monday swat-in-the-face-with-my-white-glove blogging

condé nast is hiring. condé nast is always hiring, all the time. condé nast will not hire me, because i don't live in new york, or because i think gucci handbags are preternaturally ghastly, or because i don't have a master's in journalism from yale and a phd in comparative literature from columbia, or who knows why.* whatever the reason is, the human resources department is doing nothing to convince me that it has anything to do with my skills set not being up to the publisher's standards; right now condé nast is looking to hire a senior editor—let's take a look at the prereqs, why don't we:

The Senior Editor reports, edits, and packages stories. The position requires a proven history of reporting, editing, and compiling material specifically with food-related feature stories. This person will also have a solid knowledge of copyediting and fact checking. The Senior Editor must have published clips proving an ability to weave a compelling, literary story that evokes a strong sense of place, and captures the essence of an experience or destination are necessary. Experience editing high caliber writers is essential.

what does that sentence even mean? i have to read the job description three times just to figure out what the hell it's getting at, and they're the ones looking down their noses at me? pish.

in all honesty, i have no interest in this job, but it's the principle of the thing, you know? and we have something of a history. when their promotion department sent out an e-mail blast last march about the new yorker conference, i found a typo in it. you can't reply to those e-mails (i tried; they don't even want to hear it), so i couldn't help them, but it bothered me all day. that typo isn't present on the current conference page, which is basically an expanded version of the blast, but there are new and thrilling errors in its place. 2012 is a big deal, a big, lofty, intellectual, self-congratulatory deal; there's no room for editorial mishaps in that sort of thing. likewise, public notice of a job opening that is going to be viewed by many, many people—people who have come to you because you represent a standard they aspire to—should be checked once or twice before it's released, ideally by someone who can read and speak fluent, intelligible english. i understand that nobody's perfect, but sometimes the context in which that imperfection reveals itself makes it so much more disappointing.




* i know what you're thinking, and yes, i do capitalize properly in all official application materials. i don't enjoy it, but i do it.

monday punch-in-the-face blogging

this is a very important headline about breaking news:

FOXNEWS.COM HOME > SCIENCE

Deforestation May Add to Climate Changes

Monday, April 09, 2007
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer

it is breaking my head. it is exploding my skull into all sorts of bits and shards that are flying about the room and lodging themselves in the walls and file cabinets and cheaply upholstered desk chairs. but before i succumb to my wounds i would like to draw your attention to the directory line preceding the very important headline, which, if you'll notice, tells us the most important thing of all:

fox news is greater than science. it beats it like a rock beats scissors. now, i recognize that this is an ap article and has been published in all sorts of news forums aside from those overseen by fox, and that's why i'm not going to pound fox, or anyone, into a mushy, fittingly contrite pulp. i'm just going to sit here and watch the bone fragments and gray matter ricochet around the office until my vision fades.

monday punch-in-the-face blogging

to the person who stole the small willow tree in the blue ceramic pot from my front porch this weekend,

you are a terrible human being. what kind of rotten good-for-nothing sneaks up onto a girl's porch in the middle of the night and steals a tree? i raised that tree from a sapling, i tended to it and nurtured it, i turned it regularly so it always got enough sun and cleared the leaves and debris out of its soil and gave it water when it needed it and food when it needed it and pruned away the dry branches and checked it every day for new growth and loved it like a child, and you just picked it up and ran off with it like some kind of crazy herbivorous dingo. are you going to do any of those things for it? are you? because it was just beginning to bud, and it needs care and attention now more than at any other time. is it even still alive, or did you toss it into a ditch somewhere so you could use the pot for something else? oh, my sweet, sad little tree . . . i can't bear to think about it.

listen, you murderous, plant-thieving scoundrel, i may never get my hands on you to pummel you soundly myself, but know that karma and i are tighter than a sausage and its skin, and she is on to you, buddy. if you haven't heard, let me tell you: the girl's got some moves. retribution shall be swift and thorough. prepare to rue the day, douche bag.

watch your back,

juniper


p.s. all imminent catastrophe can be averted if you simply return the tree to its place. you can keep the pot, i don't care; just give me back my baby.

monday punch-in-the-face blogging

after a boston-area woman was shot in the head and killed by a stray bullet while leaving an acquaintance's home around 4 AM this past saturday, boston's mayor menino demanded an immediate end to--what? can you guess? not gun sales, not gang violence . . .

late-night parties. these, according to menino, are the root of all of the crime and assorted evils taking place in the commonwealth of massachusetts. and this most recent call to arms is simply icing on the mayor's fold-up-the-streets-at-dusk cake: in january the city instituted a mandatory 11 PM stop time on all events allowing the attendance of people under the age of twenty-one, a move the mayor and his staff have offered zero concrete data in support of and which strikes me as arbitrary, knee-jerk, and poorly informed. i've been going to clubs and concerts since i was fifteen, and from what i've seen it's never the people under twenty-one who are causing problems; the troublemakers on the streets are generally drunks of legal age who just happen to be idiots and/or assholes, and while boston's done its best to keep them in line with a hopelessly insufficient late-night public transportation system (i'm still not sure if city officials are trying to keep people from going out or to effect some sort of darwinian drunk-driving-induced thinning of the herd), that particular crowd will not be stopped by any such measure.

i used to think menino was a bit of a magoo--well-intentioned, if somewhat bumbling and slightly socially oblivious--but now i'm under the impression that he is, at his heart, a crotchety, delusional old coot. forget the fact that saturday's gunfire was apparently entirely unrelated to the party the victim was leaving and was initiated by individuals who had not been in attendance; forget the fact that the victim was doing nothing more rowdy or rebellious than walking from a house to a car in front of that house; forget, too, that even if she was minding her own business, she was on the street in the middle of the night in a known high-crime neighborhood: ALL PARTYING AFTER MIDNIGHT DRAWS THE DEVIL. in menino's own words, "we know all those parties bring bad events in our city." not the weapons or the potentially inadequate law enforcement--the parties. THE PARTIES.

do you think those puritans would ever have braved the open seas and colonized this forbidding wilderness if they had known that in only a few short centuries it would be the hedonistic free-for-all it's become? you night owls have dedicated your bacchanalian lives to disgracing an entire state and its honorable legacy, and now your revelry has claimed another victim. for shame.

