Eating (at my desk and elsewhere)

I.
There are a lot of eating establishments along Crystal Drive in Crystal City, which is something of which I was vaguely aware from my previous contract gig in this general vicinity, but which is even more apparent to me now that I have a longer walk up and down the street between the VRE station and the government office building every day. It is a veritable Restaurant Row along that trek. And sure, there’s a McDonald’s and a Subway and a Chick-Fil-A and a Sbarro’s and a Chipotle, but there is also a McCormick & Schmick’s Seafood and TWO different high-end steakhouses (a Morton’s and a Ruth’s Chris). All along eight or ten blocks of the same street. It is a little bit maddening.


If you pay attention to and/or try to make sense of my system of tagging these blog posts, you might have noticed that, despite my protestations about my squarely stable father-of-small-children lifestyle, I still make use of the “vices” tag quite a bit. That’s because, beyond occasionally reminiscing about smoking and drinking and gambling and the like, I now consider food to be my biggest vice. I’m not so far gone as to have reduced eating itself to something I’m conceptually opposed to, but I do have an easily exploited fondness for food that is literally terrible for me, both in terms of purely unhealthy agglomerations of fat and salt and sugar and also in terms of costing more money than it should due to not being home-cooked. I can still distinctly remember being 12 or 13 years old and sometimes riding my bike to the local convenience store and spending my allowance on a couple of comic books, a soda and a candy bar; afterwards I would be really down on myself for doing myself the double disservice of spending all my allowance rather than saving some, and consuming fattening junkfood despite several kids at school thinking it was hilarious to refer to me by new vocabulary words like “portly”. (Though of course at that age I had absolutely no chance of mustering the willpower to break said habit.) The point being sometimes I feel like twenty-odd years have gone by but nothing has changed except the willpower, and then only sometimes, but I’m constantly tempted to spend money I really should be saving on meals that really would do me more harm than good.

But that’s the nature of temptation, I suppose, and when it’s multiplied by the ridiculously robust selection of dining options within walking distance of my office it’s even harder to resist the savory siren call. So far, a month into my post-paternity leave return, I’m doing a fair job staying strong. (Also helping is the fact that we’ve already had so many 90-degree-plus days, with more approaching-100 coming this week, woohoo.) I’m not sure I’d want to lay odds on how long I’ll last, though.

II.
So it seems like the safest, sanest bet for me would be to plan on not leaving the office at lunchtime. Or, if I were to leave, to not go very far. My default approach would go something like this: take two minutes in the morning at home while my coffee is brewing and throw together a sandwich in a baggie. When lunchtime rolls around, go down to the office kitchen and purchase a diet soda from vending machine #1 and a bag of chips (preferably Baked or Sun) from vending machine #2 and return to my cubicle for a reasonably cheap and non-lifespan-limiting meal. That was actually working pretty well … until they took the vending machines away.
I can’t even remember now if it was last week or the week before, but one day I came into work and the vending machines were simply absent from their (visibly grimier) spots on the kitchen floor. I do know this was shortly after I had mentally noted that they were running low on chips in the snack machine and idly wondered when it might be restocked. I guess maybe the vending machine company had a contract with the previous tenants of this office space, and we haven’t yet gotten our own deal – although I also could have sworn we were a government agency taking over space vacated by a different government agency so really why would we all need separate contracts. Contracts for, again I just want to make this very clear, SNACK AND SODA VENDING MACHINES. We’re not exactly talking vital support services at the highest levels here. Ah well. My boss did make an offhand comment the other day about replacing the vending machines but I have no idea if there’s an actual plan unfolding or what.

Luckily Plan B, which consists of riding the elevator all the way down to the lobby which adjoins with an indoor concourse that has multiple delis and convenience marts that all sell diet sodas and munchies (in far more varied profusion than any vending machine might boast), is not terribly difficult to implement. It just also carries the risk of walking into one of those deli-marts and smelling the Special of the Day on the grill and recklessly and wantonly deciding the sandwich will keep and what I really need is a double bacon cheeseburger sub with the works. It is a slippery slope, greased with deep-fryer fat.

