When Ill-Informed People Regurgitate Political Rhetoric On Facebook

College Payoff

4-team playoff? Everyone will miss the BCS once this shady reach-around is instituted in 2014. For now I'll just say---You don't fool this old rube, college football.

Your college football playoff Selection Committee 

Those old men relieving themselves in the picture? That's your selection committee (kind of,) and here's what the Great Oz (ESPN) says: "The committee will be charged with giving all teams an equal opportunity to participate in the playoffs and will consider factors such as strength of schedule, head-to-head results and whether a team is a conference champion."

What part of that is a computer incapable of? Odds are the committee will be made up of conference commissioners, retired coaches, and retired players. Let me tell you something right now---Bobby Bowden didn't know where the fuck he was for the last three years he was coaching. I imagine he's in an Alvin's Island right now wearing a snorkel and trying to convince the register girl that these souvenir shot glasses are actually "pee-pee hats."

Old players? You mean this one? Or this one? Or this one? Christ.

Don't even get me started on conference commissioners. These are the same conference commissioners that have rejected a playoff for 20 years because it had "the potential to infringe on academic expectations of student athletes." Horseshit. As soon as the playoff became economically viable these fools shook on it, and were so giddy about the possible financial windfall, they appointed a committee of this---

What bowl are you taking us to?

So, yes, college football, I doth protest. I love you, and I will watch you. But just like a stripper in Panama City, I will never trust you.

What I Wish I Was Doing Today

Roll Tide, fools.

Ugh. Whatcha Say Whatcha Say, Ugh. New York*

I hate New York. Let me rephrase—I tire of New York. I tire of television’s depictions of New York, whereby ANYONE can make it. I thought the whole deal was “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere!” Apparently not. You want to impress me? Make it in Phoenix. That place blows.

I tire of people falling in love in New York, but then almost not getting together, but then getting together right when the lights of some building flicker on. Fuck you. I tire of people in New York being “neurotic” and thus “interesting” instead of “neurotic” and thus “eat shit”. 

this guy made it

I tire of the Knicks, who haven’t been relevant since Clinton was throwing late night cigar parties. I tire of Spike Lee’s camera-close-up rants. It’s not subversive anymore, you little troll; it’s just derivative racism. Eli Manning? Oof. 

I know I’m in the minority here. I realize that New York is the center of everything. New York is our cultural power source. It’s the reason America as a land mass didn’t move any farther west. Why is everything accepted in California? Because those poor folks are too far from the power source! They don’t have the strength to fight it! What “it”? Any fucking it!

It’s the same reason people in my home state of Alabama are so stubbornly fucking backwards. See, Alabama is entirely too close to the power source. Don’t ever let rednecks drink the redneck juice and redneck too close to the power source or them rednecks will just redneck other rednecks into a big redneck**.

This morning I see that the New York Mets played the New York Yankees in a baseball game and all the world is smitten! Two New York teams play New York in New York? New! York! There’s a subway!

Make contact or me and mom
don't love you anymore. 

Look, my father wasn’t a baseball fan and neither was my grandfather or my older brother. Mom didn’t watch it. Grandma didn’t watch it. Nobody in my family watched baseball. Love of sports (by and large) is a learned condition. You watched games with an older family member, a mentor, a creepy postman. No child ever actually walked onto a playground, saw all the sports being offered there and said, “Oooohhhh! That one! That one where people stand still most of the time! I want to do that one because I just don’t have the energy for the others!”

No. Didn’t happen. You ever go to a little league game and see a fly ball land and roll right passed the center fielder who’s staring at cloud shapes and chasing nose goblins? He’s fucking bored. The coach has to yell at him to get his head in the game. Scars him for life! Years later he’s calling me to ask if we can go watch the Mets/Yankees game. No. No we cannot.

Two teams who play baseball in the same city played one another. Makes perfect sense to me. But this morning I thought all the excitement was over a cancer cure, or world hug-it-out day, or Nickelback had exploded into a beautiful firework, or Kanye West had disappeared. You’re this excited over baseball? There are 14,000 more games. Is it the subway?

* I love Hip-Hop. Thank you, thank you, thank you, New York, for Hip-Hop. 

