When I was 9 I found my kickstand rotting off; it seemed to have crept under my bicycle. I asked my brother John to fix it.
"There's two types of people in the world, Mart," he said, using an abbreviation of my name that means shop or store. "People who need kickstands and people who don't."
I didn't know what he meant, but he fixed my kickstand anyway. I rode away wondering which group Judas Priest belonged to, not knowing at the time that Judas Priest was already a group.
John is no longer around for me to ask, but it occurred to me at the time that he might have thought less of the people who needed kickstands, and therefore me.
Over the years I have determined that the world isn't so easily divided and, while it might be polite to not argue when someone says Democrat or Republican, fried or flame-broiled, Rob Halford or Ronnie James Dio, sometimes the only thing you can drink while listening to "Mob Rules" is a Pepsi, not a Coke.
"But there aren't just two kinds of people in the world, John," I might say.
"Really?" he'd reply. "You're alive and I'm not. You use a kickstand and I don't. Q.E.motherscratching D."
"But you're dead. You don't need a kickstand."
"Exactly."
Three weeks ago, the kickstand on my 11-year-old bicycle fell off in the middle of Wilshire Blvd. For a moment I experienced a feeling of otherworldliness, as if I were passing from this realm to another.
"You won't need that kickstand anymore, Marty Barrett," Our Lord Jesus Christ said.
I thought of the inspirational poster Footprints, in which a man's life was represented by two sets of footprints on the sand, one his, and one Our Lord's. In the difficult times, the man noticed that there was only one set of footprints.
"What's up with that?" the man said to The Lord.
Thinking fast, The Lord said, "It's because I was carrying you."
Because of the Inspirational Poster Spatial Limitation Act of 1977, it is not widely known that the man didn't believe The Lord's answer for a second, noting that the footprints were clearly left by the man's shoes, not The Lord's sandals, and that the man weighed at least 220 lbs. during the time of his diabetic coma, and had Our Lord been carrying him, the footprints would have been indented farther into the sand.
"Fine," The Lord said. "I abandoned you for someone who ate right. You going to go be Jewish now?"
I thought briefly that my brother might have meant that losing one's kickstand means that one is not truly alive. If this is true, I have been traveling through the realm of the undead since July.
In the first summer I had my bicycle I traveled to Martha's Vineyard with my friend Todd. We stayed at a hostel run by a nice Bavarian couple.
"The showers are open until 1 a.m.," the wife said, handing us towels, "and the kitchen is open at 5. We just had the showers redone so the water pressure is better than a hotel."
"I don't like it when German people tell me how good the showers are," Todd, who happened to be Jewish, said.
Come to think of it, I, who happen to be Irish, have never ordered potato latkes from a British deli. Why should I pay for what thieving absentee landlords stole from my ancestors?
What I'm saying is that to make choices is to be alive.
The upside of being no longer alive and riding a bike is that my calves are huge. The two types of people in this world are people who get calf implants, and people who don't.
Several times a month I ride my bike to work across seven miles of city streets. It takes me 45 minutes, depending on traffic. I rarely stop, even when I should.
The Atwater Bridge stands less than halfway through my journey, but it is the hardest part. It is the one place I must stop, in order to leave the street and get on the bridge, I hoist the bike onto the curbed sidewalk; I lose my momentum.
As I make my way across, I first pedal up a deceptively difficult incline into Los Angeles with both the 5 freeway and the L.A. River beneath me. By the end I am out of breath. I never look at the river, or the gentle hills of Griffith Park to my right.
This morning there was a bedraggled man who preceded me on the bridge. He was riding a rickety bike, very slowly. There was no room for me to pass him, so I was forced to slow down.
And that's when things changed. Pedaling casually, I saw a nest of birds in the rushes of the river. I saw the sun rising to my left. The bike moved easily, my legs weren't strained. I thought, "Why is it so difficult every other day?"
Because every other day I race over the bridge, competing with no one but myself, taking no time for enjoyment of the scenery or my own comfort, spoiling a joyful moment, making what should be a great ride into something with a flaw.
"Who is pushing you, Marty Barrett?" I said.
There is a rest area in the middle of the bridge, and the bedraggled man pulled to the side. Without thinking, I sped up and zipped past, soon aware of how much my legs hurt again, how I was out of breath, and how I was racing for nothing. I stopped and turned around.
