Years ago, I urged the young son of a friend to start using a theme song, as he always seemed to be humming something whenever he entered a room. He was 10 at the time and found it funny that something like this would be noticed, but since most 10-year-olds are egotistical, he loved that someone noticed a quirk. I told him that if he had a theme song, whenever people heard it in his absence they would think of him and wish for him to suddenly appear.
I do not know if my friend’s son now has a theme song that reminds his friends of him. I kind of hope not, since it might be insufferable, instead.
It is easy to brand oneself but it is quite hard to re-brand oneself; I have had several experiences with branding myself, being branded by others, and attempting to re-brand myself. And part of that has to do with having had a “signature beverage,” as the WordPress Daily Prompt for August 22 asks: “Captain Picard was into Earl Grey tea; mention the Dude and we think: White Russians. What’s your signature beverage—and how did it achieve that status?”
Having a signature anything usually infers affection from one’s friends towards you. When I was young, I hated getting labeled, in part because it never seemed affectionate at all and sometimes when I heard it, it meant that the next sound I was going to hear was a fist coming at my face. I started wearing glasses at age eight: “Four eyes.” Starting at about that same age, most years, I outgrew my Christmas clothes by spring, leaving me with exposed ankles for the rest of the school year. For some reason, this look, which revealed something but I do not know what about me—poverty? personal clothing cluelessness?—led to the most violent reactions from my school mates: “High waters!” was the exclamation and shoving me was frequently the action. I do not know why, and to this day I check the cuffs on my pants.
Thus, I loved having a “signature beverage” after I went to college. It was a label and it meant I belonged with some group (any group) somewhere (anywhere). And I controlled it. I picked it. I had friends and I was going places.
I have had bartenders who knew which beer I liked. I have had bartenders who made me the perfect martini: “Bone-dry,” I would say. “Allow the vodka and the vermouth to exchange pleasantries but not mingle or get each other’s phone number.” (I was a wit.) A twist of lemon peel. (“Olives? Do I look hungry?”) I have had liquor store proprietors fetch me my bottle upon seeing me enter.
Towards the end of my drinking era, several friends attempted to stage an intervention on my behalf. There is an expression in recovery that a “alcoholic will get you drunk before you get him sober,” and that sums up the intervention. We all drank. I am rarely a charismatic or convincing individual, but when I need to be …
These same friends, when we now go out to dinner, now order for me. They order a pitcher of whatever for themselves and order a Sprite for me. I can order it for myself, but it is a cool moment for all of us because, as secret as I wanted to keep my consumption years ago, it was no secret to them, and my sober life is no secret now. It is the best damn Sprite I have ever had. Each time.
I have a label—a “signature beverage”—a personal brand I can now enjoy.
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The WordPress Daily Prompt for August 21 asks, “If money were out of the equation, would you still work? If yes, why, and how much? If not, what would you do with your free time?” __________________________________
I have my final pay stub somewhere around here, detached long ago from the check whose sum it explained. It dates from late June 2010 and I should bronze it like a baby’s shoes.
As it is for me with many other aspects of a common American—well, not just American, human—life, my relationship with work is, um, not uncomplicated. Off the top of my head, from age 15 till 40 I held 14 different clock-punching jobs from almost as many employers, with a couple employers that hired me more than once. Not included in the list is the newspaper reporter job I quit via fax machine the morning of day one, because I really am a terrible employee and I guess I wanted to prove it quickly, and the one time I was paid for an acting gig (onstage with a cardboard box on my head and a ukelele in my hands—it was a little avant garde, and getting paid five bucks made it even more so).
Life for me for the last four years has been nothing but free time, however—yet I have never been quite so productive. I am the person for whom this question was written.
I have not been another person’s employee since the summer of 2010, when I was asked to leave my last job, which I had not enjoyed very much for three years and nine months, because I had not enjoyed it very much for three years and nine months too many. The manager and I decided that I no longer needed to consider him my boss and he no longer needed to consider himself my boss. On that much we agreed, so we parted company and even deleted each other from one another’s Facebook. It was that serious a firing.
The symptoms of my diagnosis had been prominent for most of the three years; I started walking with a cane in 2007. When the symptoms of adult spinal muscular atrophy first showed, they came suddenly. Only recently have I learned that this is a common experience among people with neurodegenerative diseases. When walking becomes difficult—in my case because the nerves that had been sending (ever dimmer) signals to my legs (which had started to atrophy from receiving ever dimmer signals and thus were not being asked to work)—the end of normal walking comes as if everything had been just fine one day and the next day as if one’s shoes had been nailed to the ground or one’s co-workers had painted the floor with superglue. (I must not have liked the job very much, if I thought such a prank was possible!) It is sudden and scary when the progression of deterioration is undetected and even undetectable until the day it is completely not.
Since my last job was not a high-paying one and did not offer free or simply less expensive health insurance, I had none. So I neither spoke with anyone about my developing deterioration, nor did anyone suggest I do so. But being suddenly unemployed (so very unemployed my boss had unfriended me, please recall) meant I could get poor people’s health insurance, Medicaid. (This is before the Affordable Health Care Act, which also has in fact benefited me.)
