WOULD SOMEONE PLEASE TELL ME

Why is it that as we grow older, the only emotion that we feel more strongly is regret?

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF PLACES IN BETWEEN

A note to my readers:

Right now I am drunk as a lord. This is probably the closest you will get to having an unguarded moment from me. Because though my comportment may often seem to indicate otherwise, typically I am in full control of my faculties and carefully articulate what I convey to others.

Actually, the above is untrue. I am a significant step away from the level of intoxication required for full unabashed disclosure, because I am still actively editing my sentences for syntax and rhythm even as I write this. In order to achieve full access to my unvarnished self, I have to be almost falling-down drunk.

But here are a few insights from my half-naked id. They are unified by a theme that has haunted me for several years now. I cannot tell it in its entirety, but here are a few vignettes:

Every time I drove to St. Louis from Chicago or vice versa during college, I would encounter a moment or scenario that broke my heart.

I remember eating at the Steak 'n Shake in Springfield and falling in love with the beautiful, utterly sweet African-American girl who waited on me there, so much so that I wanted to take her with me, take her out of that place, to rescue her from a life of tragic obscurity. But... was I really just looking to rescue myself?

I remember when a red meteor flashed low across the sky amid the heat lightening at 2 in the morning just south of Bloomington, and I wondered whether my mind was playing tricks on me. Or whether I was possibly witnessing the Second Coming, and soon all this driving and studying was gonna be moot.

I remember driving past exits for White City, Funks Grove, Towanda, and a hundred other small towns in Illinois that exist in my mind only in potential, places that lack the grounding of experiential reality, and thus in my mind are a thousand times more thrilling than they are in real life.

I remember being frightened more than once by the power of nature: by snowstorms that made the roads impossibly treacherous and thunderstorms so violent that threatened to drive me off the road.

I remember the crazy-hot summer day when I witnessed, from far off, a large object by the roadside, and then staring with slack-jawed wonder as that object proved to be an emu, standing alongside the highway, scarcely perturbed by my presence as I whizzed past.

I remember being utterly intrigued by a sign for a strip club that offered a full t-bone steak dinner for $9.95, lapdance included. (I'm exaggerating about the lapdance, of course. As the sign plainly stated, that cost extra.)

I remember driving friends and lovers across the state of Illinois from the great cosmopolitan metropolis of Chicago to the fragile, workaday, parochial city of St. Louis.

My friends, there have been nights on the road when I listened to country and western music that made me cry so hard I couldn't see the road through my tears; also nights when I was so tired I had to bite my lip until it bled so as not to fall asleep at the wheel.

I once pushed a Volvo to 125 miles per hour and it shook so hard I was afraid we would careen off the road; another time I drove 50 miles per hour for half an hour with a cop on my bumper, sweating bullets, waiting to be pulled over, until for some strange reason he decided I wasn't worth his time.

I have puked, shat, pissed, and passed out in truck stop parking lots where anonymity enveloped me like a comforting blanket. And then there was the time when, as I drove from St. Louis to Chicago after breaking up with my longtime gilfriend, I pulled over at a rest stop in the midst of the cornfields to look out over a vista devoid of people and felt so alone that I dropped to my knees and shook for minutes on end with mournfulness and longing.

I know every twist of that road like an old friend's laugh. It would never betray me, and though it is still possible that I might die on that road some day it would be death at the hands of a trusted companion, a stalwart ally, a true comfort in times of trouble. A friend who would look me in the eyes as he stabbed me.

I hope it seems not too romantic to say that I learnt more about myself, and learnt better to love myself, on the road between Chicago and St. Louis than I ever did in either of those two places.

I miss that road, and someday soon I will travel it again.

THE HUMANITIES PROFESSOR... RIP?

