HOW IN THE WORLD DID YOU END UP HERE

I hit the thrift stores of Park Rapids today with Amy and my brother Nate. My favorite store in the world is Rich's Antiques, which consists of two neighboring white houses joined by a connecting addition, all of it stacked floor to ceiling with weird and awesome junk/treasures. It is miscellaneous heaven.

I found some great midcentury dinner plates, a hefty, crusty Griswold cast-iron skillet ("Buy it!" Amy commanded, and I listened, she is the chef), a small snowy painting, and a pair of handmade birchbark lampshades.

But the real find of the day was at Bearly Used, the thrift store a block away on Main, where I uncovered not only a quilted flannel for two bucks and a Pendleton shirt for four, but a T-shirt jammed into a crowded upper rack. Grabbing the soft brown edge of it and tugging it into view, I glanced at it indifferently before I realized what I was looking at.

It was a Swan Island T-shirt.

The late great Swan Island was my friends' band. They were based in Portland. Who in Park Rapids had a Swan Island shirt? They played only one national tour, and it was a couple of years ago. They never came anywhere near here--the closest they got was probably the Twin Cities, 200 miles away. The band didn't print a whole lot of those shirts. And, strangest of all: I designed that shirt.

Funny to stumble upon this artifact from my life that was relatively recent--the summer of 2006--but seems so distant now, in both time and place. That was a time when it seemed I saw Swan Island play every week--Mississippi Pizza, Holocene, the Wonder, basements, wherever. I drew that volcano design in black ink on white paper in my unfinished, cluttered garage (which Melissa dubbed my "man-shack"), during a hot week in August, with the garage door rolled up to open a wall of outdoor light, the pear tree in back heavy-limbed with fruit. I did not even have Emmett yet to curl up on the couch behind me. I was living on the last money left from my Norway job.

After making a good go of it, and a couple of great videos, Swan Island played their farewell show last January. The garage is now finished, transformed into a luminous pine-walled studio, and I am thousands of miles away from it. My life in Portland semi-exists still, but tenanted, tenuous.

And stranger still to be faced with my own design, lines drawn by my hand, staring back at me, somehow transported from my adopted hometown to my original one. The nostalgic pang surprises me; it's a shock to realize that something so recent is already gone. The shirt has been worn and washed many times, it's soft and a little shrunken and fading around the seams, but the gold ink still glitters.

THE WEASEL UNDER THE COCKTAIL CABINET

R.I.P. Harold Pinter, master of mundane menace and domestic dread, one of the most singularly distinctive writers of the last century.

The playwright Tom Stoppard said that before Mr. Pinter, “One thing plays had in common: you were supposed to believe what people said up there. If somebody comes in and says, ‘Tea or coffee?’ and the answer is ‘Tea,’ you are entitled to assume that somebody is offered a choice of two drinks, and the second person has stated a preference.” With Mr. Pinter there are alternatives, “such as the man preferred coffee but the other person wished him to have tea,” Mr. Stoppard said, “or that he preferred the stuff you make from coffee beans under the impression that it was called tea.”

I have read and admired a number of his plays, but equally significant to me is his influence on some of my favorite writers. Sure, Pinter can be easily parodied--like Raymond Carver, like anyone with a singular and instantly recognizable style--but I can't imagine DFW's pause-laden stories "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men" or the disturbing, ominous "Far Away" by Caryl Churchill existing without him.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

A few weeks back my friend and childhood neighbor Tresa Undem wrote a column in the Enterprise, the newspaper that once employed her dad (reporter and cantankerous columnist) and me (hotheaded teen overachiever.) I wish I could link it here but the editorial page is print-only. It was funny and moving and it made me miss her dad, and it incited me to finally articulate some long-brewing thoughts--about Al, of course, but also about small towns and politics.

So I wrote a letter to the editor, and they printed it, and this is what it said.

I knew Al Undem from the time I was in kindergarten, spent summers in the cabin next door, and eventually worked with him at the Enterprise when I was in my late teens. My ideological opposite in many ways, Al loved to give me a hard time. He challenged me, teased me, and he taught me a lot about writing. But most importantly, despite his vehement disagreement with my core political views (I was a diehard liberal; he declared Reagan the greatest president in history), he took my thinking and my writing seriously. He read it and he gave me feedback, he showed me the ropes, he challenged me, and he supported me. He was my neighbor and my mentor and my friend.

