Thanks to the almost obsessive and completely Don Quixote battles via Twitter.com of this man, who I have been known to call a friend in the real world, I was reading some right wingers and their links. It’s a compelling, frightening read following those websites, kind of Stephen-King-eque. OK, no gore (or Gore), but scary.

It’s not exactly along the lines of John Edwards’ two Americas, but I feel like there are folks living in a different country than the one I am. For example, there’s the Glenn Beck effect. Now, I listen to old Glenn, and I think he’s either off the rocker or completely digging his dance with fame. I kind of think he’s the Jim Morrison of the FOXNews set, digging his own hype machine and taking his Lizard King news commentary on the edge further and further. One day, maybe he’ll whip his dick out of tight leather pants and claim he did it because of Obama’s hatred of his ivory soft, lilly white skin.

But, other people, like the folks on Twitter using hastags like #tcot or whatever the right is rocking these days, they think Glenn is a truth teller. They are retweeting the madness as important questions of the day.

He claims some kind of journalistic standard of research and facts. But, then, he goes on with absolute bullshit blathering of no fact, all opinion. In the irony of ironies, he wipes a broad brush over Washington, DC and all pols on the left accusing them of essentially rushing in quickly for no reason whilst waving his own brand of alarm, exactly the tenor he is accusing them of falsely raising. More weird is the high dungeon over things like 1,000-page bills or our trillion dollar debt. Where was the outrage under Bush and Cheney, for reals, were all of the bills back in those golden days an easy to read two, three pages at the same time that mounting debt made sense?

And, then there’s the health care debate. I’ve worked at hospitals and at the forefront of biomedical research. I know people who helped create and test life-saving drugs like Herceptin. I understand the good that is the U.S.-drive in novel therapies and new ways to combat diseases. You know what funds a whole lot of that there high-level research? Remember phrases like the “War on Cancer,” “new weapons in the war on HIV-AIDS,” and who’s brewing up badges of flu vaccines? Government fucking programs. Government grants.

You know, socialism. By the way, when did any and all government action automatically get disregarded as terrible and wasteful and/or the activities of apparatchiks in communist blocs? DMV aside, there are a whole lot of things going on by a layer of civil servants that are invisible by virtue of working out OK.

Hell, I even worked with that enemy of the people, Rahm Emanuel’s brother Zeke.

What I, and I’m sure a whole lot of liberals of my bent, with or without the experience working with doctors or in health care, find confusing is who is against health care reform. Blog after blog, CNN, MSNBC, FOX News, all have parades of outspoken citizenry shouting about the hell that change will bring. Taking aside the astroturf issue (and for me anyway, I would have to think twice about any protest I joined if I knew somewhere in the mix were lobbyists in suits with smug slogans feeding my anger), the fear seems palpable, yet completely misguided.

Misguided, because the folks interviewed, they all seem like regular folks. Jamokes with regular jobs and bills to pay just like me. People who live on a margin where catastrophic illness can break their situation pretty quickly. This interview ends with an outspoken dude, who had his 15 minutes of fame shouting in the face of Representative John Dingell, admitting he has “crappy” health insurance.

I’m sorry, but WHAT? And, how the hell do all of these folks contend the U.S. rocks the best health care in the world, when we simply (and statistically provably) don’t?

Why are so many people happy to pay out buttloads of cash to uncaring insurers, live with a status quo where literally millions are shit out of luck? I simply do not understand the logic.

I understand the fear, uncertainty and doubt. But, the venom and the slogans being screamed allude me. As does the intrinsic logic of government equals bad, business equals good and variations on the theme, at the same time the system is riddled with loopholes that favor no one but the soulless profiteers.

In the end, in today’s arguments, I heard a factoid on “Fresh Air,” as Terry Gross interviewed author T.R. Reid that surprised me, but shouldn’t have. The term “socialized medicine” was created by PR flacks working for the American Medical Association in 1947 to (successfully) torpedo President Truman’s proposed national health care system in good old-fashioned Cold War fear-mongering.

I’m thinking I might have to read that man’s book.

Technorati Tags: conservatives, health care, politics, protest

In one of those kind of modern day life imitates art or vice versa kind of dealios, I was just reading Gail Collins’ take in the New York Times on Woodstock. Toward the end the column compares the connectivity of today to the complete immersion of being stuck in traffic in the middle of mud in the middle of bumfuck upstate New York. The irony for me was the column was recommended to me by one of Gail’s contemporaries, and I mean contemporaries, someone who knew her back in the day, who was trying out Skype video chat over a distance of about 3K miles.

