Big Mike: Am I Blue?

Things have been going awfully swimmingly the last few months. The Loved One and I are thrilled with each other. Work’s going well for us. Our home is in fairly good shape. The car’s still running. Our doctors aren’t warning us to wrap up our financial affairs just yet. And — hoo-rah! — spring seems to be here (although Constance, the big potato over at The Book Case, keeps saying You watch, it’s gonna snow again, the scrooge.)

It’s times like these — rare though they are — that make me wonder why I still keep taking Zoloft. I’ve been on it since 2002. Before that I did imipramine and desipramine, a couple of early anti-depressants that today seem laughably primitive. I also swallowed a lot of Xanax back in the 1980s and 90s.

In fact, I wouldn’t leave the house without at least a half dozen Xanax in my pocket. Not that I was going to take all six of them. But merely having them clacking around in the plastic pill case gave me just enough spine to go out into the world and face down agoraphobia, panic attacks, and — horrors — people. So I’d take one or two on a good day, four on a bad day.

Not only that, I had my head shrunk by psychiatrists, psychologists, and licensed clinical social workers. I tried prayer, meditation, chanting, booze, and good old positive thinking. No matter what I tried, my terrors of going outdoors, high places, confined spaces, and the rest of the cornucopia of neuroses I entertained made me a shuddering wreck.

I’m thinking about all this because I just finished reading a piece in The New Yorker about depression. The author, Louis Menand, seems to think all the rage for diagnosing depression in people is a load of crap. He implies that this mania is nudged along by drug manufacturers who want to peddle more and more anti-depressants.

He’s not the only one who thinks that way. He writes of a hot new book out called Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease. Its author, Gary Greenberg, also sees a lot of business opportunism in telling people they’re pathologically blue.

Gary Greenberg

None of this is new. My old pal Danny long ago told me his daddy-o felt psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists and the like loved to tell you your head was fucked up “so they could get you hooked.” It’s unclear whether Danny’s poppa-rino meant hooked on medications or hooked on weekly visits — probably both. The latest stats seem to bear his fears out. The National Institute of Mental Health reports that 26.2 percent of Americans can be diagnosed with a mental disorder (primarily depression) in any given year.

Sheesh! That means if you’re car-pooling this morning with three other people, you’d better hope today’s driver isn’t the NIMH’s one-in-four, especially when the car nears that concrete support column up ahead.

“Please, Please, Please Don’t Be One Of The Four!”

Then again, as Menand and Greenberg argue, the driver merely might be experiencing some normal everyday sadness — the loss of a loved one, say, or a pressing financial concern. She or he feels down about it all, happens to catch an ad for Cymbalta on TV, makes an appointment and says Hey doc, lemme have some of those skull jockey pills.

Menand even cites the case of Paxil. Its manufacturer discovered in the 90s that the drug seemed to make people less shy. So it went about the business of positioning shyness as a mental disorder so that shrinks could prescribe barrels-ful of Paxil.

No doubt all of this is true. Trivializing clinical depression just to make a buck is so craven you’d think a Wall Street banker came up with the idea. The only problem is when I read this stuff I start thinking that maybe — just maybe — I’d fallen victim to all the hype back when I was that shuddering wreck.

I don’t shudder so much anymore. I have no idea why. Was it the Zoloft? Or was it a combination of meditation, therapy, and booze? Or — worse — was I just imagining it all?

Someone very close to me once scoffed at my collection of loose screws. I won’t identify him because I don’t want to embarrass him (although I should.) Let’s call him Thomas. One day Thomas had as much as he could take of my little madnesses. “You know what your problem is?” he said. “It’s all in your head.”

Uh, yeah.

Even though I’m pretty certain Thomas was full of shit, there’s still that tiny little part of me that fears he was right. Then when I read the indictments put forth by guys like Menand and Greenberg, I start obsessing: I wasn’t really depressed; There was nothing wrong with me; It must have been all in my head.

Every once in a while, though, some crystal clear memory of the existential terror I felt being trapped in an el car some forty feet above the pavement hits me. I think of my racing, pounding heart. I recall hyperventilating. I can almost feel the sweat pouring out of me again. I get twitchy thinking about how I’d struggle to resist the urge in every cell of my being to tear the doors open and jump out. And that was only one of my little madnesses.

