CALL ME SNAKE

The other day I saw a guy biking down Mass. Ave. near Central Square–which for those of you who don’t know is quite a busy stretch of road–sporting the “look ma, no hands” look. He was holding a small paper bag in his left hand and a cell phone in the right. For some reason the quote from “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” came to mind: “Life is hard, but it’s harder when you’re stupid.”

I saw I AM LEGEND a couple of weeks ago with a friend, which led to speculation in these pages regarding the speed of zombies in the 21st century. Last night I saw SALEM’S LOT (the 1979 Tobe Hooper version, of course) with the same friend, and feel that for the sake of fairness I should grant equal time to vampires. I enjoyed the movie, save for a surprisingly week ending, but it left a few loose ends. My friend put this question to me which I cannot fully answer: “If vampire’s live forever and are constantly feeding on other people, who then become vampires as well, what has kept vampires from taking over the world?” In other words, are there some kind of natural, ecological checks on the vampire population to keep that from happening? It makes sense because vampires seem to like fresh blood and if they turn the entire population into vampires, where they gonna go for sustenance? (Whole Foods?) So it seems to be in their interests not to turn everyone into vampires, yet exactly how their expanionist tendences are kept in check is not clear. At least to this observer. At the present time.

I was walking to the Y for my Friday evening handball game, around the corner from my house, when a woman I’d never seen before gave me the finger as we passed on the sidewalk. It took my totally by surprise. “Hey, what’s that all about?” I yelled. But she did not say anything. Just kept walking. And the impact of her unexpected gesture have stayed with me ever since.

I ran, or co-ran, a tutoring program in a downtrodden Boston school in a downtrodden neighborhood for 7 or 8 years–right up until my first child was born. The program petered out around that time and I decided to call it a day. Years later I just learned that that run-down school–that didn’t even have a functioning drinking fountain while I was there–was shut down. From the little I know it was not a surprising decision. But it does make me a bit sad thinking of some of those poor kids who showed up at our program year after year, trying to catch a little break, trying to get ahead.

You know you’ve grown up when one of your peers and best friends–somebody you’ve known since your teenage days–has become Chairman of the Board of Trustees at a major university. And even if it’s not a major university, but more of a minor college, that’s still not the sort of position they’re handing out to callow youths. So I guess that means I’ve grown up. Or at least my friend has.

It’s bad enough I have to be taken to task for all my lapses and missteps in waking life, I’m also held accountable for the things I do in my wife’s dreams. Like last night she dreamt that we lived in a dump and that I dug my heels in, saying it’s fine. When she woke up this morning, there was hell to pay from my end. And I had nothing to do with that dream. Maybe my only hope is that I’ll do something good in her dreams one day (not too likely) and be unexpectedly rewarded.

You know when your kids start giving you a hard time about your attire that it’s time to clean up your act. Yesterday my younger daughter asked: “Dad, why do you almost always wear a bathing suit?” The girl does not understand the subtle distinctions between gym shorts and bathing suits but I realize she’s just six and will learn about such things when she’s ready, both emotionally and intellectually. Meanwhile, it’s high time I graduated from both gym shorts and bathing suits to something more respectable like blue jean cut-offs. In other words it’s time for my latest makeover.

It’s great to be published again and the two sentences below just came out in my college alumni magazine. I will reprint my entry in its entirety so that you can see it in its full splendor:  “I’ve given up all hope of leading a productive life and have become a blogger instead. I’m adjusting well to the lowered expectations that come with my new profession and have enjoyed chronicling my steady slide into irrelevance.”

Wednesday was the last day of school in Cambridge, and the routines carefully assembled over the previous 9 and a half months were summarily shattered. On Thursday morning, my older daughter went to a friend’s house for a play date. At the “dropoff,” I spoke to the dad, who, like me, does freelance writing. We were only a couple of hours into summer vacation and already he couldn’t take it. “I wish they were back in school,” he told me when the girls were out of earshot, performing some ritual or another with their toy horses.

