best laid bricks of mice and men" or when I wished I could "walk a mile in his hat" but as you can imagine, we quickly ran out of pieces and players for that particular game of genius.
More recently we switched to haiku. This seems to have a longer shelf life than previous dumb word games.
Our haiku are not traditional. In fact, they only have two rules. They have to stick with the old 5 - 7 - 5 syllable scheme, and they have to begin with the word "fucking."
Two syllables are lost as soon as you start. It is a sacrifice which must be made.
I don't see my kids as often as I would like. As most non-custodial single parents would tell you, it sucks. When we first have babies, we all plan to be there for them every day, for every milestone, for every issue, every important conversation. But life is kind of fucked up and gets in the way far more often than it should. Something always happens in our lives that ultimately screws things up for our kids. It is tragic. But I have never known even the most selfless parents who can avoid such trappings. Lots of people make claims, but their kids are usually pretty small.
Recently I have new opportunity to spend time and do new things with my kids. It has become a goal and a routine for me, and for them, that we spend much of our time together learning, seeing, and experiencing new things. With their mom they get so caught up in the daily routine. And she is a homebody with them. She never takes them anywhere. My job, as their new weekend dad, is to help them learn to gain new knowledge and new experience so that they can keep it up the rest of their lives, maybe eventually turning some of it into the ever-elusive stuff known as wisdom.
Like all parents, I want my kids to be better than me. I also want to have some great times with them along the way. As long as I am going to be a weekend dad, I may as well take advantage of the opportunities weekend dads are afforded, which are difficult to match for married, full-time dads. Below, my readers will find a partial list of some of the benefits associated with being a weekend Dad.
Benefit #1 – I don’t have to fight with them.
Example – “Dad when we get done swimming can we have spare ribs and ice cream for dinner?”
“Well hell yes. That’s just what I was thinking.” Their mother will feed them well.
Benefit #2 - We have nothing but free time when they are with me.
Example - “Dad if you let us stay up until just 1 a.m., we promise to sleep in tomorrow”
Fuckin-a. I wanted to watch more Spongebob anyway. That dude is hilarious.
Benefit #3 - Everyone gets out of our way.
Example - Pick the best spot on the bank for fishing. No matter who is there first, when I show up with five little kids, the spot is all ours.
I make a point to do something with them, and take them somewhere, every weekend they are with me. It is our routine. Most times we just do the same stuff. We go the lake for swimming or fishing or rock climbing or hippie-watching. We wander around geocaching in odd places while they bitch and moan about how much they hate geocaching, then almost pee their pants with excitement when we find something. In the winter we drive up in the mountains to play in the snow at frozen-over airports. This summer we are planning an epic camping road trip to see the Grand Canyon.
We also have a list of things to do (roller-skating, mini-golf) when we have the chance (I am fairly certain that these activities will end with grave injuries – for me) and places to visit (Monterey, Las Vegas, Washington D.C.) which they haven’t seen. We always have an agenda for the weekend.
Last Sunday morning we woke up late, had burritos for breakfast and did some laundry.
We decided we needed to leave Sacramento, and maybe scratch some locations and/or activities from our lists. My poor kids have lived in California for more than a year now, and in that time they have not seen the ocean. So we drove to the Pacific Ocean. It seemed the closest and most convenient ocean to visit.
We got dressed, and piled into the Suburban at the crack of noon.
We drove west from Sacramento, about two hours total, to Stinson Beach. Stinson is a little tiny Northern California beach town nestled in a sandy spot between two sets of gigantic cliffs to the north and south. The drive into Stinson along California’s highway 1 is precarious. It is all hairpin curves, cliffs, rocks and ocean. The drive made all the kids just nauseous enough for it to seem like a real adventure.
Northern California beaches are not known for their warmth any time of the year, but particularly not in April. And as soon as we all parked and walked out on the sand we were freezing to death. Being a weekend dad, I did not pack jackets. That sounds like their mother’s job.
But we had come to Stinson under the notion that we would dip our toes in the Pacific Ocean or die trying. And we were all motivated. We shed our shoes, rustled up as many sweatshirts and blankets as we could from the Suburban, otherwise tucked our arms into our t-shirts, ran as fast as we could to the waves, and dipped our toes in the salty splash. Then we ran as fast as we could back to the car.
As we drove back up highway one through the curves and cliffs, we decided we should score some lunch somewhere, so we hit a fancy seafood restaurant near San Quentin. As we walked in with our arms tucked into our t-shirts, I told the hostess we had one adult and five children in our party. It was awesome. I am such an obvious weekend dad.
Our lunch conversation centered around why on earth we each had two forks but no spoons, and who washes all these napkins anyway? My children, being out of their normal element yet each confident in his or her ability to try and master new things, behaved perfectly. They were so awesome. My kids are the fucking coolest.
After a $95 lunch (with no booze, my kids can't hold their liquor), we drove south across the Golden Gate Bridge and into San Francisco. This was huge for them. They had seen pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge. They had heard rumors of the Golden Gate Bridge. But they had never imagined that it could be located on any given Sunday afternoon. And we could drive on it! They watched all the crazy people walking over it and freezing to death as they each imagined out loud what the results might be of hurling various objects, people, and animals over the side of such an infamous bridge.
After a quick driving tour of San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts, Golden Gate Park, China Town, and Embarcadero Plaza, we headed east on the Bay Bridge to get them home to their mother right on time.
We did all of this Sunday afternoon between noon and six p.m. We crossed no fewer than four bridges (though two were really the same one twice), and drove through three tunnels. Those of you with kids know how amazing that can be.
Some experiences are difficult to describe. Some emotions associated with experiences are even more difficult to describe. Dropping my kids back “home” on a Sunday night, is one of those experiences that involves some of those emotions, particularly after a day like Sunday. It is the silence that seems overwhelming as I drive away. The silence of my huge car full of empty seats mocks me as I count the days until our next adventure.
And all I can do is write haiku to my friends, and tell my favorite bartender, Siobhan, how great my day, my weekend, and my life really is.
I am an incredibly wealthy man two weekends per month.
My friends, and dumb word games fill in the rest.
I have nothing to complain about today.
fucking dumb word games
keep the silence from my mind
I wait for the noise
This essay was written a couple years ago, post-divorce, but before my kids came to live with me. I still like it.
Word Games
fucking Pacific
coldest ocean in April
my kids run from waves
My friends and I play dumb word games. We play them mostly with our mobile phones. We exchange text messages. These messages contain the intellectual pieces of whatever game we may be playing.
One of the early games we invented, and my personal favorite, was screwing up clichés on purpose. We dreamed this up, like all other dumb word games, while we were drinking. The idea is that you write a cliché into a text message, but you fuck it up, either by mixing it up with some other cliché, or missing the point all together. As an example, one of us would send all of the others a text message that read
Don’t throw stones in glass houses. You'll get burned.
Or else we would send a text message referring to being "up a tree without a paddle." I think you get the idea. It really isn't very complicated.
For the record I think it is fair to mention here that some of us do use capitalization and punctuation in text messages. I don’t always do it. But I do it most of the time. Also, I have no idea the way to properly cite text messages in an essay. I am sure some college kid could tell me.
As you can imagine, this kind of game cannot go on forever. There is a finite number of clichés available to be fucked with. Speakers of English have been historically very efficient at dreaming up and using such idiomatic phrases that almost anything can quickly become "cliché." And my friends and I tend to frequently engage in a couple of specific activities. We read a lot. And we drink a lot. We are a Hemingway novel waiting to be written. We still sometimes think of phrases not previously considered, like when my buddy's new house was built from "the best laid bricks of mice and men" or when I wished I could "walk a mile in his hat" but as you can imagine, we quickly ran out of pieces and players for that particular game of genius.
More recently we switched to haiku. This seems to have a longer shelf life than previous dumb word games.
Our haiku are not traditional. In fact, they only have two rules. They have to stick with the old 5 - 7 - 5 syllable scheme, and they have to begin with the word "fucking."
Two syllables are lost as soon as you start. It is a sacrifice which must be made.
I don't see my kids as often as I would like. As most non-custodial single parents would tell you, it sucks. When we first have babies, we all plan to be there for them every day, for every milestone, for every issue, every important conversation. But life is kind of fucked up and gets in the way far more often than it should. Something always happens in our lives that ultimately screws things up for our kids. It is tragic. But I have never known even the most selfless parents who can avoid such trappings. Lots of people make claims, but their kids are usually pretty small.
Recently I have new opportunity to spend time and do new things with my kids. It has become a goal and a routine for me, and for them, that we spend much of our time together learning, seeing, and experiencing new things. With their mom they get so caught up in the daily routine. And she is a homebody with them. She never takes them anywhere. My job, as their new weekend dad, is to help them learn to gain new knowledge and new experience so that they can keep it up the rest of their lives, maybe eventually turning some of it into the ever-elusive stuff known as wisdom.
Like all parents, I want my kids to be better than me. I also want to have some great times with them along the way. As long as I am going to be a weekend dad, I may as well take advantage of the opportunities weekend dads are afforded, which are difficult to match for married, full-time dads. Below, my readers will find a partial list of some of the benefits associated with being a weekend Dad.
Benefit #1 – I don’t have to fight with them.
Example – “Dad when we get done swimming can we have spare ribs and ice cream for dinner?”
“Well hell yes. That’s just what I was thinking.” Their mother will feed them well.
Benefit #2 - We have nothing but free time when they are with me.
Example - “Dad if you let us stay up until just 1 a.m., we promise to sleep in tomorrow”
Fuckin-a. I wanted to watch more Spongebob anyway. That dude is hilarious.
Benefit #3 - Everyone gets out of our way.
Example - Pick the best spot on the bank for fishing. No matter who is there first, when I show up with five little kids, the spot is all ours.
I make a point to do something with them, and take them somewhere, every weekend they are with me. It is our routine. Most times we just do the same stuff. We go the lake for swimming or fishing or rock climbing or hippie-watching. We wander around geocaching in odd places while they bitch and moan about how much they hate geocaching, then almost pee their pants with excitement when we find something. In the winter we drive up in the mountains to play in the snow at frozen-over airports. This summer we are planning an epic camping road trip to see the Grand Canyon.
We also have a list of things to do (roller-skating, mini-golf) when we have the chance (I am fairly certain that these activities will end with grave injuries – for me) and places to visit (Monterey, Las Vegas, Washington D.C.) which they haven’t seen. We always have an agenda for the weekend.
Last Sunday morning we woke up late, had burritos for breakfast and did some laundry.
We decided we needed to leave Sacramento, and maybe scratch some locations and/or activities from our lists. My poor kids have lived in California for more than a year now, and in that time they have not seen the ocean. So we drove to the Pacific Ocean. It seemed the closest and most convenient ocean to visit.
We got dressed, and piled into the Suburban at the crack of noon.
We drove west from Sacramento, about two hours total, to Stinson Beach. Stinson is a little tiny Northern California beach town nestled in a sandy spot between two sets of gigantic cliffs to the north and south. The drive into Stinson along California’s highway 1 is precarious. It is all hairpin curves, cliffs, rocks and ocean. The drive made all the kids just nauseous enough for it to seem like a real adventure.
Northern California beaches are not known for their warmth any time of the year, but particularly not in April. And as soon as we all parked and walked out on the sand we were freezing to death. Being a weekend dad, I did not pack jackets. That sounds like their mother’s job.
But we had come to Stinson under the notion that we would dip our toes in the Pacific Ocean or die trying. And we were all motivated. We shed our shoes, rustled up as many sweatshirts and blankets as we could from the Suburban, otherwise tucked our arms into our t-shirts, ran as fast as we could to the waves, and dipped our toes in the salty splash. Then we ran as fast as we could back to the car.
As we drove back up highway one through the curves and cliffs, we decided we should score some lunch somewhere, so we hit a fancy seafood restaurant near San Quentin. As we walked in with our arms tucked into our t-shirts, I told the hostess we had one adult and five children in our party. It was awesome. I am such an obvious weekend dad.
Our lunch conversation centered around why on earth we each had two forks but no spoons, and who washes all these napkins anyway? My children, being out of their normal element yet each confident in his or her ability to try and master new things, behaved perfectly. They were so awesome. My kids are the fucking coolest.
After a $95 lunch (with no booze, my kids can't hold their liquor), we drove south across the Golden Gate Bridge and into San Francisco. This was huge for them. They had seen pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge. They had heard rumors of the Golden Gate Bridge. But they had never imagined that it could be located on any given Sunday afternoon. And we could drive on it! They watched all the crazy people walking over it and freezing to death as they each imagined out loud what the results might be of hurling various objects, people, and animals over the side of such an infamous bridge.
After a quick driving tour of San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts, Golden Gate Park, China Town, and Embarcadero Plaza, we headed east on the Bay Bridge to get them home to their mother right on time.
We did all of this Sunday afternoon between noon and six p.m. We crossed no fewer than four bridges (though two were really the same one twice), and drove through three tunnels. Those of you with kids know how amazing that can be.
Some experiences are difficult to describe. Some emotions associated with experiences are even more difficult to describe. Dropping my kids back “home” on a Sunday night, is one of those experiences that involves some of those emotions, particularly after a day like Sunday. It is the silence that seems overwhelming as I drive away. The silence of my huge car full of empty seats mocks me as I count the days until our next adventure.
And all I can do is write haiku to my friends, and tell my favorite bartender, Siobhan, how great my day, my weekend, and my life really is.
I am an incredibly wealthy man two weekends per month.