One thing that bothers me about the kind of rhetoric that many politicians, most recently but not exclusively Sarah Palin, deploy in their campaigns is the idea that small towns harbor a single kind of people—that small towns represent one particular kind of politics and values. If there's anything I learned growing up in Park Rapids, and working at the Enterprise, it's that small towns have all kinds of people. Democrats, Republicans, libertarians, moderates, wingnuts, hippies, hunters, vegans, religious people, non-religious people, town people and country people, pro-WalMart and anti-WalMart. Our small-town politics will never be uniform, but what we do learn from growing up in these close quarters--which apparently many politicians have not--is how to live with and learn from and even love the people who are think differently from you.

Forget us vs. them. In small towns, we can't help but be both. And we're better for it. Al Undem--always next door to me, it seemed, whether at the lake or the desk across from me--reminds me of that. I miss him and I always will.

SHOUT-OUTS

I am up in the woods, playing board games, reading books in my long underwear (currently A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah, holy cow it's riveting), eyeing two expectant boxes full of student fiction portfolios, and tromping around in knee-deep snow. My friends are the ones up to more interesting stuff. To wit:

Amy made a fabulous gingerbread house, northwoods-style, complete with sugar-glass windows, rifle and woodpile;


Megan took some beautiful pictures of Portland covered in snow (!);


Donal posted pictures from the Empire State and City replete with his trademark skewed haunting-ness;


Cathy's fantastic (in both senses of the word) poetry narrative Dance Dance Revolution has come out in paperback;


Mike and Donal have a dark and seductive new website for their movie, October Country;


and my dog developed his first-ever whisker icicles after a brisk morning snowshoe.

WHERE BEER DOES FLOW AND MEN CHUNDER

I saw Australia last night. Going to the movies is a special kind of pleasure in a tiny town like this one. There's only one screen and one movie at a time, so stripped of the numbing effect of overabundance, you have to wait for a movie you actually want to see--or can at least tolerate seeing. The price of admission is $3, except on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when it's $2. (Or you can get a book of nine tickets for $24. Nine!) And you step into a lobby that has been untouched since the sixties at latest--the walls are quilted pleather, the carpet dark red and swirly-patterned, the seats leather and creaky, and the screen enormous.

For pure ridiculous entertainment value, Australia was worth almost every cent of the two bucks I paid to see it. Though it takes place in 1939, Hugh Jackman wears tight, low-cut trousers and sexy rugged leather belts. Nicole Kidman's impassive wall of botoxed forehead and newly squishy lips leave her with tears and a vicious strut as her sole emotive tools. The script is like a little kid who is so pleased with something he's said that he repeats it over and over until all the adults are rolling their eyes--if a line is important, you can bet it'll be uttered at least ten times. (I would like a count of how many times "I will sing you to me" crops up.) (Said singing sounds like, "Mango, tango.") The movie has a forehead-slapping, head-in-hands, groaning-in-disbelief case of Noble Savage. Aboriginal mystical dances in silhouette against the sunset! Cue the didgeridoo! And the kid, the poor kid, he is so very cute, but...

CJ: The boy was a little bit Jar-Jar Binks.
MICHAEL: And a lot Mowgli.
CJ: What was with his weird pidgin dialect? No one else was speaking that way in the movie. ["Him want to speakum to bad coppers."]
MICHAEL: It sounded like Tonto.

Ayako and I had to cover our faces to muffle our giggles at the romance montage (swimming naked in a waterfall?) and the dramatic reunion among the smoke and wreckage. We didn't want to ruin it for the still, silent viewers ahead of us. But it was camp hilarity like I haven't experienced since The Day After Tomorrow.

CJ: That ending music climaxed for like five minutes before they finally let us go.
ADAM: The movie was in climax the whole time.

Let's not even go into how Kidman is lovingly and excessively called "Mrs. Boss" by her aboriginal staff and aforementioned kid, or how the Chinese cook's name is Mr. Sing-song.

P.S. "Chunder" is Aussie slang for vomit!

THE NEW AGE OF SELF-PORTRAITURE

I think the genre that is social-networking self-portraiture, i.e. Arm's-Length Photos You Took Of Yourself To Put On MySpace/Facebook, will one day be the subject of thorough analysis and maybe some kind of applied theory. In the meantime here are some field notes.

