25 Random Lies About Me, issue twelve

12. At the age of seventeen I was nominated for a Nobel Prize.



I really wanted to win one for literature, but, due to some combination of typographical error, mistaken identity, and a brief experiment with a new category of prizes, I almost received one for xenobiology, a fringe science speculating about the biological, anatomical, and evolutionary nature of alien life.



I didn’t win but, come to think of it, this may be why my particular bus was picked up by that flying saucer a few years later.



I’d never really put the two together before. Hmm.

Jindal's Strange Rebuttal

I know it's piling on to pick on Bobby Jindal's speech now that it's been so universally panned by critics and pundits on both sides, but I did want to make a quick point. His key anecdote was about an incident during Hurricane Katrina, when he walked into an office and found a local sheriff struggling to get help from the federal government. He swooped in and saved the day, the story goes, and this is supposed to show us that the government is inept. But here's the thing: He was a congressman at the time. Couldn't that also be a story about how government can be good? Also, how seriously should we take a critique of the government when the central narrative is one where a Republican congressman rescued a local sheriff from the inept federal agency run by... a Republican president? This could also just be a story about why no one should elect Republicans. You know, it just might be better for the Repub Party if it turned out that Jindal made the whole story up.



Oh wait. He did! Check it out!

Now Bill Kristol can be wrong somewhere else!

Let's take a little break from the 25 Random Lies About Me project (more to come) so I can return to one of my favorite subjects: the remarkable way Bill Kristol manages to always be wrong.

So Kristol got canned at the NYTimes and is now writing a less frequent column for the Washington Post. Look, I understand that papers want to find somebody to be their conservative voice, but George Will, Charles Krauthhammer, and David Brooks all do the job just fine without reading like... well, like Bill Kristol. And if people want a Neo-Con, they can read Christopher Hitchens. Bill Kristol is a Bush water carrier, and Bush has left for Texas, so he's a man without a platform.

Nowhere is this more evident than in his advice to Republicans today in the Post. He concedes that Republicans "need fresh thinking in a host of areas of domestic policy, thinking that builds on previous conservative achievements but that deals with the new economic and social realities." But he offers no ideas himself. Instead, he says they will have to be politically agile to make up for their lack of ideas. Then he offers his political strategy:

"Obstruct and delay."

"Obstruct and delay"? That's Kristol's idea for a Republican strategy?

A Republican friend of mine was telling me just the other day that Obama would lose in 2012 if the economy hasn't recovered. But we both agreed that the only way he could weather that is if the Republicans did nothing but obstruct and delay, thus earning the ire of every person who could possibly benefit from this government program or that one. And let's face it, we could all see a windfall from some government program. Obstructionism will hurt my friend, the conservative police officer just as it will hurt me, the liberal school teacher. It will hurt the assembly-line worker just as it hurts the CEO. When Republicans obstruct and delay, they take the burden off the Dems, who would have to be choosing winners and losers, and make themselves responsible for every loser. This is a political strategy bereft of both intellectual heft and political savvy.

Way to go again, Bill!

25 Random Lies About Me, issue eleven

11. Speaking of Australia, in 2004, when former Midnight Oil lead singer Peter Garret was elected to Australia’s House of Representatives...



...the other members of the band, which had officially disbanded in 2002, decided to search for another front man.



Through some mutual friends and some interesting turns of events which would take too long to describe here, they found me. I was their lead singer for just over eight months, during which time we went on a world tour and starred in a reality TV show on the Australian version of the E network, which Australians spell “NetworkE”.



My performances were mostly met with good reviews, though some critics felt that I skewed the band too heavily toward their later work, favoring songs from Earth and Sun and Moon over classics like “Beds are Burning”. Soon, it became apparent that I would either have to leave the band or end up serving in some high capacity in the Australian government...



As an American, the second option didn’t sit too well, so I came back home just in time for the birth of my son Noah, who’d been conceived right before the guys and I headed off to Tokyo. In fact, the dates are so close he might not even be mine, and may be the child of bassist Peter Gifford, who we called “Giffo”. Even my faithful wife Paige is not immune to the charms of bass players, and who can blame her?

