Bloodless (I Walked With a Zombie)

Before I proceed with the actual talk-about-the-film-in-some-vaguely-analytical-way for this week’s installment of the 1001 Movies Blog Club, I wanted to talk a little bit about how I’m managing the overall endeavor from a personal perspective. 1103 movies total (and counting, more no doubt to come in October or so) and 210 (as of right now) seen by me. I have a spreadsheet of the entire list of enshrined movies, which for sanity’s sake I have extensively color-coded. Green means I have in fact seen it. Blue means I haven’t seen it, but it has already been an assigned movie for Blog Club members, either from a week I bailed on or some time before I joined up. Yellow means neither I nor the Club have seen it, but I very much want to, so whenever the next time I’m tapped to pick a feature film rolls around, I can zero in on the yellow highlighted movies in my list to make a selection from the designated time period.

And then there’s the orange movies, which are the ones I haven’t seen and am kind of in disbelief at myself over, because they are minor or major classics in the geek canon. This includes such 1950’s sci-fi gems as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and Forbidden Planet (a doubly improbable gap in my knowledge since I love Shakespeare as much as I love tales of alien worlds), plus latter-day mandatory movies like Planet of the Apes, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Mad Max and Videodrome. I also feel a certain amount of obligation (which I almost certainly will fulfill sooner than later) to finally sit down and watch The Maltese Falcon and Shaft one of these days, given the thematic resonance between the respective archetypes of private eyes and vigilante superheroes.

But the craziest gaps are in the horror genre, considering how I’m always going on and on about what an aficionado I am. In my defense I can only point out that horror is an inherently overcrowded field, and although I’ve seen a ton of horror flicks, from classics to crapfests, there remains an order of magnitude more that I have not yet tackled. And as far as where the genre intersects with the 1001 Must-Sees, and gets color-coded orange in my personal tracking system, the list includes Universal Monster movies The Bride of Frankenstein and The Wolfman, Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes, and both zombie masterpieces Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead …

… not to mention I Walked With a Zombie, which I was pleasantly surprised to see pop up in the Blog Club queue a few weeks ago. I didn’t request that the Club cover it, but I had duly oranged it on my own spreadsheet because it is the granddaddy of all zombie movies, and I was pleased to have the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.

Here’s the problem with granddaddies, though: sometimes they are really racist, and sometimes they tell boring, pointless stories, and sometimes you really struggle to find a way to relate to them. I Walked With a Zombie is more like a short story on film, barely clocking in at 68 minutes, and I broke it up into three viewing chunks of twenty-some minutes (because I am of course oh so busy) and yet I still found my attention wandering. The acting is fairly stilted, in the way that I tend to associate with most older Hollywood productions. There are a few nice pieces of camerawork here and there, and the shadowy black and white turns a Caribbean plantation house into a Gothic haunted manse, although the unquiet spirit in question is not a free-floating ghost but a mindless yet ambulatory woman somewhere in between life and death. Her family and her doctor believe she is suffering the aftereffects of a tropical fever, while the local slave-descended population believe she is a true zombie. The soundwork is good also, particularly the effective use of the constant, unsettling sound of houmfort drums in the background.

There are many black performers in the cast but they all fall into one of two categories, either the obsequious and servile types or the superstitious primitives. I understand the deeply embedded and unthinking institutional racism of the 1940’s and I know that nobody responsible for making I Walked With a Zombie was trying to make a provocative statement about race, but it’s still extremely hard to get around it. The African culture transplanted to the islands is depicted as both fascinatingly, frighteningly exotic and inherently inferior.

The main problem with I Walked With a Zombie is that, as a horror movie, it’s incredibly tame. It incorporates ambiguously supernatural material, in the question of whether or not Jessica is in fact a zombie, but it relies heavily on voodoo being an intrinsically terrifying alien concept, which doesn’t really hold up today. With the horror element thus not terribly horrifying, what remains is a fairly limp melodrama about a young nurse working for two quarreling brothers to take care of the woman who married one, but whom both brothers loved. And the movie begins more or less at the end of the story, with the romantic rivalry already a moot point given Jessica’s zombification. The movie concerns itself mainly with payoffs and consequences, without giving much of a reason to care.

