Author: Stagger Lee

I has a Want.

Seriously, I know it’s ridiculous, but you couldn’t get this stuff in Alabama in the mid-80s. Or two-tone. Or new wave. Or, in fact, any of the stuff that I could have really used half a lifetime ago when I wasn’t even remotely too old for this shit.

I know I’ve written at length about my rejection of the whole “rejuvenile” phenomenon, but I think it’s a little different when you’re discovering all the things you missed out on. I got kickball, I got cupcakes, I got everything you probably need to get out of childhood. To be honest, much as I grumble, you could make a case that I got most of what I should expect to get out of adolescence, too. Especially when you take into account how much Hollywood lies to you, and that real life is nothing like locker movies. (Shame, too, because I got a lot out of Heathers.) But I have discovered a lot of stuff that was out there at the right time – only it never got past the Wallace Line, and thus I didn’t stumble across it for ten, fifteen, twenty years.

OK, maybe it really is never too late to have a happy childhood. Maybe too sad, too pitiful, and/or too ridiculous, but not too late. Which means the only real question is….can I get away with 8-eyelet oxblood 1460s?

“…a depressingly high rate of self-destruction prevails among thise who ponder about the South and put down their reflections in books.”

– V. O. Key (pray for us), Southern Politics in State and Nation, 1949

Good ol’ Valdimer Orlando – patron and father of contemporary Southern studies, whose portrait hung in the study center when I was in grad school. He had it dead right. Suicide is an occupational hazard in Southern studies in much the same way that, say, black lung is for coal miners or blown knee ligaments are in the WNBA. Not hard to see why, either: consider the words of W.J. Cash, whose book is the first wellspring of all study of Southern politics – and who hanged himself in Mexico City in 1941.

In the mind of the South, any sort of deviation from the prescribed norm is suspect at best and to be violently opposed at worst. It’s the sort of thing that leads to preachers railing from the pulpit against Harry Potter and Dungeons & Dragons. It also leads to things like massive underfunding of special education (especially gifted programs), bulldozers running over Dixie Chicks albums, the school-sanctioned LGB club at Birmingham-Southern College having to meet in undisclosed locations, and a 40% statewide vote against doing away with the laws against mixed-race marriage…in the year 2000.

The old man didn’t care for it – if you came around at the right time, like say election night in 1990*, you could hear him grumbling about the “redneck mentality” that kept Alabama in the basement – the hard kernel deep in the cracker soul saying “ain’t no man living can make me do nothin’.” He knew that at some point, you have to give a little to get along in a civilized society, and that eventually you’ll have to allow for something that isn’t exactly your thing. And that at some level, you have to have a social process and respect for the order that creates – and eventually, you will have to enforce that order.

Which leads to one of my favorite stories. I wouldn’t say the old man was a crusader in the field of civil rights or anything, but he was a Kennedy delegate in his college’s mock convention in 1960. And so, when he was teaching a history class in 1963, and word came over the intercom that the President was shot dead in Dallas, and one student let out a cheer, the old man – almost eight years into severe chronic rheumatoid arthritis – bodily jerked the kid out of his desk with one hand and backhanded the bejesus out of him with the other. Now in 1963, JFK was about as popular as cancer in the state of Alabama, but I can assure you that nobody in 8th grade ever again thought it was appropriate to publicly celebrate the death of a President.

I am – as if there were any doubt – my father’s son. And we were both definitely Lawful Neutral.

* It does bum me out that the last state election he experienced was the return of Fob James. Had the assorted medications and resulting kidney failure not donked him off, I am sure he would have been dancing a Fred-Sanford-esque jig on election night 1998, when the Fob was drummed unceremoniously out of office in favor of a Catholic of Jewish descent.

Back from another first-Sunday-in-May trip to the old patch. Given that next month is ten years since the old man passed, you’d think I would have been in a much darker mood – and that even before the layover that lasted four extra hours because United Airlines momentarily forgot that an airplane needs a crew to fly. And yet I made it mostly OK.

Part of that came from getting to spend the afternoon Sunday with my double-second-cousin and his lovely bride. (His grandfather and mine were two brothers who married a pair of sisters from up the holler, thus the double.) I suspect that this is going to be a recurring feature of spring: drinks on the veranda somewhere in Southside coupled with a rousing game of “Can You Top This,” embarrassing Southern family edition. He won this year, hands down, on a matter of elective biology too heinous to repeat here.

And then, today, after packing up a lot of stuff that should have been much more emotionally trying (my dad’s class rings, my mom’s original wedding bands, $270 worth of the family silver coinage and just try sliding THAT past airport security), I was actually glancing through my baby books. You know, the ones with all my test scores and early report cards and first cut hair and first lost tooth and medical history and blah blah blah.

And apparently – no wonder I forgot this – I seem to have left a trail of urine in every mattress from here to South Carolina for the first six years of my life. To the point that they had me on two kinds of drugs – one for the wee problem and one for “nerves.”

