My Living Will

Dear reader,

Lately, my thoughts have been drifting toward swine flu. I find this alarming, since usually my thoughts drift toward encephalitis, botulism, and syphilitic brain-softening, in that order, right after I think about what I want for lunch, contemplate the good, and imagine a naked lady. What is this new fear in my hypochondriac closet of illnesses? It’s making me nervous. Only a sick person (perhaps someone with encephalitis!) would add a new disease to his litany of imagined infections. Granted, swine flu seems an upstart compared to a healthy neurodegenerative disease. And it’s so low brow. Even the newspapers scrawl about it. But, then again, the 1918 Spanish flu killed millions. And I have always been drawn to anachronism….

I’m sure this epidemic is nothing to worry about, but just in case, I’m writing a living will. Since you are the only person I trust, I am designating you to execute it. In the event of an emergency, please see to it that my wishes are carried out. Thank you, even though I despise you for staying alive and healthy longer than me.

Yours,

P.G.

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Dear Executor of my living will,

If you are reading this, then I am lying in a hospital bed in a completely leguminous state, no doubt stricken by one of the maladies I so feared. And you called me a hypochondriac. Looks like I really did have something to worry about after all. Just out of curiosity, what was it that got me? It was that dented can of lentils, wasn’t it? Or maybe a flesh-eating virus from riding the city bus that one time? I told you public transportation would be the death of me. Well, whatever it was, I’m not dead yet. I intend to drink up the dregs of life still floating in my inert limbs. And you’re going to help me.

Did you ever see that movie “The Bucket List”? I saw it on an airplane, and though I was feeling a little panicked and congested from all the microbes circling in those winged germ labs, I found it poignant (though poignancy is a common side effect of Dramamine). And it got me thinking; before it it’s too late, there are some things in life I want to do. Why should I be cooped up in bed comatose when there’s a whole world out there for me and my many tubes and breathing machines to explore? Carpe diem!

First, I’ve always wanted to go water-skiing. Before I fell into a coma, I refrained out of fear of pollutants. The Great Lakes seemed like one giant network of bed pans. I figured I might as well have gone swimming in a toilet. That was the old me. Now I want you to take me to Cleveland, strap some skies on my feet, tie me to a boat in Lake Erie, and let rip. Then I want you to take me swimming in a toilet.

Next, I would like to write a novel. The fancy kind where everyone talks about what a thundering talent I am, makes excuses for my fascist sympathies and infamous drinking problem, and writes me bootlicking poems on my birthday. First, put an eye-patch on me and carve a deep gash in my cheek—something that will leave a scar and give me an old world literary mystique. Then, they say to write what you know, so for a working title I’m thinking Portrait of the Artist as a Drooling Vegetable. Of course, this will require your help. I’ve devised an ingenious system of communication, where every time I twitch you start cycling through the alphabet and when I twitch again, you write down whichever letter you’re at. If I am not twitching, feel free to jostle me. I think this is going to be good.

Becoming a famous novelist has made me realize how important family is. It’s the seemingly trivial moments— sitting around the dinner table, sharing stories by the hearth, sponging down my lifeless bed-sore body—that really count. That’s why I want you to move my body to my brother’s home and see to it that I enjoy three meals a day with his family. His wife Deb will see to my feeding and hygienic upkeep. As is my want in my helpless state, I’ll have French toast for breakfast, a roast for lunch, and chile rellenos for dinner, all piped down my food straw. See to it Deb stuffs the chiles herself, daily, right after she gives me my mid-morning undercarriage scrub. Every afternoon, the kids will tell me how school was. For the sake of their education, I’d like to make them legally obligated to answer in full paragraphs in proper Latin and German. And on the weekends, my brother won’t have to go through the trouble of looking for someone to share his season tickets. I’ll gladly go to every game with him. That should make up for his having been the favorite son.

Thank you. This coma has given me a new lease on life. My will is done.

p.s. Don’t pull the plug!

Malcolm Gladwell polishes a turd

This piece was published in When Falls the Coliseum and can also be read there.

