brishu

[brishu]

Atsa My Band

I’m never sure of anything. Ever. Even at moments when I can fake certainty with a convincing degree of fake authenticity, the doubts are roaring. And justifiably so, because I am always a hairsbreadth from irrevocably fucking up. Not exaggerating. My relationships, my job, my health, all surrounded by a tension that keeps mounting until I finally succumb to one of the myriad absurd impulses harrying me while trying to blend in to polite society. The tension intensifies until stumbling offers more relief than staying the course, like deviation is inevitable. Say something rude. Argue a meaningless point. Treat something important dismissively and something trivial like it’s vital. Imagine grossly intimate activities with that person over there. So when I say that the people in my life who put up with me are saints, that ain’t hyperbole. Sometimes (always), I worry that the gratitude I feel toward friends and family, and the self-loathing implicit in that gratitude, is so exhausting that I’m actually urging them to recognize how much nicer their lives would be if they never had to deal with my infuriating mix of passive aggressive self-effacement and utterly unfounded arrogance, all wrapped up in a constant appeal for sympathy. I wouldn’t begrudge any of them the sudden realization that life is too short for my special brand of bullshit. And I know that’s probably just fear dressed up like sympathy to stave off its fulfillment, but whatever. The point is that, while I love my friends and family, for the good of everybody, I need large doses of solitude. But not silence. 

Like Peter and the Wolf’s anthropomorphically symbolic instrumentation, dynamic music can have metaphysical qualities, elevating rhythm, melody and harmony into a coherent, affirming message, something both resembling and removed from life’s more atonal, discordant realities. A good band takes you for a real ride, and NRBQ is a great band. Listen closely to their music and your reward will be bliss.

The similarities between NRBQ fans and XXX moviegoers are uncomfortably strong. We’re usually middle aged men. Raincoat or not, we aren’t dressed well and our hair is a mess, which is not our fault because how are we supposed to control our own hairlines? We often go to our shows alone. And we derive immense pleasure from something that most folks just don’t appreciate. I am aware of a community of NRBQ fans who have bonded over the years and are all happy to see each other. I’ve even met a few and they are lovely people. But then there are the fans like me, who prefer an unadulterated musical experience, pro-sonic, anti-social. And if they’re really like me, they’re ashamed of it, knowing that the worries about all the ways an interaction could go awry are indicative of much deeper flaws. If we were emotionally healthier, we’d happily get down with other audience members instead of grabbing as much space as we can find to dance goofily by ourselves. But our worries are real, though at least they’re quieter when the music is really sending me, which honest NRBQ does, honest they do, honest they do, whooaaaooaaaoh. Yeah, they played that too, and it was great.

First time I saw NRBQ live was in 1995 at the Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill, NC, a year after they’d released a 25 year retrospective called Peek-A-Boo, and also a year after the departure of their lead guitarist, Big Al Anderson, who moved to Nashville to write songs (and gain significantly more financial security than his former bandmates, one of whom recently needed a fundraiser for medical expenses). At the time I played electric piano for a band called The Spirits of Deviation and had gotten to know a few musicians around town. Chip, the drummer from a band called the Two Dollar Pistols who rented the same practice space as us, saw me at the show, slapped me on the back, handed me a beer and said, “This is the best band in the world.” The jovial certainty of Chip’s pronouncement made an impression, but not as deeply as the band did. Of course, I was mesmerized by Terry Adams, who still plays piano like Thelonious Monk, Jerry Lee Lewis and Chico Marx, all while conducting the show as both teacher and class clown. Also, midsong, the late Tom Ardolino, tossed one of his drumsticks to the bass player, Joey Spampinato, who, Jack Burton-style, caught it and threw it right back without anybody missing a beat. These guys were doing a highwire routine where, instead of fearing an inevitable fall, they kept adding more risk to the act, getting wobblier and wobblier, but never losing their balance. Near the end of the show, an older, almost angry man started clapping his hands and shaking the dust off his boots, shouting that he had seen music all over the world and it didn’t get no better than this! At the time, I was struck by his sincerity, even if I didn’t really understand what lent his whooping a note of desperation. But years later, I thought that maybe he really wanted to cut loose, but couldn’t quite get there without a little more reinforcement from the his neighbors in the audience. He needed the college kids hearing the same music as him to tell him he wasn’t crazy, that this really was the best goddamn Rock ‘n Roll you could ever hope to hear, but nobody really gave it to him. I wish I could buy that guy a drink because he was absolutely right, and we all shoulda partied harder to celebrate how lucky we were to see that band perform one stunning musical feat after another.

Since that night, I’ve seen the Q in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Hoboken, 3 different venues in Manhattan and 3 more in Brooklyn, and every time there are a few longtime devotees and a few newbies who come in voluntarily to see what the sparse but passionate fuss is about. The crowd is never large, but whoever shows up gets treated to the real fucking deal. These guys may not be in it for the money, but they sure do mean business. And to me, seeing commitment that deep for commercial rewards that paltry is one of the most beautiful things available in our culture. A noble stand. 

In 2004, Terry Adams was diagnosed with throat cancer, and the band stopped performing while he focussed on healing. In 2008, the Joey Spampinato left the band, along with his brother Johnny who had replaced Big Al, and Tommy, whose health was in decline. Terry had formed a new band called Terry Adams’ Rock & Roll Quartet, but in 2011, the TARRQ became NRBQ. The current lineup, with Jon Perrin on drums, Casey McDonough on bass and Scott Ligon on guitar, has been playing together for more than 10 years now, and I would argue they actually surpass their predecessors.

I caught ‘em again on Friday night at the Paramount Hudson Valley Theater in Peekskill, NY and it reaffirmed and even bolstered my admiration for the band. Before the show, I went to a Mexican restaurant and sat next to a guy I had seen 5 minutes earlier at the box office. Somehow, I mistook recognizing him for greater kinship than we shared, and talked to him like a superfan for about 20 minutes before he told me that, rather than traveling a great distance to see his beloved Q, he was a seasonal subscriber with a distant familiarity with tonight’s act. I tried to make it seem like this information was integrating itself seamlessly into a friendly back and forth conversation about topics of mutual fluency, but in my embarrassment, I nodded a little too agreeably when he said, “There’s somethin’ you don’t see everyday. Pink rugby uniforms!” I wasn’t interested in pretending Jim (not his name) and I were manlier than rugby players, but he wanted to seem funny, I’d give up a mini-guffaw for the cause. I’d blown any chance I had to be seen with any complexity when I uninvitedly yammered on about the Q song that SpongeBob covered, and now I felt like things between Jim and me would pass most pleasantly if I dumbed down considerably while still acting like the things he said were interesting, which was a check I wasn’t sure I could cash. Obviously there are social strategies that do not attribute unintentional oppression to one’s interlocutor, but I needed a reason to enforce distance with Jim that wasn’t completely fueled by my own embarrassment. I wanted this interaction to be over, and even wished I’d picked one of the three other Mexican restaurants I’d seen in a two block perimeter around the theater (also, their hottest hot sauce was not very hot). But I didn’t want Jim to feel like he was being soured on, so I kept smiling and nodding and saying something inane every few minutes just to make the coversation feel two-way, feeling increasingly apologetic as the feelings I was displaying grew increasingly counterfeit. “We’re all God’s children,” I kept telling myself. Finally he hopped off his barstool and said, “OK, good meeting you,” and I was relieved to see that he hadn’t remembered my name. I wasn’t there to make friends. 

The theater held over 1,000. I think maybe 200 people showed up, most of them subscribers like Jim. I wondered what the folks who’d never heard of NRBQ thought. I’d like to think they loved the music and weren’t turned off by the middle aged loners in the rear orchestra, flailing arthritically to some approximation of the beat. None of us look like we’re really in on some divine secret, and, since none of the people we’ve dragged before to experience this abiding source of joy ever come back, it seems like we’ve all been blown there by forces that other people subdue. It’s not that I think you have to be a weirdo to love NRBQ, just that whatever peace stronger or more successful people find is less reliant on music than mine is. Maybe if I hadn’t been driving, I would have gotten drunk enough to harangue the audience a bit, like my buddy did back in 1995. 

Jim pierced my little bubble late in the show and said, “I’ve definitely seen less talent in bigger arenas!” and, while I was glad that he appreciated the band, I also perceived that he thought validating my love for the band was some kind of good will gesture. But again, I did mistakenly geek out on the guy 3 hours earlier. So I patted him on the shoulder and nodded, hoping he’d go away so I could go back to listening without feeling too misanthropic about it. Like I was hoarding a drug. Not proud of it. On the other hand, if that’s my self-medication, I could be doing worse. 

 As the band came out for an encore, a group of women who looked like they’d been trying to show each other pictures of their grandchildren if they could only figure out what their oldest daughters did to their phones approached the stage. One of them said, “Terry! 1976!” Terry Adams looked at her, smiled and said, “Oh, I remember.” And I have to believe it’s memories like those that help a band that’s been touring for decades give a half-empty barn one of the best performances I’ve ever seen. No hyperbole. 

[brishu]

Love Is Everywhere (Beware)

Like Bill Evans, right? Somebody off the street hears that and might assume it was just boring noise piped into a department store. The bespectacled junky, hunched over his keys, trading bars with Miles, Trane and Cannonball, that image enriches the experience of the music. It does. It’s advertising, like gleaming bodies on a beach that sparkle just as effervescently in the mind as sips from Coca-Cola bottles do on the tongue. Context isn’t everything, but it’s something. And it’s subconscious enough that we have less control over it. That makes it easier to play tricks on us. So this is where advertising aims. But not just advertising. Propaganda. Cultural context, like knowing not just some of the producer’s biography, but of the niche boxes of self-identification it checks too. We treat these like secret handshakes. Maybe they are. And maybe it’s useful to know where to go, or to feel like you know where, instead of just groping around in the dark, trying to tie your shoes with mittens on, experiencing every sensation as a surprise. Maybe you’re still nimble enough to make your own story or images to the music, instead of knowing the scene this orchestral score accompanies. Why so many maybes? I’m not nearly as uncertain about things as I act. Well, some things. Often it feels like the opposite, like I’m treating deep ravines of confusion like terra firma. And not always front-facing. I mean goading myself to believe I get shit I don’t actually get, that I’m going to do shit I’m not actually going to do. But no, that’s the opposite back the other way- fraying an established order to allow for greater possibility. Sowing doubt, but doubt in the name of maybe, a positive maybe. “That’s what I’d like to know about it.” There’s something innately funny about this, like it’s recognizable from something else, but part of the humor is that very illusion, that everybody feels like they’ve heard the quote but nobody knows from whence. When I pronounce things with certitude, there’s stress involved, something between “Oh if you only knew the arduous journey I undertook to vouchsafe these gems to you!” and “I’m embarrassed but yes, I really do know this.” When I picture a wise man, he has stripes across his image, some richly dark, others pastel. And then a WILCO song comes on and I marvel at the simultaneous utter glory and relatability of Jeff Tweedy- inaccessible genius and ultra-cuddly mensch. Nobody thinks of me in either of those terms. Funny, smart, stupid, pathetic, weird, annoying, fast, pretentious, strong, weak, severe, ineffectual, lost, grounded, manipulative, empathetic, memorable, who?, impossible, available, deep, unweildy, bright, brilliant, a waste, awkward, lame, energetic, manic, distorted, Jewish, blasphemous, vulgar, conceited, humble. It’s all context, really. Wonder how this sure to be widely read piece will affect how I’m perceived.

[brishu]

The Boss

I love Bruce Springsteen. It’s ok if you don’t (no it’s not). I just mean I understand how the level of reverence levelled at the Boss has become a kind of cultural pressure to go out of your way to see what the big deal is, why Americans, mostly male, of every social strata are so worshipful of the raspy guy from Jersey. And even after hearing more than you bargained for about his genius,  you might continue to believe he’s interchangeable with some other Chevy truck selling troubador like Bob Seger or John Cougar Mellencamp, learning only after it’s too late that you’ve invited further lecturing from the mortally offended die-hards, and you’re sorry it ever got brought up and the main lesson you’ve learned is not to discuss the Boss in the first place. The man touches nerves. Fine. And if it makes you feel any better, one of America’s preeminent (pre-MeToo) literary critics agrees with you. But even if you aren’t a Springsteen-bocher, you’re probably aware that, at 71 years of age, Mr. Working Class’s formative years crashing on shut down factory floors while developing two bands��(the Castiles and Steel Mill) that barely made it further than your pal who nags everybody to come see him play classic rock covers at some shitty bar right when you’re trying to feed your kids dinner have been eclipsed several times over by the amount of time he’s been rich and famous. Without ever trying, you’ve heard Born to Run hundreds of times (and come on, it’s pretty amazing that you’re still not sick of it, right?). 

