Arm, Aber Sexy

Posted on May 16, 2012 by thisblue

Metrolink, without warning, has cancelled the ten day train fare that made my commute to Irvine both affordable and compatible with my basic needs for sanity. One last ten pass would have covered my last five weeks teaching at Irvine. Instead, I’m going to go out kicking and screaming at the commuter rail. Why are they changing the fare? Because they can.

Watch out, Metrolink. You will soon receive impotent, angry letters and phone calls from the commuter in car 186A, in which she will inflate her personal influence on all possible future commuters from Los Angeles to UC Irvine and make you feel terrible, just terrible, for this injustice.

The graffiti along the tracks isn’t telling me much today. Mesa Huke? I ♥ pussy. Fast. There are the tent cities up against the flood channel. They have multiplied in the past few months.

Before Buena Park, the short squat stucco houses with picnic tables and red plastic slides seem asleep, their concrete patios hard up against the tracks. The Italianate development, beyond them, looks grumpy, with its tight balcony rails pasted to the front of long, high windows with no actual balconies. Venetian blinds closed tight against the train. A truck with white slats across its flatbed rolls slowly past open warehouses. Tac City and Alumet Supply. It breaks my heart.

Every minute inside my car on the 5 was lost — This American Life and RadioLab and The Lovely Bones audiobook and Planet Money (before Adam Davidson went all Chicago School) notwithstanding. Those were minutes lost to the rivers of Lethe. But not so, the train. The train cops may be needlessly arrogant and aggressive, and Metrolink has earned my everlasting rage with this rate hike. But on the train, my consciousness isn’t split in two. I can daydream about distant cities with some degree of focus.

I want to go to here

At Fullerton, I imagine getting off and walking until I find a place to have breakfast. I have a credit card and my laptop and a snack bar in my bag. I could find a taxi and a ticket and a plane to Berlin. I would really like to be in Berlin by sundown. I want to eat falafel on a street corner I have never seen before and get a drink at a bar that is on a boat. I want to wander into Friedrichshain and sit on the floor in a warehouse to watch a slow-moving art film where people walk slowly through rooms filled with bloody feathers and no one speaks.

Part of the weight of being younger was always the yawning abyss of choices in front of me. It was like having to assess every stop the train made. What about here? Get off? Stay on? Having once sold everything I owned and moved to a foreign country, I knew what was possible. After I got back, it was always there. My year in Brazil.  A year of memories reprimanding me for every directionless, same-as-rain day stateside.

Now, there’s a freedom in being locked down. I probably came pretty close to moving to Miami for the same, thin, whimsical reasons that moved me to Rio de Janeiro. Late night online research about apartments near the water used to be a dangerous proposition. Now, I can fantasize about Miami, or Berlin, endlessly, without worrying that I might really be able to go.

A friend brought me a t-shirt from Berlin. It says “Arm, Aber Sexy,” in German, which is evidently a quote from the popular young mayor, meaning that his city is poor but sexy. Lissie sings in my headphones, for the last four years of my life I’ve thought about you pretty much every fifteen seconds. I can’t go to Berlin. But distant obsession is not just a luxury of youth.

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love is sexy

Posted on May 9, 2012 by thisblue

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Los Brazos

Posted on May 9, 2012 by thisblue

We were in Texas.

The taxi from the Waco airport pulled up into a summer night full of crickets—crickets hopping slowly outside baggage claim, crickets in the bushes, crickets in the air. The drive to our hotel felt like a different country. I could smell the Brazos river before I saw it. The day’s afterglow hovered at the edge of a long, flat horizon, past the floodlights on the empty picnic tables outside Papa Bear’s BBQ, past the lights on the pool tables inside Ash Cocktails.

My father and his brothers sat on a couch on a stage at Baylor University and talked about their lives. Our family history, my family history, their accomplishments, handed out on little photocopied squares of paper in party-favor plastic bags. A number two pencil and an index card, for questions. A Math Awareness rubber bracelet.