The bedraggled man had resumed riding and was making his way slowly across. I got a good look at him. He was very likely homeless.
"He seems to have all the time in the world," I thought. "He's not straining himself. He's probably having the time of his life."
I thought for a moment, and decided to light the homeless man on fire. The smoke met the sunrise, and his ashes blew northwest against the line of the river. I went southwest, because the southeast is for assholes.
Barack Obama's recent photo opportunity with the current (for 12 more hours) and three former presidents is part of a journalistic tradition that delights in getting like things in the same place, like squishing puppies together.
Throughout U.S. history there have never been more than four former presidents in the same room with the current one, and that was during the term of the first George Bush, when Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon all picked up their dry cleaning on the same historic day.
That said, in 2000 and 1994 there were five living former presidents along with the sitting one, just not in the same room.
Mostly, though, presidents haven't lived long enough to collect more than a few at a time. Here is a picture of Theodore Roosevelt (left) with William Howard Taft, his successor. Note that Taft, our heaviest president, looks more like Teddy than Teddy does. The guy in the window also showed up in "Three Men And A Baby," as part of the just-as-revered presidential tradition of homage to the undead.
Presidential wives tend to outlast their husbands, but even though Lady Bird Johnson and Betty Ford were alive when this photo was taken, widows don't get to come to the photo opps.
Funerals are also good for getting presidents together, as in the case of Richard Nixon's in 1994.
Inaugurations, not so much, as many immediately-former presidents tend to high-tail it out of town. Still, at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1963, both Kennedy's Republican predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Ike's Democratic precursor, Harry Truman, were on hand.
Truman, who lived to be 92, returned to the White House during the administrations of Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
Here's Franklin Roosevelt and the tremendously unpopular (at the time) man he replaced, Herbert Hoover. The Roosevelt/Hoover connection is most often compared to Obama/Bush, as Obama, like Roosevelt, is inheriting a financial catastrophe from his predecessor. Whoever thought to put these two in the same car was an idiot, but it was the Depression, and maybe they needed to carpool?
William Henry Harrison, who took office in 1841, gave a rousing two-hour speech in the cold without his overcoat, and died of pneumonia 30 days later (although he did not fall ill for three weeks after the inauguration). His was the shortest term of any U.S. president. He wasn't around long enough to get his picture taken with anybody.
I don't know who they voted for, but a group of needlessly belligerent homeless people I met the other night reminded me that hope is once again stirring in America.
"The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream" is one of Barack Obama's books. I feel confident that I don't need to read any more than the title to get the gist.
Does every president and presidential candidate write a book? Yes.
I spent 30 minutes on Amazon.com typing in the names of candidates from Mitt Romney to Ernest Hollings. Every major presidential candidate from as far back as I can personally remember has written a book (including George W. Bush and Dan Quayle - 744 copies new and used from .01), and I have a feeling that most of them are only used for reference material by reporters and the opposing campaign looking for spelling errors.
I have collected these books in an Amazon wish list only for convenience. Do not buy them for me.
Anyway, "The Audacity of Hope" is itself a hopeful thing. Obama has hope that people will know, or at least look up, the word "audacity." A candidate has not put that much trust in an electorate in a long time. And I see things changing already.
1. It was dark and I was walking from my office on the other side of Wilshire Blvd. toward the venerable bar The Prince. As I approached a a group of three vagrants, two male and one female pushing a shopping cart, they began muttering, and I had a feeling it was about me.
"Kill you," the first man said.
"I got a gun," the other man said.
"Hi," I said.
As I passed these two men (without incident, and without speeding up or slowing down) and approached the woman, I could smell her despite my long history of mouth breathing (usually on phones).
She did not say anything but one of the other men said, "Go get your own woman, motherfucker, that one's mine."
"OK," I said, filled with good feelings.
The Audacity of Hope: In this new America, you have hope that I want to mate with, and perhaps marry, your foul-smelling, cart-pushing, crack-addicted life partner.
2. Last week Newsweek announced that it would publish behind-the-scenes accounts of the Obama and McCain campaigns. Newsweek reporters agreed to not publish any of this material until after the election was over, and have now begun releasing tidbits, such as Obama's opinion of his debate performance and several Sarah Palin anecdotes dealing with her lack of preparedness for the vice presidency.
