Surfing Update:

I've surfed the last couple of days at Scotchmans. Thursday 3-5' with plus sets; Friday 1-3'. Both days I took out the 7'7" Becker. Surfed okay. Lots of good rights and lefts. I had a good conversation with Dan. He seems to know what I'm going through.

Gary Fischer is the perfect man. He succinctly stated his philosophy of life to me a couple of days ago: "Every day is a celebration." He's at Scotchman's everyday, surfing whatever Neptune gives him. Oh, and he cuts his own hair with the dog clippers.

Fahrenheit 911
Forget “The Passion” and “Spider Man 2,” this is the most important film you will see this year. Sadly, it will also be more polarizing than persuasive, due, in part, to what makes the film entertaining, Michael Moore’s snide sensibility.

As I watched the film I tried to find an argument, some sort of conclusion that would tie together all the images and claims that were flashing in front of me. On one level, Moore’s thesis is obvious: Bush must go. This claim is made explicit in a letter a young serviceman wrote to his mother shortly before he was KIA in Iraq. (He wrote that we needed to vote “that fool,” i.e., Dubya, out.) But there are a number of ways this argument could be made, so I was left wondering what principle was organizing the particular set of images presented in the film. The answer came at the end of the film when Moore quoted an extended passage from George Orwell’s 1984. Hearing that text the film came together for me. Moore is arguing that George W. Bush’s administration is Orwellian. In fact, they almost seem to be intentionally using Orwell’s novel as their playbook.

But, of course, they are not taking their directions of Orwell’s novel. If I were to point to a weakness in this film, it would be Moore’s tendency to simplify. In his story, everyone in the Whitehouse is driven by money. I suspect he is mostly right, but Bush, Cheney, et al are far more complex than that, and so is the war in Iraq, the “war” on terrorism, and the U.S. economy. For example, I have no doubts that the Bush-Cheney profiteering is tinged with a kind of patriotism, buoyed by their belief that they know what is best for us, and for the world, even if, in the end, their utopia seems dystopic to me, what’s good for big business is good for America, maybe even the world. But of course, my optimistic view of Bush is now grounded in any real evidence, but rather in my inability to believe that real people, Americans, elected officials, could, so cynically, hijack the country and murder thousands of Iraqis just to line their already-too-full pockets. I could be wrong. No doubt there were many people just like me living in Germany in 1938, and they were wrong, just as I may be today.

But the film does a lot to bolster its surface-level claim: Bush must go. I believe this wholeheartedly, and I’m no ideologically-driven liberal. In fact, I’m no ideologue at all. I’m the only person I know who voted both for Ronald Reagan and Ralph Nader. I’m the only person I know who voted for George H.W. Bush—twice—but would vote for anyone but Dubya. Truth be told, I hate both the political parties. I don’t think the Democrats can “save” us, and I resent a lot of their proposals. But, and here I repeat, Dubya must go.

After the 2000 “election,” and I now use that term loosely, I wasn’t particularly upset that Bush won. I figured it was a toss-up between having to listen to Gore’s condescending lectures for four years, ot to Bush’s moronic stuttering, and so, we got “President Dumberer,” but who cares? But, after 9-11, it became apparent to me that (a) we could not afford to have an imbecile in the White House, and (b) Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld and company were going to use this event to . . . well, to steal our freedoms, line their pockets, and destroy the lower classes in this country.

Come to think of it, I guess Moore wasn’t simplifying after all.

Film Review: “Saved!” and “Last Tango in Paris”
On the surface it wouldn’t seem like these two films would have much in common. One, “Saved!,” is a portrayal of life in a Christian High School; the other, “Last Tango in Paris,” explores an affair between a 20-year-old French woman and a forty-five-year-old American who engage in anonymous sex in the middle of Paris. But they both have a lot in common, including the fact that I find myself defending both of them against their detractors.

