Hard to Swallow

Got to talking about how, when we were in school, Nathan and I used to eat lunch together. He would eat a sandwich or something with maybe chips or a piece of fruit. Sometimes I guess he’d have a cookie or a cupcake. It used to drive me nuts because he didn’t drink while he ate. He would eat all sorts of foods and take no fluids for the whole hour. I would remark on it pretty much every day.

"How come you never drink anything?" I’d ask.

"I don’t need it" he’d reply.

I thought that was just bizarre. I used to bring people around to watch him eat things without drinking anything: Bags of peanut butter; chocolate bars; sawdust on dry toast.

My mom once told me how, when she was a girl, her parents used to take her over to have dinner at some friend’s house once in a while and no one was allowed to drink at the table in their house. They’d sit there, the whole family, eating chicken or something, and no one was allowed to have a drink.

There weren’t even glasses on the table.

I imagined it as just this long, wheezy, coughy, sticky-mouthed torture hour. I asked my mom why they weren’t allowed to drink and my mom said she thought it had something to do with the parent’s thinking the kids would fill up on liquids and then not eat their dinner.

I’ve never heard of that in people, but once I read how dolphins, because they don’t drink and get all their moisture from the food they eat, can’t distinguish between the sensations of thirst and hunger. So, sometimes, in captivity, they’ll spray a hose into the dolphin’s mouth and it won’t eat for a day or two because it thinks it is full. But I understand the dolphin’s point of view.

Hose water just tastes better.

My Mustache is My Hijab

How did I come to this, I often ask myself. How did the person I wanted to be diverge so precipitously from the person I actually am? I mean, am I really the sort of person who unironically wears a mustache?

It started, like so many things that turn out tragic, as a joke.

Har-har, shave the beard, leave a mustache tossed on your face like a hairy candy wrapper on a theatre floor.

I thrilled with anticipation at the responses this would engender. I especially liked imagining the abject horror and revulsion a furry caterpillar like growth would inspire in attractive women. They’d crinkle their normally smooth foreheads and ask me ‘why? why ever would you wear a mustache?’ and I’d insouciantly reply that it was ‘for kicks’ or ‘as a lark’ or even ‘to piss off my wife’.

It was supposed to be ridiculous, you see; something funny because of the discomfort it would cause me socially.

Now I don’t know who I am anymore, and neither does my mustache.

To be fair, I did (and do) receive my share of oddball double takes when I stroll into a shop or a restaurant or supermarket, but nothing like the behind-the-hand giggling I’d hoped for.

I eventually squeezed out a patch for the chin and another for just under the mouth, attempting a sort of an Errol Flynn effect, thinking that would seem even less legitimate a choice of facial hair, but to no avail.

Hell, Chiara likes it!

She balked when I recently shaved, telling me that my face sans mustache and friends appeared “puffy.” I then suffered the further indignity of having to grow the whole nonsense from the ground up - no mean feat for someone with blondish facial hair.

So now here I am, a man who wears a mustache.

Don’t call it a goatee - it’s three separate pieces of facial hair. I have some dignity remaining to me.

I’m calling it a D’Artagnan.

I can tell you that I might wear a cape or a porkpie hat and I’d feel less costumey.

I wonder if my upper lip will ever feel the warmth of the sun again, or the coolness of the pillow at night.

My mustache is the hijab of my mouth.

The Vacuum Cleaner Always Rings Twice

Chiara is in love with a vacuum cleaner.

She’ll deny it, but mention the name of our new household cleaning appliance (or speak about its specifications in a pleasant English accent) and watch her pupils dilate and her lips part.

The pathos isn’t lost on her. Here she is, an educated, liberal, feminist woman, but she’s totally enamored of the most potent symbol of domesticity anyone can think of and its associated attachments.

“One is especially for curtains!” she gushed at me.

Many of you already know the iron fist with which Chiara rules our home when it comes to the forever war against entropy. I am - at best - a sort of tolerated condition of this war and I am forever being lintrolled or washed or dusted.

But the day after our (exorbitant) vacuum purchase, I found myself on the sofa pulling at a stray thread from my shirt. I wound it into a little ball and got up to throw it into the trash when Chiara grabbed me by the forearm and - with a gleam in her eye and a toothily sexual rictus - invited me to simply toss the ball of thread onto the floor. I gaped, slack-jawed.

She rubbed the back of one hand with the palm of the other and explained:

“I can vacuum eet!”

That was more or less when I knew I had been replaced.

I had it coming, I suppose. I don’t pull my weight around here with the cleaning, and I’ve been so busy with lawyerly pursuits that I haven’t properly been attending to Chiara’s needs.

I had some measure of the depravity to which she’d sunk when I walked into the bedroom the other day to find her engaged in a truly unnatural act of cleaning:

She was vacuuming the old vacuum with the new vacuum. She looked flushed.

It was like some kind of unholy threeway. In fact, I was curiously aroused by the whole scene.

Later that same evening, Chiara squealed (in either glee or horror) as she accidentally inhaled the Swiffer into the vacuum’s see-through dust chamber. This is what I called the “Richard Gere Moment” for our new machine and I advised Chiara that now was the time for some damage control.

We both agreed that the vacuum ought to be left alone for a few days.