monday punch-in-the-face blogging

here's ann coulter being ann coulter, an act that warrants some distaste at its best and makes me choke back vomit and tears of fury at its nadir:



note the reaction of her audience, which transitions smoothly from "oooooh, you rake!" sounds of faux shock to indulgent applause. she was following mitt romney, who is now the stepford wife of the hard right but who pretended to forgive abortion and care about civil rights while he was working in massachusetts. he lied to us, people, and he will lie to you. i'm sure you're proud of him now for tying himself up in knots to make sure gay marriage was as difficult to come by as possible in the state in which he was governor even after the populace had voted to make it readily obtainable, but the truth is he's only out for himself. and ann coulter. and that's a bad thing.

monday punch-in-the-face blogging

ahhh, boston's channel 7 news team, bringing you nonstories in the form of overhyped, heart-stopping high alerts for as long as anyone i know can remember. my first and fondest memory of their brand of committed pseudoreporting is the segment they ran in early 2000 on the dangers of automatic doors, in which an elderly woman using a walker was assaulted in slow motion by a thuggish, hands-free sliding panel again and again and again; i laughed, i cried, i hurled a pillow at the television so hard i almost threw my shoulder out. i never thought they'd top it, but, masters of the trade as they are, i should have known i was mad to doubt them. because my descriptive skills fall short of those needed to accurately portray their most recent triumph, i'm going to let the work speak for itself.

ryan schulteis, mike boudo--this thud's for you.

monday punch-in-the-face blogging

i was angrier than usual for a significant stretch of time last week over the shameful, media-fueled misapplication of the term "hoax" and associated criminal charges, and it made me uncomfortable. i'm a placid individual by nature, and i'd much rather smile at something goofy than send a barrage of fuming e-mails off to city hall. but i believe in justice above all else, so i stayed angry until there was nothing more i could do, and now i'll just have to monitor the case for new developments. i am, as i mentioned, optimistic, since even the judge at the arraignment couldn't stop himself from asking the prosecutors if they were sure the charges they put forth were really something they wanted to pursue . . . but we'll see.

anyhow, i know i owe you a rant today, and i have a list of items that i plan to explore in detail: the second gold rush in recent history to threaten a significant portion of the brazilian rainforest with mass deforestation and mercury contamination; the slimy way in which the bush administration is attempting to distract us from iraq by reiterating, almost word for word and with the same dearth of evidence, its road-to-war rhetoric in opposition of iran; the incredibly late admission that the u.s. military has not come anywhere close to adequately training the iraqi military--a report that makes me batty largely because it got swept under the rug with such head-spinning, breakneck speed--coupled with reports that bush understated the number of troops he plans to send to baghdad by about fifty percent, even though the soldiers already on the ground in iraq have declared an increase in ground forces of any size will be a losing strategy if it isn't coupled with a dramatic increase in support from iraqi citizens, which no one in washington seems to think they should have to work to win . . .

ohhhh, so much to be angry about that i have not taken a second to unhunch my shoulders in days and days, and my body isn't wired for this kind of turmoil. i'm training it to bear the load, one extra pound at a time, because i want to play a part in every fight i say is worth fighting--but i can't go at it 24/7 just yet. i needed a reprieve.

and i got it. lesson of the week: nothing bolsters one's strength like a little jelly.



but first that jelly depletes one's strength by inducing a giggly, breathless languidness. i imagine i'll recover with great haste, but today my golden gloves are bedridden.

(about something that happened on) monday punch-in-the-face blogging

following stephen colbert's command last night to alter the wikipedia entry for the word "reality" so that it includes the sentence, "reality is now a commodity," wikipedia pulled up the drawbridge on "reality," "commodity," and "real." this is, i suppose, their right as an entity attempting to dispense verifiable knowledge, but it defies their marxist roots. it also makes them enormous hypocrites, one way or the other; ibm might have been able to write biased things about microsoft that could benefit ibm financially, and bloggers might have been able to rewrite those possibly biased entries while on the microsoft clock, but colbert can't offer people five bucks to write a philosophical statement about society and media that hurts no one and has zero impact on the free market? wikipedia has allowed all sorts of other philosophical explorations into the notion of reality; why not this one? do you think alexius meinong was taken at his word right out of the gate? only we can fully appreciate the nature of our own realities, can we not? perhaps your notion of reality only becomes reality once you "sell" it to someone else, or at least once it sells itself to you. and it's inarguably a mass-produced, unspecialized product (gracias, merriam-webster). so this one sentence should be permitted, even if only when prefaced with the phrase, "stephen colbert posits that . . . ." troubled, i was, and after mulling it over, i've decided that i will punch wikipedia in the face for being infofascists about an idea that no one can claim to know the definitive truth of.

i've also decided to submit the following word and definition to merriam-webster's open dictionary. don't bother trying to rip me off; they've got all my data, and the rights are mine. MINE!!!

colbereality, noun

1: a commodity
2: an entirely subjective reality in which the observer/creator manifests all of his or her desires by unwaveringly asserting the existence of such desired manifestations as truth
3: the realm in which far-right conservative pundits and all human beings between the ages of one and five exist

example sentence:
don't pester me with the findings of the iraq study group; your namby-pamby liberal delusions have no power in colbereality!

take that, wikipedia. all lexicographers accept that language is fluid and evolves over time. dare to take that flying leap into the nineteenth century and let usage dictate definition--by letting me and stephen colbert dictate usage.* that's the wiki way. become what you are.




* this statement was made by a person ensconced in colbereality.

monday punch-in-the-face blogging

if someone in my office says something that makes me recoil as if i'd just opened the door to a sauna filled with rancid meat and everybody laughs at it but me, can i forget that i ever heard the sound?

co-worker 1: we don't get martin luther king day off? seriously? do you think they'll see through it if i say i need to take it off out of principle? [chucklechuckle]

co-worker 2: come to work in blackface; that'll fix 'em. [hearty chortles all around]

no. no, i can not. all i can do is retreat to my happy place, where dean and gene ween launch into a 12-inch-casio-and-ukelele rendition of "push th' little daisies" every time i enter a room and these guys serenade me in my secret garden every afternoon at cake time. there i can recoup my strength in preparation for the next time someone says something that makes me want to crawl under my desk and keen while i dig up tiny bits of industrial carpeting with my gnawed, nubby fingernails. because there is always, always, a next time.

monday punch-in-the-face blogging

i was prepared to march back into the new yorker's copyediting department this week and start rapping the staff upon their knuckles with their red pens, which they seem to have lost interest in striving to be worthy of. some errors i can compel myself to make peace with—inappropriate spacing, dropped hyphens at word breaks at the ends of lines (oh yes, it's happened), things of that ilk, which would perhaps only be present in the final proof—but other things i can't overlook. take, for instance, this sentence on page 74 of the july 31 issue (i did mention, didn't i, that i have fallen a little bit behind?):

But a determined old woman decided to give him the water he was begging or and cleaned his face with her skirt.

