Scooter of Hope, Scooter of Change

I Hope Tomorrow Is Like Today - Guster (mp3)
Election Night - Broadway Calls (mp3)

“How’s all that hopin’ and changin’ workin’ out for ya?”

Transporting a full Grande Misto via scooter is no simple feat. Most scooters, mine included, come sans cup holder, sans trunk. I have two locations for storage on my Yamaha Riva: a very snug and teensy glove box set into the steering column, and my “hard case,” the roundish clamshell-looking contraption behind the seat.

Thanks to Starbucks stoppers -- I once called it a “Green Coffee Buttplug” and received very disappointed looks from the barista -- I have created the fairly reliable practice of scooting back to work with minimal spillage using some 10 napkins and cocooning the cup in the glove box, where it fits quite snugly.

That said, the process takes a few minutes. And it was in the midst of mummifying my coffee and nestling it into the glove that I heard, muffled through my helmet, the quote above. I looked up, and there was this older man, a little bit oily or sweaty, probably in his early 70s, smiling out of his Caddy. Or maybe it was an Oldsmobile. I’ve never been good with cars, but I know it was Amur’can.

Being clueless, I said, “Excuse me?” because the quote seemed without context. I was trying to connect his comments to my attempts to store coffee in a scooter.

And he repeated himself. “How’s all that hopin’ and changin’ workin’ out for ya?”

I still didn’t really get it. So I said, “Um, fine I guess.” And I smiled.

The man was shaking his head before I had even answered, with the same kind of smile I tend to have when I see some moron on the other side of the road driving without headlights after dusk. Then he pushed out a few of those annoyed chuckles before saying, “I’m glad I’ll be dead before I have to see this country go completely up in smoke.”

So, at that point, I finally got it. By then, this old dude has rolled up his window and pulled out of his spot. Off, I guess, to sneer at other young fools and their idiotic notions of hope and change, preferably from the comfort of his enclosed air-conditioned American-made isolation chamber.

My scooter has seven stickers. Three are UNC-related. One is the ubiquitous Apple logo. One is for a band called The Rescues. Another is for the Good People Brewing Company of Alabama. And one is for the Chattanooga Football Club. None of these are of a remote political nature. I’m not much of one for political signs, because I tend to think religion and politics carry too much negative energy in first impressions. And, in those rare moments when either topic creates positive impressions, it’s at the expense of those who don’t belong to your imaginary club.

I don’t think anyone looks at my Good People Brewing Company sticker and thinks, “Ahh, a fellow beer drinker. We’re better than those snotty wine-drinking assholes.” No one sees my Chattanooga FC sticker and thinks, “Fuck the Titans and their oblong monstrosity!”

But put a cross, or a fish, or a “W” or an “O” on your vehicle, and you are painting a double-yellow line in the road that says, “You’re either on my side and going in the (proper) direction, or you’re not.”

Nothing too wrong with talking politics and religion, but not on a first date, and certainly not with people you haven’t even met yet.

This old man made an assumption: youngish coffee-drinking asshole on a nerdy scooter = Obama voter. That he was right makes him more lucky than brilliant. That he looks forward to dying before the US sinks into some Muslim apocalypse makes him exactly the kind of conservative that makes lots of people despise conservatives. (Just a reminder that I’m plenty guilty of this prejudgement habit.)

Why would someone be anti-change? As a species, we talk all the time about how dangerous it is to forget our past, yet so many of us use words like “tradition” and “the good ol’ days” without the slightest bit of irony. Tradition is for Druids. Want tradition? Go to a 3rd world Muslim country, because they’re steeped in tradition so ancient it would knock your great-great-granddaddy’s socks off. But in America? Seriously? Tradition for us is, like, McDonalds french fries. Or something even more shameful like watching an evening news program together as a family while eating TV dinners on TV trays.

As a country, very little of our history is based on anything BUT change.

But I get the whole anti-change thing. We get older. We wish Peter Gabriel and REM still ruled the music landscape. We detest those wacky R&B people with their wacky R&B booties and def cuts. We detest Faith Hill for being twice as hot and half as talented as Loretta Lynn. I get it. It’s kinda goofy, but with every passing year, I find myself fighting that very instinct to wish things were more like they Used Ta Be.

So it sucks to be anti-change, but it’s also an absurd curse of human nature.

But here’s what would really really suck: to be “Anti-Hope.” To be the person who is opposed, politically or otherwise, to hope. I’d like to think that one could be reasonably opposed to Obama and the Democratic Party without being Anti-Hope. Obama didn’t trademark the word. He doesn’t own it. I’m rooting for the guy, but even if you don’t want to, please don’t be against Hope.

