When I was a kid, I wanted to be a paleontologist and dig up dinosaur bones. Or a disc jockey like Jim Ladd, weaving song sequences into stories – mix tapes on the radio. Or a newspaper columnist like Jack Smith of the Los Angeles Times, who wrote first-person essays on any topic he pleased: travel, grammar, gardening, World War II.
I never pursued the first two careers, but I did have a go at the third. In college I wrote a biweekly column for the UCLA Daily Bruin, which had an official circulation of 22,000. It garnered the occasional fan letter, and I was recognized on campus from my photo. I was on my way to ink-stained stardom, right?
I used the columns to enter a Rolling Stone college journalism contest…and lost. Then I wrote for a free local music magazine…which folded. Then I used America Online to bombard friends with my thoughts on the OJ Simpson verdict and my nephew's circumcision…but gave up for lack of encouragement (in my warped perception at the time).
To make a long timeline short…in 2009, with this blog, I finally have it better than Jack Smith ever did. He had thousands of devoted readers, but his audience was limited to those who subscribed to the LA Times or its partners. I may have only a dozen occasional readers, but my potential audience is literally billions.
Imagine how valuable it would be if we had access to the thoughts and opinions of actual peasants in the 14th century (instead of just Chaucer), or shepherds in 100 AD (not just the Apostles), or early warriors in 3000 BC (rather than the historically suspect oral tradition of Gilgamesh). That's the equivalent of what future archivists will have from 100 million regular yahoos like me who have blogs. Wolffe Tracks is my binary beachhead in the world to come.
Even when today's Internet evolves into something we can scarcely begin to imagine, our rudimentary 21st century websites will still exist in a memory cache somewhere, perhaps even in e-museums. Imagine…every tweet, text, post and podcast will still be floating out there on the data sea in a thousand years.
President Obama accepted his Nobel Peace Prize today, and I got a little thrill up my leg (to paraphrase Chris Matthews) when I heard him utter this matter-of-fact line about early humans:
War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man. At the dawn of history, its morality was not questioned; it was simply a fact, like drought or disease -- the manner in which tribes and then civilizations sought power and settled their differences.
My guess is that evangelicals felt similar thrills whenever President Bush referred to "the Almighty" or slipped Biblical phrases into his speeches – because he was validating their faith-based beliefs.
I felt a thrill because Obama's words tell me he has evidence-based beliefs, that he accepts evolution as easily as he accepts gravity and the speed of light. He understands the vast timeline of human history, and he wants to use that modern awareness (which we've gained only in the past 150 years) to improve our future.
I am incalculably relieved to have a rational, thoughtful, intelligent man as our president. Amen.
Does Judd Apatow have herpes? Because his movies joke about it an awful lot. Could this be a case of "The producer doth protest too much, methinks"?
Last weekend we watched "Pineapple Express" (which Apatow produced and co-wrote), and it's got a recurring gag about a character's bruised lip actually being herpes. In "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" (which Apatow produced), the womanizing rock star Aldous Snow casually mentions his infection. And way back in "Freaks & Geeks" (which Apatow co-wrote and co-directed), the high school guidance counselor uses his recurring outbreaks as a cautionary tale.
I don't remember "Knocked Up" or "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" well enough to say if they contain herpes jokes as well, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Herpes is a reliable laugh line. Genital warts can't be cured either, but they don't have a funny-sounding name. HIV also has no cure, but it can kill you and is therefore not funny. Chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, crabs…all can be cured with shots or creams, leaving herpes as the only reliable punch line in the bunch, the go-to STD for big laughs. We should all thank Judd Apatow (whether he has it or not) for bringing out into the open a virus that one-fifth of Americans have, but no one likes to talk about.
Having just turned 40 years old, I've decided to embrace my mediocrity. I've always known I'm only average in the looks department (although I do have height going for me), but it's only recently that I realized I'm not all that bright anymore. The younger, cleverer me said it best when he came up with this witticism: "I was never as smart as I thought I was, and I'm a lot dumber than I used to be."
Whereas I used to be able to recite Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" from memory (all 108 lines), now I struggle with remembering the simplest names, facts and details. Whereas I used to defend my opinions by citing chapter and verse from Shakespeare (the English major's version of the scientific method), now I just shrug and make wild generalizations based on subjective hunches.