III.
But hey, speaking of deep-fryers, the whole family made it out to our hometown Train Day celebration this past Saturday for a couple of hours, which was probably the perfect amount of time. The little guy got to see lots of real grown-up type train sets that were on display, and to climb on a giant moonbounce/slide shaped like a firetruck, and take a ride on a little tram-train that did laps around the VRE parking lot. We also grabbed lunch, and although he made it quite clear that all he wanted was ice cream, the little guy managed to acquiesce to our demands that he eat at least a few bites of chicken-on-a-stick before proceeding to demolish a vanilla soft-serve cone. My wife and I on the other hand were more than happy to avail ourselves of the prototypical fair-food offerings; I had a sausage, peppers and onions sandwich and she had a crabcake sandwich, plus we split an order of deep-fried jalapeno poppers. I know I am prone to hyperbole every now and then but I feel confident in saying that these were the best jalapeno poppers I had ever had in my life. They used fresh (not previously frozen) peppers and the breading they were fried in was thin and crisp and those little details just put the whole experience on another level of delectability. This is why I consider food to be my big vice these days: because sometimes it feels so good it cannot possibly be anything but bad for me.

I refuse to feel bad about it, though. It’s one thing to keep a sensible head on my shoulders about how I eat at work, because I have to go to work day in and day out for a long, long time. But Train Day only comes once a year, and I feel entitled on that occasion to indulge in the best cooking a truck can offer.

In which I reveal far more about my personal creative process than anyone could possibly need to know

I find that the more I know and understand about the context of a thing, the more likely I am to enjoy it or at least appreciate it. That’s probably a universal thing, whether or not most people would be consciously aware (or dorkishly hyper-aware) of it, so I’ll go a step further and say I’m actually a fan of context just as an abstract concept. Which actually explains a lot about me as a pop-culture enthusiast in general. I’m a diehard devotee of the rock album as a meaningful entity that amounts to more than the sum of its parts. I’m intrigued by retrospectives that incorporate artist’s biographies. I’m an absolute sucker for any story that includes the metafictional device of a story-within-a-story, and the more blatant the parallels (e.g. repressive authority figure in framing story becomes despotic supernatural overlord in sub-story) the better. Modern superhero comics are all about the context of their own history, the geek holy grail of Continuity, and anyone who argues to the contrary is being to some degree disingenuous.

When I was in high school I was in a band, sort of, depending on how you define terms. Of course I was in the school band (marching and concert), that’s verifiable, but I’m talking about a garage rock band which is a little trickier to pin down. My best friend played the guitar and I enjoyed singing and could tolerably carry a tune, and my friend’s uncle had built a lo-fi home recording studio in the utility room in his basement, where my friend and I used to hang out a lot and goof around. Eventually we got a couple of other guys who were in the school band to jam with us in the studio; one was a drummer, and the other played sax (as did my guitar-playing friend, who was really the closest thing to a musical prodigy I had encountered at that point in my life) but was willing to be taught to play bass guitar because that was the gap in the traditional rockband lineup that needed filling. We whiled away many an afternoon blasting out bad basement covers of Led Zeppelin, Van Halen and Queensryche. We never had a gig, paying or otherwise, though one time we did invite some other school band cohorts over to listen to a couple of our more-practised tunes. There’s also, to my knowledge, no recorded evidence of this band’s existence, although I do have a cassette’s worth of songs performed just by my buddy and me on vocals and acoustic guitar.

Whether or not this qualifies as being in a band is largely irrelevant, really, because clearly either way this was a very minor and go-nowhere endeavor in the grand scheme of the world. In my mind, though, I was always daydreaming about fifty steps down the road. I didn’t seriously believe that our band would ever become anything real, but it was fun to fantasize about what would happen if it did. Which, in my mind, very much took the form of the retrospective, so I would sit in my French III class and doodle in my notebook and come up with our extensive back catalog as viewed from about the time we were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I brainstormed the names of albums and the cover art for them and the track listings, all of which would show a certain amount of evolution over the long haul. If I remember correctly, the band wouldn’t record its magnum opus rock opera until the third album or so, because the debut album would just be straight-ahead in-your-face grand entrance anthems and the second album would be totally whoa next-level mind-blowing, and THEN (and ONLY THEN) would the world be ready for the only possible way to top that, a combination of musical and storytelling genius which would make Tommy seem like Rock Around the Clock.


(The vast majority of the time when I recollect the insane hubris of being 16 years old I wince and cringe in horror, but I swear, sometimes I just miss the sheer audacity of it all.)

