9/30/01                                                                         Taps I had my first real girlfriend when I was in high school.  I resided in New Hampshire at the time in one of those neighborhoods that seem to only exist when you are a child—that is, one with a lot of people your age in a fairly concentrated place.  I lived at the top of a hill in a house that looked like it had been ripped right out of Southern gentility.  Big white columns and a brick façade.  Façade being the keyword here since my upbringing was very middleclass.  If you stood in the front yard facing the house, my room was to the right on the first floor.  This is slightly misleading since the house really didn’t have a first floor.  The only square footage at ground level was in the foyer—from there you had to choose either the basement or the second floor.  My room was in the finished basement (common to many New England homes) and I shared the floor with a family room, a laundry room, a closet, a bathroom and the garage.  The window in my bedroom was eyelevel to the ground.  My girlfriend lived in a house at the bottom of the hill.  Weeknights during my senior year, she would wait until the rest of her family had gone to bed and then would sneak out and make her way up the hill to my window.  I would lie in bed with the lights out, awake, waiting for her tap.  The tap at the window.  To me, this was the most melodic sound in the world.  It held so much promise.  And when it would come, I would throw open the window, lift her to the floor of my bedroom, feeling her softness, smelling her scent and we would collapse to the bed in the dark.  She would stay the night until just before dawn and then reverse her path home.  The secretiveness of it, the darkness, and the danger all combined into a heady sense of time suspended.  And yet, those nights never lasted long enough.  I’m now 32 years old—that was 15 years ago, half a lifetime—and even now I wonder if those nights weren’t the finest moments I’ll ever spend on this earth.  This is either horribly sad, or a cause for joyful nostalgia.  I’m not sure which.  I suppose every person has his Madeleine—the French pastry that was the starting point for Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.  And I think we have the natural tendency to, as Bono tells us, “…glorify the past when the future dries up.”  But that was clearly a more innocent time.  Not naïve.  Innocent.  I don’t think you can reach the age of 17 in the 20th century (no wonder I feel old—my childhood was in a different century, a different millennium, no less) and remain naïve.  I had lost my virginity by this point—thanks to her.  But what was still intact at that point was the ability to give myself over to unmitigated joy.  To experience that much pleasure, simply from a tap at my window in the middle of the night is not something I have experienced in a very long time.  Perhaps that is what I miss most of all—the ability to surrender to happiness.  Scarring now blocks it.  But 15 years ago, I didn’t worry about betrayal or loss.  Those are learned responses.  Some people experience betrayal when they are very young and some when they are older.  At that point, in 1986 at the age of 17 in my senior year of high school my innocence was still intact.  It wouldn’t last much longer.  By the end of that year I would have my first taste of betrayal.  She would provide that too. 9/23/01                                                                         Glory There has been a lot of flag waving in this country recently.  Stores are selling out of flags at a record rate, major league baseball players all have the emblem sewn to their uniforms and most of the vehicles on the road look like they are part of a 4th of July parade.  I love this country but flag waving in general makes me nervous.  The problem with patriotism is that it very easily can spill over into nationalism and then jingoism and finally fanaticism.  And fanatics are the ones who crashed planes into the World Trade Center.  Sometimes I want to stop people and ask them why they are flying their flags.  Is it for solidarity with the firemen?  The police?  The country in general?  Is it a rebuke to every nation on the planet that isn’t America or just those nations who harbor terrorists?  Could they find those nations on the map?  What do they know about the quality of life in Afghanistan or the Sudan or Iraq?  To fly the flag simply because everyone else is doing it seems like a lemming mentality that is best disposed of as quickly as possible.  I personally feel that a better use of that energy would be in learning the complexities of the situation.  Who did it?  Why did they do it?  To accept Bush’s explanation that “they (whoever “they” are) hate what we stand for” or “they hate our freedom” is simple-minded and lacks any intellectual rigor whatsoever.  This issue is amazingly complex and saying that they hate us because we’re great is not only appallingly narcissistic, it is also dangerous.  