The Entomological Song

 All I really ever wanted to be was a writer.

I was taught to read before I started kindergarten by a couple of retired school teachers that lived next door to us in Salem, New York. I started reading comic books at the age of six, had read Little House on the Prairie, A Wrinkle in Time and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by the time I was ten, and was eating up all the insightful comics criticism I could get my hands on (mostly in the pages of The Comics Journal) by the time I was 13. Gary Groth and cat yronwode were gods to me. I once racked up a $50 long-distance bill because I wanted to talk to cat about comics and didn't know how much the call would cost. My god, she was kind. 

My teens were spent devouring the works of Stephen King, Robert Heinlein, Ursula K. Le Guin, and others. I loved to read, and the more you read, for some of us, the more you want to write.

I wrote about comic books for many years, occasionally even getting paid for pieces online, in magazines and one time, in a book, even. The Comics Journal paid me nearly $300 for an essay about the future of comics retailing, and I thought I had made it, in some way. I wrote news most of the years I worked in radio, and I even wrote a radio commercial for a friend's business after I was lucky enough to escape the industry. Rare is the week I have not written something in the past 35 years, but I don't really consider myself a writer, per se. 

When I spent a year working for a financial planner, a lot of that time was spent writing, from press releases and working on his website to creating the first chapter and outline for a self-help financial book that I proposed ghost writing for him. Like almost everything, he was excited about that for a week or two and then got distracted by something shiny on the other side of the room. The year after that, while looking for full time work, I wrote part-time for a regional travel magazine. I estimated at one point that based on the fees I got for each piece and the frequency of the publication, I would max out at about $1,200 a year. Honestly that would probably be more than I ever made in any other year just strictly for writing, but not one-twentieth what it would take to even begin to hold up my end of the marital budget.

The first time I think I was "serious" about writing was when I wrote my first (and only) novella, The Bane of the Bear Man, around 1988. I was inspired to make it the first of a series of six tales, which I called The Camelot Cycle. These were to be highly fictionalized stores about the people I went to college with. In the event, I only ever finished Bear Man, which ended in a spectacular shoot-out at the Plattsburgh International House of Pancakes, and those who read the thing (which I no longer possess a copy of) praised it and encouraged me to write more, but I only wrote a few dozen pages of the follow-up, The Mall, which followed the few survivors of Bear Man into a weird dystopian existence inside the Aviation Mall in Queensbury, New York after a vague catastrophe that might have been a nuclear war but maybe not. The other four novellas went unwritten, although they did have titles and the last one I had a pretty good picture of in my mind, involving as it did the then-seemingly-inevitable death by AIDS of the most promiscuous of our college cohort. He did not contract HIV to the best of my knowledge, but did end up fathering over half a dozen kids by many various women, a plot point that I could have had some fun with if I had foreseen it at the time.

The stalling out of that series of fictional stories was probably spurred by a non-fiction story I wrote in the early 1990s which was an in-depth examination of my first serious, long-term romantic relationship, which got very complicated after the first few delusional months of bliss and involved actual tragedy and not a small bit of jeopardy for us both. The writing of it was a turning point for me in both self-examination and self-expression. I found I had opened up a new avenue in my mind that allowed me to access memories and feelings while writing with a power and immediacy that is not there when I am not writing. This may not be a revelation to you, but it was to me. Even now, over a quarter of a century after writing it, when I re-read it, which is not often, I am astonished to find details of things I experienced that I do not consciously remember in that level of detail anymore, but I also remember that those memories came to me in the process of writing it originally. Writing, for me, can unlock internal doors behind which are wonders I can't imagine unless I examine them through the very process of writing. 

Despite all this writing and thinking about writing, I have never considered myself a writer. I'm not sure what it would take to really feel like a writer deep into my soul, but it would probably require earning a living wage doing nothing but writing and tasks closely associated with writing, like book tours and radio interviews about my wonderful new work. And no, that's not a fantasy I really have ever entertained. I am more self-aware than that.

