Debauchery

I tell my students never to do this, but here goes: Webster's second definition for Debauchery is: "seduction from duty, allegiance or virtue." I have to confess that:
a. I never quite thought of the word in those terms
b. I believe any number of pictures from my last man weekend, boys' trip, bromance getaway to Seattle with two college buddies could be definition number 3.

Some men of a certain age (say 43 for example) are having hoses with little cameras in them shoved up their asses to see if they will die soon, and from what (hint: the answers, in order, are, "yes" and "who cares"), while others go off every 6 to 8 months and act like rude children in a city far from home. And, while I confess that I have had the hose up my ass, I prefer to think of myself as the later. Thus I found myself, 10 days ago, in the Emerald City with two of my best friends from my Chico days. That it has taken me this long to write about the experience says as much as any of these words. While I could wax retarded for an hour about the need for men to seek each other's friendship, to nurture each other in the philos way, etc., I think a top ten would be simpler.

Top Ten Things to Not Do on a Bromance Weekend When You're 43:

10. Do not forget that last time you had the beat salad at Crow Restaurant in Queen Anne, the next morning you thought you were bleeding internally, which would have been possible.

9. Do not get a window seat each way after drinking beers at home and at the airport before getting on the plane, especially if you have a peanut-bladder.

8. Do not think that walking to a bike expo ("it's only a mile and a half") is a good idea in driving Seattle rain.

7. Do not each things your "friend" gives you.

6. Do not see how many Manhattans a human can consume at any given bar on any given night. Hint: it's probably not more than 7.

5. Do not discuss (in full voice, on a street corner, without checking around to notice the nice lady and her dog out for a walk) the likelihood that a woman who lets you have your way with her backside has had, let's say, 6 or 7 other special friends do the same thing.

4. Do not think that switching to Vodka two days in will make things easier because it's clear and then drink twice as much of it as you have anything else.

3. Do not eat more things your "friend" gives you because you can't feel the first or second one. Remember, fucker, you're drunk off your ass at this point. You're only going to wake up at 3 a.m. watching the room turn into a bad scene from Cirque De Freake, remaining awake and freaking out for the rest of the night until 8 a.m. when you realize you have to pull your shit together to get on a plane, though puking in the taxi is appealing, and you look like Joaquin Phoenix in that bad mockumentary--nuff said.

2. Do not drink strange beers from Canada, just because they're cheap and you have already spent $600 on booze this weekend anyway, while you watch the Drive by Truckers do their thing.

1. Do not pay attention to any of this shit next year. Do it all again. You owe it to yourself and it's the only thing that keeps you from going postal. Thanks R and G for a great and terrible weekend.

The Sunset Limited

HBO has made the most interesting tv of the last decade, though Showtime holds its own. The recent film version of Cormac McCarthy's The Sunset Limited is indicative of the consistently high production value of HBO's movies. Samuel L. Jackson and Tommye Lee Jones are both up to the onerous task of bringing a two man stage play to the screen, albeit the small screen (if you can call it that anymore), and, on the whole, Sunset is compelling. I confess that I didn't intend to watch it when I did, but I got caught, from the first few moments, in what is clearly a staged version of an inner debate that McCarthy has played out in his head for the last 40 years. But I think the film also represents my last trip to the alter of post-apocalypse that McCarthy has nailed himself to a cross above. Truth is, I can't take it anymore.

2000 years ago, some guy who has come to be known as St. John the Apostle wrote the last book of the New Testament or his Revelation. In it, he imagined the end times, the second-coming of Christ, and a whole bunch of other crazy shit that has been the fodder for so many Hollywood, end times movies. In the bible, it's the hard sell to the Book of Psalms' softer one. Psalms promises that God will walk with you through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, while Revelations threatens you with being left behind the rapture to watch your friends and family die in agony, only to be rewarded with continual torture in a fiery hell. As a child, Revelations worked on me. The devil scared the shit out of me, still does, still can't watch The Exorcist, still get a chill every now and then when I walk down stairs at night, still a little afraid to say, out loud, that I don't believe in no devil. But I digress. My point was that since Revelations, and no doubt many times before, someone has stood up every hundred years or so and declared that the shit has hit the fan, the jig is up. From the dark ages, to the fall of Rome, from the Black Plague to the French Revolution, smart people the world over declared that things were coming to an end, and here we are.