Trust me. You don’t want to be that old man in the Oldsmobile. It’s not a happy or contented life.

"Go Find a TV"

Into the Fire - Bruce Springsteen (mp3)
The Kingdom - Bethany Dillon (mp3)


One of seven faculty speeches given in memory of 9/11/01 on Friday morning at our school.

My wife called me just before 9:00 a.m. She was at home nursing our second daughter, who wasn't even a month old.

"I'm watching the Today Show, and they think a plane hit the World Trade Center," she said. "Go find a TV. You need to see this."

"Honey, I'm right in the middle of finishing up this story," I said, or something to that effect. "Why don't you just tell me what's happening?"

We were on the phone no more than three minutes when she said, "Oh my God oh my God."

"What? What?" I said.

"Hold on. Oh my God. I think another plane just hit the other building."

"What? Another plane? Are you..."

"Go find a TV," she said.

I walked across the floor where I work, and then up the stairs, and then slowly down the first floor admissions office hallway, looking in rooms for a TV set; it now seems like some weird 60s mind control movie. I remember passing people's doorways, and they're coming out into the hallway, too, because they've just heard, and they're looking for a TV. And we all have this dumbfounded look of confusion and disbelief on our faces.

I might have been the sixth or seventh person in the office of the one dude who had a TV. Another dozen or so crowded in over the next 10 or 15 minutes. By that point, we knew it had to be the work of foreign terrorists.

I'm 37. Vietnam ended before I could say "Mama." I never had drills in school where I ducked under my desk just in case a nuke dropped on us. The only conflicts I ever knew my whole life were quick and simple. Grenada. Libya. Panama. Kuwait. The fights were over almost before they started, and they made us proud to be Americans, and everyone said you just don't mess with the USA. As if to add exclamation points to this, the Berlin Wall fell, the USSR collapsed, and everyone who wasn't distinctly an American ally seemed to experience calamity and disaster. It really was as if God was speaking, and He was telling us all, "America is my country, and everyone best follow suit or prepare for the apocalypse."

At 9:03 a.m. on September 11, 2001, when that second plane hit... well, clearly something happened on the way to paradise. And it created a fear in me and others that was to that point in our lives unknown and unthinkable.

Many of you aren't too crazy about coming into the Chapel three days a week. I understand that; I do.

But let me promise you something. There are times when this place means everything. If you were a student at this school on September 11, 2001, if you were a teacher or a staff member, if you were Catholic or Protestant or Jewish or Hindu or completely 100% atheistic, you wanted desperately to be in this place. The power of a community gathered together for comfort in a time of high emotion cannot be explained. The value of hope that someone or something greater and wiser and more loving than humankind might be out there cannot be adequately explained.

On September 11, I learned that the world had changed, that my children would grow up in a different time, that hate existed and we were a target. And I was also made eternally grateful for this space and for this community. We were fortunate to have this Chapel and to have one another.

It's only unfortunate that we need tragedies of unspeakable proportions to be reminded of such simple truths.

"It Is What It Is."

All We Are - Matt Nathanson (mp3)
Doesn't Have to Be That Way - Will Hoge (mp3)

The dude running a live webinar said it yesterday when talking about permitting and encouraging comments on your web site.

An office pal of mine said it when talking about working with a frustrating coworker.

A colleague in charge of a different department says it about five times an hour about anything and everything.

My mother said it on Sunday, and I think she was talking about the crappy wine selection in Chattanooga.

Although it's not my specialty, my understanding is that this particular sentence -- "IT IS WHAT IT IS" -- has officially become a meme, something that has embedded itself into the culture of our moment. Unfortunately for me -- or, as the meme would go, "me being me" -- when a saying of this nature becomes second-nature to that many people in my circle, it also means said saying is likely to have totally jumped the shark.

"Jumped the shark," for example, jumped the shark about a year ago. One frequent reader accused Texas Hold'em Poker of having jumped the shark, and it was shortly after his comment that I was convinced the phrase itself had done likewise.

Since at least two of the people who regularly visit here find themselves using It is what it is in their general lexicon, I'm not trying to dump on them. We all have little favorite phrases that we unknowingly wear out, and since I'm writing and talking most of my day, I'm only grateful to be blissfully ignorant of my own lest I be struck dumb for fear of uttering them anymore.

Still, I can't deny that this particular sentence and its high-quantity of use perplexes me. It is what it is. At some mysterious point in recent history, this particular phrase overtook the previously-popular Que Sera Sera in its common usage, and that shift feels kind of tragic.

