(THE DARK K)NOTES FROM A FRIDAY AFTERNOON
fighting the crime of my mind.
For your consideration: another curious collection
of thoughts, reactions, and observations that didn't make it into a full-length
post this week. So they're sort of like all these unexpected, consecutive days
of sunshine we've had in Pittsburgh. But without the damned humidity...
• I'm starting to get the emails. I knew it was only a matter of time, but they're still coming a little earlier than I thought. The we know you don't like Obama, but you can't like McCain either, and you're living in a swing state, so you know what you have to do. They're earnest, and they're passionate -- one in particular is so much of both that I'll be reprinting it verbatim tomorrow; stay tuned -- and they're a marked improvement over all the insults and invectives I usually receive from supporters of a candidate who believes American politics are too filled with insults and invectives, but they occasionally miss the point and, so far at least, are not especially persuasive. Compelling, yes. Persuasive, no. If only because I am not, as you might have guessed, someone who takes his vote lightly. And so the you must help undo the last eight years of mistakes by voting for a guy you fear will make plenty of new ones gambit is only marginally less onerous than the you must do your duty and stand by the Democrats argument. Neither one is likely to send me sprinting for the polls. Or anywhere else.
• In November 2004, for the first time in my life, I voted not for one candidate, but against another. And I didn't much like the way it felt. In November 2006, I did it again. And it felt even worse. And so I told myself I would never do it again. I know, as Sean Connery taught me, that once you say never, you can never say never again. And I have no desire to compound what felt like two big mistakes (compromises? sell outs?) with the commission of a third. And that's why, if the election were held tomorrow, I would not vote for either man.
• Yeah. Okay. I hear you. So please spare me the you must vote or you're a bad American/person/citizen bit. I happen to believe that along with the right to vote comes the right not to vote. Because in the end, though we all must live with the sum of our choices, each of us must also live with the spirit of our own individual choice. And right now, I simply could not live with either.
• One more note about that awful Barack Obama commercial about which I wrote last Sunday: the problem, in a nutshell, with those sorts of ads is that the characters talk to each other like they're 10, and they talk to us like we're 5.
• When campaigns -- and I mean both of them -- think so little of their audience's intelligence, it's no wonder they should think us also incapable of distinguishing satire from reality.
• If both sides are aiming that low, it's no wonder they've missed me.
• That said, it is nice to see that The New Yorker will be making amends this week.
• An Obama supporter with a sense of humor -- hey, they really do exist! -- watched the new Jib Jab video on Wednesday and then emailed: Tell me Obama on the unicorn isn't the funniest part of the day. :) I responded that, yeah, it was pretty great, but that I thought it finished second to McCain just keeling over in the hospital corridor. That caught me off guard and, unlike anything else in the video, actually made me laugh out loud.
• The thing about that video, as it was about the last couple, is that it just wasn't very good. Or fresh. Or inspired. It's just more -- and so in many ways less -- of the same. They struck pure gold with the first one, but for my eye and ear, they’ve unearthed mostly silt, and just a couple of tiny, shiny nuggets, since.
• I meant to call your attention to this on Sunday but never got back to it: Dennis Roddy's typically brilliant, positively heartbreaking piece on the late Ricky Nguyen -- a most unlikely subject, it seems, for so much sympathy, much less empathy. It reminded me a lot of a another piece he did about a year and a half ago on a lost soul named Molly Jean Dilts. And so it reminded me that, among his many remarkable gifts as both writer and reporter, we can count chief among them a lovely ability to find, and then to communicate, the battered and broken lives of people like this. And to so do in a way that makes them not just emotionally but even physically uncomfortable to read.
• As usual, Dennis is operating on his own, rarefied level at the Post-Gazette. Or anywhere else, for that matter.
• The TWM Great, Unexpected Ending to an Otherwise Straight-Up Paragraph Award this week goes to Slate's Farhad Manjoo, for this passage from a piece on the new iPhone applications: They can also use the fantastic Apple-produced app that turns your iPhone into a wireless remote control for iTunes. Where you once had to trudge five or six feet to your computer in order to search through your music library, now you can do it from the couch. I'm waiting for a whole family of such remote apps—soon we'll use our iPhones to control multiroom music players, wireless security systems, and unmanned Predator drones.
• Have I mentioned how much I hate the new Entertainment Weekly magazine layout? I haven't? Okay. I hate it. Hate it, hate it, hate it. At its current rate of change, the publication will, only one or two years hence, publish nothing but photos and white space. The only remaining text will be on the address labels.
• Which, if they're still employing Diablo Cody as a columnist, will be fine by me.
