William 4.0: In Beta Testing

Different Truck, Same Loser - The Wreckers (mp3)
Different Girl - Daisy McCrackin (mp3)

In a friendly and traditional debate with my hard-right in-laws over Thanksgiving, my in-law proclaimed that this country had lost its way and that she was soon bound for another land, presumably a more conservative land where King Scalia and Queen Bachmann ruled and no one ever wanted for anything, because everyone in this land took care of themselves and shot only non-human animals and home invaders with machine guns, and no one needed public education or insurance.

She concluded that I was an ideologue. That is, someone whose views are unwavering, unchanging, and stubbornly or stupidly so, apparently based on my belief that tomato paste is not a vegetable because tomatoes are a fruit.

A few weeks back, I got into a fairly heated private debate on Facebook with a former elementary school classmate. (Only on Facebook, right?) We debated education, cost, and ways to best affect change. But mostly it was me calling her out, and her offering the implied comeback that I was a provincial “homer” compared to her worldly and evolved self.

Toward the end of her concluding retort back to me, she wrote, “I am a changed woman,” following it with all the ways she was clearly a different entity than the version I knew when we were kids and then teenagers.

Are my views unchanging? Am I unchanging?

Is change actually evitable?

I look different in photos than I did when I was in seventh grade. Different than when I turned 21. I'm pretty sure the differences went deeper than my epidermis. Maturity, spiritual beliefs, opinions on health insurance, whatever.

Is it even possible for people to stay the same? Do we just get older? Doesn’t that in and of itself count as change? Even the Matthew McConaughey character in Dazed and Confused, he of the wise words about “high school girls, man...” even he’s not the same guy he was in high school, no matter how desperately he wishes he were.

Twelve years ago, in my third year working at this school, I was a little bit restless, settling into the job and the place and grappling with the fact that I would soon be a first-time father. "Settling" was the operative word at the time, mostly in ways that induced a mild internal panic.

On the heels of two very popular talks to the student body and full of that youthful desperation to prove that anything was possible, I decided I wanted to pull the Evel Knievel of public speeches, the high school spoken-word equivalent of attempting to jump the Grand Canyon.

As the students took their seats, Chuck Berry’s “My Ding-a-Ling” would play over the speakers. Beginning with an exploration of famous pop songs on the subject, I would eventually delve into a wildly humorous discussion of the male need for masturbation.

I got 24 hours away from delivering this speech and was blocked -- some might say cock-blocked -- by several administrators. Despite their calm and amused explanations, I couldn’t understand. We all do it, right? We're not going to pretend guys don't, are we? The whole computer-and-porn thing made things more complicated than ever, right? So why the hell couldn’t I talk about it??

Thinking back on it cracks me up. How confident and certain I was of my daring, of my talent, of my ability to cross the onanistic river Styx unscathed! What the fuck was I thinking??

So, having pondered on politics and masturbation and time, I return to my elementary school classmate’s proclamation: “I am changed.”

Her words were not a proclamation about herself, but an accusation about me: “I am changed... (and ahem, you are not).” You are still that boy dressed like Samuel Gompers who plays tetherball at recess. You still live in the same town and have resided in the South most of your life. You attend the same church you did when you were six. You are the same.

More troubling, the very need to shout that claim, “I am changed,” is one of needling uncertainty. The chip remains glued on the shoulder and won’t budge. Much like someone who, while walking through the haunted house, keeps saying “I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid.”

Better to avoid such proclamations, such claims of difference or sameness. Instead, I'll go with the less debatable route: I am settled.

For now.

Burn Out or Fade Away

Summer - Buffalo Tom (mp3)
So Fast So Numb - R.E.M. (mp3)

Why do successful bands refuse to die?

In the annals of humanity, few stories are as repetitive and inevitable as this: that we rage, rage against the dying of the light. We’ve romanticized the notion so heavily that, even when we don’t have any energy left in us, and even when we don’t have any rage left in us, we still refuse to embrace the Grim Reaper.