** There's no real point in bringing up what's actually backwards with regards to education, institution of a lottery for better funding, the university's specific navigation of racism, immigration, corrupt local government, etc., because all anyone else hears is the word "redneck". That's why the same southern jokes still slay, somehow. People see no problem with regionalism. Cool. I mean, fuck off, but cool. 

Ill Communication

When texting just isn't sufficient. RIP

How do we keep up with all of the people we care about? Family, old friends, new friends, friends in low places, friends with benefits, Fox and Friends, friends we’ve made at conferences, friends we met on twitter. We could, I suppose, clarify what constitutes “friend” vs “acquaintance” vs “dude/chick that seemed cool,” but because all those qualifications are often separate parts of the same process, and because you’re not an idiot, we’ll just say “friends". 

An article in the guardian from 2009 questions whether technology is a tyrannical force “driving us further apart.” Not if INXS has anything to say about it!

If 2009 is too long ago—“C’mon, Mink, I’ve live-tweeted the births of three children and Instagrammed 16 vacays since then, bruh”—then here is a more current labeling of modern communication as a tyrannical force dumbing us down. Mark Bauerlein's piece feels very much like an updated version of Sam Waterston’s robot worries. 

Miami Heat fans would say you're just hatin'. Then they would do this and this.

I don't necessarily disagree with what Elizabeth Day is saying, though she seems terribly young to fear machines, because she's simply reporting back the beliefs of communication's old guard--"Hitch this calligraphy to the wagon, Buck, and make sure Mrs. Haversham receives it directly!"--but I do take issue with Bauerlein's assertions, which seem more provocative than proven. 

There’s a running joke within my crew of how incapable I am of surviving without my cellphone, even while physically amongst friends who are trying to carry on a conversation with me. I am never beyond pulling out my cellphone while a buddy is in mid-sentence to check my twitter, Facebook, email, or text. In my mind, I’m fully capable of doing all of the things all of the time. But the fact is that it’s rude, and it’s a social misstep I no longer even recognize I’m making. It’s routine, habit, addiction. I am immersed in so many lines of communication that I forget those right in front of me, and subconsciously, I think, I worry that if I don’t know what’s going on everywhere with everyone and don’t respond asap that the world will pass me by. It’s terrifying!

This is why I, in part, agree with the rhetoric that accuses me of being a mindless drone plugged into a spiritually dead world, leading us further away from the very intimacy that defines us as human. My b.

But where these saviors of ye old handshake miss the point is time and priority.

I say! What ravenous clicking on that picture box!

Bauerlein says, “most young people in the United States neither read literature (or fully know how), work reliably (just ask employers), visit cultural institutions (of any sort), nor vote (most can’t even understand a simple ballot.)"

Surely you’re aware that young people today travel much more than generations before, and that, there is only so much you can bring on a plane. Shall I pack an extra suitcase of books because I like the smell of paper, or just use my kindle? It’s a valid question. For while I’m sure not everyone uses their kindle to read War and Peace while on layover, they’re also not all banging away on Pac-Man.

At Florida State University (where I am a PhD student in Creative Writing), Graduate TA’s teach over 80% of the undergraduate courses offered in the English Department. Ask our employers how that’s working out for them. I would forward you their numerous emails lauding our efforts each semester, but I doubt you’d read them. Principles and all.

What counts as a “cultural institution”? Museums? Visit them each time I’m in a city that has them. Not all do. But that speaks to government funding of the arts, as well as each particular city’s wealth of economy. Much larger discussion, but it’s not the fault of those who tweet.

Voting. Oof. You can’t be serious. Is it your belief that Obama was elected President of the United States largely on the shoulders of old white people? You think Butch, who runs the hardware store in upstate New York, plastered his windows in “Hope” or “Change”?

Scientific method? In what arena? Tuesday I was with a young writer who got every physics question correct at trivia night. We were in a bar WRITING the answers in PENCIL on PAPER! Oh, the sophistication!

I can recount a ton of American history: there’s slavery, the corruption of government, capitalism, the patriarchy within the literary community (past and present), war, an economy our corrupt government renders impossible to understand or control. What else? Oh! Classism. Elitism. Racism. Ageism. Gender bias.

