What's My Line?

What's your ethnicity?
An easy enough question for many. For a great long time I answered this query with a fierce and proud, "Mostly Irish." Which turned out to be a thick slab of blareny. This was the story that my father had put together over the years, based on some anecdotal bits of history, and the fact that there is a County Cavan located in north Ireland. The story had the added attraction of how our name used to be Cavanaugh, but the powers that be at Ellis Island callously dropped the "augh" in their haste to make neat, five letter names that would fit in the blanks.
And so, for decades I approached each Saint Patrick's Day as a rite and adopted the swilling of beer dyed green as part of my heritage. My loving wife even went so far as to boil up corned beef and cabbage for the occasion.
Then, in preparation for my older brother's fiftieth birthday, my mother decided to trace our family tree. Which didn't lead back to County Cavan. It became clear that there was a lot of fuss around the time someone should have been keeping good records, but with all that pillaging and sacking of villages and such, there wasn't a nice, neat path to our ancestral home. Just to be sure, I discouraged my wife from making haggis.
I don't really know my ethnicity for certain beyond the plains of Kansas, which is where both of my parents' families chose to move just a little to the west and land up in Colorado. I know that "Kansan" doesn't qualify as an ethnicity, but I did recently learn that there was a tribe of Native Americans called the Kansa, People of the South Wind. That's not me.
So I'm wondering now, what Kellyanne Conway was expecting when she asked reporter Andrew Feinberg, "What's your ethnicity?" Was she hoping to have a freewheeling exchange about this great big melting pot of ours and how we should all be proud of our heritage as well as our adopted nation? Or maybe she was tapping into a different historical vein, in which one's ethnicity could be used to send them back or maybe just to work camps? Or put to death by the millions? It was pretty clear that she wasn't just shilling for ancestry.com. 
Meanwhile, down the street, Republican Representative Mike Kelly from Pennsylvania announced, “They talk about people of color. I’m a person of color. “I’m white. I’m an Anglo-Saxon. People say things all the time, but I don’t get offended.” Which made me think of that unfortunate box of Crayons from my youth that had a "flesh" colored hunk of wax in it. After 1962, flesh was peach and that was that.
My how we've evolved. At least when it comes to coloring.

Not Me

Fifty years ago, NASA made a really good choice. They picked Neil Armstrong to be the first man to walk on the moon. I know there has been some discussion lately about the hierarchy of commander and pilot and so forth, and which way the door on the lunar landing module opened, but I still believe their choice was inspired. In spite of the fact that he blew his line.
"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Neil left out an indefinite article. In his version, "man" and "mankind" are essentially synonyms, rendering his statement void of meaning. "That's one small step for A man, one giant leap for mankind." That would have provided contrast for the two clauses, comparing his action of stepping onto the moon's surface to that of everyone else who had ever lived.
I tend to forgive Commander Armstrong for this little faux pas. He had a few other things on his mind. Most notably: "Will I be able to crawl back up that ladder once it's time to go?" And it probably goes without saying that there were six hundred fifty million people watching on TV back home. A few years before that, "everyone" watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. And that was seventy-three million. Which makes me wonder why Brian Epstein missed his shot to book the Fab Four a gig on the moon.
But let's get back to why they picked Neil. They didn't pick me. Perhaps because I was only seven years old at the time and though my brothers and I had undergone our own version of astronaut training by spinning around tied up in a hammock until we nearly puked I would not have been the ideal candidate. I would have worried that there was no actual lunar surface, just a sandy trap waiting for the first food source to be foolish enough to step out onto that gray wasteland. Or that inhabitants of the moon had been laying in wait, avoiding detection by telescope and unmanned probes to jump out and take their first hostage.
Maybe that's a little ridiculous. How about something, anything, going wrong with the life support system while he's standing out there in a vacuum? Or let's say they had a really successful romp on the moon and picked up a bunch of rocks and dirt and when it was time to go, they packed a little too much and the fuel they had wasn't enough to get them back to Michael Collins and the Command Module, orbiting above. Sorry guys. You and Buzz are just going to have to tough it out until help arrives. Except there was no help. Just go ahead and do your best with this thing that no one has ever done before and hope that nothing goes wrong.
I'm sorry. I survived the whole hammock thing, but hanging around on the moon waiting for my oxygen to run out is not something for which I would have readily volunteered. And what about Buzz? Well, he was the second man on the moon, but he was the enforcer. I dare you to go up to Buzz Aldrin and tell him the moon landings were fake. For All Mankind.

