Everybody tells me I need to check out Pandora. Well, not everybody. My parents, for instance, I’m sure associate Pandora solely with a perilous object from Greek mythology. They feel, in fact, that for them ever to purchase a computer would unwisely “open Pandora’s box” to all manner of expenses and aggravations they’d just as soon shuffle off this mortal coil without ever having had to experience. They’re quite content to get their entertainment and edification from reruns of the Lawrence Welk Show and the pages of their ever-thinning print magazines. (Which they get at killer subscription rates because my dad successfully has maintained for 35 years now that I’m still a college student living in their home—one who presumably is far too distracted by the profundity and wit of Reader’s Digest ever to have graduated.)
Anyway, Pandora, as I suppose you know, is an Internet site that Wikipedia succinctly describes as an “automated music recommendation service.” I don’t know exactly how it works, because I’ve literally never gone there. But the idea is, Pandora somehow suggests musical artists you might like, based on what you tell it about your tastes and who’s already on your iPod or PC or CD player. In that, it strikes me as being sort of like Match.com without all the lying and the abject terror upon being presented with what you thought you’d asked for.
People tell me I should use Pandora because I dig indie rock. I’ve become a fan in the past five to 10 years of bands like The Decemberists, The New Pornographers, Wye Oak, The Strokes, Wilco and Vampire Weekend, having discovered them by such old-school means as newspaper reviews, NPR radio segments and the recommendations of friends (who may have found these bands on Pandora for all I know). But I know there are many, many acts—quirky, talented, intriguing, but slightly off the mainstream map—that I’m missing. Pandora, friends tell me, could be my invaluable muse and arbiter.
I imagine it could be. But the thing is, as much as I like a lot of artists who weren’t recording or perhaps weren’t yet born when I first started listening to my transistor radio back in the 1960s, as determined as I am not to musically calcify, and as thrilled as I am when my Gen X friend Meghan likes some current band to which Eric the Geezer Hipster has introduced her, there only are so many hours in the day. And there’s so much “old” music I still love to hear, or that I’ve rediscovered, or that’s been intriguingly re-imagined, or that isn’t old at all but is being recorded by artists of my youth who still are going strong.
This morning was a perfect example of this. I was sitting in a lounge area outside the Starbucks on New Mexico Avenue NW, near American University, sipping iced coffee and reading the Washington Post after a run. The sound system started playing a succession of songs from Rave On Buddy Holly, a recently released tribute compilation. As I listened to Fiona Apple’s touchingly sweet and faithful rendition of "Everyday," then Florence and The Machine’s hard-edged version of "Not Fade Away," I was filled with renewed respect and nostalgia for the west Texas musical genius who died with Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper in an Iowa plane crash in February 1959, when I was about six months old. As I walked to my car I sang part of "True Love Ways" to myself. I own and like the new tribute CD and would have played it in the car, except that I lent it to Meghan last week in hopes of turning on someone born in the 1980s to the music of a forever-22-year-old rocker from the Eisenhower era.
Once in the car, I popped into the CD player The Zombies’ phenomenal 1968 LP Odessey [sic] & Oracle. The Zombies were one of those short-lived British bands of the mid-to-late 1960s that had a couple of huge singles, then rancorously disbanded over egos, contracts, bad weed, bad vibes, acting gigs in experimental Andy Warhol films, all-summer parties at Roman Polanski’s house, whatever. The Zombies, in fact, no longer were together when Odessey & Oracle came out. (Perhaps if they had been, one of the guys might’ve caught that spelling error, made by a member of their promotional team.) Still, the LP yielded the monster hit "Time of the Season," which would join "Tell Her No" as ever-after staples of classic rock radio.
Few people even my age know a single Zombies deep cut, but for some reason I’d bought Odessey & Oracle in the 1970s and quickly came to love it. It was simply a great British pop-rock disc of the era—well-written, -performed and -produced. Unlike many recordings of its time, the songs were neither treacly nor overblown, with the slight exception of one about carnage during World War I that the band apparently had fancied would be a big anti-war hit. (The problem there was that as far as the protest movement was concerned, Vietnam and Verdun shared little more than the letter “V.”)
Somewhere along the way, I shelved Odessey & Oracle in favor of other bands, other sounds. (The LP, in fact, may or may not have survived several moves only to be moldering in a cardboard box in the crawl space underneath our basement steps. I’ve frankly been afraid to look.) But then, rather weirdly and wonderfully, a few months ago I was driving through the North Carolina mountains, listening to a fiercely idiosyncratic radio station out of the town of Spindale, when I gradually came to identify a bouncy tune I was certain I recognized from somewhere. I listened closely to the unlikely storyline—a man’s joy that his girlfriend or wife is about to be released from prison. “Kiss and make up, and it will be so nice,” the happy singer swooned. (Had she been sent up the river for assaulting him with a pickax, then? Unclear. But the guy certainly isn’t judging, just pining.)
Suddenly I realized, “That’s from Odessey & Oracle! Something about … cell number … something.” The too-cool-for-commercial radio DJ soon confirmed in a matter-of-fact tone—as if who wouldn’t know that—that the track he’d just played was The Zombies’ "Care of Cell 44." Well, long story short, a few days later I ordered the CD from Amazon, and by the following weekend it was a mainstay of my automotive tuneage.
Obviously, my Subaru Legacy sedan holds only so many CDs in its door and center-panel spaces, But to keep any more music that than on hand in the car, perhaps stored in the trunk, strikes me as untidy, and perhaps too stressfully much of a good thing. So I frequently rotate CDs between home and vehicle. For whatever reason I tend not to listen to music while in the house, other than on the radio when I’m getting dressed or am in the shower. This means that my in-car music has to be personal best of the best—the stuff that most satisfies, energizes and/or moves me when I’m motoring.
(I’ll pause here to acknowledge that, yes, I realize there are portable devices one can plug into an automobile’s electrical system that can hold, like, a million songs and could keep one in tunes from here to China should anyone ever gets around to building that trans-Pacific bridge. To which my reply is this: I’m old, I pretty much drained my adaptability reservoir during that 8-track-to-cassette-to CD transition, and, well, furthermore, I'd really appreciate it if you'd just shut up.)
So, you may be interested to know which CDs are sitting in my car right now. (You may not, but it’s my blog and I’m going to tell you anyway.) In addition to the Zombies CD, and two by the aforementioned Strokes, there are one or more recordings by all the artists I mentioned in paragraph three, as well as by such blasts from the past as The Who, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Rod Stewart (early stuff) and The Band. There’s also 70-year-old Paul Simon’s outstanding new CD, So Beautiful or So What, illustrative of my earlier point that some icons of the 1960s still are recording great music. In fact, two of my favorite CDs of recent years—past and future car fare—are by the former Band drummer Levon Helm, who’s older than Simon and is a throat cancer survivor.
