dealing, pt. 1

Suffered a flash of agoraphobia today. I was in a music store, and it hit me that there were just too many people around. I started to go into a bit of tunnel vision and felt light-headed.

Later, this evening, I began to have waves of anxiety about what happened--about what could have happened and, at an even more basic level, just the fact that I was shot. That simple, unchangeable fact is enough to haunt me right now. Whoever thought a basic two-by-four would be a life-saver?

life or death

I posted this at MySpace, but it can't hurt to post here too. I will add as things change...


I am now a certified hero, at least that's what everybody from neighbors to coworkers to the news to hospital workers are saying. I guess that's true, considering what could have happened.

For now, these are the facts: On Sunday night, two men followed my neighbor as she drove in off the alley. My friend Phil and I were on the porch, watching her park her car. When the men started demanding her bag and pulled a gun, I started yelling at them to leave her alone. The man holding the gun turned and fired two shots. One hit the side of the house and one went through a two-by-four and hit me. The bullet penetrated my shoulder, narrowly missing my arteries, throat, esophagus and lungs. It stopped in the muscles under my clavicle and will remain there until the doctors feel it is extractable. Anna did not wake up, though her bedroom is a matter of feet away. She didn't even wake up as the firemen arrived from the fire station around the corner, and the paramedics and police began swarming the entry to our house. I was taken to the trauma unit under full lights and sirens because the EMTs feared where the bullet might travel and whether the shock my body had gone into would cause cardiac arrest. After I was stabilized and the wound was determined not to be life-threatening, I was admitted to the hospital.

For the next day and a half, more tests were done and X-Rays and CT scans taken. On Tuesday, I was released, and for the last two days, Anna and I have laid low with another family to avoid the media attention and recoup a bit. I also wanted to wait until at least one of the suspects was in police custody--news I received this morning. We are back home now, and I am confronting major questions about what we do next--whether we stay in this house any longer--and how much I need to rely on the kindness of friends and family to manage the big and little tasks of life--you never realize how tiring things like dishes and laundry can be until small repetitive tasks cause pain.

As for the hero question, I will leave it alone for now. My neighbor Lindee is alive and safe. I am injured but extraordinarily lucky for what could have happened. My daughter remains the light of my life. One foot in front of the other...

fits and starts

That pretty much describes how often I work on or update this blog. And it pretty much describes life in general right now.

Banana and I are cruising the weeks and the new custody arrangement with fewer and fewer hiccups. Mornings go easier most days, and she seems to be genuinely happy most of the time. I wish I could say the same for myself.

The emotional triage I have to do on a regular basis gets a little tiresome, but it's necessary. When you lose your partner--especially a partner you willingly brought back into your life--it seems like the days just stretch out and all you're doing is surviving. But then there's the matter of having the partner on the edges of your life--hearing reports of friends who run into her, having her try to edge back in in small ways, even just having to explain to people what the shape of your life really is. It's exhausting in spiritual and physical ways.

One of the worst parts, however, is having no real release for all of the feelings that roil about. Drinking is a lousy approach--and one that I've used too often. Finding small releases like trips or hikes are good, but they don't really accumulate the peace of mind that I miss.The real release I want some days is the chance to scream at the ex, to spill on her all the vitriol I'm feeling, to take her apart for what she's done to Banana and me, to rip into her about what all of my friends really think of her, to scream in a soul-cleansing tirade. But, even if there were a chance to do this, it would probably do more harm than good. After all the victim of any of this fall out would be Banana.

It's all a matter of time and babysteps, I suppose. Just like learning to keep the house in good order, and my bank accounts in good order; just like learning to take proactive steps to build a better life as a single dad; just like that, it's a matter of doing the emotional and practical triage to get past the worst of the feelings. After all, as I told a friend this morning after we dropped our kids off, at least I'm finally learning to accept that she had a breakdown and that it wasn't about me. He laughed. "We all knew that," he said, "and if you didn't figure it out, we would have told you."

community parenting, pt 1

Random moments are the best.

Banana and I headed to one of our usual joints for dinner after work. I was fried and had exhausted most of the dinner options at home. The grocery store was a proposition I didn't want to mess with, not to mention the dishes that still needed to be finished. (These are the occasional joys of single parenting.)

At said restaurant, a hip sushi joint near our house, we ran into our closest parent-and-kid friends. As it turned out, they were waiting for another family of mutual friends. Suddenly, the night had a whole different shape, and in the end, we were five parents and five kids. The kids had a great time. The parents all had a good time until Parent D decided her five year-old had had enough. Her husband (Parent E) stayed with the other two kids. In general, the dynamic functioned like this: we all watched all of the kids; we all managed difficulties and policed each other's kids; there were no boundaries.

