What's Past Is Prologue

I made the comment tonight that almost everything I write is about coping with death, and then I followed it up with, “I think every writer is, in one way or another, trying to cope with death.”

I don’t have a morbid (har har) fascination with shuffling off my mortal coil. In fact, I feel quite strange, because there’s a kind of serenity that I feel about death. It is the great and impending full stop at the end of the telegrams that are our lives (is a metaphor about a telegram really appropriate in 2012? I doubt it), and there really is no escaping it.

So you may as well live, but it’s beyond that. For me, coping with death is not finding a way to handle my own death, because I won’t have to worry about it once it’s over. No, it’s handling the deaths of others. I am, for all the wonderful things I’m sure everyone is saying about me, incredibly needy. I need other people in my life, to bear witness to it, I need to see what others do.

Writers are almost universally introverts, but we’re also fascinated with other people. And other people have a very disconcerting habit of dying.

And so I write so I can find a way to handle that. I write because I’ve lost friends, family, and pets to the inevitable scythe that swings, sometimes prematurely, down on our heads. I write because even through the haze of magic and pirates and adventure, there are things to be said about sacrifice and loss.

There will be a time when I am long forgotten. Hell, I’m not exactly known now. But there will be a time when my grandchildren’s grandchildren will look at a family tree and see my name and shrug, wondering, Who is this person and what did they do and also are they responsible for my horrible genetic disposition to sucking at sports? Maybe, if I am very lucky, they will be able to pull a slim volume off the bookshelf and see what I had to say.

Maybe I lied earlier. Maybe I am concerned about my own death, but my serenity comes because I feel like I am in the active process of leaving something behind. I have not come into this world and left it as I found it, I have a record of words and thoughts that will stay behind, for a little while, at least, when I cannot speak.

Sometimes I will write about pirates, and sometimes I won’t. Sometimes I will write the sentence, “They were shouting in unison, and it looked like they were sucking in the cyclone, which grew smaller with each incantation.” Yes, it is silly and unimportant and hardly the greatest composition the world has seen, and it will probably have a short shelf life. That sentence will not wind up on my gravestone.

But there are rare and golden days when I say things worth saying, when my words do fly above the limits of a lifetime, and they will be found in the future by someone else, read, and remembered. And these words will be sparked by the disjointed nature of life and death, by the jarring fact that everyone and everything must perish — everything but the words.

In Which I Am Monumentally Disgusted

Alternative Title: I Am Not Going to Shut Up About Congressional Politics for a Few Minutes

So for those of you who don’t know, don’t care, or don’t have an American citizenship, Republicans and Democrats in Congress agreed upon a cut budget last year. The President called it “eating your peas,” but what he really meant to say is “the Democrats will eat their peas and have the things they want cut while the Republicans just stand around looking smug.”

Anyway, the United States House of Representatives just passed a $642 billion budget for the Defense Department. (That’s $642, followed by nine zeroes.) Among the provisos of the budget are funds for the construction of a missile defense site on the East Coast, a ban on reducing America’s nuclear arsenal, and a reaffirmation of the indefinite detention without trial of terrorism suspects. While the Obama Administration has been slow to move on that last item, it should be noted that the United States and Russia signed an agreement to reduce their nuclear stockpiles (passed before the current benighted Congress ambled into Washington to be total dickheads), and the military opposes the construction of a “missile defense site” on the East Coast.

But the real kicker here? The President, the Senate, and the House all agreed to a budget that was $8 billion less than what the House GOP caucus proposed. I realize in a budget of $642 billion, $8 billion is only slightly more than one tenth of one percent of the budget. When you’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars, one teeny tiny single-digit billion doesn’t make an enormous difference. Does it?

It totally does when the party proposing this budget sailed into power protesting “runaway spending” and promising to slash the budget left, right, and center. Republican Paul Ryan of Wisconsin proposed a plan that would decimate Medicare and Medicaid; Republicans throughout Congress found enough umbrage to angrily denounce Planned Parenthood’s federal funding. (For the 2008/2009 fiscal year, Planned Parenthood received about $70 million in federal funding, and an additional $293 million in Medicare funding, which mixes federal and state loans.) This is the party that promised to restore America’s pocketbook.

