Don't Play Dumb

A man in Tacoma has been busted for feigning retardation. Apparently his mother got him started at a young age. Now he's an adult and the government wants him to repay the disability benefits he and his family have collected over the years.

Can you imagine the double life that he's led? How do you remember who thinks you're retarted and who doesn't? Are these all issues resolved by Johnny Knoxville in The Ringer?

Back to Basics

A forthcoming article in Vanity Fair allegedly documents the fabrications of Augesten Burroughs in Running With Scissors.

When the James Frey book was exposed as largely fictitious, I took the unpopular position of "who cares?" Lots of people called for the guy's head on a platter. Even if Frey is a jerk in real life, the outrage was completely misplaced. Frey slandered no one. He told some stories about himself that were fiction. In order to enrich those stories, he invented some characters that others found interesting.

The woman who became JT Leroy went one better, she not only invented the stories and all the characters they contained, she invented the persona of JT Leroy. Again, no harm, no foul.

Burroughs, on the other hand, took elements of his real life, and real people from his real life, and then told alleged lies about their criminal negligence as his guardians. Will someone explain to me why he gets a pass and Frey gets villified? Because I really don't understand.

Other People's Money

I love this guy.

There's no scam like an old scam.

Changing Times

A long long time ago I worked as a reporter for a small town paper. Our paper was not the smallest in the region. From time to time we lifted story ideas from yet smaller papers in neighborhing communities. Early on I tried to credit the other papers in my copy. My editor scolded me for the attempt. As far as our readers were concered, the paper that employed me was The Paper. An acknowledgement of any other paper in the universe was a confession of weakness and bad for business. This is the normal way of doing things. You crib the story from another source, do your own reporting, generate your own quotes and hopefully write it up more elegantly. You see this on the news every night at eleven.

Except now it's wrong.

In response to complaints by the editors of smaller papers, the Times has now told its reporters to never read any of the papers that claimed their stories were pinched. Genius.

Notions of intellectual property rights have gotten way out of hand.

A Punch in the Nose

Here is a short list of people who deserve a punch in the nose:

1. Dave Eggers.
2. Jay Leno.
3. The boss at almost any job I've ever quit.
4. Probably you.
5. Andy, the guy who lives across the street from me.
6. That junky on Newel.
7. Tom Wolfe.
8. Gay Talese.
9. Any other elderly white man who dresses like a pimp.

Why Dave Eggers Sucks

Dave Eggers is a bully and a star fucker. I don't care if he writes a book that feeds all the children of Darfur, mends their severed limbs and washes clean the memory of watching the rape and murder of their mothers, Dave Eggers is still a bully and a star fucker.

Stories we tell ourselves

I love Irish Americans. Almost without exception, folks with a Hibernian surname will tell you that they are descended from a king. Where one finds pride in the royalty of the colonized is a mystery to me. I, however, am not descended from a king. My nominal Irish ancestor was an assassin who killed a king.

I Quit

Last night I finally found my old copy of Confessions of Zeno. I'd spent the whole day uselessly staring at my computer, failing to get much work done, failing to not smoke, failing to do much of anything short of exchange a few emails with a favorite writer, learn that he's in a rough spot despite four published books under his belt. I then consider the prospect of driving a truck for a living.

At least it was warm out.

So anyway, there I am with my copy of Confessions of Zeno. I've read it three times already and ripped it off a billion times in conversation and writing. And I remembered why I loved Zeno so much. He can't stop quitting. He smokes, he quits. He starts again. He checks into frigging rehab to stop smoking, and he starts again.

I have been on the patch, zyban, the gum and cold hard will. I binge smoke so that I wake up with my temples throbbing and my eyes rimmed red. This is aversion therapy, I believe. I smoke I don't smoke. I wash my face and brush my teeth and take a shower and change my clothes before going to my girlfriend's house. I know she wants me to quit. She kisses me, tastes the tell-tale Listerine and says, "John McCloskey you've been smoking."

I'm not fooling anyone, but I'm trying I swear.

Tom Tom and Pancake Batter

I made pancakes a lot when I was kid. Along with grilled cheese sandwiches, oatmeal and eggs, pancakes are something a kid can actually cook, as opposed to merely defrost or toast or nuke in the microwave. So on a typical Saturday morning, I would take down the box of Bisquick, pull some eggs and milk out and start cooking. When I first started doing it, I was in a thrall to directions and instructions as much as I enjoyed the responsibility of cooking my own massive breakfast. You know, there's that chart on the back of the box and it tells you to use one egg and 1 1/4 cups of milk for 12 pancakes or whatever. I followed the instructions to the letter. But after a few Saturdays I learned that the instructions are wrong. They're always wrong. If you follow the instructions exactly you will make shitty pancakes every time. They may be shitty in a novel way, every time you make them. One batch will be too thin, and another will be too thick. One dry, one pasty.

Eventually I stopped following the directions. I'd concoct the batter based on the principle of just making it look right. Winging it, an eight year old in front of a hot stove. Fantastic freedom. Perfect pancakes.

This may be a leap, but one popular Christmas gift puts me in the mind of pancake-making: the car-bound Global Positioning Systems made by Garmin. I hate the very idea of these things. Last year I was working a job that frequently required me to take a car service to a printing plant in New Jersey. The drivers lived and died by the GPS. They never had any idea where they were. A computer told them what to do. The computer was often right in generalities, but always wrong on specifics. Streets that it thought were two-way, were one-way. Exits didn't exist, or the merge off the highway went left instead of right. I planned for a longer car ride than it should have taken.

Now I've said before that if a machine can do a job better than a human, then the machine should do the job. But we need to understand what the job is. Knowing where you are is a metaphysical issue. You can't boil it down to longitude, latitude, minutes and seconds. Knowing where you are in space and time means that you know how your immediate surroundings relate to the time and space that surrounds your surroundings. Rats can be trained to turn right or left when running through a maze at the command of a tone, just like humans can turn off the highway because Tom Tom told them to. But the rat doesn't know where he is, and if you use a GPS, neither do you.

I have only been truly lost a handful of times in my life. My definition of lost is this: you have no idea where you are, how you got there, or how you can get to the other place you had in mind when you left your point of origin. Once I was in a foreign city. It was late, I was drunk. All the riot gates on the stores had been pulled down. So the narrow streets which in the daytime were lined with distinct, recognizable shops, were now grey walls marked with the heiroglyphic scrawl of graffiti I couldn't read.

I couldn't speak the language to ask directions, and there was no one to ask anyway. It's a sickening feeling. It is also absolutely necessary.

Word of the Month

Pie.