Why am I Always the Bad One?

ITTING IN A SEMINAR of sorts the other day - doesn't matter what it was about - when I awoke with a shudder: our speaker had just described people who cast themselves victims as "passive-aggressive."
No, I thought, That is quite wrong? The passive-aggressive trait, to my understanding, is much more insidious, far more destructive than plain wallowing in pity? The victimhood, such as it is, is entirely contrived. The passive-aggressor operates by provoking his mark to retaliate, then appeals to his audience - hands held wide before pained, pleading, hurt face - to rally to his aid in face of such attacks. He will, to cite an extreme example, explode a bomb in a lunch-crowded restauraunt then shriek and wail in horror when his house is bulldozed. It is the child who whispers in the dark I hate you I hate you to her younger sibling, then complains next day that No-one will play with me.

Why am I always the bad one?

Politics and elementary schools, and indeed families, are full of it.

How should one deal with it? I Call Bullshit! has at least the charm of satisfaction, but is ultimately futile: the passive aggressor is way too wrapped-up in themselves to notice, too narcissistic to believe themselves capable of wrong. Too sociopathic to care. I have no answer - though I've struggled for years to find one having been bracketed above and below by this nasty psycopathy. One cannot even use humor, for they have no sense of it, of anything other than schadenfreude? On the one front I have chosen to ignore, to have done, to sever and discard a poisoned extremity. On another front I cannot, and must struggle with it poorly, in my own useless fashion.

But to see it writ large, consuming every channel on the television, pampered and coddled and amplified by a heartless media or congress who recognise their own? That makes me sick to my stomach.

I'm with Michele today - it hurts to bite one's tongue. My thoughts are also with another; the quiet one, the object of all scorn and derision. Peace be with you, son.

The Game

How do geeks entertain themselves, you wonder? The Game. Or some variant thereof whose name will vary too, though to us it was always and only The Game.

The rules are simple - childish naturally, for we are indeed geeks - and when played at appropriate moments are guaranteed to provoke an instant flush of shame. Or rage. Whatevs: during the course of regular unsuspecting conversation with your colleagues or friends, deliberately introduce some slight corruption, some malaprop or petty misconstruction. And then, when your erstwhile friends correct you, you've won.

Simple. Deadly. My wife and children despise it almost to the point of divorce or emancipation, but that does not stop them trying to play me when it suits them?

Anyway, it all came flooding back today when I peaked here, at La Vache Qui Lit and noticed the photograph in the upper right corner. My first thought? Oskar Meyer!

The rules state, however, that since I was not in Game mode when I thought of it - in other words, it was an unintended, accidental corruption - it does not count, and I may indeed be slagged without mercy for being an idiot.

[LATER...

"And he was taken next day to dangle his heels in the north wind."
-- Boccaccio, The Decameron

Well. Serves me right for being too obtuse: the picture that appeared at La Vache Qui Lit yesterday was of a little blond-haired blue-eyed boy, banging on his drum. But all is changed today. Not all - that's clearly an exaggeration - rather, the photograph is gone, but an interesting blog remains. -- Fcb]

Uneasy Lies The Head That Hears The Clock

ATE TO BED, Late to rise - that's our motto: or it would be, should be in a righteous world, where none had work, nor pesky kids? Right now it's 4am and I'm still up and I'm still working: still coding and compiling. And writing this too on the off moments. I have just put the coffee on: have to time it right, because I have to wake my Love in twenty minutes so that she can be at her work by 6am, and it wouldn't do to hand her anything less than a fresh cuppa joe and a fresh cigarette first thing. Then, while she showers and prepares for the day, I'll to my bed at last, read for a coupla minutes 'till my eyelids drop and nod my way into Nod. I will probably be sleeping when she kisses me Goodbye?

-- * --

LATER, Little bit: awake again by 9am, stumble into clothes - just breeks and T-shirt for now - jumble and daze my way to the van, go collect the youngest from a sleepover in time for Grandma picking everybody up at 10. They go there Tuesdays after school but now it's Spring Break, the Holidays, just begun: they'll go there Allday and bug her to heyuhll.

I, meanwhile, have to go in today for some meetings and a seminar: No working from home for me this day - some things just cannot be attended-to remotely. Bugger.

Took a post post down before I left, moved it back a little ways in time: ashamed at having been provoked into writing it at all.

-- * --

LATER, Much later: home again, exhausted and at last. Sore as all hell from my back and my arm, crabbit as sin to boot. Cursing all traffic and drivers, all pain and interminable meetings; soooo need to crash, if only for an hour? I'll have to catch-up with my real work tonight.

-- * --

LATE TO BED, Early to rise - that's our reality. In this house of five teen-grown children, not a one of the little bastards would ever answer an alarm? Not without payment they won't? Five bucks and I'll wake ya yer arse: I'll do it mahsel.

And so it falls to me, the Elder, the gimpy Cripple with a stick, to wake them all up in the morning. She I wake gladly, willingly, cheerfully with coffee and with smokes. But THEM? Though I do like to shout, that Should Not Be So? They're young and in the prime of life - not me - they should be up and had their breakfast and oot the bloody door before I ever have to hobble out of bed? But no.

Better I should stay-up all night than try to awake at 5am. Uneasy lies the head that hears the clock.

Fight!

Hey, a Google fight! Form a circle, quick: Fight-fight-FIGHT!!

[Found at RageBoy, by way of Sandhill Trek...

...but... what's up with that? Two HighBeams illuminating competition? I think both must have misheard their instructions? I'm sure there's an answer here somewhere...]

No Business But Show Business

I hardly know where to begin, nor even that I should? But anger compels, and everyone knows that blogging in anger is best.

This is indeed my fourth life. Nothing at all to boast about. My first - my normal everyday throwaway life, a life replete with complacent certainty, a life you all have led and that most of you still do - that life ended with a birth. My second life ended with a death: just not the one that anyone anticipated? A Surprise!! death, then, to complement the other. Two for the price of one. My fourth life you have read about in these pages, if I may presume, and you know how it began and where it led me?