One of my coworkers’ mothers is 78 years old and just underwent septuple bypass open-heart surgery. The doctors and family pondered over it for a day or two. Sure, the surgery might fail, or it might kill her, but she had a 75-80 percent chance of making it.

A decade earlier, she had just wanted to see her dear grandson get married. If she could just see him get married and happy on his wedding day, she would die a happy grandma. But he went and got married while she was still plenty healthy, three years ago. So the deal changed. Now she wanted to see that first great-grandchild. If she could just see that, she could die happy.

I’m a spry 40. It’s easy for me to look at people who have lived almost two of my lifetimes and proclaim that they should accept death as an inevitable part of life and get right with their divine creator rather than finding massively expensive medical measures just to delay what cannot be stopped.

My mother turns 70 this year. My cavalier and callous attitude towards death upsets her greatly. “I guess I used to think that way. I know I did,” she’d say, shaking her head. “But now that I’m getting closer and closer to death’s door, I guess I’m just not all that excited about opening it yet. There’s more to be done. I want to see my granddaughters graduate high school. And college. And maybe if I’m lucky I can see my great-grandchildren born. And I still have a lot to contribute to our church, and to our family. I’m just not ready yet. Not nearly as ready as I thought I’d be 30 years ago.”

In other words, when death is a distant relative in a foreign land, we’re cool with him. When death is a next-door neighbor, we rally the association and do our best to get his ass removed from the premises at all costs. Even if we know damn well he has a right to live there, and even as his dog continues taking regular shits in our rhododendrons.

Perhaps it’s unfair of me to expect bands to approach death differently.

Beady Eye is Oasis Minus Noel Gallagher. It’s a band trying to sound like a band whose entire raison d'être was to riff off and amplify THE band of all bands. Or, put another way, it’s a band that just doesn’t want to accept that maybe they were already better off dead several albums ago.

R.E.M. has a new album out. The critics are all praising it and claiming it’s the best thing they’ve done in 15 years, since their vastly under-appreciated New Adventures in Hi-Fi. But if you look closer at these critics’ statements, it says the following: this album is a compilation of some of their biggest highlights over the last two-thirds of their career! In other words, what they do great with this album is to sound a lot like they already have previously. In other words, why not just compile a Greatest Hits 1997-2011? (Same exact things were said by critics when U2 came out with All That You Can’t Leave Behind, by the way.)

If the best you can do, as a band, is skillfully simulate a sound and a feeling you already created, aren’t you a zombie or a Xerox machine already and just don't know it?

But the story of rock, the story of successful performers, is similar to old people in general. Mick Jagger and my mother say the same things with different words. The closer these bands get to death, the more they want just one more milestone, just one more little reminder that they’ve lived the good life and fought the good fight.

I bought that Beady Eye album. I’ll probably buy the R.E.M. album. I’ve purchased recent albums by the Hooters, the BoDeans and Buffalo Tom, too. The more like family they’ve been in my music collection, the more my babbles about accepting mortality fail to match my actions of helping to keep them alive.

When the fit hits the shan, nobody likes saying goodbye to a loved one.

Shart! (Shut Yo Mouth!)

Why Does it Always Rain On Me? - Travis (mp3)
Transformers (Theme) - Lion (mp3)

I recently sharted.

Yes, this confession breaks the first rule of Shart Club, but I had to get it off my chest.

Returning from an off-campus lunch and walking from my car's lovely shaded parking space to my office, I let out what is not an altogether out-of-routine post-lunch fart. It wasn't a big fart, In fact, it was one of those little baby farts so inconsequential in its build-up that you don't even slow down or stop walking. You just fart in-step. It's the fart equivalent of a speed bump that's been worn down so drastically that no one even lets off the gas. (Ha. I amuse myself.)

Except this was no mere fart.

The latest studies from the University of Alabama* suggest that some 98.4% of Americans have, at some point in their lives, sharted. This number excludes acts of "poopy pants" where infants and younger children crap in their pants either because they're too distracted by life to think about the toilet, and it also excludes "incontinence" where elderly people crap in their pants because dammit the egg timer moves a lot faster than it used to, and the bathroom's a long damn way from the living room.

