My dumb vacation

Click here to read Part Two | Click here to read Part Three

Part One: Brooklyn- and Manhattan- and Staten Island-bound

I leaned over to the cabbie in front of me. We were flying down 49th Street, and while the streets were hustling and crowded, it looked suspiciously bereft of hookers. And bookstores with cheap and alternative titles readily available. But mostly hookers.

"Where can you get a little action here?" I asked innocently. "I mean, I'm just wondering. Say a guy wanted, I don't know, a light spanking in cooking oil while a Rachel Ray impersonator cooked broccoli pasta in front of him. How would that happen?"

The cabbie turned a little to glare at me. "Linguini broccoli pasta?" he barked.

"Well, duh. Is there any other kind?"

"You want Otasman's place," he said, turning his attention back to driving.

Well, I should have seen that coming. I paid him, got out, and immediately jumped into another cab. "Where to, pal?" came floating from the front seat. Ah, New York cabbies. Such a wonderful versatility with the spoken language.

"I'm looking for a place where the missile can go into the silo, if you know what I mean," I said cheerily.

Silence.

"You know, I'm looking to plant my flag. Preferably in virgin soil. Right?"

"...."

"Um, I want a taco to put some beef into? A kaiser roll for my big salami? Taking the beef bus to tuna town? Any of this ringing a bell?"

"Are you Otas's friend, by any chance?"

Damnation.

Three cabs later, still no luck. This time I got a Hindu with a heavy accent. Cultural references to tacos, burgers, hot dogs and hoagies were lost on him, so I immediately demonstrated, with a handy Barbi doll I keep for just this sort of situation, what exactly I was after.

He asked me a short question, with a rising lilt to the voice. It sounded like a request for confirmation, so I nodded in the affirmative. He nodded back, produced a Ken doll from an inside pocket, and pulled over. "For this one, I just made varsity," he explained, "and we're both going away to college in the fall."

Well, I thought, any port in a storm...

.....

Ah, New York. Like an adulterous relationship with a tempestuous mistress, I return to her city streets guiltily and furtively, remembering work to be done back home, a house that needs work, a girlfriend that requires listening-to, bills that need paying. But all too late to think of duty. I walk these streets confidently, assertively. I am no tourist. I might as well be a native, I thought to myself. I wear the same Hawaiian shirt, the same cutoffs, the same I Heart NY t-shirt and the same city map and tour guide. I fucking blend, people. Now, where does Winona Ryder shop, again?

Today, though, there's no time for asinine rubbernecking. I'm on my way to Staten Island, to check out McKee Vocational High School, where the legendary Frank McCourt taught for eight years almost half a decade ago. After reading his memoirs, I know the route like my own name: subway to the Staten Island ferry, ferry over to the island, up the hill three or four blocks to the school. I want to retrace these steps, see the city and its duties the way he saw it. I want to see the window he stared out of while wishing he could write a Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, become a household name, and then write subsequent memoirs extolling and condemning the perils and pitfalls of public school teaching, which is why, I'm told, he now has a glass of wine every first day of school in the morning, instead of schlepping off to preach to the masses about the values of literature, dodging spitballs all the while.

Not that I'm looking for a similar roadmap to success, mind you.

Staten Island is a virtual cultural mecca, completely overlooked by those snotty Manhattanites. Neighborhood bars with $2 PBR, corner groceries that sell beer By! The! Bottle! A lovely industrial section, with railroad tracks going every which way, and a refreshing breeze bringing in industrial smog and city carbon dioxide from across the bay.

I tromped around a bit through the neighborhood, snapped pictures of the school (anyone who gives a damn can see the rest of them on Facebook, I suppose) and walked into the loading dock. A maintenance worker glared at me as I explained to him (with just a pinch of falsehood) that I was a former student who wanted to know if I could get a look in the building itself. "I'm not from out of town," I assured him. "I hate it when out-of-towners come here to gape at where McCourt taught, don't you? Not like us natives. Those damn tourists are a pain in the ass, yo."

My feet touched the floor a couple of times as I was escorted out, but not before I saw a hallway. Mammoth. Absolutely mammoth. The damn school is built like a prison. Classrooms with what looked like iron doors. Gates keeping them from escaping. I made a mental note to talk to my principal about a new building plan.

Back to the city then. Matt and I ate and drank our way from mid-town to Brooklyn, and the next couple of days were more or less a haze. To be fair, he was more or less productive in the mornings: a leather suit, glitter on his chest, and he was off to the "office" to "earn a buck." I asked no questions. Safer that way. But the evenings, those were spent seeing the occasional friend (Wiggo, one memorable evening, where I learned of his evolving social/romantic/professional life), Mary another. The last night there, I of course forget my jacket at a bar. My flight leaves in an hour, and I'm suddenly frantic.

"I don't think you have time to get it and make the flight," Matt commented, glancing at his watch for perhaps the tenth time in as many minutes. He'd been making such concerned remarks over the past few days: "You're sure you're leaving Thursday, right?" and "If you want, I'll kick in for an earlier flight." Such compassion.

"But it's my lucky jacket," I whined. "It totally works with the ladies."

"What ladies would those be?"

"Waitresses, hostesses, strippers. People who are generally paid to make me happy. But besides that, it's all the jacket. Plus, it's got my Ribfest sticker on it."

A brisk ten-block walk to the South Street Seaport (another cultural mecca, by the way, and it's so not a tourist trap, which is why I go there all the time to drink ten-dollar Amstel Lights), a hurried exchange with the manager, and my jacket is back in my hands. But the flight leaves just ahead of me, so I weather another night in Brooklyn ("There are flights tomorrow morning, right? There are. Well, what about a red-eye? You could go see Nova Scotia!") and then back to LaGuardia, where, it turns out, the nine a.m. is sold out. And the ten. And the eleven. And...oh dear, the standby list is over a hundred, and the ticket agent is handing out lottery tickets for a Fight to the Death for the next available flight. I don't kid myself that I'd make it past the first contestant: a forty-two-year-old mother of three headed for her brother's wedding.

I call Matt. Get his machine: "I've moved. Don't call here any more. And I want my glitter back."

I call Wiggo: "Oh yeah, 'evolving' social life, is that what it is? Go screw yourself."

I call Mary: "What? Who is this? Listen pal, I think if I'd spent a wonderful evening with you, I'd remember."

Out of immediate options. No other flights, no buses, trains, no car pools. And the Michigan Shakespeare festival starts in a matter of hours. Time for plan B:

"Hello, Avis Rent-a-car? Do you have anything available for today?...You do?...Great, that's great. I'll be right there. Oh, by the way, have you ever heard the expression, 'burping the worm in the mole hole'? ...You have?...Great, I'll need directions and a couple of alligator clips. The safe word is going to be 'Puck.'"

Next: Part Two! Cross-country driving! The majesty of the eastern states! A triumphant return to my roots! And I pull over to use the restroom and eat a candy bar!

Good-bye Dell. Hello debt.

Forty-five minutes of my life on the phone with Dell Customer Care today. Why: My computer won't turn on. Why is this: I don't know.

I first bought this machine back in 2004. It was a rough transition, but eventually, just like my dishwasher and garbage disposal, it quickly became something without which I could not live. Oh sure, the virus control software is a pain, makes the system slow to a snail's crawl, and the fan is always running, and if you actually have it on your lap, which isn't, I don't think, unreasonable, given the fact that it's a laptop, you suffer third-degree burns after ten lousy minutes. But it was mine. Not bought on credit, after all, but on love. And a school financing program.

Still, it's not much use to me if it sits there like a damn log. I probably should have known better, but I dialed the customer service number, prepared for any catastrophe they could throw my way.

The guy on the phone's first question: "If the computer isn't working, how did you get the e-mail for our tech support?"

I answered that there was another laptop in the house. "Then why not just use that one?"

(I know. I didn't believe my ears either.)

Anyway, the tech guy had me do everything but make the machine a damn cup of coffee. I took out the hard drive. The memory card. The optical drive. The vas deferens. Piles of electronic guts were surrounding me, and still, nothing.

I unscrewed. I rescrewed. I lost screws and then I found them. I swore like a sailor. I breathed heavily while on hold, just to register my displeasure when the guy got back on (showed him). I pushed buttons and prayed to heathen gods, all to naught. The Inspiron 5160, which I've hailed as a life-changing purpose all these years, sat smugly, like a seventh-hour senior waiting his date with the prom queen.

The verdict: One new motherboard, priced at about $560.

"What does a motherboard even do?" I asked skeptically. "Do I absolutely need one to run this thing?

I didn't pay much attention to the answer. Something about it being the metaphoric transmission to the computer's so-called engine or something. But hell, I once kept my fanbelt running with a pair of nylons. Don't tell me that in the 21st century, we can't juryrig a soup can and a rubber band to do the job for us.

