The Waterworks - E.L. Doctorow

The Waterworks. A mystery set in 1871 New York City with a possible supernatural element told from the perspective of a newspaperman. Told in the style of Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins, it's a creepy mystery for sure. Sign me up! 

Trying to read more Kenyon College authors. It's where I went and is known for it's literary output. E.L. Doctorow is probably the most famous alum, so figured I'd start there. Mostly just read a bunch of Calvin and Hobbes (Bill Waterson also went there) and a contemporary professor that is an asshole. 

Hell of an opening paragraph got me pretty interested: 

“People didn’t take what Martin Pemberton said as literal truth, he was much too melodramatic or too tormented to speak plainly. Women were attracted to him for this - they imagined him as some sort of poet, though he was if anything a critic, a critic of his life and times. So when he went around muttering that his father was still alive, those of us who heard him, and remembered his father, felt he was speaking of the persistence of evil in general.” 

The gist is the narrator, McIlvaine, who works as a newspaper editor, seeks his missing freelance reporter Martin Pemberton who has vanished after telling him he has seen his recently deceased father alive, wandering the streets of New York. McIlvaine and Detective Donne, one of the few good cops in an age of corruption, uncover a mystery involving the deaths of several wealthy New York men, the elder Pemberton among them. All of this leads to trouble, as you might expect.

Three things I really loved about the book. First, his narrator is a newspaper editor named McIlvaine. I'm crazy about detective novels where it's a regular Joe who gets pulled into the action. This is especially true if the guy is a newspaperman like I used to be. With this being back in the 19th century, we get a lot of how the industry worked back then, which is cool and interesting, to me at least. Second, get a nice portrait of the New York City of old. Like other Doctorow novels, this is a document of the city. The novel's greatest strength is these vivid, rich description of the cultural landscape of the Boss Tweed-controlled city that is on the verge of falling apart. 

Lastly, I was pretty interested by the villain of the novel. Something of a Moriarty type, Dr. Sartorius is a great character that is whispered about throughout much of the novel. Once we finally see him near the end, he lives up to the hype as a Mengele-like physician that plays god while disregarding morality and convention. Unlike Mengele, however, he might be onto something with his work. 

Only thing I wasn't crazy about was Doctorow's writing style. Dude loves ellipses as there are about 1,000 of them, no shit. Guess it gives the impression of thought or oral storytelling. Also, the narrator is old and tells of some crazy shit. Sort of signifies his difficulty in telling the tale. I found that aspect a little gimmicky. 

I, Tonya is the greatest movie of all time

Academy Awards are tonight. And the Oscar goes to... Damn. That Margot Robbie is really something. Really, really, really something. I have seen her in three movies. In all of them (Wolf of Wall Street, Suicide Squad, and I, Tonya) she was phenomenal. This was her best though. She is the new Meryl Streep, this one, and this solidified it, for me anyhow. On her performance alone this would have been of the greatest movie of all time variety, but seriously, so much more that fucking rocked. Kenyon grad Allison Janney was fucking great. As was the guy who played douchebag Jeff Gillooly. It was nice reliving this little chunk of insanity through this medium and fucking believe the world is a better goddamned place because of this movie. Though it does give Tonya too much benefit of doubt. Like her mom would say, “fuck her.” Also, Nancy still seems like a bitch, which will never not be unfortunate (a lot of negatives there, I mean it always be shitty) since she was the victim and all.

Alison Janney. Known for playing great mothers.

Rotten Tomato Consensus: Led by strong work from Margot Robbie and Alison Janney, I, Tonya finds the humor in its real-life story without losing sight of its more tragic -- and emotionally resonant -- elements.

Pros: Margot Robbie. OMG is she good. Ditto Allison Janney. Pretty much a flawlessly acted film. The way the iceskating is shot is super cool and impress. You are on the ice with her basically and Robbie looks like an Olympic figure skater (for the most part). Pretty funny considering it's about a real life shit show.

Could you imagine if this chick played you in a biopic?

Cons: Sort of amounts to a Tonya Harding apology (in the classical sense) film. Nobody is really on board with that. Music is a little much and too on the nose (do we really need to hear “Devil Woman” when Tonya's mom is being terrible?).

Competitive ice skater Tonya Harding rises amongst the ranks at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, but her future in the activity is thrown into doubt when her ex-husband's people do the thing. You know the story. This is absolutely the Tonya version, hence I, Tonya, which has some basis in fact but is super kind when it comes to its subject matter. So if you fucking hate Tonya, which I imagine we all still do, keep that in mind.

She had me at "suck my dick"

This is not the movie for you if you are squeemish when it comes to domestic violence. It is brutal and fucking sucks. We start out seeing little Tonya acting exactly like you'd expect, her mom (played by Janney) drinking like a chimney, chain-smoking, so forth, is super abusive. Doesn't like it when Tonya doesn't land tricks like many a Olympic parent, I'm sure. Beats her for all kinds of stuff. Then she meets Jeff played by the guy who is Bucky in the MCU movies and was the asshole 80s guy in Hot Tub Time Machine. He beats her for the rest of the movie and even almost shoots her once. He is fucking terrible. They all are. But it's great.

