claptrap…*

Words cannot express the kind of moment we’ve just witnessed. I’ll never forget it, to be sure. Finally, this country can live up to its immense promise in a way that makes me proud to have brought a daughter into it. The country in which she’ll grow up will be different, better. Her memory will begin with fact, rather than a dream. Her generation will not think twice about certain things and the possibility of a Jewish female President isn’t the beginning of a horrid joke. John McCain’s speech was effusive, classy, and worthy of praise. His supporters were dicks. Except that, unless my ears deceived me, they let Sarah Palin know what they thought of her. If all goes well, she’ll recede into the beautiful Alaskan landscape and resume her duties as a hawkey mawm and develop a healthy love for the sauce. There’s a new Lady in charge, and she’ll likely raise the minimum wage by tomorrow a.m. But stay tuned…

Back to Barack. That he re-engaged so many people, and inspired such a response cannot be a mistake. It is a mandate. It is a reclamation of something that this country has long forgotten. I heard it from my mother and other people whose pain of 1968 flared up and ignited like oxygen to a flame. We breathe again…

We only share one wall, but it happens to be the one adjacent to my computer — the only cubby in my modest shack that I’d prefer to be silent. They’re a nice enough Indian family who isn’t at all in tune to what a ruckus their Little One can raise. As far as I can tell, they actively encourage their Little One to explore the accoustic nature of objects in the rooms as long as he produces only the loudest of noise. So, when the Little One commenced with the shrieking and pounding tonight on something that must’ve been lightly touching the wall, because with every hit came a rebounding thud against it and trembling and utter disturbance, I did the mature, adult thing. I turned up Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” and started throwing a ball against the wall. The Little One receded to another room, silence has reigned (not so much as the teeniest peep), and I have been left with the uneasy feeling that I might have acted poorly… Maybe tomorrow I’ll knock on the door with a card or a gift or something that says, “I’m sorry I way overreacted by acting borderline psychotic when a simple knock on the door and polite request for silence would’ve probably done the job.” What says that, a basket from Hickory Farms? A fruitcake?

As if it couldn’t get more tragic, it would seem DFW suffered in the precise way you might have suspected. From the NY Times yesterday:

His father said Sunday that Mr. Wallace had been taking medication for depression for 20 years and that it had allowed his son to be productive. It was something the writer didn’t discuss, though in interviews he gave a hint of his haunting angst.

In response to a question about what being an American was like for him at the end of the 20th century, he told the online magazine Salon in 1996 that there was something sad about it, but not as a reaction to the news or current events. “It’s more like a stomach-level sadness,” he said. “I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness.”

James Wallace said that last year his son had begun suffering side effects from the drugs and, at a doctor’s suggestion, had gone off the medication in June 2007. The depression returned, however, and no other treatment was successful. The elder Wallaces had seen their son in August, he said.

“He was being very heavily medicated,” he said. “He’d been in the hospital a couple of times over the summer and had undergone electro-convulsive therapy. Everything had been tried, and he just couldn’t stand it anymore.”

I just–I mean just like two fucking nights ago–discussed a fragment of “Getting Away from Pretty Much Already Being Away from it All” by DFW with my students. And I pleaded for them to read the entire essay. Even offered up “non-credit-bearing brownie points” for those who read it. I told them how DFW was my favorite author, etc. Now, he’s dead…

Yesterday came/went. I honestly wasn’t attuned to the Anniversary until I came home from teaching @ about 10-ish and navigated to MSNBC, which was “minimally edited coverage from 9-11.” This amounted to a real-time replay of “live” coverage from the past. Like a time capsule from hell, we will always have the 24-hour coverage from that day, complete with Matt Lauer’s play-by-play as the buildings come down. It made me feel skeevy, so I turned it off and lay in the dark and thought about that day…

Iowa City, IA –hell and gone from the East Coast. So much so that my freshman students at the time, god love them, still showed up to class and said things like, “Did you see those fuckin’ buildings come down? They were like whoooooosh!” I had to remind myself they were the Columbine generation–relatively unmoved by Events, unless they were of the variety that were Unfolding around them. Otherwise, isn’t there something else on TV? A graduate colleague who wouldn’t cancel class because, she claimed, “You don’t stop academia for mass hysteria.” In Steve Marlowe’s apt., drinking with friends and breaking it down. Earlier that day, I had a seminar with Jim McPherson–one of the most brilliant men in American letters. The room was packed with Workshop people who  wanted to hear his sermon. The focus of the seminar was Humor in Literature (or something to that effect). I remember passing around his cans of smoked almonds and cashews, and listening to him tell us, “Your generation now has a metaphor. We had Kennedy. You have this. I don’t know what to make of it. That’ll be your job.” The torch was passed, and we gathered together over drinks and talked…

