Don't Know What You Got, Till It's Gone- (#Best09)

I don't have to post every day. I don't have to post any day. Every day, I think I should-there must be something funny, or soulful, or soulfully funny, or funnily soulful, that I can mock or comment upon or agree with or disagree with or argue with or throw my hands up in frustration at. Most days, I do. Some days, I don't. And the Earth just keeps on turning, heedless.

The inescapably marvelous and inexplicably single Katie wrote today about the Best of 2009 Challenge , which is the End of Yeary (and End of Decade-y) thing that the media usually does, assessing and evaluating. What were the Top Ten stories of 2009? Top Ten books, movies, TV shows, plays, actors, writers, golfers, tennis players? Political bloggers will give you the Top Ten Outrageous Things The President Did in 2009, and Basketball bloggers will give you the Top Ten Dunks of 2009. Pause, reflect, look back-because after all, we're about to go buy new calendars.

That's too harsh, really-there's nothing wrong with this trend. I just don't have the patience to try to come up with my ten favorite books from 2009. (That's really the only list I could populate, unless it was Top Ten Things I Said That DMarks Disagreed With or Top Ten Inappropriately Salacious Comments I Left On Katie's Blog.)

This article suggests that social networks, ironically, spread loneliness-that a lonely person, who is bitter or snarky or nasty on a social network to his or her peers will propagate this loneliness to others. Or, as my lovely and deeply patient wife puts it, "misery loves miserable company". This is the reason why I don't spend more time on Facebook, and this is the reason why I don't get more personal on here. I'm sick of scuba diving inside my own head, as Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, and I can't imagine anyone else finding it pleasant.

So this is a roundabout way of getting to the point-Katie's point today is about her lesson-what learning experience or lesson did you learn in 2009 that changed you?

I'll let Tom Keifer of Cinderella explain:



Life is too damn short, and it gets shorter every day. I will miss my father's presence, as much as I couldn't seem to make any time for him while he was here, every single day I am alive.

More Flash Fiction: Sneakers

Yet another rejected piece (flash fiction, 200 words or less) from dogzplot.blogspot.com : "Sneakers"








"When he left, she put on her old sneakers. They are white, with some faded blue panels on the side in a checkerboard pattern. They are cut, sliced in places, and worn- friction from curbs and floors and cars and grass revealed in a thousand scuff marks. She wrote on them, once, a long time ago. You can't see what she wrote, but she remembers. They were faded, beaten, forgotten-shoved into the corner of the closet. She had other shoes-flats and sandals and flipflops and loafers and heels that she wears by herself, relishing the way her calves bunch and tighten in the mirror when she has them on. She wasn't trying to look down market and bohemian. She wasn't giving up. She wasn't backing down, or allowing him to dictate how she looked or how she felt.
She put on her old sneakers and wore them because they had been through a lot together, and it was time to rescue things that were forgotten. They looked like she felt, used and ignored and tossed aside in favor of newer, shinier things. She put on her old sneakers, and she walked out the door."

Hotel Illness

This was recommended by @ordinaryart, the magnificent Kel, who can be found writing here . As I have said, and will continue to say, if you're not reading her, you're missing out on someone special.



This is the Black Crowes performing "Hotel Illness". I am home from work trying to recover from another leg infection, a illness my body appears willing to succumb to about once a year. The last time this happened, exactly none of you will remember, the Celtics were in the NBA Finals playing the Lakers, making it June 2008. The reason why I remember things like that, I do not understand. Assuming the antibiotic takes hold, I should be back to normal very shortly. If I never post again, I'm probably dead. In that case, I would expect the number of posts to drop off dramatically.

How Quick The Sun Can Drop Away

First off, if you haven't been here yet, then you're missing out. The post called "Hymnal" is gorgeous beyond my poor ability to describe.

Secondly, I think this is a really cool site. Dramatically NSFW, but cool. If you disagree, I can probably see your point, though.

Thirdly, these are ten questions I wish my company was smart enough to ask. 