There is so much you can’t talk about at the front of an auditorium full of people. There is so much you can’t talk about on a page. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, Joan Didion wrote once. My uncles and my father told stories about the Japanese internment camps, and about their own college professors, about my grandfather who came to this country from rural Japan and sent his four kids to college. All three boys are now college professors. Their sister is a music teacher.

Ted told me later that at Minidoka, where my family was interned, they had guard towers and barbed wire around the perimeter, but unlike at Tule Lake or Hearth Mountain, the Minidoka towers stood empty. No guards.

Minidoka had a yearbook. Page-long photographs show all of the families, in front of their barracks, tiny black and white rows of Japanese faces. There are photographs of the clubs. A dance. The baseball team.

We tell ourselves stories means we shape the facts into an ordered narrative, choose one fact over the other. My father used to tell me a story about his bubbling childhood excitement when the Sears catalogue came in the mail. He left out the detail that this happened in the camps. Much later, my father clarified that the Sears catalogue was exciting, in part, because there were no stores in the camps. In order to cage the spiraling uncertainty of everything that could happen next, to understand the black boxes of the people all around us, all the little performances and evasions, we tell ourselves stories. Our own stories.

My father sat on stage next to his brothers. Ted played with the cord to his lapel mic. Paul, with his electric energy, could barely stay on the couch. They were three brothers, in a way I had never seen them before. It was new information for me just to watch them together, talking to each other, three Japanese men all above the age of 60, all surprisingly tan, the youngest, my uncle Paul, wearing a t-shirt silkscreened with a black cat. He always wears cat t-shirts. Whena piece of his had its premiere at Carnegie Hall, he came on stage to take a bow wearing a t-shirt with a Hello Kitty with red horns that said “Hell Kitty.”

My family spoke about their career choices, their success in three various different fields—philosophy, mathematics, music—and then everyone clapped. My dad introduced H., who was there, up past her bedtime, and she looked around the auditorium at the applause, wide-eyed, thrilled, surprised.

My grandfather arrived in Seattle with an eighth grade education and no English. He worked for a railroad magnate, Jesse Hill, as a cabin boy.

I look at my father and my daughter together. She demands that he tell her a fairy tale one more time. I think about how far my world is from my grandfather’s world, how unimaginable rural Japan at the turn of the century is, for me. Not unimaginable, of course, so much as impossibly distant, without any overlap in vocabulary.

My uncle Ted told me that the Brazos river figures in a lot of old Westerns. It’s the longest river in Texas. Ted watches a lot of old movies. My father told students at Baylor that someone in Texas, he couldn’t remember exactly who, but a Texan, had been the only person to read the entirety of Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica. They do things big, in Texas. While we were in Texas, my uncle Paul got one, or was it two, further commissions. He will write a ballet for a major city in China which none of us has ever heard of before. Millions upon millions of people live there.

Nothing is unimaginable, we tell ourselves. In order to live.

 

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walk home

Posted on April 6, 2012 by thisblue

Three women just ahead of me were talking about a t-shirt. “Because my cousin asked everyone what their favorite food was and then before the party she gave us all t-shirts with the name of our food. So yeah. My favorite food is spicy kim chee.”

In front of the beauty salon – the one with the green wall of plants that haven’t quite grown together to cover the paper – two girls were sitting on the curb. One of them was crying. Her long blonde hair fell forward and covered her face, so that all I could see was her shoulders, shuddering, and her knees poking out from the curtain of hair, and the tips of her green suede penny loafers.
“But it’s you,” her friend said, while she patted her. “This is you.”
“I’ve never felt this bad before,” the girl said between sobs.

The new bar that replaced the Indian restaurant was almost empty, on a Friday night. The décor is Moroccan boudoir. The lights at the points of the arches are emerald green. I want to drink in a lonely Moroccan boudoir on a Friday night.

