A Royal Do

I'm informed that every little girl wants to be a princess and have a fairy-tale wedding, so it must be true, even though I don't recall thinking about my wedding at all as a child, and only wanted a puppy, and was scandalized when that girl in my fourth-grade class wearing the pink tulle frothy princess outfit won Best Halloween Costume even though I had a neat flannel leopard suit that I had not yet peed in. I might have been unclear about the whole marriage thing at that age anyway. I remember thinking how lucky I was that my parents found each other because the pool of Brewsters is so small. It didn't occur to me that my mother would have started out with a whole 'nother name and toss it aside like yesterday's paper.

I assumed I'd be married some day because that's what happened to everybody, but I didn't spend any time thinking about the particulars. As I got older and passed through the hippie filter, I abandoned the idea of marriage altogether. Then I married a man who also assumed he would never marry--that's one of the things we had in common. I picked him out of thousands, which was possible back in that sliver of time between the advent of birth control and HIV. Actually, we snapped each other up off the bargain table. Neither one of us looked like a good deal at the time, but we gave each other a good seven-year test run, and had gotten used to the rough bits. We gave it a shot.

That was 27 years ago. Our wedding, miraculously, was much like the royal affair the world has just witnessed. I wore white; that was a fairy tale right there. Dave rented a tux and didn't change into his "Just Murred" tee-shirt for hours. There weren't a lot of hats, but Patty from the Hourglass Tavern did wear her dress sweats. The crowd heavily favored postal employees and bricklayers, which just about defines "common folk." The mood was ebullient and the vows were punctuated by the popping of beer cans among those who had brought their own to tide them over until the kegs were tapped at 2 p.m.

We soon had four kegs of beer going in the back of our 1969 International Harvester pickup with the ice blown in. Festivities included volleyball, and the "sack toss," wherein people took turns trying to lob a rubber-banded bundle of mail into a standing mail sack, and William and Kate would have done that too if they'd thought of it. We also had a race between two postal employees in which the starter pistol was replaced by an M-80, which was so loud that the contestants froze paralyzed on the starting line. Even with all the money gambled on the outcome, and even though mailmen were involved, nobody had predicted "none" as the winner.

The woman who was in charge of the venue--let's call her Adolph--had assured us that it was ours till midnight, if need be, but she personally had bet on us being out of there by four o'clock, and took some pains to see that happen, directing that all our food be wrapped up and taken away, not realizing that this group wasn't going to leave until the beer was gone. That indirectly led to the most striking resemblance between our wedding and the royal do: the attendance of a uniformed regiment. Somewhere around ten p.m., Adolph seized my arm and declared, furious, that one of my guests had just flashed her, and that the party was over. This didn't seem to be beyond the realm of possibility, but the event she was referring to was somewhat less dramatic. She had shut down the restroom in the hopes that that would make people go home, and was busy hanging up a sign when Leroy, who was next in line for the throne, showed up. "This toilet is broken," she informed him, and he informed her that he was a contractor (do NOT mess with a blue-collar crowd) and could maybe fix it; whereupon he gave it a test flush, everything looked just fine, and he said (again) he was now going to use the toilet, and she could watch if she really wanted to. She must have, because she reported back to me immediately.

Anyway, it wasn't long after that than a contingent of Portland's finest arrived with lights flashing (a theme) and encouraged everyone to leave, and Dave and I repaired to the honeymoon suite at the Marriott with a couple of our wedding gifts: a platter of chocolate Grand Marnier strawberries and a dab of cocaine. We were royally hammered. A good time was had, if not remembered, by all.