One could argue that instant recall is not as important in the long run as learning to accept one's place in the universe with humility, but it's still sad (and kind of embarrassing) to have to bear witness to my brain's diminished elasticity. I wanted to say "slippers," but what came out of my mouth was "sneakers." I grabbed the cat food container from the closet and took it to the laundry room with me instead of the detergent. Seriously. I've also gotten a lot crabbier with age. I used to be optimistic about the future of humankind, but now I complain with the rest of my old fogey brethren that the young punks of today can't write or spell, they listen to crappy fake music, they watch terrible game shows-cum-talent contests, and they fill their bodies with chemical junk (food, drink, pharmaceuticals). See what I mean about wild generalizations?
But starting today, I'm throwing in my middle-aged towel and declaring it's all gonna be good. Humanity is doing fine! Kids today are no dumber than any previous generation. They'll stop global warming and solve our energy needs. They'll save the precious few remaining polar bears and snow leopards. They'll figure out how to transfer human consciousness into silicon, granting us all immortality and negating the need for healthy bodies and a clean environment in the first place. Cultural selection will replace natural selection, and the dominant cold-blooded memes of today (religions, governments, corporations) will eventually go the way of the dinosaurs, replaced by nimbler warm-blooded memes like science, Taoism and love.
See how easy that was? I used my mediocre intellect to make a series of staggeringly vast and bizarre assumptions about life, the universe and everything, and then I called it a day. My mind can rest easy, knowing that all is right with the world. Now it's sleepy time.
Here is a little background on my recently published novel, Love Song Journey. Enjoy!
QUESTION: What led you to write Love Song Journey?
ANSWER: In my early 30s I had a good job, my own apartment, a nice car, and I took amazing vacations all over the world, but inside I wanted to die. I wasn't consciously suicidal; I just didn't want to be alive anymore. I thought the world would be better off without me. And it didn't make any sense because from all appearances you would think I had a great life.
QUESTION: Did you figure out what the problem was?
ANSWER: Not immediately, but I realized something was seriously out of balance between how my life looked from the outside and how I felt inside. So in 2004 I quit my job, moved out of my apartment, stored my belongings in my parents' garage, and went backpacking for five months in Australia and New Zealand.
QUESTION: What was that like?
ANSWER: It saved my life. I felt a huge burden of expectations being lifted from my shoulders, even if that burden had been self-imposed. I'd gotten into this rut of comparing myself to my friends, and getting depressed because I didn't have the same things they had. But when I got out of that mindset and into the completely different environment of traveling on my own in a foreign country for an extended period of time, I was able to relax and feel more comfortable in my own skin. I didn't suddenly become enlightened or mature – you could argue the opposite happened – but that was the whole point of going: I wanted to enjoy myself for five months without worrying about where I fit in the world.
QUESTION: When did the book start taking shape?
ANSWER: I've always been a writer, and I kept a handwritten journal throughout the trip. When I got back to the U.S. I decided to use those entries as a framework to retrace my life and figure out where it had gone so wrong that I wanted to die. And a lot of those wrong turns had to do with my ongoing shame at having a perfectly natural, healthy libido.
QUESTION: Ah yes, sex. Your book is full of it. The main character loses his virginity in the first chapter. He has phone sex and one-night stands, uses escort services, and compares oral sex to receiving Communion. And perhaps most significantly, he contracts herpes and spends much of the book dealing with the consequences. Are you trying to tell us something?
ANSWER: And another character has genital warts. When I wrote the book I wasn't thinking about how horribly embarrassing it would be for others to read. I just wanted to create something honest. It was very important to me to put forth the proposition that we're all normal, that no one should be ashamed of their sexuality, regardless of their circumstances.
QUESTION:Love Song Journey is labeled fiction, but you keep referring to your own life when talking about it. Can you clarify what's real and what's made up?
ANSWER: It started out as nonfiction, and under different circumstances it might have been published that way. But the more I wrote, it just made sense to change a detail here or create a composite character there. I wasn't writing an autobiography. I was taking certain experiences from my three-dimensional life and shaping them into the story of a two-dimensional literary character.
QUESTION: Can you give us a plot summary?
ANSWER: The protagonist, Edward True, is a typically horny teenage boy. He wants to be promiscuous, and despite his awkwardness and tendency to over-analyze, occasionally he succeeds. Then he gets herpes, which has no cure, and has to cope with the physical and emotional aftermath. He stumbles through marriage and online dating, then declares he doesn't need sex at all, which of course backfires. He reaches a crisis point and decides that to save his life he needs to chuck his job and apartment and go backpacking Down Under. One of the women from his past gives him a journal to write in while he's traveling, and his entries form chapters that alternate with the novel's narrative of his life up to that point. So in the last narrative chapter he's about to leave for the backpacking trip, and in the last journal chapter he's about to come home.
