With all necessary caveats about my own white privilege, liberal white guilt, political awareness and unawareness, I’m a bit like Stephen Colbert. Without the suit or success. I suspect it’s because at the end of the day, I’m hopelessly reductionist. For me, all people reduce to families, a thing which I have passing familiarity.

I finally got my hair cut yesterday. It’s been a long time in coming, but I discovered the place down the street can be booked by email. I love doing shit like booking an appointment without actually having real, human contact. Then I don’t have to feign interest in something on the telephone.

In truth, I’m a fickle, whorish hair care customer. I’ll walk in anywhere and demand immediate service and keep walking until I get a taker. Sometimes I go back, sometimes I look for another quick and easy hookup. Sometimes I let myself go, unkempt and uncaring.

However, Shirin down the street trims my bangs for free. Better yet, she’s not annoyingly banal in her haircutting chatter, like many the bubblegum rock listening salonistas wielding scissors. She’s either quiet or interesting and funny. In fact, the salon in general isn’t all about blasting pop music I hate or incessant blathering.

Somewhere in talking about her holiday weekend in Seattle and seeing family, my remembrances of July 4ths spent in Boston, history in Europe versus U.S. Colonial history versus California’s lack of extensive, long-term history, as well as my hair and what I wanted done with it, while she layered tin foil and coloring chemicals onto my tresses, I mentioned that my long hair is a reaction to Pat’s unfortunate hair loss. For reasons unknown, Pat passed from this dimension with near as anyone could tell, a smooth cue ball dome.

When Pat started buying hats to hide the falling hair, I started growing mine out with a vengeance. If I suffer hair loss at 70, I’ll remember at 40 I was rocking rock-star locks.

After I mentioned my mother and her unfortunate, inexplicably early for her family, death, I found out Shirin’s mom had just died about a month ago at the age of 90. Shirin’s probably in her 50s, has at least one son and lives around here (obviously). As it turns out, she is also the youngest of a family of six (one more than my own) and her dad died when she was little, so her mom raised the family on her own.

Shirin’s mom, before the Alzheimer’s set in, was apparently sharp-tongued and sarcastic. Her youngest daughter was the one who would talk and joke back, challenging her, and ended up doing a lot of the routine care taking in the end. She had a running gag with her mother in better days that she was so opinionated and bossy with her kids, she would come back as a mosquito to continue to annoy them into the next life.

Familiar, no?

We swapped stories about the different reactions and the different family politics, birth order, family skirmishes and how huge losing your mother is in the scale of life’s losses. I think I made her feel better about some of the inevitable arguments and bad feelings. Pretty much down the line of siblings and ourselves, we had parallel stories, including some terrible conversations that left us feeling that either we were losing our minds or someone else was acting dead-on crazy.

I told her our family’s lawyer said we were surprisingly non-contentious, even with the contentiousness that was. She said that hearing about other people fighting was good, because maybe she was just normal.

Yup. I assured her. And we laughed a lot. And somewhere, as we compared notes and laughed, we figured out a Persian widow with six kids, who ended up going from Iran to London to California, and a Catholic(ish), Boston Irish widow with five kids, who never really left Massachusetts, were kind of the same. And those 11 children are kind of the same, too.

Technorati Tags: Boston, California, death, hair, family, Pat

You know that shit about your permanent record and the president’s fitness test and measurement and standardized and fitting in and all of that shit. Not true. Doesn’t fucking matter. At the end of the day a pitcher of fermented hops and barley is like $10, $20 tops. I have a significant multiple of that in the bank.

So, who the fuck cares, right? Still and all, would have loved not to strike out the final at bat, the final inning of the final game. Color me losing.

One of the dudes at work is all Mexican and shit. In fact, when I lose my job for being a racist Bostonian, it will be because of one of the dudes who teases me for being all Mexican and shit and knowing he can tease me. Only someone who doesn’t know will overhear us and I will be all unemployed.