Smokers stood on the curb outside the bar. A strong, buff woman in black jeans with a black and red mohawk laughed. A woman in an electric blue blouse looked skeptically at the bouncer who was trying to talk to her. Two doors down, the sports bar had a row of televisions tuned to different channels. Men playing basketball flashed by images of men yelling at men playing basketball, flashed by bikes flipping over, all inaudible above the din of people drinking and eating and leaning over their tables to talk to each other. From outside, you could see six of the eight screens inside. There was blackened bubble gum on the ground between the tables on the sidewalk. The sports bar was packed.

The city has extended the little pocket park at Sunset and Griffith Park Boulevards by painting the ground electric green with pale green polka dots. Two people played night basketball on the polka dots outside the raw vegan restaurant. The children’s boutique had a crepe paper rainbow, lit from behind. The lamp hanging above the table in the apartment across the street was a too-perfect echo of the moon. I wanted them to turn it off. In the house across the street, a woman got up from the dining room table, full of people, and came back in with another bottle of wine.

 

 

 

 

 

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roller coaster

Posted on March 28, 2012 by thisblue

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Problems with Authority, Part III

Posted on March 23, 2012 by thisblue

Measurement, and pay, of course, matter very much. I’m not arguing for free work or unmeasured pay… Dan Pink the behavioral economist knows that paying people crap makes them work crappily. The people who perform best at work seem to be those who feel safe and comfortable.

But let’s stick with the psych test, the people doing worse on a cognitive task when promised lots of money (these experiments, by the way, have been performed across ages and continents and cultures)—what happens in their brains? I imagine money puts pressure on them. It distracts them from the task at hand. The big cash prize takes ownership of the task away from them: “I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing it for that guy holding the money bag.”

Now, beyond politics, imagine for a moment the psych test happening at the olympian heights of our now staggeringly unequal economy. Imagine a corner office with a view of the Hudson. Imagine that suddenly you’re being paid vast amounts of money—the kind of money that translates into raw power. You will get that raw power if you, in turn, bring more money into your investment bank. Do you feel… ownership of your work? Purpose? Are you thinking about your responsibility towards your clients, never mind your responsibility to the global economy? Or are you drooling and seeing dollar signs, like in an old school cartoon?

You work in a sector that just recently brought the global economy to its knees and got bailed out by the American taxpayer. In 2008, the commercial credit markets froze, the TED spread spiked, the entire shadow banking system imploded, Lehmann was too weak to survive (pretend you have a profound sense of how scary all this financial mumbo jumbo is). But then the good old government bought up a bunch of toxic assets. You torqued the balance sheets. And somehow… you… you have come through armaggedon. You’re still in the game. How do you feel? You feel like a cowboy who just survived an Indian raid, that’s how.

The idea of a meritocracy is meaningless when the people being paid the absolute most fail spectacularly… and suffer no real consequences. No meaningful change has come since the financial crisis. We have been feeding the sharks. They got really, really big. When they got vicious, we put one of them in Sea World, bonked the others on the nose and said “Bad sharks!” And then we led them all to a new surfing beach. Now some of us are acting surprised that they still have a taste for human blood.

Goldman Sachs had $45 billion in revenue in 2009. That guy who just resigned from there, ostensibly out of moral outrage, said he was shocked—shocked—that the piles of money pouring into Goldman Sachs seem to have made people focus on… making even bigger piles of money. Are you shocked?

The guy who just resigned (I find him self-serving, I’d rather link to the parody of his resignation letter about Darth Vader leaving The Empire) imagined that something had changed. In the golden days of yore, he said, the culture at Goldman Sachs was people-focused. Client-focused. But would the global economy not have tanked, would millions of people not have been pushed into foreclosure and unemployment, would the American taxpayer not have bailed out the one percent if some extraordinarily rich men at Goldman Sachs had… given better customer service?

The head of Goldmans Sachs said in 2010 that he believed they were doing “God’s work.” I suspect the people there probably do feel a sense of  intensity, like mercenaries in the army of a devout Viking.  But that blood hunger is not the same as a true sense of purpose, and we have to stop imagining that by letting our society reward them so handsomely, we are getting anything but a bunch of very strong, very fast, great whites.

