The Worst Way to Suffer; or, What People Need

Posted on May 23, 2013 | 12 Comments

I just read an article about a woman and her plan to retire at 50, and my first thought was, I feel bad that she’s over 40 and doesn’t have a husband or children.

I realize that reaction has become socially archaic, so let me clarify. I’m a modern man, and I’m all for independent women. She doesn’t need a husband or children for validation. But I also value romance, intimacy and all that sentimental stuff. It sounds like the woman has a good life, I just hope she has someone to share it with.

I’ve been wanting to write about this for a while. I’ve come to know around ten or more women pushing 40 or already over it. These women have good careers, make large salaries, own homes, have advanced degrees, are cultured and socially active, are attractive, exercise, eat healthy and have pleasant and interesting personalities. And they’re all single.

I think about these women often. There are limits to my compability with all of them, so I think more like a sociologist than a suitor, but I still want to know why and how they’re single. Why? Is it because men don’t approach them? Do these women feel like they haven’t met the right guy yet? Do they have too high standards? Do they feel like they don’t have time to date? Do they have some secret defect? Do they feel bad? Do they worry something is wrong with themselves? I don’t know, and I wouldn’t want to make any of them uncomfortable by asking. I do know many of them aren’t content being single – I’ve seen their online dating profiles.

I don’t understand, but I have empathy. I wish I could show that. These are great women. I’m sorry if guys don’t see that. I’m sorry if these women feel they’ve done everything right and yet feel something big is missing. And I wish I could show solidarity – I’m single too. Though that’s demoralizing the more I think about it – if they’re still single there’s no hope for me.

Supposedly some people say they prefer being single. But they’d have to work very hard to convince me of that. What, they’d rather go without love just so they don’t have to make room for another toothbrush?

I don’t care what anyone says, people need people. You need someone to share your thoughts, feelings, experiences, successes and joys, and also your burdens and problems. It’s science — we’re wired that way. You’re likely to go crazy otherwise. Loneliness is the worst way a person can suffer. It’s the first form of suffering, because you must bear all other suffering yourself.

Being single doesn’t mean people should totally surrender to loneliness. People can get a part of what they need from family and friends. But people need someone they can get really close to, someone they can literally cling to at night, and whisper things they’ve never told anyone.

I hope my friends find that someone soon. I hope the woman in the article who plans to retire at 50 is happy now, and that she will be for the rest of her life. She doesn’t have to answer to anyone’s standard of how she should live. That’s her choice. She’s worked for it and deserves it. She doesn’t have to listen to anyone, including me. She’s entitled to tell me to go fuck myself. It’s just that I’m tired of having to do that, and I feel bad for anyone else who has to too.

the-freewheelin-bob-dylanPhoto: from the photo session that produced the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan

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Posted in Life

Women with charm, men with courage

Posted on May 5, 2013 | Leave a comment

The writer F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that every story derives from two classic fairy-tales: Cinderella and Jack the Giant Killer. He said that writers keep retelling the two stories because audiences like female characters with charm and male characters with courage. I too like both, and my favorite kind of story is when a man finds courage to chase a woman with charm.

I remembered Fitzgerald’s theory recently while watching Parade’s End, the five-part HBO and BBC miniseries based on Ford Madox Ford’s four-part novel set during World War I. The protagonist, Christopher Tietjens, is an English aristocrat, an eminent statistician, and an anachronistic Tory – a man who clings to tradition and convention, and who shudders at the rush of societal change. Tietjens is married to a manipulative socialite named Sylvia, but he grows attracted to a bold suffragette named Valentine Wannop:

The trailer alludes to one of the movie’s most tense scenes, when Valentine asks Christopher why, despite a palpable attraction, he didn’t kiss her the night they met. He doesn’t because he can’t – he feels a duty to society to maintain pretenses, even for a loveless marriage. “You know what I want I can’t have,” he says.

These days we find such devotion to be stifling, but that’s the challenge Christopher has to overcome in his day. To love Valentine, he has to find courage to break with everything he’s ever known. Of course he does evolve, and you can guess how the story ends (it’s a nice ending).