With Medicaid came the, “Hey, doc, what gives with my legs?” conversation, and, eventually, the answer(s). With the answers came Social Security Disability, which is my sole income as of right now. If I had had insurance at an earlier date, perhaps I would have received the diagnosis and declaration of disability earlier and been able to leave my last employer on better terms. Entertaining such hypotheticals is a highly un-useful pastime, I find.
My barber asked me recently, “What do you do?” And I replied, “I am a retiree.” As I have written elsewhere, I am an alcoholic in recovery, sober several years, and I am living “Mark’s Life, Version 2.0.” The universe has afforded me a second life (not the online virtual community, a real second life), and the opportunity is not being wasted. I am writing, every day, on a schedule of my own fashioning, speaking with and sometimes counseling people.
There are three jobs every person in recovery thinks of pursuing, as I certainly did: becoming a counselor (but the hours of training are arduous), becoming a truck driver (perhaps because a desire to escape partly fueled the addiction and does not leave), and, after being told by enough people, “You oughta write a book about your stories,” a writer. Luckily, I already was a writer.
From Elvis Costello’s 1983 album, Punch the Clock, “Everyday I Write the Book”:
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The WordPress Daily Prompt for August 13 asks, “When was the last time a movie, a book, or a television show left you cold despite all your friends (and/or all the critics) raving about it? What was it that made you go against the critical consensus?” __________________________________
De gustibus non est disputandum. Loosely translated this means, “There is no reason to argue about matters of taste.” There is no fighting over subjective personal likes or dislikes such as colors or sounds. You can not successfully argue me into liking certain smells. I can not punch you hard enough to like what strawberries taste like. Being ticklish or not being ticklish is not an example to offer in a friendly “nature v. nurture” debate.
Comedy does not fall under the “can’t argue (or explain) taste” category of conversations. It is not a subjective taste. At worst, comedy falls in the “agree to disagree” territory—when it fails to entertain or amuse or even offends. But “agree to disagree” is a phrase that at least implies an acceptance of the possibility that opinions can differ. At best, the discovery that you and a new acquaintance share a sense of humor can seal the deal on a friendship for life. I do not know if you find what follows funny, but if you do, consider us friends (if you do not, that is fine, too; it is simply that these 16 seconds might be the quickest way to determine if you and I are potential friends) (yes, I am exaggerating):
Comedy often offends. To a degree, all comedy is offensive, as it shakes up and toys with perceptions; if you do not find the “Fish-Slapping Dance” funny, it may be because you find the waste of intellectual effort offensive. Or perhaps fish jokes generally turn you right off. “How is this funny?” becomes the same question as “Why is this funny?” “Why is this on my screen?”
Usually, “How” and “Why” are not the same question, not even related. How a car functions (fuel, pistons, wheels, tires, go go go) is not the same question as why I am using it (to go buy more fuel to drive somewhere else … um, I may need to look into this vicious cycle). The “Fish-Slapping Dance” actually can be seen as a depiction of the “How is this funny?” conversation. Michael Palin, the “little fishes,” dances the question, and then John Cleese, the “big fish,” delivers the only possible retort. “It is or it is not.” Splash.
“Because it is” is sometimes the only reply, but someone who replies with this is merely saying “Because it is funny to me,” as if to say that one can not argue about taste. That is true, but funny is not a taste. (“Funny tastes” might be a future “Daily Prompt.”) One who says this is falling prey to the logical fallacy that if something is amusing to him or her, and he or she rhetorically concedes that while YOU may not find it amusing (thus covering both bases), you, the non-amused one, are wrong. Wrong. And then you may find them theorizing that you have something rigid intimately involved with your colon. “Agree to disagree!”
So whose perceptions ought to be offended? When can offense be something that even the offended party finds amusing? I do not know if there can be a “unified field theory of offensiveness.” Or comedy. Myself, I am not a fan of “cringe comedy,” television programs or films depicting socially awkward situations in which two parties are in conflict and one party resides in an obviously superior social strata, yet they are the aggrieved party, and we the audience are supposed to laugh at the supposed aggressor, who may simply be a character depicted “doing their job.”
When all the roles are depicted as equal, scenes of bullies getting their comeuppance or returning the comeuppance can be sublime:
Poor Edgar Kennedy! Poor Harpo! Poor Chico! And they are all bullies! All three take turns being the most creatively worst person. They kick each other and destroy hats for no reason other than that is what no one in these positions ever does. They are equals. The comedy lies in the dance of disaster that unfolds for no reason. This is not cringe comedy, as all three get some sympathy and a head shaking laugh. But cringe comedy would happily use this bit (and it goes on much longer through the film, the essential “Duck Soup,” from 1933) and not get what makes it funny. (Larry David would be Chico Marx and his bald Edgar Kennedy would be some anonymous barista.)
Comedy works for me when it presents someone punching up at someone else, at a bully, at someone or something in power. It never works, and it is more likely to offend me, when it is a matter of punching down at someone or something.
