Mr. Fix Shit

In case you've been living underneath a life-size Sphinx made of foam core and cat litter, you know that we re-elected Barack Obama recently.  A bunch of different demographics came together to make that possibility a reality-- so the news media says-- and it's looking like minorities, women, and "the young" played a significant role in the President's validation.

At 32, I guess I no longer qualify as "the young".  I think membership in that particular subsection goes to 18-25 year-olds, it might even go as high as thirty-year-olds, but it definitely doesn't extend to those of us born in 1980.  I know for sure that I'm not a woman, because I just played with myself recently and I came very quickly, and we all know that only happens to men.  (Sensitive ones, especially.)  Now, the more complicated question-- am I a minority?-- gives me a slight pause, and rightfully so.  After all, my father was born in Iraq, then emigrated (read: fled) to Israel, the emigrated (read: ran away from his religion and his parents) to America, and married my mother, a half-Ukranian/half-Hungarian euro mutt.  But, ask anyone who's ever seen me dance, and then tell you without hesitation that I'm white.

White male.









White space.









White.

Am I, though?  Maybe, maybe not.  I don't know.  Guess it depends on who's seen me cut a rug at a Bar Mitzvah recently.  One thing I know for sure is that I'm a Jewish husband (and father, but let's stick with husband for right now.) and while I don't know if the number of Jewish husbands who came out in support of Obama is statistically significant, one thing I do know is that there are some stereotypes about Jewish husbands.

The one with which I'm most familiar is that "Jewish husbands don't beat their wives".  A bigoted follow-up to that is "they just hide their Macy's cards", and that was all good fun, and we all had a jolly good laugh.

I realized this weekend that there is also a stereotype about Jewish husbands relating to their inclination to engage in household repairs/improvements, but that, according to which Jewish husband you're talking to/about, the stereotype is radically different.

Take my father-in-law.  He's seventy, doddering, bewildered, hyper-intelligent, super disorganized, mechanically inclined, and attentionally defective.  Nothing makes him prouder than to install something, or create something, or refine something, or correct something around his house, or ours.  As he mentioned to me this weekend, one of the reasons he's so hell-bent on fixing things himself is that he's cheap, and no matter how much sawdust you get everywhere (EV.  ERY.  WHERE.) or how many times you have to drive to Home Depot (three in one day) because you forgot to buy something (that you already owned) it's a damn sight cheaper than picking up the phone and hiring a professional to do it for you.

Which is where this Jewish husband comes in.

Last week, our plumber installed a new kitchen faucet and repaired two toilets in our house.  Total cost: $350.  Could I have done any or all of these repairs myself?  Um, why spend energy, time, and many hot, furious tears to find out?  Are we well-off?  Absolutely not, but my wife and I are both employed, and we make enough money to know that we can call a plumber or an electrician every now and then and it's not going to give us Hoover pockets.

There are things I can do, and there are things I can't do, and there are things that I maybe could do but probably shouldn't do, and I strongly believe that, if I look at a project and my gut says "back away" then that is what I should do.  My wife's dresser drawer came off its track.  A strategically-placed screw solved the issue.  Gut said, "you can do that", so I did that.  Am I going to spend hours fucking around and potentially irreparably damaging the porcelain device that hauls away my family's feces?

Not this Jewish husband.

And not this Jewish husband's father, either.

When I was a boy, and I'm sure for a long time before I existed, my father mowed the lawn of our family home.  He trimmed all the hedges and he painted the outside and inside of the house when it needed it, he cleaned the gutters and unclogged drains and did things to the hot water boiler that I don't understand and he built a big wooden ramp for me to drive my pedal car on and he fixed and he maintained and he used his rough, careworn paws like they were tools themselves.  And one day, much much later, while we were watching out the dining room window together as Frank the gardener mowed our lawn for us, he turned to me and said,

"And I always said, 'as soon as I can afford to pay some motherfucker to do all this fuckin' sheet for me, dat's exactly what dee fuck I'm gonna do'."