Of course, what a Republican promises and what a Republican delivers are two different things entirely. Two years ago, during the Michigan gubernatorial election, I considered voting Republican; the Democratic nominee wasn’t doing much for me, and the Republican nominee promised a lot of nice things about governing the state sensibly, not ideologically. Of course, when Republican Rick Snyder won, he proceeded to rubber-stamp the radical Republican agenda coming out of the Michigan legislature. Working in that branch of government for the first year of the Snyder Administration was like watching every Republican wet dream come true.

If there is one thing I’ve learned from watching politics, it’s this: Never, never, never trust a Republican. This is not a party Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower would recognize — hell, even St. Ronald Reagan wouldn’t recognize the Republican Party today. It is beholden to a rigid ideology that refuses to compromise on any issue and tries to make any elected official with policy that differs from that ideology (i.e., any Democrat) irrelevant.

You want to be serious about cutting the budget? Fine, let’s sit down and talk about it. But don’t demonize the Democratic Party, the President of the United States, and Democratic Members of Congress for spending too much and then propose — let alone pass — a budget that is higher than what was agreed upon. Whenever the House Republicans wind up in the news, I keep on waiting to hear the other shoe dropping. Then I realize that it dropped in November of 2010, and all I can really hear is the mating call of the House GOP caucus: TROLOLOLOL.

So one of the only newspaper comics I still read is Zits. It remains funny (ish, at least, to me) in a way that most printed comics have stopped. I’ve by and large removed myself to the world of webcomics to satisfy my cartoony needs, but this is the last holdout.

Anyway, I read Zits on the website for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Years ago, when I was trying to find the comic online, it bugged me that the official website posted strips on a two week delay. I Googled “Zits online” and that was the first result, so I’ve always kept with it, for some reason. I only say that because the Seattle P-I allows readers to comment on comics, and one commenter has been both amusing and horrifying with his consistency.

I suspect this individual — who goes by the moniker keeper98 — is an older man, just because of the way he speaks. And his advocacy for corporal punishment for children. I know men of a certain age tend to think beating the ever-loving shit out of their children is the best way to make them behave, and those are guys around my dad’s age — and my dad is going to be 62 this year.

Here are a few of the more bizarre examples, with strips included:

keeper98: About time that good for nothing twerp was put to work. That disrespectful remark deserved a good slap in the mouth too.


keeper98: All teens are not like this. These two could use a good whack in the seat of the pants.

keeper98: A good swift kick in the seat of the pants is what that kid needs.

keeper98: Kid needs a good slap.

At least two or three times a week, this man (well, maybe keeper98 is a lady, I don’t know for sure) will go online, read a comic he apparently despises, and advocates beating children. The only other comments he makes are “this kid is a twerp.” And he’s usually the only person commenting on the comics.

I think this says something about the world, but I’m not sure what.

I called myself “unemployed” seriously for the first time today.

I was at the Verizon store. My phone has been deteriorating physically for a while now, and I could stand to get a new one. Verizon helpfully emailed me saying I was eligible for an upgrade, so off I went to the store to see just what this “upgrade” entailed.

The Verizon store is always a bit of a pain in the ass, because I feel like even if I’m there to buy a phone case they want me to walk out the door with a $6,000 phone contract that lasts for four months. Because they do, because they are a business trying to sell things, and this is America and not some communist country like Canada.

As I spoke to the salesman who was trying to shove a new phone down my throat before I even articulated what I was looking for (“I don’t want to buy anything today, I just want to see what the price range for this stuff is so I can figure out if I can afford it or not”), he asked me what I did.

The question caught me off guard, because of course there are a lot of things I do. I write, I watch NBC sitcoms and Game of Thrones and Doctor Who, I read young adult literature. I blog, I read Wikipedia, I obsessively follow Politico and the New York Times and The Onion. I drink good beer and I sometimes have more liquor than I should. I make choices, not often poorly, but sometimes they are bad ones.I spend most of my day wrapped up in my own head imagining pithy one liners that I’ll never get the chance to say.

So I kind of stared at this guy — his business card calls him Dan — and tripped over my tongue a bit, because usually I would say, “Oh, I’m a student,” but I’m not anymore, because I got that very helpful email from the registrar informing me that my diploma is now in the mail. Dan might have been the same age as me, maybe a few years older, but we’re both in that nebulous “20something” phase that will no doubt lend itself to a lot of overwrought pseudobiographical fiction when I’m older. Instead I said, “Excuse me, what?” and leaned in, using the excuse of my less-than-stellar hearing while I looked for the proper answer.

