Poetry. Making a comeback.

This is what I like to call a 'moody moment poem.' Enjoy.

(Oh. And. I played with the format a bit. Thoughts?)

Written five minutes ago.

Not sure yet if this is really one poem in three parts, or three poems that need their own titles. Thoughts?

Striking a little close to home.

This is basically a short essay I've been meaning to write for some time now. Complete with Gilmore Girls references. Just never got around to it.

Still might write mine though. There's one point in Stevenson's piece that I think I disagree with: that procrastination precludes certain forms of success. I'd like to probe that a bit deeper yet. We'll see. For now, I've got other things not to do.

Philly vs. Filly

Ok. So please understand: I'm not literally equating the fates of these two beings.

But. Hillary Clinton recently drew a line of comparison between herself and Eight Belles, the lone filly in the Kentucky Derby this year.

Today. (Tragically.) Eight Belles finished second place in the Derby. That's not the tragedy. The tragedy is she ran all the way through to the finish line, finished second, then collapsed with two broken ankles, and had to be euthanized right then and there.

So a little quip comes back to bite Hillary in the ass. Someone should point this out to her, though I'd be at least a little surprised if anyone in the MSM did (because of the "literally equating" problem mentioned above). But that's what the blogosphere is for.

(I'm not even gonna mention the name of the stallion that won the race.)

Mentos fountains. Too cool.

I expect this works with Diet Coke, too. And not just Coca-Cola Light.

(Thanks to Andrew Sullivan.)

Get your electric kool-aid while you can.

Salvia needs a Ken Kesey.

Or. You know. Not. Doesn't sound like much fun to me.

Flirting your way to sex offender registration.

Ok. So I admit: Sending naked pictures of yourself to someone you like (like, like-like; not just like) goes a bit beyond an extended hug after class or sitting on someone's lap during study hall.

But it's not felonious. And it's definitely not worthy of sex offender status.

With all the talk in the last decade of pushing various technological boundaries (web 2.0, nanotechnology, genomics, and yes, cell phones) we still rarely get to talking about the secondary boundaries affected by such technological innovation. Unless, of course, a hot-button social issue (read: political wedge issue) is involved, in which case let the ill-informed adventures in spin begin. As in: "Genomics sounds like cloning!" (No. It doesn't. You don't know what you're talking about.) Or, the less common refrain: "Nanotechnology is the birth of Big Brother!" (Well. Yeah. Ok. Mayyyyybe.)

Along these lines, I've recently come across several articles and stories referencing the notion that today's young people are less concerned with privacy than previous generations (privacy is trying so hard to become hot-button, it's cute -- like a puppy trying desperately to climb a staircase), and placing the blame for such lowered fences on Facebook, MySpace, and other such sites. To me, this seems either just plain wrong, or misleadingly incomplete. Facebook, for example, faced an uproar from its "millennial generation" users when it opened the site first to non-college-affiliated users, and then again when it opened the site to anyone. In response, it instituted significant user-directed privacy controls over who can see which elements of your profile. I suppose it's an unanswered (to my knowledge) empirical question to what extent these controls are put to use. But in my anecdotal experience, almost everyone uses them to some extent.

So the younger generation, it seems to me, is not less concerned with privacy than previous generations -- today's youth just have more opportunity to be more open to more people. This doesn't mean they don't value their privacy. Had their parents (who, let's face it, were pretty damn open with their opinions, feelings, and sexuality) been able to share an hour-by-hour "status" accounting with hundreds of friends, I expect they would have. They just couldn't.

But now the constraints of technology have retreated: Hundreds of people now know my favorite books. Boy, do I feel invaded. No. Wait. I don't. But not because I'm not concerned with my privacy. I never cared who knew my favorite books. I'd have gladly told anyone who asked. (People rarely did, for the record -- in fact, I can count on one hand (maybe one finger) the number of people who have commented on my Facebook favorite-books list, which suggests that the level of narcissism involved in maintaining, say, a Facebook profile is disturbingly staggering. But that's another post for another day).

