The Bible encourages us to be in this world but not of it. Two of my relatives have no trouble taking this advice to heart because they already live on other planets.
This blog describes what happens when a family’s life turns into a cross between a “Twilight Zone” episode and a Jonathan Franzen novel. It isn’t pretty, but it’s entertaining as hell and, if you’re Jonathan Franzen, lucrative. That’s kind of a crass way to look at great literature, but we’ve crasser in these parts.
Attempts to chronicle the Fall of Rome in real time will also appear on occasion, along with discussions of ways to live an examined, rationally corrupt life and attract the right kinds of hedonists into one’s social circle. If we’re in fact Weimar, you might as well get it on with a cute cabaret girl, right? Especially if she has some residual mental stability and a Swedish passport.
aliensinthefamily 
I really enjoy your writing, and check in every couple of days to see if there is anything new. I first became aware of you over at CFN. I don’t participate there, anymore, but keep an eye on it because occasionally, there is more content than noise.
Yes. People just do not know to shut the fuck up. I go to book sales or check out books in thrift shops and often there is some ass hat just droning on … and on. Makes me crazy. I’m in the process of closing down my bookstore, as I am retiring to the country to become a hermit and grow potatoes. And to enjoy the quiet. The silence. I had no places to sit, in my bookstore, just to thwart those who see a chair as an invitation to plop down and bend my ear.
Your observations of Hollywood were interesting. Way back in the early 70s, I lived in S. California for four years. When I got there, I went to Hollywood to look up an old friend. I remember how shocked I was that parts of it were a slum. Oh, callow youth.
Your thoughts on Osteen and his “church” were pretty much in line with what Barbara Ehrenreich had to say about him in her book “Bright Sided.” If you haven’t read it yet, it’s worth a look.
Thanks again for your writing. I really enjoy your take on the world.
Thanks. I’m glad you enjoy my screeds.
I’ve only glanced at “Bright Sided,” but I’m familiar with its gist. I’ve heard that Ehrenreich savaged the public discourse about cancer treatment, which I’ve often found to be facile, saccharine and superficial. I’ve never had cancer, thank God, because it sounds like if the disease doesn’t suck the treatment does. If I’m ever diagnosed with cancer, I want to be treated by sober, competent clinicians and spared the flights of stupid sentimentality to which cancer patients are customarily subjected.
I’m thankful that my grandmother didn’t have to deal with much of that smarmy bullshit in the final years of her life, when she was suffering from recurrent breast cancer. I hesitate to call her experience a “fight,” and she wasn’t exactly a “cancer survivor,” having died two and a half weeks after emergency orthopedic surgery to repair a spontaneous femur fracture resulting from bony metastases. Mercifully, her immediate cause of death was a respiration pneumonia, because most of the pain and distress that she endured in her final month or two was due to the cancer; it’s for good reason that pneumonia is traditionally called “the old person’s friend.”
Grandma probably would have had to deal with a lot more well-meaning smarm had she elected to use chemotherapy or radiation; instead, she had the primary tumors removed by lumpectomy and simple mastectomy, respectively, and she received only palliative care for the bony metastases, as it became clear a few days after her orthopedic surgery (her second emergency operation in less than two years, both of them on the right femur) that she wouldn’t walk again because she was in terrible pain whenever she moved. Within a week it was clear that she was dying.
The worldviews of the surgical, med-surg and home hospice staff who treated Grandma were very different from the disingenuous attitudes emanating from the cancer community, for lack of a better term. Part of the problem, I think, is that the public discourse about cancer has been dominated not by clinicians but by activist twits peddling bromides. No comparable gang of twits carries on about a “courageous fight against hip fractures.” Unfortunately, even though Grandma’s dedicated cancer treatment was limited in scope and duration, she was subjected to absurdities like friends and acquaintances from church telling her, “you look young.”
So really, unless one’s social circle is entirely free of well-meaning idiots, there’s no way to avoid being brightsided by them. Being abrasive might help (Grandma was anything but abrasive), but not necessarily. It shouldn’t be much of a help for those who are active in churches, because nothing can dissuade certain inane doofuses from visiting the sick faithful and running their mouths.
