God in the cross hairs

Lately the weather has not been fabulous. It's what's known here in the Bay Area as the rainy season. Days upon days of endless drizzle. Well, no, not quite: On a good day, some time between noon and two o'clock, the sky is suddenly swept clear of clouds, the sun shines gold on everything and... on, false alarm. The clouds are back. Anyway, you can't really plan a hill walk under those circumstances, because you could find yourself slipping precariously down a muddy incline and teetering at the top of an impressive drop off. So instead of my usual walking meditation in Briones Regional Park, I decided to drive over to the top of Berkeley, park the car and walk the neighborhood at the crest of the hill.

This entails strolling through a nice sixty year old neighborhood, past the Lilliputian Sculpture Garden, and up short, steep incline to the Pacific Lutheran Seminary. It's the back entrance: You walk in through a carport and there's a little latched gate. The Seminary is small and unassuming, despite its choice hilltop location. The views are mostly obstructed by trees, but it's quite possible that from the Manor house, visiting clergy can look out the window and see San Francisco Bay on one side and on the other, the verdant hills of Tilden Regional Park.

Anyway, it's quiet up there. There's an asymmetrical (aren't they all?) modern church at the top of the hill. It starts out ugly but grows on you over time. Sometimes I try to open the door to check out the architecture from the inside, but it's always locked.On occasion I might encounter another dog walker or a couple of small boys but it's rare that I see an actual seminarian. I do have an idea of their mindset, though. They are inclusive,tolerant souls. Last election, they had a lot of signs up condemning prop 8. One beatup old car had a bumper sticker that read "God wants faithful fruits, not religious nuts."

It's peaceful up there at the Pacific Lutheran Seminary. I'm a die hard agnostic, but I can sense the kindness and generosity of spirit that pervades the place. And so, as I cut through their modest campus yet again, I can't help but think to myself, these are not the kind of people who would approve of putting bible verses on the cross hairs of a rifle.

It's scandal enough that the Michigan-based Trijicon arms company is endangering the lives of our soldiers by encoding bible verses in their view finders. Reflect on Corinthians as you blow Mahmoud's head off in the name of Jesus Christ. Think it's harmless, maybe even inspirational? Trijicon probably does. Their themeline is "Brilliant Aiming Solutions." How sterile, how bloodless, how slick. But consider this: we are using Jesus rifles to train the Afghan Military. Be grateful that nation has 10% literacy or they would have already turned those rifles against our guys. Just what Bin Laden needs to fuel his propaganda. Proof, to his mindset, that we are crusaders waging a religious war. What is this communicating to our Christian soldiers? That they are killing in the name of Christ? What about our Jewish or Muslim soldiers? Should they be proselytized to as they risk their lives, just because they've been issued a Jesus rifle?

And what about poor Jesus? How is it right for his name to be co-opted by the military Industrial complex and used like some kind of peekaboo prize on a killing machine? What would Jesus do? What would he think? Who would he shoot?

It won't be long now

before there are more yoga teachers than students. And, contrary to the cliche, just because you can do doesn't mean you can teach.

Give me some skin.

I think I'll make a deal with my son, just to get him to drop the whole tattoo argument. He's not 18 yet, so we still have 15 months before he goes all human canvas on us.

Here's the deal: you can get a tattoo now if your parents get to pick the design.

Dave and Stephanie and Regina and HR

I don't judge anybody by their sex lives. As far as I'm concerned, consenting adults can consent to whatever they want. Just please don't tell me about it. Still, I'm glad I'm not married to David Letterman, whom I never met despite having once shared a corporate suite and bleachers with him at the Indy 500 – entirely another story. Anyway, I suspect poor Regina Lasko, who waited the guy out for twenty years, has long made her peace with his philandering. It seems he likes funny, smart, nerdy girls who wouldn't be out of his league in the real world. The crew and production team must be crawling with them. So what's Regina to do if the Late Show women are there for the picking, like craft service M&Ms? As the old Irish proverb says, "What cannot be cured must be endured."

But that's all between Dave, Regina, Stephanie, the tabloids and only Dave knows who else. It's the work thing that bothers me. Some office romances are kinda kosher. Like Sam in Accounting and Jan in Human Resources. But the head honcho mousing around with assorted female staff members is completely uncool. Dave's ladies, however innocent or sincere, will have a red I-had-sex-with-David-Letterman-to-get-ahead on their foreheads for the rest of their careers. Women who won't play with Dave, or are too old, or otherwise not Dave's type will be bitterly resentful and despise Letterman - not really an emotion one wants to elicit in one's employees. Men will state ruefully that they can't get ahead at The Late Show because they don't have tits.