QUESTION: Does it have a happy ending?
ANSWER: I think it has a realistic ending. Edward makes peace with his past and embraces who he is in the present. He realizes that being envious of other people is an unhealthy way to live. And he invites the reader to join him on that journey of self-acceptance, to examine their own lives and accept who they are – warts and all.
As promised, here's the second set of photos from my 2004-2005 backpacking trip, which became the foundation for Love Song Journey.
I always find foreigners and different cultures interesting when I travel, but when it comes to taking photos I'm much more of a landscape guy – and New Zealand is a topographer's paradise. Even my crappy camera (in my crappy hands) managed to get some decent shots.
The Craters of the Moon near Taupo (that's geothermal steam, not fog):
The Franz Josef Glacier. I recently saw a much more impressive glacier photo covering an entire wall at the Denver airport, but this one is MINE, dammit:
A view of the Otago Peninsula from my future bedroom window:
The Moeraki Boulders (or food baskets from a wrecked canoe, if you prefer the Maori legend):
The aptly named Nugget Point on the Catlins Coast:
Milford Sound (technically a fiord):
Glenorchy, and two of the happiest fishermen in the world:
Lake Harris on the Routeburn Track:
You can view more of my New Zealand photos on Facebook.
My father died last week. He was 84 and in failing health for the past two years. Kim and I flew out to Orange County for the funeral, and I delivered this tribute at his memorial service (insert laughs or tears where appropriate):
Once upon a time, my parents were in London and had to get on the subway. Dad stepped onto the train but Mom wasn't fast enough, and the door closed between them. So now Dad is on the train, and Mom is on the platform outside. The subway begins to move. Mom doesn't want to get left behind in a foreign city, so she does the first thing that comes into her mind: She grabs onto the outside of the subway car. Now I wasn't there, but I imagine she looked like one of those stuffed Garfields people put on their cars. So there goes the subway down the track, toward the tunnel, and there goes my mom toward certain death. Dad looks out the window, sees his wife clinging to the outside of the car, banging on the glass, and quickly pulls the emergency cord and stops the entire train.
That was Dad in a nutshell. A less rational man might have panicked, but he knew exactly what to do to save the day. Over the years the three of us kids went to him with all manner of growing pains – speeding tickets, car accidents, arrests – actually those were all me, but I'm sure my siblings had their share of problems as well. And Dad was always the rock on which to regain our footing and venture forth into the world once more. Mom was the comforting one, and Dad was the practical one who told us how to fix the mess we'd gotten ourselves into.
When I was a preteen, Dad would come to me and start to feel around my head with his hands. I'd ask what he was doing, and he'd say, "I'm feeling for the horns." That was his way of saying, your brother and sister turned into little devils when they became teenagers, and it's going to happen to you too. And although I denied it, eventually he was proven right when I grew a modest set of horns of my own.
In my early 20s I was engaged to be married, and sometimes I thought about my dad's first marriage. "Silly old man," I thought. "He didn't know what he was doing. I do." A few years later, after the marriage and subsequent divorce, I realized I had followed in his footsteps more than I had wanted to admit was possible.
By my mid 30s I had come to accept that I might never be in love or get married again, and I was OK with that. A few years later, after falling in love again and marrying Kim, I realize I have once again followed in my father's footsteps, down to the exact age of 39 when we both remarried.
Clearly there was something going on. Information was being passed, some of it conscious, some of it not. He loved to travel, I love to travel. He took lots of photos, I take tons of photos. He loved bacon, I love tons of bacon. And on a less superficial level, if Dad had been a writer like myself, I would not be at all surprised to find that we went through many of the same experiences, felt many of the same emotions, and harbored many of the same questions.
I'm constantly reminded of Dad's influence on me. Sometimes I hold our cat Charlie's head in my hands and touch noses with him, and I remember he did the same thing with our dog Toppy. When Kim and I go for a drive I like to rest my hand on her thigh, and I can picture Dad doing the same thing with Mom on our vacations and road trips.
