WRITE CLUB - Belknap, Found, 4/24/12

We’ve all seen the flyers. LOST DOG – with plaintive-looking pictures, and offers of rewards, and pleas for information.

When you see that flyer, you have one of two thoughts:

1. That dog took a powder, man – they are never gonna see that thing again. Or:
2. I’m looking at a picture of a dead dog right now. 

But when you see the flyer that says FOUND DOG, then you’re talking about a dog that was so WINNING, the people would not only take the thing home, but they would actually make a flyer.

And the flyer people dig the dog so much, that even though they REALLY wanna keep him, they consider his feelings, and would hate to contribute to his unhappiness, so they post a flyer. But even as they do, they cling to the unexpressed hope that his owners never see it, or that they are persons of such dubious priorities that they don’t want this dog, even though he is the BEST BOY.

So to review:

• Lost Dogs? Smelly morons who in all likelihood are already dead because they were too stupid and unappealing to figure shit out.
• Found Dogs? The most magnetic and lovable animals there are. These dogs will live on in your memory and prompt wistful smiles and feeling of tenderness for the rest of your days. Indeed, years from now, when you’re a different life stage, without a landlord to worry about, and you’re visiting the shelter looking for a dog, in your mind’s eye, it will be that flyer dog – that you search for. 

Look: they don’t do those milk cartons anymore, do they? With the missing kids on the back. You know why? Cause Cinnamon Toast Crunch does not go well with despair.

Lost hair. Lost gloves. Lost dreams. Lost hopes. Lost pennies. Lost at sea. Lost cities. Lost keys. Lost souls. Lost weekends. Lost heroes. Lost memories. Lost generation. Lost highways. Lost glasses. Lost in translation. Lost love. The lost boys of Sudan? ENOUGH.

Things I have lost? They number in the tens of thousands, and they range from ticket stubs and receipts to my own father, and I miss not a goddamn one of them.

Things I have found? They are few in number. But these things have a luster and a persistence and a capacity to tug at the hem of my mind in a way that that lost things never will.

The shell of a robin’s egg.

A cedar box full of time-burnished medals from my grandfather’s naval service.

A series of sand dollars and seashells, trapezoids of sea glass, abraded to perfection.

A snowy owl. Happened upon in a fog-shrouded clearing as the moonlight slipped through the clouds.

This one time? Ten bucks.

The carcass of a four-foot shark. On a Cape Cod beach. The day after we saw Jaws.

A possum, sliced clean through at the waist by a passing freight train – it landed on the flat of the cut. So it looked like a zombie possum that had nosed its way out of the earth, its face a rictus of terror and hatred, and its spindly little flesh-claws splayed in the Nosferatu style.

The only surviving photocopy of my dad’s suicide note, tucked in a file of police reports. The original was destroyed.

In the woods near our house, when I was like12: a marshy and leaf-strewn stack of Playboys – and this was the 70s, mind, when they still featured fully human females – each page needing to be coaxed away from its neighbor, so boggy and crumbly they were. You could spend ten minutes teasing apart a VITALLY important photo spread only to have the most critical components fuse together into a clot of sodden white pulp.

All these and scores of other items - stacked in the cigar box of posterity, the repository for the too-sporadic, the too-infrequent brushes with magic that make life bearable.

Found is discovery and intrepidness; it is the consequence of courage, or at least an awareness sufficient to recognize and snatch at happenstance. At the center of Found is a fondness for adventure, borne of a willingness to get off your ass and LOOK. The Tomb of the Pharoh and the Terracotta Warriors are made plain ONLY to those who get off the goddamn couch.

Look: there’s no ducking loss. We all know this.

The day we buried my grandfather – all the movie funerals can’t prepare you for the compact little box of the cremated, no bigger than a cinder block. It was disorienting to watch him lowered into a hole the size of one you’d dig to bury a toaster. My grandma knelt to stroke the box one final time. As she did so, a gold bracelet slipped off her narrow old lady wrist and into the small pit containing her husband.

She stood and brushed off her knees. “He can have it,” she said.  

My mom – abruptly, with a manic edge – dropped to her knees at the muddy lip of the hole now containing her father, and reached in. She retrieved the shimmering strand of gold.

“You keep it, mom,” she said, setting it in the cove of grandma’s palm and clasping it there.

It had been lost. But now was found.

