family

The dog who would not be silenced will bark no more. I am still sort of in shock. Apparently the night of Friday the 13th, Sixto was struck and killed by a car up Highway 299. I will miss the hell out of that canine. He was the beast who taught me to love dogs.

More words later, I'm sure, but for now I'll post the poetry of my friend.

Requiem For A Conquistador
By The Girth:

You were born in a hard summer.
I remember, the summer my father died.  
Your own master heartbroken, an intoxicated disconsolate youth.  
Later, we would chide you, the grown dog, for your irascible frustrations.
Calm down boy. So paranoid. So angry.
But I remember the puppy.
Standing guard, hardening, for the good of the herd.

You hated tweakers.
Weren't too fond of small people.
Didn't initially like women.
Rarely took to other dogs.
There was Ace of course.
But he was kind of a wolf.
And Quilan, who understood you.
As sub will understand Dom.

Peg leg didn't bother you,
No leg didn't bother you.
Didn't care.
Wasn't significant.

You got upset with me
For wearing a bini.
When i took it off
 u were relieved
And told me politely,
Get back with the damn group man.
As you were want to do,
You bit me on the thigh one time.
I was running down the beach,
I'm sorry, I shouldn't have strayed.

At Cornell Club,
you fought our raccoon.
We'll call it a draw.

You had to look out for number one
You found the shade
Under the truck
In the desert.
And told Dauter,
Who come to poach it,
Fuck You Dauter,
This is my shade.

That's right.
Go find the shade boy.

I’ve been a bad friend, son, brother, and even lover of late. Too much workahol leading to broken plans, missed connections, absurd periods of radio silence. To all the parties waiting or wanting or hoping to hear from me, I truly am sorry.

So here’s what’s been going on.

I escaped my dayjob-infused routine last weekend to attend an Indian Wedding in New Jersey with the girlfriend. Oh yes, that’s right, I’m using The Title now. Reluctance to do so in the past is — hindsight-wise — kind of embarrassingly immature. Also, while it sounds quite nice rolling off the tongue, “paramour” isn’t actually a very flattering alternative descriptor.

For my part, this feels different than previous relationships. It’s more… intentional. I chose pursuit in spite of improbability and long odds. While she’s certainly into me (so I got that going for me too), this isn’t one of those things that just fell into my lap. I had/have to work for it.

This is foregrounded because it’s been long-distance, which is a pain in the ass, and also not the norm for me. Shamus jokingly scolded me that this was the best I could do given my quote-unquote emotional availability. Very funny, but there’s maybe something to be said for the way in which the distance gave the whole thing a chance to sneak around various subconscious defense mechanisms of mine. A trojan horse for the heart, you might say.

It’s gotten harder now that she is in London, and not New York, and timezones are a real barrier, and we have to plan and coordinate even to talk. But people do this, and even successfully. Seems kind of silly not to try.

Another novelty/challenge: she is more different from me than anyone I’ve ever dated before. She is brainy of course, and at a bedrock level we have much in common, and communicate pretty well. I like to think this puts us in a good position to make the most of our diversity. Still, at times the distance (social now, not geographic) between our respective worlds seems daunting. It’s not just her being the daughter of South Asian immigrants, but more the whole variance in life paths: she’s a relatively straight-up lawyer; she’s more conventionally girly than the girls I grew up with; she’s at her finest dancing to top-40 pop hits. These things are strange and quixotic and foreign to me.

In light of all this it makes me happy that she approvingly posted this little excerpt, because really when is this sort of thing ever very logical? It isn’t, I’d say. My goal is not to think about anything more than is absolutely necessary, and generally try not to eff it up.

But yes, so I flew out to New York to spend the weekend in Jersey. It was pretty fun, actually. Unlike most men, I quite enjoy dancing — of which there was plenty — and I find the generally joyous atmosphere of weddings to be pleasant and life-affirming. Plus there was plenty of quality food and booze.

The night before the wedding itself was a tradition called a Sangeet, which is like a rehearsal dinner except bigger (half the whole wedding was there) and revolves around a talent show. This is actually an exceptional idea; there’s nothing like the sharing of amateur and cheeky performances to help bring two families together. I recommend anyone considering a bricolage approach to their own nuptials consider incorporating this genius little innovation.

I also appreciated this quote from the wedding program: “Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.” Which is also translated “To love is not to look at one another: it is to look, together, in the same direction.” Seemed apropos.

Another highlight was the after-party, which was back in the hotel/conference center we all stayed in, which had an honest-to-god nightclub. This is in North New Jersey proper, and sort of outside any real town or city center. And yet this joint had an apparently substantial clientele. The crowed was, shall we say, interesting, sort of the end result of Jersey Shore plus 25 years, or, as someone remarked, “I feel like this place is exclusively full of people here to cheat on their wives.” A great moment for human anthropology in and amongst the Dirty Beats.