DO YOU SEE??????? for shame! for shame! there's no excuse for that one. and then there's this, from hertzberg's "talk of the town" piece in the august 7 & 14 issue:

It defines "Democrat n" as "A Democratic Party member" and "Democratic adj" as "Of, relating to, or characteristic of the Democratic Party," but gives no definition for—indeed, makes no mention of—"Democrat Party n" or "Democrat adj".

was the united states under british rule for a brief period this past summer? because the end of that sentence certainly was.* and while i officially approve of the magazine's apparent decision to stop italicizing punctuation marks immediately following italicized text, on page 68 of the same issue there is an italicized semicolon following "the atlantic monthly"—and then, farther down on the same page, a non-italicized comma following the same title. what am i to think, people, of such chaos? is it a surreptitious reference to the anarchy overseas? was the hot summer sun creating a blinding glare on the office's computer screens and printed matter for two or three straight weeks? is there a method to this madness that is simply not cognoscible by my feeble, daylight-starved brain? believe me, i'd be thrilled to learn that the only problem is that i don't get it, and there are plenty of things that leave me purely confused. walk backwards through time with me so that we may revisit the july 31 issue and explore this sentence on page 83:

Its undulating glass-and-steel swoops and swells as if it were not a solid mass but a billowing length of fabric.

what is happening with those hyphens? a bit melodramatic, aren't they? are they really necessary? really? really? i just don't know anymore.

so i gnashed my teeth and rent my garments, but in the end those dozens of knuckles were spared; i am still kicking an issue of the new yorker back and forth across my apartment, but, i suppose thankfully, my rage is directed at an idea and not a technicality.

listen, i dig john updike. i do. i bought a paperback copy of marry me for a quarter at a library sale when i was in high school, and i've been collecting his titles like baseball cards ever since. i dig him so much that when the early stories came out a few years ago, i bought a hardcover copy for my cousin instead of for myself, because my cousin loves great stories but had never read anything by updike, and that made me a whole lot sadder than not owning that book ever could have. i was working at david r. godine, inc., the parent publisher of the black sparrow imprint, when the golden west: hollywood stories—a work updike wrote the introduction for—was in the final stages of its production, and one day the editor handed me a packet addressed to updike and asked me to drop it in the mailbox on my way out. i scribbled the address down on a scrap of paper and carried it around in my pocket for weeks, thinking maybe i would sneak out to his house in the dead of night and leave some sort of present on his lawn to thank him for all he'd done for me and the rest of the world. i'm a fan, right down to the tips of my tippy little toes.

today, though, i have no choice but to let him have it. i don't think i can bring myself to hit him actually, you know, in the face, but i am going to hit him somewhere about the face, or at least once very soundly on the back of the head. in a minute. i'm winding up.

in his july 31 review of sara gruen's water for elephants, a book about a depression-era traveling circus (which is more than enough to hook me; i *heart* carnies), updike says some pleasant things about the author and her firm grasp on 1930s-sideshow vernacular, and that's all well and good. but then he says . . . i mean, maybe i shouldn't be bothered, probably i shouldn't be at all surprised, but after all of the terrible things that have happened in the recent history of our world, after all of the unspeakable things that have been happening without pause since the world became a world, to say a thing like this:

Recalling, near the end of his life, his work as a veterinarian for the circus and his love for a colleague's wife, [Jacob Jankowski, the novel's narrator and protagonist] comes off as so relentlessly decent—an unwavering defender of animals, women, dwarves, cripples, and assorted ethnic groups—that he ceases to be interesting as a character.

maybe, given all the updike characters i've crawled into bed with over the years, it is exactly what i should have expected—but i still hate it. nobody likes a cloyingly sweet goody two-shoes, and a character with one earnestly altruistic dimension might be unbelievable, but there's a problem when we start viewing "relentlessly decent" individuals as unreadably dull. an unwavering defender of the weak and disenfranchised isn't tedious, he's, you know, jesus—or bahá’u’lláh or guru nanak dev, choose your path, they're more or less all rooted in those ideals. rooted; they get twisted, sometimes, up toward the branches, where people who are not relentlessly decent are able to get their hands on them. but those are lasting characters, wouldn't you say? captivating enough to have kept people turning the pages for the past couple of centuries, or millenia. i know i wouldn't die of ennui if a few more people started emulating those characters, those thoroughly decent characters. you know who wasn't an unwavering defender of cripples and assorted ethnic groups? hitler. and he was a hell of a character, sure, but not one i want to read any more stories about. ever. if my choices are "morally conflicted/challenged" and "Not Interesting To Writers," well, i guess it was for the best that i never sat up all night tying a perfect bow on the perfectly wrapped gift i never left in a certain wordsmith's front yard. *sniff*

*smack*

there, i've done it. now you sit in that corner, john updike, and think about what you've done.

oh, and, um, when you're finished thinking, um, do you think maybe you could sign my copy of pigeon feathers? that part toward the end, where david's mother is trying to make him see that the earth isn't any less a gift from god if god is an invention of humans, when she's talking about forcing yourself to pay attention to the evidence . . . it just kills me. she was a good woman, wasn't she, that elsie kern? so worried about the fertilizer hurting the earthworms . . . i could read about her forever.


