Playlist for 5 Year Old Me

I decided today to make a playlist for 5 year old me. It will contain all of the earliest songs I can remember liking.

Here’s the track list:

1. On Top of the World - Van Halen
2. Panama - Van Halen
3. Jump - Van Halen
4. Down on the Corner - CCR
5. Bad Leroy Brown - Jim Croce
6. You Don’t Mess Around With Jim - Jim Croce
7. Mr. Blue Sky -Electric Light Orchestra
8. Pretty Woman - Roy Orbison
9. You Got It - Roy Orbison
10. The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald - Gordon Lightfoot
11. I Don’t Want to Live on the Moon - Ernie, from Sesame Street

This is actually a pretty sweet playlist.

Voice Messages

I love reading voice message transcriptions on my phone because no matter how careful a person is to consider every word and present professionally, the transcription captures every ‘um’ and ‘like’ in text. Things that humanize people are beautiful.

Advice

there is a hustle to every business.

At the Drop of a Hat

“At the drop of a hat”. Intended to mean a super-reactionary response, before all of the evidence is in. What is it about the sound of a hat hitting the floor that makes certain people do rash things? Is there a unique sound? Does it trigger a primitive response? Does it matter what kind of hat? I need to know.

Free Speech

Do you ever suspect that people who say things like ‘I’m entitled to my opinion’ and reference their right to free speech in debate believe that these things somehow validate whatever stupid argument they’re making?

You Have to Love Yourself First

When I get around to purging toxic relationships from my life, my alarm clock will be first to go.

9/11

9/11 was traumatic for all of us, yet I feel hesitant to even mention it publicly for fear of enabling demagogues, fascists, and nationalists. 9/11 was a great crime against humanity, but it’s also a crime that has been turned into social currency by bad people in order to rationalize bad and dangerous international behavior by our government.

That being said, this was my 9/11: 

I was working on a loading dock. My first son (Eliot) was born in July of 2000. I was married in 1999. I was 18, and fresh out of high school. We were listening to NPR as we unloaded a delivery truck when we heard the first plane hit. We all rushed to the break room to watch the live coverage. There was lots of speculation and wonderment. We were watching live as the second plane hit. Then the pentagon. You know how it went.

All of my kids grew up in a post 9/11 world, and we all currently live in a post 9/11 world. Bad people cashed in on our collective national fear and horror. They cashed in on our experience of having our bubble of privilege burst by retribution from outsiders for generations of America’s commodification of countries primarily inhabited by folks of a darker skin tone, with foreign sounding names, customs, and religions. Bad people were quick to reframe the attack as an expression of foreign hostility towards our ‘freedoms’. They also capitalized on our new outlook of resolve and unity.

To understate the significance of today completely, 9/11 changed everything for everyone, for all time, all over the world. There is only a before and after.

Valet Parking

If you delete your Facebook account because of ‘all of the negative political posts/comments’ or some variation of that, I can make one guess about who you are with 100% accuracy: you are white. I can make a second guess at about 75% probability of being correct: you are either lower middle class or higher.

Catching feelings about political statements is a function of privilege. I don’t care if that hurts your feelings. Cry into your pumpkin spice latte. It’s only when you have to fight for even a view of the table (not even a seat) where decisions are made that you realize EVERYTHING is political.

My Apologies

The phrase 'my apologies', sounds weird to me. I know it means, 'I am offering you my apologies' (without actually saying sorry), but the phrase itself, and the austere tone people tend to take when employing it, creates a different picture in my mind. First of all, 'my apologies' is almost always sarcastic. Second of all, the statement itself evokes the image of a man standing in front of a big curtain in formal wear, announcing to the crowd, 'Ladies and Gentlemen! I present to you...my apologies!' And then he pulls on a rope, the curtain drops, and there they are--all of his apologies--swimming around in, like, a big aquarium or something.

Or, I don't know. Maybe it's just me.

Realistic Expectations

As an overweight fellow myself, I instinctually know that when another overweight fellow says, ‘Give me 5 minutes, I’ve got to run to the bathroom’, it will be many more than 5 minutes, and there will be no running involved.

Make a Move!

“Each moment, each day, each choice, is a test” -Barack Obama, from his eulogy of John McCain. 

That is exactly how we should understand each unpromised breath we are lucky enough to breathe.

When I worked at Fifth Third Bank’s processing center, I had this bulldog of a manager that always stressed a ‘sense of urgency’. It was an annoyance to me at the time, working in a job I was just working to pay the bills, but I internalized that message. Partially because of the level of passion my manager stressed it to me, but also, primarily, because it deeply matched my own orientation towards this brief and powerful flicker of a candle that is our life.

No moment is more important than this one, and the only way to honor that truth is to make a move that disregards whatever our fears may be.

On Love

Allowing yourself to experience love in any form is the ultimate vulnerability, but the only thing that makes life worth living. It’s a conundrum: the ability to love is the reason we seek to protect ourselves, but in order to experience it, we have to leave ourselves unprotected in a sense.

Ted Cruz is the Worst

The thing that makes Ted Cruz the worst is that he instinctually understood that supporting fascism was bad, and he took a few moral stands against it before fully capitulating. The fact that he obviously knows right from wrong, but still chose wrong, makes him infinity times worse than your average opportunist. Vote Beto!

Don’t get in your own way

For some reason the failures that sting me the most are the ones where I get in my or someone else’s way. So I always try to be hyper conscious of my own intent and motivation. Plus, I’ve learned when I don’t make things about myself, they turn out better. 

Or, as David Byrne said, ‘Life is long if you give it away’.

