Mr. Irrelevant

Phone rings, at about 7 p.m. It’s one of Wife’s friends.

“Hey Bookfraud, just checking in to see how Wife is doing,” the friend says. “See how she’s feeling.”

I say that Wife is feeling as well as can be expected, given she’s going to give birth in a week or two. She’s in the bathroom, can’t talk.

“Great! Just have her give me a call.”

Phone rings again, at about 7:30. We’re eating dinner and let the voicemail pick up. “Hi! It’s Wife’s Friend Number 2! How are you guys? You must be so excited now! I just wanted to check in and see how Wife is doing? Is there anything I can do to help? Anyway, give me a call! Bye!”

Phone rings again, at about 7:45. Fully knowing what is coming, I hand the receiver to Wife. “Oh, hi!” she says to Friend Number 3. “Things are fine! We’re getting pretty excited. Me? I’m feeling fine.”

And so it goes as we hurdle towards our final day as a married, childless couple. The phone rings (and rings and rings), and it inevitably will be someone asking about Wife. Her friends, her family; my friends, my family. They don’t ask, “Hey, Bookfraud, how are you doing?” They don’t ask, “Hey Bookfraud, are you feeling OK?” And they don’t say, “Bookfraud, are you sick of everybody ignoring you? Just wait. It’s going to get a hell of a lot worse.”

I know what they are saying. For though I am capable of great acts of self-delusion — it’s what keeps me writing — I am not blind to the fact that from now until the baby is born and several weeks afterwards, I am just an appendage, a barrier to be overcome. Everyone cares about the woman carrying the baby, for it is she who ultimately holds the hopes and desires of everyone around her; i.e. grandparents to be.


Lewis: doesn't look like a carrot

Nobody really cares about the baby seeder. My job is essentially done and the worthiness for the rest of my life depends upon my performance as a provider, father, and fellow who just doesn’t get in the way.

My cousin, who has two children of his own, put it well when he said that my mother and my in-laws will suddenly have a Whole Lotta Love for this infant, who, as he put it, is substitute for the infant stolen from them when I grew up.

Michael Lewis, the author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, and several other amazing tomes of non-fiction, wrote how once his wife (Tabitha Soren, the former MTV talking head) entered the hospital in labor, his job was, essentially, to get the hell out of the way. No matter how many times he told dear Tabs that she could do this, the pain was going away, or that she could make it through this, the world of nurses and doctors and relatives treated him like an elevator operator.

He was there, helping people get on their way, but he really wasn’t necessary:

[U]p until the moment the child is born, the husband in the delivery room is in an odd predicament. He's been admitted to the scene of the crisis but given no serious purpose. He's the Frenchman after the war resolution has passed.

Or, as he also put it, the father in the delivery room is an actor searching for a role — the “carrot in the school play.”

I would extend this metaphor to the weeks leading up to the “glorious event” (as one of my co-workers put it). I might as well be in Sierra Leone or Indonesia. It’s not that people don’t care about my perilous mental or physical health, but really, they don’t care. It’s all about Mama.

My own family is of the same mindset. My mother: “How’s Wife feeling?” My brother, “How’s Wife feeling?” My sister, “How’s Wife feeling?”


Endgame

If you are a parent or perceptive in the least, the joke is on me — and Wife. For, although Wife will still get plenty of sympathy I the coming months over her recovery, breast feeding duties, and days when she is alone in charge of Baby’s care, soon, that sympathy will fade. People’s concern will center on the child. Forever. This is not going to change unless I get sick and die. From now on, every friend and family member’s concern will be on Baby, Infant, Toddler, Child, Adolescent, Teenager, College Student, Adult Son of Bookfraud.

The only thing that’s going to matter is if we have the wherewithal to support Child. The only thing that’s going to matter is if we have the wisdom to choose the right schools for Child, if we get him to take piano lessons early enough, and if I can teach him to hit a curveball. Tell me when it gets better.

I Promised Myself

I promised that I would post something every day until Baby Raoul is born. This could be any day now, but it could be two or three weeks.

