Cetaceus

It has been a stressful, interesting, exciting and typical week. Two particularly Wychian encounters happened, of the sort that seem to happen to me all the time. I will highlight these rather than the other stuff that’s been going on.

Back in April when I came to the U of Chicago for prospective students’ day, I was standing outside the free-food room with a Chinese dude when a young woman walked up wearing none other than a “Philly for Obama” pin. No shit, says I, and initiated a conversation. Turns out said person lived right there in West Philly, but three blocks from the original Greenline, and was working (and I mean working for real) on the Fringe Fest (which I missed this year because of being here). All very interesting, nice girl, etc. We chatted a bit and then remarked that we would certainly run into each other around West Philly, probably at the Greenline, of which I was a frequent patron. I never once saw this girl again, not all summer, not in any mutual company nothing. She was here checking out a program in Latin American studies, and I didn’t even know if she’d decided to come here.

Low and behold, there I am on Tuesday at the massive daylong orientation for new grad students here at the University, and there in the middle of a packed room, who the hell sits right down next to me. Seriously.

Second, as you probably know I was, after college, a mid-level administrator with the Rutgers University division of Student Support Services, a federally-funded program (one of the TRiO programs run by the department of education) for low-income students coming into college. I also taught intro writing courses in the summer program, and generally look back on those days and that job with great fondness. I haven’t seen or kept of with any of the students from the class, although I still talk about them a lot and wonder how they’re all doing. That class was amazing.

So there I am yesterday in Divinity School orientation, eating lunch as they have people from various organizations come and talk to us. A guy gets up there from the LGBTQ group at the school and starts talking, and he looks ridiculously familiar. It was one of my students from SSS and EOF at Rutgers all those years ago! I haven’t seen this guy since he was 18 years old, and I remember him being conflicted deeply about his pentacostal upbringing and his burgeoning understanding of his sexuality. I cannot describe to you how fucking unbeleiveably proud I am that one of my kids, specifically with major academic and financial disadvantages growing up, is now in graduate school in Psychology at the University of Chicago! I also got to catch up with him on two of the other students, one of whom I have told many of you the story of coming into my office and crying her eyes out because she was so worried about her future. I am even more proud to say that that young woman is now in a graduate program in social work at Rutgers. Fuck. Yeah.

A lot of other weird and frustrating things have happened this week. But I’ve got some solid people around here now, and as I get stressed out I am trying to remind myself to think of this amazing news about my students. Seriously, if teaching and seeing your results feels this good even a fraction of the time, I am so goddamn excited to be here.

Do you ever find yourself walking down a tree-line residential street on a brisk September evening, on the way to the bar to meet new friends, mining your own past for the names and faces of people you once or twice met, years ago, and with whom you were quite taken, struck even, but because of time and distance and the fact that you were such a kid back then and probably made a fool of yourself, you have lost touch and will probably never find it again? All the while, for some reason you can’t quite explain, such people still linger and sit somewhere comfortably in the further-back reaches of the back of your thinking? And on such a night, and thinking such things, do you ever come home and attempt to plug those still fleeting memories into the internet, to catch some glimpse of where those folks are and what they’re doing, only do be confronted by many fruitless searches and bad leads. But later, in the wee hours and sobering up, does your searching finally bear fruit, and does the computer inform you in a matter of fact way that all of these people now like in Brooklyn?

I got completely smashed last night with some friends from my program that I met when I visited here back in April, then went out for pancakes this morning.

So far, so good.

A few weeks ago I started putting together another post about Japan, specifically the rest of my time there with the other fantastic people I stayed with, hung out with and met during that week. Unfortunately for me, you and the rest of the free world, I got distracted by Sarah Palin and moving. Let’s just hope to god that the former doesn’t remain the distraction that she has become, and we don’t end up with her and Johnny McCain getting us involved in war on four fronts. 

Anyway, much has happened in the past week, so I’m going to just skip ahead to the present. I started writing about my last few days yesterday but haven’t been able to put anything up, let alone email anyone, because the internet won’t be hooked up in my place until next Friday and I can’t find a goddamn cafe in this neighborhood with wireless. I am paying to write to you know, so this may as well be a foreign trip. Oh, also, my apartment is fantastic, although I get zero phone reception indoors, so if you are the sort of person who is likely to call me, I am going to start trying to use google talk and Skype more after next week.