War On Errorism: Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

The world cheered, got drunk, rolled its eyes, and blew things up this week at the news that Osama bin Laden may or may not have been killed by U.S. special forces or somebody else in a firefight involving helicopters rumored in any case to be black. He was killed along with, in back of, or near a woman whom he was using as a shield, or just using, who may have been a wife, a whole different wife, or a direct descendant of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Mr. bin Laden is most often associated with the destruction of the twin towers in New York City, operating with trusted colleagues of his own for the glory of Allah, or with the corporate overlords of U.S. industry in conjunction with the ruling regime in Washington bent on control of oil-producing countries, using either fuel-laden aircraft or controlled demolition devices and missiles. His body was identified using DNA "evidence," quickly denounced as fraudulent on its face by young-Earth believers, and phantom photographs. Reports persist that he is still at large, singing and swiveling his hips, and holed up in a cave in the mountains of Afghanistan, inside the Pakistan border, or in a secret bunker in Washington D.C. playing cribbage with Vince Foster. Opinion varies, but most agree with skeptics who have debunked the grainy images of bin Laden holding a current newspaper while stepping out of the Apollo moon lander, who point out that the wires in the original faked photographs are still visible.

Putative President Obama, in what is widely seen as a ploy to deflect attention from his possible Muslim faith, speaking either alone at a microphone or with the aid of instructions funneled to him via brain implants by his own handlers in Africa where he may or may not have been born fifty years ago, made the announcement at the White House while a crowd gathered outside on a grassy knoll. Elements of the vast right-wing conspiracy were uncharacteristically silent, fueling suspicion that they are in fact a clever shadow organization for the world-wide consortium of Jewish bankers. Meanwhile, a small but vocal contingent in Roswell, New Mexico deplored the news as an attempt to divert attention from the real threat.

All is on the up and up, according to administration spokesman J. Edgar Piltdown who, fingering a magnetic bracelet, snorting powdered tiger penis and anticipating an excellent evening, assured the press that God is on our side, in a rare point of agreement with the Muslim brotherhood, although the descriptions and location of the Almighty vary, and He has once again declined to comment. Most other Washington insiders are content to take Obama at his word, except for Justice Thomas, who has his doubts. Confirmation of the official version of events is not expected until a tally of tweets and chain emails is complete and an analysis is made of exclamation-point density. Polls show Americans are reassured that the story has been vetted by a guy who used to bowl with General Petraeus's manicurist's husband. Mr. bin Laden's body, or the like, has indeed been buried at sea, which is either warming due to human activity, or isn't.

The Slow Twitch

They've got this genetic test they can do now so you can find out if your child is likely to excel in athletics. This test is particularly useful if your own observational skills are meager. They look for some kind of gene marker for speed and springiness. You can swab the inside of your child's cheek and send in the DNA to the testing lab and for $160 they'll let you know if he's got potential for zip and is just being lazy, or if you should plan to spend the next eighteen years rolling him over on the sofa to prevent sores.

I suppose this kind of information helps parents with their day-to-day child micromanagement. With one tissue-culture they can find out if they should be pushing the soccer drills and saving up for a genuine Rumanian coach, or just buy the kid a clarinet and hope for something better next time.

My parents would have had it easy collecting my DNA, because I move slow and drool. But it would have been a giant waste of time. Testing me for athletic prowess would be like thumping a bowling ball for ripeness. I've never had any skills. If I were ever to excel in an Olympics, it would have to be a special one just for me, featuring trudge-scotch, stationary jumprope, tether-feather, and Red Light Red Light. One thing that was probably a plus for my mother was that she only needed to check on my whereabouts every half hour or so, because I couldn't have gotten far.

It was awful in grade school. Every day at recess the two kids who usually got to be captains chose their teams, and it always got down to me and the kid with flippers. I didn't feel bad for myself. I had no part of my self-worth tied up in sports ability, but I felt sorry for the captains. I wouldn't have picked me either. They'd stand there, shifting their weight from foot to foot, all anguished, and finally one would say "oh, I guess I'll take him," and the flippered kid would hitch on over, and the remaining captain would close his eyes in resignation.

