At least according to MSN.

39th place?!? Are you freaking KIDDING me? That’s PATHETIC! Come on, guys! We can do better! Let’s aim high! Orlando’s #1! WE’VE GOTTA BE ANGRIER THAN ORLANDO! Go out right now and smash something up! Even Indianapolis is ahead of us! Doesn’t THAT make you angry? How about Lubbock, Texas? I’m fightin’ mad about that one, let me tell you!

I figure Deval Patrick has been holding his breath for my endorsement long enough. He can’t turn any bluer, so I might as well just throw in my lot with him now.

Actually I hadn’t seen him in the news too much lately. I was wondering when he’d start running campaign commercials. But in the last couple of days his campaign seems to have kicked into high gear, unveiling two new ones–one that showed him out among the people, and featured tingly words like “hope” and “justice”. Another where he’s addressing the camera directly from in front of a blackboard in a classroom. More “hopes” and “dreams” and lives “transformed” (mainly Deval’s). He gets mildly medieval on the current administration in this one: “It’s not a deficit of dollars,” he says of the “education crisis,” “it’s a deficit of leadership — the failure to ask hard questions and tell the truth.”

This would seem to imply that his Republican opponent, Kerry Healey, the representative of the current administration seeking the governorship, too, has not asked the hard questions or told the truth. You could argue for the first, depending on what you consider to be the “hard questions” to be, but I think the second is a stretch, and I’ll tell you why.

I don’t think the truth is a big issue for Republicans, first of all. Healey’s positions would certainly “evolve,” just as Romney’s have while in office.

Neither Romney nor Healey is a leader. Both are managers, and managers are interested in the bottom-line, and they will change their management strategy according to whose bottom-line they’re paying attention to.

For her part, Kerry Healey’s latest ad characterizes her opponents as traditional “tax-and-spend” liberals, and then there’s a bit of fluff about how she will spend your money on “things like education.” And who could object to that?

What rings particularly hollow with Healey is the promise to “suspend the gas tax,” which is something no one’s all that interested in. Even the President recognizes America has an oil addiction. “With a billion dollar surplus,” she claims in one ad, “we can afford it.” Well, if we’ve got such a big-ass surplus, why not put some of it into transit-oriented development? Maybe make alternatives to automobiles a feasible alternative for people. I mean, two of her, like, four campaign promises have to do with making driving a car cheaper.

None of the Healey’s opponents are fool enough to propose new taxes, by the way. And none have mentioned our supposed billion dollar surplus. (I don’t know where this figure comes from, actually–The Mass. Budget and Policy Center puts the surplus at $120 million–if anyone has insight on this, please share.)

Healey wants it both ways here. She wants to say, on the one hand, that when she came into power four years ago, as she told channel 4’s Jon Keller, “things were very tough; we were having an economic downturn.” But now we have this billion dollar surplus, according to her. So why are we still experiencing “the big squeeze,” as she calls it in her ad? That’s the question, isn’t it?

She is literally the poster child for her own administration’s lack of effectiveness. She’s trying to court the very people her own administration could not help, by her own admission, over the past four years. It’s the legislature’s fault? OK, so how is she going to be any more effective in dealing with it than Romney’s been? And Romney had a lot more impressive management experience than Healey when he came to office.

But back to Deval. What he’s got that Healey doesn’t is precisely “hope.” And that’s what separates leadership, particularly on the executive level, from management. Managers strategize and build systems, leaders inspire and motivate people. And don’t underestimate the power of inspired and motivated people. The Healey camp says, leave it to us. We’ll manage it for you. Deval says “together, we can.”

The question for Deval is, can he leverage his charisma to convince the legislature to make changes once in office? But even if he can’t, he starts out in a stronger position than Healey. He at least has the charisma to begin with.

After their team’s recent manhandling by the Yankees, Sox fans are starting to suspect they’ve been cursed again. But they’ve got it all wrong. Yes, they’re back to being the Yankees’ bitches, but this doesn’t have to be a bad thing. In fact, being a bitch can be fun! I say, stop whining about it. Embrace your inner bitch, Sox Nation!

