I'm No Longer In Dillingham Alaska, I Have No Excuse (and Neither Do You)

People Who Are Better Than You--or--Doing Right: More Important than Being Right

2010-03-26T09:03:00.002-08:00

Have you ever known a saint that was never going to get recognized by anyone for it because they are the real deal? I mean someone who does the hard stuff without hope or expectation of reward merely because it is the right thing to do? I bet you have. And unless you are actually one of those people, which let’s face it, if you’re reading this, you aren’t, you probably have found that person intensely annoying. Or at least, I find these people incredibly annoying. It’ not that I don’t want to like good people, it’s just that stuff I have to tell myself to not feel about how much better they are than me tends to poison any positive regard I should be feeling for them. In the face of the generous, the kind, the reasonable, hardworking and fair, I almost on reflex remind myself that this person is not better than me, they are just somehow simple minded—their moral code is hopelessly pedestrian and not anywhere near as nuanced as mine, and therefore it is somehow easier for them to be a good person . These things manage to not only make me feel better about myself, but somehow also work to make me feel superior to kinder people. After all, given all the hurdles I naturally face to behaving morally, I should receive even more credit for the pathetic sops I make. After all, I am struggling against a much worse set of natural inclinations.

However, my natural inclination to dislike people with superior natural inclinations isn’t something I’m overly proud of, and so I’ve spent much of my adult life avoiding these people. Being reporter makes that fairly easily—generally speaking people behaving well isn’t so much my line of work. Criminals, politicians and angry mobs of people—that is pretty much my beat, and there isn’t much there that makes me question if I’m really trying hard enough to be a good human being. Every once and a while I get assigned to do something heartwarming about a person going above and beyond the call of duty to do something for the general good of humanity, but that is a very occasional assignment. For one thing, I’m not good at the kind of assignment—even when I’m trying to cover it straight it tends to come out like making fun of do gooders instead of paying them tribute (“Eileen, there is nothing humorous about a deaf woman dedicating her life to teaching the blind…” “Oh come on, there is definitely Something humorous about that—besides what do we care, it’s not like she’s going to hear the story.”). Second thing though, there just aren’t that many of those stories.

This week I have covered a verdict in a case where parents fed their pneumonia stricken four-year-old daughter so much Clonodine she drowned in her own blood four days before Christmas, an attempted murder for hire when our “hitman,” showed up in mother two’s drive way and shot her five times at close range, a drunk driving into a swimming pool, two bank robberies, and 4 billion dollar state budget deficit that is going to mean there are going to be no police, firefighters or teachers in this state in about a year and half. That’s what I covered personally from CNN I learned we now live in country where an appropriate response to a health care package you don’t like involves A) calling a black Congressman a nigger, B) spitting at people, C)throwing a rock through a Congress person’s window D) sending them menacing looking white powder in the mail E) All of the above. But wait liberals, let’s not be so proud of ourselves, remember that four years you spent calling on someone to assassinate Dick Cheney? I saw someone burning Rush Limbaugh in effigy on the news last night, and I think you know as well as anyone that just because a handful of white people have lost their damn minds doesn’t actually mean anyone who opposes the health care bill should be looked on as some kind of racist prone to throwing rocks. I’m pretty sure that “you all are socialists,” vs, “oh yeah, well you all are racists,” isn’t a debate. It isn’t an argument, it isn’t even a series of contradictions, it’s just stupid. Worse than stupid, living in a world full of people who would be right than do right, means nothing ever gets done.

It is times like these, times when I am convinced that humanity is one rough weekend away from devolving wholesale into a bunch of howler monkeys hopped on PCP, I wax nostalgic about my moral betters, and wish there were more of them in the world. It isn’t that they aren’t out there, Unrecognized Candidates for Sainthood—it’s just the part of being humble and not seeking recognition or credit means they are kind of hard to miss.

In Dillingham the URCSF (unrecognized candidate for sainthood—sounds a bit like irksome) was the first person who ever helped me when I took a job as a reporter there.

It will probably come as no great surprise to anyone who has read this blog before that in rural southwest Alaska, it takes a while before anyone will willingly tell you anything, due to a sort of natural mistrust for outsiders. That is challenging when one is a reporter and one’s entire job is dependent on people talking to you. Aggravating that sort of natural recalcitrance, was the nearly legendary reputation that two of my processors at KDLG had established for competing to see who could make local public officials look worse.That reputation was somewhat fair, and somewhat not, depending on which one of them you are actually talking about. Generally speaking, the one who was more talented was also a lot harder and meaner to the local ruling class than the less skilled one—but they could both be pretty tough. More importantly, from my perspective at the time, they were both a lot tougher than I was ever likely to be in a story for the local news, because, well it’s the local news, which means you need the people to be willing to talk to you more than once.[1] Anyway, right or wrong, fair or not, being an outsider was bad, being an outsider with a microphone was worse and while I’m sure much better people have faced much steeper adversity than this, it still started out as a tough gig. Plus, I kept getting warned not to offend the locals, because then they never, ever forgive you for it. I probably should have listened to that advice somewhat more circumspectly, but at the time I remember thinking “offend them, how they hell am I going to offend people who refuse to speak to me?”

In fairness, there was a list of people in town who from the beginning would call me back and give me information, but initially that was a very, very short list. Mostly, I couldn’t get people to call to answer really simple questions that one would think it would be in a public official’s best interest to get back to you about. For example, on day five I heard there was a wolf pack circling Dillingham and eating people’s pets. Now granted that sounded like more of a story to me than it would to anyone who was more local simply by the inclusion of the words “wolf pack,” but since it wasn’t actually true, you would think that the animal control officer or the police department would have gotten back to me to tell me it was just a rumor, right? No. Not so much—in fact for the first six months covering public safety in Dillingham meant I was going to have to just be on scene at the time of any given crime to report on it because other than that it would simply be impossible for me to know about it or get it confirmed because there was a less than 0% chance anyone was calling me back. A fact impossible to take personally at the time since public works, the chamber of commerce, the local branch of the DOT, the entirety of the Bristol Bay borough and most branches of the Lake and Peninsula Borough government all pretty much felt exactly the same way and wouldn’t call me back either, even to answer a question as simple as “hey is this the right phone number for you all?” For the first month I couldn’t even get school officials to call me back, and the radio station was chartered by the district and we were housed by the high school. If I wanted the superintendent to talk to me, generally the best way to achieve that goal was to sit quietly by his desk and hope to Jesus he noticed me there. It was a strange time in my career where I reported on a truly random collection of things—I spoke to Mike Gravel[2] on the phone for two hours early on my tenth day at work in Dillingham, and learned more about politics than I ever really hoped to.

Did the people of Dillingham care to learn these things? Mostly likely, no, it is almost impossible to imagine they did. Did I have much of a choice in the matter, not really, air time to fill.

After a reasonable period the good people of the greater Bristol Bay region took pity on me and started calling me back, partially based on the fact that the news was becoming increasingly random and partially based on an evolving consensus that I was a more or less reasonable human being who wasn’t on a mission to make members of the community look like idiots.

But before that golden day, there was one in that beacon of light during that dark time of random story generation, and that beacon was URCFS—who went above and beyond merely calling me back and actually would call me to tell me about things that I should be reporting on. He was/is a firefighter-paramedic, which meant a lot of my better information for several months came from this guy. When an important local luminary died 60 miles away in a village, it was URCFS who told me about it at 6 am and also filled me in on who he was. Generally speaking he didn’t want to be identified as the source of the information, he just wanted to help point me in the right direction—which in the early days of knowing less than fuck-wit about what was going on, was definitely a boon.

Now granted, much of my bad information also came from this person. The longest morning of my professional life was the day that my favorite source somehow heard that there was a jail break down at the local lock-up and managed to pass that information along in a way that it got to air before we had fact checked it. A day where you report a convict on the loose when there isn’t a convict on the loose is a day when you get to say you’re sorry to a lot of people and hope against hope the entire news department isn’t about to get fired. That was bad, and really hit home that URCSF’s info always had to be double or triple checked. Bad turns aside, he was right, or at least in the family of right, more often than he wasn’t, and he was certainly right a hell of a lot more often than most of the other “concerned citizens,” who would ring us up to tell us about something.

What I thought was admirable about him was that he really didn’t want anything much in return from me for being helpful. [He often came by with “news,” information that promoted causes his church was involved in—something that in the middle of nowhere I didn’t really find all that objectionable because I covered a lot of things churches were doing. Churches and like religious organizations were often the main engine of doing things in a town with a population of 1,500 and a huge drinking problem. Moreover, I don’t think the guy ever came in looking for us to do a story about mass baptisms in the Nushagak river, mostly it was stuff like basketball teams or camps kids were going to. Insofar as the radio station I worked for twice covered fictional or semi-fictional creatures, things that actual kids were doing at an actual location seemed fair game to me.

And no, I’m not kidding about the fictional creatures thing. People always think I’m exaggerating when I say this or making a joke about getting the coverage wrong—but when I say fictional creatures I don’t mean convicts that never existed, I mean we covered shit that does not exist in reality such as Big Foot and elves. Okay, well we really covered their local equivalents, Hairy Man and the Little People, but in either case they don’t mother-fucking exist but made the afternoon news none the less.

Don’t believe me…

Little People (Elves)

(This is the actual lead for it on the KDLG website)

If you plan on going out to the maqi on January 18, beware. According to Yup'ik tradition, that's the day the little people come out. Anne Hillman spoke with Dillinghamers about who the little people really are. (3:20)

http://www.kdlg.org/news/audio/0117_Little_People---web.mp3

and

Hairy Man (Big Foot)

Recently, we talked about the Little People, who come out on January 28th. Now, we want to talk about a much larger creature—Hairy Man. But people say he isn't just a monster, he's something else. Anne Hillman has more. (3:39)

http://www.kdlg.org/news/audio/0125_Hairy_Man_-web.mp3

If you don’t want to take 7 minutes to listening to those: the little people are really the product of local imagination. The hairy man is either a feral human that was put out of an orphanage 30 years ago and has been living without the benefit of clothes ever since, or he’s a creature that is not currently residing in reality! Given the annual two week streak of weather that is -40F? below in Dillingham Alaska, I think the smart money is on figment of the bored Alaskan winter imagination over existent adult feral child.

But I digress, as those were not the two stupidest stories covered in my tenure. Little People does make the top five, but in a small enough market there is something to be said for accepting a pretty flexible definition of news sometimes. As long as we weren’t getting information that was facedly false or obviously meant to persecute someone else as part of personal vendetta, generally we followed up to the best of our abilities.

Unless it was politics, 2008 was an election year, and I think by July we were actively trying to avoid knowing anything more about any political issue in the newsroom. It wasn’t our fault, really, we learned the hard way in 2008 that you can’t just let politicians on the air to talk about their thoughts because once they start there is no way on Earth to get them to shut-up, and once one makes it through, they all start calling you constantly. Not just locals either, when Mark Begich was running for Ted Steven’s seat, those people would call us looking for coverage anytime someone on the campaign had a thought about pretty much anything. It didn’t have to be a thought about the campaign mind you, sometimes they just called to make sure the media knew where the were having for lunch, and I if it wasn’t in my town, I failed to see why I should care.

But the guy who really made us change the policy was my friend URCSF, who ran for the area seat in the district legislature. Now it would have been tempting to write him off as a lost cause candidate because he was running against a relatively popular incumbent with strong ties to the area. In a normal race the incumbent would have to do something pretty feloniously awful to loose their seat, but thinking about any race in Alaska as normal seriously underestimates the degree to which politics in the 49^th state are on crack. The election prior to the one where I was News Director in BB had actually been won by a just a single vote, and that single vote put the incumbent that URCSF was running against in office over a guy who had held the seat for the prior 20 years. The winner of that race is a nice guy and a pretty decent rep, but he comes from a local family whose preferred method of asking for a divorce involves driving a car into your spouse’s kitchen to send the message that it’s time to leave. I’m not saying that coming from a family of crazy people or brigands should necessarily knock one out of having a political career, I’m just saying in most places it kind of does. Alaska, ehh, well there are things you can do to get thrown out of office, but it has to be you, not just someone you know, and you have to get absolutely 100% busted doing something that is pretty bad.

This actually made covering Alaskan politics fun, since handicapping a race was usually quite a challenge. Getting voted out of (or into) office can pretty much happen to anyone at any time. The former governor, Frank Murkowski got unseated by Sara Palin in a primary and she went on to win the general election against Tony Knowles, a reasonably popular former governor. In most places you can know who is going to win any given election, Alaska’s the only place I ever heard of where one vote actually made a difference and victory really is possible for anyone brave enough to stand. Part of this reflects a good things, lots of states say they are full of independent voters, Alaska actually is. People are far more likely to be informed and interested in a regional issue, like the Pebble Mine or logging in the Tsongas National Forest and cast a vote on the basis of it than they are likely to just vote strict party line. It also highlights a bad thing about Alaska, which is that a lot of the voting is determined coin toss randomly since people are often unsure what they are voting for. We used to do man on the street stories the day of and after elections and a surprising number of people, people who were very proud they had voted, couldn’t tell us what they voted for. I don’t mean wouldn’t, though there were plenty of folks like that as well, I mean couldn’t because they had absolutely no idea what they had cast a ballot in favor of.

Anyway, on the assumption that all races are races to be taken seriously, at first we covered everything connected to the URCSF vs. Incumbent race, and rapidly found out that offering them a free platform to stand on was a bad idea. So we changed our rule and said that unless a campaign was doing something active: having debate, making a speech, handing out alms to the poor, etc. we just weren’t offering them coverage. I expected some complaining, and I expected it from URCSF for sure because he was the more disadvantaged by our policy. I spent a month waiting to hear “look I helped you out…” but never did. He just said okay, he understood. The other side, the presumptive favorite, did complain a little bit—there was definitely a bit more grumbling about equal time from them—though it was minor grumbling mostly meant to ensure that we definitely, definitely intended to apply the policy equally. The only complaint I ever got from URCSF was when he heard that his opponent had been on the radio and he hadn’t been offered equal time, but was completely pacified when I told him that his opponent had been on the air because he was the sitting legislator and I had a non-political question about a legislative issue.

Other than this, in the entirety of the of my career I have never owed someone any kind of favor that I did not immediately hear about the minute I was going to say or write something they weren’t going to like. Sometimes the ethics of the situation are flexible and I can honor a favor, sometimes they aren’t and I am going to have to make someone I owe mad—but rare bordering on damn near non-existent is the person who never asks me to make the decision. To be absolutely clear, I did owe this guy a favor, and I’m pretty sure he knew that too and nonetheless he never tried to capitalize on it to get me to cover something or not cover it. Being a good source and good sport is probably not grounds enough to be called the local unrecognized saint, however noteworthy, but this guy is a lot more than that. He is one of those people who is either helping someone else, or sleeping. Helping someone else might involve being a paramedic, driving a drunk person home, sponsoring Friday night basketball, making sure everyone can get to camp, inviting strangers to his home or just plain giving someone else a fish he just caught—but it was always something, and sometimes it was something hard. The only thing I could ever think to say against the guy is that he didn’t donate money to the radio station I worked for, but then, I can’t say I’m all that upset about that these days. What I can say is that I was impressed and somewhat inspired by this guy, because for his efforts he was certainly not a rich man, nor a particularly respected man or someone that other people were overly inclined to take seriously. A person who doesn’t look for recognition doesn’t tend to get thanked a whole lot, and I don’t think my friend here was overly thanked or appreciated for what he did in town and beyond.

This guy and I probably have less than nothing in common ideologically. URCSF is a conservative Christian Republican and probably a proud member of the Tea Party movement today, and when the time comes that I don’t want to make fun of those people, I will know I have truly run out of ideas. In my time I saw him propose some truly outlandishly bad plans, my favorite of which being to abolish all local taxes to provide economic relief to the citizens. While it is truly a heart in the right place sort of idea, the problem is that 6% sales tax and equally moderate property tax aren’t a major factor in why the cost of living in rural Alaska is so back-breakingly high, which means abolishing them wouldn’t really provide economic relief. All it could hope to do is bankrupt all local systems, which unfortunately aren’t quite subsidized enough by the state or federal government to completely cut off all local support. Generally speaking, destroying an already weak educational and infrastructural baseline is not a good long term strategy for economic relief.

But there is something to be said for having a heart in the right place, and the sort of personality that is willing to work hard with no promise of thanks or material reward. People the say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, which has always struck me as a dumb thought, since good intentions never seem to actually hurt anyone. Intentions, like the Hairy Man or Little People, only live in your head, and they can’t really do anything from in there, except maybe scare or inspire you. Actions that blindly pursue good intentions without any regard for reality, on the other hand, have killed millions of people and would probably make a better pavement on the highway to Hades. What is actually done is matters a lot more than what is intended, insofar as intentions are hard to measure to whereas actions are fairly watchable, and sometimes hilarious.

URCSF’s actions were occasionally hilarious, like the time he told us about that fake convict, but they were more often awesome and more work than most people I’ve met would be willing to undertake for no reason other than the greater good. I’m pretty sure my vote for sainthood wouldn’t really count as a plus in his books, he disagrees with most of what I think, and additionally, he is probably more than a little offended by what has gone before on this page, though I am sure he is good enough to pray God forgives me as opposed to sticking me on a stake in hell. Furthermore, I would describe URCSF as a good example of what a person committed to social justice is, and I have a feeling that he would cringe at that phrase and spontaneously picture a swastika or a hammer and sickle for reasons he couldn’t quite explain. In fact if I actually still have a reader who knows who I’m talking about, I suggest you not mention this to him at all.

None of which changes the fact that if the planet is not going to be wholesale doomed to end up a ball of flaming tar, a frozen wasteland or a buffet for zombies it’s going to be because natural selection starts to favor the production of people like URCSF who are willing to go the extra-mile to be helpful for the sake of being helpful. It will also probably be good if the rest of us can manage to stop finding these people annoying long enough to actually try to include them in a new world order that involves civility and a basic concern for one’s fellow man. This is true in Southwest Alaska, where I personally watched URCSF accomplish a lot more materially and get a less recognition for actually improving the lives of people in the region then many people who were hailed as leaders did. Outside the back of beyond in Southwest, I would think this is also true just about everywhere else in this county, as there is an increasing feeling on the ground that somebody needs to do something fast or it’s game over for everybody soon. Insofar as there are actually still people in the world who, whatever ideology motivates it, want to help other people more than they want to help themselves, those people are probably the best resource to tap into to build a better future, or at least a future that does involve living at the whim of warlords. So URCSF, though I hope no one ever tells you about it, lest you decide to conduct your life very differently, I salute you, and hope the world comes to resemble you much more closely, if not in thought, then in deed.

[1] Someone who has been reading this from the beginning is now scratching their head trying to reconcile that last statement with how the hell it was I managed to get tossed out of Dillingham. Two things, I was a lot nicer and less likely to court argument when I first moved to Dillingham than I was a year into living in the frozen darkness. Also, there is a world of difference between what I am willing to report on the air and what I am willing to write on a blog. I don’t care what anyone says, I will maintain to my dying breath that they are different from each other—as there are relevant professional standards of factuality that apply to what one reports as news, as opposed to what one writes for the random stream of ill-founded opinions and conspiracy theories that the internet exists to distribute. Well okay, exists to distribute after all the porn has been doled out. Point is, as reporter in Bristol Bay I would never have said anything in the family of “a whole bunch predators hide behind their prominent and important places in local luminaries to perpetrate sex crimes against little girls by using their power to threaten those girls’ family’s livelihoods if they tell” because I can’t prove it. However, since I’m pretty sure about it nonetheless from having enough drunken anecdotes told to me at parties, I’m happy to write it on the internet. Different medium, different standard.

[2] Who is Mike Gravel? Oh God, there are so many ways to answer that question. When I arrived in Alaska, he was the only Frontier Statesman involved in the presidential race. Now he was followed up in a much more splashy and nationally covered way in 2008 by Sarah Palin, but before The Moose Hunter was out there shilling Alaska’s brand of heavily federally subsidized anti-government libertarianism, there was Mike Gravel, the only person in history to receive less of a mandate to run for president the Denis Kusinich. He was additionally Alaska’s representative to the Senate from 1969-1981, and, unsurprisingly, as a libertarian based in strongly democratic principles, he is the mad man on the political landscape I probably actually have the most in common with. I’m pretty sure he is no longer politically active, actually for all I know he’s dead, but his website is worth checking out http://www.mikegravel.us/. And even if I didn’t actually like Mike Gravel, I will always love Mike Gravel, because in the alien landscape that was learning how to cover news in Alaska. I will vote for him for any office he ever chooses to run for.

The Not So Secret World of Connie Mac --or-- Did you Ever See the Smells Like Teen Spirit Video?

2010-03-23T18:48:00.004-08:00

In Alabama right now a lesbian is fighting for her right go to the prom. Well technically, right now a lesbian in Alabama is fighting to get her school to re-instate the prom so that her classmates don’t burn her in some kind of flannel covered effigy. Then she’s fighting to wear a tuxedo and bring her girlfriend. You can read the whole story here

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/03/12/national/main6291402.shtml?tag=cbsnewsTwoColUpperPromoArea

but the gist of it is that Constance McMillen wanted to bring her girlfriend and wear a tuxedo to her senior prom. She told the school, school said no same-sex couples, no tuxedo. So she did what any rational American does, she sued, with the help of the ACLU, and the school did what any institution of learning would do in the face of adversity, called off the prom.

Now one might question why McMillen bothered to tell the school what she was doing as far back as December. There were certainly more conniving ways to get herself and her lady love into the prom. Any 17 year-old girl is more than capable of outsmarting a school policy—I saw many a maiden in pastel poufy dresses snorting what was either cocaine or ground up prescription medication out of lipstick containers at my senior prom. This in front of school officials who were too busy looking for people drinking to notice (and yes, they somehow missed most of the people who were drunk as monkeys as well.) But then I remind myself that as an upper-middle class white heterosexual person, Rosa Parks moments just don’t really come up all that often for me. I never have to refuse to sit in the back of the bus because no one ever asks me to. It seems to me very admirable that this girl is going to take on the school and the gaggle of douche bags she apparently goes to high school with.

Still, the thing that actually most amazes me about Constance McMillen’s story isn’t the total failure of spine on the part of the Itawamba school district, it’s actually the fact that someone would want to fight for the right to go to the prom at all. I had always suspected that one of the benefits of discovering one’s homosexuality early on in life was that a natural excuse for not going to things like the prom existed. Now granted this is probably because I wasn’t so passionately in love with anyone in high school that the thought of seeing them in formal wear set my heart aflutter. As a result though nothing bad happened, I don’t recall any pig’s blood being dumped on me or anyone I cared about, it was just another boring night where I wore too much make-up and uncomfortable shoes for several hours, stayed up late and ate breakfast at IHOP the next day. However, like most high school students it was one of those boring things I had to do so my parents wouldn’t worry that I was a homosexual or on my way to becoming some kind of deranged mass murderer. If born with the great fortune of being an early blooming homosexual I definitely wouldn’t have gone, and I certainly can’t imagine why anyone would fight for the right to do so.

Well that isn’t true, I can imagine it in the sense I can imagine why William Wallace wanted to lead an ultimately unwinnable war with the British, I just can’t imagine doing it. Blessed with the kind of indifference to my surroundings that blending into them affords, I managed to miss most of the prom like experiences of high school. I never saw a single football game, never went to a non-prom dance, never sent in a year book photo and though I was in the drama club, I’m not sure how many of the plays I actually watched—I definitely never made it all the way through a musical.. I should note that my lack of participation had little to do with having any kind of principles, I was just an obnoxious teenager in the mid-90’s when not caring was the coolest things going. Actually, I think not caring is pretty much always the coolest thing to do in high school if you aren’t good looking and can’t play a sport. At any rate had I ever tried to participate, I’m pretty sure that my classmates would have been nice about it as I went to high school with the most preposterously well mannered people on Earth.

They were also the whitest people on Earth. I went to high school with 8 redheads none of whom were related to each other, and one black kid, four Asians, two Jews (who were twins, so they really only count once), and three “race undetermined but probably not whites.” While there were a handful of people who claimed “Native American ancestry,” my natural inclination is to dismiss them as “Great White Liars.”(1) Bridgewater, New Jersey where my family came from is by no stretch of any human imagination a glorious cultural melting pot where all races live in peace and harmony, but Duxbury was sufficiently different that it seemed a little creepy at first. When we first moved I asked my parents if they were sure they had not actually moved us to the Village of the Damned, since there is just something plainly disconcerting about being surrounded by too many blond haired, blue-eyeds—sort of feels like maybe Hitler didn’t lose after all.

Like all places that have been wholly terraformed by incredibly white people, Duxbury is quiet. There are rumors about secret cocaine rings and key parties, but I think these are mostly the creation of bored suburban minds. My well mannered classmates were also a fairly quiet group—which should have unsurprising given the aggregate lameness of their parents, but Duxbury youth had a reputation for incredibly hard partying. Long before my family moved to town, there had been some epically bad run of years when a whole lot of high school students had died in drunken driving accidents, and the town was commonly referred to as “Drunksbury” or “Drugsbury” by other local towns. Reputations aside though, my classmates looked like a farm team the Disney Channel had set up to generate stars for its television shows—everyone had the same good teeth, same good skin, and wore cargo pants. Jocks, Nerds, Goths, Skaters, generic populars and total outcasts—united by their multi-pocketed pants in every color of the rainbow, impressive and noteworthy to be sure, but still nothing that made the group likely to mistaken for the WHO or their roadies, which is what the rumors would have led you to expect.

So for the first two years I was there, I just didn’t believe it—mostly a prejudice born of being uncoolness. While I was at parties with drugs and alcohol, nerds tend to party quietly as we fear jail, knowing that our book smarts won’t help us there. What I never saw in person was anything that would get a movie slapped with a rating higher than PG-13, though on occasion I would hear about a school ski trip that turned into a re-enactment of Caligula, or parties where the entire police force would be called in with the fire hoses. See the alleged perpetrators at school looking as much like Abercrombie and Fitch models as always made those stories hard to believe. It just didn’t seem to add up, their teeth were just too good.

Until the pep rally my senior year, when I realized that these people weren’t quite the exra’s from Dawson’s Creek I had always taken them for. I had never been to a pep rally due to the aforementioned aversion to showing anything that could be construed as school spirit, but my senior year I had to go for the first ten minutes for some reason that I no longer remember. After doing whatever it was I was there for, I watched for a short time and the most interesting thing that happened was that every member of my senior class had gotten a Captain Morgan temporary tattoo. Myself included, though I’m not the one who put it there and to this day I don’t know how it got there. Other than that, it was as expected, very boring if you didn’t play a sport. I didn’t, so I went back up to newspaper as I had a college application to pad. Ten minutes later my intrepid best friend came upstairs to tell me “uhh, you should go back to the pep rally,”

When I got there and asked what was going on, a very stoned junior looked at me through bloodshot eyes and said…

“Ever seen the Smells Like Teen Spirit video?”