This is what community is meant to be. This is what Hillary Clinton meant when she wrote It Takes a Village. We are not just responsible for ourselves. We are responsible for our community. The end result is in how the kids deal with the world. When Kid 2 fell, I picked her up, and she clung to me until she was ready to get back to play. When Banana was being a little contentious, other parents corrected her. That's how it should work. Kids need a world that both loves them and holds them in check--and that isn't just the two people most responsible for rearing them.

As a single dad, I am realizing that I have to accept this more than most. Oy.

ethics and politics -- silliness

According to Nancy Pelosi, Iraq is the greatest moral and ethical issue facing the American people today. The greatest...

I have to agree that Iraq is an important moral and ethical issue, but it is unequivocally not the most important. No. There are too many moral and ethical issues be-deviling us as a society. Certainly Al Gore is right when he describes global warming as the most important moral and ethical issue facing us. Certainly those who look at the health care debacle in this country as the most important moral and ethical issue facing us have a point. Do I need to go any further?

Any of these issues affect our future and our children's future greatly. Shouldn't our greatest moral and ethical obligation be trying to leave a better world for our children? Neither more wars, nor bigger cars, nor richer HMOs will achieve this. It's beyond sad.

Sigh... another idealist fades into the night.

wilco

Okay, back to more interesting matters...

Anyone who is around me lately knows that Wilco is almost certainly my favorite band. I practically worship the ground Tweedy walks on--the first Loose Fur album was a deep and wonderful soundtrack through some very tough times. Anyway, a good friend (thanks, Berkley!) gave me the Wilco book for Christmas. Funny thing about it: the more I read, the more I like them. Their low-fi approach to creating really remarkable music matches with my aesthetics in some powerful ways--for instance, insisting on using an old Royal manual for type effects rather than finding a font that almost approximates the look.

Saddam's Executed

This will be brief. I am very curious to hear the rationale behind the bum's rush to execute Mr. Hussein as quickly as they possibly could. No question that he was a bad man, but what political motive is there behind making this happen weeks earlier than they'd originally said? Why this Friday-before-a-long-weekend surprise? Is it a smokescreen?

Too much music

Sonic Youth is one of those bands I love, but I own none of their work. There's no good reason they've never landed in my CD collection. Now, though, I wonder why I would even bother. I still love the music, but they've got so many albums, I have no idea where I'd even start.

What an irritating dilemma for someone who loves music as much as I do.

MySpace is the devil

There's really nothing more to say. The whole web of MySpace sucks you in, and it becomes like Tetris. You have to check it. You have to check your friends profiles. You have to surf for new people, and then in the end, it's all just a waste of time--precious time.

Why is so much of our life spent trying to find new ways to waste time?

The pink will win. All hail the pink.

Daddytypes nailed the fears many of us have about color branding. When the princess was getting ready to come out, we let family and friends know that we didn't want everything to be girl-specific. We didn't want to raise a Disney Princess from the bassinet on, all swathed in pinks and bows.

Though we got a few outfits that came with those absurd little headbands, we never put one on her. When she was old enough to choose her favorite things to wear--somewhere between ten months and a year--the favorites were unisex Patagonia pieces we had picked up on sale at the outdoors store in Fayetteville. Other favorites were unisex-tending-toward-girly pieces from Zaetano. Then, as Daddytypes found out, somewhere between 18 and 30 months it all changed.

By two and a half, she was a girl. She wanted nothing but dresses and skirts. Pink and purple were suddenly, and vocally, her favorite colors. Barbie entered her life, soon followed by the first of her Disney princesses. I fought it for a while, until I resigned myself to the fact that there was no way out. The pink-hegemony branding machine is simply too strong, unless the child lives in a complete bubble--never goes to school, never sees TV or a movie.

Then again, I've also begun to think about genetic predispositions. The boys at the playground inevitably seem drawn to gun play and rough-housing. The girls inevitably seem drawn to comparing shoes and playing in social groups.

It just begs the question: do we (and society/business) begin the preferences or is there a built-in preference?

A Dog's Life

This is Reilly:

He's a hell of a dog. He is also a neurotic mess lately.

At least once a week I have to clean up an "accident." It always happens on a day he hasn't gotten enough attention or when the princess is around, and sometimes overnight. It is also always in the same general place--near the princess's art table.

He has also taken to digging into the trash and strewing it about the bathroom. This sort of thing hasn't happened since I adopted him seven years ago. Then, he made trails of trash through my little house until I started locking the trash away.

Granted, there have been a huge number of transitions in our lives lately. My wife came back, and then left again. A cat came and left. The princess started school. My work schedule got busier. It's a lot for a person to process, let alone a dog. I keep wondering whether there is any solution short of hiring someone to take him out during the day. Maybe I should just go back to advertising, get a job at one of the agencies where everyone brings their dogs in. A dad can dream...