A page from Malcolm Gladwell’s moleskine

I haven’t slept for days. No idea when I last ate. My mind is on fire. Synthesizing all that data has turned my head into a furnace. Seriously, my ears feel hot. Correction: It’s my hair that is on fire. I must have nodded off on the stove again. It looks like my snap decision to work in the kitchen today was one of those snap decisions with adverse effects. Which only confirms my thesis: Sometimes the decisions made in the blink of an eye have positive outcomes, though, in certain cases, the outcome is negative. That’s the “50/50 Effect.”

Or consider it this way. My great great-grandfather Clemens came to this country as an indentured servant in 1773, employed as a grease monger on the estate of a prominent Rhode Island rum merchant. The savage Highlander that he was, and Rhode Island winters being what they were, he acquired a habit of loitering in his lord’s kitchen and warming the underside of his kilt on the wood-burning stove. Kitchen loitering became a tradition in my family, passed down through the generations. Pair that with the fear of scissors that my mother instilled in me at a young age, a residue from the Great Scissors Uprising in Western Pennsylvania–as it turns out, all sons of Western Pennsylvanian mothers who grew up during the Great Scissors Uprising have wild unshorn hair. Then factor in the nearly 10,000 hours I have spent at the end of a manic streak dozing off in strange places.

Seen in that light, it wasn’t my guarana-fueled gut decision to put my notes in the oven and set my laptop on the griddle this morning that turned my hair into a flaming orb. It was the combination of unique opportunities, historical circumstance and habitual behavior that enabled me to make that seemingly idiosyncratic decision. That’s the “Other Stuff Besides You Matters Hypothesis,” which is all the rage these days in certain circles of corporate market–I mean, social psychology.

But how can we explain the meteoric rise of the Floofkin theory? In 1944, philosopher and accordionist Gabe Floofkin escaped Nazi-occupied Poland only to fall into the hands of the Russians. Under suspicion of espionage, he was sent to the gulag. There, under conditions of extreme deprivation and routine buggery, Floofkin developed his theory of burnished matter. Lacking writing materials, he commissioned a thief to tattoo it on his body with a rusty screwdriver. Two weeks later, Flookfin died from tetanus. But his legacy would live on.

Mysteriously, his frozen body wound up on a Vladivostok cargo ship bound for Brazil, fell off en route and, after months at sea, washed ashore on Venice Beach. The next morning, a lifeguard named Eugene Krik, originally from Odessa, discovered Floofkin’s theory inked across his chest in lewdly stylized Cyrillic. It read: “You can’t polish a turd.”

Within weeks, the Floofkin theory went viral. What started as amusing shower banter at the lifeguard hut quickly achieved critical mass and exceeded the tipping point, the point at which ideas become diseases and it is necessary to use the language of epidemiology to understand cultural change. From its Los Angeles epicenter, the Floofkin theory swiftly infected California, ravaged the Midwest and gave shingles to the entire eastern seaboard. Children in Cheyenne, grandmothers in Fort Meyers and news anchors on CNN all conclusively endorsed the Floofkin theory. As a result, turd-polishing plummeted, even in New Jersey. That’s a perfect example of the “Sometimes Ideas Spread Fast Effect.”

But the story doesn’t end there. As always, market research statistics have some really fascinating insights into how the world works–ones that just might overturn the Floofkin theory. The advertising industry has long disputed the Floofkin theory and has thrown a lot of money at the social science departments of major research universities to disprove it. Researchers at Yale have recently found that if you put a turd in a box and polish the box, 57 percent of consumers will consider the turd itself to be polished.

Which leads me to my latest thesis: You really can polish a turd. Except that you can’t. But sometimes you can if you put that turd in a box, polish the box and find some people who will believe that the polished box with a turd in it is, in fact, a polished turd.

On a Manhunt with Joe Arpaio

I had just put on my pajamas and taken off my face when the Sheriff battered down my door. “Lace up your boots. We have to hunt a man.”

“But I just took my face off,” I cried.

“Well, slap ‘er back on. It’s man-huntin’ time.”

