“Why yes, I do”

*lays a dozen fake Twitter accounts on loan officer’s desk*

“You’ve been approved, my good man!”

* * *

“Your résumé is certainly extensive, but we have many candidates vying for this job. I’d like to know if you possess any unique skills that uniquely qualify you for this position.”

“Yes, I believe I do.”

*shares 1400-word essay about “Steampipe Alley,” followed by detailed recounting of several mid-80s McDonalds commercials*

“When can you start?”

* * *

“I have to admit, you make a solid pitch, but I’ve seen a ton of sales presentations today and I’m having a hard time deciding which is the best. Are there any other reasons we should want to do business with you?”

“Yes, there are.”

*reels off several jokes about jarts and Boku drink boxes*

“Stop drillin’, you hit oil!”

* * *

“I gotta be honest, I get a lotta people coming in here saying they’re gonna be the next Hemingway. Is there some extra special reason why should I take you on as a client?”

“I believe there is.”

*displays massive tome about Edgardo Alfonzo*

“Lookin’ forward to workin’ with ya!”

The folks responsible for this movie may very well have kids, and they may think they have a parent audience in mind, but the ads are filled with “jokes” about things that do not worry actual parents: changings, feedings, sleeping, and so on. I imagine there has to be an awesome “exploding diaper” scene in it, along with a birthing sequence where the mom gets mad at the dad for “doing this” to her. Not to get all Culture Wars on you here, but I suspect that most Hollywood types fear these things because they have au pairs who take care of these menial tasks. And because their level of economic comfort shields them from the real terror that most parents confront on a daily basis.

Before you have kids, you have fears that recede almost immediately once you become a parent. You fret that you won’t be able to deal with dirty diapers or midnight feedings or temper tantrums, because these are the things that TV and movies tell us are the real trials of parenting. In real life, it all comes much easier than you could ever imagine. You will be amazed by how quickly you become blasé about handling another human’s feces on a regular basis. Sleep deprivation sucks, but that too becomes part of your existence, and you deal with it because you love your child and this is what your life demands now.

This is not the most terrifying part of being a parent. Not by a long shot.

The real terror comes from realizing how insanely expensive it is to raise a child. And I’m not talking about the my-child-deserves-the-best accoutrements like onesies knit by blind Sherpas and organic hemp bottles. I mean the bare minimum of what your child needs to live costs a god damn fortune.

It’s not changing diapers that worries parents–it’s how much the diapers cost, and how often they must be replenished. It’s not feedings that worry parents–it’s the fact that formula runs more per ounce than uranium. It’s not your kid freaking out at the doctor or the dentist that worries you–it’s the fact that all those doctor visits add up, even if you’re fortunate enough to health insurance.

Now you must find a way to pay for all this, on top of rent, car, insurance, utilities, food, and the intermittent one-time costs that inevitably pop up because the universe tends toward entropy. And if you work a full-time job to pay for all these things, you must leave your child with marginally qualified strangers all day, which also costs an arm and a leg and inevitably introduces your child to horrible language/habits that you will never, ever, ever be able to correct, which of course means that you are a terrible parent.

I’ve never laid in bed at 3am wondering how I’m going to change a diaper or get my kid to eat her vegetables. I have enjoyed many sleepless nights worrying if I could pay for those diapers and vegetables, or fretting that there was some Very Vital Payment I’d forgotten to make that could doom us all. This may just be my own hangup, having grown up poor, but it has always felt to me like the margin separating us all from living on the street was razor thin.

And that’s when I’ve had a job. Since my child was born, I’ve been laid off twice. I’m working now, but in this economy and the industry I work in (publishing), the specter of a pink slip is always there. If I was unemployed for an extended period of time…just thinking of it in the abstract makes me break out in a cold sweat.

Here is a terror I think every parent has experienced–if not exactly in this manner, then in some parallel way: You leave a party late at night, knowing there’s a long drive to get home. You buckle your kid in the backseat, and she falls asleep within seconds as you predicted/hoped. After a valiant effort to stay awake and keep you company, your wife falls asleep too. And it dawns on you that the reason they fell asleep is they trust you. There is not a doubt in any of their minds that you will get them to your destination safe and sound. And you’ve always held their lives in your hands to some extent, but it was never more stark than it was at the moment. And you think to yourself, People I love are counting on me to not fuck all this up, and “this’ = EVERYTHING.

Make a movie about that, Hollywood.

It was difficult to find people who knew Shepherd in his heyday and were also willing and able to talk. Many of his contemporaries and friends had died; others, like Jules Feiffer and Paul Krassner, proved difficult to contact. The same went for people I knew or suspected were influenced by him. I was aware Terry Gilliam had been a Shep fan in his youth, and I even had some contact info for the man, since the company I worked for had done a few books about his films. Alas, he did not return my faxes. (Yes, this was a long time ago.) Garrison Keillor wrote me a brief but polite letter in which he stated he grew up in Minnesota and therefore Shepherd–whose primary radio work was done in New York–didn’t really have any influence on him.

One of the few people who’d worked with him whom I was both able to get in touch with and wanted to talk to me was Fred Barzyk, who had produced most of Shepherd’s television work for PBS. At Barzyk’s invite, I was able to go to the WGBH archives in Boston and view some of these shows, most of which have not been seen on TV in decades. This included an odd show where Shep stood on a dock in Boston Harbor and delivered a version of his radio show there directly to the camera, monologuing for half an hour and then abruptly stopping.

