Rest in peace: Sol Saks and Madelyn Pugh

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Sol Saks and Madelyn Pugh passed away last week.

 

 

You don't know them?

 

 

Sol wrote the pilot of “Bewitched.” His name was in the credits every week. He died at the age of 100.

 

 

Madelyn was a writer for “I Love Lucy.” Her name was in the credits every week too. She died at 90.

 

 

I felt a tug at my heart when I saw these notices, both last Thursday evening, in the Times.  I associated both of them with my childhood, and with pleasure, and television, and entertainment.

 

 

I remember hearing of Jack Benny's death when I was in my teens. I went outside and walked, feeling very odd and solemn. This is what happens, I thought. How strange. People die.

 

 

But it's always old people, right? Old people die. Strangers die. Not your friends or family. Certainly not you. You'll never die.

 

 

Will you?

 

 

Some years ago, at one of the Williams family reunions, I met my cousin Joyce's husband Mel, a very trim handsome guy – a minister! - cheerful and smiling, like an athlete on the front of a Wheaties box.

 

 

He was dead within a year, of cancer. Horrible.

 

 

We are none of us exempt. We have the falling sickness, as Rilke said; we are all falling, like leaves in autumn.

 

 

But, for some reason, it hurts me most of all when comedians, and comedy writers, die.

 

 

None of it's fair. But this seems least fair of all.

 

 

We can't afford to lose them.

 

 

'Bye, Madelyn. 'Bye, Sol.

 

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Royal Wedding blog: Alternate-universe edition

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I got your Royal Wedding right here.

 

And by the way: where do you go to find people who look like the Archbishop of Canterbury and Princess Anne?

 

 

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Six degrees of Victor Garber

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There used to be a TV show called “Connections.” The host would demonstrate that Newton's laws of motion led to the invention of the lava lamp, or the microwave oven, or the Post-It note, through elaborate Kevin-Bacon-type relationships through time and space.

 

 

I call it “serendipity,” which is (I think) nicer.

 

 

The other night I was watching “Godspell,” which I had never seen before. A trifle goofy, and I liked Judas more than I liked Jesus, but that was okay. Then a bell rang in my head about the cast listings. Jesus was played by Victor Garber.

 

 

Victor Garber??

 

 

You know him from a hundred things. Maybe as one of the ship's designers in “Titanic.” Maybe as Jennifer Garner's father in “Alias.” Myself, I immediately think of his “Will and Grace” appearance as a classically-trained actor whose best-known role is a cartoon devil advertising cereal on TV. “It's sinfully delicious!”

 

 

So now I'm watching “Godspell” and browsing the Net on my laptop, catching up on Victor's career. He's very nice-looking, of course. I discover that he officiated at the wedding of Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck, which is pretty adorable.

 

 

Then I see a picture of him at the Affleck/Garner wedding with his partner, Rainer Andreesen, who just happens to be an artist, with an estimable website showing off his work. And he uses Victor as a model sometimes, and wouldn't you do the same, if you had such a handsome man around the house?

 

 

I ended my search with a smile on my face. I started with a Jesus in 1973 clown makeup, and I end up with a mature, successful, happy-looking gay couple in 2011.

 

 

Now that's what I call “serendipity.”

 

 

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Cupcake Armageddon

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The other night, I was switching around on the treadmill TV at the health club (carefully, because I don't want to lose my grip and go flying backward out the window), and I ran into the Food Network. Normally I avoid the Food Network. It is mostly people like Paula Deen and Sandra Lee and Alton Brown and Padma Lakshmi, with industrial blenders and fifty pounds of butter and ovens the size of walk-in closets.

 

 

But I came upon a show called “Cupcake Wars.”

 

 

Holy Mother of God.

 

 

Four very nice women, working under a time limit, were frantically designing brilliant delicious clever inventive cupcakes to please a panel of “judges.” I came in while they were trying to combine three flavors in one cupcake.

 

 

And, according to the judges, they all failed!

 

 

All right, I need to pause at this point. Do you honestly see how silly this whole food-combat thing has become? People are being made to cry because their cupcakes aren't as good as someone else's cupcakes. “Iron Chef” was at least funny, with the whole “Kitchen Stadium” thing, and the war cry “A la cuisine!”, and the secret ingredient being something stupid like salt cod or sweet potatoes or shiitake mushrooms.

 

 

"Cupcake Wars" has a judge named Florian Bellanger, who runs a macaroon company (!), and who is completely humorless. He is Simon Cowell times ten. He never cracks a smile. He speaks with a nasty humorless Eurotrash accent. He says things like (please read these aloud with your most atrocious French/Belgian accent):

 

• “We asked for three flavors. You gave me one. I do not like this. I say this is a no.”

• “I wanted something delicate. You give me a chocolate cupcake.”

• “This red velvet . . . it is like sucking food coloring out of the bottle.”

   

 

The contestants are baking cupcakes. You hear me? Cupcakes.

 

 

Actually, I think I might bake cupcakes this week. Maybe banana-walnut-kiwi cupcakes, with infused lemon curd and a vanilla buttercream frosting decorated with daisies and butterflies.