So times change and life goes on but some habits really die hard. Rocking and/or rolling hasn’t always been my most prominent creative outlet; neither has writing, either, but it’s arguably been essentially constant, always there even when overshadowed by something else. (Or you could argue that when it comes right down to it, penning the libretto to an imaginary heavy metal singspiel or running a densely backstoried roleplaying campaign, it’s all been writing all along.) And when I think about writing, I’m just as likely to think in those broad, pre-retrospective swoops as in specific, nuts-and-bolts story-constructing terms. I’ve lived out entire careers in my head involving various genres and conventional-wisdom-defying crossovers thereof. One of these days maybe I’ll even get around to actually writing something that could fit into one of those pre-fab contexts I so adore.

Or maybe I already have? The odd thing (ok, one of many, many odd things) is that once I acclimated myself to the notion of completely artificial contexts I found it liberating to leapfrog wildly around what would otherwise seem to be a one-way path. A normal artistic career would generally seem to start with the artist following in the footsteps of traditional masters, then maybe doing things that were more and more experimental, then possibly feeling like the envelope had been pushed far enough and going back to elemental basics. Ideally that entire arc is a journey of discovery but it’s somehow become weirdly predictable, and when you think of it that way it’s like having a map of short-cuts. Why not jump right into the experimental stuff, if that happens to strike your fancy?

Which brings us (surprise! This was all going somewhere!) to a few years ago when I decided I would try something slightly ambitious to jump-start my writing. I would crank out as many short stories as I possibly could (at least half a dozen but preferably more like a full dozen) and I would shop them around to as many magazines or websites or other publishing venues that actually pay for fiction submissions as I could possibly stand before the crush of rejections overwhelmed me. And like many a noble experiment, the actual results were both mixed and somewhere below expectations. I think I finished something like three stories, one of which was just awful (but at least got a long-simmering idea out of my head), one of which was decent and one of which was … weird. The weird one was the only one of the three that got any kind “wow” reaction from some (but by no means all) of the friends and loved ones I showed it to before trying to outright sell it. It didn’t get any bites in the publishing market, but neither did the semi-decent normal story (I don’t think I bothered even trying to shop around the wretched pump-priming effort). And then the whole experiment kind of stopped being something I actively devoted energy to.

Here’s the thing about the weird little third story, though: it’s a trifle. And deliberately so. Because of course in the midst of the writing experiment I was envisioning an anthology of short stories, all by me, most of which would be substantial and meaty, but of course any good anthology is going to have palate-cleansers and amuse-bouches and so forth to break up the heavier plates that are the real feature attractions of the feast. Logically you might focus first and foremost on those main dishes and then later go back and spice things up, but as I’ve presumably made clear by now I’m perfectly happy to pretend the big accomplishments are already done and work on the fun little counterpoints.

In the specific case of my weird little story, I thought about traditional narrative structures and what I consider The Big Divide between classical voice and tense (third-person and past, respectively) and modern voice and tense (first-person and present) and thought an interesting diversion would be to do neither of those and write a story in second-person future tense. Which is patently ridiculous, which of course made it that much more fun, above and beyond the genre-tastic premise itself which I came up with, which was also fun.

However I don’t want to give away what that premise is because I would much rather you read the story itself, which you can totally do because, long after my experiment crashed and burned, the story is about to be published. Granted, it’s as part of an anthology by various authors and not my own personal greatest hits, but it’s still pretty cool. How that came to pass is a long story in itself and I’ve probably rambled enough as it is (not to mention if I save the telling of it for another day I can plug the book again later, too) so please allow me to proudly present How the West Was Weird, Volume 2.


The book will be on sale to the general public on July 1, but as a contributor I have an inside track and I can hook you up with a sweet pre-order deal (which also gets you free shipping) by directing you to click this link right here. So order early and order often! Tell your friends, or any affable strangers who randomly profess to you a love of short fiction or cowboys in combination with horror, sci-fi and fantasy elements! Snag a whole case of copies, keep one and donate the rest to libraries, schools and prisons!

Yeah, ok, fine, I’m not very good with the hard sell and shameless self-promotion. But I had to put it out there, and if it moves even a single copy of the book that otherwise would have languished in the warehouse, that’d be pretty cool.

Thursday Grab Bag?????