WRITE CLUB - Belknap, Creation, 3/27/12

You ever see that Michael Douglas picture Falling Down? Where he’s got a flat top and glasses? And he beats dudes to death with a bat? That pretty closely approximates my inner life. I may be a dork; I may be in a short-sleeved dress shirt; but I am filled with avenging fury. When you impede me, in my mind, my glasses are spattered with your blood.

What I mostly want to do is pry the spine out of each asshole that makes modern living such a clot of hassle-prone misery and vexation and beat them into a wet, chunky pile with it.

If it came to my attention that the devil himself was gonna be at like the Aragon or Park West, and he was gonna eat a basket of puppies, I’d think about buying a ticket. I would. I would think about getting a sitter, and going to watch the devil eat puppies.

So. I get it. The allure. Of destruction.

But even though destruction has a visceral appeal that you feel at the very root of your nad-satchel, it wields no real or lasting power.

I have borne witness to creation. I have been present for the birth of my children.

It is cliché I realize to speak of childbirth as miraculous. Which is true, obviously, but is also an idea that has grown so thumb-worn that it has ceased meaning anything.

And however miraculous it may be, childbirth is completely disgusting. A more sickening spectacle you could never hope to see. It is a punishing test of vaginal endurance comparable to shitting a toaster oven or squeezing a double-A battery out of your tear duct.

But then after all the suffering and horribleness that brings a mother’s body to the very brink of destruction, there is this person.

A caterwauling person slathered in womb-snot and clotted placenta, it is true, but a person such as the world has never seen previously. This person, wriggling in protest, is distinct from all other persons before or since, a lion-hearted little person unique among the seven billion on this planet residing, and unique among all persons yet born – but for me, this singularity is not the full measure of the power and majesty of this event.

The FULL weight and wonder of the thing is this:

When my son was born in 2001, he knew us already. He reached toward us from across the room where the nurses were weighing and cleaning him. He heard our voices and he reached toward us. I had been reading aloud to my wife’s belly for months before his arrival. He was like 40 seconds old and he reached for us because he knew us already.

Now. You may believe that what I take to be reaching was just some infantile conniption – but I will go to my rapidly advancing grave knowing that it was the dawn of his consciousness and that he was in his preverbal way attempting to convey that we were known to him and that he wished to be near us.

And then seven months later, the towers came down. I was clutching him in my arms as I watched the second plane plow into the second tower. And it was horrifying, obviously. But it was rendered more horrifying, or the horror was etched more sharply because of the yielding little body in my arms. There is a kind of weight specific to babies – a gelatinous helplessness, a boneless and witless heft. A baby is a like a goatskin bag of wine – if you don’t exercise care or your attention lapses, the bag will drop and burst open. But neither can you hold too tightly the bag – if you clutch it too fiercely, it will pop.

Holding your own baby, you grow conditioned to it, this hammocking action. This cradling becomes habitual and unnoticed by you, almost – your baby becomes like an appendage of its own – a fattened Popeye arm. But when you are holding that baby and you are witnessing the worst fucking thing that you have ever seen – that hammocking embrace becomes suddenly the most mindful and attentive thing you ever have done. It becomes the only thing for which you are suited and you feel as you watch this horrific thing that you never, ever wish to stop holding this baby. Because it is all you know to do.

In the years intervening, people have often asked me: “Dude. Why are you such a combative dickface who is totally ripshit all the time?”

As much as anything – the awfulness of my family history, the quagmire of my years squandered in drink, the unbearable shittiness of people and their unrelenting campaign of assholery and willful ignorance clearly meant to grind us all down – it is that moment.

That baffled and powerless moment where I held my fat-legged son and watched the end of the world – because it was in that moment, I see now, when I resolved to fight my way toward believing that this fat-legged little person, and all the others like him, was more potent and lasting than the column of fire and the shards of steel and the screams of the fallen.

The victories in this fight are fleeting, and only for skirmishes. Victory in the campaign will never be mine. Victory in the campaign will elude me forever. But my choice is to fight, or to succumb. And that is no choice at all.

WRITE CLUB - Belknap, Robber Baron, 2/28/12

It is the rich who can claim credit for all progress in this nation.

It was the silken-hosed and powder-wigged British seeking to extract ever-greater tribute from the Colonies that sparked the Revolution.

It was mustachioed and mutton-chopped railroad magnates who brought the Coolies and Irishmen to heel with ax handles and pistol shots that tamed the West and brought civilization to a savage land.

It was the waist-coated steel tycoons and their brick-toting strikebreakers that kept the roiling and swarthy immigrant masses in line and built the modern cities you ingrates live in.

I could go on.