The post below got sidelined for reasons as picayune as they are dull.

What to say? I'm reading banal baby books, and my brain has turned to mush.

My eyes waver when open up something substantial.

Wife is reading "Special Topics in Calamity Physics," which makes me want to throw up. (The author's success, that is).

I still despise George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Republicans in general.

Some things never change.

Whence Thou Art a Snob

Anybody who knows me will say, “That Bookfraud despises pretentious people, writing, and art. That’s probably why he can’t sit through a ballet, video installations, and ‘Jackass 2.’”

Those people would be right. I hate pretense, for the simple reason that most of the time, I don’t get what the bugger is trying to say, making me look stupid. I’d rather be hit with a sharply hit line drive in the face than look stupid. So I’ll just ignore the whole thing altogether.

Hand-in-hand with pretense goes snobbery. If you don’t understand a work of art, thinks the snob, you must be uncivilized or just plain dumb.

I’ve been cogitating on this ever since I started seeing raves for Joanna Newsom’s “Ys,” a 2006 CD full of long, digressive tracks filled with heavy orchestration, harps and oblique but poetic verse.

Wondering what the fuss was about — “Ys” seemed to be on every “Best of 2006” list out there — I downloaded a couple of tracks.

To say this was difficult to listen to is like saying it’s hard to listen to the screams in a psych ward. Newsom is undeniably talented with the harp, but her compositions head towards atonal, her lyrics are digressive, and she has a voice that sounds as if it was born from the unholy union of Kate Bush and a hillbilly. It’s like listening to Schoenberg while a train screeches to a stop.

It’s pretense personified. Only snobs (i.e. critics) could get into this crap.

Ah, but you've probably spotted my hypocrisy. Only someone who is a snob would even mention Schoenberg (see extremely constipated-looking man, below), and only a person with amazing pretense would even compare Newsom to a classically trained composer. That’s my weakness. When it comes to music, I’m a snob. And I hate myself for it.


Twelve tones and 1,000 broken eardrums

I was one of those insufferable teenage boys who defined his friends by what graced their turntables. If you hated The Beatles, the Stones, Dylan, or the Clash, I probably would not have been your friend. You just didn’t have taste.

This snobbery got worse through college, as I learned more about music, proving that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I went so far as to write embarrassing letters to friends why they had to listen to the DKs and surrounding oneself with bad music was a living death.

As I expanded my horizons, my sense of superiority grew with it. You don’t like Coltrane? You don’t even own any Coltrane? Or even any Charlie Parker, Lionel Hampton, or Dizzy Gillespie? You troglodyte!

But it wasn’t until started going to the symphony in my mid-20s that my snootiness grew completely out of control. I signed up for a concert subscription, bought CD after CD, and really listened to them.

Today, classical music is the only kind I ever attend in concert — about five to ten times a year, on average. I’ve probably been to the symphony or recitals about 50 or 60 times.

Of course, I would never mention such a number gratuitously in order to show how cultured and intellectually superior I am over knuckle-dragging Neanderthals who wouldn’t know a concerto from a symphony from a Paris Hilton album.

This is pretty strong stuff from a fellow who can't play an instrument or read music.

I’ve talked about my hatred of pretentious or humorless fiction. And I know I’ve blogged about music ad nauseum, to the point that if you read between the lines, you can clearly see a nose pointed skyward. But the more I consider my youth — an exercise that I do frequently as the brat approaches birth — I realize that much of my worldview is shaped, for better or worse, by music.

Rock concerts and LPs sustained me through my sexless teenage years; a piano concerto played a role in my courting of Wife.

But what really strikes me is how much music plays a huge role in my writing. My novel is, essentially, about music and youth. The protagonist plays in a rock band, hangs out at blues clubs, and finds that is life is defined by a certain swivel-hipped fellow from Tupelo, Miss.

There’s more and more of this crap. Several short stories feature song lyrics (invented or existing) or entire scenes are set up with notes in the background. One story was predicated on the protagonist hearing “Also Sprach Zarathrusta” while he’s on hold. Another was titled “Sinatra Saves Stephen.”