Maybe you’ve noticed that politically, the Boss has made a more overt left turn in the past, oh, 25 years. Yes, he tangled with Ronald Reagan for the “Great Communicator’s” obtuse misunderstanding of Born in the USA’s scathing critique of the American Dream, but his first moment of unapologetic alienation of a good segment of his fanbase was the June 4, 2000 premiere of American Skin (41 shots), written in response to the NYPD killing of an unarmed Guinean immigrant named Amadou Diallo on February 4, 1999. Pissed off cops called for boycotting the Boss, shouting into every microphone they could reach what a scumbag the guy was, and I can only imagine the number of family barbecues whose soundtrack’s needed to be recurated from that point forth. 

Then in 2004, about 16 months into Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Boss endorsed his first presidential candidate. I actually attended an Election Eve rally in Cleveland where Springsteen played John Kerry’s unofficial campaign anthem after John Glenn talked about the debacle in Fallujah and former Cleveland Mayor, Dennis Kucinich screamed like an a capella Joe Cocker about a bunch of shit that never happened. We were told that if Kerry added 65,000 votes to Gore’s 2000 Ohio total, he’d unseat the incumbent. Well, with the Boss’s help, we added over 100,000 votes, but the Democrats forgot that Karl Rove can do math too, and Bush re-carried Ohio and got reelected by winning his first presidential election. Anyway, by that time, Springsteen seemed squarely “of the left.” Maybe he always had been. Maybe he’d become an arrogant elitist who thought his fame entitled him to tell regular Joes what to do. Or maybe he was so worried that his success would undermine his working class brand, that he tied himself in knots of wokeness just to seem relevant.

Or how about: None of the Above? Because Bruce Springsteen is fucking artist. His book was terrific, his Broadway show moving, hilarious and above all, entertaining, and his last two albums are awesome. Plenty of people have made fine careers out of thudding out noise that vaguely resembles good music. But the Boss keeps his rhythm driving and his melodies memorable. And that takes gifts that might not be transferable to policital analysis, but they certainly offer valuable insight into American life. And for those who have gotten offended over the years, who feel alienated by the divergence of their politics and Springsteen’s (most of whom I’m sure are avid readers of blogs by goofy middle-aged Jews), maybe they broke up with the wrong asshole. Imagine thinking Bruce Springsteen is more abusive, more damaging to our national well-being than a war-mongerer or a race-baiting medical scofflaw. Fealty to Democrats isn’t necessary. They suck too. But maybe the Boss, like me, feels that their sins are far less grievous. Wouldn’t EVERYBODY like to go to a big rock concert again? You know, where the biggest danger is getting drunk and falling off the balcony? This thing where you only like artists who coddle your views? That’s on you, motherfuckers.

[brishu]

NYC Marathon #6

Yes I hope this post will resonate with at least one person, but I’ll go ahead and confess at the outset that my primary motivation for sharing a few thoughts about running a marathon last week is to get a few more hits off the attention pipe. You get a handful of well-wishes before the big race, then you bathe in the support and adulation of a million spectators, then you get congratulated by people on the street for the rest of the day, then you get upwards of 100 likes on social media for crossing the finish line and then you go back to being a normal schnook. How can that not entail a precipitous drop in dopamine? And this particular marathon was special to me. It wasn’t my best time, but it was my gutsiest performance. A few people knew about the difficulties I’d been having for a few weeks, difficulties that forced me to (pretend to) seriously consider dropping out of the race. I allowed that showing up to run 26.2 miles after being unable to walk without pain for more than two weeks was definitely stupid and possibly even dangerous. But while I was never quite sure whether I was over- or under-reacting, I did feel pretty fucking proud of myself for enduring a substantial amount of pain (plus the frustration of having to run about 10 miles slowly) without quitting. In the week since the marathon I have heard several other people share stories of disappointment, injury, even walking off the course, and I relate to every single one of them. So maybe my experience is relatable too. 

Running can feel solitary, but never selfish. Every runner I know derives joy from other runners’ accomplishments. When I’m out there at asscrack hours, I get inspired by every other runner I see, regardless of speed, age, weight, facial expression or even fuel belt. And that general attitude of support pervades the whole sport, from the sub-5:00 Kenyans to the 15:00 milers who cross the finish line long after the sun has set. I’ve embraced running as an acceptable way to feel good about myself while usually feeling besieged and occasionally debilitated by personal, professional and artistic anxieties. But, just as I’m now overdrawing from the well of “hey I ran a goddamn marathon!”, how is a perpetual self-loather going to have any discipline around one of the few things that offers temporary respite?

Two and a half weeks before the marathon I got hurt. Plantar fasciitis had been creeping into my right foot for a few days, but that was manageable. Then I jumped off a 4′ fence in Red Hook, something I do all the time, and landed with the perfect combination of angle and force to detonate something in my heel. X-rays assured me it wasn’t a fracture but until I could walk without pain, I was going to have to stop running. That lasted five days. I’d missed my last 20 miler, plus two tempo runs that I was convinced would prove to me I could knock 17 minutes off my previous year’s time and qualify for Boston. Ellipticals and stationary bikes weren’t doing shit for me so I went out for a run and sure enough my limp went from slight back to pronounced. So I stopped running for 10 days, vacillating between “I’m not losing much fitness” to “If I have this much trouble walking, how much hubris gets me thinking I have any business lining up on November 3?”

So I ate my spaghetti, tried to sleep and took the subway to the ferry to the bus to Fort Wadsworth last Sunday feeling (optimistically) about 70%. My foot hut the whole time, but after the first mile I let my legs carry me, keeping a 7:30 pace pretty comfortably. By mile 9 that had crept up to 7:45, and while I didn’t worry too much, the excuse extending from my right ankle started to feel more available. I got my first leg cramp on the 59th Street Bridge, just past the Mile 15 marker. By the time I finished crossing the bridge, I resented the famous welcoming roar along 1st Avenue and started looking for gaps in the barrier where I could sneak off the course. My thinking was something like, “OK, you tried. You shouldn’t have, but you did. And now it’s time to grow up, wise up and sit the fuck down. This experiment is over.” 

But then I checked how I actually felt, and it wasn’t that awful. I was spiraling out because I was worried about how I was GOING to feel down the road, but I wasn’t there yet. So I started running again. Not very fast, but steady. Next thing I knew I was in the Bronx and hadn’t cramped up again since 59th St. Worries about not finishing, or even about taking more than 5 hours were literally behind me. More pain would be ahead and I still had to stop a few more times to touch my toes until the leg cramps subsided, but the insistent excuses that were formulating around mile 16 had been stomped into submission. In the end, I added 23 minutes onto my 2018 time and I was more than fine with that. I’ve always tried to get the best time I could, but as my family is probably sick of hearing me say, performance is secondary to just getting to participate in this event. The NYC marathon brings out so much good in so many people and the privilege to be part of something so special overwhelms me annually. But yeah, next year I am going to run much, much faster.

[brishu]

Everybody’s Heart’s in the Same Fucking Place

My shift at the Park Slope Food Coop is usually the first Saturday of the month (A Week). I am the squad leader for the 8:30 PM Food Processing shift and, for the past 9 years, I have amassed a spotless record of showing up drunk. Sometimes I wonder if a non-shift encounter with any of my squadmates would make them think, “There’s something different about you right now.” Under my drunken helm, nobody’s cut themselves on a cheese slicer or box cutter or tape roll blade. And for the most part nobody’s emerged from the coop’s basement after two and a half hours getting bossed around by a booze-soaked contrarian nursing any grievous emotional injuries. Actually, more often than not, somebody doing a make-up or holding up their end of a shift swap enjoys their time so much that they try to join our squad. 

But this is the Park Slope Food Coop and the self-righteousness is as abundant as the kale. I am not the first grump to notice that some people base their most cherished beliefs on whose approval they gain. Why would you want to brutalize the planet to access natural gas when you can oppose it and feel like you’re marching right alongside Mark Ruffalo? Would you rather your foreign policy views align with the sneering, bomb-happy conservatism of Norman Podhoretz or the serene brilliance of Noam Chomsky? These are obtuse dichotomies, to be sure. So here’s a specific one: I am skeptical of the gun control movement. Less than 10 minutes of research can tell anybody who wants to know that more than 1 million AR-15s get sold each year. For those who might stagger in horror at a number that high, I’d ask you to take a moment and consider some other information that sales figure connotes. Personally, I’m extremely reluctant to demonize that many people I don’t know. Setting aside the implicit interpersonal dynamics lecture and moving from cursory research to wonkier statistics, we can learn that mass shootings account for less than 1% of gun deaths in a given year. In 2017, 39,773 people were killed by guns in America. 23,854 or 60% were suicides, and of the 14,542 or 37% that were homicides, 117 fatalities fit the legal definition of “mass shooting.” If this sounds like I’m trying to minimize the horror inspired by mass shootings in America, it’s because I am. Does this mean I side with gun owners over victims of these atrocities? No, it does not. It means I reject the notion that those are the two sides pitted against each other. And I will assert that fear of losing a loved one in a mass shooting is about as mathematically sound as treating a lottery ticket like a reliable path to wealth. But there’s actual likelihood, and then there’s media-spurred terror. So I’m not exactly raring to see a penstroke turn several million law-abiding citizens into criminals just because an incident I heard about in the news upset me.

Anyway, I only mention this because one time a young guy doing a make-up on my Food Processing shift started lecturing me about the correlation between Scandinavian rights to bear arms (according to him, they have none) and the number of gun-related deaths they suffer there. And yes alcohol was a factor but I got really pissed off at this guy. In retrospect, I should have been patient and respectful as he regurgitated his boilerplate arguments. But I guess I was too busy getting rankled by his presumption that only cretins unworthy of respect could harbor views as indifferent to human suffering as mine, instead of thinking, “Hmm, this guy seems pretty smart and he’s rocking a terrific playlist and everyone on his squad seems to like him a lot so maybe there’s more to his viewpoint than my kneejerk assumptions have led me to believe.” So I unleashed a bunch of other data and upbraided him for being so obtuse that he presumed my suspicions about anti-gun rhetoric amounted to my being a MAGA-head. The basement got tense and I apologized for making things awkward for everyone and changed subjects to talk about movies (whereupon our anti-gun crusading dried mango bagger announced that he was boycotting Miramax’s ouevre. Good for him.). 

For years, our shift occurred the night before the Superbowl and the night before the Oscars and we worked hard to stock the shelves upstairs with enough cheeses, olives, nuts, dried fruits, teas and spices to sate the frenzied consumption that is de rigueur on these particular Sundays. Eventually, A-Week Saturday rotated away and it was up to some other squad to work like Santa’s unpaid elves to meet the demands on Pepper Jack and Brie. But somehow our shift remains on the one Saturday night when I refuse to exert myself (or get shitfaced): Marathon Eve. 

So last year I swapped shifts with someone who liked our squad so much that she joined. My policy is that as long as you show up with some regularity, you’re welcomed warmly on our shift. We care about each other’s families and careers, opinions on matters political and artistic, and general well-being. This is less some sort of management strategy enacted to optimize productivity than a simple extension of the good will I feel toward nearly all people and certainly all Food Processors (even the Pulp Fiction boycotter who pronounces Weinstein incorrectly). Now. At our shift in August, the subject of the coop’s long, tortured debate on carrying Israeli products came up. I love this subject, even though I disagree with almost every other view anybody has on it. I don’t agree with ardent supporters of Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions, and I certainly don’t agree with the ultra-orthodox Jews who consider all criticism of Israel tantamount to Naziism.