Probably the thing I was most impressed with aside from the performances, again, fucking sick, was how they shot the skating. Not only does it seem that Robbie is an Olympic level skater (which she obviously is not) through effects and what have you but you end up on the ice with her as she rushes through her routines. It's a pretty dope effect. 

Favorite scene though was when she got screwed at an event early in her career and the judge told her it was because she looked like a bull-dyke and Tonya told her to "suck my dick." Classic and classy. My kind of gall, that one. 

Overall, it was pretty cool to go back in time and relive all that shit with an insider's perspective. Up to that point it was some of the craziest shit ever. I mean it is still nuts. Reality train wrecks were already carving their way through the zeitgeist in the early 1990s (before Tonya there was Buttafuoco, John Wayne Bobbitt, the kid getting caned in Singapore, Lyle and Erik, the Gulf War, so forth)   but at the time it seemed like that really escalated it. Then, like we see at the end of the flick, OJ came along, did his thing, and now fucking Trump is the goddamned President. But yeah. Dope movie.

Googling Yourself Can Be Interesting

Quitters never say die.

If any potential employers were to Google my name, Aaron Brewington, there is practically no chance of me ever getting a job in the future.

For the longest time the number one thing to pop up was a list of registered homeless persons living in New York, it was funny to everyone in college, not so much now though. I wish I could say that would be the worst thing with someone who shares my Christian name, but no, it gets much worse. These are the things my namesakes have done in escalating order.

First up there is the AB who was once the maintenance supervisor for some Podunk county school system until he was charged with felony official misconduct when a program he was running with the local prison that allowed non-violent inmates to work on school grounds doing maintenance work, he instead transported two inmates off-campus to his home where they could work on his tobacco farm.

Next, there was the AB who severely injured his passenger, one Alicia Seedorff, while trying to drive home after drinking in bars, one of which was named One-Eyed Jakes, that served him to the point where they should have known he was drunk. The result was he lost control of his vehicle, left the road, rolled, crashed and ejected Seedorff from the vehicle, thus explaining the severer injuries.

Most heinous of all is the incident involving an Aaron Brewington, though he was not the shooter here, that ended in the death of a 5-year-old in Harlem. 18-year-old big brother Rayshawn Brewington was fucking around with a 9-millimeter Ruger pistol in the bedroom he shared with his two brothers at a homeless shelter when the gun fired a single bullet, striking his 9-year-old brother, AB, in the shoulder and hitting the boy, Lonnie Brewington, in the head. The accident killed Lonnie later that day. This whole thing is so sad and depressing though I am not sure if I am going to end up posting it.

But there are some good things about just good old me. There is my blog, of course, and a picture from a high school reunion of sorts, and my Div School stuff, and my articles with the High Point Enterprise. But the blast from the past I enjoy the most that was quite unexpected and touching seeing after a few years out of my alma mater Kenyon College was a write up about my IM basketball team that ended up winning the A-League title my sophomore and senior years. Play with that team was one of the funnest things I remember about college. We were ridiculous. We had the best player in the school on our team, Colin Hodgkins, and all of the kids were just great guys who had game and knew how to celebrate a post-game victory. I leave on this piece written in the Kenyon Collegian in March of 2003. Most of it are inside jokes that most of you won’t get but hey, I might explain them later.

***

Quitters never say die, win A league title

In the Ernst Center Mar. 27, the Quitters defeated the Cougars 48-41 to win the 2003 intramural A-League Championship.

The all-sophomore team of Ben Golden, Aaron Brewington, Jon Echlin, Sam Farmer, Eric Fitzgerald and Colin Hodgkins were 9-2 on the season. They finished the season on a six-game winning streak.

As Brewington nailed six three-pointers to start the game, the Quitters jumped out to an early 24-5 lead. The Quitters' man-to-man defense kept the Cougars from entirely erasing the lead. The halftime score was 31-17 in favor of the former varsity athletes. Although the Cougars battled back to eventually cut the deficit to two points, the Quitters held on to secure its championship, getting key buckets from Farmer and Hodgkins. Team captain Fitzgerald kept his team in man-to-man defense, which ultimately secured the win.

In the semi-finals, the Quitters knocked off Shark Attack behind Hodgkins's 22 points. The Cougars beat Team Sykes.

The Quitters, a compilation of two teams known last year as the Quad Squad and Rim Jobs, lived up to its name early in the season when two original roster players quit the team for personal reasons.

The Areas of His Expertise

John Hodgman’s book The Areas of My Expertise was hilarious. Yes, I actually found myself laughing out loud and what not; but that was not what was most fascinating a bout the book. Actually, the whole thing was pretty fascinating, even if it was completely made up.

