francis

(boy, it's been a while, readership, so much has happened since last we met.)

(so i guess i am a little late in writing this and i'm not sure how crisply the details of the following events will be remembered, partly as a result of the nature of the events themselves and partly because there have been too many stimuli in my life recently and my detail-remembering dial is set on "economy". in the case of details which are not crisply remembered, they will be completely fabricated.)

dan poppy got married and so did angie salisbury. on the same day no less! thankfully they spared all of their friends the agony of choosing whose wedding to attend by marrying each other. me and nick and seth were the groomsmen, which is the only word i can think of that has the consonants "msm" in a row. so we arranged the bachelor party. 

it was a secret and obviously the first thing to take into consideration when you're arranging a secret bachelor party is to try to make the groom think you are going to make him do something like go to the penn national horse track and al's diamond cabaret in reading, pa. it was not hard to convince dan that we were going to do something super lazy and ironic to honor him. well within the realm of possibility.

the second thing to do is to pick the activities for the weekend. to do this, we had to ask ourselves what does dan love? if you said whiskey, you're right. also long walks on majestic white sand beaches? wild ponies? yep, again. um, 11 dudes in a van with two gallons of chili? well, he likes 6 of the dudes, but he definitely loves both gallons of chili. 

number three is invite people that you think the groom would invite. this is hard, because a) you kind of have to hierarchically rank your friend's friends and also it is easy to project your own thoughts about your mutual friends onto that hierarchy. and b) you will forget people and there will be people on the bubble and some people who can't come. 

the fourth order of business is to contact the friend's boss and arrange to kidnap them from work. dan's boss is josh and he was an excellent accomplice.

lastly, most of the details should be nebulous until the very last minute, because things are way more interesting when they are frantically thrown together at the last minute. bring a whiffle ball and bat, though. 

so we decided on assateague island (off the coast of maryland) as our destination. it is this long amazing barrier island of sand beaches with wild ponies. we were hoping to get 6-8 people, so we invited twelve. eleven accepted. we rented a 12-person van and we bought two gallons of chili from ben's chili bowl for $80. extra for the onions. we got food that would satisfy all of the dietary requirements of the group, because we were a very cosmopolitan lot. 6 liters of whiskey seemed adequate. 

there were some near disasters. marson was going to drive back to new york after delivering water and s'mores materials to the camp. apparently our site was full, and the rangers told a mightily disgruntled marson that he couldn't stay with us. now walking along the beach to meet him after playing some whiskey whiffle ball, i had stumbled upon a fairly large and brightly colored toy boat. it was probably 2 feet long. so it was while holding this treasure that i was told that "this was not one of nate's best ideas", before he turned on his heels and trudged off along the beach. we had given marson vague words of encouragement about coming back out to the site. we promised to at least find him a ride back to the parking lot. no one thought we were going to see him later.

so it was with heavy hearts and a toy boat that we were making our way along the beach back to our site, me and dan and jesse. we played rock paper scissors to decide who was going to talk to the first car to come our way. dan lost. we made him do it even though it was his party; fair is fair. so dan convinced this carload of two couples, either drunk with the satisfaction of a relaxing and fruitful day fishing, or more likely keystone light, to pick brian up where he was walking, 300 yards down the beach. he said something like "our friend really needs a ride up to the ranger station, you guys look pretty full, but is there any chance you could pick him up?" 

"yeah, we're good people"

"oh thanks, i really appre..."

 then the driver's eyes got real wide, like cartoon wide. "TUGGY! HE FOUND TUGGY!" this seemed about right, like it was about time in the bachelor party for the carload of intoxicated marylanders who were about to pick up our sullen friend (so that he could drive four hours home) to grow startlingly excited over a molded plastic tugboat that they had apparently lost and had sailed a few hundred yards down the beach to the point where i had found it washed up next to some horseshoe crabs of almost equal size. one question about the situation and our arrangements comes immediately to mind, and it has to do with age and childrens' toys and mental states and good ideas, but i don't know the answer either, so i won't even ask it. so marson would at least get a ride to the ranger's station.

but he came back. and we had a fire on the beach. and macaroni and cheese (and gluten-free macaroni and cheese) and hot dogs (and not-dogs) and whiskey (and scotch and rye and bourbon). 

