| 6/24/01 Math I have alternate-side street parking where I live. Which is to say that on Mondays and Fridays only one side of the street is legal for parking. Since I don’t have any off-street parking, this means I have to remember to move my car twice a week or suffer the consequences of a $35 (or thereabouts) ticket. This is frustrating enough. What is maddening is the fact that ostensibly this is done so that the street can be cleaned. At two cleanings per week, my street should be cleaner than Disneyland. Of course this is not the case. The street cleaner is the snipe of L.A. You hear talk about it but no one has ever really spotted one in the wild. By comparison, the No Parking signs on my street are fairly simple to understand. (This doesn’t mean that I don’t stare at them dumbly on occasion and try to do that reverse logic, i.e. when you see Friday on the sign you have to realize that that means you cannot park there on Friday.) Some of the signs in the greater L.A. area require a degree in advanced calculus before you can determine if you can park there or not. There is a simple reason why there is alternate-side parking on my street and it’s not because L.A. is some sort of neurotic neat freak. Parking tickets are merely an additional revenue stream. I wish this stopped at parking tickets—unfortunately it extends to other tickets as well. Awhile back, I was pulled over for not wearing my seatbelt. When I stopped the police officer noticed my brake lights were out as well. (This is the reason they pull people over who aren’t wearing seatbelts—they assume that they will find something else wrong in the process.) I didn’t lie or try to talk my way out of the ticket. I told him I was planning on getting my lights fixed and just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. He issued me a “Fix-it Ticket.” This allows you a month to make the repair, take your vehicle to the courthouse where they can confirm that it has been fixed at which point you are permitted to pay your fine and go home. I was happy to do this. Well, ok, I wasn’t happy but I knew it was my fault and I wasn’t going to kick and scream and cry about it. I was at fault after all and I realize that driving without brake lights is (no pun intended) not the brightest idea in the world. So, I had the repairs done, I showed up at the courthouse at the appointed time and when I got to the window they asked me to pay and then said I was free to go. “Don’t you want to verify that the repair has been made?” “No.” I couldn’t believe it. Again, this puts into relief another hypocrisy of the legal system in L.A. Although the police officer will give you a lecture about how dangerous it is to drive without brake lights, they don’t really care if you fix them or not. In fact, if you don’t fix them, then they can pull you over again and create additional revenue. As people always say, “It’s the lying that bothers me.” Well, it’s both—I don’t particularly want to part with any more cash than I have to but I’d be less annoyed about doing so if it provided well-swept, safe streets. Unfortunately it does neither. 6/17/01 Gifted Cincinnati 7, Los Angeles 6 CINCINNATI (TICKER) -- It did not take long for Deion Sanders to make an impact for the Cincinnati Reds. After a three-year hiatus from major league competition, Sanders had three hits, including a three-run homer… Updated at Tue May 1 19:33:32 2001 PT http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/recaps/20010501/loscin.html I have always been envious of people like this. Deion Sanders seems to have what only a handful of people possess—the pure athletic gift. Hitting a baseball is by general consensus the most difficult thing to do in all of sports. For a guy to be away from the game for 3 years and come back in the way that he did is unbelievable. Oh yeah, by the way, he has also played professional football for 10+ years. Must be nice. There are a couple of qualifications that should be noted here--first he did spend some time (albeit limited) in the minors before coming up with Cincinnati and second the Reds subsequently released him when his batting average plummeted to .173. But those things don’t change the fact that there’s not much this guy can’t do. There have been a few people who have had these protean abilities throughout the years—Jackie Robinson and Babe Didrikson Zaharias jump to mind. An effortless ability to play any sport and play it well. You see this sort of thing in other disciplines too. Marlon Brando would have a hard time turning on a Roger Clemens fastball but was so gifted as an actor that he just got bored. It was too easy and he decided to go eat er… live on an island. I’m jealous of these sorts of people simply because I feel I have to work so hard just to be average—in many cases, below average. I suppose the reason I wish I had innumerable skills is (besides the obvious of always having a job) because somehow I imagine that multi-disciplinary skill confers a sort of mastery of the universe. (It is the reason I wish I could speak several languages or be a badass philosopher king like Patrick Swayze in Roadhouse. He can quote Nietzsche while knocking your teeth out.) And more than anything it imbues to the possessor a sense of grace. God knows I could use some more grace. 