Then I realize that Thomas was right. It was all in my head. He just didn’t know how right he was.

All In My Head

Big Mike: The Half Of Life I Love

I turned 54 big ones this week. March 4th. The only date that’s a command.

March forth.

As in the years, which are now flipping by like calendar pages in an old movie. Eek.

The Days Seem Like Minutes

I can’t stop my paunch from growing, my lower legs from turning more mottled, the area just below what used to be my finely chiseled jaw from turning wobbly, and other signs that I’m nearer the soil than the womb.

Scary? You bet. Then again when my sis, Good Old Franny, died in January 2007 I sat in her bedroom alone with her. It was our goodbye. Cancer had torn through her bowels, her liver, and then pretty much all the rest of her internal organs until she was almost a skeleton. She only had a few days left on this mad Earth, maybe only a few hours. Everyone knew it. We’d all taken vacation and sick days to gather around her and usher her out. Each of us — her sibs, her kids, her grandkids, her old pals — took ten or fifteen minutes to commune with her, alone. I almost envied her. That’s the way to go, I thought, with people waiting in line to tell you how much they love you.

Ma, of course, was part of the bon voyage party. She took an hour or so with Franny, naturally. And, just as naturally, they fought. They’d been fighting all their lives. Why should they stop just because one of them was on her deathbed?

Anyway, it came to my turn. I’m not a sugar-coater and Franny wasn’t either. It would have been an insult to her to pretend I was there for anything other than to bid her adieu. So I said, “Well, this is it. Tell me, did you love this life?

Franny nodded, then after a pause during which I suppose she was gathering her strength to speak, she said, “Yes I did.” She paused again, eying me in a way that made me squirm, as if she was on the verge of knowing something that the rest of us couldn’t even begin to imagine. That coming knowledge liberated her from niceties and any possible hesitancy — no matter how slight it might have been in her case — to tell a painful truth. She said, “You don’t, do you?”

How could I lie to my dying sister?

“Not so much,” I said. “I’d say about fifty percent of the time I love life. The other fifty percent you can have.”

She nodded again as if she knew precisely what my answer was going to be. She’d only wanted me to tell her the truth.

So let me tell you about a part of that fifty percent I love. The Loved One asked me a couple of weeks what I wanted to do for my birthday. The first thing I said was, “Don’t get me anything; I got enough crap.”

“Okay, what do you want to do?”

“I dunno.”

You know, at fifty-four you really don’t want to get a James Bond 007 attache case. I got one when I was eight. Good god, that thing was so cool — I would have had an orgasm upon unwrapping it had I been capable of having one at that tender age. That’s one of the drawbacks of my age — there’s no longer any gift that can excite me that much.

An Eight-Year-Old’s Dream

And at fifty-four you really don’t want to go to the circus, which I was dying to do when I was seven. I pestered Ma and Dad to take me to the circus for my birthday that year. Both of them looked at me as if I were daft. As if they’d rehearsed beforehand, each said, in turn, “Whaddya wanna do that for?”

I had no answer. I was trying to buy into their outlook on life so I pretended that I knew the circus was nothing more than a bunch of lions and tigers and clowns and acrobats. A silly expense. How would going to the circus help pay the mortgage, tuitions, doctor bills, and keep the family’s credit rating pristine? So I shrugged. Of course, one of the advantages of the passage of time is the ability to think of a good riposte. Now I know that when they asked why I wanted to go to the circus, I should have said, “Uh, because I’m seven?”

A Seven-Year-Old’s Priority

So what did I want to do on my 54th birthday? It hit me. Tell Me A Story, Part Three at the Muddy Boots Cafe in Nashville, about fifteen miles east on us on State Road 46.

That’s what we did last night. It was, as the name suggests, the third installment of an open mike storytelling event sponsored by radio station WFHB (for which I’m a newswriter, by the way). Just plain old folk get up and tell some true tale.

Best thing we could have ever done. The Loved One had a chai and a slice of cornbread. I had a blueberry smoothie. And we listened to the most motley collection of storytellers rural Indiana could produce.

The Muddy Boots Cafe

There was a young woman who told of a car trip she’d taken with her family when she was a girl to the mountains of Virginia. All the way, squished into the backseat with her sibs, she listened to her older brother tell her spooky tales about vampires and Jesus. She recalled laying up all night long in her sleeping bag when they finally reached their campsite, her eyes wide, listening for the tell-tale sounds of vampires or a bloody Jesus come to scare the poo out of her. To this day, she admitted, she still can’t really distinguish between vampires and Jesus.