The point I’m trying to make, getting back to Pandora, is that musically, I already feel like I’m a very wealthy man. To use Pandora to seek additional bounty strikes me as needless, if not greedy. What my well-meaning friends see as simply a trade-name means to an entertaining end seems to me to have more in common with the mythological box. Opening it might prove overwhelming. For the foreseeable future at least, I’d just as soon keep it shut.
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Friday, July 8, 2011
Four Seasons of Lassitude
About three hours ago, just back from a run and poised to hunker down at the computer for some blogging, I spotted our cat, Tess, curled up in deep sleep on our bed.
Then, just a few minutes ago, I saw her in the exact same position and state of consciousness, only this time on the couch downstairs.
I was struck by the fact that at least she’d changed venue. In the meantime, I’d dicked around at the computer for fully one-eighth of the day, accomplishing precisely nothing.
An apt note, it seems to me, on which to mark the one-year anniversary of Lassitude Come Home, this aptly named showcase of my, um, “talents.”
Technically, this blog debuted on July 15, 2010, which means it won’t turn 1 until a week from today. But the facts are these: I haven’t posted in nearly three weeks ago, I’ve got time to write today (albeit three hours less of it at this point), “blog anniversary” is my only idea for today’s entry, and history tells me it’s now or perhaps weeks from now.
Actually, today’s procrastination was somewhat instructive, in that I spent most of it rereading all my preceding posts. There have been 45 of them, not including today’s. Divide that number by 12, and even a scantly developed right brain like mine can figure out I’ve posted less than once a week. This year, there’s been only one month in which I’ve posted as many as four times.
But the point isn’t quantity—it’s quality, right? That’s what I like to tell myself. At any rate, to best figure out what I want to say now about the 45 posts I have managed to write, it seemed instructive to revisit my very first post, which I’d inauspiciously given the unimaginative headline, “So It Begins.” (Why not something more provocative, like “Hell Yes, I’m Talkin’ to You!”)
That initial post, while brief, effectively laid out my mixed emotions and motivations. I’d written that I felt I needed a creative outlet but wasn’t sufficiently disciplined or creative to tackle long- or even short-form fiction. I’d expressed concern that, in a world in which every self-important idiot seems to have a blog, I merely was jumping on a fatuous bandwagon. I’d conceded that, while my main desire was to entertain the few friends with whom I’d shared the URL, my ego was big enough to want “a larger audience than one-on-one e-mail could afford.” Finally, I’d worried that my lassitude indeed would come home—that I’d be “too lazy to keep this thing going.”
So, first the good news, as I see it. Today’s post is proof that I’ve indeed kept at this. Having revisited my previous posts, I’m gratified and more than a little surprised to find that most of them, to my eyes, Don’t Suck. While this might not sound like much, it’s high praise within the self-critical edifice that is my psyche. I came into this venture aiming to be entertaining and/or interesting, and at very least not to bore. I think I’ve mostly succeeded at that. Not every time, but more often than not.
Now, for the bad news. In my first post I’d suggested brevity would be my friend. “Blog posts needn’t be long,” I’d written. And my posts wouldn’t be, I’d implied. The benefit to readers being that I’d shut up before anyone started begging me to please wrap it up. The benefit to me being that I’d approach posting less as work and more as play, which presumably would encourage me to get off my ass and write more often.
The numbers pretty well tell the story there. I posted most often—seven times—in the blog’s very first month. And all of those posts were relatively short. Like a good newspaper story (but tellingly unlike many of my efforts during my unheralded career as a print journalist), those early pieces said what they needed to say and then stopped. By contrast, I’ve posted only two times in two different months this year, and three times in three other months. Many if not most of my posts in 2011 have been 1,500 words or longer. There’s a direct correlation between length and frequency, as I expected last July there would be.
Does that mean I always need to write shorter, or that there’s never merit in writing at greater length? No. Hopefully I’m not kidding myself, but I genuinely thought, in rereading my posts, that some of the longer pieces were among my better efforts to date. (Others struck me as far too long.) Still, size does matter. And performance, I think, can improve with frequency. (The preceding messages brought to you by the SSSAAA (Sexually Suggestive Spam Advertisers Association of America.)
Finally, here’s the news that isn’t classifiable as good or bad, but that constitutes my third reaction to that initial post nearly a year ago. I‘d written then that I hoped to amuse, entertain, edify, or at very least not bore my friends with these writings. Several of you have e-mailed me, and/or posted comments on the blog itself, to let me know that a particular post or posts have connected with you in some positive way. I’ve been very grateful for that. Thanks for reading, and for making me feel good about what I’m doing.
But, that expressed, I’d frankly like to have a larger audience. (It’s not you, it’s me.) As far as that goes, I admit that I probably need to be less like Phil Hartman’s Prehistoric Caveman Lawyer character from the old Saturday Night Live skits, protesting that I “don’t understand your strange 21st-century ‘page views’ and ‘enhance-your-Web-traffic’ ways,” and should make myself learn how to market this blog in a way that increases its visibility while somehow keeping it at the periphery of the big, scary, potentially menacing grid, where mean people and loudmouths can and too often do join the fray. But, again, there’s a reason I call this thing Lassitude Come Home and not Welcome to My Brand. I’m no go-getter. And to be frank, I want cool, vetted readers, not just any old set of eyes. So, what I’m asking is, if you read me, please consider sharing me with friends and family members you think might like me (really like me! not to be too Sally Field about it).
Oh, please consider, too, targeting anyone you might know at The Onion or other fabulous Web or print entities that are looking to hire fresh (53-year-old!) talent to write satirical or personal essay-type material full-time, at a great salary, ideally at home in his pajamas, saving him having to commute fully clothed every weekday to his perfectly fine but unexciting job at a local nonprofit association. I’m just sayin’.
When I started this blog a year ago, my fondest hope was that doing so would push me to take various thoughts, reactions, riffs and rants that might otherwise comprise a few lines or paragraphs in an e-mail message to a friend, and expand them into readable essays. Pieces that would stretch and polish my writing skills and prompt me to take a more expansive look at some of the things going on around me—in my personal life, the country, even the world. Earlier today, as I paged through material that ran the gamut from religion and mortality to baseball and the funny papers, from terrorism and foreign policy to technophobia and masturbation, I felt a modicum of pride that, if nothing else, I got that goal off to a pretty good start.
One last thing: Have I mentioned—in passing, perhaps—that I’m a little lazy? So, if there’s a subject you’d like me to write about, please let me know. I’m not guaranteeing I will. In fact, it’s more likely I won’t, whether because I don’t feel qualified to do so, or because the topic doesn’t sufficiently interest me, or because it’s time-sensitive and I’m too slack to address it before it becomes old news, or whatever. The point is, though, if I use your idea rather than having to come up with my own, that saves me precious brain power. (Believe me, there’s little in there to spare.) And even if I don’t use your idea, you may be setting me up for a future post in which I explain why I axed it. Why, I may even mention you by name! How awesome would that be? (Don't answer that.)