I don't know that any of the above is happening at The Late Show but on the work front I've seen it all. There's never any hiding these relationships. The couple smolder at each other, close a lot of doors, have too many private jokes. People notice, people talk. Incessantly. "What a lousy decision. Wonder if it was HER idea." "Did you hear Martha got promoted? Wonder if SHE slept with him too." "No, I'm not going to the conference. The boss is bringing her boy toy."

When employees conclude that the playing field is not level, they lose faith in the company leadership. The boss has proven him/her self all too human, and people start to question management's decisions. If the economy is good, intelligent employees may feel they have to leave to get ahead. Meanwhile, the slackers find it easier to stay under the radar or rationalize their lack of advancement. Bad for morale, bad for productivity, bad for quality control. There is simply no upside for an organization when the person at the top is fooling around with the staff. Unethical. Disruptive. Tacky. Really stupid human trick, Dave. By the way, did you notice that honey in the editing suite? A little broad in the beam, but I hear she went to Columbia.

Yes, I know, Regina. He makes you laugh.

Boom!

I just don't get this youtube video all my friends are posting. It's set to Dueling Banjos and stars a Caucasian rube (I'm a Caucasian - I can say that) who is about to demonstrate the efficacy of some home made fireworks in what appears to be his dining room. Instead of the discrete shower of sparks he promises, the guy makes a huge boom and startles himself silly. Except that when the boom cloud clears, he appears to be wearing a different shirt which I don't think we're meant to catch. This is not a genuine wack job, it's a dweeb with a twisted sense of humor. He looks like David Letterman's slightly unhinged younger brother who lives in their mom's basement. The twisted sib makes fireworks and wishes he had Dave's sex life – or wishes he could have sex for once in his life. (Don't start a rumor - I made up the thing about DL.)

Anyway, real or fake, I see nothing funny in watching someone risk burning down his house, possibly singe his face (or duck on cue?) and make a complete ass of himself. If this is real, it's tragic. If it's not, it's just dumb. Now let us put aside the idiotic specifics of setting off fireworks in your home and simply look at the fact that this person comes off like a complete fool. Why is that funny? Some people are accident prone or clumsy. Yours truly, for example. I have inadvertently embarrassed myself on more than one occasion.

Once, I was participating in an ad agency creative exercise. We were divided into teams and each one had to put on a group presentation before the agency and a panel of judges from upper management. We were pretending to sell some kind of software - the details elude me - and we had determined that the overarching benefit, the one that could serve as an umbrella for all the others, was adaptability. So I decided to dimensionalize adaptability and add drama to my part of the presentation. As I was making the case for staying agile in a changing marketplace, I pulled a ball from my pocket with the intention of throwing it at my creative director friend in the judge's panel. "And you have to (BALL TOSS) think fast...". Only my aim has always sucked, and instead of lobbing the ball at my friend, I spiked it into the lap of our frail and delicate head of account services who almost fainted from the shock.

Oh, I hear you laughing. Go ahead. Chortle away. I will maintain my solidarity for that terminally immature fellow and his home made explosives. Not funny. And even less amusing if they're shooting the video at his mom's house.

Got it.

All of a sudden, everybody gets it. You tell your kid to cut you a little slack because your other kid is having a crisis and you're told "I get it. You don't care about my problems." You start to make a case that you deserve a raise, or a break, or a job, and the person you are beseeching replies. "I get it. I just can't do anything for you right now." You want to call someone to task for their behavior and you get back "I get it. I was a jerk. " And then they change the subject, short-circuiting any constructive discussion to make sure said behavior doesn't happen again.

I get it is the new conversational reset button. People can use it to dismiss, reassure or mollify you, but it's always a way of taking control of the discussion. Sometimes, this is done because the person who gets it has no interest in further exploring " it" - the defensive I get it. Sometimes, it's to cut off whatever long and involved statement you were about to make - the preemptive I get it. Seems like everybody's so busy getting it, you just can't get through.

False prophets and false analogies

This inane controversy over the President's speech to school children was petty and paranoid and, yes, I must alliterate, pathetic. And yet it made me think. We on the left spent 8 years thinking of Bush as the Idiot-in-Chief, and now the far right sees Obama as the AntiChrist. Was this demonization and reverse-demonization?

I thought I might be on to something and perhaps we could all meet in the middle. This frivolous notion lasted all of 10 seconds. The truth is, one can build a lengthy and convincing case demonstrating that Dubya deserved to be dubbed the Idiot in Chief, but no logical case can be made that Obama is the AntiChrist– even if you buy into that superstitious concept.

