Do or Do Not.

The evening was warm for late March, but we knew it wouldn’t last much longer; the weather was due to take a turn for the much worse that night. We sat outside on the patio on the plastic furniture we’d borrowed for our daughter’s birthday party, and we talked about the kids and my career and where we saw ourselves in five years, where we thought we’d be once we’d made it past the financial disaster we were facing thanks to the implosion of the real estate market. Both of us sat with our backs to the house, facing west and our large, empty backyard and the copse of trees and the large pond beyond. The muted oranges and reds of the sunset in the western sky bled into a purplish-gray bruise of thick cloud cover rolling in to the north. As we talked, the wind started to pick up and we felt that first sharp, sudden drop in temperature that signaled the leading edge of the storm.

We gathered up the plastic furniture and laid it down so that the wind wouldn’t take it, and we picked up those few items in the yard we might not expect to see again if the winds came through as roughly as we knew they could. (Shortly after moving into the house, the winds which tear violently through the piedmont in which we live actually blew over our grill. We don’t take chances anymore.) We stood on the small concrete slab of patio for a few moments, my arm around her waist, and we watched the sun set and felt the breeze pick up a little more.

I feel like King Lear, I told her, except that I only have two daughters and I’m pretty sure they both love me.

She went inside then to get the kids ready for bed. I told her I’d be just a few minutes. I walked out to the middle of the yard, planted my feet (I wasn’t wearing shoes, only socks) and faced due north.

And I waited for the storm to come.

I stood there for quite awhile just being, a somewhat unusual condition for me: I’m not a nature person by nature. I’m more air conditioning and Internet than tent and campfire. But for now, I simply stood and let the elements play across me. The occasional strong gust of wind would whip through the yard, blowing my long hair and pressing my shirt and jeans tight against my body. I watched the lightning off to the north, sometimes quick flashbulbs and other times floodlights illuminating every detail of the soft gray clouds hovering over the neighborhood.

I’m going to stand right here, I thought, until it starts to rain.

A train roared past to the west, the thunder of its wheels rolling along the track commingling with the thunder in the sky to create a baritone rumble I could almost feel as well as hear, a rumble which soon gave way to the shriek of wind whipping across the wide, flat expanse of yard running behind the houses on my street.

I quickly discovered that the expectation of rain carried its own surprising emotional weight. As the wind continued to gain strength and the air continued to cool, I began to feel an intimate connection with the weather, each increasing gust further ratcheting up the tension within me — much the same way each of a lover’s touches aren’t disconnected experiences, but rather each builds on all of the touches which have come before it. And like the stroke of a lover’s fingers, particularly strong blasts of wind would touch me just so, wrap around me just right, would make my jaw drop open just a little and let a small sigh escape.

After half an hour of my standing alone in the dark of my backyard, she came out to check on me just as the wind swirled tightly around me. I felt both a little embarrassed and a little violated, as if she’d found me in bed with someone else. When I tried to speak, my voice came out as a croak.

It’s time to put the kids to bed, she said.

Just a few more minutes, baby.

But I didn’t know how long I would be, not really. I wanted the rain. I wanted my moment of poetry.

Nature owes you nothing, you know. Nature could care less whether you want it to rain, need it to rain or pray to god it doesn’t rain. It’ll get here when it gets here.

I wanted it, though. I wanted to feel whatever I was going to feel when those first drops of cold rain hit my face. The storm would reach my yard, it would lash me and soak me and hold me and rattle my teeth with the rage of its thunder…but I would face it down and I would stand solid and I would come through the other side of the storm in one piece. Slightly worse for the experience, perhaps…but perhaps slightly better.

But then I turned toward the house and I saw her, now in the living room in the warm blue bathrobe which perfectly matches the color of her beautiful blue eyes. She carried our younger daughter, who had two fingers in her mouth in her reflexive who-me-tired? gesture, towards the stairs. Our older daughter bounced after her.

And then the realization came: I could stand out here in the dark by myself and wait for the coming storm to drench my clothes and crack my cheeks — or I could go inside and put my children to bed, read them a story and kiss them goodnight. I could wait for the storm, or I could live my life and know that I had prepared as best I could for the storm’s arrival.

I closed my eyes one last time and felt the air brush past my face, and I went inside.

Lost

On Monday, we lost Alex.

Any of you who know Laurel know exactly who Alex is and how traumatic these last five days have been her, but for the benefit of those of you who don’t:

Alex is the Beanie Baby lion Laurel has carried with her everywhere for more than a year — and a year’s an awfully long time when you’re still four months from turning three. We’re not sure just how old Alex actually is, but his worn, matted mane and general state of manginess lead us to suspect he’s been around quite awhile; Laurel found him in a box of old toys which used to belong to her cousins while we visiting them sometime last summer, and he’s seldom left her arms since. (The “Alex” comes from Alex the Lion from Madagascar, a movie she first saw around the same time she discovered the toy.) Alex is, in a way, part of the family: he’s never been “Laurel’s lion” or “Laurel’s toy,” but always, always “Alex.”