In a recent article, professional academic and New York Times op-ed columnist Stanley Fish laments what he sees as the incipient passing of the humanities professorship as a viable profession. He refers the reader to a book published recently by one Frank Donoghue entitled The Last Professor: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities. In Donoghue's (and Fish's) view, the humanities as an academic discipline and pedagogic vocation have been subjugated by those branches of education that are concerned with instrumental, practical learning. In other words, the notion of the university as a preparatory environment for the professional life has trumped that of the it as a place to be instructed in knowledge lacking ad hoc significance. Fish distinguishes between the two schemas by proffering a quote by Andrew Carnegie that champions the skills of "shorthand and typewriting" over the learning of "dead languages." Fish further asserts that the institution of the humanities professor is doomed, and irretrievably so; that the corporatizing of the university is irrevocable. The disappearance of the tenure-track academic position in favor of lower-paid adjunct professorships is a symptom of the waning importance of the wise instructor; furthermore the crucial outcome of education is not the cultivation of the individual but the learning of methodologies and skills. Fish ends with a bleak assessment of the future, stating "it seems that I have had a career that would not have been available to me had I entered the world 50 years later. Just lucky, I guess."

I don't know whether Fish's dire predictions apply to me, as I entered the world only 43 years after he did. But as someone who bounced around from undergraduate major to major and finally settled on philosophy - one of the disciplines that Fish singles out as particularly doomed - I have less sympathy for him than you might expect. Don't get me wrong; I don't want philosophy or semiotics or any other field of study to disappear from the academic roster. If philosophy ceases to be taught at the university level then the academic world will be disasterously poorer for it. But even as a lover of letters and of Fish's "higher education," I do wonder whether these changes afoot in the academy aren't less insidious than Fish wants us to believe. The university as we understand it emerged in the West out of the Monastic tradition, which for intellectual inspiration drew from the Bible and Aristotle in fairly equal measures. In that formative era of European scholarship, at a time when modes of inquiry were being widely codified for the first time since the Classical Period, every field of human understanding was described as "philosophy." The precursor to biology was "natural philosophy"; to sociology and ultimately economics was "political philosophy." Even mathematics was seen as deriving from first principles outlined (in the West; I'm being very Euro-centric today, more out of ignorance than intent) by the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers. To great Greek logicians like Pythagoras and Chrysippus, even computer science would strike a very comforting and familiar chord. Some of these fields persist under the heading of philosophy to this day. From this monolithic beginning each field of study developed its own particular body of theory and achieved greater specificity and precision, to the point a thousand years later when universities now boast academic departments as diverse as nuclear medicine and African-American studies, linguistics and chemical engineering. (And about as many branches of philosophy as all other disciplines combined!)

I want to re-formulate Fish's hypothesis somewhat, because I think he fails to fully outline what he believes is in danger of being lost. Fish fears the loss of a brand of pure intellectualism that rejoices in the incredible breadth of human knowledge and cares not for ad hoc, practical application. This reification of intellectualism emerged as one of the hallmarks of academic culture, probably ramifying from the profound complexity of our knowledge of the world, a complexity that quickly outspanned the capacities of any single individual. But what of this exalted intellectualism? Philosophy majors learn early of the "is-ought problem," outlined by Hume and others, which essentially states that the mere fact some state X exists, even if it be beneficial, does not support that state X merits existence. I cannot help but think of this when I read Fish's article, because it both identifies as ultimately speculative Fish's claims of harm and yet bolsters his assertion that pure intellectualism has merit. For, would I care to attempt, let alone expect to succeed at, re-conceiving Hume's (or anyone else's) genius in order to speak about a conceptual concept like is-ought, or the naturalistic fallacy, or the Prisoner's Dilemma? Isn't the disappearance of experts on these things a dire threat to civilization as a whole, let alone twenty thousand tenured eggheads? Do we want to have to reinvent the wheel each time we wish to get in the car and drive, metaphorically speaking?

To this I say: hold your horses, sportsfans. I don't believe we're doomed to a fate where the wisdom of the Enlightenment and its legacy are lost in a dark age where everyone can construct the architecture of a sexy Powerpoint presentation for the firm's takeover bid but no one knows how to analyze the logic thereof. For that, it seems, is Fish's ultimate fear: not that we will lose our ability to construct intelligible sentences or perform economic analyses (for these it seems patently clear are talents as practical and directed as Fish's despised "shorthand and typewriting," and thus not destined for the chopping block). But if logic, interpretation, reasoning, and other faculties are innate - and they almost certainly are - and furthermore if these faculties are cultivated by their exercise (more speculative, but also reasonable to assume), then these disciplines that Fish believes doomed for being non-instrumental, turn out to be decidedly instrumental after all. Find me the executive, the high-power dealmaker or swaggering litigator who isn't served by his or her collegiate study of game theory, Shakespeare, or developmental psychology. And consider the alternate: we all know, don't we, those hapless individuals who studied nought but business in college. Didn't they almost always turn out to be the dullest people you know? I'm not disparaging business majors - far from it - but if you came out of college instructed only in marketing or management, then you are at a decided disadvantage to those who enjoyed a broader spectrum of education. And not just at the water cooler, but also in the board room or on the trading floor. It sounds trite, but the power of this supposedly inutile higher education is that it teaches you how to think; how to decide what's worth thinking about; and how to properly deliberate on those topics of inquiry. Thinking is like any other talent - hardwired, latent, perhaps, but responsive to exercise and repetition. In short, practice makes you better.