Today, I was listening to a discussion about the war in Afghanistan on NPR. One expert was lauding the Afghans for their turnout in dangerous situations and the thorough distribution of ballot boxes in remote and difficult terrain. Another pundit tempered the expert's enthusiasm by pointing out that Afghanistan was a tribal society and people were voting along those lines. Nobody mentioned the low female turnout, with many women afraid to work the polls and other women kept at home for fear they might encounter a male pole worker. The one comment that struck me was by a professor, born in Afghanistan and raised here. How can we take this election seriously, he asked, when 90% of the electorate is illiterate? They are voting along ethnic lines, in response to bribes or threats or just because they like the look of the guy (no need for unisex wording here).

My sick mind immediately returned to the conspiracy theorists getting their panties all in a wad over death panels, Kenyan birth certificates and a traditional inspirational speech to school children. Yeah, they are literate, and they vote. But they aren't very smart. Stupid people vote, and it's right and fair that they should. Sometimes, they elect stupid people. That's democracy's Achilles heel, and it certainly accounts for the high number of bozos in the House and in the Senate. So yeah, compared to the poor, undereducated people in Afghanistan, our electorate is pretty sophisticated. They can read, but apparently, they don't.

That Vision Thing

As far as I'm concerned, the nature/nurture debate is over. All you have to do is reproduce and try your best to raise your kids. Just as you come to the realization that your children have inherited all your worst traits, you're hit with another epiphany: you're turning into your parents.

My father is quite nearsighted and has always worn glasses. Without them, he has that telltale soft, myopic gaze and is, if not helpless, definitely challenged. He is a physician and health-conscious, with just a touch of hypochondria, so he wears sunglasses – over his glasses. But because he fears that's still not protection enough against those pesky, cataract-inducing UV rays, he adds on little clip-on shades. Every day is a gray day in the land of Dr. Dad.

Then, there's my grandmother. As a girl, I found her spectacles truly annoying. No, not the frames themselves - the daily drama of finding the right specs when she needed them. She would start by asking my grandfather in their native French if he had seen her "glasses to see far" or her "glasses to see close" , depending on which pair had gone missing. Pretty soon, the entire family would be searching the house, the car, the beach or the restaurant for my grandmother's glasses, which somehow always turned out to be in the first place she'd looked, her purse. My mother does not yet need distance glasses (wish I'd gotten that gene). She only wears readers, but she makes up for it by losing them twice as often as her mother did.

Growing up, I found my father's redundant eye wear and my grandmother's daily vision quest incredibly embarrassing. Surely everyone was staring at my eccentric family, thinking "That poor girl. She's related to these people." Of course, I had 20/20 vision, and I wasn't about to hide my best feature behind a pair of shades. Five presidents and a digital revolution away from middle aged lucidity, I didn't know that with maturity comes a blissful lack of concern about looking goofy.

Fast-forward a few decades.

Don't know if it's from staring at a computer screen for a living, but my eyes went south surprisingly fast. Right around my fortieth birthday, the type on paperbacks began to blur. Menus in dimly lit restaurants became illegible unless I squinted like Renee Zellweger and dislocated my arm. I got a pair of cute little red 1.0 reading glasses which quickly became inadequate. Soon, I needed glasses to look at the thermostat, the dosage on the cold medicine, the needle I couldn't thread. Too vain to go full-grandma and get an eyeglass chain, I started wearing my readers like a utilitarian headband.

I had graduated to 2.0 lenses when I noticed an annoying development at the movies: The projectionists were all too lazy to properly focus the image. Tired of reading fuzzy credits, I'd duck out of the theater and bitch to the nearest theater employee. Eventually, I realized it wasn't the projectionist who had the focusing problem. I got my eyes tested and officially graduated to bifocals, which I have never gotten used to. When came time to change the prescription, I had the optometrist give me regular distance lenses. Now, I switch back and forth, just like grandma did. Sometimes, I too can't find my glasses, which usually turn out to be on my head.

It's when I go on my nature walks that things get really complicated. I need reading glasses for the trail map, sunglasses to protect my peepers and distance glasses to make sure whatever is causing that rustling in the brush isn't a mountain lion. The distance glasses give my vision a tantalizing clarity. I can see every leaf dancing in the breeze. But the glare can be intense, so I've resorted to wearing sunglasses over my distance glasses.

Just like my Poppa does.

On Hiatus.