Yeah, basically how I felt during my viewing

I wanted to like the movie, I did! But whatever power it once held to introduce viewers to an eerie world hidden in the shadows of our own has long since been demystified; the veil it means to pull back has been subsequently well-shredded. I can feel some gratitude for the trails that it blazed at the time, especially when considered as part of the entire body of work produced by Val Lewton, who could very well be enshrined as a horror geek patron saint. It’s good to live in the pop culture world that came to be in the wake of films like I Walked With a Zombie, but it’s also good to be living at a substantial remove from them as well. Sometimes old things improve with age, but sometimes newer things improve upon the older.

Dark evidence (Green Lantern:Sleepers, Book Three)

As I tried to explain at the outset, part of my goal in putting myself through SUMMER SCHOOL is taking care of some make-up work, and today is a pretty clear-cut example of that, as I return to the verdant territory of Green Lantern Month and finally finish my reviews of the Sleepers trilogy of novels by examining Book Three. (See previous posts on Book One and Book Two.)

So I’ve come to the end of the complete three-part story that Christopher Priest set out to tell, and I just feel kind of bad. Priest has done a lot of work in the comic book industry over the years, and lots of it is really good. And, from the interviews I’ve read and behind-the-scenes knowledge I’ve gleaned, he seems like a decent enough guy. He’s a tremendously talented writer who was stand-up enough to take on various thankless editing tasks in his career as well, and who got needlessly crapped upon at various points, to boot. So who am I to dump any more on the guy, to say when it comes to being a novelist, Priest is a great comic book writer?

And for the record, though it hopefully goes without saying, I don’t mean to imply that comic books are written down to the level of not-terribly-bright children and novels are artistic expression of our highest virtues and therefore being a “good comic book writer” is a dismissive backhanded compliment. Novels can be founts of wisdom or utter dreck, and so can comics. The don’t occupy two different levels of inherent merit, but each one is its own medium, and each one can highlight different strengths and weaknesses of a writer.

Here’s an example: Priest tends toward a lot of brandname references in his writing, which is a pretty aggravating tic in prose. I actually think it can be quite an asset when writing a comic book, though. If you write in a comic book script that a character is wearing a Brooks Brothers suit, that conveys a certain amount of information, some of it potentially characterization, some of it only fleeting details of set dressing. But the only person who will read the words “Brooks Brothers” will be the artist, who then draws the character wearing the suit and has to convey the brand, not by zooming in on the label but by evoking the associations in the visuals, the lines and colors. The end result is much more subtle, less grating. When you write in a novel that a character is wearing a Brooks Brothers suit, it just seems like clunky product placement. (Unless you’re Bret Easton Ellis. But sometimes even then.)

Also, if you’re writing a comic book script and you indicate “the doors were shuddered” when you really meant “shuttered” then chances are the artist will know what you meant and draw the shuttered doors correctly and your wider audience will get the idea. Whereas if you have a crummy-to-nonexistent copy editor and your novel gets on bookshelves with the phrase “the doors were shuddered” in it, then snippy English majors like me will roll their eyes.

But style is one thing, and substance is another. The substance of Sleepers: Book Three is all about Hal Jordan, who is for all intents and purposes the main Green Lantern. He wasn’t the first, he won’t be the last, and he hasn’t always been the most interesting, but he’s the one in the Super Friends and he’s the one Ryan Reynolds played in the 2011 movie. You may have noticed in the middle of that last sentence I took a dig at Hal for being the boring Green Lantern, some of which comes down to personal preference, but some of which is genuinely embedded in the history of the character. Back in the mid-50’s all superheroes were status-quo supporting squares, and the revolutionary idea of flawed, conflicted, complicated protagonists hadn’t truly taken hold (not in comic books, at any rate). So when Hal Jordan’s adventures first started getting published, he was noble and clean cut, basically Superman but with a power ring instead of a bunch of alien powers. As the decades went by Hal was redefined and reinvented many times, in a moderately intriguing reflection of changing social customs and understandings. Hal Jordan was, from day one, a professional test pilot. In the mid-50’s, the Cold War and the Space Race, this made him a prototypical brave American essentially above reproach; by the tail end of the 20th century he was (clearly!) arrogant and cocky and possibly a bit suicidal, at the very least a man-child with tendencies to be romantically self-destructive.