 

 

Or maybe I'll just dump a box of cake mix in a bowl with some oil and eggs.

 

 

Either way, if we can peel the papers off their little bottoms and eat them, they will be a triumph.

 

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Forgetting how to read

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I read incessantly. As a child I had to have the cereal box in front of me on the breakfast table, just to have some reading material nearby.

 

 

Now, however, through some combination of age and medication and alcohol consumption, my concentration has faltered, and I can't read the way I used to.

 

 

Take the newspaper, for example. My eyes skitter up and down the page, glancing at the headlines, looking for proper nouns and keywords. But even when I find an article I want to read in detail, I sort of panic and keep skittering.

 

 

I still read a lot, of course. For some reason, non-fiction – the duller the better – has become very appealing to me. I am not kidding you when I say I recently read – page by page and word by word! - a grammar/lexicon of the Chinook Trading Jargon. I always keep a book near my living-room chair, for quiet moments; right now it's an eighteen-pound college biology textbook, which I open at random to read about mitosis and eukaryotes and dicotyledons. It's very calming.

 

 

But novels are almost beyond me nowadays.

 

 

I find I just don't care about them anymore. Every story has been told, don't you think? Every family situation has been dissected, every antihero has met his destiny, every Don Quixote has come home at last. I used to go to the bookstore and look at the endless racks of paperback and hardback novels, and I felt daunted, because I thought I had to read them all. I don't feel that way nowadays.

 

 

I even cheat. Apollonia, my work friend, gave me her cherished copy of “Water for Elephants,” so that I could talk intelligently with her about it. I found it flat and uninteresting, and got my dear friend Wikipedia.org to tell me all about it, and now I can fake my way through a conversation with her about it.

 

 

This saddens me a bit. (Also, I hope Apollonia doesn't read this.)

 

 

So, as a penance and a lesson to myself in diligence – and maybe to get my reading proficiency back – I have set myself an assignment: I am currently reading “Democracy: An American Novel” by Henry Adams. I am reading it on my Nook, a few pages at a time. No, a few sentences at a time. I do not allow myself to skitter. And, for a change, I am actually trying to think about what I'm reading.

 

 

I am enjoying it.

 

 

So maybe I am not beyond hope after all.

 

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Weekends

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I have been with my current employer for almost twenty-four years. I have a “Time To Retirement” clock on my office wall, with the dial set to the year 2040. I will be eighty-three years old that year (well, eighty-two on New Year's Day 2040, but let's not split hairs).

 

When I started there, most of my coworkers were older than me. This has changed. A few years ago, I hired someone who was around twenty years old; I realized later that she was born while I was sitting behind that very same desk, or one just like it.

 

Dearie me!

 

 

Partner, like me, is no longer a spring chicken. We both think longingly of retirement. We look forward avidly to weekends and holidays and vacations, as foretastes of what life will be like when we don't have to work anymore, if that day ever arrives.

 

So how do we spend our weekends?

 

• We sleep in.

• We refill our prescriptions.

• We refill our pill-minders (those cunning little plastic things that tell you when to take your pills, and how many).

• We argue about whether or not to see a movie.

• We see a movie.

• We shop for groceries (yogurt, rotisserie chicken, and sundries).

• We have a meal on the town sometimes.

• Once in a while we visit Partner's sister and brother-in-law up in Massachusetts.

• Once in a very great while we go completely insane and go to Boston, or Manhattan, or Cape Cod.

  
  

 

The weekends are over far too soon.

 

And then it's Monday all over again, and we have to plod back to the office.

 

If you ask me, the year 2040 can't come soon enough.

 

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Easter blog: Mahler's Resurrection Symphony

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For Easter: the last few minutes of the final movement of Gustav Mahler's Second ("Resurrection") Symphony.  I don't know this conductor, or this orchestra, or these soloists, but they're really pretty good.

 

 

I don't listen to Mahler much anymore; honestly, he hurts my heart too much. But when I listened to this, it was like hearing it for the first time.

 

 

Even if you think you don't like classical music, give this eight minutes of your time. It is amazing.

 

 

“You will rise again, my heart.”

 

I hope it's true.  It would be lovely.

 

 

Happy Easter, y'all.

 

 

 

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Ikea

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Partner and I went to Ikea recently. What? You've never gone to Ikea? Children, go and see it. It's a little slice of Swedish heaven.

 

 

It's a huge blue-and-yellow castle about the size of the Death Star. It's full of furniture (do-it-yourself, but cute and fun), appliances, throws, curtains, lighting, housewares. It's a maze, but there are directional signs. Also there are occasional staff members in yellow shirts to help you. (I was wearing a bright yellow sweatshirt when we were there, and people kept looking at me strangely. Finally one of the staff murmured to me: “Everyone thinks you're one of us.”)