I have temporarily lost my mind due to a difficult move. We had to move out on the 21st but couldn't get into the new place before the first. I had to schlep my non-laptop computer around and set it up in hotels so I could work. Now, I am in a new place, surrounded by boxes. My husband is grouchy because his internet's not working. My kid is nasty because he didn't want to move and is choking on his own testosterone. My daughter is having her 25 year life crisis a couple of years early and has decamped for the East coast. My supply of St. John's Wort has run out. The only sane person around here right now is the dog. Consequently, please bear with me while I unpack, clean cabinets, write hospital brochures and howl at the moon.

Taking the glove off.

Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson.
Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson.

"I can't believe this," grumbles my husband, the boomer curmudgeon. "It's not like he was John Lennon."

Well no, but MJ did have the best-selling album of all time. He danced with astounding elasticity and grace. He invented the expensive music video. His music is an instant flashback to the lost youth of GenXers everywhere. He broke the color barrier.

"What are these people talking about?" The curmudgeon growls." What about Motown? What about Marvin Gaye, or Stevie Wonder?"

But they weren't played on the same stations, I explain. Michael crossed over. Although I have to admit, the frenzy is starting to get on my nerves - especially when I get to yoga class and find out we are dedicating the entire class to the memory of "the King of Pop". The yoga teacher recalls how, in her early twenties, she traveled to North Africa alone. Not a good idea for a young female, even now. Hailing a cab at the Tunis airport, she asked to be taken to Carthage. As the car headed into the desert, paranoia set in. Where were they really going? Was she about to be traded for a pair of camels? Would she ever see her mother again? Peering from his rear-view mirror, the cabbie bared his tobacco-stained teeth. "So," he began,"Tell me about this Billie Jean. Is she really his lover?"

It's a great story. Michael Jackson's music creating a connection between a middle aged Tunisian cabbie and a scared little hippy chick. But the curmudgeon isn't having any of it. Instead, he presents me with a recap of Michael's greatest tabloid hits.

Jackson squandered his incredible talent. He grossly mismanaged his money. He wallowed in crass, over-the-top materialism. He was a black man so self-hating, he whittled his nose down to Phantom of the Opera proportions and somehow managed to have white babies, probably with the aid of a turkey baster and a wad of caucasian sperm. He was a publicity hound who married Elvis' daughter, hung with Liz and Liza and paid Marlon Brando a million bucks to come to a party. MJ spent his adulthood trying to make up for the childhood he never had, building his own amusement park and private zoo, traveling with a chimp, playing video games and of course, playing with children. He was a probable child molester so tone-deaf, he gave an interview in which he described sharing his bed with a thirteen year old boy as perfectly natural. Now, we are learning about anorexia, drug addiction and a live-in Dr. Feel-Good who literally anesthetized Michael on a nightly basis.

Let's face it, people. The curmudgeon is correct. The gloved one was not an innocent, or a sprite, or a manchild, whatever that is. You could say Michael was victimized by an abusive father, by fame, by blackmailers, drug dealers, sycophants, hangers-on, and so-called plastic surgeons. But ultimately, we are talking about a talented, deeply flawed middle-aged man with some serious character issues.The grooves were infectious, and the showmanship, beyond compare. But the songs sound dated and strangely sexless. When Michael Jackson grabs his crotch, it's just choreography, and it's about as hot as watching a four year old who really, really has to pee. Just try and imagine the guy crooning "Baaaaby, I'm hot just like an oven, I need your lovin'" and you'll see what I mean. Give me Marvin and some of that old-time testosterone.

Now, Los Angeles is preparing for a funeral the likes of which we haven't seen since Lady Di was put to rest. As the curmudgeon grimly points out, it's going to cost a fortune for the city to take on all that traffic and crowd control, and LA, like the rest of California, is tapped out. But it's all a welcome distraction from the ruined economy and the fans need to mourn. As for Michael, he's finally getting what he wanted for so long. Unconditional love and a nice, long sleep.

If my son were stuck in a one-horse town...

...he'd get the horse to buy him some beer.

Wright Wingnut

So "them Jews" are barring Reverend Wright from talking to Obama. Thank you, asshole, for giving Rush Limbaugh ammunition for his outrageous attempt to turn far-right white supremacist Holocaust Museum killer James Von Brunn into an antisemitic leftist wack job. Hmmmm, there are so few of that type, and most of them are from Europe. Limbaugh would have been hard-pressed to find a poster-child for leftist anti-semitism in America, had Wright not presented himself like a suckling pig on a silver platter, with an apple in his mouth. Thank you, you unholy fool.