I suppose, after all those years, there was nothing he felt he had to prove anymore, and it must feel pretty liberating to send a plumber a check instead of being on your hands and knees on a bathroom floor underneath a sink for five hours, if you don't have to.  My father-in-law and his son have just spent two days trying to install a clothes dryer for my mother-in-law.  They're connecting a pipe using brass wire meant to be used for a bassoon.  And, wonder of wonders: they did it, and they're happier than pigs in shit about it.  And you know-- that's fine, for them.  That's just fine.  

Sometimes I feel guilty or incompetent or like I'm not measuring up somehow to the challenge of being a homeowner, being a husband, being a father.  There are things I should be doing that I don't do, effort not being applied, energy wasted, money flying out the doors and the windows and wallets and pockets.  Then I remember bringing my father glass after glass of 7-Up as he perspired through his shirt, his bald spot glistening in the July sun and his hands bleeding as he manically tore out foot after foot after foot of hedges that lined my family's house.  He just couldn't take it anymore.  Trimming them made him physically ill, or mentally ill-- or both.  And he wasn't quite at the stage where he had embraced the idea of paying someone else to trim them for him.  He hadn't made that psychological leap yet, he wasn't ready to move from one stereotype of the Jewish husband to the other.  He was still in that mindset that it had to be all him, all the time, at every moment, doing every thing: fixing, making, doing, being, providing, surviving, maintaining and straining, all for his family, all for an ideal.  All for love.

And finally, one day, he let go.  He let go of all of that.  Not the love, of course, never that, but of the idea that it always had to be him.  He's able to exist now, in a world of handymen and plumbers and electricians and contractors and gardeners.  And I think he's happier now, and I love that.  A few months ago, we told him that we were going to finally attack the insidiously weeded over flower beds in front of our house, to make the place look less like Boo Radley's residence and more like a place that isn't the scourge of the neighborhood.  His brow furrowed with momentary concern as he asked,

"Mummy-- you're not going to do that fuckin' shit yourself, are you?"

"No," I said to him, privately smiling at the memory of him ripping out hedges with his hands in 1988, "no fucking way."      

Just In Case

My wife reminded me this morning about Our Last Shopping Trip.  You know, before she popped out Twins A & B.  She had read in numerous (really, there were numerous) pregnancy books that, prior to opening up the bomb bay doors, please, Hal, one should go on a shit-crazy shopping spree, purchasing seven dozen rolls of toilet paper and sixteen tubes of Mango/Orange Tom's of Maine Mint is the Antichrist toothpaste, just in case the creation of twins results in a chaotic situation that does not enable one or one's psychotic spouse to ever go to the supermarket ever again.

So, we did that.

And it's a good thing, too, because, while we were eventually with it enough to venture out of doors (it took us approximately two months or so) on an errand or two, you don't want to be brushing your teeth with a twig covered with old shoe polish or wiping your ass with the Anthropologie skirt you got your wife for her 24th birthday.

As hurricane or tropical storm or nor'easter or federal pound-me-in-the-ass storm Sandy approaches my 'hood, which is thoroughly unaccustomed to bracing for meteorological events any more fierce than a couple days of swamp-ass inducing humidity, I felt the need to write.  Just in case the power goes out for a week.  Just in case a tree limb falls on my head as I go out to check the storm drains and I incur a traumatic brain injury that turns whatever remains of my writing prowess into apple sauce.

Just in case.

Facebook wants me to confirm my phone number.

The computer wants me to restart so the latest version of Norton can self-install.

Richie Havens wants me to come downstairs and listen to him sing to the babies on my wife's iPad.

"Don't mind me, 'cuz I ain't nothin' but a dream."

Everybody wants something, don't they?  Narcissists must have it real easy-- the only thing they're concerned with is what they want.

(I'm jealous.)

I want my family and I to make it through this storm okay.  I want my supervisor at the hospital to text me and say, "Don't be crazy-- don't come in tomorrow", but she's not going to.  She said, "If you can make it in, great, but if not, I'll be here, so no worries."  But that's not explicit enough.  She's basically saying, get here, but, if you can't, don't sit at home fretting and worrying and brooding.