25 Random Lies About Me, issue ten

10. Though I’m not good at building electronic things, like Phil’s time machine, I’m pretty handy with older technology, and something of a history buff. Once, I decided to test out the theory that the people of Easter Island came there in dugout boats from South America.



I created my own simple seafaring craft and set sail from the Oregon coast, intending to land in Hawaii, which is roughly equidistant.



I didn’t quite find it and sailed halfway around the world, finally arriving at a small city on the south side of Australia named, ironically, Portland.



While there I became a walk-on member of their Australian Rules Football team, and in 2006 we won the Western Border Football League Premiership.



I thought about staying, but got sick of the way people spelled things like “Centre” and “Theatre”, so I came home. The team went on to win the premiership again in 2007, which should make me happy, but somehow it just felt like a big FU from the guys, like they wanted to show that they didn’t really need my help.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue nine

9. As a child I loved Legos...



...and would build replicas of medieval castles in order to perform enactments of historical events.



My dad caught me reenacting the beheadings of Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, and refused to believe my explanation.



My parents took me to see a psychologist who happened to be a member of our church, and who offered to give them a discount.



It turns out that discount child psychology isn’t as great as it sounds. The man decided that only shock therapy could control my urges to cut women’s heads off.



It took me years to learn to control my facial ticks, and even now, if I shuffle my feet on carpet, I can touch people and give them small third degree burns.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue eight

8. I once saw a dust-bunny under my desk hop a few times.



Then it settled on a new patch of dust to chew on, but I could have sworn it looked over its shoulder as it did so, wary of any nearby dust-wolves.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue seven

7. While my mother was pregnant with my younger brother, Joe, she would take me to the University of Illinois library.



She liked the peacefulness and found that I could entertain myself easily there, thought I was only three years old. She didn’t pay much attention to what I was reading (it was an uncomfortable pregnancy, and as long as I was quiet she was happy), so she remains unaware, to this day, that the first book I picked up was one on speed reading.



After devouring it, I quickly made my way through almost half of the library’s ten million volumes.



Eventually, in the education section, I found a book which convinced me that speed readers often trade comprehension for speed. I became convinced that comprehension was more important just a few books down the shelf, and abandoned the project. Funny tidbit: Because of the design of the library’s stacks, I’ve read thousands of books about agriculture, and I’ve never read a single thing about the nation of Mozambique.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue six

6. My favorite foods are mushrooms, oysters, and cooked spinach.






In fact, I really only eat things those food philistines among us might describe as “slimy”.



I find this has a… dramatic effect on my digestion.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue five

5. One summer I had a brief but torrid affair with Claire Danes.



One night we had an argument while driving down 101 near one of her homes in Los Angeles (we frequently shuttled to her other home in New York, and sometimes made the tabloids when we made out in popular restaurants), and on this particular night Claire became violent, causing me to crash her BMW into a divider.



She walked away from the accident, seemingly unscathed, but it turned out she suffered from some memory loss because she couldn’t remember me at all. She went off to Yale that next fall and I returned to college. I’ve completely recovered from the heartbreak, but my shoulder still hurts when it’s about to rain.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue four

4. I have a human eyeball in a box in my attic.



It’s a souvenir from a bar fight I got into once. I tried to poke the other guy in both eyes, but he blocked using the vaunted three-stooges-defense.



It turned out my middle finger was longer than his four fingers were wide, and one of his eyes popped out onto the pool table. I grabbed his eye, along with the quarters we’d both left on the edge of the table (we were arguing about whose turn it was), shoved both in my pocket, and ran out of the bar. I kept the eye, but I think I spent the quarters on a parking meter.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue three

3. I was once abducted by aliens. I was on a greyhound bus ride from Cincinnati to Spokane. Somewhere in Montana the whole bus was picked up by a flying saucer...



...and transported into low-Earth orbit where the passengers were interviewed telepathically by small green creatures with over-sized heads. I’m not sure which passenger turned them off to our species (perhaps all of us disappointed them in some way), but they made it clear they were disgusted with us and would no longer have anything to do with our planet. Then they put the bus back down in South Dakota, lengthening our trip, which irritated the passengers more than anything.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue two

2. I have a deep-seated and perhaps slightly irrational fear of microwave ovens.



If I am in your house and you have one, and I still seem comfortable, you can be sure I lined my boxer shorts with aluminum foil that day.

