G has never like clowns, Barney the dinosaur, and Santa. Likes the Tooth Fairy and Santa as concepts and business transactions, but creeped out by the reality of confronting the figures. Probably the last year he believes in these fellows. I’m on that To Be Formerly Magical List, along with a whole bunch of other people. I’d better enjoy it while I can!
I wish I had a clone army. I would have them do my bidding for a year and set up a nice bankroll to retire on, and then send them all off on their own lives. I’d be curious to see what happened to all of me. Would they marry or would they live the single life? Who would they end up with -women who look exactly like J? Would they find tragedy or happiness? Would they be driving Porsches? We’d keep in touch by Facebook.
Status update from #231,221: #231,221 is at werk and really wishing he could play golf.
Status update from #5,234: #5,234 is wishes there were more snack breaks during a Costco workday.
Status update from #16,213: #16,213 is wishing there was a third kind of Cheeto.
Mobile upload from #421,231: Pictures from Spokane with Candy and her sisters
I could ask the best of them to stay around and help Jennifer around the house. I might keep one by my side to mix drinks, crack jokes, and beat up people for me. They’d all show up for G’s birthday with presents.
I asked my wife about this, how convenient it would be for her. It’s almost as efficient as polygamy in getting more help for her around the house. I got a lecture about how awful that would be, how we’d see more cluttered deskspace, underwear on the door knobs, and unflushed toilets than even I could tolerate. They’d leave the lights on, not use coasters on the woodwork, and generally avoid work by “working” incessantly on the computer. No, one of me is enough for her.
This is a very funny musical adaptation of Governor Palin’s (my favorite ten handicapper) Couric interview. See in it what you will -it is a brilliant Rorschach test.
When Christopher Buckley, son of the William F. Buckley (formidable eminence grise of the Republican Party), was fired by the National Review, the magazine his father founded, for backing Barack Obama, I saw that it was a symptom of a sickness in the Republican Party. Buckley is no liberal. He does not identify with government control of free trade, and he does not believe in the creation of a nanny state. I watched his interviews on the evening talk show circuit with interest.
He is a Yalie like his father, and speaks in the elevated parlance of prep school essayists. When I left my solidly Republican voting record in 2000, it was because George W. Bush couldn’t speak the English language in a way that I felt comfortable with. Part of me thought, this has to be an act -a scion of a patrician New England family gabbing on like the owner of a Chevy dealership from Plano. But I decided it was not, and this along with the Bush campaign’s behavior to McCain lead me to check off Gore. Florida 2000 and the events of the last eight years have left me completely out of the Republican Party. It has left me no party to identify with. Looking back this past election season, I was wrong about grammar and intelligence. Mea culpa.
To the extant that you speak a certain way reflects your upbringing, but I believe it is a also a conscious choice. Intelligence has nothing to do with the way your mouth flaps. When I was growing up in Florida, I easily picked up the patois of Northern Florida, which is really an extension of Southern Georgia. By choosing to speak in a way that interfaces easily with the surroundings, language is eliminated as a barrier. Actions and character are far more important than diagrammable sentences.
I’ll leave you with another one of my youtube favorites:
The first domesticated animal was not the dog. It was the husband. Early man was likely a wild creature, larger and stronger than the woman. It was with much difficulty and many generations of clubbed heads to domesticate the husband. Fact was, it was the more docile of the men that hung around and the exclusively paired off man-woman unit had a survival advantage in the savannah over the usual style of primate relations.
The aggression and anti-social tendencies were bred out of men, and husband whispering skills, the innate ones, increased. This allowed for monogamy to prevail and is the established pattern for our species. Our biology demands it -we don’t know when our women are fertile -their vulvae (vulvitae?) don’t turn huge with bright red and blue colors like the baboons’ do, so we are left to guess and protect the woman against couplings with other males while exclusively tending to her to insure that the offspring are ours. Thus the nuclear familial unit.
Cultures evolved over these biologic imperatives to determine how families, clans, and tribes, and nations interacted. But at the very core is the untamed man -the echoes of which we see in our 1-5 year old boys who we “socialize” to not hit people to get their way, to not pull hair, and to obey their mothers.