My first exposure to this debate was at a General Meeting in the summer of 2012. The meeting was held in the ballroom of Congregation Beth Elohim, of which we are members. People I expected to shoot down anything anti-Israel (because they looked like elderly Jews) stood up passionately decrying coop complicity in Israeli policies they already unwillingly supported by paying taxes. And then some younger people with tattoos and gender fluidity vibes stood up in defense of selling Israeli products. The debate was passionate but civil. I found all arguments convincing and simply loved being in a room among people who cared so deeply about doing the right thing. Ultimately the boycotters advanced their initiative one more rung along the coop’s bureaucracy, and the next General Meeting would include a vote on whether to have a coop-wide referendum to BDS or not to BDS. 

This meeting got so much publicity that the coop needed to rent a larger space, so 1,600 or 10% of all Park Slope Food Coop members filed into the auditorium at Brooklyn Tech. BDS advocates who were not coop members stood outside leafleting attendees, while school buses ferried several minyanim of ultra-orthodox Jews. Unlike this meeting’s predecessor, the tone was not civil and the arguments were not convincing. They were hystrionic pleas that transparently appealed to each speaker’s own moral vanity. Lost in the debate was any consideration for practical details like how much it would cost to stage a coop-wide referendum, or have the BDSers found alternative, morally acceptable sources for vegan marshmallows? And meanwhile, it became very clear, very quickly that the measure to hold a referendum was going to get voted down. So the series of speakers dabbling in petty-demagoguery was a depressing waste of time. 

Two months later, at a meeting I did not attend, the issue came up again, and aroused such anger that a physical altercation occurred. After that, the subject was banned from future General Meetings. While appreciating the moral passion on all sides, my personal view was that people who wanted to boycott should, but they had to acknowledge that other coop members wanted to buy these supposedly blood-soaked products and depriving them of that right felt like some kind of tyranny too. 

Anyway, the tortured history of the debate comes up every now and then and I always love hearing what other people think, and also amplifying my own view that the passions that made the debate inflammatory are part of what makes the coop so special to me. So during our August shift, the woman who had swapped with me on the first Saturday of November, 2018, said with no compunction whatsoever that Israel was guilty of genocide. And despite my inebriation (that night I had done most of my drinking at a dear friend’s surprise 60th birthday party), I was able to express disagreement with this term, and assurance that, whereas many people would hear that and go through a series of internal reactions that would result in antipathy toward the issuer of such a serious charge, I understood that her beliefs were motivated by a desire to do the right thing, whatever that may be. Now she may have thought that I was just another Jew defending the indefensible. And I may have thought she was just another self-righteous ignoramus who prizes wokeness over common sense. But speaking for myself, nobody’s just another anything. In my consumption of online commentary, I see a lot of “[that] tells you all you need to know about her.” And it amazes me that this is an acceptable way to rest your personal case against a person who is always more complex, and usually well-meaning, than you presume when you decide that one view, or one errant phrase is a full representation of another person’s soul. That the practice of basing a holistic view of another person on one political position is so blithely unexamined suggests to me that anxieties underlying our need to close our minds are the real problem. 

I got annoyed with my fellow squad member. In truth I’m still kind of annoyed, both with her, and with the consortium of opinion that sent her forth believing that accusing Israel of genocide is the right thing to do. And it would be more comfortable for me to let my annoyance snowball into full-blown contempt (spurred at some level by the same anxieties which lead to over-eager mind-closing), to tie her incorrect view of my people’s national homeland to the neuroses her parenting has visited on her daughter, even to her insufficient appreciation of my marathon running, all of which are trumped up charges to be sure. Plenty of people would do exactly this, with no real consequence. They’d condemn this person because her version of doing the right thing is in opposition to theirs. Where is the conscience that holds condemnation at bay? 

Either way, while I feel alright about being able to see the light in this person despite my ethyl-clouded mindframe augmenting the shadows cast by her risible political views, I still struggle to find the balance between advancing views I know to be correct with being more of a conduit than a catalyst. And it also feels unfair that I agonize over this stuff only to see significantly less introspective people exert greater influence. But none of that will stop me from getting rip-roaring drunk before my next coop shift.

[brishu]

BSB 8/15/19

[brishu]

Almost Everyone

My daughters were introduced to the music of the Backstreet Boys by camp counselors, so their only context for hearing some of their bigger hits (and they have an astonishing number of very big hits) was the enthusiasm of people about 10 years older than them. No anti-boyband snark, no snobbery that looks askance at performers who don’t play instruments. They began asking for specific songs to be added to their music players, and even requested “As Long As You Love Me” at my dearest friend’s daughter’s Bat Mitzvah party. To them, the Backstreet Boys were as much a part of the pop canon as Elvis, only still out there performing.

Their response to the BSB’s seemed to be purely musical. It’s possible that they got high on secondhand boyband fumes, since their counselors’ enthusiasm was surely fueled by the gangbusters marketing campaign designed to make millions of kids fall in love with AJ, Brian, Nick, Howie and Kevin, which is probably even harder to pull off than it sounds. But as much as I’d like to, I can’t discount the quality of the music either. And if I’m shocked that five cute boys who first performed together in 1993 just hung another Number 1 album on the Billboard charts (which apparently also still exist), maybe it’s my shock that should be shocking. I also envied the girls their ready embrace of songs they liked without subjecting them to the battery of artistic litmus tests their sonically dyspeptic father does. 

The psychotherapeutic industry seems built upon the distinction between gentle and brutal. If you make the same, relatively harmless mistake repeatedly, steps toward correction are fine, but ease up on the internal machete. If you are too prone to lying to maintain valuable relationships or hold down a job, stop treating your dishonesty like fine china, you goddamn schlemiel. OK, I’m not a psychological expert but one of the things I’ve been working on in therapy is retaining a consistent striving for improvement while loosening an attachment to self-flagellation. So, occasional desire to make my children happy aside, was it a well-earned moment of transcendence or a mere boot to my own aesthetics that led me to sneak off to the Barclays Center to buy a trio of Backstreet Boys tickets while the girls were in Hebrew school?

I didn’t tell them about the tickets for several months, but ultimately I worried that surprising them on the day of the concert would pressure them to evince unnatural levels of appreciation for their loving father’s amazing gesture, so about two weeks before the show, I gave them a heads up. 

Another chronic difficulty I have is ordering food from people whose first language is not English. I don’t think it makes me Steve King to cling to the generalization that they never take me seriously when I say I want it spicy. So on the day of the concert I ordered Thai food and asked them to make it “extra, extra, extra spicy please.” In retrospect that was at least one “extra” too many. But by the time we had dinner before the show, I forgot about lunch and slathered everything I ate with hot sauce, which I believe contributed to my need of a bathroom that undermined my plan to arrive at the Barclays Center by 7:30 so we could get through the security line before the show started at 8.

I had looked up the setlists from Chicago and Detroit and noted that they opened the show with a song called ���Everyone”, which I thought was the one where they’re like “Everybaaaah-day! Rock your baaaah-day!”, which in my self-conferred Masters in Backstreetology seemed like the only appropriate opener so I really, really didn’t want the girls to miss it, which brought on a sustained castigation of why I prioritized capsaicin over keeping promises I’d silently (and inaccurately) made to my children. 

We got into the arena at about 8:12 and, hearing noise emanating from the stage, rushed up several flights of stairs to our seats. That’s when we learned that there was an opening act named Baylee Littrell (it wasn’t until the next morning that I learned he was Brian Littrell’s 16 year-old son). What we caught of his set assuaged whatever guilt I felt about what we missed, but I did appreciate that he played with actual bass, guitar and drums (plus keyboards, horns and back-up vocals that could not be seen onstage). We looked him up on Spotify to see how many plays his songs had gotten and determined that the one with more than 300,000 would be the closer. Do you know how many great bands would harm the elderly for 30,000 plays??? Fruit & Flowers only have two songs over 20k. Look ‘em up, they rule. Anyway, we were right. It was a song called Boxes and apparently the girl Baylee loves checks off all 22 of them. 

I have shadowy memories of watching the Backstreet Boys’ debut on Saturday Night Live with this perfectly synced dance involving chairs that they may or may not have stacked at one point during their number. At the time I was appalled by them, but proud of myself for being sophisticated enough to label their performance Fosse-esque. Harboring the incorrect assumptions that “Everyone” was the song I thought it was, and that their act had not evolved in the 20 years since I saw them on SNL, I tried to share in the excitement of the folks around me. Our neighbors were a very attractive young man and woman who kept apologizing when they passed us to get to the aisle. I tried not to eavesdrop but I did hear the young man extol his therapist to his friend (somehow it was clear they weren’t a couple). Just before the show started the young woman asked if I was the fan bringing my kids along or vice versa. I said it was mainly the kids but I was stoked too. She said that she and her friend had caught the band in Vegas and it was so amazing that they had to go again in Brooklyn and don’t mind her when she sang along to every lyric, even the new ones. Our conversation ended abruptly when the lights went down and she joined the collective “WHOO!” volleying stageward. 

As though in response, the stage started to open with almost unbearable slowness, suspense mounting as aperture expanded to maw, and I realized that I am unable to experience a reveal like that without hearkening back to one of the earliest and most vivid aural memories I have- the hinges creaking at the beginning of the Monster Mash. On angled video screens, band members appeared, one by one, in slow motion. The way they fingered their hat brim or rolled their shoulders made me laugh very hard. My neighbor to my left nodded approvingly, the kids to my right briefly emancipated themselves. Finally the tectonic shifting ended and there, on a platform so receded that I thought they should be called the Backstage Boys, were five guys who had been crushing it for 26 fucking years.

My neighbor said, “They can’t really dance anymore but they can still sing!”

“Everyone” is not the song I thought it was.

The first concert our kids ever attended was Los Lobos in Prospect Park. Our younger daughter was 10 months old and happy anywhere that had popsicles. Our older daughter was nearly 3 and for months she would ask to hear more Los Lobos. I don’t think she recognized anything from the concert, she just wanted to be reminded of the special experience of live, loud music and how happy it made the people around her (including her dad), and our living room stereo system was the best portal for that. Los Lobos’ most popular non-fucking-La Bamba-song is Cancion del Mariachi, coming in at 15,898,494 plays. Nothing else cracks a million. 

This was their first time seeing a bigtime pop act, and though they only knew about 5 of the 30 songs performed, they were rapt for the entire show. Except when the band talked to the audience, which they did in a sort of schematic where every member got his five-minute lovefest with the audience while the other guys changed outfits. They were all some variation on how much love they felt in the room (it was pretty palpable), how much gratitude they felt to the fans for the longevity of their career, and how pleased they were to be Number 1 yet again. Oh and that music was important too. I don’t mean to demean their commitment to music. All five of them can sing quite well, they harmonize together beautifully (even though I’m pretty sure vocal enhancements were employed without remorse) and you can’t sing the same song over and over again for more than 20 years without losing it unless the song is half-decent. But without getting too grumpy about it, I neither could nor wanted to suppress a flare of anger that so many serious musicians are poor while these cutie pies are all multi-millionaires. I don’t know what the ultimate size of the music market is, and it was hardly revelatory to note that these guys’ share was not in line with the quality of their musical production, but I felt like I had to take my own tiny stand, to stand up for musicians less slickly managed, artists less adept at navigating A&R social hierarchies, bands whose universality is not predicated on cultural touchstones manufactured by MTV. Obviously, nobody buys a concert ticket in the hope that they’ll get scolded at the show. Another thing people try to avoid at concerts is taking a dump. And so more acutely than ever, my self-righteousness was supplanted by regret for that extra extra.

I thought about asking my neighbors to watch the kids, and even to make the joke “And don’t let them vape!” but opted not to because I didn’t want to suggest that I had a problem with their vaping (such is my social density that I tuned out all of their apologia and was so grateful for their friendliness that I just wanted them to like me, never realizing that maybe, just maybe they might really want me to like them too). So I just told the kids to stay put and made my way to the can. And I daresay BSB fans are as nice in private as they are out in the arena. I base this conjecture on my bathroom experience where, unlike most concerts I attend, I was able to tend to my digestive needs without feeling like I had to contort myself to avoid somebody else’s excrement. It shouldn’t be surprising that more banal music begets more polite behavior, hell even Plato cautioned against exposing certain segments of society to more inflammatory musical scales. But maybe all that bougie antisepticism is just proof of how truly un-punk Mr. Stand-Taker really is.