“What do you do?” he repeated

“Oh,” I said, even though I’d heard him fine the first time, and understood him just fine. “I’m, uh, unemployed.”

Dan blinked several times and then said, “Oh, all right,” and skimmed over some of the pricier phones.

Earlier in the day, I went to the gas station to get a new tank of propane for my dad. The woman who worked at the counter was someone who graduated a few years before me in high school. We were in a play together, and she was involved with a sort-of friend’s older brother for a while. She didn’t recognize me — the play was six years ago, and six years is a lifetime in a small town like Battle Creek when you stay there.

I thought while she unlocked the propane case at the gas station — and I thought again, when Dan the Verizon Man was trying to get me to buy a smartphone that might be made of diamonds for its hype and price — that hey, at least these people have jobs. I don’t even have that much anymore. The floor has dropped out from beneath my feet, and I am in free fall.

I wrestled with this on the car ride home. (It didn’t help that my father made some what I’m sure he thought were well intentioned fatherly remarks about my lack of a career, but I pointed out to him that I’ve only been out of college for six days.) This isn’t where I expected to be when I graduated — I imagined that I would have a job all lined up after college, because I thought that’s just what happened. But of course it isn’t, as I have learned, and here I was, unemployed and resenting my continued dependence on my parents. And Dan the Verizon Man and the Gas Station Girl (I suppose she’s a woman now — especially given that she has a kid) had jobs. Dan the Verizon Man, the 20something in a wrinkled orange collared shirt and with a tie that needed retying, even had a business card.

Then I reminded myself just whose office I interviewed with on Wednesday. Yes, it would all be for an unpaid internship, but if internships are the new entry level, an internship in the White House is like blasting off into a rocket for career prospects in Washington, D.C. (I hope. I’m probably naïve about this, given how naïve I’ve been about every other aspect of the post-college world.) Even as my dad gave me a long-winded lecture on how I’m lazy and not doing enough to find work and etc., etc., I reminded myself again — I interviewed with the White House on Wednesday.

So while the present is quite dim — I’m still feeling down about a great number of things, I feel restless and listless and directionless and lots of other -lesses, I’m feeling isolated and angry and a lot of other complicated feelings that are easy to say but hard to articulate — I am trying to remind myself that it only seems so because of the brightness of my future.

I got this.

Things I Have Learned in College

• Sometimes you won’t be the absolute best at what you do. Sometimes you will find out that there are things you’re bad at, things you won’t grasp no matter how hard you try, things where others shine. This is okay.
• The hardest questions and the simplest answers rarely coincide. The phrase “common sense” is pure bunk; if solutions that you, an undergraduate in your early 20s, thought up while wiping away some bong stains on your coffee table were the ones that worked, they would have already been tried.
• There are some things that you will be really, really interested in knowing, that you want to take with you into the real world, the things that light a fire in your heart and keep you interested for a very long time. Then there are things you only know because of some idiotic graduation requirement. If push comes to shove, go with the thing you’re more interested in. (I wrote a fantastic 40 page paper on constitutionality and war policy, probably to the detriment of my international trade class. But I don’t care about the Heckscher-Ohlin model of general equilibrium, and I do care about the Constitution.)
• Nobody cares what’s keeping you from doing your work, they just care if your work gets done or not. (Well, some people care what’s keeping you from doing your work, but those are mostly your friends, and the entire world is not going to be your friend.) On that note…
• Working with your friends in non-social settings requires a great deal of patience and tact. Sometimes it’s easier to make your coworkers your coworkers, especially when you’re in charge of something.
• In between doing homework and writing essays and going to class, leave room for fun things in life. I directed Shakespeare on a whim this year while also taking 34 credits.
• At the end of the day, you’re not going to remember a bad grade or a nasty comment a professor made or a missed homework assignment. There are things worth worrying about in the world — remember, half of the people who are graduating this year will be unemployed or underemployed. But the small things fade.
• It is not a good idea to drink four cups of jungle juice that contains eight shots of liquor in each cup.
• It is also not a good idea to vomit in a taxi.
• It is also not a good idea to convince yourself that vomiting all over yourself, instead of the taxi floor, will somehow make the fine you’re now going to have to pay less.
• Don’t believe it when people say “college is the best time of your life.” They said the same thing about high school. Remember, college can be the best time of your life — so far. But every new day presents a new world to face, and you shouldn’t spend the next phase of your life wishing you were in the last.
• It’s okay to still watch cartoons and read children’s books and find wonder in the small things. Just make sure you remember to pay your bills on time and drive like a goddamn adult.

