encounter at the Shell station

When I was gassing up the car in Huntington Beach last week, another car pulled in and parked, and the driver got out and approached me.

He was in his sixties, South Asian, and wearing one of those embroidered tunic-like garments that comes down to the knees. He was either a foreigner or someone who was practicing a more traditional Indian life here in California.

He greeted me with “Hello. Do you know, could you tell me, where is New Britain?”

For a moment I froze. What the hell? Was he somehow trying to find some new Raj of Anglo-Indians, an enclave of 1908 here in suburbia? Or was he asking me a trick geographical question about a remote island? Seconds passed.

He looked at me quizzically and smiled. “It is a street.”

Oh! I had no idea where New Britain street was in HB. I pointed him to the clerk.

Now I have this image in my head of a little Simla hidden somewhere between the beach and the freeweay.

Leaving the Aquarium

When I was a churchgoer, I recall hearing a quote which was variously attributed, to the effect of: “Those called to be fishers of men have become instead keepers of the aquarium.”

I think about that quote a lot. Today I ran across the second Christian Mime Ministry website in as many months, and this week I also saw a Mario Brothers themed religious t-shirt. One sees avowedly “Christian” versions of fashion shows, first-person shooter video games, amusement parks, martial arts schools, and just about every sub-sub-genre of the arts. It’s a running joke among my friends, Christian or otherwise, to find yet another “Christian” version of something improbable.

American evangelical Christians are loath to leave their aquarium. For many of these people, any activity that is not explicitly “Christian” is suspect. But they’re unwilling to be Amish and withdraw into a cloistered world without television, pop music, and luxury cars. The call to be “a people set apart”, to reject the World and take up the Cross, is as difficult for them as it has been for anyone in the last 2000 years. The resulting conflict is tragicomic.

Why is this important to me?

In the last thirty years the word “Christian” has come to mean a culture of white Protestant lower middle class rural Americans, and people who want to be them. “Contemporary Christian Music”, for example, is a style of smooth 70s pop-rock with choral elements that would only be enjoyed by middle-aged white people from small towns if not for its presence in the subculture. Almost all the music one finds in a Christian bookstore has been filtered and flattened into something milder, cleaner, sweeter, and less troubling. There’s an entire sub-industry of Christian pop music artists who tail the musical trends of youth by about five years and turn out churchier clones of the most popular acts. One group in particular, DC Talk, has reliably walked behind the top 40 parade with a broom for two decades.

The aquarium isn’t just musical. Evangelical culture demands fiction, so there are complete lines of romances, mysteries, Westerns, and two unique genres: the spiritual thriller and the comforting small-town tale. Lewis’ science fiction triology and Little House on the Prairie have a million imitators, including the wildly successful “Left Behind” books and several popular series of heartwarming romantic novels set in small towns. A sub-industry of film produces prophetic thrillers on the same themes as the End Times novels, using down-on-their-luck Hollywood stars, and is distributed by DVD and church screening.

The list of “x plus Jesus” items is endless: a first-person shooter Quake-like video game in which the player battles sin with weapons of righteousness; non-rastafarian reggae; lifestyle stores that provide clothing and accessories for youth on the Hot Topic model; even an evangelical version of “American Idol” without the offending noun. If you’re not in the culture — or even if you are — it gets hilarious pretty quickly.

It’s way too easy to begin snickering at this point and never stop. All of this stuff is crap. Not just crap as in Sturgeon’s Law, but entire genres that are crap. “Christian” culture is derivative, cheap, poorly executed, and doubly pathetic in its pandering to pop trends and its failure to pander well. Most of the exceptions to this rule are fifty years old; The Screwtape Letters is currently on the CBA bestseller list. But I’ll take a moment to point out that talented and worthy artists do exist in the aquarium. In my churchgoing years I did encounter some. Mostly, though, the talented ones escape the aquarium or never entered it. Not only do you make less money in that world, but everyone is judged about as thoroughly as a pastor is for theological correctness.

