It's important to stay positive but this is a negative tailor's test.
Well shit, you might think. When you know what you have to do you might as well do it. So I made an appointment with the sports doctor and told him it was time for new xrays of my right hip. Pete and I showed up early. I brought underwear and everything, but I didn’t need it. Yoga pants were fine. The tech remembered me, curious about why I needed new xrays again so soon. She rifled through files on the wall and came up with my last films, dated 2009. After that, I bickered with a physical therapist for months, started exercising nearly every day, toned up and trimmed down. Yes, I miss dancing. Still, this past autumn was hard on my hip and back and Pete was more frustrated than I was. The doctor stared at the alarming new films and did exactly what he did last time: stutter and offer me drugs. He wrote a prescription for physical therapy, so today I went to the massage therapist I’ve been seeing weekly in the same building, then skipped – hahahahahahahaha! – across the room to describe my hilarious infirmities to the facility’s director.
Take two hip flexor stretches every four hours.
You’ll be pleased to hear the doctor’s heard of a hip replacement guru in the wilds of New York City who puts broken ballet dancers back to work. Twenty grand, he says, and I can grand jeté my way to more glamorous dotage. Surgery for me is years off, but stretching in awkward directions is in my immediate future. Everything old – including me – is new again.
Well, sort of. No matter how I firm up, I’m not going to get back the body I had in my thirties when I ate crumbs and lifted weights for two hours every day. Coming to terms with that even as you’re showing off your purple metallic folding cane to the sports doc is not as simple as it sounds. I don’t know what body I have, what body I can have, what body I will have, and there are decisions to make. Well shit, you might think. Take a damn aspirin and touch your toes. I’m thinking too much, I know. A best possible future body will arrive if I just choose an amusing soundtrack and move.
Oh look – the anthem of my teenage idealism and small town despair!
Terrible book. People will buy anything.
In retrospect, I had every reason to be desperate to leave the tiny hometown. That is a function of youthful hysteria. It is also the reason I know this is – despite what pretty much everyone else with a keyboard and a net connection has said – a terrible book. This book suffers from a very typical, avoidable problem: it was written by a grad student in the Humanities. If this book had simply picked a different author, perhaps it would have stood a chance.
If you have not lived in a college town, shared an apartment with a grad student or made the terrible mistake of marrying one, consider yourself warned. They are not regular people like you and me. You watch ESPN. I watch Jacques Pepin on PBS. Grad students are desperately broke and drink Olympia beer in cans. If you go to a party where grad students are drinking Olympia beer in cans, you will see them discuss nationalism and geography until the coolers and fridges are empty and the grad students fall over sideways, but by dinnertime, Olympia beer in cans will be floating in the coolers and hiding in the fridge again and no one will know why or how. This illustrates the principle difficulty of living near a grad student in the Humanities: they’re not going anywhere until they’ve carefully picked every fiber, every thread, every bit of lint and every smidge of dust out of a topic other grad students have been picking apart for decades. These people strain for a single original thought and if they have one write thousands of pages about it in which nobody learns anything truly useful. Your best bet is to seal the house where they live and toss in a comic book – but it better be a good one.
The mistake the book makes is assuming that a fourteen year old could have the same brain chemistry, the same field of vision and the same calm and tempered fluidity with the language as its author. I say the book makes it because the book should know better, but you see the same horseshit with the Twilight books, which REALLY should have found an author who didn’t have I WANT MY VIRGINITY BACK on the brain. We can talk about that some other time, because we’re talking about teenagers here: they’re stupid. Even the smart teenagers are stupid. Their brains do not work like your brain, even when you do something stupid. No, the premise of this stupid book is entirely backward. The stupid adult writes about a teenager smarter than she is and the book-reading, English-speaking world offers a movie deal.
Well, in some quarters that might qualify as pretty smart. As a business move, maybe it was. The book, however, is not good art and its elevation provides a window into the soul of a society eternally wishing it died young, pretty and stupid.
There is one detail we must observe. When the towers came down, an unmistakable cloud of debris, smoke and human remains rolled away from Ground Zero. We saw it. We lived under it. We could smell everything about it and knew what it meant. I’m sitting 35 miles from Manhattan and almost everyone I knew was sick and we knew it was from that cloud. At some point I can no longer recall, Christie Whitman told the media the air was safe to breathe. I didn’t believe that. I don’t see how anyone could have, but you will never hear one of the first responders say anything about this. The lie was ridiculous and transparent. In a legal sense, admitting they knew what everyone knew might invalidate health insurance claims. It shouldn’t.