(so now for the moral right, 'cause you knew i was gonna do it.) as men we aren't all that accustomed to expressing our love for one another. the fact that 11 people each took the time to travel many hours (from dc and new york, pittsburgh and harrisburg, north carolina and oregon) speaks volumes about how much dan's friends care about him. the fact that everything that almost went wrong didn't and that everything that seemed like a good idea was goes to show that some deity up there knows he deserves it. and i for one am starting to think that it is tuggy...

david brooks

dear david brooks,

your recent article "high-five nation" was just the worst. let me explain why.

you say that "[on v-j day] the allies had...completed one of the noblest military victories in the history of humanity. and yet there was no chest-beating." maybe there was no exuberance on v-j day because we exploded and incinerated hundreds of thousands of civilians in japan. maybe people recognized the frightening future implications of our use of nuclear weapons. maybe it wasn't because those were more modest times.

you call "individual expressionism" a capitalistic routine. you are wrong. sure, aspects of it are frequently co-opted by corporate interests, but there are vital movements (do-it-yourselfers, backyard farmers, much of the bicycle culture, to name a few that come immediately to mind) whose individually expressive members are driven not by money, but by intellectual curiosity and desire for self-sufficiency and sustainability. 

you use michael jordan's basketball hall of fame induction speech as an example of immodesty. can't m.j. allow himself a little self congratulation for the simple reason that he is the greatest basketball player to have ever lived? and because he was being inducted into the basketball hall of fame? there is nothing wrong with him reflecting publicly a little bit on his success in front of people who appreciate his accomplishments. he is frequently quoted as saying that his predecessors made his success possible. is the forced aw-shucksism prevalent among athletes today better than a little honest discussion? do you really think michael jordan is trying to bolster his resume at this stage in the game? shit.

later, you essentially compare the actions of contemporary professional athletes and entertainers, people who are paid to get attention, to those of soldiers and average americans at the end of a brutal two-front war; a war in which we unleashed the most fearsome human-made device ever devised on a civilian population. do you really think that our soldiers today would unabashedly celebrate the use of nuclear weapons on our enemies? do you even think that terrell owens would pretend to pull down his pants and moon afganistan or that dikembe mutombo would wag his finger at iraq if we obliterated their major metropolitan areas? 

you might remember babe ruth's called shot in 1932, which is possibly one of the cockiest gestures of all time. not just calling the shot, but the mocking and grandstanding the accompanied his trot around the bases. if there wasn't a precedent for public celebrations of personal accomplishments before, that certainly set it. 

an opinion column at the new york times? you can say anything you want to hundreds of thousands of intelligent people. don't fucking call me and my contemporaries immodest and self-indulgent and then back it up with illogical nonsense.

hood to coast

one time i asked my friend how you stop on a fixed gear bicycle without brakes in an emergency, right, because it seemed like the track skid took a second to initiate and he said "you just do". now that is an imperfect explanation and i ride with brakes because my gear ratio is, as rachel's friend pointed out, pretty stout. but i would like to borrow that explanation if i may to describe a recent experience i had that has nothing to do with bicycles.

so i ran in the hood to coast relay, which is a 197 mile road race on the back roads of oregon; teams have 12 people and each team member is responsible for running 3 legs, one every 8 hours or so. it is an intense experience for a number of reasons, 1) you don't have much of an opportunity to sleep, 2) you can't eat normally, because you're always about to run, and 3) unless you are a distance runner and 15+ miles don't bother you, running 5-7 miles every 8 hours is exhausting. 

now i was not out of shape, but it is true that i took a couple of weeks off from running before frantically trying to get some training in during the week leading up to the race. nevertheless, i ran my first leg, 6.4 miles, and felt pretty good. my second leg was 4.9 miles around 5am and i overexerted myself, running faster than i planned to (the result of some poor calculations of my proximity to the checkpoint.) 