Or I'm wearing these.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue one

As previously advertised, here are the 25 Random Lies About Me, presented as a serial.


1. Because I’m not good at physics, I’ve never built a time machine. My friend Phil Harrington built one on a whim one weekend in college.





After drinking too much I decided to try it out. As per the cliché, I thought I’d go back to kill Hitler.



I decided to go back to when he was a sixth grader, not because I like killing kids, but because that year he happened to be in the same school as the future great philosopher Wittgenstein, and I thought I could have a talk with him after offing the future dictator.



Unfortunately, I forgot that time machines do not also move a person through space, so I spent a cold night in Spokane in the year 1911, then came back to the present and slept it off.

25 Random Lies About Me, issue zero

You may have heard of this viral phenomenon on Facebook, the "25 Random Things About Me." If you don't Facebook (is that a verb yet?) then you might have been spared. You get a notice that a friend has tagged you (read: notified/obligated) with their own list. The note begins with a stock paragraph:

"Rules: Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you."

Like how it has all that authority at the beginning? RULES! Then it ends with that desperate plea for more information. I mean, these are coming from people who are already your friends. Who can say, "Screw you, buddy! I don't want you to know any more about me."

But here's the thing; what if there isn't any more to know? My life hasn't been entirely boring. I've lives in a handful of places and had a few rare experiences. But 25? I don't think so. And the few I have had, I've told and retold to friends so many times that my wife, Paige, has heard all the stories a million times and has to kindly remind me when I'm telling them to another friend for the third or fourth time. Plus, I'm a blabber-mouth, for Blog-sake!

Feeling obligated to accomplish a herculean task, I found a solution when my mom sent me her list. Her final entry read: "I like to read fiction." I thought, well, I like to write fiction, so that could be my first one. And then it dawned on me; after that first entry, why not write 24 examples of things which never actually happened to me.

It sounded fun (and it was) but it took forever. Coming up with 24 spontaneous stories of things I've never actually done proved to be more difficult than I intially guessed. It took me three or four sittings, and in between I found myself making little notes during work about other possible lies I could tell about my life. Then, after all that, I went to post it and discovered that, true to the post's initial paragraph, you can ONLY send it to 25 people. I mean, these are my friends and family! They already know I'm a dork. What's the point if I can't make that clear to the whole world, right?

So I think I'll post them here, as a serial. "25 Random Lies About Me." I'm not a big fan of the term "random", probably because people beat it to death my freshmen year of college, but maybe it's essential to the viral success of the lists, so I'll reluctantly acquiesce. Stay tuned (does one tune in to a blog? Stay posted? No, I'm the one who posts. Stay WiFi connected? Webbed? Interneted?)...

Writing the Perfect Query Letter

As is my habit, I've written another novel, then buckled under my overwhelming fear of failure in the face of the challenge of selling it to an agent, then a publisher. But this time, I decided to acquiesce in a new way; instead of giving up entirely, I'm asking for help creating the perfect query letter. Maybe, if I can gain enough confidence in the letter itself, I'll be motivated to repeat the process of sending it out and receiving regular, crushing rejection letters in my email inbox.

(Note to agents: I don't hold rejection against you. That would be like holding it against a reader when they struggle with an unwieldy sentence I've written. It's your job to reject the stinkers, just as it's my job to go back and agonize over that sentence until it's clear. I know I'm supposed to be thick skinned, but I'm sure you'll forgive me for not being Mr. Spock.)

Thanks to an article on Slate.com asking folks to help write Obama's Inaugural Address, I found Mixedink.com. It's a service where anybody can go on and help edit a document, basically making your document a wiki or a Googledoc open to the world. I've decided to see if anyone would work on my letter.

So, if you are interested in giving me a hand, I posted the most recent draft of my query letter. I'm not married to any of it (even the book's title), so feel free to hack away, here.

Thank you!

Required Reading

I wish I could make every American read this article about how we can't just blame Bush for everything that happened over the last eight years: Folks, the blame has to be shared by all of us, even those of us in blue states who kept voting for the other guy.

Please read this.

"What the Hell Just Happened? A Look Back at the Last Eight Years" by Tom Junod, from January's Esquire.

Inevitable Disappointment?