Apparently not. My order, while not placed, is sitting on account, ready for my authorization.

So I'm sitting here in my kitchen, feeling dehydrated and strung out, like I'd crawled through the attic to fix the wiring in 100-degree heat instead of simply sitting in my chair, bent over a recalcitrant computer. And I'm figuring, $560 for a damn motherboard that might buy me another year, but will ultimately crap out as well? It might be time to go the Mac route.

I hate even saying that. It's like a surrender of sorts: the revolution I led against Apple Computers back in the 1990s is finally over. Buying my Ipod was bad enough; buying a Mac notebook is the final step. I've no idea what my aversion is to the Apple: you can still use Windows, you can work on just about any network you want, it's a total revolution, it's got enough memory and power to run a nuclear sattelite, blah blah blah. Maybe I've got an unfair ethos built in my head concerning Mac users--they're yuppified, latte-swillers, electronic namby-pambys who know nothing about the joys of awaiting your downloads over a slow, clunky internet connection. That's not good enough for them. They want their music now. They're not content to wait another ten minutes for illegal downloads. God forbid they have to lift a ten-pound machine hot enough to fry an egg on, oh no. The kids might get hurt.

It's probably time to ditch such thinking. Even if it's true, it doesn't do me any good. I love lattes.

So, in addition to home renovations and whatever else has to be done at the new place, I apparently have to scrape up enough dough to buy a new computer. And then join the revolution. Weeping.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Climbing the mountain that is Tolstoy

rating: 4 of 5 stars

Already, I'm hankering to reread this sucker. Twenty or so subplots: impossible to summarize here (for me, anyway). But I look at the book this way: Carl Sagan once wrote an essay arguing that looking at a grain of salt could open up answers to questions about the universe. That's what Tolstoy did here. He used Napoleon's conquest of Russia to examine questions that still resound today: How much can we actually control the events around us, how great are "great" men in history (not very, according to him, merely tools of history), and what motives ultimately benefit a person in the face of tragedy and upheaval?

Tolstoy makes it very clear in his afterword that he does not consider War and Peace a novel. Neither do I. I had to fight through some of his digressions about the war, the military actions and the nature of history. I understand why most critics wish to cut them (that's right, "most" critics, not just a few radicals), but once you junk the term "novel," you have to take the package deal. And if we're to move within the parameters of mimetic realism, there's just no way to cover this material in any other fashion. You have to have a wide array of characters, to prevent coincidence and fortuitousness from intruding, and you have to contrast what is said about the events (by Napoleon, Alexander, Kutozov, or whoever) with what is actually done (by the soldiers, the nobility, etc.).

A few notable observations:

--W&P seems to have a few things in common with Gone With the Wind. Not enough for a doctoral dissertation, alas, but both novels begin with a party and end with a declaration of future change, both revolve around spoiled upper-crust girls who learn their lessons the hard way (if they learn them at all), both deal with women struggling in less-than-ideal marriages. There's no Rhet Butler equivalent, but there's plenty of his edge in scenes like where Pierre flips out against Helene, or the old Count Marya's abuses of his daughter.


--Tolstoy is big on revelation presenting itself through the natural world. Pierre, Prince Andrei, and assorted others get their big wake-up call while dying in a battlefield looking up at the sky, or sitting on a horse looking up at the sky, or staring at an oak tree, or hunting a wolf. His metaphors and analogies, when not classical references, depend on farms and farm activity (sheep being fattened for slaughter, for example: the sheep don't know why it's happening, but other sheep can correlate them being taken away periodically with their fattening bellies). None of this is surprising, I suppose, given the fact that the novel was written smack dab in the middle of an Industrial Revolution that was just beginning to make its way to Russia, but the thing about motifs, obvious or not, you notice them.


--Some of these women are downright seductive to the reader. And that's saying something. Tolstoy's prose is hardly risque, even if his topics sometimes are, so when Helene works her charms at a party, or Natasha flirts with Anatole or Andrei, I can just sense some of Tolstoy's middle-brow readers (myself included) panting with enthusiasm. Why, I'm not sure. Maybe it's the party scenes, with their many and sundry rivalries masked beneath a veneer of civility, that has me looking for further cracks in the armor. Or maybe I'm conditioned by Anna Karenina to equate these settings with eventual sexual forays. Whatever. I'm not proud.


--As far as I'm concerned, Tolstoy would have done quite the job setting this book in Alexander the Great's reign, or the American Civil War, or wherever, for reasons I've already stated. But the great thing here is, even if you know nothing about the Napoleonic Wars, it doesn't matter. Tolstoy walks you through it. A lot of critics find his "lectures" pedantic and boring, and I'd agree that you have to be in the right mood to absorb them. But they're there. My translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2007, Knopf Publishers)has over a hundred pages of footnotes, which, admittedly, I did not make full use of but which will benefit me in a second reading. Furthermore, I like how he characterizes Napoleon in scenes where he appears directly. He doesn't go out of his way to paint him as a scared little boy in scenes where he (Tolstoy) quite clearly would address him as such. But I can see him penning the scenes after the French retreat from Moscow with a dry smile on his face.


So, ultimately, I'm not about to claim expertise with W&P. It ate up the entire month of June for me, like I was having a Great Romance with it (I did cheat occasionally--I dipped into a few short story anthologies and a Michael Moorcock collection, God save me), and now I'm happy to turn to something less demanding.


But this is what Deep Reading is all about. I feel good. I feel like I've cleaned the house, paid my bills, gotten a complete physical and benchpressed eighty percent of my weight. I feel strong. I feel vindicated.

Next up: Henry James. Portrait of a Lady.

Alliance Films' Mongol just came to the U.S. Clocking in at just over two hours, it's the first in a planned trilogy of films chronicling (with a fair extent of poetic license) the rise of Genghis Khan in twelfth and thirteenth century Mongolia.

I liked it a lot. (The 1962 Taras Bulba, which I also just watched, I didn't like so much, but that's a different post.) A lot of reviewers seem to have characterized it as an "Asian Braveheart," which is just the sort of short-sighted trope the Internet was born to disseminate. I mean, come on, what was The Godfather, a Sicilian Macbeth? The equation seems to be: sprawling battle scenes, breathtaking panoramics of the setting's landscape, a tasteful love affair and a father/son motif=pre-Catholic badass Mel Gibson.

I don't buy it. For one thing, I don't think Mongol succeeds where Braveheart did. The battle scenes, while brilliantly choreographed, don't bother to highlight any secondary characters' contributions, thus robbing them of a potential emotional punch. For another thing, filmmaker Sergei Bodrov takes the undoubtedly bloody and tumultuous childhood of one of history's most notorious rulers and adds a pathos I found near-impossible to swallow. The future Khan (his birth name was Temujin, "ironmaker," for the record) fought a battle over his wife, when most Mongols had several? Multiple arrows in the back only feed his rage? All he needs to do now is yell "This! Is! Mongolia!" and kick some doofus into a nearby pit.

But that's all secondary. Bodrov takes Temujin and makes you root for him. We first meet him as a nine-year-old choosing his bride, although ten-year-old Borte, of a neighboring tribe, winds up choosing him first. He loses his father to another tribe's treachery. He can't get his own tribe to accept him as ruler in his father's place. He flees a rival ruler's sword. He hides in the steppes, meets a blood brother, comes back for Borte to marry her, loses her, reclaims her in battle, and continues on his meteoric rise to power.

The locations were well-chosen; they highlight the story more than effectively. The acting is believable. The battle scenes are engrossing, although, what with computer-added swarms of warriors, digital thunderstorms and CGI blood, their effect is somewhat muted.

The film ends with a cheesy title card: "Genghis Khan's journey had only just begun," or some such words. Cheesy or not, the carrot works: I am so there when it comes out.

An oldie but a goodie...

From Spitting Image: President George H.W. Bush on Mastermind.



And they say history doesn't repeat itself. Pshaw.

And they say puppets don't do biting social commentary. Pshaw-pshaw.

The first move I haven't had to go through putting together an IKEA or otherwise-crappy piece of castoff furniture:

As related by Jay Pinkerton:

Actually, I've unloaded quite a few of these in the past.

SCHEWL--You come in to do work. You really do. It may not be rip-roaringly important, but by God, you're an educator and you take your duties seriously. How many other assholes out there actually work during vacation? Exactly.

(Besides, I don't get internet at home until next week.)

And then you see what maintenance has done to your room in the meantime:



It's like karma is telling you, "Go out. Get some sunshine. You know, that stuff you never see from August to May? Take a book, take a walk, smell the air. Nothing here can't wait."

Well, I'm strong. I'm tough. I can handle temptation. I settle down to work.