My friends, and dumb word games fill in the rest.
I have nothing to complain about today.
fucking dumb word games
keep the silence from my mind
I wait for the noise
Thursday
Traumatic Stunted Emotional Growth Syndrome
This is in no way an actual "syndrome" that I am aware of. It is likely just an observation of a set of common characteristics resulting from a wide variety of psychological processes. But I will write about it from my own simple point-of-view.
Did you ever know someone, whose "emotional" age seemed to be much younger than the number of years they have actually been alive? Of course we all have. Many of us might even describe ourselves this way. But for some people, and we all know one of these people, this "age gap" seems to be very pronounced.
I am a people watcher. I tend to notice these types of details about people. A smart person, I don't remember whom, once said, or wrote, "I learn a lot more by keeping my mouth shut than I ever did by saying anything." Maybe I just made that up. I don't really recall. But in any case it makes good sense. Not being one to follow my own advice, at least not by the letter, I transmute this counsel to apply instead to observation. Therefore I might also say "I learn a lot more by watching others than I ever could by doing anything." Now there is sage advice.
I watch people everywhere I go. I think half of us suffer from this affliction. The rest of you are being watched. I also try to meet as many new people as I can in my daily adventures. And, being somewhat of an extrovert, I tend to get to know people, at least understanding the important details of their lives, fairly quickly after meeting them. Well I get to know people I like fairly quickly. If you sit with me at a pub and I don't ask any questions, well, you know what that means.
To the original point of this essay, my graduate level work in keen observation of individuals wandering around me wherever I may be has led me to the discovery and subsequent theory of the completely unscientific and in no way legitimately documented personality defect I write about here. I imagine many of my readers will instantly realize they have seen it before, perhaps even suffer from the malady themselves, but have never known what to call it. This phenomenon, which, once I noticed it, appeared to be incredibly common among people in our culture is something I refer to as "traumatic stunted emotional growth syndrome." Let me explain what I mean.
I can't even remember where the idea came from. I first encountered it in college, and because I studied a lot of psychology and sociology for kicks (remember I was an English major), I might have even read about it somewhere, and there may be some legitimacy to it. Probably though, I just heard about it at a party somewhere, or someone tried to bullshit me and I fell for it completely. In any case, I have been observing examples of this phenomenon for years, and I have yet to see the theory fail.
Here is the basic premise. When something particularly traumatic happens to someone at a certain age, that person will often become emotionally "stunted" right at that age. This means that as this person grows and matures in other ways, they will continue to react to certain emotional situations in exactly the same way they did at the time they experienced trauma, never "growing" into true and reasonable "adult" emotions. This, as you can imagine, can be a particularly debilitating problem for people who experience traumatic emotional events as children, because they turn into strange adults.
As an example to illustrate my point, I will tell you a little story. I once had a secretary for whom I used this theory to predict something about her past of which I could never have actually been aware. She was not a good secretary. She was about 32, divorced with two adolescent kids. She seemed a nice enough person most of the time. We were both working for a state government agency and she had been transferred to me from another state government agency. She was initially friendly and polite, but after some time I became aware of some strange habits. I did not pay as much attention to the goings on at my workplace at the time as I maybe should have, so I became aware of these habits mostly because other people came to me to complain about them.
The first thing was, she spent the first two hours or so of her morning each day sitting in her cubicle grooming herself. She did all her makeup, brushed her hair, used perfume, hairspray, everything you can think of, not at home before coming to work, but at her desk, for about two hours every morning. Secondly, she spent much of the rest of her day cruising "singles" websites. Thirdly, she did not wear shoes in the office. As soon as she arrived, her shoes came off, and did not go back on again in any way until the end of the day when she left to go home. I received the most complaints about this. And lastly, this was the problem that really finally got my attention, she refused to actually do any work. Those of you who work in an office environment will immediately understand why this kind of behavior is not really appropriate for an administrative assistant.
See she was a state employee, which in this particular state meant she actually had a "property right" to her job. So I couldn't just fire her for refusing to work, as long as she was showing up every day and not abandoning her job. I had to prove a reasonable case for denying her of her legal property. Besides, I was particularly interested in understanding her behavior, as it was some of the oddest behavior I had ever observed in a workplace. I would think that I was borrowing this story from Melville without asking, except that it actually happened to me.
The first time I approached my little Bartleby about these problems, I decided to take up the issue of the shoes (or lack thereof). I told her very plainly that she had not been wearing shoes, and needed to whenever she left her desk. I thought I would start by offering a compromise. She asked why. I had not expected this question. I explained that people had been complaining, and that office policy dictated that everyone must to wear shoes. Though I seemed at least subconsciously to understand this policy, I never thought I would have to actually explain it to someone. Her response to this was almost disturbing to me. She let out what can best be described as a low, nasally, whine, which started very quiet and got progressively louder for about 30 seconds, which is a very long time to listen to something so acutely odd. I thought that this had been a fairly simple matter, and this was certainly a reaction I had not planned for. Before my astonished mind could get back on task enough to yell "What the fuck????" she followed her little noise with a very irritated "fine, whatever!"
I simply walked away. I did not know what else to do. As I walked back to my office I heard her exclaim behind me that she hated wearing shoes.
This behavior surprised and disturbed me to such a degree that I had to mull it over in my mind for some time. After a few days, it occurred to me that her reaction to my simple, logical request was about the same reaction that a father might get from his teenage daughter if he asked her to clean her room. Except that, at the time, she was several years older than me. I mean, her reaction to me was strikingly similar to the reactions parents get from teenagers whenever any bit of logical thought is introduced to them. It was uncanny. The support for this association finally came to me when three days later she was not wearing shoes as she made her way around the office. It was as if we had never spoken at all, or she assumed that my request for her to wear shoes, as put out as she was by it, expired after two days.
The very next day I made a point of asking her specifically to complete a task. I knew this was a pretty bold move at the time, but I was determined. I gave her a stack of old hardcopy materials to re-type. It was as simple a task as I could think of. I asked her to save her work in a specific folder on a shared drive so I could check her progress. I did not ask for questions, I simply walked away and left her with her work. At the end of the day, I checked the folder on the shared drive where I had asked her to save her work, and it was empty. I asked her what had happened, and she explained to me that she did not want to save her work in that folder, because I might "check up on her" to see whether or not she was working. So she had not completed any part of the task. This move was apparently made to "keep me guessing" about whether or not she was actually working. Her defiance was maddening, but felt strangely affirming.
The day after that, I set about the task of firing her. This took eight months. During these months, I met with her weekly and made the same statement each week. I explained that her performance had not improved from the last time we met, I listed the specific actions she needed to take to correct her performance , things like wearing shoes, brushing her hair at home, and getting some work done, and explained that if she did not correct her performance she would be terminated on July 7. I had the exact same conversation with her each Thursday afternoon for eight months. She took vigorous notes each time, and even recorded several of the meetings. I was indeed perplexed.
During the course of these eight months, I learned some additional things about her. I learned that she had been married very young, and that her husband had not been a very nice man. I learned that she had a propensity for manipulating systems and services of all sorts to her own benefit. I remembered from college this theory of traumatic stunted emotional growth syndrome. And I predicted that something very bad had happened to her when she was about thirteen years old. I ascertained that this was about the age she acted in any emotional situation. Although she was physically in her early thirties, there was no mistaking her for a thirteen-year-old girl.
I eventually learned that her father had been killed rather violently when she was thirteen, and that she did not speak with her mother. This explained everything to me.
Still I needed a useful secretary. The work that had been piling up was really getting out of hand. When July 7 came around, I was not surprised to find that she was shocked to be ushered out the door. It seems that earlier in the day she had delivered to the human resourced department all of the notebooks containing the notes she took in our meetings for eight months, all of the tape recordings, and various selected email from me asking her to get something done. She had built (in her mind) a case that I was "impossible to get along with," and for proof she offered evidence that I had repeatedly asked her to perform unreasonable tasks. The HR folks did not know what to make of this at all. They had apparently never heard of traumatic stunted emotional growth syndrome. But, it was July 7, and all the paperwork was in place, so they just watched her pack up her desk and walked her out the door.
I later heard that within a month she had married a middle-school sweetheart in Las Vegas, and was living there. I was glad to hear it. I wished her the best.
This was not the first time, nor the last time I had this kind of experience with the massive explanatory power of traumatic stunted emotional growth syndrome. It has happened over and over, and I swear to you, it has never failed to explain this type of behavior.
Children in our country face any number of potential emotional traumas. Almost everyone is hurt or traumatized in some way as an adolescent or teenager. And these seem to be the years that produce the most noticeable emotional deficiencies in adults. People who are abused physically, sexually, or emotionally almost always exhibit traumatic stunted emotional growth syndrome in some way. People whose parents, siblings, or loved ones die when they are in these tender years will show symptoms. People who experience very stressful and emotional problems at home as children, such as a nasty divorce, parents cheating on each other or fighting constantly will show symptoms. Almost any truly stressful and emotional situation a child encounters could cripple them this way as adults.
I am not a psychologist, and my ignorant rambling on this topic is based only on my own observations and my half-wit social theory. But it seems to be that the thing that often makes a difference for people who suffer from traumatic stunted emotional growth syndrome is getting help dealing with the source of their pain. I have heard of people abused as children, who sought, or were offered counseling and treatment and who were not saddled with this problem as an adult. I have known people who dealt with terrible tragedies in their childhood years who grew up to function as perfectly well balanced reasonable adults, because they spent the time with therapists and psychologists working it out. It seems to be the people who are left to deal with their more significant problems on their own from a very early age who suffer most from traumatic stunted emotional growth syndrome. These are the people we know who seem perfectly normal most of the time, but when life gets stressful, they either cannot cope with it at all, or they behave in a manner typical of a much younger person in the situation. These are our lost souls. These are the people who continue to have trouble with adult relationships, and adult responsibilities. These are the sufferers of traumatic stunted emotional growth syndrome.
I must confess that I am not just the bell ringer for this syndrome. I am also a client. Almost as soon as I noticed it in other people, I noticed it in myself. It seems that far too often in my adult life, when relationships (my failed marriage for example) became difficult or stressful, I became a scared, fourteen-year-old boy who just found out his girlfriend was pregnant. Or I would fight like a sixteen-year-old who has to be in court to try and maintain a relationship with his one-year-old baby son. It has taken me several years to learn to let these emotions go, and learn to behave like a grown-up even in the worst situations.
It is my sincere hope that my readers will begin to recognize and internalize the symptoms associated with this gross oversimplification of social and psychological theory. TSEGS can be recognized and treated. In fact, recognition is the most important step. Look around you. Consider your friends and family. Consider yourself. Can your illogical and irrational behavior be attributed to TSEGS? I have no idea. I am not a professional in this field.
Did you ever know someone, whose "emotional" age seemed to be much younger than the number of years they have actually been alive? Of course we all have. Many of us might even describe ourselves this way. But for some people, and we all know one of these people, this "age gap" seems to be very pronounced.
I am a people watcher. I tend to notice these types of details about people. A smart person, I don't remember whom, once said, or wrote, "I learn a lot more by keeping my mouth shut than I ever did by saying anything." Maybe I just made that up. I don't really recall. But in any case it makes good sense. Not being one to follow my own advice, at least not by the letter, I transmute this counsel to apply instead to observation. Therefore I might also say "I learn a lot more by watching others than I ever could by doing anything." Now there is sage advice.
I watch people everywhere I go. I think half of us suffer from this affliction. The rest of you are being watched. I also try to meet as many new people as I can in my daily adventures. And, being somewhat of an extrovert, I tend to get to know people, at least understanding the important details of their lives, fairly quickly after meeting them. Well I get to know people I like fairly quickly. If you sit with me at a pub and I don't ask any questions, well, you know what that means.
To the original point of this essay, my graduate level work in keen observation of individuals wandering around me wherever I may be has led me to the discovery and subsequent theory of the completely unscientific and in no way legitimately documented personality defect I write about here. I imagine many of my readers will instantly realize they have seen it before, perhaps even suffer from the malady themselves, but have never known what to call it. This phenomenon, which, once I noticed it, appeared to be incredibly common among people in our culture is something I refer to as "traumatic stunted emotional growth syndrome." Let me explain what I mean.
I can't even remember where the idea came from. I first encountered it in college, and because I studied a lot of psychology and sociology for kicks (remember I was an English major), I might have even read about it somewhere, and there may be some legitimacy to it. Probably though, I just heard about it at a party somewhere, or someone tried to bullshit me and I fell for it completely. In any case, I have been observing examples of this phenomenon for years, and I have yet to see the theory fail.
Here is the basic premise. When something particularly traumatic happens to someone at a certain age, that person will often become emotionally "stunted" right at that age. This means that as this person grows and matures in other ways, they will continue to react to certain emotional situations in exactly the same way they did at the time they experienced trauma, never "growing" into true and reasonable "adult" emotions. This, as you can imagine, can be a particularly debilitating problem for people who experience traumatic emotional events as children, because they turn into strange adults.
As an example to illustrate my point, I will tell you a little story. I once had a secretary for whom I used this theory to predict something about her past of which I could never have actually been aware. She was not a good secretary. She was about 32, divorced with two adolescent kids. She seemed a nice enough person most of the time. We were both working for a state government agency and she had been transferred to me from another state government agency. She was initially friendly and polite, but after some time I became aware of some strange habits. I did not pay as much attention to the goings on at my workplace at the time as I maybe should have, so I became aware of these habits mostly because other people came to me to complain about them.