Nevertheless, This afternoon her friend dropped by for some risotto and gossip, and the two of them spent several minutes admiring the sleek lines and meticulously designed ergonomics of the new vacuum in much the way I might have liked to be regarded.

I don't really expect anything of the kind, of course, but I hope I don't soon find a photo of James Dyson taped to our headboard.

I certainly don’t have the attachments to compete.

Teddy Roosevelt and I Cut Our Hairs

Among the many things Teddy Roosevelt and I have in common is our mutual phobia of haircuts.

I’ve never - ever - had a haircut that I liked when I left the salon. I usually like a haircut less once I’ve gotten it home where I can get a look at it. I sustain a kind of low-grade haircut hate for the next few weeks and then, from nowhere, I’ll get a three week period of terrific hairdays - like the eye of the cowlick. From there it is a pretty steady decline into shaggy and frizzy and so back to the salon to take my medicine.

I always assumed it was like this for everyone until I met Tim, who gets a haircut every two or three weeks. Tim is happiest with his haircut at the salon the very moment after it is shorn and - like a car driven off the lot - it almost immediately declines in value as soon as he leaves. Every millimeter of growth kills his perfect head of hair a little bit more.

Me, I have to come home and have Chiara perform haircut triage, snipping and trimming the peculiar topography, trying to salvage what we can from the debacle.

Still, I think Tim denies himself something. I think he denies his hair its natural life cycle. A haircut begins as a tight laced, buttoned down, wide-eyed kid and becomes, over time, a confident individual. It then, inevitably, goes too far off the deep end and ends up a crazy mountain man.

It’s a weird character arc, I admit.

I have only once had the courage to go beyond this third stage and discover what lies beyond the shag. It was a wild ride, but I wouldn’t go back (much like Burning Man).

Anyway, it’s a long, indulgent read for one man’s haircut neuroses. I promise the next time I compare myself to Teddy Roosevelt, I’ll just turn in a short paragraph about our endearing love of the pince-nez.

The Tao Te Cheese

If you give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day.

If you give him a pizza, he can eat for two or three.

Lasciate Ogne Speranza, Voi Ch'Intrate

A number of people have asked me what it was like, studying for the bar. At best I can give a sort of half-answer, since I only sort of half studied. I usually offer some trite, unthinking response.

“It sucked,” I’ll say, or “It’s hell. I hated it.”

And mostly this is the answer they expect and so they are content. But I think a more vivid analogy could be nice:

Studying for the bar exam is just like having anvils dropped on your genitals.

And then those anvils ask you to recite the exclusions to the hearsay rule and the various means by which an executory interest can run afoul of the rule against perpetuities.

Un Jeff Andalou

Salvador Dali was said to be fascinated by the lack of surreality in reality - that of the many millions of things that could happen at any given moment, so few of them ever did. Supposedly, he was always surprised that, when he ordered lobster in a restaurant, the waiter never brought him a boiled telephone instead. It was this perplexing characteristic of reality that led to the creation of his famous objet d'art, the Lobster Telephone:

And so, in homage to Dali: I would like to record for posterity the phone message I received (in error) on my phone while I was away on vacation and which I only listened to last night. I would also like to say that sometimes I can’t believe how fortunate I am.
Here it is, though the printed word can’t quite capture the whininess of the speaker:

“Shane, It’s Matt. Hey, we opened those waffle cones and the whole tops of all of them are busted out. Would you call me back and, if you come up tomorrow, bring me another case and make sure they’re handled with care and then take this one back? ‘Cause, if they’re all busted up, heck, I don’t . . . uh, wanna have busted cones. Anyway, bring another box up tomorrow and take this one back or call me . . . or Linda.”

Once, years after he had used that line about the telephone, Dali was in a restaurant where a waiter brought him one in lieu of his order. Dali was inordinately pleased. I can understand why.

Hanga Roa: My Father versus Matt Lauer

Because my father is a walking menagerie of maniacal animals of the ridiculous variety, he has, it seems, an ongoing and bitter war with Matt Lauer of the Today Show.

It is a travel war.

I didn’t know about it until this past week, but apparently it has been in full bloom for some time, with casualties on both sides. It is an unconventional war, fought with frequent flyer miles and photo albums. Matt Lauer would seem to be winning.

Chiara and I flew down to Easter Island last Tuesday and my family took time out of their vacation in the Society Islands to meet us there. It’s a strange place, as mysterious and spooky as it is distant and hard to get to. It is home to a history unlike any other on earth and it is nearly impossible to photograph badly. All of this - at times - seemed entirely secondary to my father, so flushed was he that he had finally erased one of Matt Lauer’s stinging victories.

It seems Matt Lauer visited Easter Island as part of his ongoing “Where in the World is Matt Lauer” series for The Today Show. My father was always possessed of a keen interest in visiting the island himself, and was painfully stung when his travel nemesis beat him to the punch. When finally, last week, my father was able to even the score, he bragged of it to anyone who would listen.

As is his wont, my father told waiters, and Spanish speaking hotel staff, and tour guides, and family members. He told them that, though Matt Lauer had visited the island some two years prior, he had - he assured all of them with serious intonations - intended to come long before Matt Lauer had. It was only a coincidence - he would tell them - that Matt Lauer had gotten to it first.