Which is, you know, what I do besides eat, digest, breath, and excrete.

On Saturday, we went to Longwood Gardens to celebrate six years of marriage together.  The babies stayed with my father, but we weren't completely untethered-- my wife had to pump in the Longwood parking lot, and then driving home on Route 1, which must have been quite a sight for anyone pulled up in the lane next to us.  Autumn puts on one hell of a show, as does my wife at a red light, and being out in the crisp air surrounded by amber and gold was just right.

Just like our wedding-- just right.

Today, we shut ourselves in with the babies.  During still moments of naps, I watched some old interviews on YouTube, because I'm weird.  I enjoyed William F. Buckley telling Noam Chomsky he was going to "sock you in your goddamned mouth".  I wish he'd done it.  I guess people talk a lot more shit than they actually sling-- especially people in neckties.

I've been looking for jobs, for around half-a-year, and I spent some time doing that last night.  This non-profit and that non-profit.  Time to be a desk-jockey again.  I'm done getting assaulted and slammed up against walls and fighting for my life for no reason, and a pittance of pay.  I wish someone would pay me to write-- I think that's really what it all boils down to, in the end.  Every wish takes a route, however circuitous, back to that.  Back to where I feel most at home.  Behind a monitor, hitting keys, making them dance for me.

Dance, you qwerty motherfuckers.  Dance.

Either it'll happen or it won't, and I expect I'll be alright either way, really.  The winds are kicking up out there and the rain is coming down.  A storm comes and then it goes.  People try to outwit each other on Facebook-- where everyone is Oscar Wilde-- and my trashcans are tucked away inside the garage.  I'm rambling, of course, but you knew that.

Don't mind me.    

Getting On With It

I was talking to my therapist last week about acting, which I sort of do, and he and I were exploring the possibility of it one day (far, far away) becoming more than just an amateur, "sometimes" pursuit, and making it a professional, bread-and-butter pursuit, since it's really the only thing I'm reasonably sure I do well, and it's definitely the only thing for which I'm qualified.

"How do you reconcile, though, what I think is your core belief about acting," he asked me, astutely crossing his legs and cocking his head slightly in the manner of an inquisitive Border Collie, "that it's vainglorious and indulgent?"

"Well," I said, "it is.  But, I suppose, if one is going to make the decision to pursue it professionally, you kind of have to just get over that and get on with it."

I feel that way about writing, too.  It can be purported to be done for the writer's own demon-wrestling purposes, but I think we all know I'm after the comments.

(Gimme.)

While the twins are napping, there are other things I could be doing.  I could be dusting the... thing in the dining room.  I could do dishes, wash bottles, clean the high chair trays, prepare lunch, organize... things.  But here I am, at the computer, writing.  Writing for the first time since we put our sad old dog to sleep.  That pain and that loss has subsided some over the weeks-- has it been months?  I don't even know.  But, after I'd dressed the babies this morning, and we were playing around with toys on the bed, as I was tickling my daughter's foot, I caught myself thinking about Finley.  My wife gets triggered when she sees a dog, who maybe looks like him, or maybe doesn't, around the neighborhood, or when she sees a "Science Diet" commercial on TV.  That stuff doesn't strike me in quite the same way.  Finley comes to me at random, quiet moments, times where his rough panting would have been the background noise, times where I wish that the babies, who are far more interactive, could have spent more time with him.

There's a lot of things I wish for, and most of those things center around time, and wishing I had more of it.  More time to spend with my wife and children.  More time away from work.  More time for writing.  I've been working every other weekend, that's Saturday and Sunday from 7am-3pm, friends, for more than two years now, and I'm so tired of having my weekend family time halved like a grapefruit.  I'm so sick of cramming things into my weekends "off" (you don't really have time "off" anymore when you have children, for those of you who don't and consequently don't know) and I'm fed up with disappointing my wife, who, good fortune be praised, actually likes it when I'm home.