And I fully believe my parents would have too. The difference is not in the level of personal willingness to be open with various aspects of oneself. The difference is in the technological ability to be open. There's no new conception of something-like-the-thing-called-privacy-we-once-cared-so-much-about being cultivated by Facebook. It's the same old conception (the same old ethical bounds) being construed via newly-relaxed technological boundaries.

Which brings me to my point, finally: It's wrong to label naked-picture cell-phone swapping among consenting teenagers as "criminal behavior." It's no more criminal than that "trust me?" game where one person in a group slowly moves a hand up another's thigh while asking the two-word query until the second person responds, if ever, with a "no." (No one else played that? Really? Oh.) You might not want your kids doing either of those things. I get that. All I'm saying is, the cell-phone thing isn't a behavior of a radically different sort than anything we've seen before. It's on the same spectrum. If Polaroids weren't so clumsy and expensive, this would have been happening long ago. (And, really, claiming it's child porn is just silly. I understand why society doesn't want 50-year-olds looking at naked 15-year-olds. But it's not clear to me why other 15-year-olds shouldn't be.)

Whether you, as a parent or school administrator or Congressperson, likes that it's happening, it's just flirtation. Maybe teens shouldn't sit on each other in study hall. Maybe they shouldn't play spin the bottle. And maybe they shouldn't exchange naked pictures of themselves. But criminalizing the first two seems nuts right off the bat. And criminalizing the third is just as insane. It's wrong. And it won't work anyway (see: abstinence-only sex education).

Prose again. Or, Giving the parents equal time.

Pizza, with my mother.

It is a Saturday night, I think, or a Friday, around 6 (which is well toward the night in Chicago’s cold November). I walk downstairs, wondering at the quiet, finding only my mother, in the kitchen. I open the refrigerator, looking for a quick dinner before I have to leave to pick up my friends – who, at 17, were not all lucky enough to have their own cars at their disposal. Finding nothing fresh appealing, I turn to the freezer. I take out a microwave pizza, and my mother—whose apparent sadness had been peripheral until now—says, “Jordan, I have to tell you something.” I say, “Ok,” wondering at her “have to,” and start to open the pizza box as she begins to ramble something or other about not intending to tell me this way, and she’s not really supposed to tell me, and he’ll be angry, but he’s going to do it tomorrow and that’s not right. At this point, though I wasn’t sure at first, I know she’s talking about my father, who had earlier asked me to go to breakfast with him the following morning so we could discuss something he refused to specify to me but apparently had to her. I remove the plastic shrink-wrap and place the pizza on its box, atop its silver paper heating disc, and then reapply the frozen cheese that fell off in the plastic, careful to fill any obvious distribution holes. I set the microwave to 3 minutes and 45 seconds. She’s still talking, and as I hit START, she gets to: “He says he’s not going to, but he won’t say what, and I know he’s going to.” So, I think, apparently he didn’t specify the future conversation with her either. I open the cabinet over the microwave and take out a dinner plate – solid black, except for white painted swirls in a ring around the edge, a choice of my mother’s that I didn’t realize was unusual until college. I search the utensil drawer for the pizza cutter, and say, my profile to her, “Mom, what’s going on?”

She starts to cry as she lets out what, she tells me, has been eating at her for weeks, months, years even. It’s been so hard, she tells me, and—because of the microwave’s timer, and my memory of burning my mouth on the pizza’s first slice—I know it takes her a bit over 3 minutes to tell me, in really no detail at all, just how hard it’s been. I stand, leaning on the counter, my elbows on either side of the pizza cutter resting on the plate, facing her, as she sits at one end of the rounded-corner rectangular table, askew a bit, her left side against the table’s edge, facing me, her left arm resting on the table’s corner and her right forearm resting on her thigh. This position allows only sharp movements as she speaks, jaggedly matching the stops and starts of her words: the motion of her right arm limited, as though by a puppeteer’s rod, to the upturning of her palm by a twist of her wrist as her forearm remains on her thigh, and her left arm, constantly moving, as by the strings of a marionette, in a sort of pulling forth motion as her elbow brings her hand forward toward me and then returns it to her chest or her mouth. The combined effect of her tears and the hum of the microwave forces her voice to a higher register than normal, and that, along with what she is saying and the fact of her crying, somehow makes it hard for me to look at her for more than brief intervals. I intersperse my glances at her with long gazes at the pizza in the microwave, spinning and warming and cooking. She is telling me—in multiple and synonymous and repetitious sets of phrases—that “things” haven’t been right for a long time, that “we” still love “you” and “your sister” very much of course, that “that” will never change, that none of “this” is “your” fault at all. The pizza is making noise in the microwave, drops of sauce spurting from beneath the covering of now melted cheese. Looking at the microwave, I think, I tell her, “It’s ok, Mom,” and, turning to look at her—and lying, really—“I guess I knew something was up.”