I recently ran into an older guy at the YMCA who apparently couldn’t speak much English. But he could nod his head enthusiastically and say “handball!”. Come to think of it, sounds like I’m describing myself in a couple of years. As Neil Young once said (sang): “Old man take a look at my life. I’m a lot like you…”

In dream saw a famous physicist with whom I’ve talked several times but never met in person. In particular, he’s been very helpful on the book I’m writing, and I need a lot of help on the book I’m writing as the material is way over my head. I asked him in the dream how things were going. “Fine,” he said, “until you sent me six chapters to review and ruined my life.” Oops, sorry about that…

Ode to Joy is a poem written by Friedrich Schiller that is famous because Beethoven incorporated it in the fourth and final movement of his Ninth Symphony. I’ve heard the piece many times–my daughter is learning to play it on the piano–but never found it especially joyful. At 3 p.m. yesterday afternoon, however, I did hear a pure expression of joy–shrieks or squeals of delight emitted by, I’m guessing, many dozens of King and Amigos students (the schools being a block from my house) who’d just been released for the summer. I heard that spontaneous, gleeful cry for a few seconds and then it all quieted down just as fast, everyone evidently having already settled into their summer routines.

Twenty-six games later and the playoffs are over, the series done, and I’m reveling in the sweet sound of helicopters overhead and car horns blaring. I watched game six (and pretty much 1 through 25) with a friend and long-time Celtics fan who was elated at the end, though he complained about having to get up early after a late night of sports on TV.

“Why do you have to get up early?” I asked.

“To read all the coverage about the game,” he replied.

Like most of us, I’ve had teenagers ask me to buy beer for them but I’ve never had kids (preteens) ask me to rent a movie for them. It all came about from my watching the aforementioned “The Mist” with a friend whose soon-to-be fourth grade son goes to my daughters’ school. The boy rarely speaks to me in public but yesterday he said: “Steve, can you get ‘The Mist’ for me?” The 4th and 5th grade boys he was standing with were all enthusiastic about the idea. But the movie has a R rating and I said it was up to their parents to decide whether the time was right to rot their minds now or whether they should wait until nature took its course.

I just saw “The Mist” last night and found it reasonably entertaining. It had a good set up & a good ironic ending. The trouble was that it’s almost always a mistake to show the monster or monsters. It’s much better to keep them lurking in the shadows (or mist) unseen. But now that we’ve entered the “special effects” era, no one can seem to resist the temptation to show all. The horror masters of the past knew that what we can’t see is always scarier than what we can see, and that hasn’t changed despite the recent advances in special-effects technology.

It’s true, I normally don’t write posts based on fact. (How unoriginal?) But sometimes a story comes along that you’ve got to run with. And that’s the case with the following item I received by email the other day: It seems that folks at the University of Leicester in the UK want to communicate with ET’s. That, on its own, is not newsworthy except for the fact that they decided the message that would best represent mankind is an ad for Doritos that will be beamed into outer space. Sounds crazy, right? Well maybe not. After all, they say you are what you eat. And there’s no denying that we live in a junk food culture typified, I believe, by Doritos, so maybe somewhere in those orange-coated chips (in which Carl Sagan once said it might be possible to find the visage of Jesus Christ) the essence of humanity may be encapsulated. And if my grammar here seems deficient, that puts me squarely amidst the essence of humanity as well.

I’ve watched at least the second half of every Celtics playoff game–23 until last night. But last night, when the Celtics were playing like crap [in the early 3rd quarter] and didn’t seem to be able to get much within 15, I had the sinking feeling that it was hopeless. “If you want to turn this off,” I said to a friend, “it’s OK with me. You’d be doing both of us a favor.”

Fortunately my friend was smart enought to say, “I’m going to leave it on anyway.” Had I not stuck it out to the end, I would have felt bad at midnight when the sounds of helicopters circling above would have told me that the Celtics pulled off the impossible. And I would never have forgiven myself for having missed that remarkable comeback.

We all know about the loud people talking on their cellphones while on a train, for example, speaking so loudly that everyone in the whole car gets to join in. But I have to say, the environment in general has become noisier. My office is near a sidewalk and for years people walked by, making no noise other than their feet hitting the pavement. Now most of them are talking on the phone as they walk by, and when people are outside on the phone, they always talk in a louder voice than is normal. Or necessary. Could we ever go back to a world when people just walk on their own, without blabbing away. And where people who are driving actually pay attention to what is happening on the roads?

There’s always something that stands between me and a good night’s sleep. Lately it’s been the woodpecker (we call him Woody) who’s taken up residence in our gigantic maple tree. Woody got an early start this morning. I heard him from 5 a.m. on, pecking away at a branch not too far from my bedroom window. I’m a big supporter of nature and all that, but can’t it adhere to some standards of civility?

