governator: the early years, and other wonders

"and here's some rue for
you, and some for me." that's all
the shakespeare i know*.



regret is a singularly human sensation. other animals experience things like guilt and shame and anxiety, and i'm certain sorrow (although plenty of eminent scientists and behaviorists would probably debate that one with me), but regret is unique, and uniquely ours. whether it's because only humans are capable of it or because only humans commit the sorts of misdeeds that warrant it, i can't say. it's likely that most animals lack the cognitive skills necessary to trace an outcome back through the series of events leading up to that outcome; when your jack russell terrier eats a nail and has to undergo abdominal exploratory surgery, he doesn't wake up from his anesthesia thinking, "man, if only i hadn't eaten that nail," he wakes up thinking, "pain. i'm in quite a lot of pain." he will associate that pain with the place he's in, not with the thing he did that led him to that place, and so your dog exonerates himself and the nail is forgotten. it's a remarkably zen existence, but not one offering a shot at any functional enlightenment. he'll probably eat another sharp metallic object in no time. you, at that point, will regret your decision to adopt a jack russell terrier, but he will only be distressed because you have brought him back to the palace of pain. i don't think it means you're smarter than him that you feel regret. not eating nails means you're smarter, but regretting your pet selection because your pet is determined to die of an intestinal perforation means you're rational (if a bit self-interested). you'd think, being so rational, we'd figure out which things we were and weren't likely to regret and thereby diminish the frequency of the sensation as we matured. but we don't.

two nights ago i saw the found footage festival at the coolidge corner theatre in brookline. the impeccably ironic turn for our civilization would be for these video clips to survive when everything else has perished, and two thousand years from now some other civilization would judge us according to their content. the verdict? late-twentieth-century americans were base, deranged, and fucking hilarious. if you go to the website you can see a collection of abbreviated clips, but some of the highlights not available for preview are:

• a bizarre intersplicing of footage of a mrs. minnesota pageant, a pimp filleting a live catfish, and a full-frontal tutorial on how to use your newly installed penis pump

• "memorial day 2000," a beer-flooded weekend with a herd of a hundred or so white townie youths, replete with couch-burnings, raw sewage, the chug-vomit-chug-vomit cycle of rebirth, and the introduction of my new favorite compliment, "you're the fucking whipshit of all fucking shitter bongers"

• a short educational film for mcdonald's custodians featuring the vaguely dirty phrase, "i think you're going to see McC!"

i would happily discuss every clip that was shown, as they were dazzling from beginning to end, but i'm going to wrap it up here with the one that really made the evening (actually, the very early morning) for me--carnival with arnold schwarzenegger. this video was made by the brazilian tourism bureau when arnold was still mr. universe, and it proves that none of his egotism or misogyny is secondary to his success in motion pictures. in at most three minutes, everyone's favorite governor gropes at least three women (plainly against their will) after telling a nameless blonde that he loves america but feels more at home in brazil because, while americans focus on tits, the brazilians, like him, understand that the best part of any woman's body is her ass. later he sits down to what begins as an innocent brunch with a pretty young brunette. arnold proceeds to beat the innocence to death with its own shoe by grunting the portuguese word for poon-tang three times in rapid succession and forcing the girl to fellate a carrot stick.

were someone to project this video on a wall while mr. schwarzenegger and his wife were at a restaurant celebrating their wedding anniversary, he might feel embarrassed or anxious, or even ashamed. but i doubt he'd feel regret. i doubt he'd think to himself, "if only i hadn't ground my crotch against that strange girl's hip while she struggled to disentangle my hands from her g-string." there would be, in his mind, a sense of alarm and the desire to remove himself from an unpleasant place. he would want the name of the person who had played the video, and he would want to never go back to that restaurant.

to regret is to understand and accept culpability. that's what we get. that's the power that was supposed to keep everything in check. the problem seems to be that the majority of us don't regret the things we've done wrong, only the things we've been caught doing wrong, and so we haven't properly honed that power. hindsight's great for what it's worth, but it's worth more than we're taking advantage of it for.

anyhow. the found footage festival is touring the country, and you'd better do whatever it takes to catch it if it comes your way. i promise you won't regret it for a second.