I know I haven’t done a grab bag kind of post since something like mid-January, and up to that point they had been the format of choice for Saturdays, not only because they were thrown together quickly at home rather than at leisurely length in cubicleville, but because in general they collected the stray thoughts which occurred to me throughout the week and were significant enough to jot down but not big enough to support the weight of standalone weekday entries. As it happens I have a number of downright semi-feral thoughts yowling around in my head right now, and the weekly schedule is basically a non-issue at this point so I might as well go wildly off the rails. Let’s see if I can hit all the Areas of Interest a normal week’s worth of blogging would cover, all in a single lightning round!

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Monday (Work) – It’s understood that this week is basically a loss, right? Between Monday being a holiday and yesterday being a sick day (hence no new post round here), not to mention my boss being out of the office for the entire back half of the week, there simply hasn’t been and won’t be the critical mass of consecutive work hours I would need to really get much of anything done. I had vague thoughts, no doubt spurred at least partly by the beginning of a new, clean-slated month, that I would really diligently get organized and get stuff done this week, but no. Ah well, there’s always next week.

Of course next week is a short week, too, but has a couple of different elements in its favor. I’ll be working three days in a row, Monday through Wednesday, and I won’t be caught by surprise missing work, since the root cause (trip to my brother-in-law’s wedding requiring a Thursday morning departure) has been known for a long long time by now. So hopefully I can get a modicum of productivity out of my time in the office next week. I’m also taking the following Monday as a travel day, so the week after next is shortened by one as well. Of course by then four consecutive days in the office will feel like a marathon. And the (presumably) uninterrupted five-day work week of June 20th through 24th? I honestly don’t even know how that’s going to go down.

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Tuesday (Free-for-all) – Hey we ordered a new computer for the house! So maybe Saturday Grab Bags and Scanner Sundays will make a comeback as well. It’s really not much of a thrilling tale to tell at all, since it simply entailed going to Dell’s website and finding a decently-priced desktop and then saying “no” to absolutely every peripheral and add-on offered during the customization process, which was kind of amusing until they got all the way down to surge protectors and then, really, come on. I’m mainly psyched about being able to get iTunes incorporated into my entertainment-consumption arsenal again, and possibly looking into this whole “streaming video” thing the kids are all talking about. Updates to follow.

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Wednesday (Dork Day) – Earlier this week, in an effort to head off what I sensed was an imminent temper tantrum a’brewing in the little guy’s savage breast, I trotted out good old Castle Grayskull for him to play with. Of course, the definition of “play” becomes somewhat limited when applied to a piece of architecture, so I also handed over a couple of my older action figures which are already not in the greatest shape, a Spider-Man and a Cyclops (the X-Man; sadly I do not have any Greek mythology action figures, though now of course I can’t get that idea out of my head). A genre-respecting purist like me, you might very well think, would be much more inclined to give the little guy the appropriate techno-wizards, barbarians and monsters in action figure form to romp through Castle Grayskull, as opposed to modern superheroes, but the thing is we don’t have any He-Man figures in the house (with the exception of a dismembered Evil-Lyn, who came along with the Castle as bequeathed by the little guy’s uncle, but whose pelvic elastics did not survive prolonged storage in my in-laws attic, apparently).


All this got me thinking, though, about action figures which would be both genre- and scale-appropriate for the playset in question (He-Man figures really were a distinctive shape and size) and the possibility of making use of eBay to find a few second-hand toys with which to populate the castle. Even at non-collector’s prices, though, clearly I’m not going to order up all forty or fifty of the Masters of the Universe. Seven – a few good guys, a few bad guys – seems like a more reasonably-sized starter set. But which seven? That was the question I e-mailed to various friends this week, and the answers I got back were interesting enough to provoke further rumination that could occupy a month of Wednesdays here on the blog. So that’s exactly what’s going to happen! Next Wednesday and for every Wednesday in June, I’ll be attempting to make sense of the world of He-Man and Skeletor and how I might (or possibly even if I should) pass that portion of my geek heritage down to the next generation.

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Meanwhile the comics blogosphere is blowing up because DC Comics announced a plan to start renumbering all their titles at #1, and perform a certain amount of premise-reworking along the way. I’ve pretty well phased out of collecting individual monthly comics anymore, so I can’t even summon up a reaction to this one way or the other. But I felt it appropriate, this being a Grab Bag and all, to at least acknowledge that I’m aware of the news.

