Wesley.

I got a voice-mail yesterday that my dad died. His girlfriend found his body upon returning from a weekend away; the county coroner said he died of a massive heart attack. His drinking and sedentary lifestyle rendered him bloated and unable to move about or get outdoors. He had, as at other times in his life, ballooned out to nearly 350 pounds, though his frame was slight.

Wes wasn't my real dad, though he was my real father. His life was a page from Kerouac, a track from a mid-career Tom Waits record, and some things a lot less romantic all rolled up. Like Barfly meets Glengarry Glen Ross meets Cannery Row.

From what I understand, Wes was many things, if not a dad. He was a salesman, a laborer, a drunk, a rambler, a lover of nature and animals a sharp-dresser and a fast-motorcycle-rider. And he was a dad probably a bit, just not to me. His girlfriend had several kids to whom he probably gave at least some parenting, though they, like me, had real dads.

My mother met Wes shortly after he returned from Vietnam after receiving a dishonorable discharge for disobeying orders in a combat zone. He refused to go on a suicide mission that ended up wiping out his platoon. He was sent home, but not before significant exposure to Agent Orange, the effects of which plagued him to his death. He was charismatic and warm despite his time in Vietnam and despite being brought up by a psychotic and violent alcoholic father. He and my mother were married and I was born in 1974. Liquor and pot were his first love however, and by 1976 he had moved on.

Twenty years later, I looked Wes up on my own. We had never met or even corresponded. Nor had our families kept in touch. In fact, his last image of me was probably of a sleeping one-year-old. He was thrilled to hear from me and traveled down from Grand Forks, North Dakota to visit me in St. Paul, Minnesota. He brought me a motorcycle as a gift: 1971 Yamaha 650 that he had restored during a recent period of sobriety. He was a smoker and had installed a cigarette lighter near the bike's ignition, the kind you see in a car where it pops up when it's hot.

A few months later, he visited again and took me to one of the Indian casinos in the area and gave me a hundred dollars to gamble with. I actually came out ahead.

Wes moved to Tennessee a few years later and I visited him in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains where he'd straighten the curves with his crotch-rocket motorcycle. That was the first time saw real hillbillies. They sat on their front porches in rocking chairs, crooked stovepipes jutting from the cobbled shacks, just like in the cartoons.

Several years later just before Christmas, when I was living in Seattle, UPS delivered a smoked salmon to the door. That was Wes. I don't think we'd talked for nearly a year and suddenly this salmon shows up in the mail for Christmas. in 2003 I got married and though he was invited, he did not attend. As it turned out, Wes was drinking again and in bad shape. We didn't speak after that until a couple of weeks ago.

I was walking through the mall on a coffee break and suddenly felt like I should call him. Since we spoke last, I'd been divorced, left New York, moved in with my girlfriend in Maine and had a baby. I didn't know if he was still at the same phone number or even if he was still alive. He was both and answered right away in his deep voice and hybrid accent which straddled the Mason-Dixon line.

He was very happy to hear from me and to learn that he was a grandfather. He told me about his new golden retriever named Ben who was kicked out of guide dog school for being a rebel and I could hear the pride in his voice. I told him about my chihuahua and cats and he was very interested, commenting in ernest about the intelligence of chihuahuas.

He also said he was happy that I had a good job in this economy and remembered back to the recession in the mid seventies when I was born and he was unemployed. He'd take his pickup truck into the Minnesota woods during my first winter and chop down trees which he would in turn break into firewood and sell to neighbors from our back yard in south Minneapolis.

We didn't talk long, but it was enough so that when I got that voice-mail last night I wasn't filled with regret, only a dull shock that Wes is dead. He requested there be no memorial service and so I suppose this may be his only Eulogy. I can't say it's particularly flattering or well-written, but Wes was a straight-shooter and for that I admire him and for that I'll remember him.

Poladroid.

