On Animal Orgies and other Curious Strategies (and a little bit on my news habit.)

      First, a confession:  I was sorta kinda thinking I wanted to write something about the government-gone-wild romp through crazy-town which is, in case you haven’t had a pulse for two weeks, is the season’s newest and most disturbing reality show on the air right now, but Gina made me swear off news for the weekend because it leaves me twitchy and bug-eyed, and so I have been doing my weak-willed best to be obedient. She is off corralling children and horses on the other side of New Hampshire but her Spidey sense can pick up even the faintest whiff of political drudge on me, and she’ll know if I’ve been cheating.  Which leads me to my second confession.

            Really, and All Things Considered (Didja catch that?), I could be doing a lot worse. And most of it has been second hand, since I am up at Joy Farm with my folks who are a couple of incurable news junkies. The house is filled with NPR, and anywhere my mother goes, opaque clouds of Politico positively waft off her. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t take a deep sniff now and then.

Joy Farm. For Health and Wellness.

 But I’ve been trying to be good. I really have. Until this morning, when I noticed with horror that I was idly thumbing through my BBC app. I realized what I was doing before I went all the way into the US section, thank goodness, which surely would have wrenched me fully off the wagon and sent me square back into the muddy gutter of political filth. But on my bender, I did espy a juicy little story, and let’s be honest: What could be more delightful to write about (and read about) than stories of animals whose epic sexcapades literally kill them.

Just a prelude:  the study I am about to relate, which is about marsupial orgies, was published in a journal called Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS. Um, how do you pronounce that again?

 Anyway, according to their study, some cute marsupial species have these tantric level sex fests because the number of times in a year when a female is willing/able/open to mating is exactly once.  And moreover the females have “synchronized their reproductive cycles” which means they all want it at the same time. So this narrow window of opportunity produces, when the time is ripe, an explosion of marsupial Don Juans on the scene. There’s a lot of wooin’ to be done, stat. Everyone tries to get it while the getting’s going on. (But it’s only the females that are “highly promiscuous” in the BBC’s report. Even though both male and female alike are in a mad dash to stuff and be stuffed with as much sperm as they can manage because for the males, it improves the likelihood of passing on their genes, and for the females, it insures against them having to scramble their own DNA with only the genetic dregs of some loser marsupial simply because he got there first). This romp fest triggers hormones, unsurprisingly, and lots of them. One of the hormones it triggers is the stress hormone, which goes into haywire feedback mode, meaning it doesn’t shut off ever. It just ramps up and ramps up because there is no brake for it anymore. This means the more a male does the dirty, the higher his stress levels go, and the higher his stress levels go, the more vigorously and intensely he is driven to mate. Until eventually the stress kills him. It’s a case of mass suicide-by-sex.  Though such strategies are not super uncommon, they generally remain the provenance of insects, fish, and other unhuggable/not particularly cute creatures but the authors note it can be useful for dense populations, and for these marsupials, it might also come down to food. When food is plentiful but once a year, it helps enormously if half your population suddenly stops needing to be fed just as resources become scarce.

            In other fatal sex maneuvers, I recently learned something about honeybees: The male honeybee, or drone, leads a pretty much feckless existence. Okay, that I knew. I knew that they don’t gather pollen, they don’t make honey, they don’t even lift an antenna to clean up the hive or construct it.  And I also knew (or at least it didn’t surprise me to learn, which is pretty much the same thing, right?) that they probably contributed something to the whole perpetuation of their species. I just didn’t ever think to dwell on the particulars of the event. But it turns out, I should have, because it's fascinating.

 So, spoiler alert: soon-to-be-queen bees have a lot in common with female marsupials re: mating windows, duration of. And, like the male marsupial, the opportunity to mate with a queen is literally a once-in-a lifetime experience for a drone. And like marsupials, Mademoiselle bee also doesn’t want to be stuck with the dregs of apianity (the bee equivalent of humanity. I might have just made that word up. Sorry.)  So she’ll mate with however many drones she feels like. So far honey bees share a lot in common with Marsupials. Can you guess how it’s going to end?  But do you know how?

            Well, I’m glad you asked! It turns out, the force of insemination is so powerful, it actually and literally blasts the poor drone in half, severing his penis (and abdominal muscles) from his body. The former serves as a sort of sperm plug inside the (queened) bee while the latter floats lifelessly to the ground, his glorious and genetically fruitful act having snuffed him out in a burst of glory.           

           

I hope you all feel edified now. Goodness knows, I do. 

A Trail of Brain Crumbs.

Hey, did you miss me? Well, that makes both of us. I feel like I’ve been wandering around these past few months in a sort of blog fog. Weather pattern for my head: intellectually cloudy with a certainty of haze. Or maybe I’ve just been mired in a blog bog; sunk into a sludge of sentient senescence and all I have to show for it is a mummified mind.

My brain on Bog.

Nah, I think I’ll go with the blog fog (though in truth, I’m quite fond of my sludge of sentient senescence for its pleasing, alliterative tingle.

Agnes often wondered who might please her alliterative tingle.

As I’ve been wandering lost on the moors of thought lo these many months, fighting my way through the dense fog and haze, my brain has been pro-actively dropping little morsels here  lest I need to find my way back, or possibly to help me find my way out.  They include, in no particular order the following:

My Dog Remus

 I once had a wonderfully dim dog named Remus (his twin brother was the devilishly handsome but regrettably more tempermental Romulus). Remus’s mother is a Shar-pei, lab mix, and his father was, I think, I greyhound bus or possibly a dump truck. Somewhere along the line, a hound dog slipped his genes into the mix because Remus could howl up a storm when he wanted to, and when he wanted to seemed to hinge solely on one factor: whether or not a dog in his immediate vicinity was barking. When we had three dogs, this was not an entirely infrequent occurrence, but what separated Remus from the other two dogs was that he had no idea what he was barking at. Or what the other dogs were barking at. But he enthusiastically gave it his all. Why have I been thinking about Remus even though he’s been gone for almost ten years?