I know many people who could make more money doing something they love less. Do you know any teachers? Then so do you. I know dozens of lawyers who could make three or four times what they make at corporate jobs.  They chose their careers and life paths for reasons entirely separate from compensation. They work incredibly long hours at grueling, complicated, demanding jobs in the name of social justice. Working for a higher cause, for them, is valuable in a way that can’t be quantified or measured. It gets them out of bed on a day-to-day basis and gives their life meaning. Most of them are now, and always have been, exquisitely aware of what their CVs would get them, in dollar terms, at a white-shoe firm. It’s insulting to them and their passion and commitment to imagine that the difference in pay reflects a difference in merit.

This is not to say that if you do something well, and were paid well for it, that you don’t deserve that money. It’s just that, the reason you did well at that thing you do? Probably not the fact of the carrot. Independence, autonomy, safety. Money can bring us all these things, in our society. Many more people deserve those things than have them. But we do our best work not when the prize is big but when we believe that the work itself is valuable, important, true.  Big money sometimes correlates with better work. But money can’t buy you love, and it turns out, big money can’t buy you people who are creative, passionate, ethical and good at their jobs. The idea that it does is poisoning us.

Case in point: At Cal State Fullerton, they’re freezing enrollment. The Cal State system is being slowly dismantled. As one of the trustees put it, with these cuts ”We dismiss the aspirations and the accomplishments of tens of thousands of young people and their families who we’ve been exhorting to go to college. They don’t go other places, they just don’t go.”

The enrollment freeze comes with a $750 million funding cut for the next academic year. “Administrators are looking at eliminating athletics programs, limiting student loans and library acquisitions, deferring maintenance projects, as well as continuing a hiring freeze and streamlining operations,” said Executive Vice Chancellor Benjamin Quillian.

Meanwhile, the trustees approved a 10% pay raise for the president. He will now make more than $300,000 base salary. That’s before a $60,000 “house allowance” and a $12,000 “car allowance.” The justification is, as always: “CSU administrators say the increases are necessary to attract and retain top executive talent.”

Here is a picture of the administrator who would supposedly fly the coop without that investment banking-level pay. Without this man, supposedly, Cal Fullerton would somehow suffer even more than it is already suffering. He’s a career administrator, with a track record of… working as an administrator. He went to good schools. On the surface, he looks like a decent man. And the size of his reward almost guarantees that he will focus on that reward at the expense of all else. 

The public university system in California is a storied institution. It took decades to build it into the best public university system in the country. And let’s be clear: It was built that way before the explosion in administrative pay. High administrative pay did not build this house.

The Cal States and the community colleges are feeders for the UCs, and as such, they represent one of the most democratic, truly meritocratic second chances in the world. Thousands of kids go through that system to be the first kids in their families to go to college, to make real the increasingly distant promise that social mobility in America sometimes, in fact, can go up.

Anyone who understands that promise, anyone truly committed to the UC system and the original promise of Clark Kerr’s Master Plan, anyone working in any way for a sense of higher purpose would refuse that pay raise. The only ethical choice for the president of Cal State Fullerton is to stand up and offer to take a third of his salary. He might save a couple of professors’ jobs, keep a few classes, let a few hundred kids graduate instead of dropping out because they can’t get the classes they need in time.

“Top executive talent”? What can that possibly mean? If the president of Cal State Fullerton would leave because someone else would pay $350,000, then don’t you see? Good riddance.

Morishita could take a third of his salary and the “housing allowance” and still make a very good living. The only man who should have that job is a man (or woman) who would refuse a pay raise under these circumstances. The only man who should have that job should demand lower pay. He should be out in public giving speeches about his democratic vision, fighting tooth and nail for his students, and when he’s spending long hours at his desk tearing his hair out to prevent the enrollment freeze, he should have his door open, so some kid can walk in and say, “Hey man, I had such great teachers here at Fullerton, and now I’m transferring to UC Berkeley!! My father is a janitor and I’m going to go graduate from one of the best universities in the world! Thank you!” And for the right man for this job, that one kid would be goddam pay enough.

