New article about us!

This really nice feature article about us, written by Alberto Lacao Jr. and featuring Edwin's artwork, has just been published in Seattle City Living. It's available online and in hard copy. See what you think!

Guns are dull

It might seem despicable to yoke the Connecticut shootings to the theme of this blog -- so soon, at least -- but I think that doing so is defensible. The impetus of my post is this:

Guns are dull. Relationships are not.

Indeed, guns are dull in a precisely similar way to which relationships are interesting.

Perhaps my attitude to weapons has to do with having been brought up in the UK. I am fiercely proud of the US citizenship for which I studied years ago, but something I find notable is the sheer level of fascination  that guns seem to exercise on the US civilian population. It is an interest one simply doesn't find in Britain or a lot of other countries, and it gives these small devices silly oxygen. I accept that a few folks might find them appealing as collectibles, and I imagine that target shooting might be fun for an hour. Plus, people in certain rural or military circumstances can make a case for firearms that is strongly, if not necessarily, valid. But otherwise, guns strike me as just dull. Dangerously dull.

I am told that the allure has to do with the Constitution, and to do with guns being "more legal" here than in, say, many European countries. I'm not so sure. Both arguments have that combined fragment of original truth and skewed echo that ring -- now, in 2012, on the heels of Sandy Hook -- of misguided apology. Plus bullshit. And the phantom for which the apologist, who is very often anti-gun, seems to be grabbing is that of desire. Want. Glass-eyed lust for lead.

It's hard to fathom why. Guns are tools: that is all. I suspect that the world's best soldiers are leery of the fizzing enthusiasm that many civilian gun owners display. A gun, to a soldier, is a matter-of-fact instrument, comparable to a good lathe or quality bowl. There is professional pride in the selection and maintenance of the optimal weapon for the job, but not entertainment. Nor diversion. Also: guns need to be oiled; cleaned; have their status constantly monitored. Oh, and they are lethal, so the handler can't let his attention wander for one second. A snore-inducing combination.

It was pointed out to me once that, among their even more dreadful features, the Nazis were boring. They tried (imagine this) to suppress the Czech language. A whole language. How grey, paranoid, and arrogant would you have to be to try that? The hideous and simple potential of guns surely falls into this category. Someone who has a pistol pointed at your head has power, but it is perhaps the most tiresome power there is. Its power reeks of the metallic. It postures like a done crossword. It is nothing but its own voice. It is the diadem of the annoying kid who badgers you with one of those closed-loop, when-did-you-stop-beating-your-spouse word games. But it is awfully, sometimes fatally, worse.

Investing time and energy in relationships, by contrast, is interesting. Relationships -- romantic or not, polyamorous or not -- are intriguing. You like or you love those involved, often both, so you apply yourself to helping them.  Even then, relationships can be like seeds thrown into the air: you judge your moment, but you don't quite know how or when even a slight breeze will affect them. If it does, you have to think on your feet. Although not always in charge, you are always involved. You can pick from your spectrum of skills -- everything from intuiting a partner's feelings to knowing how to mend a tea kettle -- to aid everyone involved. You learn when to be like a bull at a gate, and when to use restraint.

Ah, restraint. This brings up another point. When the tyranny of dullness is given rein -- whether literally by guns or by a similar crass power -- rudeness follows. Tom Hodgkinson points out that "Puritanism and its brother, money-getting, are rude by nature... It is rude to kill 27,000 Iraqi civilians. Interference is rude; governments are rude; professionals are rude."

A crude, oft-made statement on this whole topic is that Americans would be better-off if their love of violence and hatred of sex swapped roles. Well, I think that's unfair. Horribly unfair. Especially on a weekend that saw the President in genuine tears, having just been re-elected by a patient, sophisticated, and compassionate electorate no longer enchanted by the sniff of cash.

But on the USA's road to re-setting itself as an exemplary nation, one of its challenges will be in recognizing the sheer littleness of guns. Dull, dull guns.

How dull? On Friday 14th December, they left 28 people cold.

 

"Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form:
Then have I reason to be fond of grief."

('King John', William Shakespeare)

The elevator pitch

The other day, Emma looked worried. I asked her why. She told me that a relative was working through some big personal problems. Emma didn't want to elaborate.

Our family has the same dilemma, from time to time, as any other: the business of keeping, or sharing, confidences. In her situation, Emma was doing the right thing: I sensed that she had been told something and had been told to keep it to herself, and she was respecting that. She was able to confirm my instinct that she had stuff on her mind, so I didn't probe further. I didn't need to be told details. I trusted that she would let me know anything serious that might impact our family. Nor -- crucially, perhaps -- did I feel resentful that the conversation ended where it did. 