The microwave beeps the pizza’s completion, startling us both: I turn too quickly to it and knock the pizza cutter to the ground; my mother lets out a gasp that frees a loud sob. I interrupt the microwave before its third beep and remove the pizza as my mother tries to calm her lungs. She wipes tears, careful not of preserving her makeup but of getting it in her eyes, and says, raising her voice above the sound of the sink as I rinse invisible dirt from the floored cutter, “It’s just gotten too hard, and we all need something to change.” I start to cut the pizza into slices—it’s only an 8-inch circle, but I have a habit of cutting it into 16 bite-size slices, quartering it, and then quartering the quarters—and she gets to the point. It’s difficult (in the way small things are sometimes difficult) to cut a soft-crusted, microwave pizza into so many small pieces—the slices stick to the cutter as it runs back and forth, they curl up and want to somersault over each other, and you need your other hand to keep them in place—and so I’m concentrating mostly on the cutting as my mother says, “Your father’s going to move out soon, I think, as soon as possible.” It must appear as though I don’t react at all—though this is, somehow, amidst what seems now obvious family turmoil, an enormous surprise—because I simply continue to make my cuts, looking down. Then, finished slicing, I bring my fingers to my lips and raise my eyes, as my mother stands and walks toward me, crying still, or again, as she reaches for a hug. Still holding the cutter, with pizza entrails still on its blade, I hug her, careful not to stain the back of her shirt. It’s a brief embrace—though longer than the hellos and goodbyes that would become common in my college years to come—and as we pull away, her wiping her face, and me licking the blade of the cutter before I put it in the sink, I tell her, “It’s going to be ok.” “Yeah,” she says under her breath, still trying to sigh away sobs, and I pick up the plate, grab a paper napkin, and walk to the family room to eat.

Some prose, for a change.

Flicking It.

My dad tells stories of being thirteen years old, sitting at the family dinner table, after eating, his parents and his sisters and him, all smoking, all flicking the butts into the kitchen sink to burn out. There are pictures of him from the early seventies, outdoors or indoors, outside the middle school he taught at, inside the law school he went to, arm around my then-twenty-something mother or not – but always with a cigarette dangling from his lips, a too-skinny, Jewish, afroed, hippie James Dean wearing too-tight corduroy pants. A decade later, he sometimes appears in home movies, my infant sister in one arm, the other draped over the side of a couch or a chair, index and middle fingers straddling a lit cigarette; more often, though, he’s behind the camera, revealed only by his voice awkwardly commanding the action in front of him (Open the one with the green bow now. Wait. Now give your brother a hug. Ok, now blow them out.) and the wafts of smoke that occasionally drift into the shot.