 

 

Then there's the restaurant. It's a slightly more formal version of the old-fashioned drugstore lunch counter / soda fountain. It's cheap and surprisingly good. It also includes a children's area, with child-sized tables and chairs. Three or four kids were in there, sitting very quietly, eating and apparently watching something on a video screen. I don't think I've seen such well-behaved – and happy – kids in a public place for a long time. (One of my friends said thoughtfully later, when I described this to her: “Maybe they were Ikea children.”)

 

Back to shopping. Housewares. (I bought a huge beautiful wok for five dollars. I've always wanted a wok.) A lamp for Partner's mother. A couple of pillows for Partner, who is very particular. A bud vase for me, because I need a few blossoms near me from time to time.

 

Then, after checkout, there's a cafe and a small grocery store, so that you can buy packaged versions of the food you had for lunch.

 

 

I would live there if they'd let me.

 

God bless the Swedes!

 

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Good Friday blog: The Crucifixion

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For Good Friday: a very old Irish poem by an unknown author, as set to music by Samuel Barber in his “Hermit Songs.”

 

 

The remarkable thing here is that Christ suffers more in thinking about his mother’s grief than over his own crucifixion!

 

*

 

At the cry of the first bird

They began to crucify Thee, o Swan.

Never shall lament cease because of that!

It was like the parting of day from night.

O sore was the suffering borne by the body of Mary's Son.

But sorer still to Him was the grief

That for His sake

Came upon His mother.

 

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Sugar is not your friend

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There was an article in the Times recently about sugar being a toxin. (I'll link to it here, but the Times now has its Gottverdammt “paywall” in place, so you may or may not be able to access the link. Sorry.)

 

 

Yes, you heard me. Sugar is a toxin.

 

 

The article actually explained this, in terms that a semi-educated blockhead like me could understand.

 

 

In short: not all carbohydrates are metabolized in the same way.

 

 

Your body wants glucose for energy. It gets a lot of glucose from metabolizing starch from food like potatoes, and grains, and other plant foods. Starches are basically long chains of glucose molecules. Yum! your body says, and takes the starch apart into its constituent glucose molecules. It has lots of ways of doing this; even saliva does it, a little. Since (up to very recently in human history) most of our glucose intake was in the form of starch, our bodies have evolved very neatly to perform this task.

 

 

Sugars are a little different. Sucrose – table sugar – is a double molecule: one molecule of glucose, one of a different sugar called fructose, linked together. Glucose is an all-purpose molecule, and can be metabolized pretty much anywhere in your body. Fructose can only be processed in one place: the liver.

 

 

And here our troubles begin.

 

 

Sucrose is half fructose, as I said. And I'm sure you've heard of “high fructose corn syrup” (HFCS), which is cheap to make, and is actually sweeter than regular sugar. Well, now let's say you have a nice Snickers bar. Right away you're flooding your system with a burst of glucose, which sends your poor pancreas into conniptions, so it sends out a lot of insulin to help regulate the glucose metabolism process. And then, of course, there's all that fructose heading for your liver for processing.

 

 

If this goes on too much, it leads to a condition called “fatty liver.”

 

 

Also – delightful! - with so much insulin washing around in your system all the time, your body's cells can become what's called “insulin-resistant.” Your pancreas pours out insulin all the time, but it's not accomplishing what it's supposed to do.

 

 

Related conditions: obesity, obviously. “Metabolic syndrome,” a risk factor in heart disease and diabetes. And, more recently, a very distinct link to some kinds of cancer.

 

 

Sigh.

 

 

Solution: eat less sweet stuff. Mostly plants, as Michael Pollan says.

 

 

No problem, baby. I love sweet potatoes and black beans.

 

 

You can just call me Mister Health.

 

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Mel Gibson in "The Beaver"

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At the movies recently, Partner and I saw the preview for “The Beaver.” What, you haven't heard of it? It's the Mel Gibson movie that was shelved for a couple of years because Mel was too notorious to handle. Everyone in Hollywood referred to it as “that movie where Mel Gibson has a beaver-shaped hand puppet.”

 

 

The studio test-marketed it, very cautiously, a few months ago, and it got very high marks from its audiences. So now they're releasing it.

 

 

I think the timing has a great deal to do with the whole Charlie Sheen thing. The PR masters are doing some very deep thinking about whether or not bad behavior is actually good for a career. Charlie may be off the air, but he's doing a lucrative “comedy” tour, in which he just paces back and forth on stage and rants, while the audience cheers. And Lindsey Lohan just gets worse and worse, but somehow we don't tire of her. I confess that I thought she was pretty good in “Machete,” and knowing about her personal life actually made her performance in that movie funnier and more pointed.

 

 

So what do we know of Mel? Anti-Semite. Drinker. Abusive. Creepily pious (he almost fooled the Church hierarchy into making him their Hollywood ambassador, back in the “Passion of the Christ” days).

 

 

But he's obviously imaginative. And talented. And often funny. And he has flashes of good ideas. (“Apocalypto” was a brilliant concept, though only a half-baked movie.)

 

 

Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan may or may not be talented; the jury's still out. But - and I hate to admit it - I think Mel Gibson is actually a gifted actor and director.

 

 

And Jodie Foster likes him, and I like Jodie Foster.