Four lives, one Fool, whistling his way along Precipice Road.

The second, the crucible wherein the tin was mixed, was chaptered by the births of my own three children, but colored by the death of the first; and closed by the death of their mother, my wife.

How do you begin to approach a firstborn clinically doomed to early death and a vacant life? When, to compound the tragedy, a Fool must choose on behalf of the Hero? Let me tell you this: there is acceptance, and then there is acceptance. The one, easier for all, accepts circumstance at its face and weeps its way into the future, smothering the baby with love unto death. The other accepts only that death will visit one day - any day - and presently; but will make the most of every minute until that day is yesterday. That you know to your bones that you cannot change the outcome is beside the point: the purpose of life is to live it, and by God - despite God - you will see that he does? To accomplish that demands a grim and exhausting kind of love that fights each day each hour to give them something of a life before they go. Rewards are slight to outside eyes: a smile of recognition; a patiently-teased chuckle; an infant throwing away his feeding tube and ever after eating off a spoon; or sitting in his pushchair at the shops, sporting custom-made shades to counteract photophobic sneezing? Little things. These little things meant more to me, to us, than any future Doctorate. The penalties, however, were gruesome and destructive: waking every morning with a knot - Is he still here? Is this the day?; the tube a capital Horror all its own, always fought, sometimes in-one-nostril out-the-next, always checking, worrying, never sure, that you fed it to his stomach not a lung? Administering daily enemas and physiotherapy - beating out the phlegm; his constant ever-present pain and illness, one bloody thing after another without Just One Time! a break of any length? Stress and distress that ruptured a family - the wider family - in unforgiving ways that never healed, not to this day. Not an easy path at all. Then, three years into his life, just as we had begun to forget, he did what we'd always known he would. Just like that, sat upon his mother's knee. One cold too many.

Five years later his mother followed. Out of the blue: she presented and died all in the space of a month - Bonfire Night to St. Andrew's Night. A strong and feisty woman of courage if ever there was, she endured two pain-wrecked weeks of diagnosis in various hospitals, then two weeks more in a hospice once she knew what it was that she had. She laughed, darkly, at the irony of catching a sunburn disease in a land of perpetual rain. This time around the Heroine chose for herself, leaving the Fool to merely gawp and bawl. We had learned the prognosis together, and she was having none of it: no treatment, no beating around the bush, get the bloody thing over and done with. She was not afraid of dying, she told me, but was afraid instead of the manner of it. She had accomplished much in her life until then - oh she had won no Nobel Prize, written no books, managed no companies, earned no fortune - but which of us, truly, would measure a life such a way? She had lived it, and lived it fully and enjoyably she was saying. Now it had come to its close, as everyone's does. Her regrets, such as she had, were all of the future, not of the past - of what she would not live to see or do. It was a lousy day to die, she said, but there it was. And you know what? I agreed with her, though it broke my heart. You love someone, you must love them enough to let them go - whether as parent waving a 'kerchief as a child leaves for college, or as husband holding hands with his wife on her deathbed.

Two tales, both all too true, and two irreconcilable paths taken at the fork, or so you'd think? I disagree: they are the same, but differ in perspective. On the one hand a life new begun and never lived at all, but on the other a life at its close and lived to its full while it lasted. Both are unified in retrospect, by looking back, as having been lived and in some way fulfilled. Both, if you like, had something nice, something accomplished, to show to God? May they both forgive me for spilling it all.

One day last week, while making lunch, I listened in horror as Pat Boone, sainted Pat Boone, fucking Pat fucking Boone on Fox News, accused a man he'd never met of spouse abuse, of beating his wife and breaking her bones, of neglect and abuse and abuse and neglect, and then... M.u.r.d.e.r. Or rather, he didn't: no - fearless Pat Boone could never be so open with his accusations, but prefers the gossip's He-says-She-says-must-be-true device. In the ladies circle he attends, the pious whisper judgement over neighbors' "immorality", of supposed sins and sinners they can never have enough of. Thoughtful, caring Pat Boone, hands clasped in prayer, asking Fox viewers How any man like that can be said to love his wife?

You know nothing Mister Boone, and it shows.

A Life in Pictures

Head full of paintings all week - he's well-and-truly back, and feeding on brainflots like a catchy refrain - it is one of those tired clichés, surely, a conditioned response, to answer "Rembrandt" when asked one's favorite artist? How easily it trips off the tongue. As thoughtlessly as "The Complete Works of Shakespeare" or filthy Mozart, as Lucky Jim would have it, are all of them flung carelessly into everyman's desert island napsack?

To admit of such is foolish: it is, on one hand, a confession of ignorance - it says you wouldn't recognize a Rembrandt if it bit right through your stretchpants? And on the other, which at least presumes you might, you are the despised bourgeoise catamite of imperialist hegemony, and likely closet racist necrophiliac. On yet a third hand - for here in the Xenoverse we are alien as Skandar jugglers, remember - we recall our past lives on another world, where any actual interest was pretentious, suspicious? Frowned upon. Art was for fairies, and fairies themselves - faeries no longer - as emasculated as The Lion and The Unicorn.

So: Ssshhh! Keep it quiet, so no-one finds out?

I hate to draw rank - so many favorites to choose from? So let's just say that Rembrandt is primus inter pares - first among equals - in my little world of Vermeers, Dürers, Botticellis, and Bruegels? There are more, many more, but they won't come to me until tonight, as I lie on the brink on sleep. Rembrandt comes first for no other reason than his were the first I saw, for real, with eyes that could? I'd walked the Louvre years before, it's true, but that was as a schoolboy: when I looked at all at paintings there, it was only for recognition with any I'd seen in books or encyclopaedias. La Giaconda was too small, her encasement too oppressive.