I recently discovered Poladroid (for both Mac & Windows). It turns JPEGs into "polaroids" that can then be saved, emailed, whatever. And it's free! It has some tongue-in-cheek nostalgic features as well: the pictures take 3 minutes to "develop" (though shaking them speeds this up), and you can only make 10 pictures in a session, like a Polaroid cartridge. Resulting files are 400 dpi, so they look pretty good! The processing is randomized to a degree so each picture is unique.

2009 Portland, Maine Sex Offenders In The Workplace Calendar: Mr. February!

February... the shortest of months. That's a good thing in Maine because the coming of March is symbolic of springtime, or "le printemps," as the French say. During the cold and dark month of February, the people of Portland, Maine take solace in the wide variety of cozy neighborhood restaurants peppered throughout the city.

Our own Mr. February, Walter W. Jepson (b. 1960), is one of the unsung heroes that keep the restaurant industry ticking, those who make sure the doors to the town's favorite holes-in-the-wall are open on even the chilliest February evenings.

Walter, who on at least 7 occasions has snuggled up a little too closely with a person or persons under the age of fourteen (so closely in fact that genitals were somehow touched), is an employee of Silly's restaurant. Silly's, whose motto is: "As far as we can discern, the Universe is a very SILLY Place," is conveniently located on Washington Ave. near exit 8.

Just look at all the fabulous menu items at Silly's! Without Walter's hard work and attention to detail, there might be one less destination in our small town to enjoy an XTC pizza and a jar of Tang on a cold winter's night. Congratulations to the staff of Silly's, the residents surrounding  the Washington/Cumberland area, and of course to Walter himself, Mister February!

Click here to see others featured in the 2009 Portland, Maine Sex Offenders in the Workplace Calendar!

Limping.

I work in a shopping mall these days, in retail. I punch a time clock and report to an assistant manager. I remember a certain dignity to retail employees in Manhattan that doesn't seem to exist here. I remember feeling that, in general, people working retail jobs probably led interesting other-lives and, if nothing else, were noteworthy and dignified by virtue of being New Yorkers.

Here, people are nice enough. They have friends and family and hobbies. For me, there's just no sense of being involved in something bigger. Local politics bore me to tears and I couldn't care less about daily news items. I don't think I've ever bothered to pick up a local paper in the year and a half that I've lived here; didn't even consider voting.

Anyway, back to the shopping mall. It's located near the hotel i worked at last year, out in South Portland. It's a one-story affair, trapped in the 80's, with the usual mall suspects: Sears, JC Penny, Macy's, Best Buy. Four or five giant jewelry stores (why?), a food court, a smattering of shitty wagons that sell iPod cases and sunglasses and stuff. Crazily bad piped-in soft-rock (think Lionel Ritchie, Elton John, Michael McDonald).

Oh, and if showing up and pulling open the doors to the shopping mall every morning wasn't bad enough, I'm greeted not only by the likes of Air Supply but to a creepy hodge-podge of elderly exercise enthusiasts: the mall welcomes senior citizens to walk laps around the mall from the early morning before the stores open to the late night.

So as I weave around the geriatrics, through the teal-bathed corridors, forced to listen to god-knows-what, the sickly smell of Cinnabon and BenGay in the air, I ask myself: What the Fuck? What the Fuck am I doing here? Before I got this job I think I went to the mall maybe once during the course of a year. I am 100% alienated.

On my lunch break, I'm forced out into the wilds of the mall to fend for myself for an hour. For the first few weeks, I ate at the food court. McDonalds, Panda Express, Taco Bell, whatever. I can think of few things more depressing than eating shitty fast food in a sea of wiggaz and mall rats, forced to contemplate the lyrics to "Solid as a Rock" or "On the Wings of Love."

If I'm feeling more anxious or have less money, I would go to the TCBY/Pretzel Time at the other end of the mall and just get a frozen yogurt or pretzel dog and sit in a public seating area, often next to mouth-breathing seniors taking a break from their workouts, completing WordFind puzzles and hacking phlegm.

