I am always humbled by any response that I get on the blogs. But once in a while one comes that is especially humbling, and this one from a certain “Leon” in response to a recent post, “screamers,” was one of those very special ones, so I wanted to share:

You “don’t want to sound like the Grinch of Upham’s Corner” but you’re going to sit there and bitch about the young kids in your neighborhood? Relax, when you live in the city you have to accept a little noise.

Of all the things I hear outside my window, hearing children play doesn’t bother me too much. If it [sic] the sound of these children playing bothers you so much, why don’t you go knock on their door and talk to the family about it? Or better yet, sell your computer and buy and [sic] AC. That way you wouldn’t have to hear noise from outside and we wouldn’t have to read your terrible blogs anymore.

Douchebag.

I’m not sure if that last bit was Leon’s signature, or was meant for me. I puzzled over it, asked a couple of brainy friends and some very clever colleagues, and we decided Leon probably signs all his correspondence “Douchebag.” It seems a pretty good nickname for him, in fact. In the future I would just recommend “Yours Sincerely, Douchebag.” It’s more professional-sounding.

Some thoughts. First and foremost, I would like to assure my readers, while I have your attention, that no children were harmed in the writing of this blog.

And I would now, for the sake of posterity, like to respectfully address Mr. Douchebag’s comments point by point:

1) “You’re going to sit there and bitch about the young kids in your neighborhood?” Yes. I think this is a rhetorical question, and if so it’s very astute of you to catch that. Good job, Douchebag! Because it’s something a lot of people don’t seem to get about the blogosphere: bloggers “sit there and bitch”. That’s what they do. If, after nearly a decade of blogs you haven’t gotten that bit, just turn off your computer. It’s not making you any smarter.

2) “Relax, when you live in the city you have to accept a little noise.” Thank you, Douchebag—may I call you Douche for short?—for the sage advice, but I was not talking about “a little noise,” I was talking about a BIG, EAR-SPLITTING, BRAIN-PIERCING NOISE.

3) “Of all the things I hear outside my window, hearing children play doesn’t bother me too much.” No, I’m sure you like it very much. It’s a cue to grab your camera with that special telephoto lens to capture their nubile flesh glistening in the golden sunlight as they gambol and frolic about. Thank you so much for sharing, Douchebag! Of course, nowhere in my post did I say that “hearing children play” bothers me too much, either, actually. What I find nerve-jangling, as I believe I said several times, is kids “screaming bloody murder.”

4) “If it [sic] the sound of these children playing bothers you so much, why don’t you go knock on their door and talk to the family about it?” Hey, maybe I should call Child Welfare Services instead! I think the real question here is actually why it bothers you so much that it bothers me so much.

5) “Or better yet, sell your computer and buy and [sic] AC. That way you wouldn’t have to hear noise from outside and we wouldn’t have to read your terrible blogs anymore.” Ooh. Was that a psychotic break I just heard? Who is the “we” you refer to, first of all? Is it the Royal We? Are you a Queen? Should we call you HRH Douchebag, Queen of Dorchester? How many voices are there in your head with you, Leon? Just give us a rough estimate. And are they the ones forcing you to read my “terrible blogs”? Or is it the little green men with the anal probe? Or is it…Satan?

Let’s be serious, though, for a moment, here. Is this a cry for help, Leon? Or just an excuse to vent your unfocused rage at your own loneliness and impotence, your isolation and unhappiness, and using my blog as a forum to advertise your painful limitations, and the young kids in my neighborhood as your human shield? No one could criticize you, after all, for bravely defending innocent, adorable screaming children against an evil blogger who insists on mercilessly bitching about them! The horror.

I mean, it’s not like I even hinted at how such little monsters might be justly dealt with. Can you imagine Douchebag’s reaction if I had gone as far as W.C. Fields when he said, “Madam, there’s no such thing as a tough child— if you parboil them first for seven hours, they always come out tender.” Or, echoing Jonathan Swift, in “A Modest Proposal”: “a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled …” Douchebag would be screaming CANNIBAL! And calling the cops!

But do I honestly think Douchebag is in a flaming tizzy over me sitting here bitching about a screaming child (not just a “playing child” as he disingenuously, distortingly says in his flame) under my window? No, of course not. As pathetic as it might be to sit here bitching about a screaming child below my office window, it is infinitely more pathetic for Douchebag to sit there bitching about me bitching about a screaming child. Whether it is even exponentially more pathetic for me to be sitting here now bitching about him bitching about me bitching about the screaming child—well, it’s a risk I am willing to take to make my point.

Which is that the chief purpose of these self-righteous rants–not mine, silly! Douchebag & Co.’s!–is to prove that somewhere, somehow, however briefly, the ranters themselves exist. No one in their day-to-day, flesh-and-bones life seems to notice them overmuch, which is understandably unsettling for them. So they flame out on the internet, projectile vomiting their curdled, acidy, upchuck existence into the ether, hoping that the splatter will stain, or otherwise somehow leave a trace of them on someone else.

But I suppose it’s also possible Douchie’s addicted to T-Rage! And in case you are struggling with such an addiction, I am here to tell you, Douchebag–because obviously you need to be told–that it is easy to free yourself from The Rage! Simply stop doing things you don’t want to do and then blaming others for your doing them. You know, blogs don’t flame people, people flame people. It’s not my fault you seem unable to stop reading my blog, now, is it? Whose fault is it, Douchebag? I think you know. Own it, babe. You can’t move on without owning it.