Because recently, Indiana representative Marlin Stutzman (R) said this about the government shutdown: “We’re not going to be disrespected. We have to get something out of this. And I don’t even know what that is.” 

Man, I miss Remus.

Shutdown vs. Slimdown.

We are now entering week two of our government shutdown. Unless you watch Fox News, in which case, we are merely in a "slimdown" as if we were put on this collective diet and have discovered to our amazement that wow, this means we can throw away our government fat pants.  Um, okay. It is sort of like convincing yourself that a quarter pounder is dietetic because hey, you could have ordered the big mac.

Language, people!

While we’re on the subject of language, here’s a sundry list of language things that irriate me:

1) Government pronounced "Gummint.” It is a political entity, not a compound word made up of two breath fresheners.

2) Nucyoolar. 

Say it with me, ready?

New.

Clear.

Again: New.  Clear.

Got it? Put it together. There ya go! Nuclear! (see how it has the world CLEAR in it? That’s a hint.)

3) The phrase “The American People”, when it appears anywhere near a congress person’s mouth.  If a congress person feels awkward or unsure about what to substitute when the itch to employ this phrase overwhelms him or her, using the term “my constituents” is a decent place to start. If this doesn’t go far enough, then either of the following phrases is an acceptable alternative: 

1) “My good friends over at <corporation x>” 

 2)  “those amazingly persuasive lobbyists who have some really good points and incidentally contribute waaaay more to my campaign funds than any of y’all have ever ponied up.”

4) The word “negotiate” when it is spoken by anyone who has a tendency to confuse it with “demand your way on everything and when you don’t get it, try bullying, throwing temper tantrums, and holding your country hostage until you do get your way.” It can be a nuanced difference I know, but language is powerful, and I just think the word should only get to be used by people who know enough to understand that "compromise" is not a four letter word, and that Honolulu is not a suburb of Nairobi. 

Book Club

So, I joined a book club recently in my neighborhood and we had our first meeting the other night. It was fun but I accidentally used the word 'seminal,' and then trotted out TS Eliot.  And this was after Gina made me promise I’d try to use regular words. She knows how I can get. But I’d had a glass of wine and it just happened. It's really embarrassing to have to admit you're a pretentious drunk. I wasn't trying to be, but I'm still feeling a little douchy about it.

Baby Season! (Permits not Required).

We have fecund friends these days, and the New Year is poised to positively explode with babies. Gina and I remain content to run our retirement home for gracefully aging canines but look forward to periodically taking in the various small children with whom we will be acquainted, and introducing them to the delight and wonders of sticky things before returning them to their parents at the end of the day.  Hopefully, before they poop.

Subtopic 1: Pregnant Women, and also Garfunkle and Oates.

  Having never been pregnant, and not really planning to be, I think this song is hi-larious, which probably shows that breederless women are also smug. . .

Subtopic 2: Odd Behavior.

I’ve noticed this funny thing that happens when I baby-sit our Newphew Leif. I feel this sort of hamster ball of sudden and urgent importance envelop around me. Leif may be the catalyst for its appearance, but as his appointed protector and defender for the next three to five hours, I am fully at the center of its orbit. One afternoon, my mother and I took him for an afternoon into Boston––which, if you’ve ever been in a city, this won’t surprise you––was filled with people. Brimming with people. People at the crosswalks, people walking in the park, people standing in great big viscous globs all over the halls of the science museum. The problem is, the stroller that we for him is approximately size of an oil tanker and maneuvers just as easily. As we pushed our way through the crowds, parting the intransigent crowds like a molasses sea, I am not proud to admit that ensconced in my hamster ball of importance that I was, it occurred to me more than once, MERCIFUL HEAVENS PEOPLE, GIVE US SOME ROOM, CAN’T YOU SEE I HAVE A CHILD? Any doleful wail, however, from the lips of an OPC (other people’s child), and I darkly think: Gah! Have mercy on our eardrums, for criminy's sake. Perhaps this is nature’s way of showing me I probably should stick with dogs.

The Birds and the Bees.

My friend, Sarah, recently and successfully harvested her own eggs to donate to her sister and brother-in-law.  If it takes a village to raise a child, she and her family’s collective efforts prove that it also sometimes takes a village to make a child in the first place. It also takes, I am told, an arse load of needles, a not insignificant amount of funds, loads of hormones, and harrowing trips into Mass General.  But she braved it all; the needles, which squick her out, and Boston rush hour traffic, which would squick anybody out, and the torrents of hormones which gave me sympathetic PMS just to hear about. And all for a sister who, for the first two and a half years I knew Sarah, was only ever described to me as “soooooooooo annoying.” (When I had opportunity to augment Sarah’s historical accounts with my own empirical data, I drew a different conclusion but I do not fault Sarah for her initial reasoning[1].)  Anyway, all of this is to say that I am so proud of Sarah for undertaking this process and emerging from it like a champ. It also illustrates a most fundamental but often overlooked truth about how babies are made. The three ingredients needed are, in no particular order: An Egg, A Sperm, and A Womb with a View. (That last one is Gina’s little brain child. Isn’t that adorably clever? I think so too.)

Sorry, Porkchop

So, Pennsylvania’s Lehigh County Commissioner, Tom Creighton said recently: “The state has a ban on same-sex marriage, so why should the county be offering benefits for same-sex marriage? I don’t feel the county should be looking for new ways to give away taxpayer money. Next it could be giving money out to people’s pets or whatever. No, it probably won’t go that far.”

 You never know. It’s a slippery slope from marriage rights to diamond studded litter boxes.

Is that a genuine Ermine wrap PorkChop????