In 1969, in those months before Janis died and then Jimi, my dad had already died. Lawn-mowing induced coronary thrombosis rather than overdose or aspiration of vomit. Pure mainstream American, not the counter culture.

If that was the year that everything changed, with Woodstock the last bout of peace and love before the dominoes of Altamont and Kent State, at five years old, I may have been feeling the new ethos. Of course, in reality I was lost in my own brown-acid-less trip of not understanding death or why everything about my life was now changing. Somewhere between 1968 and 1969, I was sent away for a couple of weeks to live with cousins, moved from Massachusetts to Maryland and back, from a small house to a bigger one and back to an even smaller one near the first. Dazed and confused without the drugs.

At five years old, I can’t say how much I remember or how much I understood or how much I figured out. It’s all glimpses and shadows, like sitting cross-legged on the floor of an elementary school watching the moon landing on a big, black and white television rolled into the hallway on a tall stand, so more of us could see. It’s a vivid memory for me, but with Neil Armstrong strolling about lunar surfaces in July, when school wasn’t in session, and my academic career not as yet started, what with kindergarten cranking up in September, it couldn’t have been the moon landing.

Similarly, logic tells me through the glimpses and shadows of happiness with my mother, that it couldn’t have all been Altamont and Kent State. For her to have gotten married to a man many have told me was fun and funny and gregarious in ways she wasn’t, and then to have had a family of five kids, she must have had some fun in her. Like where did she ever learn to paddle-ball with such vigor and elan?

Yet, my long term memory is of a profound sadness, a life where I think she believed fate had conspired against her ever feeling truly happy. Her “Summer of Love” was probably 1967 too, just like the flower children along Haight Street, because one year later her husband would be gone, leaving an aloneness and perhaps a certain capacity to love would go with him.

It’s funny when I think of Woodstock and peace and love, and let’s try to love one another right now, because I’m pretty sure I have a warped sense of what love means. It’s not a bad sense, just off kilter.

I was talking to a friend the other day, moved to cynicism about what sounded like a pretty grim wedding with two young people embarking on a new adventure with a few cards already dealt not so much against them but maybe too low to make a winning hand. A baby on the way, and a minister dad with some strong words about unity, providing a subtext to the groom that the minister’s daughter was not to be messed with in any sense.

To that friend, I’m pretty sure all relationships, any relationship, any bond of love comes with a huge heaping helping of work. It’s work to keep families together. It’s the kind of work that has brought me to now really embrace the notion of making nothing more taxing than reservations on any of your major holidays. (In truth, I’m so far down on the lazy scale for that work, it’s not even me who makes the reservations. M. likes a good meal and will arrange one.)

Love is not a free banquet on the streets and a daisy in a rifle barrel turning away harsh deeds. Nope, I gather in our conversations that to her love is a bit like my mother’s was for us kids — a 50-mile hike with a 50-pound pack on a sweltering day surrounded by mud and mosquitoes. But, you do it, and you get through and that’s what it is.

I’m no romantic, but I like to think there’s maybe a free iced latte in there or something to lighten the drudgery and load every now and again.

Our major disagreement on love and relationships is over white lies. In my version, the beauty of family and relationships is they have to take your truth warts and all, and the little shit gets worked out. It’s to my family I can point out exactly how I feel and that includes M., and with him sometimes I think he knows too much about me. In my friend’s world, the social contract allows for a little greasing of the story, Lucille Ball telling Desi Arnez the new dress only cost a fraction of what it did and working a secret job on the side to make up the dent in the family budget.

Unfortunately for M., I’m no Lucille Ball, and I’m not making up any stories.

Meanwhile, back in our playing house 1950s California Ranch, M. and I argue (but not in the bad plate-throwing sense, but in the fun dialog way) about whether unconditional love exists. He gives it a possibility for parents to their children but certainly not couples. Because in coupledom, you can always walk away. The life is chosen and can be unchosen if the circumstances allow.

But, for me, and as i argue, walking away from his hypothetical heroin addict, moving out and moving on, doesn’t necessarily mean the love ends. Sure, any Al-Anon session will teach you that you gotta stop getting sucked into the addict’s life, but at the same time the bit of your heart remains behind. Personally, I’m happy I never have or it’s never gotten so bad that I ever completely wrote off some of the folks I have loved the most whose past behavior I have hated passionately the most.

I guess the love I still feel for people who have died also makes me question what unconditional love might be. Obviously, as a not completely insane person, I get that it’s not an active, I guess the word would be vital, love, and it’s a bit one-sided, but it doesn’t stop even as my live moves along and grows. Pat and Tommy and the dad I never really knew will always get a portion of my heart, for lack of a better cliched image to flog, and have a place set at my metaphorical table.