Well, one of his brother’s he hangs out. Turns out, he may have, in fact, have witnessed my shame three years ago when I was the drunkest I have ever been in this state, the state of California. Seriously, tequila drunk. Tequila drunk, honey will you pick me up, I’m sorry that I can no longer form words drunk. He remembers, like three years ago, he might have met me.

Shame.

And we lost at softball.

But, on the bright side, here’s the major difference between Mass. and Cali. I’m at a bar, softball players are drinking pitchers of cheap beer. Yeah, that’s the same. Only then, folks are swapping stories about learning how to shoot guns. BB guns, air rifles, like Red Ryders. Skeet shooting with 12 gauge and 24 gauge rifles. Hand guns, pistols, rifles, weaponry in general. The difference between trap and skeet shooting (I think maybe up and down versus side to side). Shooting lizards, hunting partridge, dove, ducks (apparently the coldest and wettest), shooting cans and targets and seagulls.

Here’s my point of comparison, one among hundreds of kids growing up in my ‘hood might have had a BB gun. I know, but I can’t place the details, that at least one little boy in my childhood universe got buckshot or BBs embedded in a body part. And, that’s where it ends. Except for maybe boys, like my brothers, launching amphibians in space on bottle rockets and rocket kits or blowing them to kingdom come with M80s. Here they had lizards and fire power.

The suburbs here are suburbia written large and cliched. Think Brady Bunch, Partridge Family and Eight is Enough rolled into one with CHiPs patrolling everyone all safely. Only here, Marcia might have been taken hunting alongside Tracy and Adam Rich (or one of the other girl characters). Everyone here, it would seem, has shot guns.

And now, I’ve drunken beers with them and been scared. Maybe I should rethink Singapore.

Technorati Tags: Bay_Area, Boston, California, competition, race, San_Francisco, satire, softball, sports, travel, worry

M. met me on the road, and for a bit I rode my scooter along side his jogging self. But the scooter isn’t scooting like it used to scoot. We suspect it’s something with the brake control that cuts out the throttle, as a safety measure.

So instead of scooting and jogging, we walked. As we walked, I saw something up ahead, something tiny fall from the sky to the road. I thought it was a very large moth. It wasn’t.

It was a very tiny bird. Judging by it’s unformed self, I’d say a very young, newly minted bird. Perhaps, it was flapping into flight for its maiden birdhood launch and hadn’t quite gotten the hang of it. Whatever the reason it was fluttering and shivering and occasionally launching itself inches off the ground closer to oncoming traffic. I didn’t want to see a tiny bird speck of blood, feathers and broken, hollow, tiny bones glued to a rolling tiger.

We started herding it with a paper from my bag as an improved shoo-er from the street to the curb. Only problem was the storm drain it fluttered toward and into. We rescued it right into another crisis.

My hero, the inimitable M., grabbed my dirty shirt from my gym bag, lay in the gutter and scooped the little guy out of it’s dungeon. We left it shivering and shaking and evidently trying to calm it’s rapid birdie pulse, maybe to try flight again a bit later, on a fenced and manicured lawn.

My favorite part of this story doesn’t end with M.’s rescue attempt. Nope, it ended for me about 50 yards down the road, where a couple of women with a baby in a carriage asked if we just saved a bird.

Tried to any way. All in a day’s work for a superhero.

Technorati Tags: animals, California, crisis, Dorothy_Dwyer, Dot_Dwyer, heroism, photos

I was in a foul mood, because for two and a half weeks approximately, I’ve spent all of my work days helping other folks, training other folks, talking with other folks and doing the work of other folks. As a consequence I have a teetering mass of a metaphorical stool-like substance on my desk that is my own freaking work. The work I haven’t gotten done on account of the other folks.

Compounding and really kicking into high gear my work funk is the current architectural wonderment in our beautiful building. The workplace was designed for aesthetics, form, function, sunlight and green and all sorts of good wholesome shit. But such a look is almost spoiled by the presence of people–Let alone a continuously growing mass of workers who are massing beyond the hive. The answer is more honeycombs, of course, and my cube sits at a nexus of building. Fucking cube farming, even Architectural Digest style, blows.

