Wednesday, January 6, 2010 | by nathan

Midnight Train, Going Anywhere

Though generally I like him, I admit that sometimes Joe Biden is a dunderhead. But what he has to say on HuffPo this week about Amtrak is awesome:

…With delays at our airports and congestion on our roads becoming increasingly ubiquitous, volatile fuel prices, increased environmental awareness, and a need for transportation links between growing communities, rail travel is more important to America than ever before.

Support for Amtrak must be strong–not because it is a cherished American institution, which it is–but because it is a powerful and indispensable way to carry us all into a leaner, cleaner, greener 21st century.

Brian and I traveled high-speed Amtrak from D.C. to New York this past summer, and it was some of the most effortless, comfortable and enjoyable traveling we’ve ever done – far better qualitatively than anything we’ve ever had on an airline.

As part of the stimulus package, the President released a plan for high-speed rail in America, including a high-speed line that would link Oklahoma City and Tulsa, making a trip between the two cities possible in 45 minutes or so, as well as between Oklahoma City and Dallas. The map looked something like this:

It’s still a little disconnected and spare, in my opinion. And it bugs me how it’s so concentrated on the coasts; I think westerners could get a lot out of rail travel. Building railroads put generations of Americans to work in the 19th century; I wonder if it might be able to do it again in the 21st. I’d love for that map, sometime in my lifetime, to look more like this:

You might notice I’ve got all those lines converging in Oklahoma City; a dude can dream, can’t he? Seriously, though, there’s something wonderfully communal and American about traveling by train. I know we all love our cars, but I think our country could gain a lot by instituting nationwide, accessible passenger rail. Whether this is a job for the government or for private enterprise (or some marriage of the two) is a debate for another time, but I can’t tell you how much I’d love to be able to travel by rail to every corner of this country. Even though it would take longer than air travel, I’d LOVE to be able to eschew the airline industry every chance I got and to watch America zooming past my windows in the process.

Living In America, On The Road

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Tuesday, December 29, 2009 | by nathan

As Read By The Author

I have had remarkably poor luck writing about politics on this website. I mean, like – wow. I write a post about how the internet seems to give people license to verbally abuse one another in ways they wouldn’t dream of doing in person, and about how I think it’s ruining America for us to attack one another with anonymous, abusive comments, and what do I get but anonymous, abusive comments.

So when I sit here with my "Add New Post" window open, telling you that I’ve just finished listening to Sarah Palin read her book Going Rogue on my iPod, well, I can’t help but feel some trepidation. Many of my sweet, well-meaning liberal friends make faces like I’d stepped in dog poo and ask, "Ugh, why?" Many of my sweet, well-meaning conservative friends narrow their eyes and brace themselves for a stream of invective I’m sure they’ve heard about the former Alaska governor more times than they’d like.

So it confuses people of all political stripes when I tell them that I am completely, utterly fascinated by Sarah Palin, and not in a mean way. Like in a "Gorillas in the Mist" kind of way. Oh, shit, now you’re going to think I’ve called her a gorilla. She’s not a gorilla. It’s just that my interest in her is almost anthropoligical; listening to this book I felt like Jane Goodall hiding out with a pad, scrawling down my observations.

Now that Gorillagate is behind us – just so we’re clear: I would never, ever vote for Sarah Palin. For anything. But I don’t hate her; I just happen to vehemently disagree with the political philosophy to which she ascribes herself.

So I’m not going to talk about any of that, except to say that if you take your assessment of liberal political philosophy from this book, you couldn’t be more off the mark. Sarah doesn’t describe it accurately at all.*

No, what fascinates me is her life. How she became the person she is. I get now, more than ever, why the people who like her, like her so much. Her story is like so many others’ – people laud her for being "one of us," and she really, really is. She’s just an ordinary lady, a mom who got involved in the political process. That she doesn’t see the irony of so many of her statements and positions is just a testament to the paradoxical and often self-contradictory nature of political life across the spectrum in America in the 21st century.

She’s on the defensive a lot in this book, and I have to say in a lot of ways I understand that. But I also think it’s odd that someone so supremely confident that they wouldn’t hestitate to accept the vice-presidntial slot also seems to be unable to mitigate the need to hit back at people who take cheap – real** or perceived*** – potshots at her.

Thing is, as fascinated as I am by that weird personality paradox, I get it. I get defensive when people take shots at me, even when it’s anonymous, like the comments I’m sure to get on this post, but also I believe I’m a good writer and, with enough hard work and dedication could be Among the Writers. I suppose that doesn’t make sense either.

