Longest Letter to the Editor Ever

Dear Esquire,

I loved Tom Junod's recent ode to Waffle House, as part of your magazine's "Best Breakfasts in America" round-up. He hit the nail on the head with his "multiplicity within the homogeneity" observation. I grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, which had its share of Waffle Houses. There was one on Bowman Curve, which me and my high school friends frequented, and one on Shackleford Road, where my college buddies, who went to different high schools and who I hadn't really known then, went.

But we all came from the same town, so when we would come home from school (in Northwest Arkansas) for Christmas or Thanksgiving, we would invariably get sick of our families and all go out drinking. More often than not, these nights ended at Waffle House.

You might see what's coming: We'd be at the bar, finishing up, or on the way home, humming down I-630, and we would get into a pointless yet fierce argument about which Waffle House to patronize.

Junod is right: All Waffle Houses are exactly alike. But the two of us who went to Catholic High and the Bowman Curve Waffle House would argue with the two who went to Central High and Pulaski Academy and the Shackleford Road Waffle House about which to go to. I don't even know why; the Bowman Curve one was just "our" Waffle House, and so we naturally loved it and hated theirs—it's similar, I think, to the pride and loyality assigned to local sports teams.

Somewhere along the way during college, though, my friend and I from Catholic began to relent and go to the Shackleford Road Waffle House. The reason was that, in the interim between my leaving high school for college, a quasi-bohemian clique had taken over the Bowman Curve Waffle House, where I used to go after Marine Corps JROTC events with fellow cadets.

Once, home from college, I walked alone into my Waffle House and felt utterly alienated. The place was packed with proto-hipsters. Facial hair, fedoras and porkpie hats, clove cigarettes (this was around 1999/2000, mind), and all manner of pretention had invaded it. One kid was even sitting at the counter playing a goddamned violin. I walked out and rarely returned. Now you can't even smoke in there anymore. The boho clique has cleared off. The fickle wheel of Waffle House history has turned yet again.

In our college town, there was one Waffle House we could agree on. That's because there was one Waffle House. It was out on Sixth Street, near the highway and the tiny liquor store where my roommate, with his fake ID, used to buy us beer, which we would sneak into our dorm in an empty box for a computer printer. The Waffle House was situated in a near-desolate lot that looked like it used to house a Wal-Mart. It was tiny, as Waffle Houses go, and near the road. We used to go in there, sober, and get the All-You-Can-Eat special. Like the baseball rule that you have to touch all bases when running around them, we said that you had to eat a hash browns with each plate, or else it didn't "count."

Count toward what, I don't know.

Once a few of us went and ate there, freshman year, All-You-Can-Eat. I think I did "four laps," which in the parlance meant four entrees plus four plates of hashbrowns. My friend Joe always used to say that, if you were working on an All-You-Can-Eat effort, you wanted to finish with the waffle, because the waffle was like "an expand-cake," and, if eaten first, would swell uncomfortably in one's stomach, limiting the amount one could consume.

You also were kind of required to end with a waffle; it was like sticking the landing.

After this gluttonous effort—which we really did just because we were bored, and had that delicious expanse of free time particular to college life, and which really never comes again—I went out into the parking lot with my friends and leaned, doubled over, groaning against my sky-blue VW bug. I thought I had damaged myself. They asked if I needed to be driven the 0.5 miles home. (I declined.) Keep in mind we were stone-cold sober.

I got back to my dorm, curled in a fetal position on my bed, and waited for the end. At some point I went into the bathroom and tried to make myself vomit, fearing what would happen if I succeeded. (This remains the lone time I have ever tried to make myself vomit in which alcohol was not involved.)

But so that ended, and I got better. Another time, a spring afternoon during my sophmore year, Joe and I went to Waffle House by ourselves. It was a contemplative visit. School would be over soon, and I would move to Austin for the summer, and thence Oxford, in England, for the following year. Our little band would be breaking up, in some ways permanently. All leavings are like that.

Joe and I got the All-You-Can-Eat, but our hearts weren't really into it. I think we had two laps apiece. It was too nice a day, with that spring smell of fresh in the air, to gorge oneself. We talked laconically, easily, in the way of friends who don't have to say much to have a good time with one another. The door to the Waffle House was open out onto the spring day and Sixth Street. I was looking out of the door when I saw a chicken walk calmly and with no great hurry across the parking lot and across the road, entirely untroubled by traffic.