We finished the weekend strong back in the City, mostly picnicking in Central Park, greeting friends of hers, camping out behind Summer Stage, gorging ourselves on Chicken and Rice back in the apartment.

I had one more day there, so I got to see my Sister on the night before her birthday. Missed everyone else though (didn’t even tell folks I was coming out) for which, again, I am all apologies. Next scheduled excursion is late October, and will be a Good One, I think.

Now back in California, a week later, it feels like much longer ago. Like another world, a place of real summer, and me another person maybe. Another identity facet to blend? Another structural hole to bridge? Time, as they say, will tell.

Two of my favorite people are a year older today. My hobmre Frank Edward Robbins the Fifth, jobseeking soon to be father of two, and of course my sister-pal, coming up from behind with her own brand of bound-for-glory greatness. I got a chance to break bread with Brie last night in Brooklyn on my way out of town, and she showed me this, which I thought was brilliant:

So happy birthday to both of you, and be glad you’re not attacked by Pandas. Go get ‘em, Leos!

Back when I was a teenager, my Dad took me and my step-mom and sister to Europe. In retrospect, that trip was a big deal for me. It gave me a real taste of (and for) the big wide world. One of the things we ended up doing was peeking in on Palm Sunday mass at Notre Dame Cathedral, and seeing all those Catholics in that beautiful building singing in French was really something. Ever since, I’ve have an abiding affection for other people’s religious rituals.

As a confirmed agnostic and dabbler in personal mysticism, it’s a real treat to be welcomed into another cultures’ spiritual practice as an observer or novice participant. Today I had the distinct pleasure of attending my Nephew Jacob Friedman’s Bar Mitzvah. As the Rabbi rendered, the kid’s a mensch. He did a good job with all the tricky rituals and language, and more impressively rendered a philosophically sophisticated opinion on the meaning of the Tower of Babel story that was the subject of the service.

To wit: if all people were united and making the biggest tower ever, why would God break up that scene? There are traditional answers about idolatry or excessive materialism, and about human hubris, but his reading was a bit deeper I think. If we have everything, we cannot really be happy. Thus the scattering and confusion assist humanity by creating adversity, challenge, difficulty and loss. Only in the presence of sadness is there joy.

Anyway, smart observation; especially for a thirteen year old. Mazel Tov to him.

A few other things came to me in the service. The first and foremost was the primacy of family, both that we are given by blood and that which we take in by choice — close friends, lovers, colleagues and mentors — as well as the wider community we inhabit. These are hugely important things in human life. I sometimes think these are the most important things beyond simple survival, and it’s a worthwhile temper to my internal ambitions and drive to consider what it’s really all about in that context.

The other thought I wrestled with started as a famliar gut level reaction to the implied subservience resident in most religious texts. Exalting your deity, proclaiming his/her/its glorious supremacy and promising obedience aren’t actions I associate with freedom or liberty or enterprise or creativity, so I sort of recoil from that at first; reject it out of hand. But in reading through the accompanying text analysis in the service book around the story of the Tower of Babel, I started digging a little deeper.

As I said, the typical lesson of Babel is that we shouldn’t get too big for our britches as a species, and basically I disagree with that. I believe that people are what should (and in most cases do) matter to people. As per the above note on family/community, first and foremost we are all about us: we exist for, by and through one another. As such, I’m all for the exaltation of human works. Let’s go ahead and build mighty towers — or maybe shoot a few people off to the moon, or whatever — as a way to flex our muscle, make some history, and celebrate ourselves.

However, without some careful steering that line of thought does run us right into the Icarus ditch. Technological idolatry (fanboyism) isn’t particularly effective, and what’s worse it can blind us in important ways. We currently struggle with a global/generational crisis because for centuries we thought that treating the air like an open sewer was pretty much fine because of how awesome coal-fired power was. Flew too high, now the wax is melting, our wings are coming apart, and it’s a hell of a long way down.

It occurs to me that you don’t really need to subscribe to the notion that some sentient force created the universe to realize that the universe is frackin’ awesome, and that some consideration and awe of this creation is justly due. Whether this deference is to creation itself or to “the creator” is largely a matter of semantics, and perhaps the attendant humility is more important as a best-practice compliment to the manic, churning, can-do spirit of industrialized man.

So, for instance, I’m an environmentalist, but only of a sort, more on the spaceship earth trip than concerned with saving the whales per se. I believe need to manage the planet better because if we don’t life will suck and we may die in large numbers. That said, I really don’t want Polar Bears to swim to death, and I think maybe it’s a Good Thing to imbue the rest of the biosphere with a little divinity.