 

 

Now I have to ask myself: will I plunk down $7.50, some of which will go into Mel's loathsome pocket, to see “The Beaver”?

 

 

Sigh. Probably.

 

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Roger Williams Park Museum

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Providence, like New York City, has a large central urban park. It's hilly and full of greenery, marshy and irregular, with a network of ponds and canals running through it. There's a merry-go-round, and a “casino,” and a zoo (which is actually not bad), and a very nice exotic-species greenhouse, and a couple of bandstands. It's also full of lots of secluded spots ideal for drug-dealing (which explains a good deal of the automobile traffic running through the park).

 

 

In the middle of the park stands the Roger Williams Park Museum. It is a fanciful castle, decorated with elaborate stonework. Inside: rock collections. Antiquities. Native American beadwork. A small but cute planetarium.

 

But I am always most fascinated by their huge turn-of-the-century taxidermy collection. It is beautiful, and horribly sad. Have you ever seen a passenger pigeon? Of course you haven't; they're extinct. But I saw one the other day at the Roger Williams Park Museum, long-dead, stuffed and mounted. There is, in fact, a display of every bird found in turn-of-the-century Rhode Island – some of which, like the passenger pigeon, are gone from the earth altogether now (thanks at least in part to museum collectors), and many of which are no longer seen in Rhode Island (or at least I haven't see any Great Auks around lately). There's a lioness and lion cub, posed together, and they are beautiful, until you think about them a bit. And two big polar bears nuzzling one another. And a big grizzly bear rearing up on its hind legs. All dead, all stuffed. “I wonder,” Partner said quietly as we were looking at the polar bears, “if they had any idea they'd end up in a place like this?”

 

 

The Museum quite evidently runs on next to no money. The exhibits seldom change. I think Partner and I were the only people there that morning; I spent seven dollars, including admission, and I was thanked profusely three times by three different staff members.

 

All those odd beautiful things sitting in an odd building in south Providence, gathering dust. All those artifacts of science and culture.

 

If they announce the world is ending soon, probably a lot of people will go to church to pray.

 

Myself, I think I'll head over to the Roger Williams Park Museum and sit with the rock collections and fossils and stuffed passenger pigeons. It will be a good place to meditate on going extinct.

 

 

And I'll be in excellent company.

 

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Cascadian Literature 101: Ursula K. Le Guin

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Ursula K. Le Guin is our greatest living Cascadian author.

 

 

She has written “fantasy” and “science fiction” (whatever those terms mean). She has written essays, and “straight fiction” (whatever that means), and poetry.

 

She creates whole new cultures, based on entirely different assumptions than the ones we're used to. She plays games with political systems. (“The Left Hand of Darkness” creates a planet with a feudal hierarchy alongside a drab vaguely-Soviet bureaucracy. “The Dispossessed” features one planet with lots of different Earthlike governments – capitalism, pseudo-communism, etc. – and another with an anarchist government. If you've ever wondered what it might look like if the anarchists take over, read “The Dispossessed.”)

 

She uses a backstory for some of her novels, that goes like this: A million or so years ago, a humanoid culture colonized Earthlike planets all over the galaxy. Then, for some reason, they withdrew. Then, a million years later, they come back sheepishly: Look! We're your relatives! And you have cousins all over the place!

 

 

But we all evolved, hm, differently.

 

Some of us evolved hermaphroditically.

 

 

Some of us have cultures in which sex is completely open.

 

Some of us have religions in which numbers are an expression of the divine.

 

My favorite of her books is “Always Coming Home.” It is, in the author's words, “a story about some people who might be going to have lived a long time from now in Northern California.” It's sweet and strange and very solemn, and it feels very real. They have some technology, lots of folklore, and a deeply soulful lifestyle. Le Guin gives us their recipes and their holiday celebrations and their beliefs. And she ends with this plaintive refrain:

 

From the beginning, from the beginning,

We are your children.

 

 

Go read her, kids.

 

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Palm Sunday blog: Hosanna

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For Palm Sunday: “Hosanna,” from the 1973 movie version of “Jesus Christ Superstar.” It's not quite as good as the original album, but I love the ethereal voice of Ted Neely, AKA “Screamin' Jesus.”

 

 

 

 

 

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Brain medicine

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I have taken various kinds of psychoactive medication over the past ten years. (I'm kind of, um, tense. And I have what are charitably called “moods.”)

 

 

I like my current medication. I am much calmer now, and much less likely to freak out over stupid things. I'm still irritated by idiots, but I'm not infuriated by them quite so much.

 

 

But – and here's the funny thing – I find that my memory (which used to be, frankly, amazing) is not so amazing anymore. (I read recently that my medication is prescribed for people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, which makes sense; the medication seems to take the urgency away from everyday situations, and makes everything fuzzy around the edges.)

 

 

But I am calmer now. And, as I said to someone recently, if this is how normal people feel most of the time, I'm sorry I missed out on it for so long.

 

 

I do miss the sharpness and focus I used to have. But I don't miss the nervousness and tension and depression and obsession over details.