Obviously, they both explore our relationship to our own sexuality. In “Last Tango in Paris” Paul (Marlon Brando) and Jeanne (Maria Schneider) act, almost instantly, on their sexual attraction, which they explore in an almost-empty apartment over several days as Paul waits for his wife’s funeral and Jeanne waits for her wedding. The film was banned in Italy when it was first released in 1972, and received in a “X” rating in many regions. Today, the uncut version is branded as NC-17, but, if you came to this film, as I did, in the new millennium, the rating will seem odd. It’s not nearly as explicit as is a film like “American Pie” or “Road Trip,” but it is more powerfully sexual because of it refusal to fall into conventional ways of depicting sex on film. In true pornography, the sex acts are “real” but simulated. I mean, who, besides Paris Hilton, makes love in such a staged manner? In “Last Tango in Paris” the sex is simulated, but “real.” There is no romantic music in the background, no fading to black on a slow-burning candle, and no awkward scenes of a vibrating night-stand. Instead, we see two people groping and grabbing and . . . well, and having sex. The approach is summed up in the famous scene where Jeanne, sitting nude, facing a nude Paul, suggests, “try to come without touching.” They can’t, and that is the point. We need to touch each other, and we get the sense that sex for Paul and Jeanne is not about trying to fit some idealized, we might say, “cinematic” image of sex, it is not about procreation, and it is, I think, definitely not about trying to depict love by portraying physical intimacy. Whatever sex does for Paul and Jeanne it does not translate to us. We can’t come without touching.

In “Saved!” the notion that Christians are sexaphobic hardly needs stating. The film does, however, provide us with a twist on this theme. Mary (Jena Malone) attempts to use sex, in this case heterosexual sex, to “cure” her boyfriend, Dean (Chad Faust), by sleeping with him. This one sex act fulfills its biological imperative, leaving Mary pregnant and alone as Dean is shipped off to Mercy-House for “de-gayification.” But the more interesting relationship develops between Mary’s mother, Lillian, portrayed by one of the most sincerely sexual actresses of our generation, Mary Louise-Parker, and Pastor Skip (Martin Donovan), who is also the school principal. Skip and his wife are separated, but he refuses to get divorced, because that is not “part of God’s plan,” and Lillian is a widow, who obviously longs for something more from Skip. They refuse to pursue a physical relationship, denying what they both want, because their Christian convictions deny them this. But, eventually, they relent, and Skip feels this disqualifies both Lillian and him from adequately caring for the pregnant, and obviously sinful, Mary. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for Skip. His marriage has failed, but his convictions condemn him to be alone, and though he is falling in love with Lillian, he can’t touch her, and he “can’t come without touching.”

But these films also explore the ways in which love not only makes us blind, it makes us believe that our hopes for those we love must be their hopes, and in the process we end up squashing them. In “Saved!,” Mary puts this succinctly: “If God’s wants us all to be the same, why did he make us all different?” A simple observation, but one missed by most religious fundamentalists. Similarly, the non-religious Tom (Jean-Pierre Leaud) in “Last Tango” is “in love” with Jeanne, and he’s making a film about her. It’s not hard to figure out why Jeanne needs Paul when Tom is, before our very eyes, trying to turn the object of his love, Jeanne, into his own (in this case, cinematic) creation. Tom follows Jeanne around, interviews her, and asks her all the right questions, but we get the sense that this process reveals less to us about Jeanne than does the anonymous space created for her by Paul. Sure, we realize that Paul is motivated by his intense pain. We know this from the opening scene where we see him screaming at the train. But there is an honesty to this neediness that Tom does not bring to their relationship.