So I come full circle here. Perhaps I judge Ms. Newsom too harshly; after all, many of her fans admit that her singing takes a bit of getting used to. It can’t be that all those critics who put “Ys” on their “Top 10 of 2006” are all wrong.


What the hell

I’ll probably give it another chance, otherwise, I risk being a reverse snob, fearing that what I cannot understand is inferior.

Or I can just blast “It's a Long Way to the Top (If You Want to Rock and Roll)” at 11, and to say, to hell with Joanna Newsom.

Excellent choice, Bookfraud.

It Makes Me Sick

I thought about calling this post “Illness as Metaphor.” However, that would represent a kind of intellectual plagiarism, as well as skirting the matter, and I have read about as much Susan Sontag as I have Vladimir Polensk Isneninov (out of print).

There’s no gentle or cerebral way to put it: I suffer from frequent illnesses of the bacterial variety, and I will probably not be relieved of this condition for the rest of my years.

These colds— attacks of sinusitis, to be precise — have plagued me for most of my adulthood. Though one can take preventive steps to avoid contracting them, once I get sick, it’s Mucous City, Exhaustionville, City of Slug.

When I get sick, it’s also a great excuse not to write, not to blog, not to visit other’s blogs. And I they can help me ignore world poverty, the war in Iraq, global warming or any other inconvenient truths that my mess up my fragile psyche.

As Wife heads down the road to delivery and I down the road to impending happiness and responsibility, I realize how much this tendency to become ill makes me rather melancholy. I’ve been able to attend work, and been managing to post to the blog, but the rest of blogworld has been a void — no visits, no comments, nothing.

I catch sinus infections at predictable times: changes in the weather, lack of sleep, time spent in arid places (after four days in Las Vegas without a humidifier, I came back ill. So much for what happens there staying there. Does that slogan also mean VD?).


Sinusitis will turn you into this man

The latest such incident comes after a trip to visit my wife’s family over the holidays. I awaited at a gate full of screaming children and rode in an airplane with recirculated air. I slept in dry apartment and would wake up feeling as if someone had an extremely large finger up my nose. I ate a lot of food saturated in fat and drank at least one too many beers each night.

By the time we returned, I couldn’t breathe out of my nose. Each night I slept with open mouth, and I often I awoke with the sensation that somebody had been dumping sand down my throat.

For those uninitiated with sinus infections, they are a beast of a particular nature. Not really a “cold,” but not the flu, either, they are marked by heavy congestion, exhaustion, and massive amounts of mucous (of such a particular green-brown-yellow tint that trying to describe it would do it no justice).

The thing that sucks about getting a sinus infection is that it lays you low for a couple of weeks, but not badly enough to miss work. It makes you unproductive, listless, and stupid, which makes for a great imitation of the incompetent managerial class. One is essentially transformed into a life-support system for a snot factory.

About a dozen years ago, things had gotten so bad that I was getting sick every month. I had been to doctors – many doctors, each who had his own, incorrect theory about the source of my misery. I had allergies. Asthma. Chronic fatigue syndrome. I probably would have been diagnosed with mad cow had it been in vogue.

Finally, it occurred to me that perhaps an otolaryngologist (you know, an ear, nose, throat dude) just might be the right person to see. It was found that I had polyps blocking my nasal passages that would require surgery. The surgery was a success, and the frequency and severity of my colds decreased. But the sinus infections never went away completely.

The problem with sinusitis is that it lays both your body and mind inoperable. You can spend hours staring at a computer screen, having forgotten why you even turned on the computer in the first place.


Germ warfare

I imagine that these bouts of infections will become more frequent after our son is born, being that parental sleep becomes as precious as that stupid ring Gollem kept wheezing over. I’m already worried that I will never have time to write once the child has taken over our lives, and that I am likely to be ill much of the time makes me more neurotic still.

Then again, they say early parenthood is like feeling you’re sick all the time. Perhaps this has been this cosmic training, my body’s way of preparing me for fatherhood, all the suffering for all those years having a real purpose in life.