What finally gets me out the door is an administrator leaving for the day. At ten a.m. To go to a ball game. With a smile on his face and no work to take home in his bag.



Screw this. I'm for the movies.

Currently stuck in an alley, during the Chicago book fair, waiting for the rain to abate. This is what city rain looks like:



No, it's not the Midwestern flood damage that's been all over the news. But there's a reeking dumpster next to me, and my underwear is riding up into the unknown. So I've had better Sundays.

From today's issue of Modern Woman Magazine

Dear Whoever:

I am a woman in my thirties, living with a gorgeous, dreamboat sex machine of a man (emphasize "machine" in that last list of descriptions and soft-pedal the "gorgeous" and "sex" parts). I've never been happier, except for a few minutes when I was six and there was a double episode of The Muppet Show one Saturday morning. Oh, and yesterday, I had a killer cheese sandwich. God, it was good. Give me a second here...ok, yes, I'm still happy to be living with this guy. Whatever his name is.

Seriously, though, he's always been a tad vain. About his looks, about his intellect (he reads a lot, but he won't show me what, and when I quiz him, he gives evasive answers), and about his skin (he had some pisser acne attacks in high school, or so I've heard). But this is a new wrinkle.

He's losing his hair.

Not a lot. He's not bald yet or anything. And he probably won't be for a while. But every time I see the top of his head (which isn't often--he's a lot taller than I am), I see scalp.

I can't tell for sure, but I think he's picking up on his hair loss. When he stands in front of a mirror, he picks at his hairline and frowns disconsolately. He's starting to collect baseball caps, and this is a guy who believes "professional sports will choke the life out of whatever cultural heartbeat this screwed-up nation has left in it."

So: do I tell him? Because he might already know. But if he doesn't know, and he finds out later I did, he'll be pissed. Actually, he'll be pissed no matter what I do, but I'm just trying to minimize the hassle I'll have to deal with. I'm in a band. I have to practice.

So, any advice, advice columnist?

Sincerely,

Dirty Rock Grrl

I could write an ode to the days gone by. The usual work mess and then some. A hospitalization (everyone is fine now, thanks for asking). Self-medication (I made another trip to the liquor store, thanks for asking). Babies galore visiting.

But it's spring break. So your noble blogger is taking a week to tour the East. D.C. Baltimore. Virginia. Nothing but a backpack and a smile on my face. (And some papers to grade, which I may or may not lose in the Potomac.)

So long, losers.

Blogging from John's Blackberry. In a crowded restaurant. With a drooling, burping baby of his on my lap. And they don't even serve alcohol in this dump.

Benny Hill is Afraid of Virginia Woolf

Finally, a pep rally that doesn't suck...

Winter pep assembly. Maybe one-third of the usual crowd of students for this sort of thing. All of them exhausted. Demoralized. Imaginations and spirits crushed to dust because of a month of no sunshine, grueling projects and oppressive, mean-spirited teaching. God bless us, every one.

So instead of throwing stern looks at crowds of pubescents chanting asinine slogans ("Seniors rule!" "No, juniors rule!" "No, seniors rule!" "No, seniors rule!" "No, juniors...wait!" "Ah hah! Got you!") and carting kids to the dean's office for throwing toilet paper, silly string, hats, shirts, pants, and each other to the floor, I got to sit comfortably in the bleachers and make fun of everyone. Grand.

Then it was off to John and Sarah's place, to see their spawn. The kid was born in October, but, since we're such losers, we didn't get around to it until February. Whatever. The kid can't even walk yet; what's the fuss?

Being the idiots that we are, we forgot the camera. So here's a reasonable facsimile:



John, Sarah, if you're reading (and what else would you be doing while at home with a kid on a Saturday evening?), I'll replace it. Provided the kid is suitably adorable in the picture.

We were all Huskies that day.

The Truth Table of Weeknight Taverns

Today I stopped in a bar on the way home to Have a Beer.

I know. I know. "When doesn't he?" the sage asks. Good question. Lest I should seem an urbane bastard, let me remind you: I live in the burbs. Starbucks are easy to find; comfortable bars, not so much. If your schtick is a crowded, neon-glared watering hole filled with balding has-beens shouting at whatever game is on (and it's got to be HDTV, no less for these bastards with their pushbroom mustaches and missing teeth), my neck of the woods is quite delectable; but if, like me, you long for the old days of pubs and a veritable drinking culture, you might as well be living in Salt Lake City.

Not so Joe's Place, which is a mere skip down the road from my humble home. We started hitting it mornings during my holiday break, and I have to admit, there's something to be said for guzzling Heineken while staring out the window at people headed for work. Every morning I pass the place, and I never fail to glance inside longingly: the morose bartender mopping up last night's mess; the overworked crew just getting off the night shift; the hard core alcoholics; and the hung over, nursing headaches over tomatoe juice and Budweiser. Roll of booze, hear my cry, I call to them. I am one of you! Now save my seat, or I'll kick your asses.

It was a crappy Monday today, one of those days where you leave wondering, had you been born in the 19th century, would you lumber home on a morning like this, head full of existential angst over your place in life, your career path, your overall health and karma...or would you be too busy trying to survive while doctors fed you opium and sawed off your limbs?

Ah yes, simpler times.

So, completely independent of my own conscious thought, I found myself wheeling into the parking lot of Joe's for a $1.75 Heineken. I'd decided to Have a Beer.

Having a Beer calls for a certain approach. I've not had much practice in Having a Beer. I've Gone Out for a Beer, true: there, the objective is to celebrate the end of a day or week by consuming as much as possible, without stepping over the line and screwing your short-term sobriety too badly. If Going Out for a Beer is a journey with a tangible end (drunkenness), Having a Beer is a meditative, introspective act, and it demands a certain sense of dignity, one I'm not likely to find in myself as I pound the bar furiously while calling Tso a buffoon for subscribing to Libertarianism.

Actually, I've only recently understood Having a Beer; if you're not out to get wasted, why not just have a Coke? But the beer itself is a reward, a garland for the exhausted Greek athlete, I suppose. The beer itself matters less than what it represents: Victory. Or, in my case, Survival.

If you don't want to Have a Beer, or Go Out for a Beer, you can always Get Drinks. "Let's Get some Drinks" used to be a danger sign in most places I worked, up to and including my current occupation. It was an open door policy: the more the merrier, true, but x amount of people fed into the equation equals a certain number of hours out, of money spent, of poison ingested. If, say, Tom Haldemann were to send out an e-mail tomorrow, "Out for drinks at 4," the danger would be minimal: It's a Tuesday, most people are going to work late or go home; Tom is not, shall we say, universally liked; e-mail invites are routinely ignored, etc.

But if John Pepper sends out such an e-mail, as in "We're going out for drinks at 4," the equation shifts: John has something political to get off his chest or he wouldnt' be offering; John will scare several others into going and I don't want to leave them hanging; he owes me two rounds and this is my chance to get paid back.

None of that is likely in the second week of February, especially while we're in the midst of all this damned snow. I'd worked late, not really wanting to stay but hating the thought of rattling around an empty house in the mid-afternoon with anything school-related on the brain. So when I Had My Beer, it tasted more like water down a Welsh warrior's throat, the cries of the dying surrounding him as his king stares at him inscrutably. Only I had no king to adulate, the battle was far from over, and I can't shoot a longbow to save my life.

The bar was relatively empty, but what it lacked in population it made up for in volume: the Juke Box O Matic was blaring something by the Scorpions, and two guys on my side were bellowing at each other about their wives. No fooling. I make claims like that sometimes, they're total crap, but this was true: "I just said that to fuck with you!" the first guy called.

"Yeah, better fucking with me than with your wife!" the other catcalled.

"Better than fucking her in the ass, you mean!"

And on and on, and I knew I could never reproduce the conversation believably. It would look too cliched. And isn't it pathetic that was what I was worrying about, sitting in a bar all by my lonesome, guzzling cheap Heineken while the two guys on the other side of me watched a high school volleyball game on TV with, shall we say, more than usual interest. That I wouldnt' be able to tell about it and make people buy it.

I could have sat there all night. Cars were passing out the window. My mind, weighed by the minutae of daily teaching while at school, found itself strangely untroubled in that dump. I started glaring at everyone around me: "What're you so happy about, asshole? Bet you don't have to redo curriculum. Bet if they ever gave you a study hall, you'd run screaming. What's that you do, lay bricks? Come over here and lay on my asshole."

It's a bad idea to be eyeballing so many of this sort. They're not bad people, but they're not used to taking crap from anyone (one reason, I suppose, they're not co-workers of mine, watching fifteen-year-olds roll their eyes and shoot water bottles across the room), and they're certainly not going to take it from yours truly. When the volleyball watchers started glaring at me and the wife-fuckers on the other side started scaling back their conversation in favor of curious glances in my direction, I realized I'd been muttering to myself. Bad habit. Thought I lost it years ago. Wasn't even drunk. So either get drunk now, Teacher Man, cover your tracks and dive into the bottle, or get out. Go home, put on Jane Austen from last night, maybe have a glass of wine. Show those Philistines.

