IPOD SHUFFLE - part I

I have come, of late, to call myself a “dog-writer”. It is a phrase I have coined myself, and it is not necessarily a good one.

Allow me to explain. Like most dog owners, I spend many hours every week walking the dog. Often it is early in the morning, before the sun has even risen, or out in the woods or on the beach, some place that can lead to solitude, introspection, contemplation. Now of course, while I am walking the dog, much of the time my mind is focused on immediate, temporal needs, such as “How am I supposed to pick up THAT?”, or even trying to decide the best way to prevent Dooby from dismantling the neighbor’s split-rail fence and using it for a chew toy. But there are still many moments left for my mind to wander, and much of that time I am mentally writing.

And let me tell you, I have written some amazing shit on those dog walks, too. Razor-sharp wit, brilliant turns of a phrase, humour worthy of Oscar Wilde. In my mind I have already left my thankless job as a pharmacy technician many times, to embark on my new thankless career as Brilliant Writer. Book signings at Barnes & Noble, “An Evening With the Brilliant Mind of Paul Halley” selling out to nearly 65% capacity at every community college east of Albany, a thousand Courtyard Marriotts await… But inevitably, somewhere along the dog walk the thread gets lost, overtaken by the Doobster finding a wadded Kleenex on the sidewalk or reminding myself to stop at the ATM on my way to work, and by the time I get home, most of it is gone, like that awesome dream you had about whatever it was before it just became a blur like “The Andalusian Dog”. In an affront to my Holy Trinity of Augusten, Sedaris, and Sloane, my brilliant Virtual Essays never get written, my Virtual Pulitzer never received, and the only book I’m signing is when I buy Sudafed at the pharmacy.

There is another time, though, when my mind tends to set itself free, and I dog-write, and that’s when I’m listening to my music on my Ipod. Now, over my lifetime I have managed to amass a fairly humongous music collection. According to Itunes, I’ve got 455 albums, 4,234 songs, 11 days 17 hours 40 minutes and 40 seconds worth. It covers a lot of decades and a lot of different phases of my own life. So, sometimes when I’m listening to my music, I’m thinking about where I was and what I was doing when I heard that song. Or I might be thinking about the song itself, the words or the melody or the talent of the performer. But my mind is excited, thinking, mentally writing, dog-writing.

So, in an effort to knock myself off of this literary tuffet I’ve been on, I have decided to embark on a writing series. At least three essays, all to be inspired by whatever song happens to pop up on my Ipod at the moment.

Here’s the first one:

“Below the Line” by Josh Groban

Mark and I have tickets to go see Josh Groban in concert in October.

We don’t go to a lot of concerts. The last concert we went to was to see Joan Armatrading in Boston and that was at least six or seven years ago. What I remember most about that concert was that Joan was suffering from a touch of laryngitis that night, not exactly auspicious for a singer on tour. So, she had a bit of trouble hitting some of the notes that night; but anyone who knows Joan Armatrading’s music knows that hitting the high notes isn’t her forté anyway. Hell, she has a hard enough time hitting some of the not-so-high notes. But that’s OK with her fans, like me, because that is how she sounds. And then, when it came time for “Willow”, her signature song, she basically just sat there and let the audience sing most of the song to her. Imagine, being a performer and being able to allow yourself to sit back and let waves of love pour over you from the audience in the form of their singing your song, which you wrote, to you. Must have been pretty awesome for her. The audience enjoyed it for sure. Well, except maybe for Mark, who isn’t exactly a Joan Armatrading fan and probably couldn’t even pronounce her name properly. By the end of the concert he looked exactly like someone who had just lost 90 minutes of their life for the sake of their spouse; 90 minutes which he would never be able to get back.

Of all my complaints about my marriage, and they are thankfully few and mercifully trivial, I would have to say that Mark’s relative disinterest in music is one of the major ones. I have always been the sort of person who would hook up the stereo first on moving day, and pretty much have “tunes” going on all during the day. Mark, on the other hand, is a TV person, a self-proclaimed “boob-tube child”. If he is awake and he is home, you can pretty much guarantee that the television is on, even when he is nowhere nearby, which has always been a bit of an annoyance, not to mention a mystery, to me. I mean, who would rather hear disembodied voices hawking the Sham-Wow! or Debbie Boone’s Lifestyle Lift while vacuuming or washing dishes than a little Etta James or even some Dean Martin? Mark would, that’s who. And it seems that TV trumps Music in this house, so much of my music time is relegated to my time alone at home, or walking the streets of Provincetown with my Ipod playing. In any real relationship, there will be at least half of the time when it’s not about you, but about your partner instead. This, for me, is one of those times and I have learned to accept it.

So, concerts and the like are a rare occasion in my life now, but it wasn’t always that way. I have some amazing memories which revolve around concerts, from all the other parts of my life.

The first concert I ever went to was to see the Grateful Dead. Talk about jumping right into something with both feet! No pussyfootin’ around for me, no messin’ around goin’ to see Little Feat or Bonnie Raitt; no I’m gonna start right off with Advanced Concert-going. All that meant of course, is that my friend Cindy and I were obliged to smoke as much of the marijuana which was being passed up and down every row and aisle in every direction as we possibly could. Then, when we had smoked our fill and we could sit back, glassy-eyed, I watched the girls in gauze dance around barefoot down on the floor of the Baltimore Civic Center, and let the sounds of Jerry Garcia and “Truckin’" wash over me like waves of Concert Coolness. It was fantastic.