In the end, I’m now living geographically closer to Altamont than Woodstock, but I can spend time standing at the corner of Haight and Ashbury, looking at the T-shirts in the window of independent shops that popped up when the baby boomers still thought they could and would change the world by acting locally, and bemoan the big GAP on the corner, even though that was started in the same year but without the nickel and dime business plan. The boomers have, of course, changed the world both for good and for bad.

I may never know love. Or I may never believe in delirious and heady emotions blocking reason and imbuing me with a vision of chocolate-covered, rainbow-colored unicorns and puppies scampering in clover and daisies.

It’s a lock certain guarantee that I don’t aspire to and won’t be sashaying in volumes of white fabric down a satin walkway beribboned and flower bedecked, because I know not only that it doesn’t appeal to me but my self-conciousness at that little parade/ritual would just make it as joyless and awkward as I could neurotically muster. And, without a crystal ball or magic hippie divining rod, who knows, maybe in a minute or a month or a year or a lifetime either M. or I will want to walk away.

I’m not bothered, though. Because at least one thing Woodstock may have taught people, it was not only about being in the now and doing something and taking the chance like Gail Collins wrote about, it’s also about the story you get to tell later. I’m happy with the here and now and the story I might get to tell. (Not to mention, no mud, body odor or open latrines when M.’s copy of Woodstock on vinyl arrives in the mail.)

Technorati Tags: age, America, Bay_Area, California, family, food, friends, life, love, motherhood, Woodstock, youth

With apologies to The Irresponsibles, who really gave me the inspirational notion of self sabotage, I’m beginning to wonder these days if it’s time for me to scratch that itch. Here’s the thing, I moved out here, I searched for a shitty job and I got a pretty good one instead.

But, and here’s where the bullet through the foot, the one that’s not going in my mouth, here are the voices I’m hearing in my head (metaphorically). In Richard Adams’ story of anthropomorphized bunnies, Watership Down, the gang comes upon a possible safe haven. Cowslip’s Warren is full of well-fed and seemingly happy characters. But there is an air of melancholy, a mysterious vibe of things just ain’t seeming right. Lately, my toil place has felt a little like Cowslip should be hopping there.

We get free food at work. We have airy and open little warrens and space enough to live complacent lives. But there’s the shining wire outside that may be the farmer’s snare of death. I haven’t quite figured out what my corollary wire slipping through my fur and cutting into my throat will be in the real world, but I feel like there are farmers keeping me well fed.

I’m worried about complacency setting into my soul. I’m worried that I’m just counting down to eventual death. More than anything, I’m worried that I’m starting to feel that tension around my heart that clutch that says there’s no where else to go, nothing else to do, bills must get paid, any job is a good job, unemployment is up, salaries are down.

Right now, yeah, unemployment is up and I’ve been unemployed and underemployed during various era along with the others among the great, unwashed masses with whom I identify. Maybe I’ll become one of the folks on the news lining up for healthcare from volunteers and do-gooders used to lending a hand in the third world, but setting up shop in our modern, capitalist, choice-loving, fuck the poor America. Obviously, I can’t take a shitty economy lightly.

I don’t want to scrabble through dust and despair all Tom Joad and depression. I’ve already packed up my possessions and driven long and hard into a promised new future in the golden west.

But, I don’t want the kind of tamped down emotional sub-life. Simmering at my desk. Worrying about office supplies. Hating the mere voices of those around me and their mewling needy ways. I ain’t saying I’m there. I’m not even clear on how much I’m hating work as compared to simply hating that I wasn’t born silver-spooned and silk-slippered and fat, dumb, fabulously rich and happy.

My two primary fantasies for most of my life would be comfortable wealth and intellectual shallowness. By intellectual shallowness, I actually mean flat out stupid. How fucking awesome would it be to be so stupid that no one expects nothing from you and you don’t care ‘cuz you don’t know? I had a dream that one day I never even figured out more than enough reading to be sure I could get the instructions for my instant oatmeal.

If I were rich, filthy fucking rich, but slow, folks might even help me. No one would expect advice or help from me. Nosiree, Bob, nope. How could I help without insight and understanding and book learning? And, the money would ensure I still got feigned respect.

Simple.

But, I’m smart enough and poor enough that I have so many fewer options. I can do something to earn me some cake or I can go hungry. That’s about it. Work or die. Or work til I die.