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Thursday (My family) – The little guy seems to be turning a corner lately in the communication department, getting closer and closer to the point where he no longer needs me or his mother to act as a translator between him and the world at large. He can string together complete, coherent and reasonably well-enunciated sentences when he addresses complete strangers, as for example when I recently took him along to the dry cleaners and (after I spent most of the car trip answering his “why?” questions about dry cleaners) he confidently entered the establishment, looked the owner in the eye, and said “We’re here to get my daddy’s work shirts cleaned!” The owner was suitably impressed.

But he hasn’t completely left baby-talk malapropisms and spoonerisms behind. As a special grab-bag-within-a-grab-bag, I now present a rapid-fire collection of his Darndest Things:

-Calling melons “lemons” (and yesterday offering me a pretend melon and saying “here daddy this lemon will make your tummy feel better”)
-Calling mustaches “mushrooms” (this is pretty much my all-time favorite)
-Calling volleyball “bollyball” (which momentarily gave me visions of competitive full-contact elaborately costumed dance numbers, but alas no)
-Somehow re-inventing the words to B-I-N-G-O as “B! I! Bumpy-O!” (really not much I can add to that one)
-Renaming Doc Hudson from Cars as “Doc Husband” (In all fairness, my wife and I do everything in our power to encourage that one)

His sister, of course, is still as pre-verbal as you would expect a normal almost-eight-week-old to be, but she does have a really impressively attention-grabbing grunt. We’re also getting familiar enough with her various other random noises and semi-vocalizations to try transliterating some of them; our fave so far is a high-pitched “mowrf” which is just a lot of fun to say.

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Friday (Random Anecdote) – Surely it would be reckless and foolhardy to waste a perfectly good random anecdote right here when I’ll be expected to come up with another one tomorrow, right? Actually I plan on dedicating tomorrow’s space to something specific which may only be tangentially anecdote-worthy, but I still need to pace myself, so perhaps I’ll go a bit meta here.

My wife and I watched another of the 30 for 30 documentaries over the holiday weekend: The U, about the rise and fall of the University of Miami football program, which was produced by the media studio Rakontur. The doc itself is great and I ate up its entire double-length running time including the closing credits and then went back for the special features. But somewhere near the end of those credits, I had a minor epiphany.

“Raconteur” is one of those words that I’ve applied to myself ever since I developed any interest in self-definition (along with “bon vivant” and “sybarite” and a few others) more or less to try to class up the fact that I just like to have a good time; I know I have a better chance of being remembered as “life of the party” or “always up for anything” than “doctor” or “senator” or “Nobel Peace Prize winner” or whathaveyou, so I might as well be able to bandy about a few good (albeit pretentious, perhaps) terms for my state of being.

And yet apparently all this time I’ve misunderstood what “raconteur” means. For some reason I always associated it with “rake” in the “a man habituated to immoral conduct” sense (which goes more to prove once again beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am a liberal arts nerd) and beyond that I guess I just liked the sound of it enough to not think about it too deeply beyond that (see “mowrf” above). But of course the Rakontur logo, at the end of the documentary’s credits, included a definition of the word raconteur which (thudding facepalm) means “one who is skilled at recounting stories”. Even though it doesn’t mention random anecdotes specifically, this is actually is good news because I have to admit at this stage in my life I’d much rather be known for spinning a good yarn than for wasting my inheritance on gambling and whoring and bouncing from debtors’ prison to the insane asylum.

(Although I do have a soft spot for gambling.)

(No inheritance to speak of, though.)

(But the whoring is definitely right out. Yikes.)

Breather

This morning when I got off the train, at about 7:15 a.m., it was already apparent that it was going to be another stultifyingly hot and humid day typical of summers in the nation’s capital swamp. (Neveryoumind the fact that summer itself is still technically three weeks away.) I’m not necessarily proud of this but I do admit that I am accustomed to certain creature comforts including central air conditioning, and I was counting down every step between the climate-controlled VRE car and the similarly civilized Big Gray. About halfway along my walk I passed a gentleman in business attire standing on the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette. I can recall few times in the past nearly-seven years when I’ve been happier to have quit smoking. The thought of having to choose between forsaking A/C to stand outside in the swelter of midday and forgoing the need for a nicotine fix clawing at the inside of my skull is pretty repellent, and thankfully moot.