* i do love the pun, i truly do, and you can't take that away from me.


update, 1/12/07, 1:11 PM: i am not alone in my love/hate/love/love/hate affair with updike; jared young has just recently offered up a beautiful work of sardonically loathesome adulation. oh, johnny boy; we're huggin' ya . . . but we're hittin' ya!

belated monday punch-in-the-face blogging

this week i'm swinging less of a fist and more of a sock full of oranges at the new yorker's copyediting staff for first robbing me of my beloved en dash and then reinserting it sporadically and haphazardly in correct but entirely unnecessary ways, catching me off guard and making me lose my literary balance mid-sentence. this seems like a cruel thing to do to a reader so loyal as myself, and i can only assume that there is an unpublicized feud being carried out between the editorial director and some grammatically sensitive foe, as this is a knife that one wields with the sole intention of cutting deeply. but i'm pleading with you, henry finder, please stop jabbing that knife into my eye; i've done nothing to you, and yet i am the unhappy (and i assume unintended) victim. why would you keep the en for relaying sports scores but refuse to use it in place of a hyphen in post–world war II? WHY ARE YOU TORTURING ME?????

*thwump thwump thwump* goes the sock full of oranges upon your inscrutable, villainous head, and your pleas for mercy fall upon my deaf ears, just as your senseless, laissez-faire punctuation falls upon your own uncaring eyes.

*thwump*

monday punch-in-the-face blogging: the "i don't know what to do with my hands" issue

whatever issues i have with my father's politics and social morals--and those issues are many and varied--i'll always be the first to stand up and say that he was a hell of a dad. when my parents bought their first house, a few months after my younger sister was born, my dad was thirty-one years old and the main earner in the household; my mother worked because she liked to be busy, but her income was more or less pocket money. not long after we moved, though, my dad was laid off from his job as a machinist. neither of my parents had more than a high school education, and with two kids and a new mortgage, they couldn't afford to be choosy about work. my mom took a night job as a waitress, and my dad, who'd just gotten used to the idea that he was actually going to be able to come through on that promise every good father makes about giving his kids a better life than he had and being as good or better a father (depending on the family history) as his father was, stuffed his hopes and his ego in his back pocket and did what had to be done.

for a while he couldn't find any work at all, and my mom had to pick up whatever extra hours she could at the restaurant to cover the loss. my dad became responsible for preparing meals, something he'd never had to do, having gone directly from his mother's cooking to my mother's. at first we ate a lot of fish sticks and hot dogs and macaroni and cheese--but we were kids; that was what we wanted to eat. soon, though, he discovered the miracle of the stir fry and nearly wore a hole in our wok with his zealous efforts to create an entire balanced meal in a single, easily washed pan. this tactic is the cornerstone of my culinary existence to this very day.

when he could get work, he took it, no matter what it was or how far from his ideal situation the description ran. for a while he worked on a semi-freelance basis refinishing hardwood floors. when that dried up, he took a position in the snack bar of the local kmart. at night he still made dinner and fussed over the (very fussy) baby and never said no when i asked him to play a board game or read a book. if he felt stressed about the life he'd found himself in, it didn't show. my mother was a crackling mass of nerves who'd snap like a too-tight guitar string if i left a stray sock on my bedroom floor; my dad never raised his voice, never complained, never said he wished anything were different. he did what had to be done, and then he went to bed and woke up the next day and did it again. my sister and i were incredibly happy kids, because that was what my dad, in his utterly unexpected role as our primary caretaker, had decided we would be. i didn't realize my family had been poor until i started working myself and came to understand how little you can get with a minimum-wage paycheck. we were shielded from the entire experience. even after he found a steady day job, he still came home and helped me practice my multiplication tables or my softball swing, let my sister put makeup on him so they could pretend they were princesses, made sure we were clean and had everything we needed for school the next day, and never made us go to bed without a story. being a good parent isn't something that just happens, and it isn't an innate skill; it's a choice. and my father chose it every day, because family is, to him, the most important thing. if it calls for sacrifices, you make them, and if it demands that you give up a little more after that, well, you do that too. because if your family can't count on you, nothing else you accomplish or obtain will be worth a fistful of sand.

when my dad's mother went into the hospital last december, he drove an hour into boston after work every night for two weeks to sit with his father and his younger brother and sister in the visitors' room at the end of the hall. he didn't stop going when his mother lost consciousness, or a few days later when it became clear that she was unlikely to regain it. on christmas day, he stayed home with us while the rest of his family gathered in that hospital room, because he wanted us--not himself, really; just us--to have a good holiday. and when at four o'clock that afternoon, while my mother and sister and i were standing in the kitchen in our coats preparing to head out to the car so we could join everyone else at the hospital, my uncle called to tell us that my grandmother had passed away, my dad said to us, "i'm sorry this had to happen today. but at least we had a good christmas morning together." he spent the rest of the night calling relatives. he made all of the funeral arrangements alone, because his family couldn't pull themselves together enough to lend a hand. he paid for everything himself because no one else offered to help and he didn't feel right asking under the circumstances. i stayed at my parents' house for the two days of the wake and the service, and i didn't stray far from them over that time. my grandfather and aunt couldn't do anything but cry, and my father tended to them like they were his own wounded children. not once, in those two days, did i hear anyone ask my father how he was.

nothing improved in the months following the funeral. my aunt and grandfather seemed to have made some sort of unspoken pact to exist in a state of grief-stricken suspended animation. my grandfather is barely mobile and physically unable to care for himself completely; everyone seemed to agree that the best thing would be for him to move to an assisted-living facility. my father had all the necessary papers drawn up for the sale of the house and admittance to the residence, but when he gave them to my grandfather to sign, they sat on a table and were eventually lost in the clutter that accumulated around and on top of them. my uncle lives with my grandfather, my aunt lives not fifteen minutes from him and sees him nearly every day, but in a year none of them has been able to cancel my grandmother's newspaper subscription, or even throw away a single newspaper. with two capable adults in and out of the place on a routine basis, my grandfather refused my dad's offer to pay for a meals-on-wheels program because he's afraid that if someone saw the inside of his house, he wouldn't be allowed to live in it anymore. and every time my aunt leaves the house, she calls my father to ask him why he isn't taking care of it, what kind of son he is to let his father live that way. this is one of two reasons she's had to call my father in the past year; the other is to cry, late at night, about how much she misses her mom. she has still not asked my father how he is.

this past saturday, my dad called his dad to ask if he wanted to come to my parents' house for christmas, rather than sit in his sad, dirty living room surrounded by his wife's never-ending newspapers. and he said yes, in fact, he would like that very much. because my grandfather can't drive anymore, my dad called his sister to ask her to please bring their father over for christmas, because there was no way to make the day less sad, but they could at least be together. and she said no, no, no, no, no, she couldn't do that, she couldn't do anything but crawl into bed and pull the covers over her head, how could he expect her to do anything at all after what had happened to her. but my dad believes that what matters is coming through for your family, so he asked her once more, very gently, very calmly, to think of their father and what would be best for him, to think of what their mother would have wanted them to do.