I think the best concert I ever went to was a band called Dépêche Mode, an ‘80s Techno Pop band, back in 1985 or so. Three guys up on the stage, a drummer and two guys with keyboards, and all this music came pouring out of the speakers all over us. The concert was at the Meriweather Post Pavilion, a great outdoor concert arena in suburban Maryland, and they served beer in these enormously huge plastic cups. So there we were, all this Electric Youth dancing around like maniacs with these jumbo beers in hand, to this amazing, angry yet optimistic music. And it was all very intense and liberating because back then people my age weren’t sure if we’d live to see 30, partly because the Commies were going to drop a bomb on us and partly because we were starting to see a lot of people our age dying of a strange new disease. But when the band started the night with “Black Celebration” and the lights slowly went up onstage, the crowd went wild and we just lost ourselves in that awesome intense techno-80s moment.

Then, after that concert, I almost got myself arrested. It’s kind of a long story, but let me put it this way. Among the people I went to the concert with were my best friend and roommate, Tim, and his current boyfriend, whose name I can’t remember but we’ll call him Greg. Greg worked in a trendy clothing store at a pricey shopping center in downtown DC, selling pleated slacks and sweaters with shoulder pads sewn into them to people exactly like Tim and me but with more money. He was kind of cute, and by the end of the concert, he was no longer Tim’s boyfriend. He wasn’t my boyfriend either, but he was definitely my date, at least for the second half of the night.

Now, in the Potomac river which runs alongside DC, there is a tiny little island-slash-national park called Roosevelt Island. It's only accessible from the Parkway on the Virginia side of the river, via a little parking lot and a tiny footbridge which crosses over onto the island. Well, after ditching a not-very-happy Tim somewhere downtown (I paid for that one for weeks), somehow or other “Greg” and I decided that Roosevelt Island would be the perfect place for our hot and sweaty little tryst. Maybe it was the jumbo beers that made us think that scaling a locked fence would be a great idea and that nothing could possibly go awry, or maybe it was our overactive hormonal surges, I don’t know. And believe me, scaling a locked gate on a footbridge is not an easy accomplishment, either. But we did it, we jumped over the fence and made our way into the park, our own little private island where we could frolick, as it were, anywhere we liked. And was it the jumbo beers that had us thinking that the hillside just opposite the parking lot where we’d left the car would be the ideal spot for us to, well, frolick? I don’t know, but that’s what we did. And just as we were getting our Girbauds down around our slouchy-socked ankles, we were horrified to see a pair of headlights turn into the parking area just over a hundred yards away. A pair of Police headlights, that is. And even more horrified when the Police headlights were joined by a Police flashlight, one of those super-bright long range flashlights that they’re always flashing around on "CSI" even when the lights are on. We laid there, frozen in our tawdry embrace, Perry Ellis and Willy Smith accessories strewn about on the grass around us, certain we were about to be exposed and imagining what the next few hours were going to be like in the Arlington County Jail, especially if they ever got wind of what we were in for. But mercifully, we must have been just outside the range of the CSI flashlight, and after a few minutes they gave up and drove away, leaving a ticket on the windshield of Greg’s car.
Now, I would like to tell you that at that point, Greg and I collected ourselves and our belongings, and made it back to the car and away, with dignity. I would like to tell you that, but I’m sure you realize that that’s not what happened. I mean, we were already there.

I never saw Greg again after that night. But it was still the best concert I ever went to.

"...a world so hateful some would rather die than be who they are. And a certificate on paper isn't gonna solve it all, but it's a damn good place to start. No law is gonna change us, we have to change us. Whatever God you believe in, we come from the same One.

Strip away the fear, underneath it's all the
Same Love.
About time that we raised up."

Mission: H2O

I am looking for the humor in my own situation.

The average influenza virus, according to Google, is approximately 130 nanometers in size. That is, approximately 130 one-millionths of a millimeter. That means that you could line about 139,000 of the little bastards across the diameter of one thin U.S. dime. That is pretty small. Unimaginably small, as a matter of fact. It somehow doesn’t seem right that something so unimaginably small can fuck a human being up so completely.

Trying to pinpoint the moment when the little fiends found their way into the sanctity of your body is just about impossible. Out of the hundreds of seemingly innocuous daily activities: answering telephones, turning doorknobs, flushing toilets, or kissing a friend hello, or maybe even just having a conversation; it only took one. One opportunity for that 130-nanometer little shit to take its shot and move on in to the Land of Milk and Honey which is You; and your life is about to change completely, at least for a few days.

Things which were of monumental importance to you yesterday will vanish completely from your priorities. Gotta get those whites washed? Ha! Need to check those spreadsheets on the Henderson account? Fuck the Hendersons. At this point, the world is lucky if you can stand up long enough to crank the thermostat up to 80°.

Now, the most basic and perfunctory activities, things we do every day without thinking about them or giving them much effort, become the most colossal and often impossible tasks. The thought of standing at a mirror and shaving your face, for example, is so absurd that it is almost laughable. As is going to the kitchen to prepare something to eat; but that’s okay really, because the thought of actually consuming food is about as far from your mind as taking a Jazzercise class. Basically, any activity which requires you to be upright longer than one or two minutes and which isn’t immediately essential for basic human survival is pretty much out of the question.

And somehow, that 130 one-millionths of a millimeter-sized invader has the power to alter the passage of time. Days pass by like hours, you can practically watch the shadows move across your walls as they whiz by. Hours pass like minutes: is it 6:00am or 6:00pm? God forbid you have to sit down and catch your breath on the way to the bathroom; before you know it, you’ve been sitting on an ottoman with your nose running and staring at a dust bunny in the corner for 25 minutes.

The scenario: you’re in bed. You awaken to find you are thirsty. This is what happens when you are well:

Get out of bed. Go to kitchen. Get drink. Return to bed.

Elapsed time: no more than 90 seconds.

This is what you experience when some bastard sneezed on a pen last week and handed it to you to sign something:

“Oh my god. I am so thirsty. My tongue is so huge. Is that even my tongue? Terminal fucking cotton-mouth. I must get water. This is going to be really, really hard. I better rest up for it.”