Watching Parade’s End reminded me of Atonement, the 2001 novel by Ian McEwan that was adapted into a 2007 movie starring James McAvoy and Keira Knightly. McAvoy plays Robbie, a groundskeeper who loves Cecilla, the elder daughter of a rich English family. Cecilia is the only one who believes Robbie is innocent when he is falsely accused of a heinous crime, and she longs for his return when he is taken out of prison and put in the army during World War II:

Atonement is my second favorite novel (this is my first). The movie is fine for a movie, though it’s inadequate compared to the book (as movies usually are). The movie truncates the book’s frantic second part, when Robbie rushes to escape the Nazi blitz and join his comrades for the great Dunkirk evacuation. The movie also misses much of the book’s psychological probing. We get inside Robbie’s head as he weighs the danger of getting killed, the horrors of war, a festering shrapnel wound, and his shattered home life, but also his love for Cecilia. He keeps moving only because he’s determined to see her again.

I won’t tell you how Atonement ends, because there’s a twist, so let’s move on (but find out for yourself). I’ve also seen McAvoy star in Starter for 10, an adaptation of David Nicholls’ comedic novel about a working class college student who cheats during a television quiz show. McAvoy’s character, Brian, has to decide whether he should pursue his alluring teammate Alice, or a salty law student named Rebecca:

Eventually, Brian figures out which woman he should pick (she’s the one who challenges him the most). Starter’s college campus setting echoes the elite prep school in The Art of Getting By, a 2011 movie written and directed by Gavin Wiesen. I watched it last night. Freddie Highmore stars as George, an exceptional student in an existential funk who shirks all responsibility. During a chance encounter, George’s quick thinking impresses Sally, a savvy and spunky classmate played by Emma Roberts:

George doesn’t realize he’s in love with Sally until it’s almost too late. But like Brian, he figures it out. Like Christopher, he finds the courage to chase after his woman of charm (and she gets him to do his homework).

I like these stories because they have male characters I can relate to, and female characters I could love. What would happen if I met a woman like Valentine or Sally? Would I realize the stakes? Would I say the right things? Would I find the courage to chase them?

I don’t know. I like to think so. But these stories are also ruining me, because now I’ve got high expectations. I never seem to meet those women with charm, and as I get older I grow convinced that women like that exist only when literary men create them.

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Posted in Essays, Life

We say grace and we say ma’am, and if you ain’t into that we don’t give a damn

Posted on May 3, 2013 | 1 Comment

Students at a high school in Arizona recently caused controversy when they created and celebrated a holiday called Redneck Day. From the USA Today:

Tom Lindsey, superintendent of the Queen Creek Unified School District, said the only intent of Wednesday’s event was to satirize the A&E reality TV show “Duck Dynasty,” which follows a family of duck hunters and entrepreneurs from West Monroe, La.

But some students and their family members weren’t amused. Among them: the Rev. Ozetta Kirby, pastor of Holy Trinity Community AME Church in Mesa and vice president of the East Valley chapter of the NAACP.

“I’m sitting here crying and praying,” said Kirby, whose grandson Marcus Still is a 16-year-old junior at the school.

“This thing really got to Marcus,” Kirby said. “When you’re in 11th grade, that can break you down and make you feel at the bottom rung of the whole society, where everybody is being jubilant. No kid should have to go through that. We all know the connotation of ‘redneck.’ “

Yes, redneck is a loaded word. Some students came to school waving Confederate flags, which despite what southerners say about heritage, still intimidates minorities. So I understand why many students felt offended on Redneck Day.

But rednecks should be offended too. I count as friends several self-described rednecks. They wear the word with pride. But I worry people conflate the term, and the culture behind it, with negative stereotypes. Rednecks wouldn’t ever ask me to defend them, but still, I don’t like seeing them slapped in the face.

Shows like Duck Dynasty and Swamp People get big ratings nationwide. Viewers who aren’t rednecks watch because they’re curious, which is fine. But we know that people who are outsiders to the south, or small towns, or rural culture often look down on the people who are from those places. Southerners and the like talk slower and live slower, so they must have slower brains. They live in fly-over country, and the sticks, and in bum-fuck. They’re dumb hicks and white trash who fit stock characters – everyone in Georgia is strumming the banjo from Deliverance.