Shepherd also appeared in a series of odd bumpers that aired between programs. One of them featured a blank screen, with Shepherd exhorting the listener to conjure up any image they desired. The next one showed Shepherd reading the complaints the station received for all the horrible images the station had showed–images that were purely the products of the viewers’ imaginations.

The best items by far were the episodes of Jean Shepherd’s America, which I truly hope get released some day. They were fascinating glimpses of various American locales, and since they were shot on early video prototypes, they look like they were filmed yesterday (if you ignore the hair and clothes on display, of course). You only hear and see Shepherd sparingly in these shows, but it lends this eerie atmosphere. It’s like seeing an entire civilization trapped in amber, but moving.

Mr. Barzyk was very forthcoming about his experiences with Shepherd. He seemed to admire him while at the same time thinking he was more than a little nuts. Shep had a craving for attention that bordered on the pathological. You can sense this in his radio work, where he spoke extemporaneously for 45 minutes or more (much more in the late 1950s, when he had an overnight show). He did his best to draw in the listener, making him/her feel as if he was speaking to them and only them. The more I learned about him, though, the more it seemed he needed the audience much more than the audience needed him.

Shepherd had a kind of genius, but it was the type that had to constantly assert that it was genius, and was overly sensitive to the idea that someone somewhere out there might dare think he wasn’t a genius. According to Barzyk, Shepherd seethed over a childhood incident where he was accused of cheating on a test because his score was so high. He never got over the idea that people didn’t believe he could be that smart, and so he carried that resentment with him the rest of his days, that sense of being doubted and ignored never too far from the surface.

But there was one Shep story I was told by Barzyk that stayed with me, in a deep and painful way, more than any other. It happened when they were shooting an episode of Jean Shepherd’s America in Hawaii. The trip was over and everyone had to check out of their hotel and get to the airport. Barzyk and his crew were leaving in one car, Shepherd traveling separately. Shepherd saw Barzyk’s cab in front of the hotel and decided he had to regale the producer and his crew a story. So Shepherd intercepted the cab and began weaving his tale. Five minutes passed. Ten minutes passed. Fifteen minutes passed. Twenty minutes in, Barzyk told Shepherd they had to leave or else they’d all miss their flight. Shep reluctantly let them go.

As his cab pulled away, Barzyk looked in the rear view mirror. He saw Shepherd sidle up to another cab that had been waiting behind his, and begin chatting them up. He did not know these people from Adam. He just needed an audience.

I think about this story a lot. For one thing, it is possibly the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. It also serves as a cautionary tale for wanting things that are beyond your control, something I struggle with often.

Over the years, I’ve written tons of stuff online, for this site and elsewhere. Sometimes I get some positive feedback and words of encouragement. Sometimes I get yelled at, as is the internet’s wont. But more often than not, I get no tangible reaction whatsoever, no real evidence that anyone has read what I’ve written at all. I go through cycles when it comes to this; there are days when this won’t bother me in the slightest, and there are days when it infuriates me. I’m definitely susceptible to the why bother? impulse. Why spend all this time scribbling some scathing takedown, or baring my soul, or crafting jokes, if nobody gives a shit?

The answer to that question is: I have no choice. I have to do this. It’s not on the same level as having to eat and breathe, but it’s not far removed from that sphere, either. I do this to live. If I was the last man on earth, I’d be chiseling my thoughts into a rock, and not so some future civilization could read them, but because I was alive, and that’s it.

So in my mind, I see Shep moving from car to car looking for a receptacle for his thoughts as the end result of someone who needs an audience so bad that the audience does not matter. At the time he did this, he was not struggling to make a living or get attention from the world at large. He was a huge multimedia personality who made a lot of money (for the era) doing what he loved. And he still needed audience at all times. He needed to know his words were being received by people.

What I have to recognize is that regardless of who enjoys what I do, I’m going to feel a burning need to do it anyway. You could call that an impulse or you could call that an illness. Whatever you call it, I’ve got it. And so, I should not become angry or depressed when something I write gets no appreciable attention, or doesn’t get “liked” on Facebook, or doesn’t get RT’ed by that guy I was sure would RT it because it’s right in his wheelhouse.

Because whether all of these things happen or none of them happen, I’m still going to need to write the next thing. It will proceed like that…well, not forever, of course. But if I stop writing, it’ll probably be because I stopped period, and that will be true whether my work is read by a billion people or 12.

This is all a very roundabout way of saying, Get to work and let the other crap take care of itself.

Now, I think you would do well to attend any bit of this amazing (amazin’?) event, especially since proceeds will benefit a scholarship fund in the name of Dana Brand, late Hofstra professor and renowned Mets blogger. If you’re interested and want to know more, details can be gleaned from this New York Times article on the subject. New York magazine also published an excerpt from a paper about Mr. Met that will be presented at the event.

However, if you are specifically interested in my contribution, I will be moderating a panel on Saturday morning, and presenting a paper on the 1999-2000 Mets that afternoon. The paper is closely related to/informed by the book I am currently working on, Yells For Ourselves. This constitutes the first public “preview” of what this thing is. The short version is, it’s an alternate history. The long version is the book itself, the details of which are still knitting together, much like an infant’s skull.

Hope to see you there.

“You have a voice mail,” he told me, “from Kathleen Hanna.”

Kathleen Hanna had called me because I’d emailed her about doing an interview for the zine I had just started. I named it Jes Grew, after a “disease” in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, a novel about race and the influence and spread of black culture into the mainstream. Said novel was one of my many obsessions and a driving influence behind Record Ignite!, the band I’d formed a while ago. But that band was no more, and so this zine was where I thought I should channel my creative energy.