The latter means "what(ever) will be will be." That's more of a future-focused saying. It's generally intended to offer a balm for anxiety, a soothing acknowledgment that much of what happens as the world turns into the future is out of our hands and best accepted as such. Que sera sera is the Cliff's Notes version of the Serenity Prayer.

Examples:

• "Five planes have crashed in the continental U.S. in the past week, and I'm scheduled to fly to Osh Kosh tomorrow! Oh well. Que sera sera."
• "I have my annual review with the boss tomorrow. With the economy in the shitter, I'm not sure what to expect. Oh well. Que sera sera."

But the former, It is what it is, is a present-focused notion that seems to be about the acceptance of the unpalatable and undesirable.

Examples:

• "I think gangrene has developed in my big toe. Oh well. It is what it is."
• "I'm pretty sure our pastor is drinking scotch and selling meth out of his home. Oh well. It is what it is."

And that's why It is what it is bothers me so much. Because it's mostly about resignation. It's surrendering to that which you'd rather not accept. It's raising a big white flag to the unkind hand of fate, a hand that's resting on your shoulder at this very moment.

It's about settling.

And when we settle, we inevitably find ourselves looking out the window in wistful lonely moments and thinking, "Why does it have to be what it is? Why did I roll over and take it?"

It is what it is seems not philisophical but defeatist. Que sera sera seems precisely the opposite.

Maybe both, ultimately, are just meant to say, "That's Life." If so, then I'll pour one out for my homeboy Frankie. But for me? One version is a whole helluva lot easier to live with than the other.

"All We Are" is from Some Mad Hope and "Doesn't Have to Be..." is from Blackbird on a Lonely Wire. Both are available at iTunes and Amazon.com, and if you like these songs, you'll love the whole albums.

To Everything Turn, Turn

Everything Good is Bad - JJ + Mofro (mp3)
Beulah the Good - James Jackson Toth (mp3)

Nothing about the Inauguration moved me more than the recitation of Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem. I found myself listening and trying to determine where her line breaks were, where the change in verses occurred (or if it was all one continuous verse). Either because it was easy, or because the poem hit me at the right moment, everything she read made sense to me and felt perfect for the moment.

Then I read David Ulin's commentary where he basically pisses on it. He pisses on it because he didn't get it. I don't say that in a snooty way. If (sigh) there are two types of people in the world, there's the people who could give a rat's ass about poetry, and there's the remaining five people in that coffee shop wearing black turtlenecks and trying to act interested in the other poets until it's their turn to read.

So, it's not Mr. Ulin's fault he didn't get it. Poetry isn't very get-able, which is why so many people detest or fear it. To make it worse, poets are snooty-ass mofo's, so even the people poets most need in their corner mostly think all other living poets suck. It's a pretty tough place to earn credit. And it pays for shit to boot.

For a solid decade of my young life, poetry was a mental sauna where I could close the door, escape the outside world, and pull out my emotional sweat from its pores.

Poetry for me was entirely about communication. (Ironic, no? That I would use the least popular form of modern written expression to attempt to communicate with people? No wonder why I was/am an odd bird.) It was my attempt to cram my entire emotional wardrobe into a tiny suitcase, jumping up and down on its overstuffed form like Daffy Duck, hoping that the compact size might make my plight more appealing. Poetry was the antithesis of my blogging. Without question, writing the newspaper column in college and after graduation was the beginning of the end of my obsession with poetry. It seemed people were more willing to read my babbling rants than my slanting rhymes.

My prose writing is more like how I actually think. Poorly-organized. Side turns and sub-references. Run-on sentences and fragments. A pathetic inability to self-edit. Poetry, on the other hand, required concentration, care, delicacy, and a certain finitude.

Poetry at its best is a nuclear power. Maximum energy in minimum words. Thus, for me, poems longer than two pages are tough cookies for me while sonnets are a food of the gods. (Haiku, while occasionally pithy, more often feel like a J*zz In My Pants moment: over too quickly to be any good.)

Alexander's poem isn't likely to go into the annals of poetry immortality. Still, the poem is worthy. Even without knowing the exact line breaks, we know it's about commonality amidst diversity. It's about all of us being individually busy, collectively self-absorbed, yet all striving for and yearning for so many similar things. Albeit in different ways, we all yearn to be creative. We all have moments of great anticipation and hope. We all encounter words. (Yes, this is insultingly obvious... yet it's also so completely taken for granted and important.) We all yearn to be safe, to boldly go where no one has gone before, to pursue noble causes and experience noble moments. We all hunger for love, a love that's like cotton candy because you can never get enough of it to feel full.