I would like to say that it really was just like the video, down to the black spandex clad anarchy cheerleaders, but I did go to the whitest high school this side of Norway so it was more like a scene from the early part of Fight Club with better lighting. There was definitely a mosh pit, and though I have seen rougher times at a Ramstein(2) concert, there were definitely some bleeding people, which is always a surprising sight in Pleasantville. My later understanding was that most of the head injuries were sustained during the “sanctioned,” part of the presentation when some sports team decided to distinguish itself by throwing cans of soda into the crowd instead of candy. Now whether the sophomores were offended by the stupidity of heaving hard heavy cans at people, or they were just being dicks is unknown. What is known is that the 10th graders started lobbing those soda cans back as hard as they could at the team and any other random collateral damage victims on the floor. As it turns out, if you throw a soda can hard enough at someone it really hurts when it makes contact no matter what and it fucking kills if it explodes on you. Oh, and if it hits the ground it definitely explodes. So after a brief volley, when the air was alive with aluminum, the gym suddenly filled with bleeding injured athletes and a bunch of angry, sticky, people. You’d think they’d beat up the sophomores, but as it turns out, the situation just made people pretty much want to hit whomever was in arm’s reach. It wasn’t quite the Smells Like Teen Spirit video, but seeing the whitest people you know suddenly going bat shit and beating each other into soda soaked bloody messes is certainly something that sticks with you. It’s also made me more than a little wary of crowds. It’s a perspective born of seeing a 90 pound cheerleader pick up a folding chair and smack someone in the face with it while saying “fuck you, you fucking mother-fucker.”

Now in real life as reporter I have to be in crowds of people a lot, and so I can’t really say that any part of this experience taught me a lesson that involves living alone in the woods. Well unless you count the years in Dillingham I guess, but even there I managed to find an angry crowd of people. Back in the lower 48, insofar as I cover politics, I damn near go to pep-rallies professionally and though I’m always sort of waiting to get smacked in the face with a can of Diet Coke, mostly they aren’t too bad if you can put the unseemly resemblance to Jonestown out of your mind. Still, I like to think that I became a broadcast reporter because tape-recorder/digital sound capture equipment makes a much better blunt object in a riot situation than a pad and pencil. I know what you’re thinking, you can drive a pencil through a guy’s eye, but I bet that is a lot harder than it looks on TV. Besides, it’s not like radio reporters don’t also have pens, we just additionally have a two pound metal box that has a two foot tether (mike cable) you can swing it by. I’m just saying, the more weapons available in the riot, the better. After all, a wise man once said, beware of stupid people in large groups.

The problem is that though the above statement is true, it obscures its equally true corollary—all groups of people are stupid. You might try to list groups of people like say doctors—but I would say doctor is generally speaking a category not a group, and whenever doctors start acting like a group, they are universally stupider than they were when they were individual doctors. It doesn’t matter what the group is, what its aims are, or how hard it tries not to act like mob—at the end of the day the sum intelligence of the group is always going to be a lot less than the individual parts just because groups rely on shared identity and consensus, two things that frustrate a sharp focus on details. I am no great lover of the individual since people are…well pretty much terrible most of the time—but at individuals can be smart. You can reason with an individual, even if the only thing you can do is appeal directly to his or her self interest. Groups on the other hand, are stupid, you can’t reason with them because they don’t reason, they don’t think, they just act. George Washington in his farewell address warned people against forming political parties, and as you watch the circus that is the US Congress, you can’t help but think he might have had a point. There are smart Democrats, and smart Republicans, in fact to get where they are today I would argue that a majority of them are probably very intelligent—it just doesn’t matter, they’re there as part of a team, and a team wins or loses together. It would be better if these folks could be convinced they were on team American Voter, but as it is, they collaborated to create a health care bill that makes so little sense that I don’t understand it and I’ve been writing speeches about it for two weeks. This is still better than the alternative of passing nothing. But only in the sense that losing your leg in an IED explosion is better than loosing your head.

Which brings me back to Constance McMillen and the very angry group of people she suddenly finds herself dealing with. I don’t really care that the school board is intolerant of homosexuality—I think it is backwards and wrongheaded, but since a prom isn’t the same thing as an English class I don’t think you necessarily do someone’s natural rights harm by not allowing them to pay the couples’ rate. Similarly I’m not sure if barring a girl from wearing a tuxedo is a freedom of expression issue because the event has a formal dress code for everyone to start with. But mostly I just don’t care; I think it’s stupid to fight about because it’s just a vastly over-rated dance.

What I do care about is when good people cross the line from stupid to malicious. While The school district’s press release didn’t specifically blame Connie McMillen for destroying the prom but it got close enough to make clear—“uppity little lesbian sued and rather than face the scrutiny that goes with our policy, we’re just canceling the prom for everyone. How do you like us now?” And well, the people of Itawamba seem to like them just fine, because the team has been given its enemy and it’s the uppity little lesbian not the school board that decided to take the prom hostage.

And as a quick side note—it’s just not Christian. This whole tempest in a whiskey still started because these people really wanted to protect their community’s strong Christian values. I think they were probably sincere about that, Itawamba isn’t LA, apparently it isn’t even Duxbury (where a statistically greater than normal incidence of cross dressing was the one of the more interesting things about the place) and I’m sympathetic to the idea that the school has a problem if it is asked to tacitly support a behavior that the majority of local parents think is immoral. [That is a tough place to be in, and as bad as I think the decision the school board made is, I do see that they probably didn’t have a good or easy way out. I’m sure these people wish to God that Constance had just showed up in a tux and snuck her date in. That said, what they ended up doing isn’t just explicitly not Christian—it’s as close to being the opposite of Christian as you can get without actually flipping a pentagram upside down and worshiping the eternal darkness of Hell. The status of handing a person out to the mob isn’t debatable like status homosexuality, divorce, money or the eternal souls’ of non-believers. I’m pretty sure it’s just not allowed, period. I’m pretty sure that was the point of at least three of the four gospels, nope, I’m actually relatively sure that that might have been the point of all four. I’m just saying, I don’t care if they want to be bad Christians, hell maybe they aren’t, it’s possible that since I was raised Catholic and not snake-handler I understand the cannon a bit differently. But I am pretty sure, just as a matter of logic, you can’t do the literal opposite of what the Book says to do, and say you’re doing it for the Lord. Kind of like worshiping a Golden Calf and saying you’re doing it for Jesus--anyone who’s ever even seen a movie about the Judeo-Christian tradition is just going to believe you missed the point of that story entirely.

But that is a side note, because the point is that it’s not just wrong and it’s not just unchristian, it’s actually dangerous. All groups are stupid, and it only gets worse when the members of the group were dumb to start with. High school students are dumb—even smart high school students are dumb. They throw cans at pep rallies, they put pictures of their boobies on the internet (and are later surprised when they can’t work at the CIA), they take up smoking, they get expelled from school because they dunk their balls in a teacher’s coffee cup on a dare in homeroom. Toss on top of that their insane need for approval, love of conformity, lack of critical thinking skills, absence of conscience, constant state of frustrated sexual arousal and lack of ability to moderate drug and alcohol use—and well, who in their right minds says to themselves, “well you know we should definitely risk turning this group loose on another student, I’m sure nothing horrible could happen that we’ll regret.”

Fittingly enough, there used to be a playground game we played when I was a kid called “Smear the Queer.” The way it worked is that there was one kid with a ball, and that kid was the queer, and the rest of the kids’ goal was to get the ball away from the queer, however they could. They no longer play this game. It’s not allowed on elementary school playgrounds. Part of that is because of the horrible name, but even under the less inflammatory title, “Keep Away,” you can’t play this game because it falls into the same chasm with “Dodgeball,” and “Capture the Flag,” as fun shit that is too dangerous to let kids do unpadded on blacktop. Now mostly I want to think this is stupid and we’re turning today’s youth into a generation of incredibly weak pussies. I played lots of “Smear the Queer,” and never got hurt—like most kids, when I got the ball I ran for as long as I could, and then when it looked like I was gonna get tackled by 5 other kids, I just bounced it away from myself. Almost no one got hurt playing “Smear the Queer”, but the “almost” is the operative concept there—some kids wouldn’t bounce the ball, they would hold on to it until someone ripped it from their clenched fist, and some kids didn’t give a shit that you’d bounced it, if they were into tackling you, they were going to. Everyone once an a while one of those two situations would lead to a real injury—teeth knocked out, arm broken, the occasional concussion—once a year, maybe twice, someone left the playground in an ambulance because of a Nerf ball came gone awry. At some point in the 20 or so years since I was in elementary school, some wise school officials said, “yeah, not worth the risk of someone breaking their neck,” and so keep away games are no more.

It would seem to me that whatever they think about gays, the good people of Itawamba should perhaps look to their peers in education and just ban playing “Smear the Queer,” on both the playground an in policy formation. There are all kinds of ways to alternately prevent this girl from bringing a date to the prom—don’t sell anyone a ticket at a couples’ rate, make it so only Juniors can attend and no one can bring a date that is a sophomore—and they can take their chances in court with that policy. What isn’t right is a group making a decision to cancel an event that that they spent nine months promoting and billing as a seminal bonding event of a high school career and then trying to make that cancellation the fault of an individual. Most likely this girl will endure nothing worse than usual high school cruelty, at worst perhaps some of her property will get vandalized. But that doesn’t mean one can’t imagine a much more toxic result being born out of this atmosphere, the kind of thing that everyone, no matter what else they think, will agree is a lot worse than two girls at the prom together. The fact that nothing very serious will likely happen isn’t really relevant—in the same way that the fact that I drove around for my whole life with out wearing a seat belt and never got hurt will be a very cold comfort to the person who goes through their windshield at 40 miles an hour because they listened to me about how pointless seatbelts are.

Luckily all groups are at the end made up of individuals, and individuals can be smart. So here are the individuals who make up the Itawamba school board. I plan to write them, for though I feel that it will probably do nothing, at least I will feel like I took some kind of shot at making the world a somewhat less dangerously stupid place. I suggest you do the same—because sometimes the best way to convince people is with volume. I apparently have 19 readers, and I feel like 19 additional emails might help. I don’t think people should write nasty screeds to these people, because even though what they did was nasty it was born out of what was probably genuine stress, and besides, the best way to get someone to behave better is rarely to tell them they are a worthless, red-neck fuck-tard. These people probably aren’t, but they are doing something more than a little bit stupid and possibly dangerous, and sometimes the difference between knowing that and not is in being told.

Anyway—
Superintendent Teresa McNeece – tmcneece@itawamba.k12.ms.us
Principal Trae Wiygul – twiygul@itawamba.k12.ms.us
School Board Member Eddie Hood – a082315@allstate.com
School Board Member Jackie Nichols – jnichols@itawamba.k12.ms.us
School Board Member Harold Martin – hmartin@itawamba.k12.ms.us
School Board Member Clara Brown – cbrown@network-one.com
School Board Member Tony Wallace - twallace@nexband.com

(1) Being quarter-Rican I try to overcome my natural inclination because I have checked of Latino/Hispanic on every form I’ve ever received on the off chance I enjoy any benefit for doing so. The fact that I barely speak Spanish and know as much about Puerto Rican culture as your average Yupik Eskimo has never once dissuaded me and so I try to let people claim any racial identity they want, no matter how ridiculous or obviously counter factual it seems

(2) What is a Ramstein and how does it relate to you? Ramstein is a German heavy metal band that most readers would know for the song “Du Haste,” which was their hit American single. “Du Haste,” is either means “You Hate,” or “You Have,” and apparently the song is one long weird German heavy metal pun that you only get if you speak German. Doesn’t matter, the point is that ability to pick up on subtle word play aside, Ramstein’s music is such that it makes you glad you don’t speak German. Don’t get me wrong I cannot recommend the album Sehnsucht highly enough if you’ve having a bad week, it is truly music to invade Poland to. However, don’t look up the English translation of the lyrics, you just don’t want to know. In a similar vein, while I do recommend a Ramstein concert if you want to see things in person that generally you have to go to Thailand to witness, definitely wear knee pads and possibly a helmet, as everyone there has been drinking for hours and all they want to do is beat the hell out of anyone standing within 30 feet of them.

Here I Go Again on My Own -or-- I Sometimes Miss Dillingham, I Always Miss That Hat

2010-03-22T11:17:00.002-08:00

Welcome back to the wonderful world of blogging, now in Technicolor. Well, okay, now pretty much the same as it ever was, though I’m not in Dillingham so I will probably have to write about different things. Some different things anyway. With a library full of old sound files and a pretty good memory for the two strangest years of my adult life, still probably a lot about Dillingham, but also about other places I happen to be. Where am I now? Oh no, I don’t think so, not again. While incapable of learning much, I did manage to figure out that the best way not to get your fur hat stolen is to not have people know where you are hanging it. This way, when they get mad at you, they can’t find you to do shit to you.

And on a quick side note—the person who stole my hat—I know who you are. I don’t think I lost it, I never thought I lost it, and I would have made a bigger deal of it at the time if you and your gang of goons weren’t semi-constantly threatening to beat me up. I may be a coward, but at least I’m not a thief, and while getting me thrown out of a bar is fair play, stealing my god damn hat is a whole other thing and you owe me $250. Others may be wondering,” if they wanted to reimburse you for the hat you think they stole and burned in effigy, how would they do so since you won’t say where you are?” Thing is, the type of person who can man up, admit they did the wrong and pay you back, is almost universally not the type of person who passive aggressively slimes into your house in the middle of the night and steals from you. Thusly, I’m pretty sure I could send them my address and a pre-paid USPS box in the mail, and the best I would get back is nothing, and the worst I would get back is some species of poop in a box. I really only mention it now so that someday when I return to take exactly $250 dollars worth of revenge on the hat thief, they won’t wonder why. It’s sort of like the movie Payback (1) , anything else that happened I probably deserved, but stealing my hat is just wrong. I used to complain that living in Dillingham towards the end was like being trapped at a particularly vituperative high school; every time I think I about my hat, I revise my complaint. Dillingham was in fact just the world’s meanest kindergarten.

Then again, my kindergarten in New Jersey was actually also pretty mean because life is not kind when you can’t learn to use scissors on the generally accepted curve. To this day I can’t cut out a star—a huge challenge during my years as a youth minister. Luckily back then I had slaves—err, youth groupers to do that kind of work for me. The point is, despite not being very good at kindergarten, I still liked it a lot and remember it fondly, both in its literal and Dillingham incarnations. I am not special, unless you were sold to a brothel or lit on fire during those years of your life, everyone liked kindergarten. The fact of reality is that being six is awesome. Maybe you ate glue and wet your pants, maybe you tried to kiss all the other kids in your class, maybe you just barked like a dog sometimes, and yes, maybe you were sent to the child study team for evaluation over these behaviors, but that was pretty much the worst consequence. Not only were you not judged, people were instructed not to judge you. Kindergarten meant everyday included a story, a cookie, a nap, and playing with glitter, and these are all wonderful things that have almost totally evaporated out of your life by the time you’re ten. Unless you’ve gone and moved to Dillingham, which has maintained much of charm of kindergarten, though admittedly viewing it that way it does require some fairly radical revision of terms “cookie,” “nap,” and “glitter.” While this is great thing about the place, it comes with an attendant harm—when the other children get mad at you, they are prone to shoving and taking your stuff.

I’m just saying. I liked that hat a lot.

But that is not the point of this first post back. The first post is mostly to note that I’m back, (Hi!) and am now writing from an undisclosed location. Readers, the six of you, should look for new posts starting tomorrow and all Tuesday’s heretofore. If you find you are still craving more inanity later in the week, you could also look for new posts on Thursdays. The particularly dedicated with a lot of time on their hands should also check out Sundays at some point in the near future because there will be podcasts to listen to as well. When exactly that golden glorious day is coming is a function of my understanding the technology behind creating a podcast. I’m told an average seventh grader should be able to figure out in about an hour. I’m on day four of trying, many things have gone wrong. I’m hoping it works for me this Sunday, but really, that is based on the assumption that my laptop doesn’t just explode in my hands out of disgust. If you are reading this and you know how to make it easy enough that a drunken monkey could do it, please email me, friend me on Facebook, call me, I don’t care, just help me.

As always, comments are welcome of any stripe and I do take requests for topics to write about It seems that spammers have gotten interested in this sight somehow, and I am not sure how to screen them out. From here on I will try my best to delete the bad postings, we’ll see how that goes. Also, as always, click links because it’s all about the Benjamins baby, and I’m pretty sure I get like .30 cents anytime someone looks at a link.

Anyway, more tomorrow on how the world needs more good guys and fewer heroes. Until then, I don’t know, do whatever else you were going to do and then check back tomorrow morning.

Cheers!

(1)1991 Mel Gibson Classic about suicidal one man war with organized crime to recapture 70,000 dollars Porter, the protagonist, is gunned down by his wife and best friend after a heist, but he doesn’t die as planned. He then returns seeking, payback fittingly enough, but not for the murder attempt. That he seems cools with, what he ends up leaving a multiple dozen body count behind over is the money he’s owed—which is a running joke through out the movie.

Beware the Evil Outsiders -Or- There’s a Dead Puerto Rican in My Trunk

2009-08-05T10:07:00.005-08:00

I have a favorite hater, I truly love Chilly Hellion. I think I want to get married and have like a million of their babies. Don’t get me wrong, most of what they say is demonstrates a total lack of understanding of the concept of sarcasm, but such a dogged determination demonstrates a sort of wholly felt sincerity of purpose. They haven’t written the best post, that one still goes to whomever it was that offered to have sex with their brother or brothers, it was lexically ambiguous, if I would leave this town faster. That seems…extreme, but I think the world needs more people willing to go the extra mile and sign their name to suggested drunken incest. But Chilly Hellion is my favorite, from their clever nom de plum (nom de guerre), to their strangely reasoned postings they just tickle me and leave me hoping there will always be a place in the world for such deeply felt, if slightly confused, earnestness.

Or at least there will always be a home for such contributions to this blog, as whomever they are has posted a couple of times on the Quam Flucuts Diversi post. I will not speculate as to why the posted it on the last post when there was a perfectly good new post to speculate upon, perhaps they even agree with me about Pebble. That might be going to far. At any rate, I have been thinking about some of the things they said which leads me to today’s wanderings through the minefield of my own mind. (Cue Pixies music).

I just want to note, I didn’t make the first Sara Palin joke.

“Come to think of it, she's a source of pity and disappointment in her own community, and a source of endless entertainment to the rest of the world... Eileen, you have become Sarah Palin. Congratulations.”

Really? In two words, fucking awesome!!! When do I get paid and when does the Republican Party buy me a new wardrobe? Seriously dude, Sarah Palin was the governor of Alaska, had a chance to be second-in-line for the nuclear codes and is now being paid a cool 11 million dollars to write a book—and I’m pretty sure she can’t read!(1) I am capable of respecting someone separate from whether I agree with them or even like them, and I sure as shit respect the brand of crazy she has for sale. I wouldn’t vote for her because, well the reasons would take too long to go through, various things about natural suspicions about people who believe in speaking in tongues, opposition to parental consent laws for abortion and a just general unease about anyone who uses the phrase “you betcha,” but if she ever wants to drive cross country, I’m way in. If for no other reason, living in Alaska has locked me into a long pitched battle with my hair and fingernails that I am frankly loosing. I look terrible, but Sara Palin looks fantastic after she’s been set-net fishing…

Out of town readers don’t know what that means, what is set netting? There are two ways to commercial fish for salmon in Bristol Bay, drift-netting and set-netting. Drift-netting is done with what looks like a traditional fishing boat with which the fisherfolks sail out to the fishing area, a throw a net overboard. Set-netting is done with a skiff from a spot on land. There is a whole lot more to it than that but anyone here already knows it and anyone outside doesn’t give a fuck. I’m told drift-netting costs way more and is much more lucrative, (more or less) and told set-netting is easier but is much more hit or miss. However it is hard to know what to believe about drift vs set netting because drift-netters and set-netters hate each other. Hate could be too strong a word, they may merely scorn each other or have friendly rivalries over the idea that set-netting is considered a sub-par form of fishing which by its very nature “makes them some kind of parasite on the commercial fishery.” (2) (I’m told it is the traditional method for women, children and old people to fish). That is what the drift-netters will tell you, in response the set-netters will complain that the richer and much more out of state based drift-netters are just complete and utter fucking dicks to them all season every season for no other reason than they can be. Are the set-netters parasites and drift-netters dicks? I have absolutely no idea, to know that one would have to understand of the bizarro universe politics that govern the commercial fishery in Bristol Bay and that sort of knowledge is reserved for those who have a multi-generational relationship to the fishery or who are God on high Himself. Neither currently applies to me, and I have a better chance of achieving the latter than the former.

Either way, these people seem to live together in relative peace and harmony, those who are locals anyway—there are A LOT of out of state/out of area guys who fish round here—until there is a board of fish meeting and they all start playing a high stakes game of “screw your neighbor.” To understand what happens at the BoF close your eyes and imagine three hundred aristocratic jack-rabbits being given the option of acting for the common good or committing ritual suicide by pursuing their own self-interest. Now imagine them deciding their only group decision will be seppuku. Hell of a thing, this year might be different, more on that in December.

Point is, however easy set-netting might be relative to other types of local fishing, it’s fucking hard next to almost anything else one might find themselves employed doing, and no one looks good after they’ve been seriously at it for more than an hour. This means Sara Palin had not really been fishing when CNN showed up on Kanakanak (best palindrome ever) beach, or she has powers of personal aesthetic maintenance that can only be described as preternatural. Thing is, I think she was actually fishing, which means she has powers, a lame one perhaps, but I’ll take a lame super-power over my total lack of them..

Anyway, where was I. Oh right, Chilly Hellion, sorry wandered off there for a minute.

“I will gladly cease and desist when the mockery ceases. Think about it: nothing to complain about; no more complaints. that's just the way it goes. my leaving does not equal the end of these attacks against the Character of Dillingham, but the end of the attacks does equal my leaving…are you among the attackers or the attacked? then I suggest you devote your time elsewhere, and not get involved in squabbles which have nothing to do with yourself, despite some strange form of entertainment value…”

Those quotes are taken out of a post to the “Quam Fluctus Diversi…” entry, and are listed in reverse order. For the whole context, it is in the last couple of comments to that post, and please, always read everything for context. Before thinking about substance, I just want to say that I’m loving the e.e. cummings capitalization. However, you should probably stop your Microsoft Word from auto correcting the capitol “i’s” and remember to do it at the beginning of every sentence or you just look like you’re as good a typist as I am. Also, I’ve recently learned that a semi-colon separates two independent clauses. I am not totally sure what that means because when I was in the second grade my elementary school decided to abandon grammar education in favor of the whole language approach, which pretty much involved reading lots of books and picking up the rules as you went along. I learned a lot of words, and though I’m not too sure about punctuation, I think you need a coma not a semi-colon between “complain about,” and “no more complaints.” I could be wrong, I can think of how “no more complaints,” could be a complete sentence if it were a command, but I don’t think it works as a declarative. At any rate your substance is interesting.

You seem to think that I want you to go away, but as the above mockery proves, nothing could be further from the truth. As the Joker said to Batman, I don’t want to kill you, you complete me. I don’t think you get blog but that’s okay with me, I’m not entirely sure that there is very much here to get. Mostly, just me being weird. But you interest me because you persist in illustrating a point I keep trying to make—you have a lot to say, you are clearly smart and you’ve turned all that energy into…bashing a blogger who’s leaving soon? Okay, well interesting, but we seem to agree there are bigger problem than me and I know you aren’t as successfully screaming at our drunk, fighting, sexual predator, wife/husband/kid beating population because well I don’t hear a lot of harangues so public to those people in town.

I had a 14 year old kid come to my door two months hysterically crying because she was drunk, one of her friends ditched her, and her other friend was wandering up and down the street screaming. It was about 4 am and I had never met this girl before, she picked my door at random. So I’m there in my sports bra and boxer shorts trying to remember my name as this girl is blubbering her story, and then she threw up on me. Luckily she had apparently consumed little but clear liquor that evening, so it was not as gross as it could have been. I gave her a ginger-ale and found some pants and t-shirt. We tried to get her friend, who told me to go fuck my-self before farting in my general direction and walking off. Luckily, she was loud enough to be in ear-shot for a fairly long range, so I was able to keep track of her. I asked this girl if I should call her parents, she was quite adamant that I could not, to the point she would not tell me her name. She then told me that her brother was going to be so mad at her but when I asked I could call him instead, she said no, he’s in jail in Anchorage. Why is he there? Rape, but he totally didn’t do it, “she just doesn’t remember saying yes because she was drunk.” Finally she asked if I would call the police, which seemed like an odd choice for a drunk 14 year old who could get away with this if I didn’t call the police, but okay. Took the one police officer on duty about an hour to get there because I believe she was either breaking up a fight or a DV in progress. My new little friend greeted the officer by name, as the cop who showed up that night was the same cop who had arrested her for the last minor consuming. At some point the kid’s mother drives by, it’s now 5:30 and she’s noticed her kid is out so she is looking for her. She is overjoyed to see the police, and clearly thrilled beyond all reckoning as the person who called them.

I’m not mocking anyone and if you want something to scream about or at, I got a list of names for you and my phone number is in the book. I don’t you to go away, I want you to be so mad at me that you do something so I have fewer stories to tell.

Second point will be the subject for the rest of this dispatch from the third circle.(3) I am curious as to why you would attempt to invite anyone who is not personally involved in the story of Dillingham out of the conversation. I asumme the logic is something like if this blog is about us, it can only be for us and all others who might merely be interested or entertained by it have nothing to contribute. I would question if Chilly Hellion feels quite so strongly about the out of area posters who seem to agree with him or her, but I am going to assume they do, and that “outsiders need not apply,” is a sentiment that is applied to all outsiders to this conversation, and not merely the ones that don’t agree with him/her.

I come from a long line of alcoholics of varying levels of functionality and attending creepiness. This is the Irish side of the family, and God-bless us if were aren’t a group of living, breathing, can’t express any sort of emotion without a heroic amount of alcohol, walking, talking stereotypes. Do we have gays in my family? Yes. Will anyone ever ask about it unless half-dead with drunkenness? No. Did somebody in the immediate circle of cousins get knocked up by their brother a generation back? Yes. Was there enough alcohol in New York City metro-area to pry that out of anyone for 30 years? No. Did it come up at my grandmother’s funeral? Yes. Can the Irish talk about these kinds of things unless they are ripped out of their mind and there is the body of a dead loved one in the room? No.

Sometimes this had lead to outstandingly awesome consequences, like my one of my uncle’s bachelor party ending with a cop being told by another one of my uncles (not the one who was getting married) that he had a dead Puerto Rican in the trunk of his cab. Did he actually? No, of course not. Who in their right mind would tell a cop that? I have no idea. I think at the time he was trying to beat a rap for a noise complaint that was emanating from this party. By all accounts this was one of the more deserved noise complaints in the history of air being compressed to make sounds, though in the interest of full disclosure, I’ve never gotten the full story because my parents, party animals that they were even then, left before chaos broke out to sleep at my other grandmother’s for the night.

And mom, if you’re reading this, and dad, if you can read this from beyond the grave, let me just once again thank you for leaving me upstairs asleep in a crib while the rest of the family was apparently re-enacting Caligula downstairs. While I’m sure there are few in Dillingham are grateful for this, I do remain thankful that I was not a casualty of fun.