The Pil Ville

Gina and I have a new television obsession. It’s not new television, it’s a new obsession. Once upon a time about ten years ago, PBS started making ‘house’ series reality shows. For instance, “Frontier House” takes three regular families and flings them into the wilds of Montana for five months where they must live as if they’re in 1883. That means they have to live in modest cabins (that they have possibly constructed themselves) and build their own privies, haul their own water every day, milk cows, chop wood, harvest four effing tons of hay by scythe, not wear underwear, and do everything as if they are actually homesteading, and the year is 1883. It’s sort of reality television meets historical immersion.  And it's fitting, I think, that we discovered this treasure ten years into its existence. This is why I like PBS. With a focus on history and the past, my technological lolly gagging doesn't seem so hopeless. 

Anyway, the last of these series that we saw was Colonial House. This one's premise throws a bunch of people into 17^th century New England colonial life complete with a Governor, various servants sprinkled amongst the landed gentry, and mandatory Sabbath attendance, and then says, "ready, Go!"   I kept calling it Pilgrim Village which in due time became Pil Ville.  It’s a great show and not just because of the poofy pants the guys have to wear, though that certainly helps.  The shows consult historians and period experts to try and replicate as authentically as it can the worlds of history each show portrays, but being a reality show, it allows 21^st century people to be their 21^st century selves. The people who are chosen to be on the show like to philosophize about whether they might have ‘made’ it or not in the "real" time periods.  One of the fun things Gina and I like to do is speculate about our own chances of survival had we happened to live in those days. We ponder our various assets such as our robust constitutionals and hearty work ethics, and debate whether our fortitude and pluck would have helped see us through, knowing all the while that whatever we say is hogwash because the first thing that would happen to us if were actually in 17^th century New England is we'd be tried for witchcraft and burned at the stake.

Carolyn Heinz. Queen of Pil Ville

And not to give away any spoilers, but there is a woman on Colonial House that is the actual living embodiment of every character ever portrayed by Catherine O’Hara in any Christopher Guest movie. 

Catherine O'Hara Queen of Satire

Drag Queens.

And so we return to Drag Queens. Why? Because Drag Queens make everything better. Not all drag queens, obviously, just the awesome ones. RuPaul's Drag Race has started again and so we are happy campers.  Once upon a time, when I had just watched an episode of Drag Race, I had what I thought was a brilliant flash of profound insight. Ready? The fractal property of drag queens as demonstrated through Jinkx Monsoon.  Allow me to explain. Or just walk away now, that’s fine too.

Why are you looking at me like that?

Subtopic BONUS!

 Official Fan Art.  I am both proud and a little sheepish about this. Ah, I'm mostly proud, who am I kidding?

You've seen this before, but recognize the pictures on the shirts? Aw yeah, who nerds out at the varsity level!

---

[1] Sibling relationships sometimes just need to age for a few decades before they mellow and mature. Like a good cheese.

On Being Slow

I can be slow, so it should come as no surprise that it took me a long time to embrace this about myself. I can be slow to understand things. Like directions, for instance. It was my darling wife who finally pointed out to me that “rinse full strength” on our mouthwash wasn’t instructing me to swish the stuff around in my mouth as frantically as I could. Yes, I spent years thinking Listerine had intentionally and in a sort of cleverly humorous way likened my mouth to an agitator setting on a washing machine. I mean, mouthwash and washing machines, it’s a natural connection right? Because they both have the word “wash” in them and like to make things clean for you. Thus, the higher the agitation, the better the grimy bits are flushed out.  But no, it turns out this whole time they just didn’t want me to dilute their product down with water. Which I guess makes sense from a marketing point of view. Not only does it sell more product, but what sort of marketer wants to make you think about sudsy underwear every time you use their mouthwash?

Yes, I can be slow. Maybe deliberate, is perhaps a nicer way of putting it. As in: I am a “deliberate” runner.  I am also a “deliberate” writer. This is perhaps why I also have been very “deliberate” in getting back to posting here at the “Green Light.”  Because I had all these great intentions of writing about the cerebral buzz of residency and the wonders of Ireland and the lively conversations I had with my fellow Spalding writers, and I was going to post pictures, and wax poetic on Joyce and Yeats and try to articulate all these seemingly profound and philosophical thoughts I was having about the whole experience but here’s the other thing: I am not only “deliberate” with many things, I am also very easily overwhelmed. One of the things about being slow / deliberate (your choice) is that life, which has only one speed, turbo charged, does not wait for the slow to deliberate (ooh, did you catch that little language switch?). Life will plow you down if you’re not looking. And so after residency, a heady combination of exhilaration and exhaustion equaled me being overwhelmed, and so I sort of went fetal for a little while. Which is a go-to defensive maneuver of mine that I bust out whenever I’m being steamrolled by reality.

           

And it was during this time I was fetal and relatively out of commission from blogging that I learned what had happened at Trinity College just ONE day after we had left the college for Galway (though I didn’t hear about it until I was back in the states.) I was so excited by the news that I wanted to write about it right then and there. But since I am slow, I didn’t write about it then. So I am writing about it now.  But that’s okay. Because, you want to talk about slow? This historic event has been 60 years in the making! Which means in geologic terms,  I was basically at Trinity when this happened. I still get a little thrill when to think I was very nearly in the presence of such a monumental and significant event. An event, I would like to point out,  that is so monumental and significant for no other reason except it IS so slow to happen. So what was this big deal historical moment?

A drop of pitch was finally caught falling on camera.

I kid you not. Since 1944, Trinity College in Dublin has kept tar (also called pitch) in a funnel to watch it flow. But it has such high viscosity a drop breaks free only once every decade or so.  Scientists have been trying to see that moment either in person or on camera since the beginning of the experiment, and have so far never managed to.  Because think about it: This drop takes ten to thirteen years to form and just one tenth of a second to fall. Sneezes take longer than that. 