Here are just some of the reasons that the Muslim world might have problems with us: Our financial and moral backing of the Jewish people in the Israeli and Palestinian conflict, the economic sanctions placed on Iraq, our military occupation of Saudi Arabia (where Medina and Mecca are located—some of the holiest ground on the planet for the Muslim faith), our bombing of targets in Afghanistan, Sudan, Libya, and Iraq which may or (as evidence now suggests) may not have hit military targets and finally, as I’ve previously noted in these essays, we are the beneficiaries of one of the highest standards of living on the planet.  Many in this country consider conspicuous consumption a birthright.  Not everyone in the world wastes brainpower wondering whether they should go to Aspen or Cancun for their annual three-week vacation. We live in a country where you can purchase a gumball machine for kitty that dispenses cat treats.  Don’t believe me?  Check it out here.  Or (for $600) a catscratcher shaped like a grand piano that plays “Memories”, the theme from Cats.    How’d you like to justify that to children who eat dirt for dinner?  Yeah, I guess they hate us simply because we stand for all that is good in the world. Another thing about patriotism: I rent a guesthouse in the back of my landlord’s residence.  Shortly after the attack the landlady’s daughter, who is about eight years old, was in the front yard with her mother who was teaching her how to spell America while she waved a flag.  She was doing a cheer that seemed out of place outside a high school gymnasium:  (“A-M-E-R-I-C-A, what’s that spell?”)  And my thought was—why?  Why do this?  How does it improve the situation?  How does it help a child to understand that the universe is comprised of more than the area between Honolulu and Bangor? The other aspect of this event that I find disturbing is the way some in the press have covered the story.  Overall I think it has been well handled—especially by the networks but I have found some of CNN’s coverage disturbing.  Some of the anchors (especially Aaron Brown) insist on pointing out over and over that this is a tragedy of epic proportions.  There are lots of long pauses, gulping and shallow breathing.  I have no problem with genuine emotion and clearly newscasters are human beings too  (pace Stone Phillips) but I don’t understand the need for any network to sell this story.  CNN now has a running banner of a flag at the bottom of the screen over the logo “America’s New War.”  And not just a flag but a waving flag.  Maybe prior to September 11 you needed to use fancy graphics to get people to stay tuned when shark attacks or Gary Condit getting a cup of coffee were the biggest scoops of the day but clearly here, now, we have a story that sells itself.  You’ve got a captive audience.  It’s like being a water salesman in the Sahara.  If as a citizen of this country you don’t care about the destruction of 4 airplanes, two 110 story buildings, part of the Pentagon and 6,000+ lives, chances are catchy logos won’t solve the problem.  Just tell us what you know.  I hate to be the one to say it but if I never hear another bad version of “God Bless America” for the rest of my life I’ll be a happy man.  Again, it’s not that I’m unpatriotic it’s just that there is more than one way to show patriotism.  What happened in NYC and DC on 9/11/01 is disturbing on many levels but I don’t see how flying a flag off a plastic stick on your foreign sports car while tuning into a ballgame where a typically bad version of “The Star Spangled Banner” is now preceded by “GBA.” We need an appreciation of the wider world.  Our separation from 95% of the rest of humanity made these tragic events all the more shocking.  I think sometimes people in this country believe that we don’t actually occupy space in a way that can be pinpointed through longitude and latitude.  We imagine that we live somewhere in the ether where we can’t be reached.  It is this thought process that has given rise to concepts like the missile shield, where we think we can simply open a high-tech umbrella and be perfectly safe.  When the planes crashed into the WTC towers our world tilted on its axis.  The event was as revelatory as Copernicus’ findings—the U.S. is not the center of the universe.  9/16/01                                                                        Gray There is an old Saturday Night Live skit that was set in a New York newspaper office on the evening of December 7, 1941.  The writers are sitting around trying to decide what the following day’s headline should be.  They debate whether the lead story should be the attack on Pearl Harbor or if there is another story they might be missing.  They go through a number of other options—snowstorms, a woman having her purse stolen, and the proposal to raise subway fares.  One writer looks at them disbelievingly and keeps saying over and over, “I’m telling you—Pearl Harbor, that’s your story!”  I think I’ll take his advice.  I was awakened by a call a little after 8am PST from one of my friends telling me I had to get up and turn on the TV.  By that time the World Trade Center towers had collapsed and they were showing the smoking rubble.  I asked him what had happened and he said that they had hit the WTC.  I asked where it was and he said, “It’s gone.”  When I saw the plane hitting the tower for the first time my first reaction was not one of horror but of, “Well, those are some pretty cheesy special effects!”  