Stereotypes

She comes home from work after a double shift at the hospital. Her back is tired and her feet are swollen, as one might expect after twenty-four straight hours of hustling and flitting and providing care to an infirm generation. She finds him naked except for mismatching socks in front of the television (sports).

“Hey honey,” he says, and does not look from the screen.

“Hello.” She sets a bag of groceries on the counter and pans across a sea of greasy pizza cardboard and empty green glass bottles.

“Say honey, while you’re up, would you mind bringing me a beer?”

“Of course, dear,” she says. She goes to the refrigerator and pulls a bottle from the door. In the television room she brings it over to him and then smashes it onto his head. He lies bleeding on the floor. The glass is broken and shards jut from his neck. Blood pulses from this throat. He gasps for air and then stops. “I suppose,” she thinks, “I’ll be cleaning this mess too.”

 

For the fifteenth time she tells him to make an appointment. “The children need the start, you know. Colleges look at preschool records.”

“I will,” he says.

“It’s important,” she says.

“I will.”

“The children need the start, you now. Colleges look at preschool records.” That makes sixteen times before the children can be dropped at daycare. “The Jamisons did this as soon as they knew a bun was in the oven. We’re behind.”

“I will,” he says.

“It’s important.”

A few blocks from the school the road turns but he does not, and drives straight and into the pond near the mall where the older children and sometimes bums fish for perch on Sundays. The cabin fills with water and it occurs to him how funny it is that the child safety locks should keep them all inside.

 

“I’m going for a pack of cigarettes,” he says over his shoulder and pulls open the apartment door. She does not respond. He walks down the steps of their brownstone and hails a cab. He hires a fare to the airport and boards a plane. He knows a beachside bar in Nicaragua where loose Australian girls spend gap year. He takes a job there mixing pineapple rum drinks and drinks himself and sins. The hot months come and go and the life there wears thin and it occurs to him he was wrong. He leaves work one day and rushes to catch a flight and makes it back home again. He finds her car still there and runs up the steps of the brownstone apartment and is amazed his key still works. He goes inside to apologize, to beg for mercy, to bring her back into his life. “Oh?” she asks. “I didn’t hear you leave.”

 

A couple sits side by side and stares into the screen. The episode has just ended.”Another?” she asks. “I suppose just one more,” he says, “these cliffhangers have my number.” It ends again.

“And just one more?”

“A short one couldn’t hurt.”

“Just a short one then.”

“A little one.” It ends again.

“To bed?”

“Maybe just another.” They are holding gnarled hands.

“Do you suppose we should have traveled?”

“Can you stay up for another?”

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Birthdays: Our Shittiest Tradition

Ok so birthdays – can we just not? What are we getting at with birthday parties, really? Celebrating the fact that we were born? Literally the least unique thing about us? That’s bunk, and I’m sick of it.

And, I mean, sure.That’s a narrow view of the tradition. Maybe it’s more like we’re taking an opportunity to celebrate each person’s uniqueness, and a convenient time to do that is on the day they were born (or close, for those February 29th weirdos). Maybe we can give birthday parties the benefit of the doubt, and say the concept represents the best of us. Of recognizing the special importance of every individual and what they contribute to our communities as we pass this time whirling through space. Maybe the premise of the birthday party is a beautiful thing.

But then if that’s the case what’s the deal with the fucking song? Can we stop that? Forever? If we can charitably assume that a birthday party is an honest celebration of the individual, then why do we revert back to the least creative tropes of celebration in the western canon?

Birthday parties were designed specifically to amuse three-year-olds, and yet we continue to have them inflicted upon us well into our 20s, 30s, and so on until we finally snap and push away those people who love us and would adore us for a day for the sake of never ever having to hear “and many more” sung again in whatever horrifying key that was supposed to be. And sheet cake? Leave it out on the counter overnight, I say, then send it the Peace Corps to build houses or something.

And what’s with the gift giving? Don’t we have enough shit? We’re the most prosperous nation in the history of the species (maybe)! We want for nothing (except healthcare, a living wage, food security, blah blah blah), and yet we celebrate uniqueness and individuality by grabbing something off a shelf and wrapping it in an old grocery bag so that it can be presented to the Guest of Honor to open publicly while we furtively compare how much we love that person against the other gifts at the table. This is what we’ve come up with.

But it doesn’t need to be like this. You never have to sit through another joyless, awkward, self-loathing hatchet job of that song again. You never have to feel the anxiety of picking just the right gift for your colleague, now, because s/he somehow learned your birthday and gave you a potted cactus at work and now you’re engaged in a decades-scale game of three-dimensional-birthday-Battleship. You never have to pretend to like sheet cake.