The fatal flaw of aquarium culture is that it is not fundamentally or necessarily spiritual. Everyone who participates is Christian and all of the art refers to and promotes Christianity, of course. But that’s not the unifying factor. Aquarium culture is a communally shared expression of a particular kind of American Protestant cultural conservatism. It’s not enough to believe in the divinity of Jesus, or in salvation by irresistible grace through faith, or even in the literal interpretation of the King James Bible. To fit in socially, evangelicals are supposed to reject mainstream culture as completely as possible and purchase their entire lifestyle at the Christian “bookstore”, which nowadays is loaded with multimedia and gift items. Aquarium culture is a consolation prize. What they want is what all Americans want: the latest fun movies, the trendy musical styles, the TV shows everyone talks about at the office. What they get are cheap off-brand imitations of the pleasures of the World, sanitized and rewritten for an impossibly ideal mid-sized Midwestern town from a 1940s movie. To participate it’s necessary to be white (if in spirit only), distrustful of cities and intellectuals, politically conservative, and enthusiastic about some very bland material. If the scene or the hobby or the style of art you’re into is un-“Christian”, you must either drop it or make it Christian. The world behind the aquarium walls is deadly, literally ruled by demons, and one can’t be too enthusiastic about any of the amusement or education to be found there.

When I was a believer and a churchgoer this caused me no end of problems. Not only did I not give up my worldly art, culture, and politics, but my Christian artists were not from the approved list. I liked the music of T-Bone Burnett, Victoria Williams, Van Morrison, Mahalia Jackson. I liked Duvall’s film The Apostle. I read widely and included scholarly analyses and critical works as well as “inspirational” books. And I couldn’t stand the aquarium crap. In short I was a cultural and political liberal, an overeducated urban elitist, and a postmodern appreciator of cultural diversity. As much as my new friends were friendly and generous and accepting of me personally, I was the enemy and I knew it.

I left Christianity thoroughly and finally last year. Most of the reasons were essentially political. There was one permitted evangelical position: right-wing Republican, pro-war, pro-wealth, anti-intellectual, and socially intolerant. There weren’t any grey areas or places for discussion any longer. I sincerely felt that evangelicals had traded grace for wealth and love for power, and that my community was in a state of sin worthy of the rage of prophets. My conclusion was that a belief in eternal life turns people into murderous hypocrites, and I went back to my agnostic roots.

Looking back on it, I should have known from the beginning. I didn’t belong in the aquarium. It’s a place for people who are frightened, angry, greedy, hypocritical, and ignorant. I might not be an agnostic today if I had taken a different path to spirituality. I tried really hard to make my world and theirs meet, but you can’t do that with people who are deliberately inflexible. The evangelical subculture I tried to make my peace with wasn’t just full of crummy pop music and romance novels. It was also shot through with evil. The heaven these people want to inhabit is the lily-white eternal Smallville of their grandparents’ generation where everyone goes to church on Sunday in a big shiny car, no one swears, there is one child per sex act, the music is arranged for organ and choir, and Mom has just put a turkey dinner on the table with all the trimmings and three kinds of bread. It’s paid for by raining bombs on other people’s children and choking the life out of doomed slaves who do the hard work. Anyone who doesn’t fit is shunned, jailed, or killed. And no one has to take up his cross and die. Instead, they get a cheap, diluted, hand-me-down mockery of modern American life. The rest of humanity is outside their aquarium, distorted and discolored, seen through a glass darkly. I preferred to see face to face.

The banality of emo

I was looking at the OC Weekly for the first time in forever because it was their 10 year issue. Some great stuff, like a history of their investigative reports. Jim Washburn’s attempt to lengthen his penis with a weight on a rope was hilarious and I’d forgotten about it. And then I’m paging through the ads for head shops, bad restaurants, and whores (“Date 25 young Russian women on this trip: GUARANTEED!”) and I see the ad for the Mouse of Blues and wait, hey I know those people. Looks like Gina AND Jackie in the ad. Boy I hope the Mouse paid you a nice fee on top of your waitressing salary for that picture! Also, Gina has an entire pizza in front of her. Maybe that’s how they got them to do it.

I really like the people who work at my two local grocery stores. They’re just solid, likeable folks. When things aren’t busy I stop and talk to them for a few after I’ve got my stuff.

I made chicken noodle soup today, with orzo pasta and a leek and thyme and a finely chopped onion and black pepper. I also made fresh cornbread. Unfortunately we were out of eggs so I made the cornbread about 15 minutes ago when I got back from the market. But we had a delicious carrot and cabbage salad with a basil olive oil dressing. Cooking is a good place for me. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It’s a made thing, that I can make well. And I can share it with others and get an ego stroke when it turns out well. There’s nothing else like it for me. It’s my refuge.

Beauty is bad for me. Really, really bad. I can’t have it,, I can’t stop wanting it, and I know I shouldn’t want it and beat myself up about it.

Fear the abandoned car seat of suburbia. Fear it!