When it was reported that Palin thought that Africa was a country and that South Africa was the southern region of that country, and when I mentioned this at my office, a co-worker accused me of liberal hysteria.
"But what about all the stupid things Dan Quayle said, or that George Bush said," I said. "Things that pointed to a dangerously incomplete education - ?"
"You selected those things," he said, "because you didn't like those people anyway. I'm sure all the candidates you liked said stupid things, but you gave them slack because they might have been misquoted or they had an off day."
Not true. I'm still holding a grudge against Joe Biden for plagiariazing a Neil Kinnock speech in, I think, 1987.
"Just like every conservative wants to believe that Obama is an Arab and a Muslim, you want to think that Sarah Palin is retarded," he said. "If she doesn't know that Africa is a continent, she's retarded."
The Audacity of Hope: In this new America, people want to believe the best of each other, even hoping that campaigns won't run retarded people to make other retarded people feel better.
3. To prove that one doesn't have to be retarded to not know that Africa is a continent, I called someone I lived with for 17 years.
"[name withheld]," I said, "Who did you vote for this week?"
"I didn't vote for Obama because he's into the abortions," the person said. "And I didn't vote for McCain because he's too old. [name withheld 2] told me to vote for the Libertarian. I forget his name."
"His name is Bob Barr," I said. "And the Libertarian party says the government shouldn't have the right to interfere in that matter. It's in their platform. I would have voted Libertarian, too, if I thought they had a chance."
"You mean the Libertarians say yes to abortions?" [name withheld] said.
"They don't say no, which is slightly to the left of where Obama is," I said. "So you didn't try to get any information on the Libertarians, you just asked [name withheld 2] and believed what (he) said?"
"[name withheld 2] is really up on things," [name withheld] said.
"By the way," I said. "Africa: continent, country, or city?"
"It's a country, Marty. You should have studied that in school."
Then [name withheld] asked me to explain the Electoral College, which I did, saying that it was retarded.
The Audacity of Hope: In the new America, you will vote for someone just because someone else told you to, even if you don't know the candidate's name, because you hope the other person knows what he's talking about.
A friend of a friend threw a birthday party for her and, as I walked through the unfamiliar house in California, looking through closets, rifling drawers, etc., I was pleasantly surprised to see this picture as the desktop pattern on a computer. (I have modified it from the original.)
It was taken from the Bridge Street Bridge in Lowell, MA, my home town. The camera faces up the Merrimack River toward the blue chimney of Saints Memorial Hospital, where I worked at age 16 incinerating amputated body parts (I still do this now, but only as a hobby).
The photographer grew up in Lowell and left there before I would have met her in high school, but there the picture was, 3100 miles away from where it was taken.
You might notice the graffiti on one of the mill buildings.
Today I was driving my family home from church. My daughter was singing a song with her class, and we got the fuck out of there once she was done lest a god I don't believe in suddenly manifest himself just to strike me down for hypocrisy, which I wouldn't put past him.
We were all in Sunday finery and traveling a road that is packed on weekdays when I drive my daughter to school. Today I was going 84 in a 70 zone, and got pulled over.
The California Highway Patrol officer was very polite, asked me why I was going so fast, asked me the meaning of my license plate, and let me go with a warning. I still can't believe it and think I'll need to be hospitalized.
In the two other times I've been caught speeding (both going 84 m.p.h., by the way), in New Hampshire and Arizona, I was driving either alone or with a group of guys and was made to pay hefty fines. Had it not been for the presence today of my uncharacteristically well-scrubbed family, I would have been toast.
Which leads me to California Proposition 8, which on November 4 will decide whether same sex marriages can be outlawed in this state. Proponents say that the continued legality of same sex marriages will force innocent people to tolerate them, will require churches to perform them, and will lead to roving gangs of gays force-gay-marrying people in the streets. "No on 8" supporters say stop being stupid.
Proponents also point to the tumult same-sex marriage has pushed Massachusetts into, similar to when it was declared illegal to burn people suspected of witchcraft there.
All I know is that in the place of my birth, people still expend a great deal of energy climbing mill buildings carrying three shades of paint to declare someone else's alleged homosexuality (I don't think Con painted that sign) and that, had today's CHP officer found me speeding without my adorable female wife and two children, I would be looking at a $474 fine right now.
But, as much as anyone deserves to be ticketed for the victimless crime of enjoying America's roads, I deserved that ticket. And same sex couples should be allowed to marry.