Sincerely,

Hunter Reaves Slaton

We Have a Serious Problem

According to the Nielsen Co.'s "Three Screen Report" for the fourth quarter of 2008, the average American—average, mind you—watches 151 hours of TV a month, or about five hours a day.

Think about that for a minute: More then one fifth of an average American's day is taken up by sitting and watching a screen. Thirty percent sleep, 35 percent work, 20 percent TV—leaving just 15 percent of one's time free for actual human interaction.

That's the worst thing I've ever heard. I'm very glad that I basically don't ever watch TV, and so am totally outside of that particular statistic. Lately I've been watching, like, one episode of The Simpsons on DVD before I go to bed, and that's virtually all I ever watch.

Take heart! Turn them off!

The Simpsons Gets a New Opener

Can you believe The Simpsons has been on for 20 years? Incredible. I don't get to see the show much anymore, but whenever I do see it something always cracks me up at least once per episode.

This past Sunday night, coinciding with The Simpsons' switch to HD, the show got a new opening sequence. It's well worth watching, with a lot of in-jokes that long-time fans will appreciate:

Whither New York?

This is where I live:
“The epicenter of the crisis
and the nation’s largest city.”
I do not have the best job.
I do not live in Manhattan.
I don’t even work in Manhattan!

But I do live in Brooklyn, where I am afforded
the opportunity to leave for work
at seven a.m. and encounter
a sky that, upon exiting my apartment building,
which often smells of good cooking,
pork chops and Dominican food,
makes me gasp with its gaudy beauty.

The blues and pinks!
The clouds and sky that seem, like an animation cel,
to be lit joyously from behind
by a beneficent light.
Then the greens
and reds of changing stoplights, the rust
Don’t Walk and white Walk symbols
that, if you listen on a quiet corner, change
with a clunk-clunk.

I have all the coffee
and cigarettes I need. I fit my fingers
under my living-room window,
to facilitate a cross-breeze.
I write quickly—if not well—
with a cheap pen that pleases me.

Songs apply to me. “Back
in the New York Groove.” “A New York
State of Mind.” They can’t take that away from me.
They cannot kill or jail me.
They cannot make me leave.

Though I may choose to leave. When it comes,
if it comes,
it will be hard. I’ll hate to go.
I’ll say goodbye to people and,
almost more importantly, places:
Corner Bistro, Central Park in the fall on Marathon Day,
the whipping flags of Rockefeller Center where once
I laid on my back on the stone slabs
and mourned a girl I no longer mourn.

The city has become a part of me
and I have become a part of it.

It does not matter if the city doesn’t know it.

Defriending People on Facebook; or, The Times Gets Bitchy

There's a fun article in today's Times about the etiquette and practice of "defriending" (or, as the paper asserts is the more accepted parlance, "unfriending") Facebook friends. The germ of the article came from a recent online promotion by Burger King that allowed you to "sacrifice" ten of your Facebook friends in exchange for a free Whopper. Until it was shut down by Facebook for violating a user agreement clause, Burger King claimed it had ended 234,000 friendships.

Nevertheless—That's not what I want to talk about. You can, and should, read the Times article, which is here. The part I want to show is this weird breaking of the Times' businesslike remove in this article. Here are the few paras—The last one is the best, but you have to read up:

Nor does Facebook care to be a party to what might be called punitive unfriending, banishing someone from your network for violating one or more of your personal rules of conduct. Perhaps someone annoys you by posting an obsessive number of status updates, or expresses himself in a way that you consider obnoxious?

Those were the excuses that Ehren S., a former co-worker of mine who apparently unfriended me sometime this past spring, offered up recently for giving me the digital heave-ho.

“I believe it was based on a passive-aggressive update of yours to which I sighed, kinda shook my head and pressed ‘delete from friends,’ ” she confessed by e-mail. “I find negativity a bit tiresome and don’t have the patience for it.”

Fine. Though forgive me for pointing out that Ehren, who asked that I not use her full name, initially tried to fib her way out of the awkwardness by saying she did it for a Whopper.