As I write this reply, my gut feeling is that I didn’t fully convey in Ass Burgers how uncontemplative and shallow the demeanor of modern American Evangelicalism has become. One of the amazing things about Evangelical clergy and lay leaders is their emphasis on constantly maintaining a positive “game face.” It’s as though they regard public life, whether at work, church or school, as a never-ending sales pitch, and one of their greatest callings as enabling their flocks to be better salesmen. This attitude is never articulated as explicitly as I’ve expressed it, probably because it’s subconscious for most of those holding it. The ideal is an eternal hail-fellow-well-met stance towards the world. On closer examination there’s something creepy, even Orwellian, about it; with more ominous sorts of music, lighting and acting, the same script could be a Rod Serling production. This attitude is entirely absent from the Catholic and Orthodox churches, almost absent in old-line liturgical Protestant denominations (e.g., Missouri Synod Lutheran and Presbyterian Church in America), and rare in Main Line Protestant churches. From a broad cultural perspective, however, the troubling thing is that Evangelical churches are the most disproportionately influential ones in the United States. They run the lion’s share of Christian mass media: TBN and CBN on television, SRN and K-Love on the radio, the pop-style praise-and-worship record labels, the major Colorado Springs publishing houses, etc. These outfits basically crowd out the competition in many markets. If the Catholic Church has an American broadcast operation rivaling K-Love in scope, I’m unaware of it, and the other denominational churches are media nonentities even by comparison to the Catholic Church.
Another thing to keep in mind is that Evangelicals organize probably the most disproportionate number of short-term mission trips to places that the missionaries involved don’t really understand. My cousins were part of a group of nearly twenty from their church that went on a week-long mission trip to show the “Jesus Film” in a majority-Muslim part of Northern Ghana. One of their main in-country contacts, a Southerner from Accra or thereabouts, had been beaten nearly to death a few months earlier by a sectarian lynch mob after he accidentally struck and killed a mother and her child in one of the villages that the group subsequently proselytized. A bunch of American missionaries dropping into an utterly foreign land with some of the most dangerous roads and lowest sectarian flashpoints on earth is indescribably foolhardy, but of course it’s considered unconscionably rude, if not blasphemous, to point this out in the Evangelical churches that sponsor such recklessness. Several minor teenagers were part of the Ghana group; holy child endangerment, I say. Combine that sort of idiocy with an old custody dispute and you have a ready-made Dateline NBC special.
The Ghana trip (almost always referred to within the church as the “Africa trip”) is the latest piece of evidence convincing me that American churches have wrongly escaped blame for perpetuating the stereotype of the Ugly American. The annoyance caused by the standard-issue American tourist is merely secular, e.g., asking Russians pointed but banal questions about Boris Yeltsin or, in one of my favorites, asking a total stranger in an Amsterdam bar, “what’s your opinion about abortion?” Missionaries generally bring not only the usual secular arrogance but an extra layer of religious arrogance. In my cousins’ case, the group seemed to have been uncommonly well vetted, briefed and chaperoned, but I’ve also encountered loudmouth wackos. I once flew from Warsaw to Chicago two rows back from the leader of a mission group from Tennessee–if memory serves, Baptists who had just spent two weeks somewhere near Krakow. The leader, a weaselly-looking goober, fell into conversation with a belligerent Polish immigrant, a contractor who built God-awful McMansions in the Chicago exurbs and who had spent fifteen minutes over the North Atlantic yelling at a very quiet and professional but resolute steward about his alleged right to relocate to window seats explicitly reserved for crew; his end of the conversation was a torrent of rapid-fire Polish followed by the English, “Can I see the regulation PLEASE,” with at least three cycles before he finally returned to his assigned seat. Closer to arrival, he started showing pictures of his houses, which were just wretched, to the preacher; most of the economy cabin could hear these two running their mouths, simultaneously as often as not, with the preacher belting out “I hear ya!” several times a minute. I have trouble imagining the preacher’s shtick going over well in Poland; the locals were probably on the phone with their American cousins, asking whether such buffoons existed in Chicago, too.
Reflecting on this bizarre flight, it occurs to me that there’s a subtle but important difference in the ways that Poles and Americans deal with their neighborhood pains in the ass. The Polish approach seems to be to have a quiet word with them until they’ve shut up; the American approach, especially in the South, seems to be to encourage them to pursue public ministry. That way, they can spread the gospel in softspoken places like Poland by magnetically attracting and amplifying all the neighborhood abrasives and hotheads, until everyone else in the neighborhood is ready to stuff their mouths with rags. It’s no wonder that the church is losing ground in such places; John Paul II, outgoing Polish missionary though he was, would have been embarrassed by such company.
