Ignoreland
June 15, 2008
Filed in: The Home Front, The Middle Ages
There is a growing list of mainstream media story types I simply cannot read anymore, no matter who they’re written by or how important a publication they appear in.
Witness one: today’s uber-boring cover article in the NYT Mag. Wow, people in the 21st century who have children sometimes decide to split the duties involved in caring for these beings and their abode? Sometimes they fight? Sometimes it works out great? Eventually, the kids grow up and leave, and the parents look back on it all with fondness or bitterness or [insert other emotion here]? Talk about breaking news.
Other types on the list:
* Any story in which baseball or golf is the catalyst for a moment of emotion or revelation between any two men—father/son, boss/underling, celebrity profilee/profile writer, Justin Timberlake/Tiger Woods.
* Any article that attempts to codify the ways in which Marilyn Monroe was, is or will continue to be meaningful to the American zeitgeist. (It’s terrible to say, but now that Norman Mailer has passed, this bit of journalism ought to decrease markedly.)
* Any piece in which a woman of a certain age contemplates Botox/a facelift/Restylane, polls her friends, pesters her man-companion, decides in either the affirmative or negative, and learns to live, if just a tiny bit ruefully (if she didn’t do it) and/or defensively (if she did), with her decision. Over the past few months, I have had to spend a lot of time reading lady magazines in various doctors’ waiting rooms, and I’m here to say you could wallpaper the Kremlin with these articles. Stop already.
* Any story in which the writer hires a cleaning woman and experiences any kind of emotion/revelation related to that act—guilt, enlightenment, guilt followed by enlightenment, etc.
* Any essay in which a middle-aged parent (usually a dad) takes his teenaged child (usually his son) to his first concert—rock, ska, rap, punk, alternative, really anything except pure pop.
Dad has memories, dad has emotions, dad wishes he could get high or jacked or drunk or whatever mind-altering thing he used to do at concerts but no longer does, dad looks at the sexy teenaged girls and reminisces about his own sexy days past (requisite paragraph required for publication in Esquire, GQ, Details, etc.), dad looks at his fat aging self and feels insecure.
But mostly, writer dad bends over backwards to remind readers in a very low-key (and therefore cool) way how very cool he used to be.
Because the world does not need another one of these articles, not never, I’m not going to say anything about the R.E.M. concert C and I went to this weekend, his first. Way back in another century, I had the good sense to befriend Beulah, who had previously had the good sense to attend college in Athens, Ga., and hang with what would later turn out to be R.E.M.
Flash forward 25 years, and Auntie B is able to set us up with free V.I.P. tix, 15 rows back, center, in a lovely outdoor venue, plus access to the V.I.P. beer-garden-like lounge, plus (most important at this crummy car-centric stadium), V.I.P. parking that allowed us to get out of the lot in something other than the 2.5 hours it takes regular plebes.
As I rolled down the window of our pollen-encrusted Honda (the white pine is dropping its stuff this week in New England) and said to the parking girl, “Uh, I think we’re on the list for the band? We’re with Beulah?” C said, “How do you know Beulah anyhow?” You can figure out his thought process for yourselves. Fat-butt suburban mom + hipster cool Beulah = wha?????
And it’s true, B and I haven’t anything in common, except a love of words and writing and a certain bemused, mostly-but-not-always-sarcastic way of watching the world. But since those things take up 90% of my consciousness (the other 10% being divided equally between food and drink—and, oh yeah, my kids), that’s a pretty big connection.
B was happy Friday night. The evening was fine, she was looking hot, and the band played, in her honor, “Don’t Go Back to Rockville,” which was written for her way back when. They also played two hours of out-of-the-park faves of mine, including, astonishingly, an acoustic country version of “Let Me In,” a song I semi-obsessed on during a particular 18-month chunk of time when it felt like all I could do with any measure of success was miscarry over and over.
So yeah, did mom have emotions, standing next to her now-6-foot-tall offspring on a gorgeous summer night sneaking little sideways peeks as he rocked out to her favorite band in the world? I ain’t saying. You will not read a word about it here.
I am not going to be a loser and tell you that after the show in the beer garden we stood not 10 feet away from a certain polite, soft-spoken hipster icon, and could have met him for ourselves if only we were willing to wait for all the other mom/teen fan combos ahead of us to get their salutations out of the way. Not talking.
I will, however, bow to convention by posting the requisite cell-phone photo. How did people ever go to stadium concerts before mobile phones were invented? Did you just, like, stand there and listen to the music? So last century.
The trio in question are in the teeny, tiny middle of the pic. I don’t care what anyone says, cell phone photos suck.
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You better listen to the radio
June 12, 2008
Filed in: The Home Front, The Way We Live Now
I’m not being bossy, I’m quoting Elvis Costello.
Reading my various frantic bits, you’d never guess, but I do have a day job. And today—well, actually a couple of weeks ago, but airing today—I was on the radio.
Fun, in a slightly disembodied kind of way.
On my list of small anomalies of human life that will be corrected after death: in Heaven, your voice will sound the same to everyone else as it does to you.
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Down to Zero
June 08, 2008
Filed in: Alaska, The Home Front, The Way We Live Now
Way back in February when I booked our now rapidly approaching Alaska trip, I was sure as shootin’ I’d have a couple of juicy writing assignments under my belt to finance this thing by the actual time of departure, if not a book deal.