This was to be my third manhunt since the Sheriff moved in across the hall last week. And as much as I had grown to appreciate a good manhunt, I really just felt like getting cozy with a chalice of scotch and some old episodes of “Murder, She Wrote.”

But I couldn’t tell the Sheriff that. I needed to buoy his spirits with a good manhunt. Some recent jurisdiction problems at work had made him melancholic. He also hated “Murder, She Wrote.” Jessica Fletcher’s crime-solving philosophy was anathema to him, and whenever he caught the muffled sounds of the show’s catchy piano and strings theme music coming from under my covers, he’d batter down the door in a rage, screaming about illegal immigrants. “The Mexicans did it! Not the jealous real estate agent! Those dirty illegal immigrants did it!”

I tried to explain to the Sheriff that this was impossible because there weren’t Mexicans, let alone illegal ones, in Cabot Cove, Maine, where Mrs. Fletcher did her sleuthing. But the Sheriff was beyond persuasion, busy bloodying my rug with his raw knuckles. “When will that old crone get it? We gotta build a giant wall to stop this murder spree in Maine!” he shouted, heaving his battering ram through my walls.

I don’t mind the Sheriff’s company, but I do wish he would leave his battering ram next door. If only because Lardbottom, my domestic partner, suffers from hypertension, and every time the Sheriff pays a visit, the flying door and drywall splinters spike his heart rate. Fearing for Lardbottom’s tranquility, I resigned myself to the manhunt. I put my face back on, made some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and created a mix tape to put us in the right mood for hunting men. We drove into the Arizona night with hunger in our hearts and Hall and Oates on our stereo.

As the Sheriff had taught me, the secret to a good manhunt is surprise. Just as we had swooped from the rafters on an unsuspecting John Tesh mid-concert on our first manhunt, and waited for three hours in the sweltering backseat of Charles Barkley’s car during a promotional event at Footlocker on our last manhunt, we would disguise ourselves as American Idol contestants and pounce on an unwitting Ryan Seacrest on this manhunt. It was thanks to this kind of cunning that the Sheriff had hunted down dozens of famous men (and women on his womanhunts) and amassed his impressive collection of celebrity photos and autographs–or, as he called them, his scalps.

As usual, in route to our manhunt, the Sheriff pulled over anyone he reckoned was an illegal immigrant and threw them in the back of the truck. Some might call this reckless racial profiling. But, I assure you, the Sheriff employed the latest techniques in physiognomical and phrenological science. The occipital calipers he wielded so deftly had once adorned the desks of such legendary men of science as Count Gobineau and Josef Mengele. Of course, the calipers only confirmed what his nose already told him. According to the Sheriff, illegal residence in the United States had a specific smell. He said it was redolent of sorghum molasses, smoked birch wood and traces of artificial cherry.

We cruised through town, tracking the sweet scent of illegality. This particular night, illegal immigration must have been rampant, as the Sheriff found the smell on nearly everyone we passed. We filled truckload after truckload of illegal aliens, dressed them in pink lingerie and herded them off to jail. Meanwhile, Ryan Seacrest was wrapping up at the convention center. Our manhunt was slipping through the cracks.

I pulled out a sandwich and offered it to the Sheriff, hoping to calm his nerves. But he declined, unwrapping one of his own.

“What kind of sandwich is that?” I asked.

“Sorghum molasses and cherry jelly on smoked birch wood.”

Unfortunately, food seemed to aggravate the Sheriff only more. Seacrest was long gone and the Sheriff was returning from his manhunt without a scalp. In his impotent fury, he turned to immigration. He said the smell of it was everywhere, even right here in this car. On the way home, I caught him measuring my skull with his calipers.

By the time we got to the apartment, the Sheriff was beside himself. He had turned his suspicion on himself and was measuring his own skull. Then his gaze fell on Lardbottom, my domestic partner.

“What kind of cat is that?” he asked me, his eyes slowly coming aflame.

“…Mexican hairless,” I whispered. A tear rolled down my cheek.

The Club Man's Gambit

Beauty is the beginning of terror.