My first Rembrandt remains among my favorites. It is a self-portrait - the one above - which hangs in the National Gallery in Edinburgh. First gallery I visited of my own volition, too. Two crimes right there! Nobody visited galleries unless they'd been dragged by a teacher? But I was out of school, apprenticed to a shipyard - I was supposed to be bumming around second-hand record stores, Cockburn St and Greyfriars, looking for weirdo LP's. I was not supposed to be flouncing around an art gallery. But worse: a self-portrait was anathema to my kind, to the kind I once was. A self-portrait is a self-glorification, a blowing of one's own trumpet. A piece of flash immodesty and self-promotion. A portrait of someone a bit too full o' himself? To have been ensnared and captured by such a thing, to have fallen under its enchantment, such condition could not be spoken of. It meant that, given genuine passions would be instantly detected and jumped upon, I had to change my stock answer to Bosch, who was always considered cool and permissable.

But look at it! Look at the pain, look at the regret?

At this point I ought to quote Pope John Cleese I, annunciating ex-cathedra at the Secret Policeman's Ball... "I don't know much about art, but I knows what I likes!" Any formal education that I may have received in Art began, and ended, with related lines in Miss Noble's class - the same Miss Noble, Head of Culross House, who hovered hawklike at the stairs, ripping earrings out of passing schoolgirl's with a stern "See Me!" rebuke. Paintings to me are like books: I may know that there are multiple layers, hidden metaphors and allusions, but I'm too thick to read them, and need to be drawn by the topspiece?

Still, I was riveted. Stood before a painting as I never had before. Forget the craft - who needs to know or care that they made their paints with earwax? eeeeww - look at the way he melts out of blackness, and look, again and again, at that face.

Rembrandt Van Rijn, it transpires, was a serial offender, an obsessive self-portraitist. He painted other subjects too - all of them stunning - but his portraits of himself, which paint the series of his life, those attract me most. He was cursed with an interesting life, and it all of it shows:

1. Rembrandt gets laid;
   
2. Rembrandt gets screwed;
   
3. Rembrandt the Wise retires from the fray.
   

I've said before I'm lucky to live so close to Los Angeles, with its plethora of musea. Very nearly all of them have something by Rembrandt - the Norton-Simon in particular has, I'm sure I recall, a half-finished portrait of his son, or is it a little girl (I'm not sure now?) which jolted me again. But I'm luckier even than that. I've made two trips to the Metropolitan in New York, and last time I was there, back in November during the World Series, we walked down the eastern edge of Central Park to the diminutive Frick. This, despite it's small size, proved to be a treasure trove of Rembrandts and Holbeins. I looked Cromwell and Sir Thomas More in the face, strode between them thusly, for indeed, were you ever to ask my mirror you'd discover I'm 'Enery the Eighth I am. I am.


[Huge HatTip to the resourceful Olga's Gallery]

Curses:


• Scots - "May you live an interesting life"
  
• Chinese - "May you live in interesting times and come to the attention of important people"
  

The Missing Smile

I was about to leave a chirpy comment at the delightful, but sensitive Outer Life, when my finger - most uncharacteristically - first paused, then wavered, then very slowly stepped away from the "Post" button. It would have said:

Nothing good can come of this. You're setting yourself up for a fall, laddie!

No, wait - that was my voice. Gimme it back, now that you've done with it.

Harmless enough, I'd thought? You read it, you were supposed to smile. Dammit?

My days of firing-off drunken 3am Harrumph!!! mails to company executives are long since past. Still, I shudder to recall the morning-after shudder, the waking new-dawn ohnosecond of stark, scary realization that Yes, I really had called the chief executive a gormless dozey, er, chump. The thing of it is, was, that in that place at that time, the rules were known to everyone: it was understood that anything said while drunk was harmless twaddle, and that, Friday nights at 3am, everyone was drunk and just home from the pub. It was also known by everyone that I, Bearded, could always be relied upon as Monday-morning slagger meat. Rather like Cheers - an especially fitting analogy, it happens - everyone knew your idiocies. It truly was the best company to work for. I miss it sorely.

Those heady days, that company, and very-nearly all my headcase colleagues, all are long, long gone. Cast to the cracked-cheek winds. Everything is different now: no - that is completely wrong - everything has reverted now, for those days were an aberration.

But later - some years later - came blogs: dangerous blogs with their scheming, irresistable commentaries. Cue Michael Corleone standing in the kitchen, Just when I thought I was out whah-whah-whah...

Scented sweetly as a fly trap. Bzzzz.

Thing about blogs is, you read them, the same ones every day, visit them three or four times a day (screw those RSS feeds, which rob you of the pleasure of discovery), delight in new postings or otherwise - the whole time, you slowly come to believe you know the author? Pretty soon you've convinced yourself you're all old pals, grown together drunk together laughed together since primary school? But, of course, you aren't and you haven't: you have been punked, as idiom would have it, by your own psychoterie. The author barely knows of your existence, wouldn't recognize you if you shook his hand or hers. This deception, this false familiarity, leads inexorably to disaster. The most dangerous assumption to make is that the author knows your sense of humor. He will know, when he reads your comments, that you are kidding, joking, having a laugh. Regardless of your subtlety, your mastery of irony, He could not misconstrue. How could he? He knows I'm a nice guy, a good guy, who would never offend?

Oh the trouble I've gotten in to. The embarassment that's felt my collar? But still, so difficult to resist a "Comment" box.

Shock of culture is one thing: to discover that brash americans and lumberjack canadians are not equipped for a good british slagging - the lifeblood of our friendships - is one thing. You learn to accept that they do not compute; that they'll crumble at the slightest onslaught, and take everything you say to heart? You learn to just not do that. And then, gawd help you, you lose your powers and start to wobble yourself whenever you meet some wiley cove out from the Old Country?

But the web? The web is worse than all. The web - blogs - are written not spoken. It lacks all gesture, all tone, all subtle cues to meaning or intent? All you have is the barren word. You quickly realize how difficult it is to cast humor as letters.

We geeks - we ancient geeks, who've been connected and PHONE'ing since before there were the Internets - we geeks contrived a simple scheme of meta-tags (as is our way) to clarify the sense of our communications. Little pictograms of punctuation. Smileys. Emoticons.