The exact opposite should be true. We should see that knowledge and the first responders’ going on anyway for what it was: greater courage than most of us possess. We owe them a greater debt than we can repay and the least we can do is take care of them.
Our Civil War Isn’t Over; It’s Just Fought on Other Fronts
This post will make you want to toss your waffles. Attaturk:
Sons of Wank-archy
While we were growing up, my sister Daria often lamented, “You always gotta be different.” I didn’t have to try to be different from other people because I was different. Conformity was never even an option. That can be painful for kids; things went better and I was happier when I accepted or embraced what made me different from other people, though sometimes I have adopted habits and behaviors to hide in plain sight. To speak bluntly: I have – as you may have – developed an ear for threats from a distance. These motherfuckers may look mock-worthy, but they will have the last laugh. Why? Because as Attaturk reminds us, motherfuckers know no shame. The History Channel rejected this crackerjack load of flaming dogshit:
I don’t have to tell you that when a bunch of overarmed yahoos with enough money to make ads and buy time on network TV tells you to “think for yourself” they mean “we’ve told you what to do.” But there’s a whole lot more weirdness beyond what these mouthbreathing fuckpigs are up to – watch karoli tumble over words like Dick Van Dyck over an errant ottoman:
Celebrating the anniversary of this document is a slap in the face to every single black person in this country. NAACP South Carolina President Lonnie Randolph asked this:
“You couldn’t pay the folks in Charleston to hold a Holocaust gala, could you? But you know these are nothing but black people, so nobody pays them any attention.”
The thing is, attention isn’t being paid over on the liberal side either. It’s easy to blame bigots but they’re just doing what bigots do, because bigots get away with it and no one really gets too outraged over it. There’s plenty of outrage over human rights abuses in Uzbekistan because it’s the newest WikiLeaks focus and yet a celebration of slavery and a state’s decision to secede from the Union over it gets a shrug.
There is a growing divide opening between people of color and the white liberal “establishment” opening wide. As liberals, Democrats, progressives, or whatever you want to call this coalition, civil rights and equality have been pillars of our foundation but there’s a a big racial elephant in the Democrats’ living room.
So far, she’s just dancing, but here we go, whoops!
There is a very real perception that personal attacks on President Obama, the hyper-loud derision and wails of bitter disappointment expressed all over the Internet lately along with primary threats rolling around are symptomatic of a larger disconnect between white liberals and black liberals and threaten to fracture what is already a fragile coalition.
When the African-American unemployment rate is 16%, 13 months of extended unemployment insurance feels like a godsend even if it means having to cede tax rates and a compromised estate tax. They don’t see the deal as a sellout; indeed, they view it as an essential emergency parachute. When the African-American unemployment rate was 10% we were living in what could be reasonably considered a good economy. At least, good for everyone but them. Problem is, no one was paying attention to them. Not really.
It may be an insult to celebrate slavery and the 1860s, but a greater sting may be the general apathy toward the economic desperation of the African-American community. It did not develop overnight, but until the entire economy went downhill, it wasn’t on anyone’s radar either.
She means anyone who’s anyone, possibly including herself, possibly excluding herself because she’s been having conversations, but whoever anyone is, anyone isn’t paying attention.
Look, we all have an intersectionality problem. I’m A, B, C, D and Q. You’re Z, Y, X and M. Your best friend is J, R, D, M and Q. We care about completely separate things, when we care about anything at all. I care about the politics of justice, mercy, privacy and equality; if I need a reason, it’s because I can’t count on blending into the dominant culture. Maybe you can. Maybe you can’t. If you can’t, you watch the dominant culture for threats coming your way, but what about when you’re the problem?
This morning at the unnamed university, a man of my slight acquaintance called to tell me he was coming to pick up a delivery, and he used his full name. I did not recognize his voice until he told me we’d talked the day before. Later, I said to him, “Sometimes at work we know people only by their first names.” He laughed. I went on, “There’s a man in the mechanical room I’ve been talking to for 25 years and I don’t know his name at all. I can’t ask NOW.” He laughed, “It’s too late now. You can’t ask.” I agreed, “Not until we all get his retirement announcement, noooo.” So: humbling.
Let’s just admit that we’re all stupid, pretty stupid and differently stupid. We say stupid things and do stupid stuff and motherfuckers run right the hell over us. We may not have much in common, but we should at least agree that we have a common motherfucking enemy.
Someone else’s execrable week can give you a lot to think about, even someone about whom you have mixed feelings. John Cole yesterday:
I’ve had a really shitty week, so let’s have a positive thread, and think about all the things we have going for us. The topic for this thread is “Name the best thing that has ever happened to you.”