The first thing was, she spent the first two hours or so of her morning each day sitting in her cubicle grooming herself. She did all her makeup, brushed her hair, used perfume, hairspray, everything you can think of, not at home before coming to work, but at her desk, for about two hours every morning. Secondly, she spent much of the rest of her day cruising "singles" websites. Thirdly, she did not wear shoes in the office. As soon as she arrived, her shoes came off, and did not go back on again in any way until the end of the day when she left to go home. I received the most complaints about this. And lastly, this was the problem that really finally got my attention, she refused to actually do any work. Those of you who work in an office environment will immediately understand why this kind of behavior is not really appropriate for an administrative assistant.
See she was a state employee, which in this particular state meant she actually had a "property right" to her job. So I couldn't just fire her for refusing to work, as long as she was showing up every day and not abandoning her job. I had to prove a reasonable case for denying her of her legal property. Besides, I was particularly interested in understanding her behavior, as it was some of the oddest behavior I had ever observed in a workplace. I would think that I was borrowing this story from Melville without asking, except that it actually happened to me.
The first time I approached my little Bartleby about these problems, I decided to take up the issue of the shoes (or lack thereof). I told her very plainly that she had not been wearing shoes, and needed to whenever she left her desk. I thought I would start by offering a compromise. She asked why. I had not expected this question. I explained that people had been complaining, and that office policy dictated that everyone must to wear shoes. Though I seemed at least subconsciously to understand this policy, I never thought I would have to actually explain it to someone. Her response to this was almost disturbing to me. She let out what can best be described as a low, nasally, whine, which started very quiet and got progressively louder for about 30 seconds, which is a very long time to listen to something so acutely odd. I thought that this had been a fairly simple matter, and this was certainly a reaction I had not planned for. Before my astonished mind could get back on task enough to yell "What the fuck????" she followed her little noise with a very irritated "fine, whatever!"
I simply walked away. I did not know what else to do. As I walked back to my office I heard her exclaim behind me that she hated wearing shoes.
This behavior surprised and disturbed me to such a degree that I had to mull it over in my mind for some time. After a few days, it occurred to me that her reaction to my simple, logical request was about the same reaction that a father might get from his teenage daughter if he asked her to clean her room. Except that, at the time, she was several years older than me. I mean, her reaction to me was strikingly similar to the reactions parents get from teenagers whenever any bit of logical thought is introduced to them. It was uncanny. The support for this association finally came to me when three days later she was not wearing shoes as she made her way around the office. It was as if we had never spoken at all, or she assumed that my request for her to wear shoes, as put out as she was by it, expired after two days.
The very next day I made a point of asking her specifically to complete a task. I knew this was a pretty bold move at the time, but I was determined. I gave her a stack of old hardcopy materials to re-type. It was as simple a task as I could think of. I asked her to save her work in a specific folder on a shared drive so I could check her progress. I did not ask for questions, I simply walked away and left her with her work. At the end of the day, I checked the folder on the shared drive where I had asked her to save her work, and it was empty. I asked her what had happened, and she explained to me that she did not want to save her work in that folder, because I might "check up on her" to see whether or not she was working. So she had not completed any part of the task. This move was apparently made to "keep me guessing" about whether or not she was actually working. Her defiance was maddening, but felt strangely affirming.
The day after that, I set about the task of firing her. This took eight months. During these months, I met with her weekly and made the same statement each week. I explained that her performance had not improved from the last time we met, I listed the specific actions she needed to take to correct her performance , things like wearing shoes, brushing her hair at home, and getting some work done, and explained that if she did not correct her performance she would be terminated on July 7. I had the exact same conversation with her each Thursday afternoon for eight months. She took vigorous notes each time, and even recorded several of the meetings. I was indeed perplexed.
During the course of these eight months, I learned some additional things about her. I learned that she had been married very young, and that her husband had not been a very nice man. I learned that she had a propensity for manipulating systems and services of all sorts to her own benefit. I remembered from college this theory of traumatic stunted emotional growth syndrome. And I predicted that something very bad had happened to her when she was about thirteen years old. I ascertained that this was about the age she acted in any emotional situation. Although she was physically in her early thirties, there was no mistaking her for a thirteen-year-old girl.
I eventually learned that her father had been killed rather violently when she was thirteen, and that she did not speak with her mother. This explained everything to me.
Still I needed a useful secretary. The work that had been piling up was really getting out of hand. When July 7 came around, I was not surprised to find that she was shocked to be ushered out the door. It seems that earlier in the day she had delivered to the human resourced department all of the notebooks containing the notes she took in our meetings for eight months, all of the tape recordings, and various selected email from me asking her to get something done. She had built (in her mind) a case that I was "impossible to get along with," and for proof she offered evidence that I had repeatedly asked her to perform unreasonable tasks. The HR folks did not know what to make of this at all. They had apparently never heard of traumatic stunted emotional growth syndrome. But, it was July 7, and all the paperwork was in place, so they just watched her pack up her desk and walked her out the door.
I later heard that within a month she had married a middle-school sweetheart in Las Vegas, and was living there. I was glad to hear it. I wished her the best.
This was not the first time, nor the last time I had this kind of experience with the massive explanatory power of traumatic stunted emotional growth syndrome. It has happened over and over, and I swear to you, it has never failed to explain this type of behavior.
Children in our country face any number of potential emotional traumas. Almost everyone is hurt or traumatized in some way as an adolescent or teenager. And these seem to be the years that produce the most noticeable emotional deficiencies in adults. People who are abused physically, sexually, or emotionally almost always exhibit traumatic stunted emotional growth syndrome in some way. People whose parents, siblings, or loved ones die when they are in these tender years will show symptoms. People who experience very stressful and emotional problems at home as children, such as a nasty divorce, parents cheating on each other or fighting constantly will show symptoms. Almost any truly stressful and emotional situation a child encounters could cripple them this way as adults.
I am not a psychologist, and my ignorant rambling on this topic is based only on my own observations and my half-wit social theory. But it seems to be that the thing that often makes a difference for people who suffer from traumatic stunted emotional growth syndrome is getting help dealing with the source of their pain. I have heard of people abused as children, who sought, or were offered counseling and treatment and who were not saddled with this problem as an adult. I have known people who dealt with terrible tragedies in their childhood years who grew up to function as perfectly well balanced reasonable adults, because they spent the time with therapists and psychologists working it out. It seems to be the people who are left to deal with their more significant problems on their own from a very early age who suffer most from traumatic stunted emotional growth syndrome. These are the people we know who seem perfectly normal most of the time, but when life gets stressful, they either cannot cope with it at all, or they behave in a manner typical of a much younger person in the situation. These are our lost souls. These are the people who continue to have trouble with adult relationships, and adult responsibilities. These are the sufferers of traumatic stunted emotional growth syndrome.
I must confess that I am not just the bell ringer for this syndrome. I am also a client. Almost as soon as I noticed it in other people, I noticed it in myself. It seems that far too often in my adult life, when relationships (my failed marriage for example) became difficult or stressful, I became a scared, fourteen-year-old boy who just found out his girlfriend was pregnant. Or I would fight like a sixteen-year-old who has to be in court to try and maintain a relationship with his one-year-old baby son. It has taken me several years to learn to let these emotions go, and learn to behave like a grown-up even in the worst situations.
It is my sincere hope that my readers will begin to recognize and internalize the symptoms associated with this gross oversimplification of social and psychological theory. TSEGS can be recognized and treated. In fact, recognition is the most important step. Look around you. Consider your friends and family. Consider yourself. Can your illogical and irrational behavior be attributed to TSEGS? I have no idea. I am not a professional in this field.
Unfriendliness
I love Facebook. It is the new Christmas card. That’s the way I perceive Facebook these days. Whatever else it may be to me on a daily basis, I consider it at the very least to be the way I will stay in touch with people whom I don’t connect with very often. Instead of some ratty old scribbled-on, perpetually-incorrect and out-of-date address book like the one my mother has been dragging around for decades, Facebook lets me know where old neighbors, distant relatives, former colleagues, and middle-school girlfriends can be found if I need them, and often tells me what they are up to these days. Facebook gives me all of this without any effort at all. That’s why Facebook is cool.
But Facebook also gives me so much more. I can waste time during the day socializing with more current and geographically present friends, including those I do actually spend time with in person, when we are otherwise supposed to be working at our respective and supposed jobs. It reminds me of all the specials and events happening at my favorite local pubs. It updates my address book automatically with new profile photos of my friends, even the funny ones, so I see them on my phone when they call me. The other day I thought Duran Duran was trying to call me from the 80s, but it turns out my little sister just likes Duran Duran. Even if it means I sometimes have to be aware of how awesome Joe is at playing Mafia Wars, and how many barns Karen has on her virtual farm, it is totally worth it.
I once thought that having an Excel file with all my friends’ names, phone numbers, and email addresses in it was a big improvement over my mother’s address book, because I didn’t have to erase or scribble anything out to update it. I don’t have to update Facebook at all.
And even though this all happens more or less automatically, I still have options. I can choose whether to participate, and to what degree. I can post status updates, or just be nosey and read everyone else’s updates, commenting only when I have something mean to say. I can post pictures of my kids and/or my ridiculous drunken escapades while the kids are away with their mother, or not. I can post current photos of myself if I feel like it, or only old and awesome ones. I can look at photos of other people’s kids, and pretend I care by commenting about how cute they are, or I can make fun of them from a safe distance without hurting anyone’s feelings. I can keep separate lists of people with whom I have different kinds of relationships, and control what each of those groups of people sees. I can make sure that no one from work sees photos of my kids or is ever otherwise aware that I sometimes participate in wholesome family activities. I can make sure that my family members never see anything that might even slightly resemble professional activity. I can make sure that everyone sees the photos from outside the strip club. I have a very poor reputation to maintain, and Facebook helps me reach my goals.
I have some friends, henceforth referred to as “individuals formerly known as friends” because everyone knows that use of the term “friend” only applies to Facebook, who swear they will never use Facebook because of some deep-held philosophical, moral, or ethical convictions. I think that is a lot of bullshit. And I don’t say this only because I have no philosophy, morals, or ethics of my own. I also really mean it.
Some of these individuals formerly known as friends tell me that their disinterest in Facebook is a result of their preference to communicate “face-to-face” because it provides a richer and more meaningful interpersonal experience.
Bullshit.
If I avoided communicating with my friends and family except when there were time and opportunity to participate in a rich and meaningful interpersonal experience I wouldn’t have any friends or family at all. I spend time with people “face-to-face” when I can, but that time has never, to my knowledge, been described as a rich and meaningful interpersonal experience. Nor should time spent with me ever be considered such a thing. I am not that kind of guy.
Also, at least once, this concept of objection was explained to me via text message.
Still other individuals formerly known as friends tell me they are unwilling to make information about themselves available “out there on the internet” because they are afraid that something terrible might happen if a hundred old friends know what their new puppy looks like. Right-on. They just shouldn’t expect to hear from me very often. I am usually too busy removing tags from photos of myself to participate in any voice-based communicative exchanges.
But of all the new and unexpected social devices adopted by our culture as a result of our nearly universal embrace of social networking, my favorite is unfriending.
The Urban Dictionary defines “unfriend” as the act of removing a friend from your Facebook account.
I know there are a variety of different reasons for unfriending. I am not too concerned with the unfriendings that occur because you didn’t really want to share your life with an old acquaintance but you were too pussy to deny their initial friend request. I have done that, and sadly, have had it done to me. Likewise I get that you might want to unfriend people with whom you have had no actual contact for quite some time. I think this is especially popular with the kids these days who may have thousands of friends because they routinely add everyone with whom they ever come in contact. I can also appreciate more blanket unfriendings that sometimes occur as a reaction to a personal need for more privacy, perhaps in reaction to a stalker scare, or maybe because you want to share more information with fewer people. That is all good. I don’t have to stalk anyone. It is just a hobby.
The kind of unfriending that amuses me the most, is the angry unfriend. That one is going to be a classic.
The angry unfriend occurs when one person is mad at another person, and instead of, or perhaps in addition to an actual discussion about said disagreement, offense, or annoyance, one person removes the other from their list of friends on Facebook. That shit is hilarious. It is meant to be a punishment of some kind, and to send some sort of message. But it is the dumbest punishment ever, and typically sends no message at all. Still, it happens all the time.
It happened to me at least once that I know about. I pissed off my sister, and she unfriended me.
In my case the only reason I noticed at all is because my sister is one of those people who posts a lot of stupid shit on her Facebook wall all the time. Once upon a time I had to scroll past all her crap to get to any interesting updates from drinking buddies or good-looking women. One day I didn’t have to scroll at all. I knew immediately what had happened. And even though I don’t like my sister, and I was tired of seeing her horoscope or whatever crap she always posted, it still hurt my feelings a little. For passive-aggressive types, and you know who they are, unfriending might be the most powerful tool available.
But the thing is, it hurt my feelings in the dumbest way possible. I wasn’t actually hurt because she unfriended me, I expected that. We did have an argument in the real world. I was hurt because she didn’t even make the effort to actually tell me to fuck off. She could even have simply ignored me completely for a few years, and I might still have respected that. But unfriending me was just pussy.