These hooligans of the so-called Occupy Movement would do well to try to further concentrate capital at the top, if they ever wish to see their utopian pipe dream come to pass.

It is ONLY through the excesses of the Robber Baron that the rabble get roused and take to the streets.

Look here: if I have some opulent means of conveyance – a coal-fired velocipede, say, or a wood-burning dirigible – loaded with my concubines and the rest of my retinue, and we head to the hippodrome to place a wager on the cock fights, that conveyance can prove costly to operate, to say nothing of how noisy and soot-belching such engines can be.

Well what if I were to tell you that I and my associates have hit upon a source of fuel that is both virtually inexhaustible AND that is free for the harvesting on nearly any street corner in the world? What would you say THEN? Why, you would commend me for extricating this once great nation from the barbarous and dusky clutches of Arabian potentates and their control of the world’s petroleum.

Simply put: my associates and I have devised a simple means of converting engines to run on clean-burning peasant-flesh.

Why, with the peasants of a single province of Burma or the Congo, I could fuel my whaling fleet for an entire year.

At a stroke, we have attained energy independence, and have solved the more pressing Peasant Problem, as well.

It has grown so bad that when I send my chauffeur on a simple errand like fetching brass fittings from the purveyor of hardware, the auto is BESET by a dragoon of tattered hoboes laying their oily hands upon the chrome surround of the rumble seat.

I say why not harvest these fallen men and put them to use? Why are we not rendering their ill-spent and torpid lives purposeful? Why are we not butchering them and using them for fuel? I’ll TELL you why: TOO MUCH REGULATION at the Federal level.

On the face of it, I’ll concede my proposal is bold – but I think once you’ve learned its many virtues, you’ll find yourself unable to vote against it. My adversary this evening has / will no doubt plucked upon your heartstrings. Do not be taken in. I am appealing to your reason – I am appealing to your higher and more rational self.

Further, I am here to assure you that your insistence on the “dignity of all human life” is a relic of a bygone era. There are seven BILLION persons on the planet, most of whom were born on foreign soil.

It is past time that we recognize this singular moment of exploitatunity.

May I say to the more squeamish among you that my proposal is not restricted to the use of peasants as a renewable source of inexpensive fuel – far from it. My intention is that we take our cue from the savages of the Western plains – like the buffalo, I say we use every part of the peasant.

For example, did you know that by rendering the fat off boiled peasant babies, one is able to create a supple mustache wax without peer or equal? What remains can serve as an axle grease, or as a sealant for the deck of one’s yacht.

And for the business people among us: at the negotiating table, who can dispute the value of wearing a necklace of human ears?

And if you’ve not sampled peasant liver pâté, then you quite simply have not lived – I can further attest from my own observation that their days spent in the fattening pens are among the very happiest of their short lives.

For the style-conscious – peasant-leather spats are as spruce-looking as any you currently own, and peasant-skin gloves are so soft and yielding, they make calfskin feel like you’ve stuffed your hand down the gullet of an emu that’s been gorging on ground glass.

For the sport hunter – there is no more cunning game than the Street Urchin. They will keep for several weeks’ time in your root cellar – invite your friends out for a weekend of shooting. It’s not only great fun, but I can tell you this: my island compound has been poacher-free ever since we installed a garland of human teeth along the property line.

All these and a thousand other uses can be found for this bounty that sits right under our noses. If we but apply our intellect to the judicious use of the shirking classes, in a decade’s time we will have transformed the world.

Ladies and Gentlemen: to find against my recommendation regarding the responsible stewardship of this untapped resource is to name yourself an enemy of progress.

WRITE CLUB - Belknap, Black, 1/31/12

It will not escape your notice that I am white.

But I am not SO white that you need to land on the “H.“ White. So while it might be true that I am a white man, I am not The White Man.

Having grown up in Massachusetts, though, I have spent a lot of time NEAR The White Man. I grew up in a town called Amherst, named after Lord Jeffrey Amherst, a commander of British forces during the French and Indian War. A commander who authorized the delivery of blankets infected with smallpox to the Ottawa tribe in 1763.

Which is what The White Man calls innovation. Because in the mind of The White Man, there are two kinds of people:  Human. And Non-White.

Let me emphasize again: while I am inescapably a white man, I am not, nor shall I ever be The White Man.

Not only would I never volunteer, but I am prevented from ever becoming The White Man. I do not come from money.

It is Class and Capital that flavor the Goulash of Whiteness. I have neither. Consulting The White Man Glossary, we find that Class and Capital are what you and I would Oppression and Thievery.