6/10/01 Scars We love to tell and listen to war stories—losses of love, of money, of jobs. As tellers they take what would normally be tragic and elevate it to success. To be able to brag of hardships endured enhances our reputations in the eyes of our friends. They become badges of honor. As listeners we our humbled and reminded of the dictum we endured from our parents—there is always someone worse off than you. It connects us to the past, which in turn connects us to our elemental humanity. There is a scene in Lethal Weapon II (not a movie commonly cited by scholars) when Mel Gibson and Renee Russo progressively remove their clothes to show their scars and tell a little story about each one. It is part boast, part seduction. Recently I was hit in the face by a softball during practice. I was playing short and a groundball took a bad bounce on me. I received a low-grade concussion and required six stitches inside and outside my mouth. When I told friends about it they all expressed a desire to see the damage. I didn’t see some of them until several days after the accident when the majority of the swelling had gone down. They expressed sorrow and concern but there was a subtle note of disappointment in their voices. They somehow seemed disappointed. I had to assure them that “The swelling has gone done a lot. It was much, much worse a few days ago.” As foolish as I felt about the incident (I wasn’t fielding balls particularly well that day and this was a sort of punishment) and as amazed as they were that a softball could cause much damage (I can assure you that softball is a misnomer) the only way I could redeem things was to build up the accident. I listed the number of stitches, the catscan, the loss of memory—all true but these facts were trotted out to support my general thesis which was, ultimately, that I’m a tough guy and I am capable of enduring a lot of pain while maintaining a comedic stoicism. Psychological trauma differs only from physical trauma in the sense that instead of rolling up our pant leg we have to roll out our story. Again, the job of the victim is to trot out the facts, embellished where necessary to paint a dark picture. Hyperbole is the ally of the victim/storyteller. After all, if you can’t get the girl back, you can at least make her a two-headed troll. 6/3/01 Memory And I hope when I get old I don't sit around thinking about it but I probably will Yeah, just sitting back trying to recapture a little of the glory of, well time slips away and leaves you with nothing mister but boring stories of glory days -Bruce Springsteen, “Glory Days” Memories. Pictures. Scrapbooks. Proust devoted a lot of words to the topic. We look back in anger, in sadness, in joy. We come to learn as we age that time is precious. Children grow up, friends die, lovers leave and this teaches us to try to hold on to the present. Yesterday is gone and tomorrow is speculation. Today is all we have. I have learned this along with most people who took things for granted at one point in their life. You realize how transient everything is and when things are good, when you are happy, you try to focus on that, to hold on to the present. But even with this knowledge, with this aim or goal I have trouble doing it. Even when you look directly at the present, when you make eye contact with happiness it seems to pass just as quickly. And even if you manage to elongate time, if for a minute or two you can slow down the clock, if you are able to apply Einsteinian principles to that particular moment—after it passes (and it will pass) how does this help you? Does the memory of a slightly lengthened happiness differ in any meaningful way from that of an attenuated one? How can pleasure be sustained? If we cannot hold onto pleasure in the moment and we can’t retrieve it once it is gone where does that leave us? There is so much more time in the past than there is in the present. It makes it difficult to feel the present when the sheer weight of history presses down upon us. 5/27/01 Chivalry In the Oklahoma City bombing, 168 people were killed. This fact is duly noted but what this statement almost always precedes or follows is that some of these people were children. And whether the word is actually italicized or not, the emphasis always seems to be there. The phrase “Women and Children First” (in addition to being a rocking Van Halen album) has entered the culture as a moral imperative. The ship is going down? Get the