It looked like a Steven Segal movie.  But of course most Segal movies are more plausible.  When they started showing the second plane going into the tower from the reverse angle (the one where you can see the plane banking to the left at the last minute in order to hit its target) it looked even more unreal.  It was like watching a Warner Brother’s cartoon where, when a character runs through a wall, he leaves a perfect silhouette in the drywall.  So many random disconnected thoughts ran through my mind: Where was the Emergency Broadcast System?  The tests always say, “If this had been a real emergency…” Well if this didn’t qualify as an emergency, what does, exactly?  (As a side note, it’s strange to watch 14 straight hours of television and not see a single commercial.  Apparently even capitalism has a sense of decency.)  In the falling rubble you saw thousands and thousands of papers—it was like a ticker-tape parade gone horribly wrong.  Why are there so many papers?  I thought we lived in the digital age.  This was such a well-planned operation.  The targets were picked with care and precision.  Where else in the entire country could you hit two buildings that held more people in such a concentrated place?  Those are perhaps the two most populous buildings in the U.S. It seems to me that they maximized the damage you could do with commercial aircraft.  These guys were good.  They picked the right planes—jumbo jets bound on transcontinental flights, which meant they were loaded to capacity with fuel.  Also, there weren’t many people on board most of these planes, which also may have been deliberate since it is easier to hijack a flight when there aren’t as many people to rush the hijackers.  These people had to be skilled—they had to be bi-lingual, fearless, highly intelligent, capable of flying a commercial jet and, most importantly, willing to die for their cause.  I think that’s an extremely rare combination of qualities.  The targets were carefully chosen for both their symbolic and tactical value.  The WTC towers represent the capitalistic hegemony of the U.S. and are a symbol of engineering skill.  By taking them out they were able to shut down the stock market for a week and kill a lot of people—perhaps more than twice as many who lost their lives at Pearl Harbor.  The Pentagon is more symbolic than tactical.  It seems to me that these guys wanted to prove that they could infiltrate the most powerful military force on the planet.  And who knows where the fourth plane was headed—the Capitol?  The White House?  These guys were masterful—they did their homework and (it seems) achieved almost all of their aims. Commentators keep mentioning how well funded the hijackers were but with the exception of the flight training the costs were pretty minimal.  These guys didn’t need to go out and purchase F-14s or Scud missiles.  They only needed some box cutters (which you can buy at Wal-Mart for a couple of bucks) and some coach class tickets.  How many plane tickets can you buy for the price of a F-14?  Quite a few. In high school I found history pretty dull.  Memorizing the date of the Magna Carta seemed to have little application in my pursuit of seeing women naked.  Once I got to college I probably was more interested but didn't have room in my schedule for many history classes.  But what happened on September 11, 2001 is exactly why you read about stuff that happened hundreds of years before you were born.  Our generation has never seen anything like this.  But if you don't have the history of WWII you don't know that you shouldn't lock up all the Muslims in the U.S. in cages.  In terms of the battle we're going to fight it will be incredibly difficult.  I don't think we can do it without putting troops on the ground in Afghanistan—and that means casualties.  Maybe a lot.  We thought Vietnam was messy—guerrilla warfare, unfamiliar terrain, far from home, friends and foes with identical morphology—that was a cakewalk compared to this.  We've got to fight a war in many countries including our own.  This is seismic. Another strange event happened on the morning of 9/11/01: after I hung up with my friend I was watching CNN when I received another call.  A woman asked me if I lived in the duplex at 730 East Chestnut.  I told her that it wasn’t a duplex but, yes, I lived there.  Then she asked for the father of the family that used to live in the front house prior to the current tenants.  This man has an Arabic sounding name.  I told her no, they no longer lived there.  She thanked me and hung up.  It wasn’t until 10 or 15 minutes later that I started thinking how odd this was.  I was still waking up at the time and my brain wasn’t working yet (sometimes it doesn’t work even when I am awake).  After all, she didn’t say she was from a credit card or long-distance company, nor did she tell me her name.  So I did something I don’t think I’ve ever done before—I hit *69.  I reached a recording that said something to the effect of “Your call cannot be completed to the last number that called you.”  