ADD w r i t e b l o g

Financial Advice to My Children

2008-06-04T19:48:00.001-07:00

My parents, who were of the World War II generation, were not wise with money. I inherited much of their lack of insight and foresight, but have tried as I grow older to be wiser about how I spend the money I earn. I hope that my children will be even smarter than me. Here's what I think they should do.

1. Don't accept any credit card offers, ever. As I write this in 2008 it seems unlikely that you'll ever receive one, because the credit industry has foolishly extended credit to people it knew it could never pay it back, to the extent that it threatens the economy of the entire United States, if not the world. But if that could change, and you receive offers in the mail of low interest rates or huge rewards for using this or that credit card -- be smart, and throw them away.

2. Save money from every dollar you earn, and live on the rest. If your paycheck is 300 dollars, save 30 for the future in a secure place (at the moment, in 2008, banks don't seem terribly secure to me, but do some research and use your best judgment). Live on the remaining 270 dollars, which means pay the bills you must pay (groceries, rent, phone and other utilities if they still exist), and try to save whatever else is left after that.

3. Spend as little on entertainment as you can. Get books, movies and CDs from the library and use the internet (if it still exists) for other entertainment, communication and research.

4. Don't eat out more than once a month. It will be tempting to save time by spending more money on restaurants and fast food, but that is money you will never see again and could use for far better things. As I write this, you could buy enough groceries to last you a week for the same price as a night out for two at even a decent, never mind fancy, restaurant. Save such expenses for truly special occasions like birthdays, anniversaries and other celebrations. Learn to cook, it's not as difficult as you might think, and there are few pleasures in life as rewarding as sharing a meal you created with your own hands with people you care about. Try to grow your own food if you can, and eat whole foods largely based on fruits and vegetables. It's cheaper and far better for you than the meat and fat-based "diet" that corporations convinced everyone were "tasty" and "convenient." They were neither.

5. Use mass transit, walk or bike everywhere. The world sent itself to hell largely because of the selfish overuse of the combustion engine. We'd have had oil enough to last for centuries longer if the automobile had been outlawed or better regulated, and the use of buses, trains and streetcars was mandated by law. I expect by the time you are adults driving a car for a trip to the grocery store or a day trip to a city 50 or 100 miles away will be a dimly-remembered dream, but if the average citizen still has access to gas-powered transport, save it for emergencies and learn to walk, bike or take the bus everywhere you go. If you must use a car, try never to use it for single tasks or by yourself -- carpool and do your errands in batches to save on fuel expenses. All this will save you money and help the planet recover from the damage mankind did to it in the 20th and early 21st centuries.

6. Do something you love. You might not get rich doing it, but in the long run, if you truly enjoy your job you will excel at it and hopefully will be rewarded for it. In my professional life I have been in radio since I was a teenager, and I've always enjoyed being on the radio, even if at times I haven't enjoyed being "in radio" per se. I haven't done it for over two decades because of the huge financial rewards (well, except for that brief stint in Public Radio), but because it's something I love and seem to be somewhat good at. And even my most time-consuming hobby, blogging and other writing, mostly about comics, has been done because it's something that I greatly enjoy and that is very important to me. I've been very lucky to pick up some extra cash doing that from time to time, and if you can manage to do that, earn money from doing something you love so much you would have done it without financial reward anyway, well, it's a lot like finding free money.

7. Do spend some money on yourself. Most of my disposable income -- money I can afford to spend any way I want -- has been spent over the years on comics and graphic novels. Now, a majority of that money was probably wasted, because I wasn't paying attention to what books I truly found rewarding versus what books I could just be distracted by for a few minutes. But you can't take it with you, as they say, and you will need to spend some money on something to make you happy from time to time in order not to go insane. Just try to be conscious of how you spend that money, and aim to spend it on things you'll enjoy time and again in the future. Whether it's a much-loved video game, or a book that you can lose yourself in again and again, the more times you can use and enjoy something you spend your money on, the better an investment it is. My generation and the one just before mine wasted huge amounts of money, time and energy on temporary, empty distractions, and again, this is largely how the world found itself in the dire straits it currently faces. Be good to yourself, but be aware of what things cost and whether they are truly worth it to you. Your values will ultimately have to be created and monitored by you, and if you're lucky, anyone you choose to share your life with. Know what is important to you, and never forget to live the way you feel is important, and right, and whenever you can, teach others to do the same.

Two Beautiful Women and My Birthday

2008-01-27T06:33:00.000-08:00

“To two of the three or four people left in the world that I can still fucking stand,” I said, making the first toast of the evening. I clinked my gin and tonic with the light beers of my companions, the two most beautiful women I work with. Colleen, a year or so younger than me, drank from her Bud Light. Jude, 27 and therefore over a decade younger than either Colleen or I, was drinking Miller Light. We were sitting too close to the speakers in a cramped bar in upstate New York, having just claimed a table after walking in and getting our first round of drinks. I’d had a shitty couple of days, primarily because it was my birthday the day before and I was profoundly disappointed my wife did nothing of any consequence at all to mark my 42nd birthday and (thus the beginning of my 43rd year traveling around the sun), and in this manner I found myself listening to country music in this tiny bar with the two most beautiful women I know.

“Jude and I are going out tomorrow night,” Colleen had said to me the day before. I had been venting to her about how lousy I had felt my birthday had been, and she asked if I wanted to come along. It was nice of her to offer to include me in her night out with Jude; it would be a strange combination of personalities, but with a lot of recent frustration in common. I suppose that’s what brought the three of us to this little bar as much as my spoiled birthday or anything else.

Colleen had called me about 6:30 in the evening to lay out the plan. Jude was heading over to Colleen’s spacious, amazing house in a few minutes and I could join them for a pre-bar drink or I could wait and meet them at the bar sometime around 7 or 7:30. I don’t have my own car anymore, and my wife had taken hers to go to her sister’s house with our kids (on this day that was supposed to be the day we observed my birthday, I’ll remind you just this once, and with no trace of bitterness at all), so I told Colleen I’d love to be part of the pre-party, as it were, but I’d need a lift. I rung off with Colleen and found Jude in the contact list in my cell phone, and she agreed to swing by and pick me up on the way to Colleen’s. “As long as you don’t mind that I have to stop and pick up some wine,” she mentioned, and of course I didn’t mind that at all. In fact, I told her there’s a liquor store right around the corner from where I live, and I gave her quick directions, and she hung up after saying she’d finish up her makeup and be on her way in a few minutes.

I had little idea what the evening might entail, other than country music and alcohol. I am not a fan of the former, but the latter can go a ways toward making me more agreeable on the subject. And after a couple days of disappointment and conflict, I was happy to have the opportunity to get out of the house.

I pulled on my overcoat and kept an eye on the window while waiting for Jude to arrive; once or twice I opened the door and stepped onto the porch into the darkness and frigid winter air to see if there were headlights approaching from the direction I expected her to arrive from. The second time I looked, my cat Chloe, operating in stealth mode, zipped between my feet and out onto the porch and its false promises of more fun and freedom. As is my usual reaction, I rattled an old folding chair and its scary creaking noises sent my no-longer brave (or warm) white-and-grey cat racing back into the safety of the house. I did have to give Chloe points for making it past me without making a sound, but I was glad the chair trick worked; if she’d made it into the piles of junk in the eastern corner of the porch, it would take some time and effort and possibly the jaws of life to extricate her and get her back in the house. How embarrassing that would have been, if Jude had arrived as the cat was once again getting the better of me in the ten-degree cold.

About ten minutes later, Jude’s car pulled to the curb in front of where I live, and I walked down and got in. It was the first time I’d been in her car, with its futuristic barrage of bright digital readouts, and I noticed it had a standard transmission. “Of course it does,” I thought. Jude seems determined to do everything on her own, even switching gears in traffic. It was one of the things I had come to admire about her in the few short months I had known her. Also: her taste in music, her taste in movies, and the funny little dance she does when she is happy, and sometimes I think when she is sad, as well.

She navigated the short course to the neighbourhood liquor store as I described it to her, taking the shortcut behind the supermarket four doors down the street from my house and admonishing me to put on my seatbelt. Not because of safety concerns, she noted: “Although I am concerned about your safety,” she started, and I finished by correctly guessing that “The car is going to start beeping at us.” It did, but only once before we reached the liquor store, which was really within walking distance of where we started (take it from me).

Jude was dazzled by the selection of wines in the small store, which I noted to her “is the only liquor store near my house to recently have been held up by armed robbers.” I love throwing out little historical nuggets like that, probably not thinking too much about what someone new to the area might make of it. Well, it had never stopped me from visiting the store, and really, don’t you think that’s an interesting fact?

Jude asked the clerk, a plump young woman in her 20s, if the store stocked a wine known as “The Seven Deadly Zins.” “This is only my second night here,” the clerk responded from the counter, I suppose by way of apology for not in any way trying to determine the answer to my friend’s question. In the fullness of time, though, Jude chose a bottle of red, I think as a gift to Colleen for her expected hospitality this evening, and the clerk, feeling dutiful at last, asked to see both Jude’s ID and my own. “She’s a flatterer,” I noted to Jude in a stage whisper, feeling every minute of my now-42 years and thinking the clerk was just observing procedure. Jude might look like she could possibly still be under the legal drinking age, but I really don’t think I could pass for 19 or 20 under any circumstances whatsoever. Judging from the clerk’s reaction when she saw the year on my license, though (1966, the same year the original Star Trek debuted on NBC, A Desilu Production), she really did think I was younger. If she wondered what Jude (1980) and I (1966) were doing buying a bottle of wine together on this cold, upstate winter evening, she didn’t ask. “Imagine if I’d bothered to shave,” I noted to Jude, feeling giddy with my presumed youth and its concomitant piss and, presumably, vinegar.

Wine safely in hand, we got back in Jude’s car and headed in the general direction of Colleen’s house. I’d been there twice before, once as a drive-by on our lunch break when she first moved in (“Look, there’s my house!”) and once to help her carry in some bar stools she had bought for her kitchen (“You want these old ones? Some of them aren’t even broken!”). But finding it in the dark turned out to not be as easy as I had expected. So it took us two loops around Colleen’s street and a quick cell phone call and its attendant mockery (“Alan, you’ve been here twice!”) before we safely arrived. In fairness to me, it had been in the daytime when I previously had visited.

So, Colleen welcomed us into her home, a beautiful two-story house the renovation of which she is currently putting the finishing touches on. She fixed Jude and I each a White Russian and gave us the tour of the home, which she shares with her boyfriend and their four combined total children. It’s a sort of Brady Bunch On A Budget kind of arrangement – Colleen is a lovely lady with only two very lovely girls, and Steven was currently in Vermont with the two, not three, boys of his own. The tour did not include Greg’s radically groovy attic bedroom, but now that I think about it neither of the boys is actually named Greg. But the stairs do kind of seem like they were designed by architect Mike Brady, I shit you not. She also gave me a funny birthday card and a gift card to my favourite bookstore, which went a long way toward making me feel better on my long, mostly-disastrous birthday weekend.

Somewhere in this pre-bar fellowship, Colleen drinking a beer and Jude and I our White Russians (my joke about Eastern European men, based on the fact that these were really big White Russians, went nowhere; chalk it up to the fact I watched Eastern Promises earlier in the day), we began sharing our laundry list of complaints about our current work environment. It was agreed that it is, indeed, a bunch of bullshit, and there was no new business and after a short time the meeting was adjourned in favour of the bar.

We all piled into Colleen’s very large and very expensive SUV, and she told us how one of the members of the band that was playing tonight was one of her former boyfriends. It seemed more complicated than that, with various dates being bandied about, but she seemed to feel it had more or less come to an end about a decade and a half ago. Soon enough we entered the bar, which was fairly crowded, and we ordered our first round. As we received our drinks, but before we could sit, the band broke into the national anthem, noting it was something they did “at every show since 9/11.” I mentioned to Jude that “Never have my politics been so profoundly threatened so quickly after entering an establishment,” and she seemed to laugh in recognition of the rather right-wing nature of the moment, dramatically punctuated by an overweight woman at the bar looking grim and determined in her grey sweatshirt, as she held her hand over her heart during the anthem. “I’d put my hand over my heart,” I mentioned to Jude, “But there’s a drink in it,” I said, switching my gin and tonic to my right hand. The band wrapped up their heartfelt polemic and if the stern, dumpy woman with her hand on her heart noticed how much of a Communist I and my companions were, nothing was said and thankfully we were not dragged to the parking lot for disrespecting the brave American soldiers the song had been dedicated to (“And no doubt to our Muslim brothers as well,” I mentioned to my companions with only a tiny bit of liberal sarcasm and a great deal of not being terribly loud).

Shortly thereafter we took the only table that seemed mostly unoccupied (only an empty beer bottle and coat on the back of a chair indicated the table might be taken) and watched the band perform some country and southern rock-style songs. They had an accomplished fiddle player on hand, and come to find out the bottle and the coat both belonged to him, but when Colleen offered to move us somewhere else, he told her she was fine where she is, perhaps observing that, just in general, Colleen is fine and I realized in this moment (and not for the last time this evening) that there are real benefits to going out to drink with two beautiful women.

Colleen had bought the first round of drinks, having earlier promised me “A birthday drink,” and I paid for the second, and Jude the third. I was trying to nurse my gin and tonic, realizing that I was probably the most likely to be the designated driver, but somewhere in there Colleen snuck in a fourth round, and I politely sipped at my new drink while being deafened by the speaker that sat directly in front of me while we sat at our tiny table.

The music was well-performed and not all of it was as annoying as I usually find country music. Somewhere in my second drink the band did a genuinely moving love song that made me feel sad for not feeling anymore, at 42, any of the feelings the singer so movingly described about the girl in the song. I wondered if Jude and Colleen were feeling at all as maudlin as I was becoming, but soon enough we were joking around and in the fullness of time my ears wearied of the non-stop assault (the music was well-played but over-modulated) and I mentioned to my companions that a change of venue might not be out of order.

Colleen had earlier asked if Jude had ever been to Sandy’s Clam Bar, and was astonished when Jude said no. “Me either,” I noted, and Colleen was really amazed then. “I’ve successfully avoided it for 20 years,” I told her, although upon reflection it might be 22. Sandy’s is a very popular bar known for having good bands on the weekends, but something about the location (in the worst part of town) and the name (clams? Really?) had always made me leery. But the promise of ten minutes of quiet in the car while we drove from our current location to Sandy’s was too much to resist, and we pulled our coats on and headed out into the cold and the snow.

“It’s fucking snowing?” Colleen asked no one, or maybe God, and I was surprised as well, in that way you can only be surprised after an hour or two inhabiting the universe-unto-itself that is a loud bar on a weekend night. You forget that such things as weather or being able to hear normally even exist, you know?

There was some argument about what radio station to have on as we drove to our next stop: Jude wanted hip-hop, Colleen most assuredly did not. I suggested the independent new music station from Vermont, and Jude enthusiastically agreed to that, and there was some discussion as to whether The Beatles are old or not. I explained to Colleen that they will always be five years ahead of their (and our) time, while she feels they are just old and her kids can’t stand them, although to her frustration they do enjoy the same sort of hip-hop as Jude. Colleen: “Ludacris is ludicrous!” Well, yeah.

Sandy’s must have been as busy as Colleen had told us it would be, I thought to myself, as we circled the parking lot three or so times with no luck at all. Finally I pointed out spaces in an adjacent lot to Colleen, and she parked, and we walked the short distance through the insistent snow flurries to the bar. Packed, it was, and noisy as hell, but at least the noise wasn’t distorted like it had been in the other bar. Colleen led the three of us, and soon was talking with great animation to a woman she obviously was already well-acquainted with. Jude headed to the bar and for a moment I didn’t know which one to stick close to, as Colleen was staying with her acquaintance near the entrance and Jude was disappearing into the crowd. At first I tried to stay sort of equidistant to both of them, but in the end I followed Jude, figuring somebody needs to keep track of her.

She asked if I wanted a drink and I asked for a Diet Coke, which raised one of her eyebrows in that delightful Jude manner, but I knew only one of the three of us had a chance to stay sober enough to drive, and I knew that one of us was named “me.” She handed me my soda and we pried back through the crowd, Jude leading (another benefit of being with two beautiful women – I was learning a lot, here), and soon enough we were near Colleen, although not really with her. She was deep in conversation with her newfound old friend, and Jude decided variously in the next few minutes that she wanted to play Ms. Pac-Man (“the best video game ever!”) and she wanted to smoke. Smoking seemed like a good idea, cancer aside, because that meant we’d have to go outside, where it would not be as noisy. My ears were still recovering from the distorted noise at the previous bar, so I told her I would join her. The cigarette machine did not take bills, though, so she studied it with determined despair until a kindly gentleman of perhaps 50 offered her a loose cigarette in an off-hand, never-really-even-stopped-walking-by-us-as-he-did-it kind of way that just fascinated me. I’d never seen such a thing before, but I bet it happens all the time. To girls like Jude, anyway; probably not to guys like me, but, I don’t even smoke.

Then we were outside in a small crowd and Jude was smoking her borrowed cigarette and the guy who had given it to her stared talking about the band, maybe to me, maybe to no one. He mentioned that the singer used to be in another band, the name of which I recognized, and then I realized that I had worked with the singer last year and the year before on a commercial for a local charity event, when he had been with his old, and locally popular, band. I didn’t notice much about the band at all, except that they were quite good with the classic rock, and that the drummer had blue t-shirt with Captain America’s shield on it. It always comes back to comics, sooner or later.

Some young guy about Jude’s age tried awkwardly to strike up a conversation with her, but his IQ was clearly in the double digits, and he could get no traction at all. His best conversational gambit was something obvious about smoking in the snow, I think.

Eventually, and not at my behest, we went back inside. Colleen found Jude and I standing by a deer hunting video game, and also the bouncer, and asked where we had been. I responded “We were outside smoking,” feeling quite satisfyingly cosmopolitan as I did so. The band, at the far end of the bar from where we stood, launched into a Rolling Stones song, the singer doing a good imitation Mick Jagger strut, and Colleen noted at this moment both that she wanted french fries and that she wanted to dance. For a horrifying moment she mentioned the latter while looking at me, but thankfully she then asked me to watch her and Jude’s bags while they danced together. Bullet: Dodged. Dancing: Just Not My Thing.

Jude and Colleen were out of my line of sight while they danced, I am sad to report, but soon they came back and took great joy in the recorded version of “Dancing Queen” that came on after the band took a short break (“The second set is the naked set, folks, clothing optional!”), and then there was more talk of fries and we bundled up our stuff and Colleen handed me the keys and we left Sandy’s Clam Bar for good.

Colleen handed me the keys and told me I was driving, something I already knew, thank you very much, and even though I was never really drunk and had stopped drinking an hour or more ago, I wondered if one of the police cars patrolling the lot would stop me. Not so much for being drunk, as for being unfamiliar with driving Colleen’s gigantic SUV, which come to think of it, may be the same as being drunk, you know, in a legal sense. Sandy’s is often in the paper as the last known stop of sometimes prominent local citizens arrested for drunk driving, and I was fairly certain we’d at least be watched by police as we pulled out of the lot.

But no one stopped us, and with Colleen criticizing my driving (“You’re a mean drunk,” I told her, at least 75% in jest), we made our way to the only 24-hour restaurant that we could find open, Denny’s, and I ate french toast and sausage and bacon (sharing the sausage with Jude) and they both ate Moons Over My Hammy (a sandwich of some kind) and we talked of our sexual histories (Colleen has a super-hot threesome story, I have one that will make you throw up a little in your mouth; Jude’s is funny and whimsical and doesn’t actually involve sex, but rather two aging hipsters inviting her into their bedroom when she was an 18-year-old waitress serving them dinner, and again she did that neat thing with her eyebrows).

The conversation did briefly turn to our dysfunctional childhoods, and when I described my own family situation there was general agreement that I won the Fucked Up Family Sweepstakes, although we all had sad stories to share, and share them we did.

Finally, full of food and full of what had been an entertaining and most unusual evening (for me, anyway, and also for Jude, who has not gotten out much socially in recent weeks), I took my lovely companions home, driving Colleen’s SUV, and borrowing it with her permission or possibly at her insistence to get my own self home.

The next morning I awoke at 6 AM and did some writing about the evening and then called Colleen a little before 8 to see if she was up (she said she was, but I think she lied) and ready to get her car back. As I approached her house I heard a thumping inside, as if someone was racing up the stairs, and she asked if I saw her through the window. I told her I didn’t, which was true, and she said she had been wearing only a thong when she realized I had arrived, and had run up the stairs to get her robe. Of such missed moments is the stuff of my life, selah.

