parody June 4, 2017

That’s Covfefe: This One Word Explains Everything

That’s Covfefe

To be sung to the tune of Dean Martin’s signature song

(In America, there’s a toddler king
And when he tweets, here’s what it means)

When you promise a wall
that costs “nothing at all,”
That’s Covfefe

When you sit and you tweet
on your gold toilet seat,
That’s Covfefe

When your wife slaps your hand
and it’s bad for your brand,
That’s Covfefe

When you act like a punk
‘cause you’ve got tiny junk,
That’s Covfefe

Pulling out of Paris
that’s not manly to me—
That’s Covfefe

When you’re acting surprised
as the sea starts to rise,
That’s Covfefe

When your golfing estate’s
beneath a salt water lake,
That’s Covfefe

When you wish it was a dream
but you know you’re not dreaming,
What-the-Eff-ay?

Excusez mon Français, but in every way,
That’s Covfefe

repeat with full chorus

Essays May 24, 2017

Chance Encounters: Improving the Odds

Two friends have recently reported chance encounters with friends in unlikely places. Cindy ran into an old friend at the Keflavík airport in Iceland, and Megan ran into a friend while traveling in Jordan.

Cindy asked in her post, “What are the chances of meeting a dear friend at an airport in Iceland?” Just this side of impossible to calculate, I’m guessing. The number of the variables alone would explode exponentially in no time. The odds of running into someone are different if you’re at the Keflavík airport, the Guggenheim Museum, or walking on the Great Wall. We might very well have been within a few feet of each other at Grand Central Station, but the sheer number of people there surely diluted our chances of meeting. And what number of friends, dear or otherwise, would you choose to plug into such an equation?

To sum up what happens to make these unlikely meetings possible:

You are at the same place—which ideally is wildly out of the context you know them in
You’re there at the same time—and the longer it’s been since you’ve been at the same place at the same time, the better.
At least one of you needs to be aware of their surroundings—if you both have your noses pointed toward your phones, forget about it
You need to be able to recognize each other—how long has it been after all?
You both want to be seen—some of us aren’t so keen on getting a blast from the past

So being away in an exotic locale and running into an old friend happens pretty rarely. But I’m wondering how many times we just miss one of these chance encounters.

How many times are we just a block away from each other? Or maybe one of us was there in the same place, having their photo taken in front of the same landmark, an hour earlier.

If we were to expand our range from “same place, same time,” to “same block, same hour,” then the chances must go up considerably. The odds that there could be someone we know with a block or an hour of us, would have to
be greater than the odds of running into them—since this happens only occasionally—and it would stand to reason that more often we just miss people we’d like to run into. Maybe we’ve walked right by each other because at least one of us is looking at a map or a view or a Kandinsky.

Louis Pasteur once wrote that “Chance favors the prepared mind,” so maybe we can look at what we can do to improve our chances of running into an old friend somewhere.

Short of having Harry Potter’s Marauder’s Map (it would have to be specially enchanted to filter out creepy intentions) to identify friends in the immediate vicinity, or neurotically checking in to places on Facebook, we’ll just have to count on luck—which makes for better magic anyway.

Our best chances then lie with noticing people already in the same place at the same time.

So first things first, you need to put your phone away. I know, I know. But really. All the world is made apparent to us via our perceptions. It’s already being filtered through our senses and brains before it reaches us—the world isn’t going to seem bigger and more interesting if you send it through more funnels—the news as interpreted, written, edited, published, shared, and finally viewed on your phone on the steps of the Taj Mahal, while your best friend from 6th grade walks by, googling for a restaurant on her phone.

“All day long, you are selectively paying attention to something, and much more often than you may suspect, you can take charge of this process to good effect. Indeed, your ability to focus on this and suppress that is the key to controlling your experience and, ultimately, your well-being.”
—Winifred Gallagher, Rapt

I was recently at the Linate airport in Milan, waiting to pick up my daughter. As I looked through the faces, ready to pick out hers, people coming through the gate started reminding me of friends and acquaintances—this person’s eyes, that person’s hair, the way that guy walked. One woman looked so much like a nanny the girls had a few years ago, I had to do a double take—it was not her but it absolutely could have been an older sister.

Our brains are wired to recognize faces—one of our oldest skills, in fact. “At as early as four months,” Max McClure writes on the Stanford website, “babies’ brains already process faces at nearly adult levels, even while other images are still being analyzed in lower levels of the visual system.” So even if a few decades have passed since we last saw a friend, our face-recognition ability gives us a very good chance of spotting them, but you have to put down your phone and pay attention. Even if you don’t spot anyone you know, people watching is way more interesting than anything up on the Huffpost right now.

Essays April 11, 2017

Intimations of Immortality

Recollections of Early Childhood (after Wordsworth)

— • —
My father fainted when the doctor began stitching up my tongue. I was four.

— • —
I remember lying on the grass one summer day, watching the clouds drift into shapes, and seeing this huge Chinese head lean over the edge of a cloud and look directly down at me. We looked at each other for . . . minutes . . . hours . . . days?

— • —
When you’re five and it’s cold and Christmas Eve and you’re driving to your grandparent’s house—the moon following beside your car over the frozen wheat fields of the Idaho panhandle is such magic that you try to capture it in poem for years and years and cannot ever quite.

— • —
My father took me rock climbing with his buddies. They had a rule: If you stepped on the rope, you got spit on. That day, I was wearing a light-blue short-sleeved Idaho Vandals sweatshirt. I was 7.