Something happened today that’s never happened before. Someone I know called me “a man of Solomon-like wisdom,” and then presented a conundrum upon which I was supposed to pontificate. But I never lived up to the star billing. Instead of dispensing wisdom, as I was supposed to, I suggested a cheap answer to a question that demanded better. While I won’t go into the problem in full, I can say that my profferred solution involved color xeroxing, something Solomon himself would likely have sneered at.

Anyone who watched last nights Celtics-Lakers game might have wondered what the heck happened in the fourth quarter. The Celtics were up by 24 points, with only about 7 minutes left (if I remember correctly), and the Lakers managed to cut the lead to two. How did that happen? I’m pretty sure it was my fault. I was watching the game with a friend and fellow blogger, and we were laughing it up when the Celts pushed the lead to 24. Then I said: “Is it too early to bring out the brooms?” As soon as those words came out of my mouth, the Celtics’ fortunes began to change. I learned my lesson and will not mention the word “sweep” until the Celtics go up 4-0 in the series.

I don’t normally rent a movie from the video store that I haven’t heard anything about. And I didn’t do that tonight, although I came close. A couple of weeks ago, I pulled “Big Bad Swim” off the shelves and got curious about it. I found some reviews (favorable) online and kept it in mind. One of the reviews said something to the effect that no one would see this movie–as it lacks any big-name stars or even little-name stars–which was a shame. And it is a shame as it is nicely written and quite enjoyable. Who would have figured a movie about an adult swim class could be so much fun? A movie about handball or volleyball maybe, but adult swimming? Yet it really works.

I suppose that most people will never hear of this movie and fewer still will see it but if one person does as a result of this post I will consider writing it five minutes well spent.

A friend came over recently to try to see what was wrong with my computer and try to figure out how to make it better. At one point, I was showing him a few things about the machine and he wanted to take over the controls. I like the expression he used, which is one I hadn’t heard before: “Let me drive.”

We live in the era of the documentary, but many of the most acclaimed ones don’t do much for me. CRAZY LOVE, which I saw last night, stands out because it does live up to the hype. At first I thought, “Who cares about these people?”, but I stuck it out and by the end it worked. It truly is one of the strangest love stories I’ve ever seen. And I will include it in my list of favorite documentaries that includes: Fast, Cheap&Out of Control, Spellbound, Hoop Dreams, Sherman’s March, and Harlan County.

Unlike some of the superdelegates who have played their cards close to the chest, I have made no secret of the fact that I am an Obama supporter. But I have to admit to being disappointed by the way he limped across the finish line rather than surged across. I was hoping he’d pick up momentum and get hot as the primaries went on. But that didn’t happen; instead it stayed close all the way to the finish line. In my view, Obama’s weak finish blunts the mandate he’s been talking about and dilutes YES w WE CAN into the more tentative, “Maybe We Might.”

Why do all the newspapers and NPR radio shows buy into the idea that in the summer we should be reading different kinds of books than we read the rest of the year? I personally don’t buy it which is why I call this trend (admittedly an entrenched one by now) the Great Summer Reading Scam.

First John McCain released his medical records, then Barack Obama, so it seems only fitting that I should release mine (at least in part), having had my biannual physical just last week. I’ll leave McCain out of this comparison as he is a senior citizen with the numbers to show for it. But I can say that my blood pressure is very close to Obama’s. He has a slight height advantage, which is to be expected because he is taller. His weight figures are unavailable (at least to my sources) but I think it’s fair to say I’m not as skinny as him. Regarding cholesterol, I’ve got Barack beat in terms of the “good” (HDL) while he has me beat in terms of the “bad” (LDL). So I’m calling it a draw for now but ultimately we’ll have to let the delegates or superdelegates decide. I guess the main point is that I’m ready to assume office should the nation call on me.

Some months ago, I reprinted a negative quote from the New Yorker (with some reference to “self-indulgence,” I believe) about the film version of INTO THE WILD. I hadn’t seen the movie at the time, and I was chastised by a reader for having raised doubts about what was in her opinion an excellent film. Now that I’ve seen the movie, I have to agree with her. It was extremely well done which caught me by surprise as some of Sean Penn’s earlier directorial efforts were painfully bad. This one, however, was well-acted and had a great, haunting soundtrack. GRIZZLY MAN–a documentary with some similarities in plot–was highly praised, but INTO THE WILD was far superior. In fact, it may cause me to rethink my whole strategy of reviewing movies before I see them.