Maybe a bunch of high school kids dressing up and speaking with twang is harmless. Again, rednecks don’t ask me to defend them, and many are good at portraying rubes to their advantage. But the idea of Redneck Day bothers me just as it would if the students celebrated Mexican Day by showing up looking like day laborers – they don’t give a shit how people live, they just want to make jokes before going home to a cushier universe. It bothers me that MTV airs a show like Buckwild after strategically ignoring country music for thirty years – it’s no tribute to Wild Wonderful West Virginia that the city slick execs saw the depraved kids on that show as the cast of the new Jersey Shore.

I give you that many southerners and small-towners are behind the times on some issues, and would do better evolving and adapting. The world is going to pull them along whether they like it or not. But their culture still has much to offer, and it has much worth respecting.

Just as I think it’s important that all students study Black History Month to learn about universal examples of strength and dignity, I think students should learn about redneck culture. I don’t mean “white history month.” I mean students everywhere, in the cities and suburbs, should learn to appreciate the skills that rural people preserve: how to hunt and fish; how to grow the food we eat; how to use ingenuity to fix things when the ideal part isn’t around; how to use simplicity and common sense (or to be highbrow, Occam’s Razor) to avoid complexity and complication. They should understand the kind of people who mine coal, haul timber and rig derricks. Students taste grits and scrapple, and learn about Hank Williams and George Jones and Merle Haggard, because that music is just as American as jazz, rap or rock and roll. They should put their fucking cell phones down and sit on a porch with a pitcher of sweet tea and just relax.

Rednecks know all about those things and more. That knowledge has value; that culture has value. In fact, as Hank Jr. says, aint’ too many things these boys can’t do. And one day, you might just need a redneck:

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Posted in Culture

What Tim Tebow’s failure teaches us about America

Posted on April 30, 2013 | 4 Comments

Yesterday, the day a basketball player became the first openly gay athlete in one of the big four pro team sports, the cover story on ESPN’s website was about the New York Jets cutting their fifth-string quarterback.

I said on Facebook that I’m looking forward to the day when neither is a story. I’m actually surprised that I didn’t see more people talk about Jason Collins coming out, which shows how ready the country is to accept gays living in the open, and yet blended with everyone else. He’s gay; he still has to join the layup line.

But I still don’t understand the Tim Tebow thing. Actually, I do. He inspires a mania in grown men. Here’s what Yahoo columnist Les Carpenter wrote about the Jets cutting Tebow:

Apparently the New York Jets couldn’t have hated Tim Tebow more. They dumped him on the first Monday after the NFL draft, knowing that other teams’ rosters will be filled and the chance Tebow finds another job in the league is bleak.

It wasn’t enough for the perpetually dysfunctional half of East Rutherford’s two football franchises to drop Tebow from its roster. It had to humiliate their backup quarterback on the way out the door, timing his release to come at the worst possible moment.

Really? Did the Jets cut Tebow because they hate him, or because they had the sudden opportunity to draft Geno Smith two days before? The Jets are about to cut Mark Sanchez too, and Tebow was three spots behind him on the depth chart.

Carpenter writes as if the Jets timed things just to screw Tebow, when in reality all NFL teams make roster moves immediately after the draft. Many sign undrafted free agents – the Jets alone signed 16 of them. To make room for those new players, teams cut old ones. But where’s the fury over the Patriots cutting fullback Tony Fiammetta, or the Cardinals cutting guard Adam Snyder?

Carpenter eventually answers his own question about why the Jets cut Tebow: By the time the Jets made the trade they should have known Tebow’s strengths and limitations. Heck, the whole world knew about them through the final frantic weeks of Denver’s run to the 2011 AFC West title and the playoff win over Pittsburgh. All anyone had to do was watch John Elway’s face. He could barely hide his disdain for Tebow’s game.