I’d emailed Kathleen at a generic info-type address on her website, so I didn’t have a huge expectation I’d actually hear from her. It felt like asking for a million dollars–this probably won’t work, but it’d be awesome if it did. When I’d formed my now defunct band, there were a select few groups in my pantheon of what I wanted it to be, and Bikini Kill was one of them. I admired their commitment to doing something that was genuinely dangerous, and was also sympathetic to their brand of feminism, though I realize now my understanding of exactly what feminism entailed was rudimentary at best. (Now that I have a daughter, I feel like I understand feminism better than I ever did before, but that’s another post entirely.)

In other words, getting a call from Kathleen Hanna was an enormous deal in my universe. My roommate left the room so I could listen to the voice mail, sensing that this was something he should allow me to enjoy by myself. Hearing a recording of her voice address me was enthralling and terrifying all at once. She sounds just like she did on that Mike Watt album!

I eventually reached her on the phone in person, which was even more terrifying, and we arranged to meet at a coffee shop in Soho for the interview. The day we met was a gorgeous late fall afternoon, just the faintest chill in the air, summer stubbornly hanging on. At this point in my life, my only interviewing experience came as part of a group affair when Jello Biafra came to speak at NYU. Me and another editor at the school’s humor magazine lobbed questions at him along with 20 other “reporters,” one of whom took a good 10 minutes to ask Jello if he would lend his time to something called the Million Marijuana March.

I did plenty of advance work to prepare for this interview, and yet was still frightened beyond comprehension before it began, afraid that I’d say or do something unspeakably wrong. That feeling faded quickly once I actually met Kathleen, because she was unbelievably warm and engaging, completely putting me at ease about talking to someone I considered a hero. (I imagine she had extensive experience doing this.)

We talked for 2 hours, in large part about her new artistic direction, since her first solo album Julie Ruin had just come out and was quite a musical departure from Bikini Kill. But we also covered the gamut of politics and feminism and music, and I somehow managed to sound coherent on these subjects while cognizant of the fact that I was discussing them with Kathleen Fucking Hanna.

Before we parted, I gave Kathleen a bunch of 7 inches from the label my friends upstate had started, including my old band’s sole release (seen to your left). I can’t say why I did this. Perhaps because I felt I should offer some kind of token of appreciation for taking the time to talk to me, and I had nothing else to offer. I think my rationale was, We all love you, so here’s something you, in essence, helped make. She demonstrated far more thankfulness than she needed to, and left. I hadn’t the slightest idea, really, of what I’d just done.

I practically ran home to transcribe the interview. I don’t normally toot my own horn, but in this case I searched for any excuse to tell everyone that I’d just interviewed Kathleen Hanna, you know, no big deal. The hardest part was waiting to publish the interview, since I’d just released my zine’s first issue. Had I known this was going to happen, I obviously would have held out and saved her interview for Issue #1. Foresight has never been a strong suit of mine.

By the time I could reasonably work on the next issue of my zine, I’d graduated from college, which meant I no longer had access to free computer labs with design software (oops). So I quietly assembled the issue at the local newspaper where I had a part-time job proofing ad copy and typing legal notices. Then, I just as quietly printed the zine out on huge color printers at another Major Magazine where I interned two days a week.

The zine, sadly, went nowhere. The effort to make it on the cheap/sly became daunting–I was essentially sneaking around to do it, which might be fun for certain endeavors but not for publishing. The cash to make the zine in legit fashion was nonexistent. Added to this was the inherent difficulty of getting the zine into stores, made more difficult by the fact that I lacked even the most rudimentary hustle skills. (Your guess is as good as mine as to why this fact had not occurred to me before I started making the zine.) Not to mention that the idea of a print zine seemed to have fallen by the wayside altogether with the emergence of the internet. This site you’re reading right now, in fact, grew from an attempt to do something zine-like online, before the term blog had been coined.

However, I did produce an issue featuring the Kathleen Hanna interview and send several copies to her. She sent back an effusive handwritten note thanking me, which made the effort more than worthwhile. We exchanged a few letters shortly thereafter. In one of them, she told me she’d formed a new group, Le Tigre, which was more in line with the electronic music she’d done for Julie Ruin, and was very excited about it. That sounds rad, I probably said.

In the next year-plus after our interview, I would run into Kathleen on occasion, usually at a show. It never ceased to amaze me that, far more often than not, she would go out of her way to say hi to me. Especially imprinted in my memory is the time I saw her–or rather, she saw me–at the premiere of Instrument, the Fugazi documentary. I was already feeling bowled over by the experience of watching that film, which to me was a quasi-religious experience. Adding to this was the odd spectrum of musical celebrities who showed up for the event. I wound up sitting near Sean Lennon, and almost tripped over Michael Stipe on my way out of the theater. It all seemed like a fever dream. At the time, I wasn’t sure it wasn’t one.

After the movie, I was standing outside the theater, chatting with friends, when I heard Kathleen’s voice out of the corner of my ear, saying “hi!” Saying “hi!” to me. For a moment, I honestly thought she mistook me for someone else. I can’t remember exactly what we talked about; the movie, presumably. I do know that I looked over toward some of my friends, thinking I should call them over and introduce them, but they looked shy, almost scared, as if I had crossed into hallowed ground they dared not tread.