She asked if I thought Jude had fun last night, and I told her I thought she did. As she took me home, I told her I had fun as well, and Colleen said she did too, and it’s a little amazing to me that three people could come together in this way, on a night such as this had been, but I suppose such things do happen from time to time and in this way we feel a little more connected and a little less alone, if only for a night, despite the cold, despite the snow.

Like Every Other Night (Second Draft)

2007-11-09T20:18:00.000-08:00

Like every other night, he awoke around midnight and needed very badly to pee. And as he also did every night, he cursed the choice he made years earlier to take the first-floor bedroom, ceding to the children the second floor, which also included the bathroom. So instead of being able to walk sleepily in the dark a few feet to piss, he had to turn on the light and climb the narrow, century-old creaky wooden staircase to make his way to the bathroom. Usually he made it without pissing himself; actually, he always made it without pissing himself, but some nights it was a close call. This was one of those nights.

A decade earlier he had been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, and so urination was something that was on his mind more than it probably was for most people. High blood sugar leads to frequent urination (the least of its effects, which also include blindness, stroke, heart attack, and the one that really haunted him, amputation), and although his sugar was mostly under control these days, it could always be under better control, and he could rarely go more than 3 or 4 hours without having to go to the bathroom. Long gone were the days of his childhood, when his mother would marvel at how long he could go without peeing, sometimes an entire day or more, it seemed, in his memory.

She had been the first diabetic he knew, and looking back it made sense that she would envy his ability to not have to pee every few hours. He'd never thought about it, about her own struggle with the disease, so much harder then with far fewer treatment options and a far worse prognosis. She'd had the disease for all the time he really had her in his life, but he didn't bother to learn a thing about it until years after her death, when he learned he had inherited it from her. With help from a lifetime of shitty food, and too much of it.

He opened the bedroom door. The cat, white and gray, must have stirred when she heard him rising and turning on his bedroom light. When he opened the bedroom door and stepped into the living room, she was waiting, on her haunches, just inches from the door. Her motionless patience made her presence timeless; she could have been waiting there 15 seconds or 3 hours, it was impossible to tell. She trilled a throaty greeting to him as he passed by, then beat him to the top of the stairs when she realized where he was headed.

Stopping at the second floor landing, in the daytime too, but especially times like now, late at night, it was like entering another world from the one downstairs. Like every other night, the music coming from his daughter’s room was too loud. If it was too loud because it was too loud, or because it was Insane Clown Posse, he couldn’t say. If it had been one of the bands who he and his daughter both liked, like Death Cab for Cutie or The Beatles, perhaps he would not have quietly opened the door, reached in and turned down the volume. But it wasn’t, and he did, and then he closed the door and headed toward the bathroom. There was a time when all her musical tastes stemmed from what he listened to, but these past few months they came from YouTube and her friends at school and God only knew where else.

The light had been left on in the bathroom, again. He spent many minutes every week asking both children to shut off lights in this ancient house when they leave a room. The wiring was funky and untrustworthy -- the only light in the bathroom had to come from a lamp tied to an extension cord powered in another room, because the outlet in the bathroom could not generate enough power to see by at night. And like every other night, despite his requests that they leave it up (sometimes he really had very little time to make it to the toilet), the seat was down. The toilet paper roll was in the wrong place. Christ. He lifted the seat and put the paper where he needed it, and then he could finally do it.

It wasn’t the sweet relief of youth, when an empty bladder felt like it would never fill again, and every piss was the last you’d ever need to take. Rather, it was a ten-years-of-diabetes session that never really seemed to end, but rather just to came to an unwilling stop, like an Oscar Award winner with more to say but the orchestra drowning him out. Like every other night, of late, he wondered as he exited the bathroom if he should try one more time to empty himself, just a bit more.

But like every other night, he just wandered back downstairs, defeated, tired and old. The cat, as she always did, had disappeared somewhere between her enthusiastic gallop to the top of the stairs and his going into the bathroom alone. She had never, ever had the patience to wait for him outside the bathroom, and was always gone for the night when he came back out.

By the time he got back downstairs, he felt too awake to go back to sleep. He fired up his email, which had nothing new in it, unlike the old days when he never knew which comic book writer or movie director would make an unexpected visit in his inbox. He was older now, and less visible to the world, and they had mostly stopped calling on him, the famous and the obscure alike. So he surfed the web for a time, and then, fatigue returning for its encore performance, he started for the bedroom. As he touched the doorknob, he realized he needed to pee again. Not a lot, but enough that he would have to go back upstairs one more time before trying to fall asleep again.

Just like every other night, he climbed the stairs again, and hated them, and his bladder, and his body, which seemed to have turned on him almost entirely. Youth is an unbreakable alliance of mind and body. Age is an extended war between the two former allies, as bitter and spiteful as former lovers, and as damnably, fatally and eternally intertwined.

The End

Like Every Other Night

2007-11-09T13:00:00.000-08:00

Summer's End

2007-10-13T22:59:00.000-07:00

"Portentous" is the only word that seems to suit the slate-gray colour of the skies over upstate New York today. There's a chill in the air and it looks like it very badly wants to snow, but it's not quite time. Soon it will be, and the snow will come.

Fall is my favourite time of year, and yet today's unquestionable autumnal pall drove me into a torpid depression. It was close to four in the afternoon before I could rouse myself into any sort of meaningful action at all, even if it was only to drag my ass over the mountain to the comic shop to pick up my weekly haul, plus an action figure meant for my son's 12th birthday next month. It's something he'll really like. I'd tell you what it is, but he's getting pretty savvy with the internet these days. Nothing is the same anymore, now that everyone in my house except the cat has their own Gmail account.

Leaving the comic shop, I drove south instead of returning home over the mountain. In Saratoga Springs, I stopped in to Borders and bought the single copy they had in stock of Best American Comics 2007 edited by Chris Ware. Comic book artist Matt Smith was working; you may remember him as a former Mike Mignola collaborator, and artist of a Nightcrawler miniseries, an Avengers Timeslip one-shot that is fabulously drawn, and other comics. We chatted briefly once when he checked me out as I was buying some graphic novel or other; he seems very pleasant, and is also pretty tall.

I really, really wanted to wander around Saratoga Springs after I left Borders, but that gray, unrelenting sky pushed down on me and made me long for the familiar and comfortable confines of home. There was much I wanted to do today, and for a change in recent weeks, I felt well enough to do at least some of it, but maybe it's my mood, or the weather, or the time of year, that drove me back toward home. Every previously-bustling ice cream joint and hot dog stand I saw on the way has been closed up, with signs thanking patrons for a great summer and promising a return next spring. Summer's end has come.

I wonder, not for the first year, how many more summers I will see.

A Comfortable Distance

2007-08-19T06:17:00.000-07:00

Taking the “I” Out of Intimacy

Yesterday, an acquaintance of mine told me about some serious difficulties she had been having. She clearly been through hell in the past month or so, but we’ve always talked frankly with each other, and I had known something was wrong, so it was no surprise that she finally opened up to me about her problems.

This is someone I like a great deal, although I don’t know if we’re “friends.” I do know that I have asked her in the past to feel free to call me if she felt she was having trouble – and I was sincere in my offer to be a shoulder to cry on, scream into or punch if needed. As she was telling me yesterday what had gone on in her life in recent weeks, I tried to summon whatever compassion is within me, but I know it wasn’t enough. My final gesture as I left her was to pat her on the hand, and she placed her other hand over mine, momentarily. I wondered, as I always do, how long to maintain the contact. I’m sure it wasn’t long enough. I am not good at connecting with people on an intimate level – in fact, I think I flee from intimacy.

I didn’t always want to avoid intimacy, but yesterday’s interlude reminded me of a time four or five years ago when a woman I previously worked with applied for a job at my then-current place of employment. I hadn’t seen her in a year or two, and despite the fact that we had worked very closely together, and that I considered her a friend, and had even gone to the movies with her one night (to see Man on the Moon, the Andy Kaufman story), when I ran into her in the reception area as she was coming in to interview for a job opening I had recommended her for, I felt extremely awkward and managed the encounter so badly that she must have wondered what the hell was wrong with me. She came toward me and hugged me in a manner that said “Of course I’m going to hug you!” The unspoken question that seemed to me to hang in the air was, “Why didn’t you hug me?!?”

I don’t seem to be a hugger. My default gesture of choice in expressing physical affection with my own children is one of those handshakes where you slam the flat of your fists into each other, you know, the “power me up!” handshake. Don’t get me wrong, I always hug my kids if they initiate the hug, but I guess my problem is that I only ever really know when someone wants or expects to be hugged after I have failed to do so in a timely manner.

The worst, for me, is the casual handshake with strangers. My job brings me into contact with people I don’t know on an almost-daily basis, and invariably they want to shake hands. I try to manage this unpleasantness by engaging in conversation from eight or ten feet away, and thereafter trying to maintain a distance of three or four feet in any case, but this is not always possible. As a result, I have been subjected to every type of handshake there is – limp, aggressive, painful, and worst of all, damp. All these varieties of handshake are remedied with one single solution – the moment the shaker is out of sight, I race to the bathroom to wash off their germs. It’s not meant as a personal criticism in any way; I’m sure many of the people I have sped to the washroom to remove all traces of are actually quite clean. I just can’t help myself.

There are times, then, when I want absolutely nothing at all of intimacy – shaking hands with strangers primary among them. Other times, I welcome it, as long as it is on the other person’s terms, such as hugs from my children. The most confusing times are times like when my acquaintance was telling me about her suicide attempt, or when my friend was applying for a job at my place of work – I know intimacy is expected, if not mandatory – but I just don’t know the rules. I feel like a stranger in a strange land in those moments, and the awkwardness, guilt and shame they bring up in me always linger on for some time; in some cases, years.

All this is made much more difficult by virtue of the fact that I seem to be someone that is seen by those around him as someone to be confided in. My office at work is, sometimes multiple times in one day, frequently turned into a venting zone. Some outraged or upset or offended co-worker will step into my narrow workspace, glance into the hall and then shut the door and begin telling me their secrets. How they’ve been wronged by management or a co-worker; how they must find a new job; how they hate everyone in the building but me. Often I wish I was not exempt from that list, because then I would not have to have those conversations – and their implied intimacy – that I do not want to have.

My most difficult issues with intimacy at the moment revolve around my relationship with my wife, someone who certainly would seem to be entitled to as much intimacy as I can muster. The problem is, I really can’t muster much these days. Our work schedules put us at vastly different sleep schedules, and often I see her for 20 minutes or less per day during the week. On weekends she usually wants to sleep to make up for her odd hours during the workweek, and in the hours she is wide awake, I usually either want to read, or am beginning to get ready for bed myself.

A few years ago our schedules were more simpatico than they are now, and we took weekly daytrips to this or that big city within a one- to three-hour drive of our town. We’d enjoy nice meals in restaurants, long strolls through museums, movies, shopping, whatever the day brought to us. Some changes to our jobs, income and schedules, and now, as I say, we’re together maybe a total of ten hours a week total. And frankly, those ten hours are not what one might call quality time by any stretch of the imagination.

I’m sure it’s my fault, as I am regularly reminded that it surely must be. After 15 years together I can understand why she would feel she should be getting more out of our marriage. On some level, I sympathize and even wish she were enjoying the level of intimacy I guess we once shared. But at some point, am I not entitled to any say at all in how our time together plays out? Must I perform some farce of closeness just to keep the peace? Can’t we just enjoy our naps in separate rooms and perhaps meet in the living room for a quick bite at lunchtime? No, clearly, this is not enough…for her.

My inability to feel close to anyone anymore is a problem; although I don’t necessarily wish to be as freely intimate and up-close as my wife might like, I do wish that I could better read and respond to intimacy overtures from people I care about. Because I do care, as hard as that might be to believe. I care, but I don’t seem to be able to manage that caring as well as I used to, not that I was ever any kind of compassion virtuoso. I feel deficient in my relationships with most of the people I care about, but distance seems to me to be safer and more comfortable for me than closeness. I want always to reserve the right to turn away, close down, or immerse myself in my own world, away from the pain, sadness or loneliness of those around me. It’s not something I’m proud of, but it is something I acknowledge, for whatever that is worth. Perhaps, as Bender once said on Futurama, “I hate the people who love me, and they hate me!” Or maybe, as Groucho Marx once observed, I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.

A Letter to Dan

2007-08-19T06:09:00.000-07:00

41 Talking to 19

On August 19th, 2007 I wrote this farewell letter to a 19 year old co-worker who was leaving the radio station to continue his college education and move on to his second job in radio. There was a lot I wanted to tell him to sum up the two years or so we worked together and my hopes for his career.

Dear Dan,

I just wanted to say it’s been a genuine pleasure to work with you, and I wish you nothing but great success in the future.

You’ve shown a great capacity to learn in your time here, as well, of course, as a tendency to screw up. But at least you do the latter endearingly, and most importantly, you seem to learn from your mistakes. Most people never understand that it’s more important to learn from your errors than not to make them in the first place. If nothing else, it makes you a more interesting person.

You’re a great guy and I believe you have a good radio career ahead of you, if you keep your eyes and ears open, absorb as much knowledge as you can every moment of every day, and don’t ever think that you know all the answers. I’ve been doing this 22 years, and it’s only in the past three or four years that I’ve felt I have any idea at all how things work, and more importantly why they work the way they do, so if you’ve ever thought I knew what the hell I was talking about, please remember it took me two decades to get to that point.

I want to leave you with some advice, both because you always seem to appreciate it (or are an even better bullshit artist than I think you are), and because I think you could use some. So for what it’s worth, here’s what I think.

1. Always do the very best job you can at whatever job you agree to take on.

2. Always remember that no company will ever put your best interests ahead of its own. Watch out for yourself, no one else will.

3. Always remember it’s in your best interest to do your best, but don’t let anyone take advantage of you. Your time, your skills, and your energy are uniquely yours and are of great value. Demand that that value be recognized, always.

4. Know when to say no. If you always say yes, no one will respect you or your work.

5. Pick your battles wisely. Before saying yes or no to any task, weigh the plusses and minuses to you, to the company. Know what all parties involved are getting out of any situation, and if you’re getting the least of anyone involved, and yet not doing the least amount of work, demand a more reasonable arrangement.

6. Be careful about listeners. We become on-air personalities in large part because we want to be loved, but the love offered by the average adoring fan comes with too high a cost. If they meet you because you are in radio, chances are it’s radio they’re truly attracted to, not you.

7. Do not, under any circumstances, ever let anyone in a position of authority over you bully you into doing something you think is wrong, unethical or illegal. Call bullshit on this every time.

8. When you’re at work, be at work. Your personal life and your personal time are for your off-hours. A lot of young people, including yourself, seem to blur the lines. Your work and personal time will both be more rewarding and manageable if you draw strict lines and observe them faithfully. This is one you really need to work on, for the good of your career.

9. On the air, be truly interesting, but be yourself. Find things that truly interest you to talk about, and create a dialogue with your listeners. Once you do that, you will have them hooked for your entire career. Don’t fall into the easy trap of empty, vapid, pre-fab show prep material.

10. Keep a journal. One day you’ll look back and want to recall all the details of how you got wherever you end up. Keeping a journal is a love letter to your own life, and a valuable document for those that love you, and those that will in the future.

11. Your friends at work are not your friends. Your friends are the people that come pick you up at 2 in the morning because your car broke down, or who listen to you cry over a broken romance at 4 o’clock on Sunday morning. Cultivate pals and allies at work, but remember that very, very few of them will ever truly become friends. Cherish the ones that do.

12. Perhaps the best advice I could give you or anyone in this business or any other -- understand fully the underlying principles of anything you endeavor to do. Don’t just take my word, or Casey’s word, or Dan O’Day’s word, or anyone’s word, for anything. If you understand why things happen the way they do, it will give you insight and confidence that faking it never will. Think your way through any challenge or problem, and only ask for help if you truly cannot come up with a working solution on your own. It’s no shame to ask for help, but when you do, be sure you actually need it, or you’ll be seen as lazy or stupid. And you are neither.

Like I said, Dan, it’s been a great pleasure both working with you and watching you grow into a job that at this point I kind of think you were born to do. Few people succeed in radio unless they really have an inborn aptitude for it, and a stubborn ability to disregard and overcome all the assholes, creeps, crooks and morons they must work with every goddamned day; very few people can actually do that over the long haul. When facing people like that, remember what I told you long ago: Smile, agree to what they want, and then do the right thing after they walk away thinking they won.

Your first job has taught you only the slightest fraction about what it is to have a career in radio, Dan. But even the slightest fraction is a step in the right direction. This is a business only worth working in if you truly understand what it will and won’t do for you, and if you are prepared to be flexible, reliable, and always loyal first to yourself. When you find jobs and bosses and co-workers worthy of your talents and energy, give them your all. I think you did that here, and I’m proud of how far you’ve come in the time you’ve been here. Best of luck always, and keep in touch.

Alan

Completely at Ease: An Interview with James Howard Kunstler

2007-08-06T01:12:00.000-07:00

Conducted by Alan David Doane.

Introduction

On August 2nd, 2007 author James Howard Kunstler sat down with me for what turned out to be a wide-ranging discussion about his career, the state of the nation and the world, and his upcoming novel, World Made By Hand.

I first interviewed Jim Kunstler on the radio back in the 1990s, when the issue of suburban sprawl first came to my attention. The last time I interviewed him before this session was in 2000, and one doesn’t have to reflect long to realize how very much the world has changed since then. I believe Kunstler’s non-fiction books The Geography of Nowhere, Home From Nowhere, The City in Mind and The Long Emergency are groundbreaking works of crucial importance; he explains how we got where we are and where we’re likely headed in the very near future in eloquent, easy-to-understand and often very funny language. All the more tragic, then, that so many people from the highest levels of government to the man and woman on the (badly-designed) street are not getting the message.

This is a long interview, but it’s filled with important information that will directly affect your life and the life of everyone you know, and I hope you’ll take the time to read it fully, and most importantly, accept nothing on faith. Research the issues of peak oil and the sustainability of the American way of life, and you’ll very likely come to believe as I do, as Kunstler does, that things are about to change in profound and unavoidable ways. It’s the manner in which mankind deals with these changes that will define us for the remainer of the 21st century and beyond, but as you’ll read, it’s not all necessarily as apocalyptic as one might first assume.

The most rewarding moment in this interview, for me, came toward the end when Jim was describing the characters and setting of his forthcoming novel, World Made By Hand (Atlantic Monthly Press, coming in March of 2008). After all Kunstler has covered as a journalist and author, after all the bleak but credible scenarios he describes, I was delighted to see that he can still get excited about the act of writing. There was a positive twinkle in his eye as he told me how the new novel came together, and when he talked about how rewarding his overall writing career has been, I was very happy to hear that a writer whose work has meant so much to me, has felt himself so satisfied with the path of his career – “Completely at ease,” as he says. It was a privilege to talk to him for the hour we spent together, and I can’t thank him enough for taking the time to share his opinions, memories and observations with me.

Note: An audio MP3 (14MB) of this interview is available for download, as is a printable PDF file (351KB, 17 pages).

Alan David Doane: Could you tell us how you got into journalism?

James Howard Kunstler: I was a theatre major at a SUNY [State University of New York] four-year college, Brockport, back in the 1960s in the Age of Aquarius. My first job out of college was directing a play in summer stock, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare. And that was my last job in the theatre [laughs]. After that, I started writing for the hippie newspapers in Boston in the early ‘70s. From there I had a series of jobs, eventually at the Capital Newspapers in Albany [New York], and then from there I got a job at Rolling Stone magazine, which was then in San Francisco. And I figured that was about as far as I was going to get in journalism, so I dropped out in the late ‘70s to write books.

For the next fifteen years or so, I wrote eight novels and they were all published by various mainstream publishers. I didn’t get rich off of them, but I made enough money to pay the light bill. I would finish one on Friday and start another one on Monday, because that’s really how it was. I get a lot of letters from wanna-be writers, young people who want to become writers, probably the main thing they don’t understand is that perseverance counts for more than talent in this racket. If you can’t hang in there through all the discouragement and disappointments – because you’re writing in a vacuum, you’re producing a product that no one’s asked for, and there’s a lot of disappointment and failure involved that you have to get through. So you have to slog your way through it.