 There are websites devoted to watching the pitch fall and people were thrilled, thrilled thrilled that they finally saw it fall. Why do scientists and tar-drop enthusiasts care so much about this moment? Maybe because that’s what humans like to do. We spend our lives trying to save ephemera, trying to capture and bottle the moments of change that happen in a flash. We like riddles and paradoxes and mysteries and a liquid that is 2 million times more viscous than honey and seems as solid as a rock for ten years until one day it doesn’t invites the sort of head scratching philosophical questions about essence and identity that has engaged us with our world since we were grunts in dark caves wondering who we were, why we smelled so bad (and who this sweet young thing beside us is.) 

In the end, it’s just a drop of tar. But it is the first drop of tar to fall on record. Sixty years after people first started trying to witness that moment.  Without such a buildup of anticipation, maybe nobody would care if a drop of tar fell or not. I like to read into that idea and wonder if maybe slowness makes its own form of greatness. Maybe that means there’s hope for me yet. 

references:

Trinity College School of Physics Website

"Nature" (18 July, 2013)

  

Ding Dong, DOMA's Dead

Holy smokes. To be honest, my head is still sort of spinning. Wow.   Yesterday, Gina and I went to our town's middle school to vote in the Massachusetts special senate election, and patient wife that she is, Gina graciously walked beside me even though I insisted on donning my shiny and not un-garish woman's suffrage sash to  march into the polling station.  I bought the sash in Rochester NY at Susan B. Anthony's house. And I have been looking forward to busting it out at election time. And not just for its strikingly handsome color combination (Yellow for victory! White for purity! Purple for––I forget what purple is for. Temperance, probably, but I'll say Courage!).  It's easy to forget sometimes that less than a short century ago, our nation, conceived in liberty and all of that was still an enthusiastic spouter-offer of any number of justifications for why fully half its members of society shouldn't be allowed to vote. Susan B. Anthony, in her address before the judiciary committee asking the committee to adopt a woman's suffrage amendment, said this in response to the protest that perhaps the woman's vote was best decided by popular vote at a state by state level: 

 

It was tried in Kansas, it was tried in New York, and everywhere that it was submitted the question was voted down overwhelmingly. . . . Why? Because the question of the enfranchisement of women is a question of government, a question of philosophy, of understanding, of great fundamental principle, and the masses of the hard-working people of this nation, men and women, do not think upon principles.

Here's another quote, this one from Lucretia Mott. She is talking about marriage here. You know, that sacred and ever eternal institution whose purpose is to join the wife and husband into one person; the husband:  

"On no good ground can the legal existence of the wife be suspended during marriage, and her property surrendered to her husband. In intelligent ranks of society the wife may not in point of fact be so degraded as the law would degrade her; because public sentiment is above the law. Still, while the law stands, she is liable to the disabilities which it imposes." 

Today, Gina and I got married, thanks to the supreme court's decision to strike down DOMA. So now we have a second wedding anniversary to celebrate. We only wanted one anniversary, we're not greedy, but until today, our marriage had a sort of specially nebulous haze of murkiness about it has been the special provence of gay marriages. Because gay marriages are like unicorns. Not everybody can see them. And also because they're sparkly and magical. Actually, they're not, because that's the thing. Those who can see gay marriages and know they exist know the truth about them: they are every bit as boring and domestic and unthreatening as your run of the mill straight marriages (Which I guess would be horsies in this analogy.)  Massachusetts sees unicorns, but at the federal level, we dissipate into a haze of nothing.

NOTHING.

Let's take a moment and think about what it feels like to be nothing. 

But now it's like the government can now see unicorns. The same unicorns the states have been telling them about for all this time. Our marriage is now visible to the feds. 

Yes, I am happy. I cried when I found out in a totally spontaneous and unanticipated little shower of tears.  I also know I have personally done very little in this fight to get the government to open its eyes and finally acknowledge we exist. Maybe I was crying some guilty tears of the apathetic. Activists and advocates and fighters and speakers far more courageous than I deserve that credit and I know it is their bravery that I am indebted to. On the other hand, I have only ever tried live my life with honesty and honor and integrity and kindness and I hope that has helped too, in its own small way.  Here's another Lucretia Mott quote from the same speech, which she delivered at the 5th National Women's Rights Convention. In 1854. "What does woman want, more than she enjoys? What is she seeking to obtain? . . . I answer, she asks nothing as favor, but as right; she wants to be acknowledged a moral, responsible being." 

 Acknowledgement. That is what visibility is. That is what equality means.

Displacement Activities

Sometimes I set goals for myself. Like when I sit down to write, I’ll set forth this goal that my writing really ought to have some sort of point to it. A purpose. At a bare minimum, it should have depth, insight, and the power to stir minds. Which means that at the very least, it has to be profound enough to potentially merit a Pulitzer Prize. Or a Nobel. Which means that unless I am confident I could look forward to an early morning phone call from Sweden over whatever emerging writing I am working on, I must abandon all hope of literary aptitude and instead go do something that is more commensurate with my obviously limited abilities. This includes and is strictly limited to menial housework tasks such as washing dishes, sweeping floors or ––I know!––washing my living room windows. Here’s a helpful life hint:  Should you ever find yourself despairing over an appalling inability to meet the simplest little goal you set up for yourself, washing windows affords a good low-investment, high-reward measure to demonstrate that you are at least still good at something. Even if it’s washing windows.

