Pay Attention

Congratulations to my little brother.

My little brother passed the bar exam, making him an official law-talking-guy. Congratulations, James!

Around The Margins

I know a guy that complains about a TV show he’d like to watch. It looks like a good program, he says, but there are gay characters and “they shouldn’t be allowed to show that sort of thing” on television. He’d like a law that would allow him to watch a show about a high school glee club without worrying that he might see someone gay. 

The show would apparently be set in an alternate universe.

I mention this because of a bill that’s working its way through the Tennessee state senate. The bill would make it illegal to discuss homosexuality with students prior to the 9th grade. I don’t know how likely the bill is to become law. It’s failed before, but apparently it has a better chance this time because the most recent election favored Conservative lawmakers. 

Let me just say the thing that should be obvious: it’s wrong to make people invisible, and to make it illegal to talk about a significant minority of people is to take the first step down a very ugly road. 

I rarely talk about politics anymore. There’s no joy in it for someone whose views are outside of the mainstream, and at the end of the discussion I always have to concede that there’s not a lot of difference in our two major political parties in matters of war, civil liberties, fiscal, or economic policy. As a middle-class and nearly middle-aged straight white male, the outcome of any particular election is unlikely to impact me at all because change happens at the margins, and I’m comfortably in the middle.

But if I were on the margins, things would be different. If I were a pregnant teenager, or just a teenager trying not to get pregnant, then the outcome of the last election would matter a lot to me. If I were a lesbian serving in the Air Force, or a guy that walked over from Mexico looking for a job washing dishes and a better life, then I might care a lot about the last election.

That’s why I vote. That’s why I write letters and sign petitions. That’s why I give to candidates. That’s why I care who wins and who loses. It’s not for me, it’s for the younger version of me. It’s for the less fortunate, less straight, less white, less male versions of me. It matters a lot to them.

And when shit like this floats to the top of the pool, at least I can say it’s not mine.

On Doctor Who

My first experience with the Doctor came relatively late in life, on Christmas Eve a few years ago. My then 11-month old daughter had a nasty respiratory virus that required us to sit up with her through the night, and I needed something to keep myself awake while I rocked her. On a whim, I decided to watch the new Doctor Who series.

I’d never watched the classic series, but I’d absorbed enough of it through osmosis that I knew the general outline: a centuries-old alien with a time traveling spaceship in the shape of a British police box has adventures with a human companion. Like a lot of science fiction, it sounds terrible until you see how it plays.

It played pretty well.

After the first episode, I messaged a friend who was a long time fan: “Hey, this Who series is pretty good.” He messaged back: “Just wait. It gets better.” He’s never been more right. Watching the show through five seasons, and going back to some classic Who episodes, has eclipsed my other geek loves to become my favorite thing ever.

Let me tell you why.

Aside from the obvious reason that it’s a good show with fun characters and stories, the show speaks to me.

I’ve noticed there are seasons life, and every few years I look back at the person I used to be and wonder who he was. I have his memories, but he seems so different from me that I have trouble believing we’re the same person at all. This may be a defense mechanism of course, something the brain does to alleviate the pain of cognitive dissonance, but I’ve chosen to believe that I do really change and at each stage of my life I become the man I’m needed to be, just like The Doctor, who when he dies, regenerates and becomes a new person: a person with the same memories, but a different person nonetheless.

There’s something else, too. I learned to be a better parent from watching Doctor Who. The Doctor has always traveled with human companions. They’re meant as audience surrogates, asking the questions the audience needs answered, and The Doctor can explain to them what’s going on, patiently or impatiently.

Being human, the companions are necessarily younger and less intelligent than the Doctor, but he treats them with respect, listens to them, marvels at them, protects them, and takes them on roaring adventures to see the marvels of the universe. When things are frightening, he jokes, and when things are truly serious, then so is he, but he recognizes how rare those occasions are.

And right now, that’s the man I’m needed to be.

—-

New episodes of Doctor Who begin tonight, and I’m unreasonably excited about it. The latest Doctor, the eleventh incarnation of the character, may just be my favorite. Part of that is the actor who portrays him, but I think the writing on the latest series is the best the show has ever had.

I’ve got a pet theory that the current head writer, Steven Moffat, has a Steven Spielberg fetish. It’s well known that Moffat is a fan of the original Doctor Who series, and it shows in the way the most recent episodes have paid homage to the classic stories (with arks in space and lizard people beneath the surface of the Earth), but there are an equal number of old-school Spielberg tropes: lonely children, menacing sharks, a tweedy professor-type who’s also an action hero. Even the music in the Moffat-era Doctor Who sounds like a John Williams score.

I really can’t recommend the show enough. If you’ve never seen it, but you somehow managed to read all the way to the bottom of this post, then check it out this weekend. You won’t be sorry.

Life and Death - a brief note

I learned last night that an acquaintance passed away suddenly. I’ve offered my condolences elsewhere, and I don’t want to cheapen the grief of those who knew him better, so I won’t dwell on him except to say he was someone that I liked and respected, and I wish I’d had a chance to know him better. 