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I really need to go. It occurs to me that Tess in some ways is a great role model.
Then, just a few minutes ago, I saw her in the exact same position and state of consciousness, only this time on the couch downstairs.
I was struck by the fact that at least she’d changed venue. In the meantime, I’d dicked around at the computer for fully one-eighth of the day, accomplishing precisely nothing.
An apt note, it seems to me, on which to mark the one-year anniversary of Lassitude Come Home, this aptly named showcase of my, um, “talents.”
Technically, this blog debuted on July 15, 2010, which means it won’t turn 1 until a week from today. But the facts are these: I haven’t posted in nearly three weeks ago, I’ve got time to write today (albeit three hours less of it at this point), “blog anniversary” is my only idea for today’s entry, and history tells me it’s now or perhaps weeks from now.
Actually, today’s procrastination was somewhat instructive, in that I spent most of it rereading all my preceding posts. There have been 45 of them, not including today’s. Divide that number by 12, and even a scantly developed right brain like mine can figure out I’ve posted less than once a week. This year, there’s been only one month in which I’ve posted as many as four times.
But the point isn’t quantity—it’s quality, right? That’s what I like to tell myself. At any rate, to best figure out what I want to say now about the 45 posts I have managed to write, it seemed instructive to revisit my very first post, which I’d inauspiciously given the unimaginative headline, “So It Begins.” (Why not something more provocative, like “Hell Yes, I’m Talkin’ to You!”)
That initial post, while brief, effectively laid out my mixed emotions and motivations. I’d written that I felt I needed a creative outlet but wasn’t sufficiently disciplined or creative to tackle long- or even short-form fiction. I’d expressed concern that, in a world in which every self-important idiot seems to have a blog, I merely was jumping on a fatuous bandwagon. I’d conceded that, while my main desire was to entertain the few friends with whom I’d shared the URL, my ego was big enough to want “a larger audience than one-on-one e-mail could afford.” Finally, I’d worried that my lassitude indeed would come home—that I’d be “too lazy to keep this thing going.”
So, first the good news, as I see it. Today’s post is proof that I’ve indeed kept at this. Having revisited my previous posts, I’m gratified and more than a little surprised to find that most of them, to my eyes, Don’t Suck. While this might not sound like much, it’s high praise within the self-critical edifice that is my psyche. I came into this venture aiming to be entertaining and/or interesting, and at very least not to bore. I think I’ve mostly succeeded at that. Not every time, but more often than not.
Now, for the bad news. In my first post I’d suggested brevity would be my friend. “Blog posts needn’t be long,” I’d written. And my posts wouldn’t be, I’d implied. The benefit to readers being that I’d shut up before anyone started begging me to please wrap it up. The benefit to me being that I’d approach posting less as work and more as play, which presumably would encourage me to get off my ass and write more often.
The numbers pretty well tell the story there. I posted most often—seven times—in the blog’s very first month. And all of those posts were relatively short. Like a good newspaper story (but tellingly unlike many of my efforts during my unheralded career as a print journalist), those early pieces said what they needed to say and then stopped. By contrast, I’ve posted only two times in two different months this year, and three times in three other months. Many if not most of my posts in 2011 have been 1,500 words or longer. There’s a direct correlation between length and frequency, as I expected last July there would be.
Does that mean I always need to write shorter, or that there’s never merit in writing at greater length? No. Hopefully I’m not kidding myself, but I genuinely thought, in rereading my posts, that some of the longer pieces were among my better efforts to date. (Others struck me as far too long.) Still, size does matter. And performance, I think, can improve with frequency. (The preceding messages brought to you by the SSSAAA (Sexually Suggestive Spam Advertisers Association of America.)
Finally, here’s the news that isn’t classifiable as good or bad, but that constitutes my third reaction to that initial post nearly a year ago. I‘d written then that I hoped to amuse, entertain, edify, or at very least not bore my friends with these writings. Several of you have e-mailed me, and/or posted comments on the blog itself, to let me know that a particular post or posts have connected with you in some positive way. I’ve been very grateful for that. Thanks for reading, and for making me feel good about what I’m doing.
But, that expressed, I’d frankly like to have a larger audience. (It’s not you, it’s me.) As far as that goes, I admit that I probably need to be less like Phil Hartman’s Prehistoric Caveman Lawyer character from the old Saturday Night Live skits, protesting that I “don’t understand your strange 21st-century ‘page views’ and ‘enhance-your-Web-traffic’ ways,” and should make myself learn how to market this blog in a way that increases its visibility while somehow keeping it at the periphery of the big, scary, potentially menacing grid, where mean people and loudmouths can and too often do join the fray. But, again, there’s a reason I call this thing Lassitude Come Home and not Welcome to My Brand. I’m no go-getter. And to be frank, I want cool, vetted readers, not just any old set of eyes. So, what I’m asking is, if you read me, please consider sharing me with friends and family members you think might like me (really like me! not to be too Sally Field about it).
Oh, please consider, too, targeting anyone you might know at The Onion or other fabulous Web or print entities that are looking to hire fresh (53-year-old!) talent to write satirical or personal essay-type material full-time, at a great salary, ideally at home in his pajamas, saving him having to commute fully clothed every weekday to his perfectly fine but unexciting job at a local nonprofit association. I’m just sayin’.
When I started this blog a year ago, my fondest hope was that doing so would push me to take various thoughts, reactions, riffs and rants that might otherwise comprise a few lines or paragraphs in an e-mail message to a friend, and expand them into readable essays. Pieces that would stretch and polish my writing skills and prompt me to take a more expansive look at some of the things going on around me—in my personal life, the country, even the world. Earlier today, as I paged through material that ran the gamut from religion and mortality to baseball and the funny papers, from terrorism and foreign policy to technophobia and masturbation, I felt a modicum of pride that, if nothing else, I got that goal off to a pretty good start.
One last thing: Have I mentioned—in passing, perhaps—that I’m a little lazy? So, if there’s a subject you’d like me to write about, please let me know. I’m not guaranteeing I will. In fact, it’s more likely I won’t, whether because I don’t feel qualified to do so, or because the topic doesn’t sufficiently interest me, or because it’s time-sensitive and I’m too slack to address it before it becomes old news, or whatever. The point is, though, if I use your idea rather than having to come up with my own, that saves me precious brain power. (Believe me, there’s little in there to spare.) And even if I don’t use your idea, you may be setting me up for a future post in which I explain why I axed it. Why, I may even mention you by name! How awesome would that be? (Don't answer that.)
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I really need to go. It occurs to me that Tess in some ways is a great role model.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
License to Thrill
Homosexuality once was known as “the love that dare not speak its name.” It took a long time, but eventually society lightened up. Based on what I saw and heard at the recent Pride Parade in DC, that kind of love now can be shouted and even dressed in slutty cowboy outfits with no fear of prudish backlash. And that’s all to the good, I say.
