3/25/01 Infantilism I do it. I live in LA, it’s practically required by law. I run 8-10 miles a week, I do crunches and push-ups. I feel good after I’ve done it, but the process itself isn’t any fun. None. In fact, it’s unpleasant. I’m conscious that every step I run, every crunch I do puts me closer to not running and not doing crunches and that’s how I get through it. This past weekend I went to an engagement party at a friend’s house and after most of the people had left, three of us went into the backyard, took a piñata stick and some empty aluminum cans and played stickball (technically I guess it was stickcan) for--I’m not sure how long. And that’s the point. We were running around, trying to catch pop-ups, pitching, swinging as hard as we could and I have no idea how much time elapsed because I was having a great time. And that’s what exercise should be. In fact, life should be more like that. Not watching the clock. We watch the clock constantly--at work, while standing in lines, while driving--if only we could just lose ourselves in the moment I think life would probably be fuller. My memory isn’t so great but I don’t remember time passing as a kid. I just remember a lot of playing: pick-up baseball games, riding my bike to the store, playing blacksmith. It all seems to have happened in some magical twilight--not early enough for dinner, not late enough for bed. I don’t want this to sound like some trite Robert Fulghum digression but I do know that when I do those sorts of activities now--I play in a softball league, I drink Slurpees, I like baseball cards--I feel two things. First I feel like I’m too old to be acting like a kid. Then I feel really, really happy. 3/18/01 Pi I like numbers. I like their conclusiveness, their finality. They provide structure and reliability. You can play a lousy game of baseball, making errors in the field, mental errors running the bases but if you score one more run than the other guys, you win the game. There are no judges. And because of this fact you see more interesting games--you see intentional walks and sacrifices and foul balls not being caught. The structure actually makes the game more interesting. There is comfort in numbers. But numbers are not the whole story. Let me illustrate my point. I like investing--I’m a bleeding heart liberal who thinks taxes should be spent on education and health care for the poor and I don’t mind paying my share. But I also like the game of investing because again, you keep track with numbers. I’ve read quite a bit on investing but the financial expert who’s ideas make the most sense to me is a guy named Peter Lynch who is one of the most successful stock pickers of all time and made ungodly amounts of money for his Fidelity clients. Lynch’s advice is practical, logical. It is not to try to catch the hot tech stock or eavesdrop at Starbucks. Instead he suggests looking for companies you yourself know and like and then to look at the fundamentals. How much debt do they have, what are their earnings, do they have a solid basis for growing the business, what is the P/E ratio of the stock, how much cash do they have on hand? In other words, how do the numbers look? I found a company that I believed (and at least one respected financial journalist agreed with me) met Lynch’s criteria perfectly Zany Brainy. It’s a kids toy story that specializes in educational games that do not have violent content. The stores (which I visited before I invested) are much warmer than Toys ‘R Us--the floors are carpeted and kids are encouraged to play. They had room to grow--they hadn’t even opened a store in New York City. The price was reasonable and they had little debt. I couldn’t believe my luck. I jumped on it. I bought some shares at $7.50 and the stock shot up to $10.50. I bought more, thrilled that I had found a winner. The price went as high as $14 something. It now trades for under 50 cents. Ouch! The numbers were right, everything was right; what happened? People. They tried to expand too quickly, took on a lot of debt and Wall Street punished them. Severely. Numbers are our friends. People are the problem. 3/11/01 Fore I play golf. Wait, that is not accurate. I take some clubs (usually 3) and some balls (1 more than I think I will lose) and I walk around for about a hour and a half on the grass. I do this for a couple of reasons but the following are not among them: Golf is a great sport. Golf is neither great nor a sport. Anything that you can do nearly as well at eighty as you can at 25 cannot be classified as a sport. I’m grateful that there will be activities that I can do if I make it to eighty but let’s not kid ourselves--you don’t see much attendance at shuffleboard tournaments. Golf is a game of strategy. No. Chess is a game of strategy, National League baseball requires strategy, maybe even boxing (as much as I loathe it--but that’s another essay) requires some planning but golf is a simple game of put the ball in the hole in the fewest amount of strokes. There