9/13/08 Chicago

So I have come to the White City, here to witness in all it’s historic glory the World’s Fair and Columbian Exhibition of 1893; or, if you like, to go to graduate school in the philosophy of religion program at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. My arrival in this grand and expansive city has been accompanied by many trials and tribulations, and more than a few tales worth telling. A deluge far less intense than the “leave or die” hurricane that has turned Houston into Atlantis is currently battering us here. So while we aren’t evacuating, it is raining like hell out and I have little else to take care of right now. So, I am “writing you this letter.”

I’ll start from the beginning. Long time readers (IE: people I know personally) will no doubt be familiar with the legend of my father. I talk about trials and tribulations elsewhere, but the things that tend to go on (or that me and my sisters end up getting roped into, to be accurate) when my dad is up to his tricks are on what I can only describe as “on some next level shit,” especially given the comedic-mythic tone of whatever it is he ends up convincing us we have to do. As such, I want to use another term for these things altogether, one with far more gravity and hagiographic import: labors. And I mean it; think “the labors of Heracles.” A few notable examples spring to mind: the time he taught me to drive stick by putting me in a car and pulling it out into traffic, or our famous winter camping trip in January in the mountains outside Woodstock, New York where, forget the milk and water, our apples froze and we woke up to a streak of ice on our sleeping bags from our very breath freezing in the night. Or how our campfire melted the ice beneath it and slowly and evenly sank itself a foot and a half to the ground without falling apart.

The problem, in a nutshell, was this: I had to get to Chicago from Philadelphia and be here on the 12^th of August to move into my new place. All well and good but as my dad had offered to give me a brand new queen sized mattress that he and my stepmother for some reason didn’t need, as well as my need to transport a large quantity of books across about 4 states, the facts of the situation were plain: I had to rent a truck and drive it out here. I couldn’t afford it, so my father offered some financial assistance. All well and good still, but with two major complications: first, that going down the list of everyone who I would want to spend 14-hours in a truck with, each had some obligations of the sort I could not in good faith ask them to cancel, and second that when it comes to my father, everything has its price. So I would be renting a truck and driving it alone, with my dad helping me pay for it on the condition that I help him move two trampolines. This would be my pre-moving labor, a nice foundation for the numerous other trials that would follow.

Now, probably without telling you this in person you may not understand the full import and absurdity of this trampoline thing. I am not talking about some bullshit backyard trampolines. I am talking about serious, Olympic-style gymnast trampolines. They each way half a ton; no shit: 1000 pounds. See, my father has been doing gymnastics since the early 80s, and many of his best friends are gymnasts. In fact, there are now currently four trampolines living at my dad’s, since a friend of his who is a coach had to store two of his for a little while. Our task was slightly different. My dad’s friend Nick, my own gymnastics instructor when I was a kid and who, incidentally, is 78 years old and still surfs everyday, has finally decided now that he’s pushing 80 that its time to stop doing trampoline and wanted to give my dad his far superior frame. To make a long story short, in a full day of nearly losing fingers to “Canadian Jumbo” trampoline springs, having to smash apart semi-rotten pieces of wood with a hammer and crowbar for an hour because we didn’t bring any other tools to get the new trampoline out of the ground (it was bolted to this wood) and getting various parts of our bodies covered in bruises from lifting something two people should not at all be attempting to lift, we succeeded in taking down and storing one, going out and breaking down, moving with the truck, and re-setting up the other in the backyard. I was reminded greatly of past Wychian labors especially as much of the vocabulary used freely in those cases was out in full effect from both of us on Wednesday, but this being a family-oriented blog I dare not repeat any of it here. Suffice it to say, I would much rather wrestle the Cretan Bull or whatever than ever have to move two trampolines again. And that was just the beginning of it.

After getting through with a long day of physical exertion mixed with cosmic absurdity, my dad and I had a few beers and I went to sleep early, because the next day—yes, September 11^th, 2008—I would be driving a 10×6x6 Budget truck from Red Bank, NJ to Chicago, IL, with no CD player or even tape deck, alone. Factoring in picking up the truck in Philly, going to my mom’s to load up, moving the trampolines, a trip to Ikea and back and the drive from my friend Anne Marie’s (where I’d be staying the first night) to my place and finally dropping the truck back off, Google gives me a distance in the ballpark of 1044 miles, all in 4 days. I hadn’t factored in the $300 in gas and the deluge of semi-Biblical proportions I would have to do everything under the cover of once I arrived in Chicago. I never want to see that truck again.