I don’t think this book is anything revelatory. There’s not a lot of new political thinking in it, and what was there I would say I disagreed with a whole lot of the time – though not uniformly, surprisingly. Like 95% I disagreed with. I guess what I find most fascinating is that Sarah Palin is, to my mind, a perfect product of the times. She embodies so much of what the 21st century has been about so far, her life so archetypal of a lot of this time in America. She’s "one of us," all right. And if it makes me an elitist to say so, then fine, but I’m just not sure any old "one of us" should be the President. I think it requires someone excellent, intelligent, uniquely creative, highly thoughtful and supremely courageous. Whether or not you ascribe those qualities to the current President is for you to decide; as fascinating as I find Sarah Palin, after reading this book I’m just convinced she’s not up to the job. That’s nothing against you; I hope we can still be friends. Truth is, I’d love to have a cup of coffee with Sarah. I’d love to talk to her about our respective thinking about this country and what makes it so great and, occasionally, flawed. She says in the book that her conservative philosophy comes from seeing the world as Fallen; I’d love to share with her how my liberal thinking comes from the same belief. 

Maybe we’ll get to have that coffee. Maybe not. Maybe someday blog comments and political cable and radio broadcasts and letters to the editor and town halls will be a bit more like that. Maybe not. Either way, Sarah will go her way and I’ll go mine and you’ll go yours. I think when we reach whatever comes after this life we’ll realize that these differences we have don’t divide us as much as we think they do.

*Go read John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice for a better understanding of liberal thinking, and Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia for a good understanding of conservative philosophy.

**Levi Johnston

***Katie Couric, David Letterman, et al.

Living In America, This I Believe, library

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Thursday, November 12, 2009 | by nathan

…and BOOM goes the dynamite.

Get ready, this is a LONG ONE. With lots of dramatic CAPS LOCK. About POLITICS. And RELIGION. Because I’ve HAD IT.

(last chance. Please feel free to escape to a better website now).

So, I don’t shop at Wal-Mart under any circumstances whatsoever. I’ve explained some of my reasons for not shopping there, so I won’t elucidate them here. But here’s the thing – I don’t call what I’m doing a "boycott." I don’t church it up; I just don’t shop at Wal-Mart, and that’s the end of the story.

So it annoys me greatly to see that a Facebook group has sprung up encouraging people to "boycott" one of Oklahoma City’s best locally-owned places, Flip’s Wine Bar and Trattoria, for basically no reason whatsoever.

The story goes back to the unscrupulous firing of a gay teacher, Joe Quigley, from the Oklahoma City Public School system, and the failure of Gail Vines, an owner of Flip’s and a member of the Oklahoma City School Board, to vote to reinstate him once the Board was ordered to do so by a judge who found Mr. Quigley to have been wrongfully terminated.

Sorry if that was hard to follow; basically some of the gays are all up in arms because Gail didn’t vote the way they’d have liked. And normally I’m all about people putting their money where their mouths are and not patronizing businesses whose owners, staff, or policies violate some strongly-held belief or item of conscience. But seriously, you guys, Gail Vines is one of the least homophobic people on the planet. Her vote not to reinstate Mr. Quigley had categorically zero to do with him being gay; I can absolutely promise anyone that. I don’t know what the reasons were, but I don’t get the sense the boycotters do either.

To accuse Gail Vines of being a homophobe is sort of like accusing Orly Taitz of being sane, or the Jonas Brothers of being talented. Gail Vines goes to my church, Mayflower, which is literally the most liberal church in the entire state. Anyone with even remotely homophobic tendencies wouldn’t be comfortable there. To call this boycott a part of the great fight for GLBT equality is, to put it bluntly, bullshit.

Let’s boil it down: some group of people, in this case The Gays, saw a perceived slight and got all up in arms without having – or, let’s cut the crap, NEEDING - all of the facts.

It’s so typical of America today. One group or person does something that isn’t right in line with the beliefs or agenda of another group, and immediately, there go the alarm bells. Here comes the yelling. Here comes the faux outrage, wherein we get all mad and frothed up about something and then go back to our wonderful lives that are, at best, minimally impacted by the thing we’re all so pissed off about.

The worst part is, I think that when we do things like this we’re just playing to the Great Palace Lie that we ARE these labels that society, or, more to the point, The Advertising Industry, slaps on us. The Gays are a Group That Can Be Marketed To, and so – oh, you’re gay? Here’s a Britney Spears CD, some body glitter, a charge card from Hollister and a whole raft of political opinions you have to cling to without question. Please read from the script.

Oh, you’re a Christian? HOW INCREDIBLY GREAT FOR YOU. Here’s a chain of stores that sells unneeded crap made by underpaid workers in the Third World, and marketed just for you, an entire music industry to call your very own, for GOD’S SAKE YOUR VERY OWN CANDY TO EXPRESS YOUR FAITH, as IF candy could ever really do that, and an whole raft of political opinions you have to cling to without question. Please, just read from the script.