Ack, management!

After two-plus years, I am finally facing the conflict between being the creative director and a middle manager at a state university. It is, to say the least, not a comfortable position.

We have developed a culture in my office that has nothing to do with clock-punching. We are around during standard business hours, and we get an incredible amount of really good work done. Our designs are among the best I've ever worked on; our web development will set new standards for the kind of university we are. And despite all of this, I face occasional pressure about making sure we are in the office when we are supposed to be. From an administrative standpoint, I guess I understand the problem--the bean-counters worry that we might be abusing our latitude.

And here's where the culture clash really comes in for me. I have yet to know a good, dedicated creative who blew things off. If you get into this business, you do so because you give a shit about details and you get off on producing good work on deadline. It's just a part of our character. We go the extra mile in part because creative work rarely happens only between the hours of eight and four. Oh, and most people in this business do what we do because we like it.

So where does this leave us? I like where I am right now, and I like my team. I'm not looking for another job, and I don't want them to either. The trick will be continuing to navigate an institutional culture that is at odds with the design culture we have developed in the office.

how times change...

In 1991, when King George the Elder began beating the drums of war, a good many of my friends were adamant in their opposition to military action. War wasn't the answer, they chanted. No blood for oil, they insisted. In contrast to them were the Zionists who believed that Saddam Hussein needed to be removed from Kuwait and hopefully from power by any means necessary. There were a good many campus debates, some louder than others. And when it came to wider action, many of my friends went to Washington to protest the war--hundreds of thousands of people marching against a military action for which there was at least justification, even if we didn't exactly like the idea.

But what happens during the reign of King George the Junior? As the protest drums begin to beat, law enforcement officials from the federal to the local governments pull on their gauntlets and wipe the dust off their riot shields. Warnings are issued that protestors are every bit as dangerous as terrorists--and far easier to find. In an astonishing destruction of our constitutionally protected rights of free speech and assembly, the government has fomented a climate where free speech in the name of dissent is equal to treason, and even equated with the murder of three thousand unwitting people. What is also astonishing, however, is the silence of the media, lawmakers, and general public.

What's the chance this'll make Fox News?

Weapons programs in Iraq ended after the first Gulf War, who'd've thunk it? I bet this story won't get much play in the U.S. media...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3556714.stm

Fire and police strike?

So here's a frightening scenario: you decide to throw a four day party for thousands of people. That particular party will draw hundreds of thousands of protestors ranging from peaceful marchers to anarchists. The general climate is one of fear (of dissent as much as terrorism). In control of the city where the protest will be held is a Republican mayor determined to keep order in the face of all of those pesky people who thought they had constitutionally protected rights of free speech and assembly. Now, say this same mayor is at odds with 8,000 firefighters and 23,000 police who are threatening wildcat strikes during this not-so-little shindig. So what happens if two-thirds of the people the mayor counts on to keep the protestors under wraps suddenly don't go to work? Who does the mayor call?

Interesting question. The possibility of a strike has made the media, but I haven't seen coverage of backup plans should it happen. Anyone care to venture 1968 as an example of what might happen?

Why, oh why isn't the major media taking them to task?

Cheney lied and continues to lie about Iraq and Al Qaeda. He stonewalled and continues to stonewall about his energy advisory board. He tells Sen. Patrick Leahy to "go fuck [him]self." Bush lies about Kerry's votes, and cheerfully obfuscates about Iraq. The mouthpieces for the administration--whether McLellan, Ridge, or the entire staff of FoxNews--freely distort facts and produce lies about everything from Kerry's past to their own policies.

But not one report I've seen in a major media outlet has taken them to task the way they need to be. Where are the Woodwards and Bernsteins now. It's not enough for the NY Times to issue a mea culpa for their coverage, when so much is going so wrong.

Sure, you could argue that there are plenty of editorial writers out there. But how much impact does the op-ed page have compared to the front page.

For crissakes, Clinton was impeached because he got a blowjob from a chubby, needy intern, and he lied about it. That's criminal? Amoral, yes. But criminal? Hardly.

Now, in the name of a trumped up war and the blood of thousands, is there any question this administration has done far worse. So where are the indictments for the lies told by the Bush administration? Where are the charges for sending thousands of young men and women to death and permanent disfigurement in the name of grudges, profit, and hubris? This is wrong, dammit, and the fourth estate has turned into a meek little lapdog in the court of Mad King George III and his evil Viziers.

Makes me so angry I want to scream. But then I would be accused of being un-American. After all: we wouldn't want dissent in a democracy, would we?

Brilliant, just brilliant...