Sadly, however, what I have found in the past couple of days is that, for all the progress we’ve made in becoming a more tolerant and inclusive society, there remains at least one form of love that’s taboo—condemned and mocked, even though it harms no one and sexually speaking, is as chaste as the driven snow. It involves a consenting adult and an inanimate object, but no interaction thereof that could spark a Twitter scandal. It should not by any stretch be a big deal. But clearly it is.
The love to which I refer is that between a man and his driver’s license photo.
Before you, too, jump onto the bandwagon with the other haters—who heartbreakingly include my wife, one of my best friends, and a treasured office-mate —backstory is in order.
In Maryland, one’s driver’s license must be renewed every five years. On a late-spring morning in 2006, I dutifully drove up I-270 to the Montgomery County Motor Vehicle Administration (MVA) office in Gaithersburg, took the eye test and had my picture taken in front of a blue screen. But the photo on the license I was handed wasn’t me at all. It was some crabby, apparently toothless old man with washed-out hair who appeared to be on the verge of a rant against high taxes, permissive society and or/or those damn kids who kept straying onto his lawn.
I loathed that license. That it was the official representation to society of my identity depressed me for five very long years. Every time some functionary asked to see a photo ID, it was that frightening picture—taken on the cusp of my 48th birthday but making me look closer to the inverse of that number—that I was forced to produce from my wallet. Repeatedly, people who presumably had no reason to wish me ill or to pile on would look first at the license photo, then at me, hand the license back and send me on my way. Not that I wished to be detained and accused of misrepresentation, exactly, but how was it that I never got, “Whoa!” or “That’s supposed to be you?!” or “I’d sue the state for defamation of face, dude!”
I’m not saying I quite lost sleep over it, but it offended and nicked my sense of self. Yes, it’s true, I’m middle aged. And no, I’m not exactly a stranger to crankiness. Admittedly, in some ways—particularly aversion to social media and even mainstream technologies like Smart Phones and iPods—I’m hopelessly out of date. Wait, where was I going with this? Oh, appearance! Yes, I’m grumpy enough to be a very old man. But the point is, I don’t think of myself as looking grumpy. Or old! Any older than my actual, chronological age, anyway. In fact—I’ll admit it—I fancy that I look younger than the story my birth certificate tells.
I mean, I watch what I eat, and run or otherwise exercise regularly, and don’t have the gut that so many of my male contemporaries lug around with them like an 8-month fetus that never gets birthed. I’ve still got a good head of hair, even if its color isn’t, technically speaking, entirely natural. I’m not particularly wrinkled, I don’t think. My teeth aren’t and never have been straight, but I still have most of them, albeit with a lot of fillings.
For five years, though, there in my wallet was that maddening photo that suggested I seriously was kidding myself. There I’d be, feeling smug as couple of follicle-challenged walruses who I took to be my contemporaries huffed and puffed their way past me on the street, when all of a sudden the license photo would taunt, “Hey gramps! Need any Fixodent from CVS?”
The teeth thing had been my own fault. Back in 2006, I’d first decided not to smile for the photo, then maybe to smile after all. The shot had caught me somewhere in between, mouth slightly open, but not wide enough to show enamel. It was as if a sourpuss down to his dental remnants had reluctantly acceded to the request to say “Cheese” and settled on Limburger.
So. Several weeks ago I received in the mail a notice from the MVA notifying me that I could renew my license by mail. I’d need to get an eye doctor to sign off on my optical acuity, but then I could stick into the pre-addressed envelope that form, along with the renewal notice and a check for $30, and they’d send back my new license, good until 2016. No muss, no fuss, no MVA lines.
Perfect! Except for the fact that under this scenario, my photo would not be retaken. This is something Maryland allows for one renewal cycle only, but as a result there are many men and women driving around the Free State with license photos taken up to nearly a decade ago. Unsurprisingly, this isn’t a problem for a lot of people, who’d just as soon their official representation be a more youthful version of themselves.
As you might guess, however, my immediate reaction to the renewal-by-mail offer was, “Like hell I’ll keep that picture for another five years!” There’s a line from Woody Allen’s early-1960s standup act that I always think of as synonymous with the phrase “not gonna happen.” He’s bemoaning his spectacular lack of success with women even in that New Frontier age, with JFK in the Oval Office and everything seemingly possible. As Allen tells it, he’s trying to talk some stunner into bed, and she replies, “Not even if it would help the space program.” That was the line that popped into my head regarding license renewal by mail.
This past Friday morning, accordingly, I left the house in plenty of time to be at the MVA office when it opened at 8:30. I’d thought things out pretty thoroughly. I was not wearing my favorite glasses, a tortoise shell-like, thick-framed pair of bifocals, because I had an irrational fear that those graduated lenses might somehow screw up my eye test. But I really like the way I look in those glasses, which I imagine imbue my face with a certain retro, nerdy cool. So, I had them in my briefcase to wear for the picture.
I also took care to don a collared shirt, even though Fridays are casual days at my office, where I’d be headed afterward, and I could’ve worn a T-shirt. Having my face to worry about was quite enough, without adding the fear that my informality of dress would say I’d totally stopped giving a damn—like some grizzled old hobo who’d wandered over from the train tracks that abut the MVA office.
OK, one way that I kind of am an old man is that I have to pee constantly, and I’d made the rookie mistake of drinking a 16-ounce cup of coffee from 7-Eleven on the way up 270. At that time of day, everyone in Montgomery County is driving south on that highway, toward Washington, not north as I was. So, I arrived at 8:10. Two lines already had formed—a shorter one for the driver’s license people like me and a longer one for people registering vehicles and doing everything else. I’d have welcomed a bathroom break right then, though I wasn’t in critical need. What I immediately noticed, and why I say “rookie mistake,” was that none of the other 75 or so people standing in the two lines were holding beverages of any sort. Here I was, amongst a representative cross-section of my county—blue collar, white collar, old, young—and everyone but me had the good sense not to come to the MVA (a place synonymous with standing in line), bearing liquids that would heighten the possibility they’d have to flee the queue in order to void their bladder.
“Everything’s cool,” I assured myself. “The doors will open soon. The line will move fast, and as soon as you get a number you’ll have plenty of time to hit the bathroom before you’re called.” The doors did open promptly at 8:30, and the line inside moved pretty fast, although I wished the young Chinese guy in front of me didn’t need to translate for his sister every word of instruction. When I got to the counter, my information was processed quickly. I was given my number and told to proceed to the service area.
“Do I have time to go to the bathroom before I’m called?” I asked.
“You’d be taking a risk,” came the reply.
“Damn,” I thought.