Listening to the glowing reviews of Hollywood by its partisans, it’s unimaginable that it’s such a seedy neighborhood. To this day it’s seedy. It’s almost certainly the most overrated neighborhood in LA. It’s completely absurd to say that Hollywood is the place to be, as opposed to the Mid-Wilshire, downtown, Little Tokyo, Fullerton, Long Beach, Pasadena, etc. I highly doubt that the people promoting Hollywood actually live on Hollywood Boulevard. Hollywood has some of the worst and most unpredictable traffic in LA because of its frequent street closures. Really, the only things going for it are some cool buildings and the subway, to permit relatively easy escape to the nice parts of town. (Hell, NoHo, at the north end of the Red Line, is architecturally much uglier than Hollywood, but at least it isn’t overrun by tourists or plagued by Tehran-grade traffic.)
Beverly Hills is supposedly really nice, but I’ve never been there, and knowing what I do about its denizens, like Paris Hilton, I don’t particularly care to stop by.
Even more overrated than Hollywood is Las Vegas. Atlantic City, most of which is a piece-of-shit old slum, at least has decent weather most of the year, some residual architectural coherence and grace, spatial coherence and a general atmosphere of livability. Las Vegas, on the other hand, simply would not exist in its current form without hyper-automobility, and not just on account of the heat. Its downtown is reminiscent of the God-awful urban shopping centers that were built in the ruins of postwar West Berlin, and the Strip has the same proportions as a line of Khrushchev-era housing estates in the suburbs of Moscow, minus the trees. Also, the town is infested with the sleaziest sort of New Yorkers. It’s an architectural and human train wreck.
My Mom got liver cancer about 20 years ago. Elected not to be treated. The hospice people were wonderful.
Living in California in the early 70s… For about 3 or 4 years. I think it’s something young folks should do. Go somewhere entirely different. Live for awhile. I wasn’t very impressed with Hollywood, but did think it would be interesting to take a room for a week on Hollywood and Vine (I think that was the intersection) and just hang out the window and watch the passing freak show.
I lived mostly in different places around Orange County. Didn’t care for it much. Not much but freeways, shopping centers and housing tracts. The last year I was down there, I lived in Long Beach, which I did like. It had an identifiable downtown and a great transit system. Some high points were San Onofre State Beach. And, I really liked to spend time in San Juan Capistrano. Other than St. John’s Day when the damn swallows come back and the place is crawling with tourists, the place is deserted. At least, it was then.
I haven’t been back since. Frankly, being a native Pacific Northwesterner, I missed the rain. I often wonder what has become of my old stomping grounds, and Arellano’s books (“Orange County A Personal History” and “Ask a Mexican.”) have filled in some of the gaps.
Currently, I live in Centralia, Washington. The downtown looks like something out of Edward Hopper. It’s one of those places James Kunstler holds hope for in the long emergency. But right now, it’s dying and I’m getting out. The locals won’t support the downtown (although there’s a lot of lip service paid to “buy local.”)
So, by the end of January, my used bookstore will be gone, and I’ll be living out in the country. 15 minutes out of Chehalis, which is the next town over. I’ve been living (camping out) in the back of my bookstore. The building was originally an old theatre, built in 1903. Quit a bit of the superstructure is left, in back and above.
When people ask what I’m going to be doing (inquiring minds want to know … not that it’s any of their business) I say I’m moving to the woods, becoming a hermit and will grow potatoes. Probably not too far off the mark.
We had a mostly good experience with hospice, too, with two exceptions. The minor problem was that Hospice of Humboldt was overseen by a single physician who routinely made diagnoses and ordered treatments without a prior good faith examination, which is a clear breach of medical ethics. The much more serious problem was that we had to all but strangle the nurses to get them to lay off the opiates. There was no getting it into their heads that we wanted minimal pain treatment on an as-needed basis, not a massive final snowjob. Apparently hospice has been loading its patients on megadoses of opiates since its founding, sometimes less as a well-considered regimen than as a reflex encouraged by an unhealthy fascination with death. On the other hand, home hospice beat any nursing home option hands down in terms of the quality of life that it gave Grandma in her final weeks.