The last time Alex was seen was at the grocery store on Monday. Terry knows Laurel had him when they went in, but she didn’t have him when they got back to the truck with the groceries. Terry went back into the store and went up and down every aisle looking for Alex, and she left her phone number with the customer service office. She’s even been back twice checking with the store’s lost and found and called once.

But it’s obvious at this point Alex is gone.

Laurel, understandably, has been distraught all this week, though she hasn’t been able to express exactly why — advanced though her speech skills might be, expecting her to communicate emotions of that complexity is a bit much. She’s had a hard time going to sleep (Alex slept cradled in her arms every night) and has taken to pulling out her hair in anxiety. She’s been carrying around a small puppy Kelsey had given her a couple of weeks ago, but we can tell it’s just not the same — she likes the puppy fine, I suppose, but she’d had her heart invested in Alex. Unlike Kelsey, who happily flits from Most Favoritest Friend to Most Favoritest Friend with the wind, Laurel and Alex have stuck together solidly for almost half of her life.

Not quite as understandably, I’ve also been distraught this week. Every time I think about Alex’s absence, every time she asks where he is or sullenly says “I miss Alex,” I find myself having to fight back tears. (I’m sure that shatters the image of me as Tough Stoic Manly Marlboro-Man-Without-The-Marlboros so many of you hold of me.) Most of it simply has to be my not wanting to see my daughter upset, I guess, but I’m wondering if there’s be something more to it that I can’t quite get at, some childhood trauma of my own I don’t even remember.

Regardless, my daughter was upset, so I jumped into action Monday night. I crawled out of bed in the middle of the night, hit Google, and found and ordered her a replacement Alex… not sure whether I’d be able to pull off the switch, but feeling like I had to give it a shot. (Part of me felt like I was in a bad sitcom, some episode where my neighbor asks me to watch his dog while he’s on vacation and I accidentally kill the dog through some bizarrely contrived negligence and try to buy another one that looks just like it hoping my neighbor will never notice but of course he does and I learn Valuable Life Lessons about Facing Up to My Responsibilites and Lying Is Just Wrong. Or something.)

Found

Terry’s been prepping Laurel the last couple of days for Alex’s imminent return, pulling out the kinds of fantastic lies that could really only work on small children still gripped by their imaginations: “Alex went on vacation! He went to a spa to relax and get himself cleaned up, and when he comes back he’ll be prettier than ever!” We weren’t sure how much she bought it — two-and-a-half years old or not, she’s a really, really smart kid and we wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised had she seen through our film of bullshit. But we had to try.

This afternoon, a small box was waiting for us in the mailbox when we got home.

Both girls were asleep in the truck, so I grabbed the box and we drove around a little more so we could examine Imposter Alex before presenting him to Laurel. He’s not exactly the same as Original Alex; in addition to his much better overall health, his eyes are a little different and the underside of his jaw is white, details we were hoping she wouldn’t notice. (My suspicion is that Original Alex was actually a cheap knockoff of Imposter Alex, who has his pedigree: he’s an Authenic Ty Beanie Baby.) But the body’s largely the same, and I was counting on that being the aspect she’d focus on: how he felt in her arms.

After we got home and got the girls inside, I snuck back out to the truck, cut the tag off and set Imposter Alex up on the ground right outside the front door. If we were going to ride this lie, we were going to ride out to the end: Terry knocked on the wall where Laurel couldn’t see, and we encouraged Laurel to go answer the front door. We helped her pull the door open and directed her gaze groundward, where Imposter Alex was looking up at her expectantly.

“Oh,” she said quietly. “Oh.” She looked at Imposter Alex for a minute.

And then she picked him up.

And she didn’t put him back down for the next three hours.

“This is Alex,” she said to Terry later. “He’s my lion. He’s very special to me. He came back to me.”

(Here’s where I completely demolish the rest of my image as Macho Man Holt by admitting that after it became obvious Laurel was accepting our ruse, I cried. Hard. I felt like I’d done something Good: I’d managed to alleviate my child’s pain and anxiety. I realize there’s benefits to your child learning how to cope with loss and grief, that children need to learn to deal with those emotions, but dammit, not just yet and not with her very favorite toy.)

Epilogue

The book Kelsey picked out for me to read to her tonight was The Velveteen Rabbit — a book she’s never had me read to her before, a book I wasn’t even aware we had. If you know this story at all — and being that most of you were once kids, you most likely do — you can appreciate why that book hit me a little hard tonight. (If you don’t know this story, I’d like to introduce you to my good friend Google.)

I hate The Velveteen Rabbit. I’ve always hated it, ever since I was Kelsey’s age. Tremendously. (That hatred either is symptomatic of whatever real or imagined childhood grief guided my actions this week… or possibly was the root cause of it. I’m honestly not sure.) Yeah, okay, it’s a happy ending for the rabbit and al, but I’ve always felt just awful for the kid, who had all of the toys and books which were meaningful to him taken from him — especially that damn rabbit.