women and children in the lifeboats first. Civilian enclaves are under attack? Get the women and children out first. I don’t want to come off as a bad guy but let me play devil’s advocate here. What special value do women and children have over other human beings—presumably males who are not children? Why is the group of people that includes everyone but women and children inherently less valuable? Isn’t this country (and human rights organizations in general) based on the idea that all people are created equal? How then is it permissible to say that we must rescue the women and children first? You could never, for instance, say, “Hey, let’s save all the white people first” or “Wait, let’s save the Christians before those Jews.” If it’s a matter of numbers we should probably save the men first—after all there are more women than men on the planet. And are kids considered more valuable because they haven’t lived as long? If that’s so, shouldn’t all passengers on a ship be required to register their ages so that if the time comes to get into the lifeboats we can have the following exchange: Passenger: Can I get in there? Crew Member: How old are you? Passenger: 37 Crew Member: Sorry, there’s a 34-year-old standing behind you. Does a woman’s special value reside in the fact that she is capable of giving birth? I know it’s not popular to say but the last I heard, men still play at least a peripheral role in this little miracle. If we manage to save the women but all the men get killed off in the process how exactly is pregnancy to be achieved? Please don’t speculate too long on this question because I fear the answer might be “Well, we’re going to freeze a bunch of sperm rendering men essentially useless.” This whole women’s liberation thing appears a bit selective to me. Women seem to want equality when it comes to voting rights, monetary compensation and job opportunities but are happy to let it slide when the check arrives at the table or a door needs to be opened or drowning seems a possibility. I guess until we live in a truly equal society I better go get myself a life jacket. I’m going to start giving them as Christmas gifts to my (older, male) friends. 5/20/01 E=MC2 I’ve spent a good portion of my life trying to acquire knowledge. I spent 19 years in school, I’ve traveled a bit, I try to get to the museum now and again, I watch a lot of PBS, listen to some NPR and I faithfully read the three magazines that I subscribe to: Esquire, Harper’s and The New Yorker. I need to offer a point of clarification here. When I say I read these magazines I don’t mean that I skip to the most interesting articles, or (in the case of The New Yorker) breeze through looking at the cartoons. I read everything cover to cover including the ads. In fact I am so diligent in this pursuit that as I write this, I am a little less than three years behind in The New Yorker. (At one point, I was 3 ¼ years behind.) I refuse to jump ahead forsaking the past issues because I know there is much hidden treasure there and since the magazine is not as topical as say Time or Newsweek most of it holds up pretty well. In addition, I get to see what was going on in the world three years ago while, apparently, I was sleeping under a rock. When I am reading I look up every single word that I don’t know. With these types of magazines, especially TNY and Harper’s you will quickly erode the binding of your dictionary. I am prepared to acknowledge that this behavior borders on the compulsive and goes a long way to explaining my inability to have a functional relationship with a woman. But it has a purpose. I am trying, trying to increase my walnut-sized intellect. I wonder sometimes whether I am making any progress towards that goal. Now you may argue that intelligence, like many things in life, is a process and not a destination. But when you see no forward momentum, when you look down at the ground and for all the world fail to denote any velocity whatsoever, it is a little discouraging. But the larger issue that needs to be addressed here is wherefore knowledge? There seems to be accumulating evidence that intelligence does not beget happiness. “Ignorance is bliss” is such a tired cliché that it isn’t even literally examined any longer. But this may be right on the money. I suspect that if I were to put my magazine down, get out of the house, hang out at a bar, drink some beer and use opening lines such as “Did I see you on Baywatch last night?” I would be a lot happier. Most of the art that is worthy of the name—Anna Karenina, Kind of Blue and Starry, Starry Night was created by miserable sons of bitches. Their intellect, their insight into humanity didn’t provide them one iota of relief. It was all they could do to get that shit out of them. As John Lennon once said, “All art is pain expressing itself.” You might argue the point that artistic ability and intelligence are not one in the same and you’re probably right but there seems to be a link there. 