THE HOMONATOR

Years before Brandy Chastain ripped her soccer jersey off and paraded her guns at the Women's World Cup, Linda Hamilton was showing off her own assault muscles in "Terminator Two: Judgment Day."

I was raised Catholic, but before I saw Hamilton in T2 I had never actually used the words "Holy Mary, Mother of God!"

T2 is one of my favorite films, not just because Linda Hamilton is a sexy stud, and not just because it's one of the best action movies ever made, but because it's central point is that the best thing about people is not their scientific innovations or their impressive arsenals or even their Eiffel Towers or King Lears or Mona Lisas, but their ability to love.

Like, say you're an Einstein working on a Doomsday Machine to wipe out your country's enemy, who probably has a different skin color/religion from you, or, if your enemy is an alien species, gigantic ears and a bony forehead. Your research is hailed as a triumph of science and the pinnacle of human intellect, but then, as you are driving to your nuclear lab, you see a pretty girl picking flowers (or polishing her AK47) and you fall in love and forget about your Doomsday Device.

This is what Oscar Wilde meant by "The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray."

The tragedy of the Terminator, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, is that he has no emotions to lead him astray.

He is a machine. He has intellect, but no heart, like a Space Age Tin Man. But unlike the Tin Man, Arnold doesn't want a heart. A heart would interfere with his job, which is to save the human race.

When a teenager asks him whether he's afraid of dying, Arnold is baffled and says no: "I have to stay functional until my mission is complete."

Human emotion does not compute with the Terminator.

When the teenager sheds tears, he asks, "What's wrong with your eyes?"

When the same teen tells him, "You just can't go around killing people," he asks, "Why?" The teen: "What do you mean 'why'? Because you can't." The Terminator: "Why?" (And there are plenty of times in the movie where this seems like a perfectly valid question).

So the Terminator is tragic, but not a tragic hero.

Hamilton, not Schwarzenegger, is the hero of T2. They both rid the world of bad guys, but Hamilton feels pain and anger and vengeance and sorrow while doing it. The genius of the movie is that she has trained herself — her body, her mind — to be more like a machine: focused on a mission, not led astray by emotion. She can drive a ballpoint pen through a dude's kneecap without batting an eyelash. But she ultimately fails in her mission to be a machine, and it's a failure that saves the day.

Her moral outrage is the film's fuel: "Fucking men like you built the hydrogen bomb. Men like you thought it up. You think you're so creative. You don't know what it's like to really create something; to create a life; to feel it growing inside you. All you know how to create is death..." (One of the many comic moments in the film is when her young son interrupts this monologue with "Mom! We need to be a little more constructive here, okay?")

So Hamilton the human is the hero, but Arnold the machine gets the choicest line: "The more contact I have with humans, the more I learn."

It doesn't have the zip of "Hasta la vista, baby!" and "I'll be back," the two most oft-quoted T2 lines, but it's the one that deserves to be remembered. Because it's the point of the film.

And it came back to me earlier this week during an e-mail conversation with Erin. I'll reprint my first e-mail to her and summarize the rest:

OK, I got to tell you this thing that happened at dinner last night. I was just trying not to think about it today (I might blog about it when I'm less upset). But I was asking my stepmom and dad about various relatives, how they're doing, etc., and my dad's little brother Danny came up in the conversation. He was diagnosed a long time ago with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. So I was asking questions about him, how he came to be diagnosed, etc., because I was a kid when all of that happened, and I would imagine that he did not get much support, knowing my family. So I was interested in his life and what it was like, etc., and I was asking some pretty pointed questions. Then my stepmom seemed very interested in the topic, and she said, "You know, I've always wondered, with Tim being Danny's twin and Tim going gay (her exact words), and Danny being manic-depressive if maybe something bad happened when Eileen was pregnant, if something was damaged, or a chromosome dropped or something." I just looked down at my plate. I couldn't look at her because I knew I would cry if I tried to say anything. So I didn't say anything. And my dad didn't say anything. And now I feel ashamed for letting her get away with that.

So that upset me, the idea that I'm damaged goods or mentally ill. And I told Erin that I was going to kill my stepmom. And she said, "You just can't go around killing people," and I said, "Why?" And she said: "What do you mean 'why'? Because you can't." And I said: "Why?"

No, wait. I'm misremembering that.

What Erin actually said was that my stepmom clearly wasn't thinking and was suffering some sort of vast disconnect between screwed-up notions of gayness put into her head by society and the gay person sitting right in front of her whom she shows all evidence of loving and accepting. I have heard Erin make this excuse for others before — people who operate on stereotypes in lieu of experience, people who have certain notions about gays or blacks or whatever simply because they have never been around gays or blacks or whatever. And she's totally right. These people are not evil; they're just inexperienced. Their CPU's have been poorly programmed. I shouldn't get mad or hurt or homicidal. I should just be more gay. So they don't forget whom they're dealing with.