You guys, no one cares about helping you express anything about your truest identity. They’re taking your "identity" all the way to the bank. Britney Spears could give a crap about gay rights. For that matter, so could Bill O’Reilly. There’s money in what they’re doing, or else they wouldn’t be doing it.

We like to tout diversity in America. You know why? Because diversity allows us to divide ourselves up and to make doing so look really holy and just. We divide ourselves into easily-targeted groups for advertisers and politicians, and then we take offense when the people in the other marketing niches disagree with us or do things differently than we do.

Oh, and the people who think they flipped the system, who DON’T FIT INTO SOCIETY’S BOX, thankyouverymuch, with their ironic mustaches and thrift store t-shirts, oh, we’re the worst of all. I can tell you this from a zillion Flaming Lips concerts and outdoor music festivals where all the people loudly decrying the evils of corporate America sport identical uniforms of non-conformist clothing available at retail outlets near you, and they all have iPhones and went to suburban high schools and got to spend a year after college bumming around Europe on daddy’s dime.

Then the politicans, on both sides of the aisle, they line us up and yell at us that the people in the other marketing niches are DESTROYING AMERICA and are unrepentantly evil and must be, themselves, destroyed. It’s like America’s just one big cliquey high school, and we’re all sitting at different cafeteria tables, all looking exactly the same and thinking we are one and each as unique as snowflakes, and just SHOUTING at each other. HERE AND THEY’VE GOT ME DOING IT. BEHOLD MY CAPS LOCK KEY IN THE NAME OF UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE.

All of this is to say, this Flip’s boycott is yet another example of identity politics spinning wildly out of control. We are told that our stupid marketing niche – gay, or Christian, or Latino, or country, or urban, or whatever – defines who we are, and any perceived threat or insult to that identity must be met with swift and unyeilding resistance. We’ve turned into a nation of Sue Sylvesters; we shout as loud as we can until we get what we want, we play the aggrieved minority when it serves our purposes but could give half a flip about other aggrieved minorities when they get in our way. We claim our Constitutional rights are being trodden and compare ourselves to Martin Luther King, Jr., all in the name of getting to trod on someone else’s Constitutional rights. WE ALL DO IT.

To quote Tina Fey, "All God’s children are terrible."

So, what’s the point here? For me, the point is that I want us all to categorically refuse to play this game. I want us each to throw out the script, quit playing to type and stop being so ticked off about things we’re not willing to invest the time to understand outside the echo-chamber of pre-marketed media we know is just going to tell us what we want to hear. I’m losing my faith in America because I’m beginning to realize that we’re a country where the people who get what they want are the ones who yell the loudest. I’d like this to stop, but I’m under no idealistic assumption that it will. But I do refuse to play; it’s like Charlie Brown and the football – if you agree to play, you’ve already lost. I’m not going to argue about politics on the internet – who was it that said that’s like jerking off to your own photograph?

Things won’t ever get better as long as we’re organizing bullshit "boycotts" of people we don’t know for reasons we don’t really understand. But as I already said, I’m pretty much losing faith in the political system to make things better anyway. So here’s what I’m going to do instead: I’m going to go with my church to go feed the homeless every other Saturday from now until Jesus comes back, or until we as a nation decide that it’s entirely unacceptable that some people don’t have a place to live or enough food to live on. Because I used to think that, no matter our philosophies on governance, liberal or conservative or otherwise, there were some things we could all agree on, for instance, that it’s entirely unacceptable that some people don’t have a place to live or enough food to live on. I see now that isn’t true, and it breaks my heart.

There’s NOTHING we can all agree upon, nothing so sacred as to hold us in one accord, if someone, somewhere, can make money off of getting us to fight about it.

I’m going to give money to organizations I believe in. I’m not going to let anyone yell at me or call me names. I’m going to try my hardest not to yell or call anyone else names, either. I’m not going to join some random, ineffectual "boycott" for reasons I don’t understand against a woman who doesn’t deserve it because some overly-sensitive and under-informed members of my marketing group perceived some slight against us. And I’m going to try my hardest – and I’m going to fail, but that’s Okay too – to get up every morning, and go to bed every night, saying the only prayer there really is: "Thank You. Thank You. Thank You. Thank You. Thank You."

It's Not Right But It's Okay, Living In America, This I Believe

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Saturday, August 8, 2009 | by nathan

Here’s Why Delta Can Suck It (Part 1)

Fair Warning: This post gets pretty foul-mouthed.

For the past month people have been asking me non-stop, "OH MY GOD SO HOW WAS IRELAND WAS IT SO AWESOME?"

And we gay out a little bit together while I tell them that yes, it was incredible, and so beautiful. I tell them how I cried when the plane landed in Dublin because it felt like coming home, like being reunited with a long-lost and much-beloved friend. I try to emphasize how great it is to show three of your favorite people around a country you love like it’s your own, to share with them little secrets that were shared with you way back in the day. I loved this trip.