But when I got to the end of the hated story tonight, I tried to reframe it within the context of Alex Lost and Alex Regained, and it made me hate the story a little less:

I imagined that some night, Laurel (who’s maybe five or six now) will be sleeping peacefully in her bed when she’ll be woken by a noise just below her window: a soft, playful growl. And she’ll go to the window and look down into the bright, clear night to see a majestic lion standing beside the swingset in the backyard, smiling up at her with a familiar spark in his eye, moonlight dancing through his mane. And she’ll look down at the now-well-worn lion in her arms, the lion that she can’t remember ever not sleeping next to her. But she’ll smile at the familiar-looking lion in the backyard and she’ll wave and maybe she’ll blow him a kiss, and then she’ll climb back into her bed and snuggle down next to her Alex and return to her peaceful sleep.

It was never my dream to be a novelist.

I think that it’s pretty obvious at this point to anyone who’s paid a shred of attention to my progress bar on the side of the page that my heart’s not in writing the novel I was (am?) working on. The bar hasn’t budged in two months. For a while, that fact was bothering me; yesterday, I stopped letting it.

Writing a novel has always been on my “something I’d like to do someday” list. But, as I said, it’s never really been my dream. When I think of my life as a writer in the not-too-distant future, I don’t honestly see myself writing novels (or not predominantly, anyway). I’d say that writing novels doesn’t feel like the way I’m going to get my writing goals met–except that the fact is I haven’t had any firm writing goals.

The novel gave me something to do. I’d had a story idea rattling around in my head for a year or more, and that seemed like a good way to start working out the details of that particular story. What I worked out more than anything else, as noted in this space previously, was that I don’t do the dive-in-without-planning thing very well. And while I do have an overall much more clear idea of the story and where it’s going, I’m not sure that story’s future is in novel form.

What, you might ask, spurred this particular bit of self-examination? Well, I rediscovered a link yesterday to a site from which I’ve gotten one of the previous sidebar quotes for Do or Do Not. Hugh MacLeod, author of Gaping Void, writes an awful lot about creativity–how to be more creative, how to succeed at whatever your creative vision might be, how to follow your own instincts and tell everyone else to piss off, how to get through the inevitable down times. I’d read Hugh’s article several months ago, early in the infancy of this site, and it helped me restructure some things in my head; unfortunately, over time I seem to have lost all of the valuable insights I’d gained from the article.

But when I re-read it yesterday, it helped bring into focus how out-of-focus my creative energies have been recently.

I haven’t had a lot of time for writing overall lately, between a hectic work schedule, time spent with family and having some semblance of a social life, and what little time I have had I haven’t been putting to good use. Some of the stuff I’ve written for this site has been worthwhile, or at the very least fun to write, but overall I just haven’t been very productive. But as I was thinking about these issues and thinking about some of the issues raised in MacLeod’s article, I realized that even when I had been getting the words out, most of them weren’t in service to the things I’ve always really wanted to do. I think I was writing a novel because it seemed more like the kind of thing I should be doing rather than what I know in my heart I really want to be doing. I was writing just to say I was writing.

So I think that from now on (or, well, for the near future), I’m going to work on those things that will get me closer to my actual goal: writing comic books. I’m going to work on developing my craft, regardless of whether I think the projects I’m using to develop that craft are going to sell–I’ve got plenty of shitty stories to work through before I get to the good ones, so I might as well get those out of the way now. I’m going to work on things for me, not on things I think the world expects from me; when I’m ready, when the work is ready, the world will know it.

Thanks, Hugh.

I was reading “Curious George Goes to the Hospital” to my older daughter last night, doing the thing I normally do when reading interminably long books to her–speaking the words while letting my mind wander off to something more interesting. (Yes, I know that probably loses me Good Daddy Points, but c’mon, man, that book is long.)

But I noticed something during this read-through that I’d never caught onto before. As George and his yellow-chapeaued friend sat in the waiting room of the hospital, a little girl sits crying near George. The girl’s mother points to George and tells her daughter, “Look, dear, it’s Curious George! He’s not crying.” (Or something along those lines. Like I said, I wasn’t paying much attention.)

Setting aside the questionable tactics of using celebrities as role models for children, or the fact that no one in the hospital seemed to find it the least bit strange that a small monkey was there for treatment, I found myself wondering…

…how, exactly, did this woman (or, presumably, her daughter) know who Curious George was?

“Hospital” wasn’t the first in the “Curious George” series, of course; it was, in fact, the seventh, published in 1966, some 25 years after the first book hit the stores. So let us posit for a moment that all of George’s adventures from the previous six books–his kidnapping from Africa and forced relocation to the unidentified Big City, his job as a newspaper delivery monkey and his brief stint in the circus, his ether addiction, all of it–had happened in the same world. Let us say all of the books in the series took place in the same universe, not an unreasonable assumption to make (though we’ll be revisiting this topic later).