In "T4: The Homonators," a script George and I are writing, the thematic line is going to be "The more contact I have with gay humans, the more I learn."

But probably the line everyone will remember will be "Hasta la vista, Mary!"

ARE YOU READY FOR SOME FLAG FOOTBALL?!

Does this quote bother anyone else, regardless of whether you support the war in Iraq?

“Certainly, we’re not declaring victory yet. We’re probably at halftime in a major Super Bowl, maybe not even at halftime yet, and the score’s going back and forth. But, by God, it’s a good game,” Hardy said.

The quote appeared in a story in today's paper about Maj. Gen. Dennis Hardy, whose last day as commander of Fort Riley will be Tuesday.

I could be wrong, but I imagine the parents of the 2600 Americans who died in Iraq don't see it as riveting football game.

I LIKE YOUR MARILYN MONROE

I'm so glad I quit cutting my own hair and started going to a salon.

It's not because I wasn't doing a good job. The front of my hair always looked fetching (Remember, I come from a long line of hairdressers). But the back would depend on the skills of my significant other or a roommate or a kindly neighbor. So the back was always a crapshoot.

My philosophy has always been if you want something done right, do it yourself. But I couldn't do the back of my hair myself. So I had to modify my philosophy: If you want something done right, find a stylish young man with magic hands.

That's when Ryan came into my life. I called this salon a few years ago and the gal they set me up with ended up not being there on my appointed day because she had gotten pregnant and quit school and gone to live in some tiny town in Arkansas. Too bad. I bet she would have been a fun hairdresser. But her misfortune led me to Ryan, the salon owner who took all her appointments that day.

We've been together ever since.

The thing I like best about Ryan is that he doesn't expect me to talk. It's not that I would mind talking to Ryan; it's just that I can never think up anything to say beyond "been busy?" or "sure is hot outside" or "been busy?"

The thing I like next best about him is that we have a similar sense of humor. Like some gal at the next station will be telling her hairdresser about how she's not getting along with her roommates because they don't appreciate the feng shui of her space, and Ryan and I will look at each other and snicker. Or some dude with a tattoo of a dagger on his neck will be instructing his hairdresser to not give him a cut that would be "unflattering" to his tattoo. And Ryan will look at me and give a long, slow eye-roll.

A thing I enjoy about going to the salon in general is that it's like a zoo where you can gawk at stylish people. I really enjoy gawking. Like I love to look at the girl at the front desk and see how every millimeter of her body has been attended to: skin, nails, makeup, hairstyle, hair color, eyebrows, scent, clothes, shoes, pedicure. Everything is just so. When she offers me a cup of coffee I always decline because I don't feel well-heeled enough to be waited on by her. And everyone there is like that. It's so exotic.

Another thing I like about the salon is that it reminds me of my mom.

My mom (in the picture above - in her early 20s) used to be a hairdresser when we were young, and I imagine that in her youth she was a lot like the kids at my salon. Very trendy. Very well put-together. I remember she was always doing new stuff to her hair. Like she'd drop me off at preschool with a big blond bouffant and pick me up with a short brown bob. I found it very romantic. Even though I never felt any compulsion to change my look every other day, or even every other 10 years, I have always been intrigued by people who do.

My very favorite thing about the salon, though, is that I always learn something there. It's practically like going to the library.

Today, for example, I learned about two things that I did not know existed: (1) a thing called "a couple's massage"; and (2) a thing called a "Marilyn Monroe."

A couple's massage is apparently something you can do on a cruise ship. This trendy businessman getting his hair cut at the next station was telling his hairdresser gal about this cruise he and his wife were about to take along the coast of Mexico. It was his wife's idea. He resisted at first, but now he was on board. You could tell he was one of those guys who works like 10 hours a day saying motivational things to people like "Come on, team, let's take this to the next level." And I don't know why he was even having a $42 hair cut; his hair was only an inch long to begin with. Anyway, he told the hairdresser, "One of the things we're going to do on the cruise is have a couple's massage." A what? I thought. I was hoping the hairdresser would quiz him on this so I could find out more about it, but all she said was, "Oh that's fantastic. My girlfriend and I had a couple's on our cruise to Cabo San Lucas." I looked at Ryan. He seemed to know what a "couple's" was, so I tried to act like I knew also. But when I got home, I looked it up on the Internet, and it said: "Couple's massage isn't actually a different massage ... it's a special arrangement that allows a couple to receive their massages at the same time, in the same room with two massage therapists. The massage may actually be any type of massage such as Swedish, Deep Tissue, or even Hot Stone.  You could even mix and match. Couple's massage is a great way to share the power and benefits of massage." Very interesting. Is this just an orgy, except more boring?