It is The White Man who commits genocide wherever he makes landfall as surely as it is The White Man who starts a fucking lacrosse program at every school his children colonize. The White Man is the cause of Eric fucking Clapton, John fucking Mayer, Frank fucking Zappa, and all annoying manner of guitar-based beating off.

The White Man owns every basketball team, and he can watch gravity-defying miracles performed on the court far below his skybox, and still speak of a bygone era of the more “brainy” play of Bob Cousy and Jerry West.

The White Man sells cheap handguns to the desperate and then blames rap lyrics and baggy pants for all the toddlers getting shot down. The White Man blames hiphop for his crimes AND he’ll send the black reporter to cover the Senate hearings with a straight fucking face.

The White Man is available in three flavors: banker, date rapist, and date rapist banker, or serial date rapist. Each of these flavors answers to the name “Job Creator.” Newt Gingrich. Perfect example. You know why his hair’s that way? His skin is insufficient to contain the full measure of his whiteness.

The White Man appropriates every bit of culture on the planet, leaches all the cool out it, and sells it back to you. The fact that I can say the word “jazz” and anybody on the face of the Earth will see the Jeri-curl head of Kenny fucking G. blowing on that pin-dick sax of his is a testament to the rapacious and culture-killing power of The White Man.

My condemning The White Man this is NOT white guilt. LIBERAL guilt compels me to worry that I’m inadvertently perpetuating a patrician and racialized narrative of oppression by displacing the brown-skinned peoples who are its rightful inheritors. WHITE guilt leads to handguns with a seventeen-shot clip because The White Man is always in danger of being attacked by a mob seeking justice, for he is a whore-hearted demon cock.

If you suspect for a second that The White Man does not make everything worse wherever He goes, that The White Man cannot take a horrifying situation and render it even more distressing and awful and unfair, you need look no further than the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. This is from NPR.org – another way you can tell I’m a lowercase white man:

“When the quake struck at 4:53 p.m. on Jan. 12, Signal FM was playing ‘Hotel California.’ The Earth groaned and the building shuddered, but just before the DJ ran out, he had the presence of mind to hit the "repeat" button.

So for the first 30 minutes of Port-au-Prince's descent into hell, the only thing you could hear on the radio was the Eagles' standard — over and over and over.”

Now. A half hour in the immediate wake of a deadly earthquake is a horrible way to spend your time. But a half hour in the immediate wake of a deadly earthquake with “Hotel California” playing on fucking repeat is an unendurable hellscape from which light and hope cannot escape. It’s a fucking White Hole that extinguishes everything good and true.

I’d sooner be crushed under the rubble of my collapsing house than listen to the goddamn Eagles – because a rubble-crushing is mercifully swift; and even if it’s not, I’d rather stare at my own jagged fucking femur piercing my pant leg for EIGHT HOURS before I bleed out than listen to eight fucking seconds of “Hotel California.” Like any right-thinking person.

I know I’m supposed to have Black in this bout, and have spent most of my time running down White, but listen: everybody’s horrible. It’s just that the White Man is clearly the MOST horrible. By a country fucking mile.

Black people: stop shooting each other. You are not Dick Cheney and therefore cannot avoid prosecution and have your victim, whom you shot in his fucking face, apologize to you publically.

Black men: stick around and parent your children. If you do, then MAYBE they’ll stop shooting everybody.

Black people: quit it with the weird made-up names. Can we please just agree that the maximum number of times the letter “Q” appears in a name is not to exceed one?  

That’s about it. No more shooting, dads don’t be dirtbags, and ease up on the weird names. But even if you DON’T do any of that, you’ll never be as bad as The White Man.

WRITE CLUB - Belknap, No Thanks, 11/29/11

Note: the Edward here referenced is the fearsome Edward Thomas-Herrera, my opponent in this bout.

Long time ago, a friend told me this story. It is a story of thanks, and is therefore unusual.