The Old Days (2002-2005 or so, a.k.a. The Friendster Era):

• Characterized by frequent cellphone photos, identifiable by graininess, low light, a photo-of-a-VHS-video quality, and a frame that is almost all face.

• Inexplicably popular: photos of oneself without a shirt on, BUT! only from the shoulders up. Like, hey hey, I'm topless under this frame. Sober, rational adults were known to succumb to this temptation. The accompanying facial expression was serious, smoky eyed, mouth downturned--i.e., "sexy." Drawback: composition calls to mind a highly realistic wax bust rather than a pinup.

The Dawn of Myspace (2004-2007):

• The Helicopter Shot becomes the dominant form of self-portraiture. The subject holds the camera up above her head and looks up into it, usually widening eyes and maybe forming a dainty pout. Creates the illusion of big eyes and tapering chin. And tapering body. Single most inaccurate form of self-representation out there. Everyone looks like an anime figure.

The Screen Is Mirror (2007-present)

• The current predominant medium is the Macbook built-in camera. If the sepia effect, the colored-pencil effect, the mirror effect, or any of the selections from the built-in effect library haven't tipped you off, you will know this photo by

a) the faintly bluish glow it illuminates the subject's face with in low light

b) the fact that, as with the old-school photobooth, the subject is nearly always gazing upon their own visage on the screen instead of the camera lens itself. The gaze tends to be down and to the right.

• This provides the single most accurate avenue to other people's Mirror Face since the ubiquitous group mirrors of high school (locker room, restroom, etc.). You know, the multiple tiny adjustments we all instantly make when we look in the mirror--the widened eyes, the tilt of jaw, the pursed lips. The face we choose to see vs. the face everyone actually sees. Here it all is, on the Macbook.

Furthermore, most people don't bother to flip the photo to reflect reality, so it is in fact a reversed image of their face, which means this is what they think they look like all the time. But it's not, not quite.*

(*Side note: at the Pink Pony in New York (sadly, new Frenchy version, not old coffeehouse), there is (or was in 2002) a True Mirror in the restroom. The True Mirror is actually a box with a series of mirrors that manage to reverse the usual mirror image to reflect the way you really look--not backwards, which is the way you usually see yourself. I went to wash my hands, and the moment I looked in the mirror was one of the single most disconcerting experiences of my life. My whole face seemed slightly distorted, wrong, as if it had melted slightly to one side. All my little asymmetries seemed radically magnified. When I reached up to adjust my hair, my hand flew to the wrong side. The lettering on my shirt was legible. I felt horrified and then kind of nauseated. That was my face?

I went and got my friends, Norwegians who were visiting, and we all crowded into the bathroom and freaked out at our own faces. Of course everyone else's face looked perfectly normal to us. It was like, "No, that can't be what I look like!" / "Yes, that's exactly what you look like" / wails / giggles / reassurances / face-making.

Once I got used to my actual face I left feeling better. I had a whole new face I didn't know about. I wasn't just limited to what I saw in the mirror. I realized my face was pretty much out of my control and that was liberating, in a way.)

Timeless Tropes:

• Photos where the subject thrusts their lips forward--once again, to be sexy. Whether ironic or serious is unclear; usually I think it is both ("I am playing at being sexy, ha ha, but seriously it's pretty sexy right?") (Aside: The word "sexy" is starting to look peculiar to me.)

• Photos taken at arm's length and slightly up wherein the subject is not looking at the camera but looking off to some angle contemplatively, pensively, as if not taking a picture of oneself but caught in the act of Deep Thought.

DON'T LET POETS LIE TO YOU

Björk talking about her television in her fantastic Icelandic accent.

Like many Icelanders, she has trouble saying the "sh" sound, and often says "ss" instead. I find this adorable. My Icelandic comrades when I studied in Oslo liked to play guitar and sing songs, and I quietly lost it when they took on the Beatles' "She." ("Ssseeeee....")

I can't help but be a little bummed by her impeccable British English in the later videos.

HEARTBREAKER

A friend and I were recently discussing which movie stars we think are hot. Lest this sound vapid, let me clarify: it was a genuine challenge, due to the queer factor, or maybe it's the punk factor, or the andro factor, or whatever. We honestly couldn't really think of any. Most actors and actresses are obviously beautiful, but they're mainstream-hot, straight-hot, facialist-and-stylist hot. I can objectively appreciate their appeal, but they lack the scuffed-up edges and androgynous streak that I find genuinely foxy. It's strangely easier for me to identify boy actors with a kind of femme sensitivity (early Johnny Depp, River Phoenix) that translates to my sensibility.