            Our downstairs windows are more immaculate than they have ever been, and not just because we recently bought this crazy cleaner stuff that claims to have some sort of miracle enzymatic cleansing power along with 500+ official uses (Because it cleans windows! And window sills! And counters! Wow!) And never mind that a mysterious film, which appeared shortly after I had finished my flurry of industry now causes me to perpetually believe it is hazier outside than it actually is. At least at the end of the day, I can look at my windows and windowsills and bask in their gentle enzymatically scrubbed glow, and say to myself, I did that! I was so productive! On the other hand, I can also say that I’ve cleaned my windows more recently than I’ve posted to my blog. And for anybody who has seen my housekeeping skills, you understand how this illustrates the depths to which I’ve sunk. 

            But I have other goals that help get me back on track. For instance, one of my more recent goals goes like this: Today I will finish the remaining work I have to do for my mfa program’s residency, which begins next week. Which means I absolutely will finish today. Which means that if, in an emergency-sort-of-way, I don’t, you know, finish finish, it’s okay because I still have tomorrow. Which is a relief because suddenly our sluggish washing machine seems like an urgent concern. And so does the fact that we don’t have an air conditioner and it’s hot and they’re on sale right now at Lowe’s, which is just down the road. And so does the fact that it’s been quite a while since I’ve blogged.

            Which reminds me, I think my windows really could use some washing. 

Desperately Seeking Cyclops

As part of my MFA program, I have to read a portion of James Joyce's Ulysses. Just one episode. One out of 18. A mere 54 pages in my edition. A paltry 14 percent of the entire tome.  Have you ever read Ulysses? I've always been frightened of it, to be perfectly honest. I will admit that now. I know as a full fledge humanities person and all, I'm supposed to be, um, "learned" in all the classics and stuff, but if my relationship with the literary cannon of classics were an actual object, it would most closely resemble a ratty lace hanky. Or a piece of swiss cheese, or chicken wire, or a sieve, or a church. In other words, it's hole-y.

         I like Joyce I really do. I like the Dubliners. I really like Portrait of the Artist. But––and here's my point––both Portrait and Dubliners are small. They are dense, yes, but somehow density doesn't seem so bad when you can shove it into your back pocket. It's like my cat PorkChop. Small but dense. No no, that's not what I meant. What I mean is that sure she can be a regular crab cake and hook her claws in me until she and my sweater are one tangled heap of small daggers and shredded wool but I take comfort in the fact that she's not a puma.  There is something that is just plain daunting about picking up a 783 page book that is pretty much almost entirely solid print from beginning to end. And not just solid. Solidly Joyce. Even if the only section I'm required to know anything about is a slimmish bit nestled cozily in the middle. But after months of procrastinating, I finally steeled my courage and decided to face it head on. Heady with recklessness, I decided it might even prove the perfect thing to tuck into over my morning coffee, before the bleary haze of sleep has quite lifted and I can't pretend to have even a modicum of productive clarity necessary for writing or creating. Joyce could maybe serve to kickstart the old brain back into working order after an 8 hour slog through dreamland. 

Um.

I know.

But I gave it a whirl. I read it. All 54 pages of the Cyclops episode of Ulysses. Somehow. I remember my eyes bouncing along the pages. I remember the distinct feel of worn paper between my fingers. This is what it sounded like in my brain:

I reached the end and the momentary triumph of accomplishment soon crumpled as I realized I had not the foggiest idea what had just happened. A vague-ish idea that some guy named Bloom had just gotten a biscuit box thrown at him.

I had no idea why.

At least, I was pretty sure it was a biscuit box. 

But biscuit box or no biscuit box, it was becoming clearer to me as I weighed the emptiness of my accomplishment against the argument that I had at least technically fulfilled to the letter the requirement, that perhaps... I had not grasped as much as I ought to have. But still I clung to the hope that victory could be salvaged from the wreck of my endeavor. I would read the introductions at the beginning of the book. Perhaps a few juicy spoilers might let me know what I missed, and then I could go back and skim over those bits.

 It should say something when the court opinion that lifted the ban on Ulysses felt comparatively like a beach read. Especially considering its corker of a title: The Monumental Decision of the United States District Court Rendered December 6, 1933 By Hon. John M. Woolsey Lifting the Ban on "Ulysses." 

I pondered the favorable opinion of Woolsey––he liked it! for a bit, and considered that if he was able (and willing) to read Ulysses in its entirety just to see whether the accusations of smut against it panned out or not, perhaps it wouldn't actually kill me to go ahead and revisit "Cyclops" in its entirety either. And so I cozied up on the couch, and cracked the weighty tome back to the beginning of the episode.

No luck. 

And this is where I have to confess what I did. I am a little ashamed, but the truth can be healing. Even so, I can feel the tingle of shame from the reproachful gazes of all my English teacher friends out there. I have nothing in my defense. Simply put, I was desperate. 

I broke down and visited the internet.  

There, I said it. 

I know. I did what no self respecting reader is ever supposed to do. I read the Wikipedia page on Ulysses. I found the equivalent of a Cliff Notes essay on his "cyclops" episode and read that too. It was just one essay, that's all. And it was so short. Tiny, really. In true lazy scholar form, I don't even know where I found it. I think it was from some Joyce scholar or else a PhD student somewhere. He probably goes to a for profit college. And maybe he's not a PhD student at all. Maybe he's selling that essay for money. After cribbing it from Sparknotes or somewhere.  I know, I know. But here's the thing. 

That essay floating through the interwebs gave me back Cyclops. Because it gave me what I needed, which was a way into it. It helped me spin chaos into order. It turned that din wracking around in my brain into this instead:

Can you even handle another mangled metaphor? Because I'm on a roll.