And Hal Jordan’s romantic life certainly factors heavily into the plot of Book Three, as Carol Ferris plays a major role in the proceedings. Carol is to Hal as Lois Lane is to Clark Kent, although she’s also to Green Lantern as Catwoman is to Batman. Priest isn’t inventing anything out of whole cloth by delving into the fraught, soap-operatic tension between pilot Hal Jordan and his boss, Ferris Aircraft executive Carol Ferris, or between masked, ring-slinging crusader Green Lantern and his foil Star Sapphire (as Carol is known when possessed by a certain cosmic gem). But Priest does make a stab at recontextualizing Carol Ferris, and it’s not one I would consider altogether successful. When originally introduced, Carol was an exciting character simply because she was a (rare at the time) independent-minded career-oriented gal. But she generally played damsel in distress to Green Lantern. Once the Star Sapphire plots started recurring, she became a regrettable stereotype of a harridan, obsessed with defeating Green Lantern and thereby claiming him as her worthy mate. Them ladies, give them all the cosmic power in the galaxy and they still just want a husband, amirite? But those embarrassing Eisenhower-era sexual politics raise a difficult question, namely which is worse: a feminine caricature who can’t decide whether she wants to blast the hero or marry him, because that’s how girls are; OR, a character who is described by the author in one breath as dealing with the emotional damage wrought by her father when she was growing up and in another breath as “evil” as if that’s just a trait that some people develop or even embrace. I honestly don’t know which is worse, the antiquated plot device/symbol of a frighteningly strong woman, or the modern all-about-the-daddy-issues oversimplification, but I know that they’re both not good.

I think, ultimately, my main frustration with Priest’s Sleepers novels is the way that he continually attempts to make grand sweeping statements about life and humanity and the nature of the universe which I assume he thinks are profound (and posisbly even the sublime expression of truth which novels can carry off but mere comic books can’t) but which really come off as oversimplifications and pointless generalizations. He describes various characters, from minor bit parts to major players like Carol Ferris, with a kind of winking, nudging, “come on, you know the type I’m talking about” as if to make himself seem worldly and wise. But reducing people to types is kind of the opposite of wisdom, as far as I’m concerned, so it all falls pretty flat.

And then, crowning the whole hot mess, is the fact that (as I referenced in my earlier reviews) this Green Lantern story, which saves the part about Hal Jordan for last, is set at a time when Hal was not serving as a Green Lantern. He was the Spectre (a concept I have dissected before), and so he is in the Book Three novel. He is an agent of God, although the book is written in first person from Hal’s perspective and he too-coyly refers to God as “the Boss”. (If this had turned out to be Bruce Springsteen all along I would have deemed Sleepers: Book Three my favorite book of all time, but alas, no.) Or at least, he starts out as an agent of God, running around extracting severe vengeance in poetically warped ways on those who commit evil, until he steps out of line one too many times and is stripped of his divine mission, which leads to him slipping on a Green Lantern ring once again. And then by the end of the book the only way for Hal to save all of Creation is to become the Spectre once again, and he does.

OK, two insurmountable problems with using this technically-canonical-circa-dawn-of-millennium Hal Jordan:

1. I find genre-action stories in which the existence of an omnipotent and interventionist God is posited to be excruciatingly boring. If God is on the good guys’ side, they literally cannot lose, which in turn sucks all the life out of the story for me. Yeah, I know that nobody reads Superman comics because this might be the time Superman loses, that it’s inherent to the superhero formula for them to be invincible, but invoking literal G-O-D? Too far.

2. The novel inevitably becomes a tract on theodicy, but it’s a nonsensical, self-contradictory, meaningless one when all is said and done. The upshot of Book Three, if I read it right (and I concede maybe I didn’t), is “Why does evil exist? It just does. It’s all part of the plan. Don’t worry about it. In fact, don’t even think about it at all. You’ll feel better if you just accept it without question.” Which is a lousy bit of philosophy on the face of it, but as the backbone of a novel about superheroes? Are you kidding me? Superheroes fight bad guys. They don’t accept the existence of evil with a shrug, they engage in a never-ending struggle against it. They don’t look for salvation in the next world, they protect life and promote justice in this world. Many, many attempts have been made over the years to reconcile an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God with a universe full of superheroes, throwing in holy warriors and avenging angels and all that, but it rarely works, because there’s a fundamental disconnect in there somewhere.