Last year I went to a pre-release screening of I'm Not There at the Portland Art Museum. While we were shuffling in, I was captivated by The Cutest Girl I'd Ever Seen in Portland, standing in front of me in line, apparently with Gus Van Sant. She was tiny, with this wispy chocolate-brown hair curling toward her cheeks, wearing a little cotton shirt and short shorts and tall flat-soled elfin boots, and had her arms folded over her chest in a modest rather than defiant way. Dude, why have I never seen her around? I wondered. Portland is a pretty small town. I figured she must be straight. And maybe reclusive too. Sigh. I had never seen anyone So Cute.

But actually, I found out later, this is who it was.

She was in town making Wendy and Lucy with Kelly Reichardt.

Of course the movie star I end up finding completely irresistible is one in total Northwest mode, un-made-up and tousled and plaid-clad, accompanied by a mutt. Type runs deep, I guess. But I wish more actors looked like this, in life or on screen. Even in movies and series designed to appeal to lesbians, the actors tend to be either styled to the max (the L Word cast glossy-maned and eyelinered within an inch of their lives, even the supposed drag-king character unveils Rapunzel-length tresses), low-budget mulleted and hideous, or mining the dusty ruts of James Dean derivative, Dinah Shore Weekender, and B-list boring femme.

Wendy and Lucy has nothing to do with the gays, it's just good art with an appealing and real-looking protagonist (inasmuch as an actor is designed to look "real"), and I guess that follows with the rest of my taste too, which is that most music and literature and movies that are meant to be Filed Under Gay/Lesbian feel crappy and contrived to me, and the things I love most may or may not be gay-authored or -themed but speak to a sensibility, aesthetic and story-wise, that often has to do with being an outsider or misfit in some way.

Beyond Michelle Williams, the movie looks beautiful. (And parts of it were filmed in my neighborhood, which I miss.) I can't wait to see it, though I know it is going to break my heart. Jon Raymond read from the short story upon which it's based at Loggernaut and already said heart was sinking in just fifteen minutes. Even the trailer, at the point where she begins to cry--agh, I unfortunately know why, and the mere two seconds of it sprung tears to my eyes. Its prescience re: hard luck and broke-ness is intense. Sadly to say, it couldn't be more timely.

DECEMBER GEMS

3. Snow fell all evening and shortly after midnight, I took Emmett out for a long romp in it. It was thick and deep and the flakes falling were big as pearls. I take these long cold super-late walks almost every night now. I love them. They clean my mind.

2. This afternoon I spotted what I first thought was a pack of greyhounds right across the creek. Then I realized they were deer: a doe and three adolescent fawns (post-spots.) They bounded in big exuberant circles, kicking up snow, cavorting. Deer, playing!

1. Tonight my mom called me back from the message I left her; it's her birthday and she may have been tipsy. This, if you know my mom, is pretty funny. "I have been partying all weekend!" she said. Birthday brunch at a friend's house with nine of nearest and dearest; more friends dropping by to return loaned dishes, and more bottles of wine being uncorked; an inner-circle celebration of Brita Sailer's reelection to the Minnesota house, for which my mom was campaign manager this year. Whenever people ask, "What do you do in a small town?", imagining endless boredom I suppose, I think of my parents and their whirlwind social calendar and am thankful to mostly live in a place where I can get away with not having as action-packed a life.

Today, Pearl Harbor day, she turns fifty-six. When I got Emmett two years ago I attempted to make today his birthday as well, as revenge for mom assigning her beagle my birthday. (Yes she did.)

But then I realized I had counted a month wrong and he is actually probably a January dog. With a rescue mutt, it's all guesswork.