Would all of George’s various misadventures have made the news? Might that be how the mother and daughter knew of him? Did he find himself in the newspaper for the “escaping from jail, flying through town holding on to a bunch of balloons and ultimately causing an enormous traffic jam” incident? Perhaps he did–but buried somewhere toward the back of the paper, if at all. It’s far more doubtful that he would have ended up on the television news at that time for something so inane. There were far fewer news outlets back then, and less need to fill air time with inanity–George wouldn’t even have qualified as a human interest fluff piece.

The way I see it, there are two likely answers to this conundrum:

One. It seems quite likely that the mother and daughter both recognized George from the “Curious George” books. This scenario has interesting metatextual implications: does each new story starring George spawn its own new universe, one in which all of his previous adventures exist only as children’s books? The girl’s mother recognized George from the books she read to her daughter at bedtime, never realizing that she herself is only a bit player in one of George’s adventures.

And does that mean that those of us reading the “Curious George” books are ourselves nothing but simplistic cartoons to be found in future volumes? Might I someday see a little monkey driving a carjacked Duck Tour boat raggedly down Tremont Street in Boston, narrowly missing pedestrians and cars alike on his way toward crashing harmlessly into the Frog Pond in the Common? And then might someone ultimately turn my page?

Two. He’s the victim/focus of some spectacular merchandising in his own world. In addition to the books, George’s likeness is featured on other products directed at kids–in one particularly disturbing turn, the jigsaw puzzle from which he swallows the piece that sends him to the hospital shows the scene where he’s first captured by his “friend” in the yellow hat. Can we assume that it’s The Man who’s responsible for selling George to the youth of America (or of whatever country in which the stories take place)? Is he the Colonel Tom Parker to George’s Elvis?

And does George profit from the expolitation of his image? George seems to be a smart little monkey, and always very curious, but would even a smart monkey like George realize he was being swindled by his management? The Man does indeed buy him a new bicycle for a gift at one point (though we won’t count the gift of that fateful jigsaw puzzle–since George’s image is on the puzzle, we can assume The Man likely got it for free). How many millions of dollars must The Man have made off of this poor little monkey, this monkey he stole away from his home and family in Africa? And the best he can do is to give George a fucking bicycle? Shameful.

Whichever option above turns out to be correct (and it can only be one of the above options), I clearly cannot let my children read the “Curious George” books any longer. Doing so would either be contributing to the exploitation of a kidnapped and abused young monkey…or would mean that this entire existence is a lie. Either way, those books are going in the trash tomorrow.

I’ve never had a basement before. Never, not once in my entire life. So when we got all the rain that pounded the Northeast over the last ten days or so–apparently several months’ worth of rain compressed into a week-and-a-half, or so I hear–it never once occurred to me to go down into the basement to see how everything down there was faring.

The answer: not so well.

Honestly, I think we might have been OK if it weren’t for Tommy. One of Tommy’s favorite spots to rest her fat ass is right up against the side of the house…more specifically, right against one of the two small windows that opens into the basement. Even more specifically, right against the window which has a rotten board on the underside. The window which Tommy was able to knock completely out of place, opening a foot-wide hole into the basement. I have no idea when she did that or how long the rainwater had free access to my stuff.

Most of what’s underneath that window will probably be OK; it’s either in plastic boxes or just not likely to be damaged much, if any, by water.

But my comic book collection was under that window, too. And I’m not positive yet, but I think I might have lost half of the comics I’ve been collecting since I was eight or nine.

I’m not a bag-and-board guy. My comics are just stored in longboxes [1] without the mylar sleeves or backing boards that so many collectors use to store their books. It’s not that I don’t care about my comics; it’s just that A] bags and boards add to the expense of my little hobby, and I already have very little money to spend there, and B] I’ve always been more of a reader than a collector–I’ve never once considered the resale value of any comic I’ve ever bought. I buy them for my own reading enjoyment, plain and simple, that’s it, so I never thought much about “protecting my investment.”

That said, these comics are something that have been part of my life for a long, long time. I’ve been carting my collection around with me everywhere I’ve lived for the last–well, forever, honestly. From the time we moved up here in ‘03 until about three months ago, they were all in the storage unit we were renting to house all of the stuff that wouldn’t fit in our tiny apartment, and I was very happy when we finally liberated my comics from storage and moved them into our basement. I’d been meaning to go through them and figure out which ones I wanted to keep, which ones I might think about selling and which ones I could donate to a learn-to-read program or something of that ilk.

Now it seems like many of those decisions might have been made for me.

As I said, I don’t know yet exactly what’s lost and what’s not. It might be that I just have a bunch of comics that are just a bit floppier than they’d been before, thanks to the humidity (the one box I looked at seemed to bear that out as at least a possibility).

But here’s the thing: even if they’re all relatively OK, I’m thinking it might be time to get rid of them.