is no defense or offense, there is no head-to-head play so you can’t force your opponent to change his tactics--whoever has the least amount of strokes gets the lawn ornament or whatever the hell it is they give away at golf tournaments. Golf is a metaphor for life. Well, hell, what isn’t a metaphor for life? Anything that people spend an enormous of amount of time doing and want to justify as not a waste of time to their kids or their spouse or their friends they call a metaphor for life. At some time or another nearly everything that people do has been put in this category: fishing, mountain climbing, gambling, running, hunting, surfing, baseball--well that one I happen to agree with but never mind. Here are the reasons I play golf--I get to get out of the house, spend some time with guys and talk about the stock market and women without being an alcoholic. That’s it. It’s very prosaic. But it’s also necessary. Some people figured out how necessary it was and constructed private clubs with fees equivalent to a German luxury car and made a lot of money, which then allowed them more free time to play golf. That’s why I put down my $4 and play the public course. They let you talk about chicks there too. 3/4/01 Waterloo Survivor stories--we read about them in books (I confess I used to love Reader’s Digest’s "Drama in Real Life"), they are fodder for daytime talk shows and even manage respectability on programs such as 60 Minutes or Frontline. We are fascinated by carnage, by destruction, by aberrant human behavior. (Although, I’m not sure such ubiquitous behavior can be classified as aberrant.) We shake our heads, we wonder aloud at the senselessness. But never mind Hiroshima, Waterloo, the Spanish Inquisition--just navigating the diurnal traps of love and loss is enough to shut down the average living organism. How do we exist let alone thrive? I confess that this is enough for me. How would I handle the Mekong Delta in 1967? I have no idea--I can’t even make it through the day when she won’t call. How would I survive Birkenau when I can’t accept my gray hair because it makes me face my mortality? I suppose people who have been in such circumstances will tell you that it has a way of focusing the mind and that the survival instinct is very strong. One foot in front of the other, that kind of thing. And while no one--no one--need convince me of the horrors of war, a small part of me fantasies about it. It provides the opportunity for ordinary men to achieve hero status. In fantasies it is easy to block out the blood, rape, mutilation, and terror. Now that I have reached a “certain age” it seems unlikely that I will see combat. And that’s fine with me. I’m having enough trouble keeping friends and finding a job I don’t hate. To quote from the poem Another Loss to Stop For by Jill Bialosky: I know how difficult it is, always balancing and weighing, it takes years and many transformations; and always another loss to stop for, to send you backwards. Why do you worry so, when none of us is spared? 2/25/01 Proust The brother of a co-worker of mine was half of the team that produced the short film Heavy Metal Parking Lot. For those of you not familiar with this cult classic, it documents the pre-show atmosphere of a Judas Priest concert in Maryland. It is an unpleasant viewing experience. Heavy metal music and its adherents are an easy target for parody (as Rob Reiner proved) but that’s not what made my skin crawl. It’s the fact that it was like looking in the mirror 15 years ago. The scrawny physique, the bad hair, the baseball jersey concert shirts (at one time I had enough invested in these sartorial gems to relieve the debt of some third world nations), the cigarettes and domestic beer looked frighteningly familiar. Okay, maybe not the cigs and beer--I was a square even back then. What is painful about reliving this is not so much the idiocy of it all but the vulnerability. At this age you’re so desperately trying to fit in, to find a group of people who you can relate to (“Hey, my parents don’t understand me either!”) that you miss the fact that there is so much more going on in the world than how kick ass the drum solo was. Adolescence is a fragile world and music encircles it with glass tentacles. Bands like Judas Priest and the Grateful Dead would appear to be on opposite ends of the spectrum but (despite the differences in clothing and the location of runaway hair on women) are remarkably alike. They are cultures of inclusion defined less by the similarity among the members than by the differences of outsiders. The entry into these clubs turns upon nuances as absurd as whether the first or second album rocked more or which guitarist is the greatest on planet Earth, which is odd because most of the time the adjudicates are on a different planet and would seemingly be in a bad position to make the call. The film was shot in 1986, the year I graduated from high school and right about the time I was taking in the musical stylings of Dio. In retrospect I am embarrassed by my behavior but I don’t remember feeling so at the time. How I managed not to feel humiliation after accidentallythrowing my parents car into reverse at 65 mph on the way to a concert while attempting to shift into neutral so that I could rev the engine to impress my buddies in the car next to me is puzzling. But I did all of this and more. Proust managed to make memory dignified and bittersweet. It seems for me that often it is just disconcerting. Maybe if Proust had lived to see Jerry Lewis films and swooned like a schoolgirl, he wouldn’t be so damn haughty. French bastard. 