So today is just for my mom, who can't imagine ever being bored; who has nicknamed her pets Stinkweed (the beagle) and Sticky Note (the cat); who will bake a cake on any occasion or none at all, and claim it is for dad, and then eat it herself; who buys Cool-Whip by the tub; who grew up in a town of 800 people and many moose; who, at age 16, wearing a brown vinyl jumper and white go-go boots, was asked out by Frankie Valli's saxophone player (she declined); who reads literary novels faster than I can keep up, yet also gets a kick out of "The Girls Next Door"; who never hesitates to exaggerate for dramatic effect; who decided at age 49 to open a bookstore, an independent bookstore in a small town no less, and made it a smashing success; who teaches tiny kids with messed-up bodies how to move in this world; who unconsciously hums along in harmony with anything she hears; who is probably owed a grandchild or two (sorry, Mom, one of us is bound to get you one eventually); and who totally leaves me panting in her wake on the cross-country skate-ski trail.

When I was younger, "You're just like your mother" provoked me to protest vigorously. Now when I think about it, I'm more like, I sure hope so.

CHARD, SINGING

Thunderant introduces "Feminist Bookstore," Episode Two. Slays me! Click to watch.

If you haven't yet seen the first one, do immediately.

(And check out that incredible flute playing in the theme song. Ha.)

VOICE MAILBOX

At what point do you suppose voicemail will stop instructing us on what it is and how to use it?

You know, You have reached the voice mailbox of number FIVE. OH. THREE. THREE. THREE. THREE. TWO. OH. MY. GOD. The cellular customer you are trying to reach is not available. To leave a message, press one, or just wait for the tone; to send a numeric page, press two; to leave a callback number, press three; to listen to your message, press four; to twist the tips of your nerves into tiny raw knots, press five; to accelerate your own inevitable decline, press six; to squander the last of your anytime minutes, when you are finished recording, hang up, or press pound for more options.
Pause.
Beep.

Thanks, but after ten years or whatever, I THINK WE'VE GOT IT.

ELMER FUDD STARING BACK

In a cafe in Louisville a couple days ago, I was privy to the mad genius of a man with a wild beard, a pot belly, and a fishing T-shirt, holding forth solo at a table by the door. I paid no attention at first. But after a while, I started to listen, drawn in by the repeated evocation of Elmer Fudd. I strained my ears and this is what I picked up. I started transcribing.

I look in the mirror and I see the Elmer Fudd staring back.
You don’t see the Elmer Fudd staring back.
He doesn’t see the Elmer Fudd staring back.
Nobody sees the Elmer Fudd staring back.
The world around us, it’s all…

[pause to listen to unspoken question]

I don’t have anybody who can truly see.

[pause]

There may be, but I’m not aware of them.

After working through it for a while longer, along with some digressions about Will Smith and villainy, the guy genuinely nailed it. If I had to distill his brilliance down to one line, here it is. Think of all the people this exactly encapsulates:

The guy is a cartoon. But he doesn’t see the cartoon. He doesn’t see the Fudd.

SYLLABUS=THE FICTION MIXTAPE

The time has come again to submit my book orders for next semester, and as I pore through anthologies and photocopies, trying to figure out which stories to teach and in what order, it occurs to me that the whole process is a lot like making a mix tape.

Time is the cassette tape and the stories are the songs.

Necessary considerations:

• striking the right balance of tone and content, old greats and brand-new brilliance, multiple cultures and voices, realism and fabulism and minimalism and lushness
• the staples, the surefire winners, the surprises
• side-by-side order of stories, the timing and mixing thereof (which perfect triad of stories will illuminate a technique in disparate yet compatible ways--in 75 minutes?)
• sequencing the whole thing to move seamlessly from one week to the next for maximum cumulative power.

And like mixtape-making, the endless rearrangement and math of it eventually ties my brain in knots. Elbow-deep in anthologies, books and photocopies spread all over the table, I'm glassy-eyed and fast-forwarding impatiently through each story, hardly able to pay attention beyond the first and last pages.

Truthfully, I couldn't be happier that this is my job.

THE PARK RAPIDS HOCKEY PLAYERS' COOKBOOK

I mentioned the Park Rapids hockey players' cookbook in my previous post. It was printed sometime in the early 1980s, thinks my mom ("I'm pretty sure Nate was still a Mighty Mite.") The recipes are all submitted under the hockey players' names, and are presumably their favorites, or at least what their mothers figured would be the most appreciated by the other hockey moms.

From this paean to ketchup, hamburger, cream-of-something soups, and Cool Whip, I pulled out some choice recipes. Most look pretty revolting or perplexing to me, but I'll admit I'm tempted to go for the French Fry Bake.

All right, let's start with some of the main dishes--namely, hotdishes.