The truth is, that World Series win put the pressure on. And it started to dawn on Sox Nation that it’s not easy being the alpha dog. Not to say that it’s necessarily easy to lie on your belly with your bum in the air taking it from the alpha dog, either. But it’s hard for different reasons.

What’s happened here is pretty simple, actually. Sox Nation is having a bout of performance anxiety. It’s not a curse. Counseling is often very effective. It happens when you’ve been a bottom all your life and then all the sudden you’re expected to turn around and play the top. And just because you did it once in 86 years doesn’t make you Jeff Stryker. But that’s OK. What if everyone in the world was Jeff Stryker? Well, it’d be pretty boring.

Sure, once in a while it’s fun to pretend. Sometimes you pretend so good it almost seems real. But once you’ve shot your wad, the doubts start crowding in, the anxiety, the little voices. You can’t think with both heads at once, guys.

Let’s look at the facts here. It was mere hours after the Sox won the World Series in ‘04 that the hand-wringing began. They won on the 27th of October, and by the 29th there was an article in the New York Times (I know, I know, but bear with me, here) entitled “With Nothing Left to Win, Fans of Red Sox Suddenly Feel a Loss.” This was only the first in a slew of articles to detail the incipient stages of the coming identity crisis for fans.

“It didn’t take long to go from ecstatic to existential,” the article opened, quoting one devoted fan (who happens to be a Pulitzer Prize-winning expert on genocide at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard): “A team that loses in some ways is going to be easier to identify with for most Americans than one that wins. Are we going to become that which we can never imagine being? Are we winners now, and does that make us sort of less empathetic, less humble? That’s what being on the other side of the jackboot for 86 years leaves people able to do. Yankee fans don’t feel for what we’ve gone through. Are we going to become like them?”

(This from a woman who had just returned from Darfur where she was investigating reports of genocide—luckily she was able to hear the game on web radio while she was in Africa conducting her research.)

Anyway, in the World Series victory (and the reverse of the curse) she saw “a chance for a city to lighten up by removing its chip. ‘Maybe it will just become about a baseball rivalry instead of a humiliated city,’ she said. ‘It could make baseball less about the meaning of life and more about just baseball.’ And, she said, almost as if to reassure herself, ‘that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.’”

Well, no such luck.

Like I said, this was only the very first stirrings of panic in Sox Nation. But once again, it’s reaching a “fever pitch,” if you will. It turns out Sox fans didn’t know how to be winners, after all. But then maybe it’s not really about winning or losing in the final analysis. I know you’re accustomed to looking at this as a rivalry, but, really, it’s a relationship. And this was, well, a little role-reversal. It’s healthy. It can be fun once in a while. Spice things up!

But you have to be prepared to be out of your comfort zone, and Sox Nation wasn’t. At first it was liberating, but soon Sox Fans were scared. Who were they now? What was expected of them? Could they continue to play the role convincingly? With those little voices in their head whispering their doubts? They held it together respectably for awhile, but their latest repeated impalement on the great Yankee beef bayonet has brought all those fears to the fore.

What is needed here is an intervention.

Sox Nation could learn alot from Cesar Millan (the “dog whisperer”), and gay sex. Here’s how:

First Cesar Millan. One episode of “The Dog Whisperer” dealt with this little fluffy white dog–I think its name might even have been Fluffy–but he acted more like Kujo. Cesar quickly diagnosed the problem: the dog was being forced to be the alpha, when he wasn’t really alpha material. And all the stress of being made to act like an alpha was making him cranky, and he snapped at everyone at the least provocation.

Sound familiar, Sox fans?

Once the trouble was diagnosed and appropriate measures taken, everyone was much happier. Fluffy no longer felt pressured to act like something he wasn’t, and his mood changed entirely. Placid, loving, full of puppylike joy. The lesson here: not everyone’s an alpha, and not everyone has to be.

OK, so. What could Sox Nation learn from The Joy of Gay Sex?

Well, first of all, in gay life there are “tops” and there are “bottoms”. Sometimes, to be cute, gay guys refer to their roles as “pitcher” and “catcher,” respectively (there are also those who claim to be “versatile,” or “switch-hitters,” but let’s keep this simple).