and my aunt started screaming. flat-out screaming. screaming about how cold and heartless my father was to call her up and make demands when she was still struggling just to hold on after what had happened to her. screaming about how she was the only one who was doing anything to try to keep that family together, since clearly no one else gave a damn about them. screaming about how my father had no right to talk about what their mother wanted, because he hadn't even cared enough about her to be with her when she died. and then she hung up on him.

when i left my parents' house tonight, my father was gathering together the gifts that he planned to bring over to his sister the next day. because a good man looks after his family.

now, either i'm a no-good woman, or my father doesn't have the strength to draw the line--or maybe there's one more option. my mother and i don't care at this point if my aunt does crawl into her bed, pull the covers over her head, and dissolve into bubbles and foam. my uncle is a useless mooch, but he knows it and makes no claims to the contrary, and he's never asked anyone to feel sorry for him. still, i resent his uselessness because it has created so much unnecessary work for other people i love, and if he disappeared my heart wouldn't break. i'm attached to different threads, i'm bound by different knots. my aunt and uncle are family, but it's different blood, its thickness lessened by its being once removed. my father thinks this runs contrary to every value he's ever tried to instill in me, but i think it's just the opposite.

how you love someone is a choice--but whether or not you love them is out of your hands. my dad will go on quietly cleaning up messes and carrying three other people on his back until his father passes away, and i pray that that will be the last time he'll ever let himself rescue these selfish, helpless, imbalanced people--but i don't believe it will be. because my dad throws things at me when i insult the president and tells me i'm a weak-willed despot lover who would have raced out to greet the wehrmacht with flowers and pfefferneuse, he says my senseless insistence on a human contribution to climate change only proves how ignorant i am about the scientific history of the earth, he has threatened to disown my sister for letting immigrants change the oil in her car, and he chooses to walk past the composter and carry on for another twenty yards to throw leaves and lawn clippings into the woods rather than put them in that stupid barrel--but i'd stop speaking to every one of his relatives today for nothing more than their inability to express a modicum of gratitude for his efforts, and if any one of you said an unjust word about him i'd very contentedly set you on fire.

because if your family can't count on you to have their backs, you're nothing.

monday punch-in-the-face blogging: the anti-punch issue

i won't pretend that nothing made me ball up my tiny fists and flare my nostrils this week; glenn beck is, after all, still on the air, and his desperate plea to return america to its lost, puritanical, shame-driven state of yesteryear didn't ring all that tunefully in my ears. porn addiction, like all addiction, is troubling, but a little porn here and there, provided it was made by consenting adults (and don't assume no one wants to be involved in that sort of thing; am i the only person willing to admit to regularly watching the girls next door and being enthralled by the glossy, caricaturish mountain of crazy that is bridget marquardt?), can be a fine thing. the more we castigate people for being human, with all the attendant human instincts and urges, the more we fuel the seedy, deviant underworld that beck so fervently wishes to eradicate--but of course i wasn't counting on him to approach the issue rationally. and then there's this guy, and, as ever, this guy, though to a lesser degree; as distasteful as i find him, when it comes to his limp-wristed swats at malcolm gladwell i'm generally content to leave sailer to his sophomoric, colbert-esque nailedjagasms and move on to more deserving subjects. but if one more person tries to convince me that it's more offensive and exclusionary to say "happy holidays" than it is to say "merry christmas,"* i swear i don't even know what i'll do . . .

it is the holiday season, though, and my heart is ablaze with the giving spirit, so i've chosen to focus this week on things that inspired a sensation opposite that which makes me want to open up a fresh can of whup-ass. i don't know what the opposite action is, exactly, but i think it involves clasping my hands together and doing that little squat-bounce move that small children who haven't figured out how to jump up and down do when they're very excited. that's a mouthful, though, isn't it? let's call it the yippee dance. the truth is, for all my moping and whining, i do that dance a lot; sometimes it's about personal, somewhat senseless things (e.g., my cat just lay down on her side and tucked her perfect feet up under her chin), and sometimes it's about still personal but slightly more reasonable things. i find it prolongs the effects to ignore the universal merits of the origin and just take the little cloudbursts as they come. and i'm in sharing mode, like i said, so here are some things that made tiny irridescent stars swirl around in my head on saturday.

i got up extra early to meet my ex-roommate (who's a lovely girl, despite her unfortunate passion for violent, destructive hookbills) in the south end for the 2006 bazaar bizarre, a craft fair for the city's underserved eccentrics. i lusted after all kinds of beautiful things, like a sock zombie that was crocheted to look as though it were drooling blood (from pepperberry) and this dish by ambrosia porcelain, but at this point in december i'm on a strict purchases-for-others-only diet. it was tough, but so am i--at least, i was, until i found chad walker, whose sweet, strange, misshapen cartoon characters stole my heart so swiftly and completely that i almost had to sit down. i did buy two prints and a button for a friend, but i folded and bought two prints for myself, as well, because they were so perfect, and perfectly me, that the yippee dance overtook me and i couldn't say no.
































the captions don't show up here, but the one on the right reads, "portrait of earth-like planet . . . you can tell it's not earth because there are less jerks." the second says, "for a moment we both feel better--rescued beetle." i didn't hug them in front of chad, because that might have made him uncomfortable, but i have hugged them several times in the privacy of my own apartment. carefully, mind you; i wouldn't want to crease them. the realization that somewhere in some other part of the world one person whom i had never met had been sitting at home being sad and pensive about all of the same things i'm sad and pensive about when i'm sitting alone at home--it's deeply mobilizing, in a way. suddenly i want to double down on all of my efforts to change those saddening things, because i was just one and now there are two, but if there are two there must be millions, millions of us with our one voices fading into the static and buzz swelling up around the jerks on this planet that is earth and not earth-like, and we're all waiting for someone to do the little bit more that will tip the scale in the direction of enough. the odds are maybe not in favor of that someone ever being me, but one never knows. i could imagine never being so angry with anyone again. one other person on the planet thinks there is grace in saving a beetle, and suddenly i am filled with hope.

so i came home with my swag and ate a sandwich and prepared for round 2 of my happy, happy day: going to see the lemonheads at avalon. you likely do not remember, and no one would blame you for that, but i also saw the lemonheads on december 16 last year. evan dando and i have a lifelong habit of falling into anniversaries. between 1996 and 2000, i was able to see evan every year within three days of my birthday, and twice the show started the night before and carried over into my birthday, and it was like a koala bear crapped a rainbow in my brain. then there was a brief transition period where things were a little less consistent (although in 2003 i did get one last rock and roll birthday), but in 2004 i caught him on december 17, and now we've established a shiny new pattern. i do love me a pattern.

what i do not love is driving to lansdowne street and paying an arm and a kidney to park in a garage for three hours, so i decided to take the train. how hard could it be? i wondered; i take the train everywhere else, and fenway park is the draw in this city. getting walking directions to it from the train stop ought to be the easiest thing in the world, and what more reliable source for public-transportation-related directions than the massachusetts transit authority web site? it's got "authority" right there in the title, after all.