Time marched on. I lost a girlfriend and a job and felt an abnormal amount of self-pity about My Place in the World, as if I as the first person to go through losses like these. I hadn’t seen Kathleen for a while when, out of the blue, I received an email from her with the subject line “Parting Wishes.” Her name in my inbox was eye catching enough, but the subject line immediately put me in mind of the title of one of my old band’s songs.

That, it seemed, was the point. Kathleen’s email said she was working on songs for the next Le Tigre album. She really enjoyed my old band’s 7 inch, so much so she’d taken a sample from our song “Parting Wishes” to use in “Keep on Living,” a song she’d written about/for survivors of incest. She thought the new song sounded great and was really psyched by the idea of putting it on the next album, but didn’t want to proceed any further without getting a thumbs up from me.

I sat at my keyboard, almost paralyzed by the mere thought of what I was being asked, and by whom. The thought of saying no was not an option–not that I wanted to–and the thought of asking for any kind of compensation seemed uncouth. Kathleen had been a primary influence on my old band. Allowing her to sample one of our songs seemed a pittance to repay that debt.

When I could finally muster the strength to write back, I told her of course she could sample our song, playing it as cool as I possibly could. I still have that email, and looking back on it, I see my words suffused with semi-detached joking and irony, but beneath them, I can also see the trembling in my fingers as I typed it. At a time when I was struggling to stay afloat financially and emotionally, this gave me a lift that was beyond my ability, even now, to describe in words.

My band had never discussed anything as venal as publishing rights. I’d always thought of it as “my” band, but that wasn’t 100 percent true, and therefore it wasn’t entirely my call to give the thumbs up. But I went ahead and did that anyway, informing ex-bandmates after the fact, which I knew even then was a cowardly thing to do. Luckily for me, they did not question my judgment. They were, in fact, just as blown as away by what was happening as I was, maybe more so. One of them, remembering that “Parting Wishes” opened side two of our 7 inch, marveled at her choice of song thusly: “That means she listened to both sides!”

Thus began an interminable wait until I could hear exactly how my old song had been used for something new. In retrospect, I probably could have asked to hear a sneak peek, or simply asked for a description of what exactly would be sampled. But I was still so overwhelmed by the idea that This Was Happening, it simply didn’t occur to me that I could demand any of these things. Maybe I thought if I asked for details, it would all come apart, like Elmer Fudd noticing he has walked beyond the edge of a cliff. Then and only then does he fall.

Months passed. My employment situation did not improve in the slightest–if anything, it got worse–to the point where I honestly thought I might never work again. I’d spent a good chunk of the savings I’d accumulated in the previous two years, and the terrifying specter of moving back in with my parents began to raise its head. I’ve lived through worse patches of my life, but none as profoundly lonely as this one. The knowledge that something I made was appreciated and sampled by one of my heroes, that she thought what I made was worthy of praise, was honestly one of the few thoughts that got me through my days and nights.

The new Le Tigre album (Feminist Sweepstakes) came out in the fall, when I’d been unemployed almost a year. I spotted it in Kim’s Music on St. Mark’s, a full day (at least) before it was supposed to be on the shelves. Though I’d been promised a free copy, and though I didn’t have much cash to spare, the idea of waiting one more second to hear it was far more daunting than poverty. So I bought it and raced home with it, screaming in my mind at the L and G trains to move faster. “Keep on Living” was the last track. A place of importance. The liner notes mentioned our band, and all our names. It was official.

I sincerely wanted to listen to the whole album and see how “our” song fit into the thing as a whole, but of course I wasn’t that strong. So I popped it into my CD player, skipped to the last track, and…I hadn’t the slightest idea how to feel.

Part of me heard Kathleen’s voice over the beat from my song and felt validated. See? I told all you dummies my band was awesome! But another part of me felt oddly detached from what I was hearing. This was me coming through the speakers–but it wasn’t really me, not anymore.

I emailed Kathleen to let her know I loved it. And I did. Except for the part of me that didn’t. It could have just been the detachment of the digital age, the sensation of feeling divorced from yourself. It could have been the sense of having lost something I once owned. It could have just been the residual depression from a really tough year-and-change bearing down on me. I couldn’t quite put my hands on what it was I felt, or why. I just knew it felt strange, and wrong. I felt awful and ungrateful to feel this way, particularly since Kathleen had never been anything but amazing to me. But I felt this way all the same.

Le Tigre was going to play a show at Warsaw in Greenpoint, their first in NY after the album had been released. Kathleen emailed me about putting all of us on the guest list, and yes of course I said yes please do, all the while dreading what I might feel once I got there. I tried to do what I normally do in situations like this: Push my way through it, pretend everything’s okay. It didn’t work.

I didn’t enjoy myself throughout the vast majority of the show. Not because I felt bad, but because I was afraid I was going to feel bad. That I was going to hear “my” song and feel weird and uncomfortable beyond reckoning, while surrounded by people who couldn’t possibly understand what I was feeling, or why. It was like bracing yourself to be punched.

That dread stretched out for what seemed like forever, because Le Tigre made “Keep On Living” their closer. Kathleen gave it a lengthy intro, explaining its significance and how important its message was to her. Waiting for the song to start, I felt like my skin was going to run away from me.

Then, the beat kicked in, and the room erupted. I’ve been to a billion shows, but none felt intense as Warsaw did that moment, several hundred people screaming along at every side of me. And in that split-second, all those terrible feelings washed away. Not just the fear of this moment, but the fear of the last year-plus of joblessness and doubt and pain. Because everything seemed to come into focus–about this song, and about Everything.