The truth is that unfriending just doesn’t matter. It is pointless. When you unfriend someone they are not notified in any way. The person you unfriend would have to notice that you unfriended them. Typically I suppose this would happen if for some reason they tried to visit your page and were unable to access the information they wanted. But how often does that happen? For most of us, when you unfriend us, it just means you disappear from our newsfeed. Aside from the example above, I am not sure I would notice if someone disappeared from my newsfeed. People come and go all the time. I don’t regularly visit people’s Facebook pages except to get more information about something I saw posted on my newsfeed. I suspect most of us are like that. That is why we like Facebook. It is low-maintenance. It brings information to us so we don’t need to spend our time going out to gather it.
So what kind of ego is involved in unfriending out of anger? I think it assumes a level of interest in your own shit that may not actually exist. To even make the effort to find someone in your friends list and unfriend them you must assume that the former friend will notice the unfriending and therefore get the message with the intended impact. Why would you even bother otherwise? I don’t think I could assume that anyone would notice if I unfriended them. I imagine maybe I have been unfriended by more people than I realize. I don’t know. But I guess they showed me.
I try to imagine my mother, in years before the internet, being offended by a neighbor, or someone at church, and racing furiously to scribble their name, address, and phone number out of her address book.
Now that just seems silly.
But Facebook also gives me so much more. I can waste time during the day socializing with more current and geographically present friends, including those I do actually spend time with in person, when we are otherwise supposed to be working at our respective and supposed jobs. It reminds me of all the specials and events happening at my favorite local pubs. It updates my address book automatically with new profile photos of my friends, even the funny ones, so I see them on my phone when they call me. The other day I thought Duran Duran was trying to call me from the 80s, but it turns out my little sister just likes Duran Duran. Even if it means I sometimes have to be aware of how awesome Joe is at playing Mafia Wars, and how many barns Karen has on her virtual farm, it is totally worth it.
I once thought that having an Excel file with all my friends’ names, phone numbers, and email addresses in it was a big improvement over my mother’s address book, because I didn’t have to erase or scribble anything out to update it. I don’t have to update Facebook at all.
And even though this all happens more or less automatically, I still have options. I can choose whether to participate, and to what degree. I can post status updates, or just be nosey and read everyone else’s updates, commenting only when I have something mean to say. I can post pictures of my kids and/or my ridiculous drunken escapades while the kids are away with their mother, or not. I can post current photos of myself if I feel like it, or only old and awesome ones. I can look at photos of other people’s kids, and pretend I care by commenting about how cute they are, or I can make fun of them from a safe distance without hurting anyone’s feelings. I can keep separate lists of people with whom I have different kinds of relationships, and control what each of those groups of people sees. I can make sure that no one from work sees photos of my kids or is ever otherwise aware that I sometimes participate in wholesome family activities. I can make sure that my family members never see anything that might even slightly resemble professional activity. I can make sure that everyone sees the photos from outside the strip club. I have a very poor reputation to maintain, and Facebook helps me reach my goals.
I have some friends, henceforth referred to as “individuals formerly known as friends” because everyone knows that use of the term “friend” only applies to Facebook, who swear they will never use Facebook because of some deep-held philosophical, moral, or ethical convictions. I think that is a lot of bullshit. And I don’t say this only because I have no philosophy, morals, or ethics of my own. I also really mean it.
Some of these individuals formerly known as friends tell me that their disinterest in Facebook is a result of their preference to communicate “face-to-face” because it provides a richer and more meaningful interpersonal experience.
Bullshit.
If I avoided communicating with my friends and family except when there were time and opportunity to participate in a rich and meaningful interpersonal experience I wouldn’t have any friends or family at all. I spend time with people “face-to-face” when I can, but that time has never, to my knowledge, been described as a rich and meaningful interpersonal experience. Nor should time spent with me ever be considered such a thing. I am not that kind of guy.
Also, at least once, this concept of objection was explained to me via text message.
Still other individuals formerly known as friends tell me they are unwilling to make information about themselves available “out there on the internet” because they are afraid that something terrible might happen if a hundred old friends know what their new puppy looks like. Right-on. They just shouldn’t expect to hear from me very often. I am usually too busy removing tags from photos of myself to participate in any voice-based communicative exchanges.
But of all the new and unexpected social devices adopted by our culture as a result of our nearly universal embrace of social networking, my favorite is unfriending.
The Urban Dictionary defines “unfriend” as the act of removing a friend from your Facebook account.
I know there are a variety of different reasons for unfriending. I am not too concerned with the unfriendings that occur because you didn’t really want to share your life with an old acquaintance but you were too pussy to deny their initial friend request. I have done that, and sadly, have had it done to me. Likewise I get that you might want to unfriend people with whom you have had no actual contact for quite some time. I think this is especially popular with the kids these days who may have thousands of friends because they routinely add everyone with whom they ever come in contact. I can also appreciate more blanket unfriendings that sometimes occur as a reaction to a personal need for more privacy, perhaps in reaction to a stalker scare, or maybe because you want to share more information with fewer people. That is all good. I don’t have to stalk anyone. It is just a hobby.
The kind of unfriending that amuses me the most, is the angry unfriend. That one is going to be a classic.
The angry unfriend occurs when one person is mad at another person, and instead of, or perhaps in addition to an actual discussion about said disagreement, offense, or annoyance, one person removes the other from their list of friends on Facebook. That shit is hilarious. It is meant to be a punishment of some kind, and to send some sort of message. But it is the dumbest punishment ever, and typically sends no message at all. Still, it happens all the time.
It happened to me at least once that I know about. I pissed off my sister, and she unfriended me.
In my case the only reason I noticed at all is because my sister is one of those people who posts a lot of stupid shit on her Facebook wall all the time. Once upon a time I had to scroll past all her crap to get to any interesting updates from drinking buddies or good-looking women. One day I didn’t have to scroll at all. I knew immediately what had happened. And even though I don’t like my sister, and I was tired of seeing her horoscope or whatever crap she always posted, it still hurt my feelings a little. For passive-aggressive types, and you know who they are, unfriending might be the most powerful tool available.
But the thing is, it hurt my feelings in the dumbest way possible. I wasn’t actually hurt because she unfriended me, I expected that. We did have an argument in the real world. I was hurt because she didn’t even make the effort to actually tell me to fuck off. She could even have simply ignored me completely for a few years, and I might still have respected that. But unfriending me was just pussy.
The truth is that unfriending just doesn’t matter. It is pointless. When you unfriend someone they are not notified in any way. The person you unfriend would have to notice that you unfriended them. Typically I suppose this would happen if for some reason they tried to visit your page and were unable to access the information they wanted. But how often does that happen? For most of us, when you unfriend us, it just means you disappear from our newsfeed. Aside from the example above, I am not sure I would notice if someone disappeared from my newsfeed. People come and go all the time. I don’t regularly visit people’s Facebook pages except to get more information about something I saw posted on my newsfeed. I suspect most of us are like that. That is why we like Facebook. It is low-maintenance. It brings information to us so we don’t need to spend our time going out to gather it.
So what kind of ego is involved in unfriending out of anger? I think it assumes a level of interest in your own shit that may not actually exist. To even make the effort to find someone in your friends list and unfriend them you must assume that the former friend will notice the unfriending and therefore get the message with the intended impact. Why would you even bother otherwise? I don’t think I could assume that anyone would notice if I unfriended them. I imagine maybe I have been unfriended by more people than I realize. I don’t know. But I guess they showed me.
I try to imagine my mother, in years before the internet, being offended by a neighbor, or someone at church, and racing furiously to scribble their name, address, and phone number out of her address book.
Now that just seems silly.
Friday
Petroglyphs, Pornography and the Misconceptions of Human Nature
When I go to the bookstore, I am constantly barraged with reminders that I need to be writing rather than reading.
My favorite section in any bookstore these days is reference. This is where everything happens. It is always tucked away in a corner, because no one actually buys encyclopedias anymore (bookstores don't even stock them), and because people think it is filled with nothing but lexicons of all size and color. Perhaps, but, the reference section is the place to find the books I like to read these days.
Don't get me wrong, I do have lexiconological opinions. And, yes, that is a made-up word. I think the American Heritage Dictionary is the greatest dictionary ever created by man, and for seventy-five dollars it ought to be. I know what you "scholars" are thinking, but the people at Oxford English can suck my cock. Etymology is interesting, though highly subjective, and is good stuff at parties. But I don't really need it in my fucking dictionary. I need what American Heritage has. Also, it says "American," and I am biased. Oxford is for pussies.
However, in the reference section at most of the larger, highly-commercial bookstores we have all come to love, you will find all sorts of other interesting books of facts, lists, "forbidden knowledge," and what-not. Those books are my favorite. I pick up and spout off more useless knowledge than Cliff Claven. Some of my kids have even picked up this trait, and throw it back in my face when I talk to them on the phone each night. I have one kid who watches the Discovery channel, the Science Channel, Animal Planet, PBS, and the National Geographic channel all day long, remembers everything, and tells me every night everything he has learned, in great detail. I now know what it is like to be on the giving and receiving end of useless knowledge. And let me tell you, I am surprised I have any friends at all.
The thing about less-traditional reference books is that they make me think about other things. In my quest for ridiculously impractical knowledge, I find connections I might not otherwise have found. And as I sit and think through these things, usually in a pub somewhere, around noon, I am struck over and over again by how much we don't know.
Don't get me wrong, as a people, we have accumulated massive amounts of knowledge. We are smarter, more highly educated, and more articulate than any group of human beings has ever been – as far as we know, but it is probably true. But it seems odd to me how much faith we put in some of our theories and "traditions" that are so new themselves. Don't get me wrong, I am a man of science. I am a Darwinist, a Behavioralist, and consequently and Atheist. I believe in the out-of-Africa theory. I know in my soul that deep down inside we are all black Africans (Did you know, for example, that it probably only takes 20,000 years of living in Northern Europe to turn a people's skin from black to white?). But I do realize that they are just theories, and I am willing to believe anything new with better evidence. The point here is, we just don't know. And I for one am perfectly happy not knowing. I find great comfort in it. But I think that as a people, we have a quest to want to know, and be sure of everything, so even when we clearly don't know something, we make up a story, call it fact, and profess our faith in the theory, with little or no evidence.
We just want to be sure of something.
Since I was a child, I have often thought about the possibility that all this, our society, our cities, our technology, our way of life, might have existed before, right in the places where we live, and we would never know. I still wonder about this. I studied just enough geology and physical science to understand how extremely dynamic the surface of our planet is. And I fully believe, that all of this, or something very similar, might have all happened before, 20, 000 years ago, 50,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago, and there may well be no evidence of it left whatsoever. And it could all happen again, and there would be no evidence of us whatsoever.
The point here is that everything we know about our own history we know by accident. We just happened to find a few things. But the facts don't match up. I don't think the logic is fully there. We have not connected the right people to the right information to come up with the right theories. Let me explain a little about what I mean.
We know that modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) have walked the earth for at least several hundred thousand years. We know that we once shared space with other species of humans, most recently Neanderthals. We don't know whether we competed for resources with European Neanderthals, and killed them all off, or whether we just inter-bred with them, and they are still among us, so to speak. We also know that upright, bipedal, hominids (apes that stand up and walk on two legs, like us) have been around for at least four million years, though some bastards in Chad a few years ago discovered some remains that might make us as old as eight million years. And we know, that in all that time, many species of hominid, and perhaps other species of hominids that we might, having come face to face with them, described as "human," have existed, and perished on this here planet. And we know all that by fucking accident!
Imagine how much we don't know about our own story.
And today, we believe that only one species of human, and hominid, exists on the planet. And we think we own the fucking place. I don't know about you kids, but when I consider that a group of animals that was once as diverse as us finds itself occupying an entire planet with a single species, it isn't time to celebrate our accomplishments. It is time to put ourselves on the endangered species list.
But I digress. In contrast to our very long and extremely varied history (that we know of), we take great pride, and go to great lengths to protect many objects, traditions, values, and mores, to borrow a term from the sixties, that really aren't that old.
Did you know the piano was invented in 1700? Yeah that surprised me also. Doesn't it seem like something we consider to be so "classical," which we make a part of so many of our religious, cultural, and personal family celebrations should be older than that? The piano in my house growing up was almost sacred. It was as important a part of our spiritual and cultural life as clothes were to our physical life. But it has only been around for a few hundred years, so how important could it really be? How many generations of my family tree passed their lives as good people with no piano, or songs, or music at all for that matter? Music itself, at least the way we know it today, is a fairly recent invention. Yet music is so important to so many of us. It is such a major part of our identities it is ridiculous.
I think the point I am trying to make is that all of our current "rituals," whether they be practical, religious, political, or otherwise, the things we tend to take so seriously in our lives, are all relatively "modern" inventions, given the sheer scope of humanity's existence on this planet.
And this leads me to my next point. I think our modern scientists get a lot of theories wrong. I think Archeologists in particular, base a lot of their conclusions on the rituals and behaviors of modern man, rather than our instincts and emotions, which in my mind, are much more likely to transcend the generations of humanity.
I read the new every day. I have time for that. Every time I read about some new archeological discovery, whether it be a specific artifact, the foundation of some long-forgotten city, or a cave-painting, the explanation for the existence of said discovery is almost always a spiritual or religious explanation of some sort. I mean, sometimes these guys understand that the room with the hole in the ground was where these people took a piss, they often get the practical. But it seems that whenever a purely practical explanation for the existence of some new discovery can't be found, they automatically attach some religious or spiritual significance to it.