But.

For some reason, I also bring up the flights. Those goddamn buggery bollocky flights, departing in Hell and arriving in Hell. I unleash a string of expletives so strong that it blows people’s hair back like a Memorex ad; to quote Jean Shepard, I "weave a tapestry of profanity." Because the flights? WERE A DISASTER.

That’s not entirely true; the international flights between JFK and Dublin were just fine. It was the rest of it, the stateside travel, that kept making me think that any second I would black out only to awake surrounded by dead bodies and holding an Uzi, standing there like River Tam, having just unconsciously slaughtered half an airport. The trip was incredible, life-changing and exactly what we all needed, but it was bookended by two days of absolute fail on the part of the airline industry.

Our itinerary was a little janky, because Brian was working in D.C., and we wanted to go for the Fourth, but I found a great deal on airfare out of JFK on Delta. I’ve been flying with Delta for well over a decade, have racked up several free tickets with them, and when I saw the chance to get an extra 6,500 SkyMiles by flying out of New York, I thought, "It’s so easy to get from D.C. to New York. We’ll just take the train; no problem."

So, I booked the following itinerary. Since Brian, Jayson and Laurie were already in D.C. when I got there, I booked the first leg to fly by myself from Oklahoma City to Atlanta, then on to Dulles, arriving about 10:30 p.m. Then, on the way back, Brian and I would arrive in JFK, then fly to Detroit, then on to Oklahoma City.

Then, a month after I booked the flights, Delta sent me an e-mail that our itinerary had been changed. Coming back, we would now be going from JFK to Detroit, then to Memphis, THEN to Oklahoma City. I wasn’t crazy about it, but I figured things like this happen – probably not enough people on that Detroit-OKC flight to justify actually having one, so they just moved everyone around. Only they gave us exactly 40 minutes in the Detroit airport to make the flight to Memphis.

I should have called them right then. I should have tried to eliminate that extra leg by having them send us through Atlanta, or Cincinnati, or hell, even Salt Lake City would have worked if they could get us home. But I didn’t; my unwavering faith that Things Will Always Work Out held fast and I thought, "We’re really going to have to run to make that plane, but what plane ever takes off on time? We’ll make it."

Ever the motherfucking optimist.

Also, let me just point out that if I had called Delta and REQUESTED this change, they’d have charged me $250. For each ticket. For a total of $500.

And so, the trip begins, sort of on a sour note. I had a crummy day at work, my housesitter never showed up (more on that in a sec), and by the time I got to the airport I was rubbed raw with stress. I walked up to the Delta kiosk to get my tickets.

YOUR ITINERARY WAS NOT FOUND.

Immediately the Neurosis Tabernacle Choir started singing in my head. In the two hours before I get on a plane and it is in the air, I am a total nervous wreck. I become obsessed with my driver’s license, my passport and my boarding pass, convinced either that I am going to lose one of these things, or that one of them will be somehow invalid and that I won’t be allowed on the plane. I have awful visions of myself handing my boarding pass to the gate agent and her saying, "Um, I’m sorry, but this is a McDonald’s receipt. You may not get on the plane." I become one hundred percent convinced that I am not going to be allowed to board. Then, once I am allowed on the plane, I become one hundred percent convinced that someone will be in my seat, someone big and angry, and I’ll be forced to get off, or that they’ll come down the aisle looking for me, saying, it turns out, we ran a background check. It seems your moral character is lacking; please get off the plane.

Once we are in the air, I can relax; no way they can kick me off now, right? WE’RE IN IT TOGETHER NOW, MOTHERFUCKERS.

And so of course when the machine won’t give me my ticket, Bad Mind kicks in. Bad Mind LIVES for this shit. You’re going to have to go home and miss Ireland altogether. It’s going to cost you thousands of dollars to get to D.C. now, and then you won’t have any money for the actual trip. You are fucked beyond all recognition.

The only thing I know to do to calm Bad Mind down is to pray, and so that’s what I did. I just closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and said, "Help."

When I opened my eyes, a surly Delta employee was walking up to me. "You on the Atlanta flight?" she asked with all the grace and sweetness of Lunchlady Doris.

I told her I was.

"You’re on a two-hour delay," she said, and began to walk away.

"Wait!" I called after her, frantically. She turned, begrudgingly, her eyes dull and impatient. "What do I do?" I asked.

From her reaction I thought she might have misheard me; she answered like you might answer a grown adult who asks, "What’s two plus two?"

"Go stand in the line," she said, her voice dripping with impatient derision.

My blood pressure now somewhere in the realm of a heart-diseased gorilla, I went to stand in line. When I got to the front I explained my predicament for the ticket agent. I may have led her to believe that my getting to Washington that evening was a life-or-death situation; without directly saying so, I may also have made it sound like I had urgent business there first thing in the morning. Maybe.