I’ll start, and since I don’t want this whole thread to be answers like “my wife” or “my husband” or “my parents,” I won’t say the best thing that ever happened to me was being born a straight white male into an educated middle class family in the United States. Not that there is wrong being any other race/sexual orientation, etc., just that being born a straight white male in our society gave me some really unarguable advantages to the extent I’m of the opinion that if you were born in the circumstances I was born in, and find your life to be a mess, you should probably look in the mirror for your biggest problem (and yes, there are always exceptions).
SO I will rule that out, and that leaves me with the Army and Lily. Going to the Army and getting yelled at and whipped into shape, then going around the world and seeing places I might never have seen, meeting a bunch of people who were different from what I was used to in WV, and then being able to use my military benefits to pay for my education was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. Until Lily came along. Yes, I love Tunch to death, and I will grudgingly admit to loving Rosie when prodded, but Lily is the greatest dog in the world and loves me to pieces. When Tunch comes into the office, he wants food or water or a brief skritch behind the ears. When Rosie comes into the office, she wants food, or to go for a walk, or a ball. When Lily comes into the office, puts her front paws on my legs, and looks at me, all she wants me to do is push the seat back a little bit so she can sit on my lap while I work.
I don’t care what you say about dogs being con artists. Lily loves me.
Man oh Manischewitz, my brain went SPLAT! I’ve been thinking about this since then and I have no answer. The best thing that ever happened to you is probably a different thing than the best thing you’ve ever done, but my life has zig zagged all over the place and has more turning points than a big city ballet school. One answer? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe I could come up with a list, starting with happening to be the ill-timed spawn of two very smart, very good-looking, athletic people, born after the invention of aspirin, antibiotics and the polio vaccine, into a family that valued books, a fast one-liner and me. After that, shit, don’t you just hope to sally forth and do something cool?
I may not come up with answers, but thinking it over is a blast. Go read the comments. Some people can formulate an answer and some of those answers will take your breath away.
Working tonight on a donation inventory for the anti-hunger project. My hands don’t work so it’s all chicken scratch. My hip hated the hours of opening boxes and frenzied jotting. For hours, I categorized and counted everything one group of my co-workers donated for a family consisting of four children and one woman. The generosity was unbelievable, not to mention the wild imagination. Finding four tiny samples of my father’s obscure, expensive, favorite French soap, I burst into tears. My faith in humanity is fucking restored.
Sometimes, people accidentally tell you what they really mean. Via Think Progress, today’s accidental truthteller is Senator Dick Durbin. Dick:
Social Security is the most important social program in America. The commission creates an actuarially sound program for an additional 75 years. It increases the minimum benefit for the lowest income Social Security recipients and adds a much needed increase in benefits for those above the age of 85. It raises the retirement age one year to 68, 40 years from now, meaning no one above the age of 28 today would be affected and the retirement age would be 69, 65 years from now. To protect those in manual labor jobs who cannot wait to retire, we create special benefit package that will still allow for early retirement.
My bold. That appeared Thursday in the Chicago Tribune. Back in October, though, he said something that explained why the hubbub, bub. Again, Dick:
Durbin said raising the retirement age would be unfair to workers who do physical labor.
“It’s tough to say just stick around and deliver mail for another couple of years, be a waitress for another couple of years,” Durbin said.
Instead he recommends boosting the percent of wages that can be taxed to fund Social Security. He said in 1983 90 percent of wages were subject to Social Security taxes and now only 83 percent are. He added that the increase would come from beneficiaries “in upper income categories or their employers.”
Also my bold, but I’ve seen that little slip widely misquoted. Okay, bear with me, my dumplings. We’ve studied the language for decades and we have our own opinions, but the fork in the road lies at the intersection of I’m not sayin’ and I’m just sayin’. Look at Durbin’s phrasing. He’s NOT saying it’s tough to stick around and deliver mail for another could of years or be a waitress for another couple of years. He’s saying it’s tough to tell people they will be doing so. A month later, he finds finds the strength. Our suffering is nothing compared to his. His heroic stand for our ability to eventually retire from jobs we can’t get or physically perform will be long forgotten by a workforce too old to work and too young to expect to be treated respectfully. Imagine being 25 and competing with Grandpa for a minimum wage gig.
Thus, Dick Durbin accidentally tells us what a dick he truly is, and what a progressive he is not.