This doesn't work for me, because, assuming that my ancestors were much like me in the way they felt and thought every day, on a chemical-emotional level, I have to think, that much like we do, they sometimes did things, or built things, or invented things, or used things, because they thought it was cool, and for no other reason. I can assure you that everything in my daily life, which might one day be discovered by some distant scientist, can not be dichotomized into practical or religious. How might they explain the KISS belt buckle for example, or the massive bong, or porn?
I can only imagine what science will say about us one day.
Let's take petroglyphs as an example. When I lived in Utah, I had the pleasure of seeing ancient petroglyphs painted here and there on rocks and canyon walls about the state. I had read about them for years, and they fascinated me. What might they mean? What might this long forgotten culture be trying to tell us now? I spent much time thinking about them.
And then I had the pleasure of becoming a father to a pile of kids. As my kids grew older, and learned to reach the pens, pencils, and crayons in the places I hid them without permission, I began to see something positively amazing happen around my home. I saw little petroglyphs pop up on walls, doors, windows, floorboards, molding, refrigerators, dishwashers, everything. The similarities were unmistakable. They had geometric designs. They were placed in seemingly random places. They depicted people and animals in all sorts of varying activities. They demonstrated a distinctly primitive level of artistic skill. They seemed to be created with whatever drawing material was most locally convenient. And they almost always included some kind of handprints, hand-outlines, or "signatures" as archeologists who study cave drawings call them.
I never looked at petroglyphs the same way again. I am not kidding you. Every time I ever read anything about petroglyphs, some kind of cultural or religious significance was attached to each design. I don't buy it. I am willing to believe that almost all of the ancient cave drawings, etchings, or other petroglyphs we find are just kids, or drunk guys, fucking around with red mud, because they could. Those unmistakably male and female characters were not "sacred symbols of fertility." They were one kid saying "ha ha there is you dad with a huge boner." And his friend replying "well there is your mom with huge tits."
And speaking of fertility, recently I read a little bit about the origin of sculpture as an art form. The oldest sculpture known to man is a little tiny depiction of a nude woman, about 25,000 years old, called the Venus of something (all ancient sculptures of nude women are apparently a Venus of something or other), and is largely considered to be a sacred symbol of fertility to some ancient and unknown people. The reason that scientists and historians believe it to be a symbol of fertility is that some parts of her body are grossly exaggerated and out of proportion with the rest of her. You guessed it. She has huge tits, and a huge ass.
It occurred to me, and maybe I am wrong, I often am, that this might not be a symbol of fertility at all. I thought, just for a moment, that this might just been the earliest masturbatory aid known to man.
Now I know what the do-gooders and intellectuals are thinking. Why do I have to assign such crass value to something that might otherwise be considered sacred and beautiful? Maybe we haven’t met. That’s what I do. I also have to because it is much more likely to be the fucking case in my mind. Remember, I think it is emotions and instincts that carry better across generations of humanity than rituals. I suspect that these 25,000 year old bastards maybe never even heard of a "symbol of fertility." But I do know that people like to masturbate. I have no reason to think that has ever changed. I know that guys like big tits and healthy asses on women. I understand that every culture defines its own version of what is attractive, but big tits and big asses actually feel better when it comes right down to it. I have no reason to think that has changed.
Let's consider some more modern examples. Remember VCRs? We all used to have them. Anyone remember when they were new, in the late seventies? Did you ever have one that was the size of a coffee table, where the tape popped out of the top, and if you were lucky it had a big long wire stretching across the room for a remote? Remember when they cost way more money than anyone could really afford? That was in 1978. But only ten years later, by 1988, literally everyone had one. Think about that for a minute. What other technology has ever caught on that quickly? Arguably more important than a VCR, it took almost a hundred years before everyone had their own telephone.
Even television took 50 years to really catch on and become universal. Cell phones? They have been popular more than 20 years and I still know people who don't have one. So why did everyone have a VCR after only ten years? Simple. Pornography.
Everyone loves porn. And with a VCR, you no longer had to go to a nasty old theater and watch Pee Wee jack-off to see porn. You could have it any time right in your own home! Porn in the privacy of your own home must have been revolutionary back then. I kid you not. Pornography made the VCR a household device in ten years. Why do you think mom and dad always had a VCR in their room? They never seemed to watch movies or record shows in there, but they had one. Hmmm.
What else? You already know, the internet of course, and the home computer. Home computers were around for many, many years, and only a few people ever cared about them. Then, in the late nineties, everyone, literally everyone, had to have a computer in their home. What changed? The internet became widely used and popular. And the internet promised porn. There was tons of porn. More porn than would wear out eighteen VCRs. And again, it was all in the privacy of your own home. Even now, 25% of all search engine requests are for pornography. And we should be desensitized already. But we aren't.
Pornography drove two of the largest cultural revolutions western civilization has ever seen. I have no reason to think that things were any different for our ancestors. I think every "symbol of fertility" was more likely some kind of pornography.
So as I read through more useless fact and unimportant trivia. I continue to make larger connections to the world. We have to constantly question everything we think we know. And we have to constantly consider the things we are sure we do not know. And until we can connect all of our sciences, and really think through the little bit of knowledge we do have, we must remain somewhat skeptical. The truth might be out there, but right now at least, we have no idea what it is. But it probably has something to do with porn.
My favorite section in any bookstore these days is reference. This is where everything happens. It is always tucked away in a corner, because no one actually buys encyclopedias anymore (bookstores don't even stock them), and because people think it is filled with nothing but lexicons of all size and color. Perhaps, but, the reference section is the place to find the books I like to read these days.
Don't get me wrong, I do have lexiconological opinions. And, yes, that is a made-up word. I think the American Heritage Dictionary is the greatest dictionary ever created by man, and for seventy-five dollars it ought to be. I know what you "scholars" are thinking, but the people at Oxford English can suck my cock. Etymology is interesting, though highly subjective, and is good stuff at parties. But I don't really need it in my fucking dictionary. I need what American Heritage has. Also, it says "American," and I am biased. Oxford is for pussies.
However, in the reference section at most of the larger, highly-commercial bookstores we have all come to love, you will find all sorts of other interesting books of facts, lists, "forbidden knowledge," and what-not. Those books are my favorite. I pick up and spout off more useless knowledge than Cliff Claven. Some of my kids have even picked up this trait, and throw it back in my face when I talk to them on the phone each night. I have one kid who watches the Discovery channel, the Science Channel, Animal Planet, PBS, and the National Geographic channel all day long, remembers everything, and tells me every night everything he has learned, in great detail. I now know what it is like to be on the giving and receiving end of useless knowledge. And let me tell you, I am surprised I have any friends at all.
The thing about less-traditional reference books is that they make me think about other things. In my quest for ridiculously impractical knowledge, I find connections I might not otherwise have found. And as I sit and think through these things, usually in a pub somewhere, around noon, I am struck over and over again by how much we don't know.
Don't get me wrong, as a people, we have accumulated massive amounts of knowledge. We are smarter, more highly educated, and more articulate than any group of human beings has ever been – as far as we know, but it is probably true. But it seems odd to me how much faith we put in some of our theories and "traditions" that are so new themselves. Don't get me wrong, I am a man of science. I am a Darwinist, a Behavioralist, and consequently and Atheist. I believe in the out-of-Africa theory. I know in my soul that deep down inside we are all black Africans (Did you know, for example, that it probably only takes 20,000 years of living in Northern Europe to turn a people's skin from black to white?). But I do realize that they are just theories, and I am willing to believe anything new with better evidence. The point here is, we just don't know. And I for one am perfectly happy not knowing. I find great comfort in it. But I think that as a people, we have a quest to want to know, and be sure of everything, so even when we clearly don't know something, we make up a story, call it fact, and profess our faith in the theory, with little or no evidence.
We just want to be sure of something.
Since I was a child, I have often thought about the possibility that all this, our society, our cities, our technology, our way of life, might have existed before, right in the places where we live, and we would never know. I still wonder about this. I studied just enough geology and physical science to understand how extremely dynamic the surface of our planet is. And I fully believe, that all of this, or something very similar, might have all happened before, 20, 000 years ago, 50,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago, and there may well be no evidence of it left whatsoever. And it could all happen again, and there would be no evidence of us whatsoever.
The point here is that everything we know about our own history we know by accident. We just happened to find a few things. But the facts don't match up. I don't think the logic is fully there. We have not connected the right people to the right information to come up with the right theories. Let me explain a little about what I mean.
We know that modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) have walked the earth for at least several hundred thousand years. We know that we once shared space with other species of humans, most recently Neanderthals. We don't know whether we competed for resources with European Neanderthals, and killed them all off, or whether we just inter-bred with them, and they are still among us, so to speak. We also know that upright, bipedal, hominids (apes that stand up and walk on two legs, like us) have been around for at least four million years, though some bastards in Chad a few years ago discovered some remains that might make us as old as eight million years. And we know, that in all that time, many species of hominid, and perhaps other species of hominids that we might, having come face to face with them, described as "human," have existed, and perished on this here planet. And we know all that by fucking accident!
Imagine how much we don't know about our own story.
And today, we believe that only one species of human, and hominid, exists on the planet. And we think we own the fucking place. I don't know about you kids, but when I consider that a group of animals that was once as diverse as us finds itself occupying an entire planet with a single species, it isn't time to celebrate our accomplishments. It is time to put ourselves on the endangered species list.
But I digress. In contrast to our very long and extremely varied history (that we know of), we take great pride, and go to great lengths to protect many objects, traditions, values, and mores, to borrow a term from the sixties, that really aren't that old.
Did you know the piano was invented in 1700? Yeah that surprised me also. Doesn't it seem like something we consider to be so "classical," which we make a part of so many of our religious, cultural, and personal family celebrations should be older than that? The piano in my house growing up was almost sacred. It was as important a part of our spiritual and cultural life as clothes were to our physical life. But it has only been around for a few hundred years, so how important could it really be? How many generations of my family tree passed their lives as good people with no piano, or songs, or music at all for that matter? Music itself, at least the way we know it today, is a fairly recent invention. Yet music is so important to so many of us. It is such a major part of our identities it is ridiculous.
I think the point I am trying to make is that all of our current "rituals," whether they be practical, religious, political, or otherwise, the things we tend to take so seriously in our lives, are all relatively "modern" inventions, given the sheer scope of humanity's existence on this planet.
And this leads me to my next point. I think our modern scientists get a lot of theories wrong. I think Archeologists in particular, base a lot of their conclusions on the rituals and behaviors of modern man, rather than our instincts and emotions, which in my mind, are much more likely to transcend the generations of humanity.
I read the new every day. I have time for that. Every time I read about some new archeological discovery, whether it be a specific artifact, the foundation of some long-forgotten city, or a cave-painting, the explanation for the existence of said discovery is almost always a spiritual or religious explanation of some sort. I mean, sometimes these guys understand that the room with the hole in the ground was where these people took a piss, they often get the practical. But it seems that whenever a purely practical explanation for the existence of some new discovery can't be found, they automatically attach some religious or spiritual significance to it.
This doesn't work for me, because, assuming that my ancestors were much like me in the way they felt and thought every day, on a chemical-emotional level, I have to think, that much like we do, they sometimes did things, or built things, or invented things, or used things, because they thought it was cool, and for no other reason. I can assure you that everything in my daily life, which might one day be discovered by some distant scientist, can not be dichotomized into practical or religious. How might they explain the KISS belt buckle for example, or the massive bong, or porn?
I can only imagine what science will say about us one day.
Let's take petroglyphs as an example. When I lived in Utah, I had the pleasure of seeing ancient petroglyphs painted here and there on rocks and canyon walls about the state. I had read about them for years, and they fascinated me. What might they mean? What might this long forgotten culture be trying to tell us now? I spent much time thinking about them.
And then I had the pleasure of becoming a father to a pile of kids. As my kids grew older, and learned to reach the pens, pencils, and crayons in the places I hid them without permission, I began to see something positively amazing happen around my home. I saw little petroglyphs pop up on walls, doors, windows, floorboards, molding, refrigerators, dishwashers, everything. The similarities were unmistakable. They had geometric designs. They were placed in seemingly random places. They depicted people and animals in all sorts of varying activities. They demonstrated a distinctly primitive level of artistic skill. They seemed to be created with whatever drawing material was most locally convenient. And they almost always included some kind of handprints, hand-outlines, or "signatures" as archeologists who study cave drawings call them.
I never looked at petroglyphs the same way again. I am not kidding you. Every time I ever read anything about petroglyphs, some kind of cultural or religious significance was attached to each design. I don't buy it. I am willing to believe that almost all of the ancient cave drawings, etchings, or other petroglyphs we find are just kids, or drunk guys, fucking around with red mud, because they could. Those unmistakably male and female characters were not "sacred symbols of fertility." They were one kid saying "ha ha there is you dad with a huge boner." And his friend replying "well there is your mom with huge tits."
And speaking of fertility, recently I read a little bit about the origin of sculpture as an art form. The oldest sculpture known to man is a little tiny depiction of a nude woman, about 25,000 years old, called the Venus of something (all ancient sculptures of nude women are apparently a Venus of something or other), and is largely considered to be a sacred symbol of fertility to some ancient and unknown people. The reason that scientists and historians believe it to be a symbol of fertility is that some parts of her body are grossly exaggerated and out of proportion with the rest of her. You guessed it. She has huge tits, and a huge ass.
It occurred to me, and maybe I am wrong, I often am, that this might not be a symbol of fertility at all. I thought, just for a moment, that this might just been the earliest masturbatory aid known to man.