Returned to the seats where the kids looked sleepy. I told them they shouldn’t feel any pressure to stay for the whole show, which looked like it was going to end after 11. They looked at me like I’d just told them I was donating their college fund to Trump 2020. 

One of them said, “Just because we’re not dancing and screaming doesn’t mean we aren’t having an amazing time, Dad.”

OK then.

So that song I got confused about is actually called “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back).” I pretended like I knew that the whole time and was pretty sure I got away with it. Then one of the girls said, “I thought you said they opened with this song.” And with no remorse whatsoever I said, “Yeah, that was in Florida.” Why I needed them to think I knew what I was talking about is almost a less interesting question than why I also lied about what states preceded New York on the DNA Worldwide Tour. 

There were more costume changes, more banter with adoring fans, more grinding reconfiguration of the stage, more neon mike stands shifting color in unison, something that probably seemed high tech in 1999, and more hits, at least four up-tempo numbers before they went into their big treacly ballad about which way they want it, which nobody can convince me isn’t about the supposed horrors of anal sex. Our neighbors checked and sure enough, both kids knew every word. A singalong ensued. Then I encouraged departure but the kids insisted on staying in case there was more. There was more. 

In fact, all five guys came out for what I guess was an encore wearing Nets jerseys. Knowing what a rabid Nets fan I am, both kids felt vindicated for insisting we stick around. And then they actually knew the second, and final song of the evening and were so exhilarated by the whole thing that they wanted to walk all the way home. But it was 11:15 and I’d been up since 4:30 and I was not above projecting my fatigue onto them so we took the subway one stop. We had gotten out quickly enough that the train was not packed with other BSBers or whatever their fans are called. And again, if we strip away the petty concern of my daughters’ happiness, was I glad we went to a Backstreet Boys Concert? Well, one kid said “That would have been awesome even if the band didn’t sing any songs. The lights were just so great!” So cool. I just spent the better part of a week’s pay on the magic of strobes that kept me up way past my bedtime. And two very happy daughters. And very pleasant interactions with attractive strangers. And a few moments of infectious beats and melodies. And the nicest shit I’ve ever taken at a concert. Would I do it again, even with smarter lunch ordering? Without hesitation.

By the way, this was written while listening to Face Stabber, the newest Thee Oh Sees album. It’s fucking awesome. They’re playing a club in a few weeks than can hold about 800 people.

[brishu]

The Vanguard

This is about me. Yes, they all are, but since I am going to talk about greater artists than me without being able to get out of their way, I guess I want to start off with apologies- to said artists, to the two or three people who actually read this, and to God for my physical and spiritual sins.  

I moved to New York in 1996, and as soon as my feet hit the most well-trod pavement in America, I began making mistakes. I screwed up socially, I screwed up professionally, and I screwed up artistically. But amid the fuckup-fest, I did one thing right. I went to the Village Vanguard. 

I avoid nostalgia like nuclear waste, not because of some magnificent set of ethics, but because it’s too painful to me to look back on who I was anytime between 20 years and five minutes ago. I don’t forgive myself for not knowing the exact type of shit I should have known to avoid making the stupid fucking mistakes I always seem to make. The point is that I like who I am now better than earlier, shitter iterations of me. But tonight I went back to the Village Vanguard for the first time in over a decade, and the memories, goaded by the duty I felt to remember artists like Clark Terry, Cedar Walton and Tommy Flanagan, all of whom I saw perform there, who are no longer with us. (of the three dead musicans cited, two played on Giant Steps fwiw). So, amid the morass of my 20s, 30s and even a good bit of my 40s, the one unassailable thing I did was go to the Village Vanguard as often as I could and I guess that gave me license to revel in the few times in the past that I’ve actually liked myself.

Maybe you don’t listen to music intently enough to know when a master of his instrument expresses something eloquent enough to evoke human misery and joy within the same measure. But that’s what Peter Bernstein, Harold Mabern, Jr. (age 83), Jimmy Cobb (age 90) and John Webber (50) do. And maybe within that disconnect between those that love jazz and those that don’t is a nice thick coat of self-congratulations, but whatever. Jazz is the lover to whom I open myself and just allow feelings to pass through with as little interference as possible. They played Cheesecake. They played My Old Flame. They played Love Walked In, and I sat there soaking it in and indulging in memories of prior visits to a room drenched in jazz history. 

But I wouldn’t arrive at this rare moment of self-acceptance without the nobility of the art I was consuming. The band’s drummer has been around a very long time. But there he was, listening to every note his melody section was playing, ready to frame any phrase he could predict with cracks of his snare. This drummer, this generous, ever-present, good listener of a drummer’s name is Jimmy Cobb, who just a little over 60 years ago stepped into the studio with Miles, Trane, Cannonball, Bill Evans and Paul Chambers and kept the beat for the entirety of Kind of Blue. 

The last time I was at the Vanguard, smartphones weren’t ubiquitous. And the time before that, you could still smoke there. Now nobody throws you out for fucking around on your goddamn device, but nobody nobody nobody smokes there anymore. And the club is just as cool, and maybe, just maybe, I’m a little bit cooler walking out than I was walking in. 

[brishu]

Kojen

Michelle Kojen was kind of a weirdo and completely delightful. She was the most joyful figure on the dancefloor, the human gyroscope whose spinning core was carried round and round by her windmilling arms, usually to upbeat goth songs. Happier songs by bands like R.E.M. and the Cure seemed to propel her in ways pop music with no tether to deep sadness couldn’t. You knew the sadness was there, in a strange mixture of internal and external inflictions. I was definitely guilty of hurting Michelle’s feelings, through mockery, impatience and even cruel disdain. But looking back now, I can’t think of once instance where Michelle ever hurt me. I wonder if anyone else can. Because maybe she was annoying at times, but she was always a sweetheart.

The Grateful Dead played two shows at my college in March, 1993. A few hours before one of the shows I ran into Kojen on campus. I wanted to be happy to see her but I was under the influence of psychedelics and every encounter felt dangerous, or at least dangerously embarrassing. Michelle recognized my state pretty quickly and thought it was hilarious, but there was no mockery in her mirth. She was so lovely and nurturing to me that in retrospect, seeing her at that moment was actually more meaningful than the two hours of flashing lights and warmed over hippy anthems I believed at the time were a pinnacle of existence.

In 1993, methods of keeping in touch included writing letters, long distance phone calls and a new thing called email. I didn’t have any of Kojen’s contact info and I don’t think I ever saw her again in person. We were able to reconnect when Facebook became available to the general public and I so enjoyed our joint mourning when R.E.M. broke up, despite the fact that neither of us gave a shit about anything they’d produced since 1987.

Today I found out she passed away. I hadn’t been in touch, even on Facebook, in several years. But my memories of her are vivid and they are fond. I have always had a foolish streak and I don’t think it’s unfair to say that Michelle had an even wider one. Narrow it and she might not have been so special. But when her friends were particularly foolish, she could be steadying too. And she was an amazingly good sport. Over more than 30 years we shared some memorable laughs. And now my heart aches for those closer to her who will feel her loss more acutely. There was only one Michelle Kojen and she will be missed with all of the force she exerted on her love of good music, good friends, and an especially fierce hug.

Take a break, Driver 8.

[brishu]

Liquor in the Front

I’ve always had a hard time with precision. I guess everybody has. Or most people. Well, nobody doesn’t make a mistake every now and then, right? But of course, some people can do long division in their heads while Saturday I paid for $45 worth of concert tickets with $60 and the stubble-headed, lip-pierced cashier needed a calculator to figure out my change. I think it might just be that I don’t like to still myself enough to handle real-time complexities with the care they demand.

Lately I have been more patient with my wife, but I don’t feel like I’m getting much in return. I would love to be the kind of person who doesn’t get much satisfaction from a good fight, and I guess I’m working on it, but again, not sure how sure my aim is on the self-improvement range. I actually worry that cutting her more slack is bad for her, that she might have resented some of the pressures I put on her but that she actually stepped her game up, even if it was just to get me off her back. A good example of this is that I used to get really annoyed by what a bad listener she was and it led her to make more of an effort to remember the things I said. Now I barely say anything to her and she forgets absolutely everything. I blame her parents for this, which is related to how I met Stuart.

Let’s start with Stuart, or the point of contact with him, and work back from there. I was introduced to him by my brother-in-law emeritus’s fiance. I apply emeritus to Bill because he’s still family to me, even though he’s no longer married to my wife’s sister. Bill is a good man who deserves to be happy. Joanna didn’t make him happy, and I even suspect that she believed he didn’t deserve to be happy because, while he’s as menschy as they come, he’s not the rockstar for whom her parents seem to have raised her to save herself. When she was younger Joanna could override this and work hard to make Bill happy, but it seems like that eventually became a grind and her truer self was incapable of bending in the ways that might make Bill happy. I have similar issues with her sister, my wife, but a very big difference between Bill and me is that I don’t deserve to be happy. Anyway, Renee makes Bill happy and now they’re engaged. Renee is always really nice to me. At first I thought she was so solicitous because she had “other woman” anxiety. But then I realized she was just sympathetic of anybody who lived with the number Bill’s and my in-laws had done on their daughters. Joanna never asked me shit about my writing but Renee was genuinely interested, lauding me when it was going well and castigating me when I told her I’d been unproductive. It occurred to me that it had occurred to Renee that Joanna could have been more helpful with Bill’s career and that Renee wasn’t going to stand for any unhelpfulness. So she put me in touch with Stuart, and this is where things get really imprecise.

Stuart being advertised as a champion of unheralded writers, or a leader in the writing community, of course I immediately wanted his help. So when Renee sent an introductory email to both of us, I thought a reasonable first step would be to share some of my work. I didn’t know what to expect- writing advice, publication advice, encouragement, or profound disgust. But I did know what I hoped, which was that he would see genuine talent in me and put me in touch with people who could get my work to a larger audience. Of course, that’s what everybody wants, including Stuart. So I sent two stories, along with an invitation to meet for drinks sometime, and spent about three days waiting nervously for a response. Then I sort of forgot about it.

A week later, Stuart writes back that he loved one of the stories. So I thanked him and invited him to join me at a reading in Brooklyn, and he came. This is when things get imprecise.

I looked him up online and maybe he did the same for me. I learned that he has had several books published, all about poker. And that he was related to a very famous writer. And that he expressed fairly obtuse political views on Facebook under the banner of idealism. I liked to picture him as having better things to do than look me up online, but if he did, I doubted he’d find much of interest. I pictured him as a Milch-like figure, the guy who was the street-wisest AND the most academically brilliant person in every room. Basically I prostrated myself before an imaginary version of Stuart. And to achieve some combination of sympathy and peacocking of my mind’s capabilities, I even started practicing the articulation of vulnerabilities to him. For example, I formulated the entreaty that I was afraid of the world class student of human behavior that a card sharp had to be, because he would see things in me that I hadn’t been brave enough to acknowledge in myself. Then I saw through myself, realized what bullshit I was actually considering spouting, and did my best to steer clear of any prefabricated bon mots. Curbing a tendency toward over-solicitude extended to emails too, where rather than give Stuart wide latitude to beg off of meeting up with me, I simply offered to save him a seat and he said, “Yeah save me one.”

I assumed this meant he was coming but would be late. But he wasn’t. He got there at a few minutes before 8 PM and greeted me warmly. And maybe this is where things get imprecise. Because amid a morass of competing desires, to impress him with my intellect, to be lamblike in my appeal for help from someone who was so much better at synthesizing intelligence, generosity and aggression into a coherent and appealing personality, to show him how interesting I thought he was (itself both genuine and an ostentatious display of scapular curiosity), and to simply have a nice evening.