I am not a conspiracy theorist by any means but it all sounded fairly ominous. The last thing we need in this country is a bunch of people running through the streets looking to beat the crap out of anyone wearing a towel on their head.  We’ve heard leaks of the code names applied to the upcoming military actions.  Noble Eagle, Infinite Justice.  People are uptight and tense—these are fractious times.  I think the last thing we need to do is ratchet up the rhetoric.  Our government (and I can’t believe I’m about to say this) should be the voice of reason. In times like these I feel a need to reach out to other people.  Not only on an emotional level but on an intellectual one as well.  Perhaps you can’t solve this problem (or other major problems) by intellect alone.  Perhaps it requires the use of force.  But I don’t believe you can divorce intellect from action.  So the way I approach it is through discussion.  Since I don’t have a woman here (which would be nice at times like these) I try to communicate with my friends and family.  I’ve spent a lot of time talking to my brother on the phone.  And another friend of mine (who lives her in L.A.) and I trade long e-mails trying to put it all in perspective.  Trying to figure out how freedom and the Taliban and violence and Will Ferrell and poetry all fit together.  I keep trying to put the jigsaw puzzle together.  It seems that it all dovetails somehow; you just have to have the patience and the diligence to keep trying different pieces. 9/9/01                                                                Elephants There are not that many people I actively dislike.  Oh sure, there’s no shortage of people whom I don’t particularly care for but the list of people who I find objectionable is fairly short.  So, if I go out of my way to detest someone, I find it inconsiderate if they don’t do me the courtesy of maintaining consistent, repulsive behavior.  That’s why I found it so vexing when I learned that George W. Bush was planning to set up a Little League baseball diamond on the White House grounds.  I love baseball—W. has no business being a baseball fan!  The only comfort I can draw from this is that one good idea per term seems to be pushing the limit of his abilities.  I think I can be assured of another three and a half years of bad decisions and go right back to hating him.  (Not to mention that this barely balances out the injustice of trading away Sammy Sosa from the Rangers when he ran the team in Texas.)  Another guy (who I imagine runs in the same circles as W.) has been veering from his course of boorishness lately.  Charlton Heston has an excellent track record of dislikable conduct.  And Chuck is very generous with his shortcomings—he gives you several reasons to find him objectionable: He is a lousy actor who makes William Shatner look understated, he is the head of the N.R.A. and finally, he fancies himself a cultural critic that sees no irony in the fact that the government will have to pry the gun out of his “cold dead fingers” if anyone wants to impose gun control but he is more than happy to tell the Time Warner shareholders what lyrics are appropriate for musicians to sing.  Apparently on Chuck’s copy of the Constitution (printed on stone tablets that he carried down from Mt. Sinai), they left off the First Amendment and went straight to the Second.  But Chuck is a slippery one—he turned in a good performance in Branagh’s Hamlet and a self-deprecating turn on Friends.  Heston has a sense of humor about himself!?  No, I won’t stand for it.  He has an obligation to continue being a self-aggrandizing, arrogant, supercilious clod or it throws the world out of balance.  The same goes for W.—he’s proved time and time again that he lacks eloquence, intelligence or any distinction whatsoever other than being born with Bush as his surname—to do something clever now is not particularly sporting of him.  I like my cultural figures to be like characters in a melodrama—I want to cheer the hero and hiss the villain.  I don’t want to have to think about it or look for evidence of redemptive behavior.  Bush and Heston should take a cue from Jesse Helms who has never swerved from the course of being an idiot.  That’s the way we do it in America. 9/2/01                                                                    Lists I’m compulsive list maker.  I’m not saying it’s healthy or normal but in the interest of full disclosure I need to be truthful.  I make lists every day to plan out what I need or want to accomplish.  I make lists for everything—daily errands, master lists (long-term tasks as opposed to those in the short-term), lists of books I want to buy, CDs I want to listen to and movies I want to see.  I also make lists of goals: financial goals, creative goals, physical goals, and intellectual goals.  I’d like to think that this forces me to be a more productive, motivated person but I’m not entirely sure that it works out that way.  More often than not I fail to complete my lists.  Sometimes items get carried over to the following week and eventually I have a long list of things that I wanted to accomplish months ago that may now no longer be relevant.  Where the hell does this compulsive behavior come from?  I’m not sure but I’m starting to believe the psychologists when they tell us that our personalities are forged in our early childhood years.  