The highlights I’ve heard about involve my father’s eldest brother holding a butcher knife above his head, shouting “Samurai!!!” and running across the room at top speed to cut the cake, a hooker who may or may not have been there, and my aunt beating the shit out of my groom-to-be uncle while simultaneously trying to take his contacts out. The next morning, my grandmother sat calmly at the kitchen table, smoked her unfiltered Paull Mall’s and said “The wedding is off.” Always the mark of a truly successful bachelor party.

My poor future aunt comes from civilized more civilized Eastern European stock, people who believe in matching China patterns, floral upholstery and sending out “Thank-you” cards with a sort of seriousness of purpose people generally reserve for religious observance and political activism. Whether she married into the Goode family because of our appreciation for celebratory anarchy or despite it remains one of the great questions of our time, but despite the pre-wedding theatrics, she did in fact push through and marry in, making her either a saint or a lunatic. I’ll leave her kids to decide that.

The repressed Irish thing can be a lot of fun at a party, and certainly keeps our funerals more lively that most people’s weddings (4), but has as a negative side effect creating a certain impossibility in dealing with serious problems in the calm cool light of sober day. My favorite relative is a crack-head, or I should say more fairly he’s a recovering crack-head. Crack-head is descriptive but it’s also a little limiting, what might be more fair to say is that while he had a long love affair with crack, he was enough of substance abuse polyarmorist that it all pretty worked for him. And it made him a very bad, very dangerous man for a very long time. And that long time, other than being in the navy or jail, was spent living in his mother’s house. When he was in high school he OD’d, a thing that would have landed me in rehab for the rest of my primary education, but because his mother was an alcoholic in a family full of alcoholics and addicts of various stripes, dealing with her son the addict would have meant dealing with a world of shit that was no one wanted to really take a long look at. And so my favorite relative committed a lot of unspeakably awful crimes until one day he couldn’t live with himself any more and put a gun to his head. Luckily about a millisecond before the trigger got pulled his mom walked into the room, and though pretty far gone at the time, he was not prepared to blow his brains out in front of his own mother. So he fled the house.

Some time later that day a neighbor happened by him sitting on a stoop and after talking for a couple of hours, my relative went to his first AA meeting. He has not touched a drop of alcohol or pursued a high since in 25 years. That is no small feat in my family, because we didn’t stop drinking because he did, and he didn’t absent himself from family gatherings and instead took on the fantastically fun roll of designated driver. He also brews the best coffee in the family, which comes as a surprise to no one. At my grandmother’s funeral, and his own wife’s funeral a few years later, there was a crowd of people that no one in my family knew, a cast of characters that bring new meaning to the word colorful—something about having more tattoos than teeth always strikes me a noteworthy. This was his other family, the AA and NA family, the dozens, maybe tens of dozens of people whose life had been saved because my relative was to them who the neighbor on the porch had been to him, the outside guy who helped them say “no more,” and walked with them through the first steps back to human life.

How does this relate? Two ways I think. Unsurprisingly perhaps I’ve spent some time lately thinking about what an outsider is, and who is one, particularly here. I got an interesting phone call last week from a woman who said that up until all this happened, she felt like Dillingham was her home, despite the fact that she has only been here a couple of years. Then one day two weeks ago, her definitely out of town accent suddenly sounded far more foreign to her, and she found herself asking questions it had heretofore not occurred to her to ask. “What if I say the wrong thing, will I be next? Does it matter that I’m seeing someone in one of the “right” families? When will I have lived here long enough to say out loud and in public I don’t like some things? Is the answer never, am I always going to be the great white outsider?” Some of the answers there are a pretty simple no, because as much as in trouble for what I said, I am in at least as much trouble for the truly stupid way in which I chose to say it. Snide, snarky, east coast humor doesn’t work for everyone, and the consequence of telling jokes is rightly getting in trouble when the jokes aren’t funny.

However, some of the answers there are yes, because there is a strong current that runs through Dillingham, and many bush communities I’m told, that likes the blame the evil outsiders and the havoc they reek where ever they go. But then outsider is a funny term, because there are other names that could be applied to these people as well, names like doctor, dentist, teacher, chamber of commerce supervisor, bar tender, police officer, state trooper, news director, district attorney, public defender, magistrate, women’s shelter worker, commercial fishermen, city manager, public works director, landfill superintendent, social worker—the list could go on and on, and if I forgot your profession I’m sorry (or you’re welcome depending on how you feel about this) but all of these people and their skills came from the outside, and the question does stand when have they been here long enough so that they are more than the service they provide to the community and are instead and equal part of the community? Is it five years, ten years, twenty years—is it when you buy property, is it when you send your kids to the schools, is it when you marry into a family that is undeniably “inside?” When have you seen enough and when do you know enough that it’s okay to say somethings aren’t okay?

It isn’t that everything is terrible, or has to be, but there’s something about knowing more than one person whose life was slightly detoured by being married to/tied to with kids a violent sociopath that they picked-up when they were eighteen that officially makes you mad at anyone you know who didn’t finish college because they just sort of didn’t feel like it. Something has gone wrong in the distribution of opportunity in America when one of the few people I know who likes to read as much as I do and has probably read more books than I have, is slugging her way through an associate’s degree three credits at a time while 1/8 of my college friends took a leisurely 5-7 year tour through higher education while supporting themselves part time in retail jobs or food service. These people may or may not have student debt now, which sucks, but I’ve now known people who would kill to have their biggest problem with educating themselves be future student debt.

Dillingham is a very nice place to live, I lost my keys all weekend which meant I did a lot of wandering around on foot. I find something fundamentally disagreeable about walking to buy cigarettes, I feel as though I will be disenrolled from the international smokers society.(5) But addiction is addiction and I had need of nicotine, so I walked a mile to town to get my fix and after having bought my smokes I sat on the grassy knoll outside the store to fully participate in a dark mood about my lost keys and a short walk up a very slight hill back to my partially destroyed apartment. While I was pondering rending my garments in an extraordinarily petty moment of martyrdom, a car pulled over and offered me a ride. It was the guy who pushed me a week earlier who with his wife noticed my lack of overall enthusiasm for walking home. I hopped in the back and they gave me a banana. I don’t think I can possibly highlight enough how much I needed the banana and how much I appreciated eating it. I don’t think I had eaten much in the way of food with nutritional value in the preceding week, and that the amount of tar in my lungs may now be sufficient to pave Dillingham’s downtown roads. I’m certain that I had not eaten a vegetable or a fruit in recent memory at the time I was handed that banana and clearly potassium was my long lost and ignored friend.

“You got in the car with someone who pushed you into a ditch the week earlier?” Yup, without much of a concern, crimes here is prevalent but it is of opportunity, necessity or drunken idiocy, you don’t get a lot of “get into my car little girl, I want to give you a banana and then bury you in the woods.” That’s not how we roll and there is something fundamentally excellent about the being given the banana of peace that makes Dillingham unique among most of the places I’ve every lived. A person who has been here longer has more of the ability to see that, and also more of an investment in that being what people see when they look at this place.

The good is there, the good is real, and the good is worth seeing, and the benefit of being an insider is that you have a persistent vision of what is there worth preserving at all. My favorite relative isn’t two different people, a dangerous addict and a person who helped people save themselves from dangerous addiction, he’s both people and also all the people who existed on the journey from one guy to the other. The more of that you stick to see, the more you know the person, which in the case of my favorite relative I can only assert is a very good thing. Being both people is in some sense more impressive than just the very good person who emerges at the end because all of that other stuff somewhere in the middle is important.

The good is there, it’s just not all there is to see. Plato’s Republic is basically an argument for the idea that what makes a person good is also what makes a society good. There was a bunch of other stuff in there too, but I don’t remember much of it, as I did spend much of college half asleep—in retrospect wearing pajamas out in public just makes one too ready to take a nap at any given time. Still, Dillingham makes me think of Plato’s republic from time to time, because I think the city is probably a lot like the person in transition between being one thing and another, caught somewhere between the good thing, the loyal community that protects its own, and the bad thing, the insular community that would rather protect predators than call them out in public. Nothing stays in transition for long and change happens when no one is looking, but how that change shakes out and what it will mean for the future, well that is an interesting question the answer to which will probably have a lot of information appropriate to other pockets of small, poor, rural life.

Which is all a very long way of saying that no one looking into this should feel all that better about themselves or where they live, because I seriously doubt the last person who pushed you into a ditch gave you a ride home and a banana. I seriously doubt you’ve ever had to contemplate hunting your own food or otherwise gather it out of nature for fear of starving over the long dark winter. Ever seen an open sewage lagoon? I thought not and no one gets to look down on someone else because they were luckier in their opportunities. High handedness is the reason that everyone hates an opinionated outsider.

But then again, to those who are looking out, lighten up a little bit, I didn’t write the joke about the Alaskan girl and her grandfather and if I’m the first person you ever heard it from, well I guess there’s a bridge in Brooklyn I’m looking to buy. More to the point, take seriously the idea that if something looks really bad to an outsider, well, there might be something to be said for doing something about it instead of just angrily telling people to shut the fuck up. 65 five rapes in five years means you gotta try harder.

And that’s all there is to say for now, more later…

(1) Okay there is my token Palin joke, consider the shark jumped. Here’s the thing though, in continuance of defending the disliked in footnotes, I should probably note that it was be smart to stop thinking of her as a dithering idiot which she evidently is not. I tend to think of her as George W. Bush with better legs (which really is a compliment considering all the time that guy spent on a bike), she seems just dumb enough as of strategy (strategery) so no one in their right mind thinks of her as a threat. I mean how much could a former beauty queen whose husband’s official sobriquet is “First Dude,” really do to fuck with the establishment, right? My only answer is ask former Alaska Governor Frank Murkowski whose ass she kicked all the way around the maypole in a primary election when he was the sitting governor, or Tony Knowles, the Democrat who ran against her who had the benefit of having been the governor of Alaska before who lived through a similar wooping. She’s not a joke, she is the perfect embodiment of the Greek concept of matis—or cunning intelligence. I doubt she’s read much in the way of, well anything, but she’s not really stupid either. Lowering expectations gives her an natural advantage when she goes to pull the still beating heart right out of her enemy’s chest. I’m just saying, the difference between Sarah Palin and your pet pit bull isn’t lip stick, it’s that she still has her balls, and they are made of fucking brass, and the stupid person is the one who turns their back on her.

(2) Actually said to be by a drift-net fisherman, though granted a very, very drunk one whose girl-friend was at the time making out with a set-netter, so it is hard to say where the personal ended there and the professional began.

(3) And no, this isn’t another way to call Dillingham hell, it’s an allusion to the Onion for everyone I went to college with. The Onion, is, incidentally awesome if you aren’t catching this reference, and you should check it out at www.theonion.com. Granted it used to be funnier.

(4)What’s the difference between and Irish wake and an Irish wedding? One less drunk to find a ride home for at the end of the night

(5)“Convincing You Kids That Tobacco Is Cool Since 1776.”

Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangster Or Well May As Well Use this Opportunity to Talk About Pebble

2009-07-31T09:36:00.005-08:00

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Wow, and the hits just keep on coming. No seriously, shoved again in a parking lot yesterday, though I’m getting better at it as this time I did not do any sort of face plant. I’m moving the goal post and counting it as a victory. Also, does anyone else hear banjos?

And good morning angry mob, I trust you slept well, but some of the posts come in at odd hours feeling bad about your lost rest that I thought I would write you all a quick note before getting to the substance of today’s rambling. First of all, congratulations apparently you are branching out with members in Duxbury Massachusetts, which sort of makes sense, Duxbury is rich but it is also pretty drunk. At some point I think I will exert some energy into blogging about Duxbury and all the “perfect” children, the persistently persecuted school officials, the snobbery and why having too much money and not enough sense is not as bad as having no money and lots of sense but still isn’t good for the collective intellect. I mean if someone is going to ream me a new one or some such when I get back, I feel I may as well give them at least as good a reason as the folks around here have. Only fair.

Second thing I thought I would note is something my mother always used to say “good attention, bad attention, it’s all attention,” in reference to all the commentors who are all about noting that I like attention. Really, what was your first clue? I mean seriously, honestly your talents are wasted reading and analyzing this blog, clearly the CIA needs someone of your keen deductive reasoning skills in the fight against international terrorism. If you can figure out that a writer wants someone to read what they write, well shit, Afganistan is only plane trip a away and the world will thank you for finding Osama, plus I really think you might like their take on free speech. How refreshing and enjoyable would that be? Here the best you can do is insult me on my blog and engage in some playground fighting antics, there you can actually stone people. I’m just saying.

On a related note, I should probably let people in on something that I forgot to mention, no one actually has to read this. I know that it is confusing because it’s out there on the internet and I used to think I had to read everything on in the internet that I didn’t like too, but actually that law never passed Congress; I think some kind of rider requiring that for every gay couple that got married a straight one was going to have to get divorced killed it, but I’m not sure. Point is, if you don’t like my blog or me, or me and my blog, you could try not reading it. I don’t care myself, I like the readership—it’s all attention and I am nothing if not crashing narcissist, but I’m really get worried someone is going stroke out over this and as it turns out, there are plenty of blogs about kittens and stuff that you might find less upsetting. I’m told the best way to get rid of an idiot is to ignore them not argue with them further it only encourages them to keep talking. So I’m an idiot why would you encourage me.

Also, and this comes from Scott and it’s a pretty good idea, if you really want me out of Alaska that badly anyone is more than welcome to buy me a ticket out of here. I mean the whole “get out now” thing is a nice sentiment and all but do you have any idea how hard it is to relocate to anywhere else from Dillingham Alaska. Well, I guess not since many of you seem to have come here and forgotten the existence of an outside world, but whatever, the point is it’s mother fucking expensive, starting with the 250 dollar ticket I gotta buy to get out of here. I’m just saying some of you are clearly frustrated writers yourselves, and what better opportunity to demonstrate your classiness than to come up with a suitably insulting fund name for me at Wells Fargo(1) ? Hell, I can get out even faster if you want to buy all the stuff in my apartment for the bargain rate of four thousand bucks—just think of all the fun you could have starting some kind of bonfire—you could burn me in effigy. It’d be great, you could roast marshmallows, sing campfire songs, print up copies of this blog and symbolically cleanse the community of it by fire. It doesn’t have to be Dillingham, you could do this Duxbury or Beloxi, everyone likes a bonfire. The possibilities are limitless.

One more thing, you can call me any name you want, fugly manhater, evil outsider, pedestal perching know-it-all, foul mouthed troglodyte, bad journalist—I could go on but I wouldn’t want to wreck anyone’s fun in coming up with new way to be insulting. Point is pretty much whatever works for, but do not, Do Not, DO NOT accuse me of being a Republican! There are some things just too insulting to say to another human being, I mean really, have you no decency?

Okay so I think the mob probably has enough to work with there for a while. If they’re smart, which some of their posts indicate that they are, they will probably just have stopped reading about a paragraph or three ago. If they aren’t, well I assume I’ll have another 30 or so insults of varying lucidity and cleverness to read tomorrow. Either way, I thought I would talk about something a bit more serious, the Pebble Mine.

Some people are saying, “oh good here she goes advocating for Pebble, I knew this day was coming so I’m going to stop reading now and start posting a comment about how you love John Shively long time.” Some people are saying “oh God another God damn resource development blog, I am here for cursing, insensitivity, faced racism and homophobia— what the fuck is this noise?” And some people, my 12 original readers and various out of towners are saying “why would you mine for pebbles? That doesn’t make any sense. Who’s John Shively?(2) What the hell is going on here?” So there are various intelligent and well balanced accounts of this that will take into account the whole history, I am going to give the quick recap. For better information google “Pebble Mine,” you will learn about a whole bunch of stuff.

Basiscally, in Illiamna Alaska there is a giant pile of copper, a moderate pile of gold and some never discussed amount of molybdenum(3) sitting in the ground. It isn’t very pure, this isn’t like a big old vein of ore, this is like taking a handful of copper colored glitter and dropping it into a gallon of dirt and shaking it up. Except that instead of a handful into a gallon it is about 68 billion pounds of copper and 76.3 million ounces (about 5 million pounds) of gold in a patch of dirt that is couple dozen miles across and a few thousand feet down. In short it’s a lot, it’s spread out and that is problem because for at least half the development it would like require tearing a great big giant hole in the ground that would be exposed to the elements. This is a problem because the stuff in the ground when mixed with rain water turns into sulfuric acid which is probably just not a good thing to get into the water supply, though I am not scientist I can not be sure, I kind of feel this is just obvious. Second thing is the we have a lot of salmon here.

No, I mean a lot, an uncomfortable amount of salmon. If you are not from here, and one day you were swimming in a river and looked up to see thousands of bright red, green headed, sex crazed fish wanting only one thing in this world—to spawn and die, you would be very afraid because you would be sure you had stumbled into a bad, bad horror movie where fish were somehow the bad guy. My mother was scared upon her vision of a sockeye salmon in full rut, she jumped into my arms and said “What the fuck is that,” and I said “that mom is a sock-eye salmon that is about to blow his load and die.”(4) She replied, “It looks, well, you know sort of evil?” She was right they sort of do but they also look sort of festive all bright and red. And they are delicious, if all you’ve ever eaten is Atlantic salmon, you’ve made a terrible mistake. Don’t eat that swill anymore, it is a bad idea

Anyway, there is a huge and menacing amount of sockeye salmon in Bristol Bay, 25-50 million of these things a year swim up the five river systems that make up the area. If you took all the fish that that Bristol Bay fishermen were allowed to take by law and subtracted out all the fish they were allowed to catch but didn’t over the last 5 years you would have the second largest sockeye salmon fishery in the state of Alaska, and there are a lot of fucking fisheries here. If you live near any body of water, you can pretty much wait and salmon will eventually swim by. If you are from the suburbs of New Jersey there is something about an ecosystem this productive that just seems, unwholesome.

Unsurprisingly salmon is the main local industry. There are pretty much three industries in Bristol Bay 1) Salmon (in some capacity or other) 2) Social Services (women’s shelters, teachers, fire fighters(5), cops, social workers, courts, clergy, doctors, city /state/ federal employees etc.(6) ) and 3) Goods and Services (retail stores, car rental guy, gas stations, property rental companies, lodges/B&B’s, restaurants, etc.). That order is important, Salmon first, social service second, good and services third. Note: Dillingham is a hub community which gives it more balance and a lot more ability to provide in the third category which is nearly non-existent in some villages. More than industry, salmon is a main component of the subsistence lifestyle, which is a massively convoluted topic to get into in a later post so the quick and dirty is that salmon is what people eat year round, fish you catch is relied on as a local food supply the way most people rely on a grocery store.

As it turns out, copper is salmon’s natural enemy. Throws off salmon radar that allows them to find there way back to the home river, kills the shit out of them and messes up their eggs’ development. The location where Pebble would be sitting is directly in the headwaters of the two most productive rivers of the five river system that makes up the Bristol Bay salmon fishery. In the immortal words of Hunter S Thompson, “God Damn, what a bummer.”

This is a very big issue and there are lot of science related questions here that I just don’t know the answer to because I am not a scientist. Not only am I not a scientist, I know less about science than your average born and bred cult member (7) , and have real limitations when it comes to understanding scientific things. PV=NRT, I know that and if it isn’t related to it, which the pebble development certain isn’t, it’s probably not going to work out. While normally I wouldn’t let this limit me, I would just make something up or curse a lot to disguise my lack of knowledge, I don’t even know enough about the science to do that.

So I’ll work on that. This is not the first time Pebble will come up on this blog, there is a lot to talk about because it is a very big, very complicated issue playing out in a remote corner of the world that most people spare themselves the knowledge of. But what the fuck, I seem to have some out of staters reading this at the moment, so now you know. My point for this post is to justify why there will be so many others in the future, which is that it is a very big, very complicated issue playing out in a remote corner of the world that most people spare themselves the knowledge of. But the argument isn’t being carried out in a very complicated way and most of what I’ve heard is “save our pristine environment and the culture it supports” vs “this sucks, we need year round jobs.”

Oh yeah, that’s the other thing about Bristol Bay’s salmon, all the ones that we sell pretty much hit over the course of 4 weeks and so if fishing is your only and main occupation you work about three months out of the year. However fishing is generally speaking not a way to make a year’s worth of income, there was a time it was, but generally now you probably need another job. There are some high-liners who make bank in the fishery and earn about a corporate attorney’s salary out of Bristol Bay every summer, but there aren’t a lot of those guys, and not all of those guys are local, some are out of staters. The fishery has also been less economically sustaining for about 20 years, though there are up and down fluctuations in price. Generally speaking, the closer you are to the fishing grounds the more it sustains you financially, and also generally speaking, a community’s level of opposition or support for the project is generally correlated to how close they live to the mine or the fishery.

So the problem is the two sides don’t really directly address each other—one might want a preserved culture in a pristine environment and also have a year round job. One might think an interesting conversation might be about that. Nope. Instead they just talk around and past each other, often meanly. Very meanly. Well no, one side is mean, the other side is dismissive.

A couple of months ago the Chairman of Anglo (which is the parent company of Pebble and a giant mega mining company) and a bunch of Pebble folks came to Dillingham to have a meeting with the people. That meeting was initially closed to invite only but it was opened up to the entire public. Considering the greeting they got here, that was actually a hell of a nice thing, except it wasn’t of course because companies don’t do things to be nice or mean they do them to be effective. Back to that later.

So there is a protest lined up to greet this guy, about 30 people with signs saying “save our fish” “no pebble” and I think one or two personally addressed to Mark Moody Stuart. None off that I found objectionable, all normal protest stuff. The thing that is objectionable is the “Stop Cultural Genocide,” signs, mostly because I think that demonstrates the sort of hyperbolic with out thinking thing that I am in so much trouble for doing here. My opinion for what it is worth is that you can kill a culture, you can maybe even murder one. What you can’t do is round a culture up, put it on a train, put it in a camp, starve it, gas it, and burn it up in an oven. You can’t send a culture to a gulag, torture it, starve it and drop it in heretofore unfound mass grave. You can’t hunt a culture in bands of thugs with machetes, rape it, beat it, murder it’s children, and leave it in piles on the side of the road because sometimes digging a mass grave is too much trouble. These are things that happen to human beings not abstract heuristics like culture, and throwing the word around too much divorces genocide from those horrors. That I think is dangerous because genocide is not abstract, it is blood soaked hell on earth and I think it is best it remain that way. Your Mileage May Vary. I would suggest in it’s place you hold up signs at future protests that say “Stop Economic Serfdom,” which works better to express the idea.

But really, limit the future protests and consider talking instead of shouting. The don’t care, they don’t even listen it’s something to stand around and do so they can say they listened but pretty much they’re just waiting for it to stop snowing so they can get the hell out of here. They know they aren’t welcome, and it will keep them out of here, but it won’t keep them from building a mine because it’s a lot of a copper and a lot of gold and a lot of money. It’s so much money it makes economic sense to mine it in a region where they will essentially have to build all the infrastructure and buy a lot of goodwill. That should scare the shit out of anyone who wants to stop pebble because that means it is an unfathomably large amount of fucking money. Mining company has no feelings and has no principle other than making money, it is the alpha and the omega of its existence. They will adopt principles insofar as it moves the mine plan forward—i.e. they are not inherently concerned about salmon or native culture, if caring about that at all will allow them to develop those claims, they will care deeply and with the full force of their focus.

And the power of that focus is something that no one should be underestimating, because they’re job is to make money, they already have a lot of it to invest. Much more than anyone opposing the mine has, much more then anyone opposing the mine can hope to raise. With that money they can do a lot chief among those things is do all the baseline science and prove that they can build the mine without prima facie destroying the environment. Can they actually? I don’t know, I know not enough about the science but I gotta it say it just doesn’t sound good. It sounds like a really big hole in the ground and I don’t think that I’ve ever heard of mineral extraction as anything but horrifically polluting. But Pebble has hired some very smart people and I am absolutely confident that they will offer an at least plausible answer to the environmental problem and be able to claim with out looking totally insane that the fishery and the mine can live next to each other. The will then claim, quite rightly, that at this point they are the best and only option or developing the region economically that isn’t the fishery. And it won’t just be the Illiamna area, they will argue that for the whole Bristol Bay and future posts will explain how they can and do back that up. And everyone knows about the poverty and the horrors it breeds here, so that is a pretty compelling argument both to people in the region who are tired of living a certain way, and people outside of the region, who are tired of the enormous expense with little positive outcome that these communities present.

Team Greeniac can answer and win on the environmental argument; they have the much better side. But they don’t like the human economic development side of the argument at all, in fact, when I have heard it addressed at all by them they tend to dismiss it or mock it. They tend to accuse the people of Illiamna of greed when it comes to Pebble, and the problem is that it isn’t greed that makes someone afraid they can’t heat their house and feed their kids, it isn’t greed that makes one scared of not being able to send any of their kids to college—those aren’t greedy fears, they are the rational response to have not enough money and not enough opportunity to make money. Subsistence is a wonderful thing but subsistence life styles cost money too, because I don’t care how many people post they want to maintain their traditional way of life, that’s fucking bullshit, what they want is their traditional way of life aided, supplemented and enhanced by the things like power boats, snow machines, electricity and internet. Those things are part of a capitalist cash economy and there is an open question as to how to people can be intergrated into that economy without loosing their cultural identity wholesale.

Which is a topic for another day. For today all I am trying to note is that what are we going to do here so that people have full time jobs to work here and the will to work them is a question that the stop Pebble folks actually have to come up with an answer or they are going to lose. I’ve made many people on that side of the argument really, really hate me because I’ve been saying that for a while (don’t believe me, check the comments that will get attached to this in the next couple of hours) , because somehow they’ve interpreted that statement to mean that I hope they lose, which is retarded I hope they win and I’m trying to help them do that by telling them that they need to have a plan for what happens here next that isn’t mining and isn’t just go on the way we are. The way we are isn’t working, provable in a thousand ways, and mining is a solution and though it is a bad solution, a bad solution is better then no solution at all, or at least it will look that way to most people. Until you can offer some kind of counter plan, this isn’t going to be a discussion about resource development, it’s not even to be much an of an argument, hell it isn’t even going to rise to the level of a series of contradictions—it’s just going to be two sides talking right past each other and if that’s what it turns into, spoiler alert, Pebble wins. Pebble wins because without a plan of some kind for the region, the region never gets together and so we go through the permitting process with not two sides, but one side that is Pebble, and then another side that is environmentalist and then sides 3-15 are different BB communities pursuing some version of their own interest, which in turn will depend on how enriched or impoverished they are by fishing. Pebble has the most money and the most focus, they win that, it is their ideal scenario. The only winning scenario for the other side is to come up with a counter plan that Bristol Bay stands behind as pretty much a whole so that the argument at permitting is “this will mess up our environment and also our plan for a self determined functioning economic system—and we all think this, please don’ permit the mine.” You can’t say we’ll come up with the plan as long as you don’t permit the mine, that won’t work. You actually have to have a plan. And that will be an awful lot of work.