This is what I found in evangelical Christianity. I found a lover who only wanted the best for me. I found a lover who was genuinely interested in me, but this interest was part of larger project of conversion, converting me into a “good Christian,” and “Saved!” is, essentially, peopled with “good Christians.” Satirizing the hypocrisy of this goodness is where all the humor comes from. If you’ve seen Mandy Moore or Jena Malone out promoting the film, you’ve seen the exorcism scene where Moore’s character, Hilary Faye, shouts at Mary, “I am full of love” as she throws a Bible at Mary. There’s also the line where the two skeptics, Roland (Macaulay Culkin) and Cassandra (Eva Amurri), spot Mary coming out of Planned Parenthood. When Cassandra claims there’s only one reason a Christian girl would be near Planned Parenthood, Roland responds, “planting a pipe-bomb?” But there is more for those of us who have spent our lives in this culture. There is Pastor Skip’s attempt to be relevant, “Are you kids down with G-O-D?” and Lillian’s snug Christian bubble (she wants to be Christian Interior Decorator of the Year), and the classes, the chapels, the worship band, the shallow piety, all rang true for me.

Of course, other people who also know this subculture as well as I do, disagree. My sister was not much impressed with this film. Neither was my friend, Susan, who suspected, contrary to fact, that the writer was clearly “not an insider.” But I thought the the film’s evangelical world was nicely drawn. For twenty years of my life, I was Hilary Faye! Almost every youth worker I know IS Pastor Skip. I enjoyed the satire. It was delicious.

But there’s another more serious criticism leveled against the film by evangelicals. Todd Hertz, film reviewer for Christianity Today, complained that the film didn’t show any loving evangelical Christians. I disagree. Hilary Faye is a loving evangelical Christian. She sacrifices a lot of time and energy to try to help others. She organizes a prayer meeting to pray for Dean’s de-gayification. She labors over and over again to convert Cassandra to Christianity, and isn’t that what she should do if she believes Cassandra is bound for hell? I respect Todd Hertz, but if he met Hilary Faye, or me, or someone like us, we would be the loving evangelical Christians he claims the film is missing.

This is the problem: evangelicalism is loving. Why do you think they spend all that money and time trying to convert people? They are saving souls from hell. Why do you think they spend so much time, effort, and cash on things like Promise Keepers and Second-Chance Virginity (both lampooned in “Saved!”)? It is because they do love people. They love people more than most liberal Christians I know. But they love from a place of absolute rightness and righteousness. I know Mr. Hertz, you’ll claim you don’t have all the answers . . . but you do, don’t you? Truth be told, I think most of your answers seem right to me, too. The problem is that your absolute rightness gives you the right to love us all into being “good Christians.” No wonder so many of us have wandered off to crummy apartments with strangers. Don’t you realize you can’t make us come without touching us, really, truly touching us?

Surfing Update. Scotchman's, 4-6' with plus sets. Best I've surfed in weeks. I took out the 7'7" Becker so I could put it to this little posse of thrashers that paddled out right before I did. Rights and lefts held up until the tide started to rise, then it started heaving on the inside. Toward the end of my session, I took every right on the head.

It was good to finally feel like I wasn't surfing like crap, even if it was on a 7 foot board. I was going to celebrate getting my grades done, but . . . well, I guess that counts. I want to take myself out to lunch at Thaifoon, but I feel pathetic eating alone there.

There are no movies that I really want to see right now. Dodge Ball? Ugghhh. Maybe it's better than it looks. Stepford Wives was flat. I guess it was supposed to be a dark comedy, but it wasn't that dark or funny, and are we really in the exact same place as we were in the 1950's? The ending, not to give anything away, maybe addresses this problem by suggesting that we long for the safer era of the 1950's, but I don't long for that at all. I dream of Tyler Durden's world.



Oh well.

Grades In . . . Lights Out
I finally got my grades in. It was really hard to get the research papers graded. I could tell that a lot of my students had put a lot of effort into the research, but the problem is always to find something—something original—to say.

Unfortunately, I’m in the same boat. I’ve been having such a hard time finding time to write these days. I essentially decided I would take a week or so off while I tried to get some grading done. Luckily I had just finished the first draft of my latest screenplay (attempt), so I didn’t have to leave in the middle of the story, but I feel really bad about going so long without any real writing. I haven’t done any morning pages. Not much in this blog. I didn’t even do my Love of Mike Article for this month. I’m just out of ideas.

