Are You Watching Ferguson? You Should Be.
Just on the off-hand chance you’re not following my Twitter feed, which is largely retweets of Ferguson-related news, you should be looking very closely at Ferguson right now. Short version: Cops shot a black kid. The people protested peacefully, were run off with tear gas and rubber bullets. Things escalated, and the cops shut the town down, preventing news copters from seeing what was going on, shoving reporters out, arresting people on false pretenses and refusing to give their badge numbers.
This is the police state.
This is every government fear the NRA has ever inflamed to sell guns.
And yet the usual gang of conservative nitwits are… saying nothing.
I remember someone discussing Watergate, which I didn’t get for a long time: A President got in a scandal, he resigned rather than go to trial, what’s the big whoop? And an older friend who’d lived through that finally made it clear to me when he said, “What would have happened if Nixon had refused to go to trial?”
That’s when the penny dropped. That’s when I realized that shit, yeah, our government only works because people agree it does, and if people decide to just say, “Fuck the law, I don’t need it,” then that’s when civil wars result.
What’s happening in Ferguson is important. It’s a local government flouting the law in the name of ass-covering. This is, in a very real sense, a rebellion against the laws of the land, and the cops are on the wrong side. And they’re trying very hard to cover this shit up, and Twitter is really not letting them get away with that.
And I fear that what Ferguson shows is the absolute hypocrisy of the conservative movement – that for all their dumb yammering about “THE GUMMINT’S GONNA HURT US!” and “WE NEED TO DEFEND AGAINST IT!”, the truth is that they see the government as a weapon to crack down on people they don’t like. Who gives a fuck about following the law? Who gives a fuck if it’s perfectly legal to film the cops? Hey, we’ve got some suspicious-looking characters over here, they don’t need rights, what we need are rights to protect us.
Truth is, the law should protect everyone. What we have here is tantamount to rebellion. And I would feel a lot better about the conservatives going, “Oh, yeah, this is when people should rise up against their government,” but the truth of what they have to say may well better expressed as “People like us can rise up against the government, but you can’t,” and that erasure of whole realms of people worries me.
(And people will inevitably say, “But there’s looting in Ferguson!” – which, yeah, there is, but the cops started by targeting peaceful protestors long before looters came along. As a Tweet said, I can condemn both the impending police state and looters simultaneously. I suggest you try it.)
Anyway, this is one of the most important stories to break in a while. Pay attention.
(EDIT: And there are those who will say, “How dare you turn a tragedy into a political agenda?” To which I say, a) The tactic of “Let’s not politicize this” is the surest way of ensuring no change ever gets made ever, and b) conservatives are perfectly willing to, say, evince an opinion on Trayvon Martin or Clive Bundy’s respective heroism when it suits them, so I’m perfectly happy to point out what they don’t discuss.)
No, It's A Little Selfish
In the wake of Robin Williams’ suicide, I’ve seen a lot of people saying, “Killing yourself because of depression isn’t selfish! It’s a disease!”
Speaking as someone who suffers from depression, depression is very much a disease, and often a terminal one.
Suicide’s also a little selfish.
Now, because people invariably want my suicide credentials at some point in these discussions, I have two suicide attempts in my past, one where I took an entire bottle of sleeping pills in isolation andcompletely lucked out in not dying. (As I’ve often said, “A slightly stronger batch and I wouldn’t be here talking to you.”) They both happened in different years but during the same month, wherein I discovered I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder. About once a year, I am seized with an awful depression where I can barely function and usually wind up self-harming. I suicidally ideate on a regular basis, and have for as long as I can remember.
And like all depressives, when I heard Robin Williams had died, I felt that chill of Fuck, well, if he can’t beat it, what hope do I have?
I’m lucky. My depression comes in waves, wherein I emerge periodically to experience some very wonderful times, and I can carry that happiness back to the dark bits. Others aren’t so blessed, and drown.
That’s why I believe people should have the right to take their own lives. This belief is summed up in this wonderful Superman comic, wherein Superman says to a suicidal woman on a ledge, “If you honestly believe, in your heart of hearts, you will never have another happy day, then step out into the air.” Depression leaches all the joy from life, leaves you consistently miserable, and if you’re going to spend the next twenty years in joyless penance, I endorse that escape.
