In the City

Last night, I had to travel up from Manhattan to my childhood home in Yonkers to dig out my car. As I’ve mentioned before, we donated it to Habitat for Humanity NYC and I needed to do a few things before they pick it up today (clean out our stuff, drop off the title, keys, and radio, take pictures of the car for tax purposes). We were supposed to take care of this transaction a few weeks ago, but I couldn’t find the damn title, had to order a duplicate from the DMV, and then we were hit with snow. I almost avoided the trip when my mom graciously agreed to take care of all of this, but then my dad mentioned that the car was snow bound. Well, I certainly couldn’t ask my mom to dig it out (she’s in her mid-sixties and has early-stage Parkinson’s) and dad, well, he does a lot of heavy mental work (he’s a college professor and minister), but has never been one for physical labor. Long story short, he didn’t offer to dig it out, and I didn’t ask.

So, I hit the #4 train to Woodlawn after dinner (6:30 pm) and I was barreling toward my destination until we tried to enter the last few stations. We sat outside of Bedford Park Boulevard for ten minutes, then outside Mosholu for another ten, and finally about fifteen to twenty minutes outside of Woodlawn (the MTA is doing some sort of construction work on the station). If they tried to pull this crap below 96th Street, the riders would have bum rushed the engineer’s compartment, but irregular service is standard operating procedure out here. No one even worked up an annoyed sigh.

When I finally hit the street, I checked the Westchester “Bee Line” bus timetable on the sign post, which stated that the bus that will take me within a few blocks of the house will arrive at 7:55 pm. Mom and dad are out for the evening, so no one is waiting for me among the double parked cars under the El. A guy with a car that doesn’t have TLC plates offers his “taxi” services in halting English. I politely decline. Ten minutes pass and the bus does not appear as scheduled. A tipsy man and his pre-teen kid come out of a livery town car across the street. (The racetrack is only a few miles north of here and is the destination of many a livery cab.) The man loudly mentions his urgent need to hit the head. The corner bar accommodates him. People walk in and out of the pizzeria next door. Talk on the pay phone outside (“Where are you?!”). A few more trains pull in over us and their passengers flow down the stairs and disappear down quiet side streets. Another ten minutes pass, and the White Plains bus rolls up. I hop on, as it at least will get me to the city line. I could walk it, but there is a desolate ¾ of a mile stretch that cuts through the most northern tip of Van Cortlandt Park. With all the deep icy snow on what passes for a sidewalk, I’d have to walk in the road, which I did once a few winters ago, and nearly got hit by some buses, as they whipped along this stretch of urban/suburban no-man’s land.

Once I’m over the city line and off the bus, I have about another ¾ of a mile to walk, which is fine, but creepy. Hardly anyone walks around here at night, especially a bitterly cold one, and even though it is suburban and safe, I’m almost more guarded than I am in the city. So no tunes on the iPod to liven my pace as I hike up and down the hills of Yonkers.

I reach the old homestead at 8:30 pm – it took two freakin’ hours to go about 12 miles – and then spend less than five minutes freeing the car from its ice prison. (Thanks, dad.) I clean out the car, fill out the title transfer info, snap some pix of the car, and manage to catch the 9:31 pm bus (which shows up on time) back to the Bronx.

Few people of means ride the buses in Yonkers (it’s car city, baby) during the day, so it should come as no shock that the night bus is a strange ride. It’s either folks headed off to work, or the drunk, stoned, or deranged. The steps at the rear exit always smell like pee. But, tonight is quiet and painless. Everyone spread out far apart on the warm, brightly lighted articulated bus as it effortlessly runs its course. Friday nights on the night bus can have a particular edge to them, folks with pockets full of cash and bloodstreams brimming with chemicals. It could be a mellow party or a rolling brawl. One night bus I took a few summers ago was so filled with boozers, we could have fueled it on the fumes.