When I was relatively young, I remember staying up on Friday nights with my mother to plan out my Saturday morning cartoon.  I would force her go through the TV Guide with me and make a schedule of the cartoons I wanted to see: what channels they were on and the times they started.  I.E. 8:30am “Speed Buggy” on CBS; 9:00am “Hong Kong Phooey” on ABC, etc.  I’m not proud of this stuff folks—it’s no real mystery why women don’t stick around—but I’m trying to tell you the ugly truth here.  And I think the truth is that our little habits and foibles, while interesting, are pretty disturbing when examined closely.  I should probably just ignore the underlying meanings on this one. I need to put that on the list. 8/26/01                                                                      Ethos Tae be touched by real love requires great fortune, it’s no in your hands.  The best ye can do, what is in yir power, is tae acquire grace.  –From Glue by Irvine Welsh I think I’ve covered the fact that I’m an atheist before.  But this is not to say that I’m a nihilist.  There’s a pretty big difference.  Everyone has a religion.  Even me.  Everyone has a code that they live by.  Some get that code from the bible others from the Koran but I think the majority of people on this planet have a moral code that they try to adhere to.  I’m beginning to think that one of life’s major tasks is determining what that code is.  I don’t mean the big issues—I think you fairly quickly determine whether you believe in murder or rape or robbery.  Much of life is in finessing the details.  How specifically should you treat your family, your friends?  Is lying every appropriate?  I’ve come to believe that answering these questions is one of the most difficult and time consuming—it usually takes a lifetime or so—of individual human pursuits.  I happen to think that not eating meat on Fridays is a pretty arbitrary tenet to set down for oneself—it reminds me a bit of “The Lottery”—but I imagine many people would find my rules just as useless.  When you translate the above epigraph out of the Scottish dialect it’s written in you come fairly close to a credo that I think is worth pursuing.  There is no shortage of disappointment and pain in this world and I think to bear your failures and slights with an absence of anger or resentment and to aspire towards grace is a laudable credo. Grace, when publicly displayed can be shocking for its rarity.  I remembering seeing Bill Cosby on David Letterman shortly after Cosby’s only son was murdered.  There were no tears or desire for revenge on display.  Instead Cosby spent his time telling stories about amusing things his son had done while he was alive.  I was struck dumb by his self-possession.  It seemed to me that Bill Cosby and I both shared the physical attributes of human beings but the similarities pretty much ended there.  It’s unlikely that I’ll ever possess that much grace but it seems a pretty good example to follow. 8/19/01                                                                   Xylophone I was watching a rerun of Saturday Night Live on Comedy Central and Fiona Apple was the guest musician.  She was playing “Shadow boxer” and I noticed that she had a xylophone player on stage with her.  With apologies to Lionel Hampton, the xylophone player must rank somewhere south of the guy who bangs the tambourine in the hierarchy of sexual desirability.  I mean, everybody talks about the bass player being the odd man out but I think even Michael Anthony has to be getting more than the xylophonist in a teenage girl’s band.  There are some bad jobs out there—I know, I’ve (briefly) held many of them—but I think I would rather be a tollbooth collector on the Jersey turnpike before I would sign up for the xylophone gig.  A guy has enough obstacles to getting laid without going out of his way to court trouble.  The old saying is that you are what you eat but in this country (and this seems especially true in L.A.) it seems you are what you do.  I think Europeans have a different attitude towards work than we do in America.  (After all, in Europe it is not uncommon to take five weeks of vacation a year—a period of Bush-like proportions.  I’ve taken off five weeks of work myself but I don’t call it a vacation, I call it unemployment.)  The problem is how many people out there really want to be defined by their jobs? Maybe it’s just because I’m in L.A. and no one here is doing what they want to do.  If everybody out here had their dream job there would be no one to serve you food in restaurants.  They’re all doing what they have to do so that eventually, hopefully, they can do what they want to do.  God knows when or if I’m going to do what I want to do.  In the meantime maybe I should see if there are any xylophone gigs opening up. 8/12/01                                                                        Kids Smarter people than myself have pointed out how ridiculous the laws are in this country.  We are one of the very few industrialized nations to still support the death penalty, we jail non-violent drug offenders while paroling murderers and we have police forces in most of the major metropolitan areas that make Mexican police officers look like Serpico.  