Hallelujah, Thank You Jesus.



The tooth is gone. I like that it was tooth #1 on the big master tooth chart (did you know they're all numbered?). He showed it to me after he pulled it out, and it was nasty-looking: huge and discolored, with a big hole in it.

The whole thing took 15 minutes tops and I didn't feel a thing, which is a drag because the oral surgeon was cute. As I was leaving, he said, "Call me if you need me."

Um, I need you!

Young Love.

My nephew L, who is 12 and cute as the dickens (as my grandma used to say), has a girlfriend. He asked his mom (my sister) if he was allowed to "date," whatever that could possibly mean at 12. She says L and the girl are texting each other all day long.

When my sister told me, I was incredulous and maybe even a little appalled. 12? Isn't that extremely young? He hasn't even started puberty yet. I'm sure I had no interest in dating at 12. But then I remembered (duh) of course I was interested in boys at 12, but my interest didn't lead me to ask my mother if I was allowed to go on a date. I knew that if I ever told anyone about the evil growing inside me, I would spend the rest of my life being raped in jail, and even if I didn't tell anyone I would spend eternity roasting on a spit.

My Teeth Again.

Here's something I can write about. This week, I went back to the dentist, or I should say the hygienist, and she finished cleaning my teeth. And I have an appointment on Thursday with an oral surgeon to have one pulled because the filling has fallen out and it's a wisdom tooth and the hole is close to the nerve so it's easier and cheaper to just yank it. I can't describe the joy this brings me, to know that I'll soon have all the filthy, stinky rotten stuff out of my mouth.

I also feel a twinge of sadness about having a permanent part of my body removed. (Not so permanent, after all.) Being here with my aging parents, I've been thinking so much about getting older in terms of what you give up, the accumulation of loss: the people around you who die one by one, the activities you can no longer manage, the shrinking of your zone of travel, the narrowing of possibility in general, and things like bone loss, memory loss, vision and hearing loss, loss of elasticity in your skin. And the always accelerating contraction of the number of years you have left. All of it.

It's just a damn tooth, but that's how it starts!

Sorting Things Out.

I'm at a loss for what to write about these days. There's lots going on in my head for sure, some of it pretty fascinating if I do say so myself, but most of it has to do with unpacking my neuroses in light of my parents' habits. I would be an ungrateful son, not to mention a rude guest, to paint what would surely seem to them an unflattering portrait of my parents here. What I want to do, what I wish I could do, here and in my brain, is forgive my parents and paint the unflattering portrait of myself.

I've been here for 4 weeks now. It's been stormy on and off the whole time. But enough sun that the spinach Mom and I planted the week I arrived is big and leafy, and I thinned the basil so there are about a dozen seedlings now about 3 inches tall. I saw a sleek, black spider on one of the spinach leaves this morning and was glad that I found it and not my mom. They gleefully kill everything here, smash spiders with newspapers and Kleenex, lure chipmunks into cages where they shoot them with guns, rig the lawn with Medieval contraptions that impale moles as they commute in their tunnels under the grass. And god help the dandelions, the lepers of the suburban plant world. Poor little yellow things. So pretty and doomed.

Yardwork.

I won't mow the lawn. Well, I suppose I would if my dad asked me, but he hasn't and I'm grateful to the point of tears. Mowing grass might as well be the eternal flames of hell. I can't think of any worse torment. And it's been raining a lot since I got here, so the grass needs to be mowed every few days. "Needs to be mowed," they say, but I think it looks beautiful when it gets all long and green and lush. I have to admit that I feel guilty watching my 74-year-old father push the lawn mower back and forth -- but not guilty enough to go out there. I think he enjoys it. I'm going to assume he enjoys it.

I feel such a strong urge to be writing one of those usually icky articles like "what I learned about life and myself while taking care of my sick parent," but I have this rule about not writing personal stuff about other people. It's a tricky rule, and I'm usually very uncertain where to draw the line. Maybe it would and maybe it wouldn't be interesting to you to read about my mom, but I don't think it's my story to tell. At least, not right now in the middle of it.