I remembered that I wrote “Parting Wishes” about the relationship of Onstage Star to Audience Member, and vice versa, and how fame wasn’t the thing to aspire to, but some sense of contentment and peace that can only come when you realize how idiotic it is to want to lust after admiration.

When I wrote these words, I hadn’t come close to fame of any kind, even the third-hand reflective kind of being sampled in someone else’s song. So these words hadn’t truly meant anything until this moment, when I experienced hearing this song in a room full of people who were going absolutely bonkers for it.

Now I realized that the reason I’d felt so weird and awful about this song is because part of me wanted to receive the glory for having made it. And if I was honest with myself, that was the same reason I started the band in the first place: So people would think it, and therefore I, was awesome. Well, someone did think it was awesome, so awesome they sampled it in a song that was very important to them. And that someone was one of my heroes.

And look: Here I was in the middle of this great sea of people, undulating at every compass point radiating out from me, ecstatic, buoyant, singing, alive, and I had a part in making it happen. The fact that they weren’t doing all of this “at” me didn’t matter as much as the fact that I could see I had helped them to do it, that I had helped to make other people happy.

This was a tiny sliver of time, but it would be forever. It could never be spent or drained or beaten out of me, no matter how alone or broke I was. I could close my eyes and see this scene of joy I’d made, from now to the grave.

After the show, I hung back, waiting for the big crowds to clear out, waiting for Kathleen. She reemerged near the stage and had to meet and greet a few folks, but made her way in my direction before long.

“What did you think?” she asked. She smiled but looked expectant, almost nervous. I didn’t ask, but I sensed she needed met to tell her everything was okay, that maybe she suspected the weird, dumb feelings I’d been struggling with for weeks.

So we hugged, and I told her it was truly awesome, and I could mean it.

What I saw of DC back then, I liked a lot; they seemed vibrant and genuine in a way that’s being systematically leeched out of New York a little bit more each year. But my few encounters with the more traveled areas of the city felt foreign to me. It didn’t remind me of an American city at all. The first time I approached anything close to downtown DC, it reminded me of Buenos Aires, as weird as that may sound. Wide plazas flanked by arches and statues of generals on rearing horses struck me as very South American. But I also didn’t get close enough to any of them to make a real judgment.

Having now visited the stuff everyone visits in DC, I can say that those initial impressions were only reinforced. The monuments and museums of Washington are imposing and majestic in a very non-American way. America definitely does bravado well, but in a ham-fisted, dumb kinda way, like wearing star-spangled boxer shorts or selling hand-painted silver dollars with bald eagles on them or blowing your hand off with a roman candle on the Fourth of July. Or invading Iraq.

Placed against this standard, DC’s Big Parts seem positively European. It’s all extremely impressive and regal and stentorian, but none of that represents America very well. This is perhaps because when the city was designed and laid out, and even when the Really Big Monuments were being constructed, we still didn’t quite know what America was. All we had to go on was a European model to aspire to, so we copied a bunch of French and Greek stuff and dropped it in a swamp on the Potomac. It was like the ancient ancestor of Las Vegas’s New York New York.

I was really struck by this when we went past the Lincoln Memorial. I never realized how huge the thing was, and the fact that it looks out on a tidal pool adds a further sense of awe and glory. But if you know anything about Lincoln The Man, this seems a powerfully wrong tribute to him. He wasn’t quite the log cabin man mythology makes him out to be, but he was closer to that than he was to the towering ersatz Parthenon built to honor him. You have to think that, given another 100 years, we might have been able to build something a bit more American in his honor.

Then again, even the more modern stuff has a decidedly foreign feel to it. Many of the big federal buildings constructed 30-40 years ago were done in the Brutalist style, the kind of architecture most associated with the Soviet Union; it reminded me of the bizarre Yugoslavian war monuments, only not quite so artistic. The same went for the Metro system, which I found quite efficient and comfortable, particularly in comparison to the NYC subways. But every station looked exactly the same, which made it look eerily like Pyongyang to me.

For all this, I didn’t get to see as nearly as much as I’d like; I could have spent a whole week exploring the Smithsonian. And yet, it feels odd to visit your own capital and feel not just like a tourist, but like a foreigner.

When I called it home, Greenpoint struck me as having the exact amount of artsy-ness that Williamsburg aspired to while being a tad more real, for lack of a better word. For one thing, Greenpoint never needed to “recover” in the way that Williamsburg did, since it had a well-entrenched middle class that never left in bad old days of the 1970s and 1980s. On top of that, it seemed like the artists in Greenpoint actually had jobs and weren’t being held aloft by trust funds. This was provincial prejudice I’m sure, because it still wasn’t hard to find a wealthy dilettante among the populace, someone who seemed to be dabbling in bohemia until Dad’s Law Firm came calling. These folks tended to be the ones most into juvenalia like kickball tournaments and organized games of manhunt, since they had the idle time and total lack of worries necessary to waste in such pointless pursuits.

As I said, we were strolling through Greenpoint, on Nassau Street near Lorimer, where McCarren Park ends. Ahead of us, I saw a twenty-something swinging from scaffolding like it was a jungle gym. At a certain age and in a certain mood, I could have found this kind of thing is cute. In fact, I’m sure I’ve done the same at some point in my life, though I’m also sure I haven’t done so since college. To mid-30s Dad Me, it just struck me as juvenile, embodying the worst aspect of all the dumb infantile things people think of when they now think of Brooklyn. My mind voiced a judgmental Really?, but I said nothing out loud.