I was turned on to John Hodgman’s work, funny only if you know that JH is the PC guy in the Mac commercials, by my girlfriend. If she is reading this review, you know who you are Sara Hof—aka the girl of my dreams (which is fact)—go ahead and stop reading because your Christmas present from my parents is implicated here so skip ahead to the next paragraph. So anyway, since this is obviously a review of John Hodgman and since he has another book out right now, I am sure anyone can figure out that my parents gift to my one true love in life is JH’s second work, More Information that You Require, and also since my gf is a genious and what not and the only person who reads my blog, it isn’t going to shock you, Sara Hof, when my parents hand over this gift to you whenever we go home to Indianapolis, whenever that may be, so just act surprised I guess.
Anyway, Hodgman’s satirical almanac of absurd historical information and totally made up facts about nearly everything makes for some good reading. In a day and age when we are bombarded with constant information, worthless facts seep in from every aspect of life and these things that we accumulate don’t really offer us anything. They don’t bring us any added skill to the work place and unless you go on Jeopardy! they aren’t going to make you any money. So why read an almanac filled with facts that your not going to be able to use, specifically Hodgman’s? Answering this question proves interesting and in it lies the genius, if you can really call it that, of Hodgman’s work, for in the info that he bestows upon us isn’t accurate at all, in fact, he goes beyond just making it up, he actually works hard at providing but nonsensical, incorrect info. The few things here that do in fact end up being true, i.e. discovery of a real furry lobster, he actually spends some time in asserting that this furry lobster and the one describes (actually a sea otter) “are not the same creature at all.”

What has come to be the most popular part of the book, the chapter “What You Did Not Know about Hoboes,” was actually something I had read in 2005’s edition of America’s Best Non-required Reading, which features David Foster Wallace’s commencement address to my graduating class at my alma mater Kenyon College that has become insanely popular since his self-inflicted death and can be found here. Though this section has brought hoboes into the mainstream, my favorite part of the work has to do with writing successful books. In that section, JH actually gives some pretty solid advice when he writes that one of the essentials one must have as a writer is “the belief that the world cares about what you have to say,” (47) which is a tough thing to have, really, and it is about the only thing that can make anyone really want to write, otherwise, there aren’t really all that many things to really motivate you. I also find his life of a writer to be pretty accurate when he says “Mine is the typical life of the professional writer: one of quiet contemplation and knowledge-gathering and masturbation and the cashing of enormous checks,” (18) except for the part about cashing enormous checks.

One of the interesting and surprising things about Hodgman’s work is that it does force you to learn in this absurd way. Because all of the jokes aren’t clear unless you have some pretty extensive knowledge, you end up looking up a great deal of stuff to fully appreciate his satirical wit. With knowledge, as JH explains, the world is “perhaps less magical, but also less frightening.” “Such is the effect of KNOWLEDGE,” he goes on, “upon the brain—a zinging clarity that does not quickly fade, but will last all the way to dinner, and then by bedtime will turn into awful, crushing dread,” (223) which is truth. So basically, what JH has done is played a sort of joke on us while critiquing our need for hard statistical facts, by embracing that need for constant knowledge though providing knowledge that is false and lacks meaning and in that, guess what, there is meaning.

An Obama Nation

These are notes that I put together in the days leading up to the election and some thoughts from the day of. I am adding to this and trying to get it published. As always, comminents are much appreciated.

AB

T-minus six days until our great and beautiful nation has a peaceful and wonderful regime change, or to be technical begins one, since the change of power doesn’t become official until the twenty something of the next year. We take it for granted, but this doesn’t happen everywhere in the world. Either way, McCain or Obama, I believe it is going to wind up an improvement, but honestly one would prove slightly better while the other will be a huge milestone and a huge improvement.

With that said, this paragraph is something of personal voter history so feel free to skip ahead, but be warned, there are some pertinent voter controversy tidbits that you may want to read. Ever since I have been of voting age, I have witnessed voting controversy, some of these controversies, I have been directly involved in while others I was forced to watch from a distance. Growing up, I was raised to vote as a liberal, and today I am as far left as you can get, the product of a working class, Irish-American background with an old man who said things like “a working class man voting republican is like a chicken voting for the colonel” and a mother who has spent most of her adult life cleaning the homes of wealthy people (including the home of an ex-girlfriend), I have considered myself too poor to vote for the Republican Party. So in 2000, eighteen-years of age, I voted third party (Green) and watched as the party I second (perhaps third considering I am a registered socialist) most identified with celebrate prematurely and have the election stolen away from them. In all my years as an American citizen, 26-years running, I have only been sicker with the democratic system one other time, which came in November 2004, when I had to wait in line for ten and a half hours just to express my constitutionally guaranteed right of voting. The so called “ground zero” of long waits, this “longest line in America” was the most attention paid to my little college until David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech to my graduating class blew up with popularity after the writer’s suicide. On that day, once I was finished up with the frustrating but inspiring experience of casting our votes after thinking that the election was really going to come down to us, suffering through the rain and ridiculous wait, I vowed to never vote again. Immediately after voting, when Fox News was already calling the election a “Bush victory” while other networks were showing some restraint after the 2000 fiasco, I thought I was going to throw up. The next day, in a Shakespeare seminar I was so depressed that I almost skipped, when asked to interpret a portion of a “Macbeth” soliloquy, I responded with basically, “who fucking cares,” and it went over pretty well considering my professor was only a few spots behind me in line and it was no secrete who she was going to vote for, God bless her. But 2006 rolled around, I registered at the last minute, still not really expecting to vote. Plus my congresswoman at the time, up for reelection, a democrat who was bat-shit insane, the now deceased Julia Carson, wasn’t worth the trouble of casting a vote.[*] The night before the election though, a friend of mine who was then in Iraq, fighting for this country that I still naively believe in, told me not to forget to vote. Coming from a combat veteran who was fighting in a war that he doesn’t support, I found my own petty gripes about the democratic system to be insufficient in justifying my staying home and denouncing the system that had previously let me down. So this year, having registered on “Rock the Vote,” I am involved in yet another voter controversy, this time having to do with whether or not I can vote rather than whether or not I choose to. I am afraid that I am one of the many whose voter registration cards has not yet come because my application has gone unprocessed like many other thousands of people who went through that agency. Every four years and some bullshit happens and I am outraged at my American government. Goddamn it, why is it so fucking hard to vote? This is not a good thing and it shouldn’t be stood for, but this too seems to be the rights ploy, making it as difficult as possible for a young, poor voter’s voice to be heard.

