Keyword Analysis

Okay, maybe this is unbearably self-referential. But I have to share with you selections from a recent list of keywords that people searched for, causing them to land on this blog.

Yes, apparently I have a lot of time on my hands, because I do look at statcounter every now and then to check out the activity level here and on our adoption website.

I thought this list was bizarrely poetic. Here they are:

My gay encounter
Country song waiting for a train
anti-wedding
gay encounters on the train
crocker park is gay
life is like waiting for a train
jim thorpe lip cancer
they feel like a couple waiting for a train
why is jim thorpe town named jim thorpe
roberto bolano david mitchell haruki murakami

Portland, Oregon

For Thanksgiving, T and I took a trip to Portland. T's dad and his wife just moved there. An ever-growing number of friends from many walks of life have also moved there. It seems that all roads are leading to Portland.

We had Thanksgiving with the family.

Then we visited our friends John and Anna in their cool house.

We hung out with Brendt, Nina, Dennis and Julian.


T, Wendy, Clay and I viewed the ghostly paintings at the Kennedy School.
Mick and I have been playing Scrabble for almost twenty years now. He won this time.



While I was there, I had the distinct sensation that I had to move there, whether I wanted to or not, because everything was just so danged perfect. Here is a brief and in no way complete list of perfect things I encountered there.

1. Incredibly short lines in the airport, during a usually-insane holiday time.
2. Unbearably delicious meals in adorable surroundings at Lovely Hula Hands, Mother's, and The Screen Door. If you ever go to Lovely Hula Hands, be sure to try a cocktail called Talulah's Bathwater.
   
3. Evidence everywhere of superb urban planning and environmental awareness, with all kinds of amazing parking, bicycling and traffic calming innovations.
4. Attractive, affordable houses everywhere.

However, the fact that most buildings were one, and at most, two stories high kind of bugged me, urbanite that I am. I remember someone (I think it may have been my friend Allan) saying disparagingly of Portland: "It's nothing but a bunch of houses." Well, kind of, yeah, but a bunch of houses doesn't look too bad to a real-estate starved Bay Area resident like me.

Still The Same

There are so many things I could write about. One is my recent obsession with Bob Seger. Another is something I feel I should write about, because people keep asking me about it: how I'm feeling after our recent failed adoption.

I have a rather strange, yet comforting mental quirk. Songs run through my head alot; many times a day. The song of the moment tends to be suggested by some event or emotion. The songs themselves veer wildly through all genres, from advertising jingles to indie rock, with stops in between for jazz standards, country music, hip hop, and classic rock. The songs must have words, and the words must be in English.

Some might feel sorry for me, thinking that this must be annoying. But it rarely is. As a child, I turned to music for comfort in a bad situation. And I think music became, for me, a way to become organized, mentally. Even though I don't sing well or play any instruments, music is deeply enmeshed with who I am.

Last week, the songs in my head started to trend quite decidedly towards the music of my childhood. At the top of my mental playlist was a song called Still the Same, by Bob Seger.

Here is a sweet digital-storytelling type treatment of Still the Same I found on YouTube (an analysis of the maker's intent could probably fill a whole blog post itself).


The more I revisited this song, the more I became convinced that Bob Seger is fucking brilliant! One of the most interesting things about Bob was that he would often portray himself as a lonely outsider--waking up to find his girl gone, peering in the window of the bar, "trying to lose those awkward teenage blues." I remembered how his more ballad-like hits, like Still the Same, Mainstreet, and Night Moves painted nuanced, bittersweet portraits using very few words. His arrangements, especially the piano and female backup singers, heightened the poignancy. It was all a great soundtrack for an out of place, midwestern adolescent of the late '70s and early '80s like me.

But, you may ask, what about the adoption-related content you seemed to promise earlier?

Well, I don't think I'm being at all glib when I say that the reiteration of Still the Same in my head seems to be telling me just that. We are still the same, even though we're feeling kind of battered and bruised. We still know we are going to be parents, even if it's a little hard to imagine right now. And like Bob Seger, we're feeling a sadness around the edges, and a sense of still being on the outside looking in. But there's still a lot of sweetness in our lives, and we can't help but appreciate that every day.