While Terry and I were in the basement trying to assess the damage, we found a couple of boxes of books that had also taken on some water. As I was going through that box to see what was in it, I was stunned to realize that I’d had no idea I still owned most of the books that were in it. These were books I just hadn’t thought about for years, and very few of them were books I ever had any intention of re-reading.

So why have I been dragging them across the country? Why did I bother stashing them in our storage unit for two years? Why bother still having them at all?

And the same goes for most of the comics I’ve been holding on to. I have them because I’ve always had them, not because I still have any great need to have them. Some of them I’m sure I’d like to keep (the dry ones, anyway)–either I think I’d enjoy re-reading them, or could possibly use them for story or art reference, or think I might actually be able to sell them at some point. But that doesn’t describe a very large percentage of them anymore.

Taking this realization one step further: there’s a lot of crap in that basement that we don’t need and don’t really want but still have just because. I can look around our office right now and see any number of books or other items that we have no use for anymore. How does it add anything to our lives to have all of these possessions around if we don’t even remember we have them?

I’m thinking the time is coming to simplify. We got rid of a bunch of stuff before we moved up here, but there’s obviously still a large amount of crap we’re holding on to for no good reason [2]. The time might be coming soon for a Purge. A Cleansing. A Lightening of the Load. A Basement Enema, so to speak. I think our familial spiritual colon would feel much better afterwards.

So…anyone want a bunch of soggy comics?

I’ve been thinking quite a lot the last few days about the current quote that’s over there in the sidebar right now. For those of you reading this through an RSS feed, or if you’re reading this entry after the quote’s been changed, here it is:

“It’s a reactive thing, like a Geiger counter; you click whenever you come close to whatever you were built to do.” — Stephen King

That’s a valid analogy. When you’re doing whatever it is that you’re supposed to be doing, you just know. The puzzle pieces in your head click together perfectly, the picture comes into focus, however you want to say it–you get the buzz, the feeling of the internal compasses of your mind and your heart and your actions all finding true north at the same time.

(Incidentally, I think the same is true of the people in your life. I’ve had plenty of friends that I liked perfectly well but never felt that “buzz” about. I tend to think that those friends who do give me that buzz are the people that are supposed to be in my life for some reason. It’s more than just a matter of getting on well with the buzzworthy people; it feels almost karmic to me when it happens. Sometimes the reason I’m supposed to be around that person is obvious, other times not, but I always make sure to notice when it’s there.)

Some people discover very early in life the activities which give them that special sense of This Is Right and True; some never find it at all. Some people get close but never quite make that final adjustment necessary to get it.

That last batch of people, I’m pretty sure, includes me.

See, the thing is…in the same way you just know when you’re doing That Thing You Do, you just know when you’re not, or when you’re not quite. In my case, I know I’m supposed to be writing. I’m getting more and more sure of that the more of it I do.

But what am I supposed to be writing? Ah, there’s the rub.

I have a number of writer friends (any number of whom might be reading this–feel free to pipe in, y’all) for whom this particular problem doesn’t ever seem to have surfaced. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if for many of those people, there never was any decision or exploration necessary; they write what they write because that’s what they write. They write what comes naturally. Or so it seems to me…I’d love to hear some feedback about this particular point.

For me, that process of finding what I have to say, of finding the stories that are mine to tell, has been quite a trial. And that trial’s still not done. I’m getting closer, I think, but even on the novel I’m 15,000 words into, that buzz is still elusive. It’s been there in parts; I’ve lightly detected it in those areas where I started to understand my characters and found myself with vision for where the plot was going. But I’m not really not sure writing YA fiction is My Thing. I’m not giving up, not at all, not on this particular book nor on that category of fiction as a whole, but…

I’ve been getting some strong Geiger counter readings from another writing quarter altogether.

The clicks got louder and louder this week as I read a back-and-forth email conversation between two writers I really enjoy, Bill Simmons and Chuck Klosterman. For those of you unfamiliar with the names, Simmons is a columnist for ESPN.com’s Page 2 section and Klosterman is a columnist for, among other places, Spin. Each of them has different specialties–Simmons primarily writes about sports, Klosterman primarily about music–but both have a wonderful appreciation for and understanding of the broader canvas of pop culture. (At this point, any of you who know me very well at all are probably nodding your heads and can see the source of those Geiger readings.)

I read this conversation between Klosterman and Simmons and I very much had that feeling of “getting it.” It wasn’t just a feeling of “I can do this”…it was a feeling of “I should be doing this.” I don’t mean specifically that I should be either a sports columnist or a music columnist, but I should be part of the cultural conversation. I’m inspired by each of those writers, actually, in the way each one weaves in elements of the greater cultural consciousness into their columns. I know that there’s a great many people who dismiss pop culture out-of-hand as lowbrow or not worthy of serious discussion, but neither Simmons nor Klosterman believes that. And neither do I.