I got plenty of sweltering in over the weekend, anyway. My wife and I ended up front-loading the weekend with socializing, all of which was fun and which we were happy to be a part of, but all of which was also dispensed with by noon on Sunday, which gave us the back half of the long weekend to simply relax, recoup our strength for the coming week, and generally take care of any household business that needed doing in the context of a long, uninterrupted stretch of time at home. The whole rationale makes sense on paper, but in practice I put myself in the position of mowing the lawn and death-spraying the weeds at noon on Monday, which was basically the absolute peak of the weekend’s hot weather. The job got done, though, and in hindsight I am choosing to believe that’s all that matters.

Speaking of getting jobs done, one random thing that had been bugging me more or less the entire time we’ve been living in the new house was that we had moved and unpacked an assortment of framed photos and paintings and prints and so forth but hadn’t managed to get around to hanging them on the walls. Bare walls are an inexplicable pet peeve of mine. (Rambling yet hopefully illustrative tangent: when I was a kid we would spend maybe a week each summer, tops, visiting my grandparents at the beach. My cousins, on the other hand, would often spend a month or more at the beach, with their parents renting an entire house for July or something like that. And my cousins – one male and one female – would use part of the entertainment allowance to buy newsstand copies of Tiger Beat or Hit Parader or whathaveyou and tear out the pin-ups of dreamy hunks or gnarly bands and put them up on the otherwise bare bedroom walls of the rental house. This made complete and perfect sense to me at the time and also still makes perfect sense right now as I type this.) Maybe because of the concentrated downtime, maybe because it came in the wake of pleasant diversions, but this weekend my wife and I were finally able to get some things hung on various vertical surfaces throughout our domicile, and agree to a general plan for hanging the remainder in the not too distant future. And there was much rejoicing, in my de-peeved mind at any rate.

But it’s back to the grind for now, always a bit of a rough transition when the return doesn’t coincide with a Monday, but that’s a trade-off I’m willing to take to get a foreshortened week.

Train of thoughts

This morning, as I was walking from the train station to my office building, I witnessed an interesting and oddly satisfying unfolding of events. There’s a school bus stop along my walking route (the kids who congregate there seem to be around middle-school age) and as it happened the bus was in the process of picking them up as I approached. The bus was at a full stop and had its red lights flashing and its driver’s side STOP sign deployed and everything, and yet a car blew past the bus in the adjacent lane. Not just any car (in fact, not a “car” at all) but a white Hummer. The school bus driver honked the horn as the Hummer sped by, in what I thought at first was nothing but a frustrated attempt to convey something along the lines of “Hey, I saw what you just did!” but not half a second later there came the bloop of a police car siren as a sheriff’s car appeared and pulled the Hummer over. (So maybe the bus was trying to get the cop’s attention, I’m speculating?)


Now, in the interest of full disclosure, maybe I should point out that all the kids were on the sidewalk where the bus door opens, and there weren’t any 11-year-olds trying to cross the lanes of traffic which the bus’s lights and sign are intended to bring to a halt. But be that as it may I am a firm believer in the principle at play in this particular scenario. So much so that as soon as I heard and saw the sheriff’s cruiser I actually said out loud “Aw, yeah, GIT ‘IM!” like some kind of crazyperson. (This high-adrenaline response may or may not have been influenced by the fact that I was watching an installment of the movie Inception on the train this morning, which I had known was kind of mind-bendy and all but did not realize had quite so many gunfire-and-explosions scenes, which tend to pump me up a bit.)

But right before that moment I had felt deeply conflicted because, on the one hand, my inner profiler was pretty well convinced that the person behind the wheel was a worthless human being. Ignoring the safety signals of a school bus while it picks up kids would be damning enough evidence, but the Hummer really put it beyond a reasonable doubt. I’ll spare you all my usual thousand-word screed about SUVs in general and Hummers as the most egregious exemplar of their inherent wrongness, but suffice to say it all boils down to selfishness. They waste natural resources, pollute the environment, are deadly to anyone in a regular car unfortunate enough to be involved in a collision? Clearly the drivers of SUVs could not care less about these effects which their choice of ride might have on other people, and just as clearly the man in the Hummer this morning could not have cared less about the safety of the school children around the bus because he had places to be and that was all that mattered.