So that's sort of what it likes to Have a Beer on a Monday night. I'd like to try Getting Some Drinks tomorrow night, but I think it's much more likely I'll Down a Brew when I get home, and maybe Go Out to Imbibe Wednesday or Thursday night. Or maybe I'll just wait until Friday and Get Plastered. There ought to be a flowchart for the options you're supposed to exercise. Me, I'm reduced to a self-created blog.

Groundhog Day

The following is a somewhat fictitious account of my trip to Woodstock. Somewhat. I promised people tales of a hellacious trip, but truth is, the truth is more pleasant. Also more boring.

Traveling to Woodstock is a lot like traveling back in time: to 1992, when they filmed that damned movie. The town sentinels of touristic attractiveness have made sure that everything that can possibly remain the same has remained the same, and laminated pieces of cardboard mark all the truly historic markers: Where Bill Murray stepped in the puddle; Where Bill Murray leapt to his spurious demise; Where Bill Murray took a drink.

The last time we'd been there, we'd only seen the groundhog chomp on the mayor's arm. I was all for a repeat of that particular event. I'm not a sadistic voyeur, but I can play that role, and at 6 a.m. I was nudging Kim awake. "He's going to maybe take out a vein this year, I can feel it!" I whined. "And we're going to miss it!"

Kim muttered something in sleeptalk. I translated it to Fuck off. So I picked up my copy of Dostoyevsky, consoling myself with ruminating over the few pages where Raskolnikov murders the pawnbroker with an axe. A groundhog attack it ain't, but it got me through the morning.

Truth be told, I was a little woozy myself. We'd hit the banquet hall the night before, where $15 bought you a buffet dinner and dancing package. The dinner was fine--I settled mostly on spaghetti with meatballs, bringing me once again back to my college days--but the band was playing mostly ephemereal covers of Jimmy Buffet, CCR and the like. A dancer I ain't, and this kind of music wasn't giving me a good chance to fake it, either. I turned to my date with my most winning smile on my face. "I think I'm going to be sick," I said gravely. "Must be the low-grade pasta."

"Oh, sure." She looked like she'd just tasted rancid milk. "It's okay. You don't have to dance."

Well, that was a relief.

"I mean, with this kind of music, it takes skill. Poise. Grace. And endurance."

She carefully enunciated the word endurance, leaving all kinds of double entendres, none of which made me out to be the Dirk Diggler of the Midwestern Suburbs.

"See, these guys dancing?" She pointed to the crowd. I won't go into the ladies, but the men were all, almost without exception, gray-haired, bespectacled, balding, wrinkled, and unwearying, as they twirled, tossed and dosie-doed their partners all over the thirty square feet of ballroom floor Bill Murray had Played Piano For in the 1992 Film Groundhog Day. (Another paper plaque reminded the crowd of this historic significance, lest we should forget and think we were merely in some community center eating Ragu-saturated spaghetti.)

"These guys could dance all night," she was saying, "and come back in the morning for more. I wouldn't expect that of you. I know better."

Confronted with such a crass diatribe against my own plethora of shortcomings, I took refuge the way all strong men of the new millenium do: I went to the bar.

In this case, the bar was more of a water fountain cum sideboard, with a bored-looking woman standing idly. "Give me a Grey Goose martini, straight," I growled hoarsely.

She only stared belligerently. "We got Coors, and we got Coors on draft," she said tonelessly.

"What else do you have on draft?"

In response, she plunked down a plastic cup of something that looked remotely like beer. "That's a buck fawty."

I managed to sink down three or four of them in rapid succession. Blech. It tasted like warm sweat sock.

Having insulated my sense of manhood against further injury, I returned to our table, where I expected to find Kim looking hangdog, suffering those fifteen minutes or so acutely aware of how miserable her existence would be without me. Instead, I found a local chatting her up. "This is Jim-Bob," she chirped happily as I took my seat. "He owns two franchises in this county alone!"

Jim-Bob looked at me suspiciously. "This the feller you were talking about?" he drawled. "Looks right like a gust of wind would blow him away."

Jim-Bob, on the other hand, was sporting an impressive beer gut for a mid-twenties youth. "I do cardio," I said, trying not to sound apologetic.

"Hey, a right smart of you people do that, don't you? Saw some on TV at that Rainbow Parade."

"I'm not gay."

"I...believe you." He turned his attention back to Kim. "You know how to do the two-step, beautiful?"

It turned out that she did. She cut a lovely figure on the floor, being the youngest, the most beautiful, and the one in most possession of her own teeth. Jim-Bob, on the other hand, plodded like a dinosaur with hemmhroids, interrupting his counting to leer and stare at her breasts.

Coors, it turns out, is better when guzzled. Alone.

So the next morning was turning out to be more grueling than I'd believed. Domestic beer has its own flavor of aftereffect. Your body is irritated at you not just because of the alcohol saturating your system, but more out of outrage that you didn't find something better than, after the Coors ran out, Pabst Blue Ribbon.

At ten to seven, Kim woke up. "Shit!" she gasped. "We're going to miss the groundhog!"

"Well, I--"

"Why didn't you wake me, numbnuts? You have to read that damned book now?"

I put Dostoyevsky down, smothering thoughts of the axe dutifully. "Maybe they're running late," I said sheepishly.

"Maybe you want to get your do-nothing ass in the car and warm it up." She started looking around for her shoes, which were actually still on her feet. "I could be with Joe-Bob, you know. He has a franchise. Makes a lot of money. And he's got endurance."

On the last, I certainly gave him credit. My irritation for him would endure just about anything now.

Twenty minutes later, we were standing in a foot of snow. The groundhog, looking fairly placid, was out, having already made his prediction: Six more weeks of winter, a plague falling among them, more bad publicity for Britney Spears, and a winning Lotto number of 23-14-7. People were milling about, getting their picture taken with the groundhog and his handler, a ponytailed young man who looked as enthusiastic as that morning's dose of lithium allowed him.

Kim snapped pictures of the groundhog. "Let's adopt him," she suggested. "He looks cute."

"The picture alone will last you a lifetime," I intoned.

The rest of the day was spent in the jailhouse bar, throwing back Blue Moons and watching Groundhog Day (which was filmed in Woodstock, by the way, in case you didn't know) and shooting the breeze with a vet colleague who lives in the area. On our way past city limits, we went by a sign hung askew on a rickety house wall: "Joe-Bob's Snow Shoveling Service." Nary a snow plough in sight. A rack of snow shovels was up on the wall. And in front of the driveway, shoveling like mad, red in the face with a battered Lucky cigarette hanging from his lip, Joe-Bob.

"No wonder he's got such endurance!" I gasped. "Quite the entrepreneur."

"Oh, shut up."

I would have tipped Joe-Bob a toot from the horn and an extended finger of choice. But the shovel looked made of metal, and I could tell he had quite the throwing arm.

CARY--At Dewey's house, listening to his usual line of bullshit. "Yeah, I was going to get high speed internet, but I figured that was too much money."

Well, I use that connection to write high-profile blogs and surf the internet.

"Uh huh. And how much does that cost?"

Uh...ten cents a minute.

"Right. Well, I use the money I *would* spend on stupid cable crap to drink and pursue my intellectual interests."

Like what? Collecting bottle tops?

We went on like this for a few hours, at which point his daughters came downstairs to warn us to keep quiet, or they'd take away whatever remaining alcohol was kept in the house. A sad day, indeed, when nine- and six-year-olds can dictate the behavior of a couple of beat-up thirtysomethings.

Then (god help us both), the women called:

Mrs. Dewey: I just love you so much, and I hope you're having a good time with your pal tonight, but if you forgot to do all the chores I laid out for the two of you, I'll bust your ass.

Dewey: Yes, ma'am.

My Girlfriend: Don't come home tonight without french fries.

Me: You want curly-fries or regular fries, Love of My Life?

Her: What do you think, stupid?

And all that after only ten beers. Check back at midnight for the real juicy stuff.

Holiday Cheer

This is an old piece, actually, when I was living in my apartment and having trouble with my neighbors. I tweaked it a bit--it could still sort of apply today. Poetry, it ain't. But it beats holiday reruns.