The other thing I learned about is a "Marilyn Monroe." Some gal who works there got this procedure done called a Marilyn Monroe, and that, I found out from Ryan, is when you get an area by your mouth pierced and put a piece of jewelry in it so it looks like an attractive mole. Anyway, this gal had this done, and the reason I know about it is that she came up to Ryan while he was cutting my hair and said she was really pissed because she had just "swallowed" her Marilyn Monroe. Apparently, the hole was too big, and the $50 piece of jewelry she bought to put in it to mimic a mole fell all the way through the other side and went down her throat.

Ryan gave me the deep background after she tromped off to the little girls' room. And he ended the story by saying, "I don't know why I find that funny, but I really do."

AMERICAN HERITAGE

Sometimes at work I get lost in my dictionary. I'll be looking up shish kebab to see whether it's one word or two, then I'll notice that shitfaced is in the dictionary. It's just three words down from shish kebab, which can also be spelled shish kabob. First there's shit, then shit-eating grin, then shitfaced, then, in case you're curious, shitkicker, shit list, shitload.

After that there's shittah, which I thought was maybe slang like niggah, but it's actually a tree mentioned in the Bible, now called an Asiatic acacia.

That's all the shit words in my dictionary, unless you count shittim, the wood of the shittah, which was used to make the Ark of the Covenant.

No shit.

Last night I needed to look up the phrase Homeric laughter, which means loud, unrestrained laughter (Does everyone know that? I'd never heard that), and I came across homoecious, relating to parasites that spend their whole lives on one host, like Bert and Ernie, and homological. I can’t wait to use homological. Like some straight person will be blathering on about something that straight people blather on about, and I’ll interrupt and say, “Well, that’s all well and good, but it’s hardly homological.”

Anyway, I look up a word, and before you know it I’ve squandered like 20 minutes nosing around in the dictionary. This is a vice I’d like to see my students pick up, especially since, despite my best efforts, I can't sell them on smoking.

After "don't ask me," the three words most commonly heard in my classroom are "look it up." For some reason, my students think I'm a dictionary — and a whorish one at that; they think they can just say the word and I'll open up.

Well, I am easy, but I have my pride. If you want me to treat you nice, you have to show me that you care. You can't just use me for your purposes, then immediately forget what salacious means — not even care that it comes from the Latin salire, meaning to jump.

Like they'll be editing a story about "sundry race cars lining the track," and they'll pepper me with questions: What does sundry mean? Is that supposed to be Sunday? Should we just say many? Is race car one word or two?

That pocket dictionary they're required to have might as well be a big pile of dog shittah, because they don’t go anywhere near it.

After I say "look it up" a thousand times, some of them catch on that the POINT of the class is for them to become editors. And editors don't sit around a newsroom asking other editors how to spell. Editors do it alone. (Note to self: Trademark phrase/have printed on T-shirts for next semester).

Some of my students do discover the magic of their dictionary. They eventually get the notion that it's the tangible sum of our whole beautiful language. They understand its authority. They undergo their own little Protestant Reformation and discover that they don't need a priest to make sense of the Bible; they can do it themselves, with their dictionary.

When I was in fourth or fifth grade, my grandpa bought me a giant red American Heritage dictionary with little illustrations and speckled end paper. I think my mom was tired of me asking her what this meant and what that meant all the time, and our minuscule paperback dictionary wasn't up to the job. She must have mentioned to her dad, who owned some office supply stores in Wisconsin (stay tuned for a separate post), that a dictionary would be a good Christmas present for me. And it was. It was the best ever. I remember spending hours lying on the shag carpet, paging through that huge book, reading definitions and looking at illustrations and smelling the delicious scent of all that crisp, tissue-thin new paper. And oh, the dictionary was MINE; if someone in the house needed to know what something meant, they had to come to me.

Years later, in college, I read Malcolm X's autobiography, a great book that Spike Lee made a horrible mockery of in his highly touted but idiotic film "X." Will someone please make a movie about the great Malcolm X that is not a load of shittah? Anyway, I was floored when I came to the part in his autobiography where he talks about being in prison, how he was just a run-of-the-mill, uneducated black man sitting behind bars — nothing in his past but crime and time wasted on materialistic pursuits: fancy cars, loud suits, gambling, loose women, shiny things. And nothing in his future but more of the same. He decides he has to educate himself. And he does as a grown man what I did as a little kid: He starts reading the dictionary. Only he really reads it, from A to Z. Every word. Years later the word aardvark would hold a special meaning for him because it was the first word in the prison's dictionary. It was the beginning of his education, his real life.

