daily prompt | The Gad About Town

Daily Prompt: Vote for Not-Him

Posted on August 7, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for August 7 asks, “Tell us about a time you made a false assumption about a person or a place—how did they prove you wrong?”
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If you are interested in the horse race nature of American politics, the drop-everything-every-four-years-so-we-can-fill-all-the-jobs-in-Washington portion of our public life, you could do no worse than live in either New Hampshire or Iowa for the year before Election Day. This is because, for reasons I could bore you with but will not, Iowa is the first state in the country to hold a vote for President, in January of election year, and New Hampshire is the second state, usually a week later. (Through the spring and summer of election year, the major political parties conduct state-by-state votes, and the winner of the most votes is sometimes, often, usually that party’s candidate for the national election in November.)

These two states fight very hard every four years to hold their place as first, fight so hard that both states always claim to be first every time, even a week apart, because Iowa uses one type of voting system and New Hampshire a completely different one. So they are both always first. It comes down to money: because they are first, both states receive a quadrennial economic boost unlike any other, with political candidates and their support teams and journalists and their support teams needing food, shelter, television time for months before January. Some nationally famous politicians have rented houses in Iowa to live in and signed year-long leases for the year of door-to-door campaigning they will do. Other states would love to be first in the nation, to attract those millions of dollars, but these two small-population states put up a winning fight with both the Democratic and the Republican parties every four years and get to be first in the nation to cast ballots.

From 2000 to 2004, I lived in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a city of about 125,000 in a state of three million. A state that is larger than New York State but with one-sixth of the population. So that means that in 2003, I was in the second-largest city in the first of the two “First in the Nation” vote-casting states for Election 2004: Bush v. Kerry. With George W. Bush running for re-election unopposed, it meant that almost every Democrat elected to any office anywhere in the country was campaigning in Iowa.

Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In the foreground is a Quaker Oats factory. My apartment building is the red brick building smack in the middle of the photo, across the highway from Quaker Oats.

I am a progressive voter, to the left of most Democrats but tending to vote for them. But I also fall head over ballot for every candidate who claims to be the representative from the Land of New Ideas. Rarely do we hear what those New Ideas might be or how much he or she may think they will cost, but I love the idea of New Ideas. Selling New Ideas is an Old Idea, but it gets me every time. And so my life’s list of candidates I have rooted to run for the next office higher than the one they already possessed includes several people named Kennedy, Gary Hart, the late Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, and, in 2003, a North Carolina senator named John Edwards. There are others, but I am blushing while typing this.

I should retire my political instincts. Then-Senator Edwards was one of the few politicians I have ever heard speak about rural as well as urban poverty as a blight, a blight because it is a problem that can be tackled. I was inspired. From 2004-’08, it could be said that he pushed the bigger-name candidates to the left (some might think that a good thing), but from 2004-’08 it could also be said that he was doing some other (scandalous) things.

And I met him! And my immediate in-person sense of the man was: “I do not like him.” In January 2004, days before us Democratic Iowans were to cast our first in the nation votes, our so very first votes that New Hampshire was going to be the second first, so stuff it, New England!, just days before that, I saw him speak. Great speech. People are poor. Terrific. Speech over. In the crowded room, we all discovered that that single door entrance over there was now the single door exit for everyone, including the candidate and his handlers, who must hate situations like this in Iowa and New Hampshire. I was next to him for the five minutes it took to leave. He shook my hand—he shook everyone’s hand within reach. I have met a few politicians and I have met quite a few people who ought to run for office, but I have never been rendered invisible quite as quickly as I was by that man. It may qualify as the single most bizarre social encounter I have ever had: I have been dismissed mid-conversation plenty of times, even made to feel that I offended someone, but never looked at like I did not exist.

Perhaps it was the overwhelming crowd and the fact that I did not immediately produce a way out and he was looking for one, or perhaps it was the woman behind me. Or perhaps it was because, a bright man, a good reader of juries in his lawyer life, he felt my instinct to not like him. Or perhaps it was the woman behind me who wanted and received his autograph. I have no idea.