Around 1988 or so, I was getting a little burned out writing novels that weren’t making me rich, so I kind of segued back into journalism, and I started writing for The New York Times Magazine, a series of articles about development in America, particularly the northeast. And that led to a book proposal about the suburban predicament and why we had sort of destroyed the American landscape. And that book turned out to be The Geography of Nowhere. It led to several other books on the subject [Home from Nowhere, The City in Mind and The Long Emergency], and eventually to the next level for me, which was my previous book, The Long Emergency. Which is really more about the global energy predicament and its implications for American life than it is about suburbia per se.

One of the things that I was struck by in re-reading The Geography of Nowhere, and you kind of hinted at this, you sort of have had two major book-writing careers, as a fiction author and then these other – [you’re] almost like two separate authors in a way.

It was an interesting thing that happened to me, and I guess I entered the biz at a strange time, when literature per se was becoming less important, especially “The Novel,” as conceived in the previous era of Norman Mailer, and Updike and Philip Roth and all those guys, that was the previous generation. My generation sort of became over-supplied with that at a time when there was also an over-supply of movies and videos and DVDs and things to distract people.

The thing that struck me with The Geography of Nowhere, it almost seems at this point, and I’ll see if you agree, that it almost seems quaint in its optimism for the future. Even though it talks about, “We need to do this, we need to do that,” now that we’ve had a decade or more of Peak Oil predictions and seeing where things are going with the housing market, it seems like The Geography of Nowhere is almost an optimistic book in comparison to where we are today.

Well, yeah. I wrote about the oil predicament in the final chapters of The Geography of Nowhere, which was published in ’93. An interesting thing happened in the mid-‘90s, a whole cohort of petroleum geologists started retiring out of the major oil companies. And as they did this, they started publishing their own personal views after they had secured their pensions and gotten their retirement in order. And these guys started publishing their views about where the oil industry was really headed, and that really resulted in a shock of recognition for people who were paying attention to these issues.

Now the unfortunate thing is that neither the public nor the mainstream media nor the political sector is paying much attention to the oil story. But it’s a huge, huge problem that we face. It’s going to change everything about how we live. When I wrote The Geography of Nowhere, even back then I regarded the suburban situation as being really tragic. I wasn’t optimistic about it. The only thing I was optimistic about was, I had become associated with this group of people called The New Urbanists. And they offered what I thought was a pretty good remedy for the suburban problem. Which would have been, or which has been a return to traditional principles of urban design, town planning, et cetera.

The trouble is that the energy predicament is now presenting itself so rapidly and implacably that I don’t really think that we’re going to have an easy transition. I think that the longer that we put off making the necessary adjustments, the more disorderly and harsh this transition is going to be.

That’s something that I wanted to ask you about; you write in The Geography of Nowhere about the “City Beautiful” movement which was, correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like, in terms of the overall national mindset of how things should work, in a town, in a city, that that was probably the last time the country was headed in a sustainable direction.

Well, we were a very different country. And for the benefit of the people who don’t know what the City Beautiful movement was, it occurred at the turn of the previous century, in about a 25-year period from about 1890 to 1915, ’20. And it really was an extraordinary period in which we came to the recognition that we were becoming a world power and that we needed to have cities that were worthy of our greatness. And so you had this tremendous coalition of business leaders, municipal leaders, architects, planners, really all working together on the same page to produce the greatest things that we ever built in our cities. The great civic centers, the great museums and libraries, the great public buildings, all that stuff, the best of it, dates from that period.

We’re a very different country now, particularly in the post World War II period, where all kinds of things have changed, and most particularly we’ve had about 90 years of imposing the automobile over the terrain of North America with really disastrous results. And it can be stated pretty succinctly, that we have produced a living arrangement that has no future. And that’s a really big problem.

You have been a strong critic of the over-reliance on automobiles in the U.S., basically a lot of the problems that you see coming in the near future are a result of the over-reliance on the automobile. Can you tell me when you first started to see the signs were not pointing to, as you call it, a permanent “happy motoring era,” that this was the problem. What tipped you off?

It wasn’t really hard to understand; I was a young newspaper reporter during the first OPEC oil embargo in 1973, and interestingly enough in a newspaper office building that had just been relocated from downtown Albany [New York], to the suburban wasteland of Wolf Road [in Colonie, a suburb of Albany]. You could see what happened when the U.S. got into trouble with oil for a relatively short period of time. And unfortunately it was a short crisis, and people got over it. Moreover, there were things that happened afterwards that prompted us to think that it was an aberration. Namely, the last really great oil discoveries of the world, in the north slope of Alaska and the North Sea between England and Norway. These two great oil areas came into production in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, and they sort of took the pressure off of the Western world and removed the leverage from OPEC for a while.

Is it fair to say that gave a kind of false hope to the idea that [cheap oil] would never end?

Absolutely correct; yeah, that’s quite true. It really saved the West’s rear-end for about 15 years. And oil prices went down steadily from the mid-‘80s into the 21st century, until they were roughly ten dollars a barrel before 2001. So, the American people in particular developed the false reality that we didn’t have an oil problem, that we didn’t have an energy problem, and that we could just continue behaving the way we did. And ironically, or paradoxically, the worst part, the most emphatic part of the suburban build-out happened in those years, since the mid-‘80s when we built so much car-dependent stuff. It’s going to be such a liability for us, we have no idea.

We saw the price of a barrel of crude oil go up to record highs just this week...

Well, just yesterday it actually crossed into a frontier that it hasn’t been in, above $78.50. It retreated about a dollar late in trading, but the trend upward into the upper 70s towards $80.00 a barrel is now pretty firm.

And there really is no immediate hope that this situation is ever going to get better.

This is an implacable problem. There’s a new kind of wrinkle on the oil situation, and maybe a new interpretation that will help people understand it. And it has to do with this idea: That we’re discovering now that the exporting rates from the countries that sell us oil and sell oil to the rest of the developed world, the U.S., Europe, Japan, China and increasingly India, that the countries that export oil, their exports are declining at an even steeper rate than their production is declining. So, if Saudi Arabia’s production is down four percent this year, whatever it is, their export levels are going down at a steeper level. And the same is true for all the other major exporting nations.

So what you’re seeing here is a trend in which we’re going to get into trouble much sooner than people thought, and not sheerly over depletion but over simply the market availability. Now the poster child for this, and this is very important, the poster boy for this is Mexico. Mexico’s oil production, 60 percent of it is composed of one single oil field, the second largest field ever discovered in the history of the oil industry, called the Cantarell Oil Field in the Gulf of Mexico. It was discovered in the last 25 years and produced with the latest and greatest technology, which had the effect of only draining it more efficiently. So when people say “Don’t worry, we have new technology coming along,” this is one of the problems with it.

The Cantarell Oil Field of Mexico is now depleting at a minimum rate of about 15 percent a year. Meaning within about five or six years, it’s out. And long before that, they’re going to stop sending oil to the United States. Now, Mexico is America’s third leading source of oil imports. And what this means is we’re going to lose our third leading import supplier of oil within the next two or three years. This is going to have not only a tremendous effect on our ability to get around and go through our daily activities, but it is also going to create a tremendous amount of turmoil and hardship in Mexico; because the Mexican national government depends for nearly half of its revenue from the Mexican national oil industry, which is now entering a state of collapse. So as that occurs, we’re going to see probably a great deal of disorder down in Mexico. And if you think we have problems now with immigration, and with managing the border, I think the probability is that they’re only going to get worse.

When that comes to pass, they’re going to be looking to get the hell out of Dodge.

The last time there was a big problem in Mexico was this long, drawn-out revolution that occurred between about 1913 and 1940, and that was the era of Zapata, and all that tremendous amount of revolutionary activity. And back then, one-quarter of the Mexican population left the country. But back then the population of Mexico was 20 million. Now it’s over 100 million.

That’s a scary thought.

It is a scary thought, and it’s among a whole menu of thoughts that we’re not willing to even think about in the public discussion of these things.

If this is happening on a two- to three-year time scale as you say, wouldn’t you think that the people that are running for president now would be talking about it and trying to present some sort of solution, or at least a band-aid, and yet that’s the last thing that they’re talking about.

Well, I’m fond of saying that I’m allergic to conspiracy theories. And I am. People send me these 9/11 conspiracy emails and I pretty much disregard all that stuff. And I don’t think there’s a conspiracy among our leadership to keep us in the dark or anything, I think it’s simply can be explained truly as cognitive dissonance, which is a fancy way of saying “static in our collective imagination,” an inability to form a consensus about what’s important, and about what needs to be addressed. And I think that the more trouble that we face and get into and the scarier that these problems are, actually, the more likelihood there is that the cognitive dissonance will increase. And that’s one of the dangers that I think we face.

Let me give you an example. There is one particular project that is just absolutely imperative right now in this country. And that is rebuilding the American passenger railroad system; because we’re going to face enormous problems with transportation between our cities, of both people and of goods. And the trucking industry is going to get in enormous trouble, the commercial airline industries are going to be in big, big trouble, if they survive at all. You know, people are going to need a way to get around.

Now, look. We had a railroad system that was once the envy of the world. We now have a railroad system that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of. The infrastructure for rebuilding it is lying out there rusting in the rain, it doesn’t require the reinvention of anything, we know how to do this kind of technology. It could run on all different kinds of energy, but would do best if it ran on electricity, because it’s the most efficient and you can get electricity from a lot of different things. It would put scores of thousands of people to work at jobs at every level, from labor to management.

There’s another thing about it that’s terribly important. This country needs a project that can help build our – that can encourage us, that can give us some sense of accomplishment. That can build our confidence. It’s terribly important, because we’re going to be facing a larger set of problems that are going to be very discouraging. We need a big national project that will boost our confidence, and also do something for us. And so rebuilding the American railroad system couldn’t be more important.

Now the thing is, are any of the candidates even talking about this, in either party at any level of the political spectrum? And the answer is “no.” So you have to ask yourself, why is that? Again, I don’t think it’s a conspiracy, I think it’s sheer, obdurate cluelessness.

And there is a history in this country, it’s not hard to look back and see previous precedents of great, nationwide projects, from the WPA...

Well, the City Beautiful movement, which you mentioned, which was not a government sponsored project, it was a consensus among the private world, the government world, everybody agreed that it was necessary to make American cities great. And now it’s necessary to retrofit the United States for an energy-scarcer world, and we’re not even beginning to think about it. And I think there’s an explanation for that, too.

Let me ask you, because my next question involves the psychology – you’ve talked a lot [in your writing] about “the psychology of previous investment,” of the fact that as a nation we’re so wrapped up in our current status quo – as Vice President Cheney has said, “The American way of life is non-negotiable.” And yet, there’s no easily obvious replacement for cheap oil.

Yeah, there isn’t. And much of the thinking and talking that is now going on about alternative fuels, is delusional; for example, the ethanol situation. As a Pennsylvania farmer put it to me last winter, “We’re going to take the last six inches of Midwestern topsoil and burn it in our gas tanks.” We may even starve if we pursue this thing far enough. It’ll definitely be a contest between people eating and automobiles, filling their gas tanks. But to get back to your point, you mention “the psychology of previous investment,” and I think this is a very important point. One of the reasons we’re having such a poor discussion about these problems is because we’ve put so much of our national wealth – and even our spirit – into this American Dream living arrangement of car dependency and national chain retail and all of the accessories and furnishings of it, that we can’t imagine letting go of it, or reforming it, or changing it.

It’s almost like the problem is too big for the average person to wrap their brain around, so they just pretend it isn’t there.

Yes, that’s true, and as a practical matter, most Americans are so deeply invested in the furnishings of the suburban living arrangement, you know, most Americans who own their own homes, that’s where most of their wealth is located, in the ownership of a suburban house. And if you’re living 28 miles outside of Denver, or Minneapolis, or if you’re living 17 miles outside of Glens Falls, it’s going to be very hard for you to imagine living differently.

The mall is going to be very far away when gas is either ten dollars a gallon, or unavailable altogether.

Everything’s going to be far away. We’re simply not going to be able to get around. And other things are going to be happening at the same time. It’s not as though just one thing will be changing. A lot of people write to me and say “Oh, won’t we just be telecommuting from our houses?” Well, one of the things that will be happening is that the American economy will be hemorrhaging jobs. A lot of positions and vocations and professions are going to be decimated. And so you’ll have people sitting in their McHouses 28 miles outside of Dallas, twiddling their thumbs, wondering how they’re going to feed their families. And wondering when the repo man is going to knock on their door, because that’s a whole other issue, which is something that’s happening simultaneously with the ramping up of the permanent energy crisis, is that the housing bubble is crashing, or deflating.

A lot of what’s going on in the United States right now is based on wishing. Not on thinking, but on wishing. And there’s a tremendous wish out there that the housing collapse wouldn’t be so. That it’s not happening. That maybe it’ll turn around. And the builders are certainly sitting out there, hoping that it’ll turn around and that they’ll get their production back up again, but I think what you’re going to see is this: This is truly the end of the cycle. The production home builders are not coming back. They’re going to go down, for good. Indeed, the entire suburban development pattern is over. And we’re going to have to occupy the terrain of North America much differently than we have in the last 70 years. And it’s going to be an enormous trauma for us to even process the need to do this, and the resistance will be huge. In fact, I’ll go as far as to say that we’ll see an enormous political campaign to prop up the entitlements of the suburban living arrangement long after it is self-evident that it can’t be sustained. And that in itself will be an exercise in futility that may waste many of our remaining national resources, including our national capital.

Whatever capital remains in our economic system, that is money, to be invested, when the housing crash bubbles out and all of the things associated with it implode, we’re going to need money to rebuild the railroad system, we’re going to need money to help people move from parts of the country that are no longer going to be very useful to live in, to other parts. I worry very much that this process is not going to be very orderly.

You talk about the problem of people counting on wishes rather than solid realities, and something that you talk about is the idea that technology will somehow rescue us from a lack of energy, that energy somehow equals technology.

Yeah, this is one of the reigning delusions of the moment, that technology and energy are the same, that they’re interchangeable, and that if you run out of one, you just substitute the other. And nothing could be further from the truth. And we’re going to get into tremendous trouble in believing this. You can see the origin of this, it comes from a century of having one really snazzy technological achievement after another, and there have been, obviously, a whole lot of them, and things that really have given us a lot of pleasure and a lot of convenience; everything from cell phones to DVDs to cars that are really reliable, et cetera. So these things have been very magical, and it’s given the public the idea that there’s an endless supply of magic, and that it’s called technology. And that if you run into a problem with anything else, you just plug in the magic technology.

I actually had this experience when I gave a talk at the Google Corporation in Silicon Valley, and I began to understand where this comes from, too, by the way, part of this delusional thinking. Because when I finished my talk, the Google people in the audience by the way were all executives and higher-up engineers and stuff, and a lot of these people were young people under 30 who had become millionaires working for Google because they got in on the ground floor four or five years ago, and they grew with the company and got stock options, so, here they are millionaires at 28. Anyway, I gave my talk, and we had comments and questions. And there were no questions, just comments. And the comment was all the same. One after another these people, in one way or another, got up and said “Like, dude, we’ve got technology.” Meaning, “you’re a jerk.”

And what I began to realize was that this is a form of grandiose thinking, delusional grandiose thinking coming from people who have been so personally successful for moving little pixels around the screen with a mouse, that they think that this is the sovereign remedy for all the problems of the world. And the scary thing about it is that these are among the most intelligent, well-educated people in America, working at the highest level of American technological enterprise. And they don’t know the difference, how do you expect Joe Sixpack to know the difference? So, this is a matter of leadership. We’re getting poor leadership not just from the political sector but from the business sector, which is giving people the mistaken idea that if you run out of energy, you just plug in technology, and it’s a very tragic belief.

What’s the place, if any, that you see for alternative fuels? You talked a little bit about ethanol, a lot of people are buying hybrid cars, what do you see as the role of [alternative fuel sources]?

Well, this is actually an interesting point, because it’s the essence of the problem. And there are two parts of it. Part one is this: No combination of alternative fuels or systems for using them is going to allow us to keep on running America the way we’ve been running it. We are not going to run Wal-Mart, Walt Disney World and the Interstate Highway System on any combination of wind, solar, biodiesel, ethanol, used french fry potato oil, tar sand byproducts, or anything that we know of right now. Including nuclear. We’re going to have to make other arrangements for all the major activities of life. All the complex systems that we depend on, including agriculture, the way we produce our food, the way we inhabit the terrain, the way we do commerce and trade, the way we do education. All these major systems are going to have to change pretty severely.

Now, the real key to this is something that you said, which was, you asked me about the hybrid cars, and this is the big problem. We’ve got to talk about something besides how we’re going to run the cars. We’re going to have to get over this. We’re going to have to overcome this obsession with the cars. Because, any way you cut it, we’re going to be driving fewer miles, in fewer vehicles, fewer times, every day. The car is going to be a diminished presence in our life. And the important thing to focus on is not just how we’re going to run the cars, it’s how we’re going to get the other things in our life together. How we’re going to get a railroad system together, so people don’t have to drive from Plattsburgh to Syracuse. How we’re going to fix the agriculture system so we’re not dependent on the 3,000-mile Caesar salad, or the fruits and vegetables that are coming from New Zealand and South America. We’re going to have to grow more of our food closer to home. How are we going to do that?

For the entirety of the 20th century, mankind found a way to harness fossil fuel; that was like an enormous gift from the world, but it never occurred to anybody that there would come a day when it would just run out. And we don’t even need to worry about when it runs out, because it’s going to get to the point where it’s going to cost more than a barrel of oil to take a barrel of oil out of the earth.

To get the remaining oil, yeah. Whatever that is.

So it’s not running completely out of oil [that’s the issue]...

Exactly. People misunderstand this. It’s not about running out of oil, it’s how the complex systems that we depend on start to wobble and falter and fail, once you get over the peak production point and start sliding down the slippery slope of depletion.

And it’s important to note, from all apparent evidence, we are either at that point now or will be in – a year or two?

You know, I would accept the argument that we’re at that point, because the only place in the world right now where there’s really any question of whether they are at peak production has been Saudi Arabia.

And do we have any reason to believe that we would be getting accurate forecasts from the Saudi Arabians?

No, the answer is implicit in your question, because the Saudi Arabian oil company Aramco is a nationalized oil company, and they basically treat their production information as state secrets. Much of their production and reserve information, meaning how much oil they have left in the ground, they lie a lot about what their reserves are. We do know how much oil has been coming out of there. Because once it’s loaded onto the tankers, and it gets to its destinations, we know we can add up the number of barrels that have come out of Saudi Arabia. And one thing we know, is that they seem to have peaked in 2006 at about 9.6 million barrels a day in production. They are now at about 8.4 million barrels a day, so their production is down pretty steeply.

Earlier I said four percent, it’s more like ten percent, year over year, from 2006. With the price of oil ramping up remorselessly, you’d think that they would have every incentive for producing more, and yet they’re not. Now, there are technical reasons for us to believe that they’re having problems with production, and they have to do with several things. One is that 60 percent of their oil production is dependent on the largest ever found, the Gwar Oil Field; the Cantarell field in Mexico is number two, Gwar is number one. It’s fifty years old, meaning it’s a very old oil field. It’s been in production for a long time. Fifty years of production is generally way over the point where oil fields tend to peak. They tend to peak at about 30 to 40 years. So there’s that. There’s the fact that they’re using increasingly tremendous amounts of salt water injection to push the oil out of the ground, and more and more, what they’re getting is sort of oil-tinted seawater. Increasingly they’re getting more water and less oil.

And so, we have a lot of reasons to believe that the Saudis are actually pooping out, and if they’re out, then there’s no question that the world has peaked. What happens next is, what happens on the slippery slope of depletion? And what we’re beginning to see is, the oil markets themselves are among the complex systems that start to wobble. And we’re seeing that in the export picture. Because there will still be a lot of oil produced, but, it may not get to the people who want it, some of the people who want it, like us, perhaps the people in Europe. There’ll certainly be a tug-of-war between the people in Asia and the people in Europe and North America. And we don’t know how that’s going to resolve or play out.

It’s not likely to be a civil dispute, I would think.

Well, no, I’m not saying we’re going to go to war with China, India and Japan…

But saying something like “The American way of life is non-negotiable,” that doesn’t really indicate that diplomacy is the first tack.

Well, Dick Cheney, yeah, it was kind of an obtuse statement, although, and I didn’t vote for Dick Cheney, but in the defense of that utterance, we have to remember it was made in the face of 9/11, and a political leader has to get up and say something that will boost the confidence of people who are discouraged about something, and so he made that remark. It was an unfortunate remark that kind of resounded over the following six years.