Gay guys know that when boys get to balling, whether it’s baseballing or any other kind of balling, they can’t all always be pitchers. Someone’s got to play catcher, too. Sure, pitchers get the prestige, but if you want to know where the real power lies…there was a letter to the editor in the Globe today that sort of sums it up:

“LOST IN all the gloom over the Red Sox’ swift collapse has been the evidence to answer that most perplexing of baseball questions: Who is the league’s Most Valuable Player? With all due respect to Big Papi and Derek Jeter, the MVP for 2006 is now abundantly clear: catcher Jason Varitek. The Red Sox captain would appear to be worth about 50 wins a season to this year’s version of the Sox, as their 60 percent winning percentage has dropped by half in the month since he was injured. Those of us who bemoaned his inconsistent hitting early in the year now understand his true value to the team, especially to its young pitchers who have lost all confidence without his leadership.”

Just like the wikipedia article on “bottoming” says: “The terms ’submissive’ or ‘passive’ have been used for ‘bottom,’ though these may be confusing as the sex in question needn’t be part of a dominance relationship, nor is the bottom necessarily any less ‘active’ than the top.”

See, there’s no shame in being a bottom, Sox fans. In fact, methinks you all protest too much. The fact is, the man who can take a good, er, drubbing from another man might actually be the bigger of the two. But you’ve got to relax, loosen up a little, if you want to enjoy it. And take it like a man, for pete’s sake! All this hand-wringing and these bouts of out-and-out hysteria every time you do what comes natural’s getting old. There’s no shame in being a macho bitch, Sox Nation, it’s the whiny bitches we’ve all had it up to here with.

I was over in the Charles/MGH station area yesterday evening (on my bike, of course). The station there is coming along.

It’s definitely a change from the old wooden box style station that used to be there. I like the lines of the new station but it’s so not Boston, and so, so not Beacon Hill. But I like it, from the outside, at least, for the gentle curve of the high glass wall that finesses that unconventional intersection there.

Boston’s urban structures, outside of the tight little knot of Beacon Hill and the short-lived linearity of residential Back Bay, are all at odds with each other. This was caused by and has led to some striking architectural failures. Just take a stroll through the financial district. Boston’s been the butt of a running gag among architects for decades. There are cheap gimmicks galore. Nothing to give a sense of unity except that embarrassing desperation for distinction among the New York wannabes in the crowd. If Menino gets his tower, it will merely serve as a new icon of Boston’s inferiority complex.

But–and I admit this grudgingly–there are random places on the ground where the skyline is unexpectedly, pleasingly dynamic—I realized this when looking over some pictures a friend visiting from Italy had taken from various, random spots in the city—just whenever the mood struck him, he’d point and click. In the future I’ll post my own “found vistas” along with my picks for architectural flops, along with those rare successes in the Boston skyline, and I certainly invite yours as well.

For now, I’d nominate as damagingly inconsequential a structure I had business in last night in the Charles/MGH area: the Tip O’Neill Federal Building.

This is classic office park architecture. The selling point here was obviously the dramatic angle of the pie wedge. The architect’s inspiration seems to have been a stingy slice of tiramisu.

From one angle, in photographs if not in reality, the building looks, erm, distinctive. That’s about all you can say about it. But you get no sense of this when you’re actually there, on the street.

And just a note about the bike rack outside the main entrance. It’s impressive they have one (if only one). I’m not going to complain: it’s a very long one. But they have placed it under the only trees on the street, where about ten million cranky birds nest, and it is absolutely caked in bird shit. It’s become a sort of living sculpture. When I came out after my meeting, I had to tunnel through about two feet of fresh poop to find my bike.

Still the Tip O’Neill does not qualify as a complete abomination. Next door is the appalling monolith of the Banknorth Garden, whose “decorated” facade, if you can call it that, does not face Causeway Street, but looks out over 93. And I can say unequivocally that the exterior of this box is an utter abomination.

I had a daunting weekend, and it’s splattered all over my week so far. The weather has been more or less wonderful, of course, and I was able to spend a bit of time in the garden Saturday, but for some reason–maybe the planets are in an evil alignment– my relations at the moment are almost universally prickly. The ones that aren’t prickly are like trying to fit square pegs into round holes.