I left Red Bank at about 8:30am, figuring on about a 13 or so hour trip, stopped for fuel and coffee and was on my way. The saving grace of the trip was that the truck at least had a radio, which would figure heavily into the experience. Everything was fine and grand along the first leg, through and out of New Jersey. It being 9/11, the radio was packed with news of the various memorials and things going on, reflections on the election and so on. Being far enough north, WNYC came in loud and clear, my favorite NPR affiliate. Things were good, I was awake and the drive seemed pleasant enough.

But there were forebodings on the horizon. In fact, the horizon itself was ominous, not with rain or darkness, but rather with a more terrifying fate: the 3 states that lay within its purview. Crossing the mighty Delaware and leaving Jersey, it was clear—all too clear by the static on the radio—that civilization was well behind me. For somewhere a bit into Pennsylvania, WHYY, the Philly NPR station, flickered and died in a scratchy, irrevocable static death-sputter, and I was truly alone.

Friends, they don’t call it God’s country for nothing. And with the 8 or so long hours of PA, with Ohio and Indiana in front of them, this became abundantly clear. See, God, he rules all that shit out there. He’s enacted a viral political marketing strategy out in the counties so successful that it he’s got himself in as mayor, sheriff and local croaker of every single town, enclave and river valley west of the Delaware and east of the New Jerusalem. Though with some amount of panache at times, my man rules that jaunz with an iron-gloved fist. Most importantly, in a feat that neither Clear Channel or Rupert Murdock can hold a candle to, Jesus Christ seems to be chairman, CEO and DJ of every single radio station in the rural universe, and he keeps a tight watch on what goes out there on the airwaves, I assure you.

Now, I never thought this would come in as handy as it did, but I found myself counting myself lucky for my own religious affiliation. Being a Lapsed Catholic does indeed come with its perks. See, cosmic-legally speaking, if you’re both baptized and confirmed into Holy Mother Church, the Lord in Heaven and his entourage of lawyers, stuntmen and PR people are under contract to still hook you up with all the sweet benefits and perks that you signed on the line for when you got that water dumped on your head. See, Lapsed Catholicism is every bit the official sect as all the other ones. We’re right up there with the Jesuits and Benedictines and even Opus Dei. We got all the shit they got, plus some characteristics unique to us: our own particular voting habits, a tendency to be really interested in Buddhism (surpassed only by secular Jews), a guilt complex you can’t even front on, etc. Most importantly, however, we still have prime access to the most awesome part of our faith tradition: the army of cosmic middlemen, tricksters and all-around good sports known as the saints. Protestants, being boring and stiff as it is, seriously don’t know what they’re missing on this one. I think it’s because they’re non-union guys, spiritual scabs essentially, and they don’t know how to negotiate, let alone renegotiate, a contract. That’s Protestantism in a nutshell, actually: management has you bent over and you’re loving every minute of it.

So things were looking down. Jesus, as it turns out, doesn’t like to share the party, and his strong-arm boring ass radio tactics in PA were starting to drive me bonkers. Here and there flipping through the dials I’d get a classic rock station, mostly playing anything but classic rock, but on an occasion or two something good would slip through the sensors (a snippet of Hendrix; a fleeting glimpse of Zepplin). It was in this way that I heard, twice in rapid succession, that greatest of driving songs “Radar Love,” and I found myself reasoning this way:

Scientifically speaking, the “thing called radar love” mentioned in the song is clearly a reference to psychic powers. If figured that although there was no way I could get Jesus to help me out with this radio situation, I could actually pull out my Catholic card and appeal to the saints for help. I’ve never begrudged any of them, and have even argued for them being cool on a few occasions, so I figured one of my favorites would help me out. I calculated that if during the chorus of Radar Love I sent out a psychical-subliminal message piggybacking on the metaphysical waves in the space-time continuum generated by the unadulterated rock-itude of that song, literally using the “radar” part they’re talking about (this is apparently how the singer knows his baby wants him back: she sent him a telepathic message on the radar love frequency) I could probably get a distress signal to my main man St. Christopher, the patron of travelers. That swarthy giant has gotten me out of a jam or two before (and into a couple, just to amuse himself), and I figured he’d be good for the call this time.

