Sunday Archive X: Notes & Drafts
I have plenty of quick email notes to myself, often sent as the start of an article which I intended to finish upon arriving at the office, or at home, or whatever. Of course, I rarely did…
From April of 2005, here’s a “wage slave rant” with an inexplicable title.
Ironpole Purpleflesh: Medieval Adventurer
I’ve given up. It’s as simple as that. I’m going to buy a used airstream trailer for $150 and park it out in the Mojave. I’m thinking I’ll raise rattlesnakes and sell them over the internet and, maybe, score myself a job at a cinder mine or as a guard at the entrance to the Faulkner F. Williamson Cobalt Testing Ground. I’ll be the guy in the box ny the gate, big long beard, crazy stare, moth-eaten, torn, stained security uniform: “Ya cain’t go in! This here’s guvment pra-per-tee!”
The thing about giving up is that it’s liberating. When you’re young, that is. I’m 31 in the next few weeks and, let me tell you, I still feel young and vital. So giving up carries with it a certain hopeful charge as I mark which of my personal property I plan to sell and which I plan to burn in a drunken fit of self-loathing.
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From August, 2005. The effect was…what?
Over the weekend, I was reading about Hawaii’s gas cap law and I thought to myself, those poor Hawaiian’s, I hate it when I lose my gas cap.
Well, actually, I just read the headline. I didn’t read any of the, you know, words. A friend later pointed out it was a cap, like a baseball cap, and not a cap like a cap. This, later, turned into a conversation about how the article wasn’t about a cap like cap nor was it about a cap like a baseball cap but was, instead, about a cap like a cap, though not a cap.
See? Well, we were drinking. It’s all very amusing if you’ve polished off a bottle of Bacardi and a packet of purple Kool-Aid.
Once I got rid of my friends, at gunpoint, I was left alone in my basement with my old college buddy James. I was on the floor watching a giant centipede skitter towards my face and he was on top of the pool table screaming. I don’t remember what happened next, but I’ve seen The Hidden enough times to hazard a guess. My next clear memory is sitting out on the porch at 3am holding lit matches under my hand and talking about The Great Nixon.
As the booze wore off, James and I began to discuss more mundane things, such as, oh my god, America is fucked and, oh my god, so are we, oh my god.
“April Fools!” he said suddenly. Is that bad form? Said suddenly? I wanted to work in ‘halted haltingly’ but I’m not clever enough to do so.
I replied: “New plan? You’ve got months to work it out.”
“It’s a rock your boxers plan.”
“As good as last year?”
“I don’t know…”
Last April, James had invited his boss to dinner. By the time has boss arrived, James had covered the living room in plastic and, answering the door with a raincoat, goggles and fire ax, he grabbed his bosses tie and roughly pulled him inside. The effect was
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Another one that ends mid-sentence, from January of 2006:
Thursday, 4:30pm. With my head on my writing desk, where writing is never finished or even successfully approached, I stared sideways at the smoldering remains of what was once a Dell hard drive, failing even to carry out its last suicidal program to crash a day after the warranty. It had failed a day before the warranty. A new Dell drive, silently moving towards it’s own hateful demise, spun in the computer behind me, but that wasn’t on my mind. None of my New Years resolutions haunted me, either. I had one clear thought: The word “whom” is obsolete. And I’m gonna tell you why.
In the process, I’m going to debate Heather Stadelhofer’s analysis, the author of the first article that came up when I searched for “whom is obsolete” in Google. I’m also going to discuss my New Year’s resolutions. Finally, I’m going to prove that the wavelength for red is, in fact, the same wavelength for green using Nacho’s Analytical Theorum, the controversial theorem based off of the work of ancient Greek mathematician Ohmymedes which states that I’m not color blind, it’s all of you who can’t see right.
First of all – is whom obsolete? Yes. Now, on to my New Year’s resolutions. The first is to never do business with a woman I have known intimately. After much self-reflection (which came naturally after my hard drive crashed on New Year’s Eve and left me to sit around reading cereal boxes and playing with an old Lite Brite set I found in the crawlspace), I realized that I’m the type of guy that women like to “correct.” By that, I mean that I’m a hopeless misanthrope who drinks all night, sleeps all day, and has sudden moments of clarity where my best laid plans dissolve into panic attacks that begin with me losing my breath and screaming at people and end with me waking up on a bench in Heathrow. I also fail to share any emotions, distrust everyone around me and, overall, smile and nod while their lives fall apart, grateful that I’m better and smarter than them. I’m better and smarter than everybody, by the way, and any proof otherwise will send me right onto the first British Airways flight out of here.
I’ll go ahead and say it – I’m touched by god. An old Navajo told me that when I was thirteen years old. I think he tried to rape me later, but I was smarter and better than he was.