* * *

T-minus three. Once I came to terms with the fact that my voter registration card would presumably never come, I got up a little earlier than usual today and took some initiative by going down to the Forsyth County Government Building to register and vote early. With only three hours separating the time I got in line to vote from the time I had to be at work, I was gambling on the efficiency of governmental officials. After the 2004 debacle, I didn’t think this wise, but what was I to do if I wanted to vote? Not too bad this time around, only a two hour wait to cast my ballot. Still infuriating, plus this time I wasn’t surrounded by my nearest and dearest as I was four years ago, though I wasn’t completely alone in the line either, a girl I went to school with was about 15 spaces ahead of me so I did get to talk to her when the winding line snaked just right and we could chat for a couple of minutes until we got too far away from each other and then a few minutes later again converse face-to-face when our spots in line met up. But two hours of wait isn’t nearly as taxing as ten and half. If I would have been in Gambier, I wouldn’t have voted. But I did get to vote and that was that. Now I am done with it and can chill at home watching election coverage on TV while many go out and wait. And wait.

Recently, I heard someone say that “Obama looks presidential while McCain looks like the guy who doesn’t want Barrack Obama to be President.” This turns out to be apt but that seems to be the republican way and it has worked for them in the past. Actually, going back over the past damn near 40-years, it has worked very well with five of the last seven presidents sporting elephants instead of donkeys. Tonight on SNL, McCain made an appearance on “Weekend Update” where he was sort of funny, I guess, in telling of his last minute strategies going into Tuesday, one of which was called the “Old Grandpa” where he basically says “come on people, Barrack Obama has plenty of chances to be President, let me have my turn.” I fail to see how this is all that different from his actual strategy.

* * *

T-minus two. The following is somewhat of a response to a New York Times article from two months ago entitled “The Final Days” written by Peter Baker. According to Baker, the Shrub’s, George W. Bush, legacy depends on McCain winning this election. Though neither likes the other all that much, they found themselves once again connected on the campaign trail. The question that McCain is now asking himself in the Shrub’s 11th hour is whether or not Bush will beat him twice. Win or lose, he is running against a legacy as much as he is a democrat.

McCain knows this. And so does Bush. And so does Obama and most everyone else. Hence the ads that claim McC is a Bush clone and we “can’t afford four more years” and Will Ferrell on SNL doing his W saying “a vote for McCain is a vote for George W. Bush.” For McC’s part, he has been distancing himself as far as humanly possible from the sinking ship that goes way past anything Gore mustered in 2000 with his relationship with Clinton. Unlike Gore though, McC can afford to and he must. Far enough away from the President’s circle of trust and with a well documented history of piss and vinegar candor, McC can criticize W while not seeming like someone who stood back while he screwed up the country or got a blow job from a government intern and then was wishy-washy about it or whatever. Bush, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be all that pissed off about comments like “we’re worse off than we were four years ago,” which is quite the statement since it refers to the ineptitude of a leader from his own party. He lets McC be an asshole and trounce on his Presidency because that's the guy who can validate it. Obama though no doubt went negative (both candidates went negative, of course), at first setting his sites on the past 8-years, and then on the Bush clone himself. Going after the Republican nominee though may give people just the excuse they need to lose interest and stay at home and do bong rips on Election Day instead of taking the trip to the polling station.

Getting people disinterested is therefore going to benefit the GOP just as it did for Bush in 2000 when he nearly lost to the anti-candidate (McCain). But when the anti-candidate has a realistic shot, the candidate begins to do all those things he or she denounced and did not do before that made him or her popular and standout in the first place. We not only get bored of this stuff, we find it uninteresting and toxic to our ideals.[†] Being popular, in other words, barely matters. What is important is maintaining power. This is what Bush has done, to be sure, after all, many admired the man for “sticking with his gut” and not heeding to things like information and deliberation and history that in the days pre-9/11 get in the way of swift, decisive actions. And thus, we have had the Joker for a President from 2001-2008—“I don’t plan, I just do.”[‡] So, of course he found his presidency a “joyous experience,” he was obeying what he thought was a call from God after all. So sure he is with his rightness in his “principles” and his “values” that he doesn’t even toy with the notion that it could theoretically be mistaken. Maybe it’s not God talking to you there good buddy, its Dick Cheney (who may very well be Satan).