Myself I am not expert on rural development, but suspect someone who reads this is, and I would appreciate your comments if you are out there. My thought is that Dillingham has an energy problem and if Dillingham could solve that energy problem or itself, it would have something awfully valuable to export to the outside world full of small areas trying to figure out a power future that is cleaner and more sustainable. How realistic a goal that is for Dillingham/Bristol Bay remains to be seen.

So that is the early introduction to Pebble, now I’m off to the bank and back to figuring out what to keep, what to toss, and how long to stay.

Cheers!

1 Get Eileen Goode the Fizzuc out of Alaska has a nice ring to it I think, but I’m sure y’all can do better than that.

(2)John Shively is the CEO of the Pebble Partnership who is by all accounts known as a decent guy who is more hated here than I am at the moment. You’ll hear about him some. You will also hear a lot about a guy named Mike Heatwole who is my favorite PR guy in the history of PR. It’s all spin and Mike never really told me anything about Pebble that wasn’t in the press releases, but I have never met anyone who towed the party line in such a basically amusing way. In my brief career as a journalist my experience with PR guys is that they are a fairly dark and uptight group. They may be eight kinds of fun in private life, and in fact the only other enjoyable PR guy I ever met was in the middle of an eight day cocaine bender which ended with him making more than the local news. Of course, that might not be so much fun as a manic episode, so I’m sticking with Mike Heatwole is the only fun PR guy I’ve ever met, and I plan to steal some of his better lines because he has said some funny fucking stuff about resource development. And that’s not easy, it’s not poop and thus naturally hilarious.

(3)Molybdenum is a key ingredient in making steel. The reason it is never mentioned is that A) no one knows what it is and B) no one can pronounce it correctly (mo-lib-den-um) and it is better to avoid embarrassment than say it wrong on the air. Not that that ever happened to me, several times for the first six months I worked here. Also a treat to say—Unalakleet)

(4)Did you really say “blow his load” to your mother? Yes I did. I do not believe there is foul language I could use to shock my mother, or if there is such language I would dare not use it because I would be afraid that the use of such words would act as a black magic of some kind that would actually bring upon us all the rider on a pale horse. I’m just saying, I learned to curse from somewhere.

(5) Borderline if these guys count as an industry since the Firefighters/EMT’s are not paid, they are all volunteers, but fuck it, it’s a dangerous job so I think they make the social services list)

(6)This is sort of mixed up with the Salmon jobs, but like fish and game scientists are public employees in the service of fish, where as USDA is a federal social service program)

(7) As opposed to your average cult member who joined in adulthood. I mean I know the brainwashing does a lot, but I gotta think somewhere in your mind you still know something about science after you’ve joined a cult you just may not be able to consciously access that information. On the other hand, if you were just raised in a cult, I don’t think science would ever really come into play for you at all. Unless it was a science cult. But I think they call it something else when it is a science cult. I’ll look into this further.

Quam Fluctus Diversi, Quam Mari Conjucti Or I May Be an Insensitive Jackass But Do You Think You Could Dial Back the Aggressive Stupidity

2009-07-28T18:29:00.002-08:00

Some people are confused right now, those people being the 12 or so friends of mine back east who read this blog who are sitting there going “what the fuck is going on.” There are many version of what’s going on, as today I am not reporting the news I am the fucking news (check out the Alaska Daily News article http://www.adn.com/rural/western/story/878744.html which is not the only article on this, but in my humble opinion probably the fairest).

The first and obvious question “bitch, have you not learned your lesson yet, enough with the friggin blogging already!” The quick answer to that is, well, I don’t have a job anymore and I need to do something to fill the time. The temptation here is to make some sort of crack about drinking, but I’ll let it pass for now because the real answer is yes I have a lesson learned but no, it is not the one the involves taking down the blog, never writing anything again and more or less wearing some kind sack cloth for the rest of my life. However, I’ll to all of that shortly.

First I think I need to briefly recap for the folks who don’t living Dillingham because I’ve gotten many “what in hell did you do?” from those gentle readers who can’t imagine what’s going on here. I think the best quote from a friend of mine on this was by Brian, who said “but did they read the blog, who in their right mind would ever take anything you said seriously?” A good question since I tend to agree with the ADN guy on this, whatever this master work of pseudo-journalism is, it is whole hell of a lot more surreal than evocative, but at some point I took a literary criticism class in college and between naps in the back of the room I think learned that the meaning is with the reader not the writer, so I’ll just shrug my shoulders to that. But right now there are a fair number of people who have no idea what any of this means at all because I didn’t update my blog for like 7 months and then one day everyone in the state of Alaska is reading it and making comments about it, which probably seems just a touch odd. So before I get into any of the content here, first a recap.

And angry mob readers, please forgive me, I know you already know what’s going on and would like to get back to the good work of threats against my physical well being, so fear not, there will be plenty to be angry and mob like about after the recap. I suggest you take this opportunity to get some coffee or something and scroll down to the part of this that isn’t in italics, as that will indicate I am back to my mean and terrible self summing up what I observe going on here.

And now for the recap…

So I started a blog because people told me I should, and it seemed a more effective way of keeping friends and family around the country six thousand miles and a four hour time difference away posted on what it is like for someone from the suburbs to live in rural Alaska. Certainly a hell of a lot easier than writing 30 emails a day, anyway, and blogging was the hip new thing of the moment . And I wrote on it in much the way I speak, long, rambling profane rants about, wel, l whatever it is that occurs to me. You’ve read it, you know. Then, as is my proud tradition, I pretty much lost interest in blogging because I am a rambly writer and any post I started just took too long to get finished. So I contented myself to wandering around the town and making the greatest hits of my observations to those who were unlucky enough to sit next to me in public and reporting the news, which is actually a fairly consuming job here, especially during the summer which is the silly season. Lot’s of fishing, lots of fighting, lot’s of fucking—good times actually, certainly not boring, and totally made me change my mind about cutting off my toes for entertainment value. And really, good thing to, I suspect it would be a hell of a challenge to outrun an angry mob with only nine toes since my balance isn’t so hot with all ten. But I’m ahead of myself. For six months between the time that I wrote this and the present day, pretty much noting happened because no one was looking for my blog. In this time I just didn’t really think about it, I neither hoped local people would read it, nor feared they would, it was more or less a non factor in my day to day life.

And then one night, a forest grew.

Now there is what I know happened, and what I think happened. Awesomely, this is my blog and I’m no longer journalist (and let’s face facts, likely not going to be one again after this) so I get to write what I think happened. I think I had a fight with a insecure and immature friend of mine. He or she had their reasons for being mad at me over a personal issue, and those reasons are more or less legitimate, which then unfortunately got mixed up in a professional issue. I suspect that mad did some thinking in place of rationality, and it was helped along by some group think mentality such that it seemed like a very good idea to stop me from doing something that they had convinced themselves I was going to do. And so something was done with very little regard for the consequences of what might happen, though I do this person, waste of electrons though they are, probably didn’t think this was going to go so far.

Now back to what I know happened, at some point this person, some other person, or some group of people that may or may not be associated with the person I think it is decided to take the greatest hits of the most offensive things I have said on this blog and condensed them into an anonymous email which got to sent to someone, which got sent to someone, until everyone in town had it.

And then, Holy Shit, welcome to the circus.

So I didn’t get fired nor was I told to resign. What did happen is that my boss called me into his office and told me that he was going to terminate me if he were legally allowed to because I had done damage to the radio station. My initial reaction to this would be to call him a coward who was going to fire me for having an opinion 8 months ago in my private off hours but wouldn’t fire the guy who got a DWI on day five of his job here but the light of reason and day reminded me that KDLG is a public radio station that relies on public sponsorship to make ends meet and that KDLG is about to take a huge and horrifically unfair budget cut from the Powers that Be at the State that could end with the station loosing as much as a third of its yearly funding. So as much as I woud like to hate my former boss for not standing by me at all here, I also accept that there is a lot of pressure on him to keep the doors open and having someone on staff who will act as money repellent probably not the best thing in the world. Also, there is just a reality that even though I don’t think anyone can point to bias in my work over the last several months while this blog was sitting up on the web and I was reporting the news, I do think that the perception of bias is real and would damage my ability to do the job. So instead of forcing the station to try and fire me or working in a place with a boss who spends most days wishing to God that I would just get struck my lightening and put him out of his misery, I resigned on the condition that no negative information get stuck in my personel file. Some people think this was the wrong choice, I don’t. Point is, I was getting fired for it, or at least made to feel wildly unwelcome at work about it, which meant it was time to be done at work.

And then the fun really started, as people started reading the blog and talking to each other about it and realizing that they hated me way more than they even began imagine they did when the first read the email. Well, okay not everyone. Because there are a variety of types of people in Dillingham, something that I think a lot of the commentators are missing me saying here, there were a variety of responses with varying amounts of nuance and such. On Friday afternoon, though, the range of reactions felt like somewhere between “I hate you, you bitch, and I hope you fucking die,” to “I hate you, you bitch, and I hope you fucking go away, but death might be too extreme a penalty.”

So that catches us up to the present moment, more or less, except why everyone is so all fired upset. There is the total vulgarity of some sections of this, and the fact that the mechanics of my writing may tend to make people think they are reading the works of a precocious third grader with an absolutely outstanding vocabulary and the comprehension of the grammatical and spelling rules of the English language one would generally ascribe to a retarded howler monkey—but I think we can safely put those things aside since this is a fishing town where I’ve heard things so vulgar that my mind was blown , and I’m pretty sure that I’m not the only person in town who can’t spell worth a good god damn. What I am in trouble for is making reference to the death of a very young woman who died here, and for saying that her death, while horrific and sad, was not a tragedy. This thing that happened was a horrible wounding event for the community and this coming up the way it did and the quote getting out without a context around them (big ups for everyone who read the whole blog by the way) ripped the barely on scab right off and caused everyone to relive an awful lot of pain. And misery loves company, and now we are at the present day…

So let me tell you all about what it is like to be hated in a small town. Well actually if you went to middle school you probably already know. Remember that time the first blow job got given out in your eighth grade class, and for the rest of her education the girl who did it was the school slut? Or do you remember the friend who one day decided they didn’t want to shop at the GAP anymore and stated wearing black lipstick and a trenchcoat and everyone thought they were a drug addict who was about to shoot up the school and made a big show of being “afraid” of them? Or do you remember that really hot, cool, jock who was unexpectedly gay who got caught doing some unexpectedly gay shit in some totally embarrassing way and then from then on out was shunned by his own hot, cool, jock friends and rejected by the nerds who he stuck in lockers? Yeah I would say it’s something like that. Except you’re an adult and everyone else is, so it really frees them up to be good and crazy in a way you can’t be when there are parents and teachers around to pretend that you’re not a miserable little sociopath for.

Well okay, that’s a little whiny and it wasn’t even that bad, it just sucked. So on Friday night I’m out taking a walk on Woodriver Road, which is the road where my rather barracks like apartment is located. I took a walk on Woodriver for two reasons. Reason one is that the phone calls were getting to be a little bit much, there is only so much heaving breathing, “fuck you cunt/bitch,” “I’m going to slit your fucking throat bitch,” or “gee I really agree with you, but I just don’t think I can really be around you for a while because I have reputation to think of here,” that any sane person is going to listen to in a night. Second reason is that I live next door to a bar and so I took pretty seriously the idea that someone might get drunk and think it was a good idea to throw a rock through my window or some such thing. So I took to the streets, where I ran into a couple I know, who were themselves walking back from the bar, because they were too responsible to drive. Incidently, bravo. So the female half of the invited me to walk closer to them, afraid that someone might see who I was and decide to run me over or throw a beer bottle. The male end of the couple noted that he might be the one to throw said beer bottle, which I took insufficiently seriously because it is very hard to tell real intent from sarcasm when talking to a drunk person. Mistake, even bigger mistake was saying something “Well GWCKHHTH I think I’ll take my chances with people I at least know, and I’ll take my chances in a fight.”

Next thing I know I am lying in a ditch with my head in some bushes as my mind tries to integrate that I have been shoved to the ground and now have a rather suddenly menacing looking man standing over me who I sincerely hope is not about to kick me. The female half of the couple starts whacking the shit out of him and sent him further up the path before helping me up. At this point I did what every brave, stoic, mature and intelligent person would have done, started weeping like a child in the arms of this woman. She was very kind to me, noting that while she didn’t believe in everything or even most of the things I said, she did take the time to read the whole thing and mostly it just made her sad. The male half of the couple continued from up the path to shout back some things that I think were mean, but honestly my receptive abilities weren’t what they could have been at the time and I was mostly focused on my gratitude towards the woman walking next to me on the path and feeling somewhat concerned that her reward for this might be a rousing game of dodge-bottle.

So the night ends, the morning begins and some people start being nice to me. A couple of people in particular who I would I very much like to single out to thank, but I just don’t think that getting on the list of people who are nice to me in this town is exactly what anyone is looking for, so, you all know who you are, thank you very much. There are still phone calls, the posting begins on my blog, and as you can tell from the early responses, nobody is feeling the love, mostly what I hear is get out, stay out, and if at all possible choke and fucking die. Nice.

So now we move to the evening times when my friend comes to convince me to go to the bar. “Isn’t this a very bad idea,” you are saying, “considering that the previous night you didn’t even want to live next door to the bar?” Well depends on how you look at it I guess, I had pretty much decided not to go, but I am nothing if not susceptible to peer pressure and so I put some pants on and went over there.

In a word, “awesome.”

Actually it wasn’t that bad, most people seemed pretty content to ignore me and carry on with the tying one on Saturday night style in Dillingham, which is less interesting than tying one on Saturday night style in Naknek , but still pretty lively and I’m told that this weekend in July is the biggest bar night of the year. So I walk in, friend buys me a drink (I think because other friend just straight shamed him into this, because the next day he was unwilling to eat lunch with me in public, but, whatever) which I start sipping on. Vodka and tonic with grenadine, which, by the way, is a pretty color and tastes a little bit like evil. Then Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Fucking Idiot walk up and decide to regulate. TFI informs me that she should knock my bitch ass out, that if I have the right to say what I want to say then she has the right to beat the shit out of me, and on and on about the ass whooping coming my way. My loyal friend (MLF) informs her that she’s ignorant and that if she wants to beat me up she’s going to have to go through her, which TFI doesn’t’ want to do because MLF has a last name she respects and isn’t going to start shit. While TFI and MLF are arguing about the finer points of whether or not I deserve to swallow my teeth, TD starts in on “When are you going to leave, no one likes you here, I worry for you because people are going to hurt you, you have no right to stay…” on and on, I’m pretty sure that TD is the first person who posted on my blog after my most recent posting, so imagine that attitude delivered as drunken screed over about five minutes and you’ve got the idea. So then bar security shows up and separates us, note, in this time I have said almost nothing, and instead stood there passively and drank my drink and tried to explain to MLF not to fight these people, they were drunk and wanted to make a scene. TD whispers something to bar security, and guess what?

That’s right, time for me to leave, the bar will not serve me because I am going to cause a fight. I have to go, which I do, without complaint because though I am pretty sure you can’t deny someone service because other people don’t like them, I’m also pretty sure that the bar has a vested interest in keeping the peace and I really wasn’t that into getting into a bar fight anyway.

And that is the worst that happened to me this weekend, forgetting for a minute the wonderful world of ugly evil comments from people delivered in person, on the phone, or on my blog. And by the way, you’re welcome for me leaving it open for anyone to post.

So here’s what I’ve learned. I need an editor, but I can’t afford one, so muddle through I also learned I should be more careful about what I say, because saying something in a way that makes people so insanely angry they can’t think, well, stops them from thinking and allows them to focus on the writer instead of the writer’s point. But I didn’t learn not to say to anything nor am I running off anywhere, I just quit my job, my apartment is still here and will be until such point as I am good and ready to leave. And so some thoughts, for whatever anyone thinks they are worth.

First up, to everyone who signed your name, congratulations and thank you. Yes I also mean thanks you to Diane, Bob, Andrea, Evelyn, and the whole other host whose names I can’t remember who had nothing nice to say to me but at least were willing to say it with their name next to it so I don’t have to wonder when I look at them where I stand. To everyone who had something nice to say about me that they signed their name to, and I’m sorry, flaw of the human mind I can more easily pull up a list of names of people who don’t like me or what I said than people who do, also mad props to you guys. You signed your name, thumbs up. I don’t agree with everything you said, but I respect anyone who lives the with consequences of saying something.

I am an insensitive jackass who more or less was trying to be funny and was not attempting to write a comprehensive or particularly journalistic account of Western Alaska and as such there was little balance, little editing and not a lot of care taken to craft my points. I need to do better there, and I imagine with all the free time now on my hands I will find better ways to craft blog posts.

Now let’s talk about aggressive stupidity. Regular stupid gets drunk and puts a car in a ditch. Aggressively stupid takes a swing at the cop who tells them they have to take a breathalyzer test because they just put their car in the ditch. I am not a dictionary, and when I define a term on the blog I’m just noting how it is I’m using it. I am not trying to take on Miriam Webster to get her to change the definition of tragedy, and similarly, if there is an official definition of aggressively stupid out there, that’s great and this is only a point of reference. Aggressively stupid is when you do something to make the fact that you are being an idiot as public and in everyone else’s face as possible. For example, many of you will say this blog is the paradigmatic case of aggressively stupid. …

There is aggressively stupid on all sides of any issue, but there’s been a lot here and since people are asking me to say more on what good thing could happen, or what my suggestion is to make it better, here is my first one, dial down the aggressively stupidity. One thing that falls into this category being a useless fucking bigot, and so please if you hate Alaska Natives and think they are bunch of child molesting drunks, find someone else to be your champion and don’t’ defend me anymore. My point isn’t and never was that Alaska Natives are somehow morally deficient people who get themselves raped and killed because of that moral deficiency and in the face of actual facts of life in southwest Alaska it’s also an idiotic thing to maintain. There are plenty of stupid, dangerous, drunk white people here too. The truth of the matter is that the problem is poverty because real, true poverty, exacts a very high price and it exacts it everywhere that it exists. Those prices, are alcohol abuse, drug addiction, violence, sexual predation, and the wholesale loss of hope for a better life. And poverty does not care what color the person who pays the tolls is, these costs exist in black ghettos, “poor white trash” regions in the deep south and Midwest, Asian slums in west coast—where ever you find actually making a choice between feeding their kids and heating their house, or people who are living three families to a house because there is not other option, what happens here is going to happen there. I just happen to live here. Making this about what’s wrong with natives and their culture is morally incorrect, but worse, it’s mother fucking stupid, it has nothing to do with what I wrote or think because making this about “those people,” and the bad things “they do” is just another way to sweep the problem under the rug, it’s just another way to look at anyone but yourself as responsible for the problems here—because afterall, it’s just “those people” and the way “they act.” I find that offensive, and I think I can say pretty plausibly that I’m not too easily offended. We are what we do, we are what we allow, and everyone in SW White, Native, Black, Asian, Latino, Inu or plaid has some part in that to answer for, myself included. So please, knock off the stupid, or if you refuse to, know that it is no defense of my beliefs cause I think you’re and idiot too, and worse you undercut the ability of anyone who looks like me to say anything ever because you make it that easy for other people to caricature what I actually think into your small minded racist idiocy.

The other form of aggressive stupidity is everyone who thinks that threatening me with violence, or, in the rare case of the spitting and shoving population, actually doing some violence is a good idea. “Get out!” isn’t an argument, neither is “I’m going to kick your ass,” or “you’re a bad terrible person who has no right to say what she did.” These things I assume aren’t meant to be arguments, they are just meant to make me afraid and feel like if I don’t get on the next plane out of here my life is in danger which I’m sorry, I don’t feel. The reason I don’t feel that way is that I don’t take the dim view of this community and these people that some of the defenders of this community seem to, I don’t think these people are actually wholesale a bunch violent drunks who’d rather beat up a woman than have a difficult conversation. I think that exists, hell I know it does I’ve now met these morons personally and gone the extra distance to piss them off, but that isn’t everyone. Because there are good people here, and there are people who are working hard to make it better in Dillingham and those people want to use this to talk not to threaten to beat the shit out of me for not towing the line that some people believe my birthplace, race and time lived in Western Alaska obligate me to tow. But the presence of good people does nothing if they are forever trying to work in a culture that won’t let anyone say bluntly and directly what the problem is. I also doesn’t answer for the problem that even if there is good going on here and it is getting better, that good comes from the fact that there are jobs and people can do more here as opposed to say in Illiamna, or Ekwok or New Stuyahok where there aren’t jobs and thus not enough infrastructure to support even basic police functions let alone complicated social service work. But that isn’t why the threats are aggresivley stupid, that’s just why you’re wrong, what makes you aggressively stupid is that YOU ARE PROVING MY POINT! If your response to something you don’t’ like is to try to threaten me into shame or silence, especially if you get drunk first, well Jesus, what was it I said the problem was? I mean come on guys, I can’t spell, I use the word “fuck” like it’s “the,” I have no idea how to use a semi colon and a lot of that blog is like welcome to crazy town. There is stuff to work with here. But when you start saying stuff like “shut up or I’ll shut you up,” well I cant help but see that as enabling the problem.

Which leads me to the last piece of aggressive stupidity, which comes to us from Anonymous Informer. What this person did was horribly cruel and fucked my whole life at the moment. I’ll get over that, I’m 28 so barring the mob really getting out of control I probably have a whole lot of life left. This person is also a coward because while they felt strongly enough to burn down my life, they were not brave to take credit for it. Weak. But what makes you aggressively stupid is that no one would ever have read this blog if you hadn’t put a bunch of lights up around it. And what did you think was going to happen when I didn’t have a job any more? I got nothing else to do, I got a head full of stories, and for the next couple of days anyway, I have some people who are reading this. I mean, come on, if you wanted to shut me up, wouldn’t it have been better to blackmail me into taking the thing down? Just dumb.

Anyway, I will leave the comment section of this blog open, I’m enjoying the discussion people are having. I would remind someone of something that one of my commenters made note of in regards to Kim and this community—namely that she has parents, siblings and friends who are alive to hurt today and a humble request that people show some sensitivity and empathy to the fact that there are real people here. I agree entirely, and if there is anything I am sorry for and deserve to be punished and shunned for, it is making the people who loved that girl relive a horrible hurt. Now of course I didn’t mean for them to relive this now since I wrote it right after it happened and so I kind of feel like this is more Anonymous Informer’s fault, but again take what I think with a grain of salt since I also think that this person is worthless coward who deserves all the torments of hell, chilly and otherwise, to rain down on him until he learns to that there is no honor is being a spineless sucker punching bitch, but I digress. I wrote it, I won’t back down from it, but I caused hurt with it and that is wrong. However, I am also someone’s daughter, I am also someone’s sister, I am also someones’ friend, and those people have to read what you say to me, and it scares them. They didn’t do anything to you and though don’t deserve to be scared because of you. So please, I am asking that you show my family the sensitivity you are asking others to show your family in Dillingham.

Anyway, that is enough for now, more tomorrow…

And sorry for the lack of editing, I’ve been at this for like 8 hours and the phone won’t stop ringing so I am posting before anyone else decides to call me.

Evil Wins When Good People Say Nothing -Edmund Burke

2009-07-24T22:18:00.003-08:00

I suspect that somewhat more people will be reading this blog than normal today, which is probably a good thing. A lot of people in Dillingham are angry with me today because they have taken from my blog that I hate this place and I look down on the people here. Neither thing is true, and I think actually the blog says as much many times through out, but then I don’t think all that many people took the time to read the whole thing, instead focusing on the more colorful excerpts that some exceptionally brave anonymous person sent around this town in an email. An email, incidently, that everyone in Dillingham read, how nice. I would like to thank everyone who has gone out of their way to call me a racist, spit at me, call me a bitch, a cunt and a high handed outsider who knows not of which she speaks, I have appreciated all of your commentary. Those people do not bother me all that much because if you want to ride the ride you have to pay the fee, and I knew that I was saying some stuff that was going to be unpopular and easily misunderstood by others and I said it anyway. What does bother me is everyone who said to me behind a closed door that they agree with what I said, but are unwilling to express that though to anyone else because they would rather not be glowing the same shade of radioactive that I am, because, after all this is a small town and they have to be careful of what people think of them. That is truly disappointing.

I am sorry if my tone offends, that is just my writing style, and it while I do like comedy based on exaggeration it is not to everyone’s taste and perhaps I should have thought more carefully about my very serious job before writing some less than serious postings. Good enough. What I am not sorry for is what I said, because I do not believe I am wrong.

So I am going to try this without being funny at all, though sincerity is not my strong suit. The poverty in Southwest Alaska is staggering, crushing and dehumanizing. It has lead to rampant alcoholism, sexual predation, violence, drug addiction and despair. Don’t believe that, check the crime statistics, Dillingham Alaska leads the nation in per capita foricible rape and is 17 or 18 for assaults. Or you can just look at the police logs and state police crime reports that I check every single morning when I get to work, and you will note that there is almost no day with out a domestic violence assault, almost no week with out a regular assault, and no month with a sex crime. And that is not funny at all, that is very, very sad. I do not look down on, or hate this area or these people. Quite to the contrary, I love it here, it is beautiful, it is unique and it a real community where people are no anonymous to each other. I go to the store to buy smokes and the guy behind the counter has my brand in his hand when I get there, I go to get my coffee, the barrista knows what to make me before I order it, I drive down the road and people wave to me weather or not we actually know each other. I would not be moved to tell the story if I didn’t’ think the story and the story of the people were worth telling. I would not be capable of being sad about what poverty is doing to this region if I did not care, were not invested in the outcome and thought that these people were somehow less than I am. Infact, I think the people here are just like I am, and they need food to eat, a warm safe place to sleep, and the ability to believe that their children will have a life as good, if not better, than the one that they had themselves. I believe that anyone should be able to expect that a person that they call friend, cousin, lover or brother will look out for them when they can not care for themselves. And mostly I believe that it is no sign of respect or love or care to look the other way and refuse to tell someone when there is something wrong, something broken and something that needs to change.

I think people have taken me as saying that what happened to that beautiful young girl who died is her fault and thus not a tragedy. That isn’t what I said, nor was it what I was going for. What happened to the EMT who died the night before Thanksgiving was indescribably sad and awful, and shouldn’t have happened. But I won’t call it tragedy and I won’t apologize for saying it’s not a tragedy because it while it was devastating to this community and tragic for every person who loved that girl, a tragedy remains a sad thing that happened that no one could have prevented. We do not get to let ourselves off the hook that easily, because what happened, and what continues to happen here every day is preventable. That girl died alone, cold and afraid because we failed her, because no one was looking and because we have allowed a cultural norm where young women get lost and get hurt and no one cares until so terrible has happened that it can’t be ignored any more. That failure is written on her grave and we all have to live to with that.

So if you don’t like what I said because of the style in which I chose to say it, that’s okay. If you don’t like what I said because you think what I said was wrong, that okay too, though show me the flaw in my thinking. But if you don’t like what I said because I said it all then I would suggest that you take a good long look in the mirror and tell me if you like what you see. Because what I know is that neglect that runs through this community like a river will destroy this region more surely and more quickly than any copper mine or off shore oil rig ever will. What I know is that we are at the end of the day not just what we do, but also what we choose to allow, decide to enable and let happen around us. I would suggest that if you think that the solution to a problem is hiding that problem and publicly lynching anyone who suggests there may be a problem, then I would suggest that you are the problem. I would suggest that we owe each other better that poverty, predation and personal destruction and that those things are not a culture, they are a pathology. If we can not do better than that, if we can’t agree that there is something eating away at this region at this has to change, then I think I can edit Edmund Burke’s famous quote down.