Eulogy for a Dog

The world stops turning for no man, dogs less so. The greatest men and women who have ever lived have perished while the Earth unflinchingly continued its meandering waltz through the cosmos. So when my dog passed away, did the world come grinding to a halt? I still think (perhaps somewhat mutinously) that it should have.

There are no funerals for dogs, no elegies written in the darkness of mourning; no flag has ever flown at half-mast for a dog that has seen fit to, as Shakespeare put it, shuffle off his mortal coil. To compose a eulogy for a dog might seem silly, but for me, its importance is tantamount. My dog never once in thirteen years left my side, and the very least I can offer him is a fitting tribute.

I address this directly at you, Dusty. It’s not like I imagine you could speak, much less read – and even now, with the yawning chasm between life and death growing between us, you’re in no position to proofread this last gift of mine. But I feel I owe you an apology of sorts.

I am sorry I was not there. I am sorry I could not be in the room with you when you slipped away. I am sorry that I could not rub your belly one more time, that I could not lean down and whisper to you that everything would be all right. You might not have been able to speak, but you understood in the empathetic way that all dogs do. Even now, I imagine as the euthanizing medication coursed through your blood stream you would be more concerned that those around you were upset.

You never knew how to handle it when anyone you loved was visibly upset. You just went to pieces. I remember the way you would whine and try and nudge your head in between the crooks of my arms if I was having a bad day. You didn’t know what was wrong, but you wanted to help. I just want you to know, buddy, that you always did.

I’m trying not to be sad. I’m trying to remember all the wonderful things about you, but they stand in the long shadow of taking your life for granted. I enjoyed the way you looked in the front window when you wanted in. I loved the way you would sit in our yard when you’d been outside for a long stretch, back erect and surveying the land as if it were your kingdom. I loved your finicky nature, how you would react to a dog treat not in your preferred flavor. (As if you had a choice in the matter, dog. You were spoiled enough.)

Above everything, I will miss the way you laid outside my bedroom door in the mornings. It didn’t matter if I slept in until 1:00 PM, you would wait there patiently for me, not ready to start the day until I was good and ready. (Sorry for making you wait for so long some mornings, Dusty.)

You had a good life. You were always fed and watered, you had all the toys a dog could ask for, you were adored by everyone in our house. Nobody ever struck you or hurt you. Nobody ever really yelled at you (though I can hear Mom’s frustration from the time you ripped the living room carpet to shreds as a puppy). You were spoiled rotten and lived in comfort, which was the best we could give you.

You were my boyhood companion; you were there as I made the sometimes-rough transition between stages of my life. We bought you the year I turned ten. You were there for the switch from private to public school, for my first day of high school, for my first date, my first kiss, my first girlfriend, graduation. When I went through a bleak depression in late 2008 and early 2009, coming home to you almost always made it better.

We shared the secrets only a boy and his dog know. I could lay down with you in the hallway and rub your belly and watch your tail flap about in the sheer and simple contentment of doggishness. I could confide in you without ever having to worry about my secrets getting out – your stoic silence was great comfort sometimes.

Dusty, I was robbed of the goodbye you and I deserved. I wasn’t there, and I am sorry, and I can only offer this. I am sorry that there will be no other lengthy missives composed, lamenting your loss; no newspaper will blare your passing on its masthead. CNN will not interrupt a story with breaking news about your death. All of that was well earned by you, but of course, the world didn’t know that.

I will miss you, Dusty. Last January, when Mom and Dad told me you had some cancerous tumors taken off your butt (which, in retrospect, makes me smile), I had this to say:

It’s in an uncomfortable proximity to the other word that’s made you smile for over a decade. It’s intruding on a long and happy relationship, a blissful romp from boyhood to manhood with his golden russet fur coating everything you own. It’s an unpleasant reminder of something you’ve long known, always dreaded, and always ignored: dogs simply do not live as long as humans.