FRENCH-FRY BAKE

CHEESEBURGER PIE

CHEESEBURGER

MEAT ON A BUN

MISTER HOTDISH
I'm having a hard time believing this can be cut into squares.

And two of the many macaroni-based recipes, starting of course with...
MACCRONIE AND CHEESE
(Whoever typed the cookbook spells it this way in every recipe.)

WESTERN MAC HOTDISH
"What makes it Western?" my mom and I wondered. Then she figured it out: green peppers.
(Also note the second ingredient.)

---

On to SALADS,
a term that in Minnesota applies to any dish that is served below room temperature.

ORANGE SALAD
I ate variations on this at every church potluck. I preferred the kind that had cottage cheese in it too.

"MANACOTTI SALAD"
Try to envision this.

PISTACHIO SALAD

---

Finally, DESSERT.
(That's right, Cool-Whip-based dishes belong in the Salad section.)
For the most part, this is the part of the cookbook that actually sounds delicious. Cupcakes, bars, brownies, cookies, many involving melted bags of chocolate chips...and finally, my classmate Courtney Rutherford's recipe for
POPCORN CAKE.

If anyone will venture to actually make one of these dishes and send me a photo of it, I will personally mail you a photocopy of the whole book.

SWEDISH PANCAKES

I am home in northern Minnesota for the weekend. The snow is still light, the air is nippy, the sauna fired up. And this morning, I awoke to Swedish pancakes.

This was the favorite breakfast of my childhood. Growing up, I didn't eat standard fluffy buttermilk pancakes very often. Instead, my parents made these delicious floppy, crepe-like, Scandinavian pannekaker.

Essential to their deliciousness is that you slather them in maple syrup (Minnesota style) or in lingonberries and lightly sweetened sour cream (Scandinavian style) and then roll them up.

Let me tell you, a roll-up of tender buttery pancake and real maple or creamy tart lingonberries sure beats the typical sodden wedge of your standard flapjack.

Here's the recipe, as printed in my brother's hockey player cookbook from nineteen-eighty-something. (My grandmother found it the other day, yellowed and grease-spotted but staples still intact. I think I'm going to have to post some select excerpts from it after this.)

I usually put in only a tablespoon or two of sugar--it doesn't really need four (a full quarter-cup!) But whatever, I can eat these with my fingers straight off the griddle. And, as I have witnessed firsthand, kids can easily eat ten and even twenty of them in one sitting.

SNOW-PHORIA

Few things in the world make me happier.
I wrote all day.

SOURTOOTH SHOUT-OUT

One of my best friends in the world (since 1980!) just confessed to me that she has been secretly keeping a blog. (I did that too, when I started. I wanted to make sure it would take.) And what a great blog it is! Today, a delightful picture of deer-hunting cupcakes from the Menahga bakery.

Amy is a great writer (degree in English from Macalester) and an equally brilliant cook (she's cooked, and written cookbooks, for the big guns in New York--Bouley, Vongerichten, Gallante, et al). Most importantly, she is very funny, and genuine and knowledgeable and pragmatic. She's just all-around good, that's all there is to it.

About half the year she and her husband live back home in northern MN in the amazing house they've built up over the years. (The other half, in Brooklyn.) Aaron makes art and Amy cooks and writes. They harvest wild rice from the lake in the fall. They snowshoe in the woods in the winter. They have an enormous garden in the summer. And Amy makes incredibly delicious food, year-round. Every time I'm home, I can't wait to bump down their mile-long dirt rollercoaster of a driveway to their oasis in the woods.

So now she's writing about it--life in the woods, eating good food, or as she puts it, exploring rural cuisine in the city and the country. And there are recipes. Go on, feast. I'm going to be counting down to our Christmas break slumber party. (Dibs on the sleep loft.)

HARBINGER FROM THE AIRPORT NEWSSTAND

This is one of those things like cellphones on airplanes or digital books where I feel like the future is going to be a big headache. Imagine a whole wall of this.

Forget our attention spans for a second--honestly, is the human eyeball built to handle so much flashing and light and movement as the modern world keeps stepping it up? Like physiologically, what does it do to us? Are our brains going to look different when they lift them out of our skulls in ten, twenty years, new wrinkle patterns in the occipital lobes?

Or will we just become increasingly skilled at not seeing? Selective attention, honed pinpoint-sharp.