* * *

T-minus one. Got around to reading the Rolling Stone piece on Obama from the October 30 issue and it is amazing, actually the second most amazing thing that I have read about the candidate. He is, no doubt, a historic candidate and this is a historic turning point in American history. He has always been popular. He has become even more popular as of recent days because of this whole economic crisis. Iraq has become second fiddle to this whole “Second Great Depression” and McCain handled it poorly. This shift has put Obama over the top with the “meltdown” on Wall Street as well as McCain’s “equally impressive meltdown” by erratically/recklessly handling of the crisis not to mention his smear campaign that resembles Bush’s tactics he was so pissed about back in 2000. But much of the credit needs to go to Obama himself for “displaying precisely the kind of character and judgement we need in a president: renouncing the politics of fear, speaking frankly on the most pressing issues facing the country and sticking to his principles.” He has had a big couple of weeks, of course, with the wear and tear of a presidential campaign, a wedding anniversary, the death of his grandmother, and win or lose, the coming days are going to prove extremely difficult and even bigger than the days leading up to Election Day.

Part of his appeal has to be his sense of outrage as most Americans have been outraged for quite some time. In Philly two weeks ago, he called the financial crisis “a direct result of the greed and irresponsibility that has dominated Washington and Wall Street for years” and this has been the GOP economic philosophy supported by McCain that insists “the market is king” and believes in the value of Trickle Down Economics that says the super wealthy are the most deserving of massive tax breaks. So when McCain tries to change his tune, America is wise to his tactics.

Things are not good right now, the Bush administration has damaged our country in so many ways. Who would want the job of leading this bruised and battered nation? Obama does. And he is rising to the occasion. Pray for it. Pray for us. God help us.


* * *

Underworld. Woke up and went with my female companion while she went and voted, I having already done so. She gets ready. Dresses like a first lady. I wear track pants, a sleeve on my head, and a hooded sweatshirt.

Once I get back home, I pop in the documentary “Out Foxed” to get me syked for the day’s festivities. There in, Jeff Cohen, former Fox News Contributor, says, “Media is the central nervous system of democracy” and when that it doesn’t run properly, neither does the democracy. So the point is, when right wing propaganda is played around the clock, they distort the news and make it next to impossible to make an informed decision. They misrepresent and then when they are contradicted they speak over the ones contradicting them and claim that they are speaking “the truth” and “facts” when they are being deliberately misleading.

The best part of the video is a segment about Jeremy Glick, a young man that lost his dad in the 9/11 attacks who was on the O’Reily Factor and said that Papa Bear used the 9/11 attacks to project his narrow right wing viewpoint. O’Reily, of course “spins” it after he kicks the kid off his program, calling him “out of control” and claiming the he said that Bush had planned the terrorist attacks. When he tried to sue Bill for defamation, he couldn’t because the guy lies so pathologically that it was almost impossible to prove that he knew he was lying.

I watched the election at a friends house, a partisan house, most of the kids there have parents that voted for McCain. Some are obnoxious, others are cool, all are drunk. When states get called, someone colors them in red or blue on poster-boards of the country. Once the election gets called, we toast to champagne.

I called my parents, we talked for hours, it was a great time and great day the country. I couldn’t enjoy most of it though, the female companion and I were fighting.

One of the first commercials after Obama’s speech I notice is for Vagisil. This is history. History books are being written right now. No time in my life has been more exciting. I am drunk. So is Tom Brokaw. What a country. What a fucking country. I end the night looking at white guys with bad tupes while my beautiful redhead sleeps upstairs while Indiana, the state I was born, goes blue.

[*] A few days before, a friend of my dad’s, an Irish-Catholic guy much like my father, who is very racially conscious, and is married to a black woman, went to a JC political rally and was appalled by the congresswoman who he witnessed attempt to leave a limousine to only fall back in which caused her to lose her hairpiece. In this reported bit of damn near slapstick comedy, JC ended up leaving the wig in the car and some guy ran up to her just as she was about to go on stage for some political rally and threw on her crooked hair which she barely noticed and she had some clueless look on her face throughout the entire speech she read off a piece of paper and the whole thing looked terrible but she still got reelected. She died not long after. That is the system working for us.

[†] For a more eloquent and informed explanation, see David Foster Wallace’s Rolling Stone essay “The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys, and the Shrub” on John McCain’s 2000 run for the Republican Presidential Nomination and political apathy among the young.

[‡] But where does he get the balls big enough? Well, as it turns out, his religious convictions have the same stink of absolutes that drive his foreign policy. There is a deep need to protect the capacity to will such certainty in the face of daunting complexity and opposition that tere is no way he is doing anything other than what he truly believes is right. Like a Norman Rockwell painting, he is going to stand up there as everybody listening looks pissed and do what he damn well wants. But when you think about his supporters in the Evangelical Right he looks more like a Manchurian Candidate who is a puppet for some group of constituents who want things a certain way and are unwilling to budge. Facts don’t need to stand in the way of bold decisions of unshakable faith when there is need for “righteous actions” in the form of a “crusade” where “evil” is attacked and “God’s gift” of democracy is spread to all.

Former Bush speech writer and religious nut job Michael Gerson (the one who coined “The War on Terror”) calls the Shrub’s non-negotiation “unrewarded heroism/courage” in “doing the right thing under pressure.” As Mike Conway says, “he believes he’s got a role and he’s doing what God wants him to do.” To go again God is certainly something I not going to advocate but to put all you’re faith into something that just isn’t going to work is to turn a democracy into what W wants to eliminate in the Middle East—an oppressive, sectarian government where church and state are one.