Fuelish

My son, the car aficionado, is the only person I know personally who has purchased premium gasoline. On purpose. It is entirely possible that once upon a time when I was dong my due diligence and pumping my own gas that I may have inadvertently pushed the wrong fuel grade button. This is one of those odd indicators to me, by the way, that all this worry about supreme and hi-test and so forth may be a lot of hooey. There was a time when there were actually separate pumps for the special fuel that would not have been an issue. Pull around to the regular pump. I don't need any of that fancy stuff for my car. Besides, it was the late, great Mad Magazine that provided me with the image of a single tank buried beneath a series of gas pumps all labeled with various exciting names and qualities. It's all gas, right?
Well, certain auto manufactures recommend that you use premium gasoline in their very fussy engines. Luxury types. And that's "recommend," by the way. It's a way to to ensure that you keep feeling luxurious even when you're standing there at the self-sever island wiping your own windows while your tank fills.
What makes gas supreme? It's the octane rating, usually a matter of four or five points. Regular, run of the mill, garden variety gasoline sits somewhere around eighty-seven, and that liquid gold you yearn to pump into your fancy schmancy performance automobile comes in around ninety-two. Since that translates to around twenty cents per gallon and you're driving that schmancy car and affording the payments then you probably don't mind spending an extra two or three bucks per tankful. 
And yes, lower octane gasoline is a little more likely to cause engine knock, caused by a preignition in your car's cylinders that doesn't count as a full ignition. This means your engine isn't properly compressing, which might not be so bad coming from a Dodge Dart, but a Bugati Veyron is another matter. Your Dodge Dart has a low compression rate, so you probably won't notice it. That Bugati, on the other hand, has a very high rate of compression and you had better keep fancy gasoline in that bad boy or there will be trouble. Not a lot, mind you, since Modern engines use a device called a knock sensor to detect the rattling and vibration within a cylinder that signals preignition. These sensors send a signal to the vehicle's Engine Control Unit which then adjusts the engine's timing when the spark plugs fire to reduce or prevent the knock. You might not win that street race against Vin Diesel, but it's pretty tough to notice on a trip to CVS. 
And if you're worried that regular gas won't keep your engine clean like premium will, remember that Environmental Protection Agency regulations require that all grades of gas have detergent in them. So, if you're driving that Bugati and you can afford it, hire me to drive over to the filling station and I will fill it up with Supremium Bestest Grade gas. And I promise I won't pocket the difference. 

Toss Me That Wooden Stake

Racism isn't dead.
It's a vampire that feeds on hate and fear, and just like the monsters from all those Universal movies in the thirties and forties, if there is any chance of making a profit they'll be back in a sequel.
So let's start with some basics: Nobody wants to admit they're a vampire. It's a pretty well-kept secret, since there's always some doctor or villager who knows what to do with a wooden stake. And yet, while bodies keep showing up around town with suspicious dual puncture wounds in their necks, and the lady of the manor is wandering around pale and listless, no one seems anxious to pull the Vampire Alarm.
It's unthinkable in this day and age that the undead would walk the earth in search of new victims to maim and kill. Even worse that those same members of the undead would seek to enlist still more into their crew. Who wouldn't want to live forever, after all? Of course this does mean that you give up a big chunk of your free will and you need to sleep in a box while the sun is out, but that doesn't seem so bad, does it?
Unless you start to figure in the human cost of staying alive like that. You have to kill others to keep going. To be clear, I'm not talking about the revisionist Twilight vampires whose tastes would primarily to animals, though they still belong to that same club in a pinch. They suck the blood out of things for love. They're just misunderstood.
Go ahead and ask someone if they know any vampires. Of course they don't. This might be because they don't know any vampires. Or they don't know if anyone they know is a vampire. Or maybe they don't want to admit that they know any vampires because it might make you think that they are vampires too. Or maybe they're vampires.
So let's return to those Twilight-type bloodsuckers. If there was a race of people that subsisted on animal blood alone and they weren't occasionally interested in using their razor sharp teeth to inflict pain and suffering on other people, it would be akin to my own predilection for cheeseburgers. If occasionally I needed to supplement my diet with a little human flesh, that wouldn't be okay. That would be cannibalism. That would be wrong.
Vampirism is wrong. It should not be tolerated, and anyone who suggests that vampirism isn't a problem hasn't had their neck bitten lately. Which doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Racism isn't dead. It's undead.

How We Did It

Sometimes I like to tell the story about how these young punks came down to Oakland so they could take a look at our book packaging and shipping operation. This was back in the day when "we" were Bookpeople, an employee-owned book wholesaler who specialized in the kind of stuff you might expect to find in a business run by Berkeley folks. Which it was. Owned and run. And these upstarts from up north wanted to see how a bustling distributor like us could move so many boxes of books out the door every day? Bring 'em on.
The punchline being that they were thinking that selling books over Al Gore's Internet might be a good business model and we scoffed quietly behind their backs as they looked at our shrink-wrapping apparatus. Didn't they know we were getting by on the razor-thinnest of margins and they wanted to ship a book or two at a time to private customers. Didn't they know there were these giant bookstores like Barnes&Noble and Borders out there just waiting for our best customers the neighborhood bookstores to make a tiny mistake? How could they compete.
Take a look around and see how many Borders or Barnes&Noble you can spot on your store locator app. Borders? Well, you know, nothing Borders stays. And those neighborhood bookstores? Good luck.
Meanwhile, those same young punks have figures out a way to sell you just about anything on Al Gore's Internet. How do they do it? Volume, volume, volume. They can be like Costco at the very same time they are pretending to be the corner drugstore. Need some toothpaste? Don't worry, we'll run it right over. Or someone will. In a hurry.
Which brings me back to Bookpeople. Back in my warehouse days we had a rubber stamp that we used to place in red ink at the top of special orders. These were the "SPRI" or Speical Priority orders. As my erstwhile minions scurried about the shelves and stacks compiling the titles requested by those sellers, the less-than-SPRI orders sat beneath, waiting and hoping for their chance to see daylight. Picked, pulled, packed and shipped. My absurd goal each day was to clear all the tiers from those dot-matrix printed order sheets. Quitting time was when the UPS driver came to pull our forty foot trailer out of the bay. Every box out the door was a dollar in our pocket.
Of course we rushed around. We were all shareholders in the company, so if we skipped a break to get one more book out the door, there was some honor in it. Amazon workers don't own their own company. They don't have a union. Somewhere out there, a warehouse worker in a yellow vest is rushing now to a shelf to grab a copy of The Celestine Prophecy,  a book that was being sold out of the trunk of the author's car before young punks like Bookpeople picked it up and turned it into a bestseller. And right after that, they're headed across the warehouse to snatch a value-pack of Total Health Crest to fill out that order.
All. My. Fault.