I know what you're thinking, "yeah, but those guys didn't know what we know." The planet is falling apart, the oceans are dying, we have the capacity to blow our planet out of the solar system and scientists in Switzerland are trying to create a black hole (great fucking idea). These things are true. Meanwhile, there's a class war brewing in our country that I'm pretty sure is gonna get bloody before it's over. The "conservative, Christian, right-wing, Republican, sraight, white, Amercian male" that Todd Snider sings about is more pissed and irrational than ever before in my life, and the Mid-East is about to spin out of control.

Amidst all this, I can't bring myself to throw my body in front of the Sunset Limited, and I don't need Samuel Jackson to help me fill the Jesus shaped void in my soul (why is the Black guy always the spirtitual one anyway?). What I do need, I got. I'm a teacher, a father and a husband. There are a whole bunch of people in my life that I have some influence on, obligation to. For whatever it's worth, and it may not be much, I feel like we who have fucked this world up so much, can also fix it. I teach smart kids, surely we can find a way to fix what has gone wrong. While we do it, we will undoubtedly be screwing something else up, but we can let the next generation deal with that. What we can't do is load our belongings into shopping carts and hit the road. No more McCarthy for me, thanks. I don't want to bury my head in the sand, but I don't want to rub my face in the shit anymore either. I do want to keep fighting.

I'll keep recycling, buying goats for kids in Africa, eating less meat 'cause it unsustainable and telling my kids that they can change the world. It may not be true; we may be fucked. As the great Bob Knight once said, "I think that if rape is inevitable, you might as well sit back and enjoy it." Fuckin' A, Bobby, Fuckin' A.

The Beard

I haven't shaved for two months, and I never thought people would care, or notice, as much as they have. My wife, the only person whose opinion about my facial hair matters to me (for obvious reasons, which modesty compels me to omit), is fine with it. She's fairly forgiving of my eccentricities as I am of hers, a symbiotic state of matrimony. Everyone else, by which I mean my mother, brother, kids, neighbors, colleagues, fuck, even strangers, has an opinion.

I know that this beard is a conscious attempt on my part to tap into that less public side of me, the side that doesn't give a shit what you think, the side that wants to look like he hasn't sold out to the man. This thing on my face is far beyond the trendy, hipster whiskers that 20 somethings run around sporting. Mine is grey and red and brown and scraggly and, generally speaking, homelessesque. This is the way I like it. We all have that side of us that we keep submerged. Shit, there are times when my inner self doesn't even know, or very much like, the fucker who is speaking through my mouth. When I'm working my job, teaching, dealing with my own kids, I frequently find my self saying things I don't believe in or practice. I don't think I'm alone in this. You, dear reader (no plural necessary here), have surely felt this way. Those of you that know me must be thinking, "Fuck, if this is the filtered Sluggy, what kind of sick, degenerate bastard lives underneath?" To which I respond, "few people truly know". The one's who do know are equally (or nearly equally) perverse, and I love them each for that.

Don't get me wrong here. I am not lying awake at night, cursing my fate, believing that my life is all a lie. I have grown more comfortable with the work me, the family me, the father, the teacher, the bargaining team member. Still, the bar fight me has never left. Unlike Todd Snider, whom I saw in concert last night, I have sold out to some degree, and, also unlike Todd Snider, I have never been convicted of a crime. It's a trade off, a tight rope walk over a life that comes close enough to being out of control to be fun, but no so close as to leave visible marks, except for the beard.

Fantasia

I picked up the Blue Ray version of Disney's 1940 film Fantasia over the holidays and finally got around to watching it with my wife over the weekend--it is better than ever and perhaps more beautiful. Fantasia has always been my favorite animated film, for the lushness of its animation as much as for its cheesy pretentiousness. It's a film for people who wish to think of themselves as cultured, but who want a little Mickey with their Stravinsky.

The film grew out of Disney's desire to get Mickey back in the spotlight of animated film. "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" was originally supposed to be a short, but ended up being very costly Disney decided to add additional pieces to make a feature film. He also added Fantasound, or an early version of surround sound, to boot. The film was supposed to be a major affair, with audiences dressing up, etc., but WWII broke out, theaters were short on magnets for speakers, so the Fantasound was out; it all went to shit. Over the years, the film gained an audience and was, piece by piece, restored to its original glory.

I saw it in 1991 at the El Rey Theater, as beautiful an old box as ever was, in Chico, CA, just south of Paradise--really. I was with my ex-fiance, who dumped me for a professor, but still wanted to hang as friends. Under the circumstances, it's not surprising that most of the film moved me to tears. I remember thinking how lush and fantastic the color and music were, juxtaposed to, what I thought at the time, was my ruined life. As painful as that day was, I realized that, like the "Ave Maria" sequence at the end of "Night on Bald Mountain", there is life after pain.