It's not about keeping secrets, it's about keeping confidences at times when the mechanics of a situation see to it that, like Emma, someone needs to know something that others close to them just plain don't. If I do need to know at some point, I figure the information will usually come find me. I guess my job does me the favor of reminding me of this, during pretty much every shift:

At work there is a set of elevators. There are several sets, actually, because we're built on a hill. But whatever changes have been made to this pediatric center over recent decades, these particular elevators have stayed the same. They're workhorses. They ferry patients, families and staff up and down the unit floors all day, all night.  If someone wants to grasp the sweat as well as the spirit of the place, I suggest they ride these elevators for a day. Five minutes will do.

When I ride them, what hits me are the snapshots shaped by the brevity of what I see. Snatches of stories. If you're nosy, this hospital is not the place to work.  Day to day here, each of us usually sees only bits of each family's journey, however closely we work with them and however compelling the parts they are good enough to share. Even if we do witness a beginning or an end, we rarely witness -- or even hear about -- both. Nor, by law, are we allowed to find out for curiosity's sake. It's dumb even to try. Yeah: these elevators are a crash course in relinquishing the urge to know what happens next:

The doors open, and in slides a preemie infant in the center of a chunky bed. He looks, among the tubes and monitors, like a lentil in a brooch box. We travel one floor, his dad rubbing his mom's back. A nurse in teddy-bear scrubs leans over baby, and adjusts the mask on his face a tad. She murmurs: "He's mischief! I'm tellin' ya..." Both parents heave a smile onto their mouths. The heel of dad's free palm knocks again and again against dad's denim thigh. Ping. Doors open. Out they all glide.

In comes a Mexican family, a small boy with a choppy haircut interpreting for his aunt as she struggles to ask an American mom the way to the pharmacy. The lad cranes his head to hear the last of the directions as the doors slide shut. He calls out his thanks. Auntie looks stern, talks to him in rapid Spanish. I don't know what she asks or what he answers, but suddenly her face softens. The boy grins, topsy-turns a toy fire truck in his hands, and shrugs like a comedian. Now, just as quick, a small frown steals across his face. Ping. They're gone.

Three more floors to go, for me. Two young resident doctors step in: one blonde, one brunette. They are girlish, pony-tailed, and startlingly pretty. They loll against the elevator wall in the manner popularized by ballerinas on a smoke break outside stage doors. One is dangling a stethoscope between two fingers, the other jabbing at her Android.
"C'mon," she pleads with it, "get a signal."
"What's up this weekend?"
"Might do the Puyallup."
"You have energy?! Jeez, lady."
Lady has given up on her phone. She shifts her weight onto the other foot. They exchange an end-of-shift glance. The blonde doc asks her pal:
"Monday?"
"Clinic. Outpatient Psych." She tries to rub some Sharpie ink from her palm. Then: "Did I tell you I lost my gift card to the Aveda store?"
Ping. Doors open. Her colleague says "Sucks..." and looks set to elegize on the tragedy. But as they exit, she bumps into a man with exhausted shoulders and water eyes. I know from the color of his lanyard that he's a parent. For a moment, hope jags across those eyes. The look says: "Tell me. Tell me one something. Tell me any little thing that isn't a perhaps."
The resident calls to her friend: "I'll catch you up."
Putting a subliminal touch on the man's elbow, she guides him a few yards away from the earshot of the elevator, where eight others have crammed in with me.

She needn't have bothered. The doors are already closing.

Sex & the works of P.G. Wodehouse... my birthday post!

P.G. Wodehouse

It's my birthday. I was born a couple of streets from where P.G. Wodehouse was born, and I love his writing dearly. So I'm going to indulge myself with a post about an aspect of his work that seems to baffle some people again and again. Here goes:

I'm not alone in being interested in the criticism that his books and stories avoid sex. Moreover, what intrigues me is the idea that this indicates a lack in his writing. That, unintentionally or not, his work thereby holds back a couple of juicy cards or, if you like, that he is the only kid in the room who won't join in the game of strip poker.