I’ve only passed through Centralia on I-5 and on the train, but from these occasional glimpses it doesn’t look very promising. In a lot of ways it appears to be merely a wetter version of any number of wretched, washed-up towns in the Coal Country of Northeastern PA, the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys or the Adirondacks. As it happens, for practically my whole life I’ve been familiar with Jim Kunstler’s base, Saratoga Springs, and extremely familiar with the area from Glens Falls north to Schroon Lake and east to Ticonderoga. Jim is often accused of crying wolf about the rising tide of vulgarity, meanness and general uselessness in American culture. This negativity may sound shrill in more functional parts of the country, but it is completely understandable coming from anyone who lives well within an hour’s drive of Albany, Schuylerville, and Glens Falls, and an hour or two from countless wretched Adirondack backwaters whose grotesque degradation I haven’t confirmed but can confidently infer from the rotten white trash company that my late maternal grandmother kept.
Your description of the abandonment and decay of downtown Centralia is similar to what I’ve observed in Glens Falls, Rensselaer and, most starkly in recent years, in Chestertown. The impressive thing about Chestertown is that even though it has a number of evidently prosperous downtown businesses, much of its business district has the appearance of a High Plains ghost town in the making. Very inauspicious.
Just today, my dad and I drove by the old house just north of downtown Glens Falls where two dear friends of my maternal grandmother’s had lived for thirty years. This couple were practically the only classy, gracious personal friends my grandmother kept in the final decade of her life. When they lived there, their house and their neighborhood had an air of prosperity, stability and order that was missing from a huge part of the North Country; this afternoon, I noticed an awful lot more dilapidation than I remembered from the 1980s and ’90s.
Of course, all sorts of wretched architectural garbage has been built all over the Glens Falls suburbs, particularly in Queensbury. As a result, Aviation, Quaker, Bay and US 9 from Aviation through Lake George are all prone to afternoon traffic gridlock worse than many major surface streets in the Silicon Valley. These aren’t exactly shitty or ill-planned roads, either; they’re just overwhelmed by idiotic urban planning. As a case in point, there’s a very visible but underused bike path to nowhere running at a diagonal on a well-designed and well-built bridge over Quaker Road just west of the Hannaford supermarket. (Hannaford is sort of a hybrid of Safeway, Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, rivaling Wal-Mart in scale. It’s the best grocery store around here, and one of the most popular.) As the diagonal alignment and the very gentle, smooth banking on each side of the bridge suggest, this right-of-way was built for a railroad. Specifically, it was built for a trolley that ran between downtown Glens Falls and downtown Lake George. Offhand, I’d guess that maybe a quarter of the locals are aware that there used to be a trolley behind the Hannaford site, but pretty much everyone is familiar with the dumbass short bus dressed up as a trolley that the local transit authority runs between Glens Falls and Lake George.
When Kunstler complains that American aesthetics have gone to hell in a hand basket, a brief look around Queensbury is powerful corroborating testimony. It’s hard to exaggerate how inhospitable Queensbury’s newer commercial strips are.
One ominous thing that I’ve noticed about the Centralia area is that it appears to be within the cultural orbit of Fort Lewis. I’ve noticed the same sort of degraded white trash augmenting their penises by driving jacked-up crew cabs. My visits to Dupont, Fort Lewis and Spanaway starting in the summer of 2008 have often left me in despair for the future of our military, because the overwhelmingly military and military-dependent populations of these places look like certified dregs of society. A family friend there, an active-duty captain in the Army Medical Corps, had a succinct explanation for these people: “Those, my friend, are the enlisted.” I hope he’s right that that sort of belligerence, idiocy and trashiness hasn’t diffused upward into the officer corps; it’s scary enough that it infects a noticeable portion of our military at all.
I like you’re writing because I’m intensely curious about “out there.” I don’t travel at all anymore. Not for a long time. All my friends in Portland, died out. About 8 years ago I spent a week in Boise (clean, well organized and buttoned down.) When I meet people who travel, I always ask what it’s like … what’s going on, “out there in America.” I very rarely get a thoughtful answer.
I read “road” books. William Least Heat Moon (“Blue Highways”, etc.) and Nerburn (“Road Angels”.) But things are unraveling so quickly, now.