So at precisely the right moment, I invoked Tom Waits’ Hymn to St. Christopher, directing it straight into the chorus of Radar Love. From there, judging by the strange vibrations in the truck’s flux capacitor, something, and I hoped something good, began to happen. As I would find out a few short hours later, St. Chris got the message loud and clear, and instead of “making the radiator boil,” delivered me from Christian radio and country stations.

I had wanted to ask him what the hold up was, but he told me anyway when he called my cell phone to confirm my order for the traveler-hookup. As it turns out (and I was nearing the border of PA and Ohio at this point), my man was in the neighborhood carrying someone across a river. Now, as you probably know, old St. Chris cut his teeth in the business by carrying a deceptively heavy baby across some river somewhere a long time ago. He still does those jobs on commission, and wouldn’t you know who it was this time. Turns out we were by the Ohio river, and Will Oldham was coming home from work just around dusk, and someone had stolen his boat giving him no way to cross the muddy Ohio. Sure enough, St. Chris was on the job in no time, spotted Wil, threw him over his shoulder and waded across. They faced some peril in the middle, as I was told later, because although not as heavy as the Christchild, Bonny Prince Billy is after all laden with the sins of the hip world, and this made it slow and treacherous going for a spell. St. Chris would have been around to take my order sooner if not for all that, but since this was an easy job, he was happy to oblige my request and to my great delight crossing into Ohio he hooked me up with not one but three different local NPR stations (all different shows were on too, serious icing on the cake), and the radio remained cool across Ohio, fluttered a bit crossing into Indiana and then came back with a vengeance around South Bend all the way to Chicago. 

Nearing the western border of Indiana, with relatively few miles to go to the White City, I was at once relieved and as cabin-fevered as I had been the entire trip. This is where I started going seriously nuts, the details of which I’ll save for another time. I got into my friend Anne Marie’s at 10:30 CSTC (11:30 for me), had some food, chatted and went to sleep. I woke up the next day, yesterday, at 6am to the first part of what has turned out to be a weekend of serious rain. I was going to try and recruit some help moving in, but I ended up saying fuck it and unloaded the entire truck myself. I then went and bought a new laptop (looks like I’m in the apple club now, at least in public), which came with a free printer and iPod. Later I took a trip in the storm out of town to Ikea, got to experience some authentic Chicago traffic, and as I write this I am sitting in a totally awesome, almost but not quite completely furnished apartment, which I have all to myself, about 5 or 6 blocks away from Barak Obama’s house. No shit, I walked by it this morning. My back, legs and arms are aching in ways I can’t describe. All of my shoes and jeans are soaked through and the internet doesn’t get hooked up for a week. It’s been a hell of a few days, but I am here, I’m safe and dry and, minus a couch or table, I have furniture. And, seriously, thank god I brought this bed here, because it’s fantastic.

My goals for the next week until school starts on the 23^rd are to finish tidying up the apartment and to build a social life. I have a few leads on the latter, and I hope to get that going this evening. I also hope to invoke a regimen of early to bed and early to rise. I also tried to go grocery shopping at the produce place down the street, but its pouring out and I can’t carry too much in the rain. I got fucking soaked lugging the Ikea furniture I bought home last night, to the extent that the cardboard box of the bookshelf I got was so soaked in tore open and some of the smaller shelf pieces came out. It was not, at al, cool.

I have more cleaning to do, and people I don’t know to email.

The Daily Show just ran a great episode with a segment comparing clips of comments by a few different Republicans on various issues around Palin, Obama and the election in general. In classic style, and almost as good as TDS’s famous “George W. Bush vs. George W. Bush” debate, Stewart juxtaposes things these folks have said about different people (whom they are for and against politically), highlighting some grossly contradictory  comments and beautifully raw hypocrisy.

Language Log reposted it and added a few comments and a chart. If you don’t feel like watching the whole thing, the LL post has excerpted the relevant bit.