Here's a local representative. Impressive, right? 

You’ve got us on the knowledge of local representatives. We suck at it. Then again, local government is more easily corrupted, so we become jaded. That’s still our fault, but again, more complicated than just, “those damned kids.”

“They spend unbelievable amounts of time electronically passing stories.” You mean like news of what’s happening in the world? Oppressive regimes? The rise or fall of democracy? Polling numbers? Essays by an increasingly intelligent army of bloggers who often report the world’s happenings before Scoop McNulty at the Times can pull his golf pencil from his favorite fedora?

Oh. You don’t like funny cat pictures, e-cards, duckfaces, OMG’s and LMFAO’s. These things raise my hackles, as well. But then again, they take 2 seconds of your life, and you can choose to ignore them, dial Professor Pumpernickel on your rotary, and complain over static.

The fact is, to meet a friend or to call a friend or to write a friend a letter takes time. Now imagine you've more friends than just Professor Pumpernickel. Now imagine those multiple friends are dealing with the shit that life often is and need a shoulder to cry on, an ear to ramble into. Or they just want to discuss what they've seen, read, heard. Or they have a relevant joke. Or, GASP, they want to discuss work, an assignment, moving, etc. 

So you’re a part of these multiple dialogues with multiple friends, and often, you require these same things of them. You are the shit in the shit of life with shit on your mind you must get out in lieu of going bonkers fucking crazy. This happens.

And it happens on top of the little things one must accomplish each minute, each hour, each day in order to be successful.

Going out for a paper means having to dodge these people.

Technology, while certainly flawed in many ways, makes this navigation faster and more manageable. It’s that simple. If I couldn’t IM or email or tweet or Facebook comment on a friend having a baby, getting married, suffering a death in the family, getting a job, publishing a book, then we would lose touch. I don’t want that. The world is hard enough without adding “lonely as hell” to the equation. I love these people. I am fortunate to have them in my life, and if technology makes that easier, Christ, makes it possible at all, then we’re better for it. Not to mention the FUCKTONSHITLOADS of information made readily available at the click of a key. I don’t even have to leave my house. I don’t have to go outside, travel to some location, pick up a paper, and run into your crabby ass who’s probably going to cut me off in traffic because you drive like shit.

What’s more is that many employers, at least in my field, now REQUIRE a social media presence on applications. Facebook, twitter, a blog, an email, Pinterest. PINTEREST! They want me to scrapbook! So even if I wanted to sit in a dingy house reading my Freud through a monocle and stroking my beagle, Claudius, I would still be FORCED to be a part of the digital community in order to make myself more viable for potential employment.  

Got it? Now, go follow me on something.

Hatin'

Last night I was drinking hatorade with some haters who, like me, exercise haternomics on those non-haters who disdain our haterology, rendering them merely the haters they were hating…ahem…hatin’.

Fine! I would genuinely "hate" to listen to this conversation.

Actually, I was just watching game 4 of the NBA Finals, ground zero for haters and non-haters alike. Or maybe our entire world is broken into these two extremes, and America is ground zero, and aesthetics are on trial, and I’m behind the times, hatin’.

You’re hatin’ on the times, Brometheus.

I’ll make this brief because I’ve a houseguest and don’t wanna start hatin’ on houseguestin’, nahhh mean?

The use of the word was valid in its inception as a way to describe someone who exhibited a wholesale dislike for every facet of another person/thing, even if those characteristics one “hated on” were unrelated. It was shorthand—“It’s not that you necessarily dislike all of these things, but you dislike them on the basis that I perform them. You, hater, are hatin’.” Now the word, as well as any derivation, has become a crutch—sign of a clear refusal to accept any dissenting opinion or analysis, a cloak that masks an inability to offer any comprehensive, coherent, orconstructive criticism of an opposition’s point. It halts any sort of dialogue, and relegates human communication to the playground, whereby one kid asks, with genuine interest, what you believe eating a bowl full of mud will accomplish, and you respond by crying, shitting yourself, and sticking your tongue out.

If you disagree with me it doesn’t mean you’re “hating” and if you do claim that you “hate” me, well then, fuck you. Know what else? If I do not offer a coherent argument in opposition to your opinion, but rather, I berate you, refuse to listen, and act like an asshat, you can tell me to fuck myself! How would that be? Things can get real nasty!