It’s a somewhat dire picture that can be painted, as I mentioned at the start.

Let me give you an example of how these things are intertwined. We were talking a few moments ago about the exporting and importing nations, you know, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Mexico, Venezuela, et cetera, they all send oil to the U.S., Europe, China, Japan. And there is likely to be a pretty stiff contest for the remaining oil in the world. Now, one of the implications of that – not necessarily that we’re going to go to war with other countries – but for one thing our trade relations are certainly going to change.

The whole American retail system has been dependent on this 12,000 mile manufacturing supply line to the slave-labor factories of Asia, for all those $19.00 plastic salad shooters that they send over here to Wal-Mart. And one of the things we’ll see is that those 12,000 mile supply lines of cheap merchandise will change. And then we’ll be stuck in America having destroyed our local retail infrastructure over the last 40 years, with nothing but chain stores that don’t function very well. Moreover, the chain stores like the Wal-Marts and the Targets, et cetera, and even to a significant extent the big supermarket chains, they’re going to get into tremendous trouble with trucking, with just moving this stuff around.

Wal-Mart’s whole system relies on what they call “the warehouse on wheels,” which is the incessant circulation of thousands upon thousands of 18-wheel tractor-trailer trucks carrying the merchandise from the loading docks of San Pedro, California to the Wal-Marts in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Orlando, and we’re going to have a lot of trouble keeping those diesel trucks going. At least at a cost that will make it possible for the chain stores to operate profitable. And that will make all the difference, because if Wal-Mart can’t make a profit on its activities, it’s not going to be in business that long. They’re not in the charity business; they’re not giving stuff away to people, although it may have seemed that way over the last ten years.

So, you can see how the oil import-export problem is directly connected to our everyday lives and how we get stuff.

Let me say this bluntly, because, and I know you know this, and I think it’s true – you scare some people. So let me ask you – I think we’ve painted a worst-case scenario. If, as a nation, we’re able to turn things around, to wrap our brains around the situation that we face, what could be the best-case scenario as of where we are at, right now, today?

That’s a tough question. I have to say this: All of our wishes about alternative fuels and things like that, I think are going to leave us pretty disappointed. They’re not going to do what we wish them to do. If we do wind power, my guess is it will be on the household level or the neighborhood level at best. We’re not going to put up a whole lot of 400-unit wind farms all around the country. That’s not going to happen.

I think that at this point we’ve gone so far that it’s really a question of what kind of disorder we’re going to enter. And I think it will be different regionally. I wrote in my book The Long Emergency that the different parts of the United States present a kind of a different picture. I’ve maintained for quite a few years that the Sunbelt is going to get into a lot of trouble. Its difficulties will be in exact proportion to the prosperity that it enjoyed in the last 30 years. Places like Phoenix and Las Vegas are going to dry up and blow away. Because on top of sheer power/energy problems, they’re going to have water problems, they’re going to have problems with a contest between different ethnic groups over the territory. What will happen in Phoenix and the southwest generally is that there will be a contest between Anglos and Hispanics over who owns the territory. And eventually they’ll discover that the region will support no large population of any ethnic group. That’s what will be the outcome of that. So, the Sunbelt is in trouble, the eastern or “wet Sunbelt” has additional problems. I’m more optimistic about the Northeast and upper Midwest.

Let me stop you there, because you have talked in your books very specifically about how you think when The Long Emergency really settles in, people in our area of the country, the Hudson Valley and the Northeastern United States, may have a better shot than Las Vegas, the Sunbelt areas , at adjusting to the changes that are coming. What do you think are the particular strengths here in the Hudson Valley and the Northeast?

We have a lot of water, both for drinking and doing other activities. We have some pretty good potential for generating electricity locally. I know in my area, you go by the old, very small-scale electric power stations from the early 20th century on the Battenkill and other streams, and the dams have been breached. The power stations are all decommissioned and the generators have been taken out for salvage.

There’s a certain charm, though, to seeing those remnants of the previous power systems. And we need to wise up about that.

Yeah, we do. There’s charm in a lot of ways just from knowing that a locality could depend on itself for power; that you didn’t have to be at the mercy of a gigantic grid that depended on hydro-electric from 1,500 miles away in Quebec or something. The idea of living locally, itself, is something that has been lost to the extent that few people in America have any sense of real community or allegiance to where they are. And that has been damaged in so many ways and so many dimensions that it would take a whole other show to talk about that.

But getting back to the Northeast, we can generate some electricity here. Not as much as we’re used to, but some. And they can do that in the Southwest, too, but I think with solar, perhaps, theoretically, but I think they’ll be overwhelmed with other problems.

The recurring theme, I think, is that things are going to have to be at a smaller scale.

Absolutely; also, we have good agricultural land here. Good farmland. It is deeply underutilized. We’re coming out of this era where dairy farming has really come to an end, and a lot of the farmland that is still out there is either derelict, being overgrown with the sumacs and the poplars, or it’s being used for suburban development or chain stores or parking lots. That’s going to come to an end, by the way. We don’t need anymore commercial infrastructure. That’s over with.

We’re beginning to see the birth of a new, local, smaller-scaled agriculture as people, for example, move into Washington County [New York], and the places that used to be dairy farms, now they’re producing lambs on a small scale, they’re producing market vegetables on a small scale. They’re not all making it, some of these people have better skills than others and they’re doing better, but we’re going to see a different kind of agriculture. Something that people forget in this area is that dairy farming is not what has always happened here. Dairy farming itself is a product of 20th century technology; because without electric milking machines and bulk refrigeration, and transport by truck, you didn’t really have the same kind of dairy industry. People couldn’t run herds of cows larger than 50 head before the electrification of the farm.

The cultural memory of what farming was in this part of the country is very short. And we’re going to discover that we’re capable of doing a much more mixed kind of farming, and we’re going to have to, whether we like it or not.

You know, it’s going to be a tough time to get through, and I know from reading your books that the population numbers may change globally over 25- to 50-year period, if this is the worst-case scenario. But you kind of see, on the other end of things – I don’t know if you read Bill McKibben’s recent book Deep Economy --

I haven’t gotten to it yet, but I know McKibben and I talk to him.

It’s a good book, and he talks a lot about re-engaging with your own community, being a part of your own culture, not being off in, as you call it, “the little house in the woods,” away from everything and everybody that really should be a part of your life. You wonder if, after all is said and done, when you return to small cities and towns where people are walking to work and walking to get their groceries and going to farmer’s markets – you wonder if it wouldn’t be a better world.

I have wondered that in many ways. I think that just the frantic scope of life in America today has taken a tremendous toll on our individual spirits. I travel around the country a lot, I do a lot of university lectures all over, and I see how people live in Dallas and Orlando, and the Bay Area of California and Los Angeles and even Las Vegas. I’ve been all over this country, and you know, I go to these places and I can’t believe how depressing it would be to have to live in them. And to have to spend two hours and 15 minutes a day going to and coming back from work on some Texas freeway. It would just be soul-killing. So, yeah, I agree with you. I think that there’re going to be a lot of trade-offs. I think there’ll be less canned entertainment, but there will be more people making their own culture in their own community. There will be fewer kiwi fruits from Chile, but perhaps we’ll have better localized cheese production.

I try to imagine this, actually, in my next book. I wrote a novel that is set in the post-oil future, in Washington County, New York. And why? Because I’ve lived in this area for 30 years, and I know the area pretty well, so I wanted to depict it there. So, this novel is set in that period. The electricity is not working too well…

The thing that interests me about the novel, and it’s going to be called World Made By Hand, it’s coming out from Atlantic Monthly Press in March of 2008; when you announced the book a few weeks ago, it hit me that this is really is the coming together of those two writing careers that you’ve had that I talked about [earlier], writing fiction and writing about the state of our nation. It seems obvious in retrospect, but it’s not a career path that I would have personally seen for your writing. Where did the idea come from?

Well, I never gave up the idea of writing fiction. In fact, I published a novel in 2004 which kind of went under the whole radar screen of America, not too many people got it, although I thought it was a pretty good performance…

Maggie Darling.

Yeah, it was my Martha Stewart novel, about a woman like Martha, it’s wasn’t about Martha, but it was about a character like her, going through a life meltdown. It was a funny book, but nobody really “got it.” Anyway, I’ve never given up on the idea of writing fiction, but I did think it was important to try to imagine what this world would be. In part, because this public discussion we’re having about these problems is so lame. And I think people need to be prompted to have some frame of reference for how me might think about what’s happening to us. You know, I was discouraged from doing it by the people who I’m in business with. My literary agent didn’t want me to write fiction, because he thought “you’re better known as a non-fiction writer,” so…

They’re looking for The Long Emergency II.

Right. And my publisher was looking for the same thing, and so they didn’t really greet this idea with a lot of enthusiasm at first, but I think once I got the manuscript in, they really liked it. And they saw what it was about and I think it may grab the public’s imagination. There have been several other instances of novels, fiction works, that have come out in the last couple years trying to depict a dystopian future. And they’ve been pretty bleak. You know, Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road, for example, about this father and son stumbling around this post-nuclear wasteland. My book is not bleak. It’s actually a rather lyrical, pastoral kind of setting; the world has become a much more tranquil place in a lot of ways, although there’s a lot of action. The United States is still recognizable, though an awful lot of things have changed.

Is there a lot of real-life research involved in looking at the trends and how [they] would inform the coming future?

Well, I wouldn’t say that, other than in the sense that I had already done so much research for these other books that I was able to form, for me, a pretty coherent sense of what this world would be like. And as in any work of fiction, the setting or the fictional world you’re creating is a kind of self-organizing system. Once you start introducing things into it, that establishes what that world is like. For example, very early in the book, I realized that these people were not riding bicycles. Why? Well, for two reasons. There are an awful lot of materials and components that they couldn’t get to keep the bikes going. Especially the rubber. And, the pavements were so badly broken up. We assume that the pavements would be just as smooth as they are now, but in fact, it’s rough.

It is now in some places.

Right. And it’s just not easy. In fact, going back into history, the road improvement project in America really started in the late 19th century with the bicyclists, who campaigned tirelessly – no pun intended – for better roads. In fact, they were at it long before the car people came along around 1915. So, trying to imagine this world, I was surprised by a lot of things that happened. Another thing that happens in the book is that they don’t have any wheat. They can’t get wheat. And they’re just eating cornbread all the time, and they have other things, they have buckwheat, they have barley, oats and stuff, but they can’t get wheat. Trade has been severely curtailed, and you can’t grow wheat in a lot of parts of the Northeast, because there’s a persistent disease in the ground called rust, which has been here for 300, 400 years, ever since the early colonists came over, and it tends to hide out in a lot of common weeds that have a symbiotic relationship with this wheat disease. So the people in my book are not eating – they don’t have regular bread. And they’re always complaining about the fact that there’s nothing but cornbread.

It is a kind of ripping yarn of a book, it turns out to only secondarily be about the future. It’s mostly what’s happening to the characters and events in the book. And there are things that are happening that are kind of fascinating; one of the things that happens in the book, one of the characters is a rich plantation owner, who’s absorbed the farms of the other people around him who have failed, and sort of taken them on as vassals and serfs. He’s developing a kind of neo-feudal relationship with the people in that part of his community. And he’s been operating trade boats between Albany and that part of the Hudson River in Washington County, and one of his trade boats has disappeared, along with its crew. It hasn’t returned. So my protagonist is sent down to Albany with a bunch of other guys to find it, and rescue the crew. And we begin to see what’s happened to the rest of the world, because he hasn’t been out of his town for quite a few years.

This was originally one of the questions I was going to ask you in the beginning, and we kind of made our way past it, but I think it’s a good way to wrap things up. Obviously, you’ve been a writer and a journalist for decades, and four of your last five books, and your next book, are about the decaying state of affairs because of the over-reliance on oil and what you call “the fiasco of suburbia.” The subject – and this has to be something that you think about – this subject has altered the trajectory of your career as a writer, from where it could have gone 25, 30 years ago. If you could talk to yourself when you were just starting out as a writer and say “this is where you’re going,” how do you think as a young man you would have felt about the way circumstance sort of took your career?

Oh, I think I would have been perfectly okay with it. In fact, I have very, very vivid memories of working for Capital Newspapers in Albany in 1973, and driving around The Northway [Interstate I-87, which runs from Albany to the Canadian border], driving up to Saratoga and Glens Falls sometimes, and on a Friday night seeing all these headlights coming at me. And this was around the time of the OPEC embargo incident, and just thinking, “This is going to come to an end. We’re not going to be able to live like this forever. And it’s a huge problem, and we’re not paying any attention to it.” And if I had known back then that I was going to devote a substantial amount of my career to writing about it, I think that it is legitimately, really the largest issue of our time. How we are going to live. And how we are going to make a transition from the magic of the 20th century to the reality of the 21st century. So I’m completely at ease with it. I hope I don’t drop dead tomorrow, but I think I’ve accomplished enough in my life.

I’m glad to hear that. I read The Geography of Nowhere, I think when it came out, 1993; that, and your subsequent books have totally changed the way that I see the world around me. It’s been a wild ride so far, reading the books that you’ve published.

How old are you, Alan?

41.

So you’re a generation ahead of me, or behind me, which way is it? One of the things that I always marveled about with my parents, my father was born in 1917, my mother born in 1920. And they passed away within 26 hours of each other in 2001, before 9/11. But I always marveled at the fact that they saw the entire 20th century extravaganza in all of its glory. And for them, that was so normative, that they could never conceive of it coming to an end, or us having to live differently, or of things that were present in their lives not being around anymore. You know, my mom grew up through the entire communications revolution, from there being no radio, really, when she was a little baby, to the DVD generation and everything in-between. And that was the whole climbing up the great hill of magic of the 20th century.

“The American Dream” is an interesting phrase, if you think about it redefined as the oil century.

It also changed a lot. You know, the American Dream as I understand it, in perhaps its original form, was really about the idea of being able to start with pretty much nothing and make a life for yourself. And not necessarily become a billionaire, but to be able to prosper. But now the American Dream has become a strange, particular entitlement to a particular set of trophies. A certain kind of house, a certain kind of car, a certain set of entertainment appliances. And you know, that’s a pretty limited way to think of yourself. The spiritual side of this country has suffered an awful lot in the last 60 years.

Reading your books on the subject and Bill McKibben’s book recently, again, thinking that it could be a better world when all is said and done, if people re-scale their lives, if society re-scales itself to a more sustainable level, it doesn’t seem like it’s as bad as it might first appear.

No, in fact, I’ve been sort of reflecting lately; I’ve been doing a lot of bike rides around Greenfield Center [New York], in what was once pretty much a farm district outside of Saratoga. It’s become somewhat suburbanized, but there’s still a residue of farms there. One of the things that I think about often is that we’re going to be inhabiting the rural land differently. Because it’s going to take more human attention to do farming. There’s going to be fewer machines, and more people out there. And more people living in proximity to each other, and in cooperation with each other.

And more people, by the way, perhaps feeling that they’re actually contributing something.

Absolutely. Working shoulder to shoulder with people they know, at things that are important for their survival. But you know, what’s impressed me also is the loneliness of the contemporary landscape; the loneliness of the rural landscape today, which is deeply uninhabited by people participating in doing rural things. One of the weird things about suburbia was it allowed people to live an urban lifestyle in the rural setting. And that’s not going to be possible in the future. People who decide to live in the country are going to have to be working at country things, from now on. And there’s whole other discussion about what will happen to our cities and what will happen to our towns. I think that our towns here in this area are going to be coming back. I think Glens Falls, Hudson Falls, Fort Edward, Greenwich, Cambridge, those places, I think, have reached their low point and will be coming back up, again, as local living becomes more important.

So all is not bleak.

No, not at all.

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Visit James Howard Kunstler’s website at www.kunstler.com.

Me and Tom Snyder

2007-07-31T03:24:00.000-07:00

Remembering a brief love affair with TV's Tom Snyder.

Tom Snyder, who died this week at the age of 71, will likely be best remembered for one of two things; either his groundbreaking late-night Tomorrow Show that followed Johnny Carson for years, or the Dan Ackroyd parody Snyder inspired. Ackroyd’s depiction of Snyder was fevered and bizarre, all tics and mannerisms, cigarettes and waving hands, but it had the ring of truth: Tom Snyder was strange to watch on TV. He was riveting, to be sure, and a damned good interviewer. But he looked odd on television, and Ackroyd’s shtick was as much homage as it was parody.

I was seven years old when Tom Snyder’s Tomorrow debuted on NBC, and while I did tend to stay up late to catch Carson as a young teen, Snyder was mostly known to me as the show that was coming on as I shut off the TV at 12:30 to go to bed. Tomorrow ended in 1982, still a little ways off from when the 12:30 slot would draw me in, not coincidentally because of the man chosen to succeed Snyder, David Letterman.

Letterman’s first NBC series had been a daytime variety/talk show that followed The Today Show sometime around 1979-1980. I was 13, I think, when the show debuted, and completely open and ready for Letterman’s subversive, deadpan sarcasm. It imprinted itself on my mind, and was a formative influence on my personality. So now you know who to blame.

But Snyder was someone whose cultural impact I had just missed by inches. I was just too young to care about his interviews, which skewed more to current events than to the laughs I would have been looking for in my early teens. Letterman was much more my cup of tea. So Snyder’s heyday flew almost entirely off my personal cultural radar.

But fate had other plans.

I started working at my first radio job in 1986, while still enrolled in college working toward a radio broadcasting certificate from the local Community College. The job was at WKAJ/WASM, a family-owned and operated AM/FM combo in Saratoga Springs, New York. The AM station was the more popular and influential of the two at the time, with a live air staff most hours of the day and a two-person full-time news department strongly focused on community news rather than national issues. I joined the news staff part-time to supplement the efforts of the two full-timers, Mike Hare and Dina Cimino. As a fill-in anchor and reporter, I never knew from day to day whether I would be spending hours at a City Council meeting hoping for an interview with the mayor, or anchoring morning or afternoon news, or any number of other tasks a part-time radio station employee will have visited upon him. It was a time of great learning, though, and I liked the people I worked with and the jobs I was asked to do.

In 1987, I left WKAJ for my first full-time job, as the overnight guy at a country station coincidentally owned by Mike Hare’s cousin Ed Stanley, WSCG in Corinth, New York. That job lasted less than a year, in large part because I hated it. I hated the music, I hated the building, and I hated the stench of Stanley’s cigars, which permeated every molecule of the building, and anyone and anything trapped within its cheap, airless confines.

I returned to WKAJ/WASM, which was now under new ownership. WASM, which had been an older-skewing Music of Your Life station was now transformed to WQQY, 102 Double Q, a pop/top 40 station. For the first time, the FM station was emphasized over the AM, and live DJs were brought in. The AM station, WKAJ, was set to carry a new late-night radio talk show hosted by Tom Snyder, and I was tapped to be the board operator for the show.

What that means is that I had to be behind the controls for the full three hours of the broadcast every night from 10 PM to 1 AM, turning the live feed up and down when demanded by the format of the show, to play local commercials and read the weather forecast.

Being a part-time board op at a small-town radio station is perhaps the lowest rung on the totem pole of radio. But I was 21 years old and full of enthusiasm for my chosen career, radio broadcasting. Soon, I found myself equally enamored of Tom Snyder. The show was a blast to listen to, and I was getting paid to do it.

As I say, this was not anyone’s definition of a dream radio job, but I loved it. And more than that, I had a grandiose, if self-parodying image of my importance in the grand scheme of things. I appropriated an unused, dusty desk in a far corner of the newsroom and transformed it into The Snyderdesk. A publicity photo of Tom on the wall over my workspace looked down in approval on what I was creating. I began issuing memos to the staff about what “Tom and I” needed to properly perform our jobs, and the staff at the radio station found it amusing that this young kid was making so much out of so very, very little.

I was joking, of course. I still took my actual job duties seriously; in addition to running the board for Snyder, I still did part-time news reporting and anchoring, filled in for vacationing disk jockeys, and whatever else management asked me to do. During this time I worked with some of the most dynamic and unique individuals ever to work in radio in our part of the country, including the aforementioned Mike Hare, the very British David Baker, and account executive and later general manager Jerry Shepard, who was to become someone I admired more than just about anyone I ever worked with in radio in the entirety of my career. I’ve often said of Jerry that he was “the only man I ever knew,” and I still think this is true most days.