Because if the premise of a birthday celebration is to embrace our uniqueness and importance, shouldn’t the party be just that? One day a year where a person can do whatever they want, with no social consequences. Don’t want to answer the phone? Turn it off. Want to be alone? Go do your thing. Want a giant party where people cloy around you and shower you with gifts and sing songs? Great! Do that! Drop a hint or something, or just tell someone you want a party. That’s what that day is for!

But it’s time now to step away from the worst of industrialized Hallmark Holidays. To celebrate uniqueness, maybe ask a person what they’d like, or if they’d like anything at all. It’s their day, we’ve decided, so don’t throw shade. And if you really want to give them something special? Write ’em a card! See a gift that sings their name? Hell – get ’em a present any day of the year simply because you were thinking of them, not because of a transactional tradition for children. And together, if we really put our minds to it, we can put those sheet cake factories out of business for good.

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Luck is Good

Their evenings go something like she broils hamburger patties in the oven and serves them with toast and green beans from a bag. The countertops are low so she can reach them. They eat in front of the television and he wonders to her whatever happened to Cronkite, and after they’ve eaten he washes up and hangs the plates and forks and glasses in a wire rack by the sink.

He drives them into town and parks the van by the side-door service entrance at the little bar they like and he can lower Lorraine to the sidewalk where she can just roll right in. He sits at the bar and drinks whiskey and talks to anyone and everyone who walks through the door while the video keno rings and dings from the next room. I need more money, says Lorraine. Are you winning? Why would I need more money if I was winning, and she rolls back to the redblue glow of the small town casino.

How ’bout you, he says. What do you do? You like that? What you’re doing? You know you always think you gotta keep doing what you’re doing but really you can do whatever you want. You get stuck in a rut sometimes but you can do whatever you want. Tami, let me buy these boys a beer.

I fished, you know, he says. Moved out to a boat when I was 16, did it ever since. Puget Sound, mostly, but Alaska, too. Salmon, mostly, but some dogfish. Used to catch them just to get rid of ’em. Best you could get was ten cents a pound up at Mullies by Bellingham then that place burned down and you couldn’t sell ’em at all. Tami, another, if you please.

They gave me a boat, you know. Told the company man I want a boat. He said what makes you think I’d give you a boat? I told him nothing, but now you know I want one. So one day Karl called and had a boat for me, but no crew, so I did what I could. Not one of them boys had been out of Whatcom County. Karl said Fred that’s no crew, right in front of these these boys faces, so I bet him $300 right there on the spot we’d be one of the top 10 boats on the Sound.

Now, Karl wasn’t all wrong. I never thought we’d win that bet but the boys needed at the time, you know? And we were not a great crew. We weren’t bad, sure, but great? No. Not even all that good, really. But goddamn were we lucky. I never seen such luck. The craziest things – one day the engines broke down so we couldn’t get to where the run was hot and we had to just drop our nets where we were. Pulled the biggest haul of the summer.

And wouldn’t you know it we won that bet. I said Karl you remember the bet we made right here in this room? And he said he might remember something, yeah, and so I told him that’s great, pay the boys their $300, and walked out. Luckiest crew I ever saw. And you know I’ll take lucky over good any day, but the trick is knowing that lucky ain’t the same as good. Lotta guys get that mixed up.

Tami, could I have another, he says. That’s eight now. You cutting me off, he says. Just slowing you down. You still gotta get Lorraine back home. In a minute, then.

And in a minute Lorraine says I’m out, and me too says Fred. Tami, I guess I’ll pay with plastic. Ha! Never saw that before, did you? I guess not, Fred, but get her home now. I’ll be back, he says. I know you will, and I’ll be here.

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Queue the Outrage

For the last couple of days I’ve mulled over what this post might be about, and found, perhaps with a bit of chagrin, that I wasn’t all that full of piss and vinegar. The well of righteous outrage had run momentarily dry.

It’s been a week or two filled with e-mails and spreadsheets and I figured I would settle into something about the importance of planning trips you’ll never take. About how it keeps you fresh, and that simply panning across a globe has a way of shocking us away from our tendency to craft a universe on the scale of streets, blocks, and bars.

That the magic of a vacation is so often in the anticipation of a faraway place and strange food, and that the National Geographic photographs never quite capture the smell of burning garbage and street-vendor salmonella. Sometimes, in the throes of the banal, simply planning a trip is enough.

It was going to be a fine post, and still may be someday.

But then before I got to brass tacks I clicked around on the internet for a while and sipped on a cup of coffee and finally got around to watching that Michelle Wolf thing. You know the one. Hot damn.

If you haven’t watched this yet, take the time.

To be clear – I am not going to say anything here that hasn’t already been said, better, by smarter people. If you’ve followed this quirk of political americana over the past several days (years?), you will have read about the outrage over the speech.