Fourthly, seriously , Tiger? Wealthy beyond my capacity to imagine, married to a gorgeous woman, two beautiful children, and arguably the best practitioner of your craft who ever lived, and that's still not enough?

Fifthly, sometimes the simplest messages are the best. Thanks, @ericjfisher!

Sixthly, Tom Heinrich died yesterday. For a blog that is so slavishly baseball centric during the summer months, I have uttered barely a syllable since. Heinrich was a outfielder/first baseman on Joe DiMaggio's Yankee teams from 1937-1950. A feared clutch hitter, Heinrich was one of those "other guys" that never get the big money or the lion's share of the fame, but you don't win without them. He helped bury my Red Sox with 2 RBI in the deciding game of the 1949 season, sending them home with a 5-3 loss. (Boston entered the Yankee Stadium for the final two games of the 1949 season, needing one win to reach the World Series. Naturally, they lost them both.)

Seventhly, I have not given nearly enough love to my pals and brothers from another mother, Eric and Rob at WBRShow. Go here  for more information.

Eighthly, this is the always interesting Charlie Pierce's take on l'affaire Tiger. 

Ninthly, this guy grew up in the same town I did, and now he's the CEO of a major company. Sigh. 

Tenthly, for the funniest, pop culture oriented, NSFW tweets , follow her

Black

I meant to add this story as a comment to someone's post about Pearl Jam's latest album, but now I've forgotten what blog that was on. I may have told this story before, too, so if I have, I'm sorry.


Back when I was in college, I commuted every day on the subway. The subway line I took also connected to othercolleges-Northeastern University, Massachusetts College of Art, Harvard Medical School, along with Boston LatinHigh School, so at typical commuting times (pre-9AM, say), the train would get fairly crowded. C'est la guerre, right?


So, when I was either hopelessly lost or otherwise bored while in class, I would write little cartoons and such in the margins. Sometimes band logos, sometimes song lyrics. Whatever. Anyhow.


One morning, I'm studying for a test, waiting for a train. A particularly stunning girl comes nearby, waiting for the same train. (On this train platform, the trains share the same track, and where you stand on the platform determines what train you intend to board. Confusing, at times, for non locals, but we cynical college students, half asleep, pretty much do it without much thought. ) Now, this happens 50 times a day-I used to fall in love quite readily, and being around 18-22 year olds a lot of the time, your odds of seeing someone attractive are astronomically high. So not exactly a news flash.


The page I'm studying has the last verse to Pearl Jam's "Black" written on it. Which, as I'm sure you all remember, is: "I know someday you'll have a beautiful life/I know you'll be a star/In somebody else's sky/But why/
Why/Why can't it be/Can't it be mine"



So I tear the strip of paper off of my notebook, and roll it into a cylinder. The train comes, and I maneuver myself to be behind the fetching girl. She is carrying a backpack. I slip the cylinder of paper, without being detected, into the aforementioned backpack. She leaves the train at some point, and I never see her again. 


Now, questions that has tormented me for almost 20 years now: Why did I do this? And, more interestingly, how did she react to finding it? 

Fear and Loathing

I exchanged emails with my son's teacher over the weekend. This is a very 21st century thing to be doing-I certainly would have freaked out if my parents had done something similar when I was my son's age. My son seems unimpressed-but, in a way, he is unimpressed about just about everything. I think he is getting used to the idea that I am one weird cat. It wasn't about his scholastic performance, it was actually about the Vonnegut excerpt I posted below, but it wound up being about that, at least in passing. That is an entirely logical thing to happen-after all, my son's status as his student is the reason why I know him at all. 


But I digress. 


The problem I am having, and have had, and continue to have, with my son is motivating him to apply himself in school. This is not an uncommon problem-and it was certainly one that my parents had with me. It may pass, with time. It may not. I don't know anything about a lot of things, and parenting is one of them. Parenting is without question the single hardest and most complicated thing I have ever done. I'm never done parenting, and I am constantly afraid I am doing it wrong, and I am given reminders, every once in a while, that I am. 