There are times when you’re in the flow, when all those seemingly disparate elements beautifully converge, and then there are times when nothing comes together, and all those perfectly merged elements scatter to the four winds again. Sometimes life is like looking through a kaleidoscope, isn’t it?

And sometimes you just find you’re in the dark. Usually when you bang into something head-first you didn’t see was right in front of you. So many disparate emotions, your thoughts crowding each other out. It’s all a lot of static. Nothing resonates.

It seems to augur change.

So I’m sitting in the movie theater with a friend, watching the thoroughly delightful Little Miss Sunshine, and at the end, when the little girl performs at the pageant—a wonderful scene, even if you saw it coming—I find myself bawling my eyes out. Hmm. Funny.

The movie was a “small, good thing,” to borrow Raymond Carver’s famous phrase. I liked the theme of impotently defying society’s rigid structures. And the peculiarly American take on that modern struggle between artifice and authenticity. I was impressed once again by Steve Carrell, whom I think is the next generation of a venerable comic tradition whose current best practitioner is Bill Murray.

This may have been a hybrid genre piece (dysfunctional family goes on a road trip), but it was a good one. As for whether genre pieces are worth seeing, there was an interesting article in the Sunday Globe by their film critic Ty Burr, about Snakes on a Plane, where the always astute critic asserted: “We go to movies–even honest schlock–not to see what we expect to see but to be surprised by what we hadn’t expected.”

But do we?

This assumption on the part of critics is really a presumption in disguise. It’s like saying that when we go out to eat we always want Chinese. We don’t. Sometimes we want Japanese, Italian, or Mexican. If we ordered a humonga-chonga, we will indeed be surprised if the waiter brings us mugu gai pan, but that’s not what we wanted. Novelty is sometimes not on the menu.

The critic might, out of ennui, choose to distill what is valuable in a picture to “surprise” or “originality,” but this contradicts everything we see in the actual history of art, where a genre is invented, replicated endlessly, mastered by degrees, finally perfected, and then parodied, mocked, and morphed in its decline, cannibalized and hybridized beyond recognition, until a new genre emerges.

The important thing to understand here is that “we” don’t necessary want to be “surprised”–movie critics, because they are bored, because they watch too many movies that seem to be too much alike, want to be “surprised.”

Why do people buy albums and listen to them over and over and over again until they know every lyric, every guitar lick, every little lilt in the lead singer’s voice? The Cult of the New is particularly modern. And has actually already been superseded. Postmodern architecture is not about out-and-out originality, but appropriation and recombination. The ascendant forms of entertainment, like video games, are not about originality or surprise, but about repetition and mastery.

But the point here is that there is no one reason to go to the movies. Sometimes we want the salve of ritual, the stations of the cross; sometimes we want surprise. For me narrative cohesion, pacing, good–that is to say authetic, appropriate–dialogue, and a dose of je ne sais quoi are the ingredients of greatness, regardless of genre.

As for prickly relations. I mean, aside from those that are just generally prickly, regardless. (And you know who you are!)…

I got a good dressing down from a relatively new FWP about my treatment of the Newbury Street shopper a couple weeks ago in my blog. To be fair, he admitted that if he had been people-watching on Newbury Street and she had passed by loaded up like a pack mule as she was, shaking her thang, he might’ve cracked wise, but he would not have gone home and written about it.

It is an interesting distinction. And there is definitely something to it. The diarist sometimes seems petty for recording for posterity off-the-cuff observations that come off seeming unseemly when the moment is past. This is the chief source of danger in keeping a diary, in fact, as anyone who has for any length of time and has the courage to read it over occasionally can tell you. Come to find, we are all petty.

What do we do when we see someone so utterly self-absorbed they don’t even realize they’re being stalked by bloggerazzi? We mock them at a safe distance. My new FB acknolwedged this. What is unseemly is admitting it after the fact. But there is a remedy even for this. Mock the blogger. Pierce made his point–”mock not lest ye be mocked”–by mocking me! Stalked by the online mockerazzi? Mock them back! We will all go down together! In a stinking plume of self-pity and scorn!