But even you, my invincible friend? Will mortality sweep down on you and steal you away from me before I’ve even begun to comprehend how to say goodbye? And will it happen when I’m miles away from you, spending the last months of your life studying when I should spend it playing fetch with you, taking you for walks, rubbing your belly just the way you like it?

There’s no why to ask. It’s a statistical thing, and death is a great impending full-stop for every being on this planet.

I have spent the last few days trying to comprehend how to say goodbye, and now, in the early hours of a Friday morning, I think I have it: Death may be the great impending full-stop for every being on the planet, but death is not goodbye. In the way that winter inevitably turns to spring, death inevitably turns to life. Beyond the hazy idea of an afterlife (an idea which I cling to, an idea I believe wholeheartedly), I know where you will be: your memory will remain in the corridors of my heart and mind, and you will be young and golden forever, tail wagging, waiting for me to come home.

Thoughts About College and Parks and Recreation

I finished my last college class this morning. It was a 400-level class on international security, the capstone of my international relations degree. It was the only class I legitimately enjoyed all semester — actually, the only class I consistently enjoyed all school year.

I’ve often felt like I’m fighting an internal battle between my writing and everything else. Writer is the first word I use to describe myself, before my name, before my gender, before my age, even before human. My head is full of words, and I feel like an archaeologist sometimes, unearthing them fully-formed. Communication has not once been a problem for me; I always say exactly what I mean.

So it would almost seem natural for me to study something that was directly related to this. After all, I would (at the very least) excel academically at it. I was the star of every English class I set foot in, impressing every writing teacher I’ve ever known. I won the English Student of the Year award for my graduating class, and the superintendent of the school district singled me out in her speech that year for my writing.

But I made a conscious choice to study public policy. It has not been easy, it has not been something I have always enjoyed. I fought hard for grades that are lower than what I would undoubtedly get if I were studying something I am so naturally gifted in. It sometimes seemed like I didn’t like half my classes — my father said as much to me at the start of my junior year of college. “If you wanted to change majors now, we would be okay with you staying in school for another year.”

But I didn’t want to change my major, because I believe in public service. I have been incredibly blessed from the moment I was born. I wouldn’t say I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but I have not once known want, or fear that I wouldn’t have enough. There was always food on the table, the house was always warm, the Christmas tree always cluttered with gifts. I am the adored only child of a wealthy older couple, and that is by and large situational. I didn’t earn that.

And I believe more people can have the things I did, if the men and women who make public policy work for it. I believe our natural inclinations are not towards the bottom line, are not towards profit, are not towards a lower tax rate. Do we really have such a narrow conception of freedom as to say it is having a 13% tax rate on an eight figure income? Call me crazy, but my imagination is bigger than that.

On tonight’s episode of Parks and Recreation, Paul Rudd’s character dropped a bomb: If Leslie Knope won the city council election, his dad would move the town’s biggest source of jobs to Mexico. Leslie was stunned, unsure of what to do — she only had her closing statement left. When it was finally her turn to speak, she said:

I’m very angry. I’m angry that Bobby Newport would hold this town hostage and threaten to leave if you don’t give him what he wants. It’s despicable. Corporations are not allowed to dictate what a city needs. That power belongs to the people. Bobby Newport and his daddy would like you to think it belongs to them. I love this town, and when you love something you don’t threaten it. You don’t punish it. You fight for it, you take care of it, you put it first. As your City Councilor, I’ll make sure that no one takes advantage of Pawnee. If I seem too passionate, it’s because I care. If I come on strong, it’s because I feel strongly, and if I push too hard, it’s because things aren’t moving fast enough. This is my home, you are my family, and I promise you, I’m not going anywhere.

Yes, I’m slovenly liberal, but when I heard that I damn near teared up. Leslie Knope (well, Amy Poehler, who wrote and directed tonight’s brilliant episode) articulated everything I believe about government. Government is about putting people first, it’s about putting your home first.

I am so angry that I came of age in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression. I am pissed that I’m graduating in nine days, just when reports are saying one in two college graduates this year are going to be unemployed or underemployed. I am beyond frustrated that my major is listed as one of the “worst” in college in terms of job prospects. I have sent out resume after resume, and I haven’t gotten a response.