Here are some graphs, based on stats from the Congressional Budget Office:

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Problems with Authority, Part II

Posted on March 23, 2012 by thisblue

To recap: Eskimo wisdom — “By gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.” Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Behavioral economists. This is what I’m thinking about, lately.

In this talk, the behavioral economist Dan Pink, a behavioral economist, notes that people perform poorly when big money is at stake. Then, as behavioral economists are wont to do, he folds his conclusions back into the market. People don’t work best for big rewards. They do their best work when they feel a sense of “purpose and mastery.” Wikipedia! Linux! These require the applied skill of thousands of highly educated people who do complex cognitive and creative work—thousands of hours of it—for no money.  Dan Pink thinks your friendly local corporate manager can harness that. He thinks your office can create “purpose and mastery,” maybe with the right project management or leadership workshop. He sidesteps the idea that attaching a quantified market value of any size to work might change the nature of the beast. Measurement and reward follow the Heisenberg principle. They change the thing being measured and rewarded.

embedded by Embedded Video

YouTube RSA animates, Dan Pink

My husband read the popular book The Happiness Project. My husband liked this book. In it, the author quotes Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography at length. I love this! Benjamin Franklin! Patriotic and twee self-help! I want to write a self-help book where I quote Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia at length! (OK, so maybe I’m not destined to write a bestselling hipster self-help book.)

In any case: The Happiness Project quotes Ben Franklin about measurement. Franklin tried to measure many unmeasurable things, like temperance, silence, and sincerity. The Happiness author falls back on the motto: “Measure what you want to manage.” If reading makes you happy, she encourages you to try and keep track of how much reading you actually do.

My husband was rather taken with this idea. He saw it like R. and his steps. Without measurement: no milk, quota unmet. Also to be fair, I have a limited knowledge of The Happiness Project because so far, I have stubbornly refused to read it. My sense of it from my husband is that the author ultimately imagines that you would internalize what you measure. Measuring what you’re actually doing is a step along a path towards new, better habits. You think about what makes you intrinsically happy, then you measure it as a way of getting it into your life. Your goal is not an obsessive-compulsive Excel spreadsheet. Just better habits, more walking, more reading. The idea is to get to where you’re finishing the book not because you need another 42 pages today but because you’re absorbed in the beauty of the language. And maybe you never would have cracked the book if you hadn’t committed to those initial quotas.

But my gut is that the devil is in the details of the transition from extrinsic (measurement, quotas) to intrinsic (I’m reading because I want to).  My gut is that instead of counting pages and steps, it might work better to clear an hour every morning or every week and simply leave it blank. What if the guiding principle were not the thing you measured but the commitment to creating space for the unplanned and unquantified? What if you promised yourself that you would start that hour by closing your eyes and listening to yourself in that moment, making no judgment at all about what you decided to do? Not “you manage what you measure” but “only that which is unquantified and unquantifiable truly belongs to me.”

I looked at The Happiness Project blog and noticed that people were quoting Peter Drucker in the comments section. Again, I’m sure I’m being unfair, but… Aha! Here was evidence of the creep from Ben Franklin and sincerity to our market-based, “put a price on it,” exchange-obsessed, commodity-addicted society. The idea of measuring all of the things that make me happy—of quantifying everything that I love—for me, this is a special circle of hell!

In fact, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure” is often attributed, online, to Peter Drucker. If you’ve never heard of him, he’s a management guru extraordinaire. It’s unclear whether he actually said it. Doesn’t matter. He certainly wrote at length about the importance of measurement, including sentences like this one, from The Practice of Management:
“We have no standards to measure what degree of satisfaction is satisfactory.”