Now, part of this problem is the breed-preteens don't care about a lot of things that we'd rather they care about, and care a lot about things we'd rather they didn't. I get that. Part of the problem is that he's right-no matter how hard his teachers try to render it otherwise, school is boring. It is infinitely more interesting to be doing any one of a hundred other things, especially in 2009's multiverse of entertainment options, than being in school. 'Twas ever thus-even in my own childhood in the late Pleistocene, I would have much rather been at home than in school, ten times out of ten, and twice on Sunday. Except we didn't go to school on Sunday. Except for Sunday School.

Anyway. 


The only way I can get my son to work at anything is through threats of dire consequences if he does not. This is a lousy motivator. (Mind you, I'm Scottish, so I'm stubborn enough to follow through on the threats, and, on a few occasions, I have.) "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully," wrote Samuel Johnson. 


Fear motivates, but it is not viable over the long term. I run much of my life based on it. I work because I fear starving, I parent out of fear of failing. It works for a while, but like being exposed to chronic stress, after a while the system breaks down, and the gears grind to a halt.  


I love reading, and I love being exposed to new ideas, and learning things I didn't know yesterday. I don't know how to get someone else to motivate themselves. I guess that means I'll never become President. 


These are the top ten suggestions Google has for phrases that begin with "Fear of"


1. Fear of long words
2. Fear of flying
3. Fear of clowns
4. Fear of heights
5. Fear of death
6. Fear of being alone
7. Fear of the dark
8. Fear of public speaking
9. Fear of commitment
10. Fear of flying lyrics


I think we can all agree that flying lyrics are something to be afraid of. 

The End of Silence

"This silence is not just in the gaps and spaces that punctuate sentences but is rather the lack within words that renders them articulate. For those with ears to hear, all saying is unsaying and every word is also a not. There can no more be word without silence than silence without Word. The origin, then, is always duplicitous: In the beginning is the Word...In the beginning is Silence. The quiet echo of this silence is profoundly unsetlling-in it I hear the Not that I am. Though we may long to escape it, silence can never be silenced. When we forget or refuse to listen to silence, we no longer know who we are because we do not know what we are not."



"Not everything that can be said should be said. Reticence is a particularly important virtue, especially in a time when everything as well as everybody is exposed...All too often people become complicit in the colonization of their own inwardness by soliciting the very publicity that inevitably undoes them. When this occurs, thoughtful reflection gives way to thoughtless spectacle: I am seen, therefore I am."

-Professor Mark C. Taylor, "Field Notes from Elsewhere" (Columbia University Press, 2009)

Blogging about silence is not quite like dancing about architecture-it's a little more like dancing about a statue.

I've always liked the drama of the phrase, "In the beginning there was the Word." It's the first words of the first chapter of the Book of John, the fourth book of the New Testament. If you've read any of the Bible (or books about the Bible), you know that it tends to repeat itself-retelling the same story or set of stories, sometimes more than once, in various places, sometimes using different names. The reason why is pretty obvious-without the printed word for the next 1400 years or so, the tradition was either oral or handwritten to keep telling the stories to the kiddos and pass the religion along. You had to keep them simple, easy to remember.

The echo, here, from "In the beginning there was the Word", of course, is the "In the beginning" from, well, the beginning-the book of Genesis. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth." The notion of the Word being the beginning is a powerful one. In David Plotz' book "The Good Book", where he does a pretty close, sometimes very funny, reading of the Old Testament, he points out that the Word is what kept the Jewish people together, on the same page, so to speak, through all their thousands of years of wandering. The Word is everything-before everything, there is the text. Hence the phrase "People of the Book"-a Muslim phrase describing Jews and Christians-without the words, without the text, there is nothing, in a sense, to believe in. The words hold it all together.

I like Prof. Taylor's notion that every word implies its opposite. You chose that word, and not this other one, and not, by definition, silence. Words have enormous power. Silence, the absence of speech, the blank page, gives rise to words, and worlds are created. In the beginning, is silence, and then there are words, and then there is, well, everything.