Of course, with our lifespans increased many multiples beyond the 15-20 years of early primates, we are paired for life which means that the relationship extends beyond the weaning and sending off of the offspring, beyond the reproductive age of the women, and well into our senescence. The result is that men have about 65-75 years to shunt testosterone driven urges into “civilized activities.” The challenge is how to survive in face of the five denials of the long march marriage.
Denial of Solitude -This comes early, with requests for conversation and chores after a long day of hunting and gathering. The cave man only wants to lumber down to the deepest reaches of the cave and draw on the walls, and carve sculpture out of deer bone (see below, image of his wife of 20 years).
Denial of Comfort -The inevitable onset of refractoriness of desire on the part of women and men results in a waning of connubial relations. The cave man only wants to lumber down to the deepest reaches of the cave and …well, you can only imagine.
Denial of Grooming -The hotness of the young she-primate that the caveman paired with ends soon after a few young ones come around. The hair is no longer bunched up with dung like she used to when they were courting. The clay face paint -not even there -just bits of yesterday’s mammoth clinging to her neck. It’s called letting yourself go, but you can see that the cave man had something to say about it (see carving below).
Denial of Male Fellowship -Despite this lack of desire on the part of the cave-woman, she is very suspicious of all the time that the cave man spends away with his hunting and gathering buddies, and assigns many chores -carrying out of animal carcasses, beating of the mammoth hides, and grooming her mother of ticks and fleas.
Denial of Porsche -self explanatory. Very sad. Poor cave man.
Addendum: apparently this has data as someone just published this obvious fact. It relates to species self domesticating to arrive at more sociability. Link here.
Reference
County Dock, St. John's River
Growing up in Florida, I wished we lived on the St. John’s River. It was an unusually fecund river being a tidal estuary -meaning the ocean and river mixed in the waters that coursed through Jacksonville leaving it brackish and home to both freshwater and marine wildlife. At the county dock, which was built and rebuilt once during my childhood and twice more since I have left Jacksonville, you could fish and gaze on the waters and be hypnotized by the press of life. The waters are a deep tea color from the tannins absorbed on the water’s trek from cold springs in the center of the state. It is one of the few north flowing rivers of note, the Amazon and the Nile being others. You could catch blue crabs with chicken parts tied to strings that you dangled off the dock. My bike once fell into the river and I jumped in, about neck high and the feeling of my feet on the unseeable, my soles touching bottom, on the velvety softness of primordial soup interspersed with snail shells, buried tree branches, beer bottles, chicken bones, lingers to this day. The floor of the river was warm like the back of a woman, and as I stood lifting my bike over my head, my feet sank into the mud below the hot layer to a cooler layer of clay that suspended me. I could have stayed rooted in that river forever, with the water high, peering out at the land with my large saucer shaped eyes.
Men tend to get angry about small things like particles of sand clinging to the skin between the fingers (above), and the bigger picture gets lost. But if you can distract him with small shiny gadgets or the keys to a Porsche, the moment passes and all memory of it will be lost. Women, on the other hand, get angry about big picture issues, and stay angry, and have the amazing capacity to get angry again if the issue is brought up, even after years and years have passed. I just saw a couple in my office who are celebrating their 65th anniversary, and I asked what the secret to their success was. The man who hadn’t spoken a word the entire visit, piped up, “you’ve got to give up and surrender.” And he raised up both of his arms. Very funny, only the young lady was not laughing.
Chimp Brain
One of the things that happens to men of a certain age is that we really notice that our minds are degenerating. It’s as if we left them on the kitchen counter one morning after turning forty, and slowly over the days and years, you see mold growing, and flies buzzing, and then in a horrible time-lapse progression, you get an explosion of maggots and eventually a puddle of goo.
It is hard not to feel this happening as I write, and not be a little saddened by it all. You see, when you hit forty, it’s like reaching the top of a hill. You’ve spent your entire life getting there, working to get to a point where work, serious man-work, is present all the time and you get terribly efficient and good at it. And then you look up and see the vista all around you, and you see that it’s just a one-way ride down the hill. You don’t even need to pedal.
