As many of you know, I have been spending a great deal of time lately in San Clemente writing my memoirs—a task I feel represents the culmination of my long and fruitful career in public life. For quite some time, Pat has been begging me to slow down and not work so hard. After weeks of pleading, last night I finally agreed to go out and see this film Tricia and Julie have been raving about for weeks: Star Wars. The movie turned out to be a delightful break from my labors.

Dear old Pat always knows best.

Star Wars is an exciting space adventure pitting a rag tag band of anti-establishment rebels against an "empire" meant to represent, of course, evil incarnate. This rebel gang includes CP3O, a gold-plated, lispingly homosexual robot, and Chewbacca, a shaggy eight foot tall creature managing to be more hairy and inarticulate than any stoned hippy you've ever seen.

And I know that's saying a lot.

( Read more... )

Sports writer and legendary freak Hunter S. Thompson covers my little league baseball game, 1979



By the time we got to the little league field, my attorney had begun raving about the concession stand. “As your attorney,” he said, “I advise you to buy some hot dogs and Swedish fish.” The mescaline now clearly had a grip on him. At the sound of a foul ball, he swung around to the right, nearly elbowing a plump-faced housewife with a purple sailboat knitted pattern on her sweater.

“These people are vultures,” my attorney said, wheeling back to face me. “They’re filth. I think they eat babies.” A bead of spit stuck to his bottom lip. The lady with the sailboat sweater took a step back. Her eyes had become wild with fear. With a head swimming with mescaline, her head looked like a slab of bread dough stuck atop a headless body.

Standing between a 300 pound mescaline-crazed Samoan and this terrified woman, who for all I knew was the wife of the police commissioner, I felt the need to explain the importance of our task. To put her terrified, doughy mind at ease.( Read more... )

In 1979, while fishing in Plains, Georgia, president Jimmy Carter was forced to use his paddle to fend off a deranged rabbit that had attacked his rowboat. A week later, Carter's press secretary, Jody Powell, unwisely mentioned the incident to an Associated Press correspondent over tea, the reporter dutifully filing the story on the AP wire the next day:



The incident, entirely unimportant in itself, quickly set off a minor media frenzy. The press, desperate for copy during the late summer lull, quickly elevated the incident into a metaphor of the haplessness and impotence of the Carter Administration.

Though photographs of the incident were suppressed at the time, Reagan's operatives eventually managed to get their hands on them. A color copy of the photo can now be purchased at the Jimmy Carter Library for $25.50.



( Read more... )

When I was a kid, baseball cards weren't merely collectors items—they represented an alternative system of currency for young boys.

Like the use of cigarettes in prison, they were tokens of agreed-upon value in environments—like Marzolff Elementary School and my back yard—where woefully little real money could be found.

Baseball cards were "fungible:" Easily substituted for tater tots or Twizzlers at suprisingly consistent values. An elaborate but uncodified system existed for the valuation of baseball cards that involved age of card, quality of the player, and team. As we lived in Pittsburgh, any player for the Pirates was automatically highly valued.

( Read more... )

Hey, kid. That's right, you. Come over here. Do me a favor— see that bucket of ice? Yeah? Well, bring it over to me.

Thanks kid.

You ever tasted whiskey? Oh, you haven't? Well, here take a sip.

Ha! Has a bite to it, don't it? This stuff will put hair and your chest. Here, take a swig of water. That'll wash it down.
( Read more... )

The 70s were out of sight. When Star Wars exploded, it was like I was sitting in the Millennium Falcon as it blasted into hyperdrive. One minute I’m just another struggling actor serving fat slobs fried hash and pancakes at an IHOP in Van Nuys. The next moment—WHOOSH!— I’m moving so goddamn fast the whole universe turns into a freakin’ blur.

Dude, I won’t lie to you: the “blur” started a few years before Star Wars. Kashyyyk was certainly a nice enough planet to grow up on— about as comforting and stifling as a womb—but if I ever see another freakin’ Wroshyr tree I think I’m going to puke.
( Read more... )

X-post from The Seventies



In the 1980s there was a line of video games centered on a character named Leisure Suit Larry, a balding, 40-something loser clad entirely head-to-toe with synthetic fibers.