Yesterday, by accident, I was two hours late to work. I forgot that a week ago I'd agreed to come in early to cover my team-leader's dentist appointment. He makes the schedule and he hadn't adjusted it so i forgot. I've been "written up" once already for being late and since then I'd been making a real effort to get to work on time. So yesterday I thought I was 10 minutes early but when I got in I found that I was in danger of receiving a "no-call" infraction which would put me on final notice for termination. It's so humiliating to be treated like a teenager. I mean, I think my boss at Little Cesar's Pizza was more lenient and I was 15 then.

So when lunchtime came around yesterday, I was so depressed that I had to leave the mall during my lunch break. I thought some fresh air would do me good, so I decided to traverse the mall parking lot and cross the main drag to buy some dog food at Petco. All the walkways were blocked by snow piles from the parking lot plows and I had to snake through in a funny way that led me by the Wendy's. I felt depressed and people were looking at me like a homeless person because nobody walks out by the mall.

I decided to drown my sorrows in a Number 2, large, with Dr. Pepper. I saw a manager interviewing a prospective employee and felt so sorry for the kid, before I realized that my job is about the same. By the time I finished the giant box of french fries I was full. I forced myself to eat the hamburger anyway and then, feeling bloated and disgusted with myself, finished the walk to Petco.

I walked back to the dog food section and then realized that I had spent the dog food money at Wendy's. I was $2 short. So I trudged back to the mall, through the teal corridors, past the limping seniors, the chair massage place, past the baby portrait studio and back to my store where I punched back in from lunch. It's a good thing my dog likes cat food.

Chocolate Rain.

This and This.

Cabbin' Fever.

A few years ago I lived in Manhattan. One night, I was returning home from SoHo to TriBeCa, walking down Broadway. It was one of those windy winter Manhattan nights that cuts through layers of winter clothing and burns your face. It had started to snow and the slippery sidewalks were almost empty of people.

As with any bad-weather day, there were no cabs to be had. I craned my neck every few seconds to check their fare lights as they approached and finally i saw one letting someone out a block or so upstream near Spring St. I was on the corner of Grand and I jumped into the street and flapped my arms. The cab hit at a red light at Broome and I felt sure someone would claim it while it sat there. But no-one did and the driver kept on coming, almost passing me up but coming to a stop a few buildings down from where I stood.

I ran toward toward the car and as I did I noticed a man running up from Howard Street, the next corner down. It was a race and I would be damned if I was going to lose. I grabbed the door handle first and tried to open it but the other guy shoved me back and I slipped a bit on the icy street. "I don't think so!" he said. And then I saw he was carrying a young boy in his arms.

I regained my balance. "Fuck you. It stopped for me."

"Hey, I have a child here!"

"That's not my problem asshole." I flung the door open and into the man's body, forcing him to slip and fall to his knees in the street." He began to howl at the cab driver that he and his boy needed to get out of the cold and that he would report the driver to the TLC. I jumped into the warm car and the guy grabbed at the door trying to wrestle it open as I wrestled it closed, which I finally did. He was up on his feet again, slamming his fist on the hood of the cab while the boy stood by startled. The man kept yelling, but the swift wind carried the sound away uptown.

The cab pulled away from the curb and the man and his son watched as I rolled down the window and flipped them off. It felt like the right thing to do at the time, the violence, name-calling and all. That's where I was, in my head, when I lived in the city. Reliving this story now makes me feel terrible. Embarrassed. Sad.

Maine 2009 Registered Sex Offenders In The Workplace Calendar!

Each month we'll take a look at a local citizen who has gone above and beyond to make Portland a better place to live and work. Mister January, Carl H. Anderson, is an employee of the Shipyard Brewery and has achieved the distinguished honor of a statutory rape hat-trick! Yes, three counts of gross sexual assault, or "Engaging in a sexual act with another person and the other person is not the actor's spouse and has not attained the age of 14 years."