by the last leg i was spent, my quads and calves were frozen solid and i had slept two hours in the rain and eaten only peanuts and raisins and bananas for the last 18 hours. my teammate flurry had given me some energy cubes, little caffeinated gelatinous bundles of carbohydrates (yeah, that's a natural product), of which i ate five to wash down my five ibuprofen. i was at the handoff point, waiting for my teammate to come in and i was thinking "my god, i don't know how i'm going to do this". 

and if this seems too self congratulatory or you think i am about to make myself out to be some sort of hero like robert redford in the natural (triumph in the face of adversity!), well then let me disabuse you of that idea. and if you don't want to read what amounts to a story about an overprivileged white kid going for a 5-mile jog, well then i don't blame you. i bet there is some show on mtv right now that will at least make a similar story entertaining with melodramatic dialogue, a lively soundtrack and fast cuts. 

well lindsey ran in to the checkpoint and sort of surprised me, i was so checked out. i went from daydreaming to running. the first few minutes i was so uncoordinated i felt like i had hooves (or maybe high-heels on, or maybe both like if the greek god pan were a cross dresser). whenever i passed anybody or someone passed me i thought "oh man, they feel like i feel; this is hard and they are doing this too." and eventually the physical exertion and discomfort were pressed backward in my mind, like they became more than i could focus on and i was just going. 

and so if someone asks me how you run a race like hood to coast, the only answer i would be comfortable giving them is "you just do". (and if you want to extrapolate my sentiment to mean "even when you think you can't, you can", then be my guest, just don't hold me responsible if things don't work out.)

the heat and dreams

so it turns out that my car doesn't have any air conditioning, but i already knew that. you didn't, because that is not generally a piece of information that present to people unprovoked. anyway, me and kathleen took a road trip of sorts down to san francisco and camped along the way in national park/forest/recreation area campgrounds, which are the best kind of campgrounds and i had this amazing vivid dream in our tent one night and i am going to tell you about it, but after i tell you about the heat.

red bluff, california is the fucking hottest place i have ever been. you see, we were visiting lassen volcano (which erupted may 19th and may 22nd, 1915) and we were at an elevation of over 8000' and it was hot up there (but not because it is a volcano, though that's awfully clever) and if i keep adding parenthetical asides to my sentences, i'll never get through this thought. ahem. as we drove west down toward red bluff (at 348' in elevation) the temperature, which is generally one of many components that make up what we call our experiences, began to rise. at about 97 i started to monitor the situation, because at 97 temperature became the only component of living that i was capable of paying attention to and here's one reason why: it became gradually apparent to me that my eyeballs were baking in their sockets. 

now i can tolerate physical discomfort generally well, but heat will be the death of me. so with that in mind, and the fact that there was no air conditioning, so our windows were open, picture this scene: one large bearded man of northern european ancestry and a fair freckled lady of irish descent were barreling down a northern california highway at 75 miles an hour with the windows wide open, unable to talk or listen to music for all the buffeting wind noise pulsing in our heads. the bearded man at the wheel was monitoring the thermometer with a sense of foreboding as it the numbers rose and rose. the only communication in the car was every couple of minutes when the man would yell "99...100...101..." over the constant throbbing of the wind. (oh, i think i should mention that the bearded man was me, because i don't want to talk in the third person anymore.) at 105, i started to notice that i didn't seem to be sweating. then i realized that that wasn't true at all, my backside was drenched and i seemed to be stuck to the leather car seat, but everywhere the hot wind hit me was bone dry. my sweat was evaporating before i could feel it. my eyes dried out if i kept them open for more than a second. at 107 we decided to take a picture of the dashboard, where the temperature readout was. if you're all like "that doesn't sound hot", then try sitting in a sauna for two hours. 

