The Other Great Gatsby

For what it’s worth, did not live in East Egg or West Egg, but he liked eggs for breakfast, thank you very much, particularly poached soft and served on lightly buttered toast with a little kosher salt and coarse ground pepper. And he did not much enjoy his first name, Gatsby, which was chosen by a librarian mother. He didn’t think it was very fair, or very funny, and he thought, quite frankly, that his given name was weighted with mawkish American tragedy, too heavy with classism, as set up for bad outcomes as a woman named Ophelia.

Furthermore, he developed a distaste for, in no special order, daisies, swimming pools, optometrists, brash women, and green-tinged lighting. Gatsby had become petulant over the years of carrying around his infamous name, and in any situations that required a can-do attitude, he never suggested that he couldn’t do, but he was certainly one that, when given the choice, wouldn’t do. He patently refused to aspire towards hyperbole. Too much pressure, he said. I hate “great,” he said; I prefer Pretty-Good Gatsby or Not-Bad Gatsby or even Fairly-Ineffectual-But-A-Decent-Sort-Of-Guy Gatsby.

It was with this attitude that he pursued goals planning to fall well short of greatness. It was this that let him warm the bench during high school basketball, and this that let him graduate college barely making cum laude, and it was this that made him take the bar exam a staggering five times, and this that let him grow bald behind a desk, researching copyright law, in the offices of Mickel, Stiverson, and Berry, where he never planned to make partner.

Thus Gatsby’s life coasted along on the flat, boring highway of existence until he hit a major axel-bending pothole at a conference for copyright law in Tucson where he met a woman with a name not related to flowers in any fashion: Stella. And much like her namesake, she was the star of the mediocre convention with its mediocre spinach dip and mediocre name badges.  Star in the sense that the men found her dorky-chic glasses fascinating. It helped, too, that she knew all about the exciting things happening in copyright law, and she had a pretty sweet figure, although her calves were a little thick. And of all the slightly paunched, slightly bald men circling her in an awkward, slo-mo kind of high-school dance, her favor fell on Gatsby, who tried to disappear into the foliage of the faux Ficus trees crowding the mock columns of the banquet hall.

Admittedly, he did radiate an odd sort of tension, something Clark Kent-like in his demeanor. But what could we expect from man whose name marked him for something epic even as he fought to be average? Stella picked up on this energy and picked up on Gatsby after liquoring him up on perquisite cheap wine from a major vendor. Gatsby tried to resist, he really did, but he could feel everything starting to break apart as he drunkenly gazed into her designer frames. It was like the Saran Wrap that held him in all these years was finally starting to give and he felt ready to flex.

And since we don’t want to turn this into a tawdry account of conventional sex, pardon the pun, he told me that afterwards she said, “Wow, I mean Gatsby, that was great,” and the hotel room suddenly seemed posh in his eyes, and after that he sort of exploded into a bouquet of greatness. That’s what he said, “bouquet of greatness.” Not long after that, he made partner and not long after that he bought the hotel. Anyway, that’s the story he told me, by the pool after dark, obviously a few scotches into the night. Me? Who am I? I’m just Nick, the front-desk guy.

Everyone Has Something to Say About Sandy Hook

Pardon me if I meekly clear my throat and offer this:

To begin with, I find it disturbing that users of social media are co-opting the events that occurred in the town of Sandy Hook. The onslaught of memes and graphics from people who have little claim to those events except for, assumably, a strong sense of communal grief and empathy has been overwhelming, but not in a good way. If you have a meaningful comment to post, please do. However, if you're sitting in front of your computer, arranging the photos of the slain children into a collage you're hoping to collect "likes" for, then stop. The only people who should be using those images are the families of those children. They do not belong to you. Although this has become a matter of public mourning, there has to be some respect for the private pain that these families are dealing with, and whatever we're feeling, it simply can't compare. So say your peace, and then leave it alone. We have no right to craft a thoughtful response to this event. There should be no manipulation of images, no waxing eloquent, no sentimentality that isn't earned.