NO! the transit authority told me to turn right when i had to turn left, because it assumed i would have the sense to leave the subway through the exit on the other side of the street, and even though i was almost a hundred percent certain that i was supposed to be walking toward the giant citgo sign, i carried on, and on, and on and on and on . . .

it's no one's fault but my own that i was too embarrassed to walk into a convenience store and admit that i had lived in boston for four years and had no idea how to get to fenway park from the t stop two blocks away, but i was, and so i wandered back and forth through the boston university dorms and under the overpass and up and down commonwealth ave. for an entire hour before i finally convinced myself that i really was sure i was supposed to be walking toward the giant citgo sign. and then i only had to walk for about four more minutes, because of course the avalon was right there.

by the time i got inside i was chilly and sore and very upset with myself, and the club was packed and the lemonheads had already been playing for ten minutes, and that made me feel about four dozen times worse. i picked a spot against a wall and shifted from one stiff hip to the other, scowling. but two and a half songs later i was already forgetting that any of that bad stuff had ever happened, and when evan played his genius, ballady cover of the misfits' "skulls," which i love and don't get treated to nearly often enough, i actually did the yippee dance right there in the middle of the club, and an hour later when the set ended i was so blissed out and permasmile stricken that i would happily have jogged all the way home with the transit authority's web master on my back. it just proves what i've been saying for the past fifteen years: evan dando fixes everything. if we piped bootleg recordings of his acoustic numbers into diplomatic meetings around the globe, the world might be a very different, and much improved, place. thank you, evan's wife, for making him so happy, and thank you evan for making me forget what wanting to sock a pundit feels like. i hadn't known it before, but i think there may be no lovelier thing to fail to remember.

there may or may not be punch blogging next week; it's christmas, sure, but that means i have to spend the day with my family . . . i won't worry about it yet, though. for now i'm going to delight in these tiny things that i've found, and i'll deal with the rest of it if and when i must. you find a tiny thing too, and if you're smart you'll carry it with you everywhere you go.







* three cheers to the united states postal service for rolling out six holiday stamps this year, including this one:


so pretty! at least john potter still believes that it takes all kinds.

monday punch-in-the-face blogging

allow me to preface today's column with a run-down of what has been my average day for the past two weeks, which have been dedicated to turning a collection of eclectically formatted ms word documents of variable quality into a reputable fifty-six-page academic journal of highly saleable quality:

1. thwack alarm clock with undue force; roll over and proceed to oversleep by approximately forty-five minutes

2. run around apartment, run to car, drive (read: idle/inch for close to an hour along fifteen miles of highway) to work

3. copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit copyedit

4. lean head against desk for three minutes to prevent retinal detachment and further disintegration of capillary network in left eye

5. proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread proofread

6. become suddenly aware of profound hunger and mild wooziness; wash down b-complex supplement with last of cold coffee; dream distant, laughable dream of hot, healthy meal

7. repeat steps 3 through 5

8. spend drive home thinking of a) the five other journals i am responsible for and have not been able to work on and b) the two new journals i have not yet begun to work on, as i have not received any articles to work on, and which my advertising manager keeps telling people will be coming out in february

9. cry softly into slice of unadorned bread that i am now too sick with hunger to ingest

some words of advice to all fledgling editors: do not take that senior staff position at that small, semi-new publishing company, no matter how flattered you are that they've offered it to someone with as little experience as you have or how much better it seems than the job you had expected to be offered. they are offering it to you because no one with more experience or half a brain would want it. take a job at a larger, better-established company, where you will have a boss. you want a boss. you think that you don't, but you do. you have your entire life to stagger and sweat under a mammoth load of impossible deadlines and inaccurate communications and unreasonable demands; for a year or two, work under someone else who is more responsible for shouldering that load than you are, and learn what you can from that person's mistakes and successes and zombiesque stare and gutteral animal cries of despair. then, when he or she plummets off the winter river bridge, you can assume the position with your eyes wide open and not at all bloodshot or burning; enjoy this ocular nirvana, as you will be experiencing it for perhaps the last time in your life.

i'm tense, is what i'm getting at, and i am ashamed to admit that i haven't always managed to deal with my tension in the most mature or becoming fashion. as a result, this week's hook to the temple is directed right at me.

i pride myself on being one of about fourteen routinely decent drivers in the great, rotary-freckled commonwealth of massachusetts. as a result, i am frequently honked, yelled, rudely gesticulated, and menacingly scowled at. these things happen when i refuse to blow through an intersection after my light has turned red, when i refuse to make an illegal turn when doing so is clearly prohibited by obvious signage, and when i choose not to endanger my life by attempting to gun my tiny car around and in front of a bus that has begun to pull away from the sidewalk. a lot, is what i mean; they happen a lot. and like the endless drone of traffic on a busy street or the shrill, piercing yodel of the upstairs neighbor's faulty smoke alarm, they have become, over time, a thing that my consciousness just barely perceives.

while creeping up mass ave. on thursday morning, i paused at the edge of a break in the median, instead of rolling forward to the car in front of me and blocking the intersection. i always try to do this, and i am always so disappointed when i look behind me after i have moved forward and see that the cars behind me have obliviously and indifferently blocked the intersection that i had so carefully preserved the integrity of. intersection clearance doesn't benefit from the pay-it-forward phenomenon like letting someone pull out into traffic can; it is an instinct that some of us possess and some of us do not. when i am not exhausted and defeated and weak with self-pity, i can accept this and let it roll away from me like beads from the snapping strand of my social awareness. but thursday i was all of those things, so when the driver of the red pick-up behind me tapped once on his horn after i had stopped, i, um . . . *sigh*. i kind of lost my mind.