That’s what my Uncle Randy used to say. It always stood out among his other sayings, like, “Quick, ‘fore the government catches you,” a holdover from his bootlegging days, and “Dammit, Gladys, you’re one mean old cow,” a phrase of conjugal endearment. Only later did I find out he had learned it in a book of words by a deadbeat German with a sissy name: Rainy Mary Some-in-er-nother.

If only Uncle Randy had been there to offer those wise words last Monday. Then I would have known that the beautiful gift in my mailbox was not to be trusted. Instead, when I saw that card emblazoned with my name, I shrieked with joy, “I’ve been admitted to the club!” Thanks to my remarkable display of character, wealth and sartorial taste, I had become a card-carrying member of the West Coast’s most prestigious organization: Safeway.

I don’t even remember how I got to the store, I was so ecstatic. I vaguely remember driving, but I am certain I do not own a car, especially one with a baby in the back.

The doors to Safeway opened before me, no doubt sensing the club-member pheromones I was emitting. Inside, the fruit looked riper, the Cheez-Its cheezier, even the pock-marked baker had a charming Gallic air about him. Every Muzak tune on the loudspeaker was my favorite song.

As I danced my way through the aisles, it became clear there were two kinds of people in this world: club members and non-members. You could smell a non-member from the other end of the store. They slouched, were usually deformed, had a mucous-like film covering their hands and were improbably flatulent. The more respectful ones bowed and groveled when a member passed by. The others just growled and stared at their betters with desperate eyes.

At least these clubless hordes were forced to pay a higher price for the foodstuffs they clawed off the shelves. But, really, I began to wonder whether having to suffer their presence were a violation of my member privileges. What right did they have to nourish themselves on my groceries in my club?!

These questions sent me marching in indignation to the meat department. I couldn’t let the riffraff feast on the precious flesh of animals, particularly not the meat that had been collected caringly from the feces-ridden floor and put mindfully through a rusty grinder for me and other club members to enjoy at 88 cents a pound. I grabbed all the ground beef I could fit in my cart and made for checkout.

I’ll spare you an account of the emotion I felt when they swiped my club card. Let’s just say the $6.57 I saved on groceries was only half as valuable as my sense of belonging.

Back at home, I slipped into my Members Only tracksuit, put on some thumpin’ club music and whipped up some club sandwiches, along with 16 pounds of rare hamburger meat and a sleeve of club crackers.

An hour later, the trouble started. I felt a rumbling in my gut, followed by swelling in my ears. I tried to cure it with club soda and lime, stirred with my Safeway club card. Then I blew a gasket.

The E. coli sent my sphincter and all 16 pounds of rancid hamburger through the back of my track suit. The bacteria attacked my softening brain, sending me to seizure country.

I came to in the hospital parking lot, paralyzed from the teeth down. The hospital had refused to treat me because, apparently, I didn’t have what they referred to as “health insurance.” They must not have seen my club card, which, at the time, was in my mouth to prevent me from swallowing my tongue.

Now, drooling on my benumbed body crumpled on the asphalt, I felt like a non-member.

Suddenly, a mustachioed man wearing a skull cap, stropping belt and a straight razor appeared from behind the hazardous waste bin, hoisted me up from my wretchedness, and brought me to a door marked by a moving candy cane pole.

Inside was a bustling scene of combs and cauterized flesh, the floors wet with blood and barbicide.

“Where am I?” I asked.

“Welcome, poor man, to the barber-surgeon local No. 37,” said my barber savior. “We are an ancient guild. Once the beacons of modern medicine, we were forced underground by doctors. Now we ply our trade in secret, treating those infirm or in need of a trim. We are the shadow public option, healthcare for the clubless.”

Just as I was about to protest and show him my club card, he kicked my inert body into a spinning chair and lathered up my sideburns.

“Don’t you worry, young fellah. Let me give you a good bloodletting whilst you browse the nudie magazines.”

And there, as the lifeblood drained out of me while I stared into the swirling centers of two areolae, I again felt like a club man.

My Red Book

Curse you, Carl Jung! Just when the world was ready to forget about you, you unveil your sordid little Red Book.

