A Pilgrim’s Digression

Yes, in case you didn’t know, this week is the one week of the year when all journalists are officially allowed to bring out their worst penis and circumcision-related puns and double entendres.

This week, we are marking Genital Integrity Awareness Week, i.e. “Don’t cut my penis, Bro” week. Technically, female genital mutilation is also on the agenda for the week, but as usual, male anxiety concerning their pee-pees has overshadowed the much worse practice of female circumcision.

The Washington Post has an article about the protest against male circumcision taking place here in D.C., and of course, the writer has to make the obligatory play on words—something I would never, never do, as a writer with my integrity still intact: Rallying In the Name of the Unkindest Cut.

I’ve seen these protesters, or ones like them in other years. They aren’t the throng of people one sees annually on the day that Roe v. Wade was enacted, for example. But they are passionate. I always wonder the same thing about them, though: don’t they have anything better to do? Aren’t there worthier causes out there?

I wonder, too, about their motivations. For example, the two twenty-somethings who are on a hunger strike, seem inordinately preoccupied with the effect of circumcision on their sex life.

Leading the pack are two 21-year-olds, Jason Siegel and Zachary Levi Balakoff, who are on Day 3 of a hunger strike. They say they won’t eat until genital mutilation is exposed. Go ahead, ask them why. They’ll tell you, for many minutes, about the “entire realms of exquisite feeling” they are missing by not having foreskins and the corresponding nerves. The “giant monstrosity” of circumcision “envelops” their entire lives.

Let me pose this question to them: if you have been circumcised since birth, how do you know that when you have sex, you aren’t feeling what an uncircumcised man feels when he has sex? Hm? The only possible way anyone could make this argument is if they had sexual relations after being circumcised as an adult.

That’s the only way one could compare the two state s of being, and I’d venture to say that the results of that experiment would not exactly be scientific since, from what I’ve read, being circumcised as an adult is more traumatic to the penis than being circumcised as a child.

Anyway, I don’t think “Intactivists” really have much science to back up their argument. Much of their argument is based on emotion and what they “feel” is right. They could probably say the same of people on the opposite side of the issue. Ultimately, a circumcised man has a huge…er, um, stake in defending his position. No one wants to feel like, because of an operation they had no say in, they are somehow less of a man.

The odd thing about the anti-circumcision men is that they seem to be in the opposite category–arguing not in defense of their ego and self-esteem, but arguing that they are actually less of a man because of circumcision, and thus the practice is harmful to the male psyche.

There are so many other issues of importance though. To me, these kinds of protests are just sign and symbol of the affluent and childish people we have become as Americans. Only a wealthy society with plenty of leisure could actually find time to go to the nation’s capital and protest an issue as inconsequential as this.

The fact that much of the argument against circumcision comes down to how it blunts the male sexual experience only reinforces the silliness of the issue. It’s as if a group of men came to Washington to make citizens aware of the “scourge” of erectile dysfunction.

If people are that foolish that they blame the poor quality of their sexual experiences on circumcision, they’ve got bigger problems than a missing foreskin. There are some missing priorities as well.

While waiting to get on the train at Navy Yard, I noticed a bag lady that I’ve seen there before. It’s about a quarter before six in the morning, so there are only about three people including myself on the entire platform. It’s not a busy station.

The bag lady walked up and down the platform talking to herself. She’s a black woman, probably middle aged but it’s always hard to tell with the poor, dressed in dingy black sweat pants and a purple sweat shirt; her hair is held in a kind of lunch lady bun by some sort of net. She drags a plastic garbage bag on the platform behind her as she walks up and down, mumbling. Every time I’ve seen her, she is wearing those same clothes, probably dragging the same trash bag behind her.

When the train pulled in, she didn’t wait for people to get off, instead pushing through them. A woman getting off the train muttered, “God damn, people just can’t wait.”

On the train, I walked to the wall opposite from the door and leaned against the wall, not even bothering to sit down; I’m only on for two stops before I change trains. Meanwhile, the bag woman looked around for a place to sit. One woman, who we’ll call Jean, put her purse on the seat beside her and said, “Unh-unh.”

Another woman, clean and well-dressed in office attire, said to the bag lady, “You want to sit here?” I later learned the woman who offered the seat is named Maxine, so that’s what I’ll call her from now on.

So Maxine offered the empty seat beside her, but as the bag lady moved to sit down, Maxine jumped up.