Just to reassure anyone who might worry: Mom is doing very well. In fact, you wouldn't even know she'd been sick. Yesterday she had me drag all the furniture from the screened-in porch out onto the lawn so she could scrub the mold off with bleachy water. I'm not sure if I should insist on doing these chores for her, because it seems to me that this is what she does. This is what her days consist of. Taking care of the house and the lawn and the gardens. Because her immune system is compromised by the chemotherapy, she's not allowed to dig in the dirt this summer. I try to keep up with the weeding, but I know somehow that's not the point. Someone else weeding is fine, but it's a distance second to doing it herself.

I can say this without betraying anyone's privacy: I am in a foreign and mysterious place where bushes get pruned to the bloody nub and all the condiments are in upside-down plastic bottles. I miss my wild, overgrown yard, and I miss the sound of a butter knife against the rim of the mustard jar. And I miss J.

War and Whiskers.

My dad is a Civil War buff. The military stuff doesn't interest me much, but the politics do. Over the last two nights, we watched Gods and Generals (it's almost 4 hours long) and he's watching Gettysburg tonight. I'm wandering in to catch bits of it, but I can only take so much. Great acting, and beautiful photography, but the ponderous tone wears me out. I know there's a case to be made that this class of people in this time were more eloquent and sentimental, but was everything that came out of their mouths so lofty?

The best thing about these movies -- and the Civil War era -- is the facial hair. It's infinitely varied, elaborate, masculine, and very sexy.

Indiana Wants Me.

I got my teeth cleaned today! Well, at least the first stage. Apparently since I hadn't had my teeth cleaned in 6 years, I needed some kind of super comprehensive cleaning. Today they did a "total mouth debridement" (translation: chipping plaque off the teeth with a chisel) and I have another appointment in two weeks for what I think they were calling a "fine scaling," to get whatever the chisel left behind.

I don't have any new cavities, only one where a filling cracked and fell out. The dentist said since it's so close to the nerve I might want to just have it taken out. The tooth, that is. It's a wisdom tooth. Yank it out, I say. That way, I won't have to worry about it any more.

I feel giddy. I had become so self-conscious about my breath that I was avoiding public gatherings, I was really avoiding meeting new people, and I got terribly anxious going into any situation in which I might have to speak with anyone at close range. Any time I had to talk to anyone at school I found myself muttering out of the side of my mouth. But I am an outcast no more!

I'll be in Indiana until some time around the end of July. I'm staying with my mom and dad while my mom recovers from surgery she had a few weeks ago, helping with gardening and cooking and anything else they need and enjoying the nice long visit with my family that I haven't been able to have for many years. My sister and her family along with her in-laws -- they all live about 45 minutes away -- are going on a trip in mid-July, and I'm going to house-sit and cat-sit for them. They're going to pay me for it, which I feel a little strange about because it is something I would happily do anyway, but the money makes it possible for me to stay here for this extended time. So it all works out.

I was also counting on my $600 check from the IRS to help me get through the summer, but now I don't think I'm going to get one, since everyone I know has gotten theirs or at least a letter saying that one is on the way. Not that I necessarily deserve $600 from the federal government, but if everyone else is getting it I want mine too. I deserve to be pandered to as much as anyone! (I don't know if I was excluded because I earned so little money last year, or because I'm a student, or what.)

Yummy Pig Meat.

I don't remember how the subject came up, but shortly after I arrived in New York, T mentioned that he hadn't ever had really good pulled pork in New York. The only barbecue he could find was smothered in thick tomatoey sauce instead of the thin vinegar sauce that he remembered from childhood. I said, "I can make that, easy." So I did.

T wanted me to write down the recipe for him, so I thought I'd share it here, too, since I have it all typed up. I have a large slow-cooker at home that will easily fit half a shoulder roast, but if you have a regular size crockpot, you might want to have a whole shoulder cut into 3 pieces.

This recipe is bare bones, using only what T had handy in his kitchen. If I were making it at home, I might add a couple bay leaves and a big pinch of coriander. But it turned out absolutely delicious. We made 3 meals out of it.