At this point, your brain settles in for a nice long soak in the 101° crock-pot which your body has become. Numbly, you sink into the Lucy-In-The-Sky type of dreams which fever induces: marshmallow skies, tangerine horses and there, that beautiful luscious, flowing river of ice water, no, Pepsi! Yes, yes, it’s right there, so cold and so wet, and you raise that giant scallop shell full of liquid heaven to your lips and quench, quench…

And then the clock chimes in the other room and you wake up, realizing it was all just a dream and you are still dying of thirst. Okay, this is going to require real action. That beautiful river of Pepsi was just an illusion. I’m going to have to get up, get to the kitchen, and get myself a glass of water. It can’t really be that hard. As a matter of fact, it’s such a simple thing that I’m going to be able to actually do it. Pretty soon.

Now, a mission such as this one requires three things. The first thing is courage. Not because there is anything scary or inherently dangerous in your apartment between the bedroom and the kitchen. It requires courage because you know full well that everywhere outside of this little cocoon you have created for yourself, it is numbingly, bone-chillingly cold. Somehow, that microscopic little virus inside your body has managed to alter the very air around your body. Your skin will break out into goosebumps and you will begin shivering uncontrollably the moment you are exposed to the air outside your covers, despite the fact that the thermostat says 79° and the dog’s tongue is hanging out. So, you have to work up some courage, as if you were about to jump into a freezing river to save a drowning litter of kittens type of thing.

The second thing you need is a plan.

“Okay, so once I’m exposed to the cold outside and I’m upright, I know I’ve only got so much time. Two minutes, tops, before we reach system failure. Gotta plan this out right. Step one: gotta get the bathrobe. Where the hell is it? Back of the door. Holy shit, that’s like 3, 4 feet away from the bed. I could be exposed for 10, 20 seconds at a distance like that. That’s okay, I can do this. I just have to get out of the bed on the side closest to the door. Which way am I facing now? Fuck, this is so hard.” And so on.

And third, you need the strength to accomplish your goals.

“Alright. Got my plan. Time to move out. One. Two. Three. Hang on, just one more minute. One two three. Shit! Why can’t I move my arms?”

At this point, you realize that in the past few hours, or minutes, or seconds, or whatever unit of time it’s been, in your tossing and turning and rolling over in attempt after vain attempt to get comfortable, you have managed to roll yourself into a kind of human burrito and you have pinned your own arms to your sides. God, this is going to be even harder than you thought.

Eventually, though, with much effort and great resolve, you manage to extricate yourself from your percale prison. Sit upright, feet hit the floor, let’s do this thing.

“Oh my god it’s cold out here. Where are my glasses? Screw it, I don’t need to see anything. Bathrobe. OK. Got the bathrobe. Where the fuck do my arms go in this thing?” Three and a half minutes later you have finally managed to put your bathrobe on.

“So cold. The bathrobe helps. This hood is the best. I love this bathrobe so much. Now, to the kitchen. No need to raise my head, I know where the kitchen is. I wonder what time it is. I wonder what day it is. What am I doing again? Oh yeah, going to the kitchen. Wait, there’s the thermostat, what is the heat on? 82°? That can’t be right. I’m turning it up.”

“OK, heading to the kitchen. Must get vessel for water. Better use something plastic, my grip’s not the best right now. Can’t see a fucking thing, should have put my glasses on. There, that green blob, I think that’s a plastic cup.”

“Alright, got my cup. Water. Sweet, liquid, refreshing water. Inside fridge.”
At this point, you need to give yourself just one more little boost of courage, as you realize that opening the door to that refrigerator and sticking your face inside of it will be somewhat akin to running buck naked through a blast freezer.

“Oh my god I’m freezing. Fill, damn you! Fill that goddam cup!” And after an eternity of 5 seconds, the cup is finally full. Your goal is within your grasp. You raise that green blob up to your mouth and drink. As the water flows through your mouth, over your swollen tongue and down your parched throat, you can practically hear the little dehydrated cells in your body cry out in joy as they soak in that beautiful water and spring back to life like a dried out old kitchen sponge.

Sweet relief. Now, just fill the cup one more time. Five more seconds in the blast freezer. You can do this. You’re shivering and half the water is sloshing out of the cup onto the floor, but you could not possibly care less about that. Cup full. Back to bed.

Shivering, aching, functionally blind and semi-hallucinating, but fully hydrated, you shuffle your way back to the bedroom.

“I’m leaving the bathrobe on. That’s one less thing I’ll have to think about next time.”

You fall into bed, face first, pulling all your assorted bed sheets, comforters, blankets on top of you as you do, moaning half in pain and half in relief that you are back safe in your little sweat-filled cocoon. Just before you go back to sleep, you reach over and drain the green plastic cup on the nightstand, ensuring that the next time you wake up thirsty, you will have to repeat this entire process over again.

Elapsed time: two and a half hours.

“Oh, shit. Now I have to pee.”

REMEMBERING TIM

(originally posted on Facebook on Sept. 25, 2012)