Ha! The writer basically just said, "Fuck you, Ehren" in the pages of the world's most widely-read newspaper. (I don't know if the Times is actually the world's most widely-read newspaper, but whatever.)

Things I Find Hilarious and/or Amazing

I don't know why, but I find this, from the front page of today's NYTimes.com, hilarious:
There's just this weird desperation and panicky-ness to the headline, don't you think? You can easily imagine an explanation point after "aid": "Ford Has Its Worst Year Ever but Won't Ask for Aid! And You'll Never Meet a Nice Girl If You Don't Go Out!" Love it.

Item: I received the following email earlier this week from a good friend of mine. I laughed harder than I have in a long while. This friend writes:

I just glanced at the NY Times crossword puzzle. The clues for 21 and 23 across were "deface" and "into a pill bottle," respectively. When I merely glanced, my mind saw "defecate into a pill bottle." I thought to myself, "Wow, there is a single word or phrase for that other than the phrase itself."

Follow-up note: Clue 23 had actually been "info on a pill bottle." But nevertheless.

And finally, a great paragraph from a story in yesterday's Good Old Times, about a smoked bacon and sausage concoction called The Bacon Explosion:

He bought about $20 worth of bacon and Italian sausage from a local meat market. As it lay on the counter, he thought of weaving strips of raw bacon into a mat. The two spackled the bacon mat with a layer of sausage, covered that with a crunchy layer of cooked bacon, and rolled it up tight.

That is just an incredible handful of sentences: "The two spackled the bacon mat with a layer of sausage." That reminds me of the Simpsons wherein Homer, at the breakfast table, orders Bart for some reason to "butter his bacon"—and then, of course, to also "bacon his butter."

For the Bacon Explosion recipe (with amazing or, depending on how you feel about it, horrifying photos), go here.

For the full Times story about the Bacon Explosion, go here.

On the Closing of Guantanamo

In this op-ed piece published in The Daily News on Sunday, Michael Burke, the brother of an FDNY captain killed on 9/11, speaks out against the closing of Guantanamo. I sympathize with Burke, but what he advocates is wrong—and, thankfully, with the inauguration of President Obama, it looks like we are moving away from this being the dominant mode of thinking.

The whole op-ed piece is sort of insane, but here are a few highlights:

Obama and the Democrats have had a blind spot for 9/11 and have yet to show they have an ounce of understanding what happened that day.

Here is why we were attacked: Muslim extremists hate Americans and want us dead. Our policies in no way influenced the vitriol perpetuated on innocent Americans on Sept. 11, 2001.

Is that it? They “hate our freedom”? Why? What do they care about our freedom? In fact, what they—the largely Saudi highjackers—hated was U.S. support for the Saudi government, plus our backing of Israel vs. the Palestinians.

Contrary to what Burke says, our policies greatly influenced the “vitriol perpetuated … Sept. 11, 2001.”

Burke goes on:

And we do not enhance our Constitution by applying it to those it was never meant to serve. Rather, the move diminishes and threatens the foundation on which our laws are built.

It’s true, the Constitution may not have been intended to serve non-U.S. citizens, but that’s what’s called following the letter and not the spirit of the law. There is another founding American document that pretty clearly addresses how we should treat others, even those who have committed great crimes against us. It’s called the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Got that? All men. Not just Americans. In addition: If America is meant to be a “Beacon on a Hill,” as so many on the Right maintain, shouldn’t we treat all individuals according to the same Bill of Rights that we live under, namely the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth amendments?

More from Burke:

It is impossible to fight the war on terrorism, like every war, under the Constitution. Consequently, we cannot convict our enemies under it. They will get off. Once free, they will, despite having enjoyed the benevolence of our constitutional rights, strike us again. The Constitution then becomes a means of our destruction.

It's true, the Constitution will become the means of our destruction—but not in the way Burke is saying. Rather, if we erode the rights established by the Constitution in dealing with criminals or suspected criminals, we move one step closer to eroding the safety, security, and—most importantly—liberty of our own citizens. As Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Finally, Burke closes his op-ed with this:

With this order to close Guantanamo, the countdown to the next attack has begun.

