207 Wiggaz Be Havin' Dat F.A.S.

Portland, Maine has a bizarre abundance of wiggers in their teens and twenties seemingly either having been kicked in the head by a horse or born with fetal-alcohol syndrome.

Why Portland? Perhaps, it's a perfect storm: Maine is, as Barbara Ehrenreich says in Nickel and Dimed, the whitest state in the country (i guess somebody here needs to step up and be black), Maine is economically depressed, leaving Portland, its largest city, a regional destination for social services (cue the parade of impoverished, drunk mothers-to-be). And lastly, Portland experiences massive brain drain, the citizenry leaving only its pock-marked dunces limping behind.

We're So Fucked.

OK, now that I'm going to be a dad, I guess I'm getting more serious about my political feelings. I would like to take a moment and make the following small edits to our nation in order to improve our health, environment, economy and education systems.

Elections:

• One national popular vote. No state or 'super' delegates.
• Nobody understands delegates; nobody thinks it's fair.
  

• Media/speaking opportunities at no cost to candidate; no personal funding of campaign, no donations. Like a huge round robin tournament (like all major team sports in the US)
• $5.5 billion spent by this year's presidential candidates so far.

Healthcare:

• Healthcare for all, paid by taxes. Like every other country.
• Health 'bill of rights' for kids.
  
• No junk food in schools (vending machines and cafeteria food).
  

Domestic Policy:

• Enforced separation of church and state; the US is not a Christian country.
• Protect same-sex marriage at the Federal level.
  
• Legalize and standardize the most popular recreational drugs (esp. marijuana and cocaine) via licensed vendors (like cigarettes).
• Affirmative action (and other "reparations") outlawed. Equal opportunity, less resentment.
  
• Path to citizenship for current illegal immigrants. Tighter borders.
• Guarantee Net Neutrality.
• Repeal Patriot Act. Seriously, people.
  
• Make higher education free to students, but raise admissions standards (like Australia).
  
• Drinking age lowered to 16 years old to let parents observe formative drinking years.
  
• Standardized education for teenagers about credit. Must pass a test to enter credit world.
• In addition to traffic tickets, award random cash prizes for motorists who obey the law. Opposite of a ticket (positive reinforcement).
  

Foreign Policy:

• Pay off foreign debt. Govt. needs to lead by example not to live beyond means. Until debt is paid, spending needs to be reeled in, just like personal finance.
  
• Any military action abroad must have consent of Allies (e.g. EU) and NATO (checks/balances).

Environment:

• Start shutting down coal-fired power plants. Open more nuclear plants. Like EU.
• Mandate one purely electric (not hybrid) model per make of car sold in US, priced according to middle of that make's range.
• Govt. sponsored car-sharing program.
• All new SUVs must be hybrid.
  

By the way, what political party does all this sound like? None? That's because we have a 2-party system, neither of which anyone can completely relate to. Voting in America is like shopping for a car but being forced to pick between Ford and Chevy. What if I want a damn Volkswagen? Too bad.

Seattle Rules, Exhibit 1: Patti Summers.

Okay, I've had enough fun on this blog at Seattle's expense that I feel it's time to give back to the place that has provided me with such a wealth of material. Let's focus on Patti Summers.

Patti, seen above in 2001, is, in my estimation, as good as Seattle ever got. Squirreled away in the bowels of the Pike Place Market (or "Pike's Place Market" as the fleece-clad locals are wont to say), Patti Summers' Cabaret was an urban Shangri-La. A David-Lynchian otherworld, filled with white lacquered chairs and stucco walls painted with Mediterranean vistas complete with painted window frames out of which one was supposedly gazing.

Patti's visage hung, commanding, at the entrance up until the club's demise in the early aughts. The picture was of Patti in her prime, perhaps in the late 1970s, however by the new millenium Patti was a tired husk of an entertainer: bloated, short-tempered and going through the motions.

Patti's cabaret had offered a full menu at one time, but toward the end there were only pizzas, frozen pizzas, heated up by Patti herself between sets of jazz vocal standards. There were three varieties: cheese, pepperoni and half-cheese-half-pepperoni ringing in at $9, $10 and $9.50 respectively. Drinks were $7 and were the domain of Patti's bass-playing husband Gary Steele who would hustle around the room taking orders while Patti threw the pizzas in. Soda was $3.50.

