ACCENT

Lately I have been wishing that I had some kind of accent. I do not wish this purely out of vanity—I do not think that accents are inherently arousing. What would that imply, to say that foreigners or non-native speakers of English have a special monopoly on arousing speech?No. I wish now that I had an accent because I believe in it as a strategy to slow down one's train of thought and that, particularly in excitable states, the difficulty of slogging through pronunciation, the deliberation and careful choosing of simple, essential words and phrasing, could be the only way I could ever hope to express myself clearly.

This leads me to a troubling conclusion: that I must double my efforts to speak a foreign language and then immerse myself in its native culture. English, then, could become my accent and to foreigners in a foreign land, and I could really, really get it done.

SICK DAYS + DAILIES

As a few of you know, my partner and I have spent about one week in some degree of petty, but debilitating, illness.

1ST, I seemed to have caught a cold that was not properly girded for battle with my savage immune system. It vanished in barely 30 hours.

NEXT, she caught the same cold (or so we thought!), which took her over completely for several days to follow. Lovely girl, alas, she does not have my constitution.

Or perhaps, I speak too soon, for IN THE MEANTIME, my cold unexpectedly returned, having honed its endurance upon my partner's not-so-distant shores. Overconfident, this cold once again succumbed to the swiftness and brutality of my immuno-response.

BUT THEN, her cold, enraged by the massacre of its kind abroad, transitioned from "annoying cough" to "tortuous sinuses." My partner was most displeased. Her emotional reaction was exaggerated, to humorous effect, by the surprising consequence of a well of internal pressure building within her facial passageways, namely, a rather ongoing secretion of tears.

AT LAST, she made it through the worst of it and returned to work after a 5-day weekend.

THAT IS UNTIL, a series of events still poorly understood led to an experience I should like to, but shall not soon, forget: the worst stomach ache of my entire life, four straight hours of indescribable agony for which she was present and empathetically co-suffering.

And so, with fingers crossed, Thursday marks the first day that our starting team is back on its feet.

Illustration below.

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DAILIES (1.17.2012)

Literally phoning this in.

DAILIES: (01.15.2013)

SOMETHING FOR THE BROKEN-HEARTED

I saw an old friend in traffic the other day. I was on my bike—I slipped out of the west side of Forrest Park—when a rattle from my back wheel told me it was time to pull over and tighten a screw. I couched on the sidewalk with my back to the street but I was freaked out, before I got started, by a car horn. Feeling physically insecure near the curb, I quickly turned my head toward the commotion, even though it was already over. My friend was stopped there, two hands on the wheel in her dark Mazda, her sharp face straight forward and impatient with the red light at the intersection. There she was, back in my eye-line for the first time in months. If she had blown her horn, she regretted it now.

She had her heartbroken early last year. She took it very badly and, as the seasons slowly passed, was remade by her experience into someone very petty, unreliable, paranoid and cruel.

I could forgive her for allowing pain that much power. I am experienced in heartbreaks; I collected them as a younger man. One in particular often comes to mind and I am not ashamed to say that I handled it with dignity—that I took it, as I take all setbacks, as an opportunity for grace. Perhaps I also drank to excess, moaned about her to everyone in ear-shot, tarnished the beautiful girl's reputation and mine, worried my friends with frequent ruminations on our inevitable deaths and ran from the cops having screamed all night, drunk and violent to glassware in the middle of her street—and maybe that didn't happen. Maybe it was all just the dream that it feels like today.

All the while, I was gradually getting over it and coaching myself on some good advice:

• Know that one day you will be over it and that, in a year—or two, or five—your pain will feel distant, dreamlike and even a little romantic.
• Remember that there is more to a person than how they treated you. As much as you'd like to, you do not define them.
• Make note of the people you most love to make happy. They will be the best of your lovers and friends.
• And hold on tight to the idea that life's greatest pressures—for money, for love, for faith in our strengths despite evidence of absence, and the pressure to live a life worth remembering—are also our greatest motors of progress and maybe just another heartbreak or two beyond reach.