I've been quite self reflective since finishing NaNoWriMo. (pause to admire the glow from my winner's badge-winner, winner, chicken dinner.) I have this world, these people made only of words. (As I edit and reshape and retool and refine, checking things as simple as making sure someone has the same shirt at the end of the day as they had at the beginning, I'm increasingly sympathetic towards copy editors-it's exhausting, reading the same stuff over and over again. It starts to look right, even when it's glaringly wrong.) I'm sad that it's over, but I'm glad that it's done-that this story that I've been thinking about, in one form or another, since high school, is out of my head and into a finished form. I'm elated about eventually putting it onto the printed page for the world to consume, and I'm also terrified. Not just of the embarassment of missing an error, but what if it isn't the same as it is in my head? Or what if it is, and people hate it or, worse, are bored by it? You can't control that-that's the nature of art. You put it out there, and people make of it what they will.


I have ended the silence.

Vonnegut on Hemingway

I had been looking for this piece for ages, and I am delighted that I finally found it. From his nonfiction book "Fates Worse Than Death", the late Kurt Vonnegut, addressing Hemingway scholars:

" Let me hasten to say that no matter how much his choice of subject matter bothers me nowadays, I am always amazed and delighted by the power he discovered in the simplest language. A sample I chose at random from his short story 'Big Two Hearted River': 'Nick sat down against the charred stump and smoked a cigarette. His pack balanced on the top of the stump, harness holding ready, a hollow molded in it from his back. Nick sat smoking, looking out over the country. He did not need to get his map out. He knew where he was from the position of the river.

" 'As he smoked, his legs stretched out in front of him, he noticed a grasshopper walk along the ground and up onto his woolen sock. The grasshopper was black. As he had walked along the road, climbing, he had started many grasshoppers from the dust. They were all black.'

"(The grasshoppers were black, of course, because the area had been burned over recently, making black the ideal protective coloration.)

"No fear of repeating words there. How many of you had teachers who told you never to use the same word twice in a paragraph, or even in adjacent paragraphs? Clearly, that was poor advice. The biggest word in that passage, by the way, is 'grasshopper'. Big enough! The strongest word is 'black.' Strong enough!

"I myself, when I teach writing, say that people will not read a story in which nothing much happens. But nothing much happens in two of Hemingway's most thrilling stories, 'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place' and, again, 'Big Two-Hearted River.' How is this possible? It is the brushwork.  If Hemingway had been a painter, I would say of him that while I often don't like the subjects he celebrates, I sure as heck respect his brushwork."

Or, even better...(NSFW) (Jon Hamm Edition) (My Wife Is Still Funnier Than You)

As I said, NSFW. Read on if you dare.






HER:"Jon Hamm makes you drop down on your knees and thank God you have a vagina."

-OR-

"Tom Jones gets panties thrown at him. Jon Hamm makes panties disintegrate."

-OR-

"Jon Hamm makes women ovulate on sight."

My brother has a complex about this, but I don't...

...or, My Wife Is Funnier Than You, Part MCMXCVXIII


HER: But I need...lady stuff.

ME: No problem. What kind?

HER: Always Thin Overnight. With wings.

ME(writing): Thin, overnight, wings. Got it. Any special brand?

HER: I told you.

ME: No, I need to know if there's a special brand.

HER: I told you. Always.

ME: Oh, you mean the brand Always. I thought you meant the word always. Small 'a'.

HER: You're always stupid.

Charlie Pierce leaves the reservation

I promised myself I wouldn't do this anymore. (Talk about politics, and get meself all riled up.)

I lied.