It cut through the dense foliage and pointed to a place where I could at least get a foothold.  It turned this:

your mission is to walk through here readygo!

into this:

suggested route

by turning me into this:

Aaargh!    (image from minifigforlife.com)

After reading the essay, I felt invigorated, primed, and charged up.  I was ready to return to Ulysses. This time, I took my time going through. I made notes. I chewed over the text in slow easy bites, like a smooth morsel of lox or caviar, let it blossom in my mouth,  I fell into the rhythm of his cadence, let the lilting stream of consciousness wrap me and roll me and rock me mama like a wagon wheel. I went into Barney Kiernan's and felt the din of voices close in all around me. I heard music in the language and the passion in their voices. I found myself caught up and tangled in their tension and the love and the xenophobia and the drunkeness. I shivered with the delight of being let in on a secret each time Joyce detoured from the pub and launched into another swelling, hyperbolic narration.  I breathed his tall tales in, happy for the respite from the cramped cloyingness of the pub where citizen and his pals laughed and quipped and mocked and ballyhooed themselves silly.  No, I didn't find any of this from that enterprising for-profit, essay-selling, phony PhD's piece that I read. That essay had simply shown me a path in to the thicket of Ulysses. But once I was immersed, I lingered and strolled and hunted and soaked in the riches of Joyces world and words around me.  And here's where I can say that I feel vindicated. Because when I finished Cyclops, I still hungered for more. I didn't want to let it all go. I couldn't. And so I have started reading Ulysses from the beginning. I am not far along at all. I am also giving myself permission to put it down for a while if I need to. But I haven't felt that need yet. On the contrary, I look forward to every moment when I can return to his world. It is dense and thick, and impossibly overgrown in places. But if I need them, I will hunt for more essays on the internet or check them out from the library. Another metaphor (I know. Hang onto your hats.) I think of these additional or external pieces of info as maps because that's what they are. They  do not replace the rich beauty of Joyce's prose, but they can provide helpful landmarks and waypoints when I feel lost and mired. A map shows many routes through an area and marks the topography you'll encounter, but it can't tell you which path to take, or under which tree you'll discover to your delight, a sleeping fawn.  There's treasure everywhere in Joyce's language, but sometimes I just needed a little help finding my way in. 

Author. Irishman. Brilliant. 

The Negative Space of Success

Once upon a time, when pressed by my friends to choose, I decided that I would rather be rich than famous. My reasoning went somewhere along the lines of “because famous people get shot” and for any listening skeptics who might try and argue it, I could bolster my point with irrefutable proof: Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln and John Lennon. All famous, all shot, all dead. Rich people on the other hand, were just that: entities without a name. Strangers who got to luxuriate in anonymous wealth and spend their money on things like stuffed animals and trips to Antarctica (When I was ten, I would have mortgaged a kidney to be able to go to Antarctica. For no good reason except to feel I was a supreme badass for having been to Antarctica.), while famous people simply dropped dead in staggering numbers.  Naturally, it was a given that my friends and I would be granted one or the other of these two paths in due time. Voicing our preference was simply a measure of insurance, in case, you know, fate happened to be eavesdropping just then. After that, that it was simply a matter of patience and waiting until our formal entrance into “adulthood,” whereupon a choice, hopefully our preferred one, would be bestowed upon us and that, in effect, would be that.   Now that I am grown and thickly settled into “adulthood”, I am astonishingly enough, neither rich, nor famous.  Sometimes I think about that game from childhood, and  sometimes I wonder if my  ten year old self would be disappointed in me.

Because of course what was assumed in that starkly binary game of ours was that those two options, and only those two options, defined Success!   

            Perhaps as an adult, thickly settled though I am, I can laugh at the silly simplicity of this idea and pooh-pooh its folly. But on the other hand, have I really grown any wiser in the ensuing years? Maybe now I know enough to understand that Success! cam come without fame or fortune, but have I really gained a deeper understanding of what Success! fundamentally is? Simple test: would I recognize it if it came up to me on the street in a top hat and tails and knocked me over? Answer: no.

  

It seems that while we acknowledge how difficult an idea success can be to nail down, we also hold onto this delusional, hopeful notion that with just a little determination, we can sort of scrape around the edges of Success! and maybe define it through other ideas: wealth! fortune! achievement! etc. But the trouble is that these concepts are just as amorphous as Success!. It’s kind of like looking for shapes in the shadows of clouds.  Or something.

Success! is something we are all supposed to strive for.  We want to be successful! At least I think that is pretty true. Purely anecdotal, I know, but I have yet to meet somebody who says of Success!:

I know want to be successful. I want to feel like my life is successful, and that I am successful. But because I am utterly unsure what Success! even looks like, it easily becomes the plaything of Failure when I am not paying close attention.  You remember my recent post on Failure, don’t you? Oh, my dear devoted readers. I do love you.

So yes, Failure likes to squish Success! into any number of forms that just look so concrete you think you could practically reach out and touch.... just before they disintegrate into thin air.  Failure likes to dangle Success! and flap it around like a fly in front of a fish, a carrot in front of a rabbit, a hope in front of a dreamer. Failure likes to use Success! as a whip, urging you on with its bite even as its steers you towards despair.  Because what Failure assures you, is that no matter how you measure Success!, you will fall short. Sometimes I think I’d have an easier time trying to capture one water out of an entire pond of water. What is a water?

Exactly.

           

And so, when I am feeling overwhelmed and exhausted and I start to believe that the tickling tongue of Failure is absolutely right about me, I try to play a game with myself. Instead of trying to measure my Success! as a positive thing (what I’ve achieved, what I’ve earned what I’ve created, etc.) I beat Failure at its own game by measuring my Success! in the negative. That’s right. I  think about what I don’t do and what I haven’t accomplished. And thus does Success! slowly begin to emerge from the negative space:

 

See? It is a handy technique, and the best part about it is how widespread it is in its application. Here’s another negative that might help illuminate your own Success!: Not starting wars for stupid self-indulgent reasons. (...I’m listening to the Iliad on tape right now?).