INSTINCT FOR ORDEAL

The last transit of Venus occurred on the 6th of June—that’s when our charming sister planet last passed visibly across the face of the sun. The 6 hour and 40 minute trip went largely uncelebrated around the world, generating a fraction, I guess, of the hype surrounding a relatively mundane lunar eclipse. The downplay is understandable—though it has nearly the same mass as Earth, our oft-underestimated interplanetary distance renders Venus a little more than an ink dot in the sky. It may be hard to believe, then, that this puny astronomical curiosity once set the stage for one of my favorite stories in history of human achievement.

It has been called mankind’s first international, cooperative, scientific effort. In 1761 hundreds of star-searchers departed to exotic locales from ports all around the world, and all because of a paper written by the great Edmund Halley (a super-genius whose litany of brilliant accomplishments does not include discovering the comet that today bears his name) 45 years prior. This paper described how measurements of the transit could be used to calculate the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Unfortunately, transits of Venus occur less than frequently—there were none in Haley’s lifetime. But, when the occasion came, the world’s scientific community responded, including many future luminaries who would find greater fame in later pursuits, the likes of James Cook and the duo of Mason & Dixon.

What makes the story so fascinating is what happens next. This unprecedented, global scientific effort was also an unmitigated failure—at least partially due to foul weather, hostile natives, and the fact that while the scientific world was in a cooperative mood, their respective monarchies were decidedly not. The personal tales of these men, tales of optimism, calamity and woe, characterize the 1700s as an age of scientific adventure and ordeal the likes of which would go unrivaled until we started sending men into space.

The instinct for adventure and ordeal feels lost, sometimes, to my own age. Modern convenience is a luxury, but very much the sin of our fathers. I’m too lazy to google what “generation” I belong to.

For me, there will always be a romantic significance to the transit of 1761 as I picture the hundreds of scientists and staff setting sail, leaving behind their homes for years, fully culturally aware that they were pioneers in a bold age of discovery—that through their efforts and the efforts of their contemporaries, the human race changes the way that it sees itself and the universe.

I don’t know if we have that anymore. I have seen the best minds of my generation too pussified to risk destruction by madness, take jobs as waiters, and forget about the subjects that once captivated them in their youths until one night they comes up at a bar and we realize we have nothing left to say. I look around and see us frightening on the verge of a social-intellectual revolution, of discovery and innovation that could change forever the ways we see and treat one another and ourselves. I wonder if we have the same instinct for adventure and ordeal as those giants that risked their wealth, reputations and lives in 1761 to find our place in the solar system.

On the other hand, at least we’re building space-drones.

WHAT FAGS CAN LEARN FROM THE FRESH PRINCE

Did you hear the gay news? NBC has a new sitcom about homosexual men. Yes, grab hold of your head to keep it from exploding! Finally, Modern Family, but without all the geeky straight people. If you're a geeky straight person who loves homosexuals but frowns on homosexuality, this program (like all the rest) may just be for you!

The new show is about two blissfully monogamous gay men, Bryan and David. They are handsome, young, well-coiffed and professionally accomplished. Their near-perfect lives are missing only one thing: a bun in some lady's oven. The best part? The show is called The New Normal.


You would think, from the controversies surrounding the its launch, that The New Normal has done something meaningful to advance gays in America. You would be wrong. The first sex scene of the show is strictly hetero, 2:30 into the pilot. We get an eyeful of bouncing tits in a purple bra and a supposedly clever male fetish that is neither sexy nor interesting. Already, we see the subject treated with a sort-of post-modern, cynical detachment (see: Girls). I would give you the timestamp for the first gay sex scene, but it never happens.

This is the happy couple's first scene together: one comes home and describes a day spent shopping while the other, I shit you not, watches football on the couch with a beer and a large dog. Let's be perfectly clear about the message of the show: The New Normal is just the old normal... with dudes.

Like Modern Family before it, The New Normal's treatise on gay identity in american culture is "don't be afraid, they're just like you!"