But returning to our whipping boy, Fish thinks this is precisely what the academy is bent on excising from its curriculum; no longer will we be instructed in how to think, but only in how to make widgets for the Dear Old Firm. Might I suggest that such an attitude shows not only a naive contempt for business and its values, but also more than a hint of condescension to those who aren't bound for his beloved halls of academe? If it were tragic for colleges to in any way emulate trade schools, isn't that insulting to those who learn a trade? And I thought it was only elitist corporate scum who endulged in discriminatory class-consciousness!

Which leads me to my last point, also Marxist, and ad hominem. For a man so committed to the Aristotelian ideal, Fish hasn't exactly been content to remain in his cloister, poring over antique knowledge for the betterment of nothing save his (and his students') edification. Instead, he's been the academic version of the postmodern ladder-climbing executive hell-bent on the corner office. He left his position as English Department chair at Duke to join the University of Illinois at Chicago at the rank of dean (for a purported $200,000+ per year), then jumped ship again following a row with the state over - what else? - money, finding probably that the constraints of state funding were insupportable after the free and easy largesse of a major private university. He's currently an endowed professor in the law school at Florida International University, an interesting choice given that most top-tier universities would still line up to enlist his services. I can't imagine money had anything to do with his taking a position at this less-prestigious institution. Nope, couldn't be that at all.

Maybe I should cut the dude some slack given that his concern for the future of the tenured humanities professor seems genuine. But what of tenure for that matter? Is there any other institution in our society where such a combination of iron-clad job security and relaxed performance requirements obtains? If there is, it's in government, not in the private sector (what that says about government, I leave to the reader to dissect). Call me crazy, but I think many professors and practically all students would be well-served if established academics sometimes felt their jobs were on the line. There's a great term, "sinecure," defined as an insulated, highly-remunerative job that requires little work. It originated in the Catholic Church, but nowhere is it more applicable today than in the ivy-covered walls of our cherished institutions of higher learning. Fish lets the mask slip when he speaks longingly of "healthy humanities departments populated by tenure-track professors who discuss books with adoring students in a cloistered setting..." which really tells you all you need to know about Fish's egoistic fantasies, if not his earnestness. Not only does he want the money, he wants the adulation as well. Oh, and let's not forget the 'u-can't-touch-this' job security of tenure.

Well, I'm tired of beating up on this guy: let's get some other people involved here. All together now, cue up the Stone Roses; they encapsulate it better than I can: "I wanna be adored..."

PS - This blogger's back, bitches!!

Better Than a Mood Ring

Prepare yourself for something new, and awesome.

In the spirit of Livejournal and Facebook, I will occasionally note my mood, or perhaps more accurately my state of being, with the most relevant exercise class from the laughable gym I love to hate, Flirty Girl Fitness. If there weren't so many choice ways to make fun of this place, it would irritate me no end; as it is, I tolerate them only because they provide so much fodder for mockery.

Without further ado, my very first pick as Today's Flirty Girl Fitness Exercise is Pole Tease. Yeah, I'm gonna start easy and work my way up as the mood suits.

I Can't Believe It's a Commercial!

Spent a good portion of the day contemplating the near-universal crapitude of butter-substitute commercials. Take Parkay for example. Those little talking butter tubs are so weird, what with their strokey little butter tub lid lips. Not to mention the fact that they can only say "Parkay," so apparently they are retarded little talking butter tubs as well. Wait a minute - retarded stroke victims? Now I really want to buy this product. Good job, Parkay.