* it's not, really, i've memorized a shocking quantity of iambic pentameter over the years. what do you want from me? haiku is hard. it was wrong of me to lie, though, and i shall repent anon.

thirty helens agree... my ass is SLAMMIN'

if you were my real
boyfriend, i'd never say things
like that in public.



but you're not, so i guess i have no choice but to go on hollering it at the top of my lungs in the stationery aisle of the local cvs.

top ten fantasy professions (in the order of first come, first served):

1. curator of conan o'brien's tie collection

2. seahorse breeder

3. full-time tester of sleep medications or mattresses, or, even better, both

4. buyer for the world's largest japanese pop art gift shop

5. williams street intern/concubine

6. submissions editor of "found" magazine

7. personal assistant to albert einstein (i said fantasy.)

8. say somewhere there's a database containing summaries of all the books ever written. i'd like to read every book ever written and write these summaries. not critical reviews, mind you, i don't want to have to convince anyone that a book is good or bad, worth reading or worth burning; i want to offer a straight presentation of pure fact. on page 48, character b said such and such--that's all. it's all i could do within my set boundaries, since the second you attempt to interpret something someone else thought up you have launched yourself from the shores of fact into the sea of supposition.

9. copyediting assistant at "the new yorker" (they'll never hire me, i know, because of my evident distaste for capital letters. for the record, i do know they're supposed to be there, i simply prefer the appearance of lowercase ones. it's like painting a room pale blue instead of burnt orange; capital letters are a hue i reserve for accents. and while we're somewhat on the topic, i'm pretty sure i caught said magazine using the wrong form of "capital" in the context of a sentence not so very long ago, so, um, maybe it's about time they brought me on board.)

10. in medieval europe, criminals were frequently branded on the face or hand with a letter representative of their crime, such as "r" for "rogue." i'd like very much to brand all of the rogues with their glaring and ostentatiously capital Rs.


i read these and am struck by my passion for thankless, menial, behind-the-scenes drudgery. it is what it is, though, and i'm not at all shamed by the fact that i like dull work; i am saddened, to some extent, by my lack of interest in humanitarian efforts. but i've come to the desperate conclusion that the single greatest thing we could do for ourselves, those who'll come after us and this perfect planet we owe everything to would be to ban childbirth for the next thirty or so years, just skip a generation. my interpretation of the numbers in the cia world factbook is that, currently, about thirteen million people are born every year, and about six million people die every year. our resources are already stretched so thin that even a balance of the two rates wouldn't help us out any in the long run; the earth has to have less people on her. i don't want to kill anyone, so the utopian solution would be for every woman of childbearing age to step up and receive her IUD, and in three decades the population would be down one hundred and eighty million, and maybe we'd be getting somewhere.

think about it: i'm not plugging abortion, just birth control, which we mostly know and love anyway, so not one person is being honestly hurt, and the decline in population means more food and clean water and parking spaces and whatever else you're into for the billions of us still running around out there. if you can't stand the thought of not devoting your life to child-rearing you could most likely adopt; there will always be tragedies, there will always be orphaned and abandoned kids who will need you more than your imaginary ones. bottom line, to me, is it buys us some time, in a more effective manner than anything else we could do. in my mind, humanitarian efforts have to stretch beyond the current batch of humans and into the most distant hypothetical future. they haven't, really, thus far, and i think that's a big part of why we're in the mess we're in.

who'd take it seriously, though? i'll be shocked if anyone even reads this to the end, so i'm not going to waste a lot of time selling my idea, and it's the lone idea i'd be interested in selling . . . the list stands, is what i'm getting at, pointless or self-indulgent or what have you. i'm sociologically defeated. you buy yourselves some more baby clothes from wal-mart, and i'll stay home and tend to my seahorses.

ants are people, too. sometimes better ones.

elliot smith died
on my twenty-fifth birthday.
i felt (feel) guilty.