I was exciting to watch in softball games, although it put the coach on edge. If I was on second base, there was always the possibility the batter would lap me before I made it home, and technically you're not supposed to score the fourth run before the third. I read an article about the genetic differences between good athletes and us more torpid specimens, and took some comfort in it. It turns out that muscles are made up of slow-twitch and fast-twitch fibers. "So the sprinters naturally have a greater proportion of quick-twitch muscle strands," I read to Dave. He looked at me and said, eschewing the minced word, "you don't have any of those."

He has plenty. He runs bases like he's an electron, and it's a good thing, too, because the boy has a mouth on him. I, on the other hand, have had to develop my powers of ingratiation. Pokiness helps hone a sense of humor. You might be just as mean and opinionated as the next guy, but if you can manage to be adorable about it, people let you get away with stuff.

So I can't see my parents shelling out for a genetic test for athletic ability. I can see them watching me execute a crumpled cartwheel or throwing a ball at my own feet and thinking: maybe she can draw.

The Sainthood Express

There's controversy brewing over the impending beatification of John Paul II. It's too speedy, they say. He's only been gone six years, and you can't even get on a stamp until you're ten years cold. J.P. may have been adorable in his beanie and red shoes, but he's just not dead enough for sainthood.

I don't know how dead you have to be. In fact the entire business of generating saints is a mystery to me. It seems like the sort of thing that God should be in charge of, if anybody. Anything that's done by committee here on the sphere doesn't seem like it would be that valuable to the deceased. It's hard for me to visualize the holy candidate looking down with his fingers crossed--I assume down, and I assume crossed--like any other Hall Of Fame hopeful. He has to be beyond such concerns now, and after all, while alive, he got to be pope, and you'd have to be Donald Trump to think you're more important than that.

Some people have been critical on the grounds that numerous personnel who are expected to weigh in on his fitness for sainthood owe their jobs to him and can't be expected to be impartial. It's a scurrilous charge, implying they offered him the ultimate golden parachute to land a position. "Put me in as Bishop of Los Angeles, and I'll totally vote for you for saint," they'd say. I'm cynical, but even I doubt it.

There's only one pope at a time. Oh, there are fake furry ones with big hats, but everyone knows the real one is the one in Rome. I don't know why he gets called a pope and a pontiff as though there were a distinction. You don't hear anyone calling a moose a mastiff, or not more than once. Anyway, even if they're infallible, which I might be wrong about, they don't all make the grade for sainthood. You're supposed to perform a miracle, which by definition is something involving blood and suffering and visual disturbances that cannot be adequately explained. Menstruating girls with migraines would be a lock if these things were fair.

Other objections pertain to John Paul himself. Evidently he was way too involved in ecumenical affairs to go for the glory. He famously organized a peace prayer for people of all faiths and that is no way, sir, to promote Catholicism. No, the flock is supposed to be increased by keeping the club doors shut and the condoms off. But John Paul II wasn't that kind of guy. He had the big tent philosophy, threw his arms open to all, Poles and Italians, capitalists and communists, pedophiles and children, the whole family of man. With the little women doing the cooking and cleaning.

Somewhere in my Lutheran past I recall being informed that we were all saints, and that's what was meant by the Communion Of Saints--us. Even as a child I thought that devalued the brand. I didn't feel like a saint and I knew darn well Mr. Oldham wasn't, as he fumbled for communion under my choir robes. I don't think it's a good idea to dispense flattery like that. You spend enough time telling all the kids that they're smart or athletic or talented or saintly, you just lose your own credibility. Then the kids grow up to be bored, dissatisfied, aimless, unholy, and too cynical to vote, and that's why gay marriage isn't yet the law of the land. It's the Lutherans' fault, not the Catholics'.

Service Snails

Objects may be smaller than they should be.

A sewage incinerator in Russia has six enormous snails on the payroll to monitor air pollution conditions at their smokestack. The snails are eight inches long; they probably ambled over from Chernobyl. The idea is that even though smokestack emissions are already monitored by conventional means, the snails will give them a heads-up if things are starting to go south, because they are more sensitive, and if they get queasy, something's up. True, it might be a while before they made it over to the infirmary, so I assume they've got them rigged up with sensors that will light up in some way if they get sick. They'll put out a gastropodcast, or something.