(And ha ha, you probably thought I was all done forever talking about Man of Steel! But this is another one of the things I thought was completely wrongheaded about it, the whole Kal-El = Jesus theme that they drove into the ground. Yeah, yeah, their fathers sent them from the heavens and they are destined to save the world … but no. No, no, no. Superman is NOT Jesus. For one thing, Jerry and Joe were Jewish, so if anything, Superman is Moses. And for another, the story does not go that Jor-El was angry at humanity and was going to wipe us all out unless his son arrived on Earth, made a few good points about love and compassion, and then died self-sacrificially. That is Jesus’s story. Christianity assumes that people need salvation from an external, heavenly source. Superman does not atone for our sins, and in fact comes to Earth with no agenda at all from his father other than to live. It’s his Earth-parents, the Kents, who give him the gift of human spirit and with that, Superman becomes not a redeemer making up for what we can’t do ourselves but an exemplar of what we can do. I’m not saying one of those stories is intrinsically better than the other. I’m just saying they're not the same, and hammering on Clark Kent being 33 years old on a Kryptonian crucifix … ugh.)

But where was I? Oh right, Sleepers. Christopher Priest wrote a trilogy about three different Green Lanterns working together across time and space to fight three interconnected villains, and the convoluted master plot makes approximate sense by the time all the final pieces are revealed in the final volume, but that’s largely overshadowed by the insanely misguided attempts at mashing up superhero tradition, modern psychology, spirituality and assorted other quasi-deep pretensions. And I feel bad viciously laying into Priest like that, because I’m sure he’s a solid dude and nobody forced me to read the books at gunpoint! But there you have it.

Random Monday Anecdote?

Things at work are annoying, and I may post more about that a little later today (I have a meeting about the ongoing annoyance in about half an hour). I came into work on Friday but was specifically annoyed at the fact that it was a meaningless gesture, because very few other people came in (day between the holiday and the weekend and all that), and so the people I am (still) waiting to get stuff from were nowhere to be found, and I twiddled my thumbs for eight hours. I had plenty of time to blog, but wasn’t particularly in the mood.

In any case, that means I owe you guys a random anecdote, and now that the weekend has come and gone I have one I really do want to share. It’s minor-to-the-point-of-triviality, but that’s kind of my specialty, no?

On Saturday I took the kids to Costco while my wife was at work. They were all very well-behaved so it was a relatively painless excursion, and then at the checkout lane the universe delivered me a nice little geek-chuckle. As my purchases were being scanned, I could see a couple of lanes over another gentleman checking out. He was probably older than me, based on the fact that his salt-and-pepper vandyke was more salt than pepper. He was wearing this t-shirt:

If you are having a hard time discerning what that is supposed to be, it’s the torso of one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Michelangelo, in point of fact) which puts it somewhere between geek proud fashion statement and full-on cosplay. For the record, when I was a kid I always preferred the Underoos designs which were more costume-like, e.g. the t-shirt that looked like the chestplates of Boba Fett’s armor, not a full-body picture of the bounty hunter himself. So props for that.

But that’s not what made the sighting note- and/or chuckle-worthy. Because guess what this gentleman was buying. It wasn’t a massive pallet of supplies or anything, but a much humbler in-and-out transaction. He was, as it happened, buying two gigantically Costco-sized pre-prepared pepperoni pizzas. And honestly, if I woke up in the morning and was thinking about getting dressed to go out and buy comically oversized pizzas and was trying to figure out which t-shirt to wear, and I owned a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles t-shirt, I believe that would be as no-brainer as it gets. It just makes me smile knowing there are other people like that out there in the world.

56 Signatures

Independence Day is a really interesting holiday to me because it's not as though it commemorates a discovery, or a massive military victory, or even a legally binding development. The Declaration of Independence really was, on July 4 1776, nothing but a piece of paper ... with, admittedly, some really good ideas written down on it. Not to mention signatures beneath those statements of ideas and ideals, signatures of prominent men who were risking their own valuable liberties and lives by publicly supporting the Declaration (of Open Rebellion Against Britain Which Would Be Settled By Years of War). I really like the fact that it's that day of the signing we recognize as the birthday of our nation, that we stake so much importance on writing things down and owning them. These notions, that words can powerfully matter, are near and dear to me, obviously.

I'm also fascinated by names, which are some of the most powerful magic words of our civilization. Any reflection on the popular mythology of the Declaration of Independence must eventually come to John Hancock, where meanings and significances of names and signatures and words all come together so gloriously. One can only conjecture as to what might have happened if all the delegates to the Continental Congress had realized they might secure immortality by having the largest signature on the document, and the dueling quills that might have been sharpened to the task.