whenever one part of my body touched another part, there was an instant wetness. (and to steer this story toward the inappropriate, there are instances where that is desirable, but alas this wasn't one. and for the most part though, this drive wasn't hot and wet, just hot and dry.) when the thermometer topped out at 112, sitting in traffic in red bluff (and know that we were the only car with its windows open), i couldn't even bear the electrical attraction between my subatomic particles. i so desperately wanted a dark matter breeze to blow through my being (haha! what a convenient and ill-defined explanation for the real mass of the universe being so much greater than the observable mass. and also, if there was a dark matter breeze blowing through my body, and there might have been, it sure didn't help.) think of this too, we had been driving in that temperature for long enough that all of our water was 107.

but if you don't feel sympathetic to our plight, well then you're right. there was so much good on the trip, that having to reconstitute our eyeballs was just an unpleasant aside. and anyway, san francisco was in the low-60s when we got there later that night.

now to shift gears completely to a dream i had while camping (and the dream i had last night that reminded me that i had the dream that i had while camping)...

look, i have this friend greg and we all lived on this farm, all of my friends and me. so greg fell for this chicken that lived on the farm, like followed it around all day. he named it grubwalker. and you know how chickens move, sometimes running and flapping and jumping all zig-zaggy, well greg would just shuffle along behind the chicken, to the exclusion of everything else. he wasn't even interested in human contact. he just loved grubwalker, he loved that chicken.

now this was a dream, right, so there was no narrative involved. i was just shown briefly this magical relationship between my friend and a chicken. i was sort of sad that greg didn't want to interact with humans anymore, but i was happy that he had found fulfillment (although it was slightly codependent). now i can see three separate aspects of the dream that relate to my life at the moment, the first is this youtube video i saw about a dog and an elephant who are best friends (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBtFTF2ii7U), the second is the fact that i have been entertaining the idea of raising some chickens in my backyard, and third is that my friends are getting married and i am happy for them, but there is also this realization (or maybe a misconception) that marriage will somehow change the dynamic of my relationship with them. 

i have no idea why it was greg who fell for the chicken, that part doesn't make any sense. (i would also say that greg probably eats more chickens than any of my other friends, so that adds another layer of strangeness to this dream. he is at least in the top three...) dreams are so awesome.

and last night i was a speed-skate cross racer, which, as far as i know is a sport that i just made up. it is like motocross or snowboard cross (boardercross, bro!), but on speed skates. bonnie blair eat your heart out (tony blair eat your heart out too). it takes place in an arena on this crazy topographical ice. it is totally nuts. i was decent, but not great. my dream centered on this race where i had my best lifetime finish, so that was encouraging. i think i got second or third, but there were some serious competitors. and anyway, don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.

(and who needs cohesion? who needs narrative or punctuation? this isn't a novel, this is a blog for crying out loud! you want a story, be my editor. sheesh.)

kfc double down sandwich

why do you mention this you ask? because the bread is replaced with fried chicken. then what is inside the sandwich you ask? bacon and cheese and special sauce. where can i get one you ask? only in rhode island and nebraska. have we finally figured out how to create food products with no redeeming nutritional value you ask? we figured that out a while ago. then what does this sandwich represent you ask? taken in conjunction with "my humps", the direction our political discourse has headed in this country, and the fascination with the sordid details of michael jackson's life (including the fact that his death was ruled a homicide), this sandwich represents the downfall of human civilization. it was a pretty good run though, wasn't it?

oh mythology

i don't want to assign any mystical powers to myself, and actually i have none, but there was an instance two weekends ago where i was exposed simultaneously to my past and a (the?) future and i was lucky in that i immediately recognized the difference. and it is a rare occasion to feel so privy, to feel as though you understand the choices you have and to understand why you are making decisions you are making. and if you're yearning for more specifics, well then i can't help you. (but you know it has to do with love, right? only love is capable of seeping into the otherwise neatly compartmentalized aspects of our lives). 

and i bring this up only because it is on my mind right now. there is a costume party tomorrow, the theme of which is gods and goddesses, and in determining which deity i wanted to emulate, i realized that i couldn't be anyone but janus (and oh, i just learned about him today!). the god of new beginnings. he has two faces, one looking to the past and one looking toward the future. 

and my future is this and not forever, but friday, a goddess will fall asleep with me and kiss me on both faces when i am waking up.