You will have heard the dismay over crude language, and too-cutting jokes, and a media shocked, SHOCKED, that a person with the floor would mock a powerful woman’s looks. If you watched the speech you will probably have felt uncomfortable, if only for a moment. You will have felt, I hope, that it was perfect.

This year’s address at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner had everything, and exists now in perpetuity as a nineteen minute collage of the state of politics, news media, and discourse in 2018. The speech and its fallout has illustrated in an unprecedented way the essential problem with blurring the lines between the naturally antagonistic divide between politicians and the press, and the rapport required there to report the news in any relevant way.

At the center of the outrage is Wolf’s treatment of the WH Press Secretary. Sarah Huckabee Sanders stands daily and defends the actions of an autocrat with willing disregard for the truth, which is why it is so fitting that the controversy surrounding her roast is entirely manufactured. While we argue whether or not Michelle Wolf attacked Huckabee Sanders’s looks and journalists (commentators, etc) throng to the Secretary’s support, we ignore the the fact that she obviously, verifiably did not do that. And so therefore we ignore the power dynamics that underpin the relationship between the press corps and the office. Those journalists cannot do their jobs without daily access to the Secretary, can they be unbiased in their public response to a personal attack, when their livelihoods depend on rapport?

And of course critics of the critiques have not missed the comically scaled whirlwind of hypocrisy, disinformation, and partisan outrage surrounding Wolf’s roast. That she, as a female comedian, was excoriated for poking fun at the taboo, as though the actual pedophilia, the actual threats to jail journalists, the actual assault on the very notion of truth by white men in powerful positions is somehow sanctimonious.

Against the backdrop of conduct that is now commonplace nothing that Michelle Wolf said is remotely shocking. What shocked the room was her gall to say these things baldly, in public, to the faces of those who are accustomed to controlling the narrative and smirking away dissent. All this at an event ostensibly committed to the defense and celebration of the first amendment, and still the outrage.

We will miss speeches like this one if the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is culled; we will miss it more if the evening is further appropriated by the administration as our President has suggested. But we should not be shocked, or outraged at a truth to power sermon. We should be outraged that it is attacked by the establishment it has apparently replaced.

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Oh Yeah I Forgot

When the doorbell rang at Brent Booker’s third story studio apartment he was not wearing pants. He was crumpled in a second hand recliner, scrolling on his phone through wedding announcements and baby photos and news reports of genocide in Syria. A thick paste of days old coffee was encrusted on five or six mugs strewn around the room. There were no clean ones left, he had taken to simply washing the least filthy one each morning, at the last possible moment. He had finally succumbed to the heavy hand of the banal.

He ignored the doorbell. It occurred to him that he had been following links and photos and friends until he was many degrees of separation from anyone he knew, and was looking pictures of a complete stranger’s baby. He clicked on the next album, an autumn theme from the year before. Pumpkin costumes. Cute.

A damp cloud of mildew hovered over baskets of dirty clothes in the corner, although he didn’t smell it anymore. For weeks it had seemed easier for him to join the Marine Corps, or design a house, or to do anything intangible and distant, really, than to brush his teeth or switch the load of wet laundry to the dryer. Killing himself sounded better than addressing the slimy, brown water that had accumulated and begun to fester in the kitchen sink. He took a sip of cold coffee.

The front door of the apartment swung open. “They’re still sending you this shit?” Peter asked as his lanky frame stooped to avoid the open kitchen cabinets. He stepped over a jumble of shoes and slapped a pile of Marine Corps mailers onto the coffee table. “I thought you were done with all that.”

Weeks earlier Brent began telling Peter and a few close friends that he’d been visiting with a recruiter, but that they were all smooth talk and that he’d gotten queasy about the whole thing and told them to fuck off. Peter and the others said that’s a good thing for all of us because he’d make a shit marine. In reality Brent had entered his address and phone number for more information and never quite gotten around to following up, and made a habit of not answering calls from numbers he didn’t know. He figured he’d make a shit marine anyway, but the mailers kept coming two or three times a week.

“I guess they can’t live without me,” he said, and nipped at the bitter, tepid drink.

“Guess not.”

“Shouldn’t you be out panhandling or something?” It was the first time in nearly two years that Brent had seen Peter without a ratty cardboard sign extolling some sob story.

“Nah I’m done with that. I defend next week.”

“That really is shameful.”

“What,” Peter asked in mock dismay. “It’s art.”

“It’s fraud.”

“It makes the people happy. They love thinking they’re helping someone.”

“But they could be helping someone.”

“They helped me! I’m getting an MFA!”

“Unbelievable.”

“Believe it, son. Hey you going to that thing for Charlie?” The question hung in the room for a while before seeping into the carpet along with old pizza grease.

“I haven’t really thought about it,” Brent lied.

 

 

I’m not really sure what happens next.

 

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