PULLED PORK

Pork shoulder roast with bone
2 or 3 small onions, or 1 big one
8 or 10 garlic cloves
orange juice
1 lime
brown sugar
cider vinegar


Sauté the onions and garlic over medium-high heat in olive oil with a few pinches of salt until they have lots of brown charred spots (but not burnt). Transfer them to the crock pot. If you have carrots or celery around, you can brown them in big chunks with the onions. They’ll add more flavor.

Salt and pepper the roast generously. In the same pan, brown the roast well on all sides. Don’t burn it, but the more char you get on it, the better. Transfer it to the crock pot. Deglaze the pan with orange juice, scrape all the yummy brown bits off the bottom of the pan, and pour it all into the crock pot. Add more orange juice to about 1/2 full. Add a few peels of the lime, more salt, some red pepper flakes.

Cook on high until it starts to simmer, then turn to low and cook until the meat falls apart easily when you stick a fork in it -- it’ll take a few hours. Remove the roast to a plate and let it cool enough to handle, then separate the meat from the fat and bone. Strain the liquid and skim off the fat (I put it in the freezer in a cup while I’m picking apart the meat, so the fat coagulates and is easier to skim off.)

Make the sauce: Heat about a 1/3 cup of orange juice, 1/3 cup of cider vinegar, a couple tablespoons of brown sugar, the juice of the lime, and the liquid from cooking the roast. Boil to reduce by about half. Pour over the meat and let it sit for a little while to absorb some of the liquid. Add salt to taste.

When you eat the leftovers the next day, splash a little vinegar and/or lime juice on the meat when you heat it up. It’ll brighten it up.


COLE SLAW

Shred half a head of cabbage. Toss with 2 tablespoons of sea salt in a colander and let it sit over a bowl for 2 or 3 hours. Rinse well and pat dry with paper towels or a non-fuzzy kitchen towel. Toss with just enough mayo to lightly coat it and a splash of white vinegar or rice vinegar. Easy!
T and I ate the pork topped with cole slaw on potato rolls. I can't think of anything better to come home to late after working all day and you're famished.

New York.

I’m in New York. The noise and crowds and traffic are so out of my system now and they stress me out in a way they never did when I lived here. Or, more likely, when I lived here I accepted the stress as a baseline and didn’t read it as stress. I wanted the excitement so badly, I had looked forward to it for so long, and I ate it up and loved it. I had no idea how numb I had become until I left. New York is like white noise: it’s nice for sleeping.

Yesterday, when T and I were driving around midtown, I remembered that during a visit to New York in the summer of 1981, a couple months before I moved here, I witnessed a gruesome murder where two guys hacked another man to death with machetes a few feet away while I was eating dinner with friends at a sidewalk café on 43rd St. and Ninth Ave. It was shocking to be sure, but I don’t remember reacting to it with the kind of horror that I’m sure I would feel now seeing something like that. It was just part of the excitement of New York.

That sounds so perverse when I think about it now. But New York was different then. The subway cars were covered with graffiti, porn shops and prostitutes lined 42nd St., drug dealers descended on you when you walked through Washington Square Park or along First Avenue in the East Village, there was filth everywhere. A machete murder was just part of the mise en scene. New York was scary, and that was a big part of what I loved about it.

We drove down to 26th St. to look at a rehearsal studio. Afterwards, T and his little boy T went to a movie on 125th St. and I caught the A train back to T’s place on 200th and Broadway. It turns out that on weekends, because of some construction in the subway, the A train stops at 168th and you have to catch a shuttle bus for stops farther north. It was a warm day, so I decided to walk the rest of the way instead of taking the bus. 32 blocks is about a mile and a half, which is nothing, and I’d never really seen Harlem and Washington Heights.

Even though it was a mild day, the kind of jacketless day that’s rare in New York, everyone looked grim and gray, and I was depressed by the time I got home. People are so burdened by their lives here, so defensive. I’ve caught a cold too. I haven’t had a cold in years. (My allergies have gotten worse in the meantime, and don’t even talk about cedar fever, but I haven’t had a real cold for a long time.) I’ve been taking mega doses of zinc, which, much to my surprise, works.

The Old Days.