That's just stupid, hysterical, and fear-mongering. I would say I expect more from The Daily News—but I don't.

Think Our Losing Streak Is Done

It's a been a good week.

On Tuesday, my officemates and I gathered in our company's boardroom to watch Obama take the oath of office. As you may know, Chief Justice Roberts and President Obama stumbled a bit over the oath, prompting a "re-do" (just to be on the constitutional safe side) of the oath on Wednesday.

I think, though, that Barack's reaction to the stumble on the part of Justice Roberts was telling. What did Obama do, at a mistake made during one of the most important points in his life thus far? He chuckled. Now that's the temperment I want in office.

Another exchange this week between Barack and Republican lawmakers, that I just read about in a New York Times story, is also telling:

Yet in a polite but pointed exchange with the No. 2 House Republican, Eric Cantor of Virginia, Mr. Obama took note of the parties’ fundamental differences on tax policy toward low-wage workers, and insisted that his view would prevail.

At issue is Mr. Obama’s proposal that his tax breaks for low- and middle-income workers, including his centerpiece “Making Work Pay” tax credit, be refundable — that is, that the benefits also go to workers who earn too little to pay income taxes but who pay Social Security and Medicare taxes. Republicans generally oppose giving such refunds to people who pay no income taxes.

“We just have a difference here, and I’m president,” Mr. Obama said to Mr. Cantor, according to Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, who was at the meeting. Mr. Emanuel said that Mr. Obama was being lighthearted and that lawmakers of both parties had laughed.

Mr. Cantor, in an interview later, had a similar recollection. He said the president had told him, “You’re correct, there’s a philosophical difference, but I won, so we’re going to prevail on that.”

“He was very straightforward,” Mr. Cantor added. “There was no disrespect, but it was very matter-of-fact.”

I like that. It demonstrates Obama's reasonableness and good humor—something that's been sorely missing from our past eight years of government. Here's to keeping up this tone.

My Blog Is in Great Abeyance

Yesterday a plane crash-landed on the Hudson River. Everybody lived, thanks in large part to the pilot, who sounds like an all-around stand-up, cool-headed fellow. Maybe we should elect him president? OH WAIT WE ALREADY DID AND HE GETS SWORN IN ON TUESDAY.

But so: Today, in one of the Times stories about the crash, I came across this paragraph. Usually you don't see such poetic language in Times news stories, so this was refreshing to read. It paints a perfect picture of the scene yesterday afternoon, in the middle of the cold, cold river:

Over the next hour, as a captivated city watched continuous television reports and the Hudson turned from gold to silver in the gathering winter twilight, all of the passengers, including at least one baby, and both pilots and all three flight attendants, were transferred to the rescue boats — a feat that unfolded as the white-and-blue jetliner continued to drift south.

Beautiful. More TK. I promise I haven't forgotten you all.

Emmy, my family, and Dracula

This is my niece Emma:

(Taken by Jacob Slaton.)

This is my family:

(Also taken by Jacob.)

This is my buddy Joe and his poor, long-suffering, lovely wife Holly:

(Taken by someone else.)

Sparks

I read today that MillerCoors is neutering Sparks, its popular, radioactive-colored alcoholic energy drink (or maybe that's energetic alcohol drink?), by removing all its caffeine, taurine, ginseng, and guarana. No more will Sparks be liquid cocaine.

Herewith, one of the best paragraphs ever, from the Wall Street Journal blog entry in which I read of Sparks' defanging:

Still, the [attorneys general] noted in their own statement that MillerCoors has also agreed to “cease particular marketing themes that appeal to underage youth, eliminating advertisements that feature a bright orange-stained tongue and not renewing its contract with William Ocean, an air guitar champion who does a back flip onto an opened can of Sparks at all of his shows.” They add MillerCoors will discontinue its Sparks Web site, “which looks like it was created by a college freshman.”

That's why you read, kids—Because every once in a great while you come across a sentence or two like that.

My niece

Post No. 300—Or, Wa Wa Wee Wa! (Redux)

That's right, Dear and Faithful Long-time Reader. This is Post No. 300 of FIGHTING FIRE WITH UNLIT MATCHES (now bigger, in bold, and in all caps). In honor of this auspicious occasion, lets take a look back, shall we?