This is a new wrinkle on the age-old coal mine canaries. Each miner had his own canary in a cage to take down to the depths with him, and if the canary keeled over down there, it was time to come up with a new plan, or at least come up. So the concept is time-tested, if not ideal from the point of view of the canaries or snails.

The coal miners took this pretty seriously because their lives depended on it, but most of  us no longer have any idea what our lives depend on. As Olga Rublevskaya, the director of wastewater disposal at the Russian plant, said, "live organisms won't deceive anyone about the danger of pollution." That is, they won't deceive anyone who doesn't want to be deceived. I've got my doubts that most of us would take a chocolate-covered hint. We've got organisms sounding alarms all over the place, but most people don't get too worked up about snail urp. Our fish stocks are down or depleted. Birds too. Don't even get me started about the amphibians. Acid rains down from the sky. Glaciers are in full retreat and islands are vanishing. Hundred-year storms are stacking up like a pile of unread New Yorker magazines. And everywhere you look, people are aggravated as hell if their pages load slowly or their mangoes aren't ripe.

The snails are being observed by personnel who are trained to recognize when they're starting to lose some of their zip. These might even be people who are authorized to do something to mitigate the conditions that trouble snails. I think that's terrific, but I've got no faith that the rest of us are so finely attuned. Already we're hip-deep in dead canaries on this planet.

The folks in charge think we've got a canary disposal problem and are looking for shovels. The rest of us are just wiggling our fannies in the soft, soft canaries.

My Friends Are Questionable

It's probably spring by now. Birds are picking fights with each other, and some of them are--why, I believe they are wrestling. Dave built a chickadee house and situated it a foot away from my window where I do all my writing in order to facilitate the procrastination process. I was just up there today and no sooner had despaired of seeing our chickadee pair this year than they showed up. Same couple, too. One of them has that high, squeaky voice, and the other has that higher, squeakier voice. Each one took turns checking out the house, and then they sat on a nearby branch and got into a heated exchange, and I didn't see anyone hauling in any furniture. I think one of them thinks it's just fine and the other one is saying it's too ratty-tatty and couldn't they ever get anything nice for a change. The first one sharpened his or her beak on a branch and the seeds in the suet-cake trembled.

"I wonder if we should have cleaned out that nest box again," I said to Dave. Oh jeez, there's that look.

Julie

"I asked you if I should clean out the nest box three weeks ago and you said [higher, squeakier voice] 'oh no, not now, it's too close to nesting season, and maybe they'll be put off by your scent or something.'"

I would very much like to refute this, without doing damage to the truth, but I can't. I did just say that.

"And you always tell me I don't even have a scent."

Also true. The man can spend the day shoveling rocks in the sun and not emit a molecule of odor. It's peculiar. I think he's perfected flatulence just so people know he's been around.

"Besides, there's no reason you should ever have to wonder about such things. Don't you know, like, a million birders?"

Bill

I do. Literally scores of them. They're good people. I got to know their queen, Julie Zickefoose, through this here blog, and she alerted the whole flock. And then I also know Bill Thompson III, who is so accomplished he can spot invisible birds that don't even exist--I've seen him do it. And I know Susan Kailholz-Williams, who wears hawks and owls like wrist corsages. For a living. I know Jeff Gordon, the  president of the American Excuse-Me Birding Association, and can tell you his winter range and what his legs look like. All of them have blogs. The birder blogs differ from mine mainly in the density of facts.

Susan

But that doesn't mean I want to pester them every time I need to know something bird-related. No one wants to get the same questions over and over again. When I was a letter carrier, that happened all the time. "Hey, we can't really call you the mail-MAN, can we?" "Hey, Uncle Sam, working hard or hardly working?" "Hey, dipshit, where the hell is my check?"

It gets old.

Update: Furniture going in.

