CALL ME SNAKE

Keeping up with our recent rodent theme (i.e., “The Rat Race”), I was just accused of “squirreling away” some snacks left over from a preschool concert that I volunteered to help at. (In point of fact, I put them next to the director’s office and then informed her of their presence.) The person who said that probably didn’t think anything of it but I, personally, don’t like the image conjured by the term “squirreled away,” which sounds, well, “squirrely.” And, with our six-year run at preschool coming to an end in a month, squirrely is not the way I care to be remembered–especially after doing the school what I thought was a good turn.

I thought I moved around fast. On a typical day I might quit work at 5, race to the Y for a quick swim, do some food shopping and still get home by 5:30 when the babysitter leaves. But after seeing the movie, “The Pursuit of Happyness”–apparently based on the true-life story of Chris Gardner (as portrayed by Will Smith)–I move glacially slow. That guy was always sprinting, sometimes getting stuck in subway doors and occasionally getting hit by cars. He would stay up nights in homeless shelters repairing medical diagnostic devices and study for a financial exam in transit station bathrooms. Compared to the pace he set, my life seems positively sedate.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part of a recurring series on “Deconstructing Rocky Balboa in the 21st Century.”) It hit me while I was playing handball, me a guy who might be termed middle-aged (if you want to be technical about it), playing other guys who are middle-aged or worse. The movie, “Rocky Balboa,” is a story about a guy too old to get back in the ring, starring a guy too old to play a guy getting back in the ring, and watched in this case by a guy too old to fall for this same old story again. That’s all I have to say about “Rocky Balboa” for now, but I promise to get back to you as soon as I have something new to say on the subject. Or maybe not so new…

Let no one claim that CALL ME SNAKE plays chicken when it comes to the biggest issues of the day. And I will apologize upfront if I have asked this before. However, if I am repeating myself, it’s simply because I have yet to receive a satisfactory answer. So I’ll say it again in the hopes that my persistent queries might eventually lead to a resolution of this mystery: Why do brown eggs cost so much more than white eggs–sometimes 30 cents more per dozen? And why do so many white people seem to have an aversion to white eggs?

Last night I sold a condo (at a price well above its market value) to a dead man. Or I should say to a man who is now dead. He wasn’t when I sold it to him. Or at least I didn’t think so. But upon reflection, I realized that he really was dead, and the fact that I had soaked him troubled me quite a bit when I considered the plight of his widowed wife and two young children. But I then figured out that I’d just been dreaming and that I actually don’t have any condo to sell, so I shouldn’t feel bad about conning this guy, dead or alive. So once I put all that together and concluded that none of the above happened, why did I proceed with the foregoing? Simply because I liked the title: “I Conned A Dead Man.”

President Bush is in a “state of denial” about what’s going on in Iraq, claims Senator Harry Reid. Which is certainly true since the administration has been based on denial throughout his entire term. We’re seeing that once again with embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who has Bush’s utmost confidence, despite the fact that he is a disgrace to the office. He’s doing a tremendous job, Bush says, and has handled himself impressively under fire from the U.S. Congress, deftly answering every question that was put to him. Sure his responses consisted of either “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember,” but that, apparently, was good enough to impress our president.

Last night I saw a preview of the the new movie, In the Land of Women, which stars a virtually unrecognizable Meg Ryan. Once America’s darling, Ryan has since become the topic of much discussion about cosmetic surgery gone awry. An obviously pretty woman, I don’t know who she looks like anymore. She doesn’t look like anyone, or maybe she looks like too many people–like a bunch of actresses plastered onto the same face. It’s very sad to see.

In this movie, Ryan plays the mother of an adult woman–or almost-adult woman–so why can’t she look like a mother, rather than a sister? And as I said before, whatever happened to aging gracefully? Or if not gracefully, at least with some modicum of dignity and respect for nature’s inevitable ways.

Twenty years ago, I wrote an article about a mathematician with whom I’ve since kept in occasional contact. Now he’s offering me advice about writing. That might seem galling, except for the fact that I soliticited his advice. And what’s more, the advice he’s given me is good. For too long (going on six months now), I’ve been struggling with a book proposal and, given that the book is about math, I called on my mathematician friend for advice. He couldn’t understand why I was having such a problem winning over my agent. “I’m sure all the stuff you need is already there in the proposal. Now you just have to hit them over the head with a frying pan.” That image stuck vividly in my mind, perhaps because, embarrassingly, I watch Boston Legal from time to time–a show in which the frying pan often proves to be the weapon of choice. And I, too, will soon take up the cast-iron skillet in the hopes of leaving a lasting impression on a relcalcitrant literary agent.