This blog's first entry was posted on October 31st, 2005, a little more than three years ago. It was about some words I like, including "pogonip" and "snowclone," as well as Why I Hate Halloween and Why Last Night's Party (the photo website, not the party) Is Dumb.

My one-hundredth entry was posted on December 18th, 2006, less than one week shy of exactly two years ago. It was a sort-of review of the Beatles "album"/Cirque du Soleil soundtrack Love. (It—meaning the entry, not the album— is not very interesting. But feel free to click through.)

Post No. 200 entered the world on November 1st, 2007—again, about a month and a half more than one year ago. This post I'm kind of proud of. It's a poem about, on a sun-struck fall day, eating dessert with a friend after a movie, and talking about who from college we still talk to.

And now here we are at Post No. 300, on December 12th, 2008, three years and 1.5 months after I started this blog. Suffice it to say, a lot has happened. It's been nice to have this and to write in it, and to occasionally have people tell me that they've really enjoyed something I've placed here.

With that in mind, here's this (Happy holidays!, and thanks for reading):

Two Meals

1.

Cameras were everywhere, both still
and video, in the hot Brooklyn loft apartment.
Periodically, a boom mike swung overhead
of the long table at which we were seated.
It was a dinner party that was being filmed.
Across from me and my date was a lawyer
and his wife. I kept saying to the lawyer—
seated diagonally across from me,
who worked in the district attorney’s office
and whose brother was a friend of mine,
also present, snapping pictures, stonily silent—
I kept saying things like, when the mic neared,
“So how much does it cost really to buy a judge?”

Somehow, as people at dinner parties searching
for topics are wont to do, we got on the subject
of old jobs, in high school and college. I told
about the summer I worked in the hot dog stand
of the minor league ballpark at Ray Winder Field.
That summer seemed like many summers, or the ideal
of a summer. At least it seems that way in memory.

Then the lawyer said, “Yeah, Andy”—his brother—
“is really the only one of us who’s living the dream,”
meaning taking pictures, traveling. I could identify.

The lawyer continued: “My best summer job was
the summer I cleaned pools. All day I’d just clean
pools and listen to Talking Heads on my Walkman.”

And the scene came to me in a flash:
T-shirt, shorts, flip-flops: Handsome Tom,
having not yet met his wife or moved
to the city, having not yet attended law school,
the blue of the pool echoing the sky’s own blue,
the summer after college and no plans yet made,
calmly trawling the pool with the net-on-a-stick tool,
the Talking Heads’ polyrhythms coming in
from the cassette through the cord and on into
his ears, between which was an untroubled mass
exulting, lightweight, in the methodical
and the elementary: warmth, sun, sky, pool.

2.

This was later, on a Sunday in early October
on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Brunch.
My friend was telling me that on the way
to meet me, she’d passed by a building
on Smith Street that was besieged by firemen.
They were ripping and scrabbling at the side
of a building in which an electrical fire
was smoldering. The fighters-to-fire ratio
fell heavily in favor of the fighters, and so
a crowd had gathered to watch. “But,”
my friend said, “There never ended up being
any big flames. Eventually everyone moved on.”

“Sometimes there are big flames,” I said,
“Like when my place burned.” “That’s true,” she said,
“I remember the pictures. And then once
when I was little, there was a big fire
in the middle of the night on our street, and we all”—
meaning her family, including eight-year-old Maya—
“came outside to watch, and all the neighbors did, too.
Just stood in the street and watched the place burn.”

Then I saw Maya, too, on a dark New England street
in the middle of the night with her mother, sister,
brother, and father before he died, dressed
in a thin night-shirt with bed-mussed hair, holding
the hand of an adult as she looked up, face upturned,
bare feet on the asphalt, still-warm from the day’s sun,
orange light flickering over her face, which even then
bore foreshadowings of the beauty that came later—
Looked up with a child’s eyes at the whump and crash
of a big house being taken apart by fire—
and behind her eyes was an unformed mass that saw
the fire not as a tragedy, but merely a heretofore
unseen assemblage of sound, light, and heat.

QUIZ

Who are news outlets saying that President-Elect Obama will name as his Secretary of Energy?