But I wasn’t quite yet at the foot-jiggling, legs-tightly-crossed stage, so I sat down and waited. A good thing, too, as my number was called less than a minute later.
My DMV person was named Shashi and had what sounded like an Indian accent. After taking my paperwork she asked me to read the fourth line on the viewer in front of me. To my slight surprise, it wasn’t a slam-dunk, even with my “good” glasses on. I hesitated on a couple of the letters, and had to kind of close one eye a couple of times. But I got it done. I was really glad I hadn’t tried it with the bifocals.
Speaking of, the photo was next. I asked Shashi if I could switch glasses. She looked a little perplexed, as if to say, “Whatever for?” or maybe, “Are you really that vain?” But as they say in courts of law, she allowed it. I reached into my briefcase and made the switch.
She instructed me to slide my chair in front of the blue screen and look into the camera. Suddenly a discomfiting thought came into my head. Was I even allowed to smile? That’s not permitted for passport photos anymore. Maybe because it makes potential terrorists look too amiable and might facilitate their slipping through security? Anyway, for all I knew, the state of Maryland now was enforcing such humorlessness. Come to think of it, my friend Meghan recently had shown me her Virginia license, on which she wears the cold, emotionless expression of a women’s prison lifer. Had that been intentional, inadvertent or instructed?
“Smiling? Not smiling?” I tentatively asked. By now, Shashi was probably thinking, “Great, it’s only 8:40 and already I’ve got the Narcissist with a Thousand Questions. And fine, you don’t look fat in those pants. Now, will you please shut up and face the camera?”
To my relief, she just sort of shrugged and said, “Smiling’s always good.” So, I did. The camera flashed. A few seconds later, my face popped up on the computer screen in front of me.
“OK?” she asked.
It was so much better than OK. Again, there’s context to consider here, as my old picture had been so thoroughly dreadful. But, this guy I was looking at? Sure, he was still a little dorky looking—this was the MVA, after all, not PhotoShop. But, the hair was good. The glasses suited. The collar looked right. Most important, my teeth were visible and my smile warm. You know what? Had I been more than just a spectator to the Pride Parade, I might want to date this guy.
Shashi asked me to sit in the waiting area while the license was being printed, and five minutes later I had it in my hand. The lamination process had in no way sullied the photo. I was thrilled. How thrilled? When I was experiencing sweet relief at an MVA urinal a couple of minutes later and the photo was in my wallet, I felt a tinge of separation anxiety. As soon as I got in the car I took out my renewed license to stare at some more before hitting the road.
When I got to the office, my best efforts to be nonchalant proved not very convincing. I said something to Meghan like, “Not bad, huh?” in what I hoped was a neutral tone, but my beaming smile betrayed me. She agreed that it was a good photo, although she’d never seen its predecessor and clearly thought it odd that I was grinning like a madman. Then a light came on in her eyes, and her amused smile said, even if her lips did not, “Oh my God! You’re in love with yourself, aren’t you?!” I fled her office before she got the chance to say it out loud.
A short time later, I caught my friend Maryann as she walked past my office door. Again, I tried to be cool, but she could see I was pretty enthralled with myself. She’d picked up on the fact that the glasses I was wearing—the ones I’d had on for the eye test—were not the ones in the photo. Sheepishly I conceded that I thought I would look better for the picture in my bifocals.
“That’s not too vain,” she remarked with a smirk before departing.
When I arrived home that evening and excitedly showed Lynn the photo—which she knew to be about a million times better than the old one—she was happy for me. But more in the way that she’s happy for me when the Pittsburgh Pirates win a baseball game, or when I proudly tell her I just got back from a 90-minute run. The voice says “good,” but the tone and facial expression say, “And this is a big deal … why?” Because her supportiveness does not equate to finding any less stupid and unnecessary things like obsessing over baseball results, or running when one's life doesn't depend on it, or caring any more than the tiniest bit how one’s driver’s license photo turned out.
Lynn put a fine point on it a little later in the evening, when she caught me making googly eyes at my new ID and commented, “I guess I just don’t understand what difference it makes. It’s only a driver’s license photo.”
“Yeah, but isn’t it better to have a good one than a bad one, especially since you’re saddled with it for five years?” I parried. I found my own logic unassailable and wondered what she could say to that.
“Sure,” she replied. “But … .” That was all she said. But we’ve been married for almost 20 years, and I knew the rest of that unspoken sentence, which would feature one of our favorite two-word action phrases—one we often use for exaggerated comic effect.
This was what Lynn was thinking: "Sure it’s better to have a decent driver’s license photo than a crappy one. But that’s no reason to furiously masturbate over it.”
See, this is exactly what I’m talking about. I wrote at the outset that my love for my driver’s license photo is chaste, and it is. I have not and will not ever use it as a prop for self-pleasure, whether tender or roughly vigorous. Frankly, as much as this particular photo thrills me, I’m just not that attracted to myself. Not in that way.
But I think it’s sad that my relationship is being mocked—particularly by those close to me—in an age in which so many other loves not only dare speak their name, but can do so proudly and without fear of condemnation.
Is my love really so wrong? Will I ever be able to make my (other) loved ones see? Will they ever be able to witness a tender moment between my license and me without rolling their eyes?
Not even, I’ve resignedly concluded, were it to help the space program.
Sadly, however, what I have found in the past couple of days is that, for all the progress we’ve made in becoming a more tolerant and inclusive society, there remains at least one form of love that’s taboo—condemned and mocked, even though it harms no one and sexually speaking, is as chaste as the driven snow. It involves a consenting adult and an inanimate object, but no interaction thereof that could spark a Twitter scandal. It should not by any stretch be a big deal. But clearly it is.
The love to which I refer is that between a man and his driver’s license photo.
Before you, too, jump onto the bandwagon with the other haters—who heartbreakingly include my wife, one of my best friends, and a treasured office-mate —backstory is in order.
In Maryland, one’s driver’s license must be renewed every five years. On a late-spring morning in 2006, I dutifully drove up I-270 to the Montgomery County Motor Vehicle Administration (MVA) office in Gaithersburg, took the eye test and had my picture taken in front of a blue screen. But the photo on the license I was handed wasn’t me at all. It was some crabby, apparently toothless old man with washed-out hair who appeared to be on the verge of a rant against high taxes, permissive society and or/or those damn kids who kept straying onto his lawn.
I loathed that license. That it was the official representation to society of my identity depressed me for five very long years. Every time some functionary asked to see a photo ID, it was that frightening picture—taken on the cusp of my 48th birthday but making me look closer to the inverse of that number—that I was forced to produce from my wallet. Repeatedly, people who presumably had no reason to wish me ill or to pile on would look first at the license photo, then at me, hand the license back and send me on my way. Not that I wished to be detained and accused of misrepresentation, exactly, but how was it that I never got, “Whoa!” or “That’s supposed to be you?!” or “I’d sue the state for defamation of face, dude!”
