Last one...

I start to get wildly optimistic about the day during my morning shower. Everything I could, should, and will do today appears in front of me like a piece of cheerful sheet music, and I can never quite remember if I’ve already scrubbed my shoulders and my back to get out of the tub in under fifteen minutes. I’m just too damn excited to be efficient.

Then comes the toughest decision I’ll have all day: what to wear. I remember one day this semester, I was getting dressed to take a midterm for a history class where my knowledge of highly particular events would be tested to the fullest extent. I had read and read and read the story of Reconstruction the previous night in trepidated preparation. All of a sudden that morning, though, I realized that all that cramming gave me the right to strut in to that exam with a real arrogant swagger. That’s when I reached for my blinding red adidas and my shimmering escalade t-shirt.

After another quick look at the mirror (it really is tough to look away sometimes), one of my roommates will invariably ask if I’d like to partake in the inevitable inhalation of drugs. On days when I don’t actually have a midterm, I do love to start my day this way. It feels so subversive, so disrespectful to flaunt the WASP ideal of the sober, dutiful American work ethic by lending one’s self the ability to observe the images we project. The moral majority professes to rid the world of this pleasure, but they have no accurate detection system against people who can use illegal substances while performing all the legal activities of an exultant existence. We should live to spite them.

Now it’s time to get on that Enfield Bus that’ll take me into campus as it does everyday. It’s ok if I get to the corner just in time to see the bus fly by because another one comes in seven minutes, the kind of time I’d like to think I’ll be able to spare my whole life. But I don’t usually miss the bus. Twice this year, a driver has been so attentive as to take notice of my desperate condition on the other side of busy Enfield, and they hold up traffic to allow me to cross the street and board the trusty vehicle. Sometime, I’ll figure out a way to tell both Coach and Weird Guy, the two drivers who did this for me, just how much these gestures mean to me. For now, I’ll just settle for some smiles, salutations, and p’s and q’s.

So down Enfield we rumble. To the left, I see the white and pink springtime blossoms of Pease Park, the grand old friend who provides so much space for outdoor thought and reflection. No swatch of land means more to me than that narrow grassy knoll, and I bet I’ll feel even more connected to those old oak trees as life goes on.

As we approach the huge rectangular campus buildings with red tiled, half-hipped roofs, I plug my ever-changing personal soundtrack in to my ears. My bus now arriving at my crowded stop, I leap from the opened doors down to the concrete. The bright sneakers stick the landing, and I have again successfully completed my trip into the crisp breezes of a beehive of thousands just like me.

I weave in and out of the faces, stepping in time with the rhythms in my head. I’m looking so hard for an expression that seems to recognize me, and I just know it really will appear outside a dream soon. I’m trying with all my strength to not make the sudden movements which scare away such glances, but it’s so difficult to reveal one’s feelings without blurting them out clumsily.

Well, here I am rambling again. I’ve turned my weekly writings inward because I want to learn to write about other things than mere events, to make the transition to writing about everything and nothing at the same time. My new job will put this quest on hold for awhile, though, as I’ll have no more time to write at length in leisure until this summer. So this will be the last blog. This summer, I’m going to be storyboarding for a stab at a novel, so I’ll let you know how that turns out.

I really have enjoyed connecting with you all, and I know that we’ll be doing it again soon. Conversations like ours are the only hulks that can slow down the constant American construction of individualist and materialist progress, and I’m going to make sure we can do this again. Your readership will always be my humblest privilege and my perpetual motivation. Thanks for reading.

Consumer Democracy

I hate the last chapters of political books. Coming after pages and pages of rightfully harsh assessments of the state of our fundamentally unequal society, the final sections of these books are always the writer’s chance to inform his or her readers on concrete steps they can take to remedy this dire situation.

The concluding chapters create more questions than they answer, though. The reader is always left wondering if this writer actually understands the capitalistic root of all the problems, and further if the writer’s insanely impractical ideas come from the same planet. Not even Chomsky satisfies me here. Although few identify the plutocratic structure of the American system better, Noam becomes very vague in interviews about just what the hell we should do about this shit. With a look of contempt, he mutters “There are several things we can do,” but he falls well short of revealing his master plan.

Now, I’m not launching into Republicans’ current defense of the war. In other words, I’m not claiming that we aren’t allowed to question the intact system just because we can’t come forward with a clear alternative. The logic behind understanding that this war is pointless and unwinnable does not change just because some damn Democrats don’t have the balls to call for immediate withdrawal.

But we really don’t have any idea what we can do to stem the tide of the military industrial complex. A lil lecture I attended last Wednesday displayed that fact in fact’s most clear and shiny display case. Entitled “How democratic are consumer societies?,” the talk attracted some student pseudo-intellectuals like myself, but mostly several real-intellectual professor types with highly trendy glasses. Dr. Victoria de Grazia, a Columbia historian, opined for a full two hours in the UT Art building on this topic.