I want you to reflect on what you wrote and why. It might help you to understand why you feel you have no control over the things you yourself initiate and do. And then why you lash out at others who have not had anything to do with you or your lonely inner life. I’m here to help, but I can only help you if you will help yourself.

If I can lend you one piece of advice (and it is a bit selfish, I’ll admit): I think a good first step would be for you to not read the blog, Douchebag. Go cold turkey. It will be hard, but I think you need to see that what it is that causes you to act like this is inside you. It’s not the blog, Douchebag, it’s you.

I’ll wrap up with a friendly reminder to all: I am not responsible for your personal limitations, and you are not responsible for mine. If you want to spew yours out, get your own blog. Or get a therapist. I’m all set on both counts.

Thank you, and please read responsibly.

National holidays. Gotta love ‘em.

I have always had a–let’s call it a “nontraditional” schedule. I’m not interested in working nine to five, in the whole TGIF routine, in going shopping on Saturdays, to mass on Sundays, and so on. I am especially not interested in taking my vacations with hordes of other vacationers. Isn’t the point to “get away”? Or did I miss something? I mean, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to go to, say, the Cape this weekend. Half of Boston is there. What are you getting away from? Hmm, well, the other half, I guess.

It could be enough to be able to say, on the fifth, at the water cooler, or whatever: “yeah, I went down to the Cape last weekend.” That way, if nothing else, people know you weren’t forced to tough it out here in Boston with the prolies. I mean, lining up on Storrow Drive to watch the fireworks. How working class is that?

Personally, I’m all for fireworks. In my neighborhood they’ve been shooting them off pretty much nonstop every night for a month already. Every night’s the 4th of July here in Dot! As long as it means you can shoot something off, blow something up, or light something (or someone) on fire! ¡Viva América!

But if you want to know the truth, I never really got into national holidays. They always seem like an accident waiting to happen. I mean, masses of people with nothing to do all day. You got ‘em gathering with no supervision. And we all know that crowds are just mobs that haven’t been incited yet.

And the fourth is not one of those holidays where people are getting or giving gifts, or hunting for eggs or going door to door begging for candy, either. You’re just sitting around eating hotdogs and drinking beer all day. It’s inevitable that by the end of it all people are going to want to blow shit up, just out of sheer boredom.

That’s why the state sponsors all these fireworks. Because, can you imagine if they didn’t?

Still, I’m sorry, but I just don’t like crowds. And I don’t like crowds because I don’t trust crowds. And I don’t trust crowds because you can’t trust crowds. I don’t care how well-intentioned they are. One-on-one a person can’t stampede you to death. In a crowd, they’ll do it gladly.

And we all know it doesn’t take much to spook ‘em. They say two heads are better than one, but that applies mainly to cattle. As stupid as people act when they’re alone, they get exponentially stupider the more you put together. And people love crowds because there’s no accountability in crowds. People in a crowd will stomp you to a bloody pulp and then be like, “what?”

Thing is, I was a latchkey kid, same as every other kid in the neighborhood where I grew up. Every summer in my neighborhood was like The Lord of the Flies. No adults around ten hours a day and when they did come home, after they put out the slop and you all fed at the trough, they were finished with you. We were raised like free-range pigs. We had adult supervision for, like, twenty minutes a day, max. As long as you weren’t missing any limbs at bed-check, they considered that the supreme proof of good-parenting.

That’s where I come from.

But it wasn’t so bad. I think it was better, for me, at least, than if my every move had been micromanaged, like it seems is the case with kids nowadays. Longfellow wrote, “A boy’s will is the wind’s will,/And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.” And that sums up those long, adult-free, summer days of my lost youth.

I loved my latchkey summers. I could hold my own with the kid-gangs that ruled the streets, but even at an early age I didn’t care for the flaming hoops and hierarchies that define a social life, regardless of age, color, or class. I built myself a little hobbit hutch amongst the pine trees in the back yard–my own little Walden before I’d ever heard of Henry Thoreau–and that’s where I spent most of my time, digging in the dirt, conducting my thought experiments, contemplating infinity, thinking those long, long thoughts.

So I never liked the big to-do type holidays, where you got loaded up with the rest of the family in the old station wagon, and trundled off to relatives’ or family friends’, seemingly against everyone involded’s will (and certainly against all our better judgment).

And this was especially bad in the summer. There were two criteria for family outings in the summertime: wherever we went had to have an amusement park and a major league baseball team. (These criteria might have been even further refined, but they already spelled a sort of doom and gloom for me, so I didn’t go any further into it than I had to.)

Even when I was a kid, I was never amused by amusement parks. They always seemed an utter waste of time for me. I was pretty capable of amusing myself for the most part, and didn’t see the point of having to stand in long lines in what always seemed to be oppressive heat to do something that was not really all that amusing in the first place.

But then, there’s a certain type of personage, I have gathered—my older brother was one—for whom rollercoasters are especially thrilling. Yes, speed gets the adrenaline pumping, there’s no doubt. But there are apparently people for whom that adrenaline rush is enough. Not for me. From a very early age, I was more demanding of my amusements. I needed catharsis. I never found a rollercoaster that did it for me. Descarte’s Demon at Six Flags over Cincinnati came close. The Cathartic Comet at Busch Gardens St. Louis was on the right track but disappointed on that last loop-dee-loop.

It was enough for my bro, though. He could go back to the same rollercoaster again and again. He’d wait in line forever for that three-minute frig, like an addict in search of his fix. And when it was over, what had changed? Nothing. Hmm. need another fix.