As the evening went on, and the quality of the readings flagged, I felt more obliged to salvage the evening by alternating trenchant questions with my own observations in a ratio balanced more by intuition than math (which I could only imagine would work horribly at the poker table), all while desperately trying not to seem too desperate, and entered a sort of limbo where the difference between simply having a nice evening and making the kind of impression that might provoke a yearning for more of my company, which itself teetered perilously close to obnoxious, felt achingly delicate. So I ultimately opted to be fairly benign, which is its own kind of risk because whatever literary opportunity might be availed by a friendship with Stuart would have to come more from my work than from my personality. But maybe my work is supposed to speak through my personality. Maybe that’s what impels the sublimation of aggression, and the fact that I’m so uncomfortable with my own is indicative of a wobble in my belief in my writing.

So Stuart and I parted ways somewhat hastily as the train we were on arrived at my stop, and I wrote him a short, friendly email the next day. He responded warmly and certainly seems open to hanging out again. But I don’t want to be the one to ask for a second date. I don’t know why not, except maybe I yearn more for his help and professional feedback more than I do his company, though I am fascinated by the poker stuff. How is he so good at poker? I’d love to know. But I’m also spectacularly unhelpful to him except as a guy who showed a few glimmers of exceptional intelligence and an assertion of diligence when it comes to my own work (he asked me my plan of attack and I shrugged and said I just write every day). Does that get me everything I could get from him? I dunno. Maybe I feel like I left money on the table.

But what can I do except write about it?

[brishu]

A brass band was playing on Frenchman Street when the state police rolled up and told them to stop playing. The crowd booed, the 15 year-old tuba player motioned for the crowd to make more noise, he got arrested. I am 100% for police safety and sympathetic to the pressure they're under in volatile situations. I'll also note that they were courteous with me and gentle with the tuba player. Nevertheless, this some bullshit right here.

[brishu]

My girls on the run

[brishu]

[brishu]

Piffs

Why aren’t epiphanes front and center, Enlightening us as often’s we eat? Thus we, unepiphed, slog around lacking clues That might jar the rhythm of banality’s beat. Why am I wrong so goddamned often, When I wish that I was always right? The signals go dimmer the harder I focus Then blare out like neon once firmly in hindsight. Where does Vader get his gloves, That clutch your breath but leak the stars? Whose hide is tanned? How much do they cost? When I get embarrassed I use the farce. Do we get launched by movement or animate stillness? Maybe it’s both but probably neither? If you’re cultured enough to eat soup with chopsticks, You might as well chew the cud of the ether. When they finally do invent growth on demand, I wonder if I’d pay the price to partake? Would you banish all shadow, monopolize light? Or is constant correctness the biggest mistake?

[brishu]

My Week At Sea - Part 2

Day 5

Several years earlier, one of my closest friends visited Jamaica and came back more disturbed than relaxed. He said the Jamaicans at his resort were so insistent on servility that they left no room for him to relate to them as people. Knowing enough about the Jamaica not enmeshed in the vicious net of tourism, he would have loved to penetrate the hotel workers’ subservience, but nothing he said or did could disrupt their forsaking their own dignity, and he was never going to align himself with the kind of racist, paternalistic assholes who enjoy a dynamic like that. I felt like I had already experienced something similar on the boat with Addy (even though she was Trini) and I was bracing myself for a flow-going day where, for the sake of my family, I settled into the role of passive oppressor as quietly as possible. I understood that all concerns like this were predicated on acknowledgement of the inherent unfairness of American foreign policy, resulting in this dark-skinned person working harder and being smarter than me, but my portion still being much greater than his. And what little he does have is far too dependent on my caprices. I guess this makes me a “snowflake” because, upon confronting poor foreigners, rather than leverage my financial power for maximum enjoyment, I would rather abrogate belief in the Manifest Destiny and deal apologetically with the Jamaican, as though that restores any balance whatsoever.

And maybe for the cruisers who opted for a high tea on a plantation or a day in the life of Bob Marley or 18 holes on Cinnamon Hill, Rastafarian minstrelsy was a welcome aspect of the experience. But again, thanks to the superior research of my wife, we had a fantastic, and perfectly comfortable excursion. Latenya, our guide, and Desmond, our driver, were kind but hardly subservient. In fact, on the bus ride to our first stop, I asked a question about Michael Manley and when my wife said, “Now you’re just showing off,” Latenya chimed in with a confirming, “Mmm hmmm.”

Throughout the ride of about 80 minutes, on the left side of the road with Desmond’s steering wheel on the right, Latenya told us about Jamaica’s history, economy and education system. Jamaica has six National Heroes and one National Heroine. Bob Marley ain’t one of them, Marcus Garvey is. Latenya also invited everyone on the bus to introduce himself in Jamaica patois: “My niem a’Brian. Me come from Brooklyn.”We were a smaller group, with only three other families: one group from Quebec, one from Mexico and one from Rochester. Guess which group asked every Jamaican we met if he knew Usain Bolt.

Again it bears remarking what an excellent job my wife did picking excursions. Ours was a two stop trip. The first was Mystic Mountain, where we rode a sky tram from the bottom to the top, gliding higher and higher, away from road noise and above the tree canopy to the summit.

That is my parents with one of our daughters in the car ahead of ours. To the left is Dolphin Cove Bay. At the top we had the opportunity to ride a self-braking roller coaster modeled after Jamaican bobsleds. I thought it might be some kind of kiddie ride but I was thrillingly wrong.

After the ride, one of the older Quebecois dudes asked me about Brooklyn and mentioned that it seemed to be the epicenter of political activity these days. My father took this to mean the guy was anti-Trump, but, considering Quebec’s reputation for cultural purity, I was more cautious in my replies. He asked me if I thought people were really going to start moving to Canada in droves and I said that I doubted it. I did not ask him his feelings about Trudeau, nor Stephen Harper because I could care less. And there was something opaque about his line of questions, as if he didn’t want me to know whether he was looking for kindred anti-Trumpism, or trying to coax forth the specious arguments of a, well, snowflake. For whatever it’s worth (not much), I think he came away respecting me, as much for avoiding hairtrigger political opinions as for the contrast between our interactions with our kids throughout the day’s adventures and those of the people from Rochester with their little boy. “Look at this Dylan! Look at that Dylan! Hey Dylan! Do you like this? What about this? Dylan! Dylan!” At some point I arrived at the belief that he was neither named after Robert Zimmerman’s stage name, nor his Welsh namesake’s, but rather after Luke Perry’s character on Beverly Hills 90210 and nothing you can say will convince me otherwise.

Our second stop was Konoko Falls. This is us at the bottom:

And we all made it to the top, some of us with a greater sense of accomplishment than others:

Above Konoko Falls was part of an old tea plantation now converted into a nature preserve, replete with caged tropical birds, towering ginger blossoms, two snapping turtles named Pretty and Ugly and the resting place of one of my compatriots whose visit didn’t go so well:

We got jerk chicken and pork with pigeon peas and rice for lunch and Latenya and our Konoko guides ate with us. I thought about complaining to them that the jerk wasn’t spicy enough, because it wasn’t, but then it would be all “Oh look at the white boy eating like an islander!” so I skipped it.

The bus ride back to the pier was fascinating for its foreign mundanities. I’ve noticed that every country seems to have dinstinctly shaped curbs along its roads, and that the grass can be a different species too. This may seem like nothing, but it etches different borders into your field of view, giving you the abiding sense that you really are somewhere else. And then there are the commercial accents that give you some sense of a place’s imperatives:

The silhouetted animals suggest Central Dealers is a great shop for hunters. But what about the explosion behind the bullet? Come on down to Central Dealers and fuck that nice blue sky up real good! Was this the area’s biggest munitions depot, asserting dominance via advertising a la Coca-Cola? Or was it a fledgling endeavour, betting the store on a billboard’s pyrotechnics? Whatever security Central Dealers offered its customers, here’s the sign that’s supposed to assure citizens of their official safety:

Pierside at excursion’s end, Latenya and Desmond bade us all farewell with their hands held out. At the outset of our tour, they had said they would take care of us and hoped we would take care of them. So everybody hunched over, trying to keep their larger bills out of sight, extracting what they felt was appropriate and stashing the rest away to let the money they held represent the pinnacle of generosity. I gave Latenya $20 and Desmond $10 and that seemed acceptable to them. As I got back on the boat, I wondered how long the guilt would have lasted if I had tipped poorly or even not at all. But, deprived of the opportunity to savor that regret, I resumed the grim business of enjoying a high state of privelege as we set sail for Hispaniola.

With two days left, we began to get elegiac. For some, that meant the trajectory of sloth had hit its nadir and it was time to start rousing back to the surface of baseline real world functionality. For others it meant make your memories now before you part ways from all of these other fine folks. For my daughters it meant writing a thank you note to Addy for bringing them cookies one night and a towel gorilla another:

Initially I was touched, but then my older daughter told me she just wanted to let Addy know “how great her service has been.” I was not the first parent, drunk or sober, to have to measure out the proper combination of approval and correction, but somehow I did manage to mask my horror at her blithe superciliousness, and suggest she say, “Thanks for taking such good care of us” instead.

The first time we saw Addy after we’d left the note in the room, she said thank you but I sensed that she actually felt put upon by the gesture, as though it demanded a stronger connection with us than she was comfortable making. It also occurred to me that she was worried we might leave a sweet note in lieu of a healthy tip, which seemed to impel her to convey that our kids’ note didn’t mean very much to her. I tried to signify to her that I totally got her cool reception of the note, but whether she got my wordless message, I really don’t know. The next night after I stuffed the envelope she had left in our room, she greeted me far more warmly. I guess the proper way to hold up my end of this interaction would have been to smile, pat her gently on the shoulder and move on, thus concluding our business together. But I’m afraid what I did, in some tiny way, was needlessly assert some kind of superiority, silently expressing “We coulda been friends but I guess all you care about is money. Oh well.” But of course, I only pulled that shit because I fell into the older and grosser dynamic of the little white snot who can’t get enough of mammy’s loving forebearance. This all happened quickly enough to play it off, as though we’d had a vanilla interaction without wrinkles or subtext, but I felt the gnarls and, no matter how professionally dispassionate Addy might have been, she must have felt it too. But before I took my millisecond plunge into the depths of racism, we went to Haiti.

Day 6

Royal Caribbean has the lease on Labadee, Haiti until 2050. It’s a peninsula they tout as a private island, but Haitians are barred entry by company employees with paramilitary backgrounds reinforced by rolls of razorwire. When ships aren’t in port, the only people there are maintenance crew and the aforementioned mercenaries. When ships do make landfall, a village comes to life. Crowds fill the beaches, giant palapas become cafeterias, trams convey cruisers to various recreations, and rows of stalls are filled with authorized merchants’ authentic Haitian wares. The excursions we booked for the day included one ride on the Dragon’s Tail roller coaster, which, like the previous day’s bobsled ride, was an alpine coaster. I actually liked this one better than the Jamaican one because on the bobsleds, you start at the top, hurdle down through the rainforest and then get hauled back up. The Dragon’s Tail pulls you up first and then you shoot down the tracks, careening through the mountainside forest, curving out over the sky-colored sea, applying the brakes as infrequently as you dare.

As our older daughter and I swooped to the bottom, we could hear her younger sister squealing gleefully from the shuttle behind us. Our ride ended about a minute before my wife’s and hers. My parents also rode, but they were more liberal with their brake application and finished long after we had all dismounted the ride.

Following this, we had tickets to spend an hour in Labadee’s aqua park, which was like a floating inflatable obstacle course. This was a lot less fun. The inflatable slides were very difficult to climb and our daughters were whining about the discomfort of the water. At first I just thought they needed to toughen up, but then my own skin began to crawl. My wife asked the lifeguard on duty and he said the water was teeming with micro-organisms that stung but the pain was only brief. Oh. We did not last the full hour.