This pales in comparison, though, with the Country Crock commercials that show only a man's and a woman's hand helping themselves to Country Crock and caressing each other suggestively. It's like a hand-fetishizing butter-lover decided to make a porno, and it was discovered by the Country Crock marketing department. Doubtless he went on from this to shooting videos of disembodied hands writhing around in Land O' Lakes, and then graduated to the really hard stuff involving childrens' hands and Crisco. It's a shame, really - he showed such promise when everyone was a consenting adult and the polyunsaturated fat was the star of the show. Probably doing 8-12 in San Quentin now, and I guarantee the hands he's getting up close and personal with aren't lubed with butter, or anything else for that matter. Well, possibly feces.

Compared to these two ad concepts, hiring Fabio as an ironic margarine-pimp seems almost like a good idea. Good on ya, I Can't Believe It's Not Butter: sure your ads suck, but not as much as everyone else's.

Other than this, I wasn't terribly productive.

THE HEART POUNDS, AND THE MIND...

Step 1. Decide that for 20 minutes you won't worry about your job, or your bills, or your lover, or your spouse, or your weight, or your bank balance, or why that girl/guy you met at the bar last weekend hasn't returned your call, or that the fellow who lives next door is two years younger than you and drives a BMW, or anything else in the world.

Step 2. Turn off the television, turn down the lights, and put aside other distractions.

Step 3. Take a pair of good headphones and plug them into the pickup on your computer.

Step 3. Sit upright in a comfortable chair.

Step 4. Press 'Play' on the following video. Make sure the sound is up. The soft parts will be audible, and the loud parts might hurt a little bit, but I think that's the way it's supposed to be. Don't watch the video itself; it's pretty, but not terribly interesting. What's more interesting is what you will think about in lieu of the things you were thinking about a half-hour ago.

Step 5. For the next seven minutes - or as long as you wish - close your eyes, listen, and let your mind go where it will. I can tell you that when I listen to this sometimes I think about what it was like to be young and how strongly I felt my feelings as a child. I recall the excitement of exploring my neighborhood on a snow day after an ice storm. I remember campfires in the woods outside my best friend's house and warm summer nights drinking beer and listening to the cicadas in the oak trees. I think about the first girl I ever loved. I think about the last girl I loved too.

Repeat as desired.

HOW TO DINE LIKE THE GAMELAN PLAYER IN AN INDIE ROCK BAND. OR A PENNILESS WINE SHOP CLERK.

Times are tough. Companies are scaling back on holiday gifts, families are struggling to make ends meet, and for my sexworker needs I've downgraded to toothless fifty-something Puerto Rican hookers with names like Consuela and Graciela. But just because you have to fuck like a pauper doesn't mean you can't dine like a prince! Over the years, the combination of solo living, indigency, and an appetite to rival that of a stoned whale have forced me to develop a number of strategies for eating out on the cheap. Follow my helpful hints for stretching your food dollar, and soon you'll have scads of extra cash to spend on rent and important household items like electronic nosehair clippers and eight-balls of cocaine.


1. Got... Thai?

This is hardly a secret, but Thai food is perhaps the last great deal in good eats. On this front, authenticity is important, but not necessarily for reasons of cultural fealty. As Thai and other once-exotic cuisines have burgeoned in popularity, enterprising restauranteurs have developed trendy and needlessly expensive restaurants serving artful but often homogenized versions of classic endemic dishes. Not only are the prices at these nouveau joints markedly higher, but portion sizes shrink and the ratio of garnish to food increases drastically. Avoid restaurants of this type like the plague. Fortunately for our purposes they tend to be easily identified by their minimalist color schemes and decor, backlit signage, and expensive, unobtrusive stereo equipment invariably broadcasting trip-hop and lounge music. Usually the vocalist will be singing in Portuguese despite the fact that this bears no relation to the cuisine on offer. Also remember that if a Thai restaurant has a martini menu, it's a bad sign. Ditto black leather couches and water installations. On the plus side, if you see a dry-erase board announcing "Today's Special" in a squiggly, illegible language, or spot old Asian women puttering around in the kitchen, these are indicators that you are in the right place. Finally, run, don't walk out of any ethnic restaurant that boasts go-go dancers or where you have to slip the hostess a twenty (pre-rolled for use as a coke straw) in order to secure a table.