Black Friday

The economy is something I cannot begin to understand. I read reports, ask knowledgeable friends questions, listen to debates, but most of all, I get my feel for the economy by how much money I have left over (or rather how much more I owe) after the necessary expenses are taken care of. According to this system, the only system I can pretend to comprehend, after the bare essentials and one bi-monthly luxury item, my first since May came this past Wednesday so now that is becoming more of a biannual thing it would appear, I can afford to spend about $90 a month. I am someone who has reached a 5-digit salary only once in my life (and even then I literally just broke it) yet I have amassed a 6-digit almost entirely from my absurdly expensive education. While outstanding, my education has made me, I am estimating, about $15,000 in its totality. That is $12,500 for teaching and $2,500 for various writing jobs. That number, as depressing as it is, is about the same as the jobs I have had that require no education or even frown upon it. For example, the summers or 1999 through 2001, when I worked as a lifeguard, I made about $2,500 each year. The summers I was in college I made even less at J.C. Penney’s and landscaping, which was more accurately described as getting high and smashing things with a shovel, that goes for both of those jobs. In those summers I made around $1,500 and then did not work one of those years instead taking summer school. Out of college, post-academia, I did some internet database updating for some company, worked with my mom for a while, had a few sales jobs which I was terrible at and technically lost money, spent two weeks in advertising, and did a brief stint with FedEx. In sum with those odd jobs, I made something like $3,000. Now working in the service industry, don’t get me started on how badly I hate this job, I have probably made about $3,500 in the last three months.

I am not going to add all this up, it is too depressing, but I bet they are even keel. Plus if you count the year I was technically unemployed, a year I spent working for a bookie and gambling, I guess my main source of income that year would be picking NFL winners, filling out March Madness tournament brackets, and getting unbelievably lucky in basically blind draws with the sport of kings (horse racing), I would be better off, financially speaking, if I didn’t even go to school. Because starting in 1999, my schooling has cost me[1] an intimidating six-digit-number that overwhelms me just thinking about. And I have yet to even dent it. Two years at Park Tudor at $12,000 a year, plus four years at Kenyon totaling among the nation’s highest (#2 when I went there which is boasted as though it were something to be really proud of)[2] [3] with a whopping $38,000 price tag (that I consider well worth every penny [it at least in the time I was a student there] and upon my deathbed will probably consider the four happiest years of my life), though no one, save for Colin and Joe F. who are very well off but compared to some of the families there are practically beggars, and in full disclosure, I paid less and than half of that number, and then Wake Forest, in a program I am not even going to finish, I took out over $20,000 in student loans. I am actually starving here, I have lost over 50 pounds in the last year, where am I gonna get that kind of money?

I probably won’t. There are friends of mine here in a similar predicament as mine but are more responsible and these people actually know something about economics. They are basically saying the crisis will probably help us out because with all of this student debt that is going unpaid yet must be paid, the gov. will likely devise a new plan/strategy to deal with it. Our prosperity literally depends on it. Or so they say. Maybe that is one of the reasons the crisis doesn’t seem to scare me all that much, I am a survivor, I live simply and will continue to do so. Even if someone were to say, “Yo, AB! You the bomb! Here is a MacArthur fellowship for your bitchin ass! Have at it,” I would probably give most of money away and with what is left over start some sort of literary journal. I don’t own any big ticket items. The most expensive things I own, my car (which I inherited from my grandpa when he died, worth around $6,000 dollars though I take shit care of it and currently rock a donut as one of my tires) and my watch (my parents’ gift for graduating college which is an unbelievably beautiful and tasteful Swiss made Tissot worth about $600)[4] are things that were given to me and not things I would have spent money on myself to own. Its all just stuff and I pride myself on having virtually nothing.

So the point of this little musing, I guess, is to say that I see people freaking out all the time about this damn “Depression” and it doesn’t really scare me. The big-wigs macking it hard will still mack it hard and the poor are still gonna be desperately poor. Can’t people see that the system is incredibly fucked and one-sided and always going to end with inequality and oppression?

This “Black Friday” stuff I heard all over the radio today—from NPR to local rock-block to ESPN—has got people obsessing. My female companion talks about how scared she is about what all this is going to do to her credit score. Sometimes she gets pretty freaked out about it, especially when she starts inquiring about my debt and my credit, which I know nothing about other than it just has to be terrible.

Yesterday, before I heard any of this business, I went to the bank in order to cash my pay checks from work and found a line that practically went out the door. Wha? It turned out people were freaking out about this whole crisis and running to the bank to pull out their savings—ah la It's a Wonderful Life—or so I believe though it was late in the afternoon on a Friday so who knows. The line, dominated by old people, which makes me suspect that the line did in fact result from the quote unquote “Black Friday” thing, was so decrepit that at multiple times when the teller would call out “may I help you” the hard of hearing senior citizens would stand there staring strait ahead until someone with a better hearing aid finally tapped them and pointed them in the direction they needed to go.

When my turn finally came, I lucked out and came to the same woman I dealt with the last time I was in this particular branch. The first time I had went in there, this woman, young, somewhat attractive, huge rack, tried to set me up with a checking account with them. I went through the motions but I had recently been turned down with another bank because I joined an account with my mom in my name that she had overdrawn. Lacking $400, neither I nor my mom can pay it off, thus I am to remain bankless, at least for the time being. But I was going through this then because the woman said she would waive the check cashing fees on all my checks and maybe it would like go through or something as she said. Then, in late July or sometime around there, she was flirty and accommodating and said that whenever I got a valid ID, don’t ask, I could come in there and she would waive the fees, anytime.