Samuel Johnson published “A Dictionary of the English Language” in the mid-18th century. Single-handedly. No wonder James Boswell spent a lifetime celebrating him. I mean, yeah, there was the infamous appetite, the whores, the wars, the adventures. Plenty to celebrate in his best pal’s life. But the dictionary stands apart. How can one dude write a dictionary?

And Johnson's dictionary was considered authoritative until the Oxford English Dictionary came along like 100 years later.

Rick had a copy of the O.E.D. Not the 20-volume set, but an abridged version. It was awesome. I want one for Christmas.

I have bonded with a lot of people over words. And with some of these people I have had words, if you know what I mean. Like my ex-girlfriend, a big Scrabble-freak who knows all the two-letter words in the dictionary, despite her charming inability to spell definitely and sundry other everyday words.

And of course all my copy editor friends: Is cock ring one word or two?

And my ex-husband, who referred affectionately to our dictionary as The Dic, which led me, wit that I am, to make allusions to The Pocket Dic (stay tuned for a separate, salacious post).

And my best friend Ben. Not long after we met we had a discussion in which the word prude came up, and I sent him the definition from my dictionary, which was "a person who is overly modest in dress or behavior, to the point of annoying others." I noted that "to the point of annoying others" should be appended to every definition in the dictionary. And he sent back some choice examples, such as murder: to kill unlawfully and with malice, to the point of annoying others.

If I have a kid, I'm going to put one of those huge, fat dictionaries on a stand in the middle of her room. And when she cries, "What do you mean I'm an 'irksome parasite sent by Jehovah to bedevil' you?" I'll scream, "LOOK IT UP!"

And if she's a kid worth having, she'll come out of her room and say: "Mom, did you know parasite is from the Greek parasitos, meaning one who eats at the table of another? I thought you might also be interested in paraselene, an illusion caused by moonlight passing through ice. And then — listen to this! — there's parapraxis, an action in which one's intention is not fully carried out, as in the mislaying of objects — like all those times you forgot to pick me up from school."

"Very good, darling,” I’ll say proudly. “Now go look up forgot."

INDEPENDENCE

Summer reminds me of Carson McCullers.

Odd, because I scarcely remember when I read her books, or where, much less the season.

I recall hearing about "The Member of the Wedding" from my sister. I think she wrote a book report on it in high school, probably because it's short. I remember thinking it was a romance novel and not reading it. Then I read "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe." A friend of mine, on whom I had more than a little crush, loaned it to me along with some other books — Andre Breton's "Nadja," Albert Camus' "The Stranger," "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol," and a book that, for lack of a better cliche, changed my life: "Le Grand Meaulnes" by Alain-Fournier, the French J.D. Salinger, who was killed in World War I.

These books are all fantastic, but when you read them under the spell of infatuation, they are magical.

And that's how I conceived of Carson McCullers, as magical. After "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe," I ended up reading all of her books and short stories, some more than once. I must have been in my late teens when I read "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter," because it didn't impress me much that she wrote the novel when she was 22. Now, of course, I can't fathom it.

I read her "Reflections in a Golden Eye" sometime in college. Whenever I think of it now, I can think only of the bleak Marlon Brandon/Elizabeth Taylor movie of the same name. And I always get it confused with the Elizabeth Taylor movie "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" It's the same 1960s how-did-my-marriage-come-to-this? aesthetic.

I read a few of McCullers' short stories for college classes, and the rest later.

It was a long time ago. But all her writing has stayed with me — not as precisely remembered plots but as a feeling of melancholy that one might associate with autumn.

But she is a Southern writer. Like Flannery O'Connor. Eudora Welty. Harper Lee. Truman Capote. In the South, summer is the season of mellow fruitfulness. Not fall.

Summer is when all the marvelous children peopling these great Gothic novels sit around the kitchen table and yearn for something to happen.

And nothing ever does.

And that's the story.

And the tone is inevitably nostalgic. For nothing.

Oh sure, things happen. People get lynched. Neighbors feud. Flies buzz.

But mostly someone comes of age. Imperceptibly. Unassisted. Irretrievably.

And the poetry is always in the retelling, not the happening. As with the South itself.

As George and I were meandering through central Kansas last week, we came upon a sight that could have been in a McCullers novel because it was so striking and yet, in its own context, unremarkable. An older couple sitting in yellow metal chairs in the meager shade of their tiny house. It was 106 degrees, the middle of the afternoon. They waved at cars as they passed on the highway. We surmised that maybe their air conditioner was broken, or maybe they didn't have an air conditioner. Maybe this is how they kept cool, how they socialized. Maybe they spent the whole summer this way, like McCullers' characters: Frankie and Berenice and John Henry, sitting around the kitchen table, "saying the same things over and over, so that by August the words began to rhyme with each other and sound strange."