And that message is bullshit.

 I had hoped that a 21st century civil rights movement would be more about accepting difference than fitting in. "Fitting in" is a 20th century compromise, and what has it gotten us: women who have to act like men to get past the glass ceiling, and blacks who have to "act white" to get in the door.

How well do you remember 90s television? My favorite show that I grew up with was the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. It's a little campy in retrospect, but the young Will Smith still has a lot to teach us.

The Fresh Prince centers around a charismatic, street-smart teenager who, from the circumstances of urban poverty and violence, is moved in with his wealthy relatives in an upper-class, white, Los Angeles community. His new family does not always understand or appreciate the appearance, dialect, or behavior of its newest member--no one less than the his fully-assimilated cousin, Carlton. Faced with the pressures of privilege and the fear of exclusion, the Fresh Prince stays true to himself. Was not young Will's first move upon attending the stuffy Bel-Air Academy but to wear his uniform blue blazer inside-out, exposing the uniformly white student body to the cornucopia of color hidden in each of their inner linings.

What would he be if he just conformed? What would he be if he had said, "don't worry, white people, I am just like you?" He would be Carlton, and he would not have a show.


And we can blow this up a little and take a look at the the state of civil rights as a whole. This week I heard from a source in Dallas, TX that her city hall was hosting a national forum on saggy jeans. This is not a joke. Neither are club dress codes that explicitly ban "urban wear." You see, you can be black in America and be rich as God, but if you don't dress in a manner that bespeaks the wealthy class that preceded you (i.e. white-acceptable) you will encounter overt racism and told that you asked for it. If a white man speaks with a thick southern accent, he can call himself a gentleman, but if a black man speaks like a 2 Chainz song, they get to call him a thug. People in the media talk a lot about diversity, but when was the last time the smiling black family in the cell phone commercial wore jerseys, braided their hair, or looked like they vote Democrat?


It might be too late to save black people. This is what we get for winning acceptance by appealing to our similarities to the white, middle-class. I've had white women tell me that I didn't sound black on the phone like they were paying me a compliment. This is reality now.

But gays, come on, you don't have to go out like that! I know the struggle is hard and if progress were any slower, it may seem like time has stopped, but you will win the long game. Be patient, be fucking fabulous and win one for everybody. Win it for the gays who want to settle down with a family and do it for the gays who want to wear makeup and dresses or get their genitals transformed into someone else's, do it for the gays who want to fuck every man who lives and breathes or get ready to spend the rest of your "freedom" forced to look down on half of your population.

Then you can tell those children who "complete your lives" that they can be whoever they want to be.






 Alright, enough ranting. Listen to some music:

JL8: THE BEST NEW THING

All in all, it has been a very good week. I got a lot of things I really wanted, including my triumphant return from podunk-but-picturesque Kentucky to my beautiful urban hellscape, the first new episode of Dr. Who and a national convention speech that actually referred to facts and math (love you, Bubba!). But amidst all this awesome, JL8, the actual best new thing about this week, caught me completely by surprise.

JL8 is a webcomic by independent creator Yale Stewart. Stewart re-imagines popular DC comics superheroes and villians as elementary school students. A little Superman crushing on wee-Wonder Woman and speechifying on doing the right thing on the playground, bite-sized Batman sent to timeout and LOVING IT... sure, it's sweet enough in concept.

But where Stewart really breaks through is execution. Things like costume changes (Batman always has to be edgier) cleverly draw extra attention to Stewart's economic, effective and occasionally gorgeous artwork. And from a writing perspective, the dialogue, storylines, mood and characterization are pitch perfect. Let me repeat. Pitch. Perfect.

This is coming from a guy who has read every issue of the past year's Justice League reboot: the grown-ups could learn a lot from their cuddly counterparts.

Witty, adorable and sincere, JL8 is simply one of the best comics of the year, the best take on this classic team in a decade, as and it's you get it for FREE.

Best new thing. Don't sleep on it.