I got a good start on my Borges tonight before Fliptop Pegleg showed up. In the intervening period a Christian men’s group was meeting to plan a “Men’s Breakfast” event. One guy was clearly the alpha and leading the meeting, and he browbeat the others in a brisk, upbeat way about a shockingly long list of items that had to be prepared. He spoke rapidly about food, music, chairs. Periodically he’d come to a decision point and obtain consensus in a flash: “So we’re looking at Wednesday for that, about 7. Is that okay for you Craig? Ryan? How about you, Bill?” The other men responded in respectful monosyllables. I wouldn’t want to hang out with this guy but I bet that breakfast is going to be planned like the Invasion of Normandy.

They closed with the classic O.C. White Guy Evangelical Prayer, which is always slightly too long, full of catch phrases, and begins “Heavenly Father, you are awesome…” Alpha guy stayed for about an hour afterwards talking to another man. Again he was in charge, banging out paragraphs while looking intense and leaning forward; the other man nodded, agreed, chimed in occasionally.

Fliptop Pegleg arrived and ignored my book, sat down, made himself comfortable. The monologue wasn’t as painful this time, because he was talking about diabetes. He has to be real about that stuff, and it leads him to talk about other real things. He told me his father died of diabetes and TB when FTPG himself was only six, in 1949. He saw his father the day before he died, but couldn’t be in the same room; he got to talk to him from outside the hospital window on an outdoor bridge to another building.

I can’t forget that he’s unethical, creepy, probably criminal, and certainly unpleasant to be with, but it humanizes him a bit when he stops talking about video hardware or girls’ butts.

When I got home tonight the neighbors had abandoned a child seat on their front driveway so I took some weird, horror-movie style night shots of it with my house in the background. Baby stuff is generically spooky.

items

Beer.
I drank a lot of beer in my early adulthood. At first it was Corona, which was cheap and at the time not bad. A good hot-weather beer. In college we’d guzzle it by the case. Later on, all us hip kids started drinking Rolling Rock. It’s not actually very good, but it seemed cool at the time because it was new out West and wasn’t one of those normal beers like Mom & Dad had. Near the end of my twenties I became a beer snob and drank microbrews and imports and knew too much about beer. By this time I was drinking less and had more money so that was okay. I don’t drink very much at all any more. I see the kids drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon in a self-consciously slumming hipster way and think “right! we did that with Rolling Rock”. I think beer culture is in a loop in this country along with pop culture. Lately I drink Fat Tire and Wittekerke and the Unibroue stuff, but none of it in excess. I still like beer.
Cockroaches.
I never saw cockroaches until I moved to Los Angeles. I have always been messy, and as my life drifted out of control after college the messiness became annoying, then disturbing, then pathological, and finally just mind-blowingly disgusting. I got real familiar with cockroaches. I remember leaving the house to go to work and shaking one out of my pants leg, or lying awake and night and listening to them moving around the place. Since my downward spiral took me to bad neighborhoods, I lived in apartment buildings that were owned by roaches. There’s a particular smell in a building that’s at war with these creatures. It’s part insecticide, part boric acid, and partly the scent of the insects themselves. It’s a triggering smell for me, both nauseating and depressing.
Coffee.
The first time I recall having coffee was in Venice, Italy. I was seven years old and spending a summer there with my parents. Sometimes in the evenings after dinner we’d go to the Piazza San Marco and sit for a while at one of the famous cafés there. It was a carnival at night, with people selling mechanical flying doves and glowing neon-like tiaras and candy and weird little toys. I would get either a sundae of some kind (oh God Italian ice cream) or granita. You may have had a tasty iced coffee beverage here called granita. The real Italian stuff is basically crushed ice, sugar, and espresso frozen together just so, with lots of smashing the ice up and letting it refreeze repeatedly. The result is frozen pleasure. My small body took the caffeine and sugar and rocketed me to the moon. I was hooked.

I had coffee of various kinds a lot when we were living in Europe, because kids have it earlier there. Café au lait in a bowl in the morning, etc. Back in the States I didn’t have coffee much through the rest of my childhood. When I arrived at UCLA, though, the second phase began. The Kerckhoff Coffee House there served double cappuccinos for $0.85. I had between 6 and 10 of those a day for four years. By the time I left college I was a hobbled wreck of a man with a $10/day espresso habit.

When I make my coffee in the morning (which by the way is now half caf), I grind the beans fresh. When they’re ground just right I take the container and pour it into the filter cone. If I get a good breath of the fresh ground coffee something about it affects me poorly and I have to cough, every time. Then I take another big sniff of it because it smells so damned good.

NOPD.

I used to know a guy who was a New Orleans cop. He’d also been in the Navy and been a zoo keeper. I got the impression he joined the force for the right reason: decent pay with overtime for someone without a fancy saleable degree.