The stats – a 48% completion rate – and our eyes say Tebow can’t play quarterback in the NFL. The Jets saw that all last year. Tebow’s apologists will say that he’s hard to tackle, or that he can chuck a bomb, but they ignore that he fails at the core function of the position: reading defenses and making quick and accurate throws of an intermediate distance. That’s the job. Tebow can carry the fire hose but he can’t aim the nozzle.

We’ve seen failed quarterbacks like Tebow before: Heath Shuler, Tim Couch, Akili Smith and so on. And yet Tebow is different. He gets more slack – more front page news and fawning editorials. By all accounts he’s a nice guy and a hard worker, so people want him to succeed. He also gets more slack because he’s white and good looking and traditional. He fits the role of hero in the stories we heard as children. He’s Paul Bunyan and Captain America and all that.

As Americans, we want to believe that hard work leads to success. But success requires more: talent, opportunity, being in the right place at the right time, knowing the right people and other things. I think people fear that if Tebow fails, America fails. But really, the system worked. The system cut the guy who wasn’t good enough. The Jets are going to give the job to their best quarterback. If Geno Smith sucks they’re going to cut him too. To use Carpenter’s word, humiliate, we humiliate Tebow more by treating him differently than any other fifth stringer.

I don’t want to root against Tim Tebow, I just don’t want to think about him anymore as a professional football player. I’ve seen him on the field and found him lacking. Let’s move on. Let him move on. In fact, on a personal level I wish him the best in his next pursuit. He deserves no shame for flunking out of the league like plenty of others. He can go try to play in Canada. Or he can quit football and hit the lecture circuit. Whatever. He’s a celebrity in America: he’ll be a star as long as people go blind at light and mistake it for heat.

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Posted in Culture, Sports

Where should a transgendered child use the bathroom?

Posted on March 15, 2013 | Leave a comment

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The parents of a six-year-old transgendered girl with boy parts are suing a Colorado school district over the district’s refusal to let the child use the girls bathroom. From the AP:

When the Mathises learned he had gender identity disorder — a condition in which someone identifies as the opposite gender — they decided to help Coy live as a girl. And suddenly, she came out of her shell.

“We could force her to be somebody she wasn’t, but it would end up being more damaging to her emotionally and to us because we would lose the relationship with her,” Kathryn Mathis said. “She was discussing things like surgery and things like that before and she’s not now, so obviously we’ve done something positive.”

Now, her family is locked in a legal battle with the school district in Fountain, a town 82 miles south of Denver, over where Coy, 6, should go to use the bathroom — the girls’ or, as school officials suggest, one in the teachers’ lounge or another in the nurse’s office. Her parents say using anything other than the girls’ bathroom could stigmatize her, and open her up to bullying.

I posted about this on my Facebook page. I said that I wouldn’t lose comfort sharing a bathroom with a transgendered person. I’m a creative, cultured and academic adult with roots in many soils. I’ve encountered just about every type of person imaginable – there’s no untapped human trait left to startle me.

But I understand kids are different. They have much to learn, they’re impressionable, and they can get confused very easily. This is an unusual situation for an elementary school. I understand the school’s reluctance to let the child use the girls bathroom. Six-year-old anatomically female girls might get uncomfortable knowing there’s a penis in the next stall. Twelve-year-old girls going through puberty and periods might feel even worse (and surely lots of boys would feel weird if this went the other way; I know I would have at that age).

Two of my conservative friends, including one who has young children, commented under my Facebook post to say that the child is definitively a boy and shouldn’t get to use the girls’ bathroom. One friend said the child’s self-identification is irrelevant against immutable anatomy. That’s a hard point to dispute – you can’t get water with two parts oxygen and a carbon atom.

I reckon many liberals would have trouble taking this too. Most people expect a certain level of privacy and comfort when they use the bathroom, and they want their kids to have that too.

Liberals believe in equality and access – you can’t tell a black man that a restroom is for whites only. Segregation is an impractical way to organize society, and it’s a dick move. I generally try to err on that liberal side – I see the same thinking behind saying no here and in all the other cases where greater society has said no is no longer an option.