Now I know what the do-gooders and intellectuals are thinking. Why do I have to assign such crass value to something that might otherwise be considered sacred and beautiful? Maybe we haven’t met. That’s what I do. I also have to because it is much more likely to be the fucking case in my mind. Remember, I think it is emotions and instincts that carry better across generations of humanity than rituals. I suspect that these 25,000 year old bastards maybe never even heard of a "symbol of fertility." But I do know that people like to masturbate. I have no reason to think that has ever changed. I know that guys like big tits and healthy asses on women. I understand that every culture defines its own version of what is attractive, but big tits and big asses actually feel better when it comes right down to it. I have no reason to think that has changed.
Let's consider some more modern examples. Remember VCRs? We all used to have them. Anyone remember when they were new, in the late seventies? Did you ever have one that was the size of a coffee table, where the tape popped out of the top, and if you were lucky it had a big long wire stretching across the room for a remote? Remember when they cost way more money than anyone could really afford? That was in 1978. But only ten years later, by 1988, literally everyone had one. Think about that for a minute. What other technology has ever caught on that quickly? Arguably more important than a VCR, it took almost a hundred years before everyone had their own telephone.
Even television took 50 years to really catch on and become universal. Cell phones? They have been popular more than 20 years and I still know people who don't have one. So why did everyone have a VCR after only ten years? Simple. Pornography.
Everyone loves porn. And with a VCR, you no longer had to go to a nasty old theater and watch Pee Wee jack-off to see porn. You could have it any time right in your own home! Porn in the privacy of your own home must have been revolutionary back then. I kid you not. Pornography made the VCR a household device in ten years. Why do you think mom and dad always had a VCR in their room? They never seemed to watch movies or record shows in there, but they had one. Hmmm.
What else? You already know, the internet of course, and the home computer. Home computers were around for many, many years, and only a few people ever cared about them. Then, in the late nineties, everyone, literally everyone, had to have a computer in their home. What changed? The internet became widely used and popular. And the internet promised porn. There was tons of porn. More porn than would wear out eighteen VCRs. And again, it was all in the privacy of your own home. Even now, 25% of all search engine requests are for pornography. And we should be desensitized already. But we aren't.
Pornography drove two of the largest cultural revolutions western civilization has ever seen. I have no reason to think that things were any different for our ancestors. I think every "symbol of fertility" was more likely some kind of pornography.
So as I read through more useless fact and unimportant trivia. I continue to make larger connections to the world. We have to constantly question everything we think we know. And we have to constantly consider the things we are sure we do not know. And until we can connect all of our sciences, and really think through the little bit of knowledge we do have, we must remain somewhat skeptical. The truth might be out there, but right now at least, we have no idea what it is. But it probably has something to do with porn.
Thursday
Have You Ever Seen Pulp Fiction?
Extraordinary things just happen to me. I suppose they happen to all of us. They happen sometimes, not very often, but they happen regularly enough to be noticed.
This is one of the reasons I can’t do any serious long-term planning. It never works for me. I do love to imagine what the future might be like for me. I love to set goals and plan for things. I almost always have an idea in my head about what my life may be like in five years, or three years, or ten years. I set goals, determine probabilities, work around potential obstacles, and predict the most likely situation for me given current events and other predictable factors. I go as far as to imagine certain future scenarios. I have conversations in my mind with my grown children, friends, and siblings. I really like to plan, predict, and imagine what my life will be life a few years down the road. I am sure we all do this to a certain extent.
Unfortunately it never works. Well it mostly never works. Recently, when my oldest son graduated from high school, I did have an actual experience that was eerily similar to one I had imagined and predicted many, many years ago. I was also able to say something to his mother that day, that I had imagined saying to her for many years. The fact that I said it in a text message instead of in person did not diminish the experience (at least for me, she may not love text messages as much as I do). It turns out I didn’t accurately predict the popularity of text messages eighteen years ago, when I was a scared-to-death, punk-ass kid. I don’t know what I was thinking.
But something always happens. Fucking life does its thing. The unknown and unpredictable factors and forces go to work, and before long, something extraordinary and unexpected happens, and things begin to change.
Of course unexpected events aren’t always life-changing experiences. Sometimes they are just plain amusing. Sometimes, if like me you constantly process and evaluate everything around you, when something both unexpected and innocuous occurs, it can be just hilarious. And sometimes you have to write about it.
Have you ever found yourself in a specific situation, where you had opportunity for metaphysical sojourn, and you were able to just step back from yourself and consider the very moment? This happens to me all the time. I make a point of it. Sometimes I find myself some place inconceivable, doing something I never imagined, maybe with someone with whom I never imagined I would ever be doing something inconceivable. I like to step out of context for a moment, ignoring events that may have led to such a moment, and just appreciate the situation. I love to say to myself “I never would have imagined that I would be here right now doing this.” Sometimes it is hilarious, sometimes it is disturbing, but it is always amusing.
These are the things that keep life interesting. And oddly enough, these are exactly the things I was thinking about that night in line at the gas station mini-mart, in a seedy part of town, across the street from my favorite breakfast joint.
Marcus and I were out for something. My memory is a little hazy. I was either buying beer, or buying ice for beer, or buying something else entirely. We may have been coming from, or going to the strip club nearby. Or we may have just stopped by that gas station on our way to someplace else entirely, because it is convenient from the freeway. In any case, if I was buying beer, it must not have been the first beer of the evening for me. It was a Saturday night, and the line was long. Marcus was nearby, maybe in the car, but not immediately with me. All the same, I am calling him a witness.
The point is, I am not sure how I got there, or what I was doing. But there I was.
I was second from the counter. I was waiting patiently while my mind wandered around abstract notions previously described in this essay, when I noticed something strange. The man in front of me had turned around and was looking at me as he leaned against the counter waiting for something. I noticed this because I am a fairly inconspicuous guy in a crowd and I don’t normally attract a pile of attention. Furthermore he was looking me up and down and appeared to be licking his lips, which actually never happens. This was new for me, and I was not sure how to react.
Additionally, to risk the use of a stereotype, this guy looked a little tough. He was taller than me. This isn’t hard to do because I am not a very tall guy. He was maybe six feet. He was wearing a pale blue tracksuit with a plain white t-shirt underneath, on top of which lay a large gold chain with a medallion that appeared to be the Mexican flag. His hat was white, and in purple, airbrushed letters it read “Chicano.” The tattoos on his hands and neck indicated he was a fan of, and was perhaps somehow affiliated with the “Norteño” half of a popular gang rivalry in California.
His appearance made his current actions that much more perplexing. I checked again. He was definitely looking me up and down and was licking his lips. He was also apparently not buying his first beer of the evening. I was glad we had something in common.
I decided to be cool and assume he was just being friendly, so I gave him the universal “what’s up?” nod that guys my age always give each other, though I actually said “hey man, how’s it going?”
He asked me “Hey man, have you ever seen Pulp Fiction?”
This was the moment where I paused intellectually, backed up out of myself, and considered the situation for what it was. It was amusing to me, because I hadn’t expected, nor had I imagined when I woke up that morning, that later in the evening I might be standing in a mini-mart with a Chicano gang-banger discussing cinema at all, let alone the works of Tarantino.
I decided to go with it. But before I could respond, he continued. “You know what I mean man? Oh yeah. You know.”
I can safely say that I did not know.
So I said “Sure man, Pulp Fiction is one of my favorite films. I love the unlikely dialogue, and the part where Vincent Vega brings the comatose Mrs. Wallace back to his dealer’s house because she accidentally over-dosed is one of the most intense cinematic moments I have ever experienced.”
I was having a good time. I made a mental note to strike up random discussions on random topics with random people in random places more often.
He didn’t consider my assessment very long before he retorted with “I like the part where they fuck the guy in the ass.” He added “you know what I mean man? Oh yeah. You know.”
It was my turn at the counter. I made my purchase as I considered his position.
“I also like the part where they accidentally shoot Marvin in the face” was all I could think to say as I walked out somewhat perplexed but trying very hard not to laugh.
He followed me a little way to my car, and must have seen Marcus sitting in it, because he wandered back to his friend and their car, oddly enough a late-model Chevy Impala with 22 inch wheels. I laughed and told Marcus the story as they passed behind us twice and finally drove away.
What the hell?
I was glad I realized the unexpected nature of the situation while I was in it, and that I was able to be immediately amused by it. That made me happy.
I do love Pulp Fiction. It remains one of my favorite movies of all time. I don’t know about the anal sex though. I guess I hadn’t fairly considered it within the larger social context. For example, I never thought of using it as a way to hit on people. I guess I hadn’t thought of any movie in that particular context before.
But maybe next time I see an attractive woman standing in line somewhere I will ask “Hey baby, have you ever seen Knocked Up?”
I am just waiting to see what the extraordinary will do with me next.
This is one of the reasons I can’t do any serious long-term planning. It never works for me. I do love to imagine what the future might be like for me. I love to set goals and plan for things. I almost always have an idea in my head about what my life may be like in five years, or three years, or ten years. I set goals, determine probabilities, work around potential obstacles, and predict the most likely situation for me given current events and other predictable factors. I go as far as to imagine certain future scenarios. I have conversations in my mind with my grown children, friends, and siblings. I really like to plan, predict, and imagine what my life will be life a few years down the road. I am sure we all do this to a certain extent.
Unfortunately it never works. Well it mostly never works. Recently, when my oldest son graduated from high school, I did have an actual experience that was eerily similar to one I had imagined and predicted many, many years ago. I was also able to say something to his mother that day, that I had imagined saying to her for many years. The fact that I said it in a text message instead of in person did not diminish the experience (at least for me, she may not love text messages as much as I do). It turns out I didn’t accurately predict the popularity of text messages eighteen years ago, when I was a scared-to-death, punk-ass kid. I don’t know what I was thinking.
But something always happens. Fucking life does its thing. The unknown and unpredictable factors and forces go to work, and before long, something extraordinary and unexpected happens, and things begin to change.
Of course unexpected events aren’t always life-changing experiences. Sometimes they are just plain amusing. Sometimes, if like me you constantly process and evaluate everything around you, when something both unexpected and innocuous occurs, it can be just hilarious. And sometimes you have to write about it.
Have you ever found yourself in a specific situation, where you had opportunity for metaphysical sojourn, and you were able to just step back from yourself and consider the very moment? This happens to me all the time. I make a point of it. Sometimes I find myself some place inconceivable, doing something I never imagined, maybe with someone with whom I never imagined I would ever be doing something inconceivable. I like to step out of context for a moment, ignoring events that may have led to such a moment, and just appreciate the situation. I love to say to myself “I never would have imagined that I would be here right now doing this.” Sometimes it is hilarious, sometimes it is disturbing, but it is always amusing.
These are the things that keep life interesting. And oddly enough, these are exactly the things I was thinking about that night in line at the gas station mini-mart, in a seedy part of town, across the street from my favorite breakfast joint.
Marcus and I were out for something. My memory is a little hazy. I was either buying beer, or buying ice for beer, or buying something else entirely. We may have been coming from, or going to the strip club nearby. Or we may have just stopped by that gas station on our way to someplace else entirely, because it is convenient from the freeway. In any case, if I was buying beer, it must not have been the first beer of the evening for me. It was a Saturday night, and the line was long. Marcus was nearby, maybe in the car, but not immediately with me. All the same, I am calling him a witness.
The point is, I am not sure how I got there, or what I was doing. But there I was.
I was second from the counter. I was waiting patiently while my mind wandered around abstract notions previously described in this essay, when I noticed something strange. The man in front of me had turned around and was looking at me as he leaned against the counter waiting for something. I noticed this because I am a fairly inconspicuous guy in a crowd and I don’t normally attract a pile of attention. Furthermore he was looking me up and down and appeared to be licking his lips, which actually never happens. This was new for me, and I was not sure how to react.
Additionally, to risk the use of a stereotype, this guy looked a little tough. He was taller than me. This isn’t hard to do because I am not a very tall guy. He was maybe six feet. He was wearing a pale blue tracksuit with a plain white t-shirt underneath, on top of which lay a large gold chain with a medallion that appeared to be the Mexican flag. His hat was white, and in purple, airbrushed letters it read “Chicano.” The tattoos on his hands and neck indicated he was a fan of, and was perhaps somehow affiliated with the “Norteño” half of a popular gang rivalry in California.
His appearance made his current actions that much more perplexing. I checked again. He was definitely looking me up and down and was licking his lips. He was also apparently not buying his first beer of the evening. I was glad we had something in common.
I decided to be cool and assume he was just being friendly, so I gave him the universal “what’s up?” nod that guys my age always give each other, though I actually said “hey man, how’s it going?”
He asked me “Hey man, have you ever seen Pulp Fiction?”
This was the moment where I paused intellectually, backed up out of myself, and considered the situation for what it was. It was amusing to me, because I hadn’t expected, nor had I imagined when I woke up that morning, that later in the evening I might be standing in a mini-mart with a Chicano gang-banger discussing cinema at all, let alone the works of Tarantino.
I decided to go with it. But before I could respond, he continued. “You know what I mean man? Oh yeah. You know.”
I can safely say that I did not know.
So I said “Sure man, Pulp Fiction is one of my favorite films. I love the unlikely dialogue, and the part where Vincent Vega brings the comatose Mrs. Wallace back to his dealer’s house because she accidentally over-dosed is one of the most intense cinematic moments I have ever experienced.”
I was having a good time. I made a mental note to strike up random discussions on random topics with random people in random places more often.
He didn’t consider my assessment very long before he retorted with “I like the part where they fuck the guy in the ass.” He added “you know what I mean man? Oh yeah. You know.”