A) The director of the Occidental Petroleum Corporation.
B) A former venture capitalist and chemicals company CEO.
C) A Nobel prize-winning experimental physicist and director of the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory research facility, at UC Berkeley, where he is a professor.

The answer is "C," and his name is Steven Chu. The other two choices were George W. Bush's Secretaries of Energy. The New York Times writes this about Dr. Chu:

"At the Lawrence Berkeley laboratory, he has sponsored research into biofuels and solar energy and has been a strong advocate of controlling greenhouse gas emissions."

It's nice to see that Obama is bringing the smart. Also it's nice to see that Obama is bringing the not-bought-and-sold-by-the-oil-industry.

Nick Adams

I just finished reading The Nick Adams Stories, by Ernest Hemingway. My roommate got it for me, along with two other "manly" books of short stories, for my 29th birthday. (Thanks Steve!)

Man, what a book. I've read some Hemingway before—I guess just The Sun Also Rises, though maybe another; I forget—but this one really bowled me over. I know it's probably cliched and old-news to say, but reading this book really has revolutionized how I think about short stories.

One story, "Big Two-Hearted River," particularly struck me. Not much happens in it. Nick Adams gets off a train in some burned-over country, and then hikes into unburned country near the river where he makes camp. He cooks, he thinks about a friend, and the next day he fishes.

All the while, downriver, there's a swamp. Nick kind of warily eyes the swamp out of the corner of his mind. In the preface to the collection, Philip Young writes of this story that, "Put where it goes chronologically, following the stories of World War I, its submerged tensions—the impression that Nick is exorcising some nameless anxiety—become perfectly understandable."

One of the things in the story that resonated with me was how, at Nick's camp, his mood seems balanced on some sort of knife edge. I know that feeling, the feeling of taking pleasure in some simple thing one is doing while at the same time it all seems very fragile and about to tip over.

Hemingway writes:

He started a fire with some chunks of pine he got with the ax from a stump. Over the fire he stuck a wire grill, pushing the four legs down into the ground with his boot. Nick put the frying pan on the grill over the flames. He was hungrier. The beans and spaghetti warmed. Nick stirred them and mixed them together. They began to bubble, making little bubbles that rose with difficulty to the surface. There was a good smell. Nick got out a bottle of tomato catchup and cut four slices of bread. The little bubbles were coming faster now. Nick sat down beside the fire and lifted the frying pan off. He poured about half the contents out into the tin plate. It spread slowly on the plate. Nick knew it was too hot. He poured on some tomato catchup. He knew the beans and spaghetti were still too hot. He looked at the fire, then at the tent, he was not going to spoil it all by burning his tongue. For years he had never enjoyed fried bananas because he had never been able to wait for them to cool. His tongue was very sensitive. He was very hungry. Across the river in the swamp, in the almost dark, he saw a mist rising. He looked at the tent once more. All right. He took a full spoonful from the plate.

I don't know. I remember, as I said earlier in these pages, walking down the street feeling good and then catching myself. Trying to order everything, turn on a dime, precision. Balancing.

Chastised

I have been chastised by not one but two readers for not posting anything since a day before my birthday, which was Nov. 13. So I relent. I'll post (most of) this from my recent work trip to Aruba and Curacao. Dig it. More TK.

It's night in Aruba. I'm sitting out on my balcony, smoking. I just got back from the casino, where I gave back $135 of the casino's money. Blackjack. It'll get ya. Before the casino, we had dinner at the Marriott Resort's Simply Fish restaurant, myself and the press trip group I'm with. It was a long, leisurely dinner. I was seated between Kara, one of the public relations hosts of the trip, and Jennifer, from Toronto—one of the journalists. Across from me was Carolyn, another journalist from Brooklyn, and John, the director of sales and marketing for the resort. John was from the English island of Jersey, and used to work for Marriott in Manhattan before coming to Aruba about eight months ago with his family. Down the table was the rest of our group—all women. There was Beth, from Nashville; Karen, from New Jersey; Hope, from Atlanta; Jodi, the owner of the PR company who arranged the trip; and Karen, another resort staff member.