Today would have been the 52nd birthday of a very dear friend of mine, Tim Leist. There are precious few people left in my life who remember Tim, or even knew me during that time period, for that matter, although many people hear me talk about Tim. The fact is, that for a period of my life, about 1979-1988, Tim and I were practically joined at the hip; he and I were practically inseparable and he had a profound influence on my life.
I first met Tim around 1979, when I was a senior in high school. Fresh-faced, 17, and just exploring the whole “gay scene”, Tim was dating a friend of mine named PJ, and the moment we were introduced it was like one of those “haven’t we met before? I swear I know you” moments; but of course, at 17 moments like that fly past almost unnoticed. At any rate, a few weeks later, it was a Friday or Saturday night, and I was stranded out at my parents’ house in the suburbs. I had Tim’s number, knew his mom lived nearby in Loch Raven, and thought maybe he was heading downtown to “the clubs”. What do you know, he was. Of course we just had a ball together and thus began a great friendship.
For the next 8 years or so, Tim and I shared our lives together. We were never lovers, nothing physical ever happened between the two of us (like “sleeping with your sister”, we used to say), but we shared just about everything else. We lived together off and on, helped each other through bad relationships (although I was totally jealous of Tim for some of the boyfriends he used to score!), job situations, you name it; but most of all, and you’ll pardon my French, we had a fucking blast together. Put it all in context: two young guys, set loose in the wild world of the early 1980s- the glitz, the glamour, the decadence, the drugs, the booze, man we did it all. At least, I think we did. That’s how I remember it, anyway. If you knew Tim, you would know that I could have had no better companion to take me through the world of High Fashion Nightclubs, exclusive restaurants, parties on yachts; and no better friend than he to be able to look at, possibly too buzzed to speak aloud, and with a smile and a flash of the eye, say to one another, “Oh my fucking god, girl, this is fabulous! I can’t believe I’m really here!”. We traveled every chance we could, hopped the train from DC to NYC for a weekend of legendary nightclubs like the Saint, (the original Saint, that is), the Palladium, Crisco Disco, Boy Bar, the Ice Palace, and on and on. What a blast.
Many people can remember things like the best meal they ever had, or the longest they have gone without electricity, things like that. One thing I can remember is the hardest I have ever laughed in my entire life, something that I hope everyone can remember. Of course, it was with Tim. The year was about 1985, it was early in the year, which would have made me about 22 and Tim about 24. We were living in DC, and were planning the first of our two trips to New Orleans for Mardi Gras.
We had decided, of course, to go to Mardi Gras in costume, and our costumes were to be 1950s Prom Queens. Now, we are talking “Homecoming Queen’s Got a Gun” type Prom Queens: big huge fluffy multi-crinolined, strapless ball gowns with the whale-boned bodice, humongous high hair, opera-length gloves and of course a tiara. Everything on that list was very easily obtained in Washington, DC in 1985.
Back then there was a store called Classic Clothing, a great Vintage place. They had a huge warehouse just outside the city where you could dig through piles and piles of old clothes and then buy what you wanted by the pound. But, they also had a shop in Georgetown where all the best stuff got sent, and that was where we decided to go to buy our prom dresses. Now, DC in 1985 was fairly progressive, at least in neighborhoods like Georgetown, so the sight of two guys browsing through poofy prom gowns at a vintage shop was not particularly scandalous. It may have been better received around Halloween, but Mardi Gras was quite early that year so this was probably February or early March. Tim and I never gave a fuck about what people thought anyway, so it really didn’t make a difference.
Anyway, we both picked out a gown or two to try on and we both piled into one dressing room. I want to say that Tim had picked out a purple one, but it may have been robins’ egg-blue because, knowing me, I probably had the purple one. So there we were, giggling, having a good time trying on big, poofy prom dresses at Classic Clothing. Now, Tim was never fat, but we could say that he was a little bit bigger-boned than me. So, it might not have been the best idea for Tim, when he decided to try to remove the prom dress by flipping it up and pulling it over his head, pulling the dress inside-out as he went, like some bizarre self-peeling purple crinoline banana. And neither of us should have been surprised when the whole operation came to a halt as the prom gown became irretrievably stuck- the whale bones and Tim’s own bones were locked in a Mexican Standoff that no one was going to win.
I’m not sure when my laughter began. I can still see in my mind’s eye, Tim, bent at the waist, flailing about; tightey-whiteys at one end and some deranged Sid & Marty Croft Purple Petticoat Monster at the other flipping around and screaming for me to help him. I, of course, was completely useless, having been completely incapacitated by the type of laughter that had tears streaming down my face and my sides absolutely aching. Not to mention that I was not quite put together myself when this all started, so I had to remain in the dressing room with the Petticoat Monster, laughing uncontrollably until I was presentable enough to exit the dressing room and cross through the store into the street to the bewildered expressions of everyone in the place. Finally, after a few minutes outside, I composed myself enough to go back in, but by then Tim had somehow extricated himself from his prison of Tulle, no thanks to me. Unperturbed, we continued shopping and eventually bought two other gowns at that very store.
To this day, when I think of Tim, I think of that evening in Georgetown all those years ago. This is the kind of joy I want to remember him for.
Today, on Tim’s birthday, I am reminded of one other story. It was the last birthday we would ever share in each other’s company. It was 1987, and Tim and I had just shared my very first summer in Provincetown. P’Town had worked its magic on me, but it was time to head back to DC and take care of business and move on to the next thing. It was Tim’s birthday, and it was our last day in Provincetown. Tim’s mom, Julia, was coming to pick us up and bring us back to Washington. But, seeing as it was Tim’s birthday, she was taking us for a couple of nights’ stay in Atlantic City along the way. Now, I could go on about my opinion of Atlantic City, but that is for another day. Suffice to say that Atlantic City is no Las Vegas.
Now, Tim’s mom, Julia, was a lovely woman whom I adored. She was from West Virginia and had just enough of that Appalachian twang in her voice to be charming; loved ballroom dancing, and had her hair put up and a blue rinse once a week at the beauty parlor. But perhaps her booking a room for us through AARP at the fabulous Best Western, a few blocks off the boardwalk, didn’t quite jibe with our “Dynasty-Wednesdays-I-Must-Live-Like-Alexis” sensibility. Tim and I just looked at each other and shrugged when everyone in the lobby as we checked in was either asleep, in a HoverRound, or had an oxygen tank.
Like most gay people, Tim and I had a very acute “Gaydar”, even back then; the ability to find the gay people and the gay places in any given city, almost without any guidance. So, that evening, after supper, Tim and I said goodnight to Julia and set out on the real-life Monopoly board that is Atlantic City in search of a couple of cocktails. Gaydar don’t fail me now. But all to no avail. Up and down, back and forth we walked, past the glitzy, big-money casinos and everything else (which is to say, slums), searching for a gay bar. Nothing.
Finally, I spotted a hooker on a street corner nearby. She looked like Margot Kidder if Margot Kidder went for 4 days chain-smoking Winston Lights and not eating. “Honey, are there any gay bars in this town?” I asked her, and she directed me to a place called the Rendezvous Lounge. For full effect, I should spell it “Ronday-voo Lounge”.
Before long, Tim & I found ourselves at the Rendezvous, and to make a long story short, the Rendezvous Lounge still figures in the Top 3 most divey bars I have ever been in in my life. One entered through a long corridor, which eventually opened into a dark, depressing interior. The walls and ceiling were covered from top to bottom in really cheesy 1970s soft-core porn: guys with bad perms and tube socks who had been shellacked there some time during the Carter administration.
At the time, our cocktail of choice was a Madras, made from vodka, cranberry juice, and orange juice. We both ordered one. Apparently, orange juice was far too exotic an ingredient for the Ronday-voo, because what we got was vodka, something red, and Orange Crush from the soda gun. So, Tim and I smiled, clinked our plastic cups together, and I wished Tim a happy birthday, with our crappy drinks in a horrible bar in a miserable city. But we were smiling, with one another and having fun, knowing that quite likely, one of us would be telling this story one day.
Happy Birthday, old friend.