2. Second Day Is Twice As Nice; Or, Doggy Bags Are Your Friend

Rule two for economical out-dining: whenever possible, leave something for a future meal. A byword of restaurant-going for most people, this has become a revelation for me of late, the possibility of which I attribute to a general slowing of my metabolism and diminution of my appetite. Just as important as having leftovers, however, is knowing which leftovers are worth preserving in the first place. It is crucial during the meal to strategize your attack and consume fully those items that will not happily live in the icebox in the days that follow, allowing you both to achieve satiation and also hoard a portion of hardier foodstuffs for the lean times ahead. To this end, here are some rough and ready guidelines. While at table devour without mercy all mollusks, fish, and other seafood bounty, as these culinary hothouse orchids are the first victims of spoilage and will play merry hell with your digestive system if not treated with the utmost respect. The same regrettably goes for sushi which, delicious and costly though it may be, can turn on you like a dyspeptic cobra and make you rue the day you became proficient with chopsticks. Besides, sushi is too expensive for our borderline-welfare lifestyle, so I will assume that if you are seated in front of an expanse of sushi, someone else is picking up the tab. To paraphrase the popular expression, "eat 'em if you got 'em." Dressed salads are also prime full-consumption candidates: few things in life are as sorry and unappetizing as an archipelago of wilted lettuce leaves adrift in a sea of thousand-island dressing. As mama used to say, "eat your greens." Same thing goes for sliced raw fruits and fresh berries. You need them, especially if like me your diet revolves around the potato and is therefore woefully undersupplied with nutrients and roughage.

Excellent candidates for caching are starchy vegetables and their offspring (with the notable exception of french fries); the cooked flesh of birds, pigs, and ungulates; grains, pilafs, and pulses; sandwiches, excepting those that contain the dreaded term 'salad' in their name; soups of all manner; omelets and other egg-driven vehicles; and non-frozen desserts and cheese courses. With few exceptions, all these items can live for days in the fridge and pose minimal risk of causing grievous gastrointestinal damage when finally pressed into meal service. And speaking of service, don't think that doggy bags are de rigeur only if you're dining in. Whenever possible, order takeout from lunch buffets. Almost never will you encounter a buffet that charges by weight, so take that styrofoam container and load it as full as its structural integrity (and your chutzpah) will permit. After having helped yourself to an obscene quantity of food, quickly encase said container in the provided plastic bag to prevent spillage should the six pounds of chicken korma and aloo gobi breach their styrofoam hull and create what we in the food industry call a "situation." Avoid making eye-contact with the owners as you depart with your spoils, and if you frequent the same establishment with any regularity consider periodically changing your appearance and possibly your name as well.


3. Learn to Live Off the Land

Since the 1960's when natural-food advocate Euell Gibbons and his seminal tome Stalking the Wild Asparagus popularized the notion of harvesting the bounty of nature, Americans have endulged their penchant for rugged individualism by venturing into the woods and gathering wild edibles that at best taste like an unwashed rectum and at worst will leave you dead and bloated as a septic hippo. You rural kids no doubt are already attuned to the wisdom of the land and have honed your instincts to such a degree that you can create a meth lab out of little more than a hollow log, some cattails, and the restricted access section of the local pharmacy. But here's a news flash for you city slickers: you too can reduce your dependency on grocery stores and foreign oil by exploiting those pockets of wildness that persist in even the most developed of cities. For instance, as you may know snowshoe hares were one of the staple foodstuffs for mountain men and voyageurs in the era before the West was conquered by 24-hour convenience stores and Paris Hilton. Yet despair not, for the bounty of the trapline can be yours as well. I am speaking, of course, of that delectable, underutilized urban quarry, the rat. Now, stop protesting - you think people started eating whale blubber and sea cucumbers because they looked appetizing? Rats are plentiful, easy to trap, and in my ward, fat and juicy thanks to their diet of Wiener's Circle refuse and unconsumed chorizo burritos. If you're still not convinced, think of rats as very small, disgusting, and disease-riddled cows - after all, they're practically domesticated given how dependent they are on humans to sustain their enormous populations and prodigious size. (Seriously, I saw this thing the other night that from across the street looked like a Labrador, until I got closer and saw the naked pink tail... shudder. But I digress.) Anyhoo, these critters have essentially no predators in the city, and the only way we're gonna keep their numbers under control is if we all strap on our boots, swallow the vomit rising in our throats, and get those rat traplines working for us. Remember, if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.