Teachers always like to say "there is no such thing as a stupid question," but they don't really mean it. And if I got started asking my friends questions, it would never stop. Chickadees can't really tell each other apart, can they? They only figure out which one is the boy and which one is the girl when the egg falls out, right? Is there any reason I can't put up about twelve birdhouses here outside my window a yard apart, or will the birds start writing nasty letters to the editor about infill? Why do scrub jays go SKREE SKREE SKREE SKREE all the ding-dang day long when everybody heard them just fine the first time? That is wrestling they're doing, isn't it? What wine goes good with scrub jay? What has yellow legs, purple wing bars, an orange eyebrow, an argyle vest, a slant-six and tailfins? What do you mean I must be mistaken?


What good are you?

Funny Business

I don't want to let the subject of taxes go without expressing our appreciation for the fat credit we got for installing solar panels. That was a gift from all of you other taxpayers, and we're grateful. Now that you've finally got it right, I don't think I'd be out of line for mentioning that we like this a whole lot better than that war you've been getting us the last God knows how many years, which was the wrong size.

Something else. Once I got done with the preparation and sent it all off to meet its taker, my tax prep software wanted to know if I was interested in learning my chances of getting audited. I'm not particularly afraid of getting audited. If it happens, I will stride into the office with a clean conscience. "I've done the best I could," I'll say. "You figure it out, and then get back to me." Which is what I wish they'd do from the get-go, anyway.

Still, I clicked "yes" to the question, and my software then assured me my risk of audit was low. On the other hand, they saw some "areas of concern." Would I like to see the areas of concern?

Not really. I don't even like it when my friends tell me they're concerned about me. It's never anything good, and it interferes with my avoidance strategy.

But this is just a stupid bunch of software. A stupid, wickedly intuitive bunch of software. I could click "no thanks," and it would lean back, stroke its beard, arch one brow, and say well then. Okay. I just wanted to ask. Then I could banish its icon from my desktop and send it to its folder, where it would tell all my other documents about me. I hate when that happens.

Fine. Since you must know, Mr. Fancypants Tax Software, yes, I have a business that doesn't appear to be taking in any money. If you'd take the time to notice, Mr. Fancypants Tax Software, I said that right up front, when you asked the nature of my business, and I typed in "writing." Do you know what that means? That means that I am employed in the business of distilling my entire life experience and language heritage into little jewels of verbiage to charm the hearts or loosen the bowels of dozens of unnamed souls in the blogosphere, for no remuneration whatsoever. Similarly, I am compelled to concoct gems of humor for the likes of Smithsonian Magazine or The New Yorker, one of which wants humor as long as it isn't all that funny, and the other of which doesn't care if it's funny at all as long as it's gimmicky enough. And to do this I need to take my natural wit and cook it down till all the funny is rendered out of it, leaving only a thin gruel of light chuckling. Then I must send it out and wait several months for a rejection notice, or--because people in my situation are a dime a peck--an extended silence that I can feel free to interpret as a rejection after an abject half-year or so. I will have you know, Mr. Fancypants Tax Software, that I have been rejected by the best of them, and also by the North Dakota Living Magazine.

And why is this a business? It is a business because it is all in the service of developing an audience for more of my productions, which will also go unremunerated. It is a business because I am writing a novel that I would like people to read, and I have been solemnly informed that I require a platform in order to get anyone to read it. I need to network without appearing to stalk, work the social media without appearing to wheedle, and urge my readers to tell all their friends about me without appearing to snivel, all so that some day people will want to part with a dab of cash for this book I'm writing. And why should they, when they can get so much for free? I have no idea, Mr. Fancypants Tax Software. To be absolutely honest, I don't even care that much if they do pay, as long as they read it. But you asked if I had a business, not if I had an intelligent business plan.

So thank you for your concern, but if I were you, I'd just grow up and get used to the fact that I'm going to be writing off the cost of my printer cartridges for years to come. Suck on that, Mack.