I’m not saying I quite lost sleep over it, but it offended and nicked my sense of self. Yes, it’s true, I’m middle aged. And no, I’m not exactly a stranger to crankiness. Admittedly, in some ways—particularly aversion to social media and even mainstream technologies like Smart Phones and iPods—I’m hopelessly out of date. Wait, where was I going with this? Oh, appearance! Yes, I’m grumpy enough to be a very old man. But the point is, I don’t think of myself as looking grumpy. Or old! Any older than my actual, chronological age, anyway. In fact—I’ll admit it—I fancy that I look younger than the story my birth certificate tells.
I mean, I watch what I eat, and run or otherwise exercise regularly, and don’t have the gut that so many of my male contemporaries lug around with them like an 8-month fetus that never gets birthed. I’ve still got a good head of hair, even if its color isn’t, technically speaking, entirely natural. I’m not particularly wrinkled, I don’t think. My teeth aren’t and never have been straight, but I still have most of them, albeit with a lot of fillings.
For five years, though, there in my wallet was that maddening photo that suggested I seriously was kidding myself. There I’d be, feeling smug as couple of follicle-challenged walruses who I took to be my contemporaries huffed and puffed their way past me on the street, when all of a sudden the license photo would taunt, “Hey gramps! Need any Fixodent from CVS?”
The teeth thing had been my own fault. Back in 2006, I’d first decided not to smile for the photo, then maybe to smile after all. The shot had caught me somewhere in between, mouth slightly open, but not wide enough to show enamel. It was as if a sourpuss down to his dental remnants had reluctantly acceded to the request to say “Cheese” and settled on Limburger.
So. Several weeks ago I received in the mail a notice from the MVA notifying me that I could renew my license by mail. I’d need to get an eye doctor to sign off on my optical acuity, but then I could stick into the pre-addressed envelope that form, along with the renewal notice and a check for $30, and they’d send back my new license, good until 2016. No muss, no fuss, no MVA lines.
Perfect! Except for the fact that under this scenario, my photo would not be retaken. This is something Maryland allows for one renewal cycle only, but as a result there are many men and women driving around the Free State with license photos taken up to nearly a decade ago. Unsurprisingly, this isn’t a problem for a lot of people, who’d just as soon their official representation be a more youthful version of themselves.
As you might guess, however, my immediate reaction to the renewal-by-mail offer was, “Like hell I’ll keep that picture for another five years!” There’s a line from Woody Allen’s early-1960s standup act that I always think of as synonymous with the phrase “not gonna happen.” He’s bemoaning his spectacular lack of success with women even in that New Frontier age, with JFK in the Oval Office and everything seemingly possible. As Allen tells it, he’s trying to talk some stunner into bed, and she replies, “Not even if it would help the space program.” That was the line that popped into my head regarding license renewal by mail.
This past Friday morning, accordingly, I left the house in plenty of time to be at the MVA office when it opened at 8:30. I’d thought things out pretty thoroughly. I was not wearing my favorite glasses, a tortoise shell-like, thick-framed pair of bifocals, because I had an irrational fear that those graduated lenses might somehow screw up my eye test. But I really like the way I look in those glasses, which I imagine imbue my face with a certain retro, nerdy cool. So, I had them in my briefcase to wear for the picture.
I also took care to don a collared shirt, even though Fridays are casual days at my office, where I’d be headed afterward, and I could’ve worn a T-shirt. Having my face to worry about was quite enough, without adding the fear that my informality of dress would say I’d totally stopped giving a damn—like some grizzled old hobo who’d wandered over from the train tracks that abut the MVA office.
OK, one way that I kind of am an old man is that I have to pee constantly, and I’d made the rookie mistake of drinking a 16-ounce cup of coffee from 7-Eleven on the way up 270. At that time of day, everyone in Montgomery County is driving south on that highway, toward Washington, not north as I was. So, I arrived at 8:10. Two lines already had formed—a shorter one for the driver’s license people like me and a longer one for people registering vehicles and doing everything else. I’d have welcomed a bathroom break right then, though I wasn’t in critical need. What I immediately noticed, and why I say “rookie mistake,” was that none of the other 75 or so people standing in the two lines were holding beverages of any sort. Here I was, amongst a representative cross-section of my county—blue collar, white collar, old, young—and everyone but me had the good sense not to come to the MVA (a place synonymous with standing in line), bearing liquids that would heighten the possibility they’d have to flee the queue in order to void their bladder.
“Everything’s cool,” I assured myself. “The doors will open soon. The line will move fast, and as soon as you get a number you’ll have plenty of time to hit the bathroom before you’re called.” The doors did open promptly at 8:30, and the line inside moved pretty fast, although I wished the young Chinese guy in front of me didn’t need to translate for his sister every word of instruction. When I got to the counter, my information was processed quickly. I was given my number and told to proceed to the service area.
“Do I have time to go to the bathroom before I’m called?” I asked.
“You’d be taking a risk,” came the reply.
“Damn,” I thought.
But I wasn’t quite yet at the foot-jiggling, legs-tightly-crossed stage, so I sat down and waited. A good thing, too, as my number was called less than a minute later.
My DMV person was named Shashi and had what sounded like an Indian accent. After taking my paperwork she asked me to read the fourth line on the viewer in front of me. To my slight surprise, it wasn’t a slam-dunk, even with my “good” glasses on. I hesitated on a couple of the letters, and had to kind of close one eye a couple of times. But I got it done. I was really glad I hadn’t tried it with the bifocals.
Speaking of, the photo was next. I asked Shashi if I could switch glasses. She looked a little perplexed, as if to say, “Whatever for?” or maybe, “Are you really that vain?” But as they say in courts of law, she allowed it. I reached into my briefcase and made the switch.
She instructed me to slide my chair in front of the blue screen and look into the camera. Suddenly a discomfiting thought came into my head. Was I even allowed to smile? That’s not permitted for passport photos anymore. Maybe because it makes potential terrorists look too amiable and might facilitate their slipping through security? Anyway, for all I knew, the state of Maryland now was enforcing such humorlessness. Come to think of it, my friend Meghan recently had shown me her Virginia license, on which she wears the cold, emotionless expression of a women’s prison lifer. Had that been intentional, inadvertent or instructed?
“Smiling? Not smiling?” I tentatively asked. By now, Shashi was probably thinking, “Great, it’s only 8:40 and already I’ve got the Narcissist with a Thousand Questions. And fine, you don’t look fat in those pants. Now, will you please shut up and face the camera?”
To my relief, she just sort of shrugged and said, “Smiling’s always good.” So, I did. The camera flashed. A few seconds later, my face popped up on the computer screen in front of me.
“OK?” she asked.