And what makes me even more mad is that the people who did this are yelling at the guy trying to fix it, and they want to go back to the way things were. I don’t buy that argument. I don’t believe in policies that reward the richest, that hurt everyone else; I don’t believe in politics that vilify everyone who doesn’t look like me; I don’t believe in that America.

I believe these things so steadfastly that I made the conscious choice to do what I can to help. That is what college has taught me.

All I ever wanted to do was write books. I’m not the greatest at it, but I know what the hell I’m doing with that.

So as I sit here, at 3:15 in the morning, about to print off 65 pages of (unfinished) essay material that I by and large did tonight, I have to wonder how I got off that path.

Some days I am really glad that I chose to make my career in government and public policy. Politics are endlessly fascinating to me, and I am excited to further my work in the field. The most professionally fulfilling thing I’ve ever done was work in a legislative office.

But the most personally fulfilling things I do are so distant from politics. Who the hell is going to remember a legislative assistant who scheduled a meeting between a freshman Democrat and a senior-ranking White House official? (Not that I’ve done that, but still.) I’m 22 years old, I’ve written four novels, I’ve acted and directed in Shakespeare, I am (mostly) a good human being — shouldn’tthatbe the fulfillment that I seek?

Meh, I think, as I blearily rub the sleep from my eyes and prepare for my last week of classes in a field I’m never sure is right for me.

More Thoughts About Pottermore

I was a beta tester for Pottermore, and when I was finally let in, I landed in Gryffindor. Back then, I wasn’t too sure about which House would have me; I figured I wouldn’t be a Hufflepuff, I thought there were faint traces of Slytherin in me, but the two that really fight back and forth are Gryffindor and Ravenclaw.

I’m someone who takes great pride in his intellectual skills, but over the years — especially since I’ve come to college — I’ve learned to value other traits within myself. Intellect without morals is dangerous, and I’ve always had a strong sense of right and wrong, which is why I think I landed in Gryffindor in the first place. (Or not; Sorting on Pottermore is a series of fairly oblique questions, with only one or two having “obvious” answers for certain Houses.)

With Pottermore open to the public, more and more people I know are joining and getting Sorted, talking about one thing or another. One friend was pleased to be in Ravenclaw, two of my roommates were excited to discover they were fellow Gryffindors, Alli wound up in Hufflepuff to nobody’s surprise but her own (she’s an astonishingly dedicated person;Ithought her House was pretty obvious), and a few friends are now trying to decide if they are okay with being in Slytherin or not.

All the while, I was worried. Maybe I’d been put into the wrong House. I’m not exactly the picture of daring and nerve, although I occasionally surprise myself with my willingness to speak up. I thought, for a long while, Maybe I’d be better suited in Ravenclaw. I do like their maxim, “wit beyond measure is man’s greatest treasure.”

So I surreptitiously signed up for Pottermore again, just to take the Sorting test once more, just to be sure. I wound up with a different wand (hornbeam and unicorn hair, as opposed to rowan and unicorn hair, but I’m more fond of the ideas behind the rowan wand), but when I took the Sorting quiz again — trying to be as impartial as I could with the answers, hoping I wasn’t unconsciously picking the ones that would put me in Gryffindor — I found… that I was still in Gryffindor.

Not even one of those people who gets to pick between one or the other. It was a straightforward “Congratulations, you are in Gryffindor” sort of thing. The Sorting Hat was not hedging and letting me pick, it was telling me, once and for all, that I am in the House of 90% of the main characters in Harry Potter.

Of course, it’s all an Internet quiz, even if the results were written by J.K. Rowling. I’m not entirely convinced that the algorithm for Sorting doesn’t just try and keep things even — if you look at the numbers, it’s almost exactly at 25% for each House, give or take a few decimal points. Ultimately it’s all based on a series of children’s books anyway, and I should probably not take it so earnestly.

But they’rethebooks of my lifetime.Harry Potteris the biggest thing I grew up with, and its importance to me can’t be overstated. Since I was nine years old I’ve tried to figure out just to which Hogwarts House I belonged, and to have J.K. Rowling’s Internet quiz tell me that I’ve got daring, nerve, and chivalry is a big thing for me, dammit.