So I have the same problem as so many of my students: lots of information, but nothing to say. I need to spend time with my computer in order to keep my voice going. If I’m ever going to change my life, writing is the only way I can do it. It seems clear to me now that I will never get a tenure-track job, and teaching, and reading, and writing, is really all I’m good at. Unfortunately, I have no way to make a living at this. I’ve read a couple of books on freelance copy-writing, but I don’t have time to build a business like that. Maybe, I can get to it this summer, but is that the best way to spend my time? Short stories, memoirs, even “literary-journalism,’ doesn’t really pay well. Screenplays pay, but it’s really hard to get anyone to read your work, and even if they do, to get someone to put up the enormous amount of cash to buy a screenplay and get it into production makes it a really, really tough market. Or should it be all academic writing—a couple of articles, some book reviews—in one last-ditch effort to get one of those plum $35k/year jobs?

Our rector was also looking for something to say. I had a longish conversation with him today about my suicidal blog entry. He wants so much to help, but I’m so beyond help. Everyone at Saint Michael’s is so supportive, but I don’t feel like they know me, after all, I’m never really myself there, I’m always trying to figure out what kind of person I need to be to function in my various roles. I’m certainly never what you would call, “relaxed,” except, maybe, when I’m “preaching,” because then, in that space, I’m trying hard to be authentic, and so the “real” me comes out.

Ironically, I’m more myself with my students at UCI than at church. This is ironic, because I always claim that teaching is a performance, and yet, I don’t perform when I’m in the classroom, I feel more like I’m just putting myself out there. I’m not sure why I do this with my students. In part, they draw me out. There is something so beautiful about their youth, energy, and optimism that attract me. But they also have a kind of aloof cynicism that appeals to me. They are so open to everything. They are still trying to figure things out, and they still seem to believe in the importance of figuring things out. And that is where I am, both in the classroom, and the pulpit, somebody trying to figure things out. That is when I feel most myself.

Of course, I also share with them a sense of irony. The WWII generation doesn’t share it with me. I wore my “Free Wynona (Ryder)” T-shirt to the men’s breakfast last week. They didn’t get it. “Why do you care so much about freeing a shoplifter?” Baby-boomers get the joke, but they aren’t ironic, either. They are earnest. I think I don’t relate t o a lot of my peers at the university because, thought they are Gen-Xers, they have adopted/emulated our professor’s sincerity: “Oh, my observations on Baudelaire are going to change the world!” So irony is missed on them, too. I can forgive this lack of irony in the WWII’ers, because it seems so good natured in them, but in the boomers, whether Clinton or Dubya, it seems repulsive. They all know just what everyone else should be doing and thinking, and they never tire of telling us about that time they marched in Tuscaloosa, or D.C., or Berkeley. “Good job, Boomers, your world has really turned out great.”

But my students, most of them, aren’t really there. Sure, they mimic their professors’ liberal self-righteous outrage, but, like me, I think, their outrage is personal, not political. They . . . we. . . personalize the world’s problems. The plight of the Palestinians seems less import than the plight of our friends, some of whom are Palestinians.

I am a cliché in this regard. I’m completely without principles. I’m the only person I know who voted for Ronald Reagan and Ralph Nader. I voted for George H.W. Bush-twice—but when it comes to “Dubya,” I’m “anyone but . . .” I’d like to see Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore face-off . . . in a pie-eating contest, or hot-dogs, as long as their mouths are full. Neither one of them ever seems to run out of things to say.

My Suicide . . . Then and Now.

I was feeling so low last night that even though I still had a pile of research papers to finish grading I to go surfing. So I did; for about 45 minutes. I went to Scotchman’s, 1-3ft. and bumpy on a tide that was a bit too high for such a weak swell. Still, it was fun. Sammy was there, freaking me out with his fish-breath and long whiskers. I think he lifts that fin out of the water on purpose, pretending he’s a shark. It was good. I managed to connect a few all the way to the shore, but I had to go before I really got all the demons exorcised, and they are still with me.