Mr. Ulin was upset because she begins her poem with the pedestrian line "Each day we go about our business." But even January 20, a day the likes of which we might never see again in our lifetimes, was ultimately a day of national routine, of national business, filled with individuals doing their own thing. And all of us, even the most cynical and conservative amongst us, can't help but feel that we are, as a country, in a moment of tremendous importance. A brink moment that will determine the fate of us as individuals, employees, citizens, parents, and children, and also one that might well determine our fate as a collective.

We're all anticipating what comes next.

Yup, the world would be a better place if we all sat around once in a while and masticated on a good poem.

My Kid Can Beat Up Your Honors Student

If I Had a Boat - Lyle Lovett (mp3)
Down to Earth - Peter Gabriel (mp3)

Most of us want so much for our children that it hurts us. This longing causes weirdos like me actual, physical pain -- maybe that's just more proof I need to exercise. It also takes a tremendous emotional toll, because we can't give them everything, dammit. Granted, good parents wouldn't give them everything even if we could, 'cuz if you could just hand them everything, they fail to earn the intangibles for themselves. But you want it for them nonetheless. You want them to have tulips and smiley faces and all the hugs and warm fuzzies the world has out there to offer.

Over the weekend, I was witness to two entirely separate, yet completely related, parental groups. First, I took my oldest daughter to run in a county-wide elementary school race. Each grade level, separated by gender, ran a mile. Each school was limited to a handful per grade. Perhaps because she inherited her mother's athleticism, or perhaps because she's been in soccer for several years and loves riding her bicycle and expending loads of energy, she made the cut. (Which officially puts her ahead of my entire adolescent life when it comes to making teams.)

One of Avery's oldest friends won the whole damn thing. She was the best out of some 300+ girls in the county. She goes to a school where they form teams a year early to encourage conditioning (and arguably to win these kinds of races). That school had five girls finish in the top 20. Two of them run 6 1/2-minute miles. They're 8 years old. Still, watching those two kids, waaay out in front and verging on tears and pushing themselves, was amazing, and I cheered on our friend's girl. Then, more than 100 runners later, I cheered on my own girl. My pride in both girls was overwhelming, mostly 'cuz I'm one of those pathetic guys who would have been shot for snoring too loud in the days of the Wild West.

After breakfast and a brief respite, we were off to the soccer field. My 7-year-old had played her game while we were at the race, so I missed her game. But Avery's game was intense, and her team played well even if they lost 6-2 (which is 42-14 in American Football language; it never seems like quite the blowout until you put it in American Football terms).

The other team had one of the most skilled young girls I've seen yet. She stopped the ball on a dime. Passed with eyebrow-raising precision. Could kick the ball hard enough to leave little comet trails coming out of the thing.

Most of me gets nauseated by this. I think to myself, "Why does your daughter need to be Mia Hamm-esque in third grade? What good does it do, really?" I look at these parents who are hellbent on making their children so exceptional at something and think, how much of the rest of everything did you take away from your kid's life?

Does anyone really ask that of Tiger Woods? Does anyone ask that of the Williams sisters or Shawn Johnson and Nastia Liukin? Maybe they do, but somehow at that level it seems to get past my radar. Apparently, I can be indignant and judgmental about it unless it pays off. This makes my hypocrisy all the more glaring. It's like me being OK with the idiots who obsessively play the lottery once they hit the Powerball, but mocking and insulting the ones who don't.

And what I've begun to wonder lately is, do all the parents like me, who want so desperately to do right by our children, to not obsess over one single facet of their lives or interests, actually do their children as much of an injustice as those wacky soccer moms and football dads and violin moms and mock trial dads? Maybe we're so afraid of pigeonholing our children that we throw them down this big crater, a hole so big the kids don't even know where to start digging.

"The world is your oyster" is misleading, because an oyster isn't that big of a thing. The way I raise my children, maybe I'm teaching them that "The world is your ocean." And maybe that's not quite the great and positive message I think it should be. Maybe the ocean is too big. Too much. Eventually they'll need to find some place in that vast liquid expanse to call home.

Am I so busy trying to prevent them from becoming focused on or obsessed with one single thing too early that I risk preventing them from calling any single place home? Do we non-obsessive types risk raising wandering and aimless kids?