LITTLE GREEN MEN

I saw a UFO.

There, I said it. I said it and I meant it. What I saw was undoubtedly an object, it was unquestionably flying, and I have no idea what it actually was, so it was definitely a Unidentified Flying Object. Oh, and it was, like, almost 40 years ago because I was about 11 years old at the time.

I have come out of this particular closet before. “I saw a UFO when I was a kid” was one of the top 5 things I listed on “20 Random Things About Me” back when I joined Facebook sometime during the last decade. I have brought it up a few times in casual conversation, too. Over the years, though, I have learned that if you’re at a cocktail party, for instance, and you start a story, “I once woke up in an ATM in Mount Vernon after we went to a Grace Jones concert and bought a whole bunch of ‘ludes from this guy named Disco Donny,” people will laugh and think you’re urbane and sophisticated. But if you start a story by saying, “I saw a UFO once,” people will just think you’re crazy or some kind of conspiracy theorist. Well, maybe that’s actually more a function of the kind of cocktail parties I go to. At any rate, once they learn that it happened when you were a kid, they think you just made the whole thing up anyway.

So I am “coming out” again as Someone Who Saw a UFO. Now, don’t assume that I think that the object was being piloted by little green men. I don’t know that. As a matter of fact, I don’t know anything at all about that darned UFO except for what I remember about seeing it.

What I remember is this: It was during the school year, because I remember that very day, we had learned in science class about the life of stars. What I remembered was the Supernova, which is the last explosion of brilliance from a dying star just before it goes out, kind of like the old tube TV sets that were around when I was a kid. When you switched them off, the screen would collapse down into one tiny spot of light at the center of the screen, which would hang there for a moment before finally blinking off.

Now, when you’re a kid, you really don’t know whether the neighborhood you’re growing up in is a good neighborhood or a bad neighborhood. It’s really the only neighborhood you know, so you don’t really know or even realize whether another neighborhood might be a better place to grow up in. For myself, though, as the years have gone by, I have been able to look back and reflect, and come to realize that the place I grew up in was a pretty great place to be a kid. We lived in a little subdivision called Villa Nova, a sweet, tidy little neighborhood of quirky mid-century style homes plopped right down next to Tudor Revival, brick Colonial, and all kinds of other styles of homes. The yards were well maintained and big enough to play in, and there were plenty of other kids around for playmates. Our house was only the second house in from an intersection, and on the other side of the intersection our street only continued for a few dozen more yards before ending at a dead end. The dead end was long enough for five or six houses on each side, and at the end of the road was a small, privately owned farm named Pahl’s Farm which covered maybe 40 or 50 acres. Since cars rarely had any cause to drive up the dead end side of the street, the neighborhood kids would often congregate there to play Capture the Flag or some other game, or just to hang out. Cleverly, we called it The Dead End, as in, “Ma! We’re going up to the Dead End!”

So, one night, we were up at the Dead End just hanging out. It was already dark. I’m not sure how many of us were there. My brother was there, I think, “Robbie” Landau might have been there, and I do remember my friend Chris Rehm being there. He lived right across the street from Robbie and his parents spoke German. I seem to remember some girls being there, but for the life of me I can’t remember who they might have been. All tolled, I think it was about six or eight of us. Now, at the far side of Pahl’s Farm, at the horizon, was a neatly planted little grove of pine trees, which we kids shrewdly used to call “The Pine Trees”. This was where a lot of teenagers would go to make out and smoke “grass”. I was too young for either of those things at the time. Anyway, we looked out to the horizon, and we noticed a really bright white light, just sort of suspended over the Pine Trees. By age 11 I had already grown into my lifetime role as “Know-It-All”, so as we stood there staring at this bright white light off in the distance, I announced that we were indeed looking at a Supernova. Thankfully, nobody paid me much attention.

Then, it appeared that the Supernova began to rise. That was a trick of perspective, because the light was actually moving towards us. I don’t remember how long it took, but we all stood there, watching, until whatever it was flew right over our heads. The way I remember it, the “Supernova” turned out to be a very bright light in the front of the “craft”, which was diamond-shaped. At each of the other corners of the diamond was a single light, each in a different color. I don’t exactly remember what colors they were or how they were arranged, but somehow, the primary colors of red, blue, and yellow seem correct to me. I’ve always been a terrible judge of distance and dimension, but I can say that it was pretty big, maybe 150 to 200 feet from the light in the front to the light in the back. It flew right over our heads, not much higher than the treetops, maybe 100 or 150 feet in the air, completely silent. The only other thing I remember is Mr. Pahl, who owned the farm at the end of the road, being there for some reason, looking up and saying, “What the hell…?”; and I thought to myself that if a grown-up didn’t know what this was, than it must be something extraordinary.