The point is, M. got us cool tickets for a night out in the big city, the streets of San Francisco. Sadly, all the streets leading to those streets after work on a Thursday evening are clogged with cars and trucks and people in your fucking way.

We were late. The show had started, and given that the locale was a swanky, real theater they had filled our orchestra-section, eighth-row seats with someone else’s butts. We were flashlighted over to a pair of seats in the balcony with a bird’s eye view of what might have been.

But, what we saw was pretty good. More a mix of a sketch than straight-up improv with accomplished performers not horrible actor’s workshop wannabees. That caliber helps in general, but in political stuff, which can slide right out of funny, interesting, into painful, it’s fabulous.

Best quick line that won’t be done justice, performed in a series of blackout scenes: husband and wife over the morning newspaper, “Honey, what do you think of the Abortion Bill?” “We should pay it.” I admit, I’m a sucker for an abortion joke.

After, we got some food at my favorite spot in almost any eating place, the bar. Very tasty Southeast Asian, and while I was using the plumbing fixtures M. ordered me up a Lychee-tini. Lychees sure can soak up the gin. Maybe it was the lychee, the satay or the company in M., or maybe just the 100 proof lychee in the bottom of the glass, but I felt much better after night fall.

Technorati Tags: 2008_Campaign, Bay_Area, campaign, Campaign 2008, comedy, elections, Politics, satire, San_Francisco

At the trainer’s recommendation, I decided to check out Peter Egoscue’s Pain Free. I mean reading a book that has exercises in it is practically the start of my career as an Olympian (seniors’ division). Hell, I might even try one.

Truth is, I do hurt more than I think I should. Long walks mean pain in my legs while strolling and, when I stop, stiffness in the usually suspected places (and not the good kind, since I don’t have one of those stiffness agents). Personally, I suspect my god-awful stooped posture. And, for my god-awful stooped posture, I blame my tits.

Basically, in a world where it’s 1972, you’re a good foot taller than the tallest little girl in your neighborhood, t-shirts are worn tight and clingy, and you’re growing relatively prodigious melons on your chest, you tend to hunch. I would hunch or stand on one hip to lower myself to less heightened norms. I’d positively bend forward (clutching a book or notebook tightly) to divert my breastages from direct view.

The trainer recommends rolling around on the floor with one of these roller thingies that all the kids are using in the gym these days.

Apparently, sliding it under my back and shoulders, nipples reaching up to the rafters (or heavenward, if you’ve ever seen my rack), and my as yet unsprouted dowager’s hump will become a statuesque upright. Reading a book and rolling on the floor, it’s a fitness regimen I might actually be capable of mastering. I mean I read like a son of a bitch.

The best part for me of buying the self-help book was walking around with it. M. and I walked into what I consider one of the more amusingly Bay Area cliche of a healing book and gift store.

I entered snarkily mocking the flier out front for the lecture by a chick to help you get in touch with the angels. Better yet, I discovered the prominent display for this little wonder of new age malarkey. Oh yeah, “quantum” mechanics creating fortified healthy water, stirred not shaken. If M.’s aunt hasn’t yet discovered this company, and they have a branch anywhere in Asia, it’s just a matter of time.

So, I walked in offensively judging, as is my wont, but I clutched Pain Free to my bosom. I hope the hippies figured out it was just the hurt crying out.

Technorati Tags: age, Bay_Area, books, California, exercise, gym, sports

My worst nightmare realized. Me, a gym teacher (of sorts) and an empty gym. One-on-one style. Not my style. No, not at all.

Carla is a nice woman and knows her physiology, stretching, exercising stuff. She’s also of the demeanor that makes living in California a bit tough for me. You see, in my universe, or the one shared by the voices in my head, there’s a need for constant commentary. Complaining, mocking, riffing, talking smack, laughing, teasing, hyperbole that is how one passes the time while digging ditches, hanging with friends or grunting on a mat in the middle of a fitness facility.