Another guy told a story he swore was true of his high school reunion where the most athletic, noblest and most popular guy in class finally decked the biggest bully and everyone cheered. But his telling of the old chestnut was so heartfelt and entertaining that none of us cared that everyone who’s ever attended a high school reunion tells the same damned story.

There was a grandma who began by mentioning that her completely gray hair was caused by her daughter Heather. It seems the family once had a pet ferret that constantly humped everything in sight. One day when she was about four, Heather stuffed the ferret into a pillowcase and swung it wildly over her head just to see how it would feel. She stopped only when she inadvertently clunked the ferret-bag on the dining room chair. “Mama,” she called out, “the ferret’s not moving!” It turned she’d paralyzed the ferret from the waist down. The incident, the grandma said, had instilled in Heather a lifelong desire to care for animals. As for the ferret, she said, it went on to live longer than most of its species-mates, only the family never again had to witness it humping anything.

A farm woman told a story about her ex-husband. He had a horse whom she loathed. The husband, she claimed, only kept the horse around to torture her. One day he was out putting fenceposts in the ground. He came in midway through his chore and grabbed a beer out of the fridge. He went back out and resumed his work. A few minutes later, he dashed back in and demanded of the woman, “Why did you drink my beer?”

“I never touched your beer,” she said. And, like many married couples, they went back and forth for long minutes. Finally, he ordered her to bring him out another beer.

A few minutes later, he burst back in the house and yelled, “You did it again! You drank my beer!”

“I did not,” she huffed and another back and forth ensued. Again he ordered her to bring him out another beer.

This time, the woman decided to hang around, hoping to see what was going on. A moment after her husband laid his beer and the ground and began to concentrate on his fence posts, the horse peeked around the barn, extended his neck, picked up the can with his lips, raised his head and drained it.

“Look, look,” the woman shouted. “Look what your damned horse is doing!”

The next day, the woman concluded, her soon-to-be ex-husband nailed a sign up on one of his new fenceposts reading, “Horse for sale. Cheap.”

The last storyteller of the night was a big, round guy with a long, thick, gray beard and equally gray hair hanging down to his shoulders. He was about 65 or so and looked like a cross between an overgrown gnome and a department-store Santa Claus. He wore suspenders and baggy jeans and carried a six-foot walking stick. His was less a tale than a prose-poem about how telling stories makes us human.

The Loved One and I drove back home on hilly, curvy State Road 46 in utter darkness. “I’ll bet we could see a million stars,” she said. Upon hearing that, I pulled off on a gravel road leading into a secluded forest. We came to an opening and I put the Prius in park. When I turned the lights off we couldn’t even see each other for the first few moments.

“It’s too cold,” The Loved One said.

“Let’s just look for a minute,” I said.

We got out of the car and turned our heads skyward. There were so many stars it was hard to make out the constellations. We saw the Winter Triangle easily, though, with brilliant Sirius, the brightest star in the sky other than the Sun forming its bottom point, the red supergiant Betelgeuse forming its top point and white Procyon the triangle’s third point. We saw the blue Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, riding on Taurus the Bull’s massive shoulder. The Loved One broke the silence when she exclaimed, “Look at that! A shooting star!”

She then kissed me as if I were no longer a 54-year-old goat but a someone who had a finely chiseled jaw and no paunch. Those calendar pages suddenly stopped flipping, if only for a moment, in the dark under a million stars.

It was better than the all the circuses and all the James Bond 007 attache cases in the world.

Procyon (upper left), Betelgeuse (upper right) and Sirius (bottom)

Big Mike: Vajazzling

You want proof that human beings are sick and stupid? Here it is: the hottest new thing is vajazzling.

For the uninitiated, vajazzlers decorate their their female genitalia with jewels. The leading proponent of this craze is Jennifer Love Hewitt, who long, long, long ago starred in I Know What You Did Last Summer and since then has been so deservedly ignored that she was forced to, well, encrust her nether-asset in diamonds in order to get the attention she believes she so richly merits.

And you thought women having half-cantaloupes surgically attached to their pectoral muscles was a sure sign of the coming end of the world.