J got an email from the Austin Film Society yesterday about a benefit screening of a documentary made by an Austin filmmaker. The filmmaker had been hurt in a car accident on the way to the world premiere at SXSW this year, and the AFS put together this benefit to help him with his medical expenses. It was at the Alamo Drafthouse downtown, so we walked to the 7 o'clock screening.

We love the Alamo. Everybody loves the Alamo. They program everything from first release Hollywood films to obscure local documentaries. They host all kinds of film events, they serve food and beer. They don't let people talk during the movie. It's the best movie theater ever.

Before the film started, when they were showing promos for all the Alamo events, like a night when comedians make fun of Planet of the Apes while its playing, or various sing-along nights, like "Sing Along with Eighties Rock Ballads," etc., we realized we were in the wrong movie! Instead of the benefit, we had stumbled into the "Morrissey Weep-along." We had no idea whether we were in the wrong theater, or it was the wrong night, or what, and we had already ordered food, so -- after a few moments of "Is this going to be fun or awful?" -- we decided to stay. And it was great.

I'd forgotten how incredibly cool The Smiths were, and how much we all loved them. I think the consensus among my friends back then was that, after The Smiths broke up, Morrissey's records weren't as good or interesting or something. His narcissism got to be a little overbearing. But what I'd forgotten is that his music was all about narcissism, and how bracing and beautiful so many of his songs are. The Weep-along was heavy on back catalog Smiths. Remember the video for How Soon is Now? It's mesmerizing and totally holds up as a work of art.



Looking at the work now all these years later, the gay iconography is so painfully obvious, it's hard to imagine a time when all that stuff was buried in code, when Morrissey and Michael Stipe, the two biggest sissies ever to front rock bands, could fly under the radar just by telling interviewers that they were "asexual." Times have changed.

When I met B, my boyfriend through most of my twenties, in 1984, he was the drummer in a band called Crash. B and his friends were the original generation of alt rock gay boys. B was more into old Joy Division and Fairport Convention than the poppier stuff, but they all loved The Smiths, and they all wore straight leg jeans and white t-shirts and mod haircuts.

The songwriter and lead singer in Crash was Mark Dumais. They played around the East Village for a couple years, and Mark created a record label called Justine Records. In 1985, he put out 3 7-inch 45s. One was by Crash, one was by a band called Nothing but Happiness, and one was by The Woods, which consisted of B and I and two women, Mark's friends, a lesbian couple who had just moved to New York from Baltimore. One of them was Linda Smith, who went on to make a name for herself on the cassette home recording scene that flourished for a while in the late 80s and early nineties.

The Woods never really worked because the four of us all had different ideas of what we wanted the band to sound like, but we had a few sublime moments. Our Justine single, "Miracles Tonight" (a Linda Smith song), with the second song I ever wrote, "Love Me Again This Summer" on the B-side, was one of them.

Mark moved to London in search of fame and pop fortune. He died of AIDS a few years later. The guy playing tambourine in this video, a very sweet man who also played saxophone in the band, died of AIDS, too, a few years later. B and I separated in 1989, and I didn't keep in touch with most of our friends from that time who were really B's friends more than mine.

Summer Comes Marching In.

I broke down and turned on the a.c. today. I was going to try to last through Monday when I leave for New York, but after walking all over town with a stack of books, and walking back home with the heaviest ones because nobody wanted to buy them, I turned on the a.c. I guess everybody knows the textbook business is a big scam, so I'll spare you the rant.

I took my last final yesterday! My grades will be posted in a few days, but I'm pretty sure I got all A's except for that one B.

Monday evening I'm flying to New York to help put together a concert performance of Lizzie Borden (a showcase for venue people, producers, and stars we're hoping will want to get involved with the production). I'll be there for about 3 weeks, and then I hope to go to Indiana for a bit. My mother just had major surgery and she'll be recovering, so I want to visit and help out however I can.

("Summer comes marching in with his heavy boots on." from Florida, my favorite Patty Griffin song -- it breaks my heart every time I listen to it, which is a lot)

Thanks for Sharing.