These press trips are weird. When I find myself having fun, somehow a mental check comes in and I think but no, this isn't real. We're all just conversing and having fun because there's nothing better to do. We wouldn't be here and talking if we weren't on this trip. And that's true. But it's also a negative way to think about things, and so I try to stop that mental check from occurring when I notice it's happening. It's like when I used to—or sometimes still do—walk down the street and am feeling good, unreasonably happy, and I realize that and then try to check myself, thinking, "Be careful. Easy there. The higher you feel, the further you have to fall." What doom-y thinking. I do it less these days.

Off in the distance are four cruise ships; I can only see their lights, not their outlines, on the black sea which runs seamlessly into the black sky. No stars can be seen. Across from me is one of two time-share parts of the resort; six identical, well-lit stairwells on the outside of the building are stacked atop one another.

[REDACTED, BUT SUFFICE IT TO SAY THIS PART IS ABOUT A WOMAN, AND IN THAT WAY CONNECTS WITH WHAT FOLLOWS]

Six years ago, on the cross-country Green Tortoise trip I took, I was obsessed with S.

S. had a curly afro of brown hair and a cute snub nose. She'd gone to Dartmouth. Once she took too much acid at a party and hid in the corner all night long, thinking she was a squirrel. I hiked in Zion National Park with Scottish John and we discussed S., whether or not she felt what I felt and all sorts of bullshit.

I got really high among the prickly pears out in the desert with [REDACTED], one of the drivers, and then stumbled stoned through the dark, cool Carlsbad Caverns.

When I got home, I kept up with S., who lived in Brooklyn. We went on a couple dates and I spent the night once with her in her apartment, which wasn't far from mine in Williamsburg. [REDACTED] Still, sometimes, in the neighborhood, I think I see her. I'm not sure if she's still in the city. When I was coming home from San Francisco, after the Green Tortoise trip, I wrote a poem for her. Here it is:

[REDACTED]

Oh, the hell with it:

FIRST OFF LET ME SAY I'M SORRY FOR PUTTING YOU ON A PEDESTAL.

1. When I write, You,
in your tall skeepskin boots,

What I really mean to say
is your lighthouse look that illumines
like the green of lightning-bug glow;
no everyday electricity but rather
something more outside
of day-in, day-out laws like
socket, plug, cord, and bulb.

What I really mean to say is
me, deer, headlights,
only that's a cliché –
but then again, so is love.

I was saying, then,
Your tall sheepskin boots –
No, wait;
The underwater octopus-ink explosion of your curls –
Hold, wait;
The butter dish of your brown shoulderblades,
the way your sleeping form,
tucked, curled,
could be that of the first woman
one hour before awakening
when whatever all this is began.

2. I slept by a tree. When I awoke,
I spoke to the animals; there was a raccoon,
and Raccoon said to me,
"Who are you?"
and I replied, "I do not know."

Raccoon said, gesturing with mischevious paw,
"Go and find out, then. It's possible
others will help you, even if only
by eye contact."

And off Raccoon went.

3. Delusion, romance. Deluance, rolusion.
Deluromansionce. 'Twas brillig.

4. Bringing it all back home:

I am on a plane. The cold medicine
has gone to my head, as has
the last two weeks
of no email, the red clay of the Valley of the Gods,
the looming silence of Carlsbad.
Alcohol and all the stars
fraught with meaning up above,
under the massive New Mexico night sky
where I laid out in the desert with you.

Which is all to say,
You are like one of those rare places in the world
where cylinders roll uphill
and compass-points won't stay still,

and in your gaze I'm a magnet,
having deliciously lost its North Pole.

The Color Purple

At the Republican Governors' Conference today in Miami, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, who was considered as Senator John McCain's running mate, said the following about the future of the G.O.P. (these quotes were pulled from this New York Times story):

One perspective is, the Republicans lost their way. There will be calls, and voices across the country for Republicans to return to traditional conservative approaches in almost all respects.

A second viewpoint will be the country’s changing a lot. The country is changing culturally, demographically, technologically, economically, and the like. And the Republican Party isn’t changing in a way that reflects those major, or macro changes across the country.

I think this latter statement is reflected in the following map from this website, which adjusts the traditional red-blue state map by population size and also factors in, using the color purple, gradations in Democratic and Republican voting:

It looks like a thin spiderweb of red stretched across a blue and purple country, refuting the assertion that this is a center-right nation. As Pawlenty said, the demographics of these United States are changing, and I think that's a good thing—not just for the Democratic party, but for America as a whole.