4. Whole Foods Can Suck Me Til I Shoot Muesli From My Meatus

In the 1990's you may have noticed the emergence and burgeoning popularity of that great foe of discount dining, the natural foods grocery store. Disguised as a "greener," more socially-conscious way to feed one's self than those soulless Safeways and Jewels, these institutions are instead a devious marketing ploy meant to soften the blow of having to shell out $17.50 per pound for wild rice pilaf and convert T-bills to pay for steaks from sashimi grade, humanely euthanized tunas. Proponents blather on about these companies' superlative foodstuffs and eco-responsible best practices from top to bottom. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to put it to you in less rarefied terms: Whole Foods and its ilk are the grocery equivalent of strip mines, and their sole objective is the separation of you from your hard-earned greenbacks. Now, if you have a numbered Swiss bank account, count as relatives people with names like Windsor and Walton, or live in places like Monaco or Dubai, go ahead and blow your paycheck (not to mention your gustatory load) at Whole Foods on artisanal free-range Spam and Montessori-educated radicchio. But if you're like me, contemplating a future filled with pork 'n beans and government cheese, then look away as you pass these dens of iniquity as if they were Erik Estrada's Playgirl spread.


5. When All Else Fails...

So you've reached the end of your tether: your resources have dwindled to the point where even local panhandlers are crossing the street to avoid you, and the idea of a big night out is extra fire sauce at - oh god, the horror! - Taco Bell. If this worst-case scenario sounds like you, then you may have to resort to desperate workplace tactics in order to keep yourself fed. I am speaking, of course, of the office refrigerator.

I know I've lost some of you with this one. "Goddamit, Aaron," you say to yourself, "I won't do it; I won't stoop that low." Well, nobody said it would be pretty, this business of survival. It's not a long-term strategy, but in dire circumstances other people's lunches can provide essential sustenance over the course of a busy workday. Remember that it's a zero-sum game out there, and every turkey pastrami sandwich that Ted from Accounting eats is one less turkey pastrami sandwich that you could have noshed on scott-free. There are obvious pitfalls with this tactic, so in order to keep a low profile and avoid the installation of kitchen surveillance cameras be sure to take items in such small quantities as to be almost undetectable. Chips, popcorn, and other loose comestibles are excellent quarry, as are cut vegetables, soups, tupperware-bound leftovers, and the like. Also, be sure to feast mightily on office party platters, celebratory donut holes, and birthday cakes, taking care not to be the first one to slice into the cake or remove a sector of the party sub. Once that sub has been breached, however, think of it as the proverbial dead whale upon which sharks gorge themselves until they literally can't swim; that's the kind of effort I want to see. In spite of my earlier example, do not - I repeat, do not - consume a homemade sandwich, as this theft will almost certainly be discovered and heighten vigilance amongs the other brown-baggers. Food that has been abandoned in the kitchen or dining area is, of course, another matter entirely: jump on that good action while it's still fit for human consumption. Anecdotally, while working for a former employer I once noted a plastic bag of ham on the kitchen counter that had been sitting out overnight and was slimy and opaque from condensation. Fighting back the impulse to retch I wondered at its loathesome appearance but then left the kitchen and gave the bag no further thought - that is, until I returned some thirty minutes later and noted that the bag was now missing its dank contents, which I can only surmise means somebody actually ate the ham. But these are not thoughts I wish to dwell on. The point is, just because one of my former colleagues was desperate as a homeless crack addict doesn't mean that you have to be, even if their incomes and yours are practically commensurate.

Thus concludes this lecture on how to live through these tough financial times without going on the dole or moving back in with your parents who, despite their reassurances, are not anxious to have you back in the warm bosom of the family home, raiding the fridge at all hours and basically being a complete load. By following my instructions and keeping your eyes open and your pride low, you can hold the wolf at bay and eat three squares a day even if you were a performance art major in college. As a final announcement, please note that I've got a great recipe for rat cacciatore available upon request. Oh, and FYI, after calling on the services of Graciela in Humboldt Park last weekend I developed a really nasty rash and it burns now when I pee, so, as they say, caveat emptor.