I was going to speculate it's going to be weird for writers and anyone else who relies on nonspecific observation. But personally I am already zoned out much of the time, too preoccupied with whatever's in my head to notice, say, the chair I'm about to walk into.

CAN I VOTE ON YOUR MARRIAGE NOW?

I think this says it as well as anything:

I haven't let myself go into despair (yet) about Proposition 8, for a couple of reasons. For one, I have been overwhelmed by the Obama feelings. For another, my heart was so broken by the passage of Oregon's gay marriage ban, Measure 36, in 2004 that the scar tissue is thick. Like Proposition 8, Measure 36 followed a brief exuberant period of legitimate marriage licenses being issued. Friends of mine who had been married were suddenly, upon public referendum, declared "single," for all technical and legal intents and purposes. The subsequent letter that arrived a few weeks later informing them that their marriage had been deemed void was accompanied by a refund check for sixty dollars.

I had never cared about gay marriage until 2004. I had decided that the government had no place legislating love and I didn't need their validation of my personal life. Plus, it dawned on me in my early twenties that one of the great advantages of being gay was that I was suddenly exempt from the questions and pressures that dogged my brothers and cousins at every family gathering. I was delicately skipped over in the boyfriend/girlfriend inquisitions. No one was checking in on my marriage track. Mom wasn't flashing grandma's wedding ring hopefully at me. And I liked it. I alone got to forge my own path, unquestioned.

Then, in the brief time when I lived in the Bay Area, mayor Gavin Newsom famously issued the directive to the city-county clerk to issue marriage license to same-sex couples, and everything changed. My girlfriend and I, curmudgeonly but curious, went down to City Hall just to look.

How to even describe the weddings we saw? There were so many. They were happening all over the room--on the floor, on the steps, on the mezzanine. We saw people of all ages, styles, some with friends and family, some alone. We watched two men, middle-aged, one with rectangular black glasses, one wearing jeans, both small and comfortably frayed around the edges, get married on those steps. They had no friends or witnesses or parents; it was just the two of them and a deputy with her back to us. They held small bouquets instead of rings. They stood facing each other and held each other’s hands tightly, looking into each other’s eyes as they said their vows. They looked overwhelmed and shaken, in a good way, and they exchanged bouquets and kissed, and then they all embraced, the men and the deputy. She left to perform another marriage, and the men sat down on the steps. They kept holding each other’s hands and talking quietly to each other.

To be there and witness it was to be witness not only to the weddings themselves, but also to an incredible moment in these people’s lives, in our people’s lives, in history, in American life, in gay life. The ceremonies were obviously unplanned and yet so long planned--almost everyone was in their thirties, forties, fifties, sixties. Many had children and babies. These were unlike any other weddings I’ve seen. They weren’t about the family, the church, everyone you ever knew gathered together to celebrate; they weren’t about table settings or invitations or renting a space or a year’s worth of planning; they weren’t about a wedding party, about clanking wine glasses and heartfelt toasts; people weren’t marrying for money or status or family expectations. These weddings were distilled to the essential meaning of marriage, they were so purely about a love between two people, about lifelong commitment, about forsaking all the trappings in order to get what matters. Each other.

For the first time I witnessed the public recognition of love between two people who happen to be the same sex, and the essential right of that love to exist. For the first time I understood how much that recognition matters. It really matters.

So that was 2004. And time and again, these goddamn bans keep passing, state after state. It cuts profoundly, as always. Says Andrew Sullivan:

I'm happy to say that Proposition 2 passed, providing minimal humane protections for pigs, chickens and other farm animals. How odd for people to restrict cruelty for animals and simultaneously inflict it on some humans.

My friend Robert has declared on his own blog,

Go ahead, ban my future unplanned marriage. You're not making any decision for me--I wasn't getting married anyway. But as soon as I get enough votes on a petition, I'm going to put your marriage up for ban too: your second marriages first (my own parents be damned!), and then your childless marriages (with an 11-month "validation period" to consummate), and then your unhappy marriages (psychologically tested once every 18 months), your adulterous marriages (automatic divorce, with permanent marriage ineligibility for life) and your two-home marriages (regardless of whether you live in separate homes because of work or family obligations).

When I am done, there will be nine people in the country who are married, and marriage will never have been stronger.