His never-ending enthusiasm was almost infectious. Once I got so infected, in fact, that I threw up on my mother, who, upon drawing the short straw, had been forced to accompany me on one of those girlie rides: the spinning teacups. Oh, goodie.

Personally, I liked the idea of teacups. The ride seemed very refined and civilized, like that Mad Tea Party in Alice in Wonderland, and as such, somehow, potentially cathartic.

But while we sometimes confuse catharsis with throwing up, and vice-versa, I have come to understand, after ample experience with both, that they are not the same thing.

But it was enough for my brother. It’s like people for whom drunkenness is the point of being drunk. The rush was an end in itself. The thrill was the thrill. For me it was always, like, “hmm, thrilling. Is that all there is?” This question would lead down the path to despair, I knew. But there in the abyss, beyond the loop-dee-loop I would find my catharsis as well. While my brother stood in line, scratching his ass, in despair of not knowing he’s in despair. Poor sod.

But I do like hotdogs. I am a food whore. Always have been. Not gonna lie about it, try and pretty it up. Why should I? And we’re talking anything from bratwurst to beluga here. It’s all good.

I guess there’s no reason the fourth can’t be a few choice friends, good food, and fireworks. Still don’t know if I’m willing to brave the crowds down at the hatch shell, though.

I’m turning into one of those snooty cyclists. It doesn’t take long. The thing about cycling is it gives you a sort of bird’s-eye view. I might even call it “the cosmic view.” Your field of vision is longer, I guess you’d say, because you’re traveling faster than if you were walking. the pedestrian’s field of vision is reduced to next to nothing–they’re mostly shuffling along, oblivious, looking at their feet. Drivers have the opposite problem–they’re looking so far ahead that they don’t see their immediate surroundings, either.

If you cycle in the city day after day, you notice some things–I mean, you see them time and again. The first thing that blows me away on a daily basis–about motorist and pedestrians (and cyclists, too, I’m sure, although I don’t encounter as many of them)–is that they either don’t look at all when crossing the street, or they first look the wrong way, and then, once they are out in the middle of the street they glance, sort of casual-like, over their shoulder in the direction of traffic. And the fact that jaywalking is endemic to Boston doesn’t help matters.

I’m not sure what, if anything, you can learn about a region, or a city, or neighborhood, from the way people cross the street. In Italian cities, where sidewalks are narrow, but woman are not, there is no question who makes way for whom. When I lived in Budapest I noticed that folks would seek out eye contact when crossing from opposite sides of the street (always using the crosswalks, mind you, and usually waiting for the light). If you made eye contact with them they would come directly at you, in a game of crosswalk chicken. It took me probably two years to learn to cross the street without incident in Budapest. The secret was to NOT make eye contact–even passively–but to barrel across the street head-first in a bee line without regard to any obstacles that might be in your way. And you would not encounter any.

It’s a little different in Boston. People aren’t really spoiling for a fight, like in Budapest. But there’s definitely a “make way for ducklings” mentality here. But it’s motivated by what seems to be an earnest belief held by all in their own unique and special superiority over everyone else. It’s no secret the entitlement thing is off the hook in our beloved city. And it has the effect of always forcing others to accommodate you. Everybody does it to everybody else, so it would seem to cancel out–I mean, every unique and special person is equally inconvenienced by every other unique and special person, so this “make way for me!” mentality doesn’t seem to make a real difference, except in accumulated frustrations. And Bostonians are legendary for their tantrums, too. But then that’s part and parcel of acting like four year olds, I guess.

And I must say I’m really always impressed by the blind faith pedestrians have that motorists will actually see them before they see the motorists. It doesn’t seem like jaywalking in this town is a calculated risk–it really does seem like a pure act of faith.

Of course, cyclists get no respect whatsoever from either side, which is why they so often turn into monsters–and badly-dressed monsters to boot. I’m not gonna get into the whole bike messenger meme–there’s some kind of goth connection, with the dyed hair and piercings, that I don’t understand, and don’t know if I care to. There was a piece about bike messengers in the Glob a couple of weeks ago–there always is in the Spring. It’s an old stand-by. Like there will be a feature about homeless people in the dead of winter. Local color.

I think pedestrians see a cyclist and think, “well, if he hits me it’ll be at least as bad for him as it is for me.” So they give you this kind of ho-hum look, when they do look, like, “yeah? And?”

Motorists in this town are among the worst in the nation, as for both skill and temperament. Driving is such a passive activity–it really is two steps back, evolutionarily speaking–that you find basically the same behavior amongst certain drivers that you’ll find in your typical armchair quarterback. They howl and scream and grumble just like when they’re watching a game on TV. And just like when they’re watching a game on TV they always know better than everyone else–they could always have done better than anyone else. This is the kind of personality the overwhelming passivity of modern life has produced. People who essentially do nothing all day and feel they are absolutely omnipotent. But whatever.

This is another reason cyclists get this sort of holier-than-thou martyr complex thing going. Because they are actually actively doing something–sounds totally anachronistic, doesn’t it? So they’re actually doing something, and yet they’re totally at the mercy of the vehicular zombies they’re forced to share the road with, who hardly have to move a muscle in order to mow them down. Just doesn’t seem right. Doesn’t seem fair.

Or maybe I’m being too harsh on motorists. They’re actually pretty skilled at multitasking. People who are so relentlessly passive get bored easily. So when they’re watching the boob tube or driving around in their big-ass SUVs they’re also stuffing their faces nonstop full of crap or yakking mindlessly into their cell phones. People who do nothing but eat, drive around, and watch TV all day keeping their loved ones abreast of the very latest eating-, driving-around-, and TV-watching-action via satellite.

