Girl Germs.

I can’t tell you when it started, but the steady stream of mixed messages has definitely informed my perspective (or, as Frank Zappa once put it, “messed my mind up.”) I was born in 1970, approximately the same year as the birth of the modern feminist movement. To say that I have been tossed between worlds since approximately that moment is a bit of an understatement. 

 

I’m not sure when I became a feminist, or when I started identifying as one. I wasn’t given a choice, in my opinion; my mother has a will of iron, and comes from a long line of nurses. She was not going to give up her career when she met my father, nor do I think he was foolish enough to ever suggest such a thing. As fate would have it, he developed an utterly debilitating galaxy of cardiovascular and respiratory disorders when I was still an infant…so my mother was the one who taught me how to throw a ball, drive a stick-shift, mow a lawn, punch without breaking my thumb, kick a soccer ball, whittle, and remove my own splinters. The concept of a world where all women were not my mother was, despite seeming simplistic and Freudian, improbable at best. In her poem “Men”, Lorenza Calvillo Craig says that my gender are “totally unable to see beyond the body of a woman,” and “erroneously decree that a woman hath no spirit, no soul.” While I met a lot of people like that, not all of whom were men, in my elementary school years, it sounds a bit primitive. It also sounds like something you shouldn’t say to my mother (or me, for that matter.) My father, had he been told this, would have chuckled lightly and mentioned something about that denier needing a bit more education. 

 

So they had souls from the get-go, these mystical creatures who were not my mother. That didn’t preclude them from being attractive; if anything, knowing that we were equals was a bit of a relief. I was an awkward oblong eggplant of child, with no balance and unfortunate fashion choices. If I could just find a woman who saw past that, I could…well, I could do something. The idea was too fantastic, even to my eight-year-old self. I would liken it to a dog chasing squirrels; you know you’re supposed to do it, nobody has really explained why or why not, but what do you if you, well, catch one? (I ask this as a middle-aged man who still lacks a reasonable answer to that question.)

Coming from a small, middle-class neighborhood, I felt a lot of pressure from my betters, most of whom had to hammer that idea home on a regular basis (sometimes literally.) I can’t agree with their enactment of Joseph Pleck’s male-power hierarchy, as found in his article “Men’s Power with Women, Other Men, and Society”, but I understood, even at an early age, that it stemmed from their own regressive paterfamiliae. There had to be a pecking order, and, as someone who didn’t see a problem with girls (other than perhaps their superficial nature, or the inventory on hand), I was bound to get pecked pretty hard and pretty often. 

 

And despite coming from the same environs, even the same block, Dad was not like them. He wasn’t the most progressive soul, but he’d learned a lot about people simply by talking to them. It lent him a mercy, on some fronts, that was missing in other houses.

Stan Gray, in his article “Sharing the Shop Floor”, depicts a social maladroit known as a working class patriarch. These are men who, upon escape from their employers, come home to exercise all the power they lack on, say, the shop floor in question. That just was never going to happen in my house, and for a variety of simple reasons. They include the instinct for self-preservation.

My father had all the authority he could handle: he ran a newspaper, worked with several local charities, and came home to a somewhat-well-oiled, if Rube Goldberg-designed, machine that was run by my mother. If he had tried, in the tradition of those patriarchs, to put his foot down, I have little doubt that she would have, perhaps on a good day when my teachers weren’t calling about all that homework I was too busy to do, asked him to switch jobs. I come from fairly intelligent people, and that includes my father. If, as Barbara Povee Polk alleges in her essay, “Male Power and the Women’s Movement”, it is “in men’s interest to maintain…power and privilege”, Dad definitely sold us (men of the Seventies, anyways) out. 

We weren’t the only ones who were stretching the boundaries, though. One of my best friends’ dads took off to the West Coast with his secretary, so his mother, like mine, shrugged and stepped up. While the old roles and activities were maintained, no one seemed to bat an eye about who was doing what. Everything had to get done, though. Boys had to play sports; if girls did, too, then nobody cared who was coaching or driving. Boys were supposed to be tough; if the person teaching them that stoicism was a woman, well, it was the Seventies. It would be at least another twenty years before the activities were similarly blendable, although many efforts were made. They were shrugging efforts, like allowing girls to play youth soccer with the boys because only the boys had a league. None of us had operable hormones yet, and everybody got dressed at home, so it was not a thing. Of course, the parents’ encouragement differed, and our roster seemed to be a little more homogeneous by about midseason…but that wasn’t the institution. West Haven Youth Soccer appreciated every check, and they were high-minded enough to take anyone’s money. That mentality trickled down to the coaches, especially mine. It wasn’t like we were going to win, but even a loss was better than a forfeit based on too few players. 