But.
Let us not pretend that escape doesn’t have splash damage.
Because Robin Williams’ wife is suffering right now, and his children are suffering, and his young daughter will doubtlessly look at that final Instagram he posted of her and him together and wonder, eternally, if there was something she could have done. By killing himself, he’s condemned them to a lifetime of pain.
And I think that’s one of the evilest tricks of depression: it lists all the people you love and convinces you, one by one, that they’d all be better off without you. Except this is usually a huge lie. I’ve talked to the survivors of suicidal lovers, and not a one of them felt happy that their loved one had offed himself. They may have understood, they may have even endorsed it, but they all had a great loss in their life. That death ripped a hole in them that will never fully heal. Particularly if it came by surprise, which – because we treat suicide as though it’s the greatest and most shameful of evils – it usually does.
Your exit may be painless for you, but it will hurt the people you love. Count on that.
The problem, I think, is that in American society, “Selfishness” is the biggest sin. You’re not allowed to be greedy, unless it’s for money. The idea that you might harm someone willingly is seen as a monstrous act, the unforgivable thing, and so people are falling all over themselves to say that Robin Williams did nothing selfish.
He did, a little. He looked at the future, saw nothing good anywhere down the road, and decided to opt out. And like Superman, if there was truly never going to be one more good day for Robin, well, I support that. It’s a harsh equation, but there comes a point when the personal pain he’d endure would supersede the needs of his family – and if that’s the case, I think he should have the ability to opt out, just like any other terminally ill patient.
But what I do hope was that Robin was being honest with himself in his last moments. I hope he wasn’t going, “Well, they’ll be better off without me” and doing that fucked-up fandango where he convinces himself they’ll not just be better off without him, but actually happy. Because I’ve been there. I did that myself when I opened up that bottle of sleeping pills, and I survived by accident, and man, years later I am well aware of how fucked up my entire family would have been if they’d found me dead in my bedroom. They would have been the farthest thing from happy.
It’s a balance: Is your pain so bad that it’s worth hurting others to escape it? And, like all pain, it’s impossible to say how bad it is for someone else. You have to make your own decisions. Maybe it was that bad for Robin, maybe it wasn’t, I don’t know.
But let’s not pretend it’s not selfish. It is. A little. And the best I can ask of you serious depressives is to look at it honestly, to understand the hurt you’re going to dispense on your way out, and honestly weigh whether you can live – or not-live – with that injury.
I don’t think you’re a monster if you can live with it.
But I think you might be wrong.
Get help.
Ten Things I Learned About Italy While Travelling There
1) The infamously bad service is infamously correct.
When Italian service is good, what you get is this delightfully relaxed atmosphere where you can talk with friends for as long as you like, drinking wine and debating the sad state of the world, until eventually – lackadaisically – you wave a finger and the waiter comes over eventually with your check. (They do not bring you your check before you ask for it, ever, which seems delightfully civilized.)
When it’s bad, you sit at a table for forty minutes and nobody pays attention to you, even though they waved you over to sit down yesterday. Or you tell them, “I need the check, our bus is leaving in fifteen minutes” and they fuck off until with three minutes left you have to find them to throw money at them, and they look at you like you’re the asshole. Or they lie and tell you their credit card machine isn’t working so they can fake the taxes.
We had some wonderful meals, when the waiter took a liking to us and chatted with us. All the other patrons suffered while he chatted, but fuck it, at that point we were like, “Okay, fine, this is the way it works.”
2) Americans are freaks for wanting water.
We thirsted. All the time. But there is no free water in Italy, and they think us mad for even wanting some. As it is, you have to ask for “still” water or they’ll bring you seltzer, and it comes in little tiny bottles that don’t serve a table.
We had to go to so much effort that even a cup of water seemed like a monstrous effort. And yet we never stopped. After a while, it felt mad to even try, but goddammit we were thirsty and we can’t just drink wine. When we got home and found waiters refilling our glasses unprompted, it felt like a waterfall of luxury.
3) Italians do not dip their bread in olive oil.
Nor do they like their pizza the way we do. But the pasta is delicious beyond what you get; you have to work to have a bad meal in Rome, you really do. Our worst meal was an Applebees-style experience, and even then the sea bass was above the cut. Our average meal was a fine meal in Cleveland. Those Italians know how to eat…
…except for all their bitching, really, bread in olive oil is delicious. Get over it, Italians. Get past tradition.
