Wrong Turn Journal: 09/28/2003

She Don't Dish the Dirt With the Rest of the Broads Saturday, October 04, 2003

Mrs. WTJ came home from getting coffee and said, "Look outside, they're blessing animals at the church."

"Oh yeah," I said. "It's St. Francis Day."

"Sinatra?" she said.

@ 12:43:00 PM, ,

It's Just Daydream Behavior

Sorry for the silence. A full day at work, albeit working with a reporter I've known for years and get along great with; then a hurried night trying to cram in some Secret Thing work. I got a first sentence, which believe it or not is half the battle. The other hundred come today.

I think I need to reveal the other Secret Things soon--I'm going to need help on #1, and #2 is getting too damn interesting not to talk about. At any rate, I imagine it is.

OK, back to work. Tune in tomorrow.

@ 8:55:00 AM, ,

Rush Rush Sweet Charlotte Thursday, October 02, 2003

So Rush Limbaugh is done. I don't have much of an opinion on him one way or the other; he seems like a guy your uncle listens to, our your father-in-law. He seems to me like a certain type of Catholic I can't relate to: thick, prosperous and loud, a guy who wears a cross pin on his sport coat. Knights of Columbus or, worse, Malta. The football thing was dumb, the drug thing, if true, illegal. He deserves to pay for it.

On the other hand...I got the news about the drug business from Stern this morning, and he was exulting. Here's a guy who tried to tell us to live on the straight and narrow, and look at him, etc. Just about everybody else I've heard on the topic today has had the same reaction. Finally, that loudmouth got his. See? Everybody's a hypocrite.

That, to me, is dopey, imprecise and nihilistic. Limbaugh was bad because he was obnoxious, not because he was a moralizer. Everybody broadcasts their ideas about how other people should live; some do it quietly, by the simple example of their lives; on the other end of the spectrum, people harangue. Limbaugh taunted and teased and came across as a prig. Which is not to say that you shouldn't express your views with gusto; but you have to realize that doing so makes the argument about you as much as your opinions. And it turns off a lot of people.

But the real issue is that being a hypocrite is the worst thing in the world. Limbaugh said stupid stuff about blacks and maybe broke drug laws. Does that automatically invalidate the idea that drugs can be harmful and people shouldn't use them--or any other thing he said? As I said, I'm not a fan of his, but I feel like the people celebrating his downfall--or Bill Bennett's--are acting the way kids do when they find out some secret nugget about their parents. e.g., "How can you tell me to do anything--you got pregnant when you were 18, you were high every day" etc.

There's some truth to that, but the larger truth is this: Nobody is born blank. All of us have the stain. This doesn't mean we're all cursed from birth; it means we all start out with a propensity to fail but the means to succeed. Knowing this, we can all look each other in the eye, see past anybody's pomp and station, and say: We come from the same place. We act from the same motives. I know you. ("You're like me!" --Dennis Hopper, "Blue Velvet")

In other words, we should be very careful before discounting what a "hypocrite" says. By definition, we can't be "ideal." We're flawed, and we can't get away from that. So people are never going to consistently live up to the ideals they preach. What matters is the truth of those ideals, and how strenuously you pursue them. Saying that ideals, or traditions, or codes are bullshit because nobody lives up to them is just taking your ball and going home.

Again for the third time, I don't like the guy, and he should get his for what he did. But ideals aren't bad things, even if the guy articulating them is an asshole.

So ends my bicentennial minute.

@ 11:46:00 AM, ,

The Stars and Stripes Forever (Hopefully Not Forever) Tuesday, September 30, 2003

A busy day, but not worth blogging about. For yucks I'm reading Paul Johnson's "A History of the American People," a nice, and I have to imagine deliberate, inversion of "A People's History of the United States." A good rule of thumb: Anything with "A People's..." in the title will be a work of absolute horseshit, and its creator has spent the minimum time possible among the "People" he's writing about. (For a real "People's History of the United States," look to John Steinbeck's "America and Americans"--as straightahead and unpretentious as its title, unblinking in its analysis, and altogether full of love for its subjects, however chipped and dented they might be.)

Anyhow, Johnson paints a great picture. He's a brilliant guy, erudite but plain-spoken, and knows when to go into great depth, when to give a broad picture. His picture of the early English settlers (where I'm at now) is intriguing. He divides them into adventurers and pilgrims--people who came to America looking for a profit and those who came to create a utopia. The culture still has both strains, he argues, and needs them both to survive. Also an interesting take on why the English colonies "took," as opposed to the Dutch, French, etc: The Brits had a tradition of representative government going back centuries and gave the colonies (at least at first) a broad hand to manage their own affairs. From the get-go, the colonists held elections, recalls (ahem) and put big issues up for a vote.

And were religious fanatics. It's hard to like the Puritans: They thought the government should enforce religious laws, and tortured people who broke them. Doubly hard to love them as a Catholic; they kept out the Romish types and on the whole had a ridiculous, life-hating view of Christianity. (I say this, by the way, in the G.K. Chesteron-via-Thomas Aquinas sense, not the dopey me-decade sense. GK argues that Catholicism accepts the natural world as a fact and doesn't require the worshipper to deny the physicality of life--eating, drinking, dancing, presumably screwing, etc. I don't know if I get that entirely, or agree with it, but at any rate the Puritans certainly didn't have their freak on.)

So what does this all add up to? I'm waiting to write a jumphed so I can vamoose out of here. God Bless America.

@ 5:03:00 PM, ,

It's All About the Doctor

Hey there, sorry for the slack; I've been busy the past few days, trying to get other things done (chief among them sleep). Think of this fallow period as a pledge drive. A hundred dollars gets you a Toth bag!

@ 8:22:00 AM, ,

The Sound of Old T-Rex Sunday, September 28, 2003

A sleepy day in Bayonne town. Sleepy in the sense of putting together furniture, moving it into place, cooking a quasi-elaborate dinner, etc. Worked also on Secret Thing 0.5--an offshoot of a Secret Thing I could've sworn I'd finished months ago but keeps catching me in its penumbras and enamanations. This project is following the usual arc: I began it grudgingly, found a way to entertain myself with it, and now it's as unstoppable as a Vespa on cobblestones. Whatever. I'll just turn it in and see what happens. That's what editors are for, right?

Met a new neighbor over garbage yesterday. A nice guy, maybe twenty years older than Mrs. WTJ and me. Speaking of whom, Mrs. WTJ had made pals with him earlier on, found him personable and worth knowing. A challenge!

At any rate, he was wearing a pendant when I ran into him. I told him it was nice, and asked him who the picture was (a barely visible black and white).

"Meher Baba," he said. "A great spiritual leader."

Hey now! And me a Pete Townshend fanatic! Me who haunted eBay for Ronnie Lane rarities! Dude, I've got thirty alternate takes of "Baba O'Reilly"! So what if I always skip the songs off that one live album where he keeps going on about enlightenment and crossing the ferry and whatever?

I made a hash of all that when I tried explaining it. The only thing that got across right, I think, were the exclamation points. He went his way, me mine, and I can't help but wonder about guys like that--him and my mother's cousin, who took a wrong turn somewhere in the thickets of the 1960s (at least from my family's point of view). Smart guys, counterculture, living in theoretically lousy neighborhoods for their purposes but finding a way to fit in. They do yard sales, they chat with retirees, they answer questions happily.

So lookit me: I've got everything, but have to struggle to give somebody the time of day, let alone a good word. What happens when I find myself twenty years down the road in a neighborhood where I don't belong?

Smiles, everyone! Always smiles!

@ 10:52:00 PM, ,