Delivered from the duppy-infested cesspool masquerading as tropical amusement, my wife found a more secluded spot on the beach, away from a lot of the noise our boat had brought to the “island.” My parents parked on lounge chairs closer to the pop-up cafeteria and I took the girls to a playground with a sprinkler system not unlike that in the onboard kiddie pool area. I sat on a curb and watched them play with a group of other kids. To the left of them a 6 on 6 beach volleyball game was taking place. Some of the guys’ torsos were right out of the Top Gun scene(Did they lower the nets for the shots of Mav spiking it? I think they lowered the nets). Others were right out of Dollar Night at Molly Brannigans. But interphysique comeraderie was in full effect and all the players were having fun, possibly even more fun than my children were getting spouted on by a fiberglass hippo. I wanted to play. I wanted my kids to make lasting friendships so I could leave them and go make friends of my own. But I could neither dump them on some other unsuspecting parent at the playground, nor did I want to. They were so happy they’d lost track of time. And watching their industry flare up, even for something as trifling as dumping cupfuls of water down seasawing flumes ad nauseum, was its own pleasure, even if I had to miss a few sandy, heartfelt high fives for the marvelous plays I definitely would have made if I’d gotten into the game.

Back on the boat, we gathered for our penultimate dinner together. Something about the semifinality of the it, whether the extra snappy service from our waiter Richard or the table circulating of the executive chef, raised expectations that this meal would be special. So I was actually relieved that even the big night food was so mediocre because, spoiled as I am by my wife’s cooking, I was looking forward to getting back home rather than being sad that this wonderful journey couldn’t last forever.

After dinner my wife took our daughters to a show in the ship’s large theater while I took my parents to the Schooner Bar to play trivia. Seats were scarce so one man holding a whole table invited us to sit with him. He was a very friendly man and his name was Guy, so obviously he was Canadian. Guy was like the mayor of the boat. This was his and is wife Linda’s 13th day at sea and they seemed to know everyone- cruisers, waiters, vendors and officers. I felt assured that, for all of Guy and Linda’s good fortune, tonight was their lucky night because they got to be on my trivia team and few people alive knew more trivia than me. The subject that night was movie themes and just as the game began, Guy and Linda introduced us to Eric and Samantha, a couple from Atlanta. My smugness about my encyclopedic knowledge might have seeped out a bit as I assured all four other adults that they were in good hands on my team. But as the game went on and we got better acquainted, it became apparent that whatever winning ways I embodied were paltry compared to those of Eric and Samantha. A popular subject among cruisers meeting on cruise ships is their cruising history. With neither cockiness nor abashedness, Eric showed me a picture of him, Samantha and several other relatives crowded around Steve Harvey on the set of Family Feud. Then he explained that while on the cruise they had taken with 27 other family members on the steam of their Family Feud winnings, they wandered into a Bingo game and won the cruise they were on with us. So, while I doubted Eric could identify movie themes as quickly or accurately as me, I made sure he saw that I understood that, contrary to initial impressions, me wagon, him star. Though when we did not win (19 out of 20 I could answer within two bars, but I am not ashamed of my unfamiliarity with the soundtrack from Divergent), I took responsibility while still ceding leadership to Eric and Mayor Guy.

Eric told us that his free cruise did not include drinks, so he was probably the soberest of our lot. Guy explained that he had purchased one of the beverage packages and then greased a few waiters with $20 apiece. Now they brought Linda and him whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. I think Guy put away more than I did, so it seemed unwise for my father to try to keep up with him. On the other hand, once the trivia game was over, Guy, Linda, Eric and Samantha insisted that my parents join them at something called The Quest. They actually discouraged me from coming along and warned me that my wife and children should definitely skip it, as whatever The Quest was was decidedly NSFW. But they didn’t know my kids, who were as proud of their grandpa as Guy and Linda were for how game he was:

The Quest was sort of a concentrated scavenger hunt where the entire auditorium was divided by seating area into teams while the cruise director commanded each team to bring him a man in drag, a man with a hairy back, a picture of a woman in front of the White House, etc. I’m still not entirely sure why Guy and my dad were barefoot, but I think Linda wanted them prepared to drop trou. Samantha, Eric, my mother, wife (elbow pictured to my left) kids and I were less competitive about The Quest than my father and his new Canadian bff’s, but no less amused.

By some dubious criteria, a different section was proclaimed the winner of The Quest, but we didn’t care. We had laughed hard and expressed unabashed fondness for folks we just met, and at some point, my wife did a headstand in her seat, which garnered evening-long admiration from our neighbors in the seats. It all felt like the postmodern equivalent of the conga line, a postmodern letting down of the hair and kicking up the postmodern heels. I have no idea what postmodern means, nor any interest in learning. What I do understand is that socially, this was the most fun we’d had all week. We drunkenly struck up new acquaintances and took each other to new heights of enjoyment. I was so glad this had happened and deeply appreciative of Linda, Guy, Samantha and Eric for enfolding us so easily into their little band. As we parted ways, Linda asked for my personal info so she could send me some of the pictures and videos of my father’s antics. In the spirit of the moment I envisioned remaining in touch with our new friends for years to come.

Throughout the cruise I had been missing my brothers and cousins, who had made the family cruises we’d taken 15-20 years ago so much fun. And probably because that evening was really the only time we had been truly sociable with other cruisers, it was at that moment that I started thinking about my grandma and aunt, who were no longer alive. I know that part of what evoked their memories was the surrogacy assumed by my parents, now grandparents themselves, and Guy, with his Canadian Jimmy Buffet avuncularity. But of course, I was also thinking about mortality, and that if my departed relatives could have been on this trip with us, they’d have known from their time on the other side of the grass not to spend one second wallowing or actively seeking despair aboard the world’s second largest ocean liner. So ultimately, their specters were conjured to goad me into maintaining the warmth I felt toward our new friends before relapsing into dyspepticism, to stand vigil over my own happiness until it became more habitual. Weeks later, Linda did email me several pictures and videos from The Quest. And they were nearly all of Guy. I am still wondering whether I should reply with a slideshow of our trip. Or a link to this account…

Day 7

At sea all day. Spiritually too. I think at one point I saw Eric at some distance and found myself retreating the other way. I felt too much pressure to recapture whatever bonhommie we had established the night before. It occurred to me that I’d had a platonic one-night stand. But I also just wanted to be comfortable and relaxed and standing around, maintaining eye contact while chuckling about last night’s zaniness could not compare to finding somewhere to lounge, read and nap.

For the kids’ benefit I rode the zipline, one last time, delivering on a promise I had made weeks earlier, that I would invert myself while zipping, and hang like a bat, a feat I’d performed at summer camp 30+ years earlier, and presumed I still remembered how to do.

I made it about 10 feet before the lifeguard yelled “Don’t go upside down!” and I immediately complied. In retrospect, I doubt they would have thrown me off the boat for disobeying the guy, and even a ban from future zipline use would have been meaningless since the zipline was 10 minutes away from shutting down for the rest of the cruise. Maybe I wanted the younger, world-traveling recreation specialists to think I was cool, and, zipping along 80+ feet above the ground, my version of cool was readily obedient rather than daringly rebellious. So, while I can say I stopped my stunt because the boat made me, a braver man would have held his pose a bit longer.

As we gathered for our final dinner together, nobody else in my family had seemed eager to track down our friends from the night before, opting instead to drink, read and relax free of recent entanglement. And while we did little to reinforce whatever social bonds had been forged during The Quest, I wondered how many lasting friendships had been struck up that week, how many Facebook and Instagram connections made, how many romances burgeoned, or breached. How wide did the spectrum of emotion, from sadness that this magical time was ending to eagerness to get home, stretch? I had been surprised throughout the week by how many people I talked to who owned their own business. Maybe I shouldn’t have been. But I could understand why they would value a week of lethargic gluttony more than somebody whose real life entailed fewer pressures and better food. Just to steer clear of consequential decisions, to be able to screw up without harming anyone, must have been quite a tonic. I didn’t have those worries to leave behind, so I was less likely to embrace the daze.

All week long I had been pressuring myself to blow past whatever gulf there was between my personal inclinations and the style of indulgence that seemed to make my fellow cruisers the happiest. I tried convincing myself that transcendant pleasures were available if I could just ignore my myriad reservations. And even though I felt like the social version of a picky eater, I found plenty onboard to enjoy. I just didn’t have a deeply restorative experience, nor did I need one, nor did I need to care about as little as possible to enjoy being with my family. And I should note that when we left the dining room after dinner that night, the number of faces basking in the glow of devices, sometimes 10 out of 10 people at one table, was staggering. Throughout the cruise I had posted a few pictures on Instagram, but nobody in my family had taken their phone out at dinner. The tv in our room never went on, and the iPad I brought for the kids to watch on the plane stayed in my backpack all week. Surveying the dining room, I felt considerably less guilty for not connecting with more people who seemed to prefer remote electronic relationships to the friends and loved ones right in front of them. I was cautious not to milk too much superiority out of the tableau of ghostlit faces atomizing families’ last night together, but I also felt vindicated and relieved, that by remaining aloof of the vapidity, I really hadn’t missed much. Meanwhile, I knew that while the onboard sense of community had felt robust to some and anemic to others, I was so ready to return to my village of snowflakes that my departure felt like more of an escape than my arrival had.

Day 8

We got off the boat with considerably less fanfare than than we had boarded it. As the massive Port Everglades processing center spit us back out into the world, I wondered whether the feel of unceremonious credential-stripping was intentional, a touch of unpleasantness designed to make you long to return to the company’s care and good graces. Or was it simply the jarring difference between being active paying customers and former paying customers? I don’t know much about branding, but I know that Royal Carribean is a multi-billion dollar corporation and I could intuit that hundreds of suits were working every angle they could think of to open new revenue streams, and then it was another department’s job to integrate these ideas into the unified identity of a bona fide Royal Caribbean product, which was something like island pleasure,  sanitized by Scandinavian experts. Based on their financial performance, these initiatives were well-executed. But held up to the scrutiny whose discouragement I so zealously ignored, the swarm of photographers, dangling of status upgrades, nutritionists of obscure nationalities selling secret fat cures in the spa, licensced gemologists convincing cruisers that this boat was among the world’s finest jewelry shops, delighted welcome vs. slightly disgusted goodbye, felt unified only by the anchor logo and the feel of aggressive upsell. Woe be unto any of these poor bastards who found themselves in Marrakech.

On the bus from Port Everglades back to the Miami airport, I recognized an older Israeli couple I had overheard speaking Hebrew at breakfast one morning. They seemed strangely un-Israeli in that they were A) Befuddled by travel and B) Polite. At the airport a large line formed outside to check bags. My wife went inside and came back telling us the lines were shorter. The Israeli couple asked where we were going and in Hebrew I told them about the smaller lines inside. On our way in, they asked my parents why I spoke Hebrew and they didn’t and, though the answer wasn’t that complicated, I think my parents were just happy to interact with fellow Jews who weren’t from Long Island. And maybe the Israelis were happy to talk with us for our hamishness, though at the moment our most attractive feature seemed to be my ability to explain the various options a typical airport kiosk offered them, and to help them make their choices. In a way, their cluelessness about airplane security gave me great hope for Israel’s current safety situation, but conversely, a grim outlook on Israel’s regional prospects, since her progress in security had not been accompanied by commensurate diplomatic strides.

We had several hours to kill before our flight. My wife’s AmEx platinum card got us into the Miami Airport Centurion Lounge. This was a lavish prospect, and one that I was somewhat reluctant to enjoy because it extended our access to food and drink at a time when I had already shut the door on such perks. My wife’s card granted admission for the four of us and at her insistence, we bought guest passes for my parents. My father almost never lets me treat him to anything, but in this case he did, for which I was glad. And it was nice to have this extra time together, relaxed, needs met, surrounded by traveling Miamians who may or may not have been drug lords.

After nearly three hours passed pleasantly in the lounge, it was time to go to our gates. My parents and daughters exchanged warm goodbyes and then my wife and I covered whatever shortcomings lace through our expressions of gratitude with vague but intentional maneuvers meant to convey that we deserved a great deal of credit for the joy they got from their granddaughters. It could be something as outwardly innocuous as, “Hope y’all had fun with the girls, “ but subtle as it was, I could neither deny the ulterior motive in saying it, nor harness my identification of this shittiness as means of surmounting it.

Our gate was full of crying children, which tested my inner saint. On one hand, I genuinely cared about these kids, and felt confident that I could cheer them up in short order. I often did just that with funny faces or even conversations if the sad kid was close enough that it didn’t seem weird. But on the other hand, I felt helplessly triumphant that my kids were such sanguine travelers, and the attendant feelings of parental superiority were hard to avoid.