Addendum: Shortly after I posted this, Planet Green,an entity with the words sustainable and vegetarian in its mission statement, broadcast Buzzworthy Barbecue, demonstrating that nobody knows who the hell they are and what the fuck they’re doing.
For three weeks, the lung ick and the anti-hunger project have been racing to kill me. I answered emails at 5 in the morning while gasping for breath. Sick days were notable for their number, intensity and hoarse phone calls to volunteers. I broke down and took Advil. Then Almanzo over there tossed the “What if I cut cancer class, huh?” card on the table as I was no longer able to even lie flat, so I went to the goddamn doctor. The doctor prescribed two more prescriptions than I would have been willing to take even a day earlier, then I went to take photos for the project while coughing, which means eyeliner was coursing down my cheeks. We locked up the donations and I went for a chest x-ray. Hey! No pneumonia. My sister Daria owes me five bucks!
Being sick is boring and talking about being sick is a bore. I can’t wait to have something else to talk about and a voice to talk about it in that doesn’t remind me of Joy Behar’s. There’s nothing wrong with Joy Behar’s voice, when it’s coming out of Joy Behar’s mouth, but when it’s coming out of mine, I’m looking around for Whoopi and ready to kick Elizabeth Hasselbeck’s pampered ass. After a nap, maybe…
Today is National Opt-Out Day, for whatever that’s worth. I’m opting out of receiving an unnecessary radiation bath, surrendering my Constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure and foreseeable sexual assault every day by not buying a plane ticket. Pete and I are planning a vacation, so: sorry, airline industry! No ticket money for you! But you won’t miss us, will you? If you did, procedures would probably change tout de suite. No, the police state has plans for us all, such that even I, public transportation’s fervent cheerleader, might find myself persuaded to buy another car someday.
I’m surprised to write those words, but there we are.
My friend Scout observed years ago that statistics indicated 1 in 4 women would be sexually assaulted in her lifetime, “but in my experience that number is reversed.” I agree: in conversation, when you explain what legally constitutes sexual assault, you can watch the terrible light dawn in women’s eyes. Suddenly they know an uncomfortable or traumatic memory is painful for a reason.
Estimated New Cancer Cases and Deaths by Sex for All Sites, US, 2010
Estimated New Cases
Both Sexes
All Sites 1,529,560
Male
789,620
Female
739,940
Estimated Deaths
Both Sexes
569,490
Male
299,200
Female
270,290
Last night, Pete and I watched the episode of Modern Marvels called Failed Inventions, that included a segment about radiation and consumer products that were huge mistakes. We should expect to see backscatter scanners join this list of regrettable contraptions with a body count, but what will we say about people now expected by the United States government to endure sexual assault in the name of safety?
The idea born of bed-wetting cowardice, like so many in the last ten years, is monstrous.
No, really. I’ll wait. Put up my feet…admire my cats…velcro Swiffer pads to my bunny slippers…Hey, you’re back. Now I have an entirely serious question for you:
WHAT KIND OF FUCKING BRAIN DAMAGE DO YOU HAVE TO HAVE TO VOTE AGAINST YOUR OWN INTERESTS?
No matter what anyone tells you, no matter who shouts about scaaaary brown people, no matter how many buildings blow up or “heroes” fall down on the job, do you or do you not know whose interests dovetail with yours? I do. For the simple reason that Republicans hold everything I am and do in contempt, I will never – repeat – NEVER vote for a Republican. Republicans act in concert to undermine my very existence and because I understand that I will not help them.
Democrats can either earn or lose my vote. It is owed to no one. I’ve registered Green; I feel nothing but disdain for the corporatist Dems.
What I absolutely do not understand is people so oblivious to their own best interests that they go back and forth. No one’s interests change from country club to soup kitchen and back in an election cycle; people who vote like theirs do are fucking morons.
One of my aunts is so upset Black people draw breath that she votes for politicians who help those determined to foreclose on her house. My aunt is an easily manipulated moron, I’m sorry to say.
Somewhere today in my blogospheric travels, I came across a review of the Signorile calls that urged gay readers of that blog to – come on, guys! – don’t vote for the Republicans even though you have buckets of money because – like – because!
I really almost tossed my waffles. The bottom line is GLBT people of any economic stripe shouldn’t vote for Republicans because Republicans on an almost daily basis act to disenfranchise and sometimes deprive GLBT people of life itself. If you’re Black, if you’re a woman, if you’re poor or have been poor or will someday be old, if you work for a living or possess a human body and you vote Republican YOU ARE VOTING AGAINST YOUR INTERESTS.
Poor Impulse Control 