At the time he left the force (1996 I believe), some 40 officers were up on felony charges. Some of them had called out hits on other officers. I remember him saying that anyone who could get out of that department did. I never asked him how much of the corruption he experienced himself. Since his personality was “straight arrow”, my guess is that he made his bargain with the job as much as he could without getting murdered or being unable to sleep nights. It can’t have been easy. His final choice was to leave the city and move to Oregon and start over. I had dinner with him during his trip West when he came through L.A. Some things I remember from our conversations:

—

“See that security guard outside the warehouse there? You know, if you’ve been a cop you can always get a guard job, but I’d never do that if I could avoid it. I remember once I got a call for a robbery and assault. I show up at a warehouse just like that, and there’s a guard down on the ground all bloody and broken, and a guy beating the hell out of him with the guard’s own flashlight. I got out of the car with my gun, and the guy dropped the flashlight, held up his hands with the wrists together, and said “Go ‘head and arrest me now! I respeck the po-lice!”

—

[While watching some scene in a cop bar on tv in his hotel room] “Now, now. That is not a cop bar. Where are the wasted, whisky-soaked detectives shooting into the ceiling? Where are the drug dealers? Where are the women having sex with Coke bottles on the bar?”

—

“The absolutely only thing I miss about that job was the food. Cops eat free in New Orleans.”

—

He was doing tech support, and then he was a campus cop for a while and then I think he moved to PA and I lost track of him. Gregg, if you find this say howdy, and please correct anything I got wrong.

Tales from Bozospace: The AOL Trivia Club

I’ve been using online computer systems since 1977 or so, starting with a very primitive teletype-and-paper-tape hookup to a school district computer in junior high school. Later I used university systems, bulletin boards, dialup Internet, and most of the online services.

For most of this time I didn’t use these networks socially. In the earlier years this just wasn’t technically practical. When I bought my first computer I was 25 years old, living in Los Angeles, and heavily involved in the music scene, so I didn’t feel the need for any additional social outlets.

However, I’ve always been a trivia nut. I did College Bowl at UCLA, and our team won and went to the statewide competition. When Trivial Pursuit came out I loved it and won a lot. I even liked the dumb trivia games in bars. So when I found the live interactive trivia games in AOL chat rooms I got hooked right away. There’d be maybe 10-15 people chatting and a game host and a scorekeeper, and you’d try to type in the correct answer before the host typed the “buzzer”, but just before! So that others couldn’t copy you. The hosts wrote their own trivia games. If you won you got some free time on the service.

and therein lies the tale

O ye lawyers and ferris wheels

The total bill for my vertiginous vomitous vacation to the ER is roughly $900 after my excellent insurance. Otherwise it would have been more like $5000. For which I am grateful. But, so much for paying down more debt next month. Also, the insurer and the hospital are disagreeing about whether I pay that particular bill to the tune of $521 or $487, so I foresee a fun conversation on the phone tomorrow about that.

And then I think about the people who’d have to put that money (either sum) on credit and pay the minimum on the never-never, and how they can’t go bankrupt any more, and how their minimum payments will double next year, and I am even more grateful that I’m on the Eloi scale and not the Morlock one right now. If this had been me 15 years ago I would have been in deep shit. Oh wait, that was me 15 years ago, and I got sued in small claims court for $2000 by a medical group!

I was thinking these thoughts as I went over to the Apple Store to get them to fix a bad key on my expensive laptop that I can barely afford, and there was a guy in front of me in the top of the line Mercedes SUV (5 liter V8, MSRP starting at $49,275) driving like a complete dick and endangering others, and as I went down Dover Drive to PCH this person was basically playing chicken with a gigantic tanker truck full of gasoline. So here you had the gas-guzzling luxury pansy-ass dude ranch $50,000 SUV with one old fat white guy in it risking the lives of everyone within a mile over whether he got to go in front, including the working-class dude driving the fuel truck who is bringing Mr. SUV the fuel he needs to keep on with his pathetic lifestyle.

I live in this weird part of the world where almost daily I get an overblown condensed symbol of everything wrong with my country shoved right in my face, and I find myself saying to the Great Novelist: “Where is your subtlety? Enough with the clunky obvious symbolism!”

At the Genius bar I sat next to a 20something perfect California girl hottie with the blonde and the tan and the curves and the hoo and the haa. Not usually my type, but she was exceptionally hot and also really nice. However, I fell out of “love” with her as soon as she used the word “proactive”.

As I left, a family was arriving and the little girl was complaining about something. I heard the mother say “Well, we’re going to stay here for quite a while. We’ve FINALLY made it to the MALL!”