Charlie Pierce on President Obama:

"It is early days, surely, but, at the moment, there is absolutely no way on god's earth that I would vote to re-elect Barack Obama as President of the United States. I always had my DOUBTS. But I was willing to ride the train in order to keep the government out of the hands of a bunch of undereducated paranoid lunatics, which I didn't see as very high a bar, truth be told. I do not underestimate the size of the problems he was handed last January with two badly run wars and one badly run economy. But, all Lilly Ledbetters aside, it is becoming increasingly plain that the man is not up to the most important job he was elected to do--which is to wring the accumulated viciousness, ignorance, and hackery of the past eight years out of the various parts of the United States government--and to do it brutally, if necessary, which it is. One of our two major political parties has completely lost its mind. This should be a political issue. It is incumbent upon the other party to eliminate that party's influence until it purges itself and comes to its senses again. It also scarcely needs to be said that the sane party has to watch its own ranks for people who seem to be enabling and abetting the goals of the crazy party. Otherwise, as Ezra Klein memorably put it this week, every attempt at bipartisanship winds up as "a hostage negotiation." President Obama--and does anyone but me notice that he gets the honorific conspicuously less often on TV than the last guy did?-- not only seems unequal to this task, he doesn't even seem to recognize the task at all. He wasn't elected to change the tone, dammit. He was elected to change everything because everything needed to be changed. So it's a hard goddamn job. So what? He didn't know this coming in? Now we're going to feed 34,000 more American kids into the meat grinder in Afghanistan because we're America and we can do anything we set our minds to? Hell, we can't even keep our own citizens alive by breaking the power of the health-insurance industry. We can't right our economy because it's still in the hands of Wall Street grifters, and the government has fallen into the thrall of a bunch of banker-morons I wouldn't trust with a potato gun. Some people needed to be crushed politically. Some people needed to go to jail. Some people needed to be exiled forever from the serious business of self-government. It's Black Friday, and I'm shopping for another candidate. I'm beating the rush."

Rejection: It's Not Just For Breakfast Anymore

Since the fine folks at dogzplot.blogspot.com turned me down, I guess I can go ahead and post this here: Flash Fiction, again, this time 200 words or less. The title is "Ponytail"

"She crossed her legs easily. She can tuck one leg so far over the other her shoe almost hits me in the leg. The stockings make a synthetic, high pitched sound when they rub together. I am sitting behind her, so every detail is palpable. The semicircle of skin between the base of her neck and the collar of her shirt. Her ponytail, a long, straight line that bobs when she moves her head. Like a pony.

She moves her head to follow him as he lectures. Biology, Punnett squares. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. I have to follow him too, but I follow her, following him. A stray hair is on my notebook. It's hers, long and brown and curly. Hair has DNA.

When he mentions sexuality, the manifestation of all this math and intricate relationships, a titter runs through them all. Not even a giggle, just a acknowledgment that something naughty has been brought up. I feel it, feel the letters colliding, the traits mixing, the magic of generations bearing fruit. I cannot admit what I really feel, but my body screams it out. Reproduce or die, it says. Being civilized, I stay quiet."

***

My NaBloPoMo streak ended last night, to the shock and surprise of exactly no one. Don't judge.

***

If you want to see some roasting done by one of the quickest minds in the business, check out facebook.com/the40yearoldboy, and scroll down to the Jimmy Pardo roast section. Jeffrey Ross, eat your heart out. Exuberantly NSFW, though, so be warned.

Flash Fiction: "Last Night"

She sat right next to him. He was playing with his phone now, trying to look busy, not looking at her , deliberately. She considered poking him, even kicking him to get his attention. That wouldn't be “professional”, wouldn't be “appropriate”. The candidate would be out soon, and the work would begin. She'd be writing, recording. So would he. Then on to the next town. Shamed. Silenced. Forgotten. Last night, he called out her name. Pulled, pushed, kissed, advanced, retreated. Last night, his attention was on her. Last night, he looked at her. Last night.


Flash Fiction, fiction of 100 words or less. Based on a prompt found here

The Most Awesome Thing Ever Since The Last Thing I Said Was The Most Awesome Thing Ever

Clearly, the most awesome thing in the entire history of awesome.

The Future of Media – Howard Stern, Bill Simmons, Adam Carolla

The Future of Media – Howard Stern, Bill Simmons, Adam Carolla

Aaron Cohen with a provocative, though not new, idea about the future of media.