Pop culture is American culture, it’s the commonality that allows us to talk to others with whom we might not share race, creed, class, sexuality or gender. Even if I don’t know your or don’t have a lot in common with you, if I discover that we both have an interest in, say, “Gilmore Girls,” then that’s a talking point, somewhere to begin. It’s a bond. Is it a strong bond? Is that shared interest alone enough to sustain a friendship? Or a community?

Surprisingly, it can be–as just one small example, look at the phenomenon surrounding the “Browncoats” who so loudly supported “Firefly” and now Serenity. That’s a fairly large, strong, devoted community (and regionalized series of sub-communities) made up of a diverse set of people whose only real tie is a love for this particular fictional universe. And it’s enough. They frequently arrange social events to bring their members together, frequently (but not always) involving screenings of “Firefly.”

And again, that’s just one relatively tiny example. Look around–how many times do people gather together just because they have a love for some particular aspect of our culture? How many people get together for Dave Matthews Band concerts? For “Lost” viewing parties? For release parties for the newest Harry Potter book? For standing in line for weeks for the newest Star Wars movie? For performances of “Avenue Q” or “Spamalot” on Broadway? Popular culture by its very definition is our culture, it’s everybody’s culture, and that fact alone makes it worthy of discussion, from the most wretched of reality TV shows to Norah Jones’ albums.

Futhermore (lest we forget that this blog is All The Time All About Me), pop culture is an area where I have something to say. Reading Simmons and Klosterman’s conversation struck that chord within my head and my heart that told me: “These are your people. This should be you.” Will writing about pop culture win me any literary prizes? Nope…but it would make me happy.

So what am I gonna do about it? Oh, hell if I know. But when I do, you will, too. Chances are good that it will either involve this site or Moviegeekz. It looks like I have an awful lot of thinking to do over the next couple of days and weeks about just what my goals are going to be, how I’m going to get there…and about the greater cultural impact of Wedding Crashers.

“The results are not acceptable.” — The President of the United States

You’re fucking-A right, George.

When I first started this blog a little over four months ago, I wrote a post in which, among other things, I discussed the fact that while intellecutually I recognize the horrible things that sometimes happen to people in disaster situations and wish things were different for them, I don’t really feel much pain or sadness for those people:

I don’t always take the fact that I’m not easily angered to be a positive; I’m afraid it’s symptomatic of something bigger. I know that I don’t feel deeply enough for current events or for human suffering in other parts of the world. I care, but I don’t, y’know, care. I know plenty of folks who do: people who want to fight for issues they believe in or who seem to feel as much for people they’ve never met as they do for the people in their day-to-day lives.

But after New Orleans–and our government’s massive ineptitude and callous disregard for the people of the Gulf Coast region–that’s starting to change.

I’ve been too wrapped up in my own head since the disaster hit, and I’ve tried not to think too much about what’s been going on. I’ve been trying to keep up on the facts, but I haven’t been internalizing it. I know that’s wrong of me, but that’s the way I’ve historically dealt with tragedy of all kinds.

But now that my own little world has calmed down a bit, now that I know my father’s doing better and my dentist appointment is over and my cross-country drive is done, I’m more able to face the horrors of what happened, and doing so hurts. I can’t even fathom the kinds of conditions those people have been dealing with for more than a week. I can’t even fathom the numbers of people who didn’t even survive to face those conditions.

But as sad and horrified as I’m feeling for the survivors, I’m feeling even more rage and resentment for how our government has handled the situation. All of the anger I’ve felt for this administration for the last five years, all of the disbelief at the wrong-headedness and stupidity continually displayed by the men and women we (supposedly) elected to shepherd this country and protect its citizens…all of that is nothing compared to the outrage I’m feeling now.

And, glory be, I’m far from the only one: the mainstream media isn’t rolling over at the administration’s feet anymore, and the results have been wonderful to behold.

I want to share with you some of what’s making me so angry today. I know I’m coming kind of late to the party, and hopefully many of you are already plenty outraged, but if not I hope some of the following will help get you there:

• MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann (long one of my favorite commentators, on a par only with Jon Stewart) scathingly, eloquently, calmly blasts the government response to Katrina. A must-watch (Windows Media Player required).
• John Scalzi has a series of articles on his blog about Katrina, but the one that affected me most was about what it means to be poor, to be really poor. He also posted a follow-up piece several days later about exactly why he wrote that post.

  I swear, I’m never going to complain about my financial problems again.

  (And as a quick aside to everyone, including the director of FEMA, who blames those thousands of people in New Orleans who were too poor to leave town for what happened to them: there’s a very special section of Hell waiting just for you. Please don’t keep them waiting too long, OK?)

• Another Scalzi post on governmental incompetence–and even his readers who normally disagree with his politics are starting to have trouble defending this administration.
• My boy Tim has reached his melting point as well, and fires off what’s easily the most articulate, impassioned essay I’ve read from him in quite some time.
• You might have heard that rapper Kayne West went off-script during the NBC benefit telecast last Friday night, saying that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” I’ve got to say it’s hard to argue much with him. You can see the video–which was edited out of the live broadcast when it aired later on the west coast–here. (Via Mr. Snitch.)