That fact is part of what's stopped me, incidentally, from writing more-- either on this blog or as part of something else.  When I'm home, and the babies have gone to bed at 7:00 and I know we have to be in bed by 10ish or I'll be a drooling idiot at work the next day, and there are lunches and bottles and wash to prepare for the next day, how can I reasonably justify excusing myself from my love's presence while I shutter myself away in the office for an hour clacking away at the keyboard?  To be honest, I know that, if she really believed it was important to me, she wouldn't mind, but I can't justify it to myself.  I guess it's too vainglorious and indulgent after all.  I even feel guilty doing it while the babies are napping and there's no dog to walk anymore.  If I close my eyes for a moment, though, I can visualize all the dishes and bottles in the sink, and they're calling to me.

The babies are probably going to wake up soon.  There's so much in my head that I want to talk about-- no, write about.  I hate talking.  My voice is flat and heady and boring, and my words come out in a jumble of sleep-deprived fits and starts and half-cocked ideas and trailing off sentiments.  I want to write about politics (sort of) and George Takei Facebook bullshit and memories and dreams and my family but I don't really think I know them anymore so what would I say anyway and the mess in the basement and the crawling and the teething and the changing and the graying and the rolling and the tolling of the bells bells bells and I want to connect-- with you, I suppose-- and that's what we all want, isn't it?  Your time, your thoughts, your attention.  If you give me your attention, I will tell you what I am:

I am the very model of a modern major-general.

I am the monarch of the sea.

I have a song to sing, O!

I am a writer, I suppose.  One who writes.  I string words and thoughts and phrases and ideas together and I give you paragraphs and periods and you make of it what you will, and I like that.  I think I do.  I really think I like that.  If you give me two numbers and ask me to put them together, I will give you a fucking mess in return.  But words I can cope with.  I'll take words for eight hundred, Alex.

No, a thousand.

Give me a thousand: I have twins to feed.  

Fortunately, It's Just Something Else

When I was writing on this blog every single day for, um, for a very long time, it was inconceivable that there would come a time when I would write perhaps once a month.  Now that this time has arrived, it is inconceivable to me, now, that there was a time-- a very long time-- in my life where I wrote on this blog every single day.

Life; you're a real croquet mallet to the taint, aren't you?

I've been getting a lot of croquet mallets to the taint lately which, of course, doesn't make me special or martyred, it just makes me like everyone else.  I got rejected from a prospective job, my car that I bought three weeks ago started bucking like a horse and needed a repair that, if it hadn't been covered under warranty, would have cost $4,000-$5,000 to fix.  My dog died.  Work sucks.  And I haven't slept in approximately two years.  Yes, I know the twins are only 8 months old, but I count the time my wife was pregnant and thrashed around in bed in discomfort night after night, keeping me awake, and tack on another year of anxiety-ridden nightmares and evenings spent staring at the ceiling fan.

I tell people that I haven't slept since 1984, which was the year I finally understood that my mommy and daddy weren't going to live forever.  They say there's truth in every joke, and, if you look at pictures of me at around that age, there are black rings under my youthful, sparkly little eyes.

I'm emotionally drained and physically exhausted.  The heat around here has barely let up in two months and I struggle to keep my eyes open during the day-- they're all dried out from the excessive dependence on decades old window air conditioning units that struggle and wheeze like a COPD patient huffing and puffing to walk ten feet.  I need oxygen.  I need... something.

My dog needed something, too.  He needed something more than pills, something more than Glucosamine-rich food.  He needed something more than time and care and love.  He needed a miracle, and you can just ask the Catholic Church how short they are on those these days.  We kept him going longer than we should have, longer than was humane.  Did you know your vet can put your dog on the canine equivalent of hospice care?  Well, they can, if you're cowardly enough to go along with it.

We were.  For a couple long, sad weeks at any rate.

I knelt down on the floor of that tiny little room-- no bigger than our twins' nursery-- and I held him and stroked his thick, gray fur and I thought to myself, this is the most I've touched you in months.  And I felt sick.  I just kept rubbing his head and all the way down his back, as clumps of his fur came off in my hand and fluttered to the floor.  I was fine at reception.  I was fine talking to the vet tech.  I was fine when they brought him back in, the catheter inserted in his arm, like a condemned green mile prisoner deposited into the chamber.  When the vet came in and asked if I had any questions, my throat became thick and I shut my eyes and tears sprayed onto my glasses.