In Cali, much to my chagrin, wait is it “chagrin” or something else? Much to my, “oh yeah I fucking forgot you people are literal,” this kind of smack talk is taken earnestly. Like when I say I’m dying, someone needs to ask if I’m alright. You know, just in case, I’m dying.

Carla, bless her kindness, is one of those folks who actually listens to my moans. Poor thing.

So, when I, awkwardly trying to gain some sort of momentary stillness on a bosu

Or question my dignity as I grunt and sweat through a series of unfamiliar acts of arms and legs flaying, I tend to mention my life-long disability as a completely awkward, uncoordinated, prat-falling dork. As my eldest brother pointed out, as a former ski instructor with a lot of balance conditioning under his belt, he thinks he could teach anyone balance and coordination, EXCEPT me.

Foolish of me not to just shut the fuck up, really. My gym trainer now has taken interest in me and wants special time to teach me special exercises to force my 44-year-old ball of flesh to lithely balance like the swan I never was.

Oy.

So, we then were alone in the gym together. To say that kind of attention on me and my physicality was undesired would be to say Hiroshima was an explosion. More than a bit understated.

We crawled together in several styles, creeping combat style, classic baby crawl, soft-legged on all fours, stiffed legs I was supposed to use my feet and ankles to thrust me along, the entire length of the gym back and forth ad infinitum. Well, not quite infinite, since I did have the excuse of getting back to work.

We also discuss musculature and strength (or my lack), symmetry (and my lack), posture (ditto, wait, I have a posture, just an awkward, jutting neck, round-shouldered one) and apparently I walk with my toes pointed outward more than they should. Fuck yeah, I am a middle-aged hottie. I suppose in a cro-magnon way, my stance is swell. Leastways, that’s how I felt as our crawling evolved up the species and I never quite got the hang of upright and graceful.

I’m a knuckle dragger from way back.

In fairness, she gave me ample time to discuss and think about and try some exercises that might combat the pain and stiffness with which I tend to live. And, given that Pat died bitching about chronic pain in her legs and possibly her back (hard to say, as her bitching was rather free-form) and was about a foot shorter than she should have been in her final years, I should listen.

But, lord almighty, I fucking hated gym class at 8 years old, and I fucking hate it now. Maybe if I had ever grown out of my awkward years, I’d be chill. Next time, I’ll just whisper that I think I might be getting my period and ask to lie down in the school nurse’s office.

Technorati Tags: exercise, gym, Pat, sports, weather

In my harsh moments, it’s easy to mock the striving earnestness, the place where the best and brightest might wring their hands about the future. It’s tough to sit next to someone fresh out of school and fresh into 20 maybe 30 or so talking about how there aren’t any great jobs if you don’t have experience. You know, well, yah. That’s fucking right.

But, then there are the fellow travelers. The folks without the linear path of middle-class success. They are the ones I consider allies.

So, dig. Dig in a 1950s hazy with smoke, deep into Northern Californian wine, chatting over the naan on an expense accounted Wednesday night. Dig the sound of my mentioning my plugged in, internet living, wired, burnt, ripped, copied, podcast, downloaded and electronic existence. The fellow traveler, she in a kind of acceptance/denial steam punk place, talks about the Underwood she’ll soon be getting from an uncle, another generation. Pre-electricity.

Image:TheFaulknerPortable.jpg

So, she says, she says as a fellow traveler, one who cares about words, one who didn’t get to her job through a linear path, she who reads off the grid. She says, “Yeah, an Underwood, to be like Burroughs.” Or maybe something clearer or deeper or smarter. “I read Naked Lunch, and I saw clearly.” But, of course, that’s not a direct quote.

I get it. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, crazy writing, thriving genius. A dark hope. A real typewriter. Beat and words and the beat goes on.

Only the young and the bright and the should be more restless, she has no fucking idea what we are talking about. She doesn’t know what an Underwood is. She doesn’t know who William S. Burroughs is. But, best and brightest and educated, she needs to clarify the convo. She needs to bring it to her comfort place.