We were happy ( :-) ) with our little ways, happy until you lot came along and spoiled it! ( :-( ) You stole our web, usurped our applications, wrote your bloody blogs as though you owned the place: then you turned against us. Smileys and emoticons became bad form: tainted them, so that nowadays they carry an air of the trailer about them? And then - and then, what happens, people leave you comments. Leave you jokes in comments that you just don't get, start a flame war, escalation, rage, IP-banning all the rest and and and and and...

And nothing. You get what you deserve. I still haven't finished my Rembrandt post: two days it's been brewing, but I keep being distracted. Maybe tomorrow, maybe not? Although I'd better bloody hurry. You go read Matt Welch tonight then come back when it's ready - I promise, I wrote mine first.

;-)

Mystery

There is painting hanging in the National Gallery in faraway Edinburgh that has haunted me for years. But I do not know who painted it, and I do not know its name.

Perhaps I did once, but neither stuck: whatever filaments I ever had to sniff-out paths from short to long are many times exhausted? Now, like Algernon at the cusp or a sudden flash of lucidity amidst some slow descent, I am left to fret, to know what I no longer know, to remember only what it is I have forgotten. In a head jammed full of inconsequential trivia there is no place left for name or number. One is compelled, instead, to puzzle and worry piecemeal fragments - an image, a sense, some elementary principal - to congeal into something, typically porridge.

I am not helped in my feeble reconstruction by the Gallery itself, whose website is as close with its collection as we scots are said to be with our pennies? How sad, how unexpected from an otherwise welcoming place? I could, I suppose, hop on a train across the bridge as I used to do, and hobble my way up the Waverly ramp and half-way along busybody Princes Street, all the way to the Mound, and then walk in for free? - But no! Och No! - I'm forgetting the station's six thousand miles away. Damn.

But.

As muse Serendipity would have it - as she often does - I think I've found a clue, a pointer, a tell-tale sign? This is her town, Los Angeles, this is where she lives: and ever since I landed she's been good to me. She delivered me directly to a Goddess and a bold new life. She laughed in the face of those scornful homebodies who promised me "You'll find no culture there!". Here, she whispered, here at the shallow-end of the Pacific, here the barons ran-out of rail. Here they built mansions, and collections. Getty for your wonder fix. Norton-Simon for your Rembrandt self-portraits, continuing the series you discovered back there, and for the Hindu carvings you've never seen before. The Huntingdon for portraiture and gardens. Even municipal LACMA for your old socialist fix, and for weekend diversions with your kids?

I digress. It's late. You're tired. I ramble. Here at her home in Los Angeles, then, her fingers dance around my keyboard, weaving a web that led me to the picture above. To Stephenesque, to DarkoV to Drawn! to Vitriolica, a blog whose every entry is drawn by hand.

So what?

So. The painting I seek, my long-lost nameless fatherless ghost, depicts a youth, a boy - an imbecile I'd say - who is singing, arms stretched wide, singing over a corpse, laid upon a table top. Singing sweetly, innocently, without a care for caustic-tongued relations looking on. Singing something old, ancient. Not an opera.

So close: as close as Lisbon is to Edinburgh, and quite as different.

It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Guilty!

PENSACOLA, Fla: In what has been termed by some the "Trial of the Century", a Federal jury today found an elderly woman guilty of causing the deaths of more than one billion Americans in a killing spree that lasted more than two hundred years, and which touched every state of the Union. The verdict was unanimous. Sophie Gaia, known to most as "Mother Nature", wept unconsolably as the verdict was read, but later recovered sufficiently to threaten Judge Fiona McFancy, with "dire vengeance" and "a lonely death, eaten by cats" as she was led away by bailiffs. Gaia, who now faces a likely death sentence herself, was heard to scream "I'll get you one day, Missy!" at the judge, who sat unfazed at the bench.

Prosecuting attorney Roy Moore, 73, speaking outside the courtroom to an often rowdy media, stated: "This is a great day for America. In delivering its verdict today the jury sent a strong message to all of those who consider themselves above the law: They are not! Today we reassert that which we hold dear: that every American, be he large or small, young or old, is possessed of an inalienable right to life. A right which Ms. Gaia - and her accomplice, God - has held in utter contempt since the dawn of time." When asked about the co-defendant, God, who manifestly failed to appear before the court, Moore responded "People across this great land are right-now looking for him everywhere. It is only a matter of time before somebody finds where he is hiding, and he is brought before this court." He went on to say "I promise you this: One day he will stand judged."

Meanwhile council for the defense, led by law professor Alan Dershowitz, spoke separately to waiting media. "My client has never denied her role in these killings," he said. She was, however, "entirely innocent" and "not at all responsible" for her actions. Dershowitz had argued that his client had acted "under the irresistable influence of her partner, God" and that it was he, not Gaia, who was true mastermind behind the killing spree. "Who could have resisted such terrible bullying?", he queried, "Not me. That's for sure as mustard!"

The stage is now set for Gaia's sentencing in September.

Megan's Law

Prompted by this post on Jeff Jarvis' Buzz Machine to revist the excellent "Megan's Law" website here in California, I must confess to being a little disconcerted by it's invitation to "Register with us!" ?

That aside, the site is enormously useful: not only can you quickly identify sex offenders who live close by - you can search by street address, zip code, proximity radius - but you can see where offenders live, see a photograph, and read their rap sheet. This latter fact is particularly useful, because it alleviates to some extent the otherwise binary nature of the register - any sex-related offense will classify a perp' as "sex offender" to be registered and tracked. Thus we may find homosexual men who were caught in-flagrante way-back-when before liberalization tarred with the same brush as kiddy diddlers and rapists?