I vacillate between finding this criticism misguided or quaint depending on whether it is expressed as being, respectively, a deficiency or an omission in his output. I find the latter cuter because I picture that critic feeling cheated, as though she has got to the bottom of a cup of tea and found the giddy leaves of eroticism absent. The sex is where the meaning is, she seems to mutter in an undertone. She feels swizzed. (And don't tell me that the poor sap's equation was sex=fun, because PGW is teeming with fun). Maybe she even feels sad for the author: sad that the fleshly avenue of expression was somehow -- for Wodehouse if not ultimately by Wodehouse -- stoppered-up.

So why is there a sex-shaped gap in Wodehouse? Well, one hammer-blow response is this: there is no such gap. There is sex. There are loads of direct references to it. Bertie Wooster says of a pal: "His love, you see, is not wholly spiritual. There's a bit of the carnal mixed up in it." Many girls are described as being "a mass of sex-appeal" or variations thereof.  Phylllis Mills wore "a simple summer dress which accentuated rather than hid the graceful outlines of her figure". Honoria Glossop, similarly, "has more curves than a scenic railway". Biff Christoper has gone through epochs of being "rather festooned in blondes". And so on. There are certainly enough allusions to assuage a suspicion that Wodehouse was cravenly denying the whole business of the bedroom. The gap is looking hazier already.

Another rebuttal is to do with the efficiency of his technique. PGW's plotting is so refined, so sound a blend of character and behavior, that to plonk sex in the midst of it would often detract from the credibility and progress of the story. In one tale, kid's-magazine editor Bingo Little accidentally offends Bella, a lucrative would-be contributor who turns out to be a hottie. His wife Rosie, with whom he has a lovely, faithful relationship, is out of town. He gives Bella the rush of a lifetime in terms of dinner dates. Just when he books a meal at which he hopes decisively to win her round, Rosie reminds him that their anniversary lunch is at the same time.

Now, I fancy that some would read between the lines of PGW's talk of lunches and champagne, and assume that he is just being politely euphemistic. But consider: we need to like Bingo as much as possible to keep us in sympathy with his dilemma. He and Rosie genuinely do have a sweet, healthy marriage; there is no suggestion of an open relationship; so it simply wouldn't work as well to have him going to bed with Bella to win her round. Bingo would come across as at least something of a cad. Thus sex, in examples like this, is not only unnecessary: it is too blunt an instrument. It wouldn't add spice so much as add turnip.

Talking of open relationships, by the by, there's at least one novel in which two male friends are chatting about a married couple they know. The humor of the scene rests on one of the guys trying to reassure the other that the couple are devoted solely to each other, which they are, but by poor phrasing he ends up not only managing to make the husband sound like he's constantly nipping off with other girls but that the wife is just fine with the whole arrangement. The listening chum is revolted, but that isn't the point: the point is that non-monogamy and sexual color were on Wodehouse's radar. 

As well they might be. I'm choosing not to be biographical today, but it is worth remembering that PGW's career straddled both world wars and all the horny turmoil that those and the inter-war years involved. He worked and mixed with the likes of Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. He contributed to dozens of movies and musicals, including Anything Goes. He was a prisoner of war, amazing the guards with his ceaseless writing. In short, he saw a bit of life. No, scotch that: he saw a tremendous amount.

All this brings us to perhaps the most realistic explanation. It is the one PGW himself gave in an archive interview clip featured in Terry Wogan's excellent documentary on the author. As Wodehouse recounts, sex was just not something you wrote about in the first half of the 20th century. He didn't get into the habit, and found even as he wrote into the 1960s and 1970s that his work could kinda do without it. Make no mistake: he was so professional a writer that he could have incorporated sex, in the ways that I fancy his critics mean, into his creations. But as just one measure of the breathtaking extent of his genius, we can embrace and love his books as they are while neither feeling deprived of sex nor thinking that they suffer from any weird asexual anemia. His characters aren't neutered: their sex lives are just flicked up into the bigger comedy and humanity. Into the life.

The academic Sophie Ratcliffe said: "One of the reasons, I think, that people read Wodehouse novels is not to find out more about people's feelings, but to watch the way in which feeling is managed." A wonderful comment. Many people at the lowest and highest points of their lives turn to Wodehouse: sometimes he is their only solace, sometimes an adored guest among others at a celebration. And, when it comes to sex in his work, we can relax. It's there all right. There's just all kinds of else to put right. 

For starters, the Empress is lacking bran mash in the ratio and quantities specified by Whipple. She needs her 57,000 calories a day to keep her a healthy pig. Yes? No? Are we a go?

Small Comfort

When Vee and Emma, of an evening, want to bury a little landmine beneath the conversation, they'll use the phrase "comfort food" in my earshot. Then they simply stand back and watch the explosion.