For nigh on half a century, deep in the gold brick-lined vaults of Zurich, lay the tales of your vaunted vision quest. Meanwhile, your modern acolytes were busy alchemizing your high-falutin Nazi-sympathizing Swiss sorcery into one big, mealy-mouthed, touchy-feely, rainbow massage crystal to cure the world of its cosmic pain. Your legacy seemed right on track for an ignominious whimper of an end.

Then, all of a sudden, the New York Times announces the long-awaited publication of the “holy grail of the unconscious,” a tale of a psychiatrist’s struggle with psychosis, a modern man of science conversing with ancient demons and a personal discovery that would transform our understanding of the human mind. Now the salivating Jungians are dusting off their Ouija boards and polishing their monoliths, priming for personal revelation and an orgy of “Aha!” moments.

Well, I’ve got news for you, C.J. (I know your spirit is present. I can smell its foul pipe tobacco). You are not the only one with a secret diary detailing the mysteries of the unconscious. I, too, have cut new swaths of wisdom into the tangled jungle of the psyche. Everyone already knows about your break with Freud on the eve of World War I and the personal crisis it precipitated. Boring! But how many people have yet to read about my break with Dr. Leaky McNuds in those ominous summer months of 1997 and the voyage of self-discovery that ensued?

I had been a devoted disciple of McNuds for five years, enjoying the role of confidante and heir apparent in his elite circle of rogue urologists. He called me his “golden shower child”–potty jokes being a staple of the urology community. Naturally, I was flattered and my affection for my mentor was sincere. I saw McNuds as a sort of Old Testament prophet of the penis, thoroughly free from illusion or propriety, and committed to probing the depths of our field from sac to tip.

The tension between us began with a conversation one evening in McNuds’ study. We were discussing the significance of maladies arising from overzealous shaking when at the public urinal. McNuds was convinced that the act betrayed a repressed sexual wish. When I suggested that there might be a less sexual and more sincerely spiritual meaning to the gesture, perhaps akin to the waving of a sorcerer’s wand to purge the soul of evil spirits, McNuds stared at me, aghast. I knew then that if I were to pursue my own urological convictions, it would cost me my friendship with McNuds. And it did.

The last I saw of McNuds was at an uro-analysis convention in Indianapolis, a sausage fest, as it is called in the parlance of our discipline. I delivered a paper on Ancient Egyptian twisticles, wherein I remarked that Amenhotep IV’s scrotal contusion resembled the wracked state of contemporary McNudsian urology. McNuds fainted and, in a fit of guilt, I leapt from the podium to catch him. After depositing my fallen idol on the couch, I hobbled away, having just suffered a mild scrotal contusion myself, never to see him again.

Needless to say, I was drummed out of uro-analysis. Left virtually without a pot to have someone piss in, my livelihood collapsed. And it was then, in those sweltering summer days of 1997, during the great fen-phen epidemic, the fall of the Woolworth’s empire, the secessionist parliament of Scotland and finally-- the spark that set off the powder keg-- the death of Princess Diana, that I lost my mind. The ground beneath me seemed to open up and swallow me. I became trapped in the labyrinthine trenches of my own besieged brain, bombarded by poisonous shrapnel-filled thoughts.

There I was playing cards with a diffident proto-urethra and an ancient testicle from Carthage, worrying over my lost sanity and my pair of fives, when the hoary Carthaginian leaned over and whispered in my ear, “I am a nut, but you, my son, are perfectly sane. Go, engrave these trials on rune stones in a Gothic hand and illuminate them with instructive anatomical mandalas.”

I realized the only way I could maintain my sanity was by recording my phantasies, converting the crazed ravings of a castrated urologist into an epic poem about the male organ’s journey through all seven dimensions of spirit with his medieval guide Phallus Mundus. Phallus Mundus led me to these depths within my self, where I struck upon my revolutionary theories of the collective bladder of mankind and the Ur-pubis.

And as soon as these rune stones are hauled up from my grandmother’s basement in Joplin, Mo., where they have been kept safe all these years, I am confident they will be a penetrating stream of insight into the stagnant waters of urology.

This piece can also be read at http://www.stanforddaily.com/cgi-bin/?p=1033602