'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through my flat
No food to be found (just as well--getting fat).
The presents were wrapped up next to the fire,
Held together with newspaper and some cheap baling wire.
The woman was slaving over a hot, smoking stove
While I reclined comfortably, wriggling my toes.
I was about to apologize again for my gift
(She felt a new mop was sort of short shrift),
When all of a sudden the floor vibrated and thrummed--
I sprang from my chair, wondering if Saint Nick had come!
"I'll see what that noise is, dearest of dears,"
I shouted to Kim, who only shrugged and sneered.
Down the steps I bounded, taking two at a time:
Could it be Santy-Claus? That old pal of mine?
Alas, twas my neighbor, already caroling
With Hendrix on the stereo, and two cases of brandy.
"Hey butt-face, do you mind? This's a silent night!"
I intoned reasonably, which he took as a slight.
"Pal," he jeered, "you're a mere teacher of youths.
"You're an overpaid drudge, so now just face the truth.
"You're a joke in this building, a stain on our minds.
"Your breakfast a six-pack! Your dinner my wine!
"Tomorrow the rest of us schlep off to work,
"While you're watching cartoons, you Hawaiian-shirt jerk."
Then he flipped me off, and tossed me a coin.
He mooned me two times; and then grabbed his groin!
And I last heard him snarl (after yelling, "Get bent!"),
"Go read a book or something. Leave Christmas Eve to real men."

Note from Sandburgh today:

The face you make at dawn
Enough to clench my cheeks together thrice
Why not get laid more oft?

Great. Just great.

So: it's no secret I've taken a few "blue flu" days in my career. My most memorable one was when I had to study for the GRE, which I did from 5 a.m. until about noon. Then I drank the rest of the day away and still made it into school the following morning.

My least memorable "blue flu" was spent at the library rereading The Blackboard Jungle. I was settling into an apartment that felt strange and unusual.

Tomorrow I'm out of the building. But not because of "blue flu" (although I plan to spend plenty of time grading yea papers). Because I have to take care of a sick cat.

It's a family member's cat who just went through surgery. And I have to make sure it doesn't...you know...die on me. While the owners are out of town and don't want to be worried sick. Because they're taking care of something else. So...what a guy I am. I could save my "emergency days" for the real emergencies of the world: two-for-one beer night at the local bar, or Wet T-shirt Competition for Women Under 80 at the dive down the road. Nope, I spend my emergency day following a cat around an apartment and grading essays. Meanwhile, while I'm gone, my freshman will be immersed in the pathos of Lean on Me without a guiding hand to tell them of the subtleties of the mis en scene, and my sophomores will be talking about medieval Scottish heroes in short, choppy sentences. Don't even get me started on my study hall.

"But, masters, remember that I am an / ass; though it be not written down." Much Ado About Nothing. And don't you forget it.

Oh shit, I just wrote it down.

Speaking of Shakespeare, I've got tickets for Saturday night's performance of Cymbeline, which I have not read, and my date is busy. So is my girlfriend (ha ha). Form an orderly queue, theater-goers.

The Principal

James Belushi, looking slightly less fat than he does today, is a boozey, divorced teacher who gets into a fight with his ex-wife's lawyer in a bar and then, mysteriously, is out on his ass as principal of a gang-infested, rundown school nobody seems to want to fix. He strides the halls not like Morgan Freeman in Lean on Me, or like Edward James Olmos in Stand and Deliver. He's scared, but he still strides the halls, storms classes, forcibly tutors kids to read and do their homework, cajoles his teachers. The only problem is, every time he gets somewhere, someone else, at the hands of rogue drug-dealer ex-student Victor, winds up beaten up, raped, or, eventually, murdered.

The movie doesn't try to be anything else but an eighties flick, complete with cornball musical interludes. Add to that a principal who mixes chocolate powdered milk with Coke and beer, rides a motorcycle in his school's ratty neighborhoods, and gets a recently turned-around kid to high five him "down low/too slow" and you've got all the makings of an hour and fifty minute music video which is not so much an homage to teachers, or education, but to a down-to-earth tough guy doing what needs to be done to establish a status quo. Great stuff. Louis Gosset, Jr., is great, too--he spends equal time cajoling and berating Belushi for his dumb-ass bravery. The film won't create any new teachers, but it probably did pave the way for movies like The Substitute. We apparently don't have enough tough guy movies. We need Tough Guys Who Read movies, too.

Bonus: Check out a young Esai Morales as a student in this turkey. "Man, do you know where you are? You're at Brandel. Ain't you heard what they said about this place? Garbage never leaves the dump." Thank God good actors eventually do.

Yesterday: born one nephew of yours truly. James Patrick (name censored), 12 pounds and some-odd ounces; twenty-some inches long. (Height, I mean.) All are healthy. I have yet to smoke my cigar.

The First Days of School, 2007

Institute Day

The novelty of being back wore off within minutes. This alarmed me. So did the candy-ass expressions on the admins' faces as I roamed the halls of the opposite building. Normally I go between them, but since [Note: story deleted due to extreme boringness--Editor], I'll be full-time with the lower classmen.

One hour into the day and I'd managed to move several stacks of boxes across the room several times, reluctant to open them.

Two hours into the day and I'd typed up more documents and brooded in the cafeteria, surrounded by faces I didn't know and bereft of better company for the moment.

Three hours in was the first school meeting. The principal reamed us out about test scores, settled down to assure us he knew we were great, then exploded once again about "If you're so damned great, why do our scores stink?" He then lapsed into jocularity and urged all older people to go in for their colonoscopy. So it's not enough the school is up our ass...

Twenty minutes after that meeting, I wanted to go home. But then it was time for the next meeting, where my department previewed what would come up in the next meeting. The only contribution I made was to deliver a (false) phone number for colonoscopies.

An hour after that, the district meeting. Mr. Roma sat in fron of me, and didn't even acknowledge me; then he got garrulous with the guy on the other side of me. The asshole. He just made the list. Again.

The administration gave a speech, imploring us to take NCLB seriously even as we recognize its absurdity; the union reps reminded us that, even though we were "doing our all," we should still "try to do our all." Whatever that means. A tech guy got up to tell us about a meeting teaching us how to work the new phone system. "It should only last a half hour or so," he promised. "Unless it takes longer."

Then the rest of administration got up there and told us that the best way for kids and adults to succeed was to be part of a community. That means, apparently, endless tests, curriculum alignments and meetings upon meetings, but it can also include cookouts and activities (fed into by extracurriculars usually pooh-poohed in favor of study halls, but that couldn't possibly matter less). "We know what you guys are capable of," we were told, "so get on out there and get it done."

Yay team, I thought to myself in the back. Now is my phone line working yet?

As it turned out, no. That was another hour pissed away later.

Look at my attitude. Can you believe this?

Since I'm treading unfamiliar ground that's nonetheless familiar, since the old has now become the new and since everywhere I turn there's something else I have to redefine because [Note: this portion deleted due to extreme whininess--Editor], I'm in for a temperament overhaul. If I don't get one soon, there's going to be trouble.

The next two days usually take care of that. Usually. It's this time of year I remember everything that can and has gone wrong, and imagine a variety of things that could go wrong. Pointless, I admit, but then again, so are standardized tests, and they're sure not going anywhere. Once I actually attend to the hands-on business of teaching (and contrary to popular opinion, that is not always the priority in American education), that part of my psyche starts to settle down.

Anway, if you need me at school, don't call my work number. I think the outgoing message I recorded has a hex in it.

Thank god Kim's nephew stayed over last night. Playing the Cool Uncle helps take my mind off the upcoming school year.



Cool uncles let the kid play video games until his brain turns to mush.



Cool uncles also allow them to play on playground equipment recklessly, and unsupervised.

I got this down.

Behold: my first home made martini. Courtesy of my brother's birthday gift.



I didn't bother to take pictures of the second, third or fourth. After the fifth onwards, I wouldn't have been able to hold the camera steady anyway.

Almost there. Eyelids heavy, blood thick and sluggish enough to make me even more stupid than normal. Sleep can't be more than a few hours away.

Today is the woman's birthday. She wanted a kayak. No, she wanted two kayaks. And nothing is good enough for my baby. So I told her, yes, you may go out and purchase kayaks using your own money and driving your own car, and if you need any help, you may call anyone you want, as long as it's not me.

Here she is, presumably buying her kayaks. I don't see them, though. Maybe she got ripped off.

OK, bad idea. Not drunk, but it sounds like a good idea. Can't get drunk, though. Supposed to go out tomorrow night. After work. Right, forgot about work. This is good beer, though. Got it from Lake Geneva. Quality hops and malt, not like that domestic crap all the drones around me drink. But not me, though. Nothing but the finest for my lifestyle. Dammit, just spilled my spare Coors.

Just decided to teach nephew to box, which means I have to learn how to box within about, what, two years? That ought to be enough time. Kid could be training by three, beat the crap out of anyone he wants before he can even ditch the kid seat in the car. Sweet.