“Well you can sit there, but I’m not sitting beside you,” Maxine said, chuckling.

Jean, who had prevented the bag lady from sitting down, laughed and said to maxine, “You want to sit here, Honey?” and she moved her purse.

“Naw, I need to stretch anyway,” Maxine said, as she took hold of the bar that runs along the middle of the roof of the car. And she stretched and groaned in an exaggerated way, and then cackled. She was standing right in front of me now, close enough I could smell her perfume.

“Maxine girl, you are off the rails, today,” Jean said, laughing.

“I speak my mind, that’s all,” she replied. “I tell people what I think!”

Both Jean and Maxine were having a good old time, you could tell. They apparently knew each other. Maxine continued.

“I didn’t take my medication today. That’s my excuse for everything, ‘You take your pills?’ I say ‘Nope. Not today.’”

Both women laughed uproariously, and keeping the joke running, Jean said, “They gonna lock you in St. Elizabeth’s if you keep it up.”

“I escaped from St. E.’s. Those orderlies turned their backs while making the rounds, and…” Here Maxine made a motion with her hand like a runner breaking out of the starting block.

Laughter sounds so strange on a train at 6 AM. It was rather refreshing, though. I couldn’t keep from smiling, but I was also a little worried a smile might attract Maxine’s barbed wit. This was a woman who spoke her mind, after all.

“You are off the rails, mmmm, Girl, you are off the rails,” Jean said, laughing so hard she doubled over.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m the nicest person on this earth since I don’t PMS anymore,” Maxine said. This put Jean into near convulsions.

“You are off the rails!” Jean said, laughing in big chest heaving whoops.

“Yeah, you didn’t want to mess with me when I was PMS-ing, but now I got the menopause, I’m so nice to people. Hey, how you doing young man?”

She said this to me, and I smiled and said, “Oh, I’m fine. Just enjoying my train ride.

By this point, we were at L’Enfant Plaza and it was time for me to get off. Maxine and Jean also got off, as did the bag lady. I lost track of them in the crowd, but they certainly made an impression. I know there’s a good chance I will see the bag lady again next week; it will be interesting to see if I end up in the same car as Maxine and Jean again.

As I was preparing to leave work awhile ago, I had this thought.  One of the things I admire about my wife is that she doesn’t keep a blog, she doesn’t Twitter, she doesn’t have a Facebook or MySpace page. She recognizes the beauty and nobility in remaining silent when everyone around her, including her own spouse, is yapping away like a pack of giggling, chatty, narcissistic teenagers.

On our WoW guild forums recently, a guildmate asked us to describe one of our best or happiest moments from high school. It took me a little more than a day to think of something I might write about, and when I finally finished my post, I realized I hadn’t really written about something happy at all.

I wrote about how good I felt watching a bully be humiliated.

This got me to thinking, Why can’t I remember happy things? Why don’t I have many truly good memories? I know for a fact that there were happy moments in my childhood. I know that for a fact, but when I try to think of good times, few come to mind.

I can’t figure out exactly what causes this in me, but I tend to remember incidents of pain, loneliness, despair, and embarrassment, but no joy, pleasure, or just simple happiness.

I can tell you about the day when I was 18 and my Mom secretly took my dog to have him euthanized. He probably needed to be euthanized, but she could have told me she was going to do it.

I can’t tell you about one happy moment I had with my mother. Not a kind word or a moment of tenderness, or even a simple, happy moment of being with her. There must be moments like that from my childhood, but no, I remember only the bad times. Same with my memories of my father—anger, neglect, humiliation; these feelings characterize my memories of him.

I do have good memories of my grandparents, and in fact when I try to think of good memories, they are in all of them. However, these memories aren’t the most accessed files in my databank. I also have negative memories of them, as well. My grandma had these little passive/aggressive ways of making a person feel like a piece of crap, someone who is not quite normal, just a little off. She called it being “backward.” That was her country term for me. I was backward.

Even the negative memories are not free from guilt and self-loathing, however. I ask myself, do I raise the ghosts of these memories out of a desire for pity? By relating these incidents, do I make myself appear even weaker and more foolish than if I had kept silent?

A man keeps his secrets. A child tells all, without inhibition, out of a desire for approval, pity, or love.