OK, now that has been settled, I have to blow my nose for two minutes straight.

Altered States

I was fully prepared to devote an entry to a topic utterly revolting, infantile, and repulsive, but I thought, ah, what the hell, let's try something different.

It has been a well-repeated (if not proven) factoid that the longer a couple is together, the more they look alike. This is probably why Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock are now Splitsville, though I not know if Pam dumped him because she worried about morphing into her husband one day, or if Kid Rock had nightmares that enormous mountains of silicone would one day form on his chest.

Also, if one does tend to look like their partner over time, I imagine that all the 22-yearold Russian supermodels with 80-year-old millionaire boyfriends are headed for a bad ending, though Viagra has already made their pretty lives pretty miserable.

If Wife started looking like me, but I would not leave her, although our sex life would be kaput, for I might start thinking I was making love to myself, and you shouldn’t make love to someone you hate.

Although our physical appearances are in no threat of converging, of late our creative states are similar, and sadly for the worst. I’m uninspired, she’s uninspired, and this makes for a lot of bad writing. Wife is in the desperate race to finish her novel before she gives birth in a few months, and I am in the desperate race to figure out what to do with my novel before I die, which may happen any day between now and 2060.

It’s not just that we’re unhappy with our respective output; it’s that we’re just not feeling the urge to create. Nothing I read is inspiring me, ditto for Wife, and about the only thing that moves either of us is music. Which we don’t compose.


Required reading

(Wife can write circles around yours truly. For her, a slump means her writing is merely excellent; for me, merely excrement.)

This lack of creativity can come across in other unpleasant manifestations. Wife is angry at me for some supposed household infractions, including (but not limited to) lack of initiative in cleaning, cooking, conducting “research” for forthcoming baby, and other imagined and real offenses that all have to do with domesticity.

I can get rather pissy at Wife for her getting pissy at me, and the cycle of love-anger-love begins anew. Much of this anguish concerns the onset of Wife’s pregnancy, and the natural fears that motherhood will extinguish her career — if I don’t help out, she’ll be swamped and depressed, unable to ever write again.*

By all accounts of friends who have experienced the miracle of birth, writing fiction does not exactly take precedence when Junior is projectile vomiting while soiling through several thousand diapers a day. A parent’s free time is when baby is napping, and if you are lucky, you’ll be napping as well. When it comes to writing, the first six months — well, fuggitaboutit.

It is this certainty that should make both Wife and I writing fiends instead of neurotic masses of indecisive chum. Of course, we’ll get back into the swing of things, perhaps before retirement age.

Already, well before my child is born, I am envisioning a fatherly talk I’ll have with my son (ultrasound confirmed it’s a wiener). Such a talk often entails bromides on telling the truth, never getting into cars with strangers, or the unfathomable mysteries of sex, which, to be honest, I probably should not talk about, lest I ruin the kid’s sex life forever.

In any case, I will be direct, and loving, and fair: “Son, the world is full of great possibility. There is so much to learn, to see, to do. Don’t let anyone say you can’t do something, and always believe in yourself. Always follow your heart — you can be a doctor, a musician, an artist, a scientist. Whatever you want, you can achieve, just as you put your mind to it.

But for God’s sakes, don’t become a fucking narcissistic neurotic writer like your old man. Please? I don’t want to kick your ass over this. Thank you. You’re a good son.”

*(This is where the disgusting part was supposed to be. I was going to write about my newfound spirit of assistance in the household arts to help Wife through this difficult stretch. Borrowing from an infamous Saturday Night Live skit from the 1970s that never made it to air, I was going to write about a great new dish that I could cook following the birth of our child. Of course, I speak of placenta. Placenta burgers, placenta stroganoff, placenta Wellington.


It’s what's for dinner

And if you just can’t make it with placenta, you have to use what that SNL parody was selling: Placenta Helper! (“Wow, Mom, that’s great placenta!” “Oh, son, it’s not just placenta – it’s Placenta Helper!” “Can we have it again tomorrow?” “No, silly – you’ll have to wait for another brother or sister first!”)