I think to many people I heard from on the issue it seemed “unfair,” but also a bit cowardly, particularly to photograph our mystery shopper, especially from behind. It’s like shooting someone in the back. I’ll own it. But come on, people. If you step outside your door these days you run the risk of being shot. It’s not everyone else’s responsibility to be watching your back for you.

Then at work yesterday one of my esteemed colleagues sort of pulls me aside, sweetly says she wants to ask me about something I recently wrote.

Now, I should preface this by saying, about a month ago another of my esteemed colleagues, an Italian gentleman, pulled me aside in the corridor (literally grabbing me by the collar) and growled: You MUSTa Write about a de WARRRRRAH! I was like, which one? I mean, Christ. Well, the Big One, of course. It’s Armageddon, you know.

But I didn’t write about that war, because no matter how judicious you try to be about it, you will get it from both sides, and, frankly, I don’t see where the big emergency is. This has been going on for millennia, and it will go on for many milennia more. It’s the freakin Hatfelds and McKahlils. What’s the rush to write something? And so what if it is the end of the world (which it isn’t)—then what?

But finally I did write something—not really about that war, but about the War on Terror, and not from the Jewish perspective, but from that of the humble Goy.

Oy.

After reading what I had written (which, for the record, made no mention of Israel, the Jews, Hamas, or Hezbollah), my colleague this morning (who is Jewish) totally JEWED-OUT on me.

To my Jewish friends out there (even ones who claim to be Reform Jews and to be all nonchalant about their Judaism): please calm the fuck down. Your homeland is under siege, I understand. It’s painful for you. I understand that, too. You don’t need to go around picking fights and casting aspersions for me to see it. We all see it.

By the way, my Jewdentials are impeccable. I’m not even talking about the part of me–eight and a half inches (give or take a few)–that’s German Jew. I won’t mention that one of the major romantic entanglements of my adult life was with an absolutely Jewlicious Hungarian Jew. (All I will say about it–TMI ALERT– is that in one of the great ironies of History and destiny, I was the circumcised one and he, like many assimilated East European Jews born post-WWII, got to keep his foreskin–where is the justice?)

Is the modern state of Israel problematic? Yes. Is the Arab world a mess? Mm-hmm. But Yahweh is a fighting God and Jews are fighters. Didn’t you see Yossi and Jagger? You want me to drop everything and rend my garments every time a missile is hurled at you? It sucks, but I only have so many garments to rend.

Read all about it HERE.

Apparently trying to make up for a slightly skewed sample in the previously referenced “debate” over urban violence, Metro went out to Mission Hill seeking forgiveness.

I think it would be too much to attribute method to Metro’s madness, but if you do, then you can look at it a couple of different ways: either the editorial staff wants us to think we live in a deeply divided city–the “Two Bostons” hypothesis, or we really do live in a deeply divided city, and it’s enough that a random, unscientific, infinitesimal sample bolsters this tale of two cities.

The third way to look at it is, like John said in his comment to the first post: “Sometimes I think the Metro pulls their ‘Today’s Debate’ section from old issues of The Onion.”

I noticed this weather has been making me a little crankier than usual. I always get a few emails chastising me for raging out, but, people, that’s what I’m here for. I’ve said it before. It’s like complaining that all the dishes at the Chinese Buffet have MSG in them. It’s just the nature of the beast. Don’t want the MSG? Don’t go the Chinese Buffet. Simple as that.

Yesterday I was useless. I went in to “work” in the morning, just to get out of the heat, but left around noon. I dropped in to the gym, which is in Chinatown, a couple blocks from Brattle Books–so a lot of times, if the weather’s good, I amble on down to the bookstore there, and browse the one-dollar section outside. I always leave with something.

The thing I like about used bookstores is that you go there with an open mind, and you leave with something you didn’t expect to find. I mean, I never go there looking for anything in particular. But sometimes what you find feels fateful. Maybe you’re thinking about something, trying to work something out in your head, And suddenly you open up a book, and there it is, right there in front of you.

Yesterday, on the one-dollar cart, I stumbled upon a book called Secrets of the Kabbalah, and thought: now, this will bring me closer to Madonna! It was full of beauty tips, particularly about grooming your beard. There was some fellow called Microprosopus, who has a most impressive beard. “That is the beard of adornment, true and perfect, from the which flow down thirteen fountains, scattering the most precious balm of splendour.”