I have to ask, too: Is this unerring focus on the negative merely a trait of the depressive personality? Is it legitimate to feel depressed? I don’t know. On the one hand I can accept the point of view that a feeling is legitimate, if I am actually feeling it. But I don’t even know what I’m feeling anymore. Are my feelings real, or the product of a diseased mind?

In terms of the question at hand–good school memories–I can’t think of a single one after elementary school, and even the elementary school memories are contradictory. However, I can tell you any number of stories about how miserable I was in junior high and high school.

I do work hard to put the past to rest. I go to therapy regularly. I take my medication. But then something triggers this retrospective on my part, and it all comes flooding back again and I spend a day or so hating myself and my life.

I wish I could be one of those people who look at life and see the bright side. They don’t think much about the past, or if they do they remember only the good times. If they were ever hurt by someone, the wound healed over completely, leaving no scar.

Sometimes I feel that, in military terms, I am a walking wounded.  I hate it. I want a pill that will selectively wipe out certain parts of my brain I don’t want active, any longer. I don’t want to struggle with this anymore. I dont want to know myself, and Socrates be damned. The whole philosophical exercise of thinking about my existence is pointless. I’m 35 years old and I am still a child, brooding over childish things.

When I was in college in the mid-nineties, I regularly went through this mental tug of war with myself: should I have cable TV in my apartment or not?  I had the cable disconnected for a month or two, then I’d find myself missing Seinfeld, or the X-Files, or whatever I was watching in those years, and I’d have the cable reconnected for awhile.

Then I’d start feeling guilty again.  TV kept me from reading more; it kept me from going out and socializing more.  I didn’t get enough exercise.

This was all before the Internet became ubiquitous, of course.  Cable TV seems almost innocuous by comparison.

Read more…

I can’t criticize geeks. I would never dress up in a Stormtrooper costume and camp out at a movie premiere, or go to a Trekkie convention wearing Spock ears, but I can understand people who do. The impulse to dress up like our heroes in an attempt to participate vicariously in a fantasy experience is the same for a four year old as it is for a thirty-four year old–and there is even something more than a little endearing about an adult whose inner child is still alive to the fun of fantasy and role-playing.

In short, I might not dress up myself, but I’d feel more at ease at a party where people are dressed like the crew of the Enterprise, than at a Super Bowl party.

And yet, in reading this story from the NYTimes, “Getting their Kirk On,” I just found something unbearably sad about this photo of a grown man dressed like Captain Kirk and sitting in a replica command chair he made himself.

Scott Veazie in his replica chair

Maybe it’s the way his feet dangle, not quite touching the floor. Or maybe it’s the way he’s holding his cellphone like it was a Star Trek communicator. Or maybe it’s the look on his face. He just looks…sad.

Take that however you want. Maybe I’m the geek equivalent of a hypocritical quisling, professing sympathy for my fellow geeks while ratting them out when their backs are turned.

Anyway, I was glad to read that at least the guy has a wife. And his command chair is not in his basement, but apparently in his front room near a window.

I’d also like to add that, although I’m not a Trekkie, I am looking forward to the new movie coming out in May. J.J. Abrams directed the “Alias” TV series that I loved, as well as “Lost,” which I grew to hate. I hope he does a good job with Star Trek.

I am ready to admit I was wrong about you, Starbucks (The Last Drop).  Maybe all I needed was some time with another coffee shop to see the error of my ways.  In the end, when I needed a good, inexpensive cup of coffee, it was you who came through for me–not that diner around the corner.

You lowered your prices.  I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting such a blatant attempt at luring me back.  You didn’t need me or my money.  Yet you lowered your prices anyway, and that meant a lot.

At the diner, I paid almost six dollars for a cup of Maxwell House and a breakfast sandwich.  Then, when I stopped in to visit you last week, I found that you could make me a better cup of coffee and a better sandwich for under five dollars.

That made an impression.  Your nickname “Fivebucks” is now a misnomer, as long as I don’t buy any of your specialty drinks.

Your coffee seems to have improved as well.  My first taste, this morning, made my eyeballs tingle with the sudden jolt of caffeine.  We’re off to a good start, Starbucks, and I hope we can keep this relationship on solid ground for years to come.

I know I’ve been fickle.  I know I’ve suggested you are elitist, and that you are an expensive mistress to maintain.  But now I am asking you to take me back.  And please, now that you’ve got me again, don’t raise your prices.  You’ve got me on the hook for years at these prices, just don’t press your advantage too far.