So cyclists think to themselves, “here I am, actually doing something, and burning calories, not petrol, and I get no respect!” Understandably they start acting out, swerving artfully through traffic, running lights, scaring pedestrians. But they’ll never be a match for a soccer mom in a monster Escalade.

Sad.

Speaking of sad. I rode my awful little loaner bike to the South Bay Shopping Center yesterday morning. There’s a sort of back entrance to the shopping center, and as I rounded the bend, I saw that this huge party had a permanent encampment in these big bushes there. One was standing out in the middle of the street with a railroad tie he’d managed to rustle up. They were building some sort of shanty in the bushes. Later, on my way back, I saw smoke issuing from the interior.

There is such a huge disconnect between what we see in the media, and reality. The news is a highly stylized exercise, an utterly idealized daily recitation of an increasingly narrow set of norms that increasingly have no relation to actual norms, nor does the news report actual happenings so much as expectations. Look at these freaks on TV who read the news. Look at these pod people who appear on their shows. Is this who we are, or what we want to be?

They’re talking about “Nature Deficit Disorder” on The Today Show right now. Something people just used to do–catching fire-flies in a jar–you need a life coach to instruct you in now. That’s one side of the coin. The other is a dozen grown men, immigrants from God knows where, living in the bushes down the street. I mean, talk about disconnect. We’ve got Reality Deficit Disorder.

An interesting piece in the New York Times [$] this morning about being groped on the subway.

Here’s what I liked: women in New York have helped police catch flashers by snapping pictures of them with their cell phones. Ha HA! So, you wanna be an exhibitionist, eh?

Yes, when we say “no touching,” that means not only others, but yourselves, too, lads! At least in public. It’s hard, I know, because there seems to be something in man’s very nature that compels him to stick his hands down his pants. Mark Twain once remarked: “To a man all things are possible but one—he cannot have a hole in his breeches and keep his fingers out of it. A man does seem to feel more distress and more persistent and distracting solicitude about such a thing than he could about a sick child that was threatening to grow worse every time he took his attention away from it.”

Of course, mankind has a long history of touching himself, and modern technology, far from otherwise occupying idle hands has only provided myriad new and improved opportunities for bigger and better feats of onanism. The internet is a storehouse of phalluses in action. Is there any teenage boy alive today who has not waved his for the webcam? Craig’s List alone boasts a daily collection to rival Darwin’s barnacles. If there was any question that many more men than ever suspected were merely waiting for a chance to show their stuff in public without adverse personal consequences, the internet has answered it resoundingly.

It’s too easy, is the thing. Diogenes, the one who thought of himself as “a crazy Socrates,” would masturbate in public, saying, “I wish I could satisfy my hunger as easily.”

While Diogenes was making a philosophical point with his, Leonardo da Vinci liked the look of it, pure and simple. Leonardo was fascinated by the membrum-virile cupidum, even more so than the ordinary man is, as evidenced in his obsessive sketches of it. He wrote (as quoted by art scholar Kenneth Keele): “A man who is ashamed to show or name the penis is wrong. [Instead] of being anxious to hide it, man ought to display it with honor.”

Showing it off has taken various forms down through time. I’ve mentioned the phallocarp, favored by warriors in Papua, New Guinea, before. In the 15th and 16th centuries, as François Rabelais delighted in pointing out, the codpiece, molded in the shape of a permanent erection, was all the rage. Some have speculated that the power tie is the modern man’s phallocarp.

Of course, a phallus is not a penis, and the advantage of phallocarps, codpieces, and fat ties, is precisely that the thing itself remains mercifully hidden from sight. This is usually advantageous to all parties, by the way (though not always—I imagine that Mapplethorpe’s Man in a Polyester Suit would garner appreciative oohs and ahs, and even an approving head-nod or two were he to board a train as pictured in the famous photograph, so long as he minded his own business). Point is: most of us are perfectly satisfied in all but a very few cases, to speculate rather than be provided, at least proactively, with proof. In fact, in nine out of ten cases, as most adults these days know, actually seeing the thing in all its usually underwhelming glory may satisfy a native curiosity, but little else.

Some believe they can tell what it’s like without actually seeing it, thereby negating the need for proof—there’s the old fallacy that large noses are accurate predictors of a member’s mass. Not so! And I’m not just saying that as someone with a mid-size schnoz, either. “In dissecting cadavers,” one venerated anatomist once famously noted, “anatomists frequently observe the opposite.” Still, small noses on grown men are repugnant in their own right (Michael Jackson, anyone?), without any reference to this other body part.

But I digress. The pertinent question here is, are we seeing a resurgence of a primitive compulsion, obviously felt as an obligation by some males, to display their goods, variously, to the females of the species?

Meredith Small, in her fascinating study Female choices: Sexual behavior of female primates, provides what may be a clue to uncouth male behavior on the T: “Male chimps use their penis for display toward estrous females. Because a longer penis would give a female pleasure (note that the human male has the longest and thickest penis of any primate), female choice might have been a factor driving penis length to extremes among primates.”