What’s more disturbing is that there are people who actually keep and cook their placenta. Let’s eat!)

Thomas the Money-Making Engine

Over Thankgiving at the family home, I was exposed to a major problem that threatens households across our nation. It has nothing to do with breast feeding, reasonable day care, or the price of Huggies. Nor is it about affordable health care or killing several innocent adults to get your hands on a PlayStation 3. It is something more sinister.

The rot to which I refer is called “Thomas the Tank Engine.” And we have literature to blame.

For the uninitiated—that is, for those without children—this Thomas plague looks like just another innocent juvenile obsession. “Thomas” is a series of children’s books featuring a steam train engine with round eyes and moon face. He and his train “friends” reside on the island of Sodor (insert joke here), and have adventures about hauling freight, people, and farm animals (another joke here).

Humans and other anthropomorphized vehicles also reside on Sodor, which, upon close inspection, is quite like the island known as Great Britain, from where Thomas originated.


You can pee out of his face

This British Invasion is as bad as the War of 1812, and not nearly as entertaining as the Beatles. It has taken over the hearts and minds of children across the United States, infiltrating their souls with annoying songs and consumer lust to make Imelda Marcos blush. Specifically, it has taken over the life of my young nephew, who has been thick in the Heart of Darkness known as Sodor Island for at least half of his 42 months on earth. He plays with the trains, he watches the show, he hides in his Thomas the Tank Engine tent—it's all Thomas, all the time.

You see, the books spawned a television show, first in England, and now in the U.S., along with Thomas train sets, which involve hundreds of miniature trains. Thousands of trains. Not to mention tracks, buildings, and other model-train-esque apparitions, both in wood and metal versions (Twice the Cost! Twice the Fun!). This ignores Thomas kiddie wear, bed sets, clocks, temporary tattoos, toenail clippers, and enema kits.

Google “Thomas the Tank Engine” and you are confronted with 1.36 million hits, many for buying Thomas the Tank Engines and Friends Craptastic Crap. (Personally, in the name of verisimilitude, I think they should have Thomas-brand anthracite coal, a three-fingered, one-eyed engineer action figure, and a soot-covered boiler doll that sings, “I’ve been working on the fucking railroad, all my fucking days.”)


“I transform into a wallet-sucking monster”

This didn’t happen in a vacuum. An Englishman by the name of Rev. W. Awdry started the book series in 1945. Since then, “a generation of children have grown to love the cheeky engine and friends on the Island of Sodor,” proclaims the Random House Web site. Apparently, the books just weren’t enough. Somebody named Britt Allcroft turned “Thomas the Tank Engine” into a television show in the 1980s, which, Random House says without a shred of irony, “can now be seen in over 120 countries and inspired a multimillion dollar ancillary entertainment empire.”

That’s it. It’s not about literature, it’s about maintaining the multimillion dollar ancillary entertainment empire! Rule Britannia!

This rant probably stems from the fact that I will soon be a father, and I am already making plans to keep this smoke-blowing monstrosity as far away from my child as possible. Of course, as parents will gladly point out, this is a futile endeavor. And if it isn’t Thomas, it’ll be Barney. Or Barbie. Or Carburetor Al, or something yet to be devised in a marketing guru’s evil dreams.

I’m sure the Thomas books are probably great reads. But they've turned children's literature into product, aimed at the segment of the population most likely to Screaming Fits for Ancillary Junk. There are plenty of Dr. Seuss dolls and, of course, some great cartoons, but had Theodor Geisel lived to see “The Cat in the Hat” or “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas” into live-action movies and Burger King figurines, he would have just let Sam I Am stick a fork in his heart rather than into green eggs and ham.


Resistance is futile

Every childhood pleasure is super-sized and turned into a commodity. It would behoove me to just accept this state of affairs, as I am sure that our little one will get hooked on something, and I guess it’s better to be obsessed Thomas the Tank Engine than Bratz dolls, violent video games, or bad books (the worst).