That morning our Men’s Breakfast Group at church finished our discussion of Viktor Frankl’s Modern Man’s Search for Meaning. We were discussing Frankl’s Logotherapy, and I revealed a bit too much about myself and my current trauma. One of the men asked if I was “suicidal.” I brushed this off, protesting that I could never do that to my kids.

But, of course, I am suicidal. But I’ve been suicidal before, and I’m still here, more evidence of my inability to see a project through to its conclusion.

I was “really” suicidal when I was seventeen. I was filled with self-loathing and I thought about killing myself almost every day. I would sit in the bathroom with a knife in my hand wondering if I could just slit my wrists and see what would happen. But then, as now, concerns over the effect this would have on others prompted me to stay alive. This seems different than what some suicide-attempters tell me—that they believe everyone would be better off without them—so perhaps, even then, I was unusual.

That self-loathing, and those suicidal tendencies seem like they could be treated with the kind of psychology Freud and Adler proposed. As Frankl characterizes their approaches, Freud and Adler seek the etiology of a neurosis, and seek, by uncovering it, to help the patient overcome it. When I was seventeen I loathed myself because I felt my father loathed me. I felt my religious leaders loathed me. I adopted their perspective of me and chose to join them in hating me. It was the hopelessness of ever being able to live up to those expectations that drove me to want to kill myself.

But now my suicidal tendencies are different. Clearly, the most central emotion in my life is self-hatred. I hate myself. I want to harm myself. At least two dozen times a day I feel like, and visualize, taking a red-hot poker and jamming it through my eye. In my imagination I sink it into my brain which melts and flows out my ears and nose. This is my most real, my most visceral, and my most abiding desire. And I do think about killing myself. I think about it every day. I’ve been thinking about it every day for at least two years—ever since I decided to pursue ordination—and I suspect I will think about it every day as long as I’m working in a church. But now, unlike when I was seventeen, I know that I will not do it. I love my children and I know killing myself would harm them so much that I could never bring myself to do it.

And here the differences between my teen-suicide obsession and my current self-destructive fantasies become more pronounced. If I didn’t have children, I wouldn’t kill myself, because then I could just escape my life. I could quite my job at the church and resume living the kind of life I want to live. I could start doing the things I want to do. I could read poetry again. I could read magazines again. I could listen to music again. I could go camping and hiking and swimming with my kids again . . . oh wait, I don’t have kids in this fantasy. But I can’t do any of those things any more. I have ruined my life, and that is why I think about ending it every day.

Don’t misunderstand me. It is not my kids which motivate my despair; it’s my job, my situation, my identity, that motivates it. If I could leave my job, I wouldn’t be so depressed, but because I have all these kids, I can’t leave my job.

When I worked construction we talked about having some “fuck-you money” stowed away. Fuck-you money is money you keep so that if the boss, or the landlord, or the neighbors get to be too much, you can say, “fuck you” and take off. I have money in the bank, but not nearly enough for a man with four kids to be able to say “fuck you” to anyone, so I swallow it all. I say as little as possible. I choke on my words. I suppress all my feelings.

I also hate myself in a different way now. When I was seventeen I hated myself because I believed I was hate-able. But now I hate myself because I believe in my potential and worth, and I believe I have betrayed all that. Instead of taking a low-paying, but career-building job at the University of Nevada, I took the job at Saint Michael & All Angels and ruined my career. What’s worse, this was clearly an act of self-betrayal, even at the time. When they first offered me the job, even the thought of saying, “yes” to Saint Michael’s made stomach wind up in knots. I knew, my stomach knew, that I was not the right person for the job. I knew, from my experience working in churches, that this kind of job would kill me. I knew it, but for a more comfortable salary—a salary no longer even that comfortable—I betrayed myself, my career, my desires, and my ambitions. I ruined my life.