The End Is Near!

Maybe vajazzling is the last gasp manifestation of the Age of Reagan — you know, the fabulous three decades that gave us Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, real-life Gordon Geckos, McMansions, the Hummer H2, gazillion-inch flat screen TVs, Enron, Bernie Madoff and Lloyd Blankfein. I thought the Great Recession had cooled off this holy land’s fascination with greed and hyper-materialism. Maybe Jennifer Love Hewitt and her ovine followers are simply behind the curve.

Trendsetters

We can only hope.

Then again, as good old H.L. Mencken once wrote, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

Jennifer Love Hewitt may be too dense to understand that her glittery hoo-hoo is old hat. She’s certainly not smart enough to grasp the simple fact that having gems mashed into her honey pot makes her, de facto, a dope.

Of course, it could be that vajazzling is merely another benchmark in women’s long struggle for equality. Sexual expression is an historically recognized statement, a revolutionary demonstration even, in the liberation of the oppressed. Jennifer Love Hewitt et al may be announcing to the world that their vaginas are their own property, and they may do with them as they please. In that case, women have now achieved parity with the opposite sex — they are just as stupid as men.

My old pal Aaron Freeman passed on this video of the vajazzling process, via Gawker. The beauty of the whole clip is the woman who actually does the vajazzling (is she the vajazzler or is the woman who gets it done to her the vajazzler?) is embarrassed to say the word vagina!

Nice to know that the certified, professional woman to whom you’re entrusting your girl-junk has the sexual attitude of a kindergartener.

Don’t think I’m coming down hard on these people just because they’re women. I guarantee that if Lloyd Blankfein wasn’t too busy doing god’s work of raping the world economy, he’d be having his phallus gilded this very minute.

Maybe the creationists are right and Darwin and his gang are wrong. We aren’t the progeny of apes. Evolution suggests species improve upon their forebears. Jennifer Love Hewitt and her vajazzling subspecies can’t possibly be an improvement. Have you ever seen a chimp or an orang with jewels on her vagina?

Smarter Than Jennifer Love Hewitt

Big Mike: The Game Behind The Games (Redux)

(We inadvertently posted this piece yesterday. Monday is Milo’s day. Just as he was preparing to hit Publish for his masterpiece, he noticed this piece was already up. Immediately he was on the phone, threatening to take his literary pearls elsewhere. It took no less than a half-hour’s-worth of groveling, a case of Jack Daniel’s, and the arrangement for a midnight visit to his office of a trio of high-priced call girls to calm him down. Oh, and the presentation to him of a solid gold plaque bearing the inscription, “Gary, Indiana’s Greatest Writer.” Our ordeal of prostration took so much out of us, we were too exhausted to include images and links in this re-post. Go to the original post if you want to see them. — The Eds.)

The Winter Olympics are finished, thank goodness. Now it’ll be two good years before I’ll be bombarded with information about athletes I don’t care about and sports that are so pointless as to be parodies of themselves.

Didn’t I warn you a couple of weeks ago when all this year’s Olympics fuckery began that it would be chock full of emotional pornography? Sure enough, as Benny Jay wrote Sunday, some skater performed despite losing her mother. There are six-plus billion of us on this crazy planet. People drop like flies every second of the day. When someone I know cashes it in, I’ll weep. If a friend or a colleague loses a loved one, I’ll be johnny-on-the-spot at the wake or to help them sit shiva. But I won’t salivate like Pavlov’s dogs every time some NBC sportscaster rings the death knell.

This year’s Olympiad may be best remembered not for the poor guy who was killed when he flew off his sled or even for the skater but for the inexplicable interest it has generated in curling. Yup. Curling.

It’s the hottest thing right now. In a Washington Post story the other day one of the Canadian curlers claimed there are a million of her fellow citizens who engage in the sport…, er, thing. That means one of every 34 Canadians enjoys watching a giant paperweight with a handle on top sliding down the ice while a couple of goofs furiously sweep the surface ahead of it. They’re nuts.

A few years ago poker became the hottest thing in the world. It seemed as though every network and cable channel began carrying poker tournaments. Think of it! A game where people sit there, motionless, doing all they can to mask their emotions was being aired a dozen times a day. Watching paint dry would have been far more compelling — at least there’s a color involved.