He was thirty years old. I’m thirty-four.

He was engaged. Today is my fourth wedding anniversary.

So I can’t help thinking: if it had been me, then I would have missed out on the best part of my life, the only part that’s had any real meaning. 

Savor every moment. Even the terrible ones. Even the boring ones. 

I love you all. Even the ones of you I don’t particularly like.

Belinda, thank you for the best days I’ll ever have. I love you most of all.

On Pete, Which is Not His Real Name

Pete must have been about thirty-five years old, and he terrified me. We worked together as waiters in a little tourist town restaurant that served decent Italian food and overpriced wine. On summer nights, when the dinner rush came late if it came at all, we’d have several idle hours together, and I got to know him pretty well.

I’m sure he’d been good looking once, but now he was middle-aged and just holding on, though his vanity lived on in a million little ways. He carefully combed and sprayed his longish blonde hair in the men’s room before each shift, and took a little time between tables to make sure his uniform was just so.

He’d once been lead singer in a rock band, and he told me of his exploits. I don’t remember much about these. Mostly they were stories about girls he’d screwed after shows, and I was already too old to be impressed by these. The only one of his stories that I do remember is about the time he got so drunk during a show that he pissed himself on stage. He wore a perpetual sneer that might have come from those rock band days, but just looked pathetic and mean on a middle-aged man in a waiter’s apron.

He told jokes, unfunny jokes that he ended with his face shifting from the sneer to a forced smile and back again in just over a second and forced machine gun chuckle. Every joke had an undercurrent of rage because Pete was always angry.

Any little thing might set him off, a bad tip or a kitchen screw-up. He’d quietly bitch and threaten to quit, but these were small storms and I learned to ignore them pretty quick. They never involved me directly, and besides, he reserved most of his anger for his wife. Pete hated his wife. I don’t remember if he ever said so out loud, but he made it clear when he spoke with her. At least once a shift his phone would ring, and the conversation would begin with ice and gradually intensify to a fiery series of screams, after which he’d hang up and storm outside. When he returned a few minutes later, he’d recount the conversation in a way that made it clear that he’d be happier if she died before he got home.

It wasn’t his rage that frightened me. Rage is common as garlic in an Italian restaurant, so it hardly made him special among my co-workers. Yes, he was angrier than most, but the thing that frightened me was that Pete was a failure.

I was a decade younger than Pete, and already a failure myself. Like Pete, I’d had rock star dreams of a literary kind, but they were fading fast. I had no prospects and the future seemed to hold nothing but that was any different than his. Except for the one consolation was that no woman would ever want me enough to marry me, so I’d never have to hate my wife.

My own lack of self-awareness, or my careful self-denial, kept me from acknowledging the reason for my dread of Pete, but I must have thought about it some because otherwise I doubt I’d remember him at all.

Maybe Pete’s example is the reason I started making different choices about the way I lived my life and the way I pursued those rock star dreams. If so, then I owe him a debt of gratitude.

So thanks, Pete. You made a difference in my life, and I hope things got better for you, you miserable bastard.

Flattery Gets You Linked

I’m running on a killer sleep deficit, and trying to be productive anyway, so I don’t have much time to comment, but over at Cloud Culture, Time-traveling Super Blogger™ Adam Gurri offers some thoughts on friendships, digital and analog, and makes some nice comments about yours truly.

Check it out.

My Book Diet

I take a perverse pleasure in quitting things. For me, the smug satisfaction of self-improvement nearly always mitigates the feeling of loss and sacrifice. Among other things, and at various times, I’ve given up meat, red meat, drinking, smoking, and dating. Of these, only smoking cessation really stuck, and that came only after many false starts (false stops?). I’ve found that by quitting something even temporarily, I can come back to it in a more mindful way.

That’s why I quit buying books.

People often talk about being voracious readers. They proudly describe devouring three or four books in a week. Much rarer is any discussion of the compulsive book purchaser. This makes sense, as reading several books a week requires rare focus, while purchasing as many books requires only cash or credit.

I’m not a particularly fast reader. At best I manage about one book per week (more if I’m reading non-fiction, less for fiction). In the past few years, as I’ve been busy raising two small children, the number of books I read has dropped precipitously and I do well to manage two dozen in a year. In the same period, my book purchasing actually increased.

There’s no place more pleasant and relaxing to me than a used bookstore. Their shelves, invariably crammed from floor to ceiling with dusty books of various ages and conditions, act on me like a medieval labyrinth and induce a peaceful and meditative state. The problem is that I tend to enter the labyrinth empty-handed and leave it with half a dozen books.

This is a vice. I know it’s a vice because when I buy these books, I feel compelled to hide them. I tuck them away until no one is looking, and then I quietly place them on the shelf with the other unread books to wait for the day when I have time enough at last for them.

Like most compulsions, my need to buy books is rooted in control. As I give more and more of myself to my family, and my life becomes less about me and more about us, something inside me has struggled to hold on to that control and found its niche at the bookstore.