(But isn’t Chico Marx’s mock-Italian accent [he was French-Jewish, by way of Brooklyn] offensive? I could reply with the “you have to know the context” argument, that his act was a commonly seen one in the era, that really, Groucho was the only Marx brother with an act unlike any other seen in the era, but if you find the accent offensive in the here and now of 2014 because it is not 1933, I really have no reply. If it is offensive to you, then it is.)
We all are members of interest groups. I am white, half-Jewish, half-Baptist, tall and thin, an alcoholic in recovery, and have a disease that is disabling me. What is the difference between this:
The second image is from the “Fight Ataxia Project,” a website for those people diagnosed with one of the many forms of ataxia (I was diagnosed with Friedreich’s ataxia for a year) and for their loved ones and caregivers. It is one of several t-shirt logos that the group is selling. When one has a neuromuscular disease like ataxia or spinal muscular atrophy, one trips a lot and one falls down. The t-shirt is for people with such diseases. It exists to show that we can laugh at (at) ourselves. With ourselves.
The first image is a surprise. Not in itself; I have seen it before. It falls into the general territory of hard-hearted internet memes like, “every poor person is gaming the system and has a better cell phone than me,” or “look at these out-of-perfect-physical-shape shoppers at Walmart! They dress funny,” or “disabled people are faking it.” I can only speak for me, but I am poor and you probably have a nicer cell phone than I have, I shop at Walmart and hate it, and I am disabled and wish I was faking it. Why would I?
But I am my own interest group here, obviously. Of course, as a disabled person (not in a wheelchair, and I avoid the word “yet,” but … you know) that must be why I must be offended, right? Nope. Not that. My offense is from the combination of the “miracle meme” insult itself—but it’s not that insulting and I wouldn’t be posting this long post merely about this image—with the “you can’t argue about taste” attitude many took towards it when it was shared by George Takei on his Twitter account last week. (There is a must-read piece—after reading mine, of course—by Scott Jordan Harris in the August 13 issue of Slate.) Yes, that George Takei.
This George Takei:
The wonderful George Takei. The heroic George Takei whom everyone loves, including me. Who has in the past taken down internet memes from his vast social media network when he and his ghost writers have come under criticism for offending. He did not take this one down when disabled rights activists complained (obviously, as I was able to post it here), and wrote this response:
Fans get “offended” from time to time by my posts. There hardly is a day where something I put up doesn’t engender controversy. Concerned fans, worried the sky may fall, ask me to “take it down.”
So I’m also going to ask them also to take it down—a notch, please.
What? Because this internet meme is ironic (a handicapped person stands up to get a bottle of booze fro the top shelf), see, and I do not get the irony because I am too close to the issue. You can’t argue taste, after all.
But wait, George Takei’s argument seems to be that you can argue taste. Many of my posts court controversy, he says, and I receive complaints every day, some of which I respond to, but the complaints from the disabled and their advocates, well, those do not balance out the sheer comedy of the miraculous alcohol post. The complaints of the sensitive disabled (if anything, the disabled are pretty thick-skinned) fell on his deaf ears. Which is a handicap.
* * * * Added at 8:07 a.m., August 14: George Takei posted this on his Facebook page this morning:
I’ve just come back from an extended trip to England, and I came home to a large number of fan emails concerning a meme I shared more than a week ago. In that meme, a woman in a wheelchair was standing up to reach for a bottle of liquor in the store, and the caption said something about a miracle in the alcohol aisle. To this I added a quip about her being touched by the holy spirits.
I did not expect the level of offense this meme caused. I had naturally just thought of those movies where the evangelical preacher miraculously cures someone who was disabled. What I’d never really considered before so many fans wrote in is how that portrayal of disabled persons is filled with ignorance and prejudice—two things I never want to promote, even inadvertently.
Now, before all of you go and start defending my right to post what I want, I want first to thank the many fans who wrote in with the hopes of educating me on the question of “ableist” bias. While I did not ever mean to suggest by sharing the meme that all people in wheelchairs cannot walk, or that they don’t need them despite the fact that they can stand on their own from time to time, I have taken the fan mail and criticism to heart.
After I’d posted the meme, I noted in the comments an inordinate amount of very uncivil behavior on the part of many fans, including both those who demanded I take it down and those who said I should leave it up. I also received a good deal of email IN CAPITAL LETTERS asking me if I would feel the same way if someone called me FAG or a JAP. Now, I took down the meme from my timeline shortly after it went up, but I admit I was decidedly irked by the tenor of some of those criticizing me. In that moment, I posted a follow up telling fans that perhaps they should “take it down—a notch” which, in retrospect, was not the most sensitive response.
The fact that I was surprised by the response the wheelchair meme received indicates that I do indeed lack knowledge, and some sensitivity, over what is clearly a hot button issue, and that I and others can take this as an opportunity not to dig in, but rather to open up to the stories and experiences of those in the disabled community. I appreciate those who took the time to write in. I wish I’d had the chance to respond sooner, but until today I was not able to go through all the mail I’d received.
So to those who were hurt by my posts on this issue, I ask you please to accept this apology. To those who think I shouldn’t have to apologize, I want to remind you that I get to decide what I apologize for, so there’s no need to come to my defense.
Very well then, carry on, friends. Carry on.
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