pause, sit with your breath or: from russia with love

the term "mouth-breather" is in the collective consciousness these days and the first time i ever heard it was in a woody allen stand-up routine, but it wasn't live. it was recorded and i was in a car with amy and jill and we were driving from garmisch-partenkirchen down to cinque terre, which is a fun thing to do if you ever find yourself in europe with amy and jill and a woody allen cd. and i don't think it is fair to call it a coincidence that the first time i have ever felt comfortable applying the label of mouth-breather to a person was when i was riding on a chinatown bus from new york to boston two fridays ago. it is not fair to call that a coincidence because one incident involved listening to woody allen in a car with two girls i like and the other incident involved sitting next to a loud russian on a chinatown bus and they are such unrelated incidents that they cannot be considered a coincidence.

now i'm sure you've ridden a chinatown bus. i like the lucky star, mostly because of the dragon wearing a backpack that adorns the sides. and also i like stopping at arby's where there always seem to be other lucky star busses parked letting people stretch out and get cheap beef sandwiches and use a bathroom that isn't quaking and braking and accelerating and decelerating and heaving you around. and it takes some figuring to determine which lucky star is the one you just got off of and which one would take you back to where you just came from if you got on it by accident.

so i was heading up to boston for mike's wedding and it was friday afternoon and i think everyone in new york was heading up to boston for mike's wedding, because the bus was full and so was the highway. it took six and a half hours. but i was waiting in line to board the bus behind this pretty girl and maybe she had tattoos somewhere, i don't know, but she was pretty. i thought to myself "this bus is going to be full, look at all these people in line" and also "i should sit next to this pretty girl and wouldn't that make the time on the bus go by faster?" so i didn't. i sat two rows behind her on the other side of the bus because maybe i would get both seats to myself if i looked gruff enough to scare people away. but the bus was full, like i knew it was going to be. so the last person on the bus was this behemoth of a russian man with a blackberry and a tight t-shirt and a baseball cap on and where else was he supposed to sit? 

so he plunked down beside me, all elbows and hanging over the armrest and he immediately launched into a heated discussion with another russian or maybe someone didn't speak russian, but who he wanted to bellow at regardless. he probably didn't need to use the phone, if the person on the other end was anywhere in connecticut i'm sure they could hear him if the wnd was blowing in the right direction and they tilted their head just so. as abruptly as the conversation started, ten minutes later it ended and by the time his hand, still grasping his phone descended to his lap, he was asleep. and he slept like he talked, bellicosely, but instead of some unseen recipient of his energies, the recipient was sitting exactly in my seat and shared all my fears and aspirations. in case that wasn't clear, the snoring mass of russian was piled onto me. his head was on my shoulder, bicep to my bicep, hand on my thigh.

"now this is interesting," i thought and "i can't believe we're only in cos cob."

we rode like that for a while and at least the air conditioning was on this time. then his phone rang and he launched into such another boisterous conversation that i almost forgot he had been asleep seconds before. ten minutes later, conversation over and i had my snoring russian blanket again. once his phone rang again i took the opportunity to get up and spread myself out under the pretenses of heading to the bathroom. not that i didn't have to pee, because i did, but mostly i wanted air around my body and not flesh. so i made it to the bathroom and shut the door and took some deep breaths (unadvisable) and got ready to start peeing and the driver decided to accelerate and switch lanes and brake, all in a span of three or four seconds. so i wedged myself in the tiny bathroom, elbows on walls, feet on the rim the toilet, anything i could do to keep from getting jostled and sending an errant stream trickling down my shorts and out under the door. but i couldn't bring myself to do it. i felt like some drunk in a cartoon, looking down at the bowl meandering it's way through my field of vision. finally, i looked at myself in the scratched up mirror, looked away, sighed and sat down on the toilet seat. i felt so defeated, sitting there peeing while connecticut heaved past me in fits and starts.

and stepped out of the bathroom, four or five minutes later  and made my way down the aisle. when i got to my row, the russian was dead asleep, hanging over the armrest, but i didn't need to wake him up. his phone rang...