Guilty confession: last month, when I was supposed to be working on a homework assignment, I wrote a chapter of a novel. It's about an intergalactic smuggler who trafficks in people for a while, then gets mixed up in a revolution on a world on the outskirts of the galaxy. Go read it. It's gonna suck.

Seriously, I really can't sleep. This is dumb. I'm tired. I haven't slept in my own bed for a week. Slept like a rock on J&R's couch, but can't sleep in my own bed. What would a psychologist say?

Me: I spent a week away from home and slept fine on a couch, in a motel, in an easy chair. Now that I'm in my bed, and comfortably home, I can't sleep. What's my problem?
Doctor: You have insomnia. That's $500, please.

Just discovered the Instant Viewing option on Netflix, by the way. A lot of crap, but good crap. The kind of crap they used to have in the VHS shelves at Hollywood Video. Tried watching Imprint. Booring. Tried to watch The Candidate. Froze up. Tried to watch Episode I of Voltron. Freakin' awesome.

OK, I'm seriously about to whack myself over the head with a mallet with the words "Vacation is almost over, so get it in gear" burned onto it.

Possible first lines for each class on the first day this year:

--"This is going to hurt you more than it hurts me."
--"If you listen quietly, you can hear my stomach trying to eat itself."
--"Get ready to ditch your hopes and dreams now, kids. It'll make June much less painful."

Got an e-mail from an old journalism student. She got a job. Awesome! I helped make that happen. As a hotel desk clerk. Oh. Well, you probably made that happen, didn't you? Screw you.

Can't sleep. Have to go to school tomorrow and do syllabi and assignments for next week. Teaching next week. Ugh. Not ready. Wouldn't be ready if another month off. How to fineangle my way through it? Journal? SSR? Reminds me: need to stop by Office Max tomorrow and get materials. Thinking about a red gradebook this year. Obviously, I'm a professional. Need to sleep. But can't sleep. Mind racing like a...race car. Yeah, that's what it's racing like. I'm obviously the creative one in the family. Speaking of family--going to be an uncle in a week or two. Sweet. Can teach the kid baseball, football, soccer, hockey...wait, his father will probably take care of all that. OK, so what does that leave me? Teach him how to read, how to write...hell with that, dad and mom can take care of that too. So what then? Teach him how to beat a bar tab when he's old enough? Tell him embarrasing stories about the family? Tell him there's a monster under his bed that will eat him if he reveals his uncle was the one who told him about it? Oh yeah, if I get behind this wheel, it's a train wreck. Will stick to teaching kid stuff what my uncles taught me, once I remember what it was, its impact was so deep it's not readily apparent. Man, I want to sleep. Maybe a beer would help.

JACKSON, MI--So I'm about 400 pages into Gone With the Wind, and if anyone had ever told me I'd be this hooked on a Southern Romance/epic, I'd have laughed. It's tough to get past the way Mitchell describes the blacks (with all the "capering" and "gleaming teeth smiling in pleasure" I just about want to retch), but overall I can't put it down. Every time my aunt and uncle come into a room, I'm reading this damned book. Last night, for dinner, they fed me meatloaf made with sawdust, to see if I'd notice, and all I said was, "Can you believe Rhett ran off to join the army? What a turd."

Of course, while not reading or socializing, I'm doing work for the upcoming school year. And, as always, my mind keeps pushing it away, like a kid pushing away a plate of vegetables. So as I read this book, it occurs to me, What would the same story be like if told from the blacks' perspective? I could do what John Gardner did to Beowulf with his novel, Grendel. I could win the Pulitzer! I could be famous! Let me get right on it.

Scratch that. Already done: The Wind Done Gone was published in 2001. Back to work I go.

Somebody needs to give Bill O'Reilly a reading assignment.

From Kirk Russell's The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Elliot:

Any informed conservative is reluctant to condense profound and intricate intellectual systems to a few pretentious phrases; he prefers to leave that technique to the enthusiasm of radicals. Conservatism is not a fixed and immutable body of dogma, and conservatives inherit from Burke a talent for re-expressing their convictions to fit the time.

See that, Bill? Talking Points that spoon feeds us a few phrases (ego-inflated rather than pretentious, I suppose) are for spaghetti-kneed liberals. Oh, the irony is delicious.

Oh wait, Bill, I know what you'd say. You'd remind me that the following sentence in the passage I've truncated reads:

As a working premise, nevertheless, one can observe here that the essence of social conservatism is preservation of the ancient moral traditions of humanity. Conservatives respect the wisdom of their ancestors (this phrase was Strafford’s, and Hooker’s, before Burke illuminated it); they are dubious of wholesale alteration.

So, does that fit into Scalia's "original intent" framework? Doesn't that pretty well kibosh the revisions made to Article I, Section II of the Constitution? Or the 13th, 19th and 21st Amendments, right? Aren't those alterations that could be classified as "wholesale"?

I'm obviously not directly addressing Bill here. But if I were, Bill and I might agree on Russell's final point:

[Conservatives] think society is a spiritual reality, possessing an eternal life but a delicate constitution: it cannot be scrapped and recast as if it were a machine.

So...there you go. Just like we can't pack everything up in Iraq in a suitcase and Fed Ex it over here, so we can't fine-tune our laws and liberties to fit a particular agenda...any agenda.

(Note--this whole post exploded over a segment I can't find online, which makes me feel somewhat ridiculous, and a homework assignment about conservatism, which I have abbreviated here. Indulge me.)

Some freeloader is eating all my food and babbling about concerts and suburban festivals. Get him the hell out of here.

We would have made the Styx concert at Summerfest if we'd left on time. Or earlier. Or if Tso hadn't pissed away the afternoon "working late" (i.e. boozing it up at a company picnic). But that didn't happen. So, no Styx at Summerfest this year.

Foreigner--eh. They were on stage about forty-five minutes. Ten minutes longer than they needed for all their greatest hits.

That left Def Leppard. Who rocked.

They were on stage for about an hour and change. Only one song post 1989 (thankfully, no "Let's Get Rocked). Below: Def Leppard rocking it with "Foolin'."



Below, Def Leppard rocking with "Animal."



If those pictures were at all legible, trust me, you'd be impressed. As it is, I have to admit, they look more like a light wave vomiting.

Even more impressive--some stroke was passing out free tickets to Tesla's July 13 show at the Rave. For free! Like he was worried they wouldn't be able to pack the place. Puh-leeze.

I called Kim immediately after procuring said tickets:

Me: Hey, baby! Guess what I got for free just now?
Kim: Tesla tickets.
Me: (beat) Yeah, that's right! How'd you--
Kim: They suck. They're probably worried they won't be able to pack the place.
Me: Uh, well...you want to...
Kim: Hell no. I'm going to stay home and clip my nails.

Loser. Doesn't know what she's missing.

The sight awaiting our return home last night after a couple of martinis. Photo courtesy of my brand-spankin' new phone. Mess courtesy of weak-ass shelves and tank veterinary books.

I have returned.

"Enjoy yourself, bitches. It's a celebration."

--Dave Chapelle

This blog will be calling in sick for a week or so. Save my place at the watering hole and don't tell my boss where I am.

OK, OK, I'll admit it...I checked into the Paris Hilton thing.

I saw the "Breaking News" icon on Google during my routine search for young women in prison and heard about Friday's whole "she's in prison!" "she's out of prison!" "no, wait, she's back in prison!" tragedy. Then I found the online petition to let her go (signed by a multitude of fans who make up in love what they lack in grammar and logic). Then I found her myspace page, with another petition signed by well-wishers and "haters" alike. Then I found the Paris Hilton Prison Diary. It's not the Onion, but it's not bad when laughing at another's plight.

Even the New York Times covered the debacle. But they also brought up the Libby trial and what is, in my mind, the greatest judicial billet doux this millenium has seen thus far:

Also on Friday, the judge who sentenced I. Lewis Libby Jr. to prison this week issued an order dripping with sarcasm after receiving a supporting brief from a dozen prominent legal scholars, including Alan M. Dershowitz of Harvard and Robert H. Bork, the former Supreme Court nominee.

The judge, Reggie B. Walton of Federal District Court in Washington, said he would be pleased to see similar efforts for defendants less famous than Mr. Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.

"The court trusts," Judge Walton wrote, in a footnote longer than the order itself, that the brief for Mr. Libby "is a reflection of these eminent academics’ willingness in the future to step up to the plate and provide like assistance in cases involving any of the numerous litigants, both in this court and throughout the courts of our nation, who lack the financial means to fully and properly articulate the merits of their legal positions."

"The court," he added, "will certainly not hesitate to call for such assistance from these luminaries."

--NY Times.

Oh no he didn't! Well, it might not be Atticus Finch, but he still just made my Heroes List.