Yes, I'm Writing about The Onion Again

The Onion, as usual, really nailed it with this one:

Kobe Bryant Scores 25 In Holy Shit We Elected A Black President

It's brilliantly written, how it bleeds back and forth between reportage of the game and awestruck commentary about Obama's win. And it accurately conveys a real sort of national mindset of, well, "holy shit"—Just like they (The Onion) did after 9/11. Several of the pieces they wrote in response to that day had an undercurrent of sadness, fear, and disbelief. One was about a woman baking an American flag cake because she didn't know what else to do—and the tone was perfect: They were mocking her somewhat, because what use is making a flag cake?—But they were also sympathizing, expressing a helpless fellow-feeling and throwing-up-of-the-hands. Read it here.

And finally, just a clip from the Kobe Bryant Obama article:

The 2008 league MVP was solid on the defensive end of the court as well, holding Clippers guard Baron Davis to just 12 points and when they called Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida for Obama, basically ensuring victory, that was a moment in which all Americans, regardless of race, creed, color, or party affiliation had to stand back and say, "Holy shit, this is actually going to happen. Holy shit.... Holy shit. Holy shit! Holy shit!"

Then at the end it just totally breaks down, and The Onion writer is writing directly to us about his or her personal experience on election night. It's really beautiful.

NYC-area newspapers today

Click here for a round-up of the front pages of NYC-area newspapers today, including the (I predict) soon-to-be-iconic New York Times front page.

And click here for an inspiring short item about New Yorkers lining up outside the New York Times' building to wait for copies of the paper. It contains this fantastic quote from the NYTimes.com design director:

People working on that floor hadn’t noticed yet that the line was forming, and when they realized its purpose, a feeling of delight swept over the newsroom like the friendliest wildfire I’d ever seen. Reporters, editors, photographers, everyone started clapping, hooting and hollering that people still find the newspaper valuable enough to wait dozens of people deep in line for their chance to buy a copy.

YES WE DID

I won’t add too much to the mountains of words that are even now being written about what happened yesterday. But it was amazing, inspiring, and hopeful.

Last night, after Obama delivered his victory speech, the music swelled and the families joined the candidates onstage. One of my friends (I’d had people over for chili—Obama’s recipe—and apple pie) said, “I’m waiting to see the credits roll!”

Later on, someone else not at my house echoed the same sentiment, with almost exactly the same phrasing. I felt it, too: Watching Barack speak in Grant Park, echoing the words of Lincoln and Dr. King, it felt like an amazing movie where America rises to the occasion and is actually as good as we hope to believe it is.

But this isn’t a movie. It really happened. Barack Obama—Think about it: A mixed-race man named Barack Hussein Obama!—will be the 44th president of the United States. We and the world should be proud of ourselves.

I’ll end with this. Last night, toward the end of his speech, Obama spoke about a woman named Ann Nixon Cooper. Now, usually I hate these little homilies that candidates seem hidebound to work into their speeches. (“Recently I spoke with so-and-so from Nowheresville, and she can’t afford her medicine.”) So I was skeptical when Barack started to go down this rhetorical road.

But then it shifted and widened like a river delta, as Ann Nixon Cooper’s story was expanded and magnified to encompass the whole of the 20th century, now put to sleep. Obama asked what, if our children are lucky enough to live into the 22nd century, will we have changed for them?

This is how he closed his speech. Feel the sweep of history and the hope for the future. Yes we did, yes we can, and yes we will:

This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that's on my mind tonight's about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She's a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing: Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.

She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn't vote for two reasons -- because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.

And tonight, I think about all that she's seen throughout her century in America -- the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can't, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.

At a time when women's voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes we can.

When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs, a new sense of common purpose. Yes we can.

When the bombs fell on our harbor and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes we can.

She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that "We Shall Overcome." Yes we can.

A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination.

And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change.

Yes we can.

America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves -- if our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?

This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment.

This is our time, to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth, that, out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope. And where we are met with cynicism and doubts and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can.

Thank you. God bless you. And may God bless the United States of America.