But I swear to you, poker is a cavalcade of laughs compared to curling.

Yet people all over this lunkheaded land are getting giddy over it. “Fans far and wide were drawn to Canada’s No. 2 sport,” the WashPo story asserted. “… Many fans took time to try to understand the strategy and idiosyncracies. New curling clubs already are being formed in warmer places like Florida and North Carolina.”

Are people that bored in those two states?

Chicago came thisclose to getting the 2016 Olympics. Poor Benny Jay almost had a baby worrying that the International Olympic Committee would tab our town for the “honor.” Public parks would be paved over for one-off concrete arenas, Richie Daley’s cousins and campaign contributors would become (even more) enriched by sweetheart construction and concessions contracts, and embarrassingly poor neighborhood folk would be shipped off to the equivalent of Siberia (Ford Heights?) so they wouldn’t be seen on network TV. All in the name of bringing the city some mythical “world class” cachet.

We really dodged a bullet there, folks. The Vancouver Sun estimated a year ago that various arms of Canadian government — local, provincial and national — had by that time already ponied up $6 billion to make the quadrennial sports/advertising orgy go on. Six years from now, the even bigger summer games would cost us several times that amount. Like we’ve got it to spare.

Who knows what pyramid schemes Richie Daley would have concocted to pay for the 2016 bash? He’d probably begin by slashing expenses — schoolkids don’t really need textbooks, do they? And he might have sold more of the city’s assets — the sidewalks, say — to private operators.

All this talk about money, games, poker, and pyramid schemes reminds me of the one and only time I’ve ever played poker with a bunch of guys.

We played at the Arlington Heights home of a guy named Lester. He was the captain of my 12-inch softball team back in the ’90s. He was geekily earnest — he’d solemnly shake hands with every player as soon as each showed up for practice or the game.

We all arrived at Lester’s house that Friday night, opened our bottles of bourbon, lighted up our five-dollar cigars and looked expectantly at our host. “Deal ‘em up,” one guy said. Instead, Lester lugged out a bunch of charts on easels and a whiteboard. “I just wanna show you guys something before we play,” he said. We all glanced at each other.

Lester proceeded to extol the virtues and wonders of Amway. Oy. “You may ask why I’m so committed to Amway,” he said, which we hadn’t but he told us anyway.

He’d survived a near-death experience a few years before, he said. He was gassing up his car late at night when a guy came up, stuck a pistol in the small of his back and demanded his wallet. He smartly turned it over but, for the hell of it, the gunman pulled the trigger. Lester went down like a sack of flour. Fortunately — maybe miraculously — the bullet lodged in his spine and didn’t do much more damage than to give him a cranky back for the rest of his life.

Anyway, as he recovered, Lester decided not to waste another moment of his life. He’d devote all his energies to making a fabulous living for himself and his family. In fact, he was going to let us all in on the secret of his success.

He drew flow charts showing how scads of money would pass from our countless potential clients to us. The charts described perfect pyramids. Amway makes Bernie Madoff look like a three-card monte player on the el.

None of us exhibited the slightest interest in enrolling. The night wasn’t a total loss for Lester, though. He cleaned each and every one of us out by the time the game broke up.

Richie Daley, the International Olympic Committee and NBC would have been proud.

Big Mike: The Game Behind The Games

The Winter Olympics are finished, thank goodness. Now it’ll be two good years before I’ll be bombarded again with information about athletes I don’t care about and sports that are so pointless as to be parodies of themselves.

Didn’t I warn you a couple of weeks ago when all this year’s Olympics fuckery began that it would be chock full of emotional pornography? Sure enough, as Benny Jay wrote Sunday, some skater performed despite losing her mother a couple of days before. I know it’s tough to lose a parent. I’ve gone through it. My old man and I weren’t exactly peas in a pod but I still cried like a baby when he bought his ticket in 1995.

At the risk of sounding heartless, though, I really don’t care that the woman lost her mother. There are six-plus billion of us on this crazy planet. People drop like flies every second of the day. When someone I know cashes it in, I’ll weep. If a friend or colleague loses a loved one, I’ll be johnny-on-the-spot at the wake or to help them sit shiva. But I won’t salivate like Pavlov’s dog every time some NBC sportscaster rings the death knell.