“Mystic Pizza” was an important moment in film history, as it really launched the career of Julia Roberts. (The careers of Lili Taylor and Vincent D’Onofrio also got big boosts.) And now I’m an important part of that important moment in film history because on Wednesday I ate dinner at Mystic Pizza in Mystic, Connecticut. Julia Roberts evidently did well enough with that role that she’s no longer dishing out pizza there. The pizza itself was decent, and certainly cheesy enough, though nothing to write a cheesy screenplay about. I was also dismayed to learn that the movie was not shot at Mystic Pizza in Mystic at all but rather at a pizzeria in nearby Stonington, Connecticut. I couldn’t help wondering about that locations choice. What was the problem? Couldn’t they find anything in Toronto?

The murderous acts at Virginia Tech were sickening, part of a disturbing trend toward dramatic murder-suicides that reflects a growing malaise in our society. Events like these should be a time to rally, to come together, yet I can’t help feeling a bit cynical upon considering the words that George Bush spoke at a memorial service on campus: “It’s impossible to make sense of such violence and suffering. Those whose lives were taken did nothing to deserve their fate. They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

For once, I actually agree with what our president said. Yet the cynical side of me can’t stop thinking about the innocent civilians in Iraq who were killed as a result of Bush’s “shock and awe” display. They too “did nothing to deserve their fate. They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

 

You might have missed the following obituary, which originally appeared in the Washington Post. Ed Charon died last Sunday in an Oregon hospital at the age of 71. Charon, for those of you who don’t know, holds the world’s record for tearing apart telephone books. He set his fifth world record last year when he ripped 56 Portland, Oregon phone books in half in three minutes. Given his proclivities, it’s probably just as well Charon lived in the Portland area rather than in Los Angeles or New York City where the directories reach epic proportions. As a test, I just tore the slim Cambridge directory (which I never much liked anyway) but do not plan at this point to challenge Charon’s more impressive feats.

It’s the time of year for me to get depressed. Not only do I owe taxes and estimated tax payments by tomorrow, it’s also the time of year that I get to read PARADE Magazine and find out how much more people earn than I do. Thirty-year-old Chad Hurley, the cofounder of YouTube, earned as much in one hour as I did in a whole year. Pablo Picasso earned almost exactly as much as Hurley and he hardly needs the money, having been dead for nearly 35 years. I was even bested by a 27-year-old “bronc rider” in South Dakota who pulled in $237,600 and I don’t even know what a bronc rider does. On the plus side, I did come out ahead of a comedian in Boise, Idaho but that’s hardly a fair fight given that Boise has long been known as a tough town on the comedy circuit. So that was my 2006 in a nutshell–even a dead guy made as much in an hour as I managed to scrape together in a long year of hard work and sleepless nights.

I’m not the superstitious type and normally scoff at that sort of thing. Yet something happened on Friday that made me question that attitude. I ran into a friend who asked me how things were going. I said nothing bad, nothing good. That was in the afternoon. An hour later I received some bad news indeed: A project I’d worked very hard on for six months had hit a roadblack at the very least and possibly a dead end, news that had dire financial and professional consequences for me. I spoke with another friend who was familiar with the project. He reminded me that it was Friday the 13th–a day famous for bad news. And a noted skeptic like myself–a contributor to Skeptical Inquirer magazine no less–was forced to consider there was something to the Friday the 13th legend after all since I could not come up with any other “rational” explanation for the events that unfolded on that day.

I spent a day at the Cambridge Courthouse earlier this week fulfilling my civic duty as a potential juror, though I was never empaneled. A group of about 70 would-be jurors filed into the District Courtroom, 12 of whom were ultimately picked to weigh in on a dispute between neighbors. The attorneys used peremptory challenges four times, giving four people temporarily seated in the jury box the heave-ho. Unlike on TV, the attorneys did not question the prospective jurors before sending them packing, which made me wonder why they were booted off. The best I could come up with was that the people unseated tended to be younger or less prosperous looking–i.e., people who probably did not own land and might therefore be less sympathetic to the plight of a landowner who felt slighted. But we’ll never know. The judge told them not to take it “personally,” and none of them seemed bent out of shape in the slightest. In fact, they appeared to be relieved, as did most of the people parading out of the Courtroom–minus the 12 who’d walked in with us an hour or so before.