So, Chris Rehm and I ran down to our house, and asked my mom to turn on the radio. We had this very mid-century split-level house, and the radio was built into the kitchen wall as part of the ultra-modern, ultra-convenient intercom system which never really worked right. We tuned in to WBAL AM60, pretty much the only radio station I knew existed. I imagine after a while of listening to hits of the day like “Theme from The Sting” and “Winchester Cathedral” when no newsflash about Unidentified Flying Objects over Baltimore came, we probably got bored and went back up to the Dead End to hang out.

I waited, over the next few days, to hear something in the news or read something in the paper about what we had seen that night, but nothing ever came of it. So, over time, life went on and the memory was filed away, overtaken by concerns like math tests and projects for Social Studies.

So, where does this leave me? Oddly enough, what I end up taking away most from the whole experience has been an open mind. I have never taken anybody’s word for it when I have been told that certain things don’t exist or other things are “impossible”. To paraphrase the Bard, there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your Philosophy. I have never really made up my mind about what it is I saw. It was probably not little green men, but I won’t say for sure that it wasn’t.

At this point in my life, the other thing I take away from this experience mostly, is questions. And they have nothing to do, really, with UFOs. My questions are about my own memories. I ask myself, when my mind wanders to that night, whether my memories are correct, or sometimes even real. Did I just watch an airplane fly overhead and project a fantasy onto it? Were there really other kids around? Did it happen the way I remember it happening? Did it happen at all? These are hard questions to ask yourself, because if you start questioning your own memory, your own life experience, then you have to start questioning your own perception and the picture of the world which you have drawn for yourself. Thoughts like that come perilously close to staring into the abyss.

Therefore, I have to accept that my memories are correct. I have had this memory ever since that night. That is to say, it’s not like I forgot about it and then one day recovered this suppressed memory when I was 25. So I know that it didn’t come to me in a dream or anything like that. So I accept that this happened to me. And in some small way, the experience of that evening, those 5 or 10 minutes of my childhood, has helped to shape me into the somewhat wacky person I have become. The guy who hasn’t completely written off the little green men.

CONFESSIONS of a GRAMMAR NAZI

I can pretty much pinpoint the moment I started giving a fuck about grammar. I mean, Grammar Nazis are made, not born, don’t you think? Nobody really crawls around in their playpen caring about dangling participles and split infinitives. But at some point, some small number of us, myself included, morph into those annoying people who you hear saying things like, “Oh my god, did you see that? They totally misspelled the word “clearance” on that sign!” We become Grammar Nazis.

For me it happened in freshman year of high school. Looking back now, I can see that this English teacher I had was probably not that long out of high school himself, and he looked like he could have been Bob Dylan’s twin brother. Anyway, one day, he challenged us to have a lucid thought, any lucid thought, without using language. For me, at least, the task was, and is, impossible. I mean, I’m sure I could reach that point, after a few years of saffron robes and contemplation of the navel. But basically, the seed was planted: thought = language, so therefore, the more precise and correct the language, the more precise and correct the thoughts. That’s the logic, anyway, although I’m not sure that my ability to use the word “puerile” in a sentence allows me to think any more precisely than anyone else. Nevertheless, that was the moment, the birth of another Grammar Nazi.

Of course, one learns rather quickly that almost nobody likes being corrected for any reason; and being corrected for poor grammar is way down on the list. So not everyone knows of our obsession. Significant others, more often than not, have to hear it as we critique spelling, punctuation, and grammar on signs, billboards, television, you name it. After a while, they pretty much just turn their heads just a little bit and roll their eyes when we start screaming, “No! It’s “This is she,” not “her!” So, over the years we learn to keep it to ourselves, to mask our horror as we watch our Mother Tongue get blithely mangled and beaten, degenerated to the point where using one’s thumbs to type out “OMG ROTFL” constitutes writing a letter, and pseudo-words like “tonite” or “thru” have become totally acceptable.

But each of us still harbor those “Cardinal Sins”, those offenses which will have us shuddering as we overhear a conversation at a diner or as we are trapped at the in-law’s, watching reruns of “BJ and the Bear”. These are my Top 4.

1) “Very unique” Nope, you just can’t say that. “Unique” is what is called a “singular” adjective, meaning that something either is, or isn’t. There are very few singular adjectives, but they are there. “Unique” is one. Something is either unique, or it isn’t unique. There is no “sort of unique”. “Dead” is singular. As is “perfect”. We can’t all go around saying things like “very perfect”, or we’ll all sound like one of those bubble headed blonde beauty queens who, like, gets sort of lost in mid-sentence and ends up rambling about Guatemalan orphans and “opposite marriage”.

2) “Momentarily” “Momentarily” is indeed a word, but it doesn’t really mean what people seem to think it means. It does not mean “in a moment.” “Momentarily” means something that only happens for a brief period of time, as in: “I was momentarily speechless at the enormity of your ignorance.” You do not want to hear things like: “Ladies and gentlemen, the pilot has notified us that we will be lifting off momentarily.” The only way I know of to express the idea of “in a moment” is to actually use the words “in a moment”. That is, unless there is a 3-letter acronym for “in a moment” for use while texting your BFF.

3) “Irregardless” This is not a word. Please do not use it. If it were a word, it would be a double-negative anyway, so it would be a bad word. But it is not a word at all.

4) “How may I help you?” The main reason I hate this phrase, other than the fact that it’s grammatically imperfect, is entirely personal. A few years ago, I worked for a grocery chain called Grand Union. They’re sort of quaint and old-timey in the American lexicon of grocery stores, like A&P or the IGA. Anyway, it was printed, right there on our name tags. Right there, below my name, it said “How may I help you?” Now, if they had said, “How can I help you?”, that would have been fine. Or even, “May I help you?”, without the word ‘how’ would have been OK. But not “How may I help you.” Don’t force me to wear it on my chest. Even though I am the only person in the store who has any idea that this is not good English. So that phrase has earned its way into my list of Deadly Sins.