I certainly wasted it. I wasted all the time, effort, and money I (actually, my wife and I) had put into my education. Nine years of graduate school flushed down the toilet. Now, five years later, no university will touch me. I’m the fucking idiot who’s finished his dissertation five years ago and has, in the words of one of my former teachers, “been teaching Sunday School” for five years. Nobody wants me, and they are right not to want me. I have not kept up with my field the way I should have, and I have published very little. Plus, and I don’t know if anybody can tell, but I am getting stupider and stupider with every month. I’ve been working at Saint Michael & All Angles for sixty months now, and if I’ve just lost one I.Q. point per month, imagine how stupid I am now.

And I continue to betray myself. Since my friend, and assistant, Sam left, I am not myself around anyone. I cannot be myself. I am not even sure who or what that self would be anymore. I don’t do anything that I find interesting or meaningful. I just go through the motions.

I know, all jobs have a down side, and most are rather boring, and believe me, I have had plenty of them, but they are not like this. When you work for a church you are not just doing a job, you are being a person. Yes, in this day and age, you are seen as a service-provider, but you are never just evaluated on the service you provide, you are always forced to be a certain kind of person. Plus, you have to take this job home with you. You have to fret and worry about it.

Besides, do I have to justify the feeling in my stomach? I’m not exaggerating. I feel nauseous every time I drive towards the church. Saturdays are horrible, even worse than Sundays. I wake up Saturday morning feeling ill. I feel like I’m being smothered. By 8:00 p.m. Saturday night I can hardly breathe. Sunday is coming. Sunday is descending on me like some flesh-eating virus.

My “supporters” wonder why I can’t just get ordained and be happy with this work, but I don’t see any of them lining up. The thought of being an ordained minister makes me want to scream. Sometimes I do scream when I think about it, when I’m alone, when I’m where nobody will hear, I scream, and scream. Driving to my seminary class last fall I would scream in the car. I would scream on the way there, and scream on the way home. Does anybody care that this is not the kind of person I want to be? Does anybody care? Apparently not. This is the only job for which I can find employment, the one job that disgusts me the most.

It’s not just the complainers. Saint Michael’s has few of them. Barbara thinks this is all about some vile woman who called me up and chewed me out last Sunday, but it’s not. I know this particular woman is vile, and I evaluate her comments as coming from a vile person. No, it’s not the people. THE PEOPLE AND SAINT MICHAEL & ALL ANGLES ARE WONDERFUL.

No, it’s that I hate everything I do. I don’t feel like the church is really benefiting from me. I don’t feel good about them paying for it. Sure I work hard, but nothing I do there makes any real difference. Yet, if I quit, I won’t be able to pay my rent, and then I’d really hate myself for betraying my family.

So I betray myself.

Now, I’ll tell you a really sick secret. I can tell you, because you are not reading this. Nobody would read such a long blog entry if it wasn’t full of either sex, or right-wing diatribes. Still, I write it here instead of in my journal, because it is possible that it might be read, even though it won't, and so, somehow, this makes it feel like a prayer. Here it goes. . .

Wednesday night, after another soul-crushing (only for me) church event—a dinner for the children’s choir (maybe I’ll tell you later why it was so soul-crushing for me)—I was really filled with self-hatred, images of hot pokers plunging into my skull filled my imagination. My solution? I pulled an exacto-knife out and a lighter, and “sterilized” the blade. Then I made several, seven to be exact, incisions in my left forearm. The pain, the blood, brought me some real relief. Yes, I know, cutting yourself is so adolescent-girl-interrupted-chic . . . a total cliché, but . . .it worked! It not only helped my emotional intensity level drop enough so that I could grade some papers and get some sleep, it sustained me through most of Thursday. My arm hurt all day yesterday, and I didn’t feel like bashing my face in with a brick until about 4:00 p.m.

And now you know why, by 5:00 p.m. yesterday, I just had to go surfing, even in such crummy conditions.