all alone in my little car, i yelled and flapped my arms and glared into the rearview mirror and made sure that if that son of a bitch in that ugly-ass truck was looking at me, he damned well knew that i was losing my mind. i even stayed right where i was for about thirty extra seconds after the traffic in front of me moved, just to put him in his place, and when he didn't honk again and instead gazed blankly across the median and into the opposite lane, i thought, that's right, bitch; won't make that mistake again.

as i stepped on the gas i glanced behind me one last time, just for closure, and noticed that the truck's left-turn blinker was on. the truck wasn't turning left, though, because a steady stream of traffic was pouring toward it from the opposite direction, blocking its progress. this stream of traffic had come into existence about eight seconds before i had driven away from the intersection. for the several minutes that i had been stopped at the intersection, ranting and raving about the obscene self-interestedness of the driver behind me, the passage had been crystal clear in every direction. i had quite possibly ruined an innocent stranger's entire day.

sorry, dude in pick-up. a hook and a jab to bad, bad juniper pearl, who apparently can't notice anything about anything that isn't in twelve-point font and less than two feet from her face, which, as is its due, is receiving a sound roughing up this very instant.

monday punch-in-the-face blogging: the office issue

my office, that is. i'm sure plenty of you are living placid, sociable lives in which you never long to kick down a cubicle wall and assault a co-worker. but i'm not you. wrote a song about it--like to hear it? here it goes:

1. "i can't understand why people in massachusetts won't come to their senses and do something about those awful democrats. they're ruining everything."

2. "i got a cv today from dr. beaver [prurient snicker]. he really missed his calling, not becoming an ob/gyn [full-out chortle]." this speaker is about seventy years old; this joke shouldn't be funny to anyone over the age of twelve.

3. "my dentist is an asian woman. she has a really good sense of humor, which is unusual for asians." this comment was also made, verbatim, approximately three weeks earlier.

4. "is shelby a democrat now?"
"well, she's in college; need i say more? she's being exposed to all kinds of horrible ideas."

5. "mark wahlberg is the LOVE OF MY LIFE. but i refuse to watch boogie nights, even though i own it."

monday punch-in-the-face blogging: the thanksgiving issue

what i'm giving thanks for this year, darlings, is the strong evidence proffered by my own personal nature-versus-nurture drama that one can easily triumph over one's genetics when it comes to character development and intellectual curiosity. here are five things spoken by my paternal relatives last thursday that made me want to throttle them to within an inch of their lives:

1. "muslims need to be wiped off the face of the planet." (said by my aunt)

2. "i pray for the muslims to accept jesus. i believe that if they could just learn to love christ, they wouldn't be such bad people." (courtesy of my grandfather)

3. "no talking about religion or politics." (spoken by my father approximately seven seconds after i began to attempt to explain the difference between muslims and islamic extremists)

4. "why can't these people just get the hell over themselves?" (dad again, after a brief news report about a group of native americans who staged a small, peaceful protest on thanksgiving)

5. "that wasn't murder, that was just mankind making progress like it's been doing for centuries and centuries. they weren't using all the land." (dad again, making the third time the charm, after i pointed out somewhat sharply that this was, after all, a holiday celebrating the day europeans began their steady invasion and elimination of an entire race of people, and that the remainder of that race had very little to celebrate and a whole lot to be upset about)

when i objected after comment five and tried to wrench some explanation out of dear old dad for how it's o.k. to kill innocent people under any circumstances, he reverted back to his favorite standby: weak pacifists like me would have handed the entire planet over to hitler. this, tragically, is the end of the majority of my conversations with my father, but not necessarily the end of the evening; that comes very shortly after the conclusion of this conversation, when i march out into the kitchen, tell my mother that her husband is the reason i will never believe this world is a decent place to raise a child in, grab my coat, and run out. but perhaps we really should allow it to come to blows just once, and see if that helps any. christmas is right around the corner, after all.

new feature!

as any of the (two) regulars know, i am prone to starting new features and then growing more and more inconsistent in my delivery of them, until eventually they disappear and i start up something new, hoping no one will care and knowing that, really, it's unlikely anyone will notice. it isn't a malicious or even deliberate action on my part, it's simply that my infinite capacity for distraction is occasionally the dominant force in my day-to-day activities. in one sense i suppose you readers pay the price, but in another you are blessed with the excitement of never knowing exactly what manner of pretentious hackery i'll bestow upon you at any given moment. so, in the spirit of that beautiful tradition, i offer you my newest weekly column: monday "things someone said that made me want to punch him or her in the face" blogging. given my temperament and inability to forget or forgive comments that i perceive as especially hateful or stupid or both, this one may be easier for me to maintain than the others seem to be. but one never knows with bloggers; we are a vague and elusive species, and some of us are a little lazy, and some of us just can't remember what day it is. the parking ticket on the windshield of my car this morning reminding me that yesterday was sunday and i should have moved so as not to obstruct the street sweeper is tangible evidence that i am most definitely of this latter ilk; you may draw your own conclusions about the former two descriptions.

this inaugural installment will be dedicated entirely to glenn beck, whom i've only recently had the misfortune to discover and have become pathologically obsessed with. from the looks of things, he may be all i need to keep this column going--though i'm sure he won't be all i have to work with. so, without further delay:

ten things glenn beck said last week that made me want to punch him in the face

1. "[A]s a typical American before 9/11, I was like, 'Oh, you know what? Just cut it out--you [Middle Eastern citizens] can all just fall into the middle of the sea and it doesn`t matter to me, because you`re always fighting.' Now 9/11 happened. I thought, 'Gee, maybe I should pay attention to this.'"

2. "Why is it that it seems as though conservatives are the ones that are the most strong on the protection of Israel, we are the most--that we`re the strongest in defense, and yet so many Jews here in America are so on-fire liberal and they side with the people, the politicians who are ready to just give away the candy store? I don`t understand it, and so many Americans don`t." (aside: right now many of the liberals are angry that we have squandered all of our military resources on an unfounded, unnecessary war in iraq, making it impossible to take any action where it is truly needed, such as, for example, against iran in defense of israel. but i'm one-eighth jewish, so i probably would say that.)