Her speech was extremely hard to follow at times. Trying to tie in every latest world development, she leaped from the Industrial Revolution in Europe to the American fifties to the Chinese present without really allowing me to understand the broad generalizations she made about each period’s commitment to democracy.

For instance, her chief stumbling block had to do with the fuzzy concept of defining what she meant by democracy. I had anticipated this problem because I couldn’t help listening in as the professors in attendance struggled to make conversation, and one of their chief topics involved how tough it is to nail down democracy to a precise rational meaning. De Grazia never really accomplished this virtually impossible task.

She ended by speaking of consumer activism, protests against specific institutions like Wal-Mart or the Republican party, as our hope to slow down the worst abuses of consumerism. Nobody in the audience was really satisfied with this conclusion, though. By closing down Wal-Mart and Republicans, you know, we only empower Target and Democrats, and that change will do nothing to trim our fat.

We did so want to stand up during the question and answer time and figure out a real first step. We were in safe acadamia, a place where all ridiculously long-haired students and the radical faculty we admire roam freely, so we didn’t feel hampered by authority figures or anything like that. And we clearly all agreed that consumerism really is a curse that the world must get over if we are to live in a sustainable world. But we just couldn’t conjure up a plan to combat this American system.

It really is depressing to know that the society you live in is so far past sustainable that you yourself can do nothing.

Sports fandom

When I was young and fully faithful to my strict standards of sports fanship, I suffered far worse personal anguish from my team’s losses than the losers for whom I was rooting. Sports ignited the worst tantrums of my childhood.

I was eight when a Michigan football loss caused me to vandalize my own house. I had no personal connection with that wonderful academic institution in Ann Arbor, and I had never even come close to visiting the place, but I really liked Michigan’s uniforms, especially the cool black socks worn by their cool black players. I liked them so much that, following a maize and blue defeat by Illinois, I scrawled “Michigan wins” on the blinds of my room in a kind of delusional self-denial of my team’s imperfections.

In sixth grade, a Houston Rockets loss changed my personal relationship with God. All through the 1997 playoffs, I had been praying to God to help the Barkeley, Drexler, and Olajuwon triumvirate deliver an NBA championship. I knew I was doing wrong trying to talk to God about sports all through the intense entreaties I made to Him in my head, but I figured I’d do it just this once. When goddamn John Stockton drained a three to knock the Rockets out of the Western Conference Finals, I wept the tears of a guilty child who knows what he has done. Luckily, nobody noticed this most meaningful personal punishment because I always reacted to sports like that.

In my own mind, I was only being a dedicated fan. I rooted for my favorite players as if they were my best friends, and I sincerely believed that the rules of Karma rewarded fan sincerity with victory. I really could be very sweet that way, but my devotion caused me to commit what seem like ludicrous wastes of time today.

Major League Baseball may have been my drug of choice during my adolescence. Day after day, I used to indulge in its statistics, literature, and ethereal beauty. To high school Toby, baseball games were the only authentic activity around. There on the field in front of me lived an actual meritocracy where the people who achieved the most consistent objective success were the coolest, whereas high school anointed as king and queen the smoothest talkers who talked of nothing. That’s why I’ll never regret donating my transition to young adulthood to the green grass of Kauffman Stadium. That stadium was the place in the world that made me most ecstatically enjoy life, so why would I have spent my time anywhere else?

Those times are long gone by now, though. I’ll never forget the day when Vince Young and the Longhorns sliced through my brownie-induced carelessness with a true epiphany. Sitting in the stands on a bright fall day while VY and the boys took it to Tech, I realized that I could not defend working in sports to myself any longer. I had the most contentious inner debate that day as VY zigzagged all over the field.

What good would I do as the play-by-play commentator of the Kansas City Royals, I wondered, and how interesting could it be to hang around sports journalists all day? People who work in sports, you know, are some of the most pathetic blobs in the world. They reside in a perpetually-all male environment which encourages childish behavior and profoundly limited thought subjects. In a press box, it is a lost more strange to have read and enjoyed a novel than it is to have brought a pair of binoculars to the game to scope out the best cleavage in the stands. One guy who supervised my summer internship at a sports radio station showed me all the hundreds of Adriana Lima he kept on his work desktop computer. He was in his late 30s and had not an un-airbrushed real-life female to speak of. My experiences at Campus TV had only further illuminated the shortcomings of sportscasters.

The pressbox is no place for someone who rejects the very foundations upon which our society’s hegemonies are formed. For sports are an integral part of the military-industrial complex.