We’d pause in front of some great stone moai, centuries-old and smashed on the turf, and he’d lean over conspiratorially and say: “When Matt Lauer was here, he got to stand right next to that one. Did you see him do that on the Today Show?”

I’d reply quietly that I have never seen the Today Show, that I am asleep at that hour, that I had never seen Matt Lauer actually being Matt Lauer. He’d continue on, “Should I go up there and stand next to it? You know, I would have beat Matt Lauer here if we’d come when I wanted to, but your mother . . . “

I’d just shake my head softly, stifling the sudden throaty noise that often precedes a laugh. My father would get that gleam in his eye and turn back to look at the moai.

“Now if I can just get to Antarctica before Matt Lauer does.”

Toward Napoleon by Jacket

A man can need something like a military jacket.

He can need the epaulettes and the pockets and the heavy metal buttons that clankle when he walks. He can even need the space between the buttons, because he can need to pose like Napoleon in photos, and to do that he’ll need somewhere to put his hand.

He can need all of these things and the crisp crinkle of canvas when he moves suddenly in the sun; but he can’t have always have them when he needs them.

I’m not a man like that, apparently.

When I need a thing like a military jacket, I search for one at the mall and find one in size small - because I like the fit better that way. Then I pay for it. Then I have them put it in a bag. Then I take it home and wash it in hot water. Then I dry it in the dryer.

Then I wear it around the house, picking up objects to see which will fit in the pockets and which will not:

Anthology of California Poets: Check.
Small terra cotta jaguar: No.
Art Deco inspired desk clock: Check.
Esquire magazine: Only if rolled.

When you see me and my military jacket, say hello. You’ll know me by my savoir vivre.
If that doesn’t do the trick, try being needed by me like a military jacket. I’m excellent at finding what I need and putting my hand in it like Napoleon.

Believe me.

To Suffer Just a Little

At a shoe boutique yesterday, the following exchange:

Chiara (holding a pair of red, strappy heels out at me): Aren’t they faahbulous?

Me: Yeah, they’re cool.

Chiara: They better be, they cost enough.

Me: Too bad you don’t have a birthday coming up with which to scare me into buying them for you.

Chiara: Shuddup.

Me: What?

Chiara, with a gleam: Should I try them on?

Me: Are you thinking about buying them?

Chiara: Ab-so-lute-ally NOT.

Me: Then why would you want to try them on? You know you like them and you know you aren’t going to buy them. What’s the point?

Chiara (sighing): Just to suffer a little?

And she wistfully put them back on the shelf.

I found it a telling thing to say. I don’t enjoy to put myself through the turmoil of being near to something I desire, but can’t have. This is why I never enjoyed strip clubs as much as I wanted to enjoy them; window-shopping annoys me.

That said; I have the enduring and silly problem of being sexually attracted to mannequins in storefronts.

Chiara regards this as evidence of my immaturity. I am assured by others that this is normal for a man of my height and weight.

Pygmalion, so why not me?

It could, of course, also be residual sexualization from the 1987 film Mannequin starring Kim Catrall, which I distinctly remember as being the first time I felt sexually attracted to a woman. You can imagine what this did for the otherwise tepid Big Trouble in Little China.

This is probably a whole other blog, isn’t it?

I Nearly Become a Republican Activist

“My name is James and I am calling to thank you for everything you did last year for the Republican party.”

But all I’ve done for the Republican party has been to occasionally clench my teeth, pull my hair, and spit when it is mentioned. It isn’t personal; it’s only their hypocrisy, backwardness, and ineptitude.

So you can imagine my surprise at this rather forward telephone introduction. On the other hand, I voted for Kerry and that seemed to work out pretty good for the Republican party, I guess. Maybe I do deserve their thanks.

In any case, I just laughed. James continued.

“Well, Mr. Nielsen, we need your help again. The Dems think they have us on the edge and we can’t let them take back the House and Senate, now can we?”

I’m warming up to the whole thing by this point. I reply: “We certainly can’t.”

“Well,” says James, “And Schwarzenegger needs your help, too. I mean, California is finally doing pretty okay and we can’t let ‘em bring back the days of Gray Davis.”

“Dear God, no.” I said in community theatre-grade horror.

“Well, I’m happy you feel that way Mr. Nielsen. That’s why you’ll see how important it is that we get everyone signed up this year - to fight those tax-raisers. What can I sign you up for? A hundred or a hundred-fifty?”

“Dollars?”

“Yessir. Dollars we’ll use to get the word out about the party and make sure Republicans keep America on the right track.”

“Well I think we’re okay here in Orange County.” I said dryly.

“What’s that?”

“Orange County. I think we’re okay here. Have you any idea how many golf courses there are?”

“Well, your donation will help Republicans across the state of California, Mr. Nielsen.”

“So lemme get this straight. You’re asking me to redistribute my hard-earned money to you?”

“Huh? Mr. Nielsen, your money could help us keep America moving in the right direction.”

“Nothing. Look, James, it’s a nice pitch. Really it is, and I wish you all the luck, but I’m just not the sort of Republican who gives money away to people who need it. I mean.”

“Well, you know, any size donation would be appreciated.”

“Yeah. I mean, I know, but market forces and Adam Smith and all.”