George Bush has generously offered a gift to U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq: These brave men and women get to spend three more months in Iraq than they were supposed to. National guard forces have, for years, been in active duty for far longer than they signed up for. This is all thanks to a president who says he will spare nothing to support our troops. It’s support like that we could all do without. And many of us long for the day when the major preoccupation of this dangerous man will become, once again, supporting the “troops” charged with brush removal in Crawford, Texas.

According to today’s Boston Globe, Barack Obama is getting dumped on by academics and pundits for not speaking more forcefully about Don Imus’ on-air comments. Obama called Imus’ remarks “divisive, hurtful, and offensive to Americans of all backgrounds,” but evidently that is not enough to satisfy critics who were looking to him to take a harder line.

Frankly, I think he’s said plenty. The man’s running for president of the United States. Since when are the comments of a radio host an issue of national import? I also think it’s to his credit that he’s not using this incident as a springboard to demagoguery–the kind that other civic leaders are less circumspect about engaging in.

I’m a big fan of Larry McMurtry and have enjoyed many of his books. TEXASVILLE, a sequel to THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, was not one of them. Nevertheless, I got a big kick out of a Boston Globe review last Sunday of McMurtry’s latest, WHEN THE LIGHT GOES, which continues the saga started in “Last Picture Show” many decades ago. The reviewer, Amanda Heller, wrote: “It’s time to cut a deal with Larry McMurtry. If we concede there is sex after 50, 60, whatever, then he has to stop writing increasingly embarrassing novels belaboring the point.” Since I can’t improve upon Heller’s comments, I’m going to leave well enough alone. For once.

Yesterday I got an envelope from the New Yorker that intrigued me, as I had no idea what might be lurking inside it. It turned out to be a rejection letter for an unsolicited piece I’d submitted last year. I suppose there’s nothing unusual about that–something to be expected, perhaps–except for the fact that the piece had already been rejected last year in no uncertain terms. Yet for some reason the magazine felt obliged to eliminate any glimmer of doubt on the subject by rejecting it a second time. Maybe there’s a message to be found somewhere in that second, unsolicited rejection–something along the lines of: Don’t send anything to us ever again!

Or maybe, just maybe, there’s a more positive spin to be found here. It’s often said that the third time’s a charm. So maybe there’ll be a third rejection which, as in fairy tale endings, turns out to be acceptance. That, I’m afraid, is an outcome that any rational observer will have a hard time accepting.

Journalists covering the presidential campaign must always keep three simple rules in mind, for these three simple rules make their jobs ever so much simpler, while also making the job of reading the paper simpler as well.

Rule Number One: Try to get the latest fundraising figures to pin your story on. If the latest fundraising figures are unavailable, any old figures will do.

Rule Number Two: If no fundraising figures of any kind are available, find the latest poll to report on. If the latest poll results are unavailable, any old poll will do.

Rule Number Three: If no fundraising or poll data is available, prayer for a tornado or hurricane. Above all, keep calm. Do not panic and start reporting on the issues.

Long before 9/11, I wrote a screenplay with a friend who worked in Hollywood. Our story took place mainly in an airport. We came close on a few occasions to selling the script but never sealed the deal. We let it sit for a few years and then 9/11 happened, after which point airports became miserable places and our story appeared to be permanently dead.

But I got lucky on my recent trip to Chicago. Everything worked out perfectly. I used some miles to get a free roundtrip ticket less than 48 hours from my departure and printed the boarding passes from my own computer.  I was supposed to be hit with a $75 fee for the ticket, but for some reason the fee was never charged to me. At both ends, the security lines moved quickly. And because I had no baggage to check, I was able to get onto earlier flights, right at the final boarding call–thus arriving at my destinations an hour or two ahead of schedule. The flights, needless to say, were on time and generally smooth. And the flight attendants were courteous too. It was as if I’d stepped into a time warp, arriving at the airport sometime before September 11, 2001–a more innocent era where the luster of air travel had not yet worn thin.