2/18/01 Rich I voted for Clinton twice. This is no longer a statement people are likely to make in mixed company--by which I mean when anyone else is in the room. I’ve been a Clinton supporter for eight years but it has now become impossible to be a supporter without being a defender. The two words shouldn’t be synonymous but somehow have become so. The truth is that the majority of the scandals that plagued the Clinton administration didn’t particularly trouble me. Whitewater was too complex for even those that understood it to explain; the notion that Vince Foster’s death was actually a murder that was covered up is too ludicrous to defend and as far as oval office sexual hijinks go no matter what was done, it still seems less repulsive than Nixon talking about slush funds and kikes. But with the Marc Rich pardon Clinton has put even his most rabid supporters in a very bad position indeed. I don’t know anyone who finds anything palatable in the whole mess. Frankly we find it disgusting. Surely this can’t be what the framers had in mind when they vested the executive branch with the power of the pardon. (Neither can the Bush Iran Contra pardons but that’s another essay.) Marc Rich is not a guy that needs pardoning. By my estimation there are probably close to 5 billion people on this planet that should be in line ahead of him. Couldn’t we dig up the Rosenbergs and pardon them? And could ever an eponym be more appropriate? Here’s a guy that has so much cash on the nightstand that he just throws cars away instead of washing them. The much bigger issue that’s going on here is money in politics. I recently read an article by Gore Vidal on the Kennedy administration and whether the sexual allegations were true or not. He basically confirmed that most of them probably were but that wasn’t the point. What is dangerous to the integrity of American politics is not whether the Commander in Chief gets a hummer in the presidential bathtub from a hooker smuggled in by the secret service but the flow of cash in politics. Vidal contends that that is the real story and everything else is just a big diversion. I couldn’t agree more. If we could do one thing to shore up democracy it would be to get money completely out of politics. Campaign finances, pork barrel programs, and money that gains access to the highest branches of government is my concern. And Clinton can write as many defensive Op-Ed pieces in the New York Times that he wants--whether the contributions by Richs’ ex-wife were bribes or not doesn’t matter. It just smells bad, real bad. Take away those dollars and suddenly you don’t feel like you’re downwind from a Mexico City sewage treatment plant. I know taking money out of politics is a little like taking nudity out of pornography but a boy can dream, can’t he? 2/11/01 Bathos I’m not one of those cranky guys who lament the lack of edifying pop art (yet). But you know the type and you may be one yourself-- “Remember when bands had something to say, like the Beatles with Sgt. Pepper’s?” Of course the kids who listened to the Beatles had a falling out with their parents who couldn’t understand the noise and why those boys had to wear their hair so long just as their parents couldn’t understand Benny Goodman and so on and so on. But we do live in odd times. Spend some evenings flipping around the channel and you are just as likely to come across Ken Burns’ masterpiece on Jazz (with more breadth and attention to detail than the Library of Congress) as an ad for the XFL--apparently designed for people who enjoy the concept of regular football but are turned off by its nuance and tenderness. There are other examples of course--the WWF and the West Wing (a show so good that I can’t believe it’s still on the air), Temptation Island and a special on the Galapagos Islands. The New York Times bestseller list has carried Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (a book supposedly written for the laymen, as long as said laymen had a degree in particle physics) and Harry Potter. Perhaps it’s appropriate to think of the country as your own psyche. Dualism is inherent in our nature. My guess is if you search long enough you’ll find it--you probably have somewhere on your bookshelf a copy of Dickens or Tolstoy or Faulkner and it probably isn’t far from a Michael Crichton or a Stephen King or (God help us) a Danielle Steele. You like movies you