More links–and likely more vitriol–to come later.

I mentioned in a post a couple of weeks back that I tend to self-identify far, far too much based on what it is I do for a living. And I’m starting to realize that that self-identification is neither accurate nor particularly good for me.

I’m a programmer, I tell myself. And while technically that’s true–it’s what I put in that little box at the bottom of my 1040 form every year–it’s not really how I see myself. I’ve said it for years without thinking about what I was saying. But the more I do think about it, the less comfortable that particular set of clothes gets. It’s not that I don’t enjoy what I do, because I like it well enough, but it’s just not as much a deeply-ingrained part of my persona as I’d always assumed.

What it comes down to with the programming thing is: I’m a whore. I’m doing it for the money. I’m doing it so Terry can stay home while the kids are little and because it’s a job I don’t mind. I’m doing it because I can, and because I can stay in my own little zeroes-and-ones world and not have to interact too much with (shudder) people. But being a programmer isn’t my dream.

Does it have to be? Of course not. Isn’t it good enough that I get paid pretty well and don’t mind doing my job? Yeah, it is.

But it’s the identification part I’ve recently come to have trouble with.

I work with a lot of really bright people, people smarter than I am. And those of you who know me know that for me to say that really means something. These guys (not being sexist; the people I’m talking about all happen to be male) seem to have programming in their blood. They generally seem to have much more experience than I do, true, but to me it seems like it’s more than that: it’s a deep internalization of what they do, a love for the minutae and for the big picture, a passion that comes out when they’re discussing or debating various programming-related points.

And that’s what I ain’t got. Because, as noted, I’m just a whore.

As I hang out with some of these people, both at work and in a newer community of people I’ve recently met, my lack of experience in and passion for hardcore programming concepts has provoked in me a feeling that it took me awhile to recognize, because I hadn’t felt it in so long: I felt stupid.

Now, I can talk to people who have huge chunks of knowledge of subjects I know nothing about, who have mastered arcane disciplines that will serve mainly to allow them to get jobs teaching those same arcane displines to others, and those people don’t make me feel stupid in the least. I respect the work and dedication those people have put into learning what they have, and while I might be a little envious sometimes (I have occasional regrets that I didn’t do more with my education), it has no impact on my self-identity or self-worth.

But when faced with those people in my own field who have that knowledge and passion–yup, makes me feel like I’m holding up a sign with an arrow pointing at my face, a sign that says “You’re all with stupid.” And I suspect that feeling’s compounded by the fact that I don’t really want to learn as much about my field. I want to learn some more, of course, but I just don’t have the passion necessary to do so, so I’m dooming myself always to be among the ign’ant.

Locking too much of my identity in “programmer” and then being faced with people whom the word truly fits has been less than pleasant, I must say, and more than a little rattling to the pillars propping up my self-image. So as far as that goes, I’m adopting and paraphrasing something someone else said recently in a far different context: “Programming is what I do, not who I am.”

If I do want to use a vocation as the basis for my identity, I need to focus more on calling myself a writer. Part of me chafes a bit at that because I’m afraid it sounds pretentious, but it’s a much more valid label. Not only does using that word point me much more solidly in the direction I’d like my future to be going, but it fits me much better–like going from wearing a t-shirt three sizes too small to a finely-tailored Italian suit.

And I think taking the burden of the word “programmer” off of my shoulders will allow me to feel more at ease around these real programmers.

I don’t think I’ve ever in my life played a good game of Truth or Dare.

I’m thinking about my previous ToD experiences because Brian sent me a link today to Truth or Dare Online, a site partygoers can use to suggest various questions to be answered truthfully or actions to be accomplished, um, darefully. The kinds of questions the site spits out are configurable so that they’re appropriate for anything from pre-teen sleepovers to full-on adults-only orgiastic bacchanalia.

Every time I’ve ever played a game of ToD, it’s been in a group of people containing at least one, usually more, female in whom I had some level of romantic and/or sexual interest. Hell, even the one time I played a four-person game of ToD, I’d have gladly made the mad monkey sex (or any smaller subset of those activities making up the mad monkey sex) with either one of the two girls involved. And isn’t that what Truth or Dare is for (as an adult, anyway)? To have an excuse to play around with other people without the pressure of it meaning anything?

But oh, no, that’s not the way it ever worked for me. For some reason, I’ve always been the Offical Truth or Dare Comic Relief.

I’d watch as my friends, who tended to have better luck with the ladies than I did and therefore didn’t need the drunken lowering of standards of acceptable behavior provided by ToD, would take dare after dare that involved making out with hot chicks, or licking the bare bellies of hot chicks, or whatever else they were dared to do with hot chicks.

Me, though?

“OK, Allen, you have to sit at the bottom of the hottub and pretend like you’re enthusiastically masturbating while thinking about Stan. For one minute.” (Stan (not his real name) was our boss at the record store at which we all worked; his uncanny resemblance to Kermit the Frog did nothing to help put me in the mood for my mock masturbation. Neither did the fact that he was a guy.)