On Tuesday, I finished reading Philip Roth’s novel When She Was Good and began reading Richard Yates’s novel A Good School. I’m not going to write the Comp 101 equivalent of a comparison/contrast essay; however, I do think Yates and Roth make a rather complementary pair. The strength of both writers is their ability to portray characters of psychologically depth with whom we come to sympathize.

When She Was Good is an ironically titled ironic novel, in which the main character, Lucy Nelson, is a woman who is so good, she’s bad. By the end of the novel, although I still sympathized with Lucy, I found myself far more sympathetic to the “bad” people who could never live up to her high moral standards. Her alcoholic father, her weak and mincing mother and grandfather, her browbeaten husband Roy, and Roy’s philandering Uncle Julian…all come far short of living up to Lucy’s expectations, but somehow that makes me even more sympathetic with them. Lucy is a “ball buster” in Uncle Julian’s words, and that is not an attractive characteristic in any person.

Still, especially after reading the tragic ending of the novel (which seemed a bit forced), I couldn’t help but feel that maybe in this novel, Roth was taking a small measure of revenge against some ball buster in his real life. He seemed to revel a bit too much in Lucy’s pathetic demise.

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So as I wrote on Twitter just a few minutes ago, Lynn was in a car accident tonight. She had taken Brendan bowling, so I could have the evening free for a WoW night. She called me a little before 8:30 to tell me she was coming home early, and to ask me about road conditions. The bowling alley is in a town about 45 minutes North on the Interstate.

I was a little perplexed, because I’d had the dog out maybe a couple hours before and it was just raining. Mind you this morning, I wore a tee shirt and pajama pants when I took the dog out. So I was not expecting any change in the weather. But when I looked out to give her a report, I was surprised to see a skiff of snow on the car and grass.

I told her to be careful and went back to my game.

So the raid began. We were attempting 10 man Malygos for the first time–or at least it was a first time for me. We were on our third or fourth attempt when she called me back to tell me she’d been in an accident. Maybe ten or fifteen minutes passed between phone calls.

Needless to say, even though she said she and Brendan were fine, the game was over as far as I was concerned. I made my apologies to my guild mates and set off to pick up my wife and son.

The details are a little sketchy in my mind, not having witnessed it, but from what she told me, a pickup truck lost control and was partially turned around in the right lane. A white SVU T-Boned it, spinning it the rest of the way around, and Lynn nailed it in the rear with her front end and passenger side as she swerved to miss it. The white SVU went off the road to the left, into the median, and Lynn’s vehicle and the truck went off to the right.

Strangely, her airbag didn’t deploy, which I guess can be explained by the way she kind of hit it sideways. Since no one was in the passenger seat, it probably wouldn’t deploy.

The only injuries were to the old man and woman in the truck. They were taken away by ambulance, but Lynn said they seemed OK, just shook up. In fact the size of the truck may have actually saved all their lives, because Lynn said it absorbed an amazing amount of damage for everyone involved to walk away basically unharmed.

Our car, too, has likely been totaled according to one of the police officers. The front end and passenger sides are crumpled. Oddly, the interior looks as if nothing had happened. I think it’s amazing that modern cars are so well built that they can take such an impact and the people inside just walk away.

Lynn was driving a 2008 Chevy Cobalt, if you’re wondering.

We had to wait quite a long time at the scene while the police wrapped up their investigation. When the two of them finally piled in my car and we set off for home, I heard all about it from Brendan. He was excited that he got to sit in one of the emergency vehicles. He was excited by the whole incident, actually. As soon as they got out of the car after the accident, Lynn sent him across the guard rail and up onto the hillside in case another car came through the scene and lost control or hit one of the wrecked vehicles. He told us in the car he thought his mother did this for fear the car would explode.

I told him it’s almost impossible for a car to explode in an accident now, because they all have automatic fuel cut off systems in place. That’s why the car just quit running dead as soon as it impacted. The fuel is cut off to avoid any kind of leak or fire.

It was quite an exciting night all the way around, and I’m just glad everything turned out OK. Tomorrow, we’ll call the insurance and get that process started. My fear is that the car will be totaled, but the insurance won’t pay off the loan in full. Maybe they just pay the blue book value of the car? I don’t know. I’ve never been involved in anything more than a fender bender, so I don’t know what to expect. I guess we’ll find out, and at the very least I’ve got blog fodder for awhile.