We had purchased our tickets with an American Airlines credit card, which I was led to believe accorded us some type of boarding priority. But by the time active military, first class, business class, diamond star medallion, platinum status and American Airlines Advantage Preferred had been invited to traipse planeward across the special carpet, we were one of maybe 10 families left to board. Once again the special feeling extended on point of sale was withdrawn post-purchase.

I had booked the aisle and window on both sides of the same row, knowing it would give us flexibility to offer an aisle or window to whichever middle-seater was willing to switch so we could sit three on one side and one on the other. Instead, we got entangled with a scattered group of elderly Italians and again I felt like an unacknowledged superhero for being able to help another family in their mother tongue. The Italians reunited, our family contiguous across the aisle and a formerly middle-seater on the aisle ahead of us, we were seated comfortably and the plane took off.

On our flight down to Miami, each seat had its own entertainment system. The older plane we rode back to new York was equipped with monitors hanging intermittently from the ceiling, all broadcasting a long-form infomercial for a new show on NBC. Mostly I read or napped, but sometimes I would look up at the screens and watch behind the scenes clips about a show called Emerald City which was set in Oz well before Dorothy’s arrival. Cast members were interviewed in full costume, while special effects experts and producers wore t-shirts and stubble. Even though I couldn’t hear any of it, it was clear they were speaking with great seriousness. But a sublte aspect of their postures betrayed network brass compulsion. The cast included unknown actors plus a few “prestige ones” like Vincent D’Onofrio and Joely Richardson and there was something performative about the passion they exuded, which in some respects I found comforting, since it showed a tiny but perceptible leaking of the awareness that they were all involved in something expensive, derivative (it was clearly meant to be Wizard of Oz meets Game of Thrones) and preposterous. Maybe some of the younger cast extolled the show without irony, just young beef- and cheesecake thrilled by the chance to be on TV. But while the older actors and creative types all seemed engaged in a chaarade, it struck me that the millions of people who might be interested in watching this drek would have to actively ignore the micro-signals emitted by the more aware members of the show’s creative team. And this more effortful form of ignorance, this determination to elude the minefield of buzzkills that spoil superficial entertainment, even at the expense of sensitivity toward loved ones’ feelings, was as prevalent on land (or in the air) as it was at sea. Millions of enormous people geared up to consume, consume, consume, happy to think as little as possible, all while remaining vigilantly unaware of even their lack of awareness that no amount of material plenitude would turn them away from devices and toward the friendly people at the shore at whom they had such a hard time waving.

But what did that say about me, flogging the same distinctions over and over again, careening headlong into the buzzkills, coopting any human foible I could find as an excuse to remain aloof of the fray? Was I afraid of what might happen if my brain just shut up and let me enjoy the festivities too? Yes. I was.

Back home that night, we settled in to watch the Oscars. I imagined a Monday to Monday voyage at sea, where we attended an onboard Oscar party. My musings got specific as I pictured cruisers name-checking the Vanity Fair party as proof of their cinematic sophistication,  and then my own parsing why their citation felt obtuse while my own impassioned takedown of Whiplash signified a superior comprehension of what was good and bad about movies. But why was I still litigating arguments that never even took place out loud? Surely I didn’t think the Quebecois from the Jamaica excursion, or the guys I’d watched a basketball game with one night, or even Linda, Guy, Samantha and Eric were sitting at home now wishing we’d gotten to know each other better. And neither was I. So what the fuck was my problem? Well, I have many. And it’s not a cruise’s job to solve them. If I didn’t fit in on the boat as snugly as other folks, I needn’t see it as a loss, nor justify it philosophically. I’m me, they’re them, and none of them will read this anyway.

[brishu]

My Week At Sea - Part 1

I can’t remember whether President’s Day gave us a three day weekend in Greensboro, North Carolina. We sure as hell didn’t get a whole week off, but New York schools do so this year we took a cruise with my parents.

No matter how far in advance you try to book a flight for that week, the quoted fares will send you into a tailspin of regret, forcing you to relitigate all of the decisions you ever made that delivered you to this moment as a budget-conscious person. You might even start rehearsing your explanation for why this is probably a good year to skip the February trip somewhere warm. Maybe the polar vortex won’t barrel through the Northeast this year. Maybe we can get the girls wall to wall playdates so they won’t miss frolicking in the sun so much. But while you refine your excuses, your hand has already extracted a credit card or two and the people who run Kayak nod like the borderline abusive paramour who knows you’ll answer his texts every damn time. Your laptop itself might whir in a way that sounds a lot like, “Mmm hmmm. Thought so.” If only the airlines maintained their own schedules as scrupulously as they adhered to that of the New York City public school system.

So what are you really doing when you wail to your parents about how expensive Presidents’ Week trips are? Maybe, maybe you’re bemoaning your well-traveled spouse’s mathematically tenuous expectations. But lo and behold, it “occurs” to them that that week would be a great opportunity to spend some time with their delightful granddaughters. And waddya know? They’re friends with a travel agent! And as long as you don’t look too unflinchingly within, or excuse yourself the flinch through self-deception too insidious to monitor, you’ve been furtive enough about the whole thing to keep your dignity intact.

Five months later the Out of Office reply is on and you’re on a 7 AM flight to Miami, encouraging your kids as passive aggressively as possible to forgo the in-flight entertainment and take a damn nap. But when you’re eight or six and your parents enforce draconian screentime restrictions, you ain’t gonna waste three hours of untrammeled access to a large movie library on shuteye, no matter how wise or mathematically sound your handsome, loving father’s advice is. I read a book. Between naps.

Day 1

We landed in Miami flush with optimism for the week ahead. My parents were waiting for us in baggage claim. I took the girls’ stuff so they could run into their grandparents’ arms, an airport ritual they’d been performing since they were ambulatory. Watching my mom and dad’s faces during the interval between launch and collision always made me feel like my nachas/tsuris account with them was finally balancing out.

A mild comeraderie starting fogging around baggage retrieval. The airline was sending mixed messages about which carousel would convey our luggage and people were subtly jockeying, not to be first to get their stuff, but first to have the straight dope on location to share with passengers as if that established some sort of heirarchy. I was happy to smile and offer grateful thanks to another dad who seemed keen on attaining the certainty that would finally deliver him from 10 minutes inter-carousel limbo, and realized that if I knew first, I would not want anybody lavishing gratitude on me. I wondered if this distinction was formed as some kind of private rebuke of the other dad, though I was glad to oblige his emotional ambition, maybe provide him with some social momentum so he could spend his vacation accumulating validation and even new friends, patronizing as all that was. But it was him who was chomping at the bit to be town cryer. It occurred to me that us vacationers wouldn’t be revving up so much at the outset if we weren’t bracing for a few unpleasant moments we’d have to fend off or minimize, protecting our experience from anything ruinous or memory-souring.

The boat itself shoved off from Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale. We rode a transfer bus with a father and his grown son and daughter, all from Toronto. They were very nice and fascinated by real live New Yorkers. I forgot both men’s names quickly but Barbara was easy to remember, sporting a Til Tuesday-era Aimee Mann hairstyle with stars shaved into the sides. The punk rockness of her haircut combined with her genuine warmth and gladness made me feel like she knew exactly who she was and she liked it very much, which I liked too. Still, I was afraid to veer any conversation away from banalities.

By the time we got to Fort Lauderdale, I realized that my private observations were lapsing into probative NPR-speak, luxuriating in my own bafflement in the groggy upward lilt I associate with people whose comprehension lags a hairsbreadth behind their speech. Like I was trying not to miss my own bus.

Standing between us and the boat (you’re supposed to say ship but every jolly reminder of this stiffened my resolve to call it a boat) was a processing facility that seemed designed with the mandate, “Think Ellis Island, but bigger and with less craftsmanship.” “So, hollowed out Costco?” “This guy gets it!” All sorts of heirarchies were enforced within the hangar: Gold, Platinum, Emerald, Diamond, Diamond Plus and Pinnacle Club each had their own dedicated service areas with varying calibers of expedience and hand sanitizer. I asked someone where I should go if I was Linoleum Status, and then I felt bad because he was obligated to act amused even though he probably wasn’t. Or maybe his smile was from sending us to the back of the longest line. We had been up since 4:30 and had deviated slightly from our strict kale and broccoli-based diet by feeding our daughters jelly beans for breakfast. So while I was careful not to catch myself trying too hard to maintain perspective, as that tends to trick me into thinking I’m teetering over a lake of despair and that the only way to relieve this emotional vertigo is to plunge right the fuck in, I was eager to get onto the boat and start consuming. The whole process wound up taking about 15 minutes.

I don’t want to belabor the zeal with which Royal Caribbean goes about bolstering its revenue, nor even refer to it as greed since some of the money they grub has to support their massive scale of employment before funneling to a handful of bean counters in the C-Suite. But from the bombardment of promotional emails I started getting after signing the waiver for the onboard zipline to the army of soul-stealing photographers swarming the margins of every potential memory we had from boarding to debarcation, the relentless attempts to upsell lent the entire cruise the feel of a sterilized, Eurocentric souk.

So, experiencing only the downside of fame, we fled the pre-boarding papparazzi and made it to the gangplank. Setting foot onto the ship felt like it should feel momentous. So I took a picture of my parents and daughters.

This was the moment of transition from the cold grind of work and school to a carefree, sun-drenched week at sea. Just a few more steps and the fun we’d been anticipating for months would start happening! In real life! Or maybe it’s just a pavlovian response to a relative with a camera, now embroidered with the wonder of how widely the record of this moment would be publicized and digitally appreciated.

Alcohol. When I was in my 20s we took a family cruise with my parents, brothers, cousins, aunts, uncles and grandma. The onboard drinks were a ripoff so we went to the duty free shop, bought bottles of bourbon, vodka and kahlua and, with milks and juices ordered from room service, ran a bar out of our stateroom. This was pre-9/11 and smuggling was much easier so we also made beer runs at every port of call. But now all duty free purchases are held until you debark. Wanna drink, gotta pay the ship. So my father bought the four adults on the trip the Premium Beverage package. This presented a fairly obvious quandary. Do I do my damndest to make sure Dad gets his money’s worth? Or do I exercise caution to avoid being even more unpleasant company than I already am? Predictably, I opted to sprint across the emotional minefield I’d first glimpsed in the Miami airport, honoring my father’s financial commitment on my behalf and hoping that eroded inhibitions would only make me that much more charming and fun. I finished my second margarita on the way to lunch.

The Allure of the Seas features three main dining rooms, 15 different restaurants and cafes plus a few snack bars and one doughnut kiosk I learned about one day too late. But upon boarding, only one dining venue was serving food and definitely not doubling as a nautical porn location: The Windjammer. Or that was the name of the always-open poolside buffet when I was in my 20s. It had since graduated to the Windjammer Marketplace, and I am sure that many cruisegoers appreciated the connotations of wider variety, enhanced freshness and the Milton Friedman Chicago School of economics. Our blood sugar was not quite at grumpy levels, but it was low enough that I worried whatever auspiciousness I had been drumming up was about to get overtaken by hostility toward entire teams of shipmates who stood between me and the food. Writ large, this first encounter with so many hundreds of fellow passengers, representing so many different ages, body types and origins, all unified by the overfed western version of hunger had the potential to arouse contempt. We all have reserves of generosity and good will toward our fellow man, it’s just that we also have moments when these reserves are inaccessible. Or, in my case, trying too hard to access them makes me feel so artificial that my resentment toward my surroundings is compounded by my inability to generate good will toward them. But, maybe because I was afraid that feeling too much antipathy this early in the trip would not bode well for the prospect of continued heavy drinking, summoning smiles for every beefy red-stater handling what were rightfully my nacho tongs was nearly effortless.