5/13/01 40 Reality is an unpleasant place sometimes. The human race has made remarkable efforts to avoid it sometimes. Its disagreeable qualities may single-handedly account for alcoholism, Las Vegas, substance abuse, miniature golf, Victoria’s Secret and Jim Carrey. I myself don’t partake in drugs or alcohol and therefore have little sanctuary when reality rears its ugly head. I find that one of the most pleasant remedies is sleep. I’m a night person and rarely go to bed before one day has become the next but if I’m in a bad mood and things don’t look like they’re getting any better sometimes I’ll just shut the whole thing down and go to bed at nine. And if I manage to sleep through the night, I wake with what appears to be a clean slate. It’s a little gift that I give to myself. Other times—if my day has deteriorated so rapidly that I can’t even make it to the septuagenarian’s bed time, I’ll take a little catnap. If you have never fallen into a deep sleep, the kind of sleep that flirts with a medical coma, the kind of sleep that makes you feel as if you’ve just emerged from the roiling surf like Venus on that clam and upon waking discover that only 15 minutes have gone by, I posit that you have never lived. Although some Christian sects would argue the point, this is as close as you are likely to get to being reborn. A nap will not erase problems but it will make you forget them for a time—or at least make them a little bit fuzzier. I think the mind is like a giant fuse box. Some of us have 10 amp fuses in there, others have 25 but when too much electricity gets going through the cerebral cortex the fuse blows and the lights go out. In birth we pass from darkness into light. Any time you can curl up in the fetal position and shut out the lights, take it. 5/6/01 Id Every night a battle is fought between light and dark. The armies of the night swarm on opposite sides of the battlefield preparing for combat. No, I’m not talking about the war on drugs or gangs in South Central L.A. I’m referring to Howard Stern and Charlie Rose. I happen to believe that there is room for a wide range of tastes in this country. We are a polytheistic, multicultural society. And my tastes happen to run a wide gamut. I like sports but I think the arts are terribly under funded. I’ll take my Miles Davis CD out of my player and replace it with Hootie and the Blowfish. I like foreign films but also appreciate porn. The range of human behavior is what fascinates. Now I happen to believe that the Charlie Rose program is the greatest interview show currently on television, perhaps that ever was. The Dick Cavett show would run a close second but Cavett’s show skewed more towards entertainment than informative interview. This would be the only reason I would rate it lower than Charlie Rose because unquestionably some of Cavett’s shows were remarkable television. The night that Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer were at each other’s throats is absolutely priceless. There are many reasons that Rose’s show is so good, the most important being the atmosphere that he creates. The set is a simple oak table in front of a black curtain. Charlie doesn’t have a studio audience. The guests aren’t “playing” to anyone. It has the feel of a late night kitchen conversation. . But not just any conversation—a conversation with the most interesting people alive. Charlie seems to have an appreciation for the range of humanity as well. He is just as likely to follow a segment with the Japanese ambassador with some dot com genius as he is with Henry Kissinger. But way down at the other end of the dial, Howard Stern beckons. Well, not so much Howard as the endless parade of drop dead gorgeous, lesbian, swimsuit models. If Charlie is my super ego, Stern is unquestionably the id. Most nights Charlie wins. As I get older the pull of Howard attenuates. But it doesn’t go away completely. I suspect that the day this happens is the same day that they put a suit on me and people stand around eating cheese cubes while organ music plays in the background. Sex and intellect are not opposites. The best sex is intertwined with intellect. Which gives me an idea for a show. I’ll call it the Stern Rose show. Charlie will interview the most important newsmakers of the day while naked cheerleaders do stretching exercises in the background. 