But I think one of the most asinine policies is the practice of sentencing children as if they were adults.  Now, without question, there have been some heinous crimes committed by children in the past decade or so.  To verify this, you need only turn on CNN and watch for a few hours.  The fact that children are capable of being just as brutal and violent as adults is not something I dispute.  What I question is why we have two different sets of laws for juveniles and adults when we treat every case on an ad hoc basis.  In other words, either you treat kids like adults or you don’t.  If you make the reasoned argument that children under the age of eighteen (or whatever arbitrary age you choose) are not to be held accountable for their actions in the same manner as people over the age of eighteen then stick to that.  There are many examples of this theory—if you set the age for registering with the Selective Service at eighteen then that’s it: that’s the age you become an adult.  This means at eighteen you are privy to all benefits that adult citizens have—going to X-rated films, voting, drinking or renting a car.  In other words, if you’re old enough to die, you’re old enough to buy.  Having separate laws for juveniles and adults is an utterly meaningless distinction if you can decide after a crime has been committed that, in this case, the child should be treated as an adult.  After all, you never see a case where it has been determined that the adult should be sentenced as a child.  Consistency in sentencing leads to a fairer society. 8/5/01                                                                 Predecessors The unexamined life is not worth living for man. -Socrates or Plato (469–399 B.C.), Greek philosopher. Plato, Apology of Socrates 38a. Being conscious of the accomplishments to those that have gone before you is a double-edged sword.  On the one hand it can inspire—i.e. if Stephen Hawking who is unable to feed himself can tease out the mysteries of the universe, I can probably finish this essay—but it can also be very discouraging, i.e. by the time Charles Lindbergh was my age he’d already flown solo across the Atlantic.  I feel the need to do this writing thing but anytime I walk into a library or the average mega-plex bookstore and see all the books that are already there it’s hard to imagine how I might carve out a niche for myself.  There’s not enough time to read all the great books by the major writers—why should anyone want to go out of their way to read mine?  And even if people make the time, what can I manage to say that hasn’t already been said with more skill than I possess?  The answer here is obvious if not entirely re-assuring.  There have been great works of art for thousands of years now and if every artist who came along thought that there was no room for their voice there would be no new art.  Of course the people who reasoned this out were Degas and Tolstoy and Mozart and I’m, well… me. Anyway, whenever I sit down to write I need to push these thoughts aside because they are absolutely paralyzing.  This is just another example of my belief that the only life worth living is the unexamined one.  The older I get the more firmly I believe that the people who are happiest are the ones who think about nothing besides what is in front of their face.  To exist in the eternal now is the only way to live.  The memory of past injuries, the knowledge of others’ accomplishments and of one’s self doubt does not allow for much happiness.  The happiest, most productive people in this world are the ones who are dumb as sticks.  Or at least can manage to focus only on the task at hand.  I think this is the reason so many artists drink or do drugs—it is an escape from consciousness.  Forgetting is a crucial step in the process of creation.  Think how healthy and happy we’d all be if we could wipe our minds clear of historical pain, petty bickerings and perceived inadequacies.  Sometimes getting hit in the head by a softball is not all bad. 7/29/01                                                                         Bono Here in L.A. I’m well outside the loops of the Bible belt.  But apparently I live smack dab in the middle of the Jehovah’s Witness Relocation Program.  What’s curious about this is I live in a back guesthouse.  Census workers have problems finding my place. But apparently I have a flashing neon sign above my house that reads “Godless Atheist Resides Here.”  I made the mistake of actually having a conversation with one of these guys once.  Not just a polite conversation but a 45+ minute debate about homosexuality, blood transfusions and man’s basic need to be saved.  It’s fair to say that I don’t really line up with them on any of the major issues.  It’s not just the JW mind you; I would say that this goes for all the major religions.  What’s interesting is that I don’t have a problem with anyone else’s religion—whether you’re Jewish, Catholic, Muslim or Buddhist doesn’t really bother me.  Let’s put it this way: I’m not wasting a Saturday morning looking for converts to the church of Gary.  But there are some religions out there that are not as comfortable with my presence in the world.  