Last week, as I sat with my wife, watching the same film, I was struck by how different life is, I am after so many years. The film is still as lovely as ever, though it doesn't bring me to tears. For one, I'm a happier guy than I was that day in Chico 20 years ago, but it's deeper than that. As I get older my life becomes more even. I don't get quite as elated as I once did, but I never sink so low--it's a trade off. Fantasia is now just a beautiful movie, a pleasant distraction, a nice way to pass the evening with my wife. I'm thankful for that, for the relatively better place that being 43 has placed me. Life has assuredly gotten harder since 1991 for me and mine, but I have gotten better at dealing with it. Now I just think of hitting people.

The New Year

I've been a bit distracted lately with the end of the semester, laundry, dealing with my oldest son's getting caught smoking pot at school, otherwise known as the needling little things of life. I know that I am trivializing matters just a bit, but I'd rather do that than overreact to the situation, which everyone else in the "system" seems to want to do. I wish to assure my hundreds (thousands?) of dear readers that I am taking what the child (henceforth referred to as "dumbass") did seriously and am putting on a good show of anger, but that's probably all it is.

His school, which is to say the "old" school, took a slightly different approach. Dumbass needed to be made an example of, so the moved to expel him. Don't get me wrong here, I get that a 14 year old should not be smoking pot, and that to do so on campus, at 7:30 in the morning, is just plain stupid. I get that the school needed to deal with him especially because of his troubled past (last semester he stole a bag of chips from the lunch lady and ran) and I get that they want to show that they're doing everything to stop the scourge that is marijuana. I also get that, if polls are accurate, half of the adults in Dumbass's school, the teachers, principals, janitors (for sure) are getting high. Shit, it's almost recommended for Jr. High teachers. I'm not saying I shouldn't have had to beg my superintendent to take the boy into our school district, I shouldn't have had to take the child to a shrink, I shouldn't have to go to court with him for his "possession of paraphernalia" ticket (is that really a crime?), I shouldn't have to walk around like I'm profoundly worried and answer endless questions like: "Why do you think he did it?", "What else do you think he's doing?", "Why us?" I should have to do all of those things, but I do wish people would see the bigger picture.

Dumbass smoked pot on campus because he's 14. He doesn't love school, but he does love his pot-smoking, surfer friends and their older brothers/dealers. He likes cute, easy girls who like pot smoking surfer types. He will probably not be smoking much pot for the foreseeable future as he's getting drug tested once a month, no longer has access to facebook and will never hang out with most of his alleged friends again. He's in a new school and can find new pot-smokers to hang out with. In any case, I truly believe he's going to survive, and not just because it helps me to sleep at night. I'm glad the boy got caught and if there some deep psychological reason that Dumbass started to smoke pot, we will find it. I suspect there is none. I think he probably did it because it's fun and makes people laugh.

I'm writing this as I give a final to a group of junior year honor's students, all of whom look like they either need a bong load soon or they'll go on a violent bender. I don't have my head buried in the sand, but I know that teenagers in affluent America need a bit more fun in their lives. Either we find ways to provide it, or they will.

Don't Ask. Go to hell.

Whatever ails the world, from terrorists to North Koreans, drone bombs to the CIA, it's more than mildly comforting to know that at long last the war on cock suckers is over. I'm not bullshitting here; the repeal this evening of DADT is a major moment. This will be seen, historically, as more important than the end of Segregation in the South. I know how adsurd that sounds, but I believe it.

At the end of the day, more people are homophobic than racist. Nobody with half a brain (the amount alloted the average American) could ultimately, in the face of all the evidence, see a black human as anything but equal, but gay men or lesbian women are still incomprehensible and loathsome to the cousin-humping fucks who can fill their one operable care with more people than teeth, drive to the polls in Melba, KS and vote for Jesus. This repeal is not a small victory. It suggests, for the first time in a long time, that there are more of us than there are of them, more people who could care less what their neighbors do with their junk, more people who have a shred of sympathy, decency, understanding. Tennessee Williams wrote that he could accept anything human, any behaviour, any activity, so long as it wasn't cruel. He should know about cruelty having endured it throughout his "don't ask, don't tell" life. Hating gay and lesbian Americans, denying them their constitutional rights, including the right to die for their countrymen, was cruel.

The truth is, the is nothing less than a sea-change, a reminder that we are not done, that there are fights left to fight and people willing to fight them. Who knows what happens next. I doubt that the gay rights floodgates will finally open wide. It may be years before your gay neighbor can marry the man he loves, your lesbian aunt can acknowlege her love for a woman, but goddamit this is big and it's a start.