But when I wasn’t working on actual radio station business, I was spending a good deal of time building up my Snyderdesk mythology. And one day, on a lark, I sent a sheaf of my Snyderdesk memos off to Tom Snyder. I thought he’d get a kick out of them.

Apparently he did.

One night, while running the board for the show, Tom started discussing my Snyderdesk memos during the somewhat free-wheeling third hour from midnight to 1 AM. He may have eased into the topic sideways, if I recall correctly, so that it only gradually dawned on me that he not only had received the memos, but had actually read them.

As that realization began to sink in, the telephone began ringing in the studio. Moments later, I was talking to Tom Fucking Snyder coast-to-coast on national radio.

I’d be lying if I said I remember much about the conversation. Wikipedia notes that Snyder often used his third hour to chat with his “legion of fans,” occasionally including well-known admirers like David Letterman and Ted Koppel. No doubt Tom sensed the genuine adoration that was a part of my Snyderdesk hyperbole, and he was warm and full of laughter as he read some of the memos on the show and asked me about the reaction to my efforts among my co-workers. This conversation, which lasted maybe 10 minutes, remains one of the highlights of my broadcasting career, just one of the most thrilling and enjoyable moments of my life. And certainly the first time I realized that if you enjoy the work of a well-known celebrity and approach them with honesty and no hidden motives, amazing things can happen.

I think I may have had one more on-air chat with Tom Snyder before the short-lived radio show came to an end, but it could not have been as magical or memorable to me as that first, incredible Snyderdesk chat. I did remain a genuine fan, and always made it a point to check out his later TV efforts, which were every bit as odd, unique and compelling as anything else Snyder ever accomplished. On radio or TV, he was a good host, but he was a great broadcaster.

One last anecdote that doesn’t really fit anywhere, but I am sure this happened in the latter days of the Snyder radio show.

When you are a radio board op, the rewards are few (if any), and the burdens many. Snyder seemed to understand this well, and often talked about the network of radio stations and dedicated board ops that made it possible for him to speak to the nation. If any of them were like me, they lost a lot of sleep due to the show’s odd hours, but they felt amply rewarded by the fact that Snyder cared enough to mention us on the air on a regular basis. You could tell he was a decent, empathetic soul.

As time wore on, Snyder began actually talking to the board ops after the broadcast each night. When you would turn down the knob that made the show live on the air, if you turned it all the way to the left until you felt a mild pop on the knob, you had turned it into “cue,” which meant you could now hear what was happening on that channel on a private speaker in the studio. Only someone standing in the studio could hear what came out of the speaker when it was in cue, and Snyder, a longtime broadcaster, knew that some of us would have the knob in cue, and he started talking to us every night.

It only went on for two or three minutes, after the show ended at 12:58:10 every morning. Tom no doubt was ready to go home, and certainly he knew we board ops were, but it became a nightly ritual for him to entertain just us board ops, just for a few minutes.

One night he was talking to us (we couldn’t talk back, this was strictly a one-way conversation) about a new publicity photo the network had ordered. “You should see this thing,” Snyder said, in his loud and blustery, yet intimate manner. “I’m wearing the biggest goddamned set of cans you’ve ever seen!” Cans, for those not in broadcasting, are headphones. Because it was a radio show, they wanted Snyder to wear headphones for his publicity headshot. This is how stupid network executives can be.

Snyder’s tale of the headshot was funny and delightful, as his board-op pep talks almost always were. But what Tom hadn’t counted on was that some board ops might not have turned the knob all the way to the left to put the show from live into cue. In fact, apparently some stations didn’t turn off the feed at all that night. Whether it was a sloppy or confused board op, or perhaps malfunctioning automation at stations that didn’t have live board ops, Snyder’s profane complaint about the “goddamned cans” and probably more damning, his implicit criticism of his higher-ups, was apparently broadcast on some percentage of stations that carried the broadcast.

So, that was pretty much the end of the private board-op pep-talks. Snyder humbly apologized soon thereafter, and no longer did turning the knob into cue at the end of the show provide the small measure of private joy it once did. Our secret little clique of board ops across the country, all led by Tom Snyder, had been disbanded by circumstance.

Like the entirety of Tom Snyder’s broadcasting career, it was fun while it lasted.

This one is for you Tom, in sincere admiration and love. You were, as I said, a great broadcaster, and I will never forget those late night chats with all us board ops, or the one special night that you took the time to talk only to me, and made me feel like I mattered, like I was somebody. Tom Snyder was a great broadcaster because he understood everyone in the chain, from himself to his guests to his viewers and listeners down to his part-time, small-town board-ops, mattered.

In his latter days, Tom liked to tweak the clichés of technology and hype, and tell his fans to “Fire up a colortini, sit back, relax, and watch the pictures, now, as they fly through the air.” Go ahead, Tom, fire one up. You earned it. Thank you.

The End of the World

2007-07-29T18:18:00.000-07:00

It’s the end of the world, but only as we know it. How do you feel?

The end of the world is nigh. I don't think we'll be wiped out by space aliens, overtaken by zombies or even destroyed in an all-out nuclear war. Also, when I say "the end of the world," I mean it more in the REM sense: It's the end of the world as we know it. I don't, however, feel fine.

For over 100 years now, the human race has transformed the way it exists on this planet through the availability of cheap oil. The detrimental effects of the "happy motoring era," as writer James Howard Kunstler calls it, were predicted at least as far back as Orson Welles's never-properly-completed film The Magnificent Ambersons, which noted that the onset of motor vehicles had displaced the sense of community that had been a binding force in American culture prior to that. Welles's film was about much more than just that, of course, but that certainly was one of the key points.

I started to become aware of the destructive impact of the automobile after reading Kunstler's two magnificent books The Geography of Nowhere and Home From Nowhere, both of which make powerful cases for a return to a more sane and sustainable lifestyle, with people living in human-scaled communities which they can mostly navigate on foot. The obvious benefits of walking to and from work, home, school and local businesses almost go without saying, but at this late date most people have become so fully invested in the idea of their car as their main mode of transportation that it never occurs to them what the rates of heart disease, obesity and other illnesses might look like if we had all spent the past century walking everywhere.

I don't walk everywhere, but living half a block from a shopping center that includes a supermarket, video store, pizza shop, Chinese restaurant and more, I walk as much as possible. The April, 2005 accident that destroyed my last car opened my eyes a bit, and I decided the day that happened that I would not buy another car. For the six years previous to that accident, I had paid over $600.00 a month for my wife and I to each have our own car, but I was also commuting 100 miles a day to work in Albany. These days my wife and I both live less than five miles from our jobs, and while my not having a car of my own is occasionally an inconvenience, the cash savings are substantial. I also like knowing I am no longer contributing to the environmental problems and other issues associated with owning and operating a motor vehicle.

In addition to the environmental impact of the automobile era, Kunstler's most recent (and I think most important) book, The Long Emergency, also introduces a much more pressing issue into the mix, that of the peak oil phenomenon. Maybe you've heard about peak oil, and the fact that we're very likely running out of the fossil fuels that have so changed the planet in the past century. Optimists like to posit a future in which mankind has come up with an alternative fuel that will allow everyone to keep scooting around in their cars all day long, all week long, all year long, all their lives.

But a cursory understanding of peak oil shows that the chances of that happening have long since passed. Perhaps if an intense effort was made across the planet to conserve fossil fuel and create new sources of energy 50 or 75 years ago, there would be hope that mankind could mostly get through the end of the cheap oil era with its lifestyle mostly unchanged. I think it's pretty clear that that window has long since slammed shut, though. Virtually every alternative, from solar power to hybrid automobiles, depends largely on the continuing availability of cheap oil. And most optimistic theorists turn a blind eye to the growing hunger for cheap oil in other nations, especially China. Their increasing reliance on automobiles and the unbelievable mass-production mega-industry in China makes them the nation to watch in the Global Oil Sweepstakes.

And anyone who thinks high technology will rescue us from a lack of oil is probably unaware that everything from cell phones to home computers are made of plastic, which is made of -- you guessed it -- oil.

I used to think that America and the countries that have emulated its example could probably go on another 25 or 50 years before the scarcity of oil had a negative impact on the lives of the average citizen. Now I tend to think we have five to ten years at best before our lives are irrevocably altered by the end of the cheap oil age.

I don't have a lot to offer in the way of analysis or suggestions. For that, I would ask you to read some of the books mentioned above, as well as the one I read this week that got me started thinking about writing about all this: Deep Economy by Bill McKibben.

The worst estimated end-result of the end of the cheap oil era really does look like the end of the world: Kunstler, I think it was, predicted that only one out of every six people would survive on this planet after we stop extracting oil out of the ground. Not run out of oil, but stop extracting it. Because you need oil to power the machines that suck it up out of the earth. And at some point, it will take more than a barrel of oil to extract a barrel of oil from the ground. At that point, obviously, there is no profit whatsoever in continuing to drill for oil. The point is somewhere down the slope from the peak of oil extraction, a time many believe has either already passed or very soon will. And that worst-case scenario? Five billion people could be dead within this century. In fact, it seems likely that this planet never could have sustained the numbers it does if not for cheap oil, which has essentially provided most people in affluent nations with the equivalent of thousands of workers, labouring away for them without complaint.

Think for a moment how many people and how much time it would take to get a message across the country if you didn't have internet and cell phone technology. How many people and how long would it take to carry your entire family six states away on vacation? People living in countries with cheap, available oil are the luckiest and wealthiest people on the planet. But the luxuries we enjoy come at a price. The mis-allocation of resources across the planet means that while Americans sip lattes in air-conditioned Starbucks locations, across the globe others live in miserable conditions, with not enough to drink, not enough to eat, and no hope in sight for an equalization of conditions. No hope other than the almost-certainly inevitable end of the cheap oil era, a global market correction that will change the playing field for virtually everyone alive today.

Kunstler is seen by some as too negative and cynical; I find his tone and analysis to be simpatico with my own point of view, but McKibben's new book puts things in a more hopeful perspective, and it is to be profoundly hoped that Kunstler's worst predictions can be avoided (not that much is being done so far to achieve that laudable goal). McKibben looks to communities to weather the coming storm, and believes that by relying on our families and neighbours, by re-connecting with our local environments through social and commercial undertakings, we can better withstand the worst of what is almost certain to be coming in all our lifetimes. McKibben is a good deal more optimistic and hopeful than Kunstler, but I think both of them have very valuable things to say about where we are now, where we're going, and most importantly, where we can be if we take responsibility for ourselves and our communities. I can't recommend enough both The Long Emergency by Kunstler and Deep Economy by McKibben for background and insight on the issues that we all face.

If you can't afford to buy them, you should visit your local library and check them out. Given the way most of us have abandoned our own communities, it's probably a good idea to visit your local library anyway. And bring the kids. If we're going to make a better, more sustainable world, introducing your children to one of the most important parts of their local community would be a great place to start.

Dear Steve

2007-07-28T23:47:00.000-07:00

Written Thursday, June 2nd, 2005

It was twenty years ago this September that we first met, when you were the music director of our college radio station. I remember you got sick not long after we met, and there was that one day that, I think, Jake, Kelly, Craig and I came to visit you. You had a huge tube in your chest and looked pretty damned uncomfortable. If I recall correctly, though, you did tell Kelly that now that she had seen your nipples, fair was fair, and she should reciprocate. A comment made even funnier for the fact that, at the time, we all hardly knew each other.

We were all students in the broadcasting class at Adirondack Community College. From that hospital room to the college's classrooms to your living room and many of the bars and restaurants in the area over the next few years, we were good friends. Craig, and very shortly thereafter Jay, and a few other people were all part of a circle of friends united in an interest in all of our hoped-for radio careers, although only a handful – including you and I, ever actually got jobs in radio. So far as I know, only Jake and I still have them, and I haven't seen him in many years.

How do we all scatter to the wind? And how is it that we ask ourselves that so rarely, and only at a time like this?

It was just last night, Steve, that I found out you had died. I had emailed Jay about something I thought he'd be interested in, and he mentioned in his reply how hard your passing had hit him. I was so shocked by this casual mention of your death, that I was not even certain he was talking about you, although, of course he was. We always knew -- you, me, your mom, all of us -- that you were living on borrowed time. Hell, in college I looked up information about your illness and discovered the life expectancy was in the early 20s. That you made it to nearly 40 is a genuine triumph. That you died last December is, frankly, a kick in the head that I am having a hard time getting past.

There's no one to blame but me for my not knowing. I allowed us to fall out of contact with each other years ago, and at the time you died my personal circumstances took me even further away from any kind of communication with the person most likely to let me know what was happening, our good and mutual friend Joe. So much has happened between Joe and I over the past year, none of it really the fault of either of us, but it's been hard, at times, to talk to him. Hard not to hate him, despite the fact that ultimately all that's happened is not his fault.

Shit, Steve, this is about you and me. And the fact is, I'm the only one to blame for the way our lives split off from each other. For years I loved you like a brother, and respected you mightily for being the only person I knew who so very clearly was both smarter and funnier than me. I often say my friend and creative partner Chris Allen is who I want to be when I grow up, but Steve, before I met him, that person was you. I wanted to be as funny as you, I wanted to be as smart as you, and most importantly, I wanted to be as decent as you.

You were the best kind of friend someone like me could have – you never pulled your punches, and you always called bullshit on me. I never could get away with anything with you. And best of all, you stayed loyal no matter what. I'm sure every friend you ever had knew what I knew then and know now – there could be no better or more loyal friend than Steve Cole.

I'm sorry for the way things turned out between us, and I take full, 100% responsibility. I always thought that, since both of us were still friends with Jay, and friends with Joe, that somehow when enough time had passed we'd find ourselves in a conversation together, and the years would fall away. I thought you had found a strength and power to defeat your illness, and I thought there'd be all the time in the world.

Funnily enough, I have an incurable illness, now, too, although it's nowhere as devastating yet as yours was to you. I know now, having lived with diabetes for seven years, how you came to live with your own illness as just a part of your life. You were sick to one degree or another for the entirety of the time I knew you, but you never let the sickness blot out your passion, your humour, or your life. Hell, looking back, as confused as we were in our early 20s, you still managed to be one of the most alive and vital people I knew. I know you had your doubts and fears, but please know that I always looked to you as someone who seemed to have it together in ways that I could never hope to figure out.

I don't know what else to say, my friend. Too many years got between us, and I lost one of the very best friends I ever had. I'm sorry I let our friendship fall away. I'm sorry I wasn't there for you, but I'm glad to know that Jay was. My only excuse for all this is that I really, truly thought there'd be more time, and now there's none. But I remember the years we were friends, and all the funny and tragic crap that only young men in their 20s can believe is the most important thing in the world. Approaching 40, I know that friendship and shared experience is one of the most important things that anyone can ever have, and I'm profoundly grateful for the time that we had, as friends, as colleagues at the college radio station, as two young men, one of whom always thought there'd be more time, and the other who probably knew there would never be enough. I'm glad you got as many years as you did, Steve, but I wish you'd gotten a little more. Selfishly, I wish you'd gotten enough time for me to call you up, one more time, and say hello. And to say I'm sorry. And to say that I've missed your friendship, and I now, I always will.

Alan

An Interview with James Howard Kunstler

2007-07-28T13:44:00.000-07:00

In 2000, the noted author and social critic spoke in Glens Falls, New York. I was there and spoke to him about the state of the world. It was bad then; it's worse now.

On Tuesday, July 11th, 2000, I was privileged to attend a speech entitled "Can Glens Falls Survive Suburbia?" at Crandall Library in Glens Falls, New York.

I've lived, worked or gone to school in Glens Falls since 1985, so I was extremely intrigued to learn one of my favourite authors, James Howard Kunstler, was going to address the future of the city.

Kunstler is a member of the New Urbanism movement, which seeks to educate citizens, civic leaders and government officials about how people interact with their environment. Kunstler and others advocate learning from history about what forms of planning, architecture and design contribute to how people respond to their living environment, and acting to effect positive change at the local level.

Kunstler's two books, The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere, eloquently lay out his philosophy, in an engaging style that explains the tenets of the New Urbanism in terms that anyone with even a halfway open mind should be able to comprehend, absorb, and act upon.

At its most simple, I think it boils down to this: people are happier and healthier when they exist in a living environment that is organic and logical. Neighbourhoods where, say, people living in second-floor apartments can walk to the market, as Kunstler points out, to get a newspaper. Where trees are planted to fulfill a specific set of purposes (shade, protection of pedestrians from traffic, and to separate where people and vehicles travel among them), not to give an illusion that you are living deep in the North Woods (as he puts it).

Kunstler's style is appealingly ironic -- in his speech in Glens Falls, he used slides to illustrate his points, including photographs of some truly hideous landmarks (local and otherwise) that have popped up to desecrate the American landscape since the conclusion of World War II.

The result has been millions of people living in thousands of communities that are in conflict with the natural needs and desires of humanity. Strip malls, fry pits (Kunstler's term not only for fast-food nightmares like McDonalds but more pretentious "neighbourhood grills" like Applebee's), the Universal Automobile Slum. It has all, Kunstler seems to say, contributed to the lack of human dignity or sense of community for the vast majority of people living in these U.S. communities. He frankly attributes the depression many Americans suffer from, at least in part, to the conflict between what kind of environment people need and the empty, insulting, and vaguely horrific approximation modern living has delivered.

The irony is, it would not be all that difficult to get back the kinds of communities that people can live not merely exist in. In his speech, Kunstler outlined some simple steps, including mandated design of new construction (honouring both the community's history and human needs), and tax incentives to get businesses and people to move back into downtown areas. To make them once more organic and alive instead of sterile, illogical and doomed.

Right now, as a resident of Glens Falls, it seems my community could go either way. Kunstler even said during his speech that it's clear the city is in a transitional period. I hope most people came away from the speech as energized and convinced as I am of the value of Kunstler's ideas.

One of the great things about Kunstler's style is that he really, truly has a gift for explaining what he is talking about. What he terms the Universal Automobile Slum may seem to the uninitiated or disinterested as a vague concept, but it only takes a few minutes for Kunstler to illuminate what exactly has gone wrong in this country and the way its people are living.

In the post-War era, Americans fell in love with their cars. 50 years later, virtually every community in the country is built around the presumption that everyone wants to drive miles and miles to carry out every detail of their lives.
Drive to the mall. Drive to work. Drive to the supermarket. As an added bonus, each of these destinations is generally designed to subliminally oppress the human spirit with their near-universal grotesqueries. As Kunstler pointed out in his speech, the problem isn't that all of America's communities look the same, it's that they all are equally hideous. He got quite a few laughs (the sort of laughter that comes from the recognition of a truth) when he pointed out that no one comes back from Paris complaining that all the streets are the same. They are, he says, but they are all equally beautiful, well-designed public spaces.

In my local community, there are some well-designed public spaces, areas that Kunstler feels work well or could work well with a minimum of change. But there are also parts of Glens Falls that are at complete odds with any kind of design sense. For example, he used a slide to illustrate a bank building with an enormous, steep handicap ramp that very probably would not be navigable by anyone in a wheelchair.

After the speech, I spoke briefly to Mr. Kunstler:

Alan David Doane: One of the things that I found most interesting, given the conservative, sort of pro-big business, destroy everything and allow these big box stores to go up everywhere (attitude), is where you talked about suburban sprawl as a threat to freedom. How do you think you can get that message across to people that it not only endangers sort of an aesthetic point of view, but also the very structure of our lives?

James Howard Kunstler: Well, I think people are unfortunately going to learn the hard way when the auto-dependent life becomes a problem. They're going to discover that, in fact, this is a tremendous limitation on their freedom to use their everyday world and really exercise their choice about how they want to go to where they want to be, and I think it's going to be an increasingly terrible problem as the world oil markets become unstable and we can no longer really predict what the supply and price of gasoline is going to be. Even if it's just sort of a moderate fluctuation, it's still going to be a problem.

As you pointed out (in your speech), even 30 cents a gallon is going to make a difference.

And even if it goes down and up, and down and up, and down and up, it's going to mean problems for people. It doesn't have to just go steadily up, although I think overall it will. But even if it goes up and down in a way that--the price of gas, that is--in a way that is unpredictable, it's going to be tremendously difficult for these national chain retail outfits that depend utterly on massive long-range trucking to make their operations work. Wal-Mart's basic operation is known as The Warehouse on Wheels. The way they make their money, they don't store their stuff, it's constantly in motion, going from wherever they take it off a container ship to its destination in the regional warehouse.