It did feel good to get some of that off my chest. Confession, they say, is good for the soul. Of course, I am notorious for errors of my own. I am fully aware of my frequent abuse of the semicolon, and the purist would no doubt be horrified by my flagrant misuse of quotation marks in the previous four paragraphs alone. So there could be another Grammar Nazi reading this, shuddering and cringing the whole time. But for now, I can go back to my quiet, internalized life, quietly proofreading Chinese restaurant menus and homemade placards at Tea Party rallies. At least, momentarily.

PARIS par mes yeux

I’ve been sort of wondering how I should go ahead and write about my trip to Paris. The obvious thing, I think, would be to sort of tell the story as it happened, chronologically. But Paris was so much more than a series of events, or even a series of places or tourist attractions, I’m not sure telling it that way would do it justice. What I left Paris with, more than a story with a start and a finish, is a myriad of impressions, of all my senses; including my sense of humour and my sense of dramatic imperative. If Paris were a perfume, they would have to work hard to incorporate the notes of roasting chestnuts (which is actually kind of gross, if you ask me) along with cigarette smoke and the overwhelming scent of some indescribably delicious baked good which could be emanating from any one of a dozen storefronts nearby. If Paris were a sound, it would be that particularly irritating European two-tone ambulance siren, but it would also be the sound of French-Algerian hip-hop, and the sound of the word “bonjour!”. The taste of Paris: for me, strong coffee, onion soup, and that really sweet white wine I ordered by mistake. For the eyes, of course, a feast; but mostly for me it’s wide, luxurious boulevards, lined by those particularly Parisian sandstone-colored buildings with their dark slate-colored roofs and ornately embellished facades. But it’s also the flash of gold leaf in the sun, the letter “N” (placed there everywhere by the biggest egomaniac in history: Napoleon), and your first glimpse of the Eiffel Tower. Paris is a city of contrasts.

It has been said by many that Paris is the most beautiful city in the world. Debatable, to be sure. In my own personal scorecard, Venice still beats Paris as most beautiful. But, Venice is a city which is frozen in time. There are no cars there, and the Venice of today doesn’t look a whole lot different than the Venice of 500 years ago. Paris, on the other hand, is a modern, vibrant, living and lively city where the beauty of yesteryear lives side by side with the beauty of today, and the reality of today, which is sometimes not so beautiful. The Eiffel Tower is beautiful the way it was built 130 years ago, but it’s also beautiful lit up as it only could be in the 21^st century.

Traveling to Europe, Mark and I have found, the best way to beat jet-lag is to overcome your fatigue on the day you arrive, and try your best to stay awake until the local bedtime. This trip was no exception.

We were staying in the Paris district know as “The Marais”. In “the 3^rd”. People who have been to Paris will know what that means. In the future, whenever anyone I know is going to Paris, I will tell them that they should stay in that neighborhood. Steps to everything, Metro stations, restaurants, nightclubs, ancient monuments. After we dropped off our luggage, having survived the obligatory hair-raising Parisian taxi ride from the airport, we decided to embark on our usual exploration on foot. We determined the direction of the Arc de Triomphe, and started walking in that direction.

You know how when you get a magazine, you’ll usually flip through the whole thing from front to back really fast and just sort of glance at the pictures, before starting over and actually reading the articles? Well, this sort of describes our first day in Paris. It was no more than 10 minutes after leaving our building, I turned my head and there was Notre Dame Cathedral. A few minutes later, we found ourselves at the gardens of the Tuileries, an enormous park at the entrance to the Louvre. Before I knew it, my feet were treading on the famous Champs Elysées. I was looking at Cleopatra’s Needle, and the unbelievably huge Arc de Triomphe. And all within and hour and a half of our feet hitting the sidewalks of Paris. Of course, the first few hours in a new city are always kind of nerve-wracking, particularly a city where they speak a different language. So, even though we were strolling down the Champs Elysées and admiring the Arc de Tiomphe, on one level we were still very much the weary travelers, who had been awake for 22 hours and really had no idea where we were or what we were doing. We had yet to make that singularly most fear-inducing transaction: Ordering Food in a Restaurant. And, as is apt to happen when, as I said, one really doesn’t know where one is or what one is doing, we ultimately made a bad choice when it came to where we should eat, and, for that matter, what to order. But, we did make it through the meal without the waiter scoffing at us or throwing change, and although the food wasn’t very good we at least left the restaurant with a general idea of how things work and the knowledge that we would indeed be able to muddle through.

So, after a meal where I ate half of a nauseating Croque Monsieur and Mark learned the valuable lesson of what it means when the French label a mustard as “strong”, we started to make our way back to the Marais and to our apartment. Now, there was an ancient Irish saint named St. Brendan the Navigator way back during the Dark Ages, but since that time the Irish have not really been known for their navigational skills. So it should come as no surprise that I ended up getting us fairly well lost on our way home. Before I knew it, we had been walking for what felt like hours and we found ourselves at Gare de l’Est. When I asked a kind lady how to get to our street, she exclaimed (in French, of course) “Oh no, that’s too far to walk, you must take the Metro!” Nevertheless, we determined the general direction in which we were supposed to be heading and walked anyway, finally finding our apartment and collapsing, exhausted. Soon thereafter, we decided that 7:30 Paris time was close enough to bedtime, skipped that evening’s episode of Ordering Food in a Restaurant, and slept, ready to start the next day and really start reading the articles.