This Austrian business guru—herald of privatization and decentralization and the death of unions—imagined that great leadership could be sorted into best practices, quantified and theorized (I personally tend towards the idea that calling most management theory “theory” is like calling carob “chocolate.” How many of the highly paid, bonus-saturated financiers who tanked our global economy read management theory? I bet lots. More on this in Part III).

My point here is not to criticize you if a pedometer or a commitment to a certain number of pages has helped you. No marathons would be run without the measurement of miles. And I like marathons! All those millions of people running the arbitrary number of miles that killed some poor ancient Greek messenger!  We can’t get rid ourselves of measurement. Or pay. But underneath so much of this, I detect our profound drive to assess ourselves purely in market terms, to reduce our innermost dreams and desires and selves to something spreadsheet-ready. The idea that everything can be measured and incentivized strikes us as realistic, as Drucker-like, hard-nosed common sense.

There are some of you who, at this point, will be clearing your throats and demanding Gramsci’s common sense and cultural hegemony, or recognizing the opening moves of David Graeber’s argument in his little tome Debt: The First 5,000 Years. To which I say: Yes, yes!! (And Crooked Timber has this interesting discussion here.) But radical anthrolopology aside, here, I’m trying to tease out something else, a pop psych self-help thread, the way these things get lived, every morning, every time we pull on our running shorts.

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Problems with Authority, Part I

Posted on March 16, 2012 by thisblue

A friend of ours, R., experimented with walking a certain number of steps every day. He said during the experiment he would look at his little device, realize he needed another ninety seven steps, and walk out to get a carton of milk. Keeping track kept him motivated.

I find this interesting, not because it worked for R., but because it worked for R. and when I hear about it, I think: “If I did that, I would end up ordering pizza and making the delivery guy walk the box to my kitchen table so that I wouldn’t have to take the steps to the door.”

I have been thinking lately about decisions and motivation. I often feel like I have backed into every big decision in my life. They kind of sneak up on me. I feel like I spend lots of time thinking about what to do and why to do it, and then suddenly… “Oh! That was a kind of rude thing to do to the pizza guy.” I feel that these sneaky decisions are intricately tied up with my relationship to authority and motivation… But I don’t, for example, think that there’s any way to make me someone who could use a pedometer. Quite the opposite.

Psychologists call it “intrinsic motivation” when you do something for your own reasons, for pleasure, instead of for an external reward. One of my favorite parenting books is all about how you should never reward or punish your child. This, of course, is a noble but impossible goal. But respect, even self-respect I believe, does require a step away from rewards and punishments.  The Eskimo had a saying “By gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.” No rewards, no punishments. And now, there are behavioral economists—people who swear by the market—who claim that large cash rewards make people perform poorly on cognitive and creative tasks. Yes, that’s right. Big carrot dangling in front of you? You are likely to do worse.

I’ll come back to the implications of all this for, say, banker bonuses. First, authority and pedometers. I want to say that I recognize that my intense and evolving dislike of extrinsic motivation probably reveals deep-seated issues. Yes, I have a problem with authority. Yes, I even have a problem with internalized authority, if it feels externally imposed. If my internal authoritative voice says, “Hey, get off your butt and take some steps,” I might resent and resist. Perhaps this is a bit extreme.

In the absence of a good relationship to a pedometer, it took me an incredibly long portion of my life to figure out that exercise, for me, is Prozac. I have never taken Prozac, I am leery of psychotropic drugs. But I’m familiar with the noonday demons, and I truly believe that exercise saved me. Specifically, running and dance class. Getting my heart rate up regularly, for me, in general, keeps the demons at bay. I am not saying this to seem virtuous or to sell you on a Jane Fonda videotape. In fact, it makes me feel intensely goofy to admit that I need my dance class. But when I keep to my exercise routine, if the bottom falls out it doesn’t fall as far. I figured this out long before I actually truly followed my own advice. The way I got myself to start exercising with real regularity was to make exercise really hard to fit into my schedule. In other words, I had a child.