3. "[I]f we follow the strategies suggested by Tony Blair and Robert Gates and the Iraq Study Group of banding together and making friends with--with Iran, the situation will be 100 times deadlier than if Saddam Hussein were still in power and had a massive stash of chemical weapons." which he didn't have, and please see above aside.

4. BECK: Back with Benjamin Netanyahu. In the last break, you said that Islam is the most primitive religion.

NETANYAHU: I didn`t say that.

BECK: You didn`t say that?

NETANYAHU: No. I said that militant Islam is a primitive religion.

BECK: How much of . . .

NETANYAHU: Most Muslims are not part of this crazy creed.

BECK: O.K.

5. "You know, one of the great things about somebody like me, a radio talk show host, getting his own show is that I can cover issues that I want to with my own prism, my own bias. I`m going to tell you flat-out I`m not a journalist . . . ." and if that show happens to be aired on the cable news network, well, it's nobody's fault but the viewers' if they make a mistake about that. facts are for newspapers; airwaves are standard-free. that's the beauty of america. like how the history channel has the right to air documentaries about vampires and werewolves--not legends about vampires and werewolves, actual historical accounts of their lives and times. because they're not historians, they're just the history channel.

6. "A couple of months ago, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq urged his supporters to each kill at least one American in the next 15 days. It was a shocking statement, but hardly surprising. Then, just a few days later, I came across a response to that message of hate that was surprising. It said, 'You hid in your caves and behind the faces of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq. You have abandoned God and have started worshipping your own Satanic egos that rejoice at the killing of innocent people.'

Why do I say that statement, something that many of us agree with, is surprising? Because the man who wrote it is a Muslim."

7. "And K-Fed? You dope, when you`re going to marry an international pop star worth a couple hundred million dollars, don`t sign a pre-nup, you putz."

8. "O.K. No offense, and I know Muslims. I like Muslims. I`ve been to mosques. I really don`t believe that Islam is a religion of evil. I--you know, I think it`s being hijacked, quite frankly.

"With that being said, you [Keith Ellison (D), Congressman-elect of Minnesota and practicing Muslim] are a Democrat. You are saying, 'Let`s cut and run.' And I have to tell you, I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, 'Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.' And I know you`re not. I`m not accusing you of being an enemy, but that`s the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way."

9. "[M]y doctor that helped with the health care of my daughter when she was first born said, 'You know, hey, we don`t know, but she may not feed herself or walk again.' She`s in college tonight. Doctors are wrong; I certainly do not want them making these kinds of decisions on the quality of life." the doctor said "we don't know" and "may not" in an effort to express the worst-case scenario to you, beck, which is something all doctors are obligated to do. your doctor was indeed wrong, though, in prefacing these statements with "you know," as, clearly, you do not.

10. bonus "flip out like a ninja" round! the entire following segment from the november 14 show made me want to pummel not only the two speakers but every member of the production crew who believed it deserved time on the air.

BECK: All right. Every day you can hear my radio program on stations all across the country including 570 KRNS in Salt Lake City. Now if you can`t find an affiliate in your area, sign up and listen online at my web site, GlennBeck.com.

Michael Graham is a host at 96.9 FM talk in Boston. [in boston! oh, the shame! -jp]

Hello.

MICHAEL GRAHAM, RADIO TALK SHOW HOST: Good to see you again, Glenn.

BECK: Good to see you, sir. There is a citizenship test that is now being given, and it`s multiple choice, and it`s kind of trivia.

GRAHAM: It stinks. I mean, really, who cares about the, you know, trivia questions like what do the stars in the flag--is it really important for immigrants to know that the stars . . .

BECK: If you don`t know what the stars stand for.

GRAHAM: Do we really care that the stars stand for the first 50 people who were, you know, voted off the island in American Idol? I don`t think we care about that.

BECK: I don`t think that`s what they mean.

GRAHAM: In all seriousness, ten cities including Boston were experimenting with the new citizenship test that is purportedly designed to teach immigrants what we in American society truly value.

BECK: O.K.

GRAHAM: And so I`m hoping--they have not revealed the test yet. I don`t know if this is like "Do You Want to Be a Millionaire?"

BECK: Do you have any idea? Do you have any . . .

GRAHAM: Question one, my question one on 96.9. Here`s question one. Do you speak English? Question No. 2, no kidding, really? Do you speak English like you understand it? Question No. 3--I want to buy a hamburger. It`s $1.97. I gave you a $5 bill. What are you going to give me back in American money? . . . [M]achine. This is what we want. These are the values that Americans care about.

BECK: You`re a hate monger. (grinning)

GRAHAM: No.

BECK: You are a hate monger. (laughing)

GRAHAM: Here`s my test for everyone who wants to be an American.

BECK: O.K.

GRAHAM: I`m going to give you a piece of paper. Draw me a football. If it`s round, you don`t get in.

BECK: Right.

GRAHAM: It`s supposed to be oblong. That`s what we want. So I`m hoping that they--in all seriousness, I want these people--as you know, America is the only country in the world that people get to make. Every single day we`re making America. It didn`t exist, you know, five years ago like Germany, France, et cetera. And so I want to make the best America and I want people of immigrant [sic] here to make a good America.

BECK: To be--to be serious for a second, the things that are important to me is do you believe that this is the land of opportunity?

GRAHAM: Right.

BECK: Do you believe--this kind of goes into what you were saying, we make America every day. We make it fresh every day.

GRAHAM: We do. If you choose to be a lazy dirt ball, you`re going to make America a little less good.

BECK: Here`s the thing, Michael. I think--I don`t know if you saw this recent poll that shows that many Americans, in fact, 50 percent of Americans believe that the American dream is done.

GRAHAM: Right.

BECK: You know, I think--honestly, I thought of this during the election. With Vermont--is it Vermont? Which is the one that just elected the first socialist . . .

GRAHAM: Vermont. Vermont. Right up the road here, yes.

BECK: I believe we should take the ice cream factory--without the two fat guys--and we should vote them out of the union. I think you should have a renewal period on every state. I think the rest of the country should vote whether you`re a state or not anymore.

GRAHAM: There are plenty--they are plenty of Americans who, I think, don`t qualify as citizens from the standpoint of knowledge, et cetera.

BECK: Exactly.