Only, I like the Burroughs reference too much. It’s not easy enough to give up on talking about something else that isn’t linear work, earnest, school-book learning. I wanna talk William Tell and heroin. Writing to keep from screaming.

So, I tell the steam punk, manual typewriter woman about my friends. About the drinking at “Bukowski’s” and reading Charles’ poetry or considering him on the Thursday nights that were my cathedral of thought. My salvation. My intellectual oasis. The non-book-learning, 100 beers on tap truth. Performance and bullshit and thought and beer.

The earnest one. The educated one. The one with whom I work, but I would never choose to drink and speak truth, she asks, “Bukowski’s, was that a Polish bar?”

Technorati Tags: United_States, William_Burroughs, Charles_Bukowski, work, writing

Whilst most my family, those folks I grew up with back about 3,000 miles due east of here, celebrated the youngest of my nephews graduating high school, we enjoyed the loveliness of North Californian spring-time, almost summer weather, and used some of the disposable income we have. M. discovered a Cajun restaurant not far from here. He also discovered one of New Orleans’ famous beverages and that it is usually pretty fucking strong. I bored him with my story of running out the backdoor of Pat O’Brien’s on Bourbon Street into a back alley with Patty to drunkenly elude an amorous and kind of creepy young man.

M. also discovered that alligator meat is not on the list of his favorite things. What a shocker. I mean, what’s more appetizing than a reptile?

In the ultimate kindness in a boy-girl relationship, he took us to the ultimate chick flick, Sex and the City. It was great going with him, since he works with a slew of women who had been talking it up, but I’d be lying if I didn’t feel a little wistfulness about seeing it with some actual chicks. I imagine if I were in Cambridge still, I might have called up Liz and/or Dot and/or anyone else we could have conjured and made a night of it.

(The beauty of this bit of nostalgic female bonding, I don’t have to actually worry whether they would have agreed to go. Or whether they would mind my getting liquored up for it.)

Anyway, the movie was surprisingly pretty good. There was a lot of the banter that made the first couple of seasons funny, rather than the deeper story lines that evolved. I fully admit I like the comedy and dialogue over any presumed sociological message or post-feminist agenda. Nah, I don’t believe there ever was that in the show; I think that was crazed media navel gazing, because like, you might otherwise have to admit your mom, sister or daughter likes to get her nub rubbed every now and again.

There were a few laugh out loud moments, and the audience of mostly women was digging it. M. laughed.

Like a total nerd, I’m pretty sure I heard correctly the silence in the theater, as I alone laughed aloud at one line. Candice Bergen (a favorite and feminist-y role model from way back) in her role as the editor of Vogue said to Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw, “Forty is the last age a woman can be photographed in a wedding dress without the unintended Diane Arbus subtext.”

Say what you want, but you gotta give a bit of credit to a supposedly, unapologetically, shallow show without redemptive qualities apart from fashion worship, with a good Arbus reference.

Technorati Tags: books, Diane_Arbus, Dorothy_Dwyer, Dot_Dwyer, intellectual, movies, photos, Sex_in_the_City

Technorati Tags: Africa, Kampala, Kamwokya, Bobi_Wine, Fire_Base, slums, travel, Uganda, video, vindication

Anyway, it’s not the retarded shenanigans that are robbing me from the thrills and chills of a campaign year (and the FINALLY final end of the Bush years). Nope, it’s old Tim Russert, may he rest in peace.

NBC was the de facto election night channel when you got tired of zippy graphics and all sorts of counting doohickies and just wanted to see, you know, like regular math. Tim was markers and a whiteboard in the face of layered, animated maps and special effects. (I’m pretending the 2004 tablet never happened. In my mind it’s whiteboards, Florida and less flash.)

Who the hell is going to eschew the bullshit this year and just provide straightforward info?

Technorati Tags: 2008_Campaign, campaign, Campaign 2008, elections, pacemakers, Politics