Many liberals like me have been cynically admitting that we have set ourselves up for inevitable disappointment because we've elevated our hopes in an Obama presidency to untenable heights. On the Daily Show this is a joke. For some of us, it's a reality we reluctantly acknowledge.

Well, keep that disappointment train in the station, folks, because we have some big victories to be pleased with already. Not only has Obama signed an executive order to close Guantanimo within a year (closing it in a day, as some have asked for, would have been irresponsible) and signing another prohibiting torture, but today he signed one allowing international aid to go to clinics even if they (gasp) provide full reproductive healthcare to women in the third world. Under the Bush administration, if a clinic told a woman she had options like contraception or abortion, anything other than abstinence, then they could risk losing their funding. Well, no more.

And it gets better! The Senate passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which already passed the House, so Obama will soon be signing that into law.

It will be important for us to remember, when something doesn't go our way, that we've already gained a lot in just a few days. Hell, Americans can't legally torture people anymore. As much as that should have been a point of shame for anyone with a patriotic bone in their body, this should be a point of pride.

Inevitable? Probably.
Arrived? Not yet.

MLK2 Day Tradition

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and again on April 4th (the day of his assassination) I try to make a point to listen to one of Dr. King's speeches. You can find recordings of many of them online, and they always make me prouder to be a Christian and an American. This year I decided to re-read the Letter from a Birmingham Jail. The King Center has a pdf version available on it's site here. Since I've ranted here about some of my disillusion with Chistendom in America, it's so refreshing to read Dr. King struggle with the same thing.

"I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: "Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother." In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: "Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern." And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, on Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular."

Can't we say the same thing about our elective wars, about the generational poverty in our country, about our disdain for the natural world? And, though churches and clergy can have legitimate discussions about their particular stance on marrying gay couples within their own churches, isn't the legalization of gay marriage an issue of justice which the moderate church should be speaking out about, rather than hiding while the right-wing tries to use the state as a tool for their religious oppression? I'm so grateful to people like Al Sharpton, for his brave stance on the issue of gay rights. But I'm deeply ashamed of the larger, silent church.

Read what Dr. King said about this kind of silent church:

"I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South's beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious-education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: "What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor Walleye gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?"

"Yes, these questions are still in my mind. In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? l am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great-grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

"There was a time when the church was very powerful in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators"' But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were "a colony of heaven," called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated." By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide. and gladiatorial contests.

"Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent and often even vocal sanction of things as they are.

"But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust."

I confess to feeling that outright disgust, even though I am a son and grandson of preachers myself. But Dr. King did not lose hope.

"One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence."

So if he didn't lose faith, how can I call him one of my heroes and not try to emulate him?

Dr. King finished, "Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty." I expect that tomorrow, during the inauguration, some will say all those stars are shining. I still think the moral arc of the universe is a bit longer than that.

But I will still celebrate tomorrow, because it will be another sign that it bends toward justice.

God bless you, Al Sharpton!

Al Sharpton spoke out against Prop 8 at he Human Rights Ecumenical Service in Atlanta on Sunday. Check this out! He said:

"There is something immoral and sick about using all of that power to not end brutality and poverty, but to break into people's bedrooms and claim that God sent you."

Furthermore, "It amazes me," he said, "when I looked at California and saw churches that had nothing to say about police brutality, nothing to say when a young black boy was shot while he was wearing police handcuffs, nothing to say when they overturned affirmative action, nothing to say when people were being [relegated] into poverty, yet they were organizing and mobilizing to stop consenting adults from choosing their life partners."

"I am tired," he went on, "of seeing ministers who will preach homophobia by day, and then after they're preaching, when the lights are off they go cruising for trade...We know you're not preaching the Bible, because if you were preaching the Bible we would have heard from you. We would have heard from you when people were starving in California--when they deregulated the economy and crashed Wall Street you had nothing to say. When [accused Ponzi scammer] Madoff made off with the money, you had nothing to say. When Bush took us to war chasing weapons of mass destruction that weren't there you had nothing to say."

"[Social conservatives] will start with the gays but they will end with everybody else," he said. "If you give the Pat Robertsons of the world the theological right to condemn some, then you give them the right to condemn others."

Amen, Al, and thank you for giving me a bit of renewed faith in American Christianity.