   Anyway, if I understand nothing more than I did when I was ten, I at least understand that neither fame nor fortune is a reliable measure of Success! though I am kidding myself to think I wouldn't be just a little bit grateful for a teeny dollop of both. But I also know is that when I start to hunt for Success! in the hazy fog of nebulous “fame” “fortune” “achievement” and the like, I am in danger of letting Failure take over my brain and convince me Success! is a definable, bounded, discrete thing but that I am positively unequipped to ever find it. The beauty of negative space is that you know it doesn't exist, at least not in a material way. That’s why it’s negative space. And yet, it is something. It is what isn't. By embracing the fantasy and dreamy illusion of the negative space, I can turn it into something real. But Failure doesn’t believe it is real, and so Failure won’t find me there.

Have Boat, Will Travel (If I must)

There are many sterling traits that set the Yankee Curmudgeon character apart from others and give me pleasure to count my own among the ranks, but helpfulness, alas, is not one of them.

Example: Not long ago, I went into a certain, sterile big-box hardware store that shall remain nameless, with the goal of buying paint. For the purposes of anonymity, lets just call the minions hired to prowl the aisles of this vast and soulless cavern The Orange Aprons. No, not for any particular reason, but good question! Glad you're paying attention. Anyway, after milling cluelessly in front of the overwhelming array of color options for upwards of forty minutes, lost in the thrall of indecision, I finally settled on a color and a finish. (The OA’s had long ago scattered to the winds the minute they sniffed uncertainty on me.)  So I grabbed off their shelf a gallon of base paint that promised me eggshell finish, and drifted over to the ‘paint center’ counter. And waited.

And waited.

And.

Waited.

I tried to flag down an OA whom I caught unpacking boxes in the middle of the paint aisle. He first tried the old “if I don’t look at you then maybe you won’t be able to see me” routine before sighing in defeat and with the look of a doomed man, asked if he could help me. No doubt because of his manned post in the middle of the paint department, I mistakenly thought he could. Was he able to mix some paint for me please?  Or, in the event that he wasn’t, could he perhaps summon for me somebody who could? Nope. He wasn’t and he couldn’t. Awfully sorry, but he was in the middle of stocking, and his radio wasn’t working. But if I waited “just a few more minutes”, Linda would be returning from break. She could help me, he said, with oily reassurance.

Five minutes.

Ten minutes.

Finally, a pinch faced fireplug of a woman sidled up to the paint counter and in the same tone she might have employed if she had just found out I clubbed baby seals in my spare time, asked if she could help me.

I slid the gallon I had selected across the counter, along with the paint chip I had decided upon.

Can I get some paint mixed please?

Not with that paint, you can’t.

Silence.

Um, what?

She blinked.

I blinked back. Sorry?

She jabbed a finger at the label. That’s the wrong paint.

Oh.

I waited for her to elaborate, to expand upon this observation but evidently counsel had decided to rest.

Silence.

Um–– …Could you show me where the right paint is then?

Sigh.

And as she unwedged herself from the sliver of an opening the paint counter afforded and led me back down the aisle she had only just minutes before passed, she offered this nugget for me: You should have asked for help if you were confused.

More recently, Gina and I have been trying in our own bumbling way, to solicit help from our neighbors. I always say that we live on a lake but a more accurate description is to say that we live across the road from a lake. It is a small road, granted, but just the same it means that we are maddingly close to water without being able to reach it. All the land that touches the lake around us is privately owned. This is a fairly new development. Mostly because until recently, we thought we lived right down the road from a public access way, and for four or five years, we have been treating said access as such.  It was the perfect place to launch our kayaks when we wanted to paddle around the water and enjoy, say, a spate of beautiful spring weather when sounds of mirth and merriment from all those enjoying the cool waters might waft up from the shores and ring in our ears where we sat in our backyard, sweating and stewing in humid misery. Unfortunately, due to a little investigative research, begun purely in an effort to vindicate our righteous indignation that some crotchety lout had erringly plastered “private property” signs all over what was in fact a public access, we discovered that those private property signs were, to our astonishment, plastered all over private property.

Whoops.

Okay, that’s okay, we told ourselves. We would forget this access and move on to plan B.

Plan B was brilliant. It couldn’t fail. Because had a secret weapon:

Chocolate chip cookies.

The hardest part was summoning the courage to knock on a neighbor’s door. We had done a thorough investigation of the lakeside properties and had carefully chosen this neighbor because it was convenient, but also because we assessed the layout and decided their property bounds afforded the maximum convenience for everyone and also the minimum disturbance. These neighbors have a long (relatively) and winding driveway that curves around towards the house exactly as a small embankment slopes down towards the lake. It provided a perfect path for us to wheel our kayaks down to the lake while the distance and ample foliage between our route and their house would ensure that our presence would not disturb their privacy at all. The path we marked out led to a small swampy cove. It was out of the way. The cove, frankly, looked lonely and unloved.

I wrote a letter introducing ourselves and asking if we might be able to work out an agreement where they might grant us access to the cove to launch our kayaks and we in return would give them chocolate chip cookies and also our lasting gratitude. In addition to reverent hero status. I revised the letter three times. Gina bustled in the kitchen getting a plateful of cookies made. At last, we were ready to put the plan into action.

Armed with smiles and a plate of cookies, we embarked on our journey across the street and down our neighbor’s driveway.

Our neighbor was youngish. Forties maybe. Pleasant, in a socially awkward way. He nodded as we babbled. He listened to our pleas. In my enthusiasm, I thrust my letter at him and Gina flung the cookie platter into his hands. He was startled, but he took them both. He said our request seemed reasonable. He’d just have to ask permission of course.

Of course!

He looked worried, like he couldn’t figure out how to both ask for permission and also continue his duties as our host. Fulfilling one mission meant abandoning the other.

He looked relieved when we told him he could get back to us, that he didn’t have to do it now.

Of course! We told him our emails and numbers were in the letter. The cookies were his too, regardless of his decision.

Of course!