It was so much better than OK. Again, there’s context to consider here, as my old picture had been so thoroughly dreadful. But, this guy I was looking at? Sure, he was still a little dorky looking—this was the MVA, after all, not PhotoShop. But, the hair was good. The glasses suited. The collar looked right. Most important, my teeth were visible and my smile warm. You know what? Had I been more than just a spectator to the Pride Parade, I might want to date this guy.
Shashi asked me to sit in the waiting area while the license was being printed, and five minutes later I had it in my hand. The lamination process had in no way sullied the photo. I was thrilled. How thrilled? When I was experiencing sweet relief at an MVA urinal a couple of minutes later and the photo was in my wallet, I felt a tinge of separation anxiety. As soon as I got in the car I took out my renewed license to stare at some more before hitting the road.
When I got to the office, my best efforts to be nonchalant proved not very convincing. I said something to Meghan like, “Not bad, huh?” in what I hoped was a neutral tone, but my beaming smile betrayed me. She agreed that it was a good photo, although she’d never seen its predecessor and clearly thought it odd that I was grinning like a madman. Then a light came on in her eyes, and her amused smile said, even if her lips did not, “Oh my God! You’re in love with yourself, aren’t you?!” I fled her office before she got the chance to say it out loud.
A short time later, I caught my friend Maryann as she walked past my office door. Again, I tried to be cool, but she could see I was pretty enthralled with myself. She’d picked up on the fact that the glasses I was wearing—the ones I’d had on for the eye test—were not the ones in the photo. Sheepishly I conceded that I thought I would look better for the picture in my bifocals.
“That’s not too vain,” she remarked with a smirk before departing.
When I arrived home that evening and excitedly showed Lynn the photo—which she knew to be about a million times better than the old one—she was happy for me. But more in the way that she’s happy for me when the Pittsburgh Pirates win a baseball game, or when I proudly tell her I just got back from a 90-minute run. The voice says “good,” but the tone and facial expression say, “And this is a big deal … why?” Because her supportiveness does not equate to finding any less stupid and unnecessary things like obsessing over baseball results, or running when one's life doesn't depend on it, or caring any more than the tiniest bit how one’s driver’s license photo turned out.
Lynn put a fine point on it a little later in the evening, when she caught me making googly eyes at my new ID and commented, “I guess I just don’t understand what difference it makes. It’s only a driver’s license photo.”
“Yeah, but isn’t it better to have a good one than a bad one, especially since you’re saddled with it for five years?” I parried. I found my own logic unassailable and wondered what she could say to that.
“Sure,” she replied. “But … .” That was all she said. But we’ve been married for almost 20 years, and I knew the rest of that unspoken sentence, which would feature one of our favorite two-word action phrases—one we often use for exaggerated comic effect.
This was what Lynn was thinking: "Sure it’s better to have a decent driver’s license photo than a crappy one. But that’s no reason to furiously masturbate over it.”
See, this is exactly what I’m talking about. I wrote at the outset that my love for my driver’s license photo is chaste, and it is. I have not and will not ever use it as a prop for self-pleasure, whether tender or roughly vigorous. Frankly, as much as this particular photo thrills me, I’m just not that attracted to myself. Not in that way.
But I think it’s sad that my relationship is being mocked—particularly by those close to me—in an age in which so many other loves not only dare speak their name, but can do so proudly and without fear of condemnation.
Is my love really so wrong? Will I ever be able to make my (other) loved ones see? Will they ever be able to witness a tender moment between my license and me without rolling their eyes?
Not even, I’ve resignedly concluded, were it to help the space program.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Dr Death Takes a Permanent Holiday
I suspect Jack Kevorkian might’ve been a more effective advocate for physician-assisted suicide had he not himself kind of looked and sounded like Death.
He had a timeless cragginess, as if he’d never been young. Had he chosen to wear a hooded black robe and carry a scythe, he could’ve taken home best costume at any Halloween party. When I heard last week that he’d died at 83, it seemed impossible he'd only been my dad's age.
When you saw and heard Kevorkian in interviews, even if you agreed with his message—as I did—you had to concede that, like the caricature of the Grim Reaper with his bony finger always pointed toward the grave, Kevorkian typically came across as humorless and grim and terribly one-note. It’s one thing to be known as “Dr Death,” the earnest crusader for humane euthanasia, but quite another to suggest by your appearance and manner that you’re on some frenzied recruiting tour for Big Sleep University.
The truth is, there always was something a little unnerving about Jack Kevorkian. Although he billed himself as an advocate for the terminally ill—people who suffered horribly from conditions such as MS, malignant brain tumors and Lou Gehrig’s disease and needed his help to end their misery—investigative reporters from the Detroit Free Press in Kevorkian’s home state of Michigan found that more the half of the 100-plus people who’d committed suicide with Kevorkian’s assistance hadn’t actually been considered terminally ill, and that many of those individuals might have benefited from medical and mental-health options that Kevorkian had been loath to explore in his zeal to render more permanent assistance.
Kevorkian disputed those findings, of course. And at any rate, he lived by (and went to jail for) the principle that the customer’s always right—at least when the customer is suffering from illness and sees death as a blessing. Still, fairly or not, there always was the suspicion that Kevorkian whistled while he worked. And that struck people as more than a little bit creepy.
Maybe that’s why, for all his notoriety, he never came close to provoking the groundswell of fury needed to further his goals. He sought to make it legal for a doctor (which he no longer was after Michigan revoked his medical license in 1991) to actively help a patient commit suicide. But that remains to this day illegal in every US state, and in only three—Oregon, Washington and Montana—is any form of physician-assisted suicide permitted. In Michigan, in fact, Kevorkian’s efforts succeeded only in getting the legal haziness he’d exploited at first hardened into an explicit ban on such assistance.
Whatever else he might have been, Jack Kevorkian, it must be said, was a manifestly strange dude. Never mind Gomez and Morticia—he seemed the real-life embodiment of Addams Family values. Death, in a real sense, was Kevorkian’s life. He never married, and devoted his lifelong bachelorhood to all manner of death-related pursuits. He invented suicide devices he fancifully dubbed the Thanatron (Thanatos being the Greek god of non-violent death) and the Mercitron. A jazz musician and composer, he dryly named his CD A Very Still Life and his band (for which he played flute and organ) the Morpheus Quintet. Kevorkian was a painter who favored oil when he wasn’t using his own blood, which he sometimes did. One of his images, I read this past week, was of a child eating the flesh off a decomposing corpse.
After Kevorkian died, I remembered a segment Michael Moore had done with him for his 1990s Fox show TV Nation. I recalled that the gag involved Kevorkian playing against type, and that in one scene the gaunt, disaffected ex-doctor and the portly, dyspeptic director were shown giddily flying kites on a bright, sunshiny day. I found the clip on YouTube the other day, and it’s hilarious. Clocking in at about six minutes and called “A Day with Dr Death,” it purports to show what Kevorkian does on his “day off”—you know, when he’s not administering lethal drugs to people. Kevorkian and Moore were filmed not just flying kites, but also swinging on swings, tooling around town in a vintage convertible, enjoying a picnic, and discussing such inanities as the hokey pokey and the Michigan state bird and tree. At one point Moore confides that his parents had asked him not to tell Kevorkian their ages, lest that should prompt him to pay them a visit. Kevorkian laughs good-naturedly at his tubby pal’s ribbing.