I didn’t end up buying the book, but my interest in this Microprosopus character was definitely piqued. So when I got home I googled him. He was not on wikipedia. But there was an extensive entry on him in the Wisdom Archive at the Global Oneness Commitment at experiencefestival.com, that was enlightening to say the least:

Microprosopus (Latin) [from Greek mikros small + prosopon face]: Qabbalistic rendition of the Chaldean phrase Ze`eyr ‘Anpin (Short Face), which designates the nine smaller Sephiroth, in contradistinction from the Macroprosopus (Long Face). Microprosopus or the nine Sephiroth are the manifested universe or Third Logos unfolded in manifestation; whereas Macroprosopus (the Crown or Kether), the first and highest of the Sephiroth, is the First and Second Logoi considered as a unit, the purely spiritual universe and its roots. Hence the Microprosopus is the Logos manifested, and of such logoi there are many in boundless space. Naturally each such universe has its own Macroprosopus, Crown, or Kether, all these universes being united by their divine-spiritual roots in the Boundless.

Something clicked, you know?

I went back and listened to that song “Isaac,” on Confessions on the Dance Floor, right? About Isaac Mizrahi, right? And at the end, there’s this quote from Yitzhak Sinwani, this UberKabbalista of Madge’s acquaintance, where he’s like, “…the gates of heaven are always open, and he’s discovering the sky and the angels, how they sit, you know, in front of the light. That’s what it’s all about.” Yes, that’s what it’s all about. How could I have missed it? How the angels sit in front of the light, times thirty-seven, minus eleven, divided by the square root of one-hundred and three, carry the nine, and whoop! There it is!

Next I stumbled upon Nietzsche. I opened up his anthology right to his essay “Why I am so Clever” from Ecce Homo. So, why is Nietzche so clever? “I have never pondered over questions that are not really questions.” Whoop, there it is, AGAIN! In your FACE, Mizrahi!

But I did not leave with Nietzsche, either (He is a good drinking partner, but leave him at the bar). No, I left yesterday with Aphra Behn, the seventeenth century political satirist praised by none other than Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own.

There was a little blurb on the back cover that read in part: “Famous for her frank eroticism—“ I’m there!—“…she was the ‘sole Empress of the Land of Wit’—yet two centuries of female modesty were to pass before she could again come into her own.” I found that interesting. Not least because it goes to show that the more you delve into the past, the more you see that many of our assumptions in the present are based on bunk. Time and history are just not linear. Which doesn’t mean they’re necessarily circular, either. I think string theory’s the answer.

Anyway, I go in to Brattle Books to make my purchase, right? I didn’t have any cash on me, so I paid with my debit card. I bought a couple other books, too, but the whole sale came to under ten bucks. The clerk asks me for a picture I.D.

Where do they get bookstore clerks? What’s wrong with them? This was an instance of “because I can.” It’s hot. I’m irritable. Do I look like someone who’s going around stealing people’s identities to buy moldy dollar paperbacks from Brattle Books? Because that’s what you’re saying. In the guise of protecting me. It’s the very definition of “retail passive-aggressive.” Seriously.

I said, no, I don’t have a picture I.D. I don’t have a driver’s license, and I’m not going to carry around my passport for a five dollar purchase here and an eight dollar purchase there. Just ring me up. Well, did I have something with my name on it, at least? I took out another card with my name on it, but if I had stolen the debit card, I could have stolen other cards, too, right? So, what’s your point?

Don’t get me wrong. There are definitely situations in which it makes sense to ask for I.D., and situations in which it’s just the clerk—or the waiter or waitress—throwing their meager weight around. Like, I was at this restaurant in Cambridge having dinner, ordered a beer, and the waitress demanded I.D. I didn’t have a picture I.D. I’m like, look, I could not be mistaken for under twenty-one by anyone. She’s like, sorry, no picky, no dwinky.

When the clerk at the bookstore had finished with me, he actually apologized to the guy in line after me, for me. I mean, he was like, sorry that guy was in front of you and you had to wait. And it’s not like it took any time at all to ring me up. Seriously, I think it’s some kind of syndrome amongst bookstore clerks.