Don't worry. Just because I know you've all sharted doesn't mean I'm going to expose your embarrassing secret to the world. In fact, it's perfectly OK with me if you vehemently deny ever having sharted. (But if you try and deny it too strongly, well, that's just annoying.)

In college, me and my male friends would sit around into the early morning hours sharing shart stories. But college males have little shame and find ways to make the most embarrassing and horrible moments into jokes. As I've mentioned before, I know a frat boy who took a dump on a brother's head, and it was a dude he actually liked. So all bets are off in college, because boundaries are symbolic at best for those of us in the phase of life known as "emerging adulthood."

Besides, sharting in college is hardly a problem because your dorm room or apartment is almost always within spitting distance of wherever you sharted. You scurry back, wash off, change undies, and no one other than maybe your roommate ever even has to know.

But once you hit your late 20s and until you start getting mail from AARP, sharting is an unspeakable act. You don't talk about it. You don't sit and discuss the shart you had at church or at that board meeting over beers with a close friend at a downtown bar or in his living room during the game. You sure as shit don't tell your significant other.

My uncle swears he has never in his life farted in the presence or even remote vicinity of another human being. Not once. And I know there are people like that, who can somehow deny what is a natural urge to expel noxious air from one's body, who can contain it all until that time passes. And I've got to think, if you can somehow avoid farts altogether, then sharts are never going to be a problem for you. Yeah, you might have other issues, but you'll avoid sharts.

I'm sorry to do this to all of you. I know you didn't come here to read about my shit.

I needed to let my guard down for a few minutes and be honest and admit what I've done. And not just this one time, either. I've sharted a few times. In a sense, I've been lucky, because my sharts have come at times when the damage to pride and the opinions of others was kept to a minimum. I've never needed assistance to cover it up, never had to pull someone into my conspiracy of smell and stain. I've done the deed, but I've cleaned it up all by myself.

Whew. I feel like this tremendous burden has been lifted. I feel so much.... ohhhh who am I kidding? Confessing hasn't done anything. I feel awkward as ever. More, really. And not only do I feel weirder, but now all these people who apparently read this damn blog are taking a few extra steps back from me every time I walk by. There I was thinking I was being honest and forthright by coming clean.

Maybe the reason we don't talk about sharts when we get older is because it just doesn't do anyone any good. Just because they're a nigh-unavoidable part of life doesn't mean we all need to go on Oprah for it. Maybe some shit is better left to ourselves.

Shart Club has its rules for a reason. That first rule is there for a purpose. Shame on me for daring to break it.

* -- The University of Alabama has never, that I know of, done any medical studies on sharting. But considering how many people have shown up out of thin air in the last few years wearing Crimson Tide gear and toting around toilet paper on a stick with "Roll Tide" on it, I just assumed some seriously big maroon elephant must have sharted them all out.

Th-Th-That's All Folks!

Sit and Wonder - The Verve (mp3)

"I think a midlife crisis is anytime you're waking up in the middle of the night asking yourself, 'Is this going to be my life?'" -- my pal Matt

I got to eat lunch with my friend Matt earlier this week. Matt is a doctor in town. We went to undergrad together and were mutual friends of friends who always got along swimmingly, and he somehow found himself completing his residency in Chattanooga of all places.

Matt is a kick-ass pediatrician. If there was some kind of World Series of Pediatric Care, I'd put some money on him because he's the full package: gentle, compassionate, confident, absolutely brilliant, and passionately dedicated. He's passed up some incredible job opportunities (translation: shitloads of money) because he believes so deeply in what he's doing.

He first became a parent four years ago, and now they have two kids. Parenthood hit Matt and his wife like Mike Tyson with brass knuckles. My theory -- we haven't really talked about it THAT much, 'cuz we're, like, guys, and we prefer talking about UNC sports -- is that Matt and his wife were prepared. He's a pediatrician, and she's a nurse who worked in the pediatric ward of a local hospital until recently. They're around kids all the time. He was dispensing advice constantly to parents about how to handle their children. It's our job to know kids, and we love kids, and we're around them all day every day, so raising our own should be pretty easy, is what I think they thought.