 

 

Partly, I know, it's just the passage of time. I'm in my mid-fifties, and my brain is getting mushy, like a soft-boiled egg. My fuzziness and loss of memory may just as well be the progressive degeneration of my brain tissue.

 

 

Who knows?

 

 

Anyway, I'm not going to obsess about it.

 

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Tbilisi

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In the summer of 1978, I flew Aeroflot from Leningrad to Tbilisi. (On my first Aeroflot journey, from Copenhagen to Leningrad, I'd turned on the air-conditioner vent above my head, and the air that came out was blue.)

En route, I glanced out the airplane window, and I saw the Caucasus Mountains from above.

They are the mountains of your dreams, craggy and snow-covered and imperious. They are the ideal mountains lurking in the subconscious of every person of European extraction, I think. They are our heritage.

Tbilisi is the capital of the Republic of Georgia. In 1978, it was still the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, but it was very foreign, very un-Russian. I realized quickly why 19th-century ethnographers had decided that “Caucasian” was the ideal European type. The men are massive and swarthy and handsome; the women are dark-eyed and seductively beautiful. Everyone smoulders.

The culture is warm and welcoming and full of swagger. Waiting for a city bus one day, a huge handsome Georgian approached me. “Cuban?” he asked me. It turned out there'd been a Cuban foreign-exchange group in town recently, and he assumed I was part of it. (Not many foreigners came to the USSR in those days.) It was, children, the only time in my life I have ever been taken for a Cuban.

One radiant evening I was in a Tbilisi bakery, buying a fruit-and-goat-cheese pastry, when I saw a pale older woman clutching her parcel of bread and staring at me. Finally she approached me. “Bitte,” she said, “sprechen Sie Deutsch?”

“Ein bischen,” said I, lying bravely. “Ich bin Amerikaner. Sie sind Deutsch?”

She shook her head. “Nein. Polnisch.”

How in the hell did a Polish woman get to Tbilisi? “Meine Mutter ist halb polnisch,” I said, trying to be conversational and grammatical at the same time.

She shook her head, thinking I'd misunderstood. “Nein, nein,” she said. “Ich bin polnisch.”

Finally, after a few minutes, I got her story. Her husband had been a German soldier taken prisoner by the Soviets during World War II; after the war he resettled in the USSR, and he'd brought his wife to Tbilisi.

And then he'd died.

And she was left all alone, stranded, far away from her family.

The memory still haunts me a bit. I hope she managed to live to see her home – in Germany? in Poland? again.

But, from what I could see, there are worse places to live your life than Tbilisi.

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Chief Dan Lelooska

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When I was in the third grade, my class went on a field trip to Kalama, Washington to visit Chief Dan Lelooska.

 

 

Lelooska was a Native American artist and historian. He lived in a traditional Northwest Coast cedar dwelling, he carved totem poles and masks, he told stories, he performed ceremonies.

 

 

When I was a kid in the 1960s, Native American culture in southwest Washington state was moribund. The original nations – Chinook, Klickitat, Wasco, Chehalis – had been scattered, assimilated, relocated. We were taught that there'd been a colorful Native culture before the white settlement; we colored pictures of Sacajawea and ate pemmican and learned to spell “travois”; but the reality was nowhere to be found.

 

 

Except in Chief Lelooska's cedar lodge.

 

 

I remember him as a big cheerful man who told us stories. I don't remember the stories, but I remember the thick smoky atmosphere in the lodge, and the carvings all around us, and the dancers. One dancer came out dressed as a raven, wearing a huge wooden mask with a two-foot-long jointed beak; once in a while he'd pause right in front of us, wings outstretched, and snap that huge beak at us, and it made a loud clapping noise. When you're seven years old, a six-foot tall raven is scary. 

 

 

But also sort of fun, and very memorable.

 

 

Finally it was time to go. “Now,” Chief Lelooska said, “you go home and tell your parents that you're mothproof. You'll see. They'll think it's pretty funny.”

 

 

And I did.

 

 

And, as Chief Lelooska predicted, they thought it was hilarious.

 

 

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My new BlackBerry; or, I have become one of the people I hate

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I was recently determined to be an Essential Staff Member at the office. To make this official, they gave me a magic kiss on the forehead and a BlackBerry Torch.

 

 

Oh my dear little lord Jesus!

 

 

This thing sucks up all my email – not just my work email, but my home email too – and presents it as a neat little list. It somehow mysteriously hooked itself into my Facebook account (not sure how it learned my password; maybe it got me drunk, or hypnotized me), and now it makes a cheerful little “ka-thunk!” noise whenever I get a Facebook update. It hooks into the Weather Channel, and MSNBC, and Bloomberg, and the radio, and the television. It has GPS and a camera. And I am beginning to get the hang of thumb-typing on a hamster-sized keyboard.

 

 

In short, it does everything but count the change in my pocket by radar.

 

 

It is my Precious.

 

 

However:

 

 

A few days ago, I was walking back downtown at lunchtime, and absentmindedly I pulled the BlackBerry from my pocket to check it, and saw an email which needed an answer, and began to answer it, still walking down the sidewalk, not watching where I was going or paying attention to my surroundings.