Top Ten Movies (as of today)

1. The Hours
2. Fight Club
3. 8 ½
4. 12 Monkeys
5. American Beauty
6. Blade Runner
7. Breakfast Club
8. Singles
9. Crimes and Misdemeanors
10. Last Tango in Paris

When I was Ronald Reagan

I remember when I was Ronald Reagan. It was October, 1980, the beginning of my senior year in high school. We were staging a mock political debate and election. I was assigned the part of Ronald Reagan; my friend Amy was Jimmy Carter. We each spent a week reviewing press clippings and speeches, trying to get our candidate’s message down, and then we were featured in a special school assembly: a mock presidential debate.

Amy had studied hard. She had familiarized herself with all the complexities of energy policy, the Middle-East peace process, the nature of the new regime in Iran, plans for the emergence of a stronger European Union, and possible reforms in education. I found that I was mostly mastering slogans about smaller government, lower taxes, and the evils of communism.

On the day of the actual debate I spouted my, or rather Reagan’s, slogans, and Amy patiently attempted to engage in a substantive discussion of the issues. The problem was that every time I spouted one of my optimistic slogans, the rowdy crowd of teenagers cheered wildly, while Amy’s more substantive arguments were greeted with either silence or jeers.

I felt sorry Amy, who was, I could clearly see, almost reduced to tears by the other kids’ reaction to her points, and I felt a little guilty at how easily I had won over the crowd. But I could understand my classmates’ feelings. We had grown up watching our planes bomb jungles in Southeast Asia, and our older siblings and cousins throw rocks at police. We had helped our parents push their cars through gasoline lines. Like Amy Carter, we had worried about what seemed like an inevitable nuclear war and unlike the Baby-Boomers, we now knew hiding under our desks in the likely event of a nuclear attack would be useless. We had watched Olympic athletes murdered just because they were Jewish, and another group of athletes denied the right to compete because our politicians wanted to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. We had seen our embassy in Tehran fall to what seemed like a group of maniacs . . . and, of course, there was disco, but I digress.

With all this going on, it was hard not to love this grandfatherly candidate, so unlike our worried parents, who promised that he, no, we, could make things better. Of course, I couldn’t vote in the 1980 election, but I could in 1984, and I voted, with enthusiasm, for Ronald Reagan.

But that was the last time I ever felt good when casting a vote for president. In 2000 I voted for Nader, but that was clearly a “who-cares?” vote, and this year I will join the ranks of the “anyone-but” crowd. But in 1980, politics seemed so different. We had two candidates with clear differences, but who were clearly sincere. You got the sense that neither candidate was carefully, we might even say, “cynically,” choosing their words to gain political advantage. Faced with an energy crisis and grave political problems in the Middle-East, President Carter told us to turn our thermostats down and put on a sweater. What could be more sincere than that? And Ronald Reagan’s optimism seemed similarly genuine and heartfelt; he believed in America.

Since 1984 my political views have changed drastically, and typical of many Gen-X-ers, my cynicism toward, and detachment from the political process has grown. But this week, remembering Ronald Reagan, I felt a new sensation: nostalgia. I longed to hear a political message I could believe. I wondered if it’s just me that’s changed, or if somehow the heart has gone completely out of politics. I was nostalgic for an optimistic message that seemed to be genuinely aimed at buoying my spirit rather than just shoring up some politician’s political base. I was even nostalgic for a politician who would dare to tell me that if I’m cold, I should put on sweater before wasting fuel. But I guess I was mostly nostalgic for that grandfatherly voice that could always make me believe that we could, if we only we would, make things better.

Surfing Update:

Sunday, May 30th, Lowers. 4-6 ft. with some plus sets. Used the 6'10" hybrid. There was a bump on the water, but clearly this was the funnest day I've had in a long time. The crowd wasn't that heavy for Trestles, but it was heavy enough that I didn't get every wave I wanted. Still, I always feel great when I surf there. Nothing like perfect, long rights to make you feel like a world-class schredder.

Tuesday, June 1, Scotchman's. Weak 1-3ft. S. and 2-3 W. Used the 6'10" hybrid. Lots of paddling for pretty small waves, but lots of fun on the low tide rollers. West was a tease, jacking on the boil, but backing off 'til the beach. The south was inconsistent, but fun when a set would roll in.