I’m always surprised by the number of people on the #4 train headed to Manhattan or Brooklyn on a cold weeknight. Where is everyone headed? No one wants trouble, so everyone hunkers down, hoods pulled up, hats pulled down, eyes shut or fixed on the linoleum, ears alert. I’ll make eye contact with people on the train during the day, but nighttime looking invites trouble. No one bothers you when you’re digging through a story about India’s Bollywood, which is what I do. A guy with a boom box walks on at Bedford Park Boulevard, and blasts some surprisingly good Jungle and Techno music that mixes in what sounds like 70s blaxploitation film music (lots of strings). No one seems to mind the beats. (And I miss the music when he steps off at 125th Street. I’d been tempted to ask him the name of the DJ, but didn’t want to risk making a scene if inquiries weren’t welcome.) A really sharp-dressed guy in his twenties saunters on at 149th Street, stoned into bliss, a sweetly satisfied smile on his lips, headphones clamped to ears, and eyes as shut as they can be while still letting in the light.

The doors mechanically pop open at 86th Street at around 10:15, and clumps of white people pour on to head to the Village (East or West), SoHo, and beyond to hit the nightlife. For a moment, I feel both young and old. Old because I’m beat from the day, the week, the years – and I’m headed home instead of out (and don’t really mind it). Young from the muscle memory of relying on fragile spider webs of outer borough public transportation to carry me in and out of Manhattan when I was too young to drive or too cash strapped to own a car. Suspended in time, place, and age. The cold wind on Lexington Avenue strips those feelings away and I’m back in my element, happy that I don’t have to deal with the futile exercise of alternate side parking – or using public transportation to Yonkers -- for the foreseeable future.

Happy that I’m headed home to my family in the city.

Free Yourself...

Dear Education Secretary Margaret Spellings:

Why are you a homophobe? And why are we spending our hard-won tax-dollars to pay you to misinterpret the commonly-held definitions of diversity and tolerance? They include people of all races, ethnicity, religion, gender, age, and sexual orientation, dear. You’d think you could find more to do on your second day on the job than go after “Postcards from Buster” for showing a family that has lesbian mothers. Have you ever even seen the show? It’s quite sweet, really – and they have visited evangelical Christians and Mormons on previous shows, so you can’t accuse them of favoring a liberal “agenda.”

Instead of wading into the stupid culture wars, how about making sure that the nation’s schools are well-supplied and that its teachers are well-paid? My wife and I end up donating a fair amount of money each year to our son’s school PTA for classroom supplies, to pay assistant teachers, and to hold arts, science, and Spanish classes. This is on top of the high taxes we pay to the city, state, and feds.

So, I respectfully request that you stop demonizing gay people, get yourself to a diversity training workshop pronto, and publicly seek forgiveness from all Americans for your disgustingly un-American display of ignorance and hatred.

Your fellow American,

Familyman
New York City

Accidents will Happen

A few notes on the continuing uproar over abortion:

1) The anti-choice people always scream that pro-choice people are for killing babies. Well, they are actually fetuses, and if you were to take a fetus out of the woman’s uterus at the point when most abortions are done (according to the CDC, 88% are performed within the first trimester), the fetus would die (this is where the umbilical cord, placenta, uterus, and rest of the woman’s body come into play). Near term fetuses are rarely aborted, except in extreme cases when the woman’s health is threatened, or if it turns out that the fetus has some horrible abnormality not previously detected. So, even though it seems like I’m playing semantic games, I’m not. There are many medical and legal differences between a fetus and a baby, so the antis should clean up their act. When we’re talking abortion, we’re talking fetuses.