Except … he was a member of the armed forces in uniform. That’s not exactly an uncommon sight in the corridors in which I work, obviously, but it’s been drilled into my head for years, ever since the first Gulf War as a matter of simple patriotism and exponentially moreso as a government/DoD contractor whose livelihood is bound up in the military: SUPPORT THE TROOPS. Budweiser makes unironic commercials about the fact that anyone wearing camo fatigues is a hero who deserves spontaneous standing ovations everywhere they go. And I’ve pretty much bought into that. So it’s jarring to encounter one of the troops behaving like an over-entitled jackass.

Then as I kept walking I started thinking maybe I had been too quick to judge. I’ll stand by my belief that no normal civilian needs to drive a Hummer. But what if the soldier I saw was an injured vet suffering from PTSD? What if he had been in a convoy that ran over an IED and he couldn’t drive normal cars anymore because of an irrational but unshakable fear that he might be hit by another roadside bomb at any time, and only a Hummer gave him the ability to leave his house? What if that was the same reason why he blew past the school bus, if he sincerely didn’t perceive it because his PTSD causes him to not always process everything in his field of vision correctly?

Which in turn was followed up with some thoughts about how driving is a privilege and not a right, even here in the car-culture U.S., even when your much older than 16 which is the last time I remember someone saying that and expecting to be taken seriously. I’m all in favor of senior citizens being re-tested and forbidden from driving when there’s a potential that they might inadvertently hurt others on the road. Maybe the same should go for veterans, too? I wholeheartedly believe we owe vets tremendously for their service and shouldn’t marginalize them, but if it were my kid who got run down at the bus stop I’d find it cold comfort to know the driver was a former tank gunner who couldn’t always think straight behind the wheel because of traumatic brain injury suffered while defending the country.

I don’t know if the cop was in any way influenced by the driver’s uniform, if he was let off with a warning or actually got heavily fined or what. I’m reasonably sure the traffic stop did not set the soldier off on a shellshocked shooting rampage, because they didn’t shut down the street my office is on at any point today. And I don’t know what the answers are to any of the questions I pondered as I made my way to work, just that it’s all pretty complicated. Everybody just make sure you always look both ways before you cross the street, OK?

Good news is no news

My daughter is packing on the babyfat at an endearing rate, and my wife and I find cause for celebration every time we find a new dimple or roll decorating one of her joints.

My son has been skipping naps at daycare this week, but compensating by going to bed in an astonishingly compliant manner a little earlier than normal, which helps keep our interactions on the right side of the invigorating/exhausting divide.

So things are good although (or maybe because) there really aren’t any major developments to report. No medical scares or daredevil mishaps. No standout moments of innocent profundity that blow my mind, at least not any more than usual.

Meanwhile I’m dealing with some ridiculous administrative bureaucratic snafus at work related to my paternity leave and whether or not I’ll ever get paid again, so I’m a bit thin on brain cells which might normally be dedicated to composing a proper post. Things seem to be close to getting resolved, thankfully, so I should be back to normal soon.


Yiiiiiiip yipyipyipyipyipyipyip.

Idle Wonder

So there was some talk this spring about a live-action Wonder Woman series coming to tv this fall. More than talk, the project actually reached the point of a completed pilot to shop around, but apparently when the fate of the show was in the network’s hands, the network opted to pass. There’s a possibility that a different network could pick it up somehow, but the industry consensus seems to be that this iteration of the Amazon princess’s adventures is dead in the water. Which strikes me as a shame.

In fact, the coincidental timing here is probably the biggest factor in my reaction being one of lamentation rather than general indifference. The early buzz about the show largely focused on either the fact that it was being masterminded by David E. Kelley and thus would invite endless comparisons to Ally McBeal because both shows were about single gals trying to have it all, or the casting and promo-photos-in-weird-costume-prototypes of Adrianne Palicki from Friday Night Lights, but none of that meant a whole lot to me. (My wife scored what I thought was a pretty direct hit when she saw a picture of Palicki online and noted that (a) Palicki has fake boobs (b) Wonder Woman does not and (c) that in fact seems like the kind of thing which is fairly antithetical to the whole Wonder Woman core concept, yet would clearly and literally be in the audience’s face whenever Palicki was on screen in costume. Which, y’know, fair enough.)


But the demise of Wonder Woman’s 21st century small-screen chronicles came right at the same time I was (as mentioned yesterday) getting to the midpoint of the Smallville saga, and that actually makes the loss of what might have been much more acute.