Furthermore, as Helen Fisher reports in Anatomy of Love: The Mysteries of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray, while “[w]e do not know why men have conspicuous genitals,… a male chimp solicits a female by opening his legs, displaying an erect penis and flicking his phallus with a finger as he gazes at a potential partner. A prominant, distinctive penis helps broadcast one’s individuality and sexual vigor, which may lure female friends. In many species of insects and primates, males have exceptionally elaborate penises, and scientists think these evolved specifically because females chose those males with elaborate, sexally stimulating genitals. So perhaps as Lucy’s ancestors became bipedal some four million years ago, males began to parade their genitals in order to make special friends with favored females–selecting for those with large organs.”

Lucy’s ancestors are beyond bipedal. Today they take the T. But they are obviously still very keen to make special friends with favored females. Some of them, misled by ads on Craig’s List and the ubiquity of internet porn, perhaps, seem not to know that we have evolved a bit since the days when displaying an erect penis and flicking it with a finger are criteria for friendship–even special friendship.

Do men deserve pity or scorn? As David Friedman says in A Mind of It’s Own: A Cultural History of the Penis, “a man’s relationship with his penis…is the most enduring mystery in every man’s life.” Sad, but true.

The Times article concludes:

Many women said they were not so much frightened by the subway encounters as they were appalled that men would do something so pathetic.

Like Ms. Fairley, the actress. “All of a sudden,” she said, “this man moved into my frame of reference, and I was staring at a penis. I couldn’t believe it.”

Ms. Fairley said she was embarrassed, but felt even worse, in a way, for the man. “They need help, bless their hearts,” she said.

All I can say in the end is: ladies, I salute you (and not with my erect penis, either). What you have to put up with on a daily basis boggles the mind.

The screamers are out tonight.

There are two little girls next door–probably around five or six, maybe seven years old–and they are just total screechers–they scream bloody murder for everything. When they’re happy, sad, angry, bored, it’s a no brainer: scream. Of course. It has an elegant logic to it.

Now, I don’t want to sound like the Grinch of Upham’s Corner, or whatever, but they’ve got this little kiddie pool out there, like, right under my window. And it’s too hot and muggy to shut my window, and I don’t have AC, and don’t want it, but it would certainly drown out the blood-curdling screams. I don’t mind quiet children, or even children who laugh occasionally, although I think in most cases a simple smile would suffice. But what is with the screaming?

And whatever happened to the days when kids were marched off to bed at nine o’clock? These kids were out screaming bloody murder until nearly eleven last night.

You know, all it would take to start an all-out war is for me to set my boombox in the window right now and start blasting, I dunno, GWAR, or something, at top volume. Of course then I would have to leave the house, come back in a couple hours. See how they like hearing somebody else scream for a while.

It’s a scorcher out there.

I got out to the garden early today, before the temperature began to climb, to water a newly seeded section of what will become a little lawn in a couple weeks’ time. Very excited about that lawn–it must be what’s left of the squishy suburbanite in me. Is this a chink in the urban warrior’s armor? I have instructed my neighbors in the Fens to clip me if I start to go all-out suburban on ‘em, and they have promised me they will.

But, honestly, once you become what you despise (and we all do to some degree or another), you often despise what you were before you did. It is the logic of metamorphosis that once we have transformed we no longer understand or sympathize with what we once were. We may, in fact, look on our former selves as our own worst enemies. Do you think the butterfly looks back wistfully on her caterpillar days?

If my lawn-pride warps me sufficiently, I may metamorphose into something I don’t yet understand. Like my new neighbor across the path, who is methodically removing all traces of the previous tenant, an old woman who had the plot for several years and was fond of roses, and replacing her sweetly and long-nurtured beds with…lawn. Her garden was idiosyncratic, with small paths only she walked on. Now it’s full of cement bricks and dyed nuclear-red mulch. It appears hideous to me now, but there is a kernel of fear in me that someday I may understand it all too well.

I have just a little lawn, a spot of grass among the flower beds, and I am proud of it, and it’s enough for me. For now.

So I’m riding home, and the left pedal on my loaner bike flies off. How do you like that? I’ll have to stop into the bikesmith’s tomorrow and have it mended.

I got home in time to nap. This is true siesta weather. And I do love my siesta. I love my twilight, too. Last night was cool and overcast, and there was a breeze blowing. And I lay down and listened to the sounds of the neighborhood, the gunshots in the distance, the little girl screaming bloody murder (we have a couple of little screamers in the ‘hood), laughter and tears, revving motors and screeching tires. And all the while the light fading, fading, quietly but insistently. That lovely subtle, inexorable movement from daylight to darkness. That extraordinary twilight time.

You know I used to live about a block away from where Hoagie Carmichael, who wrote “Stardust”–an American creation at least as great as the martini–is buried. He’s in Rose Hill Cemetery in Bloomington, Indiana, where I went to school. I used to walk through that graveyard on my way home every night, that perfect, mysterious song in my head…

Sometimes I wonder why I spend
The lonely nights
Dreaming of a song
That melody haunts my reverie
And I am once again with you
When our love was new
And each kiss an inspiration
Ah, but that was long ago
Now my consolation
Is in the stardust of a song…

After my nap, I switched on the TV. There was something called “White Shark Red Triangle” on GBH. I caught the end of it. It was about various disagreeable sea creatures feeding on one another. You expect bad behavior from killer whales. And sharks are naughty by nature. But even the cute ones, like seals, behave atrociously. You know that when seals are done birthing, after a brief period of nursing, the adults just up and abandon the young. How’s that for family values? The young are about fifty percent blubber, so they can survive for a few weeks while they learn (or not) how to fend for themselves. In fact, only about fifty percent make it to a year old. It’s no wonder adult seals are so cranky up close and personal.