What did I do with this instinct to not like John Edwards? I convinced myself to ignore it and campaigned for him at my caucus site on election night and swung our district over to him. My instinct to ignore my instincts can not be trusted.

Daily Prompt: Ten Years Out and Four Back

Posted on August 6, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for August 6 asks writers to write about writer’s block, a question that would on the surface seem unanswerable: “When was the last time you experienced writer’s block? What do you think brought it about—and how did you dig your way out of it?”
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When one is in the throes of a block, the helpful suggestion to write about “anything,” even to “write about writer’s block,” feels like an excuse for justifiable homicide on receiving it.

Anyone replying to this prompt is not at present in its throes, so, good for us; I am patting us all on our collective shoulder. Because it feels like a physical ailment, writer’s block. First, it presents a heady sensation of having multiple thoughts at once, of a richness of topics and sentences available at all moments (justpickoneanyone!) … except this one, followed by a dread that one has committed to the wrong topic or married it to a disaster of a sentence, followed by a helpless sense that one always picks wrong, that one has no right to give privilege to any single thought, sentence, syllable over any other. No right to! Don’t finish, never start, just drool.

In his great novel “The Information,” Martin Amis describes the self-torture his character Richard Tull endures:

For an hour … he worked on his latest novel, deliberately but provisionally entitled Untitled. Richard Tull wasn’t much of a hero. Yet there was something heroic about this early hour of flinching, flickering labor, the pencil sharpener, the Wite-Out, the vines outside the open window sallowing not with autumn but with nicotine. In the drawers of his desk or interleaved by now with the bills and summonses on the lower shelves on his bookcases, and even on the floor of the car (the terrible red Maestro), swilling around among the Ribena cartons and the dead tennis balls, lay other novels, all of them firmly entitled Unpublished. And stacked against him in the future, he knew, were yet further novels, successively entitled Unfinished, Unwritten, Unattempted, and, eventually, Unconceived.

For years (the novel was published in 1995) I would set “The Information” down upon reading that passage (it comes early in the book, after Amis describes Tull’s middle-aged inner self-knowledge of his self-failure in only 20 or so sentences), because that was the bookshelf in my mind, too. And I was not going to describe it better than the master, so why attempt to? My own inner self-knowledge of my self-failure extended to believing that someone else had done a better job of describing my inner self-knowledge of my self-failure. Amis is a great novelist and essayist, one of my favorites, but he is not in my head (lucky him). (There is a pun there.)

I would read and re-read that passage, though, almost recite it like a sick mantra. Because while I could see the comedy in it—it is extremely funny, after all—I could not laugh at it with anything more than a mournful, rueful, “Heh.”

Whatever failures I have as a writer, and as a person for that matter, being too critical of myself usually was not one of them. If anything, I was not critical enough, often enough: If I was not going to attempt to try but was going to get all showy-mournful over the loss of my attempt, how was I “my own worst critic,” as I sometimes hear people describe themselves?

Through the 2000s, I did not write. I was in a writer’s block that felt terminal. (Some may wish it had remained so.) Oh, there was the occasional email of some length—I shudder at the memory of an attempted mimicking of Bill Simmons before he was famous (we even exchanged emails once) that described an afternoon at a Cubs game that I sent to friends—but the breaks between attempts grew longer. I moved part-way across country and then back, with some friends not knowing I had returned, because they did not know I had left four years before.

The irony is that for five of those ten years, I was professionally a writer, first at a factory, then for IBM. My work with a radio comedy group dried up, too. Ultimately, it all ended. I attempted this very blog in 2006, something which I had forgotten about until I started The Gad About Town in October 2013 and was told by Blogger, “This email address already has a blog, would you like to see it?”, requested the password, and discovered that I had started two posts, neither of which had a complete sentence. (It was kept private then and will remain so.) If there is a Rosebud to my writing life, it may be in those half-paragraphs.

For someone who has only wanted to do one thing, write—my family still has furniture I marked up with crayons, drawing words instead of pictures on every surface when I was two or three—the experience of not writing was a painful one. It meant that my psyche was left alone to receive each perturbation and clash like it was a brand-new, unique, and uniquely awful thing.