I don’t really notice a military presence in Centralia. Oh, we have an armory up on the hill and the Guard does a week-end once a month. But that’s about it. I worked in our Yelm Branch library (35 minutes north and east of here). Lots of military families live there. The sense I get is mostly Lakewood, Tacoma, Tenino, Rainier, Yelm. We’re just a little too far south to be impacted by Ft. Lewis.
What I have noticed the last couple of years is a number of young vets around minus a leg or arm. They have recently opened a Vet center here. Basic medical to psychological. There is a Veteran’s Museum. I guess what I’m trying to say is that there isn’t an active duty military presence here. But, a retired military presence. From all wars back to WWII. When guys get together that don’t know each other, after playing “who’s your people” then they lapse into their military histories.
The downtown is about 2 1/2 miles off I-5. You got a more accurate look from the train. That station is just a block from my store. Of course, you were looking at the backs of the buildings. The fronts are quit nice. Very Edward Hopper. Sunsets light up the old bricks in a spectacular way.
Here’s my local white trash story. Two young men were on the sidewalk in front of my store. I had the transom open, so I could hear they’re conversation. They were in their late 20s. They were having a friendly pissing contest to see who could trump who. After covering the progress of their various disability claims, which gyms they worked out in and where they drank, what kind of dogs they had, it was pretty much a draw. Cars were not discussed, as they either could not afford vehicles, or more likely, had had their licenses pulled for one reason or another. The guy who came out on top was the one with 8 kids to the other’s 6.
Ooops. Gotta learn to read these things before I post. “…so I could hear THEIR conversation.”
Just read your comment today on CFN. I feel for you, man. I’m almost an orphan, so I really don’t have to do the holiday stuff anymore. And, it is a relief. Just a younger brother and my 92 year old Dad. And, they’re as relieved as I am.
I was just telling someone the other day that since Mom died, we don’t have to do that crap anymore. Terrible attitude, I know.
On cities. Well, if I had to live in a city again, it would probably be Portland. My hometown, by the way. Great transit system and lots of interesting things to see and do. But, I landed here in 1981 and much to my surprise was ready for a small town. After Seattle, Portland and L.A.. My friends often asked why I’d want to live here. 1.) I’ll probably live ten years longer as there’s relatively little stress 2.) I never have to look for a parking spot 3.) my dentist takes payments.
On elevation. Where I am now, the elevation is about 200 feet. Where I’ll be moving to is about 600 feet. A relief, as now I’m in the flood plane. We’ve had two 500 year floods and one 1000 year flood in the past ten years. Every time it rains hard, I get pretty twitchy. Where I’m going, I may be flooded IN, but I won’t be flooded OUT.
So, a little late, I guess I’m doing that boomer thing of moving out to the boonies. But since I’m not very gregarious and rather hermetic, my choice of life will not be an imposition on others. I will have a few farm folk around me, some I’ve known for years. I intend to keep my ears open, my mouth shut and lend a willing pair of hands to whatever needs to be done. If nothing else, I ought to provide them with a little comic relief.
If this call and response it getting to be too much, you can always contact me directly at snapsht@yahoo.com .
Just read your latest piece (9/16/12) and enjoyed it immensely. Not only are you hip (hep?) to what’s happening in American “culture” but you tell it so well.
Kyooshtik (formerly Qshtik)
Thanks, Qshtik. I’m running a month or two behind on other essays that I’ve started or been meaning to start. It’s partly the result of farm work and living in a hippie dump, so that I have to go offsite for access to the internet and a flush toilet. As it is, I can keep up with probably a little over half of the online reading that I want to do. Publishing anything that’s mostly coherent and worthwhile is usually a huge time sink. (This does a lot to explain the garbage that proliferates on “free content” sites and in many newspapers. Even writing something barely readable and severely truncated can take hours.)
Projects that I’m hoping to get started soon, pending some degree of organization on my part, include pieces on drug testing and that stupid Chick-Fil-A imbroglio from over the summer. Stay tuned.
Just read your 6/6/13 blog. Who (what institution of higher learning) is your Alma Mater? I don’t have time to go back over your previous and rather longish blogs to discover it. Was it in Philly or on the west coast?
Qshtik
Hey AMR, it’s been almost 6 months since your last post. When can we expect more?
Q. Shtik