 

 

And I realized with a sudden shock that I had become exactly the kind of person that I have always hated.

 

 

But you know what? Haters gonna hate.

 

 

My precioussss.

 

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The curse of the Red Sox

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Partner likes sports a lot, but I'm a little lukewarm on the subject.  I like rugby, but for non-sports-related reasons.  But I do like baseball, sort of. It's easy to understand (although I still don't really understand why you're out if they catch your pop fly), and it's very slow and restful.  And sometimes the players look pretty hot in their little baseball outfits. I remember seeing Jim Rice pacing around left field in 1983 at Fenway Park; even at a distance, wearing that stupid uniform, he looked menacing.

 

 

Naturally, living in New England, we are Red Sox fans. This is a peculiar kind of fandom. Red Sox fans are generally hopeless about their team's chances in any given year.  This comes from many years of losing (the Curse of the Bambino, etc.).

 

 

Until 2004, and then again in 2007, when the Red Sox actually won the World Series.

 

 

But it takes more than two championships to change a lifetime's attitudes.

 

 

This year, for example. We were barely a week into the new baseball season, and the Red Sox had lost their first six games in a row. Six! So I say to Partner: “What if this is the way the whole season goes? What if they lose every single game this season?”

 

 

“They probably will,” he said gloomily.

 

 

When you play Keno, sometimes, there's a prize for getting none of the numbers. Why not in baseball? It's amazing to lose six games in a row. (I think Charlie Brown's Little League team lost every single game one season, but that was only in the comics.)

 

 

Then, of course, the Red Sox had to go and win a game against the New York Yankees. (Which really pissed the Yankees off.) So we broke our streak, but in an entertaining way, because we always enjoy seeing Yankees fans miserable.

 

 

(Go look at those rugby players again. They're inspirational.)

 

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Bo Gritz for President (!) (?)

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Back in 1992, I got a call from a friend. Would you like to go to a political rally? he said.

 

 

That was almost twenty years ago. I am smarter now, and would have asked more questions before saying yes.

 

 

On the way to the rally, I asked my friend: Who is this person?

 

 

He's a candidate for president, he said.

 

 

Of what country? I asked jokingly.

 

 

My friend didn't think that was very funny.

 

 

So we get to the rally, and the candidate turns out to be a big mustached galoot named Bo Gritz.

 

 

What? You've never heard of him? He's the real-life Rambo! He's the guy they based Hannibal of the A-Team on! He's the hero of Ruby Ridge! (He's an ex-military with a bizarre record; you should really read the Wikipedia summary of his career, it speaks for itself.) He was running that year as the Populist Party candidate.

 

 

And here's the thing of it: my friend, the one who brought me to this “rally,” was (unbeknownst to me) Gritz's Rhode Island campaign manager.

 

 

Guess where our seats were?

 

 

Up on stage, facing the crowd, alongside Bo Gritz and his wife, smiling into the TV cameras.

 

 

I felt like I was at one of Hitler's Nuremberg rallies, sitting three seats away from Adolf.

 

 

Gritz's “speech” was incoherent: don't pay your federal income tax blah blah blah, Vietnam blah blah blah, Christian nation blah blah blah. I was shrinking into my folding chair. It was worse than the Nuremberg rallies. It was like a Klan meeting. (They'd bussed in a whole bunch of disabled veterans as an audience; they all seemed increasingly perplexed about why they were there as the evening wore on.)

 

 

And Bo (who was big and handsome and crazy-looking, like a cross between an astronaut and the Incredible Hulk) just kept ranting.

 

 

I was terrified that people would see me on TV, attending this bizarre event.

 

 

I shouldn't have worried. No one saw anything.

 

 

In hindsight it seems funny. I wish I'd bought one of his t-shirts as a souvenir.

 

 

His slogan that year, by the way, was “God, guns, guts, and Gritz.”

 

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Sunday blog: John Ashbery’s “More Pleasant Adventures”

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I met John Ashbery at a reading once. He was small and frail and very cute with his big owlish glasses on, and I told him how much I enjoyed his poetry, and he sort of giggled.

 

I love his earlier poetry especially, and some of his more recent stuff.

 

This poem, written in 1983 and featured in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, I love entirely.

 

*

 

More Pleasant Adventures

The first year was like icing.
Then the cake started to show through.
Which was fine, too, except you forget the direction you’re taking.
Suddenly you are interested in some new thing
And can’t tell how you got here. Then there is confusion
Even out of happiness, like a smoke—
The words get heavy, some topple over, you break others.
And outlines disappear once again.

Heck, it’s anybody’s story,
A sentimental journey—“gonna take a sentimental journey,”
And we do, but you wake up under the table of a dream:
You are that dream, and it is the seventh layer of you.
We haven’t moved an inch, and everything has changed.
We are somewhere near a tennis court at night.
We get lost in life, but life knows where we are.
We can always be found with our associates.
Haven’t you always wanted to curl up like a dog and go to sleep like a dog?