Our friends and family have carried us through, and here we are. The counselors at our adoption agency, because they feel sorry for us, have offered to let us join something called the Last Minute Hospital List before our time, which will increase our odds. We are moving forward because that's what we have to do, and there's no telling how we will feel when our next match rolls around.

Dennis the Menace

Earlier this week T sent me an article from Salon, entitled Stop Lying to Yourself. You Love Dennis Kucinich.

I, in fact, am not lying to myself at all. I voted for Dennis Kucinich in the last Democratic primary, knowing, of course, that the former boy mayor had no chance in hell. That has never mattered to me at all. Presidential politics bore me to tears. The whole election cycle seems like a spectacularly dull and crooked show, and I am positive that no one I really like could ever win.* Anyone I would like would be way too threatening to the rich. I could get a lot more excited about a good school board election.

But yes, just as the article says, Dennis and I pretty much agree on the issues. And not only that.

When I was a child growing up in the eastern suburbs of Cleveland, Dennis (or Dennis the Menace, as he was often called) was Cleveland's mayor. Then, as now, Cleveland was half-ruined, and going further downhill from there, and Dennis was seen as the young fool who drove the city into even more ruin.

I remember Dennis exuding a strange fascination for me, just by being such a strikingly weird personality in a pretty boring place and time. Only later did I learn that much of the controversy around his mayoralty was about public power. Dennis refused to privatize the municipal power company, and the local bank, who stood to gain, retaliated by cutting off the city's credit.

It turned out that resisting privatization was--surprise--a bright move, which saved the city an estimated $195 million over ten years. And it also turned out that, after Dennis spent the eighties making, like, $38 a year and living with his friend Shirley MacLaine, Clevelanders realized that, and elected him to Congress, and continue to elect him over and over again, though he is way more progressive and vegan granola-ish than 99% of the people I have ever met in Cleveland.

I may be making it seem like Dennis is my hero. It's not that, really. Dennis is a pretty silly, new-agey guy, and politics of a congressional nature just isn't my game. But I still delight in the anomaly of him, just like I did as a kid. I believe that most people holding high office in this country are reveling in the status quo; in the potential to shovel money towards associates, in their own power, in their own place in an unquestioned game. Dennis got into the same game, and has made it a platform not only for veganism, universal health care, and a Department of Peace, but for his own exaltedly goofy ideas about life's meaning.

And yes, I am planning to vote for him in the next primary.

*Though I think Hillary Clinton would be a much lesser evil than you-know-who.

I've Got It!

On Thursday night T got Hugh and I free tickets to see Yo La Tengo and Jonathan Richman at the Palace of Fine Arts. Being old, I love to sit down when I see live music, and I was relieved to see that the over 35 portion of the indie rock crowd is following right along with me.

Jonathan Richman has played a major role in my life. He's kind of a philosopher, and helped me when I was a confused youth who was enraged at the world and drank way too much beer. An example of his brilliance:

Now I've watched you walk around here.
I've watched you meet these
boyfriends, I know, and you tell me how they're deep.
Look but, if these guys, if they're really so great,
tell me, why can't they at least take this place
and take it straight? Why always stoned,
like hippie Johnny is?
I'm straight and I want to take his place.
Oh I'm certainly not stoned, like hippie Johnny is.
I'm straight and I want to take his place.
I said, I'm straight
I said, I'm straight
I'm
I'm straight and I want to take his place

It struck me while watching Jonathan that he is a Romantic Poet for our day--you know "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" and all that stuff. The first time I ever saw him was when I lived in Columbus, at the defunct Stache's. I remember that a friend of mine began to cry when he played, I believe, Hospital, and Jonathan patted him on the back and said, "there, there, fella." Jonathan lives in San Francisco. I remember seeing him in Trader Joe's once and feeling very excited.



I got hooked on Yo La Tengo while I was going to grad school in Iowa City. How many hundreds of times have I listened to the album Fakebook? It has given me a lot of solace. At the Palace, the band played a couple of songs, then answered questions from the audience, which Ira used mainly as a springboard for comedy. They sang lots of quiet songs (Madeline and Did I Tell You? were standouts), some obscurities from their endless store of same, and a couple of loud YLT specialties. It was kind of the ideal Yo La Tengo show, as far as I'm concerned.