I'm debating with myself whether I should respond to, ignore, or delete comments like the one from "anonymous" to this post. I appreciate the criticism. I like it when my blog becomes something more than just me sending my thoughts into a vacuum, but, besides the fact that anonymous comments are kind of creepy and underhanded in general, I'm not sure how comments like this, which seem to come from a resentment about something other than my blog post, shed any light on the subject. On the other hand, maybe I'm just feeling insulted or guilty and that's why I think this person is full of shit.

I wish my shy commenter would at least sign his or her name to his or her words of wisdom.

We Can All Relax Now.

The pressure is off. I got my first B -- in Texas Political History. The grade for the course comes solely from scores on 3 exams. The first two exams had 35 questions each and the third one had 30. The total of the three scores is curved so that the top 25 scores in the class get an A, the next 20 get a B, the next 20, a C, etc. I got a 75, and the cutoff for an A was 77. You wouldn't believe these exams. I've never seen anybody pack a multiple-choice exam so full of obscure trivia.

I kind of enjoyed the course because the subject is interesting to me, but the exams -- and I studied hard for them -- required more memorization than I can manage, I guess. My consolation for the low grade is that I learned a lot.

Grumble.

The real dramatic difference between college back when I was college age and college now is that everyone is connected by email and web. U.T. has a web service called Blackboard where professors post course materials and grades, etc., there are discussion forums, they can email us with announcements, and we can email them, or our T.A.'s. And students can email everyone in the class.

So, especially around test time, there's a flurry of mass emails from students, most of them asking for the notes from a particular day when they missed class. I had 8 of them in my inbox this morning, with excuses ranging from, "I missed that day because I had my chemotherapy treatment in Houston," to "I have no excuse. I just really hated going to the boring class. Thanks!"

The ones that really get on my nerves are the emails asking for information that's in the syllabus or that could easily be gotten by contacting the professor or T.A., like "What dates does the exam tomorrow cover?" Would you send an email to 200 people for something you could get by sending an email to one? Kids today!

There's so much talk about academic dishonesty now. Every course syllabus has a required section explaining exactly what cheating is, because I guess teenagers don't know by the time they get to college that it's wrong to copy answers from someone's test or to turn in someone else's work as your own. But all this pleading for other people's class notes doesn't strike me as exactly ethical. In fact, it doesn't seem any more unethical to lift your research paper from Wikipedia than to send an email to your whole class asking to copy someone's notes in exchange for baking them cupcakes. Does it?

Work.

This is the closest I've ever come to a flame war on my blog. How exciting. People have strong feelings about work. Typically, I go back and forth on it. I've been having this conversation in my head in one form or another since I was a teenager and it's only gotten more divergent as I've gotten older and, maybe, clearer about the issues at stake.

The notion of a civil society where everyone follows the rules and contributes has a strong pull for me. We're better when we work together, and sometimes we have to do unpleasant things for the good of society. I have my utopian fantasies. The trouble always seems to be that these things don't ever really work unless there's a strong authoritarian element. Some people just want to do what they want to do.

It's always been major drama to get me to do anything I don't want to do -- ask my mom and dad about mowing the lawn or cleaning the garage when I was in high school -- and the times when I've had a regular job (like most of my twenties and thirties when I worked two jobs -- all day for a paycheck and all night for art) are times when, looking back, I see that I was unhappy more than not. But that's not your problem, is it? What's more important, my happiness or making the world go 'round?

An old friend visited recently. When I met him years ago he reminded me of my father. He grew up in the same area as my dad, their temperaments and accents are the same. As I got to know him better, the resemblance grew stronger. Like my dad, my friend is a lovable curmudgeon. He is a dear man, naturally generous and good, the kind of person you feel fortunate to have as a friend. But on the other hand, he always seems unhappy, he's judgmental, pessimistic, irritable, put upon, complains about everything. It's that dark, sad side of him that reminds me most of my father.

During this recent visit, I realized the other thing he and my dad have in common. They both worked all their lives at jobs they hated. For decades they spent most of their days at soul-crushing, humiliating jobs working for big companies that didn't appreciate them and which left them little time or energy for anything that brought them joy, like hobbies or friends or sitting on the porch with a beer watching the grass grow.