 

That focus on roster size would show up again later, just as puberty reared its draconian head. I still thought about girls (though I now suspected they were becoming women, particularly in nomenclature, but maybe in other arcane ways as well), but with little exception, they were either absent or quite vocal in their unwillingness to be that metaphorical squirrel. I went to an all-boy Catholic high school, hung out with comic-book geeks in downtown New Haven, where there were only Yale undergrads (if more of them had been Primatology majors, I might have married my way out of the suburbs), then went home to a neighborhood where there was one girl my age (Debbie N., who preferred more athletic guys. To each their own, but she really was the only girl. No pressure, Deb.)

There I was, in a world that didn’t fear or hate me. Worse, it was indifferent. I just couldn’t seem to find my demographic, even after I got a driver’s license and started hanging out at the mall. It’s possible that I was too advanced for them. I blame my parents…who occasionally insinuated, probably jokingly, that I certainly spent more time with men than women. My retort was based in fact: if they’d moved us to a neighborhood with more girls, especially ones with lower standards, I’d have brought home at least one pregnant girlfriend already.

A few short years later, that response stopped being funny…but that is a whole other story.

One swing is always empty.

As thrilled as I am that people are being forced to discuss gun control, I'm reminded of earlier shortsightedness.
I'm from Senator Chris Murphy 's home state, to offer full disclosure and express maximum pride.
As most of you know, I live a block from the beach. Yes, it's lovely. Yes, you're always welcome. Please wear sunscreen, and remember to stay hydrated.
By the beach lot is a wonderful new playscape...pink and shiny, it has a bell that gets clanged throughout most sunny days. Children scream and caper, and it gets boisterous till just after dark. (It's too close to the main road, so only the bravest stoners pass by it, and I've never seen any stay.)
It is dedicated to the children of Sandy Hook Elementary. You may have heard their story. A white male, raised in a gun-happy microcosm, decides to ventilate the world.
I said children. Yes, I did.
I want you to imagine, as I did, your child, your niece, your nephew, confronting an unstable individual who is equipped to hold out against a small Soviet incursion. Days before Christmas, and the only weather we here can recall is a lead rain.
Children. Yes, that's what I said.
So when they're clanging and banging and shrieking with glee in I have lost count of the number of languages, I think about all the children who can't. They are silent beneath the soil, haunting family trees they will never extend, because white people have been driven mad for the instantaneous gratification of having godlike power over life and death.
I've never met a group so focused on their rights to the point of rabidity...I don't know if there's a cure, but I know this:
Killing is wrong. Hating people because they aren't like you is wrong. Taking your bad day, real or biochemical, out on others is wrong.
That much I've got. The rest is strong suspicion.
There's nothing wrong with guns, as the NRA likes to say. No, there isn't. My qualms arise from the people who need bigger, better, faster, more...of a deadly weapon. It indicates genuine mental illness, the get-out-of-scorn card for white shooters young and old. If it weren't its own society, this white-knuckled world of erstwhile defenders of defense, they'd qualify as mild sociopaths.
The government has not taken a single one of their guns. Every time that bell clangs, though, I wish they had.
Children, I said. Children.

Another test for IFTT.

Allegedly, the recipe works. I'll be timing this over on Facebook.
#technicalissues

Alarmist Clocks.

(This post originally appeared as a paper for my Sociology of Communication class at Albertus, which may explain its somewhat pedantic nature. It was graded in September 2015. Dr. Yeaman liked it. I hope you do too.)

It’s that time of year again. Every September for the past fourteen years, we are asked to remember the people killed on September 11, 2001. It seems there are (and seemingly always will be) a number of people, most of them white males, who want us to Never Forget, to Remember The Heroes, and to Hunt Terrorists. As someone who is often stuck in traffic next to their bumper-stickered monstrosities, I can only assume they mean this unironically. 