4) Italy’s main pasttime is hating their neighbors.
When I went to England, the history there was “We had an empire.” When I went to Germany, it was a staunch “Here is what we built.” In Italy, it was “Here’s how we fucked over the next city over, ha, those shits, they totally deserved it.” Over and over. In every place we visited.
Which is to say that Italy wasn’t really a country until it got unified around the time of our Civil War, and most of their history consisted of fighting with their neighbors and the barbarians until someone said “Hey, you’re all family now,” so even to this day a lot of local rivalries kick in. There’s a lot of jockeying for position, and snarking, until an outsider comes in and suddenly hey, who are you to tell us anything, we are from Southern Italy.
5) There is no beauty like Italian beauty.
The Vatican looked like a very expensive yard sale, what with all the art piled willy-nilly about, but St. Peter’s Basilica was the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever seen, bar none. It was like walking into God’s mind. Likewise, Pompeii was breathtaking even as a ruin, the Coliseum was impressive, and the Doge Palace was gorgeous, and San Marco’s Basilica with its gold-and-glass inlay stole the breath.
They build big in Italy. Like, huge. Everything is oversized, even the landscape, and yet not so big that it sneaks out of your perception and just becomes noise. They know how to build things in Italy so you are forever forced into a sense of scale, where you sense how small and frail this human flesh is compared to the great powers around, and it’s glorious now that we’re tourists. (I suspect the effect was slightly different when they could flay you alive for pissing them off.)
6) There is no style like Italian style.
As a fat American, I drew glances, but the people in Italy were on average astonishingly good-looking. And even when they weren’t, they dressed sharply. I won’t claim that my Italian suit wasn’t an attempt to emulate them a bit, but crossing a public square was a little like walking through a commercial.
Yet they weren’t, weirdly enough, sexy. Sex is a big part of Italian culture – our tour guides made a lot of innuendos and “You-knows” when discussing the great fucking that went on in the past – but stylish and sexy didn’t mesh. They were all oddly restrained, though admittedly since I was with my Mom and kids I didn’t hit a lot of nightclubs. I suspect the sexy flows like wine there. But in the public square, just a bunch of pretty hunky folks meandering about.
7) Venice is not stinky…
Admittedly, we had good weather and the garbagemen weren’t on strike, but the odors we got were pretty much just low tide in Connecticut. It could be worse, but I think a lot of that stench is just living by the seashore, man.
8) …but it is a maze.
We tried to map it, and got lost. Every time. And Yelp was useless for finding restaurants, since apparently a lot of them open and close in Venice, which is for rich tourists, and even for those with followings most locals use the Michelin guides anyway. We always found our way back, since we just headed for the sea, but we never got there the same way twice.
9) The Italian people are super-helpful, and communicative.
We had people offering to help us constantly, and only a handful wanted money. Most people were very happy to chat in our handful of broken languages – the married couple on the subway who congratulated us on thwarting a pickpocket attempt and told us it was their second wedding anniversary, the taxi driver who was thrilled to discover we were from Alaska and revealed, through absolutely no English at all, that it had been his lifelong dream to go fishing in Alaska and interrogated us as to flight times and costs.
The language wasn’t nearly the barrier we thought it would be. Which was nice. The people were very kind, on the whole, when they weren’t waiters or repairmen. I guess they’re friendly when they choose to be, not when someone makes them.
10) But they are super-racist when it comes to Roma.
We did have two pickpocket attempts our first day in Rome on the subway, which was super-exciting; one person warned us as the mother with the baby snuck her hand out to filch my wallet, and then when Gini slapped the hand away when the second tried, we got roundly congratulated. So there’s definitely some crime, but we felt like low-grade superheroes for busting them. (Even if we didn’t “bust” them, really; they just ran off the subway to steal from someone else.)
But everyone we spoke to in Italy discussed God, those Roma, we tried to educate them, they don’t want to be civilized, so they prefer to steal. They train in it. They’re not like normal people. And we were left in this uncomfortable position of not knowing how to refute this, as yes, these people (who I assume were Roma, based on what people said, but who the fuck knows?) did try to steal our wallets, but every time we mentioned it it unleashed a flow of complaint to the point where we pretty much just stopped talking about it.