When I mentioned this in my brief round of therapy a couple of years ago, even my therapist called it a harmless vice. It’s true that, as vices go, this one probably wouldn’t kill me unless a stack of books topples over on me, but I don’t like being subject to a habit, and spending fifty dollars a week of my family’s money on books that I may never find time to read is plainly selfish.

When my younger daughter was born last year, I decided to make a change and stop buying books for a year. I bought my last book the day before she was born (tellingly, I don’t remember which book it was), and in the past twelve months I’ve only allowed myself to purchase books as gifts. It hasn’t been as difficult as I anticipated. More or less, I quit going to bookstores and started browsing more in my own library when I needed something to read. I’ve had two relapses. In a moment of weakness, very early in my book diet, I bought a new book by an author I enjoy. I promptly forgot the illicit book on an airplane and had to replace it because I’d already read the first half.

I’ve also purchases a few books that were intended as gifts but haven’t found their way to their planned recipients, but this is more about my vice of procrastination. The year is up and I’m free to buy books again, but I haven’t yet. A few times I’ve been tempted to head out and make that first purchase, but I’m waiting until I really need to go.

When I do go back to the bookstores, and I will go back, I think I’ll limit myself somehow. I think I’d like to be a collector of books as beautiful objects.

In the meantime, there are plenty of books on my shelf.

On My Home

I’m in Alabama. It’s six o’clock on a morning in late March, and I’m sitting on the back patio of my wife’s parents’ house. I’m wearing pajamas, but I’m not wearing shoes. The Gulf Coast is lovely in the Spring. Allow me to forget for the moment that it’s a bitch in Summer.

I grew up in Alabama, suffering most of my education and waiting out the better part of my twenties within its borders. I was born in North Texas, and I live in the hill country of Texas now. In the interim, I spent five years on the San Francisco Bay. My Texas and California homes have much to recommend them. Northern California borders, almost insufferably, on edenic. But neither of them feel quite right to me in the Spring.

It’s the smell of Spring that I miss most now. Central Texas can be warm and humid in just the right way, but it smells wrong. The air around Mobile Bay smells of saltwater and fish. Like people who can never quite convince themselves that fall has come without the smell of burning leaves, I can never be comfortable that winter is gone without a hint of brine in the air.

The trees and soil bear specific smells too. Pine is obvious, but the air under the Live Oaks smells of sweet humus. I suspect that red clay and sand can be identified with a whiff, though I haven’t put it to a test.

I didn’t feel the gravity of this place before I left it, although looking back it’s obvious how hard it was to escape it. Life can be easy here if you have a little money or if you’re young and don’t need it. There are endless ways to pass the time. I think about living here sometimes. I imagine buying one of those beautiful old homes downtown Mobile and settling in to become one of those eccentrics who refuses to go West of the Civil War cannon that unofficially marks the hazy border between the fantasy world of the Old South and the reality of modern suburbs.

I won’t do it, though. That’s the dream of the part of me that wants to turn inward and hide. That’s the me that wants to give up on dreams and futures and enjoy an everlasting present. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not for me.

It wouldn’t make me happy or unhappy. I’m happy now. It would make me comfortable, and that’s not for me. Not yet. For now, I need to be a little uncomfortable. I need to want some things so that I can keep becoming me.

That’s story I tell myself, and it’s true as far as it goes, but there’s something else that’s been in the back of my mind for a few years now.

I need to live in a place where the future seems real and present, a place where dreams can be built. I need to live in a place like that because that’s the kind of place where I want my children to grow up and live and call home.

And I don’t want them to leave me.

Happy Birthday Carson Hope Harred

Dear Carson Hope,

It’s your first birthday today. That’s why we all stood around your crib singing at you when you first woke up this morning. I hope you enjoyed it. We sure did.

Parents aren’t supposed to compare their children. It’s impolite and possibly damaging, but it’s also inevitable. We humans are sorting machines, and our brains demand that we tick off a list of what a thing is and isn’t when we encounter something new. 

And you are new. Absolutely, wonderfully new.

And different from your sister. Where’s she’s obstinate, you are amenable. Where she’s even tempered and only rarely plussed, you’re all smiles and joy and sunshine until we cross you, and then you rage against us with all the babbling fury of a baby King Lear. 

Just remember that even if we compare you, we don’t define you. You are your own person. You decide who you will be.

Forgive me one more comparison. Your sister reminds me of your mother, which is wonderful because I love your mother more than anything, but you remind me of me. I’m so incredibly proud of that, but it scares me because (just between us) I just barely know what to do with myself.

So for your birthday, I’ll give you this gift: I’ll remember all the things I learn in the years I’m rearing you, and I’ll keep in mind all of the things I did in the years before we had you, and I’ll tell you about them  when the time comes. Not all at once, but in little quiet nudges of encouragement and warning. 

And with all of that, and a little help from your mom, then maybe you can be the better version of me, but more importantly, you will always be the best version of you.

Love, 

Dad