Empathy

Serious question: what is it about the conservative mind that makes it only allow nuance and ‘gray areas’ when they themselves have personally had an interaction with the idea on hand?

Shower Thought #1

Thinking about the difference in meaning of ‘throw up’ and ‘throw down’ is amusing.

‘For now, let’s throw down. After that, we can throw up’.

A Review of Sorry to Bother You

I have never done psychedelics, and it’s not something I typically think about or am considering, but for some reason the first thought I had after leaving ‘Sorry to Bother You’ last night, was ‘I’m really glad I didn’t make tonight the first time to try LSD’. I think that movie broke by brain a little bit, and I’m still processing it. I went to see it because I liked the director based on interviews I had heard, and I liked that he is an open Marxist. And the movie looked funny. I went into the movie with a certain expectation, eventually thought I saw where it was going, and then discovered I was incredibly wrong. And then I thought I caught on, but was wrong again. I went through this cycle about two more times, and eventually was just left with my mouth open, and must have muttered to the person I was with some variation of ‘what the fuck is happening?’ a dozen or so times. I was incredibly tired and feeling a little spacey, and towards what turned out to be the end of the movie—the end point was never really evident—I started remembering the play ‘No Exit’ and wondering if I had died and was in some absurd hell. After the first scene to interrupt the credits, I leaned into my partner and was like, ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here.’ She was like, ‘I want to see what happens next’ and I was like, ‘I’m afraid if we don’t leave now, we will never leave. It will be 12 hours later and you’ll be like, I want to see what happens next forever, because this movie will never end’.

Reality sat in for us as we sat at a Chinese restaurant across the street eating the best spring rolls I have ever had. The movie made everything look strange, and our conversation became odd in a funny way.

I’m not sure if I liked the movie. I’m not sure if I totally understood it. I will always remember it, and I’m thinking about it still the day after, so I know it was good.

That’s my review.

Numinous Communications

Weird! I just showed this movie to the boys last night for the first time, and it turns out on this day 6 years ago I shared this picture on Facebook. Watching it last night was emotionally potent for me. I became very reflective about my choices in life and where they have led. In the movie, Clementine shows her panties to Joel in order to anchor him back to reality and hope. Here she is flashing me this morning and it’s having the same effect. I guess the point is that God sends angels to some people, and for others, he sends Kate Winslett to show you her panties.

The Devil Made Me Do It

You know what’s funny about religious folk who believe in Satan as a literal being? They’re always looking at bad shit in the world and their lives from the vantage point of Satan attempting to usurp them in some way or the other. ‘Satan is tempting me’, ‘Satan is behind this global catastrophe that has savaged the established order of things’. What was Satan’s biggest sin supposed to be? Wasn’t it Pride? What is more proud or presumptuous than assuming that you were born into a system signed off on by God and any attack against that system comes from the adversary? Allow yourself to consider this: what if Satan took over a long time before you were born and established his own status quo, and taught all of the entities you received instruction from as you grew up—parents, religion, culture, government—to teach you to see them as the holy truth? What if the bad shit you ascribe to satanic action in the world is really just the resistance against the world Satan has created? To assume that your original orientation is representative of the truth is supremely arrogant.

He Never Laid a Hand On Me

The fact that I, a relatively thoughtful, progressive minded 37 year old man just realized how deeply messed up the following observation is, raises a completely different set of questions for me to reckon with.

But, it just occurred to me how terrible it is that when women of prior generations (our mothers, aunts, grandmothers, etc.) would reflect on their marriages after their partner had passed, or were just in a stock-taking kind of mood, it would be very common to hear the following assessments levied in a tone of gratitude:

“He never laid a hand on me”

Or

“He came home every night”

Or

“He was a hard-working man”

What an incredibly low bar husbands throughout history have had to jump over. Regarding the first one, since when do we get praise for not being an abusive piece of shit? This bit of praise is an indication of the degraded state women in our country have had to accept for themselves; expressing joy that the man who owned them chose not to hit them. A subtle implication is also that he chose not to hit her,but he would have been fully in his rights to do so.

There is also an indictment of man as a gender in this praise: it is the suggestion that man is inclined towards violence. It’s like saying, ‘I swam through the shark tank and the shark didn’t even take a bite!’

For anyone who likes to extol the virtues of manliness, this should be offensive to you.

On the second one, it seems to suggest he was faithful, but that’s not really what it’s saying. ‘He came home’ means that whatever else may have been going on outside of the home, at least at the end of the day he comes back. I am the one who gets to wash his underwear.

The final one is often left for men who had no other redeeming qualities. He worked hard, it drained the soul from him, he was an empty husk at home, had no joy, was unrelatable to his wife and children and the changing world around him, but at least the electric was kept on.

This makes me sad, and makes me realize that we—as a society—are not even close to out of the woods when it comes to equality and progress. The wounded, fearful men of our country—predominantly white and undereducated—and  their obedient, wounded wives, just elected as president a heaving postule of toxic masculinity, fearful chest-beating, and regressive ideology. This vote is a cry for help to some extent; the mewing of a wounded animal. As much as their pain has been inflicted upon them by their fathers, they have retained a striking obedience to authority and empty symbolism. The personal pain they will not look at is transformed into fear of the other, and antipathy towards the government, Hollywood, liberal elites, etc: those who would dare suggest to them ‘a better way to live’.

‘No thank you’, the Trump voter says. ‘I’ve made it this far without any guidance. I’ll pass on yours’.

This is why they are so triggered by the concept of safe spaces. This is why they are bothered by minorities being given equal rights and voice: where was their safe space growing up in this absurd patriarchy? Where was their voice and rights when dad would come home drunk

But, they might say, ‘At least he came home’.