And so she pokes at her computer for awhile, trying to get me there. She finds a flight and then looks sideways at her computer, like a dog cocking its head upon seeing something unfamiliar. Then she looks at the gate agent at the computer next to her.

"I don’t know how to book this," she tells him.

"I don’t either," he says without taking his eyes off his own screen. "Ask Bill."

"Bill," my gate agent says to a man several feet away, at a volume guaranteed not to get his attention; she was using her inside voice in a crowded airport terminal. So of course Bill doesn’t move; he didn’t hear her. She waits. I wait. Another passenger comes around me to ask the gate agent a question, which she answers. Bill is talking to another Delta employee and doesn’t realize someone needs him, because the someone who needs him didn’t really bother with trying to get his attention.

The other passenger’s question is asinine, like, "Do I really have to check this GIGANTIC BAG? Can’t I just carry it on? Can’t you make an exception for cute little me?" 

I’m standing there about to just lose my shit all over the place. Finally the other passenger goes and gets in line like the rest of us plebians, and the girl stands back up and looks at me like, "What? Are you still here?"

"D.C.," I tell her again. "And I don’t care where I lay over or which airport I fly into. Dulles, Reagan, Baltimore, it’s all fine, just get me there."

She seems to rouse, as if from a nap, and pokes at the computer. "Oh yeah," she says. "Bill?"

BIll still doesn’t hear her.

"Hey Bill!" I say loudly. He turns to look at me. I point at my gate agent; Bill looks at me the way I look at people who go through the checkout lines at Target speaking loudly on their cell phones, and then drags himself, with great effort, over to my gate agent.

"I don’t know how to book it," the agent tells Bill.

"What is he wanting to do?"

I take umbrage at the use of the word wanting, as if I’ve made some outrageous request beyond the one I made when I purchased the ticket, which is GET ME WHERE THE FUCK I WANT TO GO. I take another deep breath, say another little prayerlet, and explain the situation to Bill with some urgency.

Bill roughly pushes the gate agent aside, hacks at the keyboard for awhile, and then steps away. By now the other gate agent is watching what the two of them are doing, saying, "Oh, yeah, I don’t know how to do this either." So I’m just holding up the whole line at this point; I can feel my fellow passengers staring daggers at me from the line.

Then someone else jumps around the line to ask Bill a question, can she take her cat on the plane? Bill steps away, leaving now two gate agents awaiting his expertise on the computer, and I hear the ENTIRE LINE behind me heave a huge Post Office sigh, an embattled groan.

Meanwhile, I’m standing there just staring at the lady who felt like she could just go around us all with her sob story, whatever the fuck it was, and make us all wait even longer BECAUSE SHE’S JUST THAT MUCH MORE IMPORTANT THAN WE ARE. I know, right? I’m looking at her with my meanest look, the one I used to give students when I would catch them surfing MySpace in the middle of lectures, like, "Seriously? Are you fucking kidding me with this shit right now?" She sees me looking at her and goes red; nobody knows how to throw shame like I do.

She goes to stand in line to check her cat. Bill looks around like, "What was I doing?" I stand up as tall as I can to get his attention. He looks at me like, "Oh God, are you still here?" and then comes back to the computer to finish fulfilling my outlandish request.

A few keystrokes and some words of training later, he has shown both gate agents how to book a flight, and I am handed a boarding pass for an American Airlines flight to Washington Dulles via Dallas. The other passengers on my ill-fated Atlanta flight watch me leave with great relief; I want to get on the airport P.A. and announce that if Delta wanted to take care of everyone faster, they could have Bill open up another line, as well as the Delta employee with whom he was talking before I flagged him down, and that they shouldn’t blame me. But I’ve got places to be; I go to board my American flight.

The flight goes as smoothly as an American Airlines flight can go, considering their chairs are so uncomfortable that it feels like their slogan should be "Fixing America’s posture, one traveler at a time." I get to Dallas and have to take their stupid Disney World Monorail all around the airport to my gate, the whole time standing next to a creepy-looking dude in a Promise Keepers ballcap who is staring intently at me the whole time. I’ve had such a bad day at this point that I’m thinking, "Just ask me if I’ve accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior. Just start that conversation with me and see how many of your teeth are still in your head at the end of it."

In the Dallas airport I call Brian and tell him that they shouldn’t plan to meet me at the airport, as I am now scheduled to arrive just a few minutes before midnight. I pay $7.99 for wi-fi and book a blue van to take me to my hotel.

The flight out of Dallas sits on the tarmac for quite awhile, and I don’t actually end up in D.C. until almost 1 a.m. When I start up my phone I have a text message from my mom:

I just went over to get Sam — he is doing great. I made him a bed in the kitchen and I think he’s asleep. Have fun! Luv mom.