I drove to Mexico this weekend for a wedding. If our nation organized its wars the way this wedding was organized, there would be friendly governments from Iraq to Iran (if one started from Baghdad and went west around the world to Tehran).
I didn't do any driving once I reached the resort where the wedding was held, but I will consider the following when I return to Baja California:
I passed from the United States to Mexico merely by momentarily slowing down my car. The trip from L.A. to our destination between Rosarito and Ensenada took three hours on a weekday morning.
The documents proving my Mexican car insurance were not checked or asked for at any time, but I still think the $90 I paid to AAA was a good investment.
I crossed the border at San Ysidro into Mexico by momentarily slowing down. The drive through Tijuana was pleasant. When hookers would approach the car, I would point to the passenger seat and say "Tengo uno ya." Big laughs all around.
Aside from Mari, the resort's head of housekeeping who babysat our tots splendidly and affectionately (all without knowing a word of English), I found the service pretty surly. I tip well, I order in Spanish, and I take a vacation once every five years. Why was I made to feel my business was not welcome in a place where the only money came from the north? That attitude would not fly at In 'n' Out Burger.
The food was great, and despite the best efforts of Donald Trump to sully the coastline, the beaches were beautiful.
Everyone takes dollars. I got dirty looks when I asked "Cuanta costa en pesos?"
Crossing back at midday on Sunday, the line to get into the United States took two hours, and then there were stupid accident rubbernecking delays in the United States that consumed more time. It took six hours to get home. Next time I will return under cover of darkness.
Churros sold on the road to U.S. Customs are the best churros.
I handed the U.S. border guard my and my wife's passports and our tots' birth certificates. He then asked where my son and daughter were, and I pointed to them in the back seat. I was momentarily scared that, after waiting in line for two hours, we would be indefinitely delayed. All he would have had to ask my three-year-old is if we had kidnapped her at gunpoint and she would have said "Yes." Children are not reliable witnesses.
On the way home, we stopped at a McDonald's in San Ysidro that figures prominently in my memory. It was built a few hundred yards up the road from the site of the biggest mass murder in U.S. history (at the time), when a former welder named James Huberty opened fire at a McDonald's, killing 21 people. After the murders, that McDonald's was torn down and its replacement opened a few doors up San Ysidro Boulevard.
My father and I had been having a fight in July of 1984 when this happened, and as I left the room he returned to his paper, where he read the word "Huberty" aloud. I thought he'd said "Puberty" (I was 14) so I thought he was negating all my significant points by reducing them to a phase. So I responded "Senility." Then we figured it out. No big laughs all around. That's not how it worked back then.
At 20 days into Lent I am horrified to realize there are more than 20 more.
As a cultural anthropologist, I engage in many traditions the world has proven obsolete, such as reading books, being married, and trepanning.
And this year I decided to give up something for Lent.
Lent is the period between Ash Wednesday and Easter, and this year Ash Wednesday was February 6 and Easter is March 23, 46 days later. Like the other bait and switch aspects of organized religions, however, Lent is advertised on its website as being just "40 days."
The last time I did Lent I was a child and had no choice. There is nothing that brings a child closer to someone else's idea of God than associating it with the removal of something that makes him happy.
So, like many children, I gave up something I could live without.
"This Lent I'm giving up Munchausen's-by-Proxy," I told my priest when I was ten. Thus I also learned the valuable lesson that my priest didn't listen to me.
Different churches determine Lent differently, but it is traditionally a variant on the 40 days Jesus was to have spent in the desert being tempted by a devil.
But a release valve was built in so that people didn't have to abstain the entire time. Catholics are allowed to go back to their vices on Sundays, but are not allowed to eat meat on Fridays (a practice abandoned year-round but still maintained during Lent), hence why McDonald's still advertises Filet o' Fish specifically on that day.
Perhaps because, as adults, we more or less arrange to get what we want when we want it, thereby taking away the childhood appeal of birthdays and Christmas, I thought it would be a good experiment to do without some things during this arbitrary time.
Tuesday, February 5 was the last day I drank anything alcoholic. Ten days after that I stopped eating fast food, a few days after that I stopped coffee and caffeinated soda. Then no red meat. Ten days before Easter I will stop murdering the homeless.