I think that's going to be a problem, it's already obviously a problem, even with gas being cheap. The whole experience of having to live in a really, massive suburban environment like you find in Atlanta, or Houston, or Los Angeles, or Washington, D.C., y'know, where many, many people live. These places are getting so horrible to just be in that, you know, people are tremendously depressed. The amount of depression and anxiety that's just being generated by these terrible surroundings is enough, I think, to be causing problems for people.

Don't you think, for the most part, short of coming to something like this (event), they really don't understand exactly why it is they're depressed?

I think that's probably true. I'd say that there are probably plenty of people who are being very negatively affected by their surroundings, who probably don't think
-- it would never occur to them that that's the problem.

You showed the picture of Route 50 (in Wilton, New York, an area overwhelmed with out-of-control retail businesses like McDonald's, Wal-Mart, Target, Taco Bell, and many more blights on the landscape), a very disturbing scene to look at, and fortunately you're able to express very eloquently why that is, but I don't think most people, if you'd gone up to most of these people before your speech, and asked Why is that so hideous?, I don't think that they would have (been able to explain) it. Do you find that the New Urbanism--are you able to spread the word beyond these small sort of gatherings?

I'm not the only guy who's out there; Peter Katz is out there, Peter Calthorpe is out there, Andres Duany is out there. Lots and lots of people are out there, speaking and doing charettes, and I think furnishing Americans with nomenclature and a vocabulary for understanding what's happened to them and what they can do about it. But it is a problem to not have a vocabulary to discuss it, and because a lot of communities have not used the vocabulary, the terminology, they've been having a fairly incoherent discussion. And they end up arguing about things like density. They're against it, basically. So there's been a tremendous amount of political paralysis and conflict arising out of these issues and an inability to resolve them in a favorable way.

The things that make us human, that sets us apart from the animals, are the ability to learn from the past, and plan for the future. You're asking for both of those things, two things that I think the average politician is just about completely incapable of.

Well, we go through these periods in American life when our culture is more or less coherent, when there is more or less a sense of common purpose. I certainly think that people who lived during the trauma of World War II knew why they were fighting. And knew why America had to go through this ordeal. And knew why they had to behave the way they were being asked to behave. Knew why they were being asked to drive less and grow vegetables and so on. There was a consensus in the year 1900 that streetcars would be a great thing. And I think this country benefited tremendously from having those wonderful systems, which were unfortunately destroyed and systematically disassembled in the 1920s and '30s. Those were things, the City Beautiful movement, which occurred also around the turn of the century, was a great instance of a great patriotic movement, having a great sense of common purpose among civic leaders of all kinds.

Politicians, architects, artists, business people, all supported the activities that went on in the City Beautiful movement, and the result of it was we got beautiful commercial buildings, we got beautiful schools, we got beautiful houses, we got beautiful courthouses, we got even beautiful power plants! Because the agreement was there, the sense of purpose that we needed public beauty in our lives. What we discovered around 1900 was that we had become a great nation. And that we deserved great buildings and great public spaces and great towns and great cities that were worthy of our new status in the world. Now we're in another situation, where we need to discover that we need an everyday world that's worthy of our humanity, that's worthy of our spirit, that is worthy of our aspirations for a good life. And right now it's all being kind of fogged out and eclipsed and there's a lot of static in the air, and people are being distracted with a lot of -- shopping.

Visit James Howard Kunstler's website.

Diabetic Again

2007-07-28T12:59:00.000-07:00

Feels like the first time; feels like the very first time.

I recently experienced a bit of a health scare -- I won't go into the gory details, but something happened one afternoon that sent me immediately to the doctor's office. I was diagnosed with a fairly simple and common infection, and given some antibiotics. Within three or four days, I not only felt fantastic, but I had managed to kick my major, major caffeine habit that I had fostered under many years of working in morning radio. The nurse practitioner that I saw told me that caffeine and alcohol would only aggravate my condition, and as it was pretty painful in the beginning, I didn't want to make it any worse. After the symptoms cleared up, it just seemed like a good idea to kick caffeine once and hopefully for all. So I have gone from drinking 4-8 cans of Diet Mountain Dew per day (the diet version because I am diabetic and sugared sodas are definitely not on the menu for me) to drinking nothing but water, lots of it, and about one bottle of Diet Green Tea (no sugar, no caffeine, plus hopefully some antioxidants) every day.

During my visit to the doctor's office, the subject of my diabetes came up, and here's where it gets complicated and hard to talk about for me. But I want this blog to be an honest discussion of whatever is on my mind. I'm writing this one for me, really, not for you. Although those of you that stick around, I am extremely grateful to you, and you might even learn something about the arrogance and denial that have fucked up my health a bit.

Where to start? Well, I was first diagnosed with Type 2 ("adult onset") diabetes on (you'll love this) Friday the 13th of November, 1998. I had been overwhelmed with fatigue and peeing every 30 minutes around the clock for weeks, so I knew something was wrong, but even with a family history of the disease (my mother was diabetic), I was ignorant and arrogant enough to actually hope, when I first went to see the doctor because of these symptoms, that maybe I was just suffering some sort of urinary tract infection.

I wasn't, of course. I found out that day that my blood sugar was 307, 300 percent of what a healthy person's reading would be. The news that I was diabetic hit me, at the grand old age of 32, like a brick to the skull. It was raining that day, and as I drove from the doctor's office to the supermarket, I remembering crying and feeling quite a bit like I had been handed a death sentence.

A lot of that emotion stemmed from the fact that I knew little to nothing about diabetes, despite my mother having had it (at this time she had been dead for four years, a victim of Alzheimer's and brain cancer). When I went to the store I bought healthier foods for the most part, but having yet not had any education about my disease at all, I also bought a big jug of orange juice. Mom had always had one in the fridge, and I realize now it was in case her blood sugar went too low. Orange juice has an enormous amount of sugar in it, so while it's good for reviving you if you're hypoglycemic (as in-control diabetics can sometimes become), for me, hyper-glycemic, it was not a very good thing to be drinking.

Luckily for me, within a week or two I had seen a nutritionist and done everything in my power (thank God for the internet, even in 1998) to learn as much as I could about diabetes. So I soon learned not to drink OJ unless it was medically necessary (and even then, it wouldn't take much to get your sugar back up to normal), and I began a radical diet program that consisted of -- amazing, for an American -- eating fewer calories than I was burning every day. This strict meal plan coupled with mild but committed exercise -- usually a half-hour or so walk every day -- allowed me to lose a mid-size child's worth of weight in less than a year, my blood sugar returned to low enough averages that my doctor cut the amount of diabetic medication I had to take every day, my eyesight improved, my libido returned to an 18-year-old's level, basically, life was incredibly good.

I didn't feel arrogant about it at first. For quite some time -- two or three years, I would say -- I felt extremely lucky. Blessed. I had been diagnosed with an incurable illness (I heard diabetes lumped with AIDS and cancer as incurable illnesses in a radio commercial one day, and it brought me to tears), and I had, through modern medicine and what seems to me now an enormous force of will, managed to bring my blood sugar levels basically to normal. All the complications of the disease -- blindness, amputations, heart disease, death -- seemed a lot further away than they did on that rainy day back in November of 1998.

But, as they do, things changed.

My job changed in late summer of 1999, and I think that's where it began. I had made my 30 minute walk a part of my daily routine at work, using my break time to keep myself healthy. When I switched jobs and started working at an all-news radio station in Albany, I now had to sit in a chair basically for seven or eight hours a day with no opportunity at all for exercise. I more or less stuck to my meal plan, but between the lack of opportunities for movement at work and the two-hour, 110 mile or so commute every day, I was just too exhausted by the end of the day to consider exercising at home.

That all-news radio job lasted about two years, then I decided to move on to a Public Radio station in 2001. The new job actually began a week and a day before the attacks of September 11th. The pay was out-of-this world compared to my Glens Falls radio days, or even the Albany job that immediately preceded it. I was a producer, editor and anchor, and also assignment editor for reporters ("bureau chiefs") over a wide swath of the northeastern United States. So I had mad cash, a lot of responsibility, felt like I was genuinely making a better world through my work in radio (a first in what was then about 15 years in broadcasting), and more or less thought I was on top of the world. As you might guess, I would trace the beginning of my arrogance to this period.

Because I had previously had such great control over my blood sugar, I went from 1998 and testing three or four times a day, to maybe once a day by 2000, and probably once a week or less by 2002 or so. I left the Public Radio station in late summer of 2004 under what I felt were less-than-ideal circumstances, and that's where I think the depression set in, depression that I experienced I would say from that time up until maybe the beginning of this year, 2007. So, for two or three years, beginning in August of 2004, I entered what was probably the darkest and most hopeless period of my life.

I took a new radio job in late April of 2005, a time that coincided almost to the day with the accident that destroyed my red car. And while the decision not to buy a new one was based as much on ideology as budget constraints, I have to say that the lack of freedom was yet another blow to my ego and sense of self. These days I am a lot more philosophical about being carless -- if not proud -- but when the accident happened, it was just more crap to deal with, at a time when I wasn't dealing well with all the crap that was already on my plate.

The new job was stressful at first -- there was a lot to wrap my brain around, because although I had been in radio 19 years at that point, I was now doing things and charged with responsibilities I had never experienced before. The learning curve was steep, but eventually I came to grips with it, and came to love it more than any radio job I have ever had. That was a big part of coming out of what I now realized was probably a pretty deep depression, and for most of 2007, I have felt pretty good about my family and my job, while more or less ignoring my diabetes.

I think it was a combination of arrogance stemming from how quickly and effectively I got it under control circa 1998, and the subsequent improvement I experienced in many areas of my health. And dealing with all the different things I did in radio from 1998 to 2007, I find that it was really easy to just forget the fact that I am diabetic. Any of my fellow diabetics may or may not be shocked when I tell you this, but I don't think I tested my blood sugar more than once or twice a year over the past two or three years.

Physically, I felt fine -- artificially propped up by all that caffeine in the Diet Mountain Dew I drank like water -- and I was actively avoiding my doctor, for a number of reasons. Primarily I assumed -- wrongly -- that my sugar was still under control. He had also been a huge fan of the Public Radio station I worked at, so I was a bit humbled by the fact that I no longer worked there. Also, his very pro-active (and very wise) approach to managing my diabetes was just not something I felt I could deal with during this time, late 2004 to early 2007. So, I went to ground, abandoned totally my monitoring of my disease, and as any diabetic will tell you, when it comes to monitoring your blood sugar, out of sight is out of mind.

When I went in to the doctor's office a few weeks back, that was the beginning of digging my way out of all this. Emotionally I feel much better than I have in years -- I don't think I'm suffering from clinical depression anymore -- and I've started monitoring my blood sugar multiple times daily. My highest fasting blood sugar has been 180, and the lowest, this morning, after a few days back on my proper meds and with some real adjustments to my diet, was 135. But I know I've probably done some damage to my body in the time I was out of touch with my diabetes, and I know I have a lot of work to do before I can start to feel that it's under my control again.

I will say that there could not have come a better time for Michael Moore's Sicko, about the abhorrent state of U.S. health care even for people with insurance. Just in the past three weeks, I have experienced some of the stupidity, contempt, bureaucracy and outright hostility the system here in Los Estados Unidos has for people with serious, life-threatening issues. I have been confronted with a lack of knowledge and thoughtfulness by people in a position to help me, that made me realize a meeker, or poorer person than myself might have just given up. Hell, maybe I would have, myself, if I was still in the depression I was in not that long ago.

There's a scorched-earth war on right now against the health and well-being of anyone in this country who needs health care but isn't spectacularly wealthy. Anyone who tells you different is either lying or incredibly naive. I really wonder how much longer I'll be able to afford to take care of myself and my family, even with both my wife and I working full-time jobs. But the lesson of the past few weeks, and of the past few years of my living in denial about a gravely serious disease I will have the rest of my life, has made me realize more than ever that if I don't take full command of my life and my health, no one else will.

The message I am getting is that here in the United States, our leaders and our health care system are staggeringly indifferent to the health and safety of the people. Of course, I need to watch out for my own health. Because it's crystal clear that no one else is going to do it, and in fact, the current system would prefer if we all just quietly suffer and die while politicians and pharmacological companies and anyone who profits from this clusterfuck of U.S. health care gets richer, and richer, and richer.

This is not a compassionate nation. In fact, health care is our national catastrophe, and we should all be ashamed. And we should all demand change, right fucking now. The billions we've wasted on the lie that is the Iraq war could have saved millions of lives. Lives not taken in the name of U.S. aggression, and lives of those receiving poor-to-no health care right here at home.

I'm not depressed anymore, I'm just pissed off. And determined to get myself better. This is a big change for me, and I hope you'll consider what you can and should change, yourself. If you're in denial about your health, or if you are in a position to effect or demand change in the way this country cares for its people -- all its people -- I hope you'll do so. If the people of this country can't watch out for each other, it's not a country worth saving. And right now we're all in grave danger, because of a corrupt and dysfunctional health care system. A good country is one that cares for and protects all its people before it wastes it resources elsewhere. This one has a lot of work to do to get where it should be, but luckily there are great examples -- Britain, Canada and France, for example -- of countries that get health care much more right than this one. What's needed is monumental change, which I fear will only be effected by monumental outrage. I'm starting to feel it. Are you?

If I Ran for President

2007-07-28T12:25:00.000-07:00

One man's stand on the issues. Bring your torches and pitchforks and meet us at his house tomorrow at dawn.

Another Presidential election is pending in the United States, and I am forced to wonder if it's even possible that this one, unlike those in 2000 and 2004, might possibly be allowed to reflect the will of the people without the fraud and conspiracies that have tainted and corrupted the U.S. government for nearly a decade now.

I saw a list of these issues on a website recently. I guess they are the issues that the site feels defines the coming election. I wondered, as I looked at it, where I would stand on the issues if I were running for President?

* Abortion Rights -- While I want every woman to have the power to decide for herself, in every instance, whether she should or should not remain pregnant, I believe the issue would be far less troublesome if every citizen of the United States were educated about reproduction and human sexuality beginning at a very early age. And even before that, parents should be frank and honest with their children about these issues, so that by the time they learn the facts in school, they already have a solid grounding in reproductive ethics and realities. This is one issue on which the entire structure of the country is utterly broken, and we've been paying for it forever.

* Death Penalty -- I used to favour the death penalty in cases of extremely aberrant criminal behaviour in which there is no doubt whatsoever that the perpetrator is guilty. Not for revenge, not as a deterrent, but just to remove the most dangerous people in society from society. But as I have gotten older I have come to realize that no one ultimately has the right to end the life of another person unless that person presents a direct and immediate threat to their own life or the lives of others. So I am opposed to the death penalty.

* Education (No Child Left Behind) -- "No child left behind" is one of the many programs the current, illegal government created as smoke and mirrors to mask its true intentions. It has done nothing to improve the education of the nation's children, and it has allowed the military unwelcome access to private information about children for the purposes of coercing them into military service. It's a fraud and a disgrace.

* Embryonic Stem Cells -- I favour any and all ethically sound medical research that does not involve involuntary, uninformed harm to a living human being.

* Energy & Oil (ANWR Drilling) -- This is another issue on which the majority of citizens is hopelessly undereducated. We're at or past the point of peak oil right now, and there's every reason to believe that a catastrophic reorganizing of human society will be forced upon us within most of our lifetimes. No alternative energy or conservation effort can hope to change the one inarguable fact, which is that the lifestyle of the vast majority of United States citizens will change in ways few will enjoy. The solution is a return to more local economies operating at a human scale, and the fact is that this will happen eventually no matter what anyone says or does; it simply has to, there are no other possible outcomes. The only question is whether people wake up to the realities in time and manage to adjust to the difficulties that lie ahead. If not, the world is in for horror unprecedented in human history. Unfortunately, I expect the latter outcome, and I expect it within the next 10 to 20 years.

* Energy & Oil (Kyoto) -- See above, with the added comment that the U.S. flouting of the Kyoto Accords is another example of how the rogue government of the country has disgraced the entire nation before the eyes of the world.

* Guns (Assault Weapons Ban) -- No human being should be allowed to possess these weapons, and the companies that produce them are guilty of crimes against humanity.

* Guns (Background Checks) -- I am opposed to private ownership of guns of any kind, but if gun ownership remains legal in the United States, there should be a one-year waiting period during which the applicant undergoes extensive psychological testing, gun safety training, and pledges to never allow their weapon within a mile of anyone under the age of 18.

* Homeland Security (Patriot Act) -- This should be repealed immediately and anyone who voted in favour of it should be removed from office and put on trial for treason.

* Homeland Security (Guantanamo) -- This surreal nightmare should be closed immediately, and a full, U.N.-led investigation should occur in the run-up to war crimes trials for all involved.

* Homeland Security (Torture) -- Anyone who has tortured another human being for any reason should be put on trial in the World Court. If found guilty, they should be imprisoned for life with no chance for release.

* Homeland Security (Wiretapping) -- I'll profess ignorance of the details of this issue, except to say that wiretapping was always legal in the United States as long as a warrant was secured from a judge, and I don't see why that should not continue to be so, as long as the police agencies involved provide genuine probable cause that the wiretap is needed to prosecute actual criminals.

* Immigration (Citizenship Path for Illegals) -- If someone is living in the United States with a family and ties to their community, they should be allowed to become citizens, period. Ignorance and racism are at the heart of the anti-immigration movement, and it needs to stop.

* Immigration (Border Fence) -- Once a fair and workable immigration system is in place, this racist pipe dream should no longer be a viable idea. But solving the problem starts with educating those who are in favour of it.

* Internet Neutrality -- No one should have any say whatsoever in what legally happens on the internet, unless it is on their own website(s). There is no greater place to test the ideas of a free market and freedom of speech than on the world wide web.

* Iran (Sanctions) -- It's time to say no to this bullshit.

* Iran (Military Action as Option) -- It's time to say no to this bullshit.

* Iraq (War Support) -- It's time to say no to this bullshit.

* Iraq (War Troop Surge) -- It's time to say no to this bullshit.

* Iraq (War Withdrawal) -- Immediately and with all perpetrators within the government to stand trial in the World Court. If found guilty, they should be imprisoned for life with no chance for release.

* Minimum Wage Increase -- The entire minimum wage system needs to re-evaluated with an eye to determining what a true, living wage is -- allowing for all necessary expenses and basic human rights. The minimum wage should reflect this, and perhaps it's time to institute a maximum wage as well.

* Same-Sex Marriage -- The right to marry is a basic human right all consenting adults must be free to exercise.

* Same-Sex Civil Union -- The right to marry is a basic human right all consenting adults must be free to exercise.

* Same-Sex Constitutional Ban -- It's time to put an end to this ignorant bullshit.

* Universal Health Care -- Free, available health care is a basic human right every person is entitled to. It should be one of the primary purposes to which our tax dollars are spent. If this country cannot afford to look after the health of its citizens, it certainly cannot afford to wage war against other nations or provide obscene salaries and tax breaks to the country's wealthiest citizens.

In short, and as evidenced by many of my responses, I believe the resources of the United States have been criminally diverted away from carrying out the basic tenets under which this country was founded. It's time for the United States to actually allow its citizens to enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I fear that a complacent and uninformed populace will not seize those rights for themselves until blood is running in the streets, if we continue on as we have. The coming end of the cheap-oil era means we'll see the ideals of America put to the test sooner, rather than later. I'd like to believe there's hope. I wish there was someone with a plan that suggests there might be.

The Rise and Fall of My Red Car

2007-07-28T12:22:00.000-07:00

The short life and quick death of one man's favourite automobile.

It was July, 1999. The car salesman looked at my credit history and other information, and came up with a financing figure; we went out into the lot, and he said I could have any one of a row of cars indicated by the sweep of his arm.

I picked the red one. Because it was red.

I've worked in radio since 1986, and this summer of 1999, I had been driving the radio station van for some time, the first time I was offered a "company car." It was the sweetest transportation deal I'd had since my days in mom's stroller. The station needed me for certain hours of the day, hours my wife needed our single car. The station, really needing my services, offered up the use of one of the station's vans 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Yes, 365 days a year. I think maybe once in those three years, they may have asked to use it for a remote broadcast one day while I was on a week's vacation, but it was promptly returned, and for all the world, it was as if it were my vehicle. If it needed an oil change, I took it to the dealer and they did it for free. If the muffler fell off, it was repaired for free. It was a sweet goddamned deal. You believe me now, right?

Well, the time came when I got a much better offer than that job -- but the job was in Albany, New York, an hour south of my then-job, and also my family's apartment. But of course, working at a different radio station, I certainly wasn't going to get to keep the van. So I bit the bullet, went to the car dealership, and that was how I ended up with my red car.