I wonder if the Kabbalah can shed any light on that?

Sometimes I can’t get to Dunkin Donuts for my daily dose of dread. When I go to “work” in the Back Bay, it’s more convenient to go to Au Bon Pain on the way. It’s a little different, but just as good, as for despair. (That’s what the pain in Au Bon Pain is, innit? Bet you thought it was French for “bread,” dincha?)

Dunkin Donuts in Dot, you get that blue collar crowd. Au Bon Pain in Back Bay, you get the white collar perspective. Honestly, in my experience, working class people, when they’re in their element, are more polite on the whole than their cubicle-dwelling white-collar counterparts are in theirs.

I think this has to do partly with the stress of expectations.

Being working class is pretty cut and dry (which is not , by any means, to say easy). But when you have haute bourgeois ambitions, things get complicated. And in the cut-throat world of the cubicle, forget Solidarity: you’re on your own. It’s not just at the top–It’s lonely in the middle, too.

So Au Bon Pain, around ten to nine on a weekday is a war of all against all. For some reason, as I stood waiting for my order, looking around, I caught myself thinking of one of my favorite Bukowski poems, “eyeless through space”:

it’s no longer any good sucker
they’ve turned out the lights
they’ve blocked the rear entrance and
the front’s on fire;
nobody knows your
name;

last is first
lost is everything;
the giant dogs mourn through
dandelion dreams;
the panthers welcome cages;
the onion heart is frosted
destiny is destitute
the horns of reason are muted as
the laughter of fools blockades the air;
the champions are dead and
the newly born are smitten;
the jetliners vomit the eyeless
through space;
it’s no longer any good sucker
it’s been getting to that right
along

Just thought I’d share.

I met an out-of-town friend on Newbury Street for coffee the other day, walking from the BPG to Starbuck’s behind the woman above. She was moving at a pretty good clip for someone loaded down like a pack mule. But you know how high-powered boutique shopping pumps up those adrenaline levels. And the more outrageously useless and overpriced the goodies are, the headier the rush. This chick was possessed. Maybe she had a shot of testosterone, or something. She must have strutted the whole length of Newbury Street showing off her booty (the pun was unfortunately unavoidable, given the circumstances).

Of course, it’s entirely possible there was nothing at all in those bags, and she was either a paid advertisement (however ill-advised) for the shops along Newbury Street, or (a little more likely) a bag lady collecting recyclable plastic water bottles on the sly. You just never know.

She seemed proud, but there was something shabby about her, sad to say. Too many bags, no one to carry them for her. Does she really think that’s something to be proud of?

People have clearly lost their minds. What tiny little minds they had to begin with.

Here’s something. I happened to pick up Metro last week–I think this was Tuesday or Wednesday, and I thought I had an op-ed in it (about Ralph Reed–but the editor was apparently skittish about some of the content–asked me for sources and everything, then never ran it–you can read it HERE, but it’s nothing special)–so on the op-ed page they have this thing called “Today’s Debate!” where they ask your schmoes, shmegeges, shlemiels, and shmendriks on the street what they think about something they’ve obviously never thought about.

Tuesday’s looked like this:

Now, as someone who lives in Dorchester, which is not a world away, by the way, I take umbrage at this willful Allstonian ignorance. Could they possibly have found three whiter, WASPier wankers to ask about urban violence? I’ll tell you what happened here. The reporter was too afraid to go to those “certain neighborhoods” Jennifer (who apparently has no last name–she’s like the Cher of Chelsea) seems to have maybe possibly heard that some of the alleged violence in Boston was “centralized” in.

The WASPiest answer was “You just need to be smart about where you go and what time you go there.” I think they left out the end of the quote, probably something like …to buy your crystal meth and cruise for rough trade.

It’s sad that Boston is so Balkanized people in one neighborhood doubt there really is a problem in the next one over. It’s true, as Jennifer says, that it’s concentrated in certain neighborhoods. But that doesn’t mean it’s not the whole city that suffers when violence erupts. Or that it’s not in our interest to examine what’s really happening (and, yes, it’s as bad as people make it out to be), why, and how we can stop it.

It’s not that far from Dot Ave to the Newbry, you know.