The Leisure Suit Larry games represented a noble departure from the typical shoot ‘em up fare of most video games, which tended to require no more creativity than blasting pixilated aliens to smithereens. These games, on the other hand, offered a challenge infinitely more complex: Using his (and I mean “his”) creativity, the player negotiated Larry through a world of beautiful women armed with frustratingly good taste.

I’d argue that video games work, in part, as metaphors for the, uh, romantic ambitions of certain types of adolescent boy—a way of directing the excess drive bestowed upon pathetic teenage boys towards something more tractable than live female girls. It was encouraging that, with his bald spot and cheesy manner, Larry was the one creature in the universe less likely than a gawky teen boy to find romantic bliss.

(Ironically, I became familiar with the game while watching John, my sister’s future husband—and future ex-husband—play it for hour on end. It seemed to set the stage for him to become twenty years later a balding, 40-something loser on the prowl.)

As a grown man, I can’t help but think with utter amusement (and contempt) about the Leisure Suit Larry archetype, a relic from the Disco-and-sexual-liberation-movement 1970s utterly adrift in our more judicious times.

Like many horrible cultural trends of the 70s, the leisure suit phenomenon was a reminder that freedom isn’t free—but can be ridiculously cheap. As the anarchist tendencies of the late 60s counterculture morphed into a corporate repackaging of the ideal of liberation, it became easy in the 70s to “do your own thing” at an entirely hedonistic level.

The Leisure Suit phenomenon was what happens when the idea of “liberation” detaches from the idea of political awareness: In the end, you’re left with a bunch of synthetic fibers and gold chains—and a boundless, unsatisfiable libido.

X-post from the soon-to-be-defunct Seventies Blog:

I have a theory that memories of particular eras are seen through the filter of the prevailing film stock of the time. It is as if the memory loses track of what was observed first hand and what was recollected later with photographic help.

I suspect that my recollection of the last ten years will always maintain the flat, luminous quality of digital photography--a reality so upclose and shimmering it begins to seem unreal.

Memories of the 80s and 90s, on the other hand, have a fussy solidity that seems nervous and defensive. Every shape is stamped in heavily saturated hues, as if to say, "Everything is back to normal now, right?"

I even have ex post facto memories of the 50s and 60s, an inherited awareness of those years when my parents were younger than I am now, a hint of mischief in their eyes as they seek a measure of youthful joy in a world as stiff and rigid as crew cut.

But it is the bleary, kaleidoscopic images of the 70s--blurred and faded in shades of yellow and orange, as if they had been soaked in water--that I tend linger. It is their utter unreality, their sense of ghostliness, that creates a seemingly unbridgeable distance to my childhood.

The truth is that what I now know about the time in which I grew up--a decade of exhaustion, decadence, and malaise--fails to match up with what I personally remember. Had I known then that it was a worthless time, perhaps I would have spent less time wandering around in blissful ignorance.

Beyond the carnivalesque swirl of my childhood memories were cultural currents that were frightening, electrifying, and ultimately unsustainable. This blog is an attempt to fill in the gaps of those faded memories--to make sense of a time that feels impossibly insubstantial 30 years down the road.

Stick with Glen Beck for a minute or two, it gets good:

It is a sign, I think, of relative personal contentment that I am cooking again. Devoid of even the slightest responsibility these past two weeks, I have been in a kind of languid drift. Except that I'd rather wallow in a layer of grime than pick up a feather duster or enamel cleaner, I'd make a pretty good house husband, picking up Mrs. Breadwinner at the train station and doing my best to prepare a fortifying, home-cooked meal. It takes strength to face the dog-eat-dog world of work. A few more weeks of this, I'll be pouring Yoko a glass of Scotch and watching her sleep at the sofa with a newspaper on her lap. Maybe that is my calling: homemaker.