“Huh?”

“I’m just not going to—” and I’m cut off by a dial-tone.

It was too bad. I had a whole bit about Hillary I was going to try to slip in. I can't believe he hung up on me. My Republican impression was fine. Anyone would have sworn I was wearing a golf shirt tucked into khaki pants by the tone of my voice - hell, you could hear the side part in my hair. I didn’t snicker behind my hand or anything.

Afterwards I took a hot, soapy shower.

Laika, The Cosmonaut

On November 3, 1957 the world tuned in to the distant beep-beep-beep of the Sputnik II orbiting satellite. It was the second object launched into outer space by the Soviet Union, but it was the first to carry a living passenger. On board was the dog, Laika.

She would also be the first living being to die in space.

Laika is remembered as the first to reach outer space, but she began her brief life in far humbler circumstances:
She was a mutt and a stray, living on the streets of Moscow and begging for food. When she was about three years old, she was found by a scientist in the Russian space program and brought to Star City, where she would begin her new life as first-cosmonaut-in-training.

They gave her the name ‘Laika’ there at Star City, (it means simply ‘Bark’ in Russian), but they usually called her ‘Little Bug’ or ‘Little Lemon’.

She was well fed for the first time in her life and had a warm bed to sleep in every night. These, one can only imagine, were the happiest days of her life.

She lived with two other dogs, Albina and Mushka, and they spent their days undergoing tests on their reflexes, their heart rates, their hearing, their breathing.
Albina and Mushka both survived brief sub-orbital trips up in Soviet rockets prior to Laika's fateful voyage, but the real mission was saved for Laika.

In the end, it was her most unheroic trait that earmarked her for destiny - she was the calmest, the best behaved, the quietest.

Sputnik II weighed more than 1,000 pounds and was filled with instruments and antennae and insulation and electrical wiring. In the very center of the craft, however, a small cavity, just large enough for a smallish dog to stand or lie down in (but not turn around), was reserved for Laika.

To prepare her for the cramped quarters, she was kept in progressively smaller cages - in the dark - for two weeks at a time.
To accustom her to the stress and shaking of the flight, her cage was routinely agitated hydraulically or placed in the massive centrifuge used to train the human cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, who would go up a year later.
To simulate the noise of liftoff, speakers were positioned outside her closed box that periodically played - at full, deafening volume - a recording of a rocket during launch.
She was fed a nutrient enriched jelly and given water, but the close quarters stopped her from urinating or defecating.
Her pulse was monitored at all times and ran high, but within the bounds of safety.
She was adjudged to have performed admirably, under the circumstances.

Three days before launch, Laika was gently bathed and groomed, fitted with a harness and electrodes to monitor her vital signs, and placed into the padded cavity of the Sputnik II capsule at the launch site. The capsule was sealed. Laika would never see the sky or the sun or another living thing ever again.
It was so cold that they had to attach a hose to the capsule to pipe in heated air. Laika was restless.

Launch! Half a ton of steel and fire hurtled into space at twenty thousand miles an hour. Laika, the stray-dog cosmonaut, the fastest thing alive.

The capsule slung around the Earth for five and a half months (2,570 orbits) before it burned up in a flash of chrome and vermillion upon re-entry. Re-entry was on April 14th, 1958 - the 46th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic and the 93rd of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln - an infamous day, April the 14th.

Of course, Laika was dead long before that day.

She was never meant to survive the trip. There was never any consideration of recovering Laika or the capsule itself. Hers was always going to be a one-way flight.

It has never been entirely clear how long Laika was able to stay alive inside her Sputnik (Russian for ‘Companion’), but it was not longer than ten days. After ten days there would be no more food or water and a poisoned dose of her nutritional jelly would have euthanized her.

She may have survived as many as four days before dying of stress and heat. Recently, a Russian scientist who worked at Star City alleged that Laika lived little more than a few hours following her fiery ascent up Jacob’s Ladder.
He said that he has always regretted what they did to Laika.

However long she stayed alive in her dark-little-fastest-flying-coffin, she has become one of the most famous dogs in history. Her face has graced the postage stamps of several countries; her image adorns a Russian monument to all those who died in the pursuit of space; she has been featured in novels and songs.

That song by Domenico Modugno, ‘Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu’, was likely written in 1958 (only months after Laika's voyage) as a kind of homage to Laika.

I originally had a whole thing about the lyrics here, but I think you’ll feel it more if I leave it at this: in the song, the narrator is exclaiming how happy he is to be flying away from everything and into infinite space. It’s a metaphor for a love affair, sure, but it’s filled with a kind of pathos as the singer moves further and further away from the Earth and everything he has ever known there, singing all the while.
Here's a link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-DVi0ugelc&feature=player_embedded

Vancouver: I Cause an International Breakfast Incident

At breakfast one morning in Vancouver, I scanned the menu anxiously. When the waitress arrived to take our orders, I went last.

“I’ll have a cappuccino and the waffles,” I said.

“All right,” she said.

“And, do you have American bacon?”

“What?”

Now look: It’s Canada. They have Canadian bacon in Canada, no? It stands to reason that in Canada they are not going to call Canadian bacon ‘Canadian bacon’. Hell, I’ve ordered bacon in Britain before and received Canadian bacon. So I’m asking, you know? I mean, the menu just says “bacon”.