Most came for the irony, though some visited Patti in earnest. Perhaps they remembered her from the 70s when she was more Streisand-like. Patti herself was not interested in irony and was deadly serious about her operation. She frequently snapped at her customers and at the band. I think she lived in the back of the restaurant.

In the fall of 2001, Patti and Gary wrote a couple of 9-11-themed songs and even put out a two-song CD (it cost $10). My friend Paul bought the CD for me; it was he who introduced me to Patti's club and he knew how much I loved these two songs, us having heard them live many times. And so I leave you with Patti Summers' opus: the poignant and nuanced "Something Just Happened," perhaps the most amazing song about 9-11 ever (but only because Elton John hasn't yet written one to the tune of Candle In The Wind).

CLICK TO LISTEN:
Something Just Happened by Patti Summers (c. 2001 Summers/Steele)

"Freedom is golden and some people broke the rules..." -Patti Summers

Winter Of Our Discontents.

So I finally finished Wonderful Town, a collection of short stories from the past 80 years or so of The New Yorker, which somehow scores a 4.04 out of 4 stars on LibraryThnig. I do have to agree with the 4.04 though; it really is fantastic.

So last night I picked up a book that I bought from a used book guy on Beaver Street where Broadway turns into Cortlandt Street in Manhattan's Financial District. There are two really good used book guys who set up shop there on weekdays and a legendary lunch wagon vendor known around the area as "The Chicken Man." Oh and in the winter there's a soup stand with great split pea and ham soup. And of course within the aforementioned 100 feet of pavement also sits Yips, the granddaddy of all Chinese buffets, in its surreal basement setting at 18 Beaver.

Oh right, the book. It's called Civilization And Its Discontents, written by Sigmund Freud and published in 1930. My copy, scanned above, was printed in 1960. I think I paid $3.00.

Anyway, I started this book when I still lived in the city. Well, Brooklyn actually. I'm trying but I can't imagine a more boring, desolate book cover (click on it for a super-intense close-up). I have no idea why I bought it, but I'm really enjoying it. It's about the futility of man's search for happiness, the absurdity of religion, and, as Huey Lewis once said, The Power of Love.

Several passages, I thought, were not only breathtakingly honest but also seemed, eerily, to transcend the 75 or so years since being written. I found the following dose of realism particularly salient:

During the last few generations mankind has made an extraordinary advance in the natural sciences and in their technical application and has established his control over nature in a way never before imagined. The single steps of this advance are common knowledge and it is unnecessary to enumerate them. Men are proud of those achievements, and have a right to be. But they seem to have observed that this newly-won power over space and time, this subjugation of the forces of nature, which is the fulfillment of a longing that goes back thousands of years, has not increased the amount of pleasurable satisfaction which they may expect from life and has not made them feel happier. From the recognition of this fact we ought to be content to conclude that power over nature is not the only precondition of human happiness, just as it is not the only goal of cultural endeavor; we ought not to infer from it that technical progress is without value for the economics of our happiness. One would like to ask: is there, then, no positive gain in pleasure, no unequivocal increase in my feeling of happiness, if I can, as often as I please, hear the voice of a child of mine who is living hundreds of miles away or if I can learn in the shortest possible time after a friend has reached his destination that he has come through the long and difficult voyage unharmed? Does it mean nothing that medicine has succeeded in enormously reducing infant mortality and the danger of infection for women in childbirth, and, indeed, in considerably lengthening the average life of a civilized man? And there is a long list that might be added to benefits of this kind which we owe to the much-despised era of scientific and technical advances. But here the voice of pessimistic criticism makes itself heard and warns us that most of these satisfactions follow the model of the 'cheap enjoyment' extolled in the anecdote-the enjoyment obtained by putting a bare leg from under the bedclothes on a cold winter night and drawing it in again. If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would never have left his native town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice; if traveling across the ocean by ship had not been introduced, my friend would not have embarked on his sea-voyage and I should not need a cable to relieve my anxiety about him. What is the use of reducing infantile mortality when it is precisely that reduction which imposes the greatest restraint on us in the begetting of children, so that, taken all round, we nevertheless rear no more children than in the days before the reign of hygiene, while at the same time we have created difficult conditions for our sexual life in marriage, and have probably worked against the beneficial effects of natural selection? And, finally, what good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?

That was all one paragraph. Actually only part of a paragraph. Freud is one bad motherfucker. I never knew he was so judgmental and poetic. It's really very beautiful.