Congratulations to Carl and his family. Who ever said mustaches were creepy? Look for him on the Shipyard Brewery tour!

Landlords Without Boarders.

Wow. There are a lot of shitty apartments in Portland, Maine. And it feels like we've seen them all in the past few days. All were two or three bedroom places priced between $1,000 and $1,350 per month: not top dollar in Portland, but not bottom dollar by any means. All were advertised either in the local paper, craigslist or just by a sign in the window. Most were either on the peninsula, near downtown or out by the University.

So let's see... there were three apartments that looked out onto gas station parking lots, one that had been painted black and pink by this weird African dude named Lado (the bathroom ceiling was also collapsing), one with laundry machines in a basement accessible only from the outside of the house, one next door to a Midas muffler shop on a busy street and four with dropped styrofoam ceilings (one of these with florescent office lights built in).

Then there was the basement apartment or "sub-dwelling" that the happy-go-lucky landlord "sometimes" occupied a part of. I recognized this man from the night he almost backed over me with his SUV in front of that very apartment as I walked my dog. He had yelled "Why don't you try wearing some other color besides black, moron!"

There was the place where we'd have to mow the lawn ourselves, the place with a loud common stairway above the only place a bed could go, the place that we'd need to flush out the furnace water every 30 days and the apartment with the bedroom looking out onto a home for mentally retarded adults. That place had a sweet non-functional fireplace and a landlord with a dyed mustache who lived upstairs.

There was an apartment that, during the day, always had a stretch Hummer parked in front, as there was a neighbor who moonlighted as a chauffeur. It was the early evening when we saw the place and we were lucky enough to see her leaving for work. She was about 21, tall and emaciated with a tight black polyester suit on and a cocked top hat, made-up like a prostitute.

Another place smelled so awful I almost threw up. There was a poor Pug dog crated in the bedroom, large feathers strewn about and a cat with no tail running around peeing on things; there was also a large boat stranded in the front yard. The landlord drove his Vespa across the grass to greet us, wearing a bicycle helmet.

We knew of a house on our block where the occupants owned a giant lynx with a chain-link collar. That place came up for rent but unfortunately it looked as if the lynx had trashed the place.

One apartment had exclusive access to a storage attic: at least 2,000 square feet of hot, unfinished space. Outside the ground-floor rental unit was a group of sunburned wiggers smoking and drinking at ten in the morning, bobbing and weaving to the sounds from a boom box underneath what would have been our baby's room.

The pièce de résistance was a tiny, dilapidated house out in South Portland that butted up to a sea of mammoth Citgo oil tanks, each seemingly the size of a football stadium. The neighbors had cars up on cinderblocks and kids wove through the streets of the weird little neighborhood on their bicycles alongside big-rig oil trucks.

We did find one place that we love. But it's one of two places that overtly doesn't want to rent to us because we have a baby. And a dog. And two cats. Apparently the downstairs neighbors are very sensitive to noise, so the landlord wants us (including our dog and baby) to meet with them. If the neighbors give us the seal of approval, then we're in! Good thing I didn't mention our snow leopard!

Baby Börn.

It's been a strange time of overt happiness for me this past week, the first week of my daughter's life. Like I don't even seem to care that my taxes, prepared 90 minutes before the deadline, have me owing over $9,000. Or that we gave notice on our beloved apartment and need to find a place by June 1. I guess it all takes a back seat for now.

I tried to take some contract work yesterday and it was a disaster. I was late to both appointments and couldn't do either job; I fumbled my way through and ended up just apologizing and leaving. On the way to the first appointment, I was trapped in a miles-long traffic jam on 295. The next exit wasn't for 10 miles, so traffic just sat there. People were turning off their engines and getting out of their cars to smoke cigarettes and stretch their legs on the median. Eventually I couldn't deal anymore and busted a U-turn across the steeply carved drainage median and found my way via county roads.