They aren’t as bad as octopuses, though. I think octopuses are possibly the most unsympathetic creatures in the whole ocean. A while back I watched a documentary on octopuses, called, aptly enough, I guess “The Octopus’s Garden”.

What odious creatures.

Maybe I was a cod in my past life, because I could find nothing particularly redeeming in the octopus. When a shark came along and the octopus was lying very still to avoid being detected, I was rooting for the shark 100%. Same for when, after the starring octopus had hatched her millions of little eggs and was crawling out from under her rock in search of food, on her last leg, so to speak, and a couple of belligerent codfish came up to her and started nibbling on her (actually they grabbed hold of a leg, and did a sort of speedy corkscrew move, since their teeth are only good for grasping but not for pulling)—yes, I was rooting for the codfish, even though, technically speaking, the octopus was the underdog.

I found the starring octopus utterly unsympathetic, and I felt nothing when I saw her corpse wash up on a beach in the end, or even when the seagulls were pecking at her flabby carcass. They kept calling it a she. Are there males and females?

At one point in some underwater garden she’s seized by a bigger, uglier octopus. He grabs her up in his arms—meanwhile she has gone stark white with fear—and spirits her away into his lair. A moment later she is released, rather pink than white now, and torpedoes off into the sea as far from her assailant as she can get, no doubt. Talk about wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. Where’s the romance? This is the Stanley Kowalski school of breeding.

That’s probably why the octopus is so unsympathetic. Not just two arms with which to hold a lover tight, but eight! Not one, not two, but three hearts (!) with which to love, and yet it has never occurred to the octopus to love. They’re too busy sneaking up on crabs, and gorging themselves on unsuspecting lobsters, and even eating their own kind! They retain a mind-boggling eighty percent of the weight they consume, growing bigger with each and every meal! I mean, enough!

The filmmakers tried to drum up a little sympathy for our heroine in the end by saying, well, look at what an inglorious end she came to after three billion glorious years of evolution. But tell me, what has she got to show for those three billion years? An insatiable hunger for shellfish!

Never once did she stop and think of using all her faculties—and she is so extremely well-endowed—for loving. And don’t tell me she can love her young. There are about two-hundred million of them, and they all fly the coop before they measure two centimeters in length. Most of them to get snapped up by the marauding cod.

And thank sweet Neptune for that!

But enough frivolous, idle chatter! Back to the pressing issue at hand!

I have been corresponding lately with a gentleman by the name of John who has some interesting ideas about the fare hikes that I would like to put out there, for your consideration, too. One caveat on this. While I think this sort of deep thinking is valuable, it may be a flawed assumption that there has been any real momentum on the fare issue among riders and their various self-styled representatives. I love the suggestions, particularly in the penultimate (love that word) paragraph, but I am not a nonprofit organization, or any kind of organization, actually, and these suggestions would require investment, staff, and organization. That’s the biggest problem right there.

Here’s what John has to say:

I know this is a frustrating issue, I am sensitive to it because I recently moved from Texas–yes the Traffic State–and am enamored of the concept of public transportation.

I did sign the petition, and have some positive thoughts. I think the rate hike may be a useful thing, hear me out:

- Public transportation is about to show its worth with rising gas prices. Cheap oil has made the economy-factor of the subways less important in recent decades, and subway systems have languished because of this. But Peak Oil is coming and the T may well become a real jewel for Massachusetts.

- A price increase will make the T create more revenue, which will increase its value to the city and state. So though this may be a cynical move to further burden a public asset, the ultimate result is that they are giving it even greater value. Unintended consequences, you know.

- Riders will become more motivated to pay attention as the T takes more of a bite out of their budgets. And also, more upset with delays and more receptive to calls for transparent governance. A group representing T riders will be set to gain from this increasing concern, since by raising prices the T is actually motivating people to pay attention. (Thank you MBTA!)

SO my optimistic conclusion is that now would be the time to kick into gear and prepare for the future. I would say let the rate hike take effect (it will do a lot for your organizing efforts) and turn attention toward solidifying the organization, with the expectation that events are converging to make the T more valuable to lawmakers, and make riders more apt to support a public advocacy organization.

As far as suggestions, I would like to help work to raise the profile of T-Justice in various non-threatening, non-confrontational, creative ways. Possibly one would be a “Subway Survey” of riders to ask what their concerns truly are, along with a petition. Sign/fill out and get a T-Justice button. A T-Shirt fundraiser (”T” Shirt!). More stuff on the website (I can help there) including a blog or chat for discussion/complaints (I can help there too). Setting up “T-Justice” recycle bins, for high visibility while doing a public service. Posters. Ongoing communication with the public, maybe even in the form of direct flyers handed to patrons, that shows T-travelers that there is a group honestly representing the public ridership.

Like everyone I don’t have a lot of time, but I am looking for a Cause or two, (Southerner’s love our Causes, especially if they are more or less lost) and this interests me a great deal.

I’ll say. So, any thoughts on this from the rest of you?

Brian McGrory reports on Mass. Secretary of Transportation Commissioner John Cogliano’s T charm offensive HERE.

Things have been pretty low-key this week. The weather’s stopped freaking the fuck out on us momentarily and it actually feels like June, a little. I don’t even mind a little thunderstorm or two–that’s normal enough–but, please, no more ten-day monsoons.

I was riding my bike down Boylston yesterday on my way to the gym, and a couple of school buses were idling at Berkeley Street. As I passed, some smart ass kid inside shouts out the window, “nice bike, HAR HAR HAR!” And lest any of you think it was meant as anything other than a taunt, just consider that (a) it was a thirteen year old, and (b) he was on a school bus. I shouted back: “Nice bus, HAR HAR HAR!”