My daughter was less guarded. Our corner of Queens holds very few hipsters, and this was not a specimen she’d encountered before. “Why is that GROWN UP swinging like that?” she asked, very loudly. I saw this guy as a kid, because that’s how he was behaving, but to my child, everyone over the age of 10 is a Grown Up, and this was conduct unbecoming a Grown Up. The Swinger abruptly stopped, somewhat embarrassed, and continued on his way, as did we.

“Grown ups shouldn’t be acting like that,” my daughter said, again very loudly and slightly annoyed, as we passed by The Swinger.

“I agree,” I said, and I felt confident that I’d already given her enough information to tell the Real Grown Ups from the fake ones.

If you’re of my relative age, this will remind you of a classic SNL fake commercial, Bad Idea Jeans. The premise is the same–guys casually discussing ideas that are clearly awful, with no one batting an eye. The setting is the same–guys playing a pickup game of hoops. The periodic title card intercuts are virtually the same. The jokes in the Verizon ad are not as hard edged; the SNL version has lines like “Normally I use protection, but I figured, when’s the next time I’m gonna be in Haiti?” And the original Bad Idea Jeans doesn’t have a “stinger” where one bad idea is considered beyond the pale. Still, the Verizon commercial is 99.9% the same.

This really pissed me off when I saw it last night. But what pissed me off more is the fact that I hadn’t seen any online outrage about this blatant ripoff. And that extends to myself, because once I saw it, I slowly realized, Wait, I’ve seen this Verizon ad before; why haven’t I said anything about this? A tweet on the subject garnered one lone response, while a quick Google search this morning shows some interweb consternation but not anything near what this kind of wholesale lifting should attract.

There are two possibilities as to why this ad has not garnered the seething scorn it deserves, and both are equally depressing. The first is that no one remembers the original. To me, Bad Idea Jeans is a classic SNL fake ad in the same company as Schmitt’s Gay and Colon Blow. In the case of Bad Idea Jeans, it was an oblique parody of an inescapable ad genre of that era, the self-important jeans commercial with superfluously busy camera work. But like all great comedy, the concept contained therein is so odd and perfect, it transcends the source material. You don’t have to know what a Levi’s or Dockers ad looked like in 1990 to find this funny.

To me, this commercial is a piece of our shared cultural fabric. But, I am also old, and it’s possible that many people in Verizon’s target audience– even those old enough to buy cell phone plans for themselves– are completely ignorant of Bad Idea Jeans, having been negative-3 years old when it first aired. I try to not think about the fact that people born in the 1990s are playing professional sports or own houses or have children, but damn it, it’s true. These people are adults, the same as I, yet we do not have quite the same cultural touchstones. Stuff that happened in the early 1990s holds no relevance for them, nor should it, really, and I must accept that.

The other possibility this Verizon ad hasn’t been greeted with more shrieking is that people actually do know from whence it came, but they don’t care. Because we live in such a reference-oriented culture now, one in which decontextualized references are considered jokes in and of themselves. (OHAI, everything Seth McFarlane’s ever done.) So many folks out there in TV Land may interpret this Verizon ad as more of an homage to Bad Idea Jeans than a ripoff. And for all I know, the ad’s creators may honestly see it that way, too. They don’t think they’ve “gotten away” with something; they think they’re playing by the New Rules. What passes for a new idea in the 21st century is being the first guy to complete bite something we’ve seen before.

Maybe I’m just being a cranky Get-Off-My-Lawn-ist here. There’s always been examples of repurposing old bits, joke stealing, concept swiping, and so on. I’m also a person who thinks jarts tweeting about themselves and captioning screengrabs of Dennis Miller is hilarious, so I may not be one to talk when it comes to reference-oriented comedy. Still, it’s hard for me to think we haven’t lost something in terms of what we will accept as entertainment.

Again, look at the original Bad Idea Jeans. It took something viewers of that era would be familiar with–self-serious jeans ads with weird camerawork–and used it as springboard for a truly original idea. Then look at the Verizon ad, which used an old idea as a template to make a reboot, and a much less funny/biting one at that.

And then look at me, the guy who considers himself an amateur ad historian (1980s forward, anyway) and yet couldn’t get mad about this until repeat viewings. Maybe I’m more deadened by this recycled world than I realized.

Many critics found the line clunky, but the words were taken verbatim from the Times report about the real-life 1966 incident that the scene mimics. About this particular line of dialogue, the show’s creator, Matt Weiner, said, “His story was such that I thought it inviolable.”

Now, Weiner has created one of the most critically acclaimed shows of our era, while I have written three as-yet unpublished novels and way too many words about Edgardo Alfonzo. However, I have to raise a slight objection to this line of thinking. Because as far as I’m concerned, when it comes to writing, nothing is “inviolable.”

This attitude comes from a lesson I took from my MFA study, one that I always try to keep in mind when writing. Often in workshops, if a story was very personal, it came dangerously close to being critic-proof, as if to criticize the writing was to criticize the writer’s life. The more a story was based on Real Live Events, the more a student would get defensive about criticism thereof. (And I was no exception.) If a reader couldn’t quite understand some aspect of a story, if they wondered why a character did Thing X instead of Thing Y, the writer would huffily respond that the character did Thing X because “that’s what really happened.”

During one such critique, the workshop leader said something I’ll never forget. (Though for the life of me, I can’t remember which workshop leader this was, though I desperately wish I could.) S/he said, “The truth is no excuse.”