It was my turn at the counter. I made my purchase as I considered his position.
“I also like the part where they accidentally shoot Marvin in the face” was all I could think to say as I walked out somewhat perplexed but trying very hard not to laugh.
He followed me a little way to my car, and must have seen Marcus sitting in it, because he wandered back to his friend and their car, oddly enough a late-model Chevy Impala with 22 inch wheels. I laughed and told Marcus the story as they passed behind us twice and finally drove away.
What the hell?
I was glad I realized the unexpected nature of the situation while I was in it, and that I was able to be immediately amused by it. That made me happy.
I do love Pulp Fiction. It remains one of my favorite movies of all time. I don’t know about the anal sex though. I guess I hadn’t fairly considered it within the larger social context. For example, I never thought of using it as a way to hit on people. I guess I hadn’t thought of any movie in that particular context before.
But maybe next time I see an attractive woman standing in line somewhere I will ask “Hey baby, have you ever seen Knocked Up?”
I am just waiting to see what the extraordinary will do with me next.
New World Literacy
My mother was a secretary. That’s what they used to call the women who do all the work in your office. She worked in this capacity about half of the years I was growing up. She took a lot of pride in her work. And she seemed to be particularly skilled at it.
My mother insisted that all of her children acquire two skills. We had to learn to play the piano, and we had to learn to type. She was sure that these two skills, even if we mastered no others, could provide for our continuous joy and sustenance. I can see her point.
As a child, I technically learned to play piano. I took lessons for a couple years. I played in at least one informal recital that I can remember.
I quickly forgot everything I learned and picked up a guitar. My mother must have seen this as a compromise of sorts. She really disliked my subsequent interest in heavy metal music, but she encouraged me to play.
I never learned to type.
My mother pleaded with me on this matter. All of my siblings took a year or more of formal keyboarding classes in high school. I never bothered. I was interested in other things. Even when it was a requirement for graduation, I just dropped out.
My mother told me with sincere earnest and great conviction that I could never graduate from college if I didn’t learn to type. It was absolutely critical, she assured me, because of the sheer numbers of lengthy papers I would be required to produce. She also assured me there was no way in hell she was going to type anything for me.
It wasn’t that I was opposed to typing specifically. It just seemed like the kind of skill I could pick up later if the need arose. I hadn’t really needed the skill before then and so I didn’t want to spend my time on it. I was busy with other things at the time, like getting girls pregnant.
Also, I reasoned that given the seemingly exponential technological growth of the late 80s, when so many people were using computers, something better was bound to come along. I mean the year 2000 wasn’t really very far away, and everything was going to be different by then.
My dad, for example, was an early adopter and advocate for speech recognition software. These are the programs that let you just talk to your computer while it writes down what you are saying automatically. He has been using this stuff as long as I can remember. He has convinced entire companies to adopt its use. I can only imagine how his zeal for this technology must have made my mother feel. But for him, it maybe had more to do with necessity than wanting to replace the secretarial pool. My dad doesn’t have any fingers to speak of on his left hand. I have never thought of it as a disability, because he is the guy who used his hands to teach me to fix almost anything around the house with my hands. But I suppose it may have prevented him from becoming a concert pianist, and perhaps from typing very quickly.
Like the old man, I reasoned that typing was somewhat archaic. As a people, we had already been doing it far too long. It just didn’t seem practical. Our brains are our primary tools of communication. We should not be so dependent on our hands. I was sure science could, and would, come up with something better.
I also like to stick it to “the man.” And I wasn’t going to be told what to do by anyone, particularly my mother. So I showed her. I graduated from college, with a major in ENGLISH, without ever learning to type.
Sure, I spent more time in a computer lab than anyone else I knew. And yes, there were late nights where I cursed myself for being so stubborn and unable to get the thoughts out as quickly as they wanted to come. I cursed science for so proficiently failing me. I hunted and pecked and spent far more time looking at the keyboard than I did looking at the screen. I really wished I had majored in math.
But near the end of my undergraduate career, something happened that changed everything. I discovered the internet. More to the point of this story, I discovered email and instant messaging.
These were technologies I could use. Back then we had to pay money for phone calls outside of the area in which we lived. I had friends, family, and more importantly girls to talk to all over the place. This new technology allowed me to talk to them for free! That is, provided we both had computers with modems and were connected at the same time and using the same software or messaging service and knew each other’s screen names. It was so simple! I could also chat randomly with nameless and faceless people whom I had never met. We could say anything we wanted to each other and we never needed to be accountable for our actions in real life. Sexting has nothing on early instant messaging. The 90s were a wild and dangerous time.
These services instantly became a major part of my daily routine. For years I eagerly anticipated the moment each morning when I was able to check my email and see what good things awaited me. Back then email was almost always something I wanted to see. Instant messaging became my primary mode of communication with almost everyone. By the early 2000s I was carrying a two-way pager with instant messaging capabilities. By 2005
I required all my employees to have and use instant messaging, and they knew it was the way to get to me no matter where I was or what I was doing. Throughout my now-failed marriage, almost every significant and important conversation I ever had with my wife about our relationship occurred via instant messages. I realize now that this was a sign I maybe should have noticed and to which I might have paid more attention, but whatever. The point is instant messaging rules.
Today I don’t do nearly as much instant messaging as I once did. When I began using the technology professionally, it lost much of its original perverse and subversive appeal for me. All of that communication has now migrated to text messages. But instant messaging gave me something texting never could have.
I no longer look at the keyboard.
I don’t know exactly when, or even how long ago it may have happened. I do recall, just a few years ago, someone waiting in my office as I was sending an instant message telling me that I type really fast. The idea was so foreign to me, given my experience with my mother, that the comment took me by surprise. But that person was right. Somewhere along the way I began to type as quickly as the best secretary, and I didn’t even notice it. I owe it all to the internet, obscenity, and particularly instant messaging.
I think the internet has given all of us something we didn’t expect.
No, not that. We expected that.
The internet has made us more literate.
My story is just an example of the internet teaching a dumb-ass to type. I am sure there are a lot of other good stories out there about things idiots learned because of the internet. We all agree that the internet has changed the way we communicate with each other. And despite all my naïve expectations about science inventing a better way for us to do it, it is still just a lot of reading and typing.
Everyone has a computer now. And everyone is connected to the internet, if they want to be. Most of us spend half our day at work reading and responding to email. Facebook is currently the premiere tool used by many of us to communicate with friends and family members, all with words and pictures. Reading news online is more popular than watching the news on television. And even with two billion videos a day being played on YouTube, we still must read and write at least a little to find the kinds of porn we like best. People in our society who would otherwise never read, and who historically have never read, people who in fact would insist they hate reading, now read volumes every year in small pieces. As a natural extension, many of us prefer texting to actually speaking on the phone. Teenagers were for decades stereotyped as constantly talking on or arguing with their parents about use of the telephone. But kids these days, who each have their own phones they carry with them wherever they go, prefer to write tiny letters to each other, constantly, instead of talk.
Literacy has never been more popular, or more universal.
We will probably eventually pass out of this phase, again preferring audio and video to written forms of communication. This might just be our renaissance. Think about that for a minute. We may right now be in the golden age of literacy for our culture. Right now everyone is doing it.
I find that thought oddly comforting. I am glad I am here to see it. And I don’t really care about my unborn grandchildren.
My mother insisted that all of her children acquire two skills. We had to learn to play the piano, and we had to learn to type. She was sure that these two skills, even if we mastered no others, could provide for our continuous joy and sustenance. I can see her point.
As a child, I technically learned to play piano. I took lessons for a couple years. I played in at least one informal recital that I can remember.
I quickly forgot everything I learned and picked up a guitar. My mother must have seen this as a compromise of sorts. She really disliked my subsequent interest in heavy metal music, but she encouraged me to play.
I never learned to type.
My mother pleaded with me on this matter. All of my siblings took a year or more of formal keyboarding classes in high school. I never bothered. I was interested in other things. Even when it was a requirement for graduation, I just dropped out.
My mother told me with sincere earnest and great conviction that I could never graduate from college if I didn’t learn to type. It was absolutely critical, she assured me, because of the sheer numbers of lengthy papers I would be required to produce. She also assured me there was no way in hell she was going to type anything for me.
It wasn’t that I was opposed to typing specifically. It just seemed like the kind of skill I could pick up later if the need arose. I hadn’t really needed the skill before then and so I didn’t want to spend my time on it. I was busy with other things at the time, like getting girls pregnant.
Also, I reasoned that given the seemingly exponential technological growth of the late 80s, when so many people were using computers, something better was bound to come along. I mean the year 2000 wasn’t really very far away, and everything was going to be different by then.
My dad, for example, was an early adopter and advocate for speech recognition software. These are the programs that let you just talk to your computer while it writes down what you are saying automatically. He has been using this stuff as long as I can remember. He has convinced entire companies to adopt its use. I can only imagine how his zeal for this technology must have made my mother feel. But for him, it maybe had more to do with necessity than wanting to replace the secretarial pool. My dad doesn’t have any fingers to speak of on his left hand. I have never thought of it as a disability, because he is the guy who used his hands to teach me to fix almost anything around the house with my hands. But I suppose it may have prevented him from becoming a concert pianist, and perhaps from typing very quickly.
Like the old man, I reasoned that typing was somewhat archaic. As a people, we had already been doing it far too long. It just didn’t seem practical. Our brains are our primary tools of communication. We should not be so dependent on our hands. I was sure science could, and would, come up with something better.
I also like to stick it to “the man.” And I wasn’t going to be told what to do by anyone, particularly my mother. So I showed her. I graduated from college, with a major in ENGLISH, without ever learning to type.
Sure, I spent more time in a computer lab than anyone else I knew. And yes, there were late nights where I cursed myself for being so stubborn and unable to get the thoughts out as quickly as they wanted to come. I cursed science for so proficiently failing me. I hunted and pecked and spent far more time looking at the keyboard than I did looking at the screen. I really wished I had majored in math.
But near the end of my undergraduate career, something happened that changed everything. I discovered the internet. More to the point of this story, I discovered email and instant messaging.
These were technologies I could use. Back then we had to pay money for phone calls outside of the area in which we lived. I had friends, family, and more importantly girls to talk to all over the place. This new technology allowed me to talk to them for free! That is, provided we both had computers with modems and were connected at the same time and using the same software or messaging service and knew each other’s screen names. It was so simple! I could also chat randomly with nameless and faceless people whom I had never met. We could say anything we wanted to each other and we never needed to be accountable for our actions in real life. Sexting has nothing on early instant messaging. The 90s were a wild and dangerous time.
These services instantly became a major part of my daily routine. For years I eagerly anticipated the moment each morning when I was able to check my email and see what good things awaited me. Back then email was almost always something I wanted to see. Instant messaging became my primary mode of communication with almost everyone. By the early 2000s I was carrying a two-way pager with instant messaging capabilities. By 2005
I required all my employees to have and use instant messaging, and they knew it was the way to get to me no matter where I was or what I was doing. Throughout my now-failed marriage, almost every significant and important conversation I ever had with my wife about our relationship occurred via instant messages. I realize now that this was a sign I maybe should have noticed and to which I might have paid more attention, but whatever. The point is instant messaging rules.
Today I don’t do nearly as much instant messaging as I once did. When I began using the technology professionally, it lost much of its original perverse and subversive appeal for me. All of that communication has now migrated to text messages. But instant messaging gave me something texting never could have.
I no longer look at the keyboard.
I don’t know exactly when, or even how long ago it may have happened. I do recall, just a few years ago, someone waiting in my office as I was sending an instant message telling me that I type really fast. The idea was so foreign to me, given my experience with my mother, that the comment took me by surprise. But that person was right. Somewhere along the way I began to type as quickly as the best secretary, and I didn’t even notice it. I owe it all to the internet, obscenity, and particularly instant messaging.
I think the internet has given all of us something we didn’t expect.
No, not that. We expected that.
The internet has made us more literate.
My story is just an example of the internet teaching a dumb-ass to type. I am sure there are a lot of other good stories out there about things idiots learned because of the internet. We all agree that the internet has changed the way we communicate with each other. And despite all my naïve expectations about science inventing a better way for us to do it, it is still just a lot of reading and typing.
Everyone has a computer now. And everyone is connected to the internet, if they want to be. Most of us spend half our day at work reading and responding to email. Facebook is currently the premiere tool used by many of us to communicate with friends and family members, all with words and pictures. Reading news online is more popular than watching the news on television. And even with two billion videos a day being played on YouTube, we still must read and write at least a little to find the kinds of porn we like best. People in our society who would otherwise never read, and who historically have never read, people who in fact would insist they hate reading, now read volumes every year in small pieces. As a natural extension, many of us prefer texting to actually speaking on the phone. Teenagers were for decades stereotyped as constantly talking on or arguing with their parents about use of the telephone. But kids these days, who each have their own phones they carry with them wherever they go, prefer to write tiny letters to each other, constantly, instead of talk.
Literacy has never been more popular, or more universal.
We will probably eventually pass out of this phase, again preferring audio and video to written forms of communication. This might just be our renaissance. Think about that for a minute. We may right now be in the golden age of literacy for our culture. Right now everyone is doing it.
I find that thought oddly comforting. I am glad I am here to see it. And I don’t really care about my unborn grandchildren.
Monday
Hey Man, Do You Know Where I Can Score Some Heroin?
Once upon a time I was a community college student. And though I was not very good at it, I kept doing it. I persisted in this occupation for three and a half years.