A shock to me, since I was supposed to have a housesitter coming to stay with Sam all week. I feel a part of my brain collapse, like a Moon Bounce that’s been stabbed with a butcher knife, and I call Brian.

"Why does mom have Sam?"

"Oh, you heard about that, huh?" he says, his voice fearful.

It turns out that our poor housesitter, Jayson’s brother Casey, totaled his car that afternoon on the way over to my house, and won’t be able to watch the place after all. He’s fine, no major injuries, but his car is lost to the ages. Mom went and got Sam and he stayed with her all week, because my mom? You guys, she’s awesome; she kept Sam all week, and at the end of it he didn’t want to come home. I sent Facebook messages to the neighbors telling them that anyone entering the house is now doing so illegally.

At this point I am entirely convinced that the day can’t get any worse. So I go to meet my blue van, wanting just to be driven to my hotel and to climb into bed.

Only when I go to meet my blue van, there are seven people climbing into it. I walk up to the door and say, "Um, I reserved a seat on this." 

The last dude climbing into it, some preppy jagweed about my age, says, "It’s full," and slams the door in my face. The van takes off, without me. Had I not been weary with frustration at that point I may have dragged him out and kicked his face, but as it was I just walked back inside to the blue van counter, print my ticket at the kiosk and take it to the desk.

"My van filled up and left without me," I tell the guy at the desk.

"That was the last one for the night."

"I have a reservation," I say through clenched teeth.

He just shrugs, like, "and?"

"So get me a van," I say.

Once again it’s as if I’ve asked him for a lock of hair, or a kidney.

"Well I’ll have to call someone," he says irritably.

"So call ‘em."

He rolls his eyes at me, and I tap loudly on the counter. He picks up the phone, points to a row of seats and says, "Thirty minutes. Wait there." 

I glare at him suspiciously, pretty sure he’s just calling for a pizza, and sit down. Two minutes later he comes over and looks at me impatiently. "Your van is outside."

So, I go and load up my stuff. A few more people come and get in, also needing rides into D.C. The driver gets everyone’s destinations and creates a route; out of five people in the van, I will be dropped off fourth.

The guy sitting next to me gets on his cell phone and calls his girlfriend. I can hear both sides of the conversation; she is yelling at him, telling him that she’d woken up in their apartment all alone and was afraid.

"I’m sorry," he pleads, "my flight was delayed two hours." 

I can tell she is crying by this time. "You have to do better about getting home. You know I’m scared to be here alone at night. That’s why I’m glad to be getting married, because then I don’t have to, like, grow up and do stuff like be alone at night or pay bills. I woke up and you weren’t here and I was so scared."

She broke down in sobs while he apologized, over and over, for his delayed flight, as if he was personally responsible for that. If he hadn’t been such a pussy I would have thought it was nice that at least someone, somewhere in the world was apologizing for flight delays. I whiled away the drive listening to him apologize for the airplanes, for the ocean, for the air, for the fact that about half of every day it gets dark, and that she was scared of the dark and he wasn’t there to keep her from ever having to grow up, and like a really fucked-up Peter Pan and Wendy, they went on and on.

So the blue van winds through GWU and Georgetown and Capitol Heights before finally dropping me off. I’m exhausted and frustrated and at my absolute wits’ end. Brian meets me at the front door of the hotel and walks me up to the room; I’m so happy to see him that I give a moment’s thought to actually taking a physical bite out of his shoulder.

Jayson and Laurie have already been there a day, and so the room is fully stocked. The hotel is next door to a liquor store and there’s a bottle of Bacardi on the dresser next to some plastic cups. I take the bottle and fill a cup to the brim with rum, then down it one gulp.

"Babe, don’t," Brian says.

"You shut up," I snap. Jayson and Laurie have awoken by now and heard my story, and so I instruct the room: "We are not setting an alarm tomorrow. Must sleep."

Everyone’s in agreement with that, and so we all go to bed. I sleep like the dead, clinging to Brian like a life raft, having vague nightmares of horrible airline seats like something out of A Clockwork Orange, and blue vans that come to life and speed away with me holding the door handle, and Bill, an army of Bill, Bill legion stepping away to answer the questions of passengers who want to know if they can bring their cats on the plane, and me, in the middle of it all, pulling out huge chunks of hair that turn to snakes in my hand.

Part 2, NYC-OKC, coming soon.

It's Not Right But It's Okay, Living In America, On The Road

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Sunday, July 5, 2009 | by nathan

233

Trying to write a blog post with the slow internet at the JFK airport is rather like trying to pull oneself out of a mess of quicksand, possibly just after having eaten a whole mess of Taco Bueno. So I’ll keep this short: Fourth of July? WAS AWESOME. Happy 233rd Birthday, America!