In the rash of partings and dyings (the new twist),
There’s also room for breaking out of living.
Whatever happens will be quite ingenious.
No acre but will resume being disputed now,
And paintings are one thing we never seem to run out of.

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Visit beautiful Idaho! (Or don't.)

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Washington state, where I grew up, was (in the 1960s and 1970s) very blue-collar: loggers and farmers and manufacturing plants. Oregon was artsy and progressive and beatnik and liberal and hippyish.

 

 

Idaho was something else again.

 

 

I went to college in Spokane, close to the Idaho state line. The attraction of Idaho was that it had a lower drinking age (in those days, anyway); everyone wanted to rush over there on his 19^th birthday. But Idaho was also home to the Old Catholics who'd rebelled against Rome after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. It was (and is) also the home of any number of crazy-ass survivalist cults. Remember Ruby Ridge? K-R-A-Z-Y. Remember the Unabomber? (Well, he lived in Montana, but it's almost the same thing.)

 

 

Back in the 1980s, I was in a restaurant in Coeur D'Alene on a Sunday afternoon, and I made the mistake of ordering a drink. I had briefly forgotten that Idaho was completely dry on Sundays in those days. The waitress focussed a strange get-thee-behind-me-Satan look on me. “You're not from Idaho, are you?” she breathed.

 

 

Napoleon Dynamite, bless his heart, lived in Preston, Idaho, near the Utah border. By rights, the country between Utah (crazy Mormons) and Idaho (crazy crazy people) should be the craziest place of all. But, for some reason, the craziest place is the Idaho panhandle, in the north between Washington and Montana and British Columbia. They corner the market on insanity up there. I used to hear of people who left Spokane in an RV, and drove through the Idaho panhandle on their way to Glacier National Park in Montana, and were never heard from again.

 

 

Brrr.

 

 

Now: look at this lovely website inviting you to visit beautiful Idaho!

 

 

(But I wouldn't if I were you.)

 

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Moscow! Moscow! Moscow!

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I went to the USSR in the summer of 1978. The only way into the country in those days was through one of the state-sponsored agencies, Intourist or Sputnik. Mine was a Sputnik tour, for college students, staff, and faculty. We were very international – Danes, Spaniards, Americans. We were also very independent, and rebellious. Our tour leader was a pale nervous Ukranian named Viktor, and he couldn't keep up with us; we kept getting away from him. (We scared him almost to death by singing the Russian Imperial Anthem in front of the Peter and Paul Cathedral in Leningrad.) By the time we arrived in Moscow (our last stop), Viktor had given up. He just wouldn't plan activities for us anymore. We had lots of free time in Moscow as a result.

 

 

This was not a bad thing. Moscow, like most large cities, is full of interesting things to see. (Naturally you have to see the Kremlin and the GUM department store and St. Basil's Cathedral and Lenin's tomb, but it's full of other things too.) One day I traipsed over to Novodevichy Convent, a beautiful run-down Orthodox structure with an overgrown churchyard/garden, where an elderly priest and an elderly nun drowsed together on a park bench. It took me a while, but I finally found the grave I was looking for: SERGEI NIKITICH KHRUSHCHEV. It was unmown and untended.

 

 

Another day, I wandered through old winding streets looking for Leo Tolstoy's house, which (according to the guidebooks) had been turned into a museum. I found it at last, almost unmarked, a nice house with an old-fashioned door. An old lady let me in (Russian museum attendants in those days seemed always to be old ladies), scolded me when I tried to go through the EXIT turnstile (ENTRANCE and EXIT are very similar in Russian, and I still get them mixed up), and brought me inside.

 

 

I was the only visitor. Another old-lady docent came swooping out of a side room, and the two of them grabbed me and dragged me through the house, showing me everything, giving me the two-dollar tour in machine-gun Russian (which I barely speak). The house was nineteenth-century and lavish and full of books and rich wood paneling and manuscripts and photographs. The old ladies brought everything out of the cases, showed me books and photo albums, insisted that I touch things, argued with one another, and generally had a very good time.

 

 

Finally they brought me into a small drawing room set up with folding chairs. One sat me down and stayed with me in the audience area; the other went up front, put a cylinder on an old Edison machine, wound it up, and let it play. It was an old man's voice, scratchily recorded, speaking slowly and carefully in Russian, either reciting or reading aloud. The two old ladies fell silent and watched my face closely. At last the nickel dropped in my head. “Graf Tolstoy?” I asked, pointing at the cylinder player.

 

 

They grinned and nodded.

 

 

It was an ancient recording of Count Leo Tolstoy reading aloud.

 

 

That, children, was one of the best travel experiences I've ever had, and I barely understood a word of it.

 

 

It just goes to show you.

 

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Gay cartoon characters I have known

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Gay.com recently did a little piece on the gayest cartoon characters of the past fifty years. They picked up on the recent cartoons, of course – Stewie Griffin, Mister Smithers, Roger the alien on “American Dad.”  But they found quite a few in older cartoons too.

 

 

In hindsight: how can we not have known?