I mean, now I know they call that 'ham' or something. But at the time.

“American bacon?” I answered.

“What’s American bacon?” she asked.

“It’s just like Canadian bacon, only more arrogant and Iraq-invadey,” I said.

A good, healthy, tension-clearing laugh from all involved.

“You mean strip bacon?” she asked.

“Yeah, sure. Strip bacon.”

“Oh, okay. American bacon. huh.”

And everyone is looking at me with furrowed brows.

Well fuck them.

It is American-style bacon. It’s our thing. Our birthright, Goddamnit.

Inside the brain of every Canadian is a klaxon alarm that sounds whenever they hear the word "American." We’re Americans too! We’re Americans too! America is a continent, not a nation! it cries. But what are we supposed to call ourselves, United Statesians? I think she simply refused to grant us the adjective for our bacon out of spite. Strip bacon, indeed.

My father then tells me that he thinks I have insulted all Canadians because I said that American bacon was more arrogant, thus implying that Canadian bacon is some arrogant.

This is the kind of thing my father says at breakfasts.

I told him that I didn’t think so, that you could be more obnoxious than someone who was zero obnoxious just like I could have more coffee than Tim, who had none. My father grew hot under the collar and red in the face.

“Ridiculous!” he nearly yelled.

“No it isn’t, it’s perfectly reasonable to say you have more money than someone who has none money.”

“That’s idiotic. No one talks that way. If they did, no one would understand them.”

“Well, everyone here at this table understood.”

“I guess you think you’re a better lawyer than me, huh? A better drafter, is that it?”

“Apparently.”

“You’re an idiot, Jeff. A real idiot, you know that?”

“Right.”

Families are the best, amirite?

When the waitress arrived with my meal, she placed the plate in front of me and said “Your waffles with American bacon.”

“Mmm, awesome.” I said, “I can almost smell the county music.”

Canadians, by the way, really say “Eh” at the end of declaratory sentences.

I mean the accent is one thing. It’s normal to have an accent. have more accents. Accents complete me.

But peppering your speech with some sort of verbal hiccup like “eh" is preposterous.

So, you know, relax, Canada.

Vancouver: Tim Has Some Sort of Seizure

While standing outside a restaurant waiting for a cab, I admired Tim’s Pea Coat.

“I’m intensely jealous of your Pea Coat,” I said.

Tim glanced down at himself, then at me and my single-breasted overcoat. “I’m jealous of your coat,” he said.

“No, damnit, you’re not,” I replied. “I gotta get me a Pea Coat like that.”

Tim shrugged. I shrugged. I pulled the corner of my mouth up and shoved my hands in the pockets of my non-Pea-Coat coat.

Tim looked over at me. “I don’t know about Scott Bakula,” he said. “He just doesn’t seem like a starship captain to me.”

I picked up my eyes from where they had fallen out of my head and used them to stare at Tim incredulously.

“I mean,” he continued, “That Captain Janeway was too real for me, like a real naval captain or something. But Scott Bakula is too, I dunno, Scott Bakula for that show.”

“You’re not seriously discussing this with me,” said I.

“I am. I mean, look, as a time traveling do-gooder he was fine, even great, but as the first captain of an interstellar spaceship?”

“Dear God.” I said and picked up my eyeballs again.

Tim was feeding on my dismay like those Harry Potter bad guys with the robes and the flying, and I considered mentioning that to him, but that would have only kicked him into overdrive. Instead I put my hand on his shoulder and looked into his eyes.

“It’s a helluva coat, though. A helluva coat.”

Vancouver: A Dream Deferred

The hotel was a highrise. I had a corner room on the 21st floor. Close-up views of the entire downtown skyline of Vancouver. This provided an excellent opportunity to fulfill one of my great, unrealized dreams:

To witness two people having sex in the office after hours through the window of an adjacent building.

I don’t particularly care if they are having an illicit affair or are simply using the office to spice up their sex-life. I just want to look across a city block from a darkened hotel room and see it happen.

Cleaning crew doesn’t count, they have to actually work there during daylight hours.

Fatcat boss and secretary would be ideal.

My dream remains unrealized. The closest I got that night was while looking across the way into the Fairmont hotel. I saw a guy in his bathrobe on the 18th floor looking up at me from behind his curtain.

Maybe he has the same dream as I do.

I waved and he scampered back into the welcoming darkness of his room. I stood by my window for a moment, scanning the illuminated boxes in the skyscrapers near me, thinking of Rear Window. Then I turned and went to bed.

I left all the curtains open, just in case.

Every So Often, Not at Great Speed

So up there in Seward, Alaska, at the Alaska Sea Life Center, they had this Octopus called Aurora.

Aurora was about five years old when she died. A Giant Pacific octopus, she was found outside the Sea Life Center when she was only about the size of a softball.

She was living inside an old tire that had filled with water from the rain. They took her to live in the aquarium and she did pretty well.

Octopuses are really smart - maybe as smart as dogs. They are excellent problem solvers and can learn to recognize symbols and play games. But they don’t live very long.

Aurora lived at the aquarium for three years before somebody had the idea to try to hook her up with the other resident Giant Pacific octopus, a male by the name of J-1.