i have, for hours, been watching an ant carry the inanimate body of another ant in rings around the center of my bedroom floor. when he first picked it up i assumed he wanted to bring it back to the hill for food, because insects are good that way, waste not, want not, you know. after the first five minutes i wondered if maybe the body was making it difficult for him to see where he was going, and after fifteen i had begun to wonder whether he had any sort of plan at all. he would sometimes stop, put the body down, approach it from a different angle, lift it back up, start walking again. sometimes he would drop it and take maybe a dozen steps away from it, but then he would circle back to it and start over. i didn't know if i'd be making his life easier or harder by scooping the two of them up and taking them outside. i still can not decide, and so i'm doing nothing. hours. two hours, looping incessantly over the same ten or twelve square feet of finished wood. i think in my life i've never done anything nonstop for two consecutive hours, except maybe sleep, and even that i couldn't swear to. but this little guy's got a mission, and nobody gonna break his stride.

i'm crazy enough that by now i'm sure he and the deceased were close friends, maybe relatives, and he really doesn't have a plan, he just can't bear to leave the body of someone he loved, loves, in a strange and unsafe place. you can imagine it, can't you? coming across the stiff, clenched form of your best friend of twenty-five years, your brother, your sister, your father, on the street or in a parking lot or the neighbor's backyard and grabbing it up without thinking, drawing it close to your chest and breaking into a run . . . maybe you would unknowingly circle the block for a couple of hours. maybe when you stopped you wouldn't know where you were.

and now i am in love with this ant. now i'm sure he's exactly what the universe had in mind when it said,

maybe i'll create some intelligent life . . . THERE!

it should have stopped, perhaps, while it was ahead. i don't have any idea how to help any of the ants, but i'm rooting for them. i'm one hundred percent on their side.

no person i've loved has ever died. but i can see some of them getting ready. my parents went to visit my grandparents on mother's day, and they drove out to a small waterfall near my grandparents' house. they told my parents that they'd like very much to have their ashes scattered over the water there, because they've spent so many happy afternoons together at its edge. my grandfather says he has no regrets and he isn't afraid of anything, but thinking about dying does make him very sad, because he'll miss us more than even an angel could stand.

i'd carry him anywhere. i hope you all have someone who can say the same for you.

i think i'm going to bring the ants into the yard.

i am not a fan of philip short.

no, actually, "crimes
against humanity" should
not be sufficient.





in a post-lecture discussion of his recently published biography of pol pot, short said he refuses to use the word "genocide" in reference to the 1.7 million people in cambodia who died at the hands of the khmer rouge because it is too strong. genocide, he explained, is the extermination of people of a particular race or ethnicity for the sole reason of them being of that race or ethnicity, and such an act is carried out at a higher level of evil than are murders committed for other reasons, even murder on such a numbingly large scale. the khmer rouge didn't target any specific group, they killed anyone and everyone who didn't live up to their ideal of a true cambodian. he was eager to point out, also, that most of those 1.7 million were not killed outright by pol pot's followers; the majority of them died passively of things like malnutrition and starvation, and the actual number of people who were physically, brutally killed is really only in the low hundreds of thousands. only. well, in that case...

gen•o•cide (n) the deliberate extermination of a race of people, such as the Nazis attempted against the Jews [fr. Gk genos, race, + L. caedere, to kill]
-the new lexicon webster's encyclopedic dictionary of the english language, 1993 edition

now, in my opinion, killing a chinese man because he is not cambodian is not so very different from killing a chinese man because he is chinese. it's true that no specific race was targeted by the regime, but that's because they were all targeted. and they weren't only killing people who weren't cambodian, they were killing other cambodians for not being cambodian enough. the killings were motivated exclusively by racism, and that racism was extreme, irrational and all-encompassing. their ultimate desire was to ensure that, within the country's borders, the blood of every member of the population was one hundred percent pure. if you were deemed unworthy of the title of "cambodian," your new race designation was "Other," and you were to be exterminated. it differs from a nazi aryan mindset only in that the khmer rouge was not interested in carrying these exterminations out world-wide. if genocide is the strongest available term, the one most appropriate for describing the gravest of crimes against humanity, then it is definitely the one that must be used here.

although he denied it more than once, it sounded to me then, as it does now, that short was attempting to defend pol pot, or at least his mission and philosophy. the sensation i experienced in the face of such an attitude is one that my personal lexicon lacks suitable language for.