Maybe if TV Nation had been more of a hit, and the American public and our lawmakers had noted Kevorkian’s ability to poke fun at his own image, I sat there thinking for a brief second, his assisted-suicide campaign might have yielded better results. But then I dwelled on another image that had been played for laughs on TV Nation: Moore posing with an apple in his mouth for a painting to which Kevorkian was applying the finishing brushstrokes. It depicted a man holding in his arms his own bloody, severed head. Which had an apple in its mouth. Funny, yes—unless you know such a painting was right up the artist’s real-life alley.
Anyway, for all his morbid eccentricities—and for, OK, maybe having been a tad overzealous at times with the old Thanatron—I do think Jack Kevorkian’s stance on physician-assisted suicide was the correct one, and I’m sure all the people he helped exit this world felt content that his was the last face they saw. All in all, I admired the man, and I hope a combination of renewed advocacy and continuing medical advances one day will bring his vision of physician-assisted suicide to fruition. It may be, however, that the next public face of the issue will need to look a bit younger, kinder and less personally invested.
I read on Biography.com the other day that Kevorkian, the son of Armenian immigrants, rejected at an early age the existence of God because much of his extended family had been slaughtered by the Turks. Still, I like to think that if there is an afterlife, Jack Kevorkian made it to the good place, and that he and Charles Addams are sharing afternoon tea together. Sipping from toxically smoking cups, with Lurch doing the pouring.
He had a timeless cragginess, as if he’d never been young. Had he chosen to wear a hooded black robe and carry a scythe, he could’ve taken home best costume at any Halloween party. When I heard last week that he’d died at 83, it seemed impossible he'd only been my dad's age.
When you saw and heard Kevorkian in interviews, even if you agreed with his message—as I did—you had to concede that, like the caricature of the Grim Reaper with his bony finger always pointed toward the grave, Kevorkian typically came across as humorless and grim and terribly one-note. It’s one thing to be known as “Dr Death,” the earnest crusader for humane euthanasia, but quite another to suggest by your appearance and manner that you’re on some frenzied recruiting tour for Big Sleep University.
The truth is, there always was something a little unnerving about Jack Kevorkian. Although he billed himself as an advocate for the terminally ill—people who suffered horribly from conditions such as MS, malignant brain tumors and Lou Gehrig’s disease and needed his help to end their misery—investigative reporters from the Detroit Free Press in Kevorkian’s home state of Michigan found that more the half of the 100-plus people who’d committed suicide with Kevorkian’s assistance hadn’t actually been considered terminally ill, and that many of those individuals might have benefited from medical and mental-health options that Kevorkian had been loath to explore in his zeal to render more permanent assistance.
Kevorkian disputed those findings, of course. And at any rate, he lived by (and went to jail for) the principle that the customer’s always right—at least when the customer is suffering from illness and sees death as a blessing. Still, fairly or not, there always was the suspicion that Kevorkian whistled while he worked. And that struck people as more than a little bit creepy.
Maybe that’s why, for all his notoriety, he never came close to provoking the groundswell of fury needed to further his goals. He sought to make it legal for a doctor (which he no longer was after Michigan revoked his medical license in 1991) to actively help a patient commit suicide. But that remains to this day illegal in every US state, and in only three—Oregon, Washington and Montana—is any form of physician-assisted suicide permitted. In Michigan, in fact, Kevorkian’s efforts succeeded only in getting the legal haziness he’d exploited at first hardened into an explicit ban on such assistance.
Whatever else he might have been, Jack Kevorkian, it must be said, was a manifestly strange dude. Never mind Gomez and Morticia—he seemed the real-life embodiment of Addams Family values. Death, in a real sense, was Kevorkian’s life. He never married, and devoted his lifelong bachelorhood to all manner of death-related pursuits. He invented suicide devices he fancifully dubbed the Thanatron (Thanatos being the Greek god of non-violent death) and the Mercitron. A jazz musician and composer, he dryly named his CD A Very Still Life and his band (for which he played flute and organ) the Morpheus Quintet. Kevorkian was a painter who favored oil when he wasn’t using his own blood, which he sometimes did. One of his images, I read this past week, was of a child eating the flesh off a decomposing corpse.
After Kevorkian died, I remembered a segment Michael Moore had done with him for his 1990s Fox show TV Nation. I recalled that the gag involved Kevorkian playing against type, and that in one scene the gaunt, disaffected ex-doctor and the portly, dyspeptic director were shown giddily flying kites on a bright, sunshiny day. I found the clip on YouTube the other day, and it’s hilarious. Clocking in at about six minutes and called “A Day with Dr Death,” it purports to show what Kevorkian does on his “day off”—you know, when he’s not administering lethal drugs to people. Kevorkian and Moore were filmed not just flying kites, but also swinging on swings, tooling around town in a vintage convertible, enjoying a picnic, and discussing such inanities as the hokey pokey and the Michigan state bird and tree. At one point Moore confides that his parents had asked him not to tell Kevorkian their ages, lest that should prompt him to pay them a visit. Kevorkian laughs good-naturedly at his tubby pal’s ribbing.
Maybe if TV Nation had been more of a hit, and the American public and our lawmakers had noted Kevorkian’s ability to poke fun at his own image, I sat there thinking for a brief second, his assisted-suicide campaign might have yielded better results. But then I dwelled on another image that had been played for laughs on TV Nation: Moore posing with an apple in his mouth for a painting to which Kevorkian was applying the finishing brushstrokes. It depicted a man holding in his arms his own bloody, severed head. Which had an apple in its mouth. Funny, yes—unless you know such a painting was right up the artist’s real-life alley.
Anyway, for all his morbid eccentricities—and for, OK, maybe having been a tad overzealous at times with the old Thanatron—I do think Jack Kevorkian’s stance on physician-assisted suicide was the correct one, and I’m sure all the people he helped exit this world felt content that his was the last face they saw. All in all, I admired the man, and I hope a combination of renewed advocacy and continuing medical advances one day will bring his vision of physician-assisted suicide to fruition. It may be, however, that the next public face of the issue will need to look a bit younger, kinder and less personally invested.
I read on Biography.com the other day that Kevorkian, the son of Armenian immigrants, rejected at an early age the existence of God because much of his extended family had been slaughtered by the Turks. Still, I like to think that if there is an afterlife, Jack Kevorkian made it to the good place, and that he and Charles Addams are sharing afternoon tea together. Sipping from toxically smoking cups, with Lurch doing the pouring.
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