I mean, first of all. YOU’RE ON A SCHOOL BUS. How COOL is that? Making fun of the guy on a bike from a SCHOOL BUS. Think about it.

I went to Wendy’s for one of those 99 cent chicken bombs sometime after that, and while I was waiting I noticed this guy I’ve seen a couple of times before in the Back Bay. I always notice him because he’s this tall, good-looking, clean-cut twenty-something in a suit WHO HAS HAD HIS EYEBROWS WAXED ALL THE WAY TO HELL AND BACK.

I can’t help but stare at this YUPPIE SIDESHOW FREAK with a sense of creeping horror, because while he looks like Bruce Willis from the nose down, he totally looks like Joan Crawford from, like, the middle of his face up. And I’m sure he has absolutely no idea. I’m sure that was not his intention. And I’m sure he thinks people are staring at him for some other reason.

What’s so dreadful about it is that his boss has obviuously not called him in to his office and said, “look, Walker, what’s with the Joan Crawford look? We’re not that kind of firm.” If his coworkers cared for him at all they would find a way to tell him.

It’s like that Snicker’s Commercial where the bald guy is wearing a Snickers toupee, and a big group of his coworkers come up to him, and one of them’s like, “Um, Steve, we just wanna let you know we know you’re bald. We think you should stop wearing the Snickers.” And Steve’s like, “Wha–whaddya mean?” And she’s like, “It’s not fooling anyone!”

If anyone at all cared about that guy they would be like, “Um, Steve, we know you think you’re Cleopatra, but enough with the sculpted eyebrows, dig?” Name and shame, people. It works. Trust me.

The rally, my first and last (and I’m not pulling a Cher, here, either–this really is my farewell tour, folks), was an experience. It was actually much like I had feared it would be, but I have to say finally meeting Dani B. in the flesh was not at all dreadful. He’s a delightful lad, in his woolly way, so far as I can tell. There were other delightful folks I’m glad to have met (including Jen, who took the pictures below), and for me that was always the point. My Doctor says I should get out and mix more. “People,” he’s always saying, “not gin and Prozac.”

Now I plan to spend some time in seclusion, of course. Like Candide, at the end of Rally Road, I find I have come full circle. My inner Pangloss intones: “There is a concatenation of all events in the best of possible worlds; for, in short, had you not been kicked out of a fine castle for the love of Miss Cunegund; had you not been put into the Inquisition; had you not traveled over America on foot; had you not run the Baron through the body; and had you not lost all your sheep, which you brought from the good country of El Dorado, you would not have been here to eat preserved citrons and pistachio nuts.” “Excellently observed,” my Inner Candide answers; “but let us cultivate our garden.”

All I can say is I’m glad I didn’t spend more than about fifteen bucks on the thing. I had three poster-size copies made—reading, simply “Keep MBTA Fares fair” and bought some new underwear for the occasion (I needed some new boxers anyway), but that’s about it. Lee Matsueda of the T Riders Union provided amplification, and TRU brought signs of their own.

Shoogs met me around three on the Square, but we didn’t really have much to do until four. The first people to show up, around fifteen minutes before the rally was to begin, were these punk-socialists. Of course they weren’t serious socialists—they just chose the most hopeless political cause they could find and joined it. They’re more like impotent designer anarchists in the final analysis. Amateur provocateurs out to draw attention to no greater a cause than the rebels without one.

I can’t deny it pissed me off to see these protest parasites show up and actually outnumber the poor, beleaguered protesters themselves. Not that they weren’t protesting. Christ, their entire existence is a protest. But there are ways things are done—and I’m just talking about people things here. Common courtesy. You want to be pariahs, do it on your own time. Get your own damn permit, don’t glom onto mine.

I mean, seriously, people. Have some manners. Do you realize how many of our social ills could be solved–just like that–with simple manners? These guys were my age, and acting like the trenchcoat mafia. When I told them to stop scaring off potential protesters one of them (I’m not sure if it was Mo or Curly — Larry was hanging back at this point)–but one of them even sneered and said: “we can do whatever we want, it’s a public square!” I was like, right, whatever. How many times have I heard that one (in the form of “it’s a free country!” and “you’re not the boss of me!”) from my nine and ten year old nieces?

It was like a bad after-school special, where the square student council president confronts the rebel outcasts trying to crash the big homecoming dance. I felt humorless and absurd doing it, and realized immediately that they’d be perfectly happy to argue with me unto the apocalypse. I told them, look, just try to stay out from in front of the cameras, will you? And by the way, this is no way to get laid.

The protest rally parasite problem is one I have to admit I had not anticipated in the least. You want to come to a rally someone’s organized because you dig what they’re trying to do, why not contact them first? I mean, if you’re socialists that shouldn’t be that big a deal. Socialize a little. There were several groups represented, but everyone had the courtesy to call first and discuss their ideas and goals. These guys basically showed up in an ugly, pestilent lump, didn’t say anything to us, and just started accosting people right and left in front of us. They were chasing people down like kids chasing pigeons in the park. People were scrambling to get away from them.

But once the rally (such as it was) started, they drifted to the margins and disappeared, as is their wont.

I wish I could say the same of the Deval Patrick groupies. They were as disgusting in their way as the impotent designer socialists. A bunch of Barbie and Ken dolls with super-sized campaign signs who just showed up in a clump and didn’t mix with the rabble, either. In their favor, there was an adult representative from his campaign who found me and introduced herself, and asked if I minded their being there and if I wouldn’t mind also mentioning that Deval would have been there himself if he had not had a prior engagement.