And time, as it is wont to do, passed.

"It's zippy," comic book artist Barry Windsor-Smith told me, as he settled into the passenger seat. It was now five months since I acquired my red car, and it was, in fact, the next to last day of 1999. I was in Kingston, New York to interview Barry, and we were driving to get something to eat. He called my car zippy. I thought that was pretty neat.

"It's shiny," said James Kochalka, musician, cartoonist and self-proclaimed superstar. It's now August of 2000, and I've driven to Burlington, Vermont to interview James my new comics-related website. We're on our way to a pizza shop, where he will spontaneously burst into a verse of "Even the Clouds Get High" to the amusement of the assembled patrons and workers.

It's nice to know that a year after purchase, it's still shiny. I like my car.

In 2001, I get another job, as radio consolidation makes it clear my now 2-year-old job is about to evaporate. The new one, at an NPR-affiliated public radio station, pays more. It's unfortunate that so much of this extra money is going to pay for the two cars my wife and I have, including about $35.00 a week in gas for me alone. But I like my job, and I still like my car, and it's still somewhat shiny.

Early on the morning of September 12th, 2001, I dream that a terrorist attack has left Albany without power and I am driving down Central Avenue into the blacked-out city, terrified of what it might hold. Something eerily similar happens a couple of years later, when a massive power blackout kills all power on the east coast. I remember my dream. In the dream I am driving my red car.

In early April of this year, my wife and I learn we only have three payments to go, and the little red car I picked out of the lot back in the Summer of 1999 will be all ours, free and clear, in just three short months.

During the second week of April of 2005, I am driving my children home from school. Every day for the past five and three-quarter years or so, the red car has pulled up to the curb and brought them home. On this particular day, my daughter is talking about the school's anti-drunk-driving program, and notes that if she never drinks and drives, she'll never be in a car accident.

I'm prompted to share with my children one of the few things I've learned in my 39 years on this planet: "You can drive completely safe and never drink and never do anything wrong, you can obey every rule of the road and still, all it takes is one idiot coming out of nowhere to wreck your car and very possibly kill you. So be as careful as you can when you drive (neither of them will for at least another five years, I mentally note), but remember that you are only 50 percent of the equation of any car accidents you might get into."

A few days before the end, my entire immediate family was in the car as I mentally reflected on the past six years, and how the car would soon be ours, free and clear. I looked at my wife in the passenger seat, and said "You know, that seat you're in is probably the only car seat ever sat in by both Barry Windsor-Smith and James Kochalka." She smiles. She's heard this before. I'm just so proud. I like my car, and in a very real way, I love both Barry and James. Their work means the world to me, and they both have been kind and generous to me, to whatever minor efforts I've made on my little website -- they're great people, and they both sat in my car, and I think that's kind of neat. My wife smiles. She's heard this before.

On my red car's final day, I was thinking about driving to Syracuse. I went so far as to write down directions to the biggest comics shop there. But the morning wears on, and I decide maybe I will go tomorrow. Instead, my friend Marshall comes over and we watch Spaced, and we laugh some. My wife is having a bad day, trouble with her family. I am not sensitive enough to her problems today, and there's some tension. I decide to leave the house to get away from it, and I drive Marshall home. Marshall sits in the same passenger seat that has hosted Barry Windsor-Smith, my wife, James Kochalka, my son, my daughter, my buddy Mick, who else has sat in that seat? A lot of people I care about. I know it's not normal to think about it this much, but I do.

I drop Marshall off at his house, and I decide to go to the record store. Maybe there's a DVD I can buy that we can all watch tonight; Saturday and Sunday are the only days my entire family gets to be together. Maybe I'll buy a movie. My cell phone, as always, is clipped to the sun visor over my head.

On the road in front of me, I note that traffic has come to a stop. I brake, and come to a stop behind a black car. I look up into the rear view mirror. There's a car coming up behind me, and it's coming up fast.

The crash seems to take many long seconds. Time seems to slow down, but only a bit. As I am slammed in to, I note my car start to skew to the left. I note that I am lifting up into the air. I wonder in no uncertain terms if my body is going to be scrunched into positions that are going to make the rest of my life difficult. I wonder...and for a split-second, I think nothing at all.

My car is positioned wrong. My arm hurts. There's been a crash. What happened?

I get out. I am in shock. I go to the car of the woman that slammed into my red car. She gets out. She is okay. She asks if I am okay. I tell her I think I am. I ask if she has a cell phone. She does not. I go to my car to get mine. It's not there. I look again. It's on the floor on the driver's side. The impact must have dislodged it. There's a dog in the car of the woman that hit my red car.

My car was pushed into the black car. It has minor damage, a woman was driving it; she's okay. We both have called 911. Sirens are blaring in the distance.

My phone rings. It's my wife. "I can't talk now, honey. I've been in a car crash." I tell her I am okay and where I am. She says she's coming. I hang up. Paramedics are here, asking questions. No one is hurt. My neck is a bit stiff, and there's a bump and a bruise on my arm -- I think it hit the steering wheel -- but no one needs to go to the hospital.

My family arrives. The woman who hit my red car seems dazed. She asks my wife and kids if they're all right, thinking they were in the car. She says she's sorry, she feels so guilty, she only glanced away for a second. "A second is all it takes," I say, and I mean to be kind. I am not angry at her. After we give statements to the police and a paramedic takes my vitals (as the only person with any sort of injury), I hear a firefighter at the scene talking to the woman who hit my car. He's asking her if she wants them to call her a cab. I walk up and offer her a ride home. She is visibly moved by the offer, but says she's caused me enough pain. I tell her I'm not seriously hurt, and we'd be happy to give her -- and her dog, I forgot about the dog -- a ride home.

We pack the dog into the back of my wife's wagon, and the woman gets in the back seat with my kids. I sit in my wife's passenger seat. My wife drives. We take the woman home, and she tells us that she is alone, her children are away on vacation. I make her promise to call them, because she seems very upset ("I feel so guilty," she keeps saying), and I am a little worried for her in the state she seems to be in.

I tell her to call me if there's no one else to talk to, and if she is feeling upset. She hugs me, she hugs my kids, she hugs my wife, this woman who killed my red car. As we drive away, I can't remember the last time I felt so sorry for another human being. She seems so alone and vulnerable. I hope she'll keep her promise and call her children.

As my wife pulls back out onto the road from the woman's driveway and points us toward home, I breathe deeply and reflect on the passenger seat I am sitting in, the passenger seat of my wife's car. No one famous has sat here. I look at my wife and say "Damn, I am going to miss that car." She smiles. It would have been six years in July, that I had that car.

I picked it because it was red, and for no other reason at all.

Justice, Sacrifice and Amadou Diallo

2007-07-28T12:13:00.000-07:00

Remembering an innocent man and the incompetent police that took his life.

One of the reasons our society here in the United States of America so honours its veterans, and to a lesser extent its police officers and firefighters, is because they give up so much for the greater good of society.

They give up their time, their safety, and often their lives so that the majority of Americans can live lives relatively free from harm, crime, pain and tragedy. It is the sacrifice of these heroes that allows us the freedom to have whatever kind of life we choose to have.

One of the things these heroes sacrifice is their right to be judged by the same standard as normal people. In the military, the laws of the United States don't even apply; military personnel are subject to the Military Code of Justice, which in some cases differs greatly from the laws the rest of us are bound by.

It is a noble thing, to give up so much to protect others.

I am thinking of the case of four police officers who allegedly shot and killed Amadou Diallo February 4th, 1999 in the Bronx.

It is a tragic thing, claimed defense attorneys for the four cops, but it was not intentional. The question, then, is whether these police officers should be punished for their actions.

The officers were searching for a rape suspect. In the course of their manhunt, they spotted Diallo, a black male, and told him to freeze. Diallo, a West African immigrant, didn't understand what they were saying but knew he was in trouble because the police were shouting at him. He reached for his wallet, perhaps to identify himself, perhaps because he thought the plain-clothes cops were robbing him. The police say they thought he was reaching for a gun, and shot him.

Not just once.

Dozens of shots were fired, 19 of them hitting Diallo, fatally wounding him. Supposedly, just prior to this hail of gunfire, one of the cops may have shouted "gun!" indicating to his fellow officers that Diallo was armed and about to shoot them.

Diallo was not armed. He was reaching for his wallet.
No one could have seen a gun, because he did not have one.

When you prosecute a citizen for a crime, you have to prove three things: Motive, intent, and opportunity. Of the three, the cops apparently only had the opportunity to kill Diallo. They had neither the motive nor intent, so far as we know.

Does that excuse their actions?

I don't believe that it does.

From everything I understand about hunting, admittedly little, hunters are taught not to shoot their guns until they are 100 percent certain what it is they are shooting at. Only then, when they are sure they have the deer, or bear, or whatever in their sights, are they supposed to fire.

These cops did not have a criminal with a gun in their sights. They had an unarmed man who did not understand the words being shouted at him. "Freeze?" At what point, even if you were learning English, would you come to understand what that meant?

Would it not have been better to shout "stop!" at him?

But Diallo's lack of language skills is not the question. He was in this country legally. There is no law requiring immigrants to learn English, so far as I know, and I would oppose one if there was; assimilation should be dictated by the worthiness of the culture one is joining, not by legislative fiat. Certainly, there is no law requiring immigrants to learn the lingo shouted out by gun-slinging plain-clothes police officers. Amadou Diallo broke no law that I am aware of. I am sure if he had, the defense would have brought that up in the trial of the four killers.

The officers that shot and killed Amadou Diallo did so mistakenly. But it was a mistake that cried out for justice. It was the job of those cops to protect the innocent, not murder them.

And what they did is a kind of murder, because they failed to uphold their own standards, to know beyond a shadow of a doubt who they were shooting at and why; anything less puts the lives of every innocent man, woman and child at risk. While those killer cops had neither motive nor intent, apparently, I submit that they should not be held to the same standard as the average citizen. They should be held to a higher standard. It is the job of the police to protect the innocent, not murder them. Their incompetence was criminally catastrophic, and should have required a punishment that met the magnitude of their error.

The officers did not adequately perform their jobs. In fact, they took their role as protectors of society, and perverted it beyond recognition. The death of Amadou Diallo remains, all these years later, one of the most heinous, unjust and horrific crimes ever committed. It is tragic, yes, but it's a tragedy that could have been prevented, with training, with testing, with standards of excellence and an understanding that the lives of innocent people come before the lives of police officers. Perhaps if that standard were enforced, fewer would want to be police officers, but the ones that did would be better cops. They would understand that they are here to protect people, not to defend themselves against possible harm from an unknown man who may very well be, and in the case of Diallo was, innocent.

If those cops had held been held to that standard, Amadou Diallo would still be alive today; alive, innocent and free to enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Remember, it is the job of the police to protect the innocent, not murder them. The price of that protection will sometimes be police officers getting killed, in order to protect the greater good. Had Diallo been the suspect they were hunting, had he been in possession of a gun, and had he started shooting, it would have been preferable, by far, that one of those officers die in the line of duty, their chosen duty, remember, than that an innocent man die, as Amadou Diallo did that day.

It's why we honour our heroes. Their sacrifice, remember? The four killers of Amadou Diallo sacrificed nothing, except the life of an innocent man.

Note: The officers -- Kenneth Boss, Sean Carroll , Edward McMellon and Richard Murphy -- were charged with second-degree murder, but the jury was allowed to consider lesser charges. The officers pleaded innocent and were eventually acquitted of all charges by a jury in Albany, New York.

Fighting for Foreskin

2007-07-28T12:09:00.001-07:00

Would you let doctors cut off part of your child's penis for no real reason at all?

In 1995, my wife and I discovered (by accident, courtesy of a sloppy ultrasound technician) that we were going to have a boy. It was our second pregnancy, and we were asked fairly early on if we wanted him circumcised.

I had long been vaguely annoyed that I had been circumcised without my consent as an infant, and had long since come to the conclusion that there is no real reason for this procedure. I am not of the opinion that males are born "defective" and need to be "fixed" before they can live their lives as males.

It took some months of convincing my wife about this; despite the fact that she was not born with a penis, she bought into all the rote arguments made in favour of the procedure. I showed her enough scientific evidence that it is unnecessary, even cruel, and she and I eventually agreed that our son would live his life intact, with all the parts his DNA instructed his growing, unborn body to have.

Convincing my wife was easy; the real arguing didn't happen until late in her pregnancy, when we were asked to come in to the doctor's office specifically to discuss the issue of circumcision.

We were taken into a quiet office and a middle-aged woman sat down...I don't remember now if she was a nurse or physician's assistant, but she asked us to tell her what we wanted to do regarding my son's foreskin.

We told the woman that we were not going to have him circumcised. Looking very discomfited and somewhat condescending, she asked us to explain our obviously ridiculous decision.

Assuming as the parents we were allowed to make this sort of decision, I somewhat flippantly told her that "I don't believe boys are born with things that need to be snipped off of them."

At that point, the brow-beating began.

The argument (and I am certain this was a standardized meeting that occurred with all parents negligent and degenerate enough to make the sort of decision Lora and I did) basically boiled down to three points:

1. "He won't 'look like you.'"
2. "He may need to have a circumcision as an adult."
3. "He'll have to learn to clean his foreskin."

My responses to those grave concerns:

1. I don't want him "looking at my penis." I frankly don't want anyone looking at my penis. Even me.
2. What are the odds? I made her look it up. 7 out of 100, she informed us. "So there's a 93 percent chance that if we don't cut off part of my son's penis, he'll grow up happy and healthy?" She had no convincing rebuttal to that argument.
3. This one really pissed me off. My response: "He'll have to learn to clean his ass, too; should we cut that off too, while we're at it?" My wife was not amused.

Call me a prick (many have), but I didn't find any of these three arguments particularly compelling. One of my main points all along had been that Americans generally find it laughable and horrifying that there are African tribes that circumcise baby girls, and yet think it is normal, in fact necessary, to do the same thing to boys.

To me it is all symptomatic of the post-intelligent, Planet of the Apes-style culture we live in. The vast majority of sheep-like Americans follow the mystical rituals laid down by our "Fore (skin) fathers" eons ago, without ever really questioning whether anything we're doing in the name of Jeezus or Cleanliness in fact is desirable, ethical or even just not laughable.

My son turns 12 later this year. His intact foreskin has never once been a problem for him, and I have successfully managed to not have him see my penis once in all those years. Snip-happy doctors aside, I think we both prefer it that way.

Cyst

2007-07-28T12:07:00.001-07:00

Have you ever had a problem that grew on you?

Around 1998 I noticed this hard little spot in the center of my chest, like an M&M just under the skin. If I touched it with my fingertip, I could move it around a bit, but there was no pain or discomfort, just this hard little bump.

Within a year it had grown to maybe four or five times its original size, and I was slowly growing alarmed. Was it a tumor? I eventually went to my doctor, and he looked and felt it and said it was a sebaceous cyst, nothing serious. My memory of that initial doctor's visit is hazy but he may have lanced and drained it, and bandaged the area and it seemed to heal. Either that or he did nothing, but it seems crazy to think that that might be what had happened: Nothing.

I started working at a radio station in the middle of a nature preserve in Albany in 2000, and around this time the cyst got infected. It was growing larger and larger, and as the skin stretched over it, it grew quite uncomfortable at first and then genuinely painful.

While on the air one day (it was an all-news station, and when I wasn't reading local news I could take a break while pre-recorded national programming played), I went in the men's room to take a look.

Removing my shirt, I could see that the cyst had, in the space of less than a day, ballooned to the size and hardness of a golf ball directly under my skin. It was horrifying and painful and at this point I had lost most of my rationality and just WANTED IT OUT OF ME.

The men's room in this radio station was tiny. I am a big guy, and had just room to stand in front of the mirror, the toilet to the left of me, the door right at my back. Facing the mirror, chin on my chest as I looked down at this horror, I took the heels of my hands and dug into the sides of the cyst, and squeezed the fucking thing as hard as I could.

It was unbelievable, surreal, and yet probably altogether ordinary. There was an audible crack as my skin ruptured and a golf ball's worth of pus and blood exploded out of my chest and onto the mirror in front of me.

As I have said, this thing had been slowly building now for a couple of years, and the smell was vile. Reduced to an almost animal-like state of unintellectual curiosity, I poked and prodded the extremely sore area where the cyst had been growing, and felt with disgust and dismay that I had managed to squeeze out maybe only half of what had been inside me. For a brief, idiotic moment I somehow thought it was OVER, but it was really only just beginning.

I squeezed and squeezed and more and more pus shot out, in these jerky, erratic pops, as if they were lined up waiting for just the right combination of pressure and angle of attack. I experimented for quite some time, poking this way and that, until all that trickled out was a little bit of pale blood, and I presumed that I had got it all out.

I covered the wound (for that was what it was now, no question) with toilet paper, cleaned off the mirror with soap and hot water, and flushed all the evidence away down the toilet. After finishing my shift, I went directly to the nearest pharmacy, and bought bandages and tape to dress the wound while it healed.

Which, of course, it didn't.

I don't know how long this went on, but I can tell you that exorcising this demon became a daily ritual in that little bathroom -- never again as much as that first, horrific rupturing of my skin, but sometimes maybe half as much, sometimes hardly anything at all.

It slowly dawned on me that this ritual was providing me with some artificial sense of control and a genuine sense of comfort, like it was my secret friend waiting there for me in the tiny little bathroom every day. The smell, the blood, the pus -- most of all, the sickest part of remembering this is the joy I took when it was enough that it would splatter on that bathroom mirror. I think on some stupid level I thought that the more there was, the more I was removing from myself, and sooner or later I would get to the last of it, and be done with it. But part of me didn't WANT to be done with it, I know that now.

Eventually the smell, the discomfort and pain and the constant visits to the pharmacy to buy more supplies drove me again to the doctor and I was prescribed antibiotics, and after many weeks, I was able to keep my hands off it and it healed over. There was a part of me that didn't want it to heal, I think, because I dreaded having to rupture it all over again -- the sound of the skin breaking and that first, momentous splatter onto the bathroom mirror loomed large in my mind and as weirdly comforting as it was, I wanted it to be healed and I didn't want to ever go through it again.

If I touch my chest, to this day, years later, my fingers go right to that spot, remembering it like a primal memory. In the years since it has never again re-infected, but there is a tiny bump, perhaps a tenth the size of that original M&M, and I know something of that long-ago nightmare remains, waiting, inside me. I have never forgotten it, the non-nonsensical conviction that I was the only person this had ever happened to, that I was deeply ashamed and frightened by it, but most of all some secret joy that this strange thing I didn't understand was MINE, like a secret lover or favoured child.

A Piece of Me

2007-07-28T11:40:00.000-07:00

Just a dad getting his kids off to school, one cold winter morning. Written January 9th, 2004.

This morning was quite unusual for me. I saw my children off to school.

I'm going to be 38 years old later this month, I've had kids for over a decade now, and although I used to pick them up at daycare and drop them off at school a few years ago in an extremely awkward arrangement made necessary by my schedule, for the past few years they've been taken to school either by their mother or by our more recent daycare provider. My wife and I both work, and it will come as no surprise to anyone who works and has kids that daycare is an extremely difficult proposition these days. Should the United States ever start caring about its people enough to provide health care for everyone, quality universal daycare would be a noble secondary goal that would probably send productivity through the roof. But I digress.

I took today off because we had no other daycare options, and I have marginally more time off coming to me at the moment than my wife -- and someone needed to get the kids to school. As I say, this is the first time in a few years now that I have done the entire rigmarole, from waking 'em up to getting 'em to the school door and everything in between. In between, of course, is breakfast.

Dad made scrambled eggs and toast, and although he was tempted to make the turkey bacon sitting in the fridge, that seemed like too much ~~work~~ -- protein for this early in the day.

Dad did dress up the eggs with a little bit of real cheddar cheese that we were gifted with by someone who considers Swiss Colony a viable holiday offering. Well, whatever, the cheese was good and made the eggs a little above-average. Who the hell eats orange marmalade, though? Gack.

After breakfast the kids played videogames on their X-Mas Gamecube and Dad took the latest shower he's had in years. I usually have to be out the door and on the way to work well before dawn, but waiting until quarter of eight seemed positively decadent. In a way, it was, because before I knew it, we were actually running a bit late.