J-1 was the largest known octopus in the world. He weighed 57 pounds. He, too, was a foundling - found on a beach when he was only the size of a quarter.

He was about five years old at the time he was introduced into Aurora’s tank. He was pretty near the end of his life. His skin was beginning to wear away and his suckers were cracking and becoming pitted. He had never met another octopus.

When they dropped J-1 into Aurora’s tank, Aurora freaked out a little bit. She retreated to the bottom and bunched herself into a ball. Eventually though, it was Aurora who approached J-1. She reached out a tentative tentacle and touched the old guy. Then she ran away, scrunched herself into a corner of the tank.

Little by little, J-1 pursued Aurora and won her over with, I dunno, charisma. Maybe he did the thing where he squeezes into a really little jar.

Anyway, at some point, the two of them suckered themselves onto the back wall of their glass enclosure with J-1 on the outside, completely covering Aurora. They stayed like that for more than eight hours, mating. At times during this somewhat alien lovemaking, J-1 flashed several different colors in rapid succession, from deep red to ghostly white, which is a thing octopuses can do. Nobody really knows what it means, though.

When they finally separated, J-1 had done what he could, but nobody was sure if the two were too old to conceive.

A month later, Aurora retreated to a rocky outcropping in a corner of the tank and laid tens of thousands of tiny, pearlescent eggs. She began the long process of caring for her unborn young by drawing water into her mantle and blowing it over them, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This was June. If all went well, in six to eight months she would hatch her eggs and then die of starvation and exhaustion.

Octopuses stop eating entirely while they tend their eggs. They really only die because they give up everything for their eggs.

But early on, there were problems. Her eggs weren’t developing. They failed to grow or change color as they should have. Probably Aurora was simply too old to be an octopus mother. Still, she sat next to her eggs and kept the water moving over them. Occasionally she would have to get rid of a curious starfish or two that snuck in at night, looking for a meal.

In September of 2004, J-1 died of old age and Aurora was still tending her (most likely sterile) eggs. She hadn’t eaten anything in months.

When December rolled around and still the eggs showed no sign of developing, Aurora’s keepers decided to drain the tank and remove the eggs that were slowly killing their well-intentioned mother.

Aurora had other ideas.

As the water level fell, the eggs were slowly exposed to the air and, in order to stay under water where she could breathe, Aurora was forced further and further away from them. She repositioned herself, half in and half out of the water, and began spraying long streams of water onto the now exposed rock face where her eggs were slowly drying and dying in order to keep them moist.

An intern charged with clearing the undeveloped eggs from the tank noticed that some of them had little red dots inside them - eyes.

They were woefully undeveloped after seven months, but Aurora’s eggs weren’t sterile after all. They hastily refilled her tank and she moved back next to them and resumed her vigil. She would have a long while left to go.

It should have taken - at most - eight months, but it took Aurora and her eggs more than twelve.

Finally, one day in April 2005, a tiny, almost spherical, baby octopus hatched from one of the eggs and began floating around in the tank. The keepers were sure that would be it, but in the coming days, in ones or twos or tens or twenties, "every so often, and not at great speed", thousands and thousands of babies were born.

They had to set up additional tanks just to hold them all.

As the eggs hatched, Aurora became noticeably more active for the first time in months, stretching herself across the glass and moving around her tank.

Aurora, who had weighed 37 pounds at the beginning of her long ordeal, was now a cephalopod waif. She hadn’t eaten on her own in more than a year. Her keepers had been hand feeding her fish and crabmeat in an effort to extend her life. They were successful, after a fashion. She lived until August of 2005, four months after the first of her babies were born, when she was euthanized out of concern for her comfort.

For octopuses, birthing is a numbers game. Out of thousands of babies, some two dozen of Aurora’s babies (a huge number for an octopus brood) have survived and grown up and are being cared for at the Sea Life Center today.

Here's a picture of Aurora, who was a hell of a mother octopus:

While the Cat is Away

. . . the mouse will sort of sit around, feeling bored and kinda lonely.

So Chiara took a jetplane to Italy on Sunday, and she left me and the cat (the actual cat) to hold down the fort. The cat might disagree, but I think it’s going all right so far; I almost always remember to feed her.

I mean, sure, the place is getting a little frayed around the edges, but nothing catastrophic. It is like the end of the Roman empire: it just gets more decadent and unkempt, and the dustbunnies make some inroads into the interior (in this metaphor, they’re the Visigoths), and eventually Chiara comes home and clucks and tsks a bit and we clean house and presto, Renaissance!

Thing is, when your wife goes out of town for a month or so, you spin these gossamer webs in your mind’s eye about what it’ll be like. You imagine that now, at last, you’ll have that poker game, or smoke those cigars, or watch those pornographic movies, or go to those bars with your bachelor friends. You think that you’ll play music as loud as you want because no one will be in the other room trying to watch the Biggest Loser. You think you’ll go out every night and the cat thinks she’ll be allowed to sleep in the bed.

Of course, the reality is somewhat more tame. Mostly you just wish you had something to do. You feel sort of depressed and suddenly feel sure that, were your wife around, you’d be having sex. And you feel sure it would be way crazier than any sex you actually have with her. The bed is noticeably colder and the house noticeably quieter.