You can take inspiration from real life. You can even hew closely to Actual Events, whether they happened to you or are historical facts. But whatever you write must survive not as a documentary, but as writing. Because if it fails as writing, history can’t bail you out. It can’t bestow profundity or meaning onto a story that otherwise has none. In the case of drama, it can’t make your dialogue sound any less stilted and inhuman.

One of the things that has made Mad Men such a smart, mature show is that it portrays its era with as little modern influence as possible. It doesn’t give the modern viewer the out of having a Righteous White Guy who echoes our sensibilities, who comforts the discriminated-against Oppressed Person and assures us that not everyone in this world is horrible.

The truth was, if you weren’t a rich WASP male in 1966, your life was some shade of terrible. Nowadays, everyone thinks they were tolerant back then, in the same way that “everyone” was in the French Resistance. And most people were tolerant–by the standards of the time. What that translated to was not actively discriminating against people while obeying the unspoken divides between classes, races, and genders, while also looking at those few weirdos who did march for civil rights with more than a little suspicion.

How many people tried to make things better? How many people spoke up for the downtrodden? Relatively few. By showing characters who aren’t all-around terrible people but who fail to be good in the ways we expect them to be good, what Mad Men says is, If you lived then you’d probably be like this, too. And you’re probably this way right now, in ways you can’t quite grasp.

This is why the “savages” line fell so flat. It felt like something from a well-meaning-but-heavy-handed mid-1960s drama. (It’s so clunky, in fact, I suspect the original “quote” was actually manufactured. It has the decided scent of “print the legend” wafting off of it.) It reassures us that the horror of the time is being articulated in a way that it really wasn’t.

The line is also a broad brush used to paint starkly drawn heroes and villains. The ad execs become racist monsters instead of blind, unthinking products of their time. The protestors become unassailable knights in shining armor, even though we can imagine their ranks including a bygone character like Kinsey, whose avowed liberalism has some rather rigid limits.

Now that I know the “savages” line is taken from something real…it still falls flat. The knowledge adds nothing to my enjoyment of that scene or that episode. If there had been a footnote crawl at the bottom of the screen saying THIS REALLY HAPPENED, it wouldn’t have made the line fit any better.

When it comes to this incident, few people, if any, remember it, and even fewer are familiar with that quote. So why not fictionalize it completely? Why not transpose the incident to Sterling Cooper? It seems odd to not do that, as if you’re saying, “This specific ad agency that exists in real life, they were racist jerks, but the guys you know and love are a-ok.” I doubt that was Weiner’s intention, but it was the effect.

When it comes to writing, poetic license excuses a lot. The truth, very little.

The moment came at the beginning of the meeting, when the PTA president insisted we all rise and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Once I heard this, I was gripped by a childlike but very real panic. I hadn’t been asked to do this seriously* since high school, and for a terrifying split second I wasn’t sure what I should do with myself.

*I include the adverb seriously here because the live Pee-Wee Herman Show I saw with my daughter opened with Pee-Wee reciting the Pledge along with the audience, which I don’t think counts, really.

The reason I wasn’t sure what to do is because I spent a good chunk of my childhood as a Jehovah’s Witness. Witnesses refuse the say the Pledge of Allegiance. They don’t do a lot of things, due to their selectively literal interpretation of the Bible (or their translation thereof; it’s a very long story, the more you hear of the less you truly know). Being a Witness is almost like keeping kosher, but instead of worrying about what you eat, you have to worry about everything else.

There are a few reasons why Witnesses don’t recite the Pledge. For one, they consider it a form of idolatry, ascribing magical powers to an inanimate object, which has been expressly forbidden since the Golden Calf days. Witnesses are particularly wary of cultural touchstones that have Pagan Origins, since they fear those are the shiny entryways for the devil and his henchmen. This is the reason they don’t celebrate most holidays, since nearly all of them originate from some ancient fertility rite or human sacrifice festival.And if you think about it, saluting and declaring your fealty to a piece of fabric definitely has some overtones of prehistorical witchcraft.

But above all, Witnesses don’t like the “under God” part of the whole Pledge thing. They believe that if you’re going to pledge allegiance to anyone, God’s the guy, and that believing God looks after any specific nation more than any other–yes, even America–runs counter to pretty much everything Jesus ever said.

I was a Witness because my mom became one at some point in my youth, but I wasn’t just along for the ride. I really, truly, and thoroughly believed in it. I dutifully highlighted my Watchtower every week and raised my hand at meetings to answer questions and gave talks and read every Society* publication cover to cover. I had these little pleather binders with Watchtower and Awake imprinted in gold leaf inlay where I kept back issues so I could refer to them again in the future, and I often did. Witnesses refer to their religion as simply The Truth, and I too believed it to be The Truth.

* “The Society” was the name often used to refer to the larger Witness organization, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. I used the phrase “The Society” as a byword for an organization in the novel I just completed, and not until I wrote this post did I realize why it had such a resonance for me.

But for all my belief, I didn’t want to be found out at school. I believed completely and unequivocally that I shouldn’t say The Pledge, but I didn’t want other kids to notice me not doing it and ask questions. So for much of my school years, during the morning Pledge I would stand and I would put my hand on my heart and I would mouth the words, but I wouldn’t say them, hoping that God and I had a tacit understanding. This is the best I can do right now, God, because I’m ten years old.