So yesterday, hoping to make good on that proposition, I went to her and reminded her of this exchange. The look she gave me was not the flirty, playful look I witnessed back in July but one of annoyance seeing me now as something of a burden, or so I interpreted. “I personally said that?” she kept demanding to know, also asking a rhetorical “Why would I say that?” that seemed to imply I was either lying or had greatly misunderstood our conversation. She then informed me that the checks would cost $6 each to cash, although that bank did not charge some businesses to cash their checks there. This is what happened to be the case with my employer and this bank. It certainly did clear things up for me then, what I assumed was this attractive and flirty young woman doing something nice for me person-to-person was in fact just doing her job, caring out a function that was as part of her routine as bringing a to-go side of dressing is to mine.

When money is involved it is hard to stay human and when money is tight it is harder still. On nights when I am in no mood to ask my tables what they want to stuff themselves with, as tonight I am sure will prove to be which I am already dreading, when a table of seven, one less than the number of people required to get an automatic 18% tacked on to the bill, spends $150 on food and drinks which constantly need refilling and leaves a $10 tip if I am lucky or a $1 tip on $80 and then say something like “you are an excellent server” and ask me “is that alright?” my job requires me to say “oh yes, thank you very much” instead of the obvious “no everything is not alright, you just gave me a shitty tip and I am working my ass off here” I certainly don’t feel like myself. On these nights, at that job, at any service job, there is no such a thing as being human. There is only the customer is always right and you have to live by it. To hell with you.

[1] My parents, barely making ends meet themselves, have not contributed a penny to my education unlike most people at the three wonderful and expensive schools I attended. Most of my peers were of families in the top 5% of yearly income, at worst, whereas my parents are more like at or below the national median making a combined $40,000ish annually. I tried to use the U.S. Census Bureau as my source here, then some other reputable agencies, but without any economic knowledge or skill, except buying things that are cheap, I couldn’t make heads or tales out of it. But hey, Wikipedia makes it easy, there I get the information I seek with minimal trouble, get class and money involved and information just disappears especially in an economic crisis. So anyway, here is my God damned source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States#Household_income_in_the_US. Thus I have borrowed and worked, but mostly borrowed, seeing this education thing as an investment that right now is not paying out in dollars like I was told it would. But to be fair its not like I really motivated by moneys, I have never had and don’t really know what I am missing. Nor do I really care to know.
[2] http://www.forbes.com/2008/01/21/education-university-globalization-biz-cx_bw_lh_0121colleges.html
[3] http://www.bizjournals.com/columbus/stories/2008/03/24/story11.html
[4] Mom and Dad saved up for a year and half to buy me something special for I am the first one in my family to finish college—a family that is so large and reeks with so much Irish Catholic descent that to go through the names of aunts and uncles and cousins and second cousins and so on and so forth would be incredibly involved. So anyway, this is an item I love and I don’t really love stuff. I am in constant panic that I own such a beautiful thing and I am always thinking I will or have lost and I get complimented on about once a month, the most recent one being from a co-worker whose name is Jordan who I think is the type of chick it is probably good to have on your side and reminds you of every cheerleader you ever met, I am sure you get the idea, who said while I was pouring tea out of a bucket into a dispenser “Oh my God, you have a really, really nice watch…It is seriously beautiful,” which, you know, doesn’t suck to hear, but nonetheless, I love it but I could never justify spending that much on myself.

See Also:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/money_co/2008/10/if-ever-there-w.html

http://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/Article.aspx/882789?UserKey=

Grieving teams learn hard lessons after tragedy

The piece below was published last Sunday as my follow article to the game I covered on Friday at Glenn. I didn't want to go the “Debbie Downer” rout being mindful that it had been a month and being sure the kids were probably tired of talking about it considering the tragedy of it and all. But I did ask everyone I interviewed how they were holding up and such and what teams were doing and things like that as sort of a warm up to get them going. So at the last minute I decided that it more or less had be my follow because I have been, let’s say, upset since David Foster Wallace’s death considering that I have been looking to his commencement address delivered to my graduating class as practically a religious text.

Here is the piece:

Last Friday’s match up that pitted the now 1-4 Glenn Bobcats against the 2-3 R.J. Reynolds Demons would to most observers appear like a game hardly worth notice in its mediocrity. However, in this unexpected setting, there was a supreme truth to be learned with life-or-death significance void of self-interest or cynicism. It was a parable of hope.

One month ago, Reynolds linebacker Matt Gfeller died in a horrible anomaly and in his honor they have worn no.57 decals and patches. They’re also a reminder that adolescent myths of invincibility and immortality to committed pursuits get shattered when reality proves fragile and temporal and directed by forces beyond control. Yet they must play on, as their teammate cannot.

Talking about how his team has held up, Reynolds coach Mike Propst vented “anything we do, win or lose, on or off the field, you know… whatever,” considering how unimportant a loss becomes when compelled to think about bigger issues.

However, in the midst of an excruciating situation, players have learned a deep truth novelist David Foster Wallace, who woefully died last week, said in his commencement address at Kenyon College, “involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”

“Sports have a way of healing things,” Propst said. He added that their opponents have done some “wonderful things” to make the burden easier to bare, but Glenn “did some extra things they didn’t have to do and that’s just been special.”