I have friends who are Roma. They don’t pick pockets. I’m sure some subset of Roma do, but the easy willingness to tar everyone with the same brush – and furthermore, to assume the scumminess of a whole culture – was a little distressing.
You Can Be More Than Monkeys: ACCOUNT FOR PERSONALITY, DAMMIT
If you were to ask an extraterrestrial to summarize 99% of all human stories, it would twiddle its tentacles and speak thusly:
“A human predicts what will make them happy. They discover they were wrong.”
Which is, well, the inherent moral of almost any tale we tell. Every romantic comedy is “You thought this person was wrong for you, but surprise! They’re your soulmate.” Every sad drama is some dude going, “Wait, I should have done this other thing” at the end of the film. Every action adventure usually ends with the hero discovering that they *thought* getting the treasure of the Rio Grande would make them happy, but it’s friendship that binds the universe together!
The reason we tell these stories over and over again is because we suck at knowing what makes us happy. Worse, we don’t understand just how bad we are at predicting our contentment. We are convinced, with the firmness of Ahab lashing himself to the whale, that we know how to do this, and by God we will shoot down all incoming advice like they were death-dealing missiles to do…
…well, whatever damn-fool thing it is we set out to do.
And then we discover that really, this thing we moved heaven and earth to get didn’t actually bring the benefits we assumed it would.
So I think any rational human being’s main quest in life should be to disprove yourself. To figure out what terrible instincts you have, and remove them like a cancer. Because you probably are brimming with all sorts of awful ideas about what’s actually good in your life, and the sooner you can dismantle those things like the bombs they are, the better.
Today’s example: **What turns me on is what’s good for me.**
I say this because in a recent blog entry, OKCupid – a site dedicated to getting people to date happily – said this:
“OkCupid’s original system gave people two separate scales for judging each other, ‘personality’ and ‘looks.’… [But] according to our users, ‘looks’ and ‘personality’ were the same thing.”
The article is fascinating, and I’d encourage you to read it. But basically, what it says is this:
“If I see a cute person, they’re awesome to talk to.”
*Smacks with riding crop* NO! Do not do that!
Look, that’s your monkey brain talking, that primitive Amygdala hijacking your higher senses to go, “ME WANT FUCK” and rerouting all of your brainpower to answer the question of, “I want to fuck him, so why do I want to fuck him?”
Your brain, which can justify any awful decision, will of course answer: “Because he’s good for me.”
But no! Christ, that’s so blatantly stupid that even the bonobos are shaking their head. (And the bonobos are freaks.) The sooner you can disentangle “This person has the physical attributes to turn me on” from “This person may be awful in all other respects,” *the better off you will be.”
The biggest step you can make towards healthy, happy dating is to understand that “People who turn you on” can also be utter nitwits who you should not get involved with.
…Of course, another monstrously stupid thing that humans do is mentally doing a search-and-replace in every argument to change all instances of “often” with “all.” And so assorted dimwits will say, “…So we should never date people we’re attracted to?”
No, you idiot. What you should do is recognize that physical attraction is the first step in many. You start with boinkability, because if you don’t want to hit that, well, you should probably just be friends. (Also note that “friends” can be unattractive to you, and yet really good for you – another problem that this lack of distinction creates, that lurking sense that your friends aren’t as good as someone who satisfies your nethers.)
But after you’ve gone, “Yeah, I want that,” then you go through many steps after that to determine whether you should take this further – which includes the incredibly critical steps of 1) getting to know who they really are, and 2) determining whether who they really are is compatible with what you really want.
Or you can just assume that the hottest people are your best matches, and be continually upset.
But if you do the dumbass monkey-brain thing of conflating turn-on with compatibility, you will have inconsistent disaster. You’ll have that slot-machine payoff of “Some people I wanted to boink were good for me, and others weren’t so I’ll just keep pulling that lever!” And many people luck into decent relationships by sheer chance, which is good, because in many cases “sheer chance” is way better than their focused planning.
Yet you. You can rise above the ape to understand that these hormones flooding through you need no justification. You can separate personality and looks, and in fact damn well should.
Because if you think that attraction == compatibility, you’re going to keep making the monkey mistakes.