But liberalism, at least as I see it, gives citizens both rights and responsibilities. People should always ask how their behavior or character affects the rest of society. As much as I want to say this child should have the right to use the girls bathroom, I can’t forget about all the other children using it too. Even I think this is too much to ask of them.

The school district offered to let the child use the private bathroom in the nurse’s office, but the parents feel that’s an insult. They don’t want their child to have a stigma that attracts bullies. They just want everyone to treat as a girl their boy who really wants to be a girl.

I’m sure the parents are doing what they think is best. They want their child to be happy. I tend to think happiness is overrated – achieving balance while always striving for something is more realistic and beneficial. I’m only an observer, but I think the parents should have said to their child: we know you don’t like it, but you have to be a boy right now, because that’s the way it is, and when you get older then you can be a girl if you still want to.

How can the child really know anything right now? No one knows yet what will happen when the child goes through puberty. This identity crisis might be a phase. The child might start to have a heterosexual attraction to girls. Then what? Which bathroom now? Regardless of sexual orientation, the child’s voice will deepen and shoulders will broaden, and an Adam’s Apple will protrude – whatever is left of the boy will become a man. I think it’s best to let all that biology unravel before we start tinkering with sociology.

I think that’s what the parents of this child should do. And I think other parents should start telling their kids this: You’re going to grow up and go out into the world. You’re going to see things that you don’t understand, and that may shock, scare or even repulse you. Get used to it, that’s the way the world is. You’ll see people you’ll want to call freaks – but imagine their perspective, and have empathy, for their situation might be very hard. Don’t make it harder, and try to coexist.

Photo: Ran on CNN.com, courtesy of the Mathis Family. I try not to lift pictures like this, but this is a special case with few potential alternatives.

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Posted in Culture, Life

This is the best day of my life

Posted on March 1, 2013 | Leave a comment

Today is my birthday. I’m 33. It’s a Friday, and later I’m going to a party at a bar with some friends.

I’m writing this from my bed, a six-inch thin, single-person mattress on the floor, over a rug, but no frame or boxspring. This is a poor bed for a 33-year-old, but I’m a poor man. I didn’t even pay for it – I inherited it from a friend seven years ago.

I remember sitting on this bed three years ago, on my 30th birthday. I had just moved back to New Jersey after twenty years in Virginia. I had already spent all the money I had saved and taken with me. I moved to try to begin a writing career, but I had no leads. I didn’t even have a job. I had applied to work in publishing, but I never got any calls for interviews. I looked for other office jobs, but I never got calls for those either.

On my 30th birthday I was sitting on the bed of child, with no career prospects, and I had to worry about how I was going to pay for food that day, and the next day and every day. Though I was living with two friends from college, I didn’t know anyone else in my new town. I wasn’t part of any groups or clubs. I sure didn’t have a girlfriend – I wasn’t in a position to be with someone.

One day I’ll be able to articulate how depressing that was. For now I’ll say, if you’ve ever questioned your reasons for living, I know how you feel.

I feel better now. I got my shot – I’m employed. Self-employed, even — I’m my own boss. I’m building a career in a profession people respect and find interesting. I talk to people and tell their stories. I’m part of a community. I’m writing a book. I spend all my time looking at, hearing and thinking about language – I’m heir to a line of scribes who have been moving the human species since the first meeting of mark and parchment thousands of years ago. I get to do the only thing I’ve wanted to do, the only thing I’m good at, and the only thing I’ve wanted to be great at.

I still struggle to buy bread, but I know if I keep working I’ll get that money. Better than knowing, I can feel it. I am master of my own destiny – I can do it. This is why I say today is the best day of my life – I really feel like my life is getting better every day, and I’m even more excited about tomorrow.

I have my career and my community, and now the next thing I want is to find someone to share my life with, someone who’d want to share her life with me – someone accomplished, active, charming and curious who can hold a conversation, and who has a good sense of fashion, a vibrant smile and hot legs. I’m ready to be in love with someone like that.

Who knows, maybe I’ll meet a nice girl at the party tonight. I’ll be glowing, and maybe that will catch someone’s eye. But if we hit it off we’ll have to go back to her place – my bed isn’t big enough for two.