She went on her merry way and left the kids to find the spot where they were most likely to get their super-size signs on TV. You can see them schlubbed-up behind Lee Matsueda in the last picture below. They were utterly disengaged, uncommunicative, and looked dreadfully bored throughout the proceedings.

You know, I would not have been so touchy about all these parasites if the beast itself they were feeding off of wasn’t so pitiful. I mean they easily outnumbered real, live protesters. It was like a twelve-mile long tapeworm feeding off a teacup chihuahua. And in the end none of the networks (NECN, CBS4, and WHDH-7 were all there), to my knowledge, used any footage from the rally.

In fact, there was hardly anything about the hearing, much less the rally, in the papers. Nothing in Metro (and this was a Metro-worthy rally if ever there was one), a tiny blurb about Deval Patrick’s cursory appearance at the hearing in the Glob, and a brief mention in the Herald, who put the number in attendance at the rally at one hundred.

That much-disputed number. In a few years’ time I guarantee you it will be in the thousands. It’s the Woodstock effect. People will be like, it was a conspiracy! A media black-out! And when you ask someone—just some random someone at some dinner party or at a pick-up bar–if they were there, they’ll be all like, hell, yeah. And you’ll be all like, well, I didn’t see you there. And they’ll be like, Well there were about fifty-thousand of us. They had all the streets all blocked off.

And then you’ll reminisce together about how those crazy socialists blew up an MBTA bus while Deval Patrick introduced Nelson Mandela to the ecstatic applaud of the revolutionary masses. And then how it was all wiped from the record because Dan Grabauskas ordered the Herald to report that only a hundred people were there. And no further mention was ever made, spirits were crushed, the MBTA Liberation Army was driven underground, and finally fled to the hills of New Hampshire to fight their guerrilla war, now in its twenty-fifth year.

And you’ll be like, it sucks we’re paying twelve-hundred- seventy-three bucks a month for a T pass, but I guess if that’s what the MBTA says it needs to get through fiscal 2031, what can you do?

Just between you and me, I’d put the real number at something more like 33, 34, maybe 40, if you count passersby who paused momentarily to take in the sad spectacle and rubberneckers in their passing cars on Dartmouth. And about 25 of the aforementioned were IDAs, Devalheads, or the media. Then there were three of my friends, and Dani B., like I said there would be, and I think three other kind souls I was very grateful took the time to come out and was very pleased to have met.

I’ll have more to say about the hearing when I get a chance to go over the audio recording I made of it. The quality of the recording is pretty bad, but I can just about make out most of it. I should have some juicy tidbits for you tomorrow.

Until then, here are some pics from the big-ass rally of ‘06. That’s me, at top, imploring an uncaring universe not to ignore the two-page list of demands I’ve just outlined, and introducing Senator Jarrett Barrios, who’s in the next shot. Then there’s one of the “crowd,” such as it was (two of my three friends, a cameraman, a couple of TRU guys, and some poor sucker from NECN who’s thinking, “what the fuck?”). And finally, that’s Lee Matsueda (rocking that mic) and a couple of those Devalhead slugsacks. (They couldn’t even stand up–the one on the left has his fat ass planted right on Kahlil Gibran’s mug. Talk about manners.)

Where’s the story? That’s what you have to ask yourself, as a reporter.

I’ll admit I’m a little disappointed in Mac Daniels’ decision to highlight the “cancellation” of the T-boycott, an idea that never really got off the ground in the first place, instead of highlighting the rally itself which has definitely not been cancelled.

I think what I said to Mac about the boycott was, if people wanted to boycott, they certainly could. He told me he, himself, was definitely interested in the idea of boycotts–not because he wanted to participate in this one, or thought it would be effective–but because boycotts are so hard to organize.

Exactly. And who’s got time for the tears? Life should be a banquet, not a beggar’s ball.

But I don’t think that’s the story, here. And I tried to stress that moving beyond the boycott (I don’t think I ever used the word “cancelled,” myself) wasn’t some big bureaucratic decision in the Star Chamber—it was really just about the best way to get people mobilized to do something productive with this thing, hook people up, show the world we’re mad as hell and we’re not gonna take it anymore, and blah blah blah, yeah, whatever. That kind of thing.

At least the headline in the Glob was somewhat informative: “T farehike protesters hold rally.” And just one little sentence in that first paragraph, detailing exactly when and where the rally would be held, and maybe even why, would have been helpful. But we’d all rather kick each other in the balls whenever the opportunity arises, so, yeah, whatever.

The Metro also ran the story, with a headline screaming “Boycott against proposed T fare hike cancelled.” Yes, the first paragraph mentions “a short rally before the first in a series of public hearings” (it’s the same exact story the Glob’s running, but with a more sensationalistically distorted headline, of course), but then the rest of the story is, again, about how it won’t be a boycott. Presumably, if you are reading the Metro in the first place, you are on a train or a bus and aren’t boycotting the T anyway.

Still there’s no doubt that a headline like that will confuse some poor Metro readers into thinking that the rally itself has been cancelled. They don’t provide any details about the rally, either: exactly where or when it’s happening, just that it’s not going to be a boycott. Which is very informative.

Of course, I woke up this morning with a dread thought: what if it’s just me and three of my friends and Dani B. who show up? It could be uncomfortable. We obviously should have stuck with the boycott idea.