Now I have to go and buy more Pre-Baby Crap and complain about it on my blog.

Ah, it’s good to be back.

Up With Food, Down With Foodies

Like most any man crashing into middle age, yours truly could afford to shed a few pounds, especially considering that my knees and back are slowly disintegrating into a fine powder-like substance one associates with ground chalk.

Of course, I want to be in good health when Wife gives birth next year, so it would pay for me to lose weight. As an exacting, thorough researcher, I have discovered the following fool-proof, scientifically proven, guaranteed-not-to-fail weight-loss techniques: the Palm Beach Diet, the Akins Diet, the Ultra Lipo Lean diet, the Laze Diet System, the Phat Predator diet, the Loose the Bums Diet, and, my favorite, something called “Zumba by Beto,” which has the distinction of sounding like the name of an Orc in the Slavic-language version of “The Lord of the Rings.”

I imagine that in this pantheon of diets is the idea that if one expends more calories than one consumes, weight will indeed be lost. The simple plan for me would be to lay off the nightly six-packs of Schlitz Special Reserve.

Research apparently posits that low-calorie diets will help prolong life, with some adherents to this philosophy eating 1,500 calories a day, though most people on such limited nourishment are so weak that they can’t think of anything except their next meal, have stopped paying attention to the world at large, and will be hit by a bus.

(And if it turns out tomorrow morning that the bad guys keep control of Congress, I’ll put on 10 pounds this week, cashing in my Dunkin’ Donuts gift certificates.)


She never went to Taco Taco Taco Bell

Diet plans generally do not inspire great literature—Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” aside—but food and drink does, all the way back to Eve pulling that damn apple off the tree, continuing through that first Roman who said “in vino veritas,” through Rabelais, that fine master of excess, and so on.

But “food writing”—non-fiction about the “art of eating” and other such swill—that’s another rodeo altogether. I’ve always thought that food and wine reviewing must be one of the hardest of all critical pursuits. You can only describe how something tastes in so many ways until fresh adjectives become scarcer than truffles; I would get stuck after “hot and spicy,” “spicy like,” and “spicy spice.”

I imagine there are great sentences in describing the joys of food, but while I love to eat and drink, I am no connoisseur of food and wine writing. If something tastes good, I like it, if it tastes bad, I hate it, and no amount of verbal bullying is going to make me enjoy olive paste or curried tomato chutney.

There was a time when I met in succession several comely women who said they wanted to quit their professional job and become a food writer, “like M.F.K. Fisher,” who wrote several memorable tomes on food. I hadn’t read the estimable Ms. Fisher, but this “I wanna write like M.F.K.” mania, which seemed to have peaked in the early 1990s, was replaced with “I wanna write a screenplay” craze, then “I wanna write children’s books,” and finally “I wanna write a blog (and get a book deal),” all of which were elaborate ways of saying “I wanna do anything but spend one more fucking day as a lawyer.”

One detects the faintest whiff of superiority in such types, especially those who declare themselves “foodies.” Not only does the word make no sense, it is one of the Five Worst Words of All Time, and anyone describing themselves a “foodie” to my face is in grave danger of having their lunch money forcibly removed from their person.


Foodie-like snobbery+wine=raging alcoholic

Calling oneself a “foodie” probably means, “I really enjoy food, much more than others, to the point of obsession.” I guess that makes a lover of Bach or Black Flag a “musicie,” and, if obsession is the standard, by nature the male half of the human race are “fuckies.” Me, I’m a “musicie fuckie readie writie sportsie combat-robotie,”* and in a few months, “daddyie.”

Which brings us back to the whole diet thing. To be fair, as Wife grows into round tumescence, I should probably hop on the Lose LBS Express. Still, my weight is probably the least of my worries. There’s baby crap to buy, wills to write, insurance to consider. There’s birthing classes to take and many more trips to the doctor. And many books on parenthood to read, hopefully none authored by an unhappy lawyer in dear need of a career change.

*After the original posting, I remembered another one: "tittie."