My feeling is if you want to preach to me, at least set it to some music I like.  None of that Christian Rock mind you—I’m referring to straight ahead spiritual rock and roll.  I’m talking about bands like U2.  U2 is so sneaky about it that you may not even notice all the Christian references that make it into their music.  I even like songs whose lyrics are straight out of the bible such as “40.”  Man, if you can quote the bible to me and I don’t either fall asleep or projectile vomit you’re accomplishing something.  But Bono and the boys manage it.  The truth is that most Irish bands have an element of religious undertones to their work and yet they are some of my favorite musicians:  U2, Van Morrison and the Waterboys are about as Irish as they come and all manage to make their religion(s) palatable.  Just don’t expect them to be on tour with Jerry Falwell anytime soon. 7/22/01                                                                       Gutenberg Why do people keep writing books?  Right now, somewhere out there, there’s at least one person working on a great novel.  If I lived a thousand years, could eradicate all televisions from the face of the earth and could find some way (please God, give me strength) to expunge all vestiges of my ailing sex drive, I would never be able to read all the good books, let alone the bad ones.  By way of example, on this website I’ve listed the Modern Library’s 100 best English-language novels of the 20th Century.  As of this writing, I’ve read a total of 15.  Out of 100.  This pisses me off because the fact is that I would like to get to all of those books.  And let me point out how limited this list is—it is only one century’s worth of books and doesn’t include foreign language books nor does it include all the non-fiction out there on history, philosophy, psychology and biography—books that contain a lot of knowledge that I am not currently in possession of.  400 years ago, it was possible to read all the major works of fiction.  Today, with the possible exception of Harold Bloom, no one has that kind of time, let alone dedication.  Were I not so ridiculously committed to my New Yorkers, I probably could have knocked off much closer to 75% of the list by now but that still leaves a lot of the Greeks, the Bible, Proust and Cervantes unaccounted for. And if you widen this view outward, I have to take into account all the other things I’m not going to have time to do—see the most important paintings, visit most of the countries on the planet, see all those foreign films or stalk Salma Hayek.  But it’s the books that haunt me the most, because there they are on my bookshelf, beckoning me.  Thanks Gutenberg—thanks for reminding me every day how much I don’t know. 7/15/01                                                                           Spin I’m not what you would call a neat freak.  I’m not exactly a slob either—you won’t find old pizza boxes in the corner or roaches in the sink but I have to force myself to do basic domestic chores, such as dusting, cleaning the bathroom, etc.  There is, however, one household task that I don’t mind doing.  In fact, if I had the facilities, I would do it all the time.  That job is laundry, or what I like to call the "King of the Domestic Chores."  Let me try to explain why I feel that laundry is in the upper echelons of domestic activity.  One of the most appealing things about laundry is that you can work on other things while it’s being done.  Multi-tasking is a horribly overused word but completely apropos in this instance.  Once you put the laundry in, you can read (one of my personal favorite choices) or watch TV or even (as silly as it sounds) do other household chores.  This is not true of vacuuming or dusting or cleaning.  Multi-tasking gives the miniscule thrill of feeling as if you’re accomplishing something in your small, pathetic life.  (I speak for myself of course.)  It’s true that using a dishwasher (I mean a Maytag, not an illegally employed domestic worker) allows you the same freedom but it’s going to be a long time before I live somewhere with that built-in luxury.  There is also the visceral thrill of collecting dirty clothes, throwing them in a steel tub and taking them out clean.  It’s true that this progression from sin to redemption is provided by other cleaning activities but for some reason it is more readily apparent with clothing.  Perhaps this is due to the fact that we wear our clothes; we have a closer attachment to them than we do the kitchen sink.  Putting on a warm, clean shirt after removing it from the dryer with its heady sent, on a subconscious level must remind me of childhood.  And childhood, unless you were burdened with abuse or abandonment, is always comforting.  I’d rather wash every piece of clothing I’ve ever owned—admittedly not a daunting prospect—than clean the bathroom sink once. 7/8/01                                                                         Talkies I like old movies.  Due to the fact that there are not one but two channels on my cable system that are devoted to nothing but old movies (Turner Classic Movies and American Movie Classics) my guess is that I am not the only one.  What is the appeal of watching old movies?  