Things I didn't know about Nixon until finishing Ambrose's third volume of his biography:

--Nixon sold his New York townhouse in 1981 to the Syrian ambassador's office of the United Nations. A company involved with this arm of the UN was involved in selling uniforms to Romania, and uniforms and helicopters to Sadaam Hussein. Nixon may or may not have profited on these sales; as of 1991, Ambrose couldn't be sure.
--Nixon gave two speeches as per his resignation: one was on August 8, 1974, where he formally announced his resignation (without admitting any specific wrongdoing on his part), and one on August 9, to his family and staff, where he made his famous "deepest, darkest valley" comment. Apparently, his family and not a little of his staff was pissed that he'd arranged for the entire thing to be broadcast; in the speech itself, Nixon claimed the whole thing was not set up in advance.
--Oliver Stone must have used Ambrose's work more extensively than I thought. Of course, I suppose he could have gotten some of the dialogue directly from the tapes themselves ("Like the Germans...shoot[ing] down one villager until the rest talk" (sic)..."I really think that's what we're going to have to do..."), but other lines are from Ambrose's own observations: "Eight words back in 1972: 'I covered up. It was wrong. I'm sorry.'" Stone takes Ambrose's sentence and changes it to "I was wrong" and then delivers the line to Haldemann (played by James Woods).
--Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon more out of concern for his own administration and political future than out of worries about tearing the nation apart. I guess I should have figured that out on my own.
--Nixon spent time in W.C. Fields' former Bel Air home at a party. I think it might have been the same house Fields fell down a flight of stairs without spilling any of his drink (as per Carlotta Montijo's autobiography, admittedly problematic).

There's other stuff, but it escapes me at the moment. Volume three sticks in my head better than the others, probably because the last 100 pages covers 17 years and as a result can't be as in-depth; probably because this was the volume I was waiting for all along, with all the Watergage dirt and the resignation itself.

From Cisco: Texas kids protest not being able to walk graduation due to failing state tests.

A perfectly fair and reasonable complaint. Until you take a look at the picture:



Note to Texan adolescents: You're not exactly helping the team out here!

SKOOL--It's funny--the last day of school, and I can't concentrate on any work in
front of me. That's hardly unusual. What's unusual is *why* I can't concentrate.

The kids are feeding me energy. This is not a "good" kind of energy, i.e. something that makes you knock down the walls you've come across, climb the metaphorical mountain, fight the good fight. This is the kind of energy that causes me to see how many times I can spin around in my chair. The kind of energy that causes me to lead a class of 07 graduates in a rousing chorus of Kum By Ya. And especially the kind of energy that makes me bounce my rubber ball off opposite walls in one throw.

I should be paying the district today for the privilege of being a teacher on the last day of school. It's just like being a kid, as long as you forget that you were ever responsible for anyone's education.

I must have this. What's $150, anyway?

I hate Mr. Roma

I'm having another professional crisis. And I blame one Rick Roma of the history department.

It's perhaps an inopportune time for plaudits, as President Bush uses the ruler of No Child Left Behind to whap the collective knuckles of my school district, but for once, the president isn't the reason for my reticence to accept praise. This time, it's a colleague.

Rick Roma. He sucks.

He's single, late-thirties to early forties, constantly gushed over by students and faculty alike. We're of a similar build and height, we both wear glasses, and we have a lot of students in common. They leave his class able to cite differences between European and American law without even cracking open a book. They send him cards from college. And you know what he says in return? "I'm just doing my job."

The nerve of that bastard.

Anyway, the last night of layout had my seniors in tears. Normally they're in tears because of an extendd run of late nights, bad food and even worse company. This time, they were crying because they didn't want to go. And they told me so. "I don't want to graduate--this is so much fun." "You've changed my life. You really have." "Thank you so much for everything."

Well, I'm not one to accept compliments. I thanked them, sure, but in the back of my mind, I was thinking, "Roma probably gets more compliments for doing the lit mag. If I were Roma, I'd be getting seniors dedicating their first novels to me by now."

Then my state-award-winning editor gifts me with a wind gun. I don't know what the real name for this marvelous contraption is, but in layman's terms, it's basically a gun that compresses and shoots pressurized air with all the precision of a sawed off shotgun. I've used them before--if you're good, you can blow someone's hat off their head from fifty yards away. Me, I can ruffle a phone book while sitting at my desk.

Okay, so it's a touching gift, but Roma would have gotten a perpetual wind machine. And a solar-powered gyro-thingee to work it automatically, made by a student whom he taught physics in his spare time. The jerk. I hate his guts.

This is the self-deprecation that runs through my mind when students and faculty are trying to congratulate me. After everything was over and I was done negating the compliments, I schlepped off to the banquet.

I won't go into the banquet in detail. Suffice to say, certain students perform at a considerably high level, and they ask teachers to attend this honorary banquet with their parents to show their gratitute. They pick a teacher who "had significant influence on them." I was chosen by a kid in my afternoon literature class. Bright kid, pretty quiet but friendly, good sense of humor, good writer (a self-confessed "synonym junkie," he makes a sesquipedalian look like positively economical). I started to swell up a little when his parents told me his accounts of my class (no need to go into it all here, but rest assured, I come off as a god)...and then I saw Roma two tables over. Three or four students had invited him, that's how popular he is. The jerk. What a jerk.

No matter. I was being honored. I got my picture taken, got a nifty certificate, shook a lot of hands and did some home-fried politicking with the parents and faculty. On my way out, I stopped in front of a mirror to straighten myself out, and there was Roma, right beside me, combing that luxurious mane of hair and flaunting his utter lack of fear of a receding hairline.

"Have a good night," he said to me. "Congratulations."

Can you believe the condescending attitude? What a jerk. He can go to hell. Good thing for him I was on my way out anyway.

So, Roma, if you're reading this (and I know you are, you smug bastard), I'm warning you. Stop fucking with my triumphs. Eat your humble pie and stay away from my business. Or I'll corral the several knuckle-draggers that aren't failing my classes and tell them to go to work on that big ugly head of yours.

I'll see you at the scholarship banquet tomorrow. Stay out of my way.

JibJab's "What We Call the News". My views on cable news 24-hour stations not having enough news to fill 24 hours a day are on record. Good to see them annotated.

More exercises today. Plus, along with waiting at the pharmacy for the back pills, I'd guess I've spent more time working on my physique in the last three days than I have the last three years. It's beginning to show, too. All I have to do is straighten myself out and let the sound of the cracking of my vertabrae lull me to relaxation.

I like having pills, though. I doubt I'll use them, but now I can growl at my students: "I'm either going to kill you or myself. Where the hell are my pills?" and actually mean it. (I used to growl, "Where the hell is my flask," but stories started getting around, so enough of that.)

Karl Rove raps at the Correspondents' Dinner. The Times says this cockiness is in spite of the recent brou-ha-ha over Libby's conviction.

I say this is yet more evidence that white people shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a microphone when hip hop is playing, especially not while wearing tuxedoes and sporting glasses and a bald spot.

Step One to Back Problem Recovery: Admit you have a problem.

Step Two: Do something about the problem.

Step One, as it turns out, was a piece of cake. The doctor made me walk on my toes, lie on my back and do a couple of knee bends. He then recommended me for physical therapy.

It took me a few weeks to actually get in there because of late nights with the newspaper, grading essays, global warming, insurance runarounds...oh hell, mostly it was dread. Dread over what I knew would happen.

I got right in there around 6:45 and was sitting on the examination table shortly afterwards. The therapist did some stress tests, then asked me to stand.

That's it. Just stand, like I would normally stand.

Her eyes rolled like marbles. Apparently, my posture sucks: I've adopted the Al Bundy life-has-defeated-me slouch for so long, it's putting pressure on my upper back. I'm supposed to square my shoulders and tighten my abdomen to improve my posture while standing. She said this is the intended way the body is to stand. To me, it feels like I'm imitating George Reeve in Superman.

So now I'm supposed to do a series of exercises every day that aren't even exercises. Ab tightening, back-stretching and other routines designed to improve flexibility and loosen/strengthen my ligaments. They aren't particularly grueling, but they take about a half hour to do. Yes, I've been doing them and everything, and I've been hating every minute of it. It's not so much the effort. It's the fact that, were someone in shape to watch me, they'd fall over laughing.

If my brother were to scoff, that would be one thing. But when a mid-twenties physical therapist with a potbelly of her own watches my leg tremble while doing a leglift and has to put a hand over her mouth to keep from laughing, you know you've hit some kind of bottom. Bottom, here I be.

Confessions of an (un)aspiring novelist; Cholera in a time of (love?)