The community college system in the United States, particularly in California, is a very interesting system. Sometimes called “Junior Colleges,” these institutions serve primarily returning students (i.e. old people in college for the first time) and slackers who couldn’t, or wouldn’t go to a real university after high school, and who still lived with their parents. I belonged to this second species.
When I quit high school at sixteen, I had a job delivering pizza and playing poker in the relatively small community of Salinas, California. Ill-content to resign myself to this fate eternally, and thinking it a good idea to provide some kind of example to my one-year-old baby son, I decided to enroll in courses at the community college. A small part of me thought it was cool to “buck the system” and start “college” at sixteen. There was no way “the man” was going to tell me where to go to school.
Starting classes at the community college was a great experience for me. It gave me the excuse and opportunity to take steps toward actions that later in life would prove to be critical for defining my character. During those years, for example, I had lunch with my mother almost every day. And after a troubled adolescence she and I were able to form a new and strong relationship which endures to this day. But that is the topic for another essay. These years ushered me into the world of frequent travel that may very well have been prophetic for the odd life I live today. I lived in Salinas, my son lived in another city roughly a hundred miles away, and many of my best friends had gone to real college in other cities even further away. Community college schedules afforded me the opportunity to frequently drive my own miniature version of Kerouac’s amazing triangle. My parents never knew where I was. And finally, after ten years of having older friends, and wishing I had been placed two grades ahead, I found myself there. I reunited with, and spent much time with many of my older friends from high school who had legitimately graduated the year before.
One of these friends was Omar. Omar had been “that weird punk kid” in high school. He was the only child of an otherwise traditional Chicano family in Salinas, and was a musical genius. He played guitar, in the words of Sublime, “like a mother-fucking riot.” That is the best way to describe it. He had been playing since he was about four years old. And having been a wannabe guitarist since my early teen years, I envied his skill. He could play anything and make it look easy.
Not having any good ideas for his future after high school Omar also took a stab at community college. And we became infrequent friends. Because I was always driving from one city to another at this time, all my friends (and girlfriends) tended to be infrequent. The people who really connected with me though, always knew where to find me. And many of them would travel with me sometimes from place to place. Omar was one of these friends.
Omar had a band called Illegal Cable Box. Illegal Cable Box played once or twice a month at the small all-ages clubs in Monterey. They, and Omar, who really was the band, specialized in the new and emerging grunge scene, but maintained solid roots in punk and acid rock. Omar was a little crazy and unpredictable. He frequently made a scene at his shows, by yelling insults at the crowd, or taking his clothes off, or throwing things. In his spare time Omar worked at Subway, building sandwiches, with his girlfriend. And he began to take fewer and fewer classes, eventually dropping out all together. Omar defined love in very simple terms. He often told me he knew he loved his girl because if she asked, he would not hesitate to pick her nose for her. I think he makes a good point (weak pun unintended). He knew she loved him because she put up with him. Omar didn’t do drugs. He barely drank. But he had the best line, the best ice breaker I ever heard. Whenever he met someone new, whoever it was, he always asked the person the same question. He said “Hey man, do you know where I can score some heroin?”
He reasoned that an individual’s response to this question would instantly tell him everything he really wanted to know about them. He would know immediately whether he wanted to continue a relationship with said person in any way. He used this line often. He was not, of course, actually looking to score heroin. He couldn’t have afforded it if he had been answered in the affirmative. I saw him do this many times. And the thing I loved about it the most was that he never got an affirmative answer, not even as a joke. Apparently the question was so off-putting upon initial introduction that it even caught smart-asses off their guard. The responses always ranged from an obviously shocked “NO” to a casual “nah man sorry.” The second answer was the one he was looking for. Those people were his friends. I loved that guy.
About this time I was entering into a little custody battle over my oldest son. His mother found an older guy to marry, and was under the impression that a sixteen or seventeen-year-old dad was something her baby could do without. Her new husband in his late twenties would make a fine father. But because my name was on the birth certificate, they had to hire a lawyer to try and get rid of me. Having been a loving father to my son thus far, I decided to give them a run for their money, and stake my claim as a legitimate parent to the boy. I figured that at the very least when he grew up he would be glad to know that loser wasn’t really his father.
Because of the impending drama, I decided to go a little more legitimate with my fledgling career in pizza and poker. And although poker had paid my rent once or twice, I decided to give it up to take a job as a night time attendant at a gas station convenience store. This job was supposed to allow me time to get all my homework done on the job, and get to class after work in the morning. It worked fairly well. I was able to carry 18 units, work full-time, and maintain a 3.5 GPA. My grades might have been better were it not for the fact that it also afforded an opportunity for my friends to find me, and come visit at any time during the night when all other smart people were sleeping.
Friends near and far came to see me at all hours. The guys from the bay area would get a bug up their butt and drive down to see the ocean, and they knew where to find me. We spent hours inside that box in those days, filling it with smoke (one memorable Christmas night in particular), filling it with laughter. It was certainly one of the best jobs I ever had. One of my most frequent visitors was Omar. He would come by “the box” with his portable stereo with music in it that he absolutely needed me to hear. He introduced me to Nirvana, Blue Cheer, Iggy and the Stooges, and Greenday when Dookie was new. He sometimes brought his guitar and would just hang out for hours talking about his girlfriend, music, his band, and the joys of masturbation (he may have been a little OCD). Once he brought his band, and we used 8mm camcorders to record a video in the convenience store. We had the drums set up by the beer coolers, a bass player wandering the isles, and Omar standing on top of the ice cream freezer. After reviewing the tapes they weren’t satisfied, and later we found that the grainy security camera footage made the best music video of all. So we stole the tape.
Having nothing better to do, Omar began to travel with me after a while and met all my bay area friends. He was an instant favorite of theirs as well. Sometimes he would drive the 200 mile round trip with me to pick up my son for the weekend. I will never forget the day, near the end of our long and drawn out custody battle, that I introduced Omar to my son’s mother. She and I had not been talking much since her marriage. I think she had really hoped to simplify her life by getting married and having her new husband adopt her son. I think that having a seventeen-year-old around every other weekend to take the kid away was becoming a real nuisance for them, and it screwed with her plan for simplicity. She was looking for any good reason to keep me away.
We walked to the door with cautious looks around. Her husband and I were likely to exchange words at that time. I hoped he wasn’t there. Before we could even knock the door opened. Both of them were there with my son. As my little boy ran to give me a hug, I introduced Omar. Before I could even think about it, and as soon as they pretended it was nice to meet him, through ears that didn’t even feel like mine I heard “Hey man, do you know where I can score some heroin?”
I have never in my life secured a child in a car seat and driven away so quickly with what I swear was a single motion. It must have been quite a sight to the shocked observers in the doorway. We laughed for at least sixty miles. Our next day in court was two weeks away.
Good times.
The community college system in the United States, particularly in California, is a very interesting system. Sometimes called “Junior Colleges,” these institutions serve primarily returning students (i.e. old people in college for the first time) and slackers who couldn’t, or wouldn’t go to a real university after high school, and who still lived with their parents. I belonged to this second species.
When I quit high school at sixteen, I had a job delivering pizza and playing poker in the relatively small community of Salinas, California. Ill-content to resign myself to this fate eternally, and thinking it a good idea to provide some kind of example to my one-year-old baby son, I decided to enroll in courses at the community college. A small part of me thought it was cool to “buck the system” and start “college” at sixteen. There was no way “the man” was going to tell me where to go to school.
Starting classes at the community college was a great experience for me. It gave me the excuse and opportunity to take steps toward actions that later in life would prove to be critical for defining my character. During those years, for example, I had lunch with my mother almost every day. And after a troubled adolescence she and I were able to form a new and strong relationship which endures to this day. But that is the topic for another essay. These years ushered me into the world of frequent travel that may very well have been prophetic for the odd life I live today. I lived in Salinas, my son lived in another city roughly a hundred miles away, and many of my best friends had gone to real college in other cities even further away. Community college schedules afforded me the opportunity to frequently drive my own miniature version of Kerouac’s amazing triangle. My parents never knew where I was. And finally, after ten years of having older friends, and wishing I had been placed two grades ahead, I found myself there. I reunited with, and spent much time with many of my older friends from high school who had legitimately graduated the year before.
One of these friends was Omar. Omar had been “that weird punk kid” in high school. He was the only child of an otherwise traditional Chicano family in Salinas, and was a musical genius. He played guitar, in the words of Sublime, “like a mother-fucking riot.” That is the best way to describe it. He had been playing since he was about four years old. And having been a wannabe guitarist since my early teen years, I envied his skill. He could play anything and make it look easy.
Not having any good ideas for his future after high school Omar also took a stab at community college. And we became infrequent friends. Because I was always driving from one city to another at this time, all my friends (and girlfriends) tended to be infrequent. The people who really connected with me though, always knew where to find me. And many of them would travel with me sometimes from place to place. Omar was one of these friends.
Omar had a band called Illegal Cable Box. Illegal Cable Box played once or twice a month at the small all-ages clubs in Monterey. They, and Omar, who really was the band, specialized in the new and emerging grunge scene, but maintained solid roots in punk and acid rock. Omar was a little crazy and unpredictable. He frequently made a scene at his shows, by yelling insults at the crowd, or taking his clothes off, or throwing things. In his spare time Omar worked at Subway, building sandwiches, with his girlfriend. And he began to take fewer and fewer classes, eventually dropping out all together. Omar defined love in very simple terms. He often told me he knew he loved his girl because if she asked, he would not hesitate to pick her nose for her. I think he makes a good point (weak pun unintended). He knew she loved him because she put up with him. Omar didn’t do drugs. He barely drank. But he had the best line, the best ice breaker I ever heard. Whenever he met someone new, whoever it was, he always asked the person the same question. He said “Hey man, do you know where I can score some heroin?”
He reasoned that an individual’s response to this question would instantly tell him everything he really wanted to know about them. He would know immediately whether he wanted to continue a relationship with said person in any way. He used this line often. He was not, of course, actually looking to score heroin. He couldn’t have afforded it if he had been answered in the affirmative. I saw him do this many times. And the thing I loved about it the most was that he never got an affirmative answer, not even as a joke. Apparently the question was so off-putting upon initial introduction that it even caught smart-asses off their guard. The responses always ranged from an obviously shocked “NO” to a casual “nah man sorry.” The second answer was the one he was looking for. Those people were his friends. I loved that guy.
About this time I was entering into a little custody battle over my oldest son. His mother found an older guy to marry, and was under the impression that a sixteen or seventeen-year-old dad was something her baby could do without. Her new husband in his late twenties would make a fine father. But because my name was on the birth certificate, they had to hire a lawyer to try and get rid of me. Having been a loving father to my son thus far, I decided to give them a run for their money, and stake my claim as a legitimate parent to the boy. I figured that at the very least when he grew up he would be glad to know that loser wasn’t really his father.
Because of the impending drama, I decided to go a little more legitimate with my fledgling career in pizza and poker. And although poker had paid my rent once or twice, I decided to give it up to take a job as a night time attendant at a gas station convenience store. This job was supposed to allow me time to get all my homework done on the job, and get to class after work in the morning. It worked fairly well. I was able to carry 18 units, work full-time, and maintain a 3.5 GPA. My grades might have been better were it not for the fact that it also afforded an opportunity for my friends to find me, and come visit at any time during the night when all other smart people were sleeping.
Friends near and far came to see me at all hours. The guys from the bay area would get a bug up their butt and drive down to see the ocean, and they knew where to find me. We spent hours inside that box in those days, filling it with smoke (one memorable Christmas night in particular), filling it with laughter. It was certainly one of the best jobs I ever had. One of my most frequent visitors was Omar. He would come by “the box” with his portable stereo with music in it that he absolutely needed me to hear. He introduced me to Nirvana, Blue Cheer, Iggy and the Stooges, and Greenday when Dookie was new. He sometimes brought his guitar and would just hang out for hours talking about his girlfriend, music, his band, and the joys of masturbation (he may have been a little OCD). Once he brought his band, and we used 8mm camcorders to record a video in the convenience store. We had the drums set up by the beer coolers, a bass player wandering the isles, and Omar standing on top of the ice cream freezer. After reviewing the tapes they weren’t satisfied, and later we found that the grainy security camera footage made the best music video of all. So we stole the tape.
Having nothing better to do, Omar began to travel with me after a while and met all my bay area friends. He was an instant favorite of theirs as well. Sometimes he would drive the 200 mile round trip with me to pick up my son for the weekend. I will never forget the day, near the end of our long and drawn out custody battle, that I introduced Omar to my son’s mother. She and I had not been talking much since her marriage. I think she had really hoped to simplify her life by getting married and having her new husband adopt her son. I think that having a seventeen-year-old around every other weekend to take the kid away was becoming a real nuisance for them, and it screwed with her plan for simplicity. She was looking for any good reason to keep me away.
We walked to the door with cautious looks around. Her husband and I were likely to exchange words at that time. I hoped he wasn’t there. Before we could even knock the door opened. Both of them were there with my son. As my little boy ran to give me a hug, I introduced Omar. Before I could even think about it, and as soon as they pretended it was nice to meet him, through ears that didn’t even feel like mine I heard “Hey man, do you know where I can score some heroin?”
I have never in my life secured a child in a car seat and driven away so quickly with what I swear was a single motion. It must have been quite a sight to the shocked observers in the doorway. We laughed for at least sixty miles. Our next day in court was two weeks away.
Good times.
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