— • —
In my 30s, I was putting together a book of my paternal grandfather’s memoirs for him to give to the family. I was stunned that it taken me so long to realize that he was actually horrible, insecure little prick.

— • —
My uncle, when he was a teenager, got into a fistfight with my grandfather. I often weigh this against my own experience of not having thrown a punch at my father.

— • —
I started walking at nine months—which I’m sure was a nuisance to my eighteen-year old parents. I got my first stitches shortly thereafter—it involved a vase at their friend’s house and I got them just above my left eye.

— • —
When my paternal grandfather found out that his son had impregnated my mother—both were 17—he shamed my father so hugely and so completely, I think he never recovered. I heard this story for the first time at my father’s funeral.

— • —
My family story is a train-wreck occurring for generations over decades. Did I jump off in time?

— • —
When I was four, my mom and my aunts took me to a drive-in movie. I was supposed to sleep in back. I did not. The movie: Rosemary’s Baby.

— • —
I remember very vividly scraping the living bejesus out of both knees at the age of five, while riding a pedal fire-engine at a friend’s house.

— • —
When I was five, my mom would put me on the bus in Moscow, Idaho and my aunts would pick me up in Lewiston.

— • —
I would spend weeks of summer at my grandparents house—the single A night baseball games were well-attended, totally electric, and it was the best temperature of the day. I’d go with my grandfather. I’d take my mitt.

— • —
Best summer memory of my maternal grandfather: going out at night with flashlights to catch earthworms in the flowerbeds we had watered before dark. Honorable mention: Driving the golf cart at the country club and bowling at the alley he owned.

— • —
My grandmother tried to teach me how to whistle with a blade of grass (I still cannot do it, alas).

— • —
When I was very young, I spent a lot of time in Lewiston with my Grandmother. Those moments were totally lived in the present. I wish I remembered more. I think my mind has become too organized by time since then. But I still have these memories of walking to the store to buy licorice and Mountain Dew (back when the bottle had hillbillies on it).

— • —
I have a very distinct visual memory of touching a hot stove burner the first time. It was totally a science experiment. Lesson learned.

— • —
When I was six, I dropped a rock over the fence onto my friend Bryce’s head. It was also a science experiment. I am stunned over my lack of regret at the time.

— • —
When I was nine, and at school, someone entered our house—he didn’t take anything but he did pee on the floor.

— • —
In second grade, I told Tami that she was my favorite girl. She proceeded to march me around to her friends to have me repeat it. Lesson learned.

— • —
In second grade, at recess, I found myself surrounded by 4 or 5 girls. Lisa Sanders kissed me. I had a crush on her for years after that. Maybe even still.

— • —
My grandmother kept a stash of JFK 50-cent pieces in the freezer. She gave them to me on my eleventh birthday so I could buy a 10-speed.

— • —
It took me ten times to pass beginner swim lessons at Mission Pool in Spokane.

— • —
Elementary and Junior High Crushes: Peggy, Tami, Lisa, Shari, Denise, Joette, Debbie, Cindy, Teri, Yvette, Debbie, Suzy, Tari, Annette, Donna, Wendy, Anne, Sue, and JoAnne.

— • —
In elementary school, I ran home from the bus stop everyday one year. I cannot remember why.

— • —
In elementary and junior high school, the male teachers had hack paddles. Some of them lovingly carved in the school’s shop to leave special marks—initials in many cases— on young boy’s asses.

— • —
In sixth grade, I was often found sitting in the hall for being a smartass. I know, big surprise. I always just avoided the hack-paddle.

— • —
In ninth grade, I was 5’2” and weighed 100 pounds at the first of football season. I weighed 92 by the end of it.

— • —
To hell with the time-space continuum—if I could go back in time I’d beat the shit out of at least 9 people, including my father and several teachers.

— • —
Fights were held after school at the pump house. The fierce recess passion had usually died off by then, but word had gotten around, it’d became a spectator sport, and the show must go on.

— • —
My brother launched a perfect toss of the bat from home plate toward first base where I stood after an easy out. The bat spun in slow motion like the bone tossed into the air in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The cut that followed was not as famous as Kubrick’s.

— • —
You cannot line-item veto shit from your past. Alas.

Uncategorized June 9, 2016

Regarding the election: I cannot wait to vote for Elizabeth Warren.

Regarding the election:

1. I cannot wait to vote for Elizabeth Warren.

2. Any upcoming Supreme Court nomination is going to be very important.

3. I’m absolutely for breaking the glass ceiling for women so there’s a better chance of getting the right person in there no matter how their chromosomes are structured (see item number 1)—yes, I am aware that Hilary is a politician

4. No fucking Trump—I’m sorry but the last time we had this discussion—[whiny voice] there’s not a lot of difference between Gore and Bush blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah—it was a huge fucking disaster. Huge. Fucking. Disaster. (I really hate using periods like that but sometimes you have to fucking use periods like that. Because Internet (I’m also not a fan of using the word “because” and then forsaking all other parts of speech aside from a single noun, but I digress . . . ))(I am, however, totally a fan of over-nesting parentheses.)(Also, I’m totally a fan of over-digressing.)

5. I didn’t move to Italy because of a potential Trump election—if Trump is elected, no place on earth will be safe. . . . besides, Milan will be an awesome place to watch the end of the world as we know it, if it comes to that.