Wash 'n' Wear

I lost a good friend a couple weeks ago. Not to worry, because I know he's in a better place.
If the bottom of a dumpster behind the University of Colorado practice field can be considered a better place.
"He" is, or was, a T-shirt. Not just any T-shirt. He was my Friday shirt. When I came home from work after a long week, I would pull that bad boy on and we would go for a run. It was the way I knew that I was home and the next forty-eight hours were mine to contemplate the next work week. It was my bookmark and my solace. He will be missed.
My good friend "Friday" and I have covered plenty of ground since the mid nineteen seventies. That was when my older brother and I retrieved him from a dumpster behind the Balch Fieldhouse after a Golden Buffalo football game. Dumpster diving was a pretty regular pastime for us back in those days. Our usual trophies were partially used rolls of athletic tape. My brother once salvaged a broken helmet that sat on a shelf over his dresser for a decade or more. My father used to joke that one day we would bring back a used jockstrap. Which we did, especially for him, sanitarily wrapped in a tennis ball can for his convenience. And protection.
Friday was rescued on an autumn afternoon when I was still in junior high. Compared to a lot of the garbage we dragged home, this seemed like it was in pretty good shape: a black shirt with "Colorado" stenciled across the front in silver letters. Not a jersey. That would have been the jackpot, but dumpster divers can't be choosers. There was some discussion about who would end up with our new acquisition, but I would imagine that it was a bit of whining on my part that allowed it to find its way, after a few washings, into my drawer.
Where it stayed. A souvenir of a forgotten time.
Until I moved out to California, and it came with me. It became a workout shirt. It didn't start out as my Friday shirt, it was a conscious choice for me to pick that one out of half a dozen. Over the past quarter century, that shirt has been through the wringer with me more times than I can count. The wear and tear was visible after a decade or two of regular wear and tear until it became more reminiscent of something from Stevie Nicks' closet than a T-shirt.
Finally, on the occasion of a return to Boulder, I said goodbye to Friday. This garment that had become a shirt in name only, which had served me so well for all those miles and miles. I went back to whence it came and returned it, much the worse for wear. It will no longer be the thing that my wife looks at and says, "Are you going out in that?"
Nope.
Friday is gone.
And it's okay.

Child's Play

Has it ever been harder to be a kid?
Working with newcomers at my school, I have encountered a great many children who have come to us because they were scared, damaged, or lost. Many of the children I meet are fleeing some other reality. A much worse place than urban Oakland, which does me the favor of adjusting my own perspective. I am not living with a dozen other loosely related individuals who have had their own families torn apart by a tragic joke of a promise of a new and better life here in the United States. Some of them came with their families intact, save for mom or dad who did not make it to the refugee camp. I don't tend to discuss the irony of a government that is currently in the business of discouraging immigrants from corners of the globe that that same government has made things less than habitable in those places from which immigrants are fleeing.
That last sentence is partly the reason why I don't have that conversation. That and the fact that if I could find a way to describe the situation more succinctly, it still wouldn't make a lot of sense. Why should a child suffer because a bunch of grownups can't seem to get on the same page about how to treat our next generation?
All of which winds me back to a place some thirty years ago, back when the famine in Africa was of great concern to a great portion of the planet. We were inundated with images of crying children with swollen bellies, some clinging to life with the hordes of media standing just close enough to get a really good shot of the suffering. Put the camera down and give the kid a sandwich.
Fast forward to the various delegations traveling to our southern border to see for themselves what sort of conditions are acceptable in detention centers. The photo of the father and daughter drowned while trying to cross the Rio Grande. These are families willing to risk all manner of danger, humiliation and degradation just to get a chance at a new life. The TV cameras that bear witness to the groups scrambling through their night vision reminding us of the advancing hordes, willing to risk imprisonment here rather than continue to live in fear in the world they left behind. The fear we heap on children who come to our shores as victims of a geo-political system that would like them to be terrorists to legitimize our treatment of them.
Children. Huddled masses, yearning to breathe (if not free). Let them.