4/29/01 KO There are many things that are not cool to admit to as a guy: liking egg pie, crying at movies (any movie), or owning a collection of hummingbird figurines among them. But surely near the top of that list would have to be not liking boxing. Occasionally you will get points for sensitivity with women (although not many—there are plenty of women out there who have bloodlust over such things like Ann Margaret in the cockfighting scene of The Cincinnati Kid) but men will not stand for it. Telling a guy you once made out with Gore Vidal at a party will draw less contempt than telling them you’d rather skip their pay-per-view party. Admittedly I am a sports snob. As I’ve pointed out before a lot of activities we call “sports” are not worthy of the name. I don’t question that boxing requires strength, skill, conditioning and even, to some degree, strategy. Although these are the components of most sports, boxing is a travesty. There is no doubt that these guys are very gifted athletes. But all those gifts are bent on devastation. Let’s not pull any punches here—the object of baseball is to score the most runs, in football to score the most points, in a marathon to have the quickest time but in boxing it is to hit someone until they fall down and can no longer get up. I don’t have a problem with peripheral violence in sports—bench-clearing brawls in baseball are sometimes necessary and many times galvanizing to struggling teams. But when that violence moves to the center of the action (one of the reasons that hockey is ludicrous) it becomes utterly destructive. I’m not all that queasy about blood—usually I’ll watch them inserting the needle in my vein when they draw blood—but there is nothing sublime about deliberate violence. And if you think I have repressed violence within me, you’re absolutely right. I think most of us probably do. But my job as a human being is to reckon with that anger before I inflict it on others. Then again, even most featherweights would kick my ass. 4/22/01 Rain It is said there are two types of people in the world- cat people and dog people. (Of course there are many dichotomies that are said to comprise all of humanity, not just cats and dogs.) I consider myself to be a dog person. Meaning, if I was going to own a pet that was large enough to have a name, it would probably be a dog. I like dogs—most dogs. I don’t take a Will Rogers approach to canines. I don’t want a lapdog. I don’t want any animal that requires more grooming than a Texas debutante. As far as I’m concerned, a dog should be like a jeep: sturdy, good ground clearance, not afraid to get dirty. Dogs are utilitarian—you can go jogging with them, they’ll ride in the bed of your pickup, they will fetch (tennis balls, Frisbees, expired ducks, and yes, slippers), they’ll bark when someone is trying to break in to rip off your porn collection and they will attract women for you. They are perhaps Nature’s perfect animals. Cats on the other hand are like knickknacks: they are fragile (ever trying patting a cat really hard on their stomachs? You get a bracelet of claws) and while they are interesting to look at for a few idle moments, you soon realize they don’t really do much. What’s interesting about my proclivity towards dogs is that, in terms of my own personality, I’m probably more like a cat: I’m not particularly sociable, I’m pretty quiet, I like daytime naps in the sun, I like sliding around on hardwood floors in my socks and I do most of my defecation indoors. You also get the sense that cats are more intelligent than dogs. Perhaps it has something to do with the angle of their heads or ears when you call them. I can’t help but feel that their stony silence towards me is an expression of their utter contempt for my existence. I mean let’s be honest here—if someone threw a stick, asked you to retrieve it and if as soon as you had done so, they threw it again wouldn’t you suggest they get their own fucking stick? Yeah, maybe cats aren’t so bad after all. 4/15/01 Distaff I’m not one of those guys who will tell you that women shouldn’t play sports. I don’t like women’s basketball but it has nothing to do with the fact that the average score looks like a hockey game. I don’t happen to like male basketball either. And if I find male boxing is brutal, savage and distasteful, you can imagine what I think of women getting into the ring. But I happen to actually enjoy women’s fast-pitch softball. In fact there is a young woman who pitches for the Arizona Wildcats named Jennie Finch that I think I want to marry. Before you start formulating theories that I can only view women in a sexual context you should know that Ms. Finch is 32-0 with an ERA south of 1.00. Granted, she happens to be pretty hot but that 32-0 excites me just as much as her 36-24-36 does. There are, however, two areas where I don’t enjoy seeing women: stand-up comedy and sports casting. It’s no great intellectual leap to suppose that the latter and the former are related. With rare exception, I think there are no funny female stand-up comics. I happen to like Ellen DeGeneres but that’s about it. (I’m going to stay away from the moral quicksand of implying that Ellen’s sexual orientation has anything to do with her talent as a comedienne.) I think it has something to do with vanity. To be