Appreciatin'

But they don’t have to. Why? Because what we’re talking about when we say—hating, hater, hatorade, hatertude—is taste, which is often simply a matter of opinion. Sometimes we can be really passionate about our opinions, and it can be a blast because we’re buzzed off of an argument and giving as good as we’re getting and, in the process, maybe discovering flaws within our own argument or completely valid, mind-altering aspects of someone else’s argument in the process. Or we could just never get to that point because we’re yelling “hater” back and forth, dismissing one another without cause, and setting the gift of language back thousands of years.

It’s called “communication”, I think. But fuck if I know. Could be that I’m just hatin’.

An Open Letter from a Fortunate Son

Dear Elizabeth Wurtzel,

Today I read your article in the Atlantic—1% Wives Are Helping Kill Feminism And Make The War On WomenPossible—and thought about my own mother. She is not, and has never been, a member of the 1%. However, by carelessly defining Feminism in strictly economic terms, you manage to devalue stay-at-home mothers within all social classes. Shame.

Below is a timeline of events in my mother’s life; and while I do not believe these few completely define her, they are stories I enjoy telling, and speak to my respect and admiration for the most amazing woman I have ever had the privilege (something your bio says you know an awful lot about) to know:

1966—Lorette Mink is a junior at Benjamin-Russell High School in Alexander City, Alabama. Two rather large senior girls who graze in the hallway like bison bully her younger brother, Lynn, a 9th grader, with cruel consistency. He is ashamed to tell anyone in his family. Hearing of the daily beasts from a friend in the cafeteria one morning, my mother stops eating lunch, quietly approaches the table where they are feeding, and asks them to accompany her to the hallway. 20 minutes pass. As two faculty members are making their way back to their classes, they hear a ruckus in the women’s restroom. Inside, a girl lies beneath a stall, head cracked and nose bloodied. Inside the stall, my mother stands over the second girl, screaming incoherently, and dunking her head in toilet water. In 1966, Lorette Mink is 5’ tall, 98 pounds. Lynn goes on to serve two tours in Vietnam. At a family reunion years later, my uncle will tell me that my mother is the toughest person he has ever known.

1977--I am adopted by Lorette and Henry Mink. I am 3-months-old. The building where they claim me is in Montgomery, Alabama, marked only by a four-digit number. 

1978—I am 16-months-old. Fascinated by everything, especially potted plants, I decide it would be in my best interest to swallow a rock*. Facedown on the floor when my mother notices, she yanks me up by the ankles in one hand and desperately pounds my back with the other, dislodging the rock and saving my life. The first time.

Despite my protests, mom refuses to get this tattoo.

1981—4-years-old, leaving University Mall in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where mom and I had been Christmas shopping. A pick-up truck cuts the parking lot, slamming into my mother’s Volkswagen at full bore. The car is totaled. Mom, dizzied and bloodied by the crash, mumbles to see if I am okay. I had yet to hook my seatbelt when it happened. Her hand is on my chest. In the crash, my back never lost contact with my seat. The second time.

1982—I am 5 and mom leaves a lucrative career to be a stay-at-home mom. My father pleads with her not to, that she will become bored, that she’s the type who must remain busy, that she is great at what she does. “I know,” she says, “but now I want to be my best at this.”

1986—Lorette Mink is preparing dinner in the kitchen, the front of our house. I am in the back of the house, the sunroom, allegedly watching after my baby sister, who is 3. Suddenly my mother rushes past me, kicking my Nintendo controller unplugged, interrupting my game of Metroid, and sending me into a white-hot rage. She leaps into the shallow end of our pool to rescue my sister, who is standing flat-footed on the bottom, surely wondering where the fish are. I never knew my sister was outside, and I was sitting no more than four feet from the screen door, the one she used to go exploring. In so many instances to come, I will never figure out how it is my mother knows things.