I figured out fairly early on that exercise was good for me. I’ve been active off and on for a while. But when I kept strict track of my exercise, when I set a quota and tried to meet it, I did less. As soon as it became precious “me time,” I did more. That moment where I used to pause while looking for my running shorts and think, “Feh… Maybe I’ve run enough in the past eight days”—that has disappeared. It was replaced with, “I have an hour, I get to go for a run!” As soon as the run was something I “got” to do and not something I “had” to do… suddenly I no longer hesitated.

Now, keeping track is not quite the same as rewarding and punishing, but the two are intimately connected. And all this gets close to but does not directly address the question of why we’re attracted to the forbidden. That’s a related question, but it’s not quite the same. The psychologists say “intrinsic motivation” is about pleasure. The behavioral economists say we need to feel “purpose and mastery.” But it’s complicated. The reason it took me even longer to give myself permission to take more dance classes than it did to start running regularly… complicated. It turns out that once you start sailing the intrinsic motivational seas, you hit some deep philosophical and psychological shoals…

(to be continued….)

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hair of the dog

Posted on March 7, 2012 by thisblue

At the Museum of Jurassic Technology, in the section on folk remedies, there’s a little display for “Hair of the Dog”–dog hair was meant to cure the animal’s bite–right next to “Mice on Toast.” I don’t remember what the Mice are meant to cure. I remember what they look like: tiny, grey carcasses, blurry in the dim light, curled around themselves on a flat square.

When I’m hungover, I get a dire, tingling sensation in my fingers and toes right before things are about to go truly south. It’s like my blood is dancing. In these moments, I tell myself: I will never drink again. I am allergic to alcohol. I am the stupidest person in the world.

Hangovers, for me, are the result of a complex calculus involving not only alcohol but also water, exercise and food. Food above all. The same amount of hard alcohol that I normally put away without blinking can, on an empty stomach, put me in the hospital.

The only remedy, the only thing that actually helps, in case of a true hangover, is hair of the dog. Why are we built to fight poison with poison?

I now get hungover rarely. In my twenties, I used to get up and go running when I could feel a dark day coming. I have a distinct memory of jogging down Bradley Street and tasting the vodka on my breath. Vodka is tasteless. That was an accomplishment. This was at a time in my life when I jogged less than I do now. Running helped ward off the tingle.

At Bar Keeper, down the street, the owner’s name really is Joe Keeper. He sells every kind of bitters you could ever imagine—rhubarb, chili chocolate, lavendar mint—plus boxed sets to make fancy cocktails. It may be my favorite store ever. When Joe started selling liquor, he installed floor-to-ceiling walnut shelves with steel grids and a rolling ladder. I want those shelves. I want to live inside those shelves.

Bar Keeper also sells a lot of vintage barware—tumblers with sea green pictures of the Seattle space needle, or gold-leaf horse and buggies—but he has never yet carried the precise, squared cut-crystal decanter that I covet. I want the one straight out of The Philadelphia Story. When I own it, I will immediately become svelte, begin to speak in clipped Yankee tones, and own a pet jaguar.

The Philadelphia Story, by the way, is not only one of the best romantic comedies ever to disprove the Serendipity rule that the genre is utterly bankrupt but also a movie that portrays heavy drinking with both panache and gravity. You can’t help feeling, watching them put away coupe after coupe, that the drink is papering over some deeper darkness. And yet, when they get up in the morning and demand hair of the dog from the butler… You can’t help but want Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant to go on talking that way forever.

–Do you s’pose, sir, speaking of eye-openers…?
–Oh, that’s the first sane remark I’ve heard today. C’malong, Dexter, I know a formula that’s said to pop the pennies off the eyelids of dead Irishmen.

The front window display at Bar Keeper, since January, has featured a home-computer print-out that says HAPPY NEW YEAR. The mannequin that is always there, with straggly blonde hair, wears a harlequin cocktail dress. Since January 1, she has been positioned on all fours with her face in a toilet bowl.

It’s now March. Happy New Year.

 

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green dots

Posted on March 4, 2012 by thisblue


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