Evil Wins.

Evil Wins When Good People Say Nothing

2009-07-24T22:18:00.001-08:00

Evil Wins When Good People Say Nothing

2009-07-24T22:18:00.000-08:00

This Little Piggy had Roast Beef, This Little Piggy had None. And this little Piggy was Severed Intentionally and Stored in a Cooler.

2009-01-05T09:53:00.000-09:00

Part I: Friday January 2^nd, 2009, 6 AM

Have you ever thought about cutting off one of you toes? Yeah, I didn’t think so…

I really didn’t think the darkness would affect me. I used to think I liked the dark. Now I’m pretty sure that darkness is trying to get me to cut a toe off. Unfortunate.

Last year I had no problems, though admittedly I only felt the effects of the dark half of Dillingham’s year since partially since I moved here right before the winter solstice, so pretty much from the start it was always getting lighter, and before I knew it the sun was up until ten pm. That, incidentally, was maddening; constant unending daylight is a plague on par with frogs and locusts. By mid-June the sun was coming up at 5 in the morning and going down at quarter after midnight with no real darkness in between, just a couple of weird hours of bluish grayish light such that you could read a novel with moderately sized typesetting on your back porch at two in the morning if you wanted to. I was forced to tack blankets to my window and chug a glass of red wine every night so that I could maybe sleep for four hours, sometimes I felt moments away from making myself a tin helmet. That was unpleasant but not unexpectedly so—I knew that sundown at midnight was going to be an issue and so while I was somewhat disgruntled, I was comforted by my correctness about how annoying constant sunlight would be.

Going into fall of 2008 I naturally assumed that the worst was over for at least 8 months, if 18 hours a day of sunlight didn’t make me nuts, surely I would be fine through 18 hours of dark since I actually like the dark.

And for a while it looked like I was right, other than a stronger than normal proclivity towards napping, everything else seemed pretty normal.

Then I really started thinking about cutting off my toe.

I’ve since begun to really consider the possibility that the human psyche may not be cracked up to endure 18 hours a day without natural light.

The cold doesn’t help, It is currently 15 degrees below zero outside in Dillingham Alaska and the temperature has been hovering somewhere between 0 and 20 below zero for the better part of the last week. Though my fur hat (wolf and otter) does much to keep the top and sides of my head warm, my face is exposed. Because my face is exposed, the snot freezes to the inside of my nose whenever I step outside. If you’ve never felt a bodily fluid freeze inside of you, take my word, it isn’t pleasant; made less pleasant by the fact that the mucus unfreezes unevenly so when you re-enter a building clear liquid leaks from your nose while leaving behind a coating of goop that has a consistency similar to goose liver pate. The mucus pate, in turn, makes it impossible to breathe through your nose for the next 45 minutes. It’s gross.

Recent gaps in my sleep schedule also deserve at least some of the credit for my new found interest in body modification. This week for the first time since he began work, PROAG decided to take some actual time off, leaving me to work his god-forsaken early morning shift beginning at 5:30 in the morning. I feel some shame over how quickly working the early shift two non-consecutive days in a week has reduced me to jello. Waking up at 4:30 in the am is not pleasant, but it shouldn’t be the end of the world. For the first six months that I worked here, early AM was mine and this was back in the early era of life in Dillingham when I lived in the middle of downtown and didn’t yet own a car. Every night I went to sleep looking forward to waking up at 4 am, layering on clothes until I bore a striking resemblance to the Michelin Man and waddling (because with that many layers on walking is no longer an option) to work in pitch darkness and blistering cold. I only lived four blocks away from the radio station, but I learned a valuable lesson, at 20 below, all walks are long walks.

Clearly a year ago I was more durable.

Where once I would have used the hours before my co-workers arrived to gather news, I’ve now been using the time to give some real thought to the cutting off a toe thing. 5:30 am in a Western Alaska radio station is a weird time, leads to weird thoughts. Cutting off a toe would obviously be painful, though that is mitigable if I can figure out a way to do it outside. A long term issue might be walking a little crookedly for the rest of my life, but that’s assuming that they can’t re-attach the toe. It is true that they can’t re-attach the toe locally since there is no surgical suite at the hospital, but from all local accounts that’s probably for the best anyway since there are 3 competent doctors at the hospital and a bunch of other people who probably should have gone into veterinary medicine[1]. But the lack of surgical facilities probably doesn’ t matter at this time of year because it is very cold and I’m sure we could keep the toe chilled enough that they could re-attach it in Anchorage. A further plus in the cut off toe column: I think my insurance company would have to pay for my trip to Anchorage, which means not only might I keep my toe in the long run, I could also scam a trip to Anchorage in the bargain and get to see a movie in a theater.

Worst case though, they can’t re-attach it. How much do I really need my pinkie toe? I’m told it is important for balance, but people adapt to having strokes. Surely if it is possible to learn to work around part of a brain going dead, I can eventually regain my balance nine toed. Also, on the upside if it were widely known that I had recently lost a toe, people would stop inviting me to go cross country skiing with and snow shoeing with them, which would be nice because I am running out of reasonable lies to tell as to why I can’t go. Barring an unforeseen stroke of good luck or cutting off my left pinkie toe, I will either have to start telling unreasonable lies, like I am a Zoroastrian who opposes cross-country skiing on purely spiritual grounds,[2] or I will have to break down and truthfully reveal that I would rather play Russian roulette with a semi-automatic hunting rifle than drag my sweating half frozen ass across miles of open tundra in the dead of Alaskan winter.

Telling the truth now is particularly unpalatable because in the past I have agreed to these bizarre excursions to get close to nature while it is frozen solid. I did so in the vain hopes that seeming amenable to winter sports would make someone take me snow machining[3] at some point in the future. This is something I have desperately wanted to do since I moved here a year ago because it looks incredibly fun. Friends of mine who snow machine have repeatedly forced me to watch snow going videos with them to heighten my feelings inferiority. Problem is, Snow-Goes are expensive and are not the type of fun I am willing or able to pay a couple of thousand dollars for with my rapid onset financial insolvency problems of late. Unlikely to ever own one of my own, I am forced to rely on the magnimity of my snow machine owning betters leading them to feelings of pity sufficient to take me along on a ride. To soften people up I have willingly participated in more outdoor activities than I normally would given the fact that it is mother fucking freezing outside.

To this day I have never ridden on a snow go, so it is safe to say that plan probably hasn’t been working, but I must admit that maybe it would have worked if I’d given it more of a chance. We are only able to disguise our essential nature so well, and my essential nature is that of someone who prefers to spend three months indoors than three hours outside with frozen tear ducts. I was raised in New Jersey and so to me snow-shoeing or cross country skiing when it is 0 degrees or colder outside is an experience that quickly brings the words “Bhutan Death-March,” to mind, except I suspect in some sense the Bhutan Death March was in actually more pleasant than a December tundra hike in Western Alaska, because at least they were warm.[4]

But I am getting off my central point about cutting off a toe, which is starting to look pretty good, or at least not as facedly bad as it probably should. In the grand scheme of things, having 9 toes is a minor physical defect that at worst would leave me with a limp. In return for that limp I could probably get out of any future activity I wanted to avoid without the side effect of looking weak,lame or unfun. However, since my interests are fairly lazy in nature, I imagine I will still be able to do anything that actually interests me without too much limitation.

There are some practical problems with streamlining my foot. First problem is actually finding someone to cut off my toe. I am certain I can’t do it myself no matter how cold I get the fucking thing, and almost certain Todd won’t do it for me. I can’t ask a friend, because I feel like this is sort of like asking someone to be part of a ménage-a-twouis with you and your boyfriend; if they say yes no problem, but if they say no there’s just no undoing the awkwardness that’s been injected into the relationship. That leaves asking a stranger. Given what I know about Dillingham Alaska, it’s probably safe to assume there is someone local who would not only be willing to cut my toe off for me, but would be happy to have the chance but ’m still not really comfortable with that because I’m not sure if there is anyone in town who would be both happy to cut my toe off and be happy to stop cutting me when that job was done.

Second main area of practical concern, even if I can get the toe off somehow, I’m not sure how I would explain a severed limb at the hospital. Lacing a good explanation I feel I could get myself into some serious trouble. I know they are legally required to contact police in the event of a stabbing or gunshot wound, I’m not sure what their rules for maiming are. I assume if you have a good explanation for a severed limb involving power tools they don’t contact the police, but power tools probably wouldn’t be my best bet for an excuse in a severed toe situation since it is pretty damn unlikely that I’d be handling a power tool a all, let alone with my feet. I worry that, in some pain due to my recently severed toe, I might feel compelled to tell the truth, and I think an explanation for a toe in cooler involves the words/phrases “boredom,” “wanted to see what would happen,” “really sick of outdoor activities in the cold,” “got a up a little too early on too many mornings,” and “it’s been really dark for awhile now,” will get me tossed into straight to a padded cell, do not pass go, do not collect 200 hundred dollars.

So the toe plan has some limitations.

I am open to suggestions on how to improve it.

Part II January 2^nd 1pm-January 4^th 2pm

One of the main failures of blogging is that there is now way to account for time interludes passing. At some point I had actual work to do and abandoned this blog post. When my actual responsibilities at work had been discharged, I called Todd to ask him if he would be willing to cut off one of my toes. “You’re weird,” he replied.

“True,” I said, “but would you do it anyway?”

“I don’t know, is there a good reason?”

“I’m bored and I think it might increase my chances of going snow machining this winter.”

“Then no. Also, you’re insane“

“Oh come on.”

“I am not going to dignify this by arguing with you, you clearly need a nap, don’t forget to check the mail on the way home from work.”

Todd refusing to argue with me was strange bordering on shocking and highly shame inducing. I felt like a heroin addict showing up for the daily shoot-up circle only to find out all my junkie friends had run off and joined NA. I felt like I had just propositioned my nympho-maniac porn star wife and heard her say “not tonight baby, I have a headache, let’s just cuddle.” It was like saying “Todd, breath,” and having him write out “Nope” on a piece of paper while he was turning blue and passing out. It pretty much took all the shine off the removing a toe plan, if Todd won’t dignify something with a debate, then truly it must be among the the worst ideas in the history of mankind.

George Carlin once asked of people who go psychotic, why is it the voices always tell them to do stuff that is criminal and violent as opposed to just odd and socially inappropriate? Why do the voices always say “kill your whole family,” when they could suggest “take a dump on salad bar at the Ponderosa.” I have an answer for that, I think crazy complusions usually take the form of weird and socially inappropriate, but most of us tend to ignore them until they become sociopathic or otherwise dangerous. Before I started thinking about victimizing my pinkie toe, before I had a couple of days on the early morning shift, I would lay in bed at night and ponder the question, how long could I go without showering before someone (other than Todd) said something about it? A week? Two weeks? Should I wear deodorant?[5] I asked myself what would happen if I only wore my pajamas to work, especially if my pajamas got progressively more suggestive and less appropriate for outside wear each day. I pondered if it would be possible to say the word cunt during a news broadcast on purpose but make it sound like a total accident. Three weeks ago I spent an hour at work contemplating the likely consequences of peeing on the production directors chair before I went home form work—would he notice, would he say anything, would he accuse me, or would he think he did it himself? The toe thing was just the last in a series of weird notions, definitely the weirdest notion, but certainly not a lonely weird thought.

On the brightside of things, the Christmas season is also over at long last which means there will be news to cover again so my mind will be less completely bored. Also good news, PROAG returns from his annoying time off, which I believe will do great things for my sanity because other than his outer-space beliefs on how uncomfortable and binding underwear[6] is, PROAG is a shining beacon of cheerful good-naturedness. He is my favorite co-worker in my personal history of working, because I believe in the event of a nuclear holocaust, PROAG alone would be able to find positive outlook on it[7]. He also seems to immune to frustration and photo-climatological mental illness.

Or he is very skilled at disguising it—there are times that PROAG makes me wonder if there is an actually a deep, dark, bubbling cauldron of pure, unmitigated evil just inches beneath his surface. That’s probably a thought for another day. Relevant to today’s wanderings is that despite everything I’ve written here, I’m pretty sure that Alaska can not be fairly be blamed for making me crazy, Alaska should in fact be blamed for making me publicly crazy. Truth be told, I’ve always had a dark and bizarre fantasy life I’m pretty sure that’s chugging along fairly normally, which is to say weirdly, but no more or less weird than it has been in the last 10-15 years. My filter on the other hand, is shot to shit and for that Dillingham Alaska is most surely to blame.

Two options, I’m not sure which one I like best. It could the reality of 18 hours of daily darkness, mixed with extreme cold, seasoned with intermittent sleeping patters and topped off by a lack of anything good to watch on television isn’t actually making me any crazier than I’ve ever been, instead, its just wearing away at the boundary that separates the ormal part of my mind fit for public consumption from the creepy part of my mind that needs be hidden from others at all costs. If that is the case, that would be good news, since it would mean once the days inevitably get longer, the temperature warms up and Battlestar Galactica’s final season starts I should return to comparative normal, at least until the days start getting overly long again. Basically would mean I’m suffering from an eccentric case of Season Affect Disorder.

However, it occurs to me that this might be overly optimistic, the damage might be more long term than the season because I am very susceptible to peer pressure. I had only lived in MA for six months when replaced the word “very” with the word “wicked” in my speech, it took about 15 minutes of going to school in Virginia to add “y’all.” Everyone I knew in high school was a vegetarian and so I became a vegetarian, even though I really couldn’t care less about the rights of food (animals); cool kids smoked, I smoked. I have no illusions about being a shepherd, me, I’m a total sheep, and I stay in the flock for long stretches after the immediately motivating stimulus is passed. I hated being a vegetarian, but I stayed one for like two years of college until finally truly good and moral friends of mine exerted sufficient peer pressure on me to eat some ribs. I still smoke, though that might have more to do with the addictive properties of nicotine than the siren song of peer pressure.

And in Dillingham Alaska what people like to do is share. It isn’t that the details be chose to pipe up with locally are all that strange. I am nearly certain that there are people outside of Dillingham Alaska who have gotten so drunk they nearly electrocuted themselves trying to put their penis into an uncovered electrical outlet or have become so overwhelmed by pre-orgasmic passion that they peed in the bed of a one night stand , or whose first sexual experience with their future wife was on the floor of a feces smeared bathroom in a fishermen’s bunkhouse. I can envision a reality that includes women in Salt Lake City Utah who secretly entertain fantasies of getting ectopically pregnant with a profoundly retarded child so that they can know what it would be like to have an abortion. I can imagine a disgruntled town accountant in West Bugfuck Ohio who is secretly hoarding millions of dollars right now so that when he dies he can leave it all to the town he worked for on the two conditions: 1) he is stuffed by a taxidermist and 2) his naked (and fully erect) body is displayed in town hall in perpetuity. With the possible exception of the guy who told me about the time he considered having sex with a dead moose, I don’t think I’ve heard anything here that I can’t imagine hearing from somebody anyplace else. Weirdness is universal, Dillingham has not patent on it.

No, what’s special here is that I don’t have to imagine someone hoping for a pregnancy that medically requires and abortion because I can just remember the conversation I actually had with a complete stranger about it in a coffee shop six months ago. Ditto on every other example in that paragraph—I’ve heard something like all of those things while here. I have one of those faces that makes people want to tell me things for some reason, so I had heard some weird things before coming here, I can remember a particularly weird New Years some years ago when a teary friend confessed that he used to masturbate to photos of his older sister in the shower that he had secretly taken, but 90% of those confessions involved extreme consumption of alcohol and 80% involved an attempted take back the following day when sobriety settled in (I assume the other 10% just couldn’t remember what they confessed to). What’s amazing about Dillingham is that all of those things I listed were said by people who were totally sober. Some of them weren’t even said to me, they were just said loudly enough in a public place that I was able to hear it all and transcribe it for future reference. Just yesterday while I was in the center of town buying groceries, I overheard the following conversation

Guy on one side of the street, “It’s fucking cold.”

Guy on other side of the street, “I know, my stomach was upset and the shit froze to my ass this morning.”

Guy on one side of street: “That’s terrible, what did you do?”

Guy on other side of the street “slept on my stomach until it melted, then I wiped it off.”

Bonus questions, what was the grossest part of that A) shit freezing to an ass, B)Going to sleep with shit still frozen on an ass, C) Wiping it instead of rinsing it off, D) All of the above.

Privacy is just quite as valued here as it might be in other places, probably because privacy is by and large a lost cause here anyway—whatever it is, people are going to talk about it. Maybe that is why all the unfiltered sharing, you figure if people are going to know about it anyway, may as well pull the pin on it yourself. In some ways it is refreshing to live in a place where people are so willing to let their freak flag fly. It’s like living in a weird photo negative of New England, where most people wouldn’t say shit if they had a mouthful. By contrast, in Dillingham I’m pretty sure I could find someone to tell me the story of the last time they had a mouthful of shit, and also the story of the time before that. It is comforting to know that right now if I went to the bar and sat down next a total stranger and said “I’ve been thinking about cutting off my toe recently,” they probably wouldn’t have much of a reaction to that other than to maybe tell me the story of how they lost a couple of fingers while fishing.

It does make me worry thought that I may never actually be able to leave. Much the way I still say wicked, I’m concerned that my parameters of acceptable conversation have been so widely stretched that they may not contract to levels necessary to civilized discourse in the United States. I have these fears of going into future job interviews and telling stories about interesting rashes that I’ve had through out the years, or going to dinner with friends and accidentally bringing up uncomfortable topics like “Hey did you ever tell your husband Pete about that time you slept with a Canadian when you were first dating? Oh that’s still a secret? Well shit, I bet he probably hasn’t told you about that stripper he slept with in New Mexico so I say you’re even. Anyway, Pete, what do you think? Fucking Canadians right?[8]” In short, I worry that I may have to stay here because I’ve forgotten normal human interactions.

I suppose I could move to a foreign country where a limited vocabulary would stop me from describing anything to weird or asking any questions too uncomfortable. I could cut my tongue out, though that would probably cut my career as a radio journalist pretty short. I could try thinking before I speak, but I’m pretty sure that isn’t going to happen. Or I guess I could just hope that the walls within my mind will be refortified after the light cycle returns to normal and that the recent weirdness is just a temporary side effect instead of a long term personality shift.

Or I could just cut off my toe, it wouldn’t solve my problems certainly, but it would certainly be a hell of a good distraction.

Over and out.

[1] I’m not making any claim as to the validity of this thought. I’ve only seen two doctors at the hospital in my tenure here. One of them was the best doctor I’ve ever seen, the other one forgot I was there for over an hour and eventually told me to wash my pulsating and infected hand. So, mixed bag.

[2] Unreasonable first because I am not a Zoroastrian and second because Zoroastrians do not have any sort of prohibition on cross-country skiing that am aware of

[3] Snow-machine is the local term for what most of my friends and family in the lower 48 would call a snow mobile or snow-go.

[4] Someone who reads this may object that one gets warm while cross country skiing or snow shoeing, which is true, sort of. Because most people, myself strongly included, invariably put on too many layers before they set out to trek across the tundra (because they are reacting in a 100% logical way to the soul crushing cold) in the winter so warming up once you start moving isn’t a big deal. But it isn’t a pleasant warming up because it isn’t easy to stay in the pleasant temperature zone called warm. I usually overshoot warm and then move directly to hot and sweating. It is a very bad thing to sweat when you are out in temperatures that are measured in negative numbers because as soon as you stop moving, your body temp goes down and all that lovely sweat gets cold and then freezes to your skin. Being covered in sweat is gross, being covered in slushy sweat is worse.

[5] A brief tribute to WPOYIYWOF,MCIYW—ten years ago before she was a lawyer WPOYIYWOF,MCIYW was a freshmen at Wellesley college for women. Wellesley was the best school WPOYIYWOF,MCIYW got into and so she went, though if her decision were based on her temperament the problem was if there were ever a person less well suited to a single sex environment, it would have to be my friend WPOYIYWOF,MCIYW. While I never saw her as someone particularly likely to become a goth kid, she religiously attended Harvard Square Screenings of the Rocky Horror Picture Show weekly, mostly to get away from her all-girl college campus. She was not the type of girl to have female friends, particularly the type of female friend who thought going to an all girl school was a good idea. Anyway in what I can only assume was a ploy to get her extremely annoying first year roommate to stop talking to her, WPOYIYWOF,MCIYW stopped bathing. When I went up to visit in Novemberish of her first year WPOYIYWOF,MCIYW hadn’t bathed in ten or so days, and her hair was reflecting that hotness. When I suggested that maybe she should take a shower, WPOYIYWOF,MCIYW rolled her eyes and said, “no it’s cool, I don’t smell, I’ve been wearing deodorant,” to which I responded “dude deodorant isn’t the same things as soap, it isn’t killing the bacteria that make you smell, it is just muffling their smell. Shower, college and camping aren’t the same thing.” I believe she went another five days sans a shower.

[6] For those keeping score at home, panties back on here in Dillingham as the temperature falls below zero. PROAG is not happy to be wearing undies these days, though he says the uncomfortable sensation caused by the confinement of undergarments is still better than the uncomfortable sensation cause by his testicles trying to crawl back up inside of him. Can’t argue with that I suppose.

[7] “Hey guys it seems the mayonnaise hasn’t been irradiated, which means we totally have food to eat. I told you the apocalypse wouldn’t be that bad—look we can totally use the remains of Rob’s arm as a spoon to get it out with. This is great.”

[8] I do not know anyone with a husband named Pete, I do not know anyone who has ever slept with a Canadian that they weren’t dating/married to.

Christmas At Camp

2008-12-30T15:35:00.000-09:00

Once again, I’m sorry. Bad person, bad blog updater, puppy eater. All true, all disgusting, I don’t deserve to have people read this. My punishment is that I had to work the day after Christmas. People all over America and in the state of Alaska were at home with their friends, families and pets, eating left over roast beasts and playing with their toys, as well they should have been, the president and governor both made the day a national holiday and everyone in the state of Alaska is more or less employed by the state of federal government or by an organization that will give employees the day off at the drop of a hat.

I hated working the day after Christmas, one because it sucked, but two, and more importantly, it sucked pointlessly. Since the only people who were at work or out and about at all were me, two postal workers edging toward disgruntlement and a handful of stoned teenagers working at the grocery store, there wasn’t anything going on in the city except a lot of people nursing hang overs, which meant there is no news to cover. The state news took the day off, I think CNN ran a biography about Jesus or something and since nothing positive happened like a tsunami or six year old white girl going missin—December 26^th was the slowest news day of the year. If they had just given me the day off, they might have paradoxically gotten some work out of me, I would have pre-prepared a news cast. But since I had to be here, I pulled my favorite stories off the wire and read them, creating the world famous four minute newscast. I should have enough professional pride to want to avoid that sort of thing, but I was truly embittered about being at work, and life offers us few opportunities to offer meaningful protest to assuage our petty feelings of victimhood.

Forced to be in the location of my job, but unwilling to work, I filled my time admirably. I have at this point probably watched over 100 version of Justin Timberlake’s Sexy Back on YouTube, I am also pretty well caught up on internet opinions on who the last Cylon is,[1] I am disappointed and concerned at the number of people out there who think it is Dualla or Gaida, but am beginning to come around to the idea that Admiral Adama might not be a Cylon after all, though that is hard for me accept. I also managed some plotting against my family who neglected to call me on Christmas (!)[2]

With this sudden glut of time on my hands I thought, say, I should write something holiday themed for my blog since my half dozen readers might be curious about what Christmas in Alaska is like. Well actually a couple of my half dozen readers live in Alaska and so they already know, but my sister Deirdre might be curious and since she didn’t CALL me on Christmas perhaps I can just leave a log entry on it so she can be updated about my life at her leisure and convenience. I started writing this post the day after Christmas, but somehow managed to forget to finish it and leave it open on my desk at work all weekend. I imagine this would work better if I would just bite the bullet and pay for internet at my home, but that $15 extra a month is just a bridge too far for me for some reason I can’t explain.

So anyway, Christmas 2008 in Alaska….

Well actually, first summer of 1993 and 1994 in Pennsylvania, which will eventually shed light on Christmas 2008 in Alaska.

So, when I was in the pre-teenaged years of my life, my parents sent me to camp, camp Tegawitha to be specific; named for Kateria Tegawitha, a Mohawk Indian who either rowed a flower across a lake in a canoe or was the first North American Native to be declared blessed by the Roman Catholic Church—I’m not sure which, the first one I learned at camp, the second I got from the internet. At any rate, if I ever find Pinhead’s puzzle box[3], I will know better than to fuck with it because the hell dimension that it would suck me into is actually an all girls camp in the Pocanos where, apart from being mutilated in several S&M-tacular styles, I would be forced to wear a blue and white uniform and read BOP! magazine for the remainder of eternity.

I cannot blame my parents for sending me to this place. I would like to, I really would. I would like to be able to say that the summer of mockery I endured because I caught on to the leg shaving thing a year later than my peers, or the time I got my period for the first time while wearing a white bathing suit on the shore of Lynchwood lake, or the Eastern European men who sexually harassed me during my budding womanhood, or the photographs taken of me in the shower[4], or the countless lame ass singing and dancing skits I was forced to help write and choreograph, or the innumerable balls that hit me in the face during the infinite and eternal games of volleyball were somehow my parents’ faults, but I can’t. I wanted to go to camp, camp was my motherfucking idea. I suppose I could say that I was mislead by television shows like Salute Your Shorts, or “authors” like Anne M Martin, or countless movies about kids having fun and learning a lot about themselves and life while attending a sleep away camp, and, to some extent that is true, popular culture did give me a mistaken view of summer camp, but really the only person I can blame for the trauma of Camp Tegawitha is me. I knew that camp sucked totally and completely on the second day of my first year there; I knew the other children didn’t like me and wished with my whole heart to return to the eudemoniac bliss that was Camp Sunshine.[5] Though I didn’t quite yet have the academic background to properly describe it, even at the age of 13 I understood on some level that in being at camp Tegawitha I had pretty much left normal human society behind and entered into the state of nature. For those who didn’t waste their college education majoring in philosophy or political theory, political philosophers describe the state of nature as the pre-civilization state of things when human relationships were best characterized by the words anarchy, chaos and predation. Years later, when reading Hobbes Leviathan and his description of the war of all against all, I could only think to myself, “huh, must have gone to a single sex summer camp.”