It wasn’t until my middle school years that his smoking became a problem. He’d fallen ill, had left his office downtown, and was home almost all the time, spending much of the day and night in the home office that for so long had been so under-used. After a few months, the carpet and fabric-covered desk chair and wood desk—none expensive, but previously like-new—all had their own small, sort-of-circular burns. (The strands of earth-toned Berber carpet melted down into rounded pellets the size and shape of the smallest kernels of corn at the narrow end of the cob. Desk burns were the most intriguing: the burn would begin as a circle, but then would follow the grain of the wood, giving it tendrils, like an artist’s rendition of a live flame, inching onward. Burns on the chair just became holes in the fabric, revealing the yellow foam padding beneath. On the weekends, late at night, when I used the computer in his office to chat online with my friends, I’d poke at the holes in the chair, and rub my toes on the now-massaging Berber kernels, and stare at the smoky shapes inscribed on the desk.) But the burns weren’t the problem. It was all the smoking. All the additional smoking in the house. Aside from a few early morning and before-bed smokes, his two-and-a-half-packs-a-day habit had always been satisfied elsewhere. Now yellow tar flavored and colored our lives. Our clothes smelled—his office was next to the laundry room—and wallpaper, heating vents, and electrical outlets were various shades of nicotined ocher, and ashtrays and half-smoked butts floating in glasses of flat, watery Coke became fixtures in the kitchen and family room. My sister, no longer an infant in his arms but a defiant 16-year-old we all somewhat-lovingly called “The Queen,” demanded changes. The door to his office had to remain closed even when he wasn’t smoking, the window had to remain open when he was; when she was home, he had to smoke outside; and even when she wasn’t, he could only smoke in two rooms. So it was that my dad, just when he started spending time at home, was confined to his office and his bathroom.

As middle school turned to high school for me, my dad’s health finally improved – despite his smoking, as his doctors still chronically inform him. With his new lease on life, he embraced the cliché. Freed from home, he was unconfined, and he became a fixture at every somewhat local restaurant with a bar where smoking was allowed. He rarely ate alone (His being a regular, his being friendly with restaurant owners and bartenders and waitresses—though I’m a regular nowhere, my friends tell me now that I am similarly flirtatious with waitresses—is something I associate with other women. I’ve been to suburban bars with him where waiters, who apparently have never seen my dad without a female companion, assume we have a third who is yet to arrive – where my dad can order “the usual,” and actually get his meat cooked extra well done like he likes it. Recently, during one of my breaks from law school, he took me and my mother to one of these mostly-nighttime places for lunch. “Al, how you doin?” the bartender called out, as my dad—who was only ever “Al” with archetypal Chicagoans—directed the hostess to the table he wanted. I winced a bit at his ease, wondering whether anyone could tell that this one was my mother.), he sometimes didn’t come home, and eventually he moved out of the house.

But once, I must have been about thirteen, I remember sitting with him in that old office, as I occasionally did, reading on the couch, fingering the thinning brown fabric with its once-white, yellowed flowers when I wasn’t turning pages. My sister must have been home because he asked me to go out on the porch with him while he smoked. I did, and as we stood there, watching our neighbors play with their kids in the cul-de-sac, he gave me a cigarette and told me to put it in my mouth and let it hang there. “Just for kicks,” he said. I took it between my two first fingers and brought it to my lips, licking them first in hesitation. How the outer paper of the filter stuck to my lower lip surprised me, and I finally understood the magic behind my dad’s ability to talk with a cigarette in his mouth, the lit end flapping up and down with his words. As air came through the filter, I tasted the tobacco – sharp and a bit sweet, it somehow tasted like it needed to be burned. Not liking its rawness, I took it from my mouth, again between two fingers, as he always did. “How do you flick them?” I asked him. He brought his cigarette to his mouth and left it there, and then took the unlit one from my hand. He started to show me how to position it with my forefinger and thumb, but “You really need to do it with a butt,” he said, handing it back to me. I took it, thinking at first that he was actually going to have me smoke it, but he didn’t want me to light it; he wouldn’t have let me had I wanted to. He took a long drag from his, and then stubbed it out on the underside of the porch railing and handed me the butt. He showed me again how to hold it, figuring out how to translate his righty orientation to my left-handedness. With the butt in place, he let go, as though it were a bicycle seat and I was ready to pedal on my own. I flicked it. Down at my shoes. “Pick it up,” he laughed, “You’ll get it. Like this,” he said, flicking the air.