Daily Photo, Living In America

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Wednesday, July 1, 2009 | by nathan

Just Imagine It In Neal Conan’s Voice

I was driving home from lunch today, listening to Talk of the Nation like I always do in the car at lunchtime. They started talking about President Obama’s recent outreach to the LGBT community and the question was put to the callers as to whether Americans feel that their political leaders’ publicly (and loudly) expressed views really reflect the feelings on the ground about gay marriage. I tried to call and couldn’t get through, and by that time I was back at work anyway, so I ran inside and fired off a quick e-mail. Then I threw in my headphones and had a listen, and sure enough! "Here’s an e-mail from Nathan in Oklahoma City," said Neal Conan, who then read the words I’d punched out literally 60 seconds before:

"I live in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and despite my state’s reputation as one of the most conservative areas in America, despite the fact that we are the home of such foaming-at-the-mouth anti-gay characters such as Sally Kern and Anita Bryant, I have to say that my husband and I have had almost no trouble with anti-gay sentiment. Even people who disagree with us on religious grounds are generally friendly – the attitude around here is that it’s no one’s business but our own. I would say that in Oklahoma, our politicians are very out-of-step with the populace. Most of the people I know could care less about anyone’s sexual orientation or whether gay marriage is legal or not.

As to President Obama, while I’ve been disappointed so far in the slow steps the administration has taken, I think we have to remember to keep in mind that only six months have passed since the Inauguration. I think we should remember that there are a lot of things going on right now. Gay people will still be here and ready to marry once we’ve tackled some of these more pressing issues."

I wanted to add in about how Clinton’s failure to pass health care in his first term, and the Republican resurgence of 1994, is occasionally attributed, in part, to the huge amounts of political capital he wasted on both sides of the aisle with the battle that eventually gave us "don’t ask don’t tell." Nothing irritates me more about the gay community than when we start acting like our issues should be at the top of everyone’s agenda, and damn everything else to hell. It doesn’t do anything for our image as a community except makes us look selfish and myopic. While it’s good to remind the President that we’re here, to keep ourselves on his agenda, let’s not pretend like we should be the top priority right now.

Heaux-Meaux, Living In America, Oklahoma, This I Believe

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Tuesday, May 19, 2009 | by nathan

Three Trips

Traveling has been on my mind of late. I just finished the third in a series of travel articles I’m writing for the local alternative newsweekly, and in about six weeks I will fly to Washington, D.C. for a weekend of patriotism and mayhem before Brian, two of our great friends and I take off for a week in Ireland. To say I’m excited wouldn’t quite be fair; I’m having throes, people. Throes.

I’ve been to all of these places before, of course. But the gist of the travel series (which is based on last year’s Road Trip), is that even within my own state there is so much to see that often goes unseen, and so to that end I’ve been thinking about how much of America I have yet to see for myself. Brian and I were talking about this the other day. I was telling him about how when I was a kid we used to take these crazy-complicated road trips all over America – from Oklahoma to Los Angeles to Northern California to Colorado and back, or from Oklahoma to Cincinnati to New Orleans and back to Oklahoma. But if you drew a horizontal line through a map of the U.S., there is a great deal of stuff north of that line that I’ve never seen.

So, to that end I’ve been thinking about how to cover the 14 of the contiguous United States I’ve never visited; I figure Alaska and Hawai’i, while more than worthy of visits, are trips unto themselves. I used to dream that I’d take all 14 at once, in a Kerouac-esque hitchhike-a-thon across the northern half of our country. But now, encumbered and enhanced both by the wise caution that comes with growing older and a sense of perspective, I came up with three potential road trips to cover all 14 states and as much ground as possible.

Trip #1: Middle America

This trip begins and ends in Des Moines, IA, mostly because I have been fascinated by Iowa ever since I read On The Road, wherein Kerouac states that "the prettiest girls live in Iowa." I’d like to wind through northern Nebraska and the Black Hills of South Dakota (with a stop at Mt. Rushmore) before traveling north to visit North Dakota’s Audubon National Wildlife Refuge and Audubon Lake. From there it’s into Fargo, then to Minnesota, hopefully catching a live show of A Prairie Home Companion in St. Paul. This followed by a jaunt through Wisconsin – Eau Claire, Green Bay, Milwaukee and Madison, before winding back through Iowa. Middle America writ large.

Trip #2: Northern New England

I lived in New England for a time, squatting in a New Haven walkup and trying to be a Yale student. We all know that it didn’t go great. Since my time in the northeast was cut short, I missed out on exploring as much of that area of the country as I’d liked. So this trip starts in Boston (I’ve already been to Massachusetts, but) and winds up through New Hampshire and Vermont – the town of Rutland is of special interest to me because of Time Chasers – before rounding out the inner portion of Maine and then returning to Boston. I consider the part of the country that I’m originally from – Oklahoma – to be basically the exact opposite of New England, and so the idea for this trip really thrills me.