THE MOMENT

I couldn't believe it. It took a while to sink in. At the party, I stood in stunned awe with my colleagues as the returns came in--Should we get out the champagne?, someone asked, dubious, wondrous. Already? We poured the champagne, wide-eyed and grinning, and toasted and cheered and teared up at the sight of Obama, the people. Still, I felt like I had suspended but not shaken my disbelief.

How could the moment have already arrived? This moment?

My friend and I got on our bikes, the night was cold and clear, and I couldn't quite believe that I was biking home and Obama would be president, that we had actually won. No vote theft, no fraud, no lawsuits, no upsets--a clear, undeniable win.

We heard, then saw fireworks flashing above the trees. "I think it's in Tappan Square," Bernard said. "Should we go check it out?" Of course we did. As we neared, we heard drums thumping and a steadily increasing roar. There, underneath the sporadic glittering explosions, a full-on bacchanalia was underway: a marching band, swarming throngs of people dancing and hugging and screaming and whooping, kids climbing the rafters of the bandstand, gleeful streakers, and, something I never thought I'd hear on this campus, chants of U-S-A! and O-BA-MA! The euphoria was mass, the joyful noise deafening and continuous.

My camera and my phone had both died so I had no way to document the moment, but I was grateful for this. All I needed to do was be in it. The moment demanded no less.

Eventually, having hugged and cheered and shared amazement with everyone I knew there, I took leave of the escalating nudity and shenanigans. Back home I read the online newspapers from around the world until three a.m. I closed the laptop and got up to take out my contacts and on the way, reaching into a dark room to turn on the light, I leaned my forehead against the doorframe and closed my eyes and burst into tears.

I sobbed and sobbed.

I said aloud, Black president. I had to repeat it. Black president.

I'll admit, I talked to myself. I had to say it aloud again and again as it sunk in deeper and deeper. Really? Is this really my country? I could not stop crying. I don't think I have ever felt so surely that America did something so right.

I know there are impossible expectations, but now my cynicism is completely dismantled. All I feel is love and relief and a kind of heartbroken-ness, in a good way--just cracked open, feeling it all, and good with that.

ELECTION DAY IN PICTURES (SO FAR)

The Oberlin Obama HQ, 9:30 am, already bustling (they'd just dispatched a huge batch of volunteers). I was sent out to rural Henrietta Township with a first-year student named Truc Lin.
















I arrived home at noon to find my own door tagged. The campaign operation may not always be super efficient--but it's certainly prolific.


Obama HQ at 3:30 pm

Back to Elyria for one last round

Obama HQ at 5:40 pm

Off to an election party, more to come.

MCCAIN'S LAST GASP/THE BLACK MCCAINS

This arrived in my mailbox on Saturday, printed big and bright on sturdy cardstock, courtesy of the Ohio Republican party.

(cover)

(centerfold)

(back)

Too little, too late is the least of it. That this arrived on November 1st illustrates some real desperation on the part of the Ohio GOP. Weren't they supposed to be wooing the Hillary supporters in June, and sealing the deal with Palin?

Interesting to note that McCain is the central figure here, while Palin is mentioned only once, and appears as a sort of disembodied bust butting into the text while emerging from, or being swallowed by, a mysterious eyeshadow-blue mist. In fact, fogginess is the unifying graphic motif throughout here. Fittingly. And even though she's only an inch or two shorter than him, Palin looks eerily tiny next to McCain (bad Photoshopping?), which magnifies the paternalistic vibe.

Also, I must say, I hate the McCain font. Very 1970s minor-university press.

FAR more fascinating is this amazing article I read in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago about the other McCains--the black McCains. That's right, the descendants of the slaves the original John S. McCain owned back in Mississippi, on a plantation called Teoc. Many of them still live in the area.

The whole article is amazing, and sort of maddening, the way the WSJ tries to temper things ("The McCains in the early 20th century were known among African-Americans for relatively equitable treatment of their workers and tenants, especially compared with the abuses happening on many other farms," key word being "relatively," of course; in the 19th century, they took advantage of a despicable law to forcibly reclaim custody of three girls under age 15 whom they'd owned before emancipation.) Read the whole thing, it's great. One clip:

The black McCains of today were raised to believe that they were blood relatives of the white McCains, dating back to slavery times. White McCains say they're unaware of any biological connection between the families. A spokesman for Sen. McCain declined to comment.

They all support Obama for president.