There are legitimate fears that such sites serve to promote vigilantism - not so much of the "hang-'em high" variety as the arguably more dangerous "drum 'em out of town" kind? If registered offenders are continually forced to move out of a neighborhood, once residents learn what they've done, they may eventually fall into vagrancy, and therefore become harder not easier to keep track of? A dilemma that kicked its way into my tardy mind upon learning the dreadful fate of Jessica Lunsford, whose murderer was described as "vagrant" (it is at times such as this, I think, that every parent hears the call of their inner Volokh?)

But what to do?

I don't kow. Keep it in mind, I suppose? Don't overreact. Look and learn, read the rap sheets, inform your kids, and keep a weather-eye out for the creeps.

No mommy's kisses, and no daddy's smile...

Hi. My name is Bearded. I'm a...

Bourbon Congratulations! You're 127 proof, with specific scores in beer (40) , wine (50), and liquor (139).

Screw all that namby-pamby chick stuff, you're going straight for the bottle and a shot glass! It'll take more than a few shots of Wild Turkey or 99 Bananas before you start seeing pink elephants. You know how to handle your alcohol, and yourself at parties.

My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 53% on proof You scored higher than 85% on beer index You scored higher than 85% on wine index You scored higher than 99% on liquor index

Link: The Alcohol Knowledge Test written by hoppersplit on Ok Cupid

[Provenanters: via Snark Attack via Unfogged]

Ach - Bourbon's okay, I suppose, but it has such a flowery aftertaste, you know? Not like whisky. Straight up, nae water, and nae bloody ice.

Haven't drank in years. Which is to say: haven't been drunk in years. Have the odd margarita or glass of red now and then - maybe an appletini if I'm out - but very rarely? After whisky, nothing else seems up to much? Stop drinking that and pretty soon your enthusiasm wanes for anything less.

Whether you acknowledge it or not, there is a window in your life for whisky: youngsters can't drink it because it tastes so bad when you're a kid? Smells so bad too, you'd puke before the glass got near your lips. Oldsters - well, for oldsters whisky makes them old and weepy, makes them cry for days on long-forgotten songs. My window opened in my later twenties, and clapped-to ten years later. It began, forgive my Conneritic tone, with Maltsh - Shingle-maltsh. Sublime and smooth, the single-malt scotch whisky is without doubt the single finest spirit on the planet. There's a bar in my home town - The Old Inn - with a gantry that had fifty different malts if it had one; every last distinct, unique. I favored the Speysides: The Macallan, The Glenlivet, Glenfarclas. Had a pal from Dufftown, his dad was manager at Glenfiddich, used to tell us "Rome was built on seven hills; Dufftown's built on seven stills." Not so keen on the dry, peaty Islay malts (Islay as in Isla Vista, sunshine) - Laphroaig or Lagavulin - except for the gentler brands like Bunnahabhain or Tallisker? The ones that didnae taste like the dry-cleaners? Others swear by them: won't drink anything but? They love they way that peaty malts sook the moisture out their gums.

But malts were too expensive - like forty quid a bottle! You'd maybe get a bottle for christmas, but you'd have to make that last a year? For everyday fare, then, one had to hold one's nose and acquire a taste for a bit o' the rough: for the blends. I never had any trouble acclimatizing to the blends. Cheap and cheerful and fine enough for the likes of me. Was a time I would happily down a half-bottle of Grouse while ironing the kids' clothes at night. Never any worse for wear. Any more than that, though, I'd soon start to feel it: like an exponential whoosh! A bottle was my limit - after that, deed.

Came out here, of course, and met my wife. After years of drinking alone, we all of us partied like it made us go blind. A loud and obnoxious drunk, perhaps, but a happy one. But after a while when I began to change; turned from happy drunk to nasty drunk, and that was time for me to settle down. No more Satan's Semen for me. The window had closed.

I don't miss it. Not really.

Against the Laws of Bog

The Bogs. The Cludgie. The WC. The Khazi. The Cottage. The Oothoose.

Circled inside the compressive horrors of Asimov's Caves of Steel, the Lavatories - vast communal halls where ten-tier tenemented citizenry gather for ablutions. The populace divides by gender, and behavior. Gentlemen rigid and straighteyed and mortified, march in here, utterly silent, looking neither to the left nor to the right, seeking in ritual a solitude otherwise denied. Ladies, always contrary and sinister behind closed doors, roll and gyre and jumble into there; singing, chatting, gossiping in shameless, shocking sociability. A future returned to a past: to the past of the Gorbals.

Ugh. Don't you shudder just to think of it? Of conducting all your triple-S necessities in public, amongst your neighbors? My wife scoffs, laughs at me and men - as all wives do - for our ridiculous psychoses? She can not understand us, will not understand us, our reticence, the cloying shyness of our public business? Refuses to believe stories of the washroom? That there are no stories of the washroom! Eyes front, mouth Schtum! legs slightly parted, cheeks tightly clenched. Stare daggers at a pale-painted wall, forget to breathe. Silence. She will not believe that, were it your long-lost brother long-thought dead and rotted in Amazonia stood next to you, that you would not speak a hushed "Hello!" Never there, not at the urinal? A grunt, perhaps, a nodded acknowledgment at the washbasin? But rather like an officer of The Guards who wears his hat to breakfast, a gentleman at piss does not wish not to be engaged in conversation. Nessun parlare.

I wondered, when I read that book, whether the Laws of Bog were universal? Whether men stood uneasily at urinals across the globe, to micturate in silence? I'd thought - I'd expected - that it was at least as american as it is an anglo phenomenon? That here too, would be as there - at least in this regard?

It looked, at first, as though public restrooms in America - for it is only the public lavatories we are addressing here, a man's private thronery being his own domain, where he may and does act as he pleases - that public restrooms in America were equal to their British counterparts? That here, too, a man will keep himself very much to himself? At casual glance it is indeed so, or very nearly so: walk into a Men's Room in America - in California, in New York, New Jersey, New England, North Carolina, Louisiana, Illinois, Oregon, hell, even Texas - the same rules hold; decorum, privacy, silence and solitude. A little lax around the edges, sure, a little too familiar - one may nod at acquaintances upon approach, for example - but on the whole sound. "Sound as a pound", as I might once have said?