"How long will it take?" I asked.  I was surprised he understood the question, because what I heard was utterly unintelligible, but I guess a lot of people must ask that.

"Not very long at all, maybe a minute or two."

"Jesus," I said.

The Propofol went in first.  Goodnight, Finley.  His breathing had become so loud and harsh and raspy, cagey, throaty, labored, awful in the past year-- it was everywhere I walked.  When we would be upstairs and the baby monitor would be on downstairs, all it would pick up was his breathing-- like a lumberjack sawing through a stubborn oak.  I close my eyes and I can still hear it.  His head thunked on the blanket covering the floor in seconds and his tongue fell out lazily.  I stared at it, and I was shocked at how repulsed I was by the sight of it-- undignified, disorganized, vulgar.  I wanted to push it back into his mouth, like the doctor who put the coins over Lincoln's eyes, but I couldn't move.  The phenobarbital came next and fast-- the overdose.  The end.  Dr. Peters put the Littmann on Finley's chest and said,

"His heart's stopped."

His heart.  My heart.  I still could hear the relentless clatter of his breath.  Only I could hear it, I guess.

I'm so tired and run down these days I haven't had time to grieve or process or anything-- I suppose that's what this is.  This blog used to be the place I would come to and sort out life's idiocies and its beauties, where I could make fun of the world and myself, where I could come to identify with that part of me that still clung desperately to the notion that I was a writer in some way.  Now, I don't know what it is, or why it is.

I still can't get over how fast it happened.  He was fourteen-- eighty-eight in people years.  He was my first dog ever and, at 32, I come downstairs in the morning and I don't know what to do.  Make coffee, I suppose.  The English make tea-- the half-Israelis make coffee.  We have hairy arms and hot tempers and we drink coffee and we get on with it.  While taking a walk today with my father's sister who is visiting from Australia, I lost one of the baby's hats.  It's somewhere, on some street in our neighborhood somewhere-- some sidewalk.  I pushed them in the stroller while they slept and my 70-year-old aunt with her squeaky voice and her artsy glasses followed diligently a half-step behind us.  She casually mentioned that, in the early 70s, she fell in love with a cousin of hers and, when he was arranged-married off to someone else, she overdosed on pills to try to kill herself.  I wanted to stop pushing the stroller and turn to her and scream,

"WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN YOU TRIED TO KILL YOURSELF?!  ALL DAY LONG I WORK WITH ASSHOLES LIKE THAT-- WHAT ARE YOU TELLING ME?"

But I just said, "uh-huh-- wow" and kept pushing the stroller along, petrified that, if I stopped and thought about it, it would become real.  Something to deal with, a thing to confront.  Fortunately, it's just something else to write about.

That's all.

Floored

Trying to force himself to remember a moment from his childhood, Tommy Fawkes squints at Katie Parker.

"I had a little red car..."

"Yes," Katie says, in her charming, French accent as she smiles in the slightest sympathy at Tommy, "and you drove it into everything!"

"Funny Bones" is my favorite (non-Wes Anderson) movie, because it is as funny as it is painful as it is charming as it is dark as it is passionate as it is flawed.  It's everything life is-- or should be.  And I knew, when I first saw it, almost half my life ago, that I wouldn't see a film that touched me the way this one did, that filled me with fun and hope and despair like this one did.

And I haven't.  But I still go to the movies when I can anyway.

I still go to my parents' house when I can anyway, too, although, with twins, it's hard to go pretty much anywhere.  "Oh, yeah," parents of one muse gently, "I guess it would be harder with two..."

Yeah.  Only twice as hard there, duck-shoes.

I went to my parents' house yesterday because they'd just gotten new flooring put in, throughout the entire first floor.

"It's beautiful," my mother said on the phone earlier in the week, "there's shades of green and purple and it looks just like stone-- it's going to feel like we're eating outside on some patio."

My father, speaking to me on the phone later in the week, had something slightly different to say.