On my flight to Chicago, I sat between two middle-aged men. With me wedged in between, I guess that made three of us (though I’d rather apply the term “middle-aged” to others rather than to myself). A few minutes into the flight, all three of us were working on our own sudoku puzzles. An hour later, we all donned headphones and watched a rebroadcast of “The Office,” laughing together, more or less at the same moments. During the two-hour flight, the three of us sat there pretty much in synch, like three peas in a pod, you might say. Then we landed in Chicago and went our separate ways, never to see each other again.

As to why I saw fit to recount this story, I’m not sure. It’s sometimes said that “travel can be so broadening.” But in other ways, as the above attests, travel can be so narrowing…

The memorial service for my uncle was a tremendously moving experience. I’ve known my uncle my whole life but learned a lot about him I didn’t know during the hour-and-a-half service. He’s an even more colorful character than I realized. I knew he was a great storyteller and heard many of the stories myself, but I also found out he was the kind of person who inspired stories and legends about him through the sheer force of his personality. People spoke quite eloquently about his life and recounted long humorous tales that were emotionally rare and totally captivating.

I couldn’t help wondering what kind of service might be held for me when I meet my end. I’m much duller than my uncle and doubt that people will carry on in the same fashion with equally fascinating stories. More likely, the remembrances will be rather brief: “He was a man of few words…” “He didn’t volunteer much…” “From the looks of it, he might have been intelligent but it was hard to tell…”

 

 

Call Me Snake will be quiet for a day or two, as I’m heading out of town for a funeral. My uncle, a great man who was widely loved, died last week and we are gathering from all over the country to honor him.

I was talking about that this morning with a senior citizen I know at the YMCA who told me that people all around him are dying. “Good to see you,” I said before leaving. “It’s good to be seen,” he said.

 

 

 

 

After six years of legal wrangling, the Cape Wind project proposed for Nantucket Sound earned environmental approval from the state of Massachusetts. Although that’s an important milestone for advocates of clean power, a federal review is still pending and all bets are still off. Meanwhile, a well-funded coalition called the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, which has been battling the project since the beginning, will not go down without a fight. The Alliance represents a bunch of rich people on Cape Cod (including Ted Kennedy and family), many of whom claim to be in favor of offshore wind so long as they don’t have to see it. That attitude is part of a broader problem in this nation of hypocrites. Everyone says they’re in favor of environmental protection. But they’re not willing to make any changes or sacrifices when it comes to their own precious lifestyles.

Around 25 years ago, I wrote a book that argued we needed to rely on renewable energy sources plus conservation to keep the human contribution to global warming to a minimum. The book analyzed transportation options and concluded that electric vehicles were, ultimately, the way to go, being more efficient than hydrogen-fueled vehicles. A decade later, I wrote a book on transportation that perhaps not surprisingly reached a similar conclusion. Around that time, GM was just introducing its flashy new electric vehicle (EV), the Impact, which showed that electric cars could offer very high “performance.”

Last night I saw an interesting documentary, “Who Killed the Electric Car?,” which followed up on this story. GM not only pulled the plug on its EV program, it made a concerted effort to destroy every single Impact ever made, having them all (except for perhaps one that’s now in a museum) crushed and put in a landfill. The movie makes a very convincing case that the automakers, with the help of “big oil,” colluded to kill electric vehicles in the U.S. Instead, Bush and others are now promoting hydrogen vehicles. Why hydrogen, you might ask? The movie concludes that hydrogen is preferable to the industry because it is farther in the future–and ultimately less practical–which makes it less threatening to the powers that be. If this argument is correct, and there is much evidence to support it, one has to conclude that we live in a very sick country indeed.

 

I dropped something off at my neighbors the other night. Their three-year-old came to the door and asked me: “Why is your face all squished in?” At first I didn’t know what she was talking about, but when her mother quickly covered for her saying–”You have to realize we come from a family of fat-cheeked people”–it dawned on me that the girl was indicating that my face was showing signs of age. That same night, I watched part of a video called “Keeping Mum” that was unexceptional yet it showed me how much Kristin Scott-Thomas had aged since “The English Patient” and how much Patrick Swayze had aged since his heyday (“Dirty Dancing” or “Ghost” or “Point Break”). The same, of course, had happened to me. And maybe more so, not having availed myself of some of the options that a movie star might have opted for. I was thinking all this while debating about how to respond to the overly-frank three-year-old. While I was tempted to say, “Let’s see what you look like in 49 years.” But instead I said: “You’re right. I think an elephant must have stepped on it.”