Happy To Be Tagged

I have recently been “tagged” by two different people.

Let me start by saying that I love these things. I love them because they let me talk about myself. I also enjoy learning about what the Boss calls my “internet friends”. You people. The people I kind-of-know through the blogosphere.

We used to do these question posts on LiveJournal, back in the paleoblogic. The form has waxed and waned here on M*d*um over the years. I’ve seen this trick before, but I haven’t seen it in a while. For the record, I am not one of the “early adopters” of M*d*um (I’m no Tim Boucher), but I’ve been here since 2015. That’s long enough to watch a stream of humanity come and go. As I often say to Tre L. Loadholt, “We’re still here, man.” I’ve got no better place to go. In case you were wondering, here is a link to my first post:

I found that link only because I’ve linked to it a thousand times before. It’s very hard to find your old stories on M*d*um. To find them, you have to remember enough about them to do a Google search. That first post is under a compost pile of 3,160 forkfuls of dreck.

Sherry Mayle tagged me in her post, and soon after that Jimmywayne Ford tagged me in Muddyum. I’m going to do both sets of questions and submit it to Muddyum. More questions is better, I figure, because the more questions I answer the better chance there is that I will answer one of them well. Are you ready?

The Sherry Questions

1. Starting with a softball question: Who’s your favorite writer? Holy shit. The “softball question” is going to initiate a canned and familiar rant of mine. How much of a crank do you have to be that a simple question inspires a cavalcade of condemnation and recrimination? Here it goes: my favorite writer is the one I just read on M*d*um. Really. I believe that the collective wisdom of our culture is housed right here on the Internet, but there’s a catch. Each one of us has only a few great things to say. There’s a second problem. We, the authors, have no idea what the great things are. The artistic version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is at play. For the convergence of a “great post” to occur the reader is as much in play as the writer. In that way, finding great things to read is like finding a good slice of pizza. It has as much to do with your subjective emotional state and the context of the ‘za jamming as it does with the mechanics of the slice itself. Why is this a rant? Because I think that M*d*um is the perfect platform for the millions of points of writing brilliance, but they still believe in the “Great Writer” bullshit of the old publishing model. The fuckers in charge of this joint are looking for the next Norman Mailer or Sylvia Plath to fart dust all over the ether. They don’t realize that that shit died a natural death LONG BEFORE Esquire and the New Yorker started sucking donkey balls. OK, I’ll stop, but trust me, I could go on. And on. And on.
2. If you found out that writer was secretly awful, would you still like their art? That’s happened a lot. John Cheever was a bad guy and I still REALLY LIKE almost everything he wrote. Dickens was bad to his wife and had an affair with an girl younger than his daughter. I still like Dickens. Rock Stars are harder. I read Greg Allman’s autobiography and it kind of ruined a lot of Allman Brothers music for me. I almost can’t listen to the Smiths because of Morrissey. It pains me that Mick Jagger stills sings “Brown Sugar” and hasn’t changed the lyrics. I can’t watch Woody Allen movies anymore though I was a huge fan of them as a kid.
3. If someone told you they’d really seen aliens and wanted your help, what would you do? (Asking for a friend.) I had a friend who did intake interviews in a psychiatric treatment center. His favorite question was, “can you go everywhere in your house?” It turns out that when people can’t visit parts of their own home the reasons supporting their confinement are seldom… ordinary. So, I’m all for talking about aliens if the aliens aren’t keeping you from going to the bathroom in the middle of the night or stopping you from resetting the circuit breaker in your basement. If they are, if the aliens are watching you, then I know of at lease five or six medications that can probably send them back to the planet Xenon. Maybe permanently.
4. What’s your favorite TV show? I’ve watched everything and am looking for entertainment because I’m a bottomless pit. Let me know when you find the answer. I can find nothing. I tried Glow and didn’t make it though the first episode. I am watching Bigmouth. I still watch South Park. Have you watched The Norsemen on Netflix? I watched both seasons of that.
5. Do you practice mindfulness in some form? Yes. I meditate. My practice is in rough shape right now. When I was young I did Zazen.The boss and I are partial to Intregal/Shivananda Yoga and the meditation that comes from that, though she is currently doing hot yoga at a place that USED TO BE a Bikram joint.
6. What’s the most revealing thing you’re willing to share about yourself because you realize the ego is just a construct? I’ll go first. Last Saturday, I accidentally poo’d myself, just a little bit. I wasn’t sick — just thought I had more time. I eat at McDonald’s. It’s fucking awful. Not the food, I mean the fact that I am supporting McDonald’s and everything that goes along with it. The plastic, the factory meat, the giant line of cars idling outside waiting for their bag of happy. There is no excuse. I really do it as this weird, self-hating, self-destructive, addictive bender drop into abject nihilism. Then I judge the OTHER people in the restaurant. I sit stuffing fries in my face (I really hate the fries) thinking horrible thoughts about THEM before deciding that we are all slaves to the system and there’s no way out. Believe it or not, I sometimes go to Taco Bell or KFC also. They are actually more depressing and somehow that makes it less bad. I mean, you can’t blame the people in KFC, can you? The people in KFC need help, not judgement.
7. How do we make the world more peaceful? You said it before when you said that the ego is just a construct. To be willing to give up tribalism we have to be willing to give up identity. Unfortunately, we live in the age of identity. The big question in America today is “how do we find community without shitting on the other”? I teach Middle School so I see a microcosm of this every day and I don’t have the slightest idea how you answer that question.
8. What do you think love is for? I don’t know, man. I’m just glad we’ve got it.
9. What’s the best article you’ve read on M*d*um in the last month? I found this today. I think it is brilliant.
10. If you had to get out your phone and send an email of gratitude right now, who would you send it to and what would it say? When I cook, the Boss cleans up after dinner. Tonight she made Pesce All’Anacontana from the Romagnoli’s Meatless Cookbook AND she cleaned up afterwards. Let me say that again. Whenever I cook, she cleans up, but she made this:

AND CLEANED UP. I should text her right now. I think I will.

Part II: The MuddyUm Questions

1. If you had only one dollar and needed two dollars, how would you git the other dollar? This is really easy. I would bet the 1–2–8 trifecta (boxed) at the dog track. The hard part is finding a dog track.

2. This is fer men or women. If you was sweet on two gals or guys, how would you decide which one to keep and which one to say goodbye to? Or would you try to keep’em both? I’m with Stephen Stills on this. If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.

3. Who makes you laugh the most and why? I think the funniest, and most relevant, person out there right now is Trey Parker. There was an article about the Impossible Burger by Katie Couric on M*d*um recently, and I think the fourth episode of the twenty-third season of South Park, entitled “Let Them Eat Goo”, was a better, more revealing, commentary. I think Cartman is the most important fictional character of the now, because we are all, more or less, Cartman.

4. What one habit do you wanna keep and what habit do you wanna quit if you could? Writing is the good habit. Chewing on plastic is the bad.

5. What’s your fav’rite cowboy movie? This is tough. Cat Ballou would be up there, but I think my favorite would be a toss up between either High Plains Drifter or Jim Jaramusch’s Dead Man.

6. Stick or automatic? I prefer stick-shifts. I currently drive an automatic because my life is not my own.

7. How did you avoid a near disaster? 1–2–8 boxed trifecta at the dog track.

8. What can you remember about first grade? This is a trap. You know that success in first grade is the best predictor of a boy’s educational trajectory. You probably also know that it’s the one grade I can’t remember anything about. It’s the neutron star of my childhood, the cool, white plain of forgetting amid all the crazy rememberances. How did you know to ask this?

9. What would your perfect day be like? It starts with one-hundred totally consenting and strangely accepting middle aged women in wet suits, swim fins, and football helmets. I emerge from a giant cheesecake, and they mistake my “birth” for the second coming of their love god, Celembifortuchan. The Boss texts me a certificate for twenty-four hours of ethical immunity, and one of the women shouts, “Come, the bull fights are about to begin.” You can extrapolate the rest, can’t you? Or should I continue?

10. What’s the dumbest thing you ever said and where did you say it? When I was 13 there was a girl that I had a full-body, mind-destroying crush on. I asked her what bands she liked (it seemed like an important question at the time). She replied that she liked “Lynyrd Skynyrd”. I said, “I like him too.”

You know what? More than four decades later and that admission still makes me wince. She was very polite. There is some chance that the whole sexist construct is what prevented her from being openly mean. In a different, perhaps better, world she wouldn’t have had to talk to me or been empowered enough to gut me for my presumption in thinking she wanted to converse. Male privilege might have saved me from a much more obvious humiliation.

For the record, I’m willing to give my privilege to those who think I don’t deserve it, but I have to say… I’m going to miss it.

I’m not going to tag anyone else because I welcome the bad luck of breaking chains. You may not know this, but I am pathologically oppositional.