Or maybe the scene had nothing to do with their way of life. Maybe they were just taking a break from weeding the yard. Maybe they'd go out on the town later.

Something else that recently reminded me of summer and Carson McCullers: Neko Case's new song "Star Witness," which I've listened to a hundred times, partly because the refrain has a curious sexual rhythm — not like routine adult sex but like sex before you knew what it was like, sex as you imagined it as a teenager: enchanted.

But mostly I listen to it for the lyrics leading up to the enchantment, which are about a little girl tripping on the sidewalk where tree roots have sundered it, like nature reclaiming civilization. The kid's pocket change falls out.

Trees break the sidewalk
And the sidewalk skins my knees
There's glass in my thermos
And blood on my jeans
Nickels and dimes of the Fourth of July
Roll off in a crooked line
To the chain-link lots where the red tails dive
Oh how I forgot what it's like

It's something McCullers would have seen significance in. A moment dense with meaning. Decaying order. Shattered glass. The weird freedom of summer, a sweet liberty constrained by thick boredom. Independence Day. Money. Blood. Birds who could fly anywhere but stay.

The difference between Neko Case and Carson McCullers is that McCullers would never have written "Oh how I forgot what it's like."

Because — this must have been her gift and her curse — she would never have forgotten what anything was like.

GROCERY STORE GANGSTA

I'm at Checkers just now getting a 12-pack of Diet Black Cherry Vanilla Coke for George, who's on his way here for a weekend of fun.

I also need lemons and half-and-half for the Limoncello Creams I'm going to ply him with later.

On my way to the dairy aisle I accidentally bump a little kid with my cart. He's probably 5 or 6 years old. Black. Cute as hell. It's the merest bump and it's his fault because he was walking backward and spinning around and, as children are wont, moving in unpredictable paths.

The bump doesn't even displace him, let alone knock him down or anything. Still, when he registers the offense, his eyes widen with disbelief. Anger. "How'd you feel if I kicked your ass?" he says.

I think for a moment, then grab his tiny shoulders and slam him into the dairy case. His feet are three feet off the ground, dangling helplessly. His face is full of fear. An inch from his ear I say: "How'd you feel if I kicked yours, you little fucker?"*

Then his mom grabs him and smacks him in the back of the head. "Tell the lady you're sorry."

"I'm sorry," he says.

"No, you're not," I say. "Say it like you mean it, asshole."+

And his mom chimes, "Say it again."

"I'm sorry, white lady."

I hope you appreciate these beverages, George.

*My exact words: "I wouldn't feel very good. I'm sorry."
+ My exact words: "That's OK."

ROAD TRIPS

My girlfriend broke up with me because I'm boring.

That wasn't the only reason. I'm also narrow-minded, ill-tempered, prudish and set in my ways. Plus I don't appreciate good graphic design. When she had to come up with a wine label for an art class, I suggested a picture of a bunch of grapes. That was the beginning of the end.

Actually, our end was written in our beginning, just like the Great Gatsby, but I was too boring to notice. As a result, instead of breaking up five years sooner, we beat on, like boats against the current. Or something.

Anyway, I'm boring.

She was right about that. I don't live enough. The other day she was at my house trying to get me to have fun. "Let your hair down," she said. And "Loosen up." And, my favorite, "Let your freak flag fly." I don't know what that means exactly. Freak flag. It has something to do with uninhibited fun, I imagine, but it's something more. It got me thinking about my inner freak. And I came to the conclusion that I don't have an inner freak. Hence no flag. With me, the freak you see is the freak you get. And that's not much.

My ex was in Kansas because she's driving across the country with her new puppy, Pip. Pip is part golden retriever and part German shepherd. Beth crashed at my house a few days, then hit the road. Here are some of our recent phone conversations that really underscore my boringness, in case you are having a hard time believing it.

Conversation 1:
Beth: Hey, what are you up to?
Kim: Nothing.What are you up to?
Beth: I'm swimming in the Atlantic Ocean with Pip.

Conversation 2:
Beth: Hey, what are you up to?
Kim: Nothing.What are you up to?
Beth: I'm exploring Colonial Williamsburg, then I'm going to Jamestown.

Conversation 3
Beth: Hey, what are you up to?
Kim: Nothing.What are you up to?
Beth: Driving through Illinois. I just visited Abe Lincoln's log cabin.