I still remember the first time Matt was able to make it out for a night of beer, four or five months after their first child was born, and he looked like a defeated man. "I had no idea" was the general gist of his reaction to parenthood.

He'd seen exhausted parents at the end of their psychological rope hundreds of times. Friends like myself had shared our own tales of the It Ain't All Wine + Roses variety. But when you're brilliant and gentle and caring and passionate and confident, the challenges facing normal humans don't concern you much. It's like expecting Tiger Woods to be worried about a 5-foot putt just 'cuz a lot of duffers miss theirs.

Here are just two things I've learned to believe about parenting:

(1) The smarter and more passionate you are about parenting before you become a parent, the more likely you'll be absolutely miserable and convinced you're a failure once you become one; and
(2) The more of a control freak you are, the more likely children will break your soul (or you theirs) for a while.

(Please note. We're talking likelihoods here, not cold hard absolutes.)

We were talking about parenting, and life, when Matt spoke the quote atop this page. He wasn't talking about himself when he spoke the words, but both of us ended up acknowledging that, to some extent, we've both struggled with that question more recently than we ever imagined we would.

Personally, I often struggle with the feeling that I'm "circling the runway."

Professionally, I'm in a position where my only options for advancement require that I leave my current job, and probably Chattanooga, and possibly education in general. But I like my job. My job is "a good, solid 7 1/2." It brings me plenty of satisfaction, and I know with certainty that I am appreciated and of value. Secure, satisfactory, static.

Domestically, I'm in a position where my only options for advancement require that I leave my current wife, and probably Chattanooga, and possibly everyone else who ever had any respect for me. But I love my wife. My wife is "a good, solid... um... 10 1/2..." and my family brings me more satisfaction than I could remotely deserve. I also know with certainty that I am appreciated and of value. Secure, satisfactory, static. [This is a clever joke, people. I don't really consider it "advancement" to leave my spouse. Unless Evangeline Lilly really really needs me.]

Parenting, especially in those first three or four years, is so intense that few people have time for the midlife crisis because the crisis is the poopy diaper and the baby screaming so loud your eardrums start bleeding and the baby throwing food all over the floor. When you're waking up in the middle of the night, it's not to ask yourself an existential question, but rather to change your kid's diaper or rock them back to sleep. But once you get a handle on that -- well, as much of a handle as parents can remotely get -- then the static electricity of life can create some challenges.

Your job, as the loathed saying goes, "is what it is." Your family "is what it is." You try and confront the static electricity with a hobby or two. Maybe you start a blog. Maybe you obsess about World of Warcraft or shoe shopping or rec league soccer. Maybe you do some cool philanthropic stuff like joining a board or becoming a Big Sister. All to figure out whether those things are enough to release that static electricity the way reaching out for a metal doorknob would.

All I know is that, for the most part, it seems like almost everyone I know well enough to have this kind of conversation admits to having asked themselves this middle-of-the-night question somewhere between one and a hundred times.

Thankfully, for many of us in that boat, we can get up at 3 a.m., walk to the doorway of our child's bedroom, look at them sleeping peacefully, dreaming of unicorns or tractors or Ronald McDonald, and find some solace. When they awake in the middle of the night, we calm their fears and assure them everything's gonna be OK; gloriously, the reverse can also hold true.

The Death of Personal Reinvention?

Sorry - Nerf Herder (mp3)
Linger - Cranberries (mp3)

A March New York Times Magazine included an intriguing column on the impact of Facebook on the maturation process, an article suggesting that Facebook risks preventing the normal maturation process of adolescents and young adults because Facebook always keeps your past crammed into your present.

To this day, I distinctly remember the horrible nausea that washed over me my senior year when I visited Rhodes College in Memphis. I had a similar feeling when I visited Washington & Lee. The nausea stemmed from feeling that, were I to go to one of those schools, I would always be trapped as the guy everyone thought they knew in high school. Rhodes and W&L were, for all intents and purposes, slightly altered universes of the very school I was so desperately excited to escape.