781px-Lautrec_in_bed_1893

Photo: In Bed, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1893

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Posted in Essays, Life

I’m writing a book

Posted on February 26, 2013 | 4 Comments

I’ve been writing professionally for three years, though except for three newspaper articles, I’ve never thought of myself as a published writer. I’m old-school and I still put an asterisk next to digital. But soon I’ll put a real book on a shelf. Arcadia Publishing does a line of books called Legendary Locals about interesting people in cities, some as large as Cleveland and Detroit. They want to do one about Hoboken, and they want me to write it.

This is the biggest project of my professional writing career. Each of the books are small, only 128 pages, and they include mostly pictures with captions, but I’ll still write 30,000 words, about a third of a novel. Since each caption is individual, I won’t have to string together a narrative, but I still have to organize the book into thematic chapters.

As for pay, I’ll only get royalties – 8% of every print and digital copy sold, plus a percentage of ancillary sales to databases and the like. But I’ll also be able to use the book to promote myself to commercial clients. I’ll be able to ask for more money by having a book on my resume.

Legendary Locals Jacket designBeyond pay, this book gives me validation. I asked the acquisitions agent if Arcadia was doing a blanket search for people to submit proposals, or if they wanted to do a book about Hoboken and they wanted me to be the one to do it. She said the latter – they wanted me.

The editor said she found me while researching writers from Hoboken. There are some other good ones here, so I’m honored she picked me.

She said she read my work with the Hoboken Patch, but also that she visited my website. I’m especially happy about that. I don’t get a lot a hits here. I might spend three hours writing an essay for only 25 people to read it. I share what I write on Facebook and Twitter, and maybe a few of my friends see it, but they seldom share it with their friends for a viral effect. The stuff I write isn’t consumable like some picture of a cat jumping over a rainbow with an inscription telling people to believe or be happy or whatever.

That lack of hits is demoralizing, but I’ve realized I shouldn’t worry about many people seeing this website. Instead I spend all that time writing in case the right person sees it – someone in a position to pay me to write something for them. That just happened, the website worked.

I waited a long time for an opportunity like this, and for much of that time I believed it would never come. When I was a teenager I wanted to be the next Christopher Hitchens – someone cultured writes about interesting things, and who people turn to for an opinion. I realize I’m never going to reach that level. I might not have enough talent for it, but certainly I screwed up too many times along the way. I’m ashamed of some of the opportunities I’ve thrown away.

But I figured out how to take opportunities just in time, as I was getting what should have been my last one three years ago, and I’ve been getting more and taking them ever since. I’m getting more projects, getting my name out there. I’m going to be able to point to a book on a shelf and say I did that – and I’ll be able to imagine that book sitting on thousands of other shelves. Maybe I’m not Christopher Hitchens, but I’ve done something, I’m still in the league.

I feel like I’m at top of my game. I remember hearing about Lawrence Taylor meeting Wayne Gretzky at an event while both of them were stars in the ’80s. Gretzky said to Taylor, everyone thinks I move faster than them, but I feel like the game around me has slowed down; I see everything before it happens. Taylor said he felt the exact same thing – he felt like those lineman were frozen as he was charging past them to sack the quarterback.

That’s how I feel about my writing these days – I see everything around me slowing down. When a client gives me a project, I’m already writing in my mind before they finish explaining it. I’ve read enough words to be able to parse sentences and see things most people don’t. I’ve thought about the craft enough to have my own theories – I understand what makes good writing, and I can explain it.

Though Arcadia approached me, they still asked me to submit a formal proposal – about me and my connection to Hoboken, a chapter outline, some sample captions and places that might buy the book to sell. Two committees looked at the proposal.

Legendary Locals Jacket design backI was only worried about whether the committees would see enough opportunities for the book to sell – they’re in business to make money. I wasn’t worried about whether they think I’m a good writer or if the book will be good. I know both of those things, and I knew I’d be able to show them that.

I’m going to write a great book, and I’m going to be proud of it. My family, friends and community are going to be proud of me – hopefully proud enough to buy a copy, or better yet two.

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Posted in Essays