Quite often I find there’s real value in the ability to blend seemingly inconsistent or irreconcilable ideas and traits. The Jungian Thing. In the Rabbi’s discussion of what made Jacob a mensch, she gave a compelling case for moderation — something that’s too often associated with bland, watered-down timidity, or bullshit equivocation (c.f. “bipartisanship”) — by talking about the need to be passionate, but not uncontrollably ruled by passion, and so on. Feels like the old, Romantic Polytheism.

At the end, I come around once again to a familiar vision in which the creator is creation, and moral necessity springs from the necessary practice of enlightened people existing in simpatico. Being right with one another demands some honesty, trust and charitable spirit, but it’s generally not rocket science to do the right thing. Like the soap bottle says, we’re all one or none.

First, the news.

My postmodern uncling career is really taking off. Our lead story is last night’s text message from Tommy reporting the birth of baby Ramadan Adderall Callabasa Sparks-Plus Stereo-Clutch Manmohan Death-Machine, a strapping 9lb 4oz girl. Actual name turns out to be Mirella Colette Dauter. Beautiful! I had a feeling about that one.

Also noteworthy: the recovery of my automobile in the East Bay hamlet of Hayward. I’m hoping my attorney will be able to disentangle it from the impound lot, have conducted some long-distance bureaucratic maneuvers via facsimile. Luckily my office is near the jail, and the bail bonds people are also notary publics. Mechanical status is unknown, but the report doesn’t indicate wreckage or any stripping. Perhaps Moamar will have a glorious third act.

Last night was also opening day for the Humboldt Crabs, America’s longest continuously running pro-am baseball team. It was good old fashioned home-town hillstomping double header; I caught the night game, which the Crabbies walked away with 13 to 1.

And now, for some analysis and context.

It’s really a great scene down there at Crab Park. It’s everything you know of baseball, complete with highschool kids selling nachos and old men keeping stats with over-sized clipboards and complicated paper forms. But it’s also lots of neck-tatoos, microbrew, heckling, and a volunteer brass band that plays Sabbath.

The combination represents, in my opinion, some of the best of America — layers of idiosyncrasy, honest fun, community spirit, low-stakes gambling, social diversity and ritual tradition. It is also specifically some of the best of small town living. When it works, it’s like everyone’s a VIP.

And I mean what I said when led off with my position as postmodern uncle. Family is a pretty virtuous thing, blood-related and otherwise, and it’s really fun to help wrangle a bunch of kids at these things, especially when it’s a once a week event and not a daily responsibility.

Outside, in the Big World, I’m not so sure what to say. I’m far from being one of those who takes such a dim view of things that they don’t want to bring kids into being, but we’re heading into some turbulent times for sure. Politics is moribund and lifeless; the right typified by bitterness, half-crazed infighting and literally murderous extremism, the left ineffectual as ever, a fact made abundantly clear by the Democratic Trifecta. They’re blowin’ it, in my opinion, unable or unwilling to take the kind of action necessary to, say, guarantee universal health care.

Meanwhile, Governors around the country are slashing already meager social welfare programs as jobs continue to evaporate at a rate of several hundred thousand a month. With GM set to begin mass layoffs (which will have significant ripples as the whole automotive supply chain adjusts) and another wave of mortgage resets and real-estate losses in the mail, I think harder times are coming. Our institutions are failing.

I see no reason to be worried about my own personal fate, or any reason to expect anything bad for my business (the viability of a boutique bicycle startups notwithstanding), but it’s getting really tense and shitty for a lot of people who are already on the bubble. The dark reality is that a lot of companies are bloated paperwork-clotted clusterfucks, and they really can lay off 1/3 of their workers and still do just about the same thing.

One in ten citizens is functionally illiterate. One in five unable to balance a checkbook. We live in a nation wracked with inequality. Not quite Brazil, but headed in that general direction, even as Brazil steadily improves.

The old philosophical struggle between revolution and pirate utopia, running hot these days. But it’s a nice sunday afternoon, and in spite of my aching back, the time is now (now!) to dig up the septic tank.

My grandmother Victoria, Vicki to the rest of us, passed last week. She was a tough old lady. She saw the depression and worked the USO during WWII, said that British sailors were the worst, that they used shoe polish to keep their uniforms white rather than washing.

She had five children, including my mom, two of whom she outlived; my uncle Patrick who worked for IBM and programmed primitive computers for early nuclear submarines, and my uncle Terry, who got hit by a car before I was born and who I never met, but am supposed to resemble. She was the matriarch of the McCues.

My mother moved her out to Eugene a little more than six years ago after my sister left for college, gave her a nice final act in Oregon. She was pretty happy there.