I guess you play the music (mostly so you don't feel so alone) and you get to dance like an idiot, but that’s more fun when someone is there to roll her eyes at you.

And you don’t really like cigars or strip clubs or whatever anyway.

And the cat? Hell, she’s batshit crazy. Who knows what she thinks about cigars or stripclubs? And if I let her in the bed, Chiara will probably knife me.

So, unless someone gets me out of the house, This’ll be more or less just a great opportunity to catch up on some reading. I’m looking at you, Grapes of Wrath.

Well, and the porn. That part is just like you imagine it will be, more or less.

The Fortress of Not So Solitude

I do my best thinking in the shower.

Really. I find something about the experience conducive to clear, organized thought. Maybe it is the hot water, or the white noise of same, or maybe it is simply being in a small room without distractions - like a deprivation chamber.

Like in Altered States.

It could be that the act of showering has been repeated so many times that it requires no thought whatsoever anymore and that rote quality itself frees my mind for other things. Maybe a Freudian would tell me that it approximates the warmth and wetness of the womb and thus unconsciously calms me.

In any case: I do my best thinking in the shower.

I come up with ideas for the Great American Novel, I practice speeches to the United Nations General Assembly, I imagine solutions to the problems of the Iraqi constitution, I invent inventions.

All while I am shampooing my hair!

I have even extended the range of this effect by studying in the outer chamber of our bathroom. I can’t study in the loft because that is where all the books are and the computer. I can’t study downstairs because that is where Chiara and the television are. So, I move my books and papers onto the bathroom counter, turn on the overhead heater (for the noise - it drowns out the Oprah Chiara is inevitably watching) and get cracking.

The shower (and the bathroom) is like my Fortress of Solitude - it is white, it is quiet, and nobody is allowed in.

The problem with having a Fortress of Solitude is that Lois Lane knows all about it.

Chiara doesn’t seem to respect my study-system. I swear she follows me around the house to check up on me, and few of my activities perplex her more than studying while standing up in the bathroom. Moreover, she hasn’t the least concern for my privacy.

To me, the shower is like my inner sanctum. She isn’t supposed to be in the room unless there is to be shower sex.

Now look, I’ve dated women who wanted an open-door policy in the bathroom; girls who either wanted me to do everything without privacy and/or girls who, themselves, wanted to expose their bathroom activities to me.

I’m not a believer in it.

And, in point of fact, neither is Chiara. It is only that, for her, these other, academic, functions of the bathroom are not deserving of the same privacy.

And, to top it all off, she is constantly grooming me when I am in my Fortress of Solitude. It is like having a gorilla for a wife. I’ll be shaving, let’s say, and she’ll come up behind me and inspect my shoulders for the stray hairs that occasionally try to colonize that otherwise bare expanse of skin. If she finds one, she’ll pluck at it with tweezers until she gets it out. If I have dried my hair, she’ll start stroking down cowlicks and flyaways. If I am getting dressed (she watches me do that, too), she will pluck at places where the fabric is pilling, or tug at where the material has bunched.

God help me if she finds a clogged pore on my face.

And I am nearly always being lint-rolled.

Now I know why they usually build Fortresses of Solitude in the middle of Ice-bound, antipodal plains.

Of course, maybe Superman has stray hairs on his shoulders.

The End of Elephants

In the small town of St. Thomas, in Ontario, there is a massive (and life-sized) statue of an African elephant. This is because St. Thomas is where, on September 15, 1885, Jumbo the Elephant died after being hit by a steam locomotive.

Jumbo had an interesting life, for anyone, elephant or human. He was born free, sometime around 1861, in the Sudan. The French, who then controlled the Sudan, captured Jumbo as a young elephant and brought him by rail to Cairo, where he was sold and then taken by boat and then again by rail to Paris, where they exhibited him in the Jardin des Plantes near the railway station. He was probably chained.

In 1865 he was given to the London Zoo. More boats on the ocean and trains chugging across unfamiliar landscapes.

In London, he became a favorite among children for the remarkable docility he showed. Even though by this time he was far and away the largest elephant ever held in captivity (standing some four meters tall), and though he had never been trained to do it, he routinely allowed visitors to the zoo to ride on his back. In fact, he so impressed one particular visitor with his demeanor and ever-increasing size, that he ended up being sold again for the tidy sum of $10,000 - to P.T. Barnum. This transaction was made over the public protestations of Queen Victoria herself, who had taken rather a fancy to Jumbo, it seems.

Jumbo then became the star attraction in the Barnum and Bailey circus. He became so famous that his name (a corruption of the Swahili word for ‘hello’) became a household word. His name has survived in the English language to this day as a descriptor for anything gigantic.

He was an icon of the early industrial age, traveling all over the globe in an era when most humans never went far beyond their hometowns. He was, very nearly, the most famous anything in the world. People waited in line for hours just to see him and feel awe.

In 1885, while being led onto his car on the circus train along with the smallest elephant in the circus, Tom Thumb, Jumbo was struck by an unscheduled (and yes, speeding) locomotive coming from the other direction.

Later, P.T. Barnum would claim that Jumbo’s final living act was to grasp Tom Thumb with his trunk and throw him twenty yards away, out of the path of the hurtling train.