Trip #3: The Northwest

But this idea here is, to me, the most exciting. Starting in Seattle we’d drive up to Port Angeles, Washington, then down the Pacific Coast before turning inland to visit Portland and Bend, Oregon, then traipsing across Oregon, through the southern part of Idaho, to Casper, Wyoming. From there it’s north to Billings, Great Falls, and Kalispell, Montana, then across the panhandle of Idaho to Coeur d’Alene, up to the Grand Coulee Dam, then back to Seattle. Everything about the idea for this trip – except for the cost, really – excites me, and I hope to get to do it someday soon.

So, those are the three trips I’ve conceived to cover the 14 contiguous states I haven’t visited. Who’s in, and for what part? Also – if any struggling car companies want to reach out to me to, say, creatively market a  new car, especially an SUV hybrid, by sponsoring me to take one or more of these trips and blog about it, well, THAT WOULD BE FINE. JUST FINE.

Living In America, On The Road

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Saturday, May 16, 2009 | by nathan

Turbinomic

A building that generates its own power and supplies the surplus back to the grid. THESE are the kinds of solutions we need, people; we’ll see what feasibility studies have to say about whether or not this is a real possibility, but if it is, I can’t think of a better place for it than OKC. Read more about Turbinomic here.

Living In America, Oklahoma, videos

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Tuesday, April 7, 2009 | by nathan

Courage

I’m currently writing a column about Sally Kern – or, I should say, I’m TRYING to write a column about Sally Kern and it’s proving exceptionally difficult – but in the meantime the news out of Iowa and Vermont is really buoying up my spirits and maybe thinking that "mean and unfair in the name of Jesus" won’t be the prevailing order of the day. Check this video of Iowa’s Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal, who refused cooperation in pushing forward a bill that would amend the Iowa Constitution to define marriage as solely between a man and a woman:

Heaux-Meaux, Living In America, videos

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Wednesday, February 25, 2009 | by nathan

The Neighbor

I realized recently that I was, in fact, not in good hands with Allstate. Okay, fine, I’m not here to impugn the quality of the Hands, but the fact is those Hands were costing me about a half a bill more a month than almost everyone I know. This after the fact that for the last three or four years – basically since I realized at one point that if anything happened to my car I’d be oh so fucked zOMG because there’s no replacing my car, there’s having the car I have and not having a car – I drive like an old lady. I go the speed limit, I always buckle up, and while I do have stored within my body roughly the amount of road rage that’s present on, say, the Triborough Bridge at any given moment, I haven’t had a ticket in over three years. And that ticket was a seat belt citation. I honestly could not tell you the last time I got pulled over for speeding.

And yet – here I am paying half again for car insurance what everyone else I know is. File under, Chump.

Brian has a friend who’s an insurance agent, and today he called him for me. The guy quoted me a more reasonable price for car insurance but also mentioned to Brian that, should, say our house burn down (not entirely unthinkable since our house was built in 1941, we live next to this, and this occasionally happens in our neighborhood, and oh yeah, all those tornadoes Oklahoma’s famous for), nothing of mine would be covered. So our wonderful insurance agent suggested I get a renters’ policy to cover me in the event of a disaster.

So fine, I did it. I’m still saving about $50 a month AND I have an insurance agent I actually trust for once. So that’s a plus. But it went all over me – a renter in my own home.

Do you know who doesn’t have to be a renter in their own home? Straight married couples, that’s who. If Brian and I were legally married, crap like this wouldn’t matter. We could visit each other in the hospital without having to spend thousands on legal fees drawing up paperwork saying we can visit each other in the hospital. If one of us died the whole insurance and inheritance thing would be much, much easier than it is now – we have to pay the aforementioned legal fees and do mountains of paperwork just to loosely codify something that married people get the instant their marriage license is filed. Legally, we’re strangers.

I wish that the people who oppose gay marriage could understand the way I’m feeling right now. It’s a rancid stew of so many negative emotions, of unwantedness and exclusion and passive aggression and not being a fully included or valued member of my society. I’m a renter in my own freaking house. I wonder what Jesus would say about that. I wonder if that’s a metaphor for the larger situation. I wonder if people who have such strong opposing views to mine would take a moment and try to see this from my point of view, for just a second. At the very least I hope you’ll hold back and understand I’m hurting enough. Maybe now’s not the time to pile on with your little opinions about something you don’t know anything about.

Whatever, man. I really hate playing the aggrieved minority. But I have to say that if you’re straight – especially if you’re married – you have it so easy and you don’t even know it. It’s like being rich that way – it’s hard to understand how much easier your life is unless you’re on the outside. And here we are living next door to you or down the street or hiding within your families and churches and feeling invisible and left out and unwanted. So you should think real hard about that and wonder if that’s the witness you want.

Heaux-Meaux, It's Not Right But It's Okay, Living In America, This I Believe

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