My Beard Is a Lie

Okay, that’s not entirely true. I just wanted to get your attention.

My beard is not a lie. My beard is actually more of a metaphor, which is a useful sort of lie because it carries a resonance of truth inside it. With any luck, I’ll manage to tease that resonance into some manner of cognitive audibility before all’s said and done here, and the clever idea/minor epiphany that’s been tickling me the last few days will airlift a version of itself into your brain, for you to make of what you will. But let’s get back to my beard.

My beard is, by all accounts, a pretty freakin’ fantastic example of the species. Customers in the bar and random passersby on the street compliment me on it. Women with whom I’m not personally acquainted are, on occasion, unable to stop themselves from touching it. When my girlfriend nuzzles her face up against it she sighs with such contentment you might think she’d just finished a day at the spa with a bath in warm chocolate while a small team of experts rubs her feet and shoulders and sings Pachelbel’s Canon in D in four-part harmony.

Anyway, you get the idea. It’s a good beard, the kind of beard that defines a face, and I am grateful that it grows there because without it I would not look like me, nor be half so pretty as I am with it (that was certainly my opinion when last I shaved it clean; thankfully no records survive of that traumatic period).

But here’s the thing: my beard has a weakness Continue reading “My Beard Is a Lie” →

My Two Cents on the Shutdown

Many people have said and written some very cogent, passionate words on the subject of today’s commencement of the 17th shutdown of the United States Federal Government, which is going to cause a great deal of unnecessary pain and suffering for a staggering number of people and likely derail whatever recovery our national economy has made since the bankers and sociopaths on Wall Street tanked the economy back in 2008. It is entirely the choice of the Republican majority in the House of Representatives that it’s happening. They are, in effect, shooting the hostage to prove that they’re serious about stopping the implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Why would they do that? It’s an important question to ask, I think, and one with a definite, if complicated, answer.

It begins, I think, with the election of Barack Obama. For a significant chunk of the population, that was a real shock, something heretofore impossible, and it represented not only a major electoral defeat, it signaled the emergence of demographic trends that meant the end of their way of life. America was no longer a majority-white, center-right nation. The son of a black man could ascend to the land’s highest office. The easy swagger of the Bush years were over, and had left such a bad taste in our mouths that we all tacitly agreed to forget them. This was not the America they grew up in, the America they loved and believed in with all their hearts, and it freaked them the fuck out. Think about the Tea Party’s early days, their eruption onto the scene as the result of an offhand comment by a finance pundit on CNBC. Remember their passion and outrage. They were (and are) fundamentally incapable of recognizing the election of Barack Obama (or the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) as legitimate, because neither of those things were allowed to happen in the America they believe in.

This was (and remains) an existential crisis for them. Extreme measures are not only permissible, but necessary. The United States federal government has become an occupying force, and invasion from otherwhere, and their duty as citizens of the real America is to resist with whatever means are at their disposal. Continue reading “My Two Cents on the Shutdown” →

The Lightbulb

Had one of those moments yesterday that really makes this whole being a writer thing worth the heartbreak it usually consists of. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, but this is some Sisyphean business most of the time. Push the rock. Push the rock. Push the rock. Why is the rock down the hill again? There’s a reason they say works of art are never finished, only abandoned.

But sometimes, sometimes you get that light bulb, and it shows you something whole enough that you can make a thing out of it, and when it does, oh man, that is some good shit right there. But the switch is only flipped for so long, so when you get that brief illumination, you have to drop what you’re doing and get it down, or you could lose it quick as you found it.

I had that experience yesterday (it’s been awhile). I was in the shower, starting the process of getting ready for work. I had already cleaned myself, and was getting ready to shut off the water and finish my personal toilet when for whatever reason I started thinking about this thing I saw at Burning Man maybe ten years ago, and the guy who had built it, and then I was thinking about Wilhelm Reich, and orgones, and everything just started to snowball from there. A story-frame (and title) crystallized in my brain as if from the aether, and I barely stopped to towel myself off before I ran to the table, still naked, and grabbed a pen and paper. Over the course of maybe eight minutes I scribbled a page and a half synopsis teasing out that frame into a more-or-less complete story arc.

I’ve only had this experience a few times. Continue reading “The Lightbulb” →

A Thing to Remember When Dealing with Nasty People

Got reminded again early on during tonight’s shift of something I’ve been trying to teach myself (and others) for years now, which has, as you might suspect from the title of this post, to do with dealing with particularly nasty people, one of the bigger occupational hazards of working in the Industry.

One of the things you learn early on, and have to learn to deal with the regular occurrence of if you’re going to survive in the Industry, is that some people just can’t seem to help being just extra shitty to you. Everyone who’s ever worked front of house knows who I’m talking about: the people who treat you like a servant, who are bitchy and dissatisfied from the get-go, who do their absolute best to take a shit in the middle of the happy place you have to cultivate and share in order to do your job. Any given night you work, these people will comprise 5-50+% of your clientele, and if you’re not careful, they’ll suck the reservoir of joie de vivre you need to do this kind of work dry.

So what do you do when someone tries to take a dump in your psyche? Continue reading “A Thing to Remember When Dealing with Nasty People” →

A Generational Shift of Which I Do Not Approve

These kids today should get off my damn lawn, at least until they learn how to play on it properly. Seriously, I know it’s trite for old fogies like me to bitch about the younger generations, but this, I think, is a real loss, and, professionally speaking, I’m sick of fking dealing with it.

I was raised by old-school drinkers, children of the Greatest Generation. I remember my father telling me on several occasions that the way he was raised, you drank what you drank, but you held yourself together, and didn’t let on how hammered you were, no matter how hammered you got. I remember, growing up, feeling proud of myself when I could tell he’d been drinking (which wasn’t often; he was a responsible parent). It was always the tiniest slip, a moment of clumsiness you could miss if you weren’t paying attention, and it was rewarding to be on-point enough to spot it when it happened (my sister and I have bonded over this). I’m not saying his example was universal, but there was a respectability to it, and it’s something I think has been lost somewhere along the way.

For one thing, I think, parents stopped teaching their kids how to drink sometime not too long after the generation that raised me. Somewhere around my early adolescence there was a sea-change in the way people in this country parent, and as younger and younger kids come of age, I’ve noticed a sea-change in the way they relate to alcohol as a result. Continue reading “A Generational Shift of Which I Do Not Approve” →