I believe the single sex environment at is actually very important. My parents were concerned about protecting my virginity (probably overly so since I was truly an ugly 13 year old) and so sent me to an all girls’ camp. I assume neither of them had ever read Lord of the Flies, which might have given them some clue as to what was in store for me and my sister at girl’s summer camp. Pre-teenage and, to a lesser but noticeable extent, teenage girls have a psychology that is so cruel, vicious and vindictive that after a weekend spent exclusively in their company, most reasonable people will ask to be transferred to someplace more nurturing to the human spirit, like a gulag in Siberia for example. Seriously, people who teach middle school should be paid half a million dollars a year and receive some sort of presidential commendation at the end of 25 years service. Most people link tween cruelty to sex—boys have fist fights with each other to determine dominance and thereby look appealing to the womenletts , girls, on the other hand, try to drive their rivals to suicide thereby thinning out the competitive pool and assuring themselves a mate. I can say from firsthand experience that this is wrong, impressing members of the opposite sex probably has something to do with outrages against human decency perpetrated by tweeners but on some basic level, pre-teens, particularly girls, are cruel for the sheer pleasure of inflicting misery on others. So unwavering is the nasty streak that runs through most 12-14 year old girls that, much like putting two male hamsters in the same cage, girl on girl tween action only ever ends with one of them trying to eat the other. Experience tells me the absence of boys may even make the problem worse because a dearth pre-pubescent penis to play with leaves tweeny boppers with and unhealthy amount of time on their hands to devise increasingly sadistic, perverse[6] and demonic things to do to each other. There is no loyalty, there is no love, just an ever writhing, twisting mass of alliances forged wholly to protect one from being mocked, tormented, and photographed while nude.

Obviously, I wasn’t very good about creating and nurturing proper alliances, and was consequently miserable. But I went back. I went to Tegawitha for two years, and, loathe though I am to admit it, I went entirely voluntarily, I am sure my parents would have been ecstatic to spend the ludicrous sum of money they spent on camp on something else, like a better television. But I went back, hell I wanted to go back, because as miserable as I was I also understood that the experience was actually making me a better person.

In life the minute you hear something described as “character building,” you can immediately conclude that, whatever it is, a miserable god awful slog. In many more ways than I can remember (the human mind is wonderful about deleting those memories that are too traumatic to handle) camp Tegawitha was a miserable, god-awful slog, but it was also an experience well worth having because I learned many things. My first successful use of sarcasm was directed at my wretched bitch-goddess counselor Michelle, who made fun of my red sneakers, asking me if I was trying to make a statement or if my parents just didn’t consult me when they bought my footwear (I think the implication my parents still bought my shoes was somehow supposed to be insulting to a 13 year old girl, but my parents bought most of my clothes until I was…well I’ll get back to you on when I outgrow that) and I said, without missing a beat, “I’m sorry, you were talking to me but I was thinking about how annoying your voice is, and so I didn’t hear what you said.” Did I get in trouble? Yes, no swimming for me for like two days, but luckily I had just ruined my white bathing suit and wasn’t in the market for swimming anyway. It remains the third most worth it piece of sarcasm I ever used. More important, I learned the whole dismissive sarcasm thing works on pretty much anyone who is dumber and slower than you, which luckily most of the bitch-tykes were at camp. I also learned that any book is more interesting than talking about A)Luke Perry, B)What it would be like to give a blow-job[7], C)the level of progress one is making in their tennis game, D)toothpaste’s merits as an acne fighting agent. Also because of camp I am completely prepared for the apocalypse, particularly one that involves the undead because I read A LOT of Stephen King while there. I learned that no matter how embarrassing a thing you do in public, someone else will always follow it up with something more humiliating if you are just patient. During gymnastics I was forced to attempt to do a cartwheel off the balance beam, though I had already demonstrated several times that I was not capable of doing a cartwheel on the ground. However, Inga, our Arayan poster child gymnastics counselor, was insistent, so I tried, and pretty much did a header off the beam. I was laughed at. Luckily, my friend Claire laughed much harder than anyone else, so hard in fact, that she peed herself—and not like a little squirt got loose situation, she full on soaked her navy blue shorts with piss. My cartwheel was forgotten.

So yeah, camp was occasionally fun, I even learned to enjoy volleyball after I improved to a level that the constant balls on face onslaught ended. The fun didn’t make camp less miserable; in fact the fun was a direct result of how lousy camp really was. Anarchy, chaos and predation are, generally speaking, bad things that create suffering and misery, but it is a special flavor of misery that is slightly delicious even as it is burning down your throat.

Which leads us back to Dillingham Alaska during the holiday season. What originally got me started on the whole lengthy flashback to my life as a preteenaged wilderness scout was looking at my Christmas tree last Wednesday night. My very stolen Christmas tree. There are places in town where one can legally go and cut a tree down, perhaps you have to pay for it, perhaps you don’t, I honestly never really did any of the requisite research to figure that out. I do know that the Bristol Bay Native Association are the people in control of the local tree reserve, but since they recently failed to give me a job, I was less than enthusiastic about asking them about the rules for Christmas tree harvest. So I just didn’t and as a result we had no tree during the entire run up to Christmas. Finally at about 4 pm on Christmas Eve when the sun was going down and it was starting to snow it suddenly seemed clear to Todd and I that if we were going to be in Dillingham Alaska for the holiday, six thousand miles away from our families and friends, we were going to need some kind of token of Christmas cheer to display in the living room.. We debated the tree situation for about a half hour and decided to go into the backyard and get a tree. Well, actually we decided to into the yard in general and get a tree, but as we were walking about in the front yard our neighbor’s cat sitter pulled into the driveway, forcing Todd and I to pretend we were just walking the dogs around the yard while holding a saw. I’m not sure if she bought it.

Anyway, once the cat sitter went away, we decided it would be better to procure our tree from the backyard where it would be more difficult to see us cutting it down, since we both had the strong feeling you can’t just take a tree even if it is growing on the land you happen to be renting. After trudging in the deep snow and bickering about how high our ceiling actually is for about 45 minutes, we found ourselves something cute, reasonably sized and piney that looked remarkably full when covered with snow, so we cut it down and dragged it back to the house—at this point the sun was down and it was really snowing outside both of which helped conceal our vegetative poaching. We placed our rather snow covered tree in the bathtub where I gave it a luke warm shower to wash the snow off while Todd fought angrily with a Christmas tree stand. After several hours, some fighting and a lot of swearing we had our tree up. Todd got the lights on only to discover that half of one strand didn’t work, forcing him to re-do the whole thing several times until our light coverage was equal (my solution involved having a half lit tree), we then hung our shiny “shatter proof” (i.e. plastic) balls and stood back to revel in the Christmas spirit of it all. As we looked at our intrepid, if somewhat sad, little tree glowing in the living room, Todd commented that it reminded him of the Charlie Brown’s tree from the Peanuts Christmas Special.

To me, our tree looked a good deal better than the one that Charlie Brown initially dragged back to his friends, but somewhat worse than what Linus turned said tree into after giving it “a little love.” Instead, it reminded me of Christmas in July, a holiday we celebrated at Camp Tegawitha. Our tree this year was real, which is an improvement over camp where we decorated fake trees with crappy homemade ornaments and tinsel before eating something that I think was supposed to resemble a Christmas dinner of turkey and stuffing, though with camp food you could never quite be sure if it was really turkey, or if Jim had just found a way to dye Spam so it looked like white meat. Christmas is July was definitely lame and hoakey, but it was also undeniably a good idea because by July 25^th most everyone was pretty much climbing the walls and wishing they were at home eating real food, watching cable and wearing cool clothes. For whatever reason celebrating Christmas was just enough of a reminder of good times had at home to tide everyone over until their parents came for them three weeks later.

2008 was the second Christmas I spent in Dillingham, but the first one didn’t really count because I had t moved here 11 days prior and didn’t have much energy or interest in worrying about a holiday—I was happy, so happy ,to have an apartment, working telephone and cable on Christmas of 2007 that honestly I didn’t really give too much thought to the holiday cheer I was missing out on. Todd put a Christmasy cloth on the kitchen table, that was good enough for me. This year was different, the lead up to Christmas felt lonely, fake and sad because in my heart I knew the “real,” Christmas was spinning up to happen six thousand miles away at my mother’s house while I was stuck here trying to figure out where I am going to live since I’ve been asked to leave yet another house, attempting to make a plan for how I am going to keep my head above water financially, and, as always, trying to think of a new way to cook salmon (okay, a new way to have Todd cook salmon). Plus, as I’ve previously noted, the news totally drops dead during the holidays, making finding news five days a week less a fun activity and more a monumental pain in the ass. Also, just try buying Christmas presents when you are more than 150 air miles from the nearest mall—sure I could have used the internet, but I am unbelievably unsuccessful when it comes to ordering things over the interweb (I have yet to receive any object I have ever ordered over the internet and I have been wronged by a large swath of online ordering firms) and I somehow don’t feel like it counts as Christmas shopping unless I can hold the item for purchase in my fat little hand. All in all, I was not looking forward to Christmas this year, in fact I feel the two words that would best sum up my pre-yuletide attitude this year were bah and humbug.[8]

But the general feelings of peace and goodwill that accompany Christmas always get to me in the end.

I’m coming to realize that Dillingham Alaska is my adult life version of Camp Tegawitha. Like at camp, I spend much of my time wondering what is going on in the real world, waiting for the mail to arrive (and my mother to send CARE packages), and reading whatever books happen to fall into my lap. Functioning cable is a great luxury, there is entirely too much pressure to experience the great outdoors, I am constantly afraid that I am going to be eaten by a wild animal and, like being at camp, there is no such thing as privacy here—anything you do , have done, are thinking about doing, or could have plausibly done (even if you didn’t)will soon be known by everyone else and discussed heavily. Anarchy, chaos and predation are the background noise of life here though in fairness I am more a witness to it than a victim of it most of the time. I’ve also started talking to myself again a habit I thought I’d broken myself of some years ago, though in my adult incarnation I’ve learned that it is better to limit out loud conversations with one’s self to places like the car as opposed to places like the shower where you can be overheard and thusly mocked. The conversation I have now with myself is remarkably similar to the one I had with myself in the summer of 1994—“what the fuck am I doing here, why did I volunteer to come here, when do I get to go home?”

But Dillingham, like camp is character building and for all the drunken insanity, myopia, claustrophobia, and crippling expense of everything, I would be sad to see the whole mess fall into Bristol Bay and be consumed by salmon. Amused certainly, but sad, because Dillingham Alaska is capable of dishing up fun in a way that only truly miserable, freezing and bewildering locations can. I have never stolen a Christmas tree before, in the suburbs we tend to buy them pre-cut from farm stands, and there is something to be said for the experience of trying to sneak a 6 foot tree into your house. In other new experiences, I have never, while enjoying my Christmas morning cigarette had someone pull up to my porch on a snow machine. WTFDYDT! was our Christmas morning visitor, who explained, somewhat glumly, that his parents had ditched him for Christmas this year because they had gotten caught in the blizzards and were unable to make it back to town. Sad for him, we asked what he was doing, at which point he brightened some and pulled a beer out of his jacket, which he then cracked and proceeded to pound.

“(WTFDYDT!) it’s like ten in the morning?” I said

“Your point?” he asked

“Well, I mean, isn’t it a little early to start drinking?”

“My parents aren’t here, which means no family dinner, and I have to work tomorrow.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“If I have to go to work tomorrow, the day after Christmas, than obviously the goal is to drink as much as humanly possible today so that I am still drunk when I get to work tomorrow forcing them to send me home.”

WTFDYDT! successes in his Christmas plan were admirable, after visiting with us we traveled SSNWH? and YCAGTOGHH’s for brunch where he switched from beer to mimosas. I left our friends at that point, since I had spontaneously invited all of these people over for Christmas dinner the previous day[9] and thus had to go home and help Todd cook and clean (i.e. follow Todd around the house while he cooks and cleans asking what I should do next). Some hours later, our friends arrived, mostly sober except of course WTFDYDT!, who was possibly the drunkest I’d ever seen someone on a holiday, and I come from an Irish family where alcoholism runs rampant so really, this is high praise.

The rest of Christmas isn’t that unique, we ate a lot of food, including a road beast of some sort that Todd draped with delicious bacon, and there was some fairly impressive consumption of wine and beer, though no one got drunk except WTFDYDT!, who didn’t so much get drunk as manage to stay incredibly drunk. It wasn’t as good as being at home, but the nice thing about Christmas at camp is that it really doesn’t have to be as good as home, it just has to be a close enough stand-in so that you can remember what it was like to spend Christmas at home. A friend of mine made me a really good Christmas cd this year, and my new favorite Christmas song is John Prine’s Christmas in Prison. The opening verse more or less some’s up Christmas this year…

“It was Christmas in Prison and the food was real good…”

Dillingham often can feel like a really pretty jail, but the food was real good. The people were good too, Todd was, as always, a saint, the dogs were cute, and it snowed on Christmas eve, so on the whole there were probably worse things that could have happened to me than spending Christmas on the frontier.

Besides, this year, I got TiVo, so now I am no longer beholden to my four hours ahead shifted cable. Victory is mine.

I would like to believe I will get a blog post up before the new year, but let’s face it, I’ve been writing the Christmas post for the last 5 days so, just in case, Happy New Years to all 12 of you.

[1] A Cylon is a bio-mechanical robot on the television show Battlestar Galactica. The Cylons were made by man, they rebelled (by blowing up all the human colonies in the alternative reality this show exists in), they evolved (into beings that look like this, and because sci-fi is written for men by men, this), they look and feel human (yeah they do), some of them are even programmed to think they are human (not so much at this point in the show’s run, but for a while that was true), there are many copies (cause they’re robots), and they have a plan (which is still pretty unclear, has something to do with the one true God). For anyone who watches the show, that was really funny, no one else will get the joke but I don’t really care because the only people I take seriously watch Battlestar Galactica.

[2] Plot might be too strong a word as it implies that I actually have a plan for revenge that I am going to pursue in the future. Mostly I just thought about plotting against my family, realized that there is no plot that I can easily carry out from Western Alaska, and resolved to be bitter and sarcastic about it when I call them later. Except to my sister Mary Kate, whose aspergers syndrome makes her incapable of appreciating my most clever sarcasm anyway, but who more importantly gave me the most lovely and thoughtful Christmas gift ever, so she gets immunity in this round. Mary Kate, still on the good list; Deirdre and Mom, at risk of being dead to me.

[3] Refers to the Hellraiser movies and is properly called Lemarchand’s box.

[4] And let me offer a special shout out on this one—the only thing worse than that having photos taken of you in the shower while naked and screaming is having your “friend” from camp show that picture to her parents. And the only thing worse than having your “friend” from camp show that picture to her parents, is to have your “friend’s” father, while he is inviting you to dinner with his family, say “Hey I saw that picture of you, very nice,” while wiggling his eyebrows at you. Yes I still went to dinner, camp food is terrible, but I was mildly uncomfortable with the knowledge that everyone at the table had seen me denuded on film, and so I would like to thank you, Don father of Claire, where ever you are, for providing me with the traumatic incident that explains why I refuse to be naked in public for any reason. I didn’t streak the lawn at UVa, and it is all your fault.

[5]I can blame my parents for Camp Sunshine—since it was their desire to save money that landed me in at a day camp rub by lunatic Christian fundamentalists, but there is no blame when it come to Camp Sunshine since I will always remember it fondly as a place where I first rowed a canoe, excepted Jesus as my personal savior, learned that the Catholic Church was leading international conspiracy against the faithful by intervening between supplicants and Christ, and created my first key-chain out of lanyard. Say what you will about Christian fundamentalists—they don’t believe in evolution, they think that eleven year old girls pregnant by their father should be forced to have the baby—but they really do put on a hell of a summer camp—I don’t think I’ve ever felt better about myself than I did when I was the undefeated champion of the 200 yard dash in my age group during the summer of 1991.

[6] The is an unrelated thought, but I have found myself unable to work it into the rest of the holiday post, so I’m just going to place it where it belongs, in a footnote for the truly committed. Because I work at an affiliate I spend most of my days listening to NPR and in recent weeks I feel like I have gotten many updates from the gay front. I find every 4-6 months the national media feels it is important to keep the straights posted on what’s up with the gays, and in the wake of the Episcopal church blowing itself to hell over a homosexual bishop in New Hampshire, the people of California, particularly the black ones, voting up prop 8 and Rich Warren being invited to goose step his way into the inauguration (not my phrase, taken from a favorite liberal wing-nut blog of mine) I’m to understand the gays aren’t feeling happy these days. This thought in only tangentially connected to that. I have often wondered why in debates where someone on the boo-gay side says homosexuality is unnatural and against God’s plan why someone on the yay-gay side doesn’t point out that in any instance when human beings are put into a single sex environment they resort to homosexuality in about ten minutes. The Navy, boys boarding schools, girl’s catholic schools, prison, the seven sister schools, the boy scout’s (yes that’s right, 9 out of 10 eagle scouts you know have had a penis in their mouth at least once), all girl’s/boy’s summer camps—these places all have one thing in common—they turn people gay in about the amount of time it takes to unzip your pants in a closet/sleeping bag/bunk/cell, etc. I’m just saying clearly it’s a natural impulse people have.

[7] And you know what, clearly many of the young ladies I had conversations about “what would it be like…” already knew exactly what it was like, and that is not counting that large number of them who probably could have extrapolated what a blow job was going to be like from the copious experience they were having as cunning linguists at camp.

[8] Though interestingly, I found it highly insulting when other people described me as Scrooge or Grinch like this year, which, due to my terrible holiday attitude many people did. My friends SSNWH? and YCAGTOGHH invited me to go get a tree, legally and everything, but I declined due to the pre-Holiday funk, causing much protestation that I was intentionally ruining my own holiday for no reason other than spite felt towards the universe writ large. I didn’t speak to these people for a week. I also briefly considering smacking a cop, who expressed surprise at my good mood on Christmas Eve, noting that he had me figured as the “bah humbug,” type.

[9] Todd is, incidentally, a saint; an occasionally annoying saint, a judgmental saint, and saint that is prone to get mad and yell, but a saint nonetheless because Todd hates parties, hates preparing for parties and particularly hates parties that spring up at the spur of the moment that do not allow for enough planning. I am constantly springing holiday related parties on Todd because before I can stop myself, think or consult him, I invite people over for holiday meals. Since I do not cook and am lousy cleaner, this means I essentially assign Todd to prepare a celebration that he in no way wants to have. Though he truly hates it when I do this, and usually yells at me fairly prodigiously for AWAYS doing this to him on holidays, he also always bears up under the strain and puts together a really nice celebration because even though he hates these things, he knows I like them for some reason. I love him, and in many ways to do not deserve him.

The Back Log of My Thoughts, Part I

2008-12-04T17:17:00.000-09:00

So let’s just get the unpleasant reality of the situation out in front, I’m the worst blogger in the world. I am like a six year old with a puppy, I played with it for a week, then I let it starve to death in the basement. By six year old, I mean evil six year old who is going to go on to serial killer status. My puppy bloggy here would still be starving in the basement but I saw Arianna Huffington on the Daily Show and she talked me into getting back to the blogging. Or at least I think that is what she did, actually I never have even the dimmest diddling idea what Arianna Huffington is talking about because I think she sounds like a cartoon character and that makes her hard to take seriously. But her new book seems to be called blogging, which reminded me of the incredible shame I feel for not updating my blog.

But really this is your fault. Not nearly enough of you made comments, and knowing that people are reading something is the best way to get me to write something. I have no interest in doing anything more challenging that watching tv and eating cookies when I get home from work, some nights I don’t even smoke because I am too lazy to lift my lighter and BAH has been singularly unwilling to light my cigarettes for me. Thinking and writing things down in my spare time is a big step if my sister Deirdre is the only person reading them, because I could just write her email[1] It was only popular pressure by Blair Reeves, who reminded me that I live in Alaska and have nothing better to do that made me write this post. I’m lazy, but also attention seeking which will overwhelm my natural propensity towards doing nothing.

Okay, this is also my fault. The problem with not writing stuff down is you start accruing this weird backlog of half written blog posts on subjects that are truly fascinating (to me anyway, probably not to anyone else, but then, they can start their own online journal to talk about the things they find interesting) and then I move on to the next thing, but don’t want to give the first thing up. So I am getting over it today. Gear up, I gotta a lot of posts fragments to get through here, this may take a while, there will be footnotes, but I promise more sensiblely sized posts in the future in a more timely manner.

So here’s some stuff that happened since my last blog post.

1) The people of Alaska in a fit of what can only be called blind stupidity voted Ted Stevens out of office. I hope nobody else liked having a job, because we all about to loose ours.

2) I turned 28 years old.

3) Barrack Obama won the presidency of the United States: I do feel a tiny bit like I’ve accomplished something by being in a nation that elected an African American. Granted, I didn’t vote for him—as is my normal custom, I threw my vote away with a third party candidate (Alaskan Independence Party represent!!! Todd Palin and I are kicking it secession style.), but I do feel pretty good that 50 years ago Barrack Obama wouldn’t have been allowed to eat lunch at the Woolworth’s counter in Greensboro North Carolina and now he could wipe Greensboro off the face of the Earth if he so desired (and you should president –elect Obama, you really should, Greensboro North Carolina is a boil on the ass of America and you have the power to lance it) . However, I kind of also feel like the self congratulation got sort of out of control since the president elect is A) half-white, B) straight outta Kenya not Compton, C) smarter than everyone else he’s ever met, D) hot,. I think we should protect ourselves from dislocating the collective shoulder patting ourselves on the back here—in the end we elected a Harvard educated lawyer whose is both really well spoken and really, really good looking—it’s a step, just not that big a step. Also, in case anyone is wondering, everything is still totally fucked and unraveling at a high rate of speed more every day. I am pretty sure we are hours away from media reports of dogs and cats laying down together and total anarchy breaking out, so I think it would be best if we all avoided happiness or enthusiasm for a little while, at least until January 20^th because the Old Testament God is currently running the universe, and my understanding is that if you aren’t crawling on your belly, you are annoying him with your behavior. .

4) Someone didn’t like my web-blog and was actually offended by it. This person clearly doesn’t know me at all because if they did they would know that for me, this blog is like the ABC Family Network version of my thoughts because my mother reads it. Seriously, I am like a deranged lunatic, I think horrible crass and occasionally violent thoughts for like 19 hours a day. I haven’t even used the phrase “douche nozzle,” “cum dumpster,” or (my personal favorite) “cum guzzling gutter slut,” yet to describe anyone, and, honestly, I use one of those three phrases at least twice a day conversationally.[2] This is the comment I got from one very brave reader.

“If you're a News Director for this small town in Alaska, it's hard for me to take you seriously. Your outlook on the people of the community is rude. Do you have any respect for the people you broadcast to?”

-Anonymous

That comment goes with the “A Bra Is Optional…” post if you would like to read the original text. Initially I was going to dedicate a whole post to responding to anonymous, heretofore to be called Douche Nozzle (DN), but then I got kind of lazy about it, so I am going to hit the highlights of what I would have said. Because this is the condensed version, I will have to really stuff as much offensive into each sentence as I can; Douche Nozzle, if you are reading this, I suggest you maybe get some Vaseline, this may chafe your sensibilities some.

DN, I appreciate that you don’t take me that seriously, but that is okay because as far as I am concerned you are worthless cowardly fetid pussy with about as much spine as Sonya Blade after Sub Zero has completed his finishing move.[3] I considered initially calling you a faggot because you strike me as the sort that is permanently offended on behalf of groups to which you are not a member, but I imagine that hardcore ethnic or social slurring will burn your eyes too much and stop you from reading the rest of this, and I would really hate to waste a good rant. Besides, you are a woman, you are almost certainly a woman, because men get jokes, and women have vaginas, which are like caves where laughter goes to die.[4] I feel fetid pussy is a better insult to a woman than faggot, but still leaves me room to escalate to cunt later as it becomes appropriate. I may in fact be rude, vile, insensitive, unclean, cruel and just flat out plain old disgusting at times, but I’m at least confident enough to put my name by anything I write. You, DN, are assertive enough to write something on a my page, but are so overwhelmingly pusseo-fagtacular that you can’t sign a name to it. This makes it hard for me to take you seriously as a reader.

Also, you’re dumb, not like regular poor person who votes republican dumb, but like little tarded kid licking the windows on the short bus dumb. You don’t find it hard to take me seriously as a News Director because I assume you aren’t all that familiar with my work as a reporter. If interested, you can check out www.kdlg.org and click the news page—you can hear me both read news broadcasts and listen to the stories I do. It’s really motherfucking boring, but not disrespectful of anyone except maybe Walter Cronkite who is rolling over in his grave[5] for having to share the title Anchor/Reporter with someone like me. What you mean is you find it hard to take me seriously as a commentator. Which is fine, since clearly the goal of this blog isn’t to be taken seriously, if it were, I probably wouldn’t have dedicated a day to writing about the fact that that dirty fucking Jew PROAG doesn’t wear underwear (for the interested, panties off once again here in Dillingham as the temperature here has risen above freezing recently—still gross) my goal is to make people laugh. As stated earlier, you are a woman, and as such don’t really understand how humor works, which is okay, not your fault you were born with ovaries or that your parents didn’t raise you to understand that no one cares what a moron thinks, but as a quick tutorial, there is a species of joke that is based off of exaggeration and overstatement of facts—it’s funny because it is an inflated version of what is true, generally taken out of context in a way to make it seem particularly absurd. That may be too theoretical, try this: a kick in the balls is always a laugh generator, mean is funny, and a way to turn up the volume on a joke is to crank up the mean to the point of ridiculousness. As for the question of my respecting the community—I absolutely respect the people here, life is hard, the challenges are unique and they are able to do things that people from the suburbs are wholly incapable of. However respect doesn’t mean you approve of absolutely everything about a person or group, and moreover, being unwilling to point out anything bad, ridiculous or funny about a person or group isn’t being respectful of them, it is being incredibly patronizing, which in itself is insanely disrespectful. Again that might be too theoretical for you, try this, you’re a cunt and no longer worth my time.

I hope that generates some new complaints, hopefully from those brave enough to sign their names.

5) Some really sad shit happened because I have superpowers. Last week in the lead up to Thanksgiving, news pretty well dropped dead in Dillingham Alaska. This caused me to wish, out loud, several times for something tragic to happen so I would have something to cover. In fact, I think I threw the chief of police out of my office with a recommendation that he go water board someone in the local jail on suspicion of being a terrorist. That night two eleven year old kids were desiring to go take a steam (I will write more on local steaming in a future post, for now suffice to say that near as I can tell a steam bath is just an excuse of adults to sit around together in the nude without having to all the trouble of organizing an orgy) so they decided to light the family steam bath. Being 11, they didn’t understand that gasoline is not the right thing to use to light a steam bath, and, as a result, they pretty much blew the damn thing up, and themselves in the process. They survived, though my understanding is that both are rather seriously burned. That night I learned an important journalistic lesson, the quick way to annoy the fire chief is to wander around a fire scene with a recorder while he is trying to instruct people on how best to fight a blaze. That was the only important lesson I learned that night, by the next day, I was back to bemoaning the lack of tragedy as an unreasonable burden the news department was being forced to shoulder—noting, again, outloud “is it too much to ask for someone to die tragically?”

As it turns out, no, that was not too much to ask. On Wednesday, the night before Thanksgiving, moments away from eating dinner at home, the phone calls started about the latest tragedy, a 21 year old girl who had frozen to death on the Tundra. Well, to be totally accurate, the girl had not yet frozen to death by the time I got the call. She was found by a skier early in the afternoon, around 1, lying in a snow drift with a body tempreture in the 70’s. A three year old child once survived a body temperature of 63 degrees, but, in general, an adult won’t survive anything below 86. God bless the EMT’s and doctors here in town, they made truly heroic efforts to revive this girl and brought her to the hospital where they spent something like 6 hours trying to thaw her out and wake her up, but not all heroic efforts have happy endings associated with them, and they didn’t succeed. She was pronounced dead at 9 pm.