He thanked us, and we thanked him, and then we returned home. I immediately headed to the bathroom to scrounge for asprin.

That night he emailed us back.

Naturally, he said, he was sorry that it wasn’t going to work out. His reasons were squirrelly and vague and I couldn’t quite follow what he meant. We were crestfallen. We’d been hoping that all our effort would help us secure a place where we could wheel our kayaks down to the water. We were hoping it could be his cove. It wasn’t going to be. That was his prerogative, of course.

Of course.

The cookies, he made sure to tell us, were delicious.

We still haven’t found a place to put our kayaks in. At least not a place that doesn’t involve a severely off road commute through the woods or strapping them to the car and driving down to the public boat launch.  We haven’t summoned up our courage or our efforts to deploy plan B upon another neighbor. Partly because we're feeling cowardly, but mostly because the weather’s turned cold again and so the pressing incentive to secure ourselves a boat launch has mysteriously faded.

Then, just the other day, we were playing out in our garden, and watched the kids from across the street try to sell water. Yep, straight up, plain old tap water out of a plastic jug. Their grandmother who lives with them and was more or less overseeing the operations, wandered over to our yard to talk. She said they couldn’t find the jug of country time powder in their house, but clearly, these enterprising kids were undeterred and felt if they couldn’t sell lemonade, then they could at least help their neighbors stay hydrated.

But soon, a minor crisis arose when they discovered they were running low on plastic cups. Potential loss of sales swam before their eyes. I could see it in their expressions. Not that anybody had driven by in the last hour, but still. They sent the youngest on an emergency supply run, but after several minutes, he came back empty handed. Their grandmother promised she would help scrounge more up when she was done talking with us. It was however,  apparent to all that she was in no danger of flagging any time soon.  Then she happened to peer around the corner of our house and she spotted our kayaks. And that’s when found out from her that there might exist a lakeside benefactor not three doors down from us. Our neighbor knows this first hand because she launches her rowing scull from this woman’s property. She suggested we try asking her. Gina and I looked at each other.

When our conversation ended, Gina thanked our neighbor and then went into the house to get one of our plastic tumblers and a dollar. The kids practically went limp with relief when she showed up with her own vessel. They gave her extra water as a token of their appreciation. She told them to keep the extra change, as a token of hers.

She wandered back into our yard and in silence, we ruminated on our tip. I could feel courage and hope start to trickle through my veins once more. I looked over at her and saw her purse her lips, deep in thought. She was staring off, towards the direction where our potential benefactor lived.

How’s the water, I asked 

Delicious, she said. A dollar very well spent, I think. Here, have some.

I did, and so it was. 

We haven't gone over to plead our case with the woman, not yet. It's cold and raining right now and we haven't had time to make more cookies, but the delicious hope of possibility blooms once more. And I am considering amending my blanket statement about New Englanders. Some exceptions apply.

Sometimes, You Just Need to Escape.

      Blessed little lambs that you are who read this blog, know that drag is a recently cultivated little obsession of ours. If you want to bail out now, go ahead. No hard feelings. This is part 2 of my foray into drag. You’ve been warned.

     Last Friday, Gina and I went to our first live drag show. It was, to quote the lingo the kids these days are using, epic.  Not only was it our first live drag show, it took place in Northampton Massachusetts, which is quite possibly one of our most favorite places in the world. It’s where the coffee is strong, and so are the women. And not only was it in Northampton Massachusetts, it starred two of our favorite drag queens ever. We got our picture taken with them. They signed our t-shirts. The spoke to us. We’re in love, officially.

            Though I would submit that there is never not a good time to get to see Raven or Jujubee in person (forgive me, o gods of syntax for that one), our virginal drag show experience proved to be a small but restorative oasis in a sea of roiling reality. Sometimes, a person just needs to escape. And drag provides an escape, both for the performer and also for the (willing) audience.  I am still learning about drag, its culture within the gay world, and its different forms of expression, but the more I learn about it as an art form, the more enamored of it I become. Drag shows and the drag pageant circuit are sort of offshoots of the gay ballroom scene, which in turn formed out of a need for the gay community to create their own havens of safe realities. In the 1990 documentary about New York City's ball scene, Paris is Burning, one person describes entering into a ball venue as“crossing into the looking glass. Into Wonderland. It is the only place where it feels 100% right being gay.”

            For those in the ball world, and also for those who do drag, both forms of expression are a way to escape the feelings of powerlessness, self-hatred, vulnerability, and real danger that exist on a daily basis for queers. By participating in balls, and by doing drag the contestants and performers get to rewrite the rules of reality. They make a world where the reviled are instead revered, where losers are winners, and where the voiceless have voice. In my last post, I wrote about failure. About feeling like a failure and about how failure can rapidly consume. What I love about drag is that I see how it provides for those who do it, a way to escape feeling like a failure (the failure of being gay in a hetero-normative world), by creating a persona that empowers.

            Drag queens are characters. They have personalities, likes, interests, and tastes that are separate from their male counterparts. In that sense, drag is like writing. Both are a way to fiddle with truths and make up different realities and then invite audiences into their crafted worlds. The power of fiction is its ability to model reality without having to submit claims of actually being reality. Sometimes, I just want to escape. And so I create worlds and characters and stories that are my own. I can lose myself in them, and I can also tweak reality to my liking. Writing is my venue. E.L Doctorow writes in the opening paragraph of his essay, “False Documents” that “by a ritual transaction between reader and writer, instructive emotion is generated in the reader from the illusion of suffering an experience not his own.”  Just as I can feel real empowerment or understanding or sorrow or love in the novels that I read, so too can similar instructive emotion be generated in other forms of art. I feel empowerment and love and voice from drag. Not in all drag, not from all performers. But my favorite drag queens are like my beloved authors.  When they invite me into their worlds, I eagerly accept.   

        

I never knew how small Gina and I actually are.