When my father retired a few years ago, his temperament changed overnight. He's still a curmudgeon, but he's lighter, funnier, he has more energy. He seems happy now in a way that I never remember him being. It's a change in outlook that feels familiar to me. When I quit my day job in 2001 I suddenly felt very different too, and it started a whole cascade of changes in my life and attitude that I wouldn't trade for all the financial security in the world. I wish my friend were closer to retirement age.

(I feel a need to defend myself a bit from the commenter who suggested I suck it up and get a job. First, my issue with that craigslist ad was with the falseness of it. The gall of asking people to pretend to be ecstatic about a demeaning minimum-wage job. Generally, the people applying for that kind of job are people who don't have a lot of choices. It's like saying, "I'm going to slap you really hard across the face, and I want you to smile when I do it." I think it's a symptom of a sickness in our society that is caused by corporate culture worming its way into every aspect of our lives.

And regarding me: I do work hard. I'll admit that I guard my leisure time fiercely, but I work hard. I just don't usually get paid for it.)

Where Am I?

This is the kind of ad that I'm scrolling through, looking for work. I find this process so profoundly depressing, for reasons I've whined about enough.

*Do you have a great smile and personality?
*Do you radiate energy that is felt by those around you?

Texadelphia is looking for Customer Service Reps that embody a great attitude and exhibit the ability to connect with our customers. We have immediate opportunties at all of our locations for day/night, part-time/full-time positions.

Here are a few of the qualities and expectations that we require for this position:

*An awesome disposition.
*Energy that is easily noticed by others.
*A charisma that is "contagious" to our customers and your fellow employees.
*The ability to suggestively sell our menu offerings.
*The utmost of integrity, honesty, and dedication to the position.

As a customer service rep with Texadelphia, you set the feel for what our customers experience. We are looking for special candidates that can create atmosphere and maintain the experience that Texadelphia has been known for 30 years - an atmosphere that is cool and comfortable from a customer's viewpoint.

A couple of things to consider when applying:

*We don't wear uniforms.
*The qualified candidate will make $8+/hour + tips (usually $2-$3 extra/hour depending on your ability to engage the customer).
*We provide balanced, consistent schedules.
*You will be joining a cohesive teamwork environment that will support your success as you will support your fellow employees.

***

We look forward to meeting YOU!

What universe is this, where fast food workers radiate energy that is felt by those around them? Like, for instance, the kind of energy you might find leaking from the gates of hell? I worked at McDonald's for a summer when I was a teenager, and I'm almost positive I didn't have an awesome disposition. I'm not qualified for this, and I'm not qualified for the high-paying corporate jobs either -- the ads for which are virtually identical to this one -- even though I've done both.

The older I get, the more alien I feel. I can't live in the world of these ads. I don't breathe the same air.

I'm in Love with Ann-Margret.

I finally picked a Texas movie to write my paper about. State Fair is, as far as I know, the only score Rogers & Hammerstein wrote for a film that wasn't a stage show first. The story is that Fox threw it together quickly to capitalize on the popularity of Oklahoma which was still running on Broadway. The book is pretty lame, and the songs seem almost like very good parody of R & H. A lot of musical themes evoke more developed themes from earlier and later shows of theirs, like South Pacific and The Sound of Music.

In 1961, they made it over, leaving out half the original songs and adding a few new ones by Richard Rogers (I think Hammerstein was dead by then). The remake starred Pat Boone, Ann-Margret, and Bobby Darin, who are all very good. And they moved it from Iowa to Texas, filmed it on location at the fairgrounds in Dallas, just a little over a year before the JFK assassination. I think the general consensus is that it's bad. Parts of it are embarrassingly hokey, but I think it's a pretty interesting film overall. Some of the songs, especially the new ones, are great. Ann-Margret and Pat Boone are really good in it.

I'm arguing in my paper that the movie is Texas's, and by extension America's, fever dream of anxiety about the possible triumph of the modern world over an agrarian innocence we hold as sacred, Texas's final desperate (but unconvincing) assertion of its purity on the eve of a very public loss of innocence in 1963.