At every pass between the buffet and our table (usually for another glass of water, in my defense), the line to get into the international temple of all you can eat poolside cuisine grew longer, and announcements began issuing in three different languages to please enjoy your food and then get the fuck out so somebody else can sit down. I couldn’t help wondering how many liberty-loving Trump voters responded to authority-impelled courtesy by remaining at their tables until dinnertime. Did anyone onboard know Cliven Bundy? But I had seen enough signs of friendliness among the array of diners there, polite deference to wheelchairs, help with utensils, that a climate of decent manners did seem to govern the Windjammer Marketplace and perhaps the entire boat. Everybody seemed to understand that we all have more fun when we’re nicer to each other. And a lot of them were even drunker than I was.

Cocktails in hand, we vacated our table and went to see our staterooms. We did not expect our luggage to be delivered for another few hours, but we could change from our morning in New York clothes into the bathing suits we’d carried on. Just after we’d changed, our stateroom attendant came to introduce herself. She was a stout Trinidadian woman in her 50s named Adeline. She told the girls to call her Addy. In a bigoted way that I fear no amount of enlightenment or sensitivity training will ever cure me of, I saw Addy as a type more than as a thinking, feeling person. And in this blithe relegation, I wondered if her relationship with the girls would be colored at all by the way they might associate her with some of the West Indian nannies they’ve known their entire lives. Would they warm toward her in ways kids from the sticks might not? But conversely, would Addy prefer to keep her interactions with guests perfunctory, with just enough warmth to engender greater generosity at end of the week tip time? Did it serve anything whatsoever for me to be so delightfully sensitive that I broke through the typically transient cruiser-attendant relationship to foster something more meaningful, or would I merely succeed in creating more confusion in service of my own moral vanity? Did I give a shit either way? Yeah, I guess. Maybe it was time for another drink.

My mom had a friend who had cruised on this vessel months earlier and she said the one show you do not want to miss is Oceanaria, a Cirque du Soleil type diving show, presumably enough  unlike “O” to perform without triggering a lawsuit. The show was so popular that by the time we sought a reservation, the only available timeslot was Night 1 at 10:45 PM. So will you please nap now please? Maybe after we go swimming. I see. So I accompanied them to the pool area and, responsible adult that I am, I waited at least 20 minutes before pursuing drink number seven. Whoo!

OK so you can’t actually swim in any of the pools. But who can resist the appeal of a chlorinated soak rife with incidental contact with obese strangers drinking sugary cocktails through straws while singing along to reggae songs whose lyrics they don’t know? The rational mind assures you that diabetes is not contagious but you still equate acceptance with osmosis and no matter how fictitious your worries are, you just know that something here is doing you damage. But what about the kids? They are joyous and unfatigued, so you owe it to them to smile and pump your fist every time they run through a candy-colored sprinkler. Now is not the time to teach them to raise their search for validation to a standard higher than getting wet. Sell that smile. You know you’re not supposed to be at war with your more jaundiced perspective while you’re on vacation, but if you are, at least win. Maybe all this running around will increase the odds of a nap. Maybe my parents can come take over for me lest I claim all this happiness for myself. And can’t I just cut ahead of all these multi-ingredient drink orders to get another plastic tumbler of whiskey? Whoo.

What finally pries the kids out of the pool is Muster, the mandatory survival drill that compels all passengers to the emergency station where a designated crew member would spirit us to a 237 person lifeboat. Take that, Godzilla. Our station was in the Silk Dining Room. My wife pointed out that photographers were poised in the lobby in front of a backdrop of the balustrade from Titanic, yet one more reminder that too much thought was ill-advised. Familiarity > Meaning.

After Muster we gathered on our room’s small balcony to wave goodbye to the Floridians who had come to the pier to bid our voyage bon. The horn sounded, the boat set sail and the waving grew wavier. Trying to get with the program, I thought that was very nice of the people at the pier and nothing more. Nothing whatsoever.

We were now at sea. And while I refused to call the ship a ship, I became a stickler for maritime directions. I don’t know what accounts for such inconsistencies, but by 6 PM the fore, starboard, aft and port views were all landless. The vastness of the Atlantic Ocean or Gulf of Mexico or Caribbean Sea or whatever was terrifying in a good way. Thrilling. And feeling dependent on the vessel and her crew, and recognizing how casually at ease I was told me that, for all of the blundering attempts the Royal Caribbean corporation made at invading my conscience, they succeeded where it really mattered, winning my trust in their nautical competence and banishing all worries the mighty sea presented.

At 10:45 PM, further mastery of water was on display at the boat’s Aqua Theater. Our kids normally get up at 7 and go down at 8. Today they got up at 4:30 and wouldn’t go down til midnight. I presumed the show would go one of two ways: either luster would be lacking or we would bear witness to muscular specimens whose notable skill was drilled into them by authoritarian regimes who had destroyed their capacity for joy whereby it could be argued that we were no better than party officials sitting there on our asses, too sluggish to express appropriate appreciation for the amazing feats these exploited acrobats were performing, quiet hatred seething justifiably from the stage. Instead we were treated to 30 minutes of soaring, splashing joy. Whatever behind the scenes cynicism governed the performance, I was too dazzled to contemplate. Plunging from 3 meter springboards, 10 meter ledges and even 15 meter perches, I joined the crowd in roaring approval, according the divers full dignity for their show. More than once a woman behind me said, “I’ll take either one of those!” And our sleep-deprived girls were so invigorated by the performance that even my mother’s guilt for booking us so late was relieved. As I downed my umpteenth drink, I felt my duties as a son were fulfilled on all fronts.

Day 2

I was out of bed early to run laps around the 650 meter track that wrapped around Deck 5.

I sweat buckets in 30 degree weather, so in the Tropics it seemed extra wise to get going before dawn. Didn’t matter. Between the heat, humidity, alcohol, shortchange of zzzz’s and onboard climate of sloth, three miles and a little work at the gym was all I could handle. Ashamed of my effort, I sulked back to our stateroom where my wife and kids were now awake and spoke to them as though my body’s newfound shortcomings were somehow their fault. Later that day my wife pointed out the donut kiosk so for the rest of the week, I went there after exercising and returned to our stateroom the picture of civility.

With no port of call on Day 2, all 6,100 passengers and 2,200 crew members were together and ready to…. well, that depends. I know that judging people says more about you than them, and that a crowded cruise ship is a great place to subscribe to Will Rogers’ credo that strangers are just friends you haven’t met yet. And there were certainly people around me who knew how to survey a crowd and then mingle into it successfully.

Sometimes I see a group of people yukking it up and I think of a passage from the Great Gatsby: Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes made unintelligible circles inside. Imagining that I, too, was hurrying towards gaiety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them well. But these groups took delight from the heights they attained, whereas other groups laughed loudly and called it a good time no matter how funny anything really was, reveling in comedy without humor. I was not guaranteed entrée into either clique, and even if my private pomposity was as defensive as it was discerning, the boat groups felt boorish to me. So I dumped the kids on my parents and retreated to a quieter area of the boat, choosing my book over people.

The dimensions of the boat were such that port and starboard stateroom corridors were more than 100 meters long. Later I learned that you could always go to a deck that featured one of the boat’s “neighborhoods” and walk through that instead of a Shining-like hallway. But I did notice that the superstition applied to decks did not apply to room numbers:

A funny thing about thinking is that the wider you cast your thoughts, the less significant your personal affairs become. But the ego, never fully banished, can’t help but notice that recognizing your insignificance is a fine mental feat, so while you’re transcending your petty concerns, you’re touting the transcendence you’re achieving. Am I alone in enjoying the deftness with which I self-negate? Maybe there’s a paradox named after a suicidal philosopher that describes it better than me. But during moments alone, pondering the ocean and sky, questioning whether I’d like to see myself as more consequential or less so, I wondered if it wouldn’t be wiser to build a strong divider between material and spiritual concerns and spend the rest of the week focused on material good fortune. So what if I sensed spiritual poverty at every turn, from my shipmates’ difficulty returning a friendly wave to well-wishers to the hundreds of children I’d seen holding ice cream in one hand, an entertainment device in the other, crying their faces off? Who am I to judge? I’m probably worse because not only do I object to so much, I hone my fucking objections. Yes, I was enjoying the joy my unjaded kids were experiencing, and the nachas that was bringing my parents. But what did I want for me? Weren’t insistent anxieties like these exactly what I was supposed to be vacating for the week? On the flipside, how does one enjoy the ocean and sky without listing toward the existential?

Day 3

Made it a wopping 4 miles and change on the track, much of it with the sun well above the bristling skyline of Cozumel, Mexico.

The cruise company sold all sorts of onshore excursions, from swimming with dolphins and sea turtles to tequila and chocolate tastings to visiting the Mayan ruins in Quintana Roo. Ace researcher that my wife is, she found an escape from the rampant gringoism that was just a taxi ride away from the port. My parents and children wanted to take advantage of a less crowded boat so they stayed onboard while we went off to Playa Palancar.

It would have been lovely if I hadn’t spoiled it. The details are unimportant, but, attributing nothing to my masturbatory tussles with significance, I made a big deal out of something insignificant and that started an argument from which no winners emerged. I suppose the reasons why my difficulties relaxing were so acute they fucked up my wife’s relaxation too merited some kind of examination. But, possibly by astrological fate (Libra), I felt caught between attempting to solve an issue and dropping it altogether. Getting to the bottom of what the hell was the matter with me seemed thornier but more rewarding, while moving on felt like shirkery. I don’t think I ever made a decision one way or the other. My wife swam out to the floating platform (that’s her in the photograph) and I read my book. By the time we caught a cab back to the pier, peace had been restored and the rest of the day was fine and maybe even relaxed. OK, the argument was about fish tacos.

That night the kids slept in their grandparents’ stateroom while my wife and I had a reservation at the Comedy Club on Deck 4. You know, the Comedy Club. Across the hall from Jazz Club.  When the biggest George Carlin and Eddie Murphy ruled stand-up comedy, nobody paid much attention to the learning curve of a comedian. But in the current heyday of Louis CK and Chris Rock, it’s gushed into our consciousness that there’s more to the art than good jokes, and that one minute of solid material seems to take hours of work in small clubs, where even the big boys sometimes bomb. I don’t know whether this greater familiarity with the risks involved in stand-up comedy has trained audiences to be more supportive of those poor, vulnerable people onstage, or spoiled the magic of sausage-making. But either way, I figured the comics who got this gig would be seasoned professionals who knew how to work a room. And they were and they did. Opener and headliner alike got laughter from the room and they harnessed it and killed. It’s worth noting that Trump jokes were conspicuously absent. The only borderline political moment was when the headliner mentioned “participation trophies” and a few audience members roared approval (this is a right wing trope that has convinced a huge segment of America that poor people aren’t entitled to the same representation as rich people). I didn’t let it bother me (too much). The biggest laughs came from jokes about very specific cruising behaviors and when I saw that the participation trophy folks laughing just as hard as I was at some of the nonsense onboard, it actually gave me a great feeling of hope. As long as people believed that cruise ships were the perfect place to splurge on jewelry, elitist libtards and Bible Belt morons could unite in mockery of them.

Day 4

At sea due to arrive in Falmouth, Jamaica the following morning. Not much of note except it was National Margarita Day. I had grown sick of my anthropological pretensions and was not keen on observing people in pursuit of some great insight on human folly or spiritual deviation. I just wanted to observe NMD and spend time with the kids after being away from them the prior day. If I fell into the stupor that was de rigeur onboard, look out below.

But I’m realizing that, while I had a lot of fun throughout the week, it’s harder for me to write about the nice times in an interesting way. Muddling through my difficulties throughout weeklong Caribbean vacation is a tough enough ask of a reader. But what’s readworthy about the enjoyable parts, where I didn’t feel confused or conflicted?

That morning after breakfast I played shuffleboard and minigolf with my daughters. Even the boat’s minigolf course hardly seems noteworthy. The ice skating rink, the carousel, the zipline and rock climbing walls, I found myself wishing I was more familiar with deprivation so I could be wowed by those features. But I didn’t feel guilty about being non-plussed by them either. Just happy to be with my family and, at this point, looking forward to getting back to my book, which I already knew I would miss more than the cruise when it was over.

And I also wasn’t going to feel guilty about enjoying an hour alone with said book, a Spotify playlist I love, and said holiday’s honored beverage.

[brishu]

Dry Joke

Q: Why didn't the guy stranded in the desert die of thirst? A: He was well aware.