NBC Got What It Wanted

This year’s Olympiad may be best remembered not for the poor guy who was killed when he flew off his sled or even for that skater but for the inexplicable interest it has generated in curling. Yup. Curling.

It’s the hottest thing right now. In a Washington Post story the other day one of the Canadian curlers claimed there are a million of her fellow citizens who engage in the sport…, er, thing. There are about 34 million Canadians so that mean one of every 34 of them enjoys watching a giant paperweight with a handle on top skidding down the ice while a couple of goofs furiously sweep the surface ahead of it. They’re nuts.

That Sound You Hear Is Me Snoring

A few years ago poker became the hottest thing in the world. It seemed like every network and cable channel began carrying poker tournaments. Think of it! A game where people sit there, motionless, doing all they can to mask their emotions was being aired a dozen times a day. Watching paint dry would have been far more compelling — at least there’s a color involved.

But I swear to you, poker is a cavalcade of laughs compared to curling.

Yet people all over this lunkheaded land are getting giddy over it. “Fans far and wide were drawn to Canada’s No. 2 sport,” the WashPo story asserted. “… Many fans took time to try to understand the strategy and idiosyncrasies. New curling clubs already are being formed in warmer places like Florida and North Carolina.”

Are people that bored in those two states?

Chicago came thisclose to getting the 2016 Olympics. Poor Benny Jay almost had a baby worrying that the International Olympic Committee would tab our town for the “honor.” Public parks would be paved over for one-off concrete arenas, Richie Daley’s cousins and campaign contributors would become (even more) enriched by sweatheart construction and concession contracts, and embarrassingly poor neighborhood folk would be shipped off to the equivalent of Siberia (Ford Heights?) so they wouldn’t be seen on network TV. All in the name of bringing the city some mythical “world class” cachet.

We really dodged a bullet there, folks. The Vancouver Sun estimated a year ago that various arms of Canadian government — local, provincial and national — had by that time already ponied up $6 billion to make the quadrennial sports/advertising orgy go on. Six years from now, the even bigger summer games would cost us several times that amount. Like we’ve got it to spare.

Who knows what pyramid schemes Richie Daley would have concocted to pay for the 2016 bash?  He’d probably begin by slashing expenses — schoolkids don’t really need textbooks, do they? And he might have sold more of the city’s assets — the sidewalks, for instance — to private operators.

“Dear Diary: I’d Happily Give Up All My Textbooks So The City Can Build A Curling Palace!”

All this talk about money, games, poker and pyramid schemes reminds me of the one and only time I’ve ever played poker with a bunch of guys.

We played at the Arlington Heights home of a guy named Lester. He was the captain of my 12-inch softball team back in the ’90s. He was a geekily earnest fellow — he’d solemnly shake hands with every player as soon as each arrived for practice or the game.

We all arrived at Lester’s house that Friday night, opened our bottles of bourbon, lighted up our five-dollar cigars and looked expectantly at our host. “Deal ‘em up,” one guy said. Instead, Lester lugged out a bunch of charts on easels and a whiteboard. “I just wanna show you guys something before we play,” he said. We all glanced at each other.

Lester proceeded to extol the virtues and wonders of Amway. Oy. “You may ask why I’m so committed to Amway,” he said, which we hadn’t but he told us anyway.

He’d survived a near death experience a few years before, he said. He was gassing up his car late at night when guy came up, put a pistol in the small of his back and demanded his wallet. He smartly turned it over but, for the hell of it, the gunman pulled the trigger. Naturally, Lester went down like a sack of flour. Fortunately — almost miraculously so — the bullet lodged in his spine and didn’t do much more damage than to give him a cranky back for the rest of his life.

Anyway, as he was recuperating, Lester decided not to waste another moment of his life. He’d devote all his energies to making a fabulous living for himself and his family. In fact, he was going to let us all on the secret of his success.

He drew flow charts showing how scads of money would pass from our countless potential clients to us. The charts described perfect pyramids. Amway makes Bernie Madoff look like a three-card monte player on the el.

None of us showed the slightest interest in enrolling. The night wasn’t a total loss for Lester, though. He cleaned each and every one of us out by the time the game was over.

Richie Daley, the International Olympic Committee and NBC would have been proud.

Big Mike: Can A Barn Boss Be A Friend?