Which reminds me of another story: My parents were on a cruise and went to see one of the onboard performances. Dad wanted to be affectionate, so while they watched the show he slowly worked his hand under my mom’s thigh, between her leg and the seat cushion. Which was all fine and romantic, until he looked over and realized he'd chosen the wrong person. Mom was on his other side, and the woman whose bottom he was fondling was nonplussed to say the least.
On more than one occasion in family discussions, Dad said he defined God as the unknown, and every time we figured out how something worked, we stopped attributing that phenomenon to God. He may have changed his mind in later years, or perhaps he told my mom things he never told us, but going by those earlier declarations, that may be one area where we differed. I define God as the sum total of all the matter and all the energy that ever existed, from the birth of the universe to the end of time. So I attribute everything to God, whether or not we know how it works or why it happens.
But however you define God or immortality, there's no denying that my father's legacy lives on. He's in the DNA of his children and grandchildren. His actions altered the lives of thousands of people over the course of eight decades, in ways that we don't know how to quantify. And simply by living his life, my father contributed himself, his example, to the ever-growing definition of humanity – and in so doing, he gave me the opportunity to live my life and to contribute my definition as well.
So Dad, thank you for your life, and thank you for my life. I hope you could look back at the end and be well pleased with what you accomplished. We're all headed your way eventually, which means that once again you're showing me how not to be afraid of what's to come.
In November 2004 I traveled on my own to Australia and New Zealand. The handwritten journal I kept during those five months of backpacking became the foundation of Love Song Journey. My photography skills back then were even more amateurish than they are now, plus I still had a film camera, which limited how many pictures I could take conveniently. Luckily I came across so many gorgeous sights that I still ended up with lots of memorable images, some of which are posted below. (You can also view the complete photo album on Facebook. I'll get to New Zealand at a later date.) A flock of rainbow lorikeets taking a birdbath in front of the Raglan Tavern in Queensland:
The waterfront in Cairns:
The Devils Marbles in the Outback:
The aptly named Remarkable Rocks on Kangaroo Island:
Eucalyptus trees at the Bay of Fires, Tasmania:
A very, very content Tasmanian devil:
A jellyfish washed up on Maria Island, off the coast of Tasmania:
The ruined church at Port Arthur, a 19th century penal colony in Tasmania:
While I was finishing the rough draft of Love Song Journey in the spring of 2006, Kim was reading a newly published memoir called "Eat, Pray, Love." From the way she described it, it sounded sort of similar to my book: The author took an extended leave of absence from her unhappy life to travel to several foreign countries, then came home and wrote a book about how the experience had changed her for the better. I was intrigued but didn't read it because I didn't want it to affect my writing.
A year later, after "Eat, Pray, Love" had become a bestseller and everyone and their sister was raving about it, a co-worker gave me her copy. Reading it proved to be quite unnerving; I had to make a list to keep track of the details in the author's life (and book) that matched mine:
--We both chose the number of chapters in our books intentionally (hers 108, mine 42). --We both include our dreams, poems and journal entries. --We both compare our joy in travel to a friend's joy in having a child. --We both mention having eight-year-old nephews back in the States. --We both describe our first halting attempt at prayer. --We both include a list of countries that begin with "i." --We both quote REM's "Losing My Religion." --We both like Bruce Springsteen and Bill Clinton. --We both get in digs at George W. Bush, Iraq and the 2000 election. --We were both single, divorced, childless, white American writers born in 1969 who left home at 34 to travel the globe, turned 35 while overseas, and found happiness by sleeping with a Brazilian at the end of the trip.
Creepy, innit? I wrote to Elizabeth Gilbert's agent in case she wanted to represent a similar story from the male perspective. Her agency sent back a generic rejection the next morning. Of course, there are also significant differences between our books. Gilbert sold hers ahead of time and traveled on the advance payment; I had no book deal and financed my travel with savings. I chose to use a fictional name for my protagonist, which allowed me to create composite characters, move events in time and place, alter details and make up dialogue without too much worry about "getting it right." My book focuses heavily on the backstory before the overseas trip; hers only references it here and there. My book is occasionally pornographic; hers is strictly PG. My reclamation of sexual freedom is a stereotypically male happy ending; her falling in love is a stereotypically female happy ending.
And the biggest difference of all: "Eat, Pray, Love" has sold over 4 million copies, and Julia Roberts is making the movie. I published "Love Song Journey" myself, and so far it's sold approximately nine copies.