Several of our undersigned founding fathers went on to become U.S. Presidents, of course, which means their names are well-known for accomplishments other than voluminous use of ink. Of the remainder of the overwhelmingly WASP-y semi-obscurities at the bottom of the Declaration of Independence, I have to note that many of them do have fantastic names for action heroes or even superheroes: John Hart! Sam Chase! Thomas Stone! Carter Braxton! Doctor Rush!

On the other hand, perhaps the most unfortunately named of the signers was Button Gwinnett. (Runner-up: Elbridge Gerry) But, at least Isaac Asimov got a good short story out of Gwinnett and his weird handle: Button, Button.

Enjoy, and Happy Fourth!

Not so long ago (In the Heat of the Night)

SUMMER SCHOOL or no, the 1001 Movies Blog Club beast must be fed! That is especially true this week as the Club is considering In the Heat of the Night at my behest. I figured that a movie set in the South in the summer would be, at the very least, seasonally appropriate.

So you know how I’ve made mention in previous 1001 Movie Blog Club posts about how I often appreciate the most baseline broadening of horizons that watching a foreign film can provide? I do so enjoy the insights into other cultures, the opportunity either to be grateful for what I already have from my own cultural perspective or to be exposed to another, possibly better, way of approaching life. And the reminders that, however different we may all be, there are more things that bind us together than separate us.

I had something of an opposite reaction while watching In the Heat of the Night; I found myself wishing desperately that the film were a dispatch from another country, or maybe another planet or a distant parallel universe. Alas, no, this is an American movie made about contemporary (at the time, less than fifty years ago) America. I have espoused many a time in the past my belief that everybody needs to own their own shit, and the naked, ugly racism of the southern United States during the civil rights struggle is about as far down in the shit as you can get, but it’s an indelible stain on our collective history. Any attempt to distance ourselves from it, to say “that all happened before I was born” or “that was them over there, not us over here” is an understandable reflex but a less than ideal way of coming to terms with it.

So here we are, with a black President in the White House and Paula Deen getting kicked off the Food Network, with the Supreme Court recently having gutted the Voting Rights Act, and with the George Zimmerman trial going on in Florida. The 237th Independence Day is tomorrow and, where I happen to live (right down the street from Bull Run Battlefield), the 150th anniversary commemorations of the Civil War are continuous and ongoing. It’s an interesting time to reflect on the difficult process of forging an integrated society that was underway in the middle of last century and is still imperfectly in progress today.

I think it’s important to recognize that the primary, unassailable value of In the Heat of the Night is as a fragment of the historical record. It captures something very uncomfortable but very real and very fundamental to understanding what problems our country and society continue to face (and, crucially, what the better elements at the heart of our country and society can do to surmount those problems). That alone makes it an utter no-brainer that this is a mandatory movie for everyone. It seems (to me) to be missing the point to debate the artistic merits of In the Heat of the Night, although that’s usually the default mode I go into when approaching any of the 1001 Must-Sees. It’s a good but not great straightforward detective story, with a good number of plausible red herrings to complicate matters but nevertheless a solution which requires the main investigator to follow up on a hunch and a whole lot of other things to coincidentally come together. The cinematography is workmanlike, with nothing particularly innovative or challenging standing out. The acting across the entire cast is about what I’ve come to expect from quality productions of the time period, pitched somewhere between theatrical artifice and realism, though of course Poitier and Steiger are both amazing. Poitier as Virgil Tibbs holds the whole movie together, and it is nothing short of awe-inspiring how he’s able to convey so much interior struggle and rage in spite of (or possibly because of) the veneer of implacable calm he keeps in place almost all the time. The moment in the first act when he is arrested at the train station, and Jewison goes for a close-up of his face as he’s braced against the wall, captures a lifetime of resentment and resignation via pure facial expression without Poitier saying a single word.

But Steiger arguably has the juicier role to play, and his performance in no way disappoints (as his Oscar for Best Actor readily attests). As Chief Gillespie, he has to contend with a murder that happened on his watch, his own semi-competent underlings, a stranger from out of town who complicates the investigation, the mindless prejudices of his community, and most of all, himself. Gillespie isn’t willfully ignorant, but he is complacent within his insulated world of local customs. Still, something inside him, some higher calling to notions of justice and the rule of law allow Gillespie to act, however unwillingly and uncharitably, as the bridge between Virgil’s world and his own. (No accident that when Gillespie collars the first suspect, Harvey, it literally happens on a bridge.)