During my early twenties, shortly after I concluded that 90% of all foods eaten in the suburbs was hyper-processed garbage, I began exploring the cuisine that was least like Vernon, CT: Indian food. During summer break from college, I would bring home these exotic ingredients from an Indian grocery store that would annoy my mother because they would inevitable clutter her already cluttered pantry. When I left for Oregon, she very politely refrained from throwing out my bottle of rosewater (which I used for making homemade Yogurt Lassis) which stayed in her refrigerator for several years.

(In retrospect, she may have been hoping that I would come to my senses and return to Connecticut soon so that I could rightfully reclaim it, transforming that rosewater into a metaphor for her wish that I live closer.)

Last night, I made fried urad dal balls with coriander leaves with a fresh mint / coriander chutney. Though the photo makes it look a bit lifeless and sad, it was surprisingly tasty:



It was, in fact, the first substantial Indian meal I've ever made that involved no substitutions. Real ghee (a kind of clarified butter), real jaggery (a kind of unprocessed dark sugar), and actual dal (more or less a family of lentils.)

There are two possible lessons to be learned from my new-found culinary spark: Either working in a bitterly divisive and inefficient workplace sapped the life right out of me-- or it's simply work itself that sucks me dry. The house husband thing looks better and better every day.

Like other leftist utopias I've lived in-- Portland, Northampton--the town of Takoma Park, MD, remains thoroughly aware of its complete marginality. You could just as well post a sign on the roads out of town reading: "Welcome to the United States of America." Every "War is Not the Answer" bumpersticker, every dreadlocked girl biking daintily down the road, screams: We are not like the rest of you sharp-eyed, materialistic, warmongering American bastards. Insular, elitist, and detached from reality? Feels like home already.

Earlier this week I bought some yogurt from the co-op in the center of town. I was rung up by some scruffy hippy with Mansonesque eyes who stared directly at the cash register and my yogurt and no further. Little tufts of hair sprouted all over his head, each gathered by one of dozens of colorful little rubber bands--a veritable rainbow coalition on this guy's oily head--standing there blankly in front of me like the living monument to everything wrong about the 60s counterculture. Maybe it was time I just moved to some bland suburban middle-age ghetto, I thought. The prospect of having a bunch of gin-soaked salesmen neighbors suddenly looked a lot better.

Wednesday I went into the pet shop in the middle of town that sold dog food that was all but whipped up in Wolfgang Puck's kitchen. Latin music played on the speakers, giving the store the aura of one of those bookstores where you can buy Buddha figurines. I grabbed a bag of Pacific Salmon dog food (I think it's meant to be served with tarragon in a white wine reduction) and stood at the counter, feeling snobby and decadent about serving my dog gourmet food.

The town is growing on me. Unlike other hippy havens, this town actually backs up its rhetoric about diversity with a very earnest dedication to tolerance. Takoma Park is 35% African-American and ringed with neighborhoods where some of the hundreds of thousands of Salvadoran immigrants in the Maryland suburbs live. This commitment to diversity is thoroughly honorable and unhypocritical--though when I am driving down University Avenue and every single sign for miles is in Spanish, my own commitment to diversity is tested. It only takes a few moments as a minority to realize just how wonderful it is to be in the majority all the time. But the pupusas I had for lunch at the local pupuseria today were delicious. Cheese and meat stuffed corn cakes, gooey with a crisp exterior. And the horchata was flavored with sesame!

For whatever my misgivings and ambivalences, however, I am feeling-- one week into this move at least-- increasingly content with the decision to move. A rain storm just blew through the area and I sat on the front porch watching the rain fall through the trees. For whatever the virtues of South Philly, I realized it was a chance to rest my eyes on a little greenery that was most lacking. So I just took a chance to sit there and watch the rain with my pampered dog-- feeling like the filthiest, most contented hippy in the world.