After all, nothing more emphatically entrenches the status quo than a sporting event. By filling up humongous monuments to massive construction for mere games, we communicate that everything is fine. If we really cared about the massive inequality of the world, we would do something about it instead of sitting down and watching freaks bludgeon someone or something.

Just look at sport’s most recently obvious interactions with politics. All of a sudden New Orleans is completely recovered from Katrina because the Saints have won a few football games. Major League Baseball was an integral aspect of the outrageous Lee Greenwoods-style nationalism flowering after 9-11. And the 2003 NCAA Tournament truly broadcast the hypocrisy of our supposed dedication to liberation the people of Iraq. In almost every situation, the apple pie support sports provide our institutions increases evil. That’s why the times that we take our minds off the realities of our lives are actually the times when we are the most vulnerable to electing Bush and Kerry.

At the same time, though, I know sports can help me take my mind off this indefensible relationship. Since attempting to educate Americans about the unsustainability of our system is as pointless but not quite as funs as rooting for the Royals, I’ll just keep enjoying sports. But, God help me, I will know during the course of my fandom that there is so much more to this world than games.

Obama 2008

All across the parts of America with enough sense to hate Bush, there’s a flame spreading by DVR’ed Daily Shows, forwarded e-mails, and happy-faced text messages. It’s a phenomenon known as Barack Obama, and it fills us with the same wishful yearning as we get every time we Americans get a chance to purportedly make a change.

You see, Obama’s speech at the 2004 convention (the only one not about John Kerry’s courageous service in Vietnam) damn near moved us to tears with its you-empowerment, unifying message, and universally-charming good looks. When Obama dismissed the culture war, we dismissed the idea that America could have enough ignorance to vote in favor of this stupefying war. We went to sleep the night after his speech with the satisfied self-satisfaction that sustains us lefties in George W. Bush’s America.

It doesn’t matter that not one of us can name one piece of legislation Obama has chartered through the Senate, one famous stand he has taken, or even one time we saw him on tv doing anything other than campaigning. His 2004 speech makes us believe unequivocally in the integrity of this man. Needless to say, when I heard he was coming to Austin on February 23rd, I knew I’d be down on Auditorium Shores high on hope and other drugs with the rest of Austin’s right-thinking citizens.

It’s really something when a presidential candidate comes to your town, you know. If you’re not content to live in the middle of the nowheres that are Iowa and New Hampshire, you almost never get to see national political figures up close and personal. It’s really not fair. Farmer John and his God-fearing kin get to enjoy breakfast at Waffle House with John Edwards, and I haven’t been able to get near close enough to a presidential contender to expound my unrealistically-maddening views.

At least I got to see Obama speak last Friday. I wasn’t the only student there, mind you. There were about fifteen or seventeen thousand people packed by Town Lake that day, and I’d be willing to bet college students were the largest demographic there.

A good dozen or so of my friends made the trip, and my gaze just kept running over faces I recognized from campus. Just a few feet in front of me stood a guy who, in the Jester East lobby in the first month of my freshman year, informed a table of us that he was determined to be a journalist. Pacing around in a volunteer shirt was a rotund Gregory Gym basketball player who threw his weight around to stop the other team’s best player and gave me authoritative high-fives every time I scored the infuriating baskets I like to seek. Waiting patiently a couple of yards to the left of me, a T.A. who graded my scantrons in the class I took from dangerously radical Bob Jensen looked on with his arm hooked in his girlfriend’s. With all of us braving the constant sprinkle, I couldn’t help thinking we actually do give a shit.

I thought Obama’s speech lived up to the hype, too. With a measured, common-sense rhythm, he advocated universal health care, withdrawal from Iraq starting May 1, and the notion that we could connect ourselves to the founding fathers, the abolitionists, and the civil rights movement by pressing with as much elbow grease as possible for change. The highlight of his speech came when he rattled off a few of Cheney’s genius quotes and retorted, to the crowd’s delight, “You know you’re in trouble when Cheney says it’s a good thing.” The only lowlight involved his campaign’s choice of the Jock Jams NFL touchdown song that goes “Neeeeeerrrrraaaaaannnanananut (pause) HEY!!” as his entrance music. Aside from that selection, he killed.

He dealt with race a great deal. Though he stopped short of connecting the dots of racist correlation between people of color and the deplorable poverty, education, and health care he decried, he did not fail to observe the most authentic diversity I’ve ever seen in Austin. When Obama told us we could start a movement if we all work together, we grinned at each other in a way that agreed on principle, though not on practice.

But initiating realistic, progressive racial dialogue is not the duty of a candidate who has a shot to win today, and Obama definitely might win the Democratic candidacy. If he can motivate college students care about the 2008 election this far in advance, he just might take that White House. No matter what, though, he sure as hell makes us feel harmonious about ourselves. Today, that’s exactly what we want.