2) Are fetuses people? No. They are developing human beings that cannot survive outside of their mother’s womb (until very late in a pregnancy, and even then, only with lots of medical intervention). They are people, with rights as individuals and citizens AFTER they are born (and many of their rights, like the right to vote, are not accorded until they are adults). Some would argue that all life is sacred…but clearly it is not. We wage “just” wars that happen to kill and maim innocent children as a byproduct. We repeatedly fail to address famine and genocide and the AIDS epidemic all over the world. Countless children die in impoverished countries because we have failed to immunize them against preventable childhood diseases. Our government essentially ignores millions of American children in poverty, failing to provide them with adequate health care, education, housing, and even food. How many children languish in our nation’s foster care system? How many non-white orphans are out there waiting to be adopted? Even the Catholic Church, which is generally against capital punishment, does make allowances that there are times executing someone is justified! Can’t we focus some of this “fetus love” on these enormous problems that affect millions of our fellow human beings that already have been born? And what about preventing unwanted pregnancies in the first place? Let’s leave aside all the moral judgments about people having sex outside of marriage or when they are teenagers, or if people should have sex for reasons other than procreation, etc. What about making sure that if people want to have sex and don’t want it to result in a pregnancy, that we provide them with all of the accurate information and condoms/birth control pills they need? Seems like a simple solution to making abortion rare, if you ask me. Yet the antis are against emergency contraception, the birth control pill, and condoms (even masturbation)!

3) I’ve read a bunch of quotes from anti-abortion youth born after 1973 who call themselves post-Roe “survivors.” (I was born in 1966 to an unmarried 19 year-old woman and put up for adoption, but could have ended up being aborted illegally and I don’t call myself a survivor…though many people back then would have called me “illegitimate” or a “bastard” and my birth mother a “whore,” “slut,” and worse.) Well, kids, your parents CHOSE to have you, for whatever reason they made that’s none of my damn business…it’s not like abortion doctors were roaming hospital delivery wards, randomly killing fetuses before they were born, or King Herod decreed that all first born male babies should be killed. The government didn’t tell your parents whether to keep you, offer you up for adoption, or to abort you. Spare me your hysterics. Grow up, get out into the world. Things are much more complex and complicated than you imagine. (I’m always amazed by the right wing’s capacity for embracing victimhood...somehow Christianity is always under attack and good evangelical Christians are always being wronged by not being able to impose their beliefs on the rest of us).

4) Why don’t we trust women to make their own decisions? We don’t trust them if they decide they want birth control or an abortion, but we’ll trust/expect the very same women to raise their children to be good, productive members of society. If these women are “morally corrupt” enough to want the pill, how do we know that when they are having babies, they are not churning out little godless pagans?

5) Finally, I’ve read about this supposed “Roe effect” theory that declares that the country is becoming steadily more conservative because liberal people are aborting great numbers of their offspring. What a load of crap. It’s estimated that 35% of American women 45 and younger have had abortions. That’s one in four women. And they aren’t all atheist, liberal, Democrats who live in New York City or San Francisco. Some of them are red state soccer moms who go to church and help out at the PTA. In fact, in terms of numbers of abortions performed in each state, a surprising number of red states like Texas, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia are in the top ten. (A little sidebar here, Mississippi, which has only one abortion clinic and the most restrictions on abortion of any state in the Union has the highest rate of infant mortality in the U.S. -- and rates of infant mortality are higher in red states than blue!) I have two kids and I know plenty of great liberal folks who are having or adopting kids (some of them are even gay parents! Shock, horror!)…I even know many women who had abortions and went on to give birth to many kids. The country is becoming more conservative because there has been a strong, organized effort by the right wing over the past 30 years to drag this country back into the stone ages -- not because abortion is wiping out generations of liberals.

God Save the Queen

Ex-Senator Gary Hart has written a commentary for the Independent that succinctly lays out the great harm the Bushies intend to inflict on this great democracy over the next four years. We can only hope that circumstances beyond their control hinder their dark agenda (and the Dems can avoid the Body Snatcher pods left in their offices and actually muster some opposition to the GOP). Here's the first paragraph of Senator Hart's piece:

Today's inauguration of George Bush will be all about his vision for uniting America. Three radical forces will colour the second term. The first is represented by those concerned to dismantle America's social security system, the cornerstone of the Rooseveltian New Deal and the heart of the United States' social safety net. The second by those attempting to remake the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court, the fulcrum for institutionalising the cultural agenda of the religious right. The third is represented by those seeking to salvage the neo-conservative project to bring democracy to the Arab world at the point of a bayonet.