At my high school, I completely identified with Anthony Michael Hall's character in Sixteen Candles when he referred to himself as "King of the Dipshits." My geeky nerdy classmate friends were just enough more socially awkward than I that they seemed to look up to my ability to communicate with other "regular" people. My less geeky nerdy classmate friends tolerated my presence with patience and bemusement, but it's not like any of them were at a kegger on the weekends thinking, Y'know, this party would launch into the stratosphere if Billy showed up...

Socially, high school for me often felt like I had a special backstage pass for High School Musical. I was allowed to witness all the cool people be cool and fun people have fun, but I wasn't ever really a part of the performance. I was part of the stage crew or something. Just be grateful they're letting you see it all! was kinda the vibe.

You remember the video for "Take On Me" by A-Ha? (Sure you do.) Remember the dramatic conclusion, where Lead Singer Dude is trying to escape his sketchy cartoon bonds to join that girl in the full-color real world? That's totally what high school felt like, like I was pounding the walls and beating the floors and desperately begging for a full-color existence. I was trapped in two dimensions -- academics, comic books, role-playing games and church stuff -- and couldn't ever seem to break into the real world of... well, girls. The parties weren't nearly as painful to miss as the girls. I just wanted to be around them, to understand how they ticked. They were such a mesmerizing mystery to me. I longed to be able to study them like I did math or English or German, but I couldn't seem to find the right teachers.

To say I felt awkward, was awkward, in high school is to insult awkward people.

I wanted nothing more out of college than to escape that image of myself, an image I'd helped create, and an image I was convinced might haunt me the rest of my life if I couldn't escape it.

With 20 years of hindsight, it's far easier to accept that almost all teenagers feel this way. Even the most popular kids can feel like outsiders, and even the sweetest and kindest girls can feel like they're tolerated more than loved, endured more than appreciated. I thought my high school misery was unique, but it was really just one verse from "Message In a Bottle" I was sharing with millions of my peers.

And now there's Facebook.

Hawthorne wrote "The past lies upon the present like a giant's dead body." With Facebook, we have revived the damn giant, and it's now a zombie who wants piggy-back rides all over town.

Who knows whether the woman who wrote NYT article is right to be afraid of Facebook, but it's worth keeping an eye on.

As I approach 40, I've begun to love all of my different personae over the years even as I've begun to realize that the awkward nerdy Billy in high school is virtually identical to the wacky goofy Billy in college who is almost exactly the same eager uncertain Billy who worked in Warner Robins who is a hair's breadth away from the austere handsome unshakable Billy who sits here writing this entry. What I thought was a series of substantial personal transformations were actually more about a single persona traveling through a variety of environments, each time with a little more experience and wisdom in his quiver.

Sure, I've changed over the years. It's called "growing up." But I have trouble believing Facebook or even "helicopter parents" can leash a kid to their youth forever. Eventually, growing up happens no matter how hard we fight it, no matter how strongly we deny it. The past may never be past, but it never stays completely present, either.

Neverland never had Wi-Fi, yet Peter Pan still never managed to grow up. So maybe it's a little quick to lay all the future developmental problems of today's youth on Facebook.

However, if I read another one of those dang lists, I might go postal, and prison would definitely curb my future growth as a human.

Go getcha some Cranberries or Nerf Herder on iTunes or Amazon.com! Support great music!

Malled to Death

Have You Ever Needed Someone So Bad - Def Leppard (mp3)

I went to the Chattanooga's primary mall today for the first time in at least two or three years. In the imaginary movie of my life, in which I'm playing the main character in real time, Hamilton Place Mall was once a central character.

The mall wasn't quite of the supporting actor category, but then, if Judi Dench can win an Oscar for six minutes in Shakespeare in Love, then the mall should get some consideration for its role in my adolescent years. It was, for me, the Central Perk of Billyville.