I won’t even waste time breaking it down rhetorically — I’ll let my students do that later in the semester. Right now, I’m concerned about the sudden reversal of media fortunes…and that Matt Damon is talking politics…

After a record-breaking two years without cable TV, I caved. College football has begun, and I must have access to the games. What’s odd is that I find myself watching pretty much the same channels as before, only for a lot longer cuz the picture is so clear…

I ran over a rather large frog tonight on the way home from teaching class. I didn’t recognize it as a frog until I was almost upon it and saw it kind of skitter-hop into my lane. In the dark, it looked too much like a leaf drifting. But once I recognized it as a plump, animate target, it was too late. The sensation was a bit like running over a water balloon filled with Jell-O–both satisfying and completely grotesque. Anyhow, I found myself appealing to the soul of the flattened creature by choosing to believe it’s gone to a better, marshy place…

This past week, as a kind of mommy-daughter bonding experience, our daughter had her fingernails painted, including the addition of a little white daisy on both of her thumbs. It was cute, I have to admit. But then in the car this weekend, she declared, “Guess what I watched the ‘nother day? Hannah. Montana.” I asked her if she liked it, as I envisioned countless hours of watching cartoons together spiral down the drain, and she said, “It was. So. Cool.” The nails were cute–it was a special occasion with her mom, and they were–well, they were cute. But this Hannah Montana is a huge problem. These shows–live-action, tween-to-teen-aged dreck–grate on my last nerve like braces on a canker sore, and lead to discernable changes in speech patterns, fashion, and, worst, attitude. (Cap-A.) Further, these shows lead to concert tickets and high-decibel shrieking and the necessary engagement in conversations that revolve around plot-lines that at their barest essentials suck. Heartily suck. I love Word Girl and SpongeBob and even Cyber-Chase. Hell, I’ll tolerate Arthur, if nothing else is on. But Hannah Montana means that we need to find something else over which we can bond. Maybe fishing. Or skeet shooting…

I watched National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets this weekend, and enjoyed it (as I did NT1). Soooo many critics have hated these movies, for a lot of obvious reasons. But I will go back to my Goonies argument: If you grew up Goonies, then you love the National Treasure movies, which appeal to the same audience who found something really, really cool in stumbling upon a treasure map in your attic, getting your boys (and girls) together to creep through caves, fight off bad guys, and ultimately, discover riches in a large, hidden cavern…and love. The Goonies R Good Enough…

What…?

Yes, but Goonies isn’t dreck. It’s our childhood…

I have nothing but love for The Dark Knight. Heath Ledger, excellent. Michael Caine, British. Maggie Gyllenhall, cool brother. Morgan Freeman, in another movie. And Christian Bale, excellent even if whenever he is “Batman” he sounds like he’s got a little piece of black pepper caught in his throat. Gets a little annoying after a while–you’ll see what I mean…

Meanwhile, back in reality, I’ve been the recipient of all kinds of attention from the IRS, which is both flattering and really, really annoying. To think that this humble non-profit working, low-income earning, couldn’t-even-figure-out-how-to-be-shady-financially-even-if-I-wanted-to guy is so in the IRS’ crosshairs is, well, the reason that escapist movies have been my saving grace this summer. When offices open on Monday, it will mark my sixth phone conversation with them in response to letters I’ve received because of errors they have made…

Bright side: In a couple of weeks, I’ll be returning to Toledo, OH, for a family gathering at Cedar Point. I haven’t been there in over 10 years, and this time, I’ll be hoofing the Little Girl through SnoopyLand. Though I’m sure I’ll be in for a few rounds on the Gemini, Corkscrew, and Mine Ride. Possibly a little Troika action. Maybe the Witch’s Wheel. This is the CP I remember–check it out, if you’re from the CP area!

The latest version of Firefox has a Smart Location Bar that has placed my most visited pages in order. WebMD is third, which gives you some indication of where my mind has been lately. For some reason this site is fourth, followed by this, then this. A visit to my doctor on Thursday confirmed that I’m both healthy and still in need of a more robust social life…

God rest her soul. She lit up the room, was someone I looked forward to seeing each week, and should still be with us. I occupy such infintesimal space in this world, and have really had a hard time accepting that she–who sat with us at our table every week at Walker Bros. and talked about how she was going to take my ENG121 class in the Fall–met with this fate…

Brighter news: My parents have been in town this weekend for a very nice visit. They need to do this more often…

By the way–the song from the Pineapple Express trailer is “Paper Planes” by M.I.A…

I’m a neutron bomb of creativity, about to go off…

Hu-kah. Shout out to my brother, Marlowe, who hosted me last weekend and took me to a pow-wow in Dayton, OH. I am Dances With CD On Head…