At my second appointment, I had to meet with a recruiter at a life insurance agency. He had slicked-back hair and smelled of sugarless gum. His office was festooned with successories and laminated "service pyramids". He looked a lot like Michael Scott and needed me to run wires through his office wall. He was wanting to connect his laptop with a new plasma TV to show powerpoint slides to his prospective recruits. Unfortunately I don't do in-wall wiring and so I told him I'd transfer the work order to someone else.

Then came the soft sell. He started to ask me questions about where I live and my family, angling for a policy sale. He fished out two creepy Lance Armstrong-style wristbands that said "LIFE HAPPENS" from a bulk bag of thousands, acknowledging that they might be "a bit big for the little one yet, ha ha ha."

I was frustrated and dazed when I left the insurance office and drove toward home. I was hungry and a Wendy's drew me into its drive-through. I got my food and drifted into the adjacent WalMart parking lot, shoring up next to a white Ford Windstar. I ate my food, shifting my focus between the Windstar, the Wendy's and the WalMart. I wondered why the Windstar had the word "Sport" splashed in teal across the front quarter panel. Maybe because it had alloy rims?

I wondered why the wristbands didn't say "DEATH HAPPENS" as I tossed them into the Wendy's bag with the detritus of my lunch, crumpled it up and headed home to see my baby girl.

Sketchy Days.

A three-year-old drew this picture of me yesterday. It really captures my state of mind well, i think. When do kids stop being able to see into people's souls so well? Soon he'll be drawing prototypical houses with smokey chimneys and dump trucks and stuff, but for now he's almost clairvoyant. Ellis is the son of a client of mine here in Portland. When he drew this picture, I was three days into major surgery on his dad's only work computer, and I was very stressed about not losing any data and about him being offline for so long.

Also on my mind was the fact that I'm unemployed (I barter with Ellis's dad for picture-framing services). And that rent is past due, and that my former employer is probably not going to give me my final paycheck just to be a dick, and that we can't afford our apartment anymore so in 6 weeks we'll be moving to god-knows-where (someplace where they don't care that I'm unemployed?), and that our car is literally falling apart, and oh yeah, that we're having a daughter two weeks from today.

On the brighter side, I have applied for three good-looking jobs recently, all of which I'm strongly qualified for. Hopefully by the time my daughter can draw pictures of me, I won't look so lost.

Telephone Anxiety.

A symptom of my depression and anxiety is that I hate the telephone. I hate answering it and I hate calling people. Yet I have a fancy phone and lots of minutes and options. I guess maybe the options are all ways to circumvent talking. I rely on voicemail to field the calls, my data plan enables email on my phone, and unlimited text messaging allows me to reply to many voicemails without having to talk to the person. In fact, did you know you can deposit a message in someone's voicemail box without even calling them? I LOVE that!

Ironically, I don't really use my caller ID because it doesn't matter who's calling; I won't answer. Maybe the best thing would be to not have a phone, and maybe subscribe to a voicemail service so I'd have a phone number, but not a thing that rings. This Google service lets you manage a voicemail number via the web.

Researching "telephobia", I have come across some interesting observations. Check out this bizarre poem:

"The telephone, my nemesis! Spawn of Alex Bell.
The 1880 genesis, connecting Earth and Hell!"

I can identify with this person:

"Perhaps you can trace your phone anxiety to something someone said to you on the phone or maybe you have a fear of something that may be said to you on a call. Not many people understand why I don't answer my phone, and I learned not to care what they think. When you turn the ringer off, you will never know if it rings."

A doctor's insight:

"Fear or anxiety accompanying the use of the telephone is a symptom that is not uncommon. In my own experience it has appeared exclusively in male patients. In the majority of cases in which it has been encountered, it is relieved fairly readily by treatment. The symptom most often appears in the patients' discourse at the time when they are occupied with material from the oedipal phase."

I guess the oedipal part means people get anxious about having to be in the middle of a situation, maybe being forced to make a decision about something or to choose a side? Anyway, if you call me and I don't answer, don't take it personally.