FOR EXTRA CREDIT: Are the people you can successfully date casually the same people who you can live with 24/7? Society thinks it’s an inevitable progression! But society are the same jerks who got rid of the personality rating on OKCupid! Think carefully!
The Expensive Things I Purchased In Italy
1) In Rome, one of the most stylish cities in the world, there is a hat company so renowned for their fedoras that they’ve actually made a relatively famous French movie with the hat’s name. (The movie is not about the hats, but rather the gangsters who wore them.)
That hat’s name is Borsalino. And I purchased one.
This hat is, in all ways, ridiculous. It’s as light as Elven chainmail, just this thin layer of woven stuff that somehow manages to retain a shape. When I put on my old hats, they feel weighty; this thing is a puff of air. Totally worth the 129 Euro it took to buy it.
2) What was not worth it was the 1500-Euro panama hats I tried on in Venice. There are four grades of panama hat, and for some reason the top-grade is $2300 and the next grade down is $750, and – well, there was an improvement in quality, but the fit wasn’t anywhere near as good as the Boursalino, nor was the quality seemingly that amazing. But hey, for a brief period I had a hat worth a reasonably priced used car resting atop my dome.
(Though major points to the woman in the shop for looking at me as I walked in and perfectly guessing my hat size just by glancing at my head.)
3) While in the city with the most Michelin-starred restaurants (one more than Paris, which I’m sure chafes), we decided to dine at one. I booked seats at La Terrazza Del’Eden, a one-star restaurant with a great view of the city. And my Mother got to see what Michelin-starred service was like.
Michelin service, for the record, is where they have a battalion of waiters constantly scanning you unobtrusively – they don’t interrupt your conversation, but if your wine glass goes dry they’ll be there to refill it within a minute. They are knowledgeable. They will do literally whatever it takes to make you happy. They are the Marines of the service industry, and in this case our waiters saw me come in with my new Boursalino hat. I looked around for a coat check for about five seconds before they smiled and unfolded a small table next to my seat for me to rest my hat on, and another table for my mother to rest her purse on.
These guys are pros, I thought.
The best dish I had in Italy – and there will probably be a meal overview, as Italy was basically a cavalcade of amazing dining – was this:
This is a peach gazpacho. I don’t know why I ordered it; I can’t stand peach, and I don’t like raw tomatoes. But I do like cold soup, and I said to myself, If a Michelin-starred restaurant thinks these are two good flavors to put together, I will trust them. And what I got was a synthesis of the umami of tomatoes and the light sweetness of a peach without the cloying syrup in it, this constantly mutating dish of flavors that changed as I tried, say, putting more of the puree of tomato onto my spoon or the cream on the side in. My mouth rang with flavors, my tongue vibrating as as chilled complexity saturated every taste quadrant on my tongue; it is the closest I’ve come to eating a meal as complex as a Velvet Tango Room drink.
But you also had dishes that looked like this red mullet:
And this foie gras:
So basically, we had a pretty amazing meal there. Well worth the price, if you like spending vast amounts of money on dining experiences.
4) But! I forgot to bring my suit to Italy because I thought it would be casual turista dining throughout, so my usual “nice shirt and chinos” would carry me. But you can’t pull that shit at a Michelin-starred restaurant!
(Except, as it turns out, you totally can. We had a family of Japanese tourists over who showed up in T-shirts and baseball caps. Michelin waiters being what they were, nobody said anything, but these people spent money on a huge meal with two screaming kids and a granddad in a sun visor who nodded off at the table. They were placed in the very far back.)
So I said, “What I need is a fine and stylish Italian suit,” and set out with my family to find one.
…not so fast, Fat American.
The first three shops were pretty damned rude. Stylish Italians are thin, and they weren’t particularly thrilled about me either, and so there was a lot of bad English and gesticulating of “This is what we have in your size,” followed by rat-a-tat Italian among the clerks that was pretty clearly, “Look, this guy’s in here, we can’t make him leave, what the hell do we have?” Which was fairly humiliating.
Eventually, however, we went to Sartoria Italiana, a tiny shop with some nice suits, and the proprietor didn’t seem actively repulsed by my heaving body. We tried on suits for almost an hour – my wife wanted a charcoal grey suit at first, as she thought it very flattering, but I pointed out that this suit didn’t feel like me. Which is to say that I’d wear it for the handful of formal occasions that I wore all suits for, and then it would gather moths in my closet.