Furthermore, do we really believe that this is either a gun control or a mental health issue? Have we become such a nation of binaries that we can't imagine how it might be some of both and maybe even something else besides? See, I think it's at least a gun control issue, a mental health issue, and a community issue. In terms of gun control, do we really think that we either can have guns or we can't have guns? As a bleeding-heart liberal gun-owner, I like to think that there are some smart and reasonable people out there who might be able to craft legislation that's fair to responsible gun owners. And I believe the slippery-slope argument is listed as a logical fallacy in my college textbook. Look it up.

And of course this is a mental health issue, too, as were most of the prior mass shootings. What can we do about this? Remove the stigma of diagnosing mental health issues. Fully acknowledge that mental illness is a real, often chemical, thing. Find ways to fund and support the individuals and families that contend with mental illness everyday. I'm sure other things, too. I'm confident that there are knowledgeable people out there with great ideas for enacting meaningful change, but we have to be willing to move forward into uncomfortable territory.

In terms of this idea of community, it seems like the more private and isolated we become as individuals and as families within our communities, the more likely something like this can foment. And yet the more we become exposed to events like this one, the more inclined we are to withdraw into our homes out of distrust for our neighbors. Catch-22. When I learned about this event, my first thought for Dexter was home-schooling. So, great. The more we distrust each other, the more we isolate, the more we isolate, the more out-of-touch we become with our fellow human-beings. One can imagine how it might become easy to miss the signs of great mental disturbance in such a scenario. Family life used to be more public. We used to know the family that lived next door and across the street. The more we know about the individuals that live around us, the more we can empathize and offer support to them before that support has to be packaged as grief.

All I can say is that it's absurd to suggest that these sort of tragedies are easily attributed to one thing.

And we should stop watching the news. It's just a heavy-hearted doomsayer. Instead we should fill our precious time with joyous art and long walks through our neighborhoods. I'm oversimplifying, I know, but such logical fallacies belong to idealists like me who still refuse to believe that, as a rule, other human beings shouldn't be trusted.

Encore of Pregnancy Limericks

Per a friend's request, here is an encore of my pregnancy limericks:

There was a young woman named Sonia

Who feasted on Cake and Lasagna

Her belly got big

As she supped like a pig

But she was pregnant, so folks said “Good on ya!”

Squeezing out my little baby’s head

Fills me with a sense of dread

Will I push mainland China

Through the hole in my vagina

Or is he Luxembourg instead?

There was a young wife from Ipswitch

Whose labor was a terrible bitch

The pain she couldn’t bare

When she felt her parts tear

Still she asked for the “daddy stitch!”

There was a little fetus named Scooter

Whose in utero pic couldn’t be cuter

In Vegas conceived

His parents perceived

His daddy must be a straight shooter!

There was a young lady from Leicester

Well into her third trimester

She cleaned with great feeling

Even scrubbed down the ceiling

Not a bird, but still quite a nester. 

My baby will soon be blessed

To feed from his mommy’s breast

My boobs a food source

As a matter of course

Milk and love to be expressed.                        

A knocked-up girl from Monroe

Sought fame which seemed apropos

Although not her plan

Once her labor began

She was the star of her own bloody show.

Labor stories are meant to scare

Though I’m pregnant with nary a care

My water may break

While I’m out having steak

But the chance is medium-rare.

A baby bump is very impressive

When circumference becomes quite excessive

To get around your gut

And clean up your butt

With T.P. you must be aggressive.

I prefer my skin smooth and bare

Sleek legs with no public hair

But I’m shaped like a keg

I can’t reach my legs

And I guess there’s a beaver down there?

When Your Child is Sick

Everyone is always saying, "Thank God It's Friday!" but you're not thanking God much for this particular Friday. On this Friday you pick your son up from preschool and notice that his body is a torch. You notice that he is sitting in a flushed, crumpled daze in the middle of the floor clutching a random sock, and when he sees you, he literally tips over and bangs his head against the cubbies. So you scoop him up in a panic and dash past the kind but overwhelmed preschool teacher who didn't notice how fiery your son was, how absolutely delirious he was.