I don’t really know why she was out on the tundra in the middle of the night freezing to death, there are a lot of rumors about it and probably some pretty good theories involving the wrong combination of illicit substances and a decision to take a walk when it was 8 below outside. The thing that more sticks out about this is that this story isn’t all that uncommon here. This particular ending is a little bit novel, I’m told no one has actually frozen to death out on the tundra for like 25 years—but in the year that I have lived here there have been three accidental deaths like this—the other two involved a guy freezing to death under the city dock, and a guy falling off a boat and drowning in the harbor—and something like 11 sexual assaults. The story always follows a similar pattern---folks went out, got drunk, went someplace else, got drunker and maybe did some drugs, and then someone, usually a woman, got to her limit and sort of lost touch with the group. For whatever reasons whatever it is that makes everyone here everyone else’s cousin doesn’t seem to make people particularly inclined to watch out for the safety of their very intoxicated friends and so people get lost, and a lot of times bad things happen as a result of that. This time, the bad thing was a 21 year old EMT died and apparently left hundreds of grieving people behind in her wake. I wish I had something funny to say here, but I don’t cause I can’t think of anything funny in such a sad situation. I can think of something that is sort of unpopular to note, which is though what happened is sad, I wish locally people would stop calling it a tragedy. A tragedy is when fate intervenes to rob the world of someone in such a way that no one could have predicted or prevented it . John F Kennedy getting assassinated is a tragedy. When the variables that lead up to a death were things completely in the hands of the person who died on the other hand, it isn’t a tragedy, it is just a sad situation—John F Kennedy Jr crashing his plane into Martha’ s Vinyard because he flew a plane at night when he didn’t know how to read the dials is a good example of this. Tragedies aren’t in our hands to control, sad situations often are—perhaps less people here would get lost if we stopped looking at the bad things as tragic.

Minimally, I don’t wish for bad things to happen anymore.

Which seems like as good a point as any to end this dispatch from the third circle. Tomorrow, in backlogged thoughts part II I will explore what would lead a person to pee in a bathtub when there was a perfectly good outside available, question the wisdom of putting a dead body on a bed in an apartment that someone else will have to rent someday, and resolve the long debated issue, do you get in more trouble for head-butting a cop or for spitting on one.

Peace Out.

[1] I don’t, of course, because I am a useless lazy sack of shit unworthy of such a cool little sister, but I the fact remains I could write to just Deirdre instead of the whole internet, which would probably cause me to get into less trouble in my life.

[2] I just want anyone reading this to take a moment to consider that before I was a news reporter in Deadwood, I was a youth minister at a church. I think this more or less summarizes the harm that all that little boy diddling by Catholic priests did to religious institutions everywhere—clearly we live in an era of diminished expectations when it comes to what type of person we will let off children religious instruction—insofar as you aren’t fucking them, pretty much anything is acceptable. On the upside, all of my former youth groupers are now college and military service age, and I believe that the language I taught them will serve them well at frat parties and naval bases around the country. Also, I gotta believe that “treat yourself like you have some value, you don’t have to be some jock’s cum dumpster,” is probably a life lesson that will stick with them better than “wait until you’re married to have sex.”

[3] Mortal Kombat reference for all non-nerds.

[4] Lesbians are, of course, the exception to the vagina as a mausoleum for laughter rule, since lesbians to a woman are fucking hilarious. I attribute this to the fact that they could give a hot god damn if men think they’re appealing. I don’t actually think it is women’s fault that we usually aren’t that funny, it’s just that men don’t value being made to laugh by their girls as much as they value girls who laugh at their jokes, which means funny women are A)gay, B) (like me) funny looking enough that they know their appealing to a niche market no matter what and go with being funny, or C) hot enough that it really doesn’t matter what their personality is like one way or the other.

[5] Yes, I know Walter Cronkite isn’t dead.

There Are 12 People In Washington DC Who Can Suck It

2008-10-27T15:40:00.001-08:00

I know it is sort of lame to dedicate two blog postings to Ted Stevens in a week, but all day I have been getting all kinds of emails from people who very smugly ask me “So are you still voting for Ted Stevens now that he has been convicted of seven felony counts?”

So let me put this one to bed, yes I am still voting for Ted Stevens, as many times as humanly possible (gotta love Alaska, where in our last primary 25 Anchorage residents voted twice using the ever cagey and clever method of filling out an absentee ballot and voting at their local polling place). Mother-fuck the DC jury, the department of justice, the bunk ass crooked prosecutors who tried him and everyone who is jumping ship to vote for Mark Begich.

And you know what folks, I wouldn’t be so sure that all of those people who say that are voting democrat now that Uncle Ted has been convicted actually mean it. No one wants to say, when a microphone is in front of their face, that they seriously plan to vote for someone who has been convicted of seven felony counts. Alaskans have taken it in the pooper for the last few months with the entire nation pretty writing us off as a bunch of ignorant hillbillies from the frozen backwoods led by a gun toting, semi-literate, religious fanatic Barbie doll. And don’t get me wrong, I get why people think Sara Palin is a gun toting, semi-literate religious fanatic—she is actually a good deal smarter and more politically savvy than most people give her credit for, but that has pretty much not been on display at all during this campaign and so everyone is more or less justified in thinking she is an idiot. Thinking that everyone in the state she comes from is also an idiot however, is a little unfair. George W Bush is an idiot that doesn’t mean everyone from Texas is an….okay bad example. The point is everyone is Alaska is not an idiot, I don’t care what the Daily Show says (yes, a stranger is just a friend you haven’t thrown up on yet is hilarious, and also possibly something that should be in the running for the state motto of Alaska, but still dude come on) John Stewart is not always right. So faced with the fact that Alaska is becoming the new West Virginia, do you really think anyone today is going to say that they actually plan to vote for Ted Stevens—seriously there are now 15 reporters here for every resident, and as much fun as it is to see yourself on TV generating a headline that goes something like this “Alaskans Plan to Vote for Felon: They Say They Don’t Care if He’s In Jail, He’s the Only Senator They’ve Ever Known,” we are all getting a little bit tired of looking like idiots all the time—dontcha know, you betcha.

So sure, the polls today are doubtlessly going to show that Democrat mayor of Anchorage Mark Begich is pulling way ahead, because everyone is obligated at this point to sound the bell on Ted’s political career. However, before the Democrats start counting Ted’s seat toward their invincible 60 seat majority they should probably take just a moment to think about some things. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, Ted Steven’s is a tiny, wrinkled ATM of federal dollars for the state of Alaska. When people settle into the privacy of the voting booth they are going to remember the women’s shelter Ted Steven’s built in their town, or the road, or the funding of Ilheap, or the funding for native health care, or the funding for their school, harbor project or new airport. Hell maybe they are just going to remember the time their kid needed a recommendation to go to college and Ted Stevens wrote it, or they’ll remember that Ted Stevens was at their wedding. Point is, there are a lot of people here who have a lot to thank Uncle Ted for, and they might say to themselves when they settle into the privacy of a voting booth, “well shoot, I know he’s a convicted felon, but I really like him, and so I’m going to vote for him cause it is the loyal thing to do, and after all, everyone else is going to vote for Begich anyway. “

So I think there is still a good chance he will win. Will he serve? That is probably a different question entirely, since I think it is quite possible the Senate will move to impeach him over this conviction, which is when things get pretty interesting. If Ted get’s booted then (and I’m not totally clear on the law on this in Alaska yet, if someone out there knows it would be helpful) either the governor will appoint a new senator or there will be a run-off. I think it is safe to assume that Caribou Barbie is not going to be elected VP next week (though really, with the Democratic party it is almost never safe to assume anything since we have shown a gift over time for snatching defeat from the jaws of nearly any victory—yes John Kerry I am looking at you) and if Ted’s senate seat is suddenly open I believe she will resign and let governor Parnell appoint her to the Senate, or she will run in a special election and likely kick Begich’s ass all over the court. Either way, voting for Ted Steven next week does run some risk of furthering Sara Palin’s political career, which is certainly a frightening prospect.

It is not one that will daunt me however. No, I am voting for Ted Stevens. Yes he’s old, yes he’s crazy, no he doesn’t really understand what the internet is, and yes he is most certainly a convicted felon. However, most of Alaska is populated by convicted felons, and in a state with almost no regulation of guns, drugs and sexual violence I just can’t even pretend I care about whether or not a senate disclosure form was properly filled out. I just don’t give a crap, I do care however the Ted is dedicated, that he truly works for the state, and that he’s just too quotable to let go. And as far as I can tell, the trial was a farce, the jury is retarded, the prosecution cheated and the conviction is a total crock.

That’s just my opinion, I could be wrong, but I’m not.

A Bra Might Be Optional, Underwear Not So Much

2008-10-26T13:36:00.000-08:00

Being gay just doesn’t have the punch it used to. Back in the day, coming out of the closet really packed a rhetorical punch--if you were looking for squeals of surprise, jaws all agape, and a lot of conversation about yourself nothing could get you there faster than “I’m gay.” Ten years ago one of my high school teachers came out as gay. Well to be totally accurate, I never actually heard him utter the words, “I’m gay,” because I had earphones on at the time. I put the earphones on because Molly Sjoberg had sat down next to me, and I feared she was gong to start talking to me, and it seemed important to look busy with something wholly consuming like listening to Bon Jovi. Molly, as it turned out, didn’t really want to talk to me at all, she wanted to ask Mark if he was seeing anybody. Now teacher Mark was a cutey at age 27, but a thin, bespectacled, neat looking kind of sensitive cutey that screamed loudly “it’s fun to stay at the YMCA.” and so it really seemed to me that Molly was barking up the wrong tree. Granted, barking up the wrong tree was sort of Molly’s thing in high school—from the head shaving, to wearing the same outfit everyday for a year, to the slipping her brother a mickey so she could throw a party while her parents were out of town, to taking penicllin when she was sick (that doesn’t probably sound like it belongs on the list, but Molly and family were Christian scientists who believed that illness was a sign of faithlessness and that medication was a one horse open sleigh to hell), to pretty much anything Molly did for about two years—if it was some how iconoclast and inappropriate, she was game. She is the second person I have ever met who deserved the nickname WFDYDT! which means on that faithful night it was equally likely she was trying to come on to Mark or just old fashioned out him, there is no way to ever be sure.

Anyway, Molly antics could be entertaining, but they also got pretty god damn old quickly, because there is only so much avante garde shit a person can do before it just becomes a crushing drag to talk to them since they make you feel boring and uncreative because it has never even occurred to you to try to induce a miscarriage by using advil and allergy pills. At some point in my junior year I realized it was just better to be doing something else before Molly started talking, and so, sadly, because I immediately went to the haven of prophylactic hair metal when Molly opened her mouth, I missed the big reveal. Bummer. However, at some point I look around me and realized that the entire editorial staff of the literary magazine was sitting around the same table with WFDYDT !(HSE)[1] , Mark the gay teacher and myself. Now at this point it occurs to me that half the table looks like they just found out there mother is dying and the other half looks like they just found out there mother is actually Cher, which means WFDYDT !(HSE)’s antics have yielded something amusing and exotic. So I took off my headphones to determine we were in the middle of an extensive conversation about Mark’s homosexuality.

And because this was ten years ago, when being gay still meant something, it was a really, really extensive conversation. I remember tears, hugs, going to the guidance office to express our feelings about the issue, letters being exchanged—it was a big deal.

Now, meh, gay is boring, I doubt you could even secure a hall pass over a gay teacher in Duxbury Massachusetts anymore. We’ve all be inundated with gay stuff—Will and Grace, Dancing with the Stars, the Backstreet Boys, the entire programming line-up of the Bravo Channel (yes Queer Eye and Project Runway, I’m talking about you) and so now gay isn’t really surprising. Gay is, frankly, passé. By half-way through college when all the “sensitive” guys from my high school started coming out of the closet, I couldn’t even pretend to be surprised anymore. “Really, that guy? That guy who was totally into theater and poetry who never met a party that wasn’t an excuse to wear a dress, wig and make-up in public, that guy turned out to be gay? The hell you say, I’m shocked, shocked.” Pretty much ditto with the girls, what ended up being more interesting with them was who stayed gay after graduating from Smith/Wellsley/ Barnard etc. Once gay went off the list of things that could really shake up a family Thanksgiving, I was just a little bit sad, fearful that no one would ever be able to tell me anything about their life-style that truly shocked me again.

Oh was I wrong.

God-bless Dillingham Alaska.

Now there are probably several life-style choices I should find more shocking—alcoholism as a calling, sexual relations with relatives, passing around drunk women like poorly rolled joints—but honestly, though those are all disturbing behaviors, they are also things that I can find in my personal gene pool; I fail to be shocked by them. No what if find shocking is PROAG and his choice not to wear underwear.

Yup, my co-worker goes commando, and apparently has been doing so for some time. Because, thankfull, we keep our pants on at work, I had no idea that PROAG was so deep down weird until yesterday when SBYCCATOHSH and I were getting coffee at the local shop. SBYCCATOHSH was afflicted by a hangover, probably owing to the fact that he, PROAG and WFDYDT! decided that in celebration of Friday they were going to kill an 18 pack of beer, a handle of Canadian whiskey and a fifth of rum—this was the drinking that they will admit to, so I would say probably increase that by a third. Unsurprisingly this left the three of them legless with liquor, and vomiting in tandem in WFDYDT!’s sink (SBYCCATOHSH), toilet (WFDYDT!) and off his balcony (PROAG). The next day, SBYCCATOHSH and WFDYDT! were crawling around town looking like something that Death brought with him in a suitcase, while PROAG was bouncing sprightly about, eating chicken and inquiring as to how much he drank and how he got home.

So SBYCCATOHSH is at the coffee shop, staring blankly at his beverage when he finally intoned “I hate and I hope he dies,” to which I helpfully respond, “really, cause he’s eating fried chicken enjoying his day, maybe you should aspire to be more like him, Boozy McHangover.’ SBYCCATOHSH looks at me with disgust on his face and says “I refuse to be like that dirty, disgusting not underwearing man.” I am confused so SBYCCATOHSH goes on to explain, loudly in a coffee shop full of pre-teenaged girls, that PROAG does not wear underwear, that he never wears it and that he doesn’t believe in it. He also more fully fleshed out that this makes PROAG dirty and should obligate him into steam cleaning all of the furniture he’s ever sat on at someone else’s house. Initially I just don’t believe SBYCCATOHSH because everyone wears underwear, so he goes on, wondering aloud about whether or not PROAG has a callous on his pee pee (cause of the zipper), whether he washed his pants enough (probably not) and what his new girlfriend’s reaction was the first time she unzipped his pants and found herself immediately handling all of the goods (“oh my god, you’re a freak.”) and, unsurprisingly, we are encouraged to leave the coffee shop

I still did not believe SBYCCATOHSH so I called PROAG and said ‘I know this is going to sound like the beginnings of a dirty phone call, but I am entirely serious about this question, do you wear underpants?” to which he responded “yeah I actually just started yesterday because it is really cold out.” Confused I pressed “ but before yesterday, you didn’t wear undies of any sort,” to which he responded “nope, I haven’t worn underwear in several years.”

“ what do you mean you haven’ t worn underwear, everyone wears underwear, you’re a freak.”

“I am not, lots of people don’t wear underwear, there is no point to it, it is a totally superfluous piece of clothing.”

“But dude, if you don’t wear underwear the inside of your pants essentially becomes you underwear, which is gross and means you have to wash them like all of the time.”

“Yeah I know you would think that would happen, but nah, not really, I only have to wash my pants once a month.”

“Dude, you don’t have to wash your pants ever, but if you don’t wear underwear you should wash your pants like once a day.”

“I don’t see why this is such a big deal.”

“Dude, this is like finding out the person I share a cubicle with worships Satan in their free time.”

“Well would it be better or worse if I worshipped Satan?”

“This isn’t a better or worse issue, they are equally weird. We work at a school for Christsake PROAG, you can’t go parading around not wearing underwear.”

“I wear pants, it isn’t like I’m exposing myself to kindergarteners.”

“What if something happened to your pants while you were at work, things could get dicey?”

“What could happen to my pants at work?”

“Bandits.”

“Yes, then I would be totally up a creek, luckily that doesn’t seem like much of a risk. What was a problem was when I was traveling and would get holes on the inner leg and crotch of my pants—it was very important to keep the holes sewed up.”

“ that just isn’t right, fellow travelers shouldn’t risk seeing your testicles.”

“Well I wear underwear now, because it is cold, maybe I will just get into the habit and forget to stop wearing them in the spring.”

“I hope so , I really hope so.”

PROAG is not the first person I have ever known who believed that underwear is more an option than duty, in college TDSTLOLI dated a girl who didn’t believe in underwear but who did believing in wearing a skirt everyday. This lead another friend of mine to comment “I just don’t know if there is a good way to tell TDSTLOLI that I am getting tired of seeing his gilfriend’s pussy?” However I wasn’t shocked that this girl didn’t wear underwear because she was an exhibitionist who was pretty clearly fucked 8 ways to the weekend most of the time, and not wearing underwear was pretty low on the list of freaky deaky shit she was into. PROAG on the other hand seems by all accounts to be a rather normal person, not an exhibitionist anyway, who has a job, a girlfriend and a grocery list. These types of people should be wearing underwear, they should not see it as optional.

Since the great panties revelation, I have begun to look at people in a new light. I’ve started to wonder I am surrounded by people who aren’t wearing underwear. I want to ask, but I feel that it is rude to just come out with, like would ultimately make me look weird, weather or not they were or were not wearing underwear. I guess I don’t have to worry about it right now, the winter is setting in, the days don’t get much warmer than 30 now, so whatever ones philosophical beliefs on the subject, we are all pretty much wearing them at this point, to literally keep from freezing our collective asses off.

I guess the good news is there are still lifestyle choices I can be shocked by, and therefore judge. Makes me feel better about my place in the world.

[1] WFDYDT!(HSE): What the Fuck Did you Do that (High School Edition) or Molly Sjoberg. You may wonder why I bothered to protect other with nicknames on this blog, but not her and the reasons are three-fold: 1) I don’t like her, 2) I doubt she’s ever going to read this 3) if someone she knows reads it and tells her about it, I don’t care if she’s mad.

We All Pretty Much Work for Ted Here

2008-10-23T15:45:00.002-08:00

Ted Steven’s fate is now in the hands of a jury of his peers. Sort of.

Ted Steven’s fate is currently in the hands of one white woman, 7 black women, 3 black men and one Hispanic guy which is one might argue is not a jury of his peers since the number of minorities on said jury is approximately the same number that live in the state of Alaska (not counting Native Alaskans, of course). Which isn’t to say that Alaska, particularly the rural town of Dillingham isn't looking for a stronger minority presence, we did recently see our black population double when our new program director Mike came on board, bringing out grand total of permanent local African Americans (as opposed to seasonal African Americans who come up to fish or work in canneries) up to two. Interestingly, when PROAG when to get Mike from the airport, the town’s other black guy, BROW, was on the same flight and got off the plane first. This lead Adam to walk up to BROW and ask, “hey I’m Adam, are you…” but before he could finish BROW said “No, I’m not, he’s behind me.”

Some in Alaska have claimed that it is somehow highly unfair that Steven’s jury is so unlike the make-up of the population. Myself, I’m more in the school of thought that says that no one cries for the accused black car-jacker that somehow ends up in front of a jury that's full of soccerr moms who drive Honda Odyssey’s and so turn-about is pretty much fair play where Ted Stevens' jury is concerned.

Ted Stevens' trial on the other hand, that is a whole bunch of bullshit. When I first moved to Alaska, I made fun of the near religious fealty that these people seem to pay to the octogenarian senator. There is one international airport in all of Alaska, want to take a guess what it is called (if you guess Ted Steven’s International Airport, you win a prize). I would say about 1/3 of the people I meet here have at least one photograph of themselves and Senator Stevens framed somewhere in their house (I am not yet one of these people, not because I don’t have the photo, but because I lack a frame) and I have heard more than one person utter the following phrase, “Ted Stevens, I love Ted Stevens, I wouldn’t have no job or health insurance were it not for Ted Stevens—I would vote for him even if he was in jail.” Yes I made fun of this once, but not anymore...

I must admit the truth. I love Ted Stevens, and I will vote for him even if the jury convicts him of seven felonies. I feel now, I am truly Alaskan.

The trial, for anyone who hasn't been following it is, in two words, pretty stupid. The government contends that Ted Stevens received about a quarter-million dollars in gifts from people he shouldn’t have been receiving gifts from at all (mostly an oil service company VECO and their CEO Bill Allen) and then not reporting them on his Senate disclosure forms as he is legally bound to do. No one is accusing him of accepting bribes mind you—no one contends that Stevens directly showed any favor to anyone because he received all of the gifts—rather the gifts were a form of soft influence whose existence Stevens tried to conceal (and as well all learned from Richard Nixon, it is not the crime, it’s the cover-up). Is Stevens guilty? Probably, insofar as I am pretty sure he got some stuff as a gift that he didn’t’ report. Should he lose his office over it? Probably not, since it seems the crime is more stupid than infamouns—it doesn’t really seem that Stevens was trying to get away with anything all that interesting here, it looks more like he is more or less a dumbass who should have hired a better accountant.

Stupid crime, however, is something of an Alaskan specialty. Since I work for the local news, stupid crime is more or less the highlight of my life. Every two or three weeks something that is totally illegal and also totally awesome happens and I get to read about it live on the air. Sometimes I am interested in what I am reading, sometimes I am reading on auto-pilot, but every now and again I am reading while actively trying to surpress a giggle, and these are the greatest days of them all.

Some Highlights from the annals of Stupid Crime…

Dillingham police and the Alaska state troopers spent much of early Tuesday morning chasing a driver on a rampage.

At approximately 1:30 in the morning Tuesday September 30^th, DPD received a call from 26 year old August Johnson who reported that he had been drinking and threatened to roll his truck if he were not allowed to speak with a specific Dillingham Police officer.

Johnson allegedly called back several times, and began driving up and Down D Street at a high rate of speed, even once striking the curb outside the police department.

As the situation escalated, Johnson began broadcasting, using a specialized radio, over VHF channels and the police only frequency, taunting police and United States coast guard officials by threatening to flip his truck, ram a patrol car, and take others, presumably citizens or police personnel, out with him. Johnson also reportedly said quote “Seidl, catch me if you can,” referring to Dillingham Police office Charlie Seidl.

Attempts were made to stop Johnson in front of Dillingham’s post office, however, he would not turn off his car or get out of it, and continually repositioned it in such a way that he could easily accelerate rapidly into officer Seidl’s vehicle. After an extensive game of what court documents referred to as “cat and mouse,” where in officer Seidl was forced to reposition his car six time to avoid being struck, Johnson took off on D street, extending his middle finger at police personel.

Johnson then allegedly traveled towards Kanakanak road, stopping and accerating rapidly and randomly as he went. When he later turned onto Aleknigek Lake road, state troopers were called in to assist in the chase. During this time, Johnson allegedly continue his communication with DPD dispatch, carrying on with threats to wreck his own vehicle and take someone out with him, along with a new threat to drive his car off a mountain. Aleknagik lake road was closed for an hour during this time to ensure public safety.

At approximately 6 am, approximately 4 hours after the beginning of this events, Johnson was taken into custody near Dillingham’s City limits on the lake road without further incident. He faces 11 separate criminal counts in connection to this event, including two counts of terroristic threatening, a class C felony, one count of assault 3, a class C felony, one count of failure to stop, a Class C felony, four counts of reckless driving, a Class A misdemeanor, one count of criminal mischief, a class A misdemeanor, one count of a false report, a class A misdemeanor, and a single count of disorderly conduct, also a class A misdemeanor. We’ll bring you more on this story as it becomes available.

That is, word for word, what I read on the air, I did not laugh once. That one was fun because no one actually got hurt, the idiot involved was arrested and has since been indicted on all of the counts that he is accused of, which to me seems a bit excessive since being a world class pain in the ass and being a terrorist seem to be somewhat different things. However, just as often, people get hurt by stupid crime, which would make me sad if I were a better person, but still usually cause me to giggle.

Like the case of Peter Jason Chunak. This is actually a very sad story about a guy named Bobby Cocknok getting burned alive in his house. What happened? The known and widely accepted facts of the story are that PJay and his couisn Peter John Yuckluck were drunk as monkeys one Saturday night, and lit a grass fire outside Bob Chocknok’s house, right one top of a couple of tanks of propane. This leads to an explosive fire that burns down the whole house and burns up one Bobby Chocknock who was passed out drunk inside. While the fire was burning, the two eventual defendants were hanging out at one of their houses, alternating between watching MTV and watching the house burn down.

Why? I have no idea, though there were many explanations. Perhaps PJay and his buddy, PJon were just bored. Perhaps they were out of booze and needing more (but you couldn’t just buy more in New Stuyahok where this whole thing when down because New Stew is a dry village, which means alcohol can’t legally be purchased or consumed there) so they tried to steal it from Bob, and when his house was locked they got frustrated and decided to burn down the joint instead. Or perhaps Peter Jason and Peter John were mad because earlier in the year, PJay’s uncle got killed by a fire that Bob Choknock may or may not have set, and decided to take revenge on him. Or perhaps they were just drunk and though it would be pretty to see a fire, who knows, it could be all or any of those, or none of those at all.

I know it probably sounds like there is nothing funny about that story, but that is because you are picturing two hardened criminals, two sociopathic madmen who burned this guy alive. You didn’t sit though the multi-faceted defense that PJay (PJon will be tried next month)offered in the case.

He admits he lit a fire, admits that he told a bunch of people he lit a fire, admits lots of people saw him running away moments after he and his friend had lit a fire, and admits that he confessed to police that he lit a fire. But, he says, he is not totally sure that he lit the fire on the front doorstep of the house. The fire he remembers lighting that night was one in the front yard, and that was just to destroy all the of the hay for Bob Choknock's family's dog sled team. His opinion is that Bobby Choknock’s brother, Wassiley Chocknok lit the fire that killed his brother. That theory would probably be more crazy sounding, except it was documented during the trial that Wassiley Chocknok had been wandering the streets of New Stuyahok the afternoon his brother died wielding a hatchet and muttering threatening bits of insanity under his breath. None the less, most witnesses did agree that Wassiley Chocknok was drunk and passed out on some women at the time that PJay and PJon were lighting a fire somewhere in the vicinity of Bobby Choknock’s house. PJay’s defense all went out of its way to underline that if he did light the fire on the front door step of the house, he totally didn’t’ notice those propane tanks there.

I tend to believe that completely, I don’t think that PJay or PJon went out that night hoping to burn anyone alive, I think they were probably just trying to inconvenience they guy buy burning his grass and didn’t realize that perhaps doing it right up against the house near propane tanks wasn’t such a good idea. Because crime in Alaska is not vicious, mostly it is just really stupid and really drunk.