We started the car -- which didn't want to start, since the temperature is somewhere around zero right now -- and while we waited for it to warm up my daughter drank a juice-box thing of some sort and my son made explosion sound effects. He's eight. It's amazing how little it takes to entertain yourself at that age.

Eventually the heat started working and the window began defrosting and since I now had three minutes to get the kids to the door, we were on our way, hardly breaking any traffic laws at all. Almost none!

Right at the time my wife told me to have them at the curb, we were there. The street in front of the school seemed less busy than I remembered it being when I used to bring them to school every day (wow, that was nearly five years ago now) -- but with temps in the single digits, loitering is really not a viable entertainment option for me or my fellow parents.

Hugs and kisses were doled out -- they're at the nice age where they not only don't mind, but actually want affection from their parents -- and off they went to a day full of spelling tests and other assorted learning, and hopefully a recess or two. They work hard, they deserve it.

The View from One Year

2007-07-28T11:35:00.000-07:00

What happened here? As the New York sunset disappeared...

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11th. I remember vividly, as I am sure you do, where I was and what I was doing one year ago today.

The week previous, I had just started a new job at a radio station in Albany, New York. I was nearing the end of my morning shift, when I noticed increased activity in the newsroom. Come to find out, a plane had slammed into the World Trade Center in New York City. Some were saying this was a possible terrorist attack. I didn't believe that. In retrospect, more likely, I didn't want to believe that.

Despite the clear skies that morning, in the high tech 21st Century, I honestly believed that the cause of the crash was probably a breakdown in the air traffic control system. One bad instruction and one distracted pilot could, I thought, have combined to create this catastrophic circumstance. Even when the second plane hit, I wanted to believe that this was the case, but the terrorism theory had firmly implanted itself by then, and it was more hoping against hope than actual belief, by then, that this was merely an horrific accident.

As a radio newscaster, the 48 hours or so that followed were the most intense and horrible I've experienced in my 17 years on the air. I did nothing but read news for those two days -- most everything else was suspended in the interest of getting as much hard news as possible about this situation on the air. At home, I couldn't stop watching television, and all that was on was images of the crashes, again and again.

It was hypnotic and horrible. Worst of all were the images of the doomed inhabitants of the giant buildings willingly leaping to their deaths rather than burn alive. It would be a recounting on the radio of the story of two of those people, who held hands as they jumped from the inferno to certain death below that would bring me to tears on a car drive home a few days later. How horrible. How uplifting. A paradox. How human.

On September 12th, I posted an editorial to Comic Book Galaxy, leading off with some words reprinted with permission from a personal e-mail from my friend Barry Windsor-Smith. A former New York City resident who now lives about an hour upriver in New York's Hudson Valley, he was deeply affected by the events of September 11th -- but then, I guess we all were.

A year later, there's much I want to say about that day and the year that followed it. I began writing a column about it a couple of weeks ago, but honestly, what I have put down in words so far is so extreme that I fear putting it up for public consumption. I mean every word that I've written, but my righteous rage at the opportunists that have used September 11th to further their own hidden agenda will do no good. You either realize how vile the people running this country are, or you do not. It's not as if any real effort to disguise their base thuggery is even being attempted. As long as you wrap yourself in the flag, and nude statues in blankets, it seems anything goes, and most of it is being done quite obviously, with a snide contempt for a depressingly compliant populace.

It's not that I don't recognize and condemn the terrorists who ordered the attacks -- if they had survived, I would gladly kill each and every one of them with my bare hands and live the rest of my life guilt-free and secure in the knowledge that I had made the world a better place. But when three-quarters of the killers were Saudi Arabian and the guy who supposedly master-minded the entire thing was also Saudi Arabian, and we spend a year supposedly prosecuting a war on terrorism without ever catching Osama bin Laden -- whose family are former business partners of President-Select Bush -- well, let's just say that I believe the true work we needed to do after September 11th has been completely ignored, while the business interests of Bush and his family's oil-industry buddies have been well-served by a military action that has given the U.S. new access to Afghanistan.

See, there, I'm drifting into the territory covered in the column-I-am-not-showing-you. So let me wrap this up: I love the U.S. and I realize that it's one of the best, most free nations on Earth. But I am deeply ashamed that its citizens have tolerated an illegitimate, greed-driven junta that has used the awful events of September 11th as justification for suspending the civil rights of U.S. citizens and lining the pockets of the military-industrial complex. I just hope that people will take the time to learn the facts and recognize what Bush and his enablers are up to for what it is, and remember the most important lesson that came out of September 11th, 2001: That religious zealotry is the purest, most destructive form of evil on the planet. Because the event that took the lives of 3000 people that day was the textbook definition of a Faith-Based Initiative. The murderers were driven by their twisted interpretation of their religious beliefs, they had faith that their God would guide their way and lead them to victory, and sickeningly, horribly, from the perspective of however many fundamentalist Islamists are still out there hating the U.S. -- that's exactly what happened.

The hatred that fueled the terrorists was a potent mix of ignorance, religious bigotry and closed-minded fundamentalism. The very same elements that Bush and those like him are informed by and celebrate. From the attempts to funnel government money to churches through Bush's transparent "Faith-Based Initiative" scheme to the sickening, cowardly response of both Republicans and Democrats when a judge rightly, bravely followed the Constitution and ordered the words "Under God," stricken from the Pledge of Allegiance, the people who are running the U.S. continue to try to use religious ignorance to control the populace's wealth and reproductive functions. This, I contend, is the primary goal of organized religion -- but most especially fundamentalist groups like the Taliban and Southern Baptists.

So a year later, in my opinion, the evil is stronger than ever, and it's right here at home. If it makes me unpatriotic or unsympathetic or uncaring to point it out on this of all days, there it is. On this of all days, when we remember nearly 3000 people who died because of fundamentalist opportunists like bin Laden and Bush, who seek power not through logic and reason but through the cynical manipulation of the ignorant and oppressed, the best way we can celebrate their memory and respect their sacrifice is to begin to work to remove the power from those who would commit violence in the name of their alleged God in the first place.

Written September 11th, 2002.

An Evening with James Kochalka Superstar

2007-07-28T11:34:00.001-07:00

An Evening with James Kochalka Superstar
Tuesday, August 17th, 2004

The Burlington, Vermont booksigning event for James Kochalka's new American Elf collection was held at Crow Books, an intimate new and used bookstore located in a vibrant downtown marketplace area in Kochalka's hometown.

I've been a fan of Kochalka's comics and music for about half a decade now, and the work that has most directly affected me as a human being is his daily sketchbook diary, which has demonstrated not only the great talent Kochalka possesses as a cartoonist but the great potential comics has as a valid medium for profound and delightful individual artistic expression. The new collection gathers all the strips from their very beginning up until the last day of 2003, compiling four earlier and much slimmer collections, plus an additional year's worth of previously uncollected strips and numerous appealing extras.

Kochalka is perhaps one of the most prolific alternative cartoonists, frequently releasing new comics, mini-comics, graphic novels and music CDs. He is also a frequent presence in anthologies; you never know where he'll turn up next. He's a frequent topic of my writing on Comic Book Galaxy, and in my home as well. To my kids, as I explained to James as he was sketching in my copy of American Elf, James Kochalka is as big as Elvis. And on this night, we were front row center for a magnificent performance by the King of Rock and Roll.

Crow Books closed up so the staff could clear the main floor in preparation for the booksigning and planned performance. My son Aaron and I were sitting on a bench (well, I was sitting, he was running barefoot through the fountain) near the shop when I spotted James hauling boxes to the shop about 45 minutes before the signing was scheduled to begin, at 8 PM.

No doubt a familiar sight to the people of Burlington, to this visitor it was slightly surreal seeing James ambling down the street, and I pointed him out to Aaron, who was amazed at seeing this Capital-S Superstar in person after reading his comics and listening to his music all these years. I first interviewed him in person exactly four years ago this week, so it wasn't the first time I had seen him, but I was excited to see that the reason we'd driven three hours to Vermont was now just moments away from beginning.

My wife Lora and daughter Kira returned from shopping at Old Navy, and once Aaron and I told them James and the band were setting up inside the shop, Kira and Aaron couldn't resist peeking in the windows to get a look at what was going on. They were both excited to meet James for the first time, and each brought along a Kochalka book of their own to have signed. Kira brought The Perfect Planet, while Aaron carried his much-read Peanutbutter and Jeremy's Best Book Ever.

My two peeping toms caught the attention of Amy Kochalka, who came out to greet them, along with baby Eli on her hip. I said hi to her and introduced her to my wife and kids -- it was my first time meeting any member of the Kochalka family (other than James and their family cat Spandy, who I met back in 2000), and yes, they do look just like James draws them. Eli is a bundle of wide-eyed energy, taking in every moment and hardly ever sitting still until much later in the evening (I think the 10 PM end of the evening might have been at least a few minutes past his usual bedtime). About 10 minutes ahead of the scheduled start time, James came out and invited the then-small crowd to come in to the store and get the party started.

The energy, and there was a lot of it, built slowly in the first few minutes. James signed and sketched in books behind the counter as a forthcoming DVD (to be included with his first major-label CD on Rykodisc) projected onto a screen a number of James Kochalka Superstar videos, kid-friendly high-energy fare like "Pizza Rocket," "Hockey Monkey" and the transcendent crowd-pleaser "Monkey vs. Robot." Eli was a center of attention as he crawled around the floor and rocked out to Dad's music.

When it was my turn in line to get my copy of signed, James told me "I can never remember which comes first, Alan or David," which put to rest any nagging question of whether he remembered me. It was nice to be recognized, especially after so long, and especially with the crowd building in the store. James thanked me for the coverage I've given his work, and I thanked him for creating comics that really have changed the way I see not only comics but, well, everything. We briefly talked about how far he's come in life and in his work since that day four years ago when Marshall O'Keeffe and I shared pizza with him and interviewed him, an interview that would become the first to run on Comic Book Galaxy when it finally launched on September 1st, 2000. At the time, Marshall and I were still formulating ideas for the site, and I remember James taking Marshall's side in his insistence that it should be called "Galaxy O' Comics." Briefly chatting with James as he finished up a drawing of himself riding a strange creature shouting "Hi Alan!" it felt to me like things had come full circle in a way; I was back in Burlington, once again talking to James, once again covering his career for Comic Book Galaxy as he celebrated his greatest artistic achievement with his fans, friends, family and community.

After signing several books, about a half-hour into the evening, James and his band members moved into the performance area and started in on an all-ages set of songs that included a number of tunes he'd written specifically for Eli. Eli was at his father's feet, rapturous at the sound of the rock and roll created especially for him. As James's son became part of the performance, my daughter did as well; she was recruited by one of the band members to carry a colourful, hand-painted rainbow during the song "Rainbow Love." In a starstruck instant, Kira went from loving James's music to performing onstage with him. Perhaps now she knew what I meant when I had told her earlier in the day that this would be a night she would never forget. Of course, at the time, I had no idea what a personal and exciting part she would get to play. She even got to take a bow at the end of the number as James thanked his "Rainbow dancer."

After about 20 minutes, James and the band took an intermission, saying that the second set would be "the swearing set," a warning to parents that now might be a good time to take the children home. Our home was three hours away, though, and besides that I have an enlightened profanity policy for my children; you get to swear when you have a job, a driver's license and your own apartment. They observe this policy well, and have never invoked the Hammer Exception, although they know if they hit their thumb with a hammer they are, indeed, allowed to say "SHIT! That hurts!" Long story short, we weren't going anywhere.

During the intermission, my daughter was making friends (and recommending new friend Kerrie's mini-pizzas); I've noticed that she seems to thrive best in progressive towns like Burlington or Northampton, Massachusetts; as I said to Lora, "These are her people." At the age of ten, she's more than a little iconoclastic already. I have no doubt she'll eventually come to settle in a town like this, where individuality is, if not celebrated, at least not discouraged. As she worked the crowd, she introduced me to Nick, a former University of Vermont student who had become a Kochalka fan when he was creating Deadbear: Circus Detective many years earlier. Nick was visiting Burlington for other reasons, but told me "When I heard about this [booksigning], I knew what I was doing tonight." I noticed during the second musical set that he was absolutely enraptured by James's performance.

There were numerous highlights during the second set; guitar player Jason Cooley's surprise appearance (and my daughter's accompanying sotto voce announcement that "he's a dog with a robot brain!"); my son's laughter during "Wash Your Ass;" the crowd's spontaneous singalong of the endless, hilarious "Justin Timberlake" refrain to the song "Britney's Silver Can;" the wide-eyed woman who walked in the door just in time to hear James sing about his "magic finger" as he cupped his crotch. Just like E.T.'s big finger, it glows. At least, as one person in the audience noted, he kept his pants on.

I've long thought that there is genuine magic in the way James has created his own world of comics, music, laughter and joy. In all he does, he aims not only to define but create his own universe. In his very best works, we're invited in and can see the world as he does. For me and my family on this night, for everyone who came to recognize and congratulate James on his biggest and best book yet, that's what happened. For a couple of hours, capped by James literally hugging every single person in the store as the band played on, we were all living inside his Superstar vision of the world, taken away from all else, applauding in thanks and in communion for one of the most generous performers I'll ever see in my lifetime -- a singer and cartoonist who celebrates both the pedestrian and the sublime with such abandon and dedication that it is all transformed into something spectacularly alive. I've never had as much fun or felt as much energy. It was electric.

My Life in Comics

2007-07-28T11:33:00.000-07:00

How a 6-year-old with tonsilitis ends up 35 years later as a comic book critic.

"You write good rant," comics retailer Brian Hibbs said about me once; it would be disingenuous not to note that he went on in the same paragraph to say that point I was making in that specific rant was "kinda stupid." But, Hibbs is the same comics retailer who once, when ranting at me after calling me on the telephone, informed me with utter conviction that "everyone that reads Love and Rockets also reads Superman." Res ipsa loquitur, I suppose, vis a vis what is or isn't "kinda stupid" to Mr. Hibbs.

Some autobiographical sketching seems required. What the hell, at the end of the day I believe autobiography is the highest form comics can aspire to, conveying as it does such a pure distillation of the author's intentions, in the very best autobiography that has been created in comics (be it R. Crumb, James Kochalka or Alison Bechdel, to name three people who have worked wonders in the form). So, a little about me.

I was born in 1966 in upstate New York (not Westchester County, either, real upstate New York, where a day trip to Montreal is vastly more likely than one to Manhattan), and lived in that area there until my family moved to Florida when I was around 8 years old. My earliest memories of living in New York involved being given comics by my mom as I was recovering from having my tonsils out when I was six years old, and later walking down a half-mile or so to the downtown area of the town we lived in to the drugstore that had an extensive comics rack to satisfy my earliest comics fixes with Spider-Man, Archie and Richie Rich comics.

In the 1970s, amid possible scandal regarding my birth, I later came to realize, my family moved to Florida. For most of the time my family -- my mother, her husband (who I believed was my father until I was about 16 or so and was told the truth) and my "brother" (actually my nephew, but adopted -- you can see the Doane family story is a complicated one) lived in Florida, I attended a private Christian school, even performing puppet shows for the affiliated church's Sunday school classes. This quasi-religious upbringing (there was no religion in our home, thank you, Jesus) is no doubt to blame for my later, autodidactic exploration of history and science, which moved me to abandon the supernatural as anything other than powerful myth.

My lifelong love of comics was certainly cemented while we lived in Florida, with a 7/11 convenience store near our house; I walked there once or twice a week with a buck or two from my parents and would return home with a stack of comics -- at the time I started reading them in the early 1970s I think they were 20 cents, and by the time we were in Florida, they had probably moved up to the outrageous-but-still-affordable price of 25 cents. It wasn't until they were 35 cents that I seriously began to wonder if they weren't charging too much. These days I have come to agree with the idea that "the only comics that are too expensive are shitty comics," a phrase coined by the great comics critic Tom Spurgeon, another formative influence. He means, I think, that truly excellent comics are worth any price; bad comics are a lousy bargain even if you get them for free, as comics critics like me and Tom often do, and which is even more widespread among comics readers thanks to the massive pirating efforts on the Internet.

As a kid buying comics in the 1970s, my tastes were all over the map; if it was comics, I was interested. Marvel, DC, Harvey, Charlton and Gold Key were my main sources of entertainment, but the occasional Warren magazine like 1984, Creepy and Eerie, and even Jack Chick Comics (ubiquitous in Florida and throughout the south, where, of course, they are quite literally Gospel) also found their way into the mix in my voracious need for comics reading material.

In my early teens, probably through in ad in a Marvel or DC comic, I discovered The Bud Plant catalog, which opened up my eyes to the vast, and vastly richer, greater comics artform. It was easy to believe in the 1970s and early 1980s that comics and superheroes were interchangeable nouns. I am, therefore, eternally grateful to Bud and his colleagues in Grass Valley, California (who I've never met and who have certainly never heard of me) for what they did for me. I remain a fan of just about any good comic, superhero or no, but Plant and Co. introduced me to such concepts as autobiography, creator-owned work, and black and white comics, and those three elements in some combination (ideally all three) almost invariably make up the comics that I love the most.

We moved back to New York in the very early 1980s. Returning to public schools for the first time since 2nd grade or so, I majored in art in high school, but the art teacher discouraged my interest in cartooning, so nothing much ever came of that, although I remain an inveterate doodler. I do draw Wolverine's head better now than I did in the 9th grade, so, all was not for naught, Mrs. Murphy.

In 1985 and 1986, I attended Adirondack Community College in Queensbury, New York, majoring in broadcasting and doing a regular radio show on WGFR, the college's 10-watt radio powerhouse. I started working professionally in radio in 1986 and continue to do so to this day. I've been a disc jockey, news reporter, writer and producer, but currently work as a copywriter and production director; gratifyingly, it's actually the most fun I've had in two decades years in radio.

In 1993, I married Lora, and in the ensuing years we've had two children, a daughter and a son. Both kids have inherited my love of comics, and love to draw as well.

In 1999 I began working at an all-news radio station in Albany, New York, and that was where it first occurred to me that comics might make for interesting news stories from time to time. Luckily the job was loosely-defined enough that no one ever told me to stop. The very first person I ever interviewed in the industry was DC editor Dan Raspler, on the subject of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's JLA: Earth 2 graphic novel. It remains one of my favourites. The radio interviews and my personal GeoCities website On2TheFuture (that was focusing more and more on comics the longer I maintained it) eventually led to my being tapped by a New Zealand-based website, Silver Bullet Comic Books, to write and edit reviews; in late August of 2000 I decided to take a chance on the creation of Comic Book Galaxy, and after a few weeks of gathering a dream-team of writers (many of whom have gone on to amazing careers as writers, and in one case, the editor-in-chief of a fairly major comics company), the site debuted on September 1st, 2000.

The Galaxy's remit is to feature quality writing about comics with "Passion, Truth and Diversity," with the ever-present goal of "Pushing Comix Forward," and celebrating comics that achieve that mission. The site has been more successful at these goals at some times than others, but in recent years I have realized that surrendering to popular taste in exchange for an increase in "hits" (visits to the site by readers) is a sucker's game. Give me 10,000 monthly readers interested in the comics we talk about at Comic Book Galaxy any day, as opposed to the 10,000 or more daily visitors to some sites who come looking rabid with desire to learn what such hacks as Geoff Johns or Chuck Dixon might be working on next.

Among my personal favourite comics creators are Alan Moore, James Kochalka, Paul Hornschemeier, Barry Windsor-Smith, Los Bros. Hernandez, Grant Morrison, Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, Chester Brown, Kevin Huizenga, Renee French, Dan Clowes, Bernard Krigstein, Chris Ware, Phoebe Gloeckner and David Mazzucchelli -- but such a list fails to explain the true breadth of my love for great comics, or my passion for, as Warren Ellis once noted, "What's new and what's next."

The one thing that always keeps me immersed in comics as an artform is the fact that there's always something new and different just around the corner, always something amazing to discover. It's been my privilege to be able to share some of those discoveries with others since I began writing about comics, and I hope that my writing about comics will impart to the reader at least a bit of the joy I have received over these past years.

The ADD writeblog

2007-07-28T11:31:00.000-07:00

What's going on?

I'm Alan David Doane, radio broadcaster since 1986, husband and father of two. On my main website, Comic Book Galaxy, I mostly write criticism and commentary about the artform and industry of comic books and graphic novels.

On the ADD writeblog, I'll be presenting my non-comics writing in one dedicated place. Much of it will have already appeared on CBG in one form or another, but I also want to have a place just for my writing about politics, real life, and whatever else is on my mind.

Thanks for stopping by.