(When he left home, his office was once again unused for a year or so, until the house sold to a divorcee with four kids, who no doubt covered the Berber kernels with furniture when his office became the fourth bedroom we had never needed. His desk chair, with its holes, remained with my mother for years, until I took it from her for a new apartment post-college, and subsequently left it with my roommate, who has since thrown it out – because of the holes. The desk is now in my dad’s new home office—his business was disrupted too badly by his illness to ever allow a move back to the city—and it has fresh burns, from his same old Winston Ultra-Lights, and his girlfriend's Marlboros (the two of them quit together occasionally, and they start up again in equal measure), reaching out through the wood’s grain and cracks in the varnish. Out of habit, I suppose, he still opens the window in the office when he’s smoking, and, out of forgetfulness, I suppose, he leaves it perpetually open – so, like his old office in our old house, though the warm smell of cigarettes is always present, the room is forever either too hot or too cold.)

With something similar in mind, I think, after the last exam of my first semester of law school, standing in the still unfamiliar sun of a California December, I bummed a smoke from a classmate. He was surprised that I asked, and again when I didn’t cough as the smoke flooded my lungs and tickled through my nasal passages. Looking at me, a shot glass of whiskey (provided by the sympathetic second-year students) in my right hand and a lit cigarette dangling between the forefingers of my left, he joked, “Not a very California image.” Still expecting a cough, he paused. And, filling his otherwise unfulfilled pause, as I let the smoke leak back out through my mouth and nose, and rolled the cigarette slowly between my thumb and forefinger, I said, “I have my father to thank.”

A lil poem. From me to you.

This is from last April, though I added a line tonight. Any guesses which one?

Extra Sents.

When I write--more frequently with essays, but also with poems--I often have leftovers. Phrases and sentences that I can't find a place for, but which I don't want to delete forever. So the Documents folder of my computer is riddled with files containing the abbreviated phrase "extra sents" -- words that remain, useless. What follows is a sampling, connected.

The novel is a collection of tales that, as a whole, tells a story of upheaval.
Truth exists only in the present; the past cannot speak for itself. This, at first, seems rather trite and the reader rushes past it in search of a more inventive thought. She wants to bring the two ends of the dichotomy together and tie them in a knot, but this does not take seriously the distinctions between persons -- in the “Occasional Strings Attached” way. (An admonition just vague enough to make me think.) This self-interrogation turned supplication is a last-ditch effort to follow a path set out for him by prescriptions from a childhood that has literally fragmented into tangents in a classroom: What starts a wildfire but a single burning bush? (But with this question, he asks not of his classroom but of his neck. (That’s not a confession. Just something I’ve been told.))

Brand spanking new (what a weird phrase).

So I was playing with old pictures. Then came this. Took a while to finish-- wasn't sure where it was going. But I think I like where it ended up. Enjoy or not!

* * * * *

Circa early- to mid-2004.

Venting.

The people at the Tribune seem to have wanted to give my blogalogue adversary the final word over there: They have yet to post the response I sent in a week ago. But I shall not be defeated. I have other ways of reaching the mas...well...the seven of you, anyway.

Here is the blogalogue as it stands.

And. Here is what the Tribune should have posted last week:

Laurie,

Once again, you have twisted my words and offered nothing substantive in response. It's clear at this point that this discussion is going nowhere. At every turn it seems I have to untangle my words from the spinning you've put them through.

So, one last time: My concern is not that you don't offer "reasoned" argument; my concern is that your reasoning is punctuated with alarmist analogies and all the rest of the devices I mentioned previously.

I am left to assume that you offer such things in place of substance -- like, say, the first principles you still apparently refuse to reveal. I appreciate your suggestions for relevant reading (charitably, I'll assume away your condescension), and I'll add those books and authors to my ever-growing list.

But, though I understand it might take a book to describe and support a first principle in detail, I must say I'd find it odd if you couldn't also simply state yours succinctly -- so odd, in fact, that I must assume you could, but won't.

So whether I find your ideas intellectually and ethically bankrupt is for now, to my dismay (and despite the words you've put in my mouth), an open question.

And apparently, by your design, it will remain so until other authors explain you for you.

Until then, then,

Peace.