Am I envious? Hell fucking yeah. But not so much that I won't get over it. If my self-esteem depended on book sales, I would be in no better condition now than I was during the period I wrote about in the book itself, when I was absolutely miserable but tried to convince myself I was a worthy person because my salary afforded me fancy vacations and other material acquisitions. For the past several years I've been content with my life, and writing "Love Song Journey" was key to changing my perspective. That's what I call success.
So good on ya, Mrs. Gilbert. Kim and I will put "Eat, Pray, Love" in our Netflix queue as soon as it comes out, and I'll be celebrating your happy ending with the rest of the audience.
I won't claim it's the Great American Novel -- or even a Grape Bavarian Hovel, which I vowed to create as a teenager. But it is a good book full of sex, love and rock & roll. It's got epic travel stories and relationship dramas. It's got way-too-personal diary entries to please voyeurs. It's got poetry worthy of any modern anthology (I spared readers the bulk of my early work). Here's the blurb on the back cover:
Follow Edward True as he moves from college to the workplace, from relationship to relationship, and to the far reaches of the globe in pursuit of ultimate answers. Why is he still alive? What is happiness? Is sex necessary? Picking up clues at home, abroad and within, he starts to piece together a larger picture of who he is and where he's headed. Sometimes the journey is the destination.
Doesn't exactly scream bestseller, does it? This was one of the problems with not getting a traditional book deal: I had no one to advise me on writing jacket copy. An expert would probably have said, "Mention the hookers! People will buy the book if they think it's got herpes, hookers and hand jobs."
But (the artist in me protests), it's not about those things, although they're in there. It's about life, and one person trying to make sense of that life. That's it. The rest is commentary.
Here are links to the book on Barnes & Noble and Amazon. It's also available oniUniverse (the publisher) as both a paperback and ebook. Thanks for reading.
~@~
PS -- The book has no dedication page because the entire story is my dedication (as well as my supplication and absolution). But unofficially it belongs to Meeko, my beautiful boy who passed away in 2004. This one's for you:
I've never made much of an effort to see politicians in action. I adored Clinton in the '90s and abhorred Bush in the '00s, but never did anything to support one or impeach the other. The closest I ever got to political activism was holding up a Dukakis sign when Bush the Elder drove by after a presidential debate on the UCLA campus in the fall of 1988. But in the past year I've found myself more engaged than ever before, and I don't know if it's a coincidence, a sign of getting older, or a natural part of living in the Midwest.
It started last summer, shortly after I moved from California to Minnesota. Kim and I happened to attend the Iowa State Fair the same day as John McCain, and I got to shake his hand and take a photo with him. It was terribly exciting, even though I didn't support his candidacy for president.
A few months later, just before the election, I went to a campaign rally in Minneapolis and had brief conversations with former Vice President Walter Mondale, future Senator Al Franken and current Senator Amy Klobuchar. But the biggest kahuna at the event was the Democratic messiah himself, Bill Clinton. He made his way along the barriers after the rally, and when he got to me he stood there with his arms outstretched in a Jesus Christ pose and let the worshiping masses paw him as he carried on a conversation with someone next to me. Charisma flowed from his body like loose electricity and sparked in all directions.
Last month Kim and I went to the Minnesota State Fair and met Senator Klobuchar again; this time I asked her to extend the soon-to-expire credit for first-time homebuyers because we're not ready to buy a house yet. The next night we went to a townhall meeting on healthcare reform held our representative, Betty McCollum. My ticket number wasn't called, but I was ready to ask her how Democrats could prevent Republicans from watering down the bill under the guise of bipartisanship and then voting against it anyway.
And that brings me to yesterday, and hopefully another Democratic messiah: Barack Obama. He came to the Target Center in downtown Minneapolis to deliver a healthcare pep talk in front of 15,000 voters who already agreed with him. There were numerous Obama shirts in the audience (including the one on me), and the energized crowd even did a synchronized wave, something usually reserved for rock concerts. Godspeed, Mr. President. Pay no attention to the ignorant, the fearful, the racists, the anti-Christians, the hate-mongers and the ratings whores. Keep fighting the good fight – for compassion, for progress, for the long arc of the moral universe that bends toward justice.
When I was a teenager and terrified of dying, I did the math and figured out that if wanted to live in three centuries, I needed to be alive on Jan. 1, 2101 – the first day of the 22nd century. So I began telling people I was going to live to 131.