People respond differently to this Kobayashi Maru moment. Some buy Porsches. Some run off, lose a lot a weight, and then buy a Porsche. Some navel gaze obsessively, offending many in the process. The best way to deal with this is complete suppression and utter denial, with hair replacement as necessary. Golfism helps a great deal as well.
I have read that President-Elect Obama learned about being African-American through the lens of television. I am not surprised. All land mammals take cues from the environment and do internal, brain-stem level assessments based on first impressions. That’s why some dogs bark when I approach. That’s why the groundhog on Wakonda #11 rears up on it hind legs and hisses at me (I’m going to get it and turn it into a hat). That’s also why I don’t wear a Batman costume to work.
That is also why I bring up this book: The Preppy Handbook. It was written as satire, but in fact, it was a cultural Rosetta Stone, Enigma Machine, and decoder ring wrapped up in a pocketable volume. Being an immigrant, I had no clue as to how to dress or talk in the social cauldron of a southern prep school. Having just come from Brooklyn was no help -I may as well have arrived from Mars.
Being an analytical yet typical teen, I set upon a quest to break out of non-conformity, and did it the only way I knew how -by research and keen observation. Funny thing was, this book was available at my school’s library, and I checked it out for about …26 years. It was like reading Jane Goodall’s field notes, and it was with the same determination that I jumped into the world of tassel loafers, khaki pants, and button down Oxford shirts. It took Jane about a year before the chimpanzee’s of Gombe let her sit among them. It took me about the same amount of time before the inner ring of high school students let me lounge around with them at the gazebo on our sprawling campus.
Ultimately, it was about one thing. Okay, maybe two or three things, but I was still too young to even think that the third thing was possible. But who knew? Knowing what I do now, I have no regrets.
A long line of pilgrims stretched around the glass cube waiting their turn to descend the glass staircase into the shrine. They came from all corners of the world with a purpose in their mind, an apple in their heart, and their credit card in their hand. Once inside, they circled the space under the plaza, from Genius Bar, to Macbooks, to Macbook Pro, to iPods, to iMacs, then to Mac Pro’s, to the final station: the iPhone. They smiled, and felt comfortable in their knowledge that they had come to a good place. While other stores offered 30-70% discounts for electronics made by lesser manufacturers, this place offered only 2-5% off only their least popular items. It didn’t matter, because these were the faithful. There are in fact documentaries and academic papers written about this cult (link). For myself, I can’t fathom why anyone would consider joining this religion when you could be a golfist or a Presbyterian.
Shown is a can of SPAM, which took a big hit during the nineties after junk e-mail (about p3n1s 3nlarg3m3nt, p0rn, and millions of dollars stuck in an account in Nigeria) was named after it. Fact is, for Koreans of a certain age, it meant not just sustenance, but luxury. During the Korean War, when hunger struck the fleeing and bombed out Korean population, SPAM in the form of government issue C-rations, was a treasure more dear than chocolate. I remember that it was very expensive, much more so per pound than fresh meat, and to give a case of it was the kind of thing you gave at weddings of very important relatives. That or the cans of pineapple rings, but I digress.
I suspect it had to do with the fact that it goes so well with cold rice. Sliced thin and fried in its own juices (and fat) on a grill to a crispiness on both sides, a slice of SPAM gives instant flavor to a bowl of leftover cold rice in ways that cannot be described. It is comfort food that is existential, bringing rush of memories of childhood when as a child of privilege in Korea, I was fed not only the finest fruits and vegetables, but meat, and the best meat in the form of SPAM.
I googled its shelf life, and most reports come back that as long as it has kept its vacuum, its probably still good to eat (link). Meaning as long as you keep it in a cool dry place, you can keep it for years, possibly decades.
Bachelor mock-fried rice:
cold rice from Chinese takeout, butter, soy sauce, sesame seeds (optional), black pepper, two fried eggs, spam. Melt butter into the cold rice in a skillet. Drizzle soy sauce. Separate pan, fry two eggs over easy and enough slices of spam for your man appetite. Put done eggs on rice and mix with spoon until eggs are fragmented. Put spam on side in bowl. Season with sesame seeds and black pepper. Go to TV and enjoy.
Golfism -life is a metaphor for golf 