A Russian guy – this was back in Iron Curtain times, so he was a Soviet guy – comes to the United States. He defected I guess, so it was like Moscow on the Hudson, but free of Robin Williams, so it’s a FAR less annoying story. Guy arrives at this bustling airport – LaGuardia, maybe, or JFK – doesn’t matter. The guy knows nobody in the U.S. He has no people here. There’s nobody to come collect him and shepherd him through this disorienting new world he’s been disgorged into. So he’s staggering through this garish airport and there’s a throng of strangers and signs he can’t read and announcements he can’t understand. The guy is at a loss – he feels totally dislocated. He feels abandoned and adrift. Plus, he’s hungry. Long flight from – I don’t know, let’s say Minsk. And all this Soviet guy knows is like black bread and vodka, so American shopping is WAY more than he’s equipped for. So the guy goes to a kiosk and he is TOTALLY overwhelmed by the neon Doritos and Zagnut bars and those orange circus peanuts – guy has no idea what any of this shit is. But then he sees little plastic cups of yogurt. Guy knows yogurt. So he buys a thing of yogurt and he slumps into a bench, and he’s spooning this yogurt into his mouth that’s slackened by the overkill all around him.

He gets to the bottom of the container. And there is this miraculous red jelly – this sweet, summery little dollop of fruity goodness at the bottom of the cup. The guy has only known plain yogurt all his life. He has ONLY had lumpy, sour gulag yogurt. And he comes to America and gets served this mild, textureless cup of uniform excellence that has this sweet buried treasure of unaccountable deliciousness. The guy is beaming.

Which is sensational and marvelous and terrific. Of course it is.

But the reason this story stuck with me for like 15 years? It is an anomaly. We have all had these moments that fleetingly imbue the world with more luster and quicken its pulse. The reason we notice these moments is that they stand in such stark contrast to the fifty-six thousand shitty moments that surround it on all sides.

For every INSTANT of “Wow, that’s amazing” there are HOURS of “Fuck this – are you kidding me?”

For every buoyant moment where your load is lightened and the way seems clear, there can be whole days where you want to fill a pillowcase with canned sardines and beat the piss out of everyone in your path. For every moment where you feel certain that we live in a benevolent universe guided by a Divine hand, there can be months where you wanna drown yourself in a toilet full of Mitch McConnell’s turtle shit. For every moment where the light of reason seems it won’t be snuffed out, there can be whole years where the caterwauling mob threatens to consign us all to a future where we live in squalid and sulphurous underground burrows and we eat uncooked grubs by the light a guttering fire fueled with the few final pages of the last remaining books.

Look, I’m not Bartleby the Scrivener up here – I would not ALWAYS prefer not to. But my bullshit detector is exquisitely sensitive, and hair-triggered, so it does not permit me to say “Thanks” wherever “Fuck, No” is required.

Those moments of thanks? Those moments are easy. Those moments are cake. They require nothing of you.

You know who says “No Thanks”? The 99%. And Woody Guthrie. And Tom Joad, and Henry Fonda AS Tom Joad. Scout and Atticus Finch. Robin Hood. And George fucking Bailey. Plus, R2D2, and two of the Ghostbusters.

Tellya who else says “No Thanks” – Tiananmen Square Guy.

So if you’re pleased with the way things are going, if your allegiance is with Mr. Burns and Darth Vader and Mr. Potter and the Koch brothers Cthulu, you go right on ahead – vote “Thanks”. Cause in YOUR world, things are aces. But if you want to be an advocate for positive change in this world, you have to vote “No Thanks” – you HAVE to.

I’m with Dan Savage. I want it to get better. Edward doesn’t. Edward likes things just as they are. Edward LIKES intolerance and hatred. He’s crazy for it – can’t get enough of the stuff.

And you know who else would vote “Thanks”? Anthrax. And that dew drop of snot that’ll be hanging off the end of your nose till next April.

When you get to the front of the chow line and they ladle out the stew full of snouts and hooves, you say “No Thanks”.

When you work hard and play by the rules, and they still bulldoze your house while you’re in there brushing your teeth, you say “No Thanks”.

When your daughter is possessed and her head’s spinning around and she’s puking all over the place, you say “No, sir, Mr. Devil – No Thanks”. Or maybe you’re PRO-Satan, like my opponent here.

The majority of moments – the moments that bore and exasperate you, the moments that vex and baffle you, the moments of defeat and outrage, the moments that test you – these are the moments that teach you what you’re made of.

It may seem counterintuitive – perverse, even – to ask that you find in favor of the many millions of moments that make you say Screw This, Up Yours, No Thanks. But THESE are the moments that stitch together the quilt of human progress. If you wish to find for complacency, by all means, vote “Thanks”. But do so with OPEN EYES, friends, because “Thanks” is Ann Coulter having demon babies with Rick Perry. I don’t know about you – but I say “No Thanks” to those demon babies. I hope you will, too. If anybody needs us, we’ll be over here, saying “No Thanks” with Jon Stewart and Obi Wan Kenobi.