No, I wanted something colorful, something bold, something European. And we were there so long it got awkward, as the clerk on duty left and was replaced by a “doesn’t-speak-English-at-all” clerk, who struggled mightily to get across the concepts of proper hems, what’s stylish in Italy, and what time to return.
Yet we persevered! And this was my Great Italian Suit!
This thing is light and comfortable, and it may get me to wear it on more occasions than just funerals and weddings. It looked phenomenal, and I couldn’t stop swanning about in it. Plus, I wore it for a whole airline flight (in order to preserve and protect my customs charges, as per advice from Bart Calendar), and it didn’t chafe or pull.
A suit like this can get a man to wear more suits. This could become an addiction, really. Which Gini is already starting to meep about the prices, but hey, I remember the days when all I wore was black T-shirts and black pants and she said, “Don’t you want to look nice?”
Be careful what you wish for, my love.
Still, despite all the serious sartorial stylings of the suit, one can’t stop the cross-generational appeal of FINGERGUNS:
How Being Polyamorous Makes Me A Healthier Person
The first time I dumped someone to save my wife’s sanity, I felt pretty bad about it.
Which is to say that I’m a roiling hot mess of bubbling neuroses myself, so I am endlessly tolerant of fucked-up behavior in others. If someone has a breakdown in public at a party, I think, “There but for the grace of God go I,” and immediately try to talk them down. If someone gets into a screaming fight with me, I think, “Our lines of communication need work,” and set to figuring out what crossed wire has led to such fury.
This has allowed me to turn a lot of dysfunctional messes into good friendships.
The dark side is that I’ll spend months, years, convinced that a breakthrough is around the corner and never getting there. It’s like the Xeno’s Paradox of fucking, wherein every week we have another howling breakdown followed by a breakthrough, but nothing ever seems to get better.
And I can’t leave, man. Because they need me. And we came to a new realization last night! Same as the realization we had last week, and the realization we had last month, and we’re still fucking miserable but Lessons Are Being Learned, we’re halfway to heaven.
Next thing you know, three months of my life have vanished into the suckhole – the bad suckhole – and I’m just exhausted.
Gini does not stand for that shit.
Gini is of the opinion that sure, I can date, but there is a limited amount of time I can devote to diagnosing the issues of my lovers. And that time ends when ours begins. Left to my own devices I’ll still be ruminating about Jessica’s problems on my date with Gini… And Gini will tolerate a dash of that, but really she’s selfish.
When my bad times with other lovers impinge on our good times, they gotta go.
(And the same goes for my long-term girlfriend, though since we get so little time together it takes a fantastically dysfunctional relationship to rip through that little slice of fried gold.)
The cut-off didn’t happen often – maybe twice in seven years, honestly – but the threat of being cut off changed the flavor of my relationships. I started choosing less needy women. I started asking, “Is this person legitimately going to get better if we have a night-long discussion, or am I just fooling myself into the illusion of progress?” I started asking some seriously hard questions before I flung my heart down the Well Of Mystery Smooches, asking, “Yes, we share the same psychological issues, but is ‘having similar problems’ the same as ‘compatible’?”
And slowly, I started having saner and more satisfying relationships.
The weird thing is, rejecting the incompatible-but-sympathetic is something I should have done years ago. But I couldn’t do it just for me. But I can do it if I’m protecting not just my sanity, but guarding the happiness of my wife and girlfriend. I might piss seven months of daily arguments away on my own, but I owe it to Gini to be as happy as I can for her. I owe it to her to not waste my spare time (and some of my not-spare time) spinning wheels on people who I’m fundamentally incompatible with.
So now I take my time. Because I’m working to shield my wife. Which works to shield me.
Poly makes me better at having all kinds of relationships. Even if I went monogamous, the lessons learned would be applicable. It’s okay to break up with someone even if you think they’re close to having a breakthrough, because frankly, you’re not responsible for guiding everyone to the gate. It’s okay to want to be in relationships where, the occasional bumps aside, you spend most of your time being happy and communicating well.
I’m better at that these days. Thank God.