All in all, I think it’s as light and positive a turn as death really gets. The past year or so, I’d known that Vicki had decided to quit fighting for her life, accept the coming end. After two hip replacements and a broken femur, she didn’t see the value in physical therapy; already a pretty private person, gradually retreated into herself. She also had Parkinsons, and while she wasn’t senile or anything, she had started forgetting things and getting confused from time to tome. Worse she was more than with it enough to know she was making mistakes, which I think for her was the hardest thing of all.

Last Wednesday night she suffered a massive stroke in her sleep and never woke up. Half a day later she died in Hospice. I’m glad she didn’t suffer, and I’m glad that she’s at peace.

I went home this weekend to help my mom pack up her things, and to lend some good old family joy to the situation. It was good. These events have a way of getting everyone down to a level.

So I’m nobody’s grandchild now; advanced a generation on the ladder.

So I’ve been rolling this one over in my mind a fair bit in the past week, thinking about what I want out of life, what/how I want to be.

One thing I want is to hold on to my far-flung cadre of friends, the bigger Family I have that’s grown by choices. I don’t have any illusions about everyone all living together in one big happy hippy compound, or cutting a swath of stylish destruction as a king-hell gang of city-dwelling bohemians. No, people want to do their own things, and that’s cool. I’m good with it. There are 31 flavors and more. Please sample them all and stick with whatever fits you the best for as long as it feels right.

What I’m more thinking about is keeping up the knitting, maintaining fresh contact information and some sense of What’s Up with all these people I fucking love so much. Keeping up the process of running them into one another whenever possible, expanding the network when appropriate, etc. I don’t want to sound like an ass, but I like being a part of an elite crew. I’m ambitious. It drags me down being around sad or needy or low-caliber individuals. You know the tune; Rise above, we’re gonna rise above.

I was talking the other day with my Gypsy Princess roommate, about how she’s always felt the lure of travel, the open road, adventure. And the more she thinks about it the more she wonders if the life of a rambling gypsy isn’t but one of many possible outlets for her inner desires, maybe the easiest and best-practiced and ergo most alluring in a default fallback kind of way. Life tough? Go travlin’. That always gets the juices flowing. But maybe there’s something more out there, something more substantial, another expression, a way of being that answers the same calling, but more creatively, substantively, sustainably.

It made me wonder about how fired up I got being back in NYC, if there isn’t something similar at work in my psyche. Not that I’d ever consider denying myself the joys of The City — any more than she’d consider giving up travel — but that feels like a thread worth tugging on. Unraveling my various rationalizations, it occurs to me that one reason I feel so comfortable in New York is that I can be as Big as I want there and nobody will necessarily notice. Out here in the HC — and in a different way in SF — letting the full flower of my being bloom would turn a few heads, at the very least, and I’m not 100% comfortable with that.

Which runs into the fact of my ambition like a wood-chipper. Cognitive dissonance. Look at me. Don’t look at me! No, wait, look at me! Yeah.

So, in the continuing spirit of Owning My Shit, and also following the philosopher’s advice that Beliefs are Habits of Action, I think I have to intentionally put myself into the spotlight a bit more, if for no other reason than to get comfortable with that as my ongoing role in life. The truth is I love being a center of attention. I’m a fucking Ham and everyone knows it. I just need to get over and/or embrace my inner artist, quit being so worried about always being a success and never being a jackass. Worry takes one out of the game, and it’s who dares wins. Fortune favors the bold.

Well, I’m descending into catchphrase hell now so I’ll pull up. It was a lovely Thanksgiving, Mom and Sister coming to me for a good break from their routines. December promises to be fun, with some travel back up to Oregon in the cards. I’m hoping to get some serious Time Off to decompress and then dig into some personal projects.

My comrade Franko and his lovely lady Laura are preggers. Way to be procreative, kids.

Also, nice to know that years of bike-riding did nothing to deplete Mr. Robbins’ virility. Big ups to the ball-channel.

I’m looking forward to visiting them this New Years. It’s been too long!

UPDATE: Housing secured. Also, Brie would like to point out that she is not, in fact, a “gangbanger.”

Any of my New York readers know of a place to say in Brooklyn?

Brie is teh awesome. You should be so luck as to have her as a roommate.

In Which I Explain With A Single Quote My Certainty That All My Achievements Will Be Eclipsed By My Sister:

By 7[pm] I was sitting in the back of a really small, really red, bar (alone, I might add. A practice I'm not a fan of) listening to some Columbia graduates read from their first published works. Nothing like hearing words pulled off the page and spoken out loud, it evokes a good feeling, a little internal nudge that this is what I really love spending my time doing. But, for the love of God, what's with that fucking wispy, ethereal, panty waist voice grown men get when they read poetry? That's got to stop, people. Let's put the balls back in prose.

The blog you all really want to be reading.

I'm doomed! Doooooomed!