funny, you can’t give a damn what you look like and women haven’t exactly been encouraged to adopt this viewpoint. I’m not saying women aren’t funny or smart, I’m just saying that we don’t make stars of the ones who are. As far as women sportscasters go, I don’t want them in my life. If this is sexist, so be it but they grate on my nerves. Please refer to my above disclaimer and rest assured that I do like smart women. I just don’t like watching women act like men. The last thing this planet needs is a woman trying to emulate Chris Berman. (I’m starting a campaign to get Chris Berman to stop trying as well but these things take time.) Perhaps you’ll feel as if you’ve slipped into a time warp here but I feel this is a good time to mention that I don’t like the movie Thelma and Louise either. Not because of some vague notion that women shouldn’t be able to be action heroes just like men but for exactly that reason. How does imitation of Arnold Schwarzenegger constitute a step forward in women’s power and prestige in society? I would rather see women exploit what is uniquely feminine. 4/8/01 Jazz I don’t know much about it. When I watch guys like Gary Giddins rattle off band line-ups like those diehard baseball fans who can tell you who played second base for the 1951 Braves and how many bases he stole I am amazed. (It was Roy Hartsfield with 7, by the way). But I feel about jazz much the same way I feel about poetry. In fact jazz is the poetry of the music world. Those who read Danielle Steel are likely to listen to Britney Spears, those who want Raymond Chandler may turn to Springsteen. Jazz, like poetry, requires patience on the part of the audience. It yields its pleasures slowly. Just as you can’t read Adrienne Rich quickly and expect to glean anything from it, you can’t listen to jazz while driving the 5 on a sunny day at 70 mph with the top down. It doesn’t lend itself to that. Jazz and poetry require such concentration and mental agility that it is unlikely to attract more than a niche audience. I don’t listen to much jazz and I don’t read much poetry but I always feel better when I do. There is the snobbish aspect of it, certainly, the I’m-so-much-more-cultured-than-Joe-Lunchbox but in addition there is the feeling of tapping into pure emotion. At its best, these art forms strip away traditional methods—poetry lacks plot and character development; jazz does without verse-chorus-verse. I think when you are in love you are susceptible to poetry and when you heart is broken you are open to jazz. At least the bluesy, Kind of Blue jazz that appeals to me. You may not get her back and it may not make things any better but listening to “Flamenco Sketches” lets you know that, unquestionably, Miles had been there before too. If all great art is pain expressing itself, jazz and poetry is perhaps the greatest pain of all. 4/1/01 Light There is a medical term for it- Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)—the belief that our moods are controlled by the seasons and the amount of natural sunlight available to us. This is a belief that, in terms of scientific credence, I have placed somewhere between Astrology and the causal link between stepping on a crack and your mother having problems with her vertebrae. Or, as Lisa Chipongian on Britannica.com, says: Still, the idea that our moods and behaviors could be linked to the seasons, to cyclical changes in light, temperature, and humiidity, seems naive. Our lives, after all, are in large part sealed off from the weather—by glass, by the power of electricity—we can control the temperature, the illumination, and even the humidity level of our inside environment. Furthermore, we "breed" year-round, we are not programmed to migrate, and food is generally available and abundant at all times of the year. So how can we view ourselves as anything but immune or invulnerable to the effects of the changing seasons? I couldn’t agree more—especially with that “breeding” part. I think most people who are getting laid on a regular basis will tell you that they don’t really give a damn how much light there is—in some cases, the less the better. But for the first time this past winter I experienced something similar to SAD (even the acronym is maudlin). What’s odd is that I live in L.A.—not a spot known for unbearable seasons. I’ve lived in New Hampshire and Chicago for God’s sake! A few weeks of dark, rainy weather in the winter is a small price to pay for sunshine and warm weather from May through September. But it got to me. Not being able to play softball, not being able to go outside started making me (more) nuts. My guess is that I’m spoiled. (Shangri-) LA really is an outdoor person’s dream. I just hope, I pray that this doesn’t mean I’m going to have to move to Florida when I retire to keep suicidal tendencies at bay. |
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