The biggest shift for me was actually across the week of the attacks. I was in class at a new job, and we’d decided to take a coffee/smoke break after some intense grilling about health insurance benefits. We had just heard about the first plane hitting the World Trade Center, so someone wheeled a television into the back of the cafeteria. Over just a few minutes, hundreds of fellow Anthem employees suddenly massed in almost complete silence to watch the towers fall.

We were allowed to go home, if we so chose. I so chose, and immediately tried to reach friends who had jobs in or near the City. I’m thankful to report that none of them were lost that day…but parts of them were. Parts of all of us were vaporized, albeit less dramatically or fatally.

I woke up on September 12^th to a changed world. As a country, we had gone from having a sagging stock market to enduring a state of media siege that has yet to be matched. As a culture, we had gone from mildly sociopathic self-interest to utter xenophobic hysteria. People who would give their last dollar to a stranger wanted to boycott dollar stores. “Those people” weren’t born here, and they “spoke the same language as the terrorists.” These are the words of a close friend, since alienated by such thinking and my inability to accept it. Our friendship was deemed less important than my unwillingness to just sit back and let the hawks invade the rest of the world. 

Everybody wanted a war. A war on terror, a war on somebody, an expression of justice that would match the suffering of “our”thousands, all sounded like great ideas, made more appealing by the constant monotones of CNN and the adolescent jabbering of Fox News. Our home had been attacked. We had a moral obligation to attack the attackers, even if, to pick a few nits, they were actually already dead.
People greeted each other again, in ways that northeasterners would have normally deemed threatening…because people who weren’t Us had demonstrated such hatred. We were unified, with our manners intact and our shirts slightly less wrinkled, by the horrors of war.

I was stunned and appalled. I still am, to a large extent. Almost every lawmaker who could reach a microphone was singing Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless The USA”, whether literally or figuratively, and we were all invited to sing along. We were to be a chorus, condemning “evil” (in the words of Toby Keith, a country singer who has not been reduced to poverty by this audio jingoism), extolling the virtues of being American. That in itself was enough of a virtue; the fact that we’d antagonized huge chunks of the world, actually trained and/or equipped some of our less savory overseas acquaintances, were still letting people starve while pornographifying capitalism and selling predatory loans, that wasn’t as important as a geographical accident of birth. Cracker Barrel, never ones to miss a beat, stopped playing Hank Williams and Patsy Cline just long enough to embrace Greenwood and Keith. I do not consider this a coincidence.
So the norms of all these behaviors, the bumper stickers, the endless stream of defensive rhetoric, the fondling of dollar bills while children go hungry, the unsubtle hints at American supremacy or the need for biblical justice (whether in the form of music or pseudojournalism), the war itself, are alleged to be patriotism. They claim to defend tradition, too, and of course, America as a sovereign notion, boundless and destined for glory.

I’m a patriot too, although my particular brand condemned me to be a very lonely one in those early days. I wanted to be sure people were safer in their thinking than to just run around, panicked and surprisingly capable. Until that day, I’d been fairly proletarian; I wanted to go on vacations, and pay off my house early, and maybe put a basketball hoop in the driveway. I wanted a nice hardwood floor, and a kitchen island for all those meals I’d cook if I only had a kitchen island. I wanted a new car, and to buy first printings when my favorite authors released new material. It wasn’t that I was unaware of the world, but my focus had been forcibly reduced to such a myopic degree that even Manhattan itself seemed so distant, so removed from my reality unless I sprung for train fare. If anything, the attacks reminded me that the planet is a sphere, and suffering is more universal than we’re encouraged to think. For a week, I looked to the sky in fear, certain that unseen hands would wipe away what little I’d accomplished. Now I look up because it’s the same sky, and we are all under it together.

List of Norms (with Values in Parentheses)

Other people put ignorant and aggressive stickers on their cars (patriotism/America/free speech)
Other people make Dead Terrorist jokes, or talk about foreigners being the problem
(patriotism/fear of the unknown)
Other people think that oil-bearing nations should be annexed
(greed)
Other people play patriotic songs as if that makes our country better than all the others
(patriotism)
Other people think that any nation that disagrees with America should be bombed
(patriotism/love of talk radio)
Other people think that an eye for an eye is the best way to practice international diplomacy
(patriotism)
I don’t do any of those things, especially those based on greed and talk radio, but I consider trying to live as an antithesis, if not anathema, is my duty as a global patriot. So we all really want to be the best Americans we can be; my notion of it just happens to involve the rest of the world.