Conversation 4:
Beth: Hey, what are you up to?
Kim: Nothing.What are you up to?
Beth: Driving through the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve. All the rangers here are women. It rocks.

Conversation 5:
Beth: Hey, what are you up to?
Kim: Nothing.What are you up to?
Beth: Driving around Salt Lake City, waiting for this rockin' lesbian Mormon bar to open. I think that so-called Great Salt Lake dries up in summer. I can't find it. (Insert "Dumb and Dumber" reference: "I thought the Rockies would be a lot rockier. That John Denver is full of shit.")

Conversation 6
Beth: Hey, what are you up to?
Kim: Nothing.What are you up to?
Beth: Crossing this mountain pass with Pip.

You get the picture. Pip is more fun than I am.

It's true.

But it's one thing to be boring and another thing to be boring and not know it. That is the worst kind of boring.

But if you're boring AND you know it, clap your hands. Because there is hope for you. Just today I used my self-awareness and decided to be less boring. Here's what I did: I visited my friends Erin and Ben at their house in Newton on Monday night. We didn't have one boring moment. I brought my Deluxe Edition Scrabble game, and we didn't even play it because we had too much other fun stuff to do, like repotting a plant and cooking a vegetarian meal and watching a video of the 2004 barbershop quartet championship.

But that's not the point. I always have fun with Ben and Erin. We complement one another's boringness. Like I was telling Erin about Beth's trip, how she was just driving all over the country, carefree, without a destination, and Erin matter-of-factly said, "I'd rather stay home."

Too bad Erin's taken.

If she were available and gay and not way too good for me and 10 years older and lived in Massachusetts, I would have proposed to her on the spot.

Another time I was telling her about a museum exhibit, and she said she wasn't really interested, and I said but it's a really cool museum, and she said it wasn't the museum that she would mind but "the going there."

Excellent.

Anyway, that's not the point. The point is there's only one Erin, and realistically if I ever want another girlfriend, I have to be less boring. So here's what I did when I left their house: Instead of driving straight home, I took a little detour off Highway 50. At the Highway 177 junction, you can go north into the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, as Beth recently did, or you can go south to the twin burgs of Strong City and Cottonwood Falls. Being an adventurer now, I took the road less traveled and headed south. Here's what I saw on my journey:



Downtown Cottonwood Falls, which boasts "a brick street so wide you can turn a horse-drawn carriage around on it." Or a Trans-Am. Like this one, which was collecting dust at an abandoned filling station on Broadway.





The Chase County Courthouse: the oldest courthouse in Kansas still in operation. Made of native limestone and walnut. A sign in front says it was built in the 1870s by John G. Haskell, who also built the courthouse and a bunch of other stuff in Douglas County, where I live. This kid cycled around the courthouse six times while I was there. Once he waved to me. Nice folks, these Cottonwood Fallsians. Too bad the city missed the boat because the lines of commerce — highways and railroads and such — bypassed it.



The abandoned Strong City train depot. Apparently Strong City and Cottonwood Falls, just down the road, were linked by some sort of 19th century public transit system that was considered cutting edge at the time. Now the only business this depot sees is a weekend Farmers Market. With actual farmers, I imagine.



Dave’s Place in Strong City. I wanted to get a soda here, but I was a bit scared of an old guy on the bench out front. I was afraid he’d look askance at my Birkenstocks. Or say something hostile to me like, “You’re not from here, are you?” The Strong Citians, I felt, lacked the warmth of their Cottonwood Falls cousins. And yet I did find evidence of a sense of humor:



This, I imagine, refers to clothes lines. Probably every few years someone falls for it, like I almost did, and makes a serious inquiry, only to be laughed out of town. That cowboy on the railing looks poised to slap his knee and guffaw at some city slicker's expense.



A typical house on Main Street with all the amenities. Trampoline with safety rails. Satellite dish that has seen better days. I wondered what the place was like when all that stuff was new and shiny and bursting with the promise of fun.We’ll never be bored now.

So that’s the first day of my new, exciting life. Actually, just the first 20 minutes, which is all the detour I had time for. I had to get home for my nap. Next time I'll go north on Highway 177. As Erin says, wish me luck.

WHAT'S THE POINT? IF YOU HAVE TO ASK...

I know, I know. It's the Men's World Cup Final that is Sunday, not the women's. But all things soccer remind me of Brandy Chastain celebrating after defeating China for the 1999 Women's World Cup. It's the greatest victory photo ever. That it was considered controversial because it showed her bra is laughable now. And it was laughable then. Shame on anyone who saw anything in it but a fantastic athlete with a brilliant, powerful body. Anyway, France and Italy meet on Sunday, and Rick, who has taken a late liking to the sport, as have I, had these reflections:

I never played any team sports. In gym class I never liked basketball, baseball and such. Chasing after balls was not my strong suit, and it seemed rather pointless at the time. I preferred gymnastics. And even better were the things we didn’t do in gym, like skiing or skateboarding.  There were no mountain bikes when I was a kid, but there should have been. I broke three bikes in the time it took to break one arm. I started climbing as a kid — long before I had a rope. It was simple good luck that I never fell off anything high enough to do me lasting harm.
 