Jordan Blumenthal
Chicago, IL

UPDATE: Apparently sending the response in again did the trick. It is now posted on the Tribune blog. Same link as above.

Linking.

Confession: I've recently been blogging elsewhere. I thought, in the interest of consolidation (sort of), I should link here to that blog. It's the Chicago Tribune "Voice of the People" blog that exists, as far as I can tell, for the purpose of responding to letters to the editor. Which is what my posts were. Responses. Essays, you might say. So do not expect poetry (though I like to think they have a certain flare).

About two weeks ago, a woman from my hometown wrote a letter to the editor in response to an op-ed piece that denounced our military's "Don't ask, Don't tell" policy regarding gay soldiers. You'll find her letter if you scroll to the top of the page. Then, to read the responses in order, scroll all the way to the bottom and read upward. Scattered throughout, you'll find three back-and-forth response rounds between me and her (if you care to look, that is).

A change of pace from what I generally offer here, but I thought it might be of interest. It is to me, anyway.

Here's the link.

Enjoy. (Or not.) And feel free to comment -- there or here.

UPDATE: My blogalogue adversary fired another volley (though the ammunition seemed to be blanks). I've sent in my response, but judging from past experience I don't think it will be posted until sometime Monday. Keep checking there or here for updates (if you care) (if you really care, I'll email you my response) (if I know you) (or if I don't, actually).

Short, but sweet.

Finally.

The deodorant thing isn't working. Something's not right. It keeps getting detoured and sidetracked and broken down and then chased around by maniacal cannibals in the woods (anyone see Wrong Turn? Eliza Dushku? Anyone? Anyone? Buehler?). But I'll keep at it.

To tide you over. Since I know I've had oh so many of you at the edges of your seats for so long. Something old. From sophomore spring. But with a new title.

Enjoy. (Or not. Up to you.)

An aperitif.

Something about deodorant will be forthcoming soon.

But in the meantime: something old. Circa 2002. And revisited a bit since then.

And. As the style is not entirely my own. I should note: This stems from a writing prompt -- an imitation of the short shorts of Thomas Bernhard's Voice Imitator.

As commissioned, but untitled.

I'm not sure how to present this.

Except to say. I'm pretty certain this will not be its final draft. But I'm also pretty certain its final draft won't come anytime soon. Its roots are too many, I'm too attached to its petals, and its metaphors got mixed up and missed the boat.

Feel free to comment.

Feel free to suggest titles, too -- I'm leaning toward "Upon imagining several lived moments, and others."

A tribute [, which takes precedence].

Thanks to those who responded to the last post. The highest vote-getter was number 6. And whatever comes of those words will be here next. But for now...

I took a fiction workshop in college. We did writing exercises in class. For one session, the instructor had us bring in our favorite book. The exercise that week was simply to copy out, word for word, its opening page. And then to continue on our own, to see where that took us.

What follows is the first page of a favorite book from a favorite author. It also happens to be the entire first chapter. See where it takes you.

*****

THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED

Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.

Jonah--John--if I had been a Sam, I would have been a Jonah still--not because I have been unlucky for others, but because somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places at certain times, without fail. Conveyances and motives, both conventional and bizarre, have been provided. And, according to plan, at each appointed second, at each appointed place this Jonah was there.

Listen:

When I was a younger man--two wives ago, 250,000 cigarettes ago, 3,000 quarts of booze ago...

When I was a much younger man, I began to collect material for a book to be called The Day the World Ended.

The book was to be factual.

The book was to be an account of what important Americans had done on the day when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.

It was to be a Christian book. I was a Christian then.

I am a Bokononist now.

I would have been a Bokononist then, if there had been anyone to teach me the bittersweet lies of Bokonon. But Bokononism was unknown beyond the gravel beaches and coral knives that ring this little island in the Caribbean Sea, the Republic of San Lorenzo.

We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon, and the instrument, the kan-kan, that brought me into my own particular karass was the book I never finished, the book to be called The Day the World Ended.

*****

So it goes.

And.

If the accident will, freethinker.