This all seems blatantly obvious to those of us who read multiple sources of news each day, but we need to be perfectly clear about what's going to happen (just like we could see the Iraq invasion coming right on the heels of Afghanistan...the "war on terror" = "all war all the time") and resist this radical plot against America with all of our might!

Otherwise...well, it's going to be like 1984 meets the Handmaid's Tale.

But worse.

Invisible Sun

Perhaps my daughter F is a distant relative of the ancient Egyptian deity Nut, who swallowed the sun at the end of every day and gave birth to it every morning (from www.pantheon.org):

The ancient Egyptian sky-goddess, one of the Ennead of Heliopolos. She is the personification of the sky and of the heavens, the daughter of Shu and Tefnut.

Nut was the barrier separating the forces of chaos from the ordered cosmos in this world. The god Re was said to enter her mouth after setting in the evening and travel through her body during the night to be reborn from her vulva each morning. She also swallows the stars and has them reborn later. In the death cult she plays a part in the resurrection of the dead; she is portrayed on the inside of the lids of the sarcophagi. The pharaoh was said to enter her body after death, from which he would later be resurrected.

As sky-goddess Nut was portrayed as a naked woman covered with painted stars, held up by Shu. Thus she forms the firmament above her husband Seb, the earth. Her fingers and toes were believed to touch the four cardinal points or directions.

Now with our little ancient Egyptian religion lesson out of the way, I have to confess to being lax in ranting about the confirmation hearings for Alberto “Torture Guy/International Law is for the Little People” Gonzales and Condi “Mushroom Clouds/Bin Laden Determined to Attack U.S.” Rice, as well as the lavish coronation of George Dubya “I Actually Won this Time and am Gonna Whoop It Up in my Boots Even though it’s Wartime and all my Policies are Unmitigated Disasters” Bush. Well, kids, you too can betray everything good this country stands for, be rewarded handsomely, and no one gives a damn.

I mourn for our nation.

Walking on the Moon

Whenever my two year-old daughter F sees the moon, or if you ask he what you do with it, she proudly exclaims, “I eat it!” None of us know where she came up with that notion, but it works for me.

War Ina Babylon

Well, Georgie…how daya feel…got some egg on yer face now, don’tcha?  Finally had to call it quits and admit that no WMDs were found in Iraq after almost two years of scouring that dusty country from top to bottom.  All those Chicken Little cacklings about mushroom clouds and imminent threats to God-fearing, White, Christian-Americans were a bit short of the truth, weren’t they?  (Even though you trusted that Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Tenent were God’s way of telling you to do His will in Iraq).  Turns out that nasty Saddam didn’t even have the capability of producing any biological, chemical, or nuclear WMDs after Pops kicked his ass in the Gulf War (and the UN inspectors kept him check). 

But it was all worth it, right?  FREEDOM IS ON THE MARCH!  A murderous, mad dictator has been vanquished!  (Never mind that Saddam was our ally during the almost decade-long Iran-Iraq war and Ronald Reagan supplied him with chemical weapons!)  You’ve given the Iraqi people the divine gift of DEMOCRACY.  All the billions of taxpayer dollars, the tens of thousands of Americans and Iraqis killed or wounded, and the complete destruction of a sovereign nation’s infrastructure were worth it, right?!  Who cares that we alienated our allies and have swelled the ranks of fundamentalist Islamic terrorists?  Who cares that we've trashed international law and the Geneva Convention in our "war on terror?"  We can torture and “disappear” anyone we damn well want to, right?!  We're righteous! Hell, we're gonna start up our own death squads in Iraq like we did in El Salvador to smack down the evildoers! Nobody else can tell us what to do now…we’re the ONLY GOD-DAMN SUPERPOWER and GOD IS ON OUR SIDE!  Right…? 

What?  Social Security is in imminent danger of failing and we need to borrow $2 trillion and dismantle the system to save it?!  Power on, O Great Leader!!! Clearly, you cannot fail!