One such thing came soon after the horror when Glenn coach Dickie Cline, who not so long ago had a player pass, interrupted practice to talk about issues more serious than sports—assuming one thinks that possible—when he declared the obvious but overlooked truth that life is cruelly and unbelievably short.

“We do not know when it is going to be taken,” he said. “That is why you need to live your life to the fullest and to make sure your right with the-Man-Upstairs. Because you never know when its your turn.” This televised message for players to take responsibility and own up to their true interior selves was also an act of mercy since it took just a little attention off of the traumatized Reynolds community.

Though Cline would never say it, his team faces similar yet far less consequential dismay with their recent slump. But confident in his team’s “men of character,” there is hope that “something positive will ignite this team.”

When tragedy strikes the self-contained world of football, it paradoxically makes everyone more cognizant of the world off field since it refuses to indulge the fantasy of a seamless break between realities. There, things like personal character and communal disposition become extremely important to success. To deal with a player removed from not only his role on the team but from all aspects of life is a transcendentally profound and sad experience—teams have come apart when a player changes clubs or gets sidelined for a few weeks. Yet, as Cline’s words also pointed toward, through the tragedy there comes the more important awareness that life actually means something beyond self-interest.

Reynolds won the game 34-0.

Dead At 46: David Foster Wallace Hanged Himself and It Will Never Make Sense

DFW, who is my favorite writer of all time and the inspiration for the name of this blog (from his novel Infinite Jest) and the first contemporary writer who has a substantial amount of work out there that I have read in its entirety, who I witnessed give the commencement address to end all commencement addresses—Kenyon College Class of 2005—which I turn to whenever I think about how working in the service industry makes me want to stick my head in a microwave or think about how much I hated grad school or anything really that I just can’t deal with in a rational way, who I talk about everyday to my girl friend’s annoyance, has just taken himself off the map.  It sucks and I am as sad as anyone can be over the death of someone I don’t actually know.

I don’t watch TV.  I don’t care about celebrity culture.  And I don’t shed tears for anyone outside of my most nearest and dearest.  But Don Gately got my eyes flowing at a time when the end of my then current relationship to a girl I had loved since high school never did.  I saw a lot of Gately in myself as a once “near great” football player who is “massive” who found work with a bookie and is an alcoholic with an affinity for Demerol.  Plus I read the book while teaching at a boarding school outside of Boston, a job that I hated, yet found comfort in this work of splendid fiction. 

It is no wander that IJ has been called “the grunge American novel.”  Kurt Cobain and to a lesser extent Layne Staley (though the music of Alice in Chains had a more profound effect on me, I had mourned for Staley long before they found him dead) were the only other quote unquote celebrities that moved me in anyway, one was also a suicide, and I find that my heart ache this time around is even more awful.  Cobain and Staley pointed out how shitty the world is and while listening to their music, I felt momentary release and continue to.  With DFW though, I find ways to connect with other people and to see the world as a less hostile place, which Nirvana/Alice in Chains/Mad Season definitively did not do.  

When I first heard about the death of my literary hero, it was from the person who probably knows me better than anyone else, my girl friend whom I live with and love and who understands that this is the one person in the world outside of my close and very small circle whose death would have a devastating effect on me.  I was in the can at my shitty, shitty job, risking dismissal for having my phone out and in use, hitting send on my missed call from “The PGOAT”, which I typed in on the night we met, and on this night, when she began to talk, I was afraid that Darth Maul, the black cat we are cabbaging from our neighbors, had been run over by a car.  No, thank God, but in the long run it was something much worse.  Sara, the girl friend, has made me promise, before and again on this evening, that I would not do that to her—hang or in anyway de-map myself—and I won’t.  I wouldn’t do that to her or to my parents because of what I have learned from the man who himself could not swallow his own medicine.  I believe love involves empathy and connection and now I have allowed myself to be vulnerable enough to do that—to love and experience empathy—which I interpret all of the thousands of DFW pages to really, at their core, convey.

But what to do when the one person whose words you turn to when you just don’t feel like going on, in your darkest hours when you barely feel human, when you are nothing more than some abstract conception of grief or doubt or negativity, whose words always bring you back from whatever despair you find yourself consumed by, has killed himself.  Was he consumed by this idea that he was a fraud like his character in “Good Old Neon”?  Did he feel “weak and afraid” or maybe “stupid, afraid, always on the verge of being found out”? Did he buy into the line of thinking that he explicitly warned us was so soul sucking and deadly on that lovely May morning in 2005?  Perhaps he had that “constant, gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing,” Some probably question whether he felt washed up and/or like a sell out considering that Brief Interviews is being made into a feature film and rumors circulate that Infinite Jest may be as well and lets not forget the photo of him in GQ last year.  None of these questions really matter though and we are never going to get answers unless a 200 page suicide note begins to circulate (which it very well might), his fiction and essays will continue to make me a much better and happier person and will never be more than a couple of feet away lest I forget “what it is to be a fucking human being.”  His death is an extraordinarily sad thing.

Below are some of the better pieces I have read that talk about his death.  I am still in shock.

Washington City Paper

La Times

Gawker

Kottke.org

New York Times

LA Times: Farewell, David Foster Wallace