say? The Third Man? The Last Temptation of Christ? Battleship Potemkin? And on the shelf behind the Leonard Maltin’s guide--is that where the Vivid videos live? That naughty Misty Rain. We’re all complex little boys and girls. Thank God our parents screwed us up real good--it gives a chance to see the range of humanity. And how exactly do you see the light without the dark? 2/4/01 Progress Ethical progress is the only cure for the damage done by scientific progress. –Freeman Dyson One of the old saws about technology is that it has advanced more quickly than our capability to use it properly. The belief is that until we learn to employ our knowledge for good we will be doomed to make a mess of things. Science has permitted us to wipe out Polio, perform heart transplants, talk to friends who live in mainland China (I don’t have any there but someone must) and of course, I can’t leave out, put a man on the moon. It has also killed thousands of innocent people in Japan, shorn the face off a building in Oklahoma, created amputees in Vietnam and blown up planes 6 miles above the earth. Still, to me, the good seems to outweigh the bad. That may sound a bit rash until you consider the fact that you can’t crack open someone’s chest, yank out their ticker and put a new one in without spending some time hitting the books. However, you can kill without an A-bomb. It is startling to remember that the fairly recent genocide in Rwanda (where estimates are of 1,000,000 dead in a few short months) was accomplished mainly by people wielding machetes. That’s right- using a weapon that’s been around even before Dick Clark was born was used to dispatch hundreds of thousands of people. That’s commitment to a cause folks. If you’re willing to kill someone by hacking his or her body into bite-sized bits you are taking your slaughter seriously. Taking away grenade launchers doesn’t do much to prevent this. The epigraph above seems to provide the only logical solution. When tolerance outpaces the means of destruction we can all get a bit more sleep. 1/28/01 Taxation The talk lately on the political circuits is about W’s proposed tax cuts. Most Democrats have conceded that the cuts will happen, the only question is how large they will be and who will get them. They even dragged Alan Greenspan up to the Hill to give his feedback on what the cuts will do to the economy. Greenspan, who is normally so circumspect that political pundits begin to look like a Dionne Warwick infomercial when they try to divine his intentions, came right out and said that he thought some prudent trimming would be healthy. I’m in no danger of winning a Nobel Prize in Economics but I believe if we have any cuts at all they should go to the working poor. That is unlikely to happen because the working poor do not get a guy like W elected. Last year (in spite of the dismal performance of stocks) I made more money than I’ve ever made in my life. Although this amount falls well below the median income level for my age bracket and geographical location I still have everything I need. Here is the simple fact folks--the majority of the people that live in this country enjoy an obscenely high standard of living. Somehow we get caught up in the notion that we need everything we see advertised on TV or in magazines. You must remember that in some parts of the world the phrase “disposable income” actually is an oxymoron. Unlike many other countries we ask ourselves, “What will we eat tonight?” not “How will we eat?” We don’t spend a nanosecond of our day worrying about finding a place to sleep or something to wear--except, of course, to make sure we’re fashionable. Whole geographical portions of this planet don’t worry if their shoes match their belt. It is obvious that most Americans have too much food to eat, not too little. And just how exactly do you explain to someone living in a third world country the fact that the diet industry pulls in millions every year? Bishnu (malnourished, big-eyed, sad-looking boy): “Mr. Gary, this Richard Simmons, they give him money to get them food, no?” “No, actually they give him money to help them eat less food.” Bishnu: [Long Pause]“But, Mr. Gary, why don’t they just eat less and then save their money?” “It’s hard to explain Bishnu.” Don’t get me wrong- I like my toys- my TV, this computer, and an occasional pint of Ben & Jerry’s but if all of that goes away tomorrow I’m still in pretty good shape. I’m not saying that we all need to live like Thoreau, who managed to make $27 last him a year, but let’s keep things in perspective here. Go ahead and give us a tax cut but don’t pretend we need it. In truth we don’t need anything we want and most of what we already have. 1/21/01 Return Perhaps this is true elsewhere, but in LA it takes a long time to get home. This seems to be true regardless of the time of the day, the day of the week or the week of the year. The return is often epic. It is not only the volume of the traffic but also the layout of the city that lengthens