Now, I think doctoring was different back then. I was born on the 1st and didn’t come home ’til the 6th. I cannot FATHOM any hospital keeping mother and child for five days when it was a regular uneventful birth with no complications and nothing gone awry. I mean, that’s longer than my first niece stayed in the hospital and she was at least five or six weeks premature. When I had my tonsils out in January of ’76, in an attempt to do something about my chronic rhinitis, I was in the hospital for TWELVE DAYS. I’ve had family members laid up for REAL medical issues – serious lighting candles at Mass stuff – that were in and out of the hospital in half that. Medicine has changed, kids, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

Anyway, the older I get, the better I was. I say this because I saw various test scores, report cards, the original letter that gravely informed my parents that I was eligible for special education services at a different elementary school than I had been slated to attend. And apparently, I peaked around age 6 in terms of being light-years smarter than my peers. There was stuff written in those evaluations that was just embarrassing to read (and I’m not talking about the “He especially enjoys Gilligan’s Island” comment).

So I guess the moral of the story is this: if you want to be the kind of superstar that would make Kanye West weep with humility, you can’t bother yourself about getting up to have a piss.

I don’t think I’m going to be let to try this at home.

Auburn Crocs.

Bullet points tonight.

• I have over 2000 words already typed and saved…but it’s all on politics, and I’m burnt out. There’s really nothing more to say until the psychodrama of the nomination process plays out. So that stuff will have to wait.

• Interesting speculation tonight that most of the Congressional superdelegates have already made up their minds, and that Obama has most of them – but is slowly dribbling them out in order to maintain the steady uptick in delegate count even in the face of adversity (and incidentally to avoid having them antagonizing potential donors who they need for their own races). If true, then the showrunners for Team Obama are bloody brilliant, more so than even the Begala-Carville tag team in 1992.

• My little Motorola MOTOFONE F3 from back at Christmas has a problem: the battery life is shit. Seriously, the thing will go dead in three days from a full charge…if left alone on a table TURNED OFF. Apparently this is not an uncommon problem. By contrast, my Sony Ericsson Z520a (which is my international-use phone) will last four days with normal use, turned on 24/7 with Bluetooth active. That is absolutely insane. I’ll hang onto the F3 as a backup, certainly, but the days when I was tempted to try carrying it instead of the iPhone are long gone.

• Maybe there’s going to be a new iPhone, maybe there’s not. I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’. However, I feel safe in saying that if there is a new iPhone, and if it does have stuff like 3G or GPS or etc, then there must have been some kind of improvement in battery technology superior to what the original has, or else they have done something extraordinary in terms of power management. Because 3G will suck your battery dry in jig time, which is the sort of thing that would have killed a first-generation product in the marketplace.

• PAUSE FOR FART!

• seriously, if you didn’t see that episode of Graham Norton, well, it was outstanding. Especially when they hauled that guy off on a forklift.

• I sent my grad school ring out for repair and it was received a week ago, and I haven’t heard a peep. I’m starting to get antsy.

• I’m actively seeking a new job. Mainly because the current one, in almost every way that matters, is like two part-time jobs crammed together, with all of the accompanying inconsistencies, conflicts, and utter lack of benefits. I still think I did the right thing to leave my previous job when I did, given that there was no hint that things would get any better (to all accounts, they haven’t) – but I miss things like, oh, feeling like you can afford to call in sick when you’re too weak to get out of bed. Or being able to drink from the water fountain without worrying about how many chemicals and heavy metals you’re ingesting. Or, hell, having an email system with more than two-nines reliability.

• Problem is, I’m not sure what I’m qualified to do at this point. I have about the most useless degree you can have in modern society – in fact, I have two of them – and what I do is constrained by the fact that I’ve spent ten years backing the wrong horse if you’re interested in pursuing an IT career. Not that I regret it for a second – it’s MUCH easier to get into the field the way I did, especially when I did – but it sort of limits my options when I go job hunting. Unless somebody’s willing to pay me to drink and blog all day?

• Not looking forward to the trip south, except for possibly getting to see my cousin and his wife, who are the only people in my side of the family who are remotely like me. But what blows my mind is that once you start north from downtown, you don’t hit another Starbucks for a hundred miles. NOT CISED.

Mainstream sports journalism died last night.

Please join me and the rest of the blogosphere in taking an enormous Duce Staley on the corpse.

Bill Simmons once said that the reason he started blogging – which is basically what he was doing back in the days of the Boston Sports Guy, even if he didn’t realize it at the time – was because he wanted to write about sports, and there were a limited number of slots in the field, held by cranky old guys who were never going to leave the position until six friends carried them out of it by the handles. So he struck out for the Internet in hopes of making something happen for himself. Some say he sold out. I prefer to think of him as our man on the inside.