Manimal.

I've been reading, in Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, about the death instinct, the tendency towards destruction. I also have been fascinated by Freud's assertion that civilization has done little to tame the beast in man and that we still inherently want to kill one another as a form of self-preservation (Darwinism in a sense).

This got me thinking about about my time living in Seattle, a place that prizes political correctness above all else. I felt that many people there, while PC on the surface, were terribly angry and hateful. It seems the more you constrict people's ability to say what they really feel, the more volitile people become and their true animal nature moves closer to the surface.

"...men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbour is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus. [Man is a wolf to man.] Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?

In consequence of this primary mutual hostility of human beings, civilized society is perpetually threatened with disintegration. The interest of work in common would not hold it together; instinctual passions are stronger than reasonable interests. Civilization has to use its utmost efforts in order to set limits to man's aggressive instincts and to hold the manifestations of them in check...

In spite of every effort, these endeavours of civilization have not so far achieved very much. It hopes to prevent the crudest excesses of brutal violence by itself assuming the right to use violence against criminals, but the law is not able to lay hold of the more cautious and refined manifestations of human aggressiveness. The time comes when each one of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellowmen, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will."

Hell, No.

Remember my new job? Yeah, well, that didn't work out so well.

Over the course of seven weeks, my "guaranteed" 20 hours per week had slipped to between 11-13 hours, my initial rate of $45/hour had slipped to $30, and my boss began picking and choosing which hours he felt like paying me for.

According to his twisted logic, you can't charge a client more than he wants to pay. So if a job takes me 6 hours to do, my Korean boss, Hans (what up with that name, dogg?) would chicken out and charge the client for 2 hours, at my expense. Then when I'd object, Hans would attack me, usually via email, CC:ing my colleagues, and insist that I am being naive and tacky.

Hans' accent is eerily Kim Jong Il (in Team America), as is his disposition. He runs a struggling PR firm and I suppose the IT company is a side project to keep himself afloat. He's always swearing at someone or throwing temper tantrums. Every email I would send to the group would immediately be replied to all with a scathing personal attack, usually based on an ESL-related misunderstanding.

So last Wednesday, Hans dramatically called a meeting inviting everyone to attend, the agenda being to discuss my "inability to follow clear instructions." It was during this meeting that Hans screamed across the table at me telling me I am inflexible and difficult to work with and that we should part ways because I'm more of a headache than I'm worth.

I can be stubborn and call people on their attitudes, but I never did that with Hans. I knew from the very beginning that he was an immature drama queen, but I also knew I needed the money so I'd better kiss ass anyway, which I did. I'm actually pretty proud of myself for not walking into his traps on several occasions.

I'm almost expecting a final fuck-you in the form of Hans withholding my last paycheck, even though I gracefully excused myself after he skewered me in Wednesday's meeting. If that turns out to be the case, I will enjoy writing letters to all of the clients I worked with explaining how Hans stole money from a good worker with a baby 3 weeks away and asking them to boycott his firm.

My Boss Is A Hateful Sadist.

That is all.

Drunk Blogging.

Although I'm not drunk now, I Treo'd the following stream-of-consciousness when I was drunk indeed, a year or so ago in Brooklyn.

And while I'm not drunk currently, I am at a bar and on my second Moinette. In that spirit, here's what was on my mind this time last year...

stuff:
violent femmes' self-titled.
Dinosaur jr.
Fate. Luck. Love. Sex. Friends. Booze.
irony(/)wit.
Fashion/style.
old/new tom waits.
obesity.
The bus.
Losing weight/gaining.
Touring then/ touring now.
city/suburbs.
$70 per hour/ $30 per hour.
Dating?
family. Sara.
Maine/nyc.
what's so great about nyc? (maybe that ppl have stories and/or are passionate about something. Or are they just lame. Or something in between. Or neither?).

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.

ASCII Nicely.

Here's a fun way to nerd out. Render your girlfriend or pet's name in ASCII. Just because.