 

 

For example:

 

 

Snagglepuss. He's a pink mountain lion, for God's sake.  And he thinks he's an actor. He reminds me of a lot of people I know.

 

 

Several of the Transformers. Especially Starscream, an ineffectual villain with a high shrieky voice. He reminds me of a lot of people I know.

 

 

Several GI Joe heroes and villains. Doctor Mindbender, who mostly dresses in torn leather. Cobra Commander, who camps it up so much he's liable to burst into flames. Gung-Ho, the huge Marine with the tattoos and the torn flannel. Shipwreck, the Jack Nicholson sailor with the chronically unbuttoned shirt.  Collectively they remind me of so many people I know.

 

 

Peppermint Patty. And Marcy too, I suppose, although they both seem to pine after Charlie Brown.

 

 

Vanity Smurf.  This one hits especially close to home.  For me it's like looking into a mirror.

 

Theatrical, stylish, evil.  And always entertaining.

 

Once again: how could we not have known?

 

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Venersborg Church

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Venersborg, Washington, where I grew up, had just one little church, which espoused a sort of Protestant mishmash theology. The church is still there. I don't know if the theology is the same.

 

 

In early June, after regular school got out, the Venersborg church would hold Bible school for a week. I always begged to go.  We did crafts with stickers and macaroni and gold spray paint, and we memorized Bible verses, and we sang songs. The church was small and musty and fascinating, and there was always a burst of sunny weather every year at that time. I took lunch in my astronaut lunchbox, and I still remember the smell of bologna sandwich and lemonade when I opened the lid.

 

 

It was wonderful.

 

 

Then, of course, there was the Jesus stuff.

 

 

The church people (who were really all very nice) said it was all about belief. If you believed in Jesus - really believed in him - you'd get into heaven.

 

 

This was an impossible challenge for a nervous kid like me. Did I really believe? How about now? How about now?

 

 

Does doubt matter?

 

 

Does God care if I believe?

 

 

Does God exist?

 

 

How silly! I realize now. Things are true or false, whether you believe in them or not. If God wants me in heaven, no doubt he'll have me there. If you don't see me there, ahem, no doubt I am elsewhere.

 

 

I am older now (no kidding!) and have read not only the Bible, but the Koran and the Upanishads and the Popol Vuh and the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch.

 

 

I think I know a bit – a tiny bit – more about the way the world works.

 

 

But I am not necessarily happier.

 

 

I had such a feeling of quiet contentment when I was a kid in the 1960s, sitting in an old musty white church and singing “Fishers of Men.”

 

 

Ah me.

 

 

We have all grown so very very old.

 

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Smoking

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Both my parents smoked. My father smoked almost right up to the time he died of lung cancer. My mother quit in the 1960s, but she had a ferocious Sen-Sen / Life Savers habit for the rest of her life.

 

 

As a kid I used to sit in the front seat of the car, between my father in the driver's seat and my mother on the other side. They both blew smoke in my face. I stared straight ahead into the overflowing ashtray and the cigarette lighter (both of which sort of fascinated me).

 

 

Despite all this, I never had any desire to smoke, until my boss and his wife took me to a Red Sox game at Fenway Park back in the early 1980s. Someone outside the park was giving away free packs of Lucky Strikes (get it? strike? baseball?). I took a pack home with me and put it in a drawer.  I smoked one finally, but I didn't much care for it. Then I tried some of those noxious “Black & Mild” cigarillos that taste like the tobacco equivalent of flavored vodka.

 

 

Obviously, as you can tell, it was preying on my mind.

 

 

Soon after, in the Peace Corps, I discovered that everyone in North Africa smoked all the time.

 

I was up to two packs a day in no time. In Morocco, I smoked Koutoubia cigarettes. When I moved to Tunisia, I discovered Vingt-Mars cigarettes. Also Cristal. Also Koaqib, which tasted great, but made me cough like a TB patient. (I found out later they had snuff in them, which evidently liquefies when you smoke it, and oozes through your lungs like asphalt.)

 

 

And why?  Because it was calming.  Because it was a little moment of relaxation during the day.  Because the smoke was strangely soothing.  

 

 

I came back to the USA in 1987, still smoking two packs a day (now Benson & Hedges 100s Lights). This went on for another ten years.

 

 

Did I mention that my father died of lung cancer? Also my uncle Claude? Also a couple of other relatives?

 

 

I knew I stank of smoke. I knew that I was a fire hazard. I didn't much care. (Smokers don't really care. It's a strange state of mind.) But I'd made a promise to myself: I'd quit by the time I was forty.

 

 

In 1998, my forty-first year, I actually quit.

 

 

Even now, thirteen years later, I still dream about it. The dreams are strange: I find myself lighting a cigarette, and thinking: Oh no! If I smoke I'm hooked again! And I do, and I'm very disappointed with myself.

 

 

How very peculiar addiction is.

 

 

But I have a vivid memory of leaving the house on a lovely warm Tunis morning, and feeling the fresh air in my face, and lighting the first cigarette of the day.

 

 

And it was wonderful.

 

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