• Ever have one of those moments when you're alone, and you're listening and maybe singing along to a song you know and love, and some emotion sneaks up from deep down inside you, from some place you knew you had but, until the song caught you at just the right time, you hadn't really been paying much attention to? And then, before you realize what's happening, and long before you could ever hope to stop it, it just reaches up and grabs you and damned near rips your heart out? I had one of those moments this morning, listening to Drive-By Truckers on my way home from dropping off Ethan at his day-camp bus stop. Some combination of that, and talking to my Mom -- who lives, of course, on the other side of the state, and who, along with my father, I don't get to see nearly as often as I like -- for a long time last night, and all the thinking I've lately been doing about all the best parts of my childhood, and missing the holy hell out of Adam, who's finally coming home tomorrow from two weeks away at camp and who's going to high school next month and who's growing up just too God-damned fast, made Jason Isbell's Outfit reduce me to a suddenly blubbering mass of father and son on the front seat of the 4Runner. I'm pretty sure you had to be there, and I know you had to be me, to fully appreciate it. But it's still a wonderful song, one I'm pretty sure any parent or child out there will appreciate it, and so it seems like a fine place to close for today...
You want to grow up to paint houses like me? A trailer in my yard till you're 23?
You want to be old after 42 years? Keep dropping the hammer and grinding the gears.
Well, I used to go out in a Mustang, a 302 Mach One in green.
Me and your Mama made you in the back, and I sold it to buy her a ring.
And I learned not to say much of nothing, and I figure you already know,
But in case you don’t or maybe forgot, I’ll lay it out real nice and slow.
Don’t call what you're wearing an outfit. Don’t ever say your car is broke.
Don’t worry about losing your accent; a Southern Man tells better jokes.
Have fun but stay clear of the needle. Call home on your sister’s birthday.
Don’t tell 'em you’re bigger than Jesus. Don’t give it away.
Five years in a St. Florian foundry; they call it Industrial Park.
Then hospital maintenance and Tech School, just to memorize Frigidaire parts.
But I got to missing your Mama, and I got to missing you too,
So I went back to painting for my old man, and I guess that’s what I’ll always do.
So don’t let 'em take who you are boy, and don’t try to be who you ain’t.
And don’t let me catch you in Kendale with a bucket of wealthy-man’s paint.
Don’t call what you're wearing an outfit. Don’t ever say your car is broke.
Don’t sing with a fake British accent, and don’t act like your family’s a joke.
Have fun, but stay clear of the needle. Call home on your sister’s birthday.
Don’t tell 'em you’re bigger than Jesus. Don’t give it away.
Don’t give it away.
• I'm starting to get the emails. I knew it was only a matter of time, but they're still coming a little earlier than I thought. The we know you don't like Obama, but you can't like McCain either, and you're living in a swing state, so you know what you have to do. They're earnest, and they're passionate -- one in particular is so much of both that I'll be reprinting it verbatim tomorrow; stay tuned -- and they're a marked improvement over all the insults and invectives I usually receive from supporters of a candidate who believes American politics are too filled with insults and invectives, but they occasionally miss the point and, so far at least, are not especially persuasive. Compelling, yes. Persuasive, no. If only because I am not, as you might have guessed, someone who takes his vote lightly. And so the you must help undo the last eight years of mistakes by voting for a guy you fear will make plenty of new ones gambit is only marginally less onerous than the you must do your duty and stand by the Democrats argument. Neither one is likely to send me sprinting for the polls. Or anywhere else.
• In November 2004, for the first time in my life, I voted not for one candidate, but against another. And I didn't much like the way it felt. In November 2006, I did it again. And it felt even worse. And so I told myself I would never do it again. I know, as Sean Connery taught me, that once you say never, you can never say never again. And I have no desire to compound what felt like two big mistakes (compromises? sell outs?) with the commission of a third. And that's why, if the election were held tomorrow, I would not vote for either man.
• Yeah. Okay. I hear you. So please spare me the you must vote or you're a bad American/person/citizen bit. I happen to believe that along with the right to vote comes the right not to vote. Because in the end, though we all must live with the sum of our choices, each of us must also live with the spirit of our own individual choice. And right now, I simply could not live with either.
• One more note about that awful Barack Obama commercial about which I wrote last Sunday: the problem, in a nutshell, with those sorts of ads is that the characters talk to each other like they're 10, and they talk to us like we're 5.
• When campaigns -- and I mean both of them -- think so little of their audience's intelligence, it's no wonder they should think us also incapable of distinguishing satire from reality.
• If both sides are aiming that low, it's no wonder they've missed me.
• That said, it is nice to see that The New Yorker will be making amends this week.
• An Obama supporter with a sense of humor -- hey, they really do exist! -- watched the new Jib Jab video on Wednesday and then emailed: Tell me Obama on the unicorn isn't the funniest part of the day. :) I responded that, yeah, it was pretty great, but that I thought it finished second to McCain just keeling over in the hospital corridor. That caught me off guard and, unlike anything else in the video, actually made me laugh out loud.