I also think I attract strange women. I know that, actually. Often, I seek madness. I seek it out because I’m exhausted by normal people and, when you drink all night and sleep all day, it’s hard to meet safe, secure and upwardly mobile women. For example – the blonde in the corner of the All-Nyte no name Columbian bar in one of Silver Spring’s back alleys, where the front room is closed and dark and the back room is an illegal bar, she’s not a good bet. Yet I seek her out anyway. I seek her out because I think I’m trying to commit Suicide by Woman.
My second resolution is to learn to drink straight alcohol. No mixers. (And all alcohol, not just the ultra-smooth no-mix vodka water that costs $69 a drop. And I mean drink with no reaction. Calmly gulp it down while staring lesser men in the eye.) I’ll admit that I can’t do this, even though it harms my image. I’ll also admit that I didn’t drink until I was 18. (Except for a rum party when I was 17, but we’ll not talk about that dark night of my life.)
I feel that my drinking has waned in these later years. I had an excellent and exciting streak of heavy drinking in my mid-20’s, where I bedded strange women, consumed exotic cocktails and named constellations after other people’s pets. Then I entered the work force and, despite the reality of taxes and soulless supervisors, my drinking slid away fro me. I had to wake up in the mornings, go to work, be responsible, and a hangover at a 9-5 job isn’t as fun as a hangover at History 304: Weimar Republic. That’s not just because everyone in the Weimar Republic was hungover, it’s because I drank all day. Part of my resolution has been to just start drinking at work,
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And another that ends mid-sentence from February of 2006. (This is a draft of “At War With Peace Studies”.)
Metro Monday, the frequently delayed, rattling Red Line blasting into the heart of DC and, in a fit of depression, I take that extra step and rip a filthy, stained Washington Post out from under the slumbering mass of the Burger Queen filling both seats across from me. It’s Sunday’s paper, dispelling the hope that they actually do have cleaners who fix up the trains every night. Flipping through in a feeble attempt to find good, non-sensationalist journalism I run across an article that hollows my soul.
I see “Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School,” my alma mater, and I see “Peace Studies Class,” Colman McCarthy’s enlightening and influential course. I see a picture of two yahoos on the front lawn of the BCC campus and I see the word “banning.” I say to myself: Just put it down. Just roll with the punches.
In spring 92, my final semester at BCC, I signed up for Colman McCarthy’s peace studies class. Founded in 1988, the class was a sort of pass-fail thing, but everyone passed if they showed up, and McCarthy stood in as a volunteer lecturer. He didn’t really represent the school and, repeatedly, bent or broke the rules. Right down to smuggling in live farm animals and even controversial speakers (back in the days when you could walk around school with automatic weapons and the two security guards spent all day at McDonalds across the street).
McCarthy worked for the Washington Post and maintained the Center for Teaching Peace – a weird kitchen table outfit dedicated to “promoting peace through education.” McCarthy’s main thrust is pacifism and animal rights, focusing these ideals in the classroom setting. Start them young, you know? Not PETA’s vision of animal rights, by the way. All passive. He’s a good guy with lots to say and it all makes sense.
The class was one of the most fundamentally important high school courses I took. It inspired something rare for the teenaged high school mind: Interaction, thought and focus. It influenced the path I took during the awful transition to college life, how I approached my degree and how I live today. It helped me examine my place – and role – in this world. It helped me through rough social and family times.
Was there a bias? Well, of course. Everyone is biased towards something. But the class wasn’t about the bias. McCarthy’s only agenda was to teach us what he knew. He did not enforce his views on us. He was then, and is now, one of the few teachers who actually taught. That is, he inspired interaction, he welcomed opinions, and he didn’t look down on us like so many other teachers. We weren’t a chore, we weren’t even a project. We were a bunch of stupid high school seniors, and he was a highly intelligent and successful journalist, and he put us on equal footing and heard whatever we said without belittling us or even contradicting those who went against his opinions. Find that in the classroom today – I dare you.
We all had value in his eyes, and we all felt it.
So here we go. Two kids come out and petition to ban Peace Studies, claiming that McCarthy has a hidden agenda. Here’s what one of the fools said:
“I know I’m not the first to bring this up but why has there been no concerted effort to remove Peace Studies from among the B-CC courses? The ‘class’ is headed by an individual with a political agenda, who wants to teach students the ‘right’ way of thinking by giving them facts that are skewed in one direction.”
Let’s name these fruitcakes — Andrew Saraf and his wingman, Avishek Panth. Two 17 year olds with an axe to grind.
And if liberal activism is what they fear, I pity their college lives. I suggest a small, Midwest, religious-affiliated school.
Also – it’s an elective