I feel light today. We may all still die from global warming, war, suicide, but the fucking aliens who find our ruins one day will have to acknowledge that we were moving to the light when the shit hit the fan. Thank god we live in a country where this change can happen. Forget that it took too long. Remember the countless gay men and lesbian women who sacrificed career and love of country because they dared to speak the love that dare not speak its name. This wasn't a Glee episode. It was the Joint Chiefs of Staff admitting the dick sucking isn't a crime and doesn't lead to cowardice.

My nephew is in his second year at Annapolis. He sent me a copy of an essay he just wrote for a class he's taking. His writting is brilliant and he earned the top score in his class and dinner with the Admiral for his efforts. The topic was vague: "Should any Americans be prevented from serving in the U.S. Military?" It's clear that the Academy is more than a little aware that it serves some gay students and that gay men and women are in the Navy. My nephew's essay argued eloquently, using Kant, etc. as evidence, for the immediate repeal of DADT on the grounds that it is unconstituional, unwise and unamerican. I'm as proud of this esssay, and of my nephew as I ever have been. His generation is better than mine and I ought to know. They are smarter, kinder and will leave the world a better place than they found it. In the words of the poet, "get out of the way if you can't lend your hand; for the times they are a changin'."

The Loyal Order

You can take the boy out of the wood paneled, poorly lit bar, but you can't take it out of the boy. Those exposed to Moose Lodges as children, at very early ages I might add, can never shake it. I remember practically growing up, in every way, in the Moose Lodge right off State Street in Santa Barbara. My grandmother would take me every day after two or so for happy hour, which at a Moose Lodge begins when the sun comes up and ends when the sun comes up. I would sit, stare at the wood paneling, drink my Roy Rogers ("Shirley Temples are for the bitches" I would say to my seven year old self) and play some sort of gambling game that predated modern scratchers. My grandmother would sit with three or four other retired, but still alive, friends and drink the afternoon away. If my brother was there, we would play in the parking lot, or slide on the dance floor. People still danced then, by which I mean all people, some well, some less so, but all people. On Friday nights, Marge would take me to the fish-fry at the Moose, which always meant fresh Red Snapper caught by her boyfriend, Lauren, who we all called speedy because he drove slower than a tax refund. Speedy's van was an old Dodge conversion, carpeted from floor to ceiling in a Tijuana body shop--shag carpet as far as the 10 year old eye could see, heaven. I didn't mind riding with Speedy and Marge because the inside of that van was like an afghan blanket, which is something you want in a town that never gets hot. So, Speedy caught the fish, fried it up every Friday night and we all went to the Moose Lodge for dinner and dancing. I had to dance with my grandmother, mother, aunts and any other old lady who thought I was cute, and I had all the cougars wanting a turn.

It makes sense then that my mom, who is now as old as my grandmother was then, who has recently gone through a year without a job, who is her mother's daughter, would join the El Segundo chapter of the Moose. It makes equal sense that she would volunteer to host the dinner for the month right out of the gate. Naturally, she asked my wife and me to help. In turn, we recruited a couple we know to come with and it was a party. I said to the husband of the couple who came with us that they are the only people I know who would say yes to making and serving dinner at a Moose Lodge to 75 retired Chevron and Hughes workers for no pay, unless you count the two free drinks from the bar and a free steak dinner. I have many friends, but J and A are special, the kind of people you want to be around, the kind you want to be like. So, with the wife and J and A, we made, served, remade and re-served 75 dinners for the octogenarian, blue-hairs who literally ate it up. I was on steak duty and only had to redo four. One sweet retiree asked my wife if she could meet me to tell me how much she liked the dinner. Now my wife is a believing soul and she let the lady in, prompting a fifteen minute lecture on how to cook a steak from a woman who was clearly wearing no bra, probably because they can't make them that big. Other than that, and one dirty old man hitting on my wife (do I have to kick an octogenarian's ass?), it was a good night. Sometime during the evening, my mother, whether it was the stress of a bad year, the tough time she's had with my sister, the nostalgia of the evening, crawled into a large bottle of questionable quality white wine and got blotto. For me, I was ten again, taking care of a drunk parent and not really feeling to bad about it. The wife and I hung around for an hour after dinner, drinking cheap liquor and trying to keep my mom in her chair. Then we piled her into the man van and unceremoniously dumped her off at her house. It was a fun night, a sketchy night, a night at the Moose.