1985—3^rd grade, Northington Elementary, Tuscaloosa. Do you remember when you discovered you could produce fart noises with your hand and armpit? I do. What a glorious time! The whole world before you! The time I realized this my teacher, Mrs. Wolmack, was having a particularly trying day. When I did it, and Wolmack realized I did it, she jerked me up by the arm in front of the whole class. “Do that again and I’ll beat the shit outta you,” she screamed. Mrs. Wolmack was a feminist**, you see, and she’d be damned if she was going to take this abuse from an 8-year-old. She made a paycheck, goddamnit! These stay-at-home moms were failing her! After school I got into mom’s car in tears. I had never been cursed by my folks, much less by another adult. Mom turned the car off, grabbed my hand, and marched me back into the school, to Wolmack’s classroom. She told me sit.

“Hello, Mrs. Mink, what can I do for you?”

Most of Danny's roles just involve him
playing a male version of my mom. 

My mother, a solid foot shorter than Wolmack and much lighter, moved toward her with such speed that I didn’t notice her taking actual steps. She grabbed Wolmack by the throat and put her against the wall. All that touched the ground were Wolmack’s toes.

“You want to ‘beat the shit outta’ someone, here I am. But I’m telling you right now, lady, you better bring a lot more than that paddle.”

1992—It is late on a terribly sticky September night in Brookwood, Alabama. Me (9^th grade,) my buddy Ralph (a junior,) and my mom are in the driveway. Ralph and I are practicing jumpers and she is snatching boards, telling stories. It’s difficult to practice while laughing. Everyone in my high school (9% black) recently found out that Ralph is dating the prettiest girl in school, Misty. Not a problem, except that Ralph is black, and Misty is white. Around 8 p.m. a truckload of white boys and white men barrel down my street. My house is at the end of the cul-de-sac. The truck is blue. Rebel flags are hooked to both sides of the cab. They slow down in front of my house to throw beer bottles, to scream nigger lover, we’re gone whoop yer azz, and nigger loving bitch. My mother does not approach the truck, now center with the driveway. Instead, she begins to walk briskly toward the road, the cut-off point. The truck spins out, and it picks up speed as it nears my mother, who stands now in the middle of the road between the truck and our street’s exit. A horn. She does not move. You better move, nigger lover. She remains. The truck swerves, takes out a mailbox in the neighbors yard and spins away. Not a bottle is thrown at her. Not a word exits the truck as she becomes smaller and smaller in the taillights. Just mouths agape. She never budged.

Elizabeth, the problem with your article is that only in the title, and the ending, do you actually qualify your critique. You pit working women without children along with working mothers AGAINST stay-at-home mothers of all classes. It’s sloppy, and because of that, you must get touched.

Lorette Mink has shown me what’s right and what’s not in this world. She explains the why’s of when my heart is broken and points out the what the fucks when I am the breaker. All I know of sacrifice, of work ethic, of responsibility, and of goodness comes from her. My successes are a result of my mother, and my failures are a result of me wandering too far from the lessons she instilled in me. If this sounds like rhetoric, then perhaps you haven't been listening close enough when you’ve been told this before.

Many of us loathe the super wealthy. Welcome to the party, Princess. Maybe the women you mention in your article who do nothing but attend yoga classes are the wrong stay-at-home mothers to ask.

If it’s payment you require in order to judge value, consider this: I’ll ask mom to meet you in the street, to beat you six ways from Sunday, and then sit you down and listen to your problems, to offer solutions, to hug your neck and tell you how wonderful you are, how this world is a son of a bitch, and the fact that you’ve made it this long with such success, woman to woman, makes her very proud. When she’s done, I’ll pay her. Does this suffice?

This morning I called here to ask if she stands for Feminism.

“Of course. You know that. But then again, I stand most of the day. I sit down when I cut grass, though. Love that riding mower. 2 acres is too much. Does that mean I’m not a Feminist?”

“Mom, what do think of yoga?”

Silence.

“Uhhh…Oh! That little green thing in Star Wars? I didn’t really care for those movies. You loved them, though. Are you eating? I want you to make sure you’re eating. You let me know if I need to send something down there.”

Thank you, Mom. I love you.

* At 5-years-old I am reunited with rock, this time burying it in my ear. In undergrad, my first slam poem involves personifying gravel. Yeah, it's a problem. 

** By Wurtzel's definition: a woman with a job resulting in monetary compensation.