Until July 15, 2010, I was deeply engaged in doing the one thing I did best: Get drunk. My will to engage in much else in life was slowly being sucked away, but I also believe that my writing block was partly the result of a perverse sense of integrity and honesty: Nothing that I could or would write was going to be honest. I could not write out an honest shopping list, since the one thing I was actually leaving my house for was not even on the list. Any blog post, comedy piece, essay, memoir, to-do list was a lie of omission, and I do not like to lie. So, “Unpublished, Unfinished, Unwritten, Unattempted, Unconceived.” Until I was willing to blush while saying (or writing) the words, “My name is Mark Aldrich and I am an alcoholic,” nothing else was going to come from me.

That coin you see up top? I am pretty proud of it. (I tried to photograph the actual one but it is too shiny.)

So for the last year, I have been writing regularly. The Gad About Town has over 60 published posts; 13 of them responses to the “Daily Prompt.” But the lack of confidence that a writer’s block presents, that still visits. It did so this spring. My girlfriend’s help—really, I am a lucky guy—and my choice to do the Daily Prompt every day (even though it “is not me coming up with the ideas. Grumble”) have me writing now. So responding to the Daily Prompt every day is part of how I can respond to a Daily Prompt about writer’s block, a topic that would be unanswerable if I was in one.

Daily Prompt: The Curse of Concern

Posted on August 5, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for August 5 asks us to play voyeur in our own lives: “We often capture strangers in photos we take in public. Open your photo library, and stop at the first picture that features a person you don’t know. Now tell the story of that person.”
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I do not know the attractive couple entering the photo above from the left side of the frame, but that is okay, as I did not take the photo, and this is not about them. If I had a steadier hand with the photo editing Clone Stamp tool, they would be an oddly tall bush of purple flowers or a stack of blue Peroni umbrellas or two copies of that bicycle that they are walking towards. My hand is not that steady, so their brief moment together (are they still together?) was spared awkward editing. May the rest of their lives together or apart continue to be free of terrible editing decisions or deletion by a heavy-handed photo perfectionist.

But the photo above sets the scene:

It is May. My beloved and I are eating brunch at the table under the Peroni umbrella that is all the way to the right in the photo above. We are at DePasquale Square on Federal Hill in Providence, Rhode Island, in an outdoors restaurant called Caffe Dolce Vita. After brunch, we walk to about where the above picture was taken, turn around, and she takes this photo of me:

Two things: One, with spinal muscular atrophy type 3 or 4, which is what I have, sitting on a hard but rounded surface like the fountain I am sitting on instead feels for me like I am sitting on the edge of a plane sending troops into a war zone and the sarge is about to kick me out even though I do not yet have my parachute strapped on, so I am sitting on my cane for stability; two, that man behind me is strolling along the same fountain as if it is wider than a mere tightrope … with a child in his arms.

I knew I was going to hear a splash before it never happened. You can even almost make out the look of concerned anticipation on the face of the elderly woman sitting closer to the street. (Well, I can, now.) So a fall into the fountain by father and child was inevitable because it was already seen in the eyes of a worried old person, like a curse, the curse of concern. There is no worse curse than that, the curse of anonymous concern, because it is often followed by the worst four-word sequence in the English language: “You should not have … .”

“You should not have” shown your child the sun-dappled fountain up close as if the world was his and he can touch the sun itself in your safe arms.

Perhaps the curse of concern really is a curse only in the idea that you will hear from loved ones and strangers alike—loved ones as if they are strangers: “I didn’t think you could do it,” and strangers as if they are as close as loved ones: “I didn’t think you ought to have tried”—about their ability to foresee your future failure or your imperfect success.

I respect “I told you so” from people more, because, if it is spoken truthfully, perhaps the speaker had indeed offered advice that I had ignored or implemented poorly. “You should not have” is blaming me for your impotence at controlling the most recent past. I bring this up in order to confess that too often, I am that “concerned bystander” about to ex post facto say “Tsk” at someone about something they should not have done, but did do.

So I did not say anything, not anything at all, to the father and child behind me before I used my cane to grab his ankle and trip them into the fountain.

(I might have made up part of this story: I do know the couple in the photo at top.)