The movie analogy is only important because, having not been a regular at the mall in almost two decades (so help me God), and having only gone a handful of times since I became overwhelmed with children, I somehow managed to convince myself that the mall was losing its popularity. How could something survive if people like me, who used to go all the time, no longer go?

Yes, I know how foolish that seems, but I think most of us do it. We go to this restaurant everyone is talking about, and we don't know why everyone loves it, so we don't go back. And whaddaya know, six months later, the restaurant is closed. Coincidence? Sure. But we get the luxury of believing we have that kind of power, because it's our movie, dadgummit.

Yet there the mall was on a Saturday, just where I'd left it.

Because it was only two blocks from my house, I walked or rode my bike down there frequently, at least two or three times each week. I was not, however, a Mall Rat, because rats congregate in clusters, and I was a solitary explorer most of the time. I was more of a Mall Declawed Wolverine.

As a teenager, the mall was about possibility and variety. I would eat lunch there every Sunday after church. Dad would hand me a generous $5 for lunch, so my goal was to eat as economically as possible so I could max out the spare cash for use in the arcade, at the movie theater, or to help purchase a cassette or a book. I discovered the best stores to hang around to observe the alien species that was the Teenage Girl. If I wanted to try accidentally bumping into a GPS student, I milled around outside the Laura Ashley store. If I wanted to run into your more standard upper-middle public school girl, the Gap was my best bet. (There were no Abercrombies or Eddie Bauers in "Hammy" at that point.)

When I wasn't busy repeatedly viewing a single movie ("Young Guns" and "Die Hard" come to mind), the mall was mostly a venue for fishing. I was fishing to catch some incredibly attractive, lonesome teenage girl who was searching for some awkward boy milling around alone, one so appealing that she felt compelled start a conversation with me, maybe invite me to continue with her on her shopping adventures, offer her advice on how she looked in various outfits, maybe even get married and have a brood of children.

This was fishing in the same way it is for thousands of drunk males in the South. Which is to say, they have to call it something other than "sitting in a boat and getting shitfaced," because that sounds pathetic, so they call it fishing even though they don't ever care to catch anything. Likewise, I was "shopping," but mostly I was shopping for something that was neither on sale nor even of the real, non-imaginary world: a spark-lit relationship built on nothing but a sideways glance across the food court.

If this comes across as agonizingly, uncomfortably pathetic, imagine what it must have been like to live as that person. Maybe that's why I don't go to the mall much anymore. Because I see the Old Me -- or actually the Young Me -- there, and I feel so damned sorry for him.

But maybe he'd feel sorry for me. All I see at the mall now is overpriced crap, old people sitting around staring into the ether, minimal numbers of rowdy teens, and no Frank & Stein's, where I could stare at the beer taps and long for the day I could legally purchase a beer and drink it in the mall (ohhhh, Glory Day!). But Young Billy saw potential, promise, hope. He saw fun in the arcade, possibility in the bookstore, adventure in the movie theater, and beauty in all the stores. He got nervous when the girl at the movie concession stand was cute, because maybe he could buy some popcorn and then invite her to share it with him, and maybe she'd say yes! He would walk around imagining the conversations that were never going to happen.

What is it in our natures that allow us to look back at such embarrassing, awkward, isolating and confusing times and think, "Geez, sometimes I miss those days..."? Whatever it is, I somehow think we oughtta be grateful for it. It probably shaves years from our lives.

The sad reality is, I'm very very grateful that the Internet didn't exist when I was a teenager. I don't know for sure what kinds of problems would have sprouted for me from the computer, but I'm damn sure I was just naive and desperate enough to locate my fair share.

Had the Internet been thriving in the late '80s, the video below would even more painfully mirror my own ineptitude:



(Yes, this is linked from a place called GodTube. And yes, apparently this song has deeper religious implications, although I can't seem to find them.)

To continue the hypocrisy and inconsistency of the above, I will admit to enjoying my fair share of Def Leppard, but I won't go promoting what album this song came from or how to best get your hands on it. If you liked Def Leppard, you prolly already have this. If you didn't, you prolly don't and hate me for using it in this post.