I no longer think that team sports are pointless. Or, actually, they are pointless. They are pointless in very much the same way that my balance sports are pointless. They are chosen because they are hard to perform well: The attraction is in the unnecessary challenge. It just has to be an interesting challenge. Big professional team sports are pointless in another way as well. All societies when they achieve any surplus labor seem to promptly begin grandiose projects that are, at root, unnecessary. We no longer want to build pyramids or cathedrals, but, after all, these are now easy for us. Men on the moon were grand indeed, and not easy, but proved to be of passing interest. But we have big team sports. Their enduring success suggests that they are the ideal fulfillment of our own grand excesses. During the last NCAA men’s basketball tournament, I read several articles that claimed that office betting pools were causing this huge loss in productivity and costing the nation’s employers billions. But, hey, we can afford it.
 
The moral-improvement crowd might be offended at my glorifying the pointlessness of sport. Sports create leadership, self-esteem, role models, they will say. The British Empire was forged on the pitches of Eton. Hogwash. Did English sport go sour before the Empire went belly up? And really, what kind of role model is a twenty-something multimillionaire? Is that a realistic benchmark of success for today’s youth? That’s all so whatever.
 
I’ll stick with inspired pointlessness. But the inspired bit is important. For instance, baseball strikes me as an insipid sport. The only attraction I can imagine is that of the fan who loves to go around spouting endless sports trivia. If you don’t like statistics, then baseball becomes so much standing around to see if a guy can hit a ball with a stick. The swatting at the ball part isn’t so bad, but seems a poor return for all the preparation time. Cricket, if anything, is even worse. At least it seems to take even longer to play.
 
My two favorite team sports are very unlike each other even though they kind of have the same name. On the one hand we have soccer, which we should call football like the rest of the world does. There are three brilliant things about this game.  First, it is basically very simple and hardly even needs a ball to play. Everywhere in the world there are kids on the street playing pickup soccer. (Except in middle class America which prohibits pickup sports.) If the kids are too poor to have a ball, they will make one out of a wad of old clothes. The rules are simple and straightforward.  In no time at all, you can learn how this game is played. But the rules make the game very, very hard. Humans are good and versatile runners. Few other animals are good at both sprinting and long distance. We can run well almost by instinct. The inspired element of soccer is to hobble that great running instinct with the requirement that you kick the ball while you are running. Running and kicking are nothing like each other and need very different balance. Soccer players should be falling down all over the field from the mere effort of trying to do both. So dribbling, passing, and shooting are all hard. To that is added a not very large goal that is defended by a keeper who can use his or her hands. To score even a single goal against these obstacles is an amazing achievement. And a virtue of these low-scoring games is that you can never be sure that even a dominant team will win. They might fail to score: One to nothing upsets are not rare. The third great thing about soccer is that the players are left almost entirely to their own devices throughout the game. The field is large, the play stops only briefly, and substitutions are very limited. The coach’s role is to prepare the players for the game — once they are on the field, they have to play with only whatever skills and desires they brought with them that day.
 
American football couldn’t be more different. Although it is played at several levels, I think that it is the perfect sport for large professional franchises that can bring lots of money to the game. They need to. Played in this way, football is a stunningly complex sport. Like a military, there is a lot of “tail” for the “tooth.” The roster for a team is large, and unlike soccer, several different line-ups are fielded during a game. But the amazing bit is what goes into getting those men ready.
There are many ranks of support that you see on the sidelines, up in the “booth,” and even farther behind the scenes. A football play is an exacting bit of choreography with men spread across the field needing to act carefully in sync. It is a strange dance, though, where your “partner” is trying to get you to stumble. So the enduring tension of football is between trying to execute your plan as you designed it and reacting to your opponent’s reactions. This makes football perhaps the most strategic of team sports. These professional teams can develop and train their players to run hundreds of plays full of variation and misdirection. The stereotype of the dumb jock doesn’t apply. At the very least, these guys need excellent memories.
 