I’d gotten a cue to this from my mother, who also seemed reticent to abandon everything she was told to. We stopped celebrating most holidays, but Christmas remained, in a way. We didn’t put up a tree anymore, and we didn’t exchange presents. But when my grandparents who lived next door to us hosted the extended family Christmas , we would show up and drink egg nog and play dumb games and even sing carols. We would basically do everything Christmas-y except the gift giving. My mom could give up presents, but giving up her family on Christmas was too much to bear.

I’d been told that as a Witness, I was supposed to stand out. I was supposed to relish the scorn of the Outside World (which comprised anything beyond the small universe of Witnessdom). The Watchtower would always contain a tale of an apostle who was stoned to death, or some believers in a country in Asia or Africa or someplace who were machine-gunned to death because they wouldn’t renounce their faith. If they could endure that, The Watchtower said, you can endure not celebrating your own birthday.

If you truly believe in something, this concept can be soothing. Enduring hardship for what you believe in just reinforces how right you are. But the idea of this and the deed of carrying it out are two very different things. Especially if you must live in the world of Kid-dom, where every slight difference is identified, tagged, and ridiculed.

There was no help for you as a Witness kid. Your parents weren’t going to come into the school and tell your teachers the score, as if you had a peanut allergy to jack o’lanterns and birthday cake. You, the kid, had to do all the telling yourself. I’d already been tasked with informing every teacher why I couldn’t/wouldn’t participate in every holiday-related art project. Though I trusted these teachers would be understanding–and they invariably were–even this effort crushed me. I dreaded Halloween, dreaded Thanksgiving, dreaded that first sheepish approach to a teacher’s desk in early fall to have The Talk with them.

When it came to any activity involving other kids, I skirted the Witness issue as much as possible. If I got a birthday invitation, I’d say I couldn’t go, giving no additional explanation. Eventually, I stopped getting those invitations period and the problem solved itself. If anyone asked me why I didn’t draw a Christmas tree or an Easter bunny for my seasonal project, I’d say I didn’t feel like it. In weaker moments, I’d do half-assed holiday work for cover, then make sure to throw it out once it was handed back to me.

I used to go proselytizing door to door, though I found it terrifying. I don’t have the personality to knock on a stranger’s door and sell them anything, be it vacuum cleaners, encyclopedias, or Jesus. I was lucky that our congregation was a good 20 miles outside of my school district, and so the likelihood of running into someone I knew was slim. Still, I had the constant fear that I’d ring a doorbell, and some kid would answer and it would be someone from my school. I knew that if that ever happened, I’d completely lose it.

That never came to pass, but the fear that it might never faded, the thought that behind every stranger’s door lay the possibility My Dark Secret would be uncovered. The only thing that made this feeling fade was the thought that well, we’re in the End Times anyway, so any kind of embarrassment I experience will be fleeting, for the Apocalypse is nigh. Which is definitely a healthy thing for a preteen to think.

As I got older, I got a little more daring. Eventually I worked up the courage to simply stand during the Pledge but not put my hand or over my heart and not say anything. (This was the Witnesses’ prescribed reaction, a show of respect but no allegiance.) I started doing this in junior high, when I noticed that the other kids could care less about the Pledge. They cracked jokes, made fart noises, and snapped bras during the morning Pledge, ironically showing a lot less reverence to the ritual than I was. I caught plenty of grief during junior high, but none of it was Witness-related.

Through high school, my intellectual curiosity and natural bent toward Weird Stuff slowly pushed Witnessing to the periphery of my beliefs. By freshman year of college, I abandoned it altogether. This coincided with my mother sloughing it off as well, and so I was spared any angry confrontations. Everyone independently, quietly decided this chapter in our lives was over and that was that. I don’t know what caused my mom to leave the faith because to this day we’ve never had a conversation about it. And though we often reminisce about growing up, anything Witness-related is rarely mentioned, if ever.

I’ve held on to certain aspects of what Witnessing gave me. My political outlook is shaped by the idea that God doesn’t really care about imaginary borders on a map, and that believing otherwise has gotten a lot of people killed during the course of human history. I think that the world works best when we’re all not trying to elbow our way to the top, that a little more equity and recognition of each other’s humanity would make the world a better place.

What I don’t believe anymore is that this world is nearing the end of its run, which just seems a convenient excuse to let it go to hell and do nothing for your fellow human beings. I suspect that all millennial sects (Witnesses included) actually want to see this world end to fulfill some perverted revenge fantasy on everyone they dislike. That they hate the bulk of humanity so much that they want God to smite everyone and bring them up to a cloud somewhere so they can laugh as the whole thing burns down.

For most of my adult life, I only occasionally had to confront the strangeness a childhood of Witnessing imposed on me. But since having a kid of my own, the rush of strangeness and discomfort washes over me far more often than it used to. Because kids want to celebrate every holiday, and I’ve kind of forgotten how. By osmosis, she’s come to believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and their brethren, and it’s very difficult for me to handle sometimes. Even birthdays still seem strange to me. I have to walk myself through all the motions of things that other people do by rote. It’s like I suffered head trauma and am reteaching myself how to tie my shoes.

So when I was asked to stand and recite the Pledge, I rose through my panic. For a moment I thought to myself, Even though I’m not a Witness anymore, this Pledge thing is still pretty weird and kind of stupid, actually. But before I even realized what I was doing, I put my hand over my heart and found myself not saying the words, but mouthing them. The action came so suddenly and so thoughtlessly that I never considered for a second I could stop it.

I soon sat down and felt like a child, in the worst ways. Powerless, nervous, fearing monsters under my bed.