the process. The relationship of the geographical size of the U.S. and the quality of mass transit seem to be inversely proportional. Europeans can rightfully sneer at our feeble attempts to get anywhere quickly. On the chart of expeditious transportation, L.A. seems to occupy the nadir. The powers that be are trying to construct a skeletal subway system but it is years and many under-the-table-pesos away from completion. So the fact is, if you want to get anywhere in L.A., you get in your car and you wait. You wait to arrive. Strange things happen. The freeways--a misnomer that connotes fluidity but in reality reveals solidity--often are avoided because they are less efficient than surface streets. Many times I have had the ironic experience of crawling along at a geriatric pace on the 134 only to actually speed up once I get to the exit ramp. You know those signs that tell you to decrease your speed while exiting? Funny guys those city planners. But no matter where we live where we’re trying to get, even those of us that have nothing waiting for us there, is home. And often in L.A. the journey is the destination. 1/14/01 Hellfire Let gloom and deep darkness claim it. Let clouds dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it. -[Job 3:5.5] I’ve got to tell you kids, it’s been goddamn biblical around here lately. Some parts of L.A. sustained four inches of rain in just a day or two this week. Yeah, it’s been raining Korats and Beagles. This added to constant threats of “rolling blackouts”--a menacing term applied to the power shortages due to the deregulation of the utility companies that conjures images of DeMillean cinematography--has some of us a bit nervous down here. For all of Southern Californians rejection of traditional religions, we do get a bit nervous about retribution from above. Don’t let the laid back attitude fool you--when Midwesterners start talking about California breaking off from the rest of the continent and floating off into the Pacific (presumably to distract themselves from the fact that any minute now a tornado is going to snatch up their trailer home and toss it up into the troposphere like a kitten with a ball of yarn) people begin to worry how they are going to get good domestic help at a reasonable price. For myself, in my hovel, I’m sucking about 1 kilowatt-hour per month so the threat of a blackout doesn’t scare me none. Bring it on sissies. I can stand darkness longer than you- have you ever seen a cat scan of my psyche? It's dark baby! 1/7/01 Etiology I’ve read two stories within the past couple of weeks that got me thinking about this. One was a New Yorker article from September 29, 1997 on the influenza epidemic that broke out in the second decade of the last century and the other was on Hepatitis C from the most current issue of Esquire. The question that came up in both cases is why and how these two diseases have been so effective in spreading. In the former case, scientists seem to believe that although there have been flu breakouts many times throughout the course of time (we get several strains every winter), what seems to have made this particular breakout so deadly is twofold: first, obviously this was a bad-ass strain of flu but secondly it was the First World War that allowed it to spread so rapidly and so ubiquitously. American men were traveling to Europe and being exposed to it and then returning home. In the case of Hepatitis C, the people in the position of knowledge believe that it is a blood borne disease and is transferred primarily by the sharing of needles between intravenous drug users. Most believe that the only time it is passed on through sexual intercourse is where blood meets blood, which seems to be not very often (excepting the Marquis De Sade of course.) This got me to thinking that perhaps this is a double cautionary tale. Destructive behavior- whether it is war or serious drug use- seems to allow room not only for it’s own carnage but also opens the door to diseases that seem to prey upon this behavior for transmission. While this is not particularly instructive for curtailing these behaviors- it would be a little like saying that scientists had recommended that the monks who set themselves on fire in the 1960s to protest Vietnam not do so because any chocolate they might have in their pockets would be sure to melt- it raises an interesting ontological issue. Are diseases such as the ones I’ve mentioned acting as ethical vigilantes seeking out immoral behavior and punishing it? Have we found yet another reason not to fight wars or shoot up? I don’t think so. The reason is obvious: Because if we open this issue for discussion, we must also ask questions such as “Does AIDS seek to punish homosexuality?” But I do find it interesting that certain behaviors facilitate amoral diseases. Unfortunately these disease run little risk of dying out when all they must rely on for success is ill advised human vagaries. |
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