Maybe part of it is jealousy, too. The way I was raised, the values I was given, made me above average at lots of different things, but I never won a race of any kind, a contest of any kind. I was never The Absolute Best at anything (with the mildly debatable exception of winning my high school's award as its best English student), but I was staunchly competent in many arenas. Do I see these 8-year-olds running at blinding speeds, these soccer kids playing years ahead of themselves, and want them to burn out so that I can feel better? See? That's why we didn't put you in tennis lessons so soon. That's why we only dabbled in piano or swimming or acting camp. We didn't want you to burn out. We didn't want to choose your passion for you.

As Lloyd Dobbler so brilliantly put it a few decades ago, "I can't figure it all out tonight, sir, so I'm just gonna hang with your daughter."


"If I Had a Boat" is from Lovett's first album, Pontiac. "Down to Earth" is from the WALL-E soundtrack. Both can be found on iTunes or Amazon.com's mp3 site.

I Want to Believe

Lighting Candles - The Weepies (mp3)
Believe - The Bravery (mp3)

NPR has this series called "This I Believe," where ordinary joes and janes get on and spew out their belief in one particular aspect of faith, life, culture, or other. I generally tune out on these things. Nine times outta ten, it's not particularly worth my time. Thus, karmically speaking, this post is probably doomed to bore, but that's precisely perfect for the topic at hand, one that appeals more than proclaiming what I DO believe, but rather what I so desperately WANT to believe.

I want to believe one woman can step into the D.C. school system with passion and vision and turn around the most notoriously awful inner-city school system in the country. I want to believe it takes a person like that -- clueless to politics but convicted of her certainty and willing to push into the inevitable head winds of opposition -- to affect substantial change. I want to believe that, if she manages by some miracle to succeed, teachers' unions stop embarrassing our country by placing the security of lazy or burned-out or incompetent teachers over the importance of the education of our nation's children. If Michelle Rhee's plan to arrange merit-based pay passes, the number of teachers who will choose the safety of lower salaries to avoid the scrutiny of their performance is going to be a clarion call for just how fucked up our educational system truly is. AT THE MOMENT: Belief beats pessimsm by a few feet.

I want to believe John McCain chose Sarah Palin for deeper reasons than the hope she could steal a few Angry Hilary Supporters from Obama. AT THE MOMENT: Belief is on an iron lung, but it's not dead. I don't know enough about her yet to lack all belief that this could be true.

I want to believe the return of football to television will add some much-craved superficial joy to my weekly existence. I want to believe the college season will be filled with awesome games and dramatic turns of event, and that the NFL will bring some great moments. But mostly I'm resigned to thinking that all football outside the SEC will involve one decent team, a lump of mediocre fluff, and a bottom-heavy suck-fest. AT THE MOMENT: After watching the Big Ten, ACC and Big East all embarrass themselves on Saturday -- including my beloved Tar Heels roughing out a 7-point win against McNeese f*#kin' State, I'm resigned to believe college football will be depressing with the exception of the SEC.

I want to believe Barack Obama will not lose the election based solely on a funny name and extra pigment. I want to believe that, were Obama and McCain forced to switch bodies ala Trading Places, the election numbers would come out the same because America actually pays attention to what these people say and to their hopes and aims for this country's future. I want to believe if McCain wins it won't be merely because he was white.  AT THE MOMENT: C'mon people. We all know better. And I promise this isn't me being all left-wing political. It's because I've heard or overheard at least a dozen conversations in the past months that scream the reality out to me.

I want to believe I'll one day write a novel. It doesn't have to be bought by Penguin or Random House. It doesn't have to get Hollywood production companies competing for the movie rights. It just needs to be something that has a beginning, an ending, a story that links the two in ways that most readers can understand, a character or two that I'm proud of having created and led through the journey. AT THE MOMENT: Hope is neck and neck with fear, with laziness stretching out on the track ahead of them, waiting to stick out a leg and trip one of them up.

I want to believe people are inherently decent and born that way. A friend of ours believes, as do many people, that we are all born evil thanks to the notion of Original Sin. She believes it is the responsibility of adults to protect them from the very worst in themselves and in their nature. I believe we're born good, and the adults are merely working to keep from fucking us up any more than they absolutely have to. AT THE MOMENT: Aw, I have no choice. This is as central a part of my worldview as believing in God or in the importance of fathers in the lives of their children. Fortunately, this is a "Did Adam and Eve have belly buttons?" kind of question that can be debated forever without proving anything.

"Lighting Candles" is from The Weepies' second album, Hideaway. "Believe" is from The Bravery's most recent album (or double album if you bought the version I did), The Sun and Moon (Complete). Both can be purchased through iTunes or Amazon.com's mp3 site. The former is solid. The latter is better for only a couple of songs.