• The thing about that video, as it was about the last couple, is that it just wasn't very good. Or fresh. Or inspired. It's just more -- and so in many ways less -- of the same. They struck pure gold with the first one, but for my eye and ear, they’ve unearthed mostly silt, and just a couple of tiny, shiny nuggets, since.
• I meant to call your attention to this on Sunday but never got back to it: Dennis Roddy's typically brilliant, positively heartbreaking piece on the late Ricky Nguyen -- a most unlikely subject, it seems, for so much sympathy, much less empathy. It reminded me a lot of a another piece he did about a year and a half ago on a lost soul named Molly Jean Dilts. And so it reminded me that, among his many remarkable gifts as both writer and reporter, we can count chief among them a lovely ability to find, and then to communicate, the battered and broken lives of people like this. And to so do in a way that makes them not just emotionally but even physically uncomfortable to read.
• As usual, Dennis is operating on his own, rarefied level at the Post-Gazette. Or anywhere else, for that matter.
• The TWM Great, Unexpected Ending to an Otherwise Straight-Up Paragraph Award this week goes to Slate's Farhad Manjoo, for this passage from a piece on the new iPhone applications: They can also use the fantastic Apple-produced app that turns your iPhone into a wireless remote control for iTunes. Where you once had to trudge five or six feet to your computer in order to search through your music library, now you can do it from the couch. I'm waiting for a whole family of such remote apps—soon we'll use our iPhones to control multiroom music players, wireless security systems, and unmanned Predator drones.
• Have I mentioned how much I hate the new Entertainment Weekly magazine layout? I haven't? Okay. I hate it. Hate it, hate it, hate it. At its current rate of change, the publication will, only one or two years hence, publish nothing but photos and white space. The only remaining text will be on the address labels.
• Which, if they're still employing Diablo Cody as a columnist, will be fine by me.
• Ever have one of those moments when you're alone, and you're listening and maybe singing along to a song you know and love, and some emotion sneaks up from deep down inside you, from some place you knew you had but, until the song caught you at just the right time, you hadn't really been paying much attention to? And then, before you realize what's happening, and long before you could ever hope to stop it, it just reaches up and grabs you and damned near rips your heart out? I had one of those moments this morning, listening to Drive-By Truckers on my way home from dropping off Ethan at his day-camp bus stop. Some combination of that, and talking to my Mom -- who lives, of course, on the other side of the state, and who, along with my father, I don't get to see nearly as often as I like -- for a long time last night, and all the thinking I've lately been doing about all the best parts of my childhood, and missing the holy hell out of Adam, who's finally coming home tomorrow from two weeks away at camp and who's going to high school next month and who's growing up just too God-damned fast, made Jason Isbell's Outfit reduce me to a suddenly blubbering mass of father and son on the front seat of the 4Runner. I'm pretty sure you had to be there, and I know you had to be me, to fully appreciate it. But it's still a wonderful song, one I'm pretty sure any parent or child out there will appreciate it, and so it seems like a fine place to close for today...
You want to grow up to paint houses like me? A trailer in my yard till you're 23?
You want to be old after 42 years? Keep dropping the hammer and grinding the gears.
Well, I used to go out in a Mustang, a 302 Mach One in green.
Me and your Mama made you in the back, and I sold it to buy her a ring.
And I learned not to say much of nothing, and I figure you already know,
But in case you don’t or maybe forgot, I’ll lay it out real nice and slow.
Don’t call what you're wearing an outfit. Don’t ever say your car is broke.
Don’t worry about losing your accent; a Southern Man tells better jokes.
Have fun but stay clear of the needle. Call home on your sister’s birthday.
Don’t tell 'em you’re bigger than Jesus. Don’t give it away.
Five years in a St. Florian foundry; they call it Industrial Park.
Then hospital maintenance and Tech School, just to memorize Frigidaire parts.
But I got to missing your Mama, and I got to missing you too,
So I went back to painting for my old man, and I guess that’s what I’ll always do.
So don’t let 'em take who you are boy, and don’t try to be who you ain’t.
And don’t let me catch you in Kendale with a bucket of wealthy-man’s paint.
Don’t call what you're wearing an outfit. Don’t ever say your car is broke.
Don’t sing with a fake British accent, and don’t act like your family’s a joke.
Have fun, but stay clear of the needle. Call home on your sister’s birthday.
Don’t tell 'em you’re bigger than Jesus. Don’t give it away.
Don’t give it away.
Posted: Fri - July 18, 2008 at 03:36 PM
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Published On: Jan 16, 2009 04:50 PM
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Published On: Jan 16, 2009 04:50 PM