The beast of iron and wheels met the “mountain of bone and brawn” and was completely derailed - was, in fact, so damaged that it had to be scrapped - but Jumbo too was crushed, and his six and one half ton body was badly broken.

It took 160 men working together to drag his body into the ditch alongside the rails where he finally died.

Jumbo’s handler, Matthew Scott, stood guard over the fallen giant all night, waiting for the heavy machines to arrive which would be able to lift Jumbo’s immense corpse onto the train that would take him away.

When Scott finally collapsed from exhaustion, scores of eager souvenir-hunters rushed the body with knifes, hoping to hack off a piece of history. Scott had been fighting them off for more than ten hours and wept pitifully when they finally overwhelmed him.

Jumbo's bones now reside in the New York Museum of Natural History. His skin was stuffed and displayed at Tufts University (whose mascot Jumbo still is) until it was consumed by fire in 1975.

Jumbo is only the most famous in the surprisingly long roster of famous elephants killed in tragic circumstances far from their homes. To wit:

Abul-Abbas, the famed elephant of Charlemagne, who died of pneumonia after swimming the Rhine in the winter of 810.

Hanno the Blessed, elephant of Pope Leo X, who died after he was given a laxative by the Pope’s doctors in 1516.

Topsy, who was fed a lit cigarette by her trainer in 1903 at Coney Island’s Luna Park and then went on a rampage in which she killed three men. Topsy was electrocuted to death by Thomas Edison, who wanted to use the opportunity to further his war with Westingouse and Tesla and alternating current. Edison filmed it for his propaganda. You can watch the film he shot on YouTube, but is is graphic and it will stay with you.

Mary, the circus elephant who, in 1916, finally reacted to years of physical abuse by throwing her trainer against a drink stand and then deliberately crushing his skull with her foot. She was hung. On the first attempt she snapped the chain meant to hang her and fell to the ground, breaking her hip. They strung her up and tried again - this time successfully.

And perhaps not finally, but less depressingly, there is the still living Ruby, the famous painting elephant of the Phoenix Zoo, who once had a painting of hers sell for more than $10,000 - the price of one Jumbo.

An Obit for Old Adwaita

I read today that the oldest animal on earth died last week In Calcutta. He was a tortoise called Adwaita. In Bengali, his name meant ‘The Only’.

He was - they think - some 256 years old.

He was born in the Seychelles but was captured there by British sailors and brought to India, where he was presented - along with three of his brothers - to Robert Clive, the man who forged the British Raj in India for the East India Company. This would have been sometime in the 1750s or 60s.

For one hundred and some-odd years, Adwaita lived on the sprawling estate of the Adventurer, Robber Baron, Statesman, Opium Eater, and Suicide, Robert Clive.

Eventually, Adwaita outlived his three brothers, Clive, and the British Empire.

In 1876, he was moved to the Calcutta Zoo, where he lived the life of a bachelor until his death last Wednesday.

About a month ago, his massive shell cracked and he developed a wound that wouldn’t heal. His keepers came to feed him one morning and found him collapsed under his own weight. They will preserve his shell and use carbon dating techniques on it to ascertain his age with more certainty than was possible while he lived.

Having had, at one time, a pet tortoise of my own (Shellbert, by handle), maybe this all hit me harder than it otherwise might have.

Shellbert hibernated nearly all the time. He was usually buried somewhere in the garden - his preferred situs for his project of endless sleep. When he reappeared occasionally, we’d ply him with strawberries, which he ate with abandon. You could hold them in front of him and he would rush at them with a speed you would not expect from such a slow little creature.

Strawberries are a tortoise's favorite thing in the whole world, in my experience.

One day he simply disappeared. Either he had buried himself yet again in the flowerbed and we simply didn't see him on the days he happened to emerge or he had escaped our backyard for the wide world. I think about him sometimes.

I read once about the tortoises that were kept by the Ottoman sultans on the Topkapi Palace grounds on the Golden Horn. They wandered freely through fields of tulips with gigantic candles fixed to their backs and at night, the candles were lit so that - in those days before electric lights - one could look up at the gently sloping hill from the banks of the Bosphorus and watch the sad creatures’ nocturnal movements by the slow, pendulous motion of the flickering candles on their backs.

I like to think Adwaita’s days on the Clive Baronate Estate were like that: full of balmy nights under quiet stars, with a belly full of flowers.

I hope that his long years at the Calcutta Zoo weren’t anything like the only tropes I know for zoo animals. I hope they gave him strawberries sometimes.

I hope he didn’t have the kind of memory we do - one that endlessly ferments everything into treacly nostalgia, no matter what we pour into it; I hope he didn’t think much about the Seychelles or about other tortoises.

The Egyptians have this thing they say about the Pyramids:

“All men fear Time, but Time itself fears the Pyramids.”

The story of Adwaita the tortoise feels like that to me, mixed up with the sensation I get when I see homemade posters stuck on stop signs advertising lost dogs and cats.

I am strangely moved by the passing of this reptilian monument to time and I never even knew he existed until today. If I ever go to Calcutta, I will be sure to look for his great shell, horny and calloused, wherever it hangs - as it is sure to do - for a reverent public to view. Maybe I will feel like I feel when I visit the grave of someone I admire.