Again, though, that’s all fairly beside the point. In the Heat of the Night is a statement movie, although it raises many more questions than it definitively answers. It’s historically significant for the specific turning point it depicts, for the ground it broke in everything from narrative (showing a black character striking a white character, with provocation and without immediate retribution) to technical details (using appropriate lighting to capture the facial features of a black actor). And it’s significant for the philosophical even-handedness it displays. In the course of the investigation, even Virgil himself is guilty of being blinded by his own prejudice, as he automatically suspects the misanthropically racist Eric Endicott. And by the end of the film, it’s not as though all the townspeople of Sparta have welcomed Virgil with open arms, as the biggest progress in race relations made is a rare smile Gillespie offers as he sees him off. In the Heat of the Night makes the arguably obvious, but also arguably necessary point that racism is counter-productive and ultimately self-destructive, but it doesn’t offer any easy answers as to what we should do about it. Even today, that remains for all of us to figure out.

Togetherness

This past weekend did not go exactly as planned. Little Bro and his wife arrived at our house in the middle of the morning Saturday, but they only stayed for a couple of hours, as opposed to the overnight visit we were expecting. The vast majority of the east coast had seen heavy rain on Friday, and while the impact on me was speed restrictions for the VRE which got me home an hour or so later than usual, the impact on my Little Bro’s current town of residence was widespread flooding and power outages, a combination which unfortunately removes electrical sump pumps such as Little Bro’s from the equation just when they’re needed most. He and my sister-in-law didn’t even really learn about the extent of the storm and flood until Saturday morning, since they had been visiting her relatives in a locale with zero cell phone coverage, and only once they were on the road toward my house did the attempts by their friends back home to reach them start showing up in the text message feeds and voicemail inboxes. Obviously my wife and I assured Little Bro that he should not feel the slightest bit bad about popping over to say hi and meet his newest nephew and then continuing on back home to deal with the flooding of his basement as soon as possible, so that’s how things went down.

Luckily (I suppose) this was not the first time their basement had flooded and they had previously gotten any and all items they did not want to lose to water damage up off the basement floor last time, so nothing was really lost this time around. They had to call the fire department to pump out their basement before the electric company would restore their power, but it all got sorted out.

So instead of doubling the number of human beings under my roof for the entirety of Saturday, it was mostly just my father, step-mother and sister joining us. I ran around doing a not insignificant amount of house tidying Saturday morning before everyone else appeared, while my wife went out to run an errand or two, and then in the afternoon I did a speed run to the grocery store to pick up the requisite cookout staples (thankful, honestly, that I had put it off til the last minute, since I didn’t end up overbuying in anticipation of Little Bro and sister-in-law, who were long gone by dinner) and by the end of the day, after my folks and sis had decamped to their hotel, I was completely wiped out. My wife observed my stupefied exhaustion and observed, “Having your family visit really stresses you out, doesn’t it?”

The weird thing was not that she was right, but that I was not particularly consciously aware of it. I mean, I’m familiar with the phenomenon but I hadn’t been obsessively focusing on it this past weekend, and if my wife had simply said to me as we were getting ready for bed “Why are you so run down?” I would have honestly answered “I have no idea.” The fact is that relations between the family I am the (nominal) head of and the one my father is head of got off to a bit of a rocky start but have steadily gotten better and better over the years. And that fact actually probably goes a long way toward explanation; I used to experience abject, mortal terror at the thought of the families getting together, and now it merely gnaws at me in a subconscious kind of way.

My dad is just the kind of person who wants certain things a certain way and doesn’t always take kindly to suggestions that maybe he might take the impact on other people into consideration. This means, for example, that he will make a long drive down the interstate, hours and hours to cover hundreds of miles, to ostensibly visit his son and daughter-in-law and grandchildren. But, after arriving late at night to sleep at a hotel and then planning to come over to visit in the morning, he will wake up and get ready and have breakfast at the hotel all in no particular hurry, and show up at our house with a good chunk of the day gone. And then it’s equally likely that at some point he’ll slip off to the den by himself to turn on the television and see how the Yankees game is going. He doesn’t mean these things as a snub or a slight, it’s just that he works all week and on the weekend he wants to do things at his own pace and relax in front of a sports broadcast and so on, not only wants that but feels it is his right and his due. And the fact that these things take away from the time he could be spending interacting with his children and grandchildren, time which is extremely limited based on geographical separation to begin with, doesn’t factor in.