But.

But this would not be the Xenoverse if everything in it were completely aligned or completely opposed to the world we left behind? Here in the Xenoverse we fasten on difference, on tiny skews, inconsequential deltas whose chaotic effects far exceed their weight; in short, we fix upon the little things that keep us off-balance, remind us that we're alien?

There are three distinct zones in any public washroom, physically demarcated, at whose boundaries social repression increases logarithmically. Out-to-in they are the Wash Area, the sinks and dryers and paper towels, a kind of decompression chamber where tongues may wag and flap; beyond that, the steady rank of Urinals, of which we have already spoken. Further still, deeper, the sanctum sanctotum of the Stalls. Quiet as the grave. If urinals are ten times tougher than the hand-basins, then stalls are ten times harsher still? Here all sound - whether voluntary or involuntary - must be suppressed; here no birds may sing. While you are here, as balded monks in meditation, you must not be.

In the Old World unscrupulous men, shirksters, workshy skivvers often took advantage: they knew that they might spend whole workdays there, reading the daily newspaper, secure from all discovery? They knew that fist-clenched charge-hands would hunt them knocking everywhere, everywhere but there? Honest men avoid the stalls completely. Honest men - responsible men, family-supporting men - prefer to hold it in all day than visit there? Attendance at stall, they know, is an act of desperation, of absolute necessity. Look closely: in Britain - in Japan too, far as I can tell - a stall is a cell, hermetically sealed from visual inquiry. A door, once closed, admits no crack of light where those outsider may peer; and fills the space down to the floor. A three inch floorside gap at worst. In british stalls you are assisted in your privacy.

But, oh my Gawd not here!

In every public washroom I have been there is at least a twelve-inch gap, floor-to-door or wall, all the way around! A gaping maw a full foot high! I find this hugely disturbing. So much so that I can count on one depleted hand the number of my visits spanning six years wide? I simply cannot bear to sit there. It flies against all holy Rules of Bog: a tiny stall that ought to hide, that ought to offer solace and security, instead exposes man's most secret private place to all who happen past! The inside of our underpants, People! - a sight kept secret from our mothers, denied to-this-day our wives or girlfriends - laid boldly at our ankles, revealed Shazaam! as though a silver-plated feast whose dome has torn away in flashy flurry? It matters not one whit to us that we are many many years matured beyond our fearful skidding boyhoods? That nowadays our tighty whities dazzle blue as Daz in every part? That nowadays we sport us rainbow-colored boxer briefs that, still, are always shiney clean? Never, ever, can such a thing be shown. Whatever extremity it was that pushed you to the stall, it magnifies a hundredfold within, concentrates attention towards gripping kegs at knees, into not permitting anything to fall below the line. There are no relaxed expulsions there.

This hideous openness - what to make of it? I blame it on the movies. It must be law, a building regulation, that public lavatory stalls sit one foot above the floor for movies? So teachers, cops, or hitmen can surely creep along the farthest wall scanning for our hero or our heroine hiding there? Who never sit but always crouch with shodded feet upon on the rim, in order to escape discovery? All stalls are built that way so movies work?

Perhaps not? Perhaps instead I have completely misunderestimated the situation - not entirely beyond the realm of likliehood? Perhaps this cult, this U.S of A, perhaps it is evolving past old european precedents by designing the future incarnation of stalls - of stalls so prohibiting that one day no man shall ever use them? Perhaps these americans, so much more puritan than I in other ways, perhaps they do not want me there at all - perhaps they're saying: "Take your slurry with you Home, you Bearded!"

I'd be happy to oblige.

A Thousand Trumps, and More

I am back. Lonely and depressed, and back.

The first time I visited Las Vegas I was completely unprepared. I had arrived, still aglow, out of New Orleans, and in that leap from city of soul to city of none my guid scots sensibilities were shocked to their pursed-lip core: I had come from streets draped in song and music and drink and food and life led full, and landed in this harsh, glaring, tasteless, shameless, monstrous money machine, where everything molded or burning-bright or clanging-loud or otherwise was built to ream my hard-earned from my pocket. Unable to comprehend its size and scope and horrorshow gaudiness, I fled, benumbed, into the desert that first time, to escape its terrible cheesy chintzy tunes and bells. Bells that haunt waking, sleeping, drinking hours. I trolled the dark, quiet tunnels of the nearby Hoover Dam and rapped my knuckles along its walls, all to reassure myself that this, at least, was real and made of stone?

I did not gamble then, that week: being in town for a trade show, I personified local taxicab wisdom which holds, still, that coders – who are despised here - arrive in town with one shirt and one twenty, and change neither.

Though I did not then, I - we - love Vegas. Now that I live and have married in southern California, now that I'm five hours car-or-plane away, Circus Circus and Luxor are home-from-home to us, my family and me. Road trips to Vegas, once or twice or thrice a year. Sometimes all, sometimes not. Depends who wants to go, or who we need to take? Two routes from here to there: although of late we've dabbled with the freeways - 118, 210, 15 - we prefer the back way through the bumpy desert: through Antelope Valley to Palmdale, then deadly Pearblossom to meet the I-15 at Victorville. But trips are a tale for another day. Imagine, instead, that four hours later you're bombing round that final bend and there before you is the sprawl of Vegas...

I left the blessèd one behind. Not willingly. Never that. She must attend a convention. Not willingly. Never that. Three nights apart. Three nights more than we can bear. The longest time in six years. Not alone, me, but lonely. All alone, she, and lonelier.

Bombing round that final bend at night, in darkness, where mountains part for a carpet of light, intricately woven, grander by far - but not quite so magical - as its herald at State Line sixty miles back, where a miles-long emergency truck ramp is fenced by signs "No Stopping At any Time!" all the way down the hill? Not quite so magical, the turkish ravel Vegas, but never mind that - nobody stays at Primm, or Jean, Nevada: all roads lead all cars to Vegas.