I don't think I have much fiction in me. The Bane of the Bear Man is the only fiction I ever completed. I started an eerie story called The Doors to Midwich once, and was pleased by how it opened, but I had no idea where it went from there, and no idea how to get an idea. I don't think of myself as a writer, but I definitely don't think of myself as a fiction writer. I knew this pretty early on. Marvel Comics once asked me to pitch to write a Thor mini-series based on a premise by the then-publisher of the company (they were trying to hire a lot of comics critics as writers back then), and after a weekend spent considering it, I realized not only did I not have fiction about Thor within me, but I didn't really have fiction within me more generally. 

One night recently, I woke up needing to pee at about 3 o'clock in the morning. As I looked around the bathroom, I noticed with a visceral fear reaction a house centipede clinging to the inside of an open cabinet door. Usually, I have read, they flee from light, and I think I have only seen three of them in my entire life. This one was about two inches long and had about seven thousand legs. I fought the urge to kill it, as I understand they are harmless and kill other household pests, but I was struck by my instinctual need to make that thing die or at least disappear. There was a part of my brain engaged that I have rarely felt activated in my 52 years on this planet. 

The following day, on my ride in to work, I was listening to Vermont Public Radio, as I do about 60 percent of my commuting time. The Vermont Edition that occupied the noon hour was their "Bug Show," which I took to be an occasional special version of the program, and the guest was a Vermont entomologist. At some point, someone used the term "entomological," and, always unable to avoid making connections between unrelated things, I thought about my favourite Supertramp song, "The Logical Song." I wondered if anyone had ever written an essay called "The Entomological Song." If Nabokov were alive today, he might have, and he certainly would have done a better job.

Supertramp seemed like one of the best bands in the world to me in the early 1980s, when I knew more about music than I did about sex, but really knew nothing about either. I know a lot more about both now (some in part thanks to Nabokov), enough to know that Supertramp was kind of an interesting band for its time but not one for the ages, and while I wouldn't change the radio station if they came on, neither would I make a playlist of their great songs (four, maybe?) to listen to on my commute. 

There are a lot of 1980s bands that I loved then that I don't listen to much or at all anymore. I am embarrassed by how much I loved the first Hooters CD, for example. (Yes, believe it or not there is more than one, although four or five of them are greatest hits CDs for a band that had maybe four hits total.) Or how important it once was to me to create the perfect Phil Collins/Genesis mix tape combining the best of his solo work with the best of his Genesis stuff. There's not much of it at all that I care to hear anymore. And yet some music from around that same time sticks with me. Phil's former bandmate Peter Gabriel, for example, although my interest in his first three albums is limited to a song or two on any of them at best. But his fourth album, So, I still love pretty unreservedly. I think "Sledgehammer" is the greatest rock song of the 1980s. Don't argue with me. The only song on that album I usually skip these days is "Don't Give Up," because hey, you're not the boss of me, Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush. I still respect U2 for most of the first half of their career creating music, but I can't honestly say I feel I ever need to hear another thing by them, old or new. 

This essay, by the way, is going nowhere, like the Talking Heads on that famous road they were on once. It was inspired by a few different things all happening at around the same time, but has failed to come together brilliantly like the end of a particularly good episode of Seinfeld would have. The last element I will mention that inspired it was an essay by my sometimes-colleague and very good long-distance friend Tegan O'Neill, who sometimes writes in this fascinating mode where she is writing about two or three things at the same time, trading off topics from paragraph to paragraph, and I thought it would be interesting to see if I could pull that off. It is apparent to me now that I can't, and I apologize to her for trying, although hopefully she'll be flattered that I tried. 

For a week, this essay existed only as three sentences in a draft in my Gmail: The opening bit about wanting to be a writer, the part about trying to ghost write for that financial planner, and that part about the goddamned house centipede. If I hadn't seen that thing, I might not have paid as much attention to the Bug Show on Vermont Edition, and I certainly would not have thought of conflating "Entomological" with a Supertramp song. Interestingly, I also confused "entomological" with "etymological" for longer than I can bear to tell you, but which provides a nice ironic note for those writers among you.

And because it's a sometimes wonderful, sometimes clichéd way to end an essay, I'll end as I began: All I really ever wanted to be was a writer.

Two Beautiful Women and My Birthday

“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)

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

Summer's End

"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

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

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

Me and Tom Snyder

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

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.