Four years in, though, four years into this gig, I’m still at a sweet enough spot where no one is avoiding me in the hallways. I’m in a sweet enough spot that the free Diet Coke still keeps my afternoons moving. I’m in a sweet enough spot that I even got a long-awaited title change (even if half of everyone in the building got one at the same time, too).

I think it’s not so much Watership Down and dying outside my cushy warren, but George Costanza. Maybe all I need to do is figure out how to leave on a high note.

Technorati Tags: California, food, internet, work

I’ve always been fairly news-addicted, putting a few decades or so under my belt of reading about politics.

I was young, but by high school a reformed Abbie Hoffman was up from the underground after saving, or something, the Saint Lawrence River and doing talk shows. I knew from political protest and disruption for the sake of sticking it to the man.

I preferred Ken Kesey and the Pranksters. The Merry Pranksters, they new theater. They might be jamming up the status quo, but they seemed contagiously fun. I could imagine being on the bus and just trying to find my place at the party.

Abbie Hoffman just seemed like a self-important douche. The kind of guy that got punched by Pete Townshend at Woodstock. Disruptive and self righteous. An annoying combo for sure, whether you agree with the political slant.

Now, we’re in a new age. Everyone and everything can be a disrupter on the world-wide webs. Scream out your protest and maybe you’ll go viral.

Apart from all of that and admitting that the Code Pinks of the world are more irritating than effective, what I can’t figure out is when did the out and out crazy ass making shit up without satirical intent happen?

Could Sarah Palin really believe/em> that there are “death panels” in one version of a health reform bill? How the fuck do folks like Betsy McCaughey get play on legit op ed pages, columns and radio and the TV? How is that shit even possible?

One of the conditions of my great move west was that I do it unencumbered by the vast stores of shit I had accumulated in my 20 plus years in Cambridge.

I had not one but two yard sales in preparation, and I gave countless treasures to charities. (And, to some neighbors who decided to pick apart and rip up and throw around all manner of bags and boxes I had left in my side yard for the Boys and Girls Clubs before they could show up. I’m pretty sure the most flagrant destroyer was the chick who flat out fought with me over some gewgaw or another and the usurious 75 cents I was charging. She looked me right in the eye and told me my life’s accumulations were garbage.)

Anywho, among the items lost in the westward expansion were a lifetime’s worth of vinyl. Actually, I think it was a couple of lifetimes, because there were my records, begun with my very first ever long-playing vinyl record the Beatles “Rock and Roll Music,” and a couple of giant crates an old roommate left behind before he eventually moved out of this country.

A huge metric ton of the records were bought by some heavy-metal-haired dude who was visiting friends in the apartment next door. He also got my shitty, but fun enough to tool around with, bright blue electric guitar and my actually pretty good Fender amp.

It was a fair enough trade to not have to move all of that weight, which actually had been moved in milk crates and wooden boxes through at least five geographical locations, if you count not just cities but apartments. By then I think I was onto my second iPod anyway, and I never ever was the kind of audiophile who needed my chair inside the perfect acoustic V or gave that much of a shit about the hisses and pops of dust and scratches. I bid adieu to my old Beatles records, Janis and “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” which was a must own circa 1978, and much, much more.

Now, the move to California is four years in and growing. We’ve been in two apartments and now a house. Thanks to a 30-year mortgage and an easy stroll to the ocean, that last move seems like it may be a long-term keeper. (As a side note, I flipped through the report on sea levels and their rise from climate change, if all goes poorly, as I’m sure it will, within our mortgage we’ll be inching closer to ocean-front property.)

Here’s the ironic twist, because you knew there had to be an ironic twist.

As we have settled into our little suburban home, the kind of home where you run into the neighbors at the grocery store, which we just did, the kind of suburban home where a stroll down the street with wet hair gets you questions about how the water was today and the waves, the retro home in the retro-feeling town where kids lean their bikes up next to the ice cream shop without locking them, as we settle into that home, M. has embraced Americana and home owning like nobody’s business. This weekend, this episode, that means he came home with a stereo turntable.

Now, it ain’t your grandpa’s hifi. Nope, it’s USB and comes with software to record your vinyl to your computer’s hard drive.

But, M., he envisions something a bit more akin to his lying in a distant bedroom in the 1970s listening to the crackle of vinyl rock and roll and imagining a life in the U.S. of A. He wants a record-player set up in our British Empire inspired dark wood and breezy curtains plantation meets Pier 1 Imports living room. He wants to hear Deep Purple all over again like the first time.