Smallville might seem at first glance to be a retelling of Superman’s origins from when he was just a young lad being raised by farmers in the heartland, but it’s not exactly that. It’s not really the Superman story at all, at least not in the sense that “THE Superman story” exists in some definitive, canonical way (which of course it does to diehard comics fans, except different sects adhere to different One True Versions, but that’s beside the point). Smallville takes a bunch of elements from the Superman mythos and then updates them and recombines them in various ways, which annoys a lot of people but just strikes me as fun and interesting and amusing. Half the entertainment value of any given episode of Smallville comes from picking up on the differences between the show and its source material, particularly when little moments wind up overstuffed with irony because the audience knows where all this is (or should be) going, from every time young Clark Kent and Lois Lane emphasize they are just friends who really often can’t stand each other to every attempt Clark Kent makes to hold on to his friendship with slightly-older-but-still-young Lex Luthor.

The other half, to me, is the constant milking for all its worth of the major theme of the series: growing up. Specifically, at least as far as Season 5 goes, navigating the waters between adolescence and adulthood while relationships with parents transform from adult-to-child to adult-to-adult. And of all the modifications made to classic Superman folklore, I think this is where Smallville has been the most successful. Which is kind of weird, as I stop to think about it, considering the last time I talked much about Smallville it was to point out the almost embarrassingly high levels of fan service involved in giving copious screen time to the bare flesh of the actresses playing Lana Lang and Lois Lane. But for all that lusty teen soap operas are a viable formula for winning viewership, Smallville is all about fathers and sons.

Clark has a generally good relationship with his adoptive father, Jonathan Kent, although of course they go through all the tribulations that teenage boys and their fathers do. Lex has a toxic relationship with his father, Lionel Luthor, which in addition to giving Superman’s future nemesis a little depth and context provides one more reason for the mega-wealthy genius to envy the farmboy down the road. Everything gets cranked up to 11, with Lex and Lionel trying to outmaneuver each other (up to and including assassination attempts) for control of their family corporation, while Clark and Jonathan argue over whether or not it could ever be safe for someone with Kryptonian strength to play full-contact football with normal kids. But under all the melodrama, there are actually just as many similarities between the two father-son pairs as differences. Jonathan and Lionel both are having a hard time letting their sons emerge from their shadows and spread their wings, both men are painfully proud, both believe in a certain form of tough love, both believe their sons could be bound for a greater destiny, and so on. So in the end it becomes a compelling examination of how little things can lead to big differences: expect that your child always do the right thing, and he could become the world’s greatest hero; demand that your child always have all the right answers, and he could become the world’s most feared villain.

Maybe this is a case of being the outsider looking in, but in my opinion if there’s one area of life more freighted with drama than father-son relationships, it’s mother-daughter relationships. And the Wonder Woman mythos is already halfway along the Smallville model. Wonder Woman is a princess because her mother is the actual Queen of the Amazons, the leader of a secluded all-female society who recognized that they needed an emissary to “man’s world” but would never have chosen to send her only daughter Diana on such a mission. Diana had to win that right, the opportunity to become Wonder Woman, through competition. This even though (again, in some versions) Queen Hippolyta herself wore the costume and acted as Wonder Woman earlier, during World War II, setting up some juicy “do as I say, not as I do” potential conflict in addition to the premise of the young, modern Wonder Woman simultaneously working for her Queen on behalf of her homeland while at the same time trying to assert her independence from her protective mother.

What’s missing from the Wonder Woman comics, in comparison to Smallville, is the parallel evil mother-daughter relationship, but that could be fairly easily addressed. In the Wonder Woman cosmos the Amazons are an advanced civilization and all but immortal, but higher still than them are the Greek gods and goddesses – and we all know how petty and nasty they can be (both genders). So select whichever member of Wonder Woman’s rogues gallery tickles your fancy (the Cheetah, Giganta, Circe the Sorceress) and update her origin to make her the long-lost demi-goddess offspring of a really morally-challenged Hera and there you go, two females dedicated to destroying Diana (if they don’t try to kill each other first).

Of course, please bear in mind that what I’m describing most likely in no way resembles what the Wonder Woman show from David E. Kelley would have looked like even if it hadn’t been axed. It’s just what I would’ve liked to see, based on shamelessly ripping off the approach of something else I’ve enjoyed. Maybe someday we will get to see something like that. The broadcasts of Smallville just had their tenth and final season finale, so those guys might be looking for something to do, you never know.