Here’s another of my favorites, one that I’m sure at least three of the readers of this blog will remember. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, one of the readers of this site was responsible for this particular dare as we sat in a big circle on the beach:

“OK, Allen, take off all of your clothes and go jump into the Gulf.”

The best part about that one, though, was the fact that I couldn’t find my glasses when I came nakedly up out of the Gulf. Fumbling around the beach for my glasses, Little Allen just kind of hanging there in the cool night breeze… not my most dignified of moments, I have to tell you.

Don’t get me wrong–I accept that these kinds of happenings are part of the game. You don’t play Truth or Dare in an attempt to seem elegant in front of your friends. I just hated the fact that in every game I ever played, I was the one to whom these things happened.

I think a large part of that was the fact that back in the days when I had less confidence than I do now, I’d give off the sort of desperate vibe that indicated to others that it probably wasn’t the best idea to foist me onto any girl who wasn’t already interested in me. Which I completely understand; god knows how badly I might have pulled the puppy-dog-follow routine on anyone dared into as much as kissing me.

But man, does part of me (only a part of me) wish I could have those days and those games back now–because I am such a different person in so many ways than I was then. I’m much more confident and several orders of magnitude more comfortable with myself…which, of course, makes me far, far sexier. The outside doesn’t look all that much different, but the inside has undergone a drastic revolution over the last few years.

So, to sum up… Me then: lonely; desperate; probably more than a little creepy to women. Me now: happily married; not even remotely desperate; far, far sexier.

The moral, of course: be comfortable with who you are, whoever that person might be, or no one else is gonna be, either.

Isn’t there anyone left in Tom Cruise’s life who can tell him that the time has come for him keep his damn mouth shut? I liked the old, relatively private Cruise far, far better than the obnoxious, showboating knowitall who’s dumping his rat-pellets of condescension and simulated love all over the media.

What he’s done to poor Katie Holmes is one thing–at the rate they’re going, her career’s to be over faster than FOX can cancel a quality TV show. She’s already been told her services won’t be needed for the next Batman movie, largely because the suits at Warner Bros. were annoyed that her antics with Tiny Tom were overshadowing the promotion of Batman Begins. I doubt that’s the kind of career boost her contract with Cruise specified.

But as annoying as The Tom and Katie Professional Courtship Show has been, what’s really starting to get under my skin is his spouting off about Scientology all the damn time. Does he really think acting like an arrogant ass makes him a good poster boy for Scientology? Even the most devout celebrity Scientologists don’t talk about their “religion” all that much, Tom, and do you know why? Because they know that it makes them look like mush-brained lunatics to sane people.

It’s not just that so many of the ideas involved in Scientology are so bizarrely dumb. It’s Tom’s attitude and conviction that his is the only worthwhile spiritual path–anyone who disagrees with him is obviously just a big stupid-head and hasn’t done their homework, or else they’d agree with his views 100%.

Just this morning, Cruise got in a tiff with Today’s Matt Lauer because Lauer dared to question Cruise’s beliefs:

“You don’t know the history of psychiatry. I do,” Cruise said.

The interview became more heated when Lauer, who said he knew people who had been helped by the attention-deficit disorder drug Ritalin, asked Cruise about the effects of the drug.

“Matt, Matt, you don’t even — you’re glib,” Cruise responded. “You don’t even know what Ritalin is. If you start talking about chemical imbalance, you have to evaluate and read the research papers on how they came up with these theories, Matt, OK. That’s what I’ve done.”

The flat-out balls of those statements just blows my mind. Matt Lauer’s a smart, educated guy and I’m sure he didn’t get to be host of the Today show by not knowing what he was talking about. I’m honestly a bit surprised Lauer didn’t slug him. I certainly wouldn’t have blamed him if he had.

I can’t see Cruise’s recent Scientological blitzkreig bringing the funds of any new followers to Xenu’s coffers. If anything, I’d imagine it’s only exposing more and more people to its ridiculousness. Maybe the “church” will excommunicate him for…nah, what am I thinking, he’s far too rich to be kicked out. There’s still some buildings in downtown Clearwater the Scientologists don’t yet own, so I’m sure Tom’s safe.

Oh, and in addition to not being able to recount how he and Holmes met, Cruise continues not to be able to offer up any valid reasons why he’s so head-over-heels, couch-hopping in love with her:

“I don’t want to compare things,” Cruise said. “It’s that thing where you just — in life when it just happens. … You meet someone. And it’s — I can’t even describe it.”

Tom, it’s time to go back in your box. One of the reasons you’re a superstar and not just an actor is due to the fact that the public doesn’t know all that much about you. The less we know–more specifically, the less we know that doesn’t make us want to kick you in the goddamn teeth–the more we can project onto you whatever we want you to be.

And right now, what we want you to be is quiet.