You take him home, dose him with Tylenol, and pull him into your bed for a nap, his temperature wavering around one oh two. You suck your teeth, and sigh, and place your hand on his head over and over until you both fall asleep. What wakes you up is your son's full-blown febrile seizure as he flops around your husband's side of the bed. You call hoarsely, desperately, for your husband who rushes in and says, "Give him room, let him finish," because there is nothing else you can do but watch and wait and say, "Oh God, Oh God." Afterwards, in his postictal state, your son can only drool, and his eyes roll around as flat and blank as unstamped pennies.Your husband takes your son's rectal temperature. It's one oh four point three. Apparently, the Tylenol didn't work.

Speaking of God, when your son is sick, your prayers become pleading. You say, "This is my only boy, my only child" as if you're suggesting that God mess with somebody else's child, someone who has more than one child. Like it would somehow be less sad for a family with extra children if there was one fewer. And you revisit your Our Fathers and your Hail Marys-- the words part of your DNA, programmed into your brain by a Catholic youth-- in the hopes that God might respect how you've held on to those old chestnuts for when you really, really need them.

In the meantime, all around you, life goes on, and you're expected to be on, too. You have students who need you in the last days of the semester. You have your own grad school classes to finish. You have a reading to perform. You can still hear the healthy children at the park rattling the metal steering wheel on the jungle gym. Christmas lights are still being strung with great cheer across the neighborhood. Everywhere your ears turn, you hear people laugh, and you think, "What the fuck are you laughing at?" You of all people become, in these dark times, a real killjoy.

Because children change you. Even in what might be construed as carefree moments, you're still dragging a great weight around behind you like a giant, jangling pull-toy.

And you're left wondering what you've done wrong. You remember that your son didn't eat Friday morning, and he seemed a little warm, a little lethargic, so you gave him a preventative dose of Motrin thinking that if he felt punk, preschool would call and you'd rush home from teaching to grab him. You find yourself saying, "How did I fail?" and "What mistake did I make?" because raising a child doesn't really leave much room for miscalculation. You think about what parents of gravely ill children must think. How they must wonder if what went wrong with their child was something they put in him. Kind of how you wonder about your son's seizure disorder. You imagine the spiral staircase of your DNA strands with missing or broken stairs.

When your child is sick, you spend a great deal of time scouring the Internet looking for answers but are only left with more fears. You think, Kawasaki's? Leukemia?? Then you remember the woman you met while riding the Griffith Park train with your son. She was there with her granddaughter, and she told you how she no longer judges people on first sight. She tells you how her two-year-old grandson was judged as fat and ill-mannered when he was actually dying from Leukemia. Amazing what impromptu lessons you can learn from strangers: Don't judge. Her granddaughter, a silent, Spanish beauty, wore small gold hoops. She touched your hand with such seriousness. After all, her family's love is a weight made heavier by her brother's death even if she never knew him.

And so you carry around worst-case scenarios in your head and play them out to farfetched happy endings. And you spend four long days chasing your son's fever trying to prevent another seizure. You set the alarm every three hours and alternate Motrin and Tylenol. You watch him waver and burn on the couch. You let him suck his thumb with his comfort dog all day. You don't care. You let him watch the same Thomas the Tank Engine movie five times in a row. You're well past simple indulgence now. You think, whatever he needs, I'll give it. Wherever I have to go, I'll go there. Kidney? Here you go. I have another. Ends of the earth? Sure. Not very far, really. Heart? It was his the minute you birthed him, anyway.

When your child is sick and you end up in the emergency room for the second time in four days because your son can no longer walk, and you're convinced it's Guillane-Barre Syndrome, you think maybe you're going to finally lose your cool because you're so sick of your little boy being sick. You're so sick of feeling like some sadistic shrew of a fate is trying to take him away, and you tick off all the scary things that have already happened in the short three years he has been around.

But then (miraculously?) in the five hours of sitting around in the ER waiting for a room in the Peds Unit, he starts to perk up. He shuffles along like Tim Conway. He cracks preschool jokes. You choose to go home instead of checking in to the hospital because hospitals are for sick children. And in the end, it really was only a virus, just a very bad one. Like the flu, which has been known to kill. You can't take it too lightly. There's no place in your life for a cavalier attitude anymore. Your boy is tired now. You're just going to let him sleep the rest of it off.