Coffee Cups

Bill Napoli.

A frat-boy adaptation of T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," by Lauren Frey.

I am in awe.

First-born and her friend are playacting. First-born is the mother of an elementary-school child. Friend is that child's teacher. Scene: the classroom, just after school ends one day.)

First-born: The reason I'm here is that we're taking [child's name] with us on a trip to Washington next week, so she won't be in class.

Friend: I'm sorry. You can't do that.

FB: Well, how would it be if you gave her her assignments for the week in advance, and she did them while we were on the trip?

F: No, I'm sorry, she can't be gone that long.

FB: How about if I pay you five thousand dollars?

F: No.

FB: How about a million?

F: OK.

FB: I'll just write you a check ...

F: Can you make it cash?

FB: OK. Just let me run to the bank.

* * *

I don't even want to know what they've been watching or reading to come up with dialogue like that. We chatted with F's mom later that evening, and we agreed that we couldn't decide what was worse -- that our child so readily offered a bribe or that her child so readily accepted.

So the veep shoots some guy and waits almost a full day to report it.

Isn't that what his crowd are always getting on Teddy Kennedy about?

Just sayin'.

Also? Al's been bird huntin' a time or three. You maintain a safe field of fire in front of you, which is an arc of well under 180 degrees, so that you don't shoot your fellow hunters, who, if following routine safety procedures, will be walking in a row alongside you. (And you keep your muzzle up at least 30 to 45 degrees, not only because that's where the birds are but also because you don't want to shoot your own hunting dog.)

If, in trying to shoot, you pivot outside that safe field of fire, you don't shoot. Period. Not even if Bambi's 12-point daddy suddenly materializes a foot away. (Of course, shooting a buck with birdshot would just piss him off.)

The veep was criminally negligent, and if it had been Bill Clinton, he'd be in jail.

Firstborn, currently suffering from flu and (possibly) strep throat: "I'm burning up and I'm really cold and my shoulder hurts and I feel like there's blood coming from my teeth."

I neither need nor intended for this blog to be political, but fuck me dead, have you looked at this country lately?

• Torture: What the fuck? It doesn't work. It's against both U.S. and international law. It turns people against us who otherwise might be for us. It makes a mockery of the values we profess. It puts our military in even more danger than it would be in otherwise. It corrupts those who practice it, sometimes permanently. So does someone want to explain to me, in little bitty words, why this is such a good idea?
  
• Iraq: Can you say "hell on a sled"? A majority of Americans don't want us there. A majority of Iraqis don't want us there. We're manifestly NOT putting down the uprising. It's one big looting spree for Halliburton and their ilk. It's bankrupting the country -- their and ours. And, oh, yeah, it's KILLING TENS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE. Last night at the Grammys after singing, Bruce Springsteen said, simply, "Bring 'em home." Today. Now.
  
• Corruption: Let's see: The vice president apparently ordered his top aide to leak the identity of an undercover CIA operative to disrupt her anti-proliferation efforts ... because those efforts were finding that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, even though the claim that there were was the big reason we invaded. The administration's chief procurement officer pleads guilty to felonies. A member of the House Armed Services Committee cops to bribery charges. The Senate Majority Leader dabbles in insider trading. The House Majority Leader is under indictment (but still gets a cushy seat on the Appropriations Committee, where he can steer tax money toward his district or those of supporters, where he can raise a ton o' money for his tapped-out legal-defense fund and where -- oh, by the way -- he can dangle the power of the purse over the same Justice Department that happens to be investigating him). And, geez, there's so much more but this bullet item is too big already ...
  
• High crimes and misdemeanors: The president conspired with the British Prime Minister to fabricate an excuse to invade Iraq. He illegally and unconstitutionally took money appropriated for rebuilding Afghanistan and spent it to invade Iraq. He illegally and unconstitutionally ordered a seedy warrantless domestic wiretapping program so offensive that even three Republicans with the power to do something about it -- House Intelligence chair Heather Wilson, House Judiciary chair James Sensenbrenner and House Majority Leader John Boehnert -- have called for investigations. And yet this man remains unimpeached. The fuck?
  
• Economy: Deficits are still shot to shit, we just "cut" the deficit by cutting spending $40 billion and giving the rich a $50 billion tax cut (for the math-impaired, that means we made the deficit $10 billion worse), we're not even creating enough new jobs to keep up with work force growth, let alone bring unemployment down, wages are stagnant for all but the very wealthy and the housing bubble is popping as we speak.
  
• Homeland security: While we waste money in Iraq, we are no safer against dirty bombs or suitcase nukes in our ports today than we were five years ago, and Hurricane Katrina suggests that if something like a bird-flu epidemic does happen, we are so screwed ... which might be all this administration needs to declare martial law.
  
• Citizenship: People, did we learn nothing from the Milhous minions? No one is above the law. Not Nixon, not George Dubya Suckass, not anyone. And I'm sorry, but the terrorist attacks of 9/11, horrible as they were, do NOT excuse lowering our standard of behavior to "just slightly higher than, if not indistinguishable from, those of the terrorists," and to suggest otherwise betrays a fundamental (pun not entirely unintended) contempt for American values.
  

OK, I just had to get all that off my chest. Thanks.

Clue No. 46 that life is about to improve:

You find that your wife has bought both "The Good Girl's Guide to Bad-Girl Sex" and "Sex Tips for Straight Women from a Gay Man" and you know she cannot possibly have been having an affair.

In the 1998 movie "The Wedding Singer," the title character, Robbie, has been dumped at the altar. The best friend of his eventual love interest, a cheerfully slutty girl named Holly, develops an interest in him, and after a night out, right before it hits her that Robbie really loves her friend, Holly softly tells Robbie as her brings her home:

Look, Robbie, I know you are painfully shy, and I know you've been hurt. So I'm going to make this very easy. If you come upstairs with me, you're going to get laid.

You have no idea how often I have longed to hear that -- not that I'm going to get laid, but the "I'm going to make this very easy" part.

Because a responsible life isn't easy, and believe it or not, that's the kind I live. I do a good job, pay my bills, am kind and attentive to my kids, love, cherish and remain faithful to my wife, give to charity, volunteer my time.

And it's hard. I pray, I use what passes for my logic, common sense and experience, but in almost every one of these spheres, I regularly run into situations where I don't know what the best thing to do is, or sometimes even the right thing. And that's especially true in my marriage, where no sin is too picayune too trigger a fight, no issue too insignificant to pout over, no mistake so far in the past that it can't be used to beat me over the head (again, sometimes savagely) in the present.

I don't want a different life. I just want the life I have to be a little easier to negotiate once in a while. Just once every so often, I'd like my job or my wife or my kids or my friends or somebody to say, "We're going to make it easy for you."