One of the ongoing motifs of this site is Benny Jay’s amazing inability to grasp many of the simplest precepts of computers and the Internet.

For a couple of weeks last year, he and I spoke day after day on the telephone, me trying to get him to understand how to open a new window on his screen. He had no idea what I was talking about. That’s like your doctor saying, You have a fever? Hmm, I don’t know anything about that. If I understand Benny correctly these days, he doesn’t yet know how to create a folder. That’s like a native English speaker admitting he doesn’t know the definition of the word the.

You and I know Benny is a supremely gifted thinker. Time and again I’ve said Benny Jay is one of the three smartest guys I’ve ever known. The other two, by the way, are Aaron Freeman, the comedian, commentator and professional contrarian, and Damien Reynolds, a one-time Jeopardy! champion and the world’s most curmudgeonly options trader/cabdriver.

Damien Reynolds (With Guitar) At Woodstock

So it’s not that Benny Jay lacks the neurons and axons to comprehend the gobbledygook that is computerese. It’s got to be something else. But what?

Before I attempt to diagnose the poor sucker I must add he’s like a dope addict, surrounding himself with shady characters also carrying monkeys on their backs. For instance, he spends a great deal of time with Milo, Gary, Indiana’s Greatest Writer. Milo, although a fine wordsmith and accomplished self-abuser, is nearly as baffled by the computer as Benny is. The other day, in my role as Barn Boss of this communications colossus, I issued a fiat demanding that all contributors categorize their posts.

That’s Me, On The Right

I figured most of us were getting just a little lazy. I know I was. Occasionally I’d slap up a post and dash off, promising myself I’ll categorize it later, knowing full well I wouldn’t keep it. Several minutes later, an email came back from Milo:

I am a dumbass. I don’t know how to categorize.

That ranks right up there with My name is Bill and I’m an alcoholic as a startling yet hopeful admission of frailty. I quickly dashed off a step-by-step tutorial on categorizing. I sent it out to all the principals of this entrepreneurial juggernaut — Benny, Milo and Jumpin’ Jonny Randolph, Chicago’s finest photojournalist. Benny Jay emailed me back moments later, writing:

This is so well done even I understand it.

I’ve yet to hear a peep from Milo. He’s probably lying in some uncategorized gutter somewhere.

Ned Ludd would be proud of the both of them.

Now and again I become peevish when talking to Benny Jay about things we have to do to maintain this national treasure of a site. A good half dozen times I’ve hung up wanting to scream, Stop being such a blockhead!

I know he senses my impatience churning beneath the surface. I feel bad about it. Benny Jay and I, friends and colleagues for more than 25 years, have never exchanged a harsh word. One of the reasons I’m drawn to him is the fact that his serenity seems to temper my rashness. Had I thrown my lot in with Milo, say, the two of us would be carousing, ingesting too many substances, breaking too many sacred vows, and otherwise pushing each other into early graves. Even though I consider Milo a prince, I have to hold him at arm’s length for my own well-being.

What Would Happen If Milo And I Were Best Friends?

Once in a while, I entertain silly thoughts. Benny Jay considers working with computers and our website beneath him. His life’s work — uncovering the petty tyranny that is the Richie Daley empire — is far too important for him to be distracted by trivialities like windows and folders. Let Big Mike, that schlub, do the dirty work. But naw, Benny Jay’s never been a jerk like that.

Then I wonder if he and Milo might be conspiring against me. Let’s act dumb all the time in front of Big Mike, they whisper to each other. Then maybe he’ll quit in frustration and we won’t have to cut him in on the big payoff when this thing goes global. No, couldn’t be. Milo might be a cut-throat but he couldn’t be delusional enough to think there’ll be a big payoff on The Third City. And as far as global ambition goes, Benny Jay’s quite satisfied that The Third City is the talk of his bowling alley.

The other day, in the midst of another of one of these paranoiac jags, I rang up Benny Jay. We chitchatted for a few minutes. Finally he blurted, You’ve been mad at me about all this computer stuff, haven’t you? It felt as though he’d knocked down the brick wall between us. Yes, yes, I cried. It was catharsis.

Calmly, patiently, Benny Jay explained his aversion to cyber-awareness. “You know how you had that trouble with bridges and trains?” he asked. (From 1985 through 1996 I suffered from melange of phobias that prevented me from leaving the house for weeks at a time, riding the el, driving on an expressway, et cetera — I was a wreck.) “What if I told you ‘Just don’t worry about that bridge’? Would that have made things any better?”