I never watched football until I started hanging out with some people who knew it.  You can see at a glance that it is complex, but getting some good explanations shows that it is deep. I learn more about the sport with every game I watch, and I still don’t think I know much. So much is there to see, though. The success of the sport depends upon television. Without it, the teams would never have built the revenue to run such large complex organizations. But being a big-money sport also means that they can pack the stadium with TV cameras and hire a crew of top professionals to put on a big show with high production values. There is little about the game that they cannot show you and from multiple angles and in close-up. If there are two armies contesting on the field with their long tails of supply and command, then there is another army to bring it all to you in your living room.  When a big play that is so improbable as to seem impossible happens, you get all the glorious details. Truly a sport for our age.

STILL AND ALWAYS

"I think during spring break I'll concentrate more on having fun instead of trying to figure everything out." — Erin Gough, 12, in her diary


Here's something damn bleak.

(Bleak as in stark. As in grimly blunt. As in sort of beautiful.)

Maxine Kumin, one of my favorite poets, has a poem in the current New Yorker about Anne Sexton, another of my favorite poets, who killed herself on Oct. 4, 1974.

Kumin and Sexton were best friends.

In the poem, called "Revisionist Dream," Kumin dreams that Sexton is still alive, that she is taking piano lessons and translating Anna Akhmatova and making coq au vin.

The dream, of course, "blew up at dawn." Sexton isn't alive. She isn't almost 80. She gassed herself in her garage at age 43, just after lunch.

After 32 years of the fact, deep down the mind still rejects it.

In the dream, ""It was a mild day in October, we sat outside/over sandwiches. She said she had begun/to practice yoga."

In the dream, Sexton "hugged me, went home, cranked the garage doors open,/scuffed through the garish leaves, orange and red,/that brought on grief."

In real life, Sexton drove off after lunch, said something out her car window that Kumin didn't hear, then cranked open the garage doors, and closed them, and left her car running.

To tell the truth, this poem doesn't resonate with me much as a poem — not like the poem Kumin wrote about wearing Sexton's sweater after she died, not like her startling "woodchuck" poem. I don't see the poetry in this new one exactly, but then Maxine Kumin is the one with the Pulitzer Prize, not me. What resonates most with me is its quality as a human document, a testament to the doggedness of memory, the impossible delicacy of our physical connection to each other and the almost unbearable solidity of our mental one, and as a testament to the significant, mysterious moment. Like the moment of Mrs. Dalloway kissing Sally. Of Lot's wife looking back at Sodom ("who suffered death because she chose to turn"). Of Anne Sexton's last — unheard — words.

I read a biography of Sexton years ago. Here's what I remember:

She was a housewife.

She suffered chronic depression. Her psychologist recommended poetry as therapy.

She took a poetry class. And met Maxine Kumin there.

They became friends. They critiqued each other's work. They raised each other's kids. They drank vodka and read poems in a swimming pool that Sexton — scandalously — bought with grant money.

Often they concentrated more on having fun instead of trying to figure everything out.

They each won a Pulitzer Prize.

They had affairs.

Sexton wrote to her baffled, jealous husband (I'll always remember this): "No, you are not the man of my dreams; you are my life." (Christ, I'd settle for that.)

And I saw Maxine Kumin read her poetry in Kansas City right after I read the Sexton biography, maybe a dozen years ago. I had Kumin sign my copy of her poems. It was the first time I asked anyone for an autograph. And I didn't want her autograph; I just wanted to be in her space for a second. She seemed old and frail, yet tough, exactly like someone should who had spent decades in rural New England raising horses and writing verse. Like someone who lived close to the earth. There were references to Sexton in some of the poems she read that night. I wanted to ask her what she felt, if anything, speaking those allusions to strangers. Performing them for strangers, over and over. It must have had, I see now, no resemblance to the unbidden dream. But that's not a question you could possibly ask someone. Because the answer, even if she felt like giving one, is a lost ingredient, just like in Sexton's poem.

The Lost Ingredient

Almost yesterday, those gentle ladies stole
to their baths in Atlantic City, for the lost
rites of the first sea of the first salt
running from a faucet. I have heard they sat
for hours in briny tubs, patting hotel towels
sweetly over shivered skin, smelling the stale
harbor of a lost ocean, praying at last
for impossible loves, or new skin, or still
another child. And since this was the style,
I don't suppose they knew what they had lost.

Almost yesterday, pushing West, I lost
ten Utah driving minutes, stopped to steal
past postcard vendors, crossed the hot slit
of macadam to touch the marvelous loosed
bobbing of The Salt Lake, to honor and assault
it in its proof, to wash away some slight
need for Maine's coast. Later the funny salt
itched in my pores and stung like bees or sleet.
I rinsed it off on Reno and hurried to steal
a better proof at tables where I always lost.

Today is made of yesterday, each time I steal
toward rites I do not know, waiting for the lost
ingredient, as if salt or money or even lust
would keep us calm and prove us whole at last.