a boys' and girls' history of the future

Upon further examination, everything crumbled.

— Garin Williams

Turns out the real reason for growing up
was to learn what to do with suffering.
Not being surprised was the answer.

— Tony Hoagland, from his poem Powers

Music Nite

Playing The Green Lantern (3rd and Jefferson in Lexington, KY) tonight with the good ‘uns in Small Batch. We go on first, The Swells headline. Promise there’ll be goooood songs and 3-part harmony. Some o’ the sweeties from The Swells will be joining us, also. Doors are at 9pm, but we pro’ly won’t hit ‘til 10pm or later…

(come out.)

Christmas, Last Night

Once, a long time ago (honestly, I can’t remember when), I sat too-late at a bar up in Boston (Atwood’s Tavern, I’m sure) after a show (pretty sure I was sidemanning it with Christian McNeil) and Duke Levine (a stellar guitarist) told how on Christmas Day, he and his sister (because they’re Jewish and didn’t celebrate that holiday) would go down the street to watch their good friends (the Macy’s? The Mason’s? I don’t recall their names, but I know Duke does) open presents.

“Didn’t it make you sad?” we asked and “What was it like?” and “Did you wish the gifts were yours?” and “Didn’t they ever get you anything?”

Duke was convinced and convincing: it had been great. A gift, even, to watch his friends unwrap their gifts. And no: he and his sister did not feel cheated/left out/omitted but had felt fully the opposite: included/welcomed/blessed. We were amazed.

Last night, late—after work and some drinks and waaaay after reasonable folks had long since retired to bed—I was with my friends, Brian and Emily, in their apartment on Limestone Street in Lexington, Kentucky. They opened their gifts to and from one another—books and panties, boots and a coat, pillows, an iphone cover, socks and more—exclaimed and kissed and tried things on and handed me the ribbon from each package that had one. It was, in a word: glorious.

I have, of course, been a part of the system of reciprocity that makes up most Christmas experiences. I have been to tons of showers and birthdays—places/scenes where others received gifts while I did not, but because last night I did not have my own self-interest in gear (Do they like it? Do they like it? Oh, good! They like it!), my sharing with them in their gift exchange approached something like joy for me. I was just a witness. They were pleased and showed it; they were glad and content. My being there altered nothing, but it did alter me. Emily and Brian Opening Christmas Presents: it was one of the best things I ever yet got to see.

I disagreed with a lot of what he wrote, disliked tremendously the spirit in which he wrote it—the smugness, the certainty—and still, I cried when I learned that his light had gone out. So much of who we are depends on the joyful plurality of the voices willing to speak up, and Hitchens’s voice within that plurality was mighty. He will be missed even by those who wish he’d never learned to speak at all.

What blessing do we give the dead atheist? I think it is the blessing of no-blessing, i.e. the blessing of:

“Shit. There will never be another Christopher Hitchens.”

And there won’t be one, boys and girls.

No. More. Christopher. Hitchens.

Do you feel the collective heart ache? And after this round? Not another you or me, either. This hardship is fer real and ferever. Sigh. Rest in peace, Mr. Hitchens. Whatever that means.

Rest in peace, Future Uses.

Whoever we are.

An ad that pretends to be art is — at absolute best — like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill’s real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.

— David Foster Wallace

(Source: commitmenttissues, via themadeshop)

I think there’s a God; I just don’t know if we invented him or not.

— Arlyce, in full laughter

Paging Senator McCarthy

I hate to be a downer (although, it does seem to be one of my main skill sets), but sh*t just got a lot more Orwellian here in the good ol’ U.S.A.

Our sweetie-pies in the United States Senate just voted against a provision that would have kept our military from arresting and detaining U.S. citizens on American soil indefinitely and without charge so long as they are suspected of terrorism. Which means that unless President Obama vetoes the whole thang (and it’s a part of the Defense Spending bill for the next year—not an easy veto, politically-speaking), we can all be snatched up and scooted away so long as we’re “suspected”—forever. Habeas Corpus be damned. All that crazyareyoukiddingmewhatabouttheconstitution havoc that’s been wreaked in Guantanamo and in our countless secret prisons is now beginning to stink up our own sections of town. It’s like the folks in charge are trying to prove that the greatest oppressor and danger to a people is it’s own government.

James Madison said, “Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression.” Our real power (just ask the rest of the world) is in our ginormous standing army/navy/air force/special ops/marines/drones/Patriot Act/pepper-spraying-peaceful-protestors-police/moolah. Regardless of whether you think he’s Hitler or Muslim or an atheist or the Second-Coming of Christ, this bill is an unprecedented undoing of Constitutional rights, and Mr. Obama is our last line of defense. Write the President. Tell him to veto the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012.

You can read more about the hot water we’re in here, here, and here.

(And if you’re up for it, see how your senators voted on the provision here. If they voted yea, it means they were trying to take the indefinite detention provision out (and we should applaud their stance). If they voted nay, it means they wanted it left in, and you and i and all of us should write them, and tell them in no uncertain terms that they will never get another vote out of us.)

Salvage

by Kay Ryan