“Yabbut I was agoraphic, acrophobic, claustrophobic, suffering from panic disorder, insomniac, you name it. I’ve got the papers to prove it. My shrink wanted to nominate me for the Neurotics Hall of Fame.”

“Well, did it ever occur to you that I might be as crazy as you are?” Benny asked, his voice still even.

“Yabbut….”

“‘Yabbut’ nothing,” Benny replied. “I’m a freak.” He went on to explain how working with computers and this Third City racket have been jabbing him in all his psychological weak points — his dread of making mistakes, his unreasonable fear that he’ll wreck the whole operation with the inadvertent click of a key, his panic at confronting the new, his terror of technology. He even told me he was years behind all the other kids in learning how to tie his shoes.

It was a revelation. I’d never thought of Benny Jay as a loon. But here it was. I realized he could benefit from a cocktail of skull jockey drugs that’d make my daily dosages look like St. Joseph’s Aspirin for Children.

I feel much kindlier toward Benny Jay now that I know he’s not plotting with Milo behind my back. In my role as caring and loving friend, I hope to provide him help and support as he attempts to overcome these psychological impediments.

In my role as Barn Boss of The Third City, though, I must say, Goddamn it! Just don’t worry about that bridge!

Big Mike: A Silence That Speaks Loudly

It just occurred to me that The Loved One and I haven’t had a real conversation for about two weeks.

True. It’s not that we’re fighting or anything. Matter of fact, it seems we’ve moved past the fighting phase of our relationship. We had a major league blow up last November that was so alarming I actually was on the phone to my oldest friend in the world, in tears, asking if she and her husband had room to put me up for a while because, well…, you know.

I wouldn’t say The Loved One and I had ever been street fighters. Not like The Honeymooners or anything like that. More like head-shrinkers locked in a room for a weekend. More like George and Martha from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Lots of psycho-play. Tests of wills. Cleverly disguised broadsides. Stealth attacks designed to reach into the opponent’s amygdala, putting said opponent into a state of paralyzing fear. Oh hell, we didn’t even know we were doing it, consciously at least, so we’re weren’t psychopaths terrorizing each other for sport. We’d learned our tactics from the best (worst?) possible source — our birth families.

Not Us.

So no, the neighbors didn’t have to call the cops every other weekend for all the racket of shattering serving plates or shrieks of pain. But, make no mistake, we did as much damage — spiritual and psychological — that any other smart, quick, loving couple would do to each other.

That November tete-a-tete seems to have been the last act of our fighting years. One or both of us had pushed the games envelope a millimeter too far. We both saw our shared breaking point and decided Hey, we like each other too much to put ourselves through this.

That’s a relief. We’re both reasonably happy here in Bloomington, Indiana. She loves her job. I’m crazy about what I’m doing here — peddling books with the crew of proud lunatics at The Book Case, writing the news for the community radio station and pretending that one day Benny Jay and I will make a living off The Third City.

So our silence is neither tactical nor the omen of an impending storm. We’ve just been sick as dogs. I, of course, had the crap kicked out of me by the 2009-10 seasonal flu. The Loved One has been merely grazed by it. For my part, when it feels as though all my insides suddenly want to be on the outside, idle chitchat ranks way down on the list. And even if the topic were pressing, I hardly had the strength to follow it.

Funny how I feel warmest toward my lovely bride in the middle of the night, when I can’t sleep and I can hear the occasional dainty snore emanating from the bedroom. I have the urge to wrap her in my arms and tell her how much she means to me and how ravishingly gorgeous she is, a move that works well in the movies but in real life would only earn me a stern scolding, the hour being late.

It’s now 4:07am, eastern standard time. I just put down one of my PG Wodehouse compilations, my equivalent of a warm glass of milk. I still don’t know if I’ll be able to close my eyes before the 6:00 o’clock alarm rings. Probably not. An American in Paris, one of my ten fave movies of all time, has just ended on TCM. There’s a little bit of Leslie Caron in The Loved One. The two of them are spritely, China doll-like. I’ll have to tell her that.

Not now, of course. I don’t want to be scolded for waking her up in the middle of the night.

Still Not Us — But Closer!