You Want History.

This is mostly a test post, so I can time the response between posting and IFTT's transfer to Facebook...but I've been doing some admin work hereabouts, and it occurs to me that I was a very different person when I came here in April 2004.
That was just a couple of months after my second ex-wife dumped me for the first time, so I made a lot of declarative statements. Most of them don't hold up prima facie, especially the boys' ages, but some of them have only tilted. I suspect what changed was my perspective, of course, but I really did think that I was that person.
I don't know if I miss him or not. I am also deeply unsure if he looks any different to the outside world, then or now. As ever, I welcome your input.

Silence Fiction.

When I was younger, I actually read all the science textbooks all the way through. It wasn't difficult, although the age of the books (I went to public school, where some facts or their publications had not changed greatly since Cotton Mather's retirement) provided challenges. As such, I found that pseudoscience filled in the gaps of missing pages or monstrous chronological crevasses quite nicely.

One drawing that stood out was a simple alkaline battery. It was bisected like a tree, the view from amidships, with ions all over the damned place and color-coded rings. I was about six or seven (it was my sister's book. Mine were chapbooks, and insultingly written. Of course I could see Dick run. Of course I saw Ben with the key and the kite. Any imbecile knew these things. I craved SCIENCE, the kind Vincent Price was always doing when he wasn't playing the organ or talking to his dead wife.)

I understood it instantly. It was me. Maybe it was us, but it was absolutely me. We all have rings; the whole introvert/extrovert fad is based on them fulfilling rough ellipses, covalent bonds flailing in a cosmos made of nature and nurture. The cold periwinkle (or was it cadet blue? It's been a while since I had the full crayon buffet at hand) of the atom diagram was a close second, but the battery really clicked (no pun intended.)

We are all everything, just not all the time.

I was always a quiet kid, except when I wasn't. When the opportunity presented itself, I was prepared to do standup at an early age...not the considered, timed standup comedy of the true professional, but the utterly improvised observational work of the stereotypical Irish drunk. Given that I started doing this around the age of four or five years old, I would like to add that I was cold sober. I didn't even drink soda, which was usually the first order of business. "Why do you want bubbles in your mouth? Do you miss the feeling of eating paint?" In the lead-paint-crazed Seventies, that one always killed.

When the spotlight, literal or figurative, wasn't on me, though, I could hide against a white background while wearing a Ronald McDonald costume. I clambered through clothing racks to get from the front door of any given department store to its toy department. I loved jungle gyms, never fell, but never made any of those noises I hear from down the beach. I didn't scream. Even if I was in pain, which occurs with a fair degree of frequency if you're too literate around young athletes, I wasn't much of a screamer. Sharp inhales, though, that I had. I felt, and feel, no need to make extraneous noises. I still get somewhat selfconscious when I cheer at a sporting event. (I'm a Nets fan, so it never happens while I'm watching television. Swearing loudly or cursing the GM using foreign languages doesn't count.)

Why all the quiet, though? Was it because one sister was a chatterbox and the other one was even less introverted? Was it because my unmedicated, bipolar father, who was dying from COPD the entire time, was given copious amounts of steroids? Was it because my mother, who had trailerloads of just cause, occasionally raised her voice instead of caning her three idiot children? I'm not sure. I have my faith that a lot of my inner quiet came from major depressive disorder, the need to evade my peers, and the constant feeling of self-defeat that comes with the aforementioned. I was a ghost who wanted to be a devil. Or Batman. Or Spider-Man. Or, well, not me.

So I disappeared a lot. Sometimes, for my own amusement, I'd reappear directly behind people. My poor mother is 75 when I write this. The fact that she has never needed digoxin or a pacemaker is a testament to her durability, not my good behavior.

I still do it, too. I know how utterly insane this sounds, but I have proof, substantiated by the U.S. Attorney's Office, that I am pretty damn quiet for a six-foot-seven, over-three-hundred-pound behemoth...until you get me on the witness stand, when I become an articulate expert in the nooks and crannies of Amity Road, Selden Place, and the layout of the bank those guys were robbing when I walked in. Don't worry; they didn't hear me.