No cable, no comfy beds in hotel rooms. Neither clock nor compass in casinos. A maze of lights, of noise, the casinos, where bearings are pointless, where aisles of slots stretch and twist and criss and cross, 5c 10c 25c $1 $5 spin, though only a fool plays one coin only - what if you hit something? Save a buck, lose five hundred? Tables green and baized and crowded-quiet, Blackjack, Pai Gow, Caribbean Stud? Where aged ladies in another life are grandma soft and sweet, but here they cast the Evil Eye and curse like sailors for fucking-up the deck. Here they are vicious, feral, snarling - they watch and count, need you to pick up the dross but not too many; save, for them, the best cards until last? Other tables green and baized but crowded-noisy are the Craps: shouting, cheering, jeering, leering. Crowded with every mix and sort: full Cincinnatis; belted midwestern shorts with gartered socks and slip-on shoes; nice people nasty people. Jersey mobsters real or not, rubbing dice on girlfriend's crotch, shout across the pit "She's on the rag this week!", laughing deeply, "Twelve hard! Twelve hard! Oooooooh!" Suited men watch everywhere, talk quietly together, all brusque hair stood tall and likewise-dressed. A thousand Trumps, and more.

I can't play craps. I'm too confused, and dazzled. I can't see how those guys keep track of who bets what on where? I'd lose my place myself if ever I dared? I can't play Blackjack either. I twist when I shouldn't, stay when I shouldn't, never double-down when I should? I forget the bloody rules - not the rules, the Rules - I know how to play, just not how to play.

I play slots. My wife does too, but she's lucky - like, Luck Lucky McLuck lucky. Comped up the wazoo, but not me. I'm a little bit lucky, sometimes lucky, but mostly not. I don't care that you think slots are mindless. I really don't. I never look, just listen. To look is bad joss, is to see an empty spin coming. I look away, and listen. Listen for the bells, the jingles - the winning ring. The longer it rings, the more you've won. Sometimes, once in a while, the mad clatter of a jackpot. Filling-out tax forms before being paid, cash counted out one, two, three, one thousand, one thousand one, one thousand two, and on: the last hundred always paid in tens and twenties to tip the cashier lady and her boss.

I love Vegas. But not tonight. I had to leave her there tonight. Home to an empty bed is not home at all.

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Paging Dr Freud

In the four minutes it took me to spot this, laugh at it, capture it, and zip it up - the staff at yesterday's Los angeles Times website caught it too, and corrected it. Blah!

See if you can spot the, um, slip here?

I promise I have not changed any of the text - but I had to modify some of the html references so you could view it.

Heil Me!

I was watching a Czech movie on TV the other day while I ate my lunch, and a phrase was uttered that I must have heard a thousand times throughout my life, and spoken aloud in as many boyhood games of "Japs and Commandos", or "Colditz", or while playing with my "Soldiers" or whatever? A simple, chilling phrase that had been nothing more to me, really, than a thoughtless boyhood association? The kind we all collected, pulled-out the drawer while we played? For british boys of a certain age there are many: "Aiiieeeeee!!"... "Banzai!!"... "As you wish, Effendi"... "Take that, Fritz!"... "Achtung! Schweinhund!"... "For you, Tommy, ze war is over."

And, "Heil Hitler!!"

Or, "Heil Hitler!!"<*-click-*> as we used to say - for it was always to be accompanied by a sharp snap of heels. Like I say: unthinking.

What struck me this time - I suppose for the very first time - as I watched the movie, aged forty-two, was the "Hitler!!"? It dawned on me that it must have required an extraordinary degree of insecurity to be so controlling that an everyday "Hello" had to be usurped to the cult?

Silly, really. But after that initial connection had been made, once that switch had been flicked, it was as though blackout curtains had suddenly parted and a darkened room all-at-once illuminated by a flood of images? Pictures that had hitherto stood outside together, huddled at the window, stamping feet on the frosty ground and wrapping arms about breath-steamed bodies, waiting impatiently for that moment? Images acquired, thoughts that popped, small connections made, all of them randomly collected over time, but set aside or buried or otherwise discarded until now? All came crowding in at once. Bearded, Erwach!

Pictures of Brezhnev and goose-stepped May Day parades; of Ayatollahs carried high in angry crowds; of Saddams and Assads and Kim Jong-Ils - or whatever Great Leader - glaring out of every wall; of NKPD's and KGB's and DPRK's and GDR's and PRC's, sinister initials whispered in hush? Of expectorating chhh-juntas, Galtieris, Myanmars? Of chests burdened by heavy medals, never earned. Of radio voices speaking ill; of loudspeakers hung on lampposts; Haw-Haws hanged by the neck; of Tokyo Roses and gimpy Göebbels, whose diary I long ago read but never since found in any bookshop? Of all the massive State and Party and Führer paraphernalia? All of it suddenly unified, gathered under one brooding flag, shouting and bullying "No other God but Meeeeeeee!!"

Odd, these strange epiphanies? As I grow older they manifest more frequently - things that I had always known, it seems, but never really noticed? All the tiny pieces I've collected begin to coalesce, and mutiny.

I try as a rule to avoid writing about politics, events, or whatever controversies arise out of the day. Chiefly because I'm not very good at it. Whenever I do I'm always left embarassed by the evident poverty of my rhetoric and the sophistry of my reasoning? It is no secret here in the home that I, Bearded, can not will not argue my way out of a paper bag; can be spun and runaround and rigmaroled by kiddies teens and grown-ups all. In other places - work places, say - I hide my disabilities behind a stoney-faced crabbit demeanour and brooding quietus. I am helped in this by the natural fall of my face while at rest, which is contrary the norm: Yours smiles, mine scowls. The consequent impression, I have been told, is quite unsettling; one of having been grilled in silence, and of having failed to convince. Sinister really, but completely false. How does the saying go? "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your gob and remove all doubt"?