I had no idea at the time what a drag it is getting old. I'm not even 40 yet and I can already feel entropy collecting its past-due payments on my physique, stamina and inner workings. I have colitis and asthma and probably a hernia. I no longer want to reach the 22nd century if it means being wheelchair-bound, eating through an IV drip, using a catheter and colostomy bag, having skin that rips like tissue paper, and losing all my memories of being young and immortal.
I don't think that growing dependent on technology and the kindness of others was even an option before a few hundred years ago. When you could no longer take care of yourself, you died. Prolonging life at all costs has become a prized goal in modern American culture, regardless of the quality of that life, and for a long time I wanted that for myself as well. But there's something to be said for those who choose to wander off into the forest on the failing strength of their own two feet, never to return.
I get the fear-of-death thing, I do. Nobody wants to die. Some of us fight it with exercise, diet and medicine. Some of us try to deny it with religion. Some of us try to trick it by creating art that will outlast us. And some of us simply shrug our shoulders and get on with the business of living.
I want to live as long as I can follow what's happening in the world. Have we stopped killing each other over gods and oil? Has the global population stabilized? Have machines overtaken us in intelligence and morality? We're all witness to the greatest story ever told, and I can't wait to see what happens next. When my time is up some other kid will pick up where I left off, and he’ll be just as in love with humanity as I was. It's not about me or him. It's about the story.
I love paying taxes, and you know why? Because I love getting free CDs from the library. And while I’m not a big reader anymore, Kim checks out several books every week, saving us hundreds of dollars a month.
I love paying taxes, and you know why? Because I love getting in my car and driving on the roads that stretch across the country. I have a map of the United States on which I’ve highlighted all the roads I’ve driven on, and from California to the Midwest it’s one big beautiful tangle of orange. I’ve got a decent head start on the rest of the country, but there’s still a lot more to cover.
I love paying taxes, and you know why? Because I like knowing I can call 911 and have the police or fire department come to my aid. I haven’t had a real emergency yet, but I did call once about a piece of furniture on the freeway.
I love paying taxes, and you know why? Because they enabled me to get an education until I was 18. College was expensive enough.
I love paying taxes, and you know why? Because I want the food I eat, the water I drink and the air I breathe to be safe.
Do you know what corporations want? The prime objective of a food manufacturer is making money, not feeding people. The prime objective of a health insurer is making money, not healing people. The prime objective of Wall Street is making money, not making YOU money. If our laws allowed poison to be sold to infants for a tidy profit, someone would do it. Hey, we're just following the law! Corporations are structured to survive and grow just like humans, and even murder can become the price of doing business.
Government may not be perfect, but it is composed of us. We can choose to have a tax-funded government that fights to keep its citizens safe, healthy and educated, or we can choose to have a tax-starved government that leaves everyone alone to fend for themselves. We can choose to regulate businesses so they don’t profit from serving us harmful food or denying us healthcare, or we can let them run roughshod over us. It’s our choice, but we can’t expect for-profit companies to ever look out for our best interests.
This article on Slate.com by William Saletan says everything I tried to say in this blog post a few months ago, only much much better.
To summarize (somewhat accurately, I hope): It starts with the fact that the universe obeys certain immutable scientific laws that can be observed and understood. Then it moves on to the fact that the evolution of life on Earth was also guided by a framework of principles we are still discovering -- such as similar but physically separated climates and geographies resulting in similar organisms inhabiting those niches.
And then comes the great leap forward: If the natural unfolding of the universe (chemical evolution) gave rise to organic life (biological evolution), perhaps humanity is now giving rise to the third stage of history: cultural evolution, in which information bypasses physical matter altogether and is passed from one generation to the next in the form of memes instead of genes.
Dude.
At a time when there's so much dumbing down in our culture, when politics has become an idiocracy, awesome articles like this give me hope for the future of our species.
~@~
As usual, Dan Savage is spot on (fourth letter down) when it comes to explaining the tragedy in Pittsburgh, in which a sexually frustrated, fucked-up middle-aged man relieved his pain by killing himself along with three women in a gym. Why does our country devalue sex workers? They are doing the Lord's work.
~@~
Brad Pitt had this to say when asked about T-shirts urging him to run for mayor of New Orleans:
"I'm running on the gay-marriage, no-religion, legalization-and-taxation-of-marijuana platform. I don't have a chance."
A screen shot of the cover art for my forthcoming novel, Love Song Journey:
The painting is called "Cloudy Day in Rainbowland," and it was painted in the late 1980s by an artist named Daniel Kam. I came across it when it was included in an art insert in the UCLA Daily Bruin, and I loved it so much that I cut it out and put it on my wall. The paper has gotten a little damaged over the past 20 years and you can see a wrinkle in the middle, but it's near the spine and I don't think it detracts from the image's overall impact.