Certainly the dearth of good movies coming out of Hollywood today can be cited but I’m not sure this is accurate reasoning.  After all, there are good and bad movies in all times—I think our notions of old movies are skewed.  It’s not that they didn’t make bad black and white movies, it’s just that those aren’t the ones that are shown repeatedly.  So what is the compulsion we have for watching movies that were not only made before we were born but whose stars died before we made our first entrance?  My guess is that we want to submit to a world that has the appearance of an understandable moral landscape.  Again, I’m not so sure times were actually simpler then but because the cars and clothing look different we are able to lull ourselves into a feeling of security.  Watching films that were made prior to the Women’s Liberation Movement, the rise of substance abuse, World War II (not to mention Vietnam), the assassination of the Kennedy brothers, Watergate, AIDS and television seems a different world to us now.  It is a popular parlor game (not that anyone plays parlor games anymore) to name a different time you would have preferred to live in—this again is escape from the nebulous present and a retreat into the presumed simplicity of a different age.  Going to the movies is an escapist pursuit.  Westerns, Murder Mysteries, Action Adventures, Comedies—all these genres remove us from our quotidian present and whisk us off to some Never Never land.  Even drama that deals with issues that we ourselves are confronted with on a constant basis (loss of love, money problems, identity crises) allows us to escape.  It’s someone else’s problem.  And, to be truthful, I’d take Ingrid Bergman over Helen Hunt any day of the week. 7/1/01                                                                       Suffrage Voter disenfranchisement.  This term along with “dimpled chads” and “undervotes” arose out of the debacle in Florida during the 2000 Presidential Election.  The question has been raised many times before whether the low voter turnouts in most elections helps or hinders the democratic process.  On one hand, if people aren’t participating in the vote the will of the people is not being adequately represented.  On the other hand, do we really want people voting who don’t care whether they vote or not?  In other words, are we better off with everyone voting or just those who are informed and care about the process?  As far as the general presidential elections that occur every 4 years go I have mixed feelings.  When it comes to a much more important campaign that runs from April-June every year my mind is much more clear.  That’s right, I’m talking about the Major League Baseball All-Star game.  This year I was disenfranchised as a voter.  I tried to vote online several times but the website was not functioning properly and I could not get it to accept my vote.  This does not bode well for the future of our republic.  All the votes must be counted.  Unfortunately the game itself has lost some of its luster.  The players seem to take the competition less seriously.  Many players (pitchers especially) opt out of the game altogether in fear of aggravating existing injuries or running the risk of sustaining one in a game that does not make an iota of difference in terms of the post-season.  With the advent of interleague play, the matchups are not especially unique anymore and everyone seems to be there just to have a good time.  I’d actually like to see some of the competitiveness return to the event.  I don’t think we need to go back to the days of Rose taking out Ray Fosse in the 1970 All-Star game and virtually ruining his career but at the same time I think we can do without Larry Walker’s at bat against Randy Johnson in 1997.  Let me just state for the record that I happen to love Larry Walker—he’s one of the best players in the game and has been a mainstay of my fantasy baseball teams for the past couple of years.  But when Walker faced Johnson (who, at that time, was a member of the Mariners) in the All-Star game he took one look at a Johnson fastball and immediately flipped his batting helmet around and batted from the right side of the plate.  It was funny and got a good reaction from the crowd but I would rather have seen one of the best batters in the game face one of the best pitchers with both of them at their finest.  (Indeed, when Walker faced Johnson this year in April, he homered off of him, becoming the firstleft-handed batter since September 23, 1997 to take Johnson out of the park in a regular season game.)  But let me get back to my point—the All-Star vote is important.  For the most part I think voters are educated and caring.  But (just as in the presidential election) we often see popularity contests instead of performance-based consideration.  How else to explain Ken Griffey, Jr. being elected?  Griffey is without question a great player but has been injured this year and doesn’t have the numbers to support his election.  The All Star game, like presidential elections should be a meritocracy.  When an undeserving player is elected irreversible damage has been done.  But remember (as Ken Starr would remind us), you can always impeach a president.