But sometimes, it would seem, opinions must out: some small thing is noticed, and riles the subconscious to action. For me, the meek, it is an unvoiced loathing of all-consuming Cults of Self, of "I am the Boss of You". For me, the secretive closet obsessive, who hides his thoughts, opinions, sometimes even from himself - for me even me, some things have to be said out loud? I do not want to think of myself as being pro-war, but in the end I am. Who the hell would want to label themselves so? Certainly not an arthritic armchair chickenhawk liberal like me. It sounds so wrong - to be pro-war. It conjures images of havoc-steeped lardies wielding Browser of Power(+2) to summon dread Aries or flashing-eyed Athene, and casting them hither and thither about the darkenened earth at pointy-headed foes? Of yelping "8d12 - haHA!"

But so it is. My confession: I am pro-war. Pro-this-war. Pro-other-wars. I support the War on Terror, the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, in all its current manifestations bar torture. And have done all along. It brings me no joy to say so, no glee, no rubbing of hands nor skipping steps: it is what it is, and it had to be. Saddam's card was marked the day the towers fell. I'm sure I'm not the only one to have thought so at the time? And though he had nothing whatever to do with the catastrophe, he had everything to do with the solution. That it was Bush whom I despise, or Blair, whom I admire, that it was either of them that did it worries me not. I'm glad they did, and I'm glad the bastard fell with all his accoutrements.

And though it is not over, not by any long chalk, and though you argue its consequences were unintended or otherwise; it seems to me, sitting here in the comfort of my living room - my chicken-livered "War Room" if you must - it seems to me, to draw some small analogy, that blue-stained fingers in Iraq have also hit hit a power switch? A bigger one than mine, for sure, but a switch nevertheless? That the curtains are slowly parting; that the tethered unconcious of an entire region is having its say, if not yet its day? That images of a different kind are clumping together and stamping their feet, content to be stood in the cold no more?

I hope to heaven it is so? You may think otherwise: you may have mustered a hundred darker pictures of disaster and misadventure waiting in the wings? You may sit now, as I do, but with your finger poised to hit your "TOLD YOU SO!!!!" scream button, having enumerated and elaborated every one of a thousand potential failures, one of which must come true one day some day any day twixt here and the ending of the world, proving you a master of prophecy? Anything, anything, preferable to "Bush was right" or "Blair did good"? But you all have your own blogs. Here in the Xenoverse, where small worlds collide, here we are not ashamed to say "Good job George", or "Good luck Tony." Here we hope for change. Here we offer our support, paltry though it is, to others in the world whose lives are harder, harsher, darker, than our own.

Go Ahead...

Something for the weekend, sir?.

I moved it here...

Poor Kid

Poor kid. He's a kick in the arse shy of eighteen, and he's been gipped as all hell. He knows it, too, but he doesn't complain. He oughta hate my guts, but he doesn't? Least, I don't think he does? See, it was me that hauled him 6,500 miles away from his pals and his native and his fitba' and his birthright: every scot's delight, where drinking becomes legit at eighteen. It was me who chose, but he that now must sacrifice.

Of course, by that age most of us had been drinking for years. Fifteen, I was, still at school but only just... drinking with the grown-ups after a murderous game of rugby - you were old enough to play with them, you were old enough to drink with them. That simple. By the time I was my son's age - seventeen - I was halfway through a four-year apprenticeship, was smoking twenty a day and getting rat-arsed nightly at the Cuinzie from payday Thursday to stoney-broke Sunday when my wages ran out. The Cuinzie Neuk! The Cuinzie - a great wee place in Kinghorn where rock bands like Pallas or Chasar or blech Marillion blasted every night, where punk held no purchase. Where good bands, great bands, soon-to-be-famous bands but more often nowhere bands would play and we would jump and scream and hurl our hair and air-guitar their solos. Where by tradition two bottles each of Nookie Broon for the last bus home. Or the long dark walk, whatever, if you missed it? Godawful stuff - but that wasn't the point. You'd nae money left for a taxi, but taxis were for jessies and matelots anyway: not for the likes of us. Last time I saw the Cuinzie - some years after - it had been turned into an Old Folk's Home. Full, no doubt, of onetime Jaggers and Richards, in cardigan sweaters?

An eighteenth birthday was an event: it meant you could go drinking down the pub with your dad; it made an end to those illicit thrills that drove you pubward in your younger days. It was a kind of growing-up. Once you hit eighteen, a drink became mundane; it became ordinary, everyday fare. Once you hit eighteen it lost its gloss, and you began to settle down. Your wildest days were over.

But there'll be none of that here for my boy(s). At the age when music and bands mean the most, they are denied the delights of watching and bopping while drinking and smoking? By the age of eighteen they are used to it; submissive to constraint. For this is Puritan America, where none shall drink 'til twenty-one; where cigarettes are worse than 'H or a bullet in the head and where teachers send wee kiddies home to point accusing fingers at their parents; where photo-ID is unofficially mandatory. This is Zero-tolerance America, where scissors and tweasers are weapons, by God, and your kids will be expelled should they carry them to school. Sheltered, caring America, where it's always the driver to blame when pedestrians fall; where little kiddies never need be taught how to cross a road - the cars will always stop; where little kiddies grow into bigger kiddies still not knowing how; where little kiddies, precious kiddies, waltz six busy lanes and never look once. The cars will always stop. They'd better, or we'll sue, by God!

Here's the thing: in every young adult that draws a breath there is a pressing need for excess, for life lived wild and loud and stupidly. For two or three years of idiotry, beyond the opressive shelter of parents. And it must always out. The longer it's deferred, the longer they are sheltered, coddled, kept hidden in a cupboard, the longer they stay children. And all the more embarassing they become when finally unleashed. Boys who should be grown, yet find The Man Show funny.

My boy's eighteenth will be a disappointment. He'll need to wait, find something else to occupy his wildboy wiles for now? At least, I'm fairly sure, he won't be jumping garages? And if he ever did, broken neck or not, he'd feel the taste of my boot, jammed squarely up his arse. And he knows it!