"It's fuckin' floor-- I put my fuckin' feet on it and walk around-- what?  I'm supposed to care about it or something?!  Who gives a shit?!"

My nearly three-year-old nephew, a clear moderate, said, "I like this floor" as he ran his fingers over it when I came by yesterday to see it.

I mean, it's sheet linoleum made to look like stone.  They did a good job with it, it almost looks like real grouting in between the large square "tiles", but it's all one flat sheet of linoleum.  It's ugly.  Unless the people who buy my parents' home when they die are in their seventies already, the floor will be the first thing they'll replace when they move in.  Sure, it's nicer than the linoleum it replaced, but it's still ass-ugly.

If I'm honest with myself-- and, by turn, with you-- it's not so much that I don't like the floor, it's that I'm always kind of insulted when a change is made to the home in which I was raised.  I remember being ten or eleven and putting up quite a protest when the time came to replace the sofa and chairs in the living room, which, admittedly, looked as if they'd been through a hurricane and a pogrom.

"They're FINE!" I'd insist, "and so COMFORTABLE!" as I'd do a head-first dive into the warped sofa cushions that had virtually no filling left in them.  The next thing on their agenda, after the floor is finished, is to replace all the carpeting in the living room, and the staircase, and, of course, all the furniture in the living room.

Again.

Every time I go there, it seems, it's less and less, um, mine.

Not that it ever was mine-- it's not-- and not like I have any right to it, because they offered to will the fucking house to me and I said no, but it's mine in memory.  And the memories are still there, but the reality is changing.  It would be easier if some random family were living in there now, gutting it, making additions and deletions, trashing it and rebuilding it to greater glory.  But that my parents are there doing it themselves, it's like they're trying to erase the past we'd all built together that, in my head at least, was so happy.  Most of the time.

That old, peeling, yellowed, disgusting linoleum floor was mine.  And I had a little red car.  And I drove it into everything.

My Kingdom

*Ahem*

(They all turn around in their chairs and look at him.)

"What kind of bird are you?"

(Pause.)

"I'm a sparrow.  She's a dove--"

"No-- what kind of bird (beat) are you?"

----------------------------

I've seen the trailer maybe twenty or so times.  Maybe I have Aspergers-- maybe I'm just in love.  I don't know.  In any case, I've been waiting for a long, long time.  I had plans to drive up to New York City to see it two weeks ago, but it just didn't happen.  I'm not as impetuous, or as quixotic, or as liberated as I used to be.

Twins'll do that to a guy, you know.

Because I wasn't alive in the late 19th century, I'll never know the thrill of hearing that "a new operetta by Gilbert & Sullivan" is premiering at the Savoy, or is coming to New York.  I'll never get to hear the scuttlebutt or the gossip about the costumes or the sets, and I'll never get to see the sheet music for "The Law is the True Embodiment" when it was brand new.  That would have been it for me.

So, because I live in this place and this time and in this century, the release of a new Wes Anderson movie is, I suppose, as close as I'll ever get to that feeling.  And now, at long last, "Moonrise Kingdom" is rising at a theatre near me.

Which is good, because I'm damn tired of waiting.

When I read a little review of "Rushmore" all those years ago, one reviewer called it "A love letter to the misfits of the world."  I didn't need to read any more of that review to know that I needed to see this film.  I couldn't have known that, as Max Fisher danced with Miss Cross to the clanking chords of The Faces' "Ooh La La" that I'd be in tears. I couldn't have known that I would have a fight with my allergist about the ending of that movie, that he argued that the film shouldn't have ended happily for Max-- that, because the movie ended how he wanted, he never learned anything, he never grew as a character.  I argued that Max did learn and Max did grow, but that the film ended how he would have ended it if he'd written it.

What kind of bird is he?

It's funny, being drawn to films about people whose family dynamics are completely fucked up.  You'd think it's how I must have grown up-- surrounded by eccentric people who possessed an uncanny inability to communicate anything resembling affection-- but I didn't.  My upbringing was mundane and regular and safe and surrounded by love.  We were not without our problems, but we weren't Tenenbaums, and we never wanted to be.