The instructor for that dismal class (see yesterday's post) sent me an email telling me I got an A. Here is the email in full:

Hi Rob,
You received a grade of A for Project 3.
Therefore, your final grade for the class is an A!
It was nice to have you in class.

I have put off responding to this email all day because, in fact, it was most definitely not nice for me. It was rather like listening to the droning narration of vacation slides by some half-senile aunt for three hours at night. My strategy to keep myself mentally engaged was to attempt to write in my notes every single word she said. The guy sitting next to me simply laid a slim book on meditation on top of his notebook, paying not the least attention to the ceaseless drone coming from the front of the room. The girl on the other side of me just repeated the phrase "this is boring, this is boring" in her notebook.

Earlier in the evening I had started to draft a response that included the phrase "and I really enjoyed the class"-- until my body shuddered from the sheer mendacity of it. I am now trying to develop a formula that acknowledges my pleasure at the grade, adopts a measure of friendliness, and refrains from telling her that the class was actually so mentally dulling that I actually lost knowledge during the course of it. And I feel like I have to acknowledge it within 24 hours.

So the question is: How fake do I want to go on this?

I am sitting in our new apartment on the outskirts of Takoma Park, MD, intent on a week of slack-jawed relaxation after a couple of weeks of stressful upheaval.

During the final days before our move--and settlement on our house--the dog and I found ourselves in an increasingly feral environment. As the house uncluttered and the boxes piled up in the living room, my entire existence seemed restricted to a three feet space around the couch where the dog and I slept. At night I would run to class, living behind a bewildered dog, mixing packing and homework during the day.

One of the courses vied for one of the worst classes I've ever taken. The instructor was prone to 45 second pauses, spoke in a droning monotone, would hand out things she printed off the Internet for the purposes of two minute "conversations" that went nowhere, and would sometimes leave the class for 20 minutes at a time while we did various busy work. During one of those absences, the guy next to me said in exasperation: "If I turn into the undead, please tell my wife I loved her." During the final class, he was drinking cognac during the break in order to get through. It was that bad.

It was an unfortunate matter of timing that my move and closing occurred the weekend before the end of class. During the time, I also had to move into the room I am renting in Mt. Airy. And then, when school wrapped up we rushed off for 36 hours in Chicago for a wedding.

The boxes have mostly been unpacked and the move 95% complete. When we decided to move to DC, it seemed like an impossibly complicated task. It's hard to believe we actually figured all this out. Now all I have to do is finish my degree and get a job.

But first: A few days of therapeutic brain death...

I have created a new, temporary blog for this ridiculous blogging class I'm taking. It's about the 1970s:

http://the-seventies.blogspot.com.

So far I'm struggling, but standards are pretty low in Blogging 101. Feel free to comment; I'm being graded on "community."

I won't deny that during my last week of work I settled some scores.
( Read more... )

As the 1980s wore on and the sociopathic aura of Reaganism settled over my little suburban street, I remember feeling deeply cheated to have grown up in the eighties. Veterans of previous decades spoke longingly—if annoyingly—about the thrill of living in stirring, decadent times, but I was reasonably sure that the only great adventure offered by this decade was a siege mentality of the few who cared surrounded by the many who didn’t.

By 1984, the decade's fun New Wave early years were over, replaced by a pop culture that seemed formed from an especially noxious and gooey mix of bubblegum and silicone. What wasn't schlocky and insipid (E.T.) seemed vicious and shallow (Andrew Dice Clay) and the Reagan Revolution seemed to give an entire nation permission to let out its inner slick dickhead.

It's possible, of course, that my alienation had nothing to do with the culture. Perhaps I had simply become sufficiently adult, and therefore hip to the world, to become appropriately cynical. It's possible that Americans had always been as shallow and selfish as they suddenly appeared to me around the time of Reagan's re-election, only I had grown out of my puerile Disney-ish fantasies of a nation of people who shared certain humane beliefs.




( In which I drone on and on about the 80s )

On my last day of work at my famously dreadful job, I looked to the right sidebar of my Facebook page to see this advert:


( Read more... )