Here's the thing. Although I'm skinny and can eat pretty much what I like (caveat: I am overdue for a cholesterol test), I really, really balk at that term. Not that I disapprove of the kind of meals that are, as it were, the meat and drink of comfort food. From creamed potatoes to melted cheese, nib-shot chocolate to chop-chop salad, or whatever your fancy: it's all dandy and just what the doctor ordered. Even if she didn't.

No. What gets me is "comfort" as a prefix. It has far too much of a tone of apology for my liking: like the tiresome "sinful desserts" and "guilty pleasures", but far more insidious. It isn't comfort food, people: it's just food. It's the food you wanted at that particular time. You're a good person. You identified your appetite for it, bought it, cooked it, ate it. Good on you. Oh, and for all you know, your body was biochemically crying out for it.

After all, you don't hear about "vexation food". You don't wake up feeling secure and buoyant, and declare that on those grounds you'll go find a bisque that has a few regrets.

Comfort food. I ask you.

There's an online video doing the rounds right now in which a female news anchor puts a viewer in his place for making unpleasant comments about her being large. Excellent stuff. But, of course, folks of various weights are the victims of bullying and snottiness. I've worked in and around ballet enough to know about the despicable misery of already-skinny teen dancers being advised to lose a pound or two by adults who should know better and whose fuckwittedness beggars belief. Young women and men who should be eating pizza while having a laugh with their pals can soon find themselves in caloric and psychological tortures. Literally.

So we owe it to ourselves, and to each other, not to buy even remotely into any of this bullshit or bullying by prodding ourselves with little linguistic forks like "comfort food". We're all adults. We know the basics of nutrition and exercise: we can keep an eye on ourselves and, if we like, turn that into a blind eye once in a while. And if we do feel as though we've been on a bit of a spree, the best thing is just to remember that getting a little exercise to counter-balance it is not a question of flaying ourselves for our excess. It's just a matter of getting a bit active in a way that we enjoy. That we like doing. That's fun. Just fancy that.

And now to confront the one defense of the dread phrase for which I'd have time, were it not folded so often into a bigger bowl of guilt. "Matt," people say, "you don't get it. Comfort foods are just foods that we associate with the fireside; with that window seat at granny's; with warmth." Hmmm. Okay. I'll buy a few ounces of that... from the hard end of the cheese, please... but I'm not convinced. I believe that that's what you ate in the window seat, and I love to hear about how much it means to you: but I also have a hunch that it contained more than a touch of butter, raspberry jelly, or sour cream. (And why not, indeed?) Put another way: if these nostalgic meals were typically raw parsnip and diet soda, for how much longer would the moniker "comfort food" stay in currency?

It's time for a separation between church and stomach.

Beyond The Blog (7)

The writer Scott Campbell -- Terisa's partner of many years -- has just had this article published online. It's his take on the era in which Family: the web series was made; Terisa's influence on polyamory; and the effect on their family (and kinda on ours) of big media interest.
It's a good read: what also comes through is the value of Scott's habit of keeping a journal.

The tryst

From time to time, I wonder what some people think polyamory entails in our family. Do they imagine that we spend a good four-fifths of our time cavorting in bed, in ways of abiding interest to the patrons of video stores with blacked-out windows?

Well, gosh, I suppose we have our moments, albeit with a frequency pretty much on a par with Venus’s recent amble across the Sun.  As to the rest of the time... put it this way:

Most Wednesdays, Emma and I do have a tryst downtown. That much is true. But is it cast-iron XXX stuff? Look, here's an extract from last week's encounter. You be the judge.

(MATT discovered at downtown shuttle stop. Enter EMMA. They kiss.)
EMMA: Hello, sweet pea.
MATT: Hello, pickle. Jolly nice of you to see me on your lunch break.
EMMA: It's a pleasure. And the place where I eat is only two blocks away.
MATT: That's right. They do a good mushroom-and-barley soup, I hear.
EMMA: I have it every day.
MATT: A happy arrangement. Well, there's five minutes before my shuttle. Shall we stroll around the block?
EMMA: Yes, let's.
(They exit, stage right.)

See what I'm driving at? Don Juan cocks an eyebrow. Casanova mutters something under his breath about the younger generation thinkin' it all that, but it ain't. Frat boys trudge away, dragging their hard drives behind them.

I mean, Emma and I enjoy our Wednesday spots, but would they sell? That's my question for the sales staff of the dark-fronted video outlets: would they sell ?