So, here's an idea for how you SHOULDN'T fight a war on terrorism: be so impatient to announce the capture of a high value target (something the Bushies desperately wanted during the DNC so as to take the shine off Kerry's party) that you blow the cover of a mole who might actually have helped lead us to the person who really WAS responsible for September 11th. Surely the announcement of his name--not for political reasons, of course--would look good; never mind the fact that anyone who was in any way linked to him would go even further underground and any plans that he might have been involved in would likely be scuttled. Sort of raises an important question: what's the high value target here--poll numbers or killers? Of course, should anyone question the motives, there's a simple response: lie until there's another news story to cover your asses. Thanks Karl and Condi.


http://www.misleader.org/daily_mislead/Read.asp?fn=df08102004.html

How many Americas are there?

First, there was the North and the South. Then, a few years ago, it was Red America and Blue America. Now, there is John Edwards class-conscious meme of two Americas.

But the bipolar divisions can be so much richer: Democratic and Republican. Minority and majority. Black and white. Pro-choice and Anti-abortion. Vanilla and chocolate. Tortes and apple pies. Starbucks and Maxwell House. Walmart and Target. Organic versus processed. Poor versus rich. West versus East. New York City and Bentonville. LA and Portland. Flatlanders and hill people. Country and city. The New York Times and Fox News. Old and young. Minis and Hummers. Urban renovators and exurban McMansioneers. Greens and liberaterians. Federalists and socialists. Patriots and patriots. The NRA and gun victims. On and on and on.

Really though, there is only one "America" that gives the symbology life: the world of the big box store and pure consumption. Commerce is what creates our society and what drives it, from television to the names of roads built into new developments. The utopian ideal of a society where everyone has the same opportunities is simply the kitsch that our presidential candidates spin in different directions--bootstrappers versus nurturers. And in the classic truth of kitsch, this flag-waving picture simply hides the shit.

The shit is that there are more Americas than any of us know what to do with. It's not just about red and blue, or city and country, or black and white. Rather, the division is much broader, region to region, or even state to state. Cultures and even language change. Signifiers change. Political and social concerns change. All of it to such an extreme that it does not seem inaccurate to say that a Mainer and an Arkansan share nothing more in national identity than the ability to shop in the same stores, eat the same foods, and watch the same television shows. This is not to say that the shibboleth of national identity cannot evolve into a cohesive, nuanced culture, but it's not going to happen as long as our ethos relies on consumerist lemmings doing the bidding of brand managers.

In other news, so many of us are apoplectic over the lies and slander of Fox News, but what of the New York Times's kid glove approach to Bush's lies. Sure, they apologized for their coverage of the lead-up to war--but as a cursory survey of the blogosphere and the AP wire will show, they have let too many follow-up stories pass without notice. Sandy Berger anyone?

A thought while watching the first night of the 2004 Democratic Convention

One hundred years ago, TR worked to break the hold of corporations on American life. He almost succeeded. Now, however, every aspect of our life seems driven by corporate interests, not the needs and expectations of people. As a society, we need to change this. The corporate hold on every aspect of our lives needs to be examined and changed. Calvin Coolidge knew what he was saying when he said, "The business of America is business." But being right does not always mean being correct.

just imagine...

What if we lived in a world where the powerful (for example: those who run large corporations and governments) decided to make the populace sick, frightened, and stupid? What would it take? Food that is processed so as to have lost any real nutritional value; meat so inundated with hormones and antibiotics that children's bodies develop earlier and medicines become less effective; constant warnings that anything and everything can harm us, but no suggestion that we should change our habits in any way; an education system that seeks to dumb everything down to an anti-intellectual pedagogical stance that the right answer is all that matters. Okay, so that's a disingenuous approach, since we already live in such a world.

There are those conspiracy theorists out there who believe that somewhere in a room in Skull & Bones a cabal of freemasons is deciding all of these things in an effort to destroy the world in a craven chase for ever-greater wealth. I'm not one of these theorists--though every time I bring up an example of corporate mendacity and irresponsibility with my step-father, he gets irritated and suggests that I drop my conspiracy theories. So, to address the question briefly, since I think corporations and some in the government do, in fact, look for ways to to turn us into addicted lemmings, metaphorically willing to jump off a cliff after the next fast food promotion, here it is: I do not think the corporate heads gather together to plot how to ensure the longevity of American conspicuous consumptiion, but I do think that there is an unacknowledged assumption that well-informed, healthy people are bad for business.

After all, it is fair to say, I think, that the various food processing corporations would rather not admit to consumers exactly how the food is made, what it consists of, and what it really does to a person's body. It is also fair to say, I think, that clothing companies would rather not sell higher quality clothing because their whole business model is built on a puerile craving for new clothes with each seasonal shift. And the intelligence question? Is there any doubt that an informed populace might actually ask questions before making choices? But we are not that society. Rather we are apparently the society that praises the folksy guy who doesn't seem too smart. We appreciate ignorance as much as we like our high fructose corn syrup.