Wes Anderson films are more than the sum of the camera angles, the flat presentation of the characters, the shirt and tie combos (in "Rushmore", Herman Blume wore monochromatic shirt-and-tie combinations-- all yellow, all blue, etc, and in "Royal Tenenbaums", Royal favored hues of purples and green stripes-- effeminate choices for such a, well, bastard) or the chic, carefully selected eyeglasses or the indie-cool, carefully selected soundtracks.  It's not the charming, pizzicato tinklings of Mark Mothersbaugh or, now, Alexander Desplat.  It's not the many, many details.

I think it's the sad sincerity of even the most insincere characters.  It's their unabashed presentation, it's the way in which they plod through life, saying awful things with a great innocence.  They're telling the truth even when they're lying through their teeth.

And I guess I like that.  I guess I'm like that, too.  Even though I wish I wasn't.

I suppose I keep coming back to these films because they're some kind of mirror, albeit a distorted one, with cooler clothes, of who I am and I think that, if I watch enough times, if I step aboard the Darjeeling, Ltd one more time, if I close my eyes and listen to the words and the music and the pauses, maybe one day I'll figure out what kind of bird am I.

Notes from the Anglo File

The bumper-sticker (custom made, mind you) says it all:

"WARNING: Gilbert & Sullivan Freak Behind Wheel"

You know, even if you're just some random schmoebert driving behind me, that I'm a little, well, off.  I'm a little, well, smitten with all things Britain.  I'm a little looney.

Just a li'l.

(To be said with a traditional Cockney glottal stop.  Of course.)

Anglophiles are a unique breed, and we're all a bit muddled, a bit befuddled, because, see there's the whole identification issue-- identifying with your oppressor.  After all, Good King George did try to fuck our shit up for daring to take flight, lest we forget.  But for an American who is, after all, half-Israeli and 100% Jewish to boot, that whole dynamic seems almost a bit irrelevant.

I fell in love with English culture years and years ago.  Too much "Monty Python's Flying Circus" exposure at a time when the brain was extremely soft, malleable, and porous.  It's settled some now, but the damage has been done.  And it was done unto others.

Our elementary school had a program where 5th graders were paired up with 2nd graders.  The purpose of this was that the 5th graders would get together with their 2nd grade "book buddies" in the library once a week and read the 2nd graders stories.  Mentoring at a very young age.  It worked-- my book buddy and I are Facebook friends.  And she's fucking hot as balls now, but I digress.  Anyway, I can still vaguely remember reading young Carly "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs."  It was a swell time.

Anyway, the culminating event of the Book Buddy program was that we 5th graders were to write a book specifically for our 2nd grade book buddy.  Every page of the book would be laminated (in case, I guess, our book buddy became violently ill while reading it) and spiral bound by the school librarian, and entered into the permanent school library collection, for future impressionable youths to enjoy.  Some 5th graders wrote their takes on traditional fairy tales, some wrote stories where vegetables came to life and some wrote about things that had happened to them in their own lives, like breaking bones or getting puppies.

My story concerned Queen Elizabeth II getting kidnapped by members of the IRA and being hidden away inside the clock tower of Big Ben, and then rescued by members of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guard, assisted by Detective Inspectors from the London Metropolitan Police Department.  That Carly is Facebook friends with me today, and that, to my knowledge, she has never been the recipient of inpatient psychiatric treatment, is nothing short of miraculous.

I'm the kind of Anglophile who believes that everything coming from the British Isles is better than things in America.  Hobnobs taste better than Chips Ahoy.  The English Ford Focus is cooler than the American one-- at least it was for years, until the latest American restyle.  G&S is better than American musical theatre.  The monarchy is cooler than the presidency.  British comedy is funnier than American comedy.  British men's clothing is sharper than American men's clothing.  The British are more refined, more tasteful, more... correct than Americans.

That last point, however, gave me a moment's pause today as I looked through a slideshow from the Queen's Jubilee celebration.

Observe:

Mm-hm.  And let's not ignore...

And that, my friends, is how an American Anglophile gets bloody well humbled.

God Save the Queen.