Where my first vinyl collection came about from that being the only thing there was, this one will be more kitschy. M., no doubt, will be piling up the classics from the British and American stars from way back when. I think Frampton will be coming alive fairly soon in our living room. Me, I have to think about it. Do I need to by Cheap Thrills on vinyl again, or should I start hunting for 78s and one-off recordings with dust and questionable worth?

Technorati Tags: 1970s, 1980s, America, beach, records, vinyl, music, youth

Here’s what’s occupying a few brain cells this should-already-be-sleeping night.

Meryl Streep was just on the Colbert Report. She’s playing one of my heros, Julia Child, in a new movie. Once many, many, many, long, long, long years ago, I used to watch Julia and take notes. I fantasized about a well-appointed kitchen and endless hours to let my bread rise and my own fresh patch of herbs to grow.

I now have that kitchen, and most of the time it hosts take-out rice and noodles from various eastern lands. As someone here, surprised that my zucchini bread was respectable enough, pointed out to me — Spending hours to cook in New England weather, sure why not, what else are you going to do? But, here? Here where mild and temperate are a presumed way of life, who the fuck has time for yeast to breed? Why cook when you can buy and then have plenty of sunlight left over to do something else?

I also have the dead basil haunting my every step in the backyard to taunt my desire for a Provence-enspired garden worthy of Julia. I am simply not worthy. Only my rosemary seems to be surviving the concentration camp-like nursery that is life under my green thumb.

But, none of that is why I mentioned Meryl. Meryl, she reminded me of my roots. My non-French Chef roots.

She brought up Peg Bracken and the I Hate to Cook Cookbook. Apparently, my mom, Pat, and Meryl’s mom shopped at the same bookstore and believed in the same notion of 20 minutes to the table after a long day at work. So, we have the same nutritional base, but somehow her vitamins and minerals, no doubt freeze-dried or flash-frozen, crystallized and grew into talent. Mine, they took another path.

Meanwhile, back in the news, despite the obsessive attention to her Puerto Rican roots and the inherent fear of such a woman playing in the major leagues alongside the white, male power base, Sonia Sotomayor did it. The world didn’t end. Justice didn’t stop. White men aren’t being sent to camps in Manzanar.

Congratulations, to a wise Latina, and I mean that in a non-condescending or suspiciously close to racist manner.

Better yet, she did it by a wider margin than Justices Alito or Thomas. By the way, how come if the left is supposedly destroying the country and always has been un-American, how come the presumably liberal judges get wider vote margins, reeling in some folks from the opposition party? We can’t be that horrible over hear behind the socialist left curtain, yeah?

Meanwhile, back in the shitty, sad news, one crazy guy killed himself and shittily brought some others with him, because he couldn’t get a date? Fuck you, madman Sodini. Your failed life was on your shoulders, but now women, gym-goers and bloggers, and most of all the women you killed and their families are now dealing in the wake of your selfishness. Asshole.

And, Lynette Squeaky Fromme is getting out of the pen. The only thing good that ever came from her pathetic life and worship of Charlie Manson is Stephen Sondheim’s duet with Hinckley in Assassins.

Finally, the celebrity deaths just keep piling up this year. Budd Schulberg left the world after a good, long run at 95. “You don’t understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it. It was you, Charlie.”

On the flip side of memorable dialogue, everyone alive and watching youth-targeted movies in the ’80s lost the man responsible for “Farmer Ted” and a resurgence of Danke Schoen. John Hughes was so much a part of more than just pop culture in that decade, kind of uber-pop culture, I remember not just the movies themselves but stories around them.

The first thing I thought of when I heard the news was actually about Pat. In those dark and distant days, technology wasn’t what it is today. “They” had just come out with a magical bit of consumer-level, household electronics that let the moving picture shows be recorded of of the TV. The TV. The VCR it changed our collective relationship with the TV.

Pat had gotten a VCR and, I think, somewhere in the mix of my heading off to college, she got cable television. Once upon a time, television waves floated through the air and got caught by a large antenna placed up on the roof. And, then there was a chunk of co-ax bringing in MTV and the Home Shopping Network.

Anyway, back then, Pat would prepare for my various returns home from school in a modern, electronics rich welcome. I wasn’t prodigal or a son, and I didn’t get a fatted calf. But, I got videos of 16 Candles and Pretty in Pink and the like. She’d store up recordings and present them to me. I don’t think she watched them, just recorded them for me.

Thanks for the memories, Mr. Hughes. “Screws fall out all the time. The world is an imperfect place.’

Technorati Tags: 1980s, Julia Child, Squeaky Fromme, America, John Hughes, Movies, Sonia Sotomayor, food, cooking, gardening, herbs, life, Budd Schulberg, Pat, Supreme Court, video