The Dead Next Door

Oh the humanity of it all...my wife just told me that not only am I snoring like a bloody freight train every night, now I've begun moaning! Not like I'm in the throes of passion, mind you, but like a Return of the Living Dead zombie craving brains. The worst part is that our neighbor's bedroom is right next to our living room and the walls ain't thick (we could hear the previous tenants shagging like we were sitting on their bed). So not only do they hear my kids screaming at 6 am every morning, they hear me snoring and moaning all night. I'm begging my wife to swap sleeping spaces tonight...

It's My Ambition to Have Ambition

If I may, allow me to wallow in befouled puddles of self-pity for a moment.

My wife and I had one of those “what are you going to do with your life” conversations over the holidaze. While I fought my natural instinct to change the subject (and I’m mighty damn good at that, mind you), I confessed that I really didn’t have any career goals or dreams. I’m the marketing manager for the planned giving office at a non profit, and have done proposal writing for their major gifts department. But I’m really not going anywhere. Just treading water.

My wife challenged me to state my dream job…and I couldn’t come up with one(!). She was bug-eyed with disbelief, I tell you, and I was feeling nothing but shame, like I had somehow emasculated myself (what real man doesn’t have his eye on the prize?). And for any semi-ideal jobs that I might toy around with in my head, I can spout out a dozen reasons (fears) why I’d fail at each endeavor.

I’m also heartbroken over the best job I ever had (my wife J says, “get over it!”) that went so sour at the end (director of marketing at a now-defunct indie record label). Even though that was five years ago, time hasn’t healed me yet. J wants me to find the passion for work that I once had (see social work and music below), instead of settling for clockwatcher that I’ve become.

After college, I fell into social work (helping people with mental illness who had been homeless), then did the incredible music industry gig, followed by some advertising production work at a magazine (and a digital-download internet label that I started up on the side that went bust after two years), and a string of marketing and development jobs at some non profits. Instead of climbing up the ladder all these years, I’ve been hanging from the rungs, swinging across the monkey bars, lunging at the opportunities that crop up in front of me.

You know the cubicle adage that you should dress for the job you want? I have no idea what to wear…

Overpowered by Funk

Now that the holidaze are over, I can settle in to my usual seasonal affective disorder (whose apt acronym is SAD). Despite my being an agnostic (really, I’m afraid to declare myself an atheist due to family circumstances – dad’s a minister, mom is Church Lady -- and who knows if I’ll be able to make this declaration in the future, as we lurch toward a evangelical Christian theocracy), I like Christmas and appreciate all that it represents (you know, the Jesus stuff, love, redemption, etc.), but the gray days and black ink winter nights tend to bum me out on a chemical level. I suspect that thousands of years ago my peeps used to find a good cave to crawl into and sleep ‘till April or May. No daily grind for them.

In the interest of full disclosure, dear reader, I’m struggling with how much of myself to reveal here, as I’m a pretty secretive (read: insecure, self-loathing) person. Obviously, there already is some built-in anonymity to this blog, and I’m careful not to include too many identifying or revealing details to protect the innocent and guilty alike. But I’m having trouble sharing right now. I will, however, forge ahead and attempt to smash this writer’s block/blue mood….

Ever since I came down with a cold before Christmas, my snoring at night has become so freakin’ loud that I’m banished to the living room couch (otherwise, the wife can’t sleep, and that’s no good). To be honest, the snoring has been a problem before I was sick (and the doc said I need to drop some of the daddy poundage to eliminate it), but it is now worse than ever. So, when the weather permits (or I don’t wimp out), I’ve started running again at night (the half-way mark on my run is a poster of Jennifer Garner on a phone kiosk in the 70s…yowza, pant-pant, woof-woof, hubba-hubba!) and have cut out all snacks, etc. at night. Root for me, dammit! Gotta lose the fat, work the heart, and flood the brain with all-natural happy juice that will kick out the funk.