And I stick to it on Sundays because I'm hard-core. I don't know of anyone in recorded history who has gone without alcohol and snacks for more than 20 days.
The challenge then is: after these things are removed, mightn't I also add something? I might take some time to invent a religion based on my science fiction stories.
So far I don't feel the benefits that giving up on vices is supposed to provide, but then I'm not missing them as much as I thought I would. Ask me in a month if I feel the same way.
I haven't had a Massachusetts accent since I was about 17, but something happened to my speech once I crossed the Colorado River into California; I started pronouncing my "ar"s like long "i"s, and I can neither hear it nor correct it. Maybe I had a stroke.
And that is not the accent I was born with. People from Massachusetts pronounce their Rs like Hs. I don't know why I progressed one letter farther in the alphabet.
I'll make dinner reservations and show up at the restaurant only to find my table taken by someone named Mighty. When I introduce myself to people they rarely comment on my name, but then they will introduce me to others as Mighty.
It makes sense that they would not question what they obviously assume is a stage name capitalizing on my massive frame and powerful mind. About three years ago I met a lesbian who called herself Raige, and I believed it.
Starbucks employees throughout Southern California, Arizona, and Nevada choose this spelling, however, because barristas cannot pronounce silent Gs.
Once I directed a pub crawl version of Sean O'Casey's "The Plough And the Stars" in Boston. Plays performed in bars are an Irish tradition, and the scene from O'Casey's play about the 1916 Easter Rising was even more appropriate because it took place in a bar while the uprising commenced outside.
Anyway, I cast an elderly gentleman for the role of Peter, an ineffectual loudmouth and "lemon-whiskered oul' swine". He was about 70. I don't know why he wanted to schlep all around the city doing plays in bars for not much money, but it might have had something to do with the fact that there were four or five 22-year-old women in the cast playing spirited agitators, bar wenches, and prostitutes. He must have thought, "Good odds."
One night as reheasal was breaking up he tried to get the young ladies to go home with him. They politely declined, and he said:
"I have alcohol."
...and they politely declined again. I filed the exchange away. Did he think that alcohol would tip the scales?
The other night I had my annual Los Angeles birthday dinner at the Irish bar Tom Bergin's in Los Angeles. One by one, my friends came bearing gifts of alcohol, particularly Jagermeister. I got three bottles of Jager, which is my biggest birthday haul of the substance to date.
"I thought, 'I could be original or I could get you something you'd use'," one friend said. Indeed, we killed two of the bottles right there at the table as the long-suffering waitstaff rejoiced that it would be a year before they saw me again. (We tipped the living shit out of them.)
I also had Jagermeister at my 20th birthday on Martha's Vineyard. A lot of it. I threw up most of it. But I was poorer then and I was drinking it without any food. The other night we were able to drink it with dinner, and I didn't have a hangover the next day. In this world the poor are even denied vices.
Here is my friend Gabriela with the evening's take, which included a bottle of wine in a Chinese suit. I consider myself lucky because I think my friends and family would have shown up even if there had been no alcohol.
(I could be wrong about this - I'm no longer a 22-year-old woman.)
Today marks the seventh anniversary of my departing Boston for Los Angeles. I left that city a broken man, my arm having been clipped by a UPS truck while I was riding my bike to work in my last months there.
Less than a year after crossing the Colorado River into California (we drove), my relationship with the person I'd traveled here with ended. I don't know many relationships that have survived westward expansion. I am told that Lewis returned from their travels feeling that Clark was a "douchebag".
We took west four cats, two mine and two hers. I know that one (Roswell, staring from the background) is dead and I think at least two more might be (at least the one in the foreground, if there is any justice). Frampton (seen there in the middle) is still going strong, and just wrote her first novel.
I came out here to be a writer for television and film, and to perform comedy on stage. I have done all those things, but I think I should have been more specific in my plans, such as "I want to write for television shows that aren't cancelled almost immediately". But I guess saying that prior to leaving would have seemed too obvious to me then.
I am going to spend my remaining time in Los Angeles (I have an exit strategy) being more obvious.
Also, when I first moved here, I spent a lot of time riding my bike on the beach. I don't do that anymore. I've been to the beach once in the last year. This disgusts me. It's like living in Bogue Chitto and not eating at the truck stop every day.
When I was 9 I found my kickstand rotting off; it seemed to have crept under my bicycle. I asked my brother John to fix it.