Which leads me back to the honorable Ted Stevens. Myself, if I had paid $150,000 dollars in home repair bills, I might assume that I had paid completely for my home renovations. But even if Ted Stevens did know he was getting gifts for free, I just want to say that I don’t care, it may be a crime, but it is a really stupid crime. I find it impossible to believe that in a city full of lobbyists that seem to be rather enriching large portions of the congressional delegation that Ted Stevens with his home renovation is the most egregiously guilty man on capitol hill. I just can’t fathom it, since all of this free lucre Stevens got basically increased the value of his home to $300,000—my mother lives in a home worth more than that—John McCain has garages that cost more than that.

So I’m voting for Ted Stevens. Part of it is naked self interest of course, Ted Steven’s is one of public broadcasting’s more decorated champions which means I essentially work for Ted. Many people will vote for Ted Stevens for just such reasons, all of our municipal employees, teachers, social service workers and the staff on the many, many grant funded public works constructions throughout the state are all in some way or other employed because of Ted Stevens and the work he does on capitol hill. While I believe that anyone who is our Senator will bring money back to the mothership, I do not believe anyone will succeed quite like Ted because, frankly, he has been in the Congress since the middle of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency (at 84 years old he makes John McCain look young and spry) and as such, either has a lot of seniority or a lot of good blackmail stored up. Either way, he is like a tiny, wrinkled ATM of federal dollars, and you have to respect that about him. More than that, however, I actually like Ted Stevens, I believe in Ted Stevens. Yes he is old, and yes he is crazy, but I think he genuinely cares about the people whom he represents, whatever the attack ads say, it is still totally about Alaska for Ted. My friend TNBIC and her husband AHD were able to attend TNBIC’s father’s funeral because of our senator’s direct intervention—TNBIC was on day 238 of not leaving the country so she could get her green card when, oops, her father suddenly drops dead in the fatherland. Due to arcane immigration laws, TNBIC technically could not leave the US for a year, 365 days, while awaiting her green card so going to her father’s funeral would have wiped out her 238 days and started her over at 0. But Ted Steven’s stepped in, got her a special visa and she was able to return to the land of plaid and maple syrup to bury her dad. When I was covering Ted Steven’s earlier this year while he was in Dillingham I noticed something interesting, I think he literally knew the name of every single person he encountered while he was here, he knew their name and usually biographical facts about them. I believe Ted Stevens, in the 150 or so years he’s been in the United States senate, has had time to learn the name of everyone in the state of Alaska and if that doesn't deserve my vote, I don't know what does.

It will force me to vote republican, which does make me feel dirty, but because voting republican makes me feel dirty, I feel that despite this vote, I am safe from losing my soul wholesale.

That’s Why I Say Hey Man Nice Shot

2008-10-21T14:54:00.001-08:00

This post is dedicated to Thumper, the bunny rabbit that was skinned in my sink last night…

Dillingham Alaska has been described as a very pretty jail. The pretty part is certainly true, this morning there was a thick frost that left all the plant life looking like it was made out of glass, we are surrounded by mountains that are currently snow capped and glow purple in the morning and evenings and as far as the eye can see there are miles and miles of tundra that are quite verdant in the summer, and like a white sands dessert in the winter. If I were a better blogger, I would photo log the many aesthetic upsides of Dillingham, but, sadly, I do not currently own a camera. Todd will in a little under a week when I give him one for his birthday (if, please Jesus, the stupid fucking thing arrives in the mail on time…) but I am pretty sure that he will never let me touch said camera since I have a long and checkered history of losing/breaking important objects that are left in my care. As a result, the blog will suffer the strategic weakness of not offering nearly enough pictures. But take my word for it, pretty as a postcard here, that’s for damn sure.

Also for damn sure is the strong feeling of incarceration that living in Dillingham beats into my soul. Dillingham is not connected to the road system, as REM sang, you can’t get there from here because we have no roads (REM just sang the part about not getting there from here, I don’t recall them mentioning roads). Or, we have roads, crappy pot-holed, suspension wrecking roads that are in the middle of their annual transformation into an ice luge you drive on, but roads none the less. They just don’t connect to anything other than ½ of the village of Aleknagik (the other half is on the other side of the Lake and can only be reached by boat or snow-go when the lake is frozen—there is currently $20 million or so dollars of state money budgeted to construct a bridge that connects the north part of Aleknagik to the south part, but, for the time being only half of the village can be reached by car). So, if you want to get to the big city (Anchorage) or any place else in the world, then you have to say a Hail Mary and get on a propeller plane and fly there.

Why a Hail Mary? Well, whatever you have heard about flying being safer than driving is probably true as long as you don’t live in Alaska—here planes fall out of the sky with a regularity that is not so much charming as alarming—caused by a combination of factors 1) the planes that are used for commuting here are tiny, 2) the pilots are all crazy and will take off in weather conditions that most people in the lower 48 wouldn’t consider walking to their mailbox in and 3) the weather is pretty much certainly going to be really, really bad from mid-October until late May. Apart from it being marginally less dangerous to leave Dillingham by airplane that it would be to launch oneself to Anchorage with a catapult, it is also insanely expensive. A round-trip flight averages around $500 dollars, which I think is an unreasonable cost to bear for taking my life in my hands.

As a result, I, like most Dillinghamers, don’t leave town unless I have a very good reason to so do, or because someone else is forcing me to go and paying me to do it. This may not seem like a very big deal, you may think to yourself “well shit, it isn’t like I spend a whole lot of time away from my house anyways unless I’m at work or something…” but it only seems like not a big deal because if you wanted to, leaving town is still an option for you pretty much at any time of the day or night. For example while you are reading this you are thinking that you could really go for some Taco Bell. Maybe you don’t’ want Taco Bell for yourself, maybe you got drunk last night and punched your best friend in the face and now you need to bring him or her the taco of peace. If there is a Taco Bell in your town, so you can be there in ten minutes and delivering the taco of peace within the half hour, but even if there is no Taco Bell in your town, you can still give yourself or someone you care about explosive diarrhea within the next hour or so because somewhere within 30 miles of you there is a Taco Bell that you can drive to (or have your friend drive you to if you are still drunk from last night). For me, there is no Taco Bell (or MacDonalds, or Burger King—but that is pretty much okay with me because frankly their new advertising campaign has convinced me never to eat at BK again) nor can I drive to a Taco Bell, even if my relationship with another person absolutely depends on it. I could go to one of our 3½ local restaurants but the Chinese place sucks, the Bristol Eagle is only open when the owner feels like it, the Muddy Rudder (whose food is aptly described by its name) closes for half the year, and the Windmill—well actually I haven’t been there yet so I don’t have anything clever to say but the point is no matter where I go I will pay about $25 dollars for a meal that at best should cost $10, and at worst someone should be paying me to eat.

So, to sum up, leaving, not an option, eating out, not an option which pretty much leaves drinking, doing drugs, fucking, watching movies or otherwise making your own fun. While I hope to have much to say about drinking, drugs, fucking and movies (and combinations thereof) in future posts, today I want to talk about making your own fun, particularly in the form of shooting innocent woodland creatures.

Hunting is big here. Now, I was born and raised in suburban New Jersey, went to High School in Massachusetts and went to the university of Virginia where I was a member of a literary society and debating union. Clearly I am about as familiar with guns and hunting as I am with the upper level tenants of particle physics. Before I moved here, I had never so much as handled, let alone shot, a gun—and though that has since been rectified, when my friend PASK was kind enough to introduce me to the world of firearms at the shooting range, I accepted about myself that I am terrible shot who has no chance of hitting anything that is more than 25 feet away from me. So hunting is pretty much lost on me, but I am in the huge minority here as most people hunt for fun and for subsistence purposes—people stock their freezers for the winter with the moose and caribou they shoot during the fall.

Just because I can’t hunt worth a damn, doesn’t mean I can’t help cut up the game meat once someone else has been good enough to kill it; I have helped gut and dress a moose, ditto with caribou, beaver, spruce chicken and ptarmigan. I didn’t feel particularly bad about this—the animals had a sporting chance and people gotta eat (and yes, moose is delicious in case you are wondering)—until WFDYDT showed up at my house last night with his latest kill—a bunny rabbit.

A little brown and white bunny rabbit to be specific, very cute except for the giant gaping hole in his head with little bits of bunny brain leaking out of it. WFDYDT rolled up, moment before heroes was starting, and entered my house announcing “I think we should find toon town.” Confused, I asked “Huh?” He repeated, “I think we should find toon town because I shot Roger Rabbit and we should inform his wife. He clarified that while on his way home from work he noticed a whole bunch of spruce chickens mulling about doing spruce chicken things. At that moment he didn’t have time to stop, but returned some short time later with his rifle to shoot up some dinner. Sadly the chickens had all flown the coop by then, but, no worries, the just as he was about to lose hope, poor Thumper happened by. Then, he thumped no more.

The bunny was still warm when WFDYDT arrived at my house, and he wanted to know if we minded him cleaning it in our kitchen so it wouldn’t freeze on the drive home. Not wanting to seem rude, Todd and I said sure, and the horror show began.

I love really violent, torture porn horror movies, there is no variation on the theme of putting teenagers through a wood chipper that I don’t find totally awesome, which is why I am ashamed to have to admit that I made it through about 2 minutes of skinning and gutting a bunny before I had to run to the couch, hide under a blanket and listen to Disney movies soundtracks on my ipod. To clean a bunny you have to first cut its head off, which WFDYDT did, then he held it up and noted that if you squeeze it a little bit you can make it bug its eyes and stick out its tongue. In a word, gross, made more gross when Todd noted that he used to raise bunnies when he was a child and used to have one that looked just like the one WFDYDT was dismembering in my sink (WFDYDT noted that Todd’s bunny probably had a head). After the rabbit has decapitated, you then cuts its legs off, and cut around the neck stump and asshole region so you can more easily grab the pelt and just pull it off. It was the point that I watched a bunny get flipped inside out that it was time for me to retire to the other room. Todd and WFDYDT were doing pretty well with the whole experience until they got to the intestines and there was poop to deal with, which apparently grossed them out. I could have lived the rest of my life without seeing the entrails of a dead rabbit, but Todd, not wanting to deprive me of yet another unique Alaskan experience, stuck them in a clear plastic bag and kicked me until I came out from under my blanket to look at them. In five words, heinously, deplorably mother-fucking gross.

And then it was over, the bunny was sliced, diced, skinned, gutted and in several bags. WFDYDT says he hopes to make a stew out of it soon and that he will invite us over to eat it with him. I would like to be able to say that I will not be able to eat said dead rabbit, but that is a croc, I will totally eat it in stew form. Who knows, perhaps if I live here long enough, I will be able to bring myself to shoot my own bunny someday.

I doubt it though; the fact still remains I am a terrible and more likely would splatter bits of bunny rabbit everywhere then get in a good head shot.

I love Alaska.

Sometimes When People Try to Impress You Here, They Just End up Scaring the Shit Out of You…

2008-10-20T14:33:00.000-08:00

Cubs fans just don’t know how good they have it. When your baseball team is cursed, it allows one a sort of cheerful fatalism where no one is ever really to blame because it isn’t anyone’s fault if your baseball team loses, they are cursed after all. The Red Sox used to have a curse, which was a wonderful and beautiful thing. Sure the curse led to many terrible and depressing upsets, Bill Buckner, Bucky Dent or Aaron Boone spring to mind, but those bad things were, in a certain sense, totally expected and even a necessary part of life—in the fall the leaves change colors, the air gets cold, and the Red Sox get knocked out of the play-offs by the hand of a fickle and vindictive God (or a Devil that was on the Yankees payroll, either way). A curse means never having to say your sorry. While most sports teams are supposed to win, cursed teams are supposed to lose, and to lose as spectacularly as possible. If the Red Sox were still cursed, then today I could be grumbling about the gnarled hand of fate forcing Boston to lose to Tampa Bay (the fucking Rays, seriously!?!), I wouldn’t have to confront a reality where the Rays were just the superior team this year.

So I have decided not to confront that reality, I am simply putting it out of my head and pretending it never happened. Instead I will harken back to a happier time two days ago when the world was still the Red Sox oyster (or oysta’ as they say back home)—they had just made a fantastic game five comeback and were wearing the Rays down in game 6, slouching towards game 7 trying to get to the World Series. Because game 6 was an elimination game, I assumed it was safe to go to someone else’s house to watch it, after all, who doesn’t want to see an elimination game in the ALCS?

As it turns out, Alaskans are those people. Being a summer sport, baseball is not very popular here because there is no summer. Hockey is huge, basketball is huge, wrestling is huge, but baseball, not so much. The problem is, baseball, because it is a heroically slow moving game, tends to be much more enjoyable when watched with people so you have something to do while you wait for the next pitch, but here, people to watch baseball with are few and far between. Those people who do want to watch baseball also tend towards being pretty hardcore about it, because it take s a lot of schedule manipulation to watch a good game (what with our 4 hour time difference with the East Coast) and these aren’t the sort of people who want to watch baseball with me, because I just don’t know enough about it to have an in-depth discussion of the stats associated with the game. Instead, I prefer to comment on things like “Man, I liked it better when the BoSox were all fat.”

But I digress.

Point is, Saturday night I went to WFDYDT!’s house to watch the game and drink beers among other things. When I got there WFDYDT!’s friend Hugh was hanging out and they were most decidedly not watching the ball game. No, instead they were watching an Ultimate Fighting mixed martial arts competition. Being a woman I don’t spend much time watching mixed martial arts, but now that I have spent an evening trying to watch an Ultimate Fighting bout and baseball game at the same time, I feel I am qualified to make the following observation. Baseball is a sport, Ultimate Fighting is totally gay. I don’t mean gay as in lame, I mean gay as in homosexual. From the oiled up bodies, to the shiny gold lame trunks, to the inevitable ending where the two “fighters,” are rolling around on the ground with one guys head lodged pretty securely in the other guys crotch, it is just one big festival of barely repressed homotacularity. It is also not violent enough. I mean, yes, sure they bleed, sometimes a lot, but mostly they just half heartedly punch each other in the head or make failed attempts at kicking each other for about two rounds, before collapsing to the ground in the third (and final) round; wiggling about on top of each other in an action that looks staggeringly sexual expect for the fact that the guy on his back is usually punching the guy on top of him in the ear repeatedly (which I think is a recognized sexual position here in Alaska which I will describe more fully in a future post titled subsistence sex). I only got to see the game during UFC commercial breaks, which meant that more or less I got to know the Red Sox were ahead, but didn’t know a hell of a lot more about what was happening play by play.

This made me sad.

I tried to complain about it, but WFDYDT! and Hugh were definitely way more into the ultimate fighting, which they don’t think is gay at all (this reminded me of when my friend Christian got upset that I thought the movie Fight Club was the most homoerotic film in the history of the moving picture, and I wondered if he and I had seen the same movie). They also commented that they believed that someday they could be ultimate fighters, which made me laugh for two reasons.

One, was the obvious, “be bigger queers guys,” reason. The second reason is that WFDYDT! is a really skinny kid, and Hugh is smallish doughy sort of native type. Whatever else one can say about the Ultimate Fighting guys, they are not the weak type of gay that listens to show tunes, owns a pommeranian and got stuffed into all make and manner of locker in high school. No, these dudes are big, tough, cut looking and have spent the last couple of decades studying all make and manner of ass kicking, probably to avoid being shoved into holes by jocks without their consent. These are the type of men that would likely bounce any human being not currently playing for the NFL like a rubber ball, and are certainly not the kind of person any one in their right mind would look to fight unless they had money, pride or property on the line. WFDYDT! saw that, Hugh, not really, and he told me the following story, I assume to prove how tough he is.

Back in the day, which I take to mean as sometime between 5 years ago and last week, Hugh was at a bar, with his drunk and one eyed brother. Yes, you read that right. His brother, I believe, had lost the first eye to bar fighting, and was hankering to see if he could go two for two with (quote) “some big old jig that was giving him the stink-eye.” Now I was already impressed, not with a one eyed man looking to get into a bar fight, but with the use of the word jig, which I have honestly never heard in conversation. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve never even seen the word jig used outside a Faulkner novel, so I actually had to double check when I got home that it is, in fact, a racial epithet applied to black people. (Thank you Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_slurs). Anyway, Hugh, concerned that his brother was about to be made totally blind by some (quote) “Evander Holyfield looking nigger (that one I understood and didn’t’ need to look up) with an attitude,” decided to get up and make the fight go away.

Now, it seems to me there was no fight to made to go away, because the “EHLNWAA” didn’t sound like he was looking to fight anyone, it sounded to me like he was just drinking a beer and by so doing caught the attention of our local redneck population. However, for the purpose of narrative clarity, I will assume there was a fight to be short circuted here and make the following observation, where I come from, making a fight go away usually involves, A) running away, B) apologizing, then running away, C) paying the person not to fight you, apologizing, then running away or D) the very occasional, getting into the fight, knowing that you will probably get your ass kicked but at least your brother will keep his one good eye. Hugh opted for E) None of the above, and instead grabbed his beer bottle, snuck up behind the guy and broke it over his head. Whatever you have seen on TV—breaking a beer bottle over someone’s head usually knocks them right the fuck out, and though it failed in this case, the guy, bewildered that some complete stranger was bludgeoning him with Bud Light, simply pulled a chunk of glass out of his dome, and ran away.

I assume the intention of this story was to impress upon me how tough Hugh is, after all he had chased a much bigger stronger man out of the bar without so much as soaking one blow. Ipso facto, I supposed I should have concluded that yes, Hugh would make a good ultimate fighter, assuming they would just let him carry a beer bottled into the ring with him. What it mostly did was convince me that I was currently sitting with a dirty fighting lunatic who could snap at any minute and be ready to sucker punch me on a moment’s notice. It also made me consider changing WFDYDT! name to WFDYITGO? (Why the Fuck Did you Invite That Guy Over?).

The moral of the story, people should watch baseball together, not ultimate fighting championships. Because when UFC ended, we got to watch the 9^th inning of the Sox-Rays game, and thus came together to appreciate Jonathan Papplebon shutting down the Rays offense. This made us happy, made us drink beer, and did not inspire anyone to tell a story about the time they had nearly beat someone to death with a baseball bat, which I felt was a plus.

Anyway, Go Phillies!!

It Rains in My House

2008-10-19T12:14:00.000-08:00

Todd and I used to live in an apartment in Downtown Dillingham, a necessity when we first moved here because we didn’t have a car. The good features of our old apartment was that it came completely furnished, it was close to my job and the grocery store, it had a really nice view and it was relatively inexpensive. The downside to my old apartment was that it was really, supernaturally dry to the extend that we spent much of last winter waking up with bloody noses, we could hear everything our hard partying neighbor was doing next door, we lived across the street from the bar and as such occasionally had drunks showing up looking for a place to crash (note: these aren’t the drunks we knew personally whom we would be happy to have crash for a night, these were random drunks who at some point in their history had known someone who lived in the building), and we weren’t allowed to have dogs.

Not that this stopped us from getting dogs mind you. BB, the first dog found us, or found Todd anyway on a cold winter day when she was looking for food and love. BB is really cute so Todd brought her home, loved her, fed her and claimed her as his own dog. His own mind you, not mine, every time BB shows even the slightest preference for me, Todd complains bitterly that I turned his dog against him while he was away fishing this summer. Raven, our other dog, Todd also found and I forbid him to get because we lived in a small apartment where we weren’t supposed to have dogs. Todd more or less ignored me, and brought Raven home one day because she needed a bath and a place to hang out for the weekend or she was going to get put down. Dillingham’s animal shelter has very limited space, and when it gets full the dog population is thinned forcibly. Putting dogs down doesn’t upset me in concept, but locally putting down a dog doesn’t mean putting it to sleep, it means taking it out to the town landfill and depositing a bullet in the back of its head, which I do find notionally upsetting. So Raven came home “just for the weekend,” and I, the infinite softy, then was unable to return her to the pound because now that I new her personally, I was more than notionally upset at the though of Travis, the dog catcher, air conditioning the back of her head. Todd believes that because I was the one who technically refused to return her to the pound, she is my dog, which figures because she is obviously the less well behaved of our two dogs. It isn’t that Raven didn’t mean well, it is just that the trauma of being a stray had obviously affected her furry little mind such that at the slightest sign of threat, she peed. As a result our apartment rapidly started smelling like pee.

Which is about the time our old landlord Victor reminded us that we weren’t supposed to have dogs. Now this is a genuine point of debate, when Todd and I moved in we both feel sure we stated that we were dog people and were going to have to get one. We also both feel certain that we remember that Victor told us we could get a dog, and have our copy of the lease where he crossed out the no dog thing. Still, we did sort of try to hide the dog situation from Victor, mostly on the grounds that we didn’t’ want to pay the dog deposit. Todd can hide things, I lack the organizational skills and the long term commitment necessary to keep things hidden, and so Victor eventually figured out we were housing two dogs. At first he said the dogs had to go. We, and by we I mean I since I didn’t bother to tell Todd this so he wouldn’t get angry, simply ignored this order, which worked for a while because luckily weather or not we had dogs was not Victor’s primary concern. However, eventually he corners Todd on the stairs that lead to our old apartment and demands that we get rid of our pets, which causes Todd to argue, forcefully, back that he told us we could have dogs. Victor is a Yupik Indian, who in the grand tradition of the Eskimo peoples is not terribly confrontational and so after what was a brief exchange of words, Victor attempts to storm off, muttering “fucking cocksucker” under his breath. Most people might let an accusation of fucking cocksucking slide, but Todd Skinger is not most people and so he responds “what was that, do you want to come up here and say something like a man, or do you just want to mutter under your breath like a fucking pussy.” I did not witness what happened next, because normally when it looks like Todd is going to get into a fight with someone, I take a very brave course of action that I like to call hiding until he is done. However, from Todd’s accounts, Victor runs back up the stairs, gets into Todd’s space and asks him what he wants to have happen here and then informs him that we have to move out now.

Todd comes in angry, not angry that Victor threw us out mind you, but angry that Victor didn’t punch him because “then I could have thrown him down the stairs.” I have always found that the point you actively hope for opportunity to throw your land lord down the stairs is about the same point it is time to move out.

So we did. We moved to a lovely home on the lake road, about 8 miles out of the center of town. Our new house has many lovely features, we have a nice oven, and island in the kitchen, wood floors a back deck and a lovely view. We are also allowed to have dogs, and because our landlords live in Anchorage, there is almost no chance that anyone will be called a cocksucker or risk taking the express route down three flights of stairs. So all is well.

Or so you would think….

The problem is that it rains in our house. You see, living in Alaska people really try to seal up their houses so heat doesn’t escape, or at least they have started getting really into it since fuel oil has gone from cost $1.50 to $3.00 to $4.50 to $7.00 a gallon in the last 4 or so years (and on behalf of the entire population of Alaska I would like to thank the Bush administration for their brilliant choice to invade Iraq to lower our oil costs). Our house has a 4 start energy rating which is a good thing, it means that we leak relatively little heat to the outside world. It also means that water vapor doesn’t escape either, it just stays trapped in the house and condenses on the ceilings and walls, eventually to rain down upon us. That in itself wouldn’t be so bad, accept that it means that our household and all of our worldly goods are slowly getting covered with a lovely layer of white fuzzy mold, which I’m pretty sure just can’t be good for us. Now the good news here is that our house isn’t properly ducted either, which means we get a build up of burned oil smoke in our basement which vents up into our house and doesn’t escape to the outside world because our house is so well sealed. How is this good news, you may ask.

As far as I can see, in one form or other, Dillingham Alaska is likely going to be the death of us no matter what. As far as I can see, the two mostly likely candidates for my early internment in the earth are carbon monoxide poisoning or a fungus taking root in my inards and slowly killing me. Carbon monoxide poisoning by all accounts is a fairly pleasant way to go that leaves a reasonably attractive corpse behind. Fungal infestation, on the other hand is slow and will likely leave me looking like something out of an episode of the X-Files by the time it has run its course, so clearly I prefer to take the gas pipe if it is an option.

Todd, perhaps more reasonably, wants to see the problem fixed and is engaged in extensive negotiations with our out of town landlords to get their maintence guy to come and do something about the problems. While he has enjoyed almost no success in this so far, no one has been called a cocksucker or physically threatened yet, which I view as progress and thus a victory.

Which is, I believe the secret to a happy life in rural Alaska, set the bar the low and count it as a victory every time something lumbers over it. In most places I assume you aren’t allowed to rent a house with a carbon monoxide issue or that could be used as a penicillin farm. Here we have no zoning laws and there is no building inspector to certify that the structure you build won’t tip over and sink flaming into the tundra, on a basic assumption that you won’t force yourself to live in an unsafe structure, you tenants will sue you and move out if it is unsafe and if either you or your tenant is stupid enough to live in an unsafe building, well, you pretty much deserve what you get. Given that as the local attitude, I feel that in the grand scheme of things, matters at my household could be far worse then they are, at least the property perk tests appropriately and doesn’t have magnetic water.

And so it rains in my house. If I should ever stop updating my blog, assume the mold has gotten me.

Disclamer

2008-10-19T11:28:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Dillingham Alaska, a town made up of about 2,400 people who, quite simply, probably aren’t quite ready for mass production yet. There are many colorful local aphorisms applied to this town/area which I think more or less sum up the situation…

1) Dillingham, a small drinking village with a fishing problem.

2) Dillingham Alaska, we fish we fight and we fuck, in the winter, we fish somewhat less.

3) What did the 10 year old Alaskan girl say after she was done having sex? Hey Grandpa, can you pass me a cigarette.

By no means should this be interpreted to mean that I don’t like the place I live. Quite to the contrary, I love living in a place where I can be treated as a respectable personage simply by dint of being sober, employed and totally uninterested in having sex with relatives or children.

Currently my job here is as the news director of the only local radio station, which means, unsurprisingly, that I report the local news. The local news breaks down into three categories: resource development, holy shit we’re all going to freeze/starve to death because power costs are so high, and stupid, stupid crime. All of these things will be covered on this blog. However, working where I do everyone in town knows who I am, which means another important part of my day to day life is to act as an unpaid counselor for the other people who live here—people who sometimes call me to talk about news but just as often they call me to talk about how much they hate all the other people. This will also be another important part of this blog. Because I actually like a lot of the people I want to talk about on this blog, I will change their names and an awfully large number of facts in the stories I tell about them, so that people I otherwise like do not accuse me of sharing all of their secrets on the internet.

So if yourself is saying “is that story possibly true,” the answer is it depends. If I use a proper name and date stamps, yes, the story is true. Note, things that might sound like fake names, Wassiley Blunka, Petla Noden, are not made up—those are real, and any name given in a proper first name/last name form is a real person in a real story. If however you get a name that is a description like “most likely a serial killer,” “holy shit why did you do that,” or “for the love of God stop drinking.” (see cast of characters page to catch up on who these people are, so when they are referenced in posts you know what I am talking about) the story has been highly fictionalized, as have will most of the things I’ve mentioned about the character, who is probably a composite of several people (i.e. for the love of God stop drinking” is everyone and no one in Dillingham.)

If you want facts, check out the Alaska Daily News, the Bristol Bay Times or KDLG.org. If you want what I think about the facts on life here on the ground in rural AK, read on…