All week long, all I could think about was spring break, and now that I'm here, unlike other years where it's felt like charging headfirst into your favorite bar, surrounded by friends and dollar-a-pint prices, this time it's more like getting into a hot bath after a day working out in cold weather. Muscles relax. Blood pressure decreases. I wound up canceling my plans (yes, I'm the only person alive who has to call in sick for a party), watched TV for an hour (of all things, Scrubs episodes I already have on DVD), read for two hours and was asleep at nine a.m. Up this morning at 4:30, finished the book, made coffee and stared out the window impatiently, waiting for the newspaper. My old man, I do take after.

I do have a checklist, of sorts, for the next eight days. Projects and papers to grade, lesson plans to prepare, etc. But there are a few books to read as well. In a fit of ill-advised ambition, I offered my sophomores extra credit to read and review James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me over break, then realized I'd have to read it myself. No matter. I'm a fan of revisionist history. Every time Rush Limbaugh or Anne Coulter sounds off about "liberals who want America to fail," I have to wince and shrug embarrasingly. No, I want to tell them, it's not about wanting your country to fail. It's about wanting the people who "run" your country to fail. When a president goes to war because God told him to, when an administration congratulates itself on a "reasonable proposal" by offering members up for testimony without oath, and when think-tanks doing precious little thinking give shitty advice on Capitol Hill, I find myself waiting for the fifth act, when hubris is punished and, if the righteous don't prevail, at least they get to say, "I told you so." I've been able to say such words to several people lately, but have gotten no joy out of it. Maybe when and if Patrick Fitzgerald goes after President Bush, I'll be able to crow a little.

But I digress. Before I can tackle Loewen and how my history textbooks got it all wrong, I had to finish Jane Smiley's Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel. I stumbled across the book in a Salon.com article reviewing books about how to read, and I picked it up more or less on a whim. I've read two Smiley novels, and neither made much of an impression on me. However, I've come to realize this had less to do with her writing style than it did with my attention span--I read both of them in grad school, on off-hours not spent studying or grading undergraduate themes, and just seeing her name and recognizing her cadence brings back some of those memories. Smiley's meditation on the novel and the novelist is a tad circular since she constantly brings up the same novels as examples, and she is fond of pointing out that (maybe) novelists are good at their craft because of their inability to engage successfully within their own social circle. But I could listen to her go on about the particulars of novels for twice as long as she does in the book. I like how she points out that most, if not all novels are destined for some level of failure, whether through the passage of history or the disparity of today's multimedia audience, and I respect how she willingly offers herself up for sacrifice by walking us through the composition and editing of her novel Good Faith (which I have not read).

What's probably the most alluring part of the book, though, is the last two-thirds, where she offers encouragement to would-be novelists by reminding them to write to please themselves rather than get rich and famous, and where she offers her own two cents on one hundred novels she read over a two- or three-year period. I've only glanced at a few of her reviews, and I plan on only skimming the rest, but I have to admit, I'm a sucker for reading about reading. Nick Hornby does it in The Polysyllabic Spree and Housekeeping vs. the Dirt; Jonathan Franzen bemoans both his own and the public's lapses in novel-reading in How to Be Alone, and while I have yet to finish it, Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading is no less intriguing for its social commentary about why we read and why we read what we read than it is for its insights into the psychology and even sexuality of reading (did you know your eyes are skipping all over this page even as you follow the words? or is that because you found some porn somewhere and are getting distracted? come on, share the wealth, asshole).

Gulity confession: I used to want to be a novelist. Sometimes, in spare moments, I still do. I've started maybe a dozen novels in my lifetime. Some fought for existence heroically, uttering strangled last words melodramatically on a death bed. Some came into existence, chuckled contemptuously at the lot that had been cast at them, and died without a murmur. The example that sticks in my head most vividly: in the summer of 1998, while working for a mosquito management company, I spent days trudging through forest preserves and suburban back yards spraying larvae and thinking up third-rate horror stories. One tried to become a book about a vampire who tries to give up blood drinking by switching to substitutes, only to have his possessive witch of a mother trick him into backsliding with a girl he's trying to start an affair with. I was smoking fairly heavily at the time and unsure of the teaching credentials that I was shopping around the state, and figured, way way in the back of my mind, that this could be a means to avoid the drudgery of work, of an alarm clock and a briefcase filled with essays on Why My Parents Don't Understand Me. What's always precluded me from pursuing a career in writing has been twofold: I find myself questioning why I want to do it in the first place, and I wrestle with the guilt that comes with struggling valiantly over something so middling while working in a profession that, by necessity, demands creativity, innovation and dedication. Elmore Leonard wrote some of his first work by hiding it in a desk drawer while at his office job. Geoffrey Chaucer was a civil servant his entire life; The Canterbury Tales were more of a hobby. Were I to do likewise, my students would be watching a lot more movies, and I wouldn't be able to sleep at night. Every time I sat down to write something halfway decent, Jack Roeser would leap up in my head, chuckling over how well-paid I was and how many kids would never learn to write coherently because of a middle-of-the-road drama about an alcoholic ex-priest visiting his home town.

Then along comes Smiley with words of encouragement, arguing that a finished first draft of a bad novel is in itself a success, that only through looking at the trees at first can one eventually see a forest. "Just write," she seems to be telling me. "The worst that can happen is you won't finish it, and that's already happened, what, a dozen times?"

Well, don't sit by the phone, Reading Public. "Write a novel" is on my list of Things to Do Before I Die, and I'll most likely get to it before long, but I'm still in the process of deconditioning my must-publish attitude towards the whole thing. I'm also having way too much fun reading novels, not to mention histories, biographies, essay collections and, yes, even the occasional student essay.

Among the pile: Maugham's The Painted Veil. I picked up a copy at Target on an impulse (and before anyone gives me any static about that, let me just point out that there hasn't been an independent bookseller in my neck of the woods in years, and that I regularly frequent the Chicago bookstores, not to mention independent sellers on line) and read it over the space of a week. I like Maugham. I don't know why, but I do. Of Human Bondage is a book I'd love to teach, although I have no idea how I'd go about doing it. Maugham has symbols, foreshadowing, style and substance, but it's all just so there. Things just happen. I think it was Jane Smiley herself who wrote the foreword to the Bantam edition, in which she points out that the progression seems more an afterthought, as if it's an excuse to watch the protagonist struggle with his passions, his lack of money and his ostracism. My cup of tea. The interior conflict has always been something that, when executed well, I can eat for breakfast.

The Painted Veil is different, though. Kitty Fane is caught in an affair with a big-talking diplomat, and in a fit of passive agressive punishment, her husband Walter, a doctor, takes her with him to treat cholera victims in an epidemic sweeping through rural Japan. Kitty is superficial, but changes when exposed to true suffering, true love, and the example of the Catholic church as it treats cholera patients, and she learns to see her husband through her new eyes. The ending could have been melodramatic, but Maugham does a better job wrapping up Kitty's journey of self-awareness than he does Philip's in Of Human Bondgage--she's lost too much and made too many mistakes to have a happy ending, but she can at least step in a new direction, and it's from there that I derived the most enjoyment.

Unfortunately, the one factoid that kept running through my head while reading was Maugham's homosexuality. Critics, I believe, keep returning to that as an explanation for his treatment of women: they're either complete and utter bitches, like Mildred Rogers, or confused yet immoral roundheels, like Kitty (and is it any accident that she's named after a slang term for either a prostitute or a vagina? I doubt it). So I was preconditioned to be skeptical of her portrayal, and I think I bought into it. Leafing through the pages once again, I still can't see deep pathos on her part, just a matter-of-fact account of her second thoughts and self-ruminations, almost as if she's going through the motions of having a soul.

But then, pathos in fiction has never been my strong suit. Like Eleanor of Acquitaine, I am not moved to tears, but I should at least be able to recognize when I should be so moved. It's something to work on, I guess. How else could I write my own deathbed scene, many years from now? "As the life left his eyes and his head slumped on the pillow, she felt as if she were floating over him, untethered, free yet precariously so, like a balloon drifting into the atmosphere, at risk of popping because of the inverted atmosphere." Sure, that will do the job just fine. God, I could have gotten a paper graded in the time it took to write that. Damn you, Roeser, you win this round.

NYC-49th and 6th-TROPIC zone bar is a lounge-type place with pounding yet manageable disco music, plenty of space, and waitresses in string bikinis. Journey's End turned out to be an outstanding play chronicling the pathos of the Great War. But it didn't have any waitresses with string bikinis. So I think it's only fair to turn my attention back to the excellent service I'm receiving.

I like this blackberry. This could be a problem.

NYC-88th and 1st Ave--Blogging from Matt's Blackberry. He tells me it's a work-related device, which means it's not to be used frivolously. So hopefully, this is costing his shit company money, and I'm getting the bastard in trouble.

46 degrees. Off to Battery Park. Then Broadway, then the bars. As the Black Keys sing, You just got to be.