That’s why guys like Will Leitch, Orson Swindle, and their pale imitators are currently pwning the hell out of the sad-sacks who write the column in your local fishwrap. The bloggers are winning because bits are cheap, publication is just a matter of hanging out a URL, and – in the case of 95% of sports bloggers – they’re not doing it for the kind of wealth that lets them sit on a mound of gold, drinking Cristal out of a stripper’s brassiere. They’re doing it because they really and truly care about the things they write about. They’re not filled with the kind of self-loathing that makes columnists get all serious and one-word-paragraph pompous about “perspective” and “what really matters” everytime something awful happens in the real world. They know exactly what their place in the food chain is – somewhere between the Twinkie and the beef jerky – and unlike the print guys, they don’t have to be any more than that. Spencer Hall knows what’s important – the man’s career is working with international refugees – so when he tallies the scores for the Fulmer Cup and loops together a funk theme for it in Garage Band, he knows how important it is in the grand scheme of things; he doesn’t need some buffet-hoovering J-school washout telling him what truly matters.

We let absolutely anybody vote in this country. The fate of the United States hangs perennially in the hands of 100 million lightly-informed amateurs. The problem is, the print columnists think that what they do somehow demands a higher standard than that. Somehow, they’ve deluded themselves into thinking that they have to set a bar for what is, at the end of the day, the journalistic version of wanking.

Which is why it’s appropriate that their dying yelp came from a man named after the sound a vibrator makes.

* The Supreme Court rules that photo ID can be required in order to vote.
* Government-issued photo ID (other than employee badges for government employees) generally consists of a driver’s license or passport.
* A driver’s license is not free, nor is a passport; a fee is required to obtain same.
* Therefore, a fee is required to vote.
* Amendment 24, US Constitution: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote…shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.”
* Therefore, the Supreme Court has endorsed a patently unconstitutional decision.
* Therefore, the six Justices voting in the affirmative should rightly be impeached and removed from the bench.
* Q. E. mother-!ing D.

“Tolerance, in sum, was pretty well extinguished all along the line, and conformity made a nearly universal law. Criticism, analysis, detachment, all those activities and attitudes so necessary to the healthy development of any civilization, every one of them took on the aspect of high and aggravated treason. Indeed, this is only half to state the fact, for the peculiar effect of the extraordinarily close identification of the individual with the idea of the South, and of the continually sharpening personal outlook, was this: that any questioning or doubting of the South in any respect (and in tis atmosphere of boiling emotion, merely to stand aloof a little was ipso facto to be convicted of such questioning and doubting) was inevitably felt by each loyal Southerner as a questioning and doubting of his immediate ego. Which is to say that, being what he was, he inevitably felt it as a challenge to be resisted with all the enormous pugnacity at his disposal…”

-W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South, 1941

Read this and realize that I got there 15 years ago. The older I get, the better I was, yeah yeah yeah…but I really was good at this once, and I nailed it.

RENAULT: …and what in heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca?

RICK: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.

RENAULT: The waters? What waters? We’re in the desert!

RICK: I was misinformed.

That’s how it begins. They tell you that everything’s going to be so much better once you’re out of school. Once you get to college. Once you get out of college. Once you get out of this stinking town and head for the big city. Once you get out of the rat race. Once you make partner, once you make VP, once you get the star on your shoulder. Everyone – and I mean everyone – perpetuates this lie that at some point, the game comes to an end, and you can sit back on your arse and relish the spoils of victory.

Hell, they convinced me. They convinced me half a dozen times. Everything will be fine once you get to junior high high school college grad school the real world California on staff … Eventually you learn too late, as I did, that Hollywood’s concept of high school and college is NOTHING like reality. Andie doesn’t get Blaine. The laser doesn’t fire. The popular girl doesn’t get run over by a bus. The team loses the big game 65-0 and the struggling striver doesn’t even get into a uniform, let alone on the bench. The nerds get crushed underfoot, if they get noticed at all, and the plain girl with a heart of gold always gets overlooked. Hell, the only true thing that ever happened in a teen movie was that the girl Duckie pined after went off with the popular rich kid instead – and then they queered the whole thing by throwing him a pneumatic blonde as a consolation prize. But I digress.

The point is this: Jonathan Coulton is right. The cake is a lie. No matter how many problems you solve, no matter how many pieces you fit together, no matter how close you think you are to picking the lock – the test never ends, the puzzle is never solved, and you will never escape. You just have to keep chugging along – you never get to see what’s on the other side of the hill, because it just goes up and up and up. The hard part is learning how to cope with it. Which I am sure I will be doing, to an utterly annoying extent, in this very space.

So on that cheerful note…

On the last day of the season, Morton beat Partick Thistle 3-0. This ties them with rival Clyde on 37 points…and gives Morton a one-goal lead on the tiebreaker, goal differential.

And as a result, Morton are guaranteed to stay in the Scottish First Division, while Clyde go into a relegation playoff with the 2, 3, and 4 teams from the Second Division.

Any win you can walk away from…

UP THE TON!!