In between then and now, the economy tanked and tanked and tanked some more, gas costs spiked to their highest levels in recorded human history, and it is now more difficult and uncomfortable than ever before to fly across country. Lovely.
And, as you might already suspect from various and sundry previous postings, I have had not one shred of a second to seek out writing gigs or any other forms of remuneration for this ultra-ultra-expensive jaunt. So yes, in the middle of a recession, we are slamming the entire thing on a credit card. [Confidential to T: for now, honey, just for now.] How very American of us, is it not? The 50th State indeed.
If it all seems like sheer folly to you—and yes, it does to me too, to the extent that it’s keeping me up the 2 hours at night that aren’t already reserved for other worries—rest assured it’s nothing new for me and mine:
* When I went cross country in 1985, I was quitting a job that paid $14,000 a year, so not a lot of cash heading into that trip. My friend D and I traveled to 37 states in 3 months with a gas card and one credit card between us, which we didn’t use. We tented it the entire way (well, we hit two hotel rooms in 90 days). When we got back, we were well and truly broke, down to zero. We found crummy jobs to replace the crummy jobs we’d left, and life went on etc.
* Five years later, when T and I quit our jobs and took off to Italy for five months before we got married (one of the first words I learned in Italian was fiancé, fidanzanto or something like that), the booming ‘80s economy turned suddenly sour in our absence. Our friends kept writing letters (yes, people did such things way back in the ‘80s) saying, don’t come home, the economy sucks. We did indeed fly home, completely out of money, with no jobs and a wedding to stage. And once again, we faked it through somehow.
* One vacation a few years after that in the Adirondaks, I called in to the office to find out I’d been let go. [That boss was the spineless and gutless type (sorry, P).] Another year, same place, T had found out hours before we were to head North that he’d been laid off himself, but we decided to fake it and not tell anyone (sorry, M and T).
Now we’re taking what’s absolutely the most expensive trip of either of our lives in the middle of a deep, deep recession and the beginning of what I’m personally convinced is a permanent oil crisis. So it goes. As the Alaska charges pile higher and higher on the credit card and the economy dives further and further down, I can at least look back on our ignoble cash-strapped vacations past and say, well, we’ve survived worse. We didn’t die, we didn’t go bankrupt. We just worked our butts off upon our return.
Looked upon that way, the only thing that’s troubling is that my butt already feels worked off. Of course, it doesn’t look worked off, or on, so… there’s (dare I say it?) wiggle room there.
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Worst. Blogger. Ever.
May 28, 2008
Filed in: Alaska, The Home Front, The Way We Live Now
How bad is it? It’s this bad: my teenaged child emailed me the other day from the “contact me” section of my own web said and said it was lame that I haven’t been blogging. That bad.
I know I’ve been gone a long, long time. I wasn’t kidnapped—I was run over, mauled, spit out, and left for dead by the runaway engine that is Swellville local politics at its most furious. Post-election, I am crawling across the floor to my laptop like some kind of aging, transgendered, slightly-less-hairless Wile E. Coyote, but yeah, thanks for asking, I’m still breathing.
If you truly want to read the nitty-gritty details, you can go here, where to my dismay I was named by name, but really, why would you? My own mother prefers to pretend I’ve taken up gardening (except, she keeps wondering, where are the actual plants?)
Speaking of which, while all this infighting and outrage has been going on, a spectacular spring busted out all over Swellville, almost out of spite, it seems. Now there are fourteen days till school gets out and less than a month till we embark on our Alaska vacation. Again in the immortal words of Wile E., “Arrrrghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” [Insert mental images here: high cliff, long fall, puff of smoke.]
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Will You Please Be Quiet Please?
April 06, 2008
Filed in: The Home Front, The Middle Ages, The Way We Live Now
It’s weird to be pitching a book about falling in love with America again when in fact I am less and less in love each day with our economic system of government. It’s kind of like going to a marriage counselor when you already have one foot out the door.
Poor Swellville is in such dire economic straits we are in danger of having our town name changed to UnSwellville (and who among us could endure a tragedy of that scope?). It just doesn’t make any sense to fund public education from tax revenues that go up and down (and down, and down). Really, what am I supposed to say to my kids, sorry for the gaping hole in your knowledge bank, but that was the year everyone stopped going to Best Buy?
I have been working with a lot of other people to try and turn that around somehow, but all the while in the back of my head a little voice is saying, isn’t this pointless?
It was with a head full of this kind of crap that I took Pip out for a walk into a spring morning that, in typical New England fashion, was neither sunny nor warm. Because I was blasting Pearl Jam on my iPod in the hopes of shutting up the noise in my brain, I missed the warning cries from the crows and the sudden dead quiet from the littler (and smarter) birds that would have told me a hawk was nearby (a juvenile red-tail, as it turns out. I looked it up when I got home.)
So I nearly jumped out of my skin when he swooped about a foot above my head and gave two sharp, economic little flaps and sailed to the top of the tallest pine. He ruffled up all his feathers and looked down on Pip for a moment, wondering if she were worth a fight (she’s not), then turned back to his job of dispassionately surveying the Swellville horizon and freaking out the crows and the jays.
Was he a message from God? It was Sunday morning after all. A sign from Buddha? I should be hawklike in my resolve? Or maybe I should majestically rise above all these petty social concerns? What did it all mean?
Nothing, I decided as Pip and I rounded the corner toward home. Not a damn thing. It was a hawk in spring, and if he could talk he’d say, My message to you Tracy Mayor is: shut up.
Which I will.