To my dad’s credit, he didn’t get to our house too terribly late on Saturday morning, and not once did he attempt a surreptitious score check. Of course, we got to talking about baseball Saturday evening and he did more eye-rolling than talking. He said he had come into the current season with extremely low expectations for the Yankees, by virtue of which he’d be satisfied if they simply had a winning record, one game over .500, playoffs or no. As it happens, that’s pretty close to where they are right now. As it also happens, the Yankees were playing the Orioles all weekend, and ended up getting swept via a blown lead, a rout, and a close game that didn’t feel that way. I suppose on some level even that made me feel like I was stuck between a rock and a hard place; if the Yankees had been winning the series my wife might have felt ganged up on by my whole New York descended family, and I would have felt obligated to temper that, whereas if the O’s had the better of it (as they certainly did) I would have worried about my dad simply being a sore loser about it and curdling whatever satisfaction my wife might normally take from our own friendly rivalry. But other than the brief discussion of how rough a year the Yanks are having, baseball failed to impress itself much on the proceedings. The fates of the AL East: simultaneously totally trivial and yet devastatingly hot-button!

But yes, to sum up, nothing untoward happened but apparently I spent most of the day Saturday just waiting for the other shoe to drop, and by the time we said goodnight and goodbye to my fam I was on the verge of collapse. Maybe one of these years I will have enough faith in all our collective abilities to navigate the personal minefields that it won’t be quite so draining to traipse on through them for a weekend. But clearly I am not quite there yet.

Fourth quarter

The last three months of the calendar year are quite possibly the easiest ones to get through in terms of the workaday routine, mainly because said routine is frequently disrupted by holidays. In the first half of October there’s Columbus Day, and in early November there’s Veteran’s Day. I grant that these are not always faithfully observed in the private sector, but in the government, and particularly the DoD, they tend to be days most people stay home one way or another. Between those two falls Halloween, which doesn’t merit any extra paid time off but at least stands a good chance of seeing an office party taking place to break up the monotony. Then there’s Thanksgiving Day and the Day After Thanksgiving, the only time of year where two consecutive days of rest are guaranteed to always create a four-day weekend. And Christmas and New Years, falling a week apart, create an annual terminus dead zone where people either blow their remaining vacation balance to bridge the two, or show up to work but don’t expect to get anything done because everyone else is on vacation. Throw in some very unofficial days off, for college homecoming or emergency-pre-Turkey-Day-guest-arrival-housecleaning or last-minute-Christmas-shopping, and all in all it’s pleasant enough.

The last three months of the fiscal year (a span which, not at all coincidentally, starts today), on the other hand, goes nothing like that. We get the Fourth of July this week, a holiday-free wasteland in August, and Labor Day at the beginning of September, and man that is it. And if, like me, you have some reason or another not to take a week off for a beach getaway or somesuch, it is a long hard slog.

And this year, we have the budget sequester to contend with, which entails the furloughing of government civilian employees for a few months, generally in the form of forcing people to take a day off without pay every Friday starting now and going through some time in the fall. Actually, not starting right now, which is the real kick in the painful-parts; the furloughs go into effect as of July 8. So do the government civilian employees get a four-day weekend for Independence Day, albeit with one of the two weekdays unpaid? No they do not! They all have to show up on the 5th, but then the Friday after that (and every subsequent one until further notice) they get to hang around the house brooding over their 20% pay cut.

As I’ve mentioned before, the sequester doesn’t affect me quite the same way because I’m a contractor. The assumption at this point is that the furloughs will be painful and the longer the summer goes on the more pressure will build for Congress to get the budget sorted out or at the very least pass some revisions which allow entities like the Army to re-distribute reduced funds according to their needs instead of hacking exactly ten percent off every line item in their budget with no regard for strategy or sense. My contract runs through the end of the fiscal year and my boss has already let it be known that the agency wants to renew it for an additional year and is working on allocating the funds to do that, and the closer we get to the deadline for funding the more likely that the obstacles currently in the way will either be removed or be understood well enough to be worked around. So there’s that.

I’ve been saying lately that the summer is my favorite time of the year, and that is true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go so far as to include my 9-to-5 gig as such. That probably goes without saying, but now I’ve gone ahead and said it anyway.

(And also needless to say, I’m ruminating on generalities here because I am still awaiting any kind of specific progress on my much-delayed, forever-in-limbo big project, the laughable deadline for which is the day after tomorrow. Oh, the fun just never stops.)