From the time I started writing Love Song Journey four years ago, I wanted to use this painting as the cover. I tried Googling Daniel's name several times without success. When it came time to pick a cover a few months ago, I chose a backup painting that was centuries old and in the public domain, but in a last-ditch effort I emailed all the Daniel Kams on Facebook who looked plausible (i.e., not teenagers). Only one wrote back -- but it was the right one.
So I finally got permission to use the cover art I'd wanted all along, which wouldn't have been possible if I'd published any earlier. See, all that procrastination was worth it!
The book is going through final formatting corrections and should be available for sale soon.
It's been 11 months since my last white squirrel post, so I thought I should provide an update.
According to our building's managers, two white squirrels died during the winter. Despite those losses, there are still at least two that I've seen at the same time this summer, and the bigger one looks the same as in the link above. I haven't been able to get that close to him again, but here are two photos from last week as he moved through the pine tree next to our balcony:
And these are hot off the camera, just over an hour ago:
In the space of one week about a month ago, I was friended by two women on Facebook, and I friended two others. It’s what the four women had in common that made the timing so interesting.
The first to friend me was a girl I had a crush on in ninth grade. We sat near each other in different periods of science class, and initially communicated by scribbling on the desktop. Eventually the writing migrated to notes we left for each other in a book under the desk. I thought she was the bomb but way out of my league. One day my mom dropped me off at a house the girl was babysitting at, and we spent the afternoon together…being nervous and doing nothing in particular. At one point we were playing with a rubber ball and fell together onto a seat, her with her arms wrapped around me from behind. If I had been trained for that sort of moment I might have known what to do next, but I was not, and I didn’t. So I got up and walked away to hide my, ahem, excitement. A year later I wrote a short story called “12 Notes,” which I still have – along with the original notes.
The second to friend me was another teenage crush – the first girl I ever French-kissed. She was 14 and I was almost 17. One night I walked a few blocks to her house while her parents were out, and we spent the evening together…being nervous and doing nothing in particular. When her parents’ return grew imminent we said goodnight, and for the first time in what would become a supremely uncool habit, I asked permission to kiss her. She said yes. I went home and spent several paragraphs describing the kiss in my journal. A year later we went on a single date, kissed again, and that was the end of that.
At the other end of the friending spectrum, I reached out to my ex-wife, to whom I had been a complete asshole, and to a very special ex-girlfriend, with whom I had a tumultuous, two-year, on-off entanglement. My ex-wife and I had more or less reconciled after the divorce, but I hadn’t talked or written to her in over a decade. I hadn’t communicated with the ex-girlfriend in over a decade, either. Both seemed happy to hear from me.
All four of these women are married and/or have children now. I’ve remarried. Life goes on. Time dims both crushes and the crush of heartbreak. The situation reminds me of Fleetwood Mac, where everyone slept with everyone else, broke everyone else’s heart, then reunited 20 years later and toured together. I’m friends on Facebook with a dozen women I dated or otherwise hooked up with (to use the kids’ parlance these days; we used to call it “getting together”).
Once upon a time, severed romantic connections were lost forever. But in the age of Facebook and MySpace, anyone can reestablish contact with anyone from their past. That may not count as progress for those who wish to leave their past in the past, but that's not how I roll. I have always been engaged in a constant, conscious struggle to integrate my past into my present, and every day there’s more past to integrate. Making contact with former crushes and lovers on Facebook gives me more information with which to form a more accurate impression of where I've come from, and therefore where I'm going.
And to learn that a girl I desperately wanted to kiss over 20 years ago was just as nervous as me? That’s priceless.
My laptop died last month and it's put a crimp in my blogging. My apologies to anyone who's gotten tired of checking my site and seeing Dick Cheney's bio at the top. We have a new desktop PC now and I'm slowly getting my photos, videos, music files and Word docs in order.
Videos? Yep, I've started shooting the occasional low-quality amateur video: singing at a Jain temple in India, prairie dogs tussling at the Minnesota Zoo, Charlie playing with the door stopper,that sort of thing.
Last week there was a fantastic dry lightning storm in the Twin Cities, and I went out on our balcony and filmed 21 seconds of it. I've never posted a video before, so I hope this works.