We were joined the next day by my friend Gary, who had been delayed because of bad weather. So we were three, and each of us had a list of “must-see” places and things. It was a pretty long list, so the next few days were spent in a whirlwind of sightseeing, picture-taking, people-watching, and, of course, Ordering Food in Restaurants. But at the same time, it’s just about opening your eyes and ears and trying to absorb it all, this whole Being in Paris thing, trying to be a Tourist and a Traveler simultaneously.

I have great moments to remember. The freak hailstorm that came down as we were on the first level of the Eiffel Tower, kids were laughing and the cacophony of a million golf balls pelting a huge iron tower all at once. The moment when my friend Gary got pickpocketed by a couple of “Gypsy” kids in the Marais: maybe not a great moment, per se, but it sure will make for great storytelling, which is surely worth $100 sometimes. I think my favorite Paris “moment”, though, was one afternoon when Mark and I were riding the Metro. A small, kind looking man stepped on and said in a loud but totally-not-panhandling way, “Mesdames et Messieurs, bonsoir, et bon voyage,” and began playing the accordion. It was the soundtrack to every black and white MGM romance ever set in Paris, some sweet French ballad as familiar to every Frenchman as “Misty” is to us, as identifiably Parisian as a dijeridoo is Australian. But this was real, this was Paris, as I rode along on the Metro with a slight smile across my face.

Our lists included, of course, things like The Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Versailles, and Notre Dame, and we did all those things and more. First on the list was the Eiffel Tower, which included two minor sub-categories: Riding the Metro and Standing in Long Lines. Riding the Metro went OK, once we mastered the technique of buying a ticket, which involved not only Foreign Language, but computer know-how, as well as a little bit of Why-the-Fuck-Won’t-My-Credit-Card-Work. Once we figured all that out, it was a breeze. The Eiffel Tower was cool, an obligatory stop, it seems, for any tourist in Paris. What I will remember most about the Eiffel Tower is its size. Seeing pictures of it in books, movies, magazines, and everywhere else, you really don’t get a sense of its scale. It’s huge. Bigger than you ever imagined. As were the lines to go up. We could either wait in a huge line to walk up the stairs, or an enormously huge line to ride in an elevator. We opted for the merely huge line and walked up the stairs. Just getting to the first level is the equivalent of walking up 21 stories, and I thought poor Mark was either going to throw up or have a heart attack halfway up.

At the Louvre, the lines weren’t quite as bad, and we pretty much made a beeline for the Mona Lisa, like half the other tourists in the place. There we were, whizzing down corridors filled with priceless treasures: sculptures from Ancient Rome, paintings by Old Masters and Renaissance geniuses, more Blessed Virgins than Carter’s got pills, following the signs for Italian Painters and “La Joconde”. The famous “Winged Victory” stands majestically at the top of a staircase as people zip by with their IPhones in full-on camera mode. We crowded into the Holy of Holies, the room housing the Mona Lisa, we behind a crowd of onlookers about 5 deep, and she behind a thick sheet of presumably indestructible Plexiglas. Now, I have been fortunate enough to have traveled in my lifetime, and I have seen some things which we have all seen in history books and magazines and so forth for all of our lives. Some of them are truly awe-inspiring. Seeing the Acropolis in Greece, for instance, or the Coliseum in Rome. When I saw Michelangelo’s David in Florence, I knew why it was the most famous statue in the world. But for the life of me, I don’t see what all the fuss is about the Mona Lisa. Nice painting. Famous artist. But I’ve been frankly more impressed by stuff I’ve seen at the Walters art museum in Baltimore.

Seeing Versailles was an experience. We were originally going to opt for the guided tour thing, and made our way one morning to the tourist agency. The lady there was super nice, and explained to me in very clearly enunciated, slow textbook American-Public-School French that they were sold out, but we could get there by ourselves using the trains. I only include this bit of narrative because I was soon impressed by my own ability to understand everything this lady said to me, and successfully found our way to the proper train station, the proper train, and ultimately to Versailles! This was in sharp contrast to most other occasions, when I would try to address the person in what I thought was perfectly pronounced French and they would inevitably reply to me in English. “Bonjour, pour trois personnes, s’il vous plaît.” “Certainly sir, right this way please!”

But I digress. Versailles. How does one describe Versailles? Take the most opulent thing you can think of, and then multiply that by fifty thousand. Double that amount and add twelve. That begins to describe Versailles. Everything is gilded, sculpted, painted, frescoed, or covered in rich fabrics. The gardens go on forever. To walk from the entrance to the gardens to the end in a straight line would take an hour. And that’s in just one direction! Endless overstated luxury and ostentation. On the one hand, it was amazing to look at and beautiful, but at the same time it made one mindful of why the French had a revolution. I mean, no wonder they ended up chopping off all the heads of the Aristocracy when they were living like this as people were starving in the streets.

What else will I take with me from Paris? I will remember the hours we strolled through the famous Père-Lachaise cemetery. I’ve always been drawn to old cemeteries and this one is a doozy. I loved just wandering around, discovering the cool sculptures and darkly beautiful atmosphere, but also the rare experience of peace and tranquility in the middle of Paris. I will remember visiting a huge Paris flea market, in “the 18^th”, which according to the guide book was “one of the poorer parts of town”. Looked pretty much like any other part of Paris, as far as I was concerned. Just as nice but maybe with less high-end retail shops and more community centers. I will remember the Parisians, seemingly impervious to cold or rain, sitting unflinchingly outside at the café smoking cigarettes and nursing a coffee for hours. I will remember the little pit-bull puppy who only wanted to lick the face of a poor beggar sitting on the sidewalk. The beggar, by the way, wanted nothing to do with the puppy. And laughing with the waiter who said that he had been speaking English to us for two hours, now he must insist that Gary order his dessert in French, forcing Gary to suffer his way through it.

So, there are many things that I will take with me from Paris. A sense of style, a sense of history, a sense of romance, and a sense of a people who don’t take life too fast, or too seriously. A taste for the good things in life. It was an experience I will treasure forever.