OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2002
FOX AND FRIENDS
     Alan Colmes enters his dressing room and sits before a lighted mirror. He begins to shave off his eyebrows. Greta Van Susteren enters wearing a bath robe.
     "Rupert is giving me a raise," she says. "He liked the work I did on the sniper."
     "Shut up," he winces, as the electric razor snags. "Shit!"
     "You don't have to keep putting yourself through this," she says massaging his shoulders.
     "Someone has to be the idiot, Greta. I'm just not thrilled about it."
     "Well, from an acting stand point you're the best in the business. And it's working. People haven't had this much contempt for Democrats since Gary Hart. And I think you look sexy."
     "Please."
     "I'm just trying to help."
     Colmes applies dark makeup to accentuate the hollows of his cheeks. "I think Hannity is taking his role too seriously. He snubs me in the green room. That Nathan Lane wannabe. I can't take it."
     "It will all be worth it, baby. Don't worry."
     Colmes removes his normal glasses and picks up the unflattering pair left on the dresser by the wardrobe department. He turns them over in his hands. "Once The Company rules the world, they'll make us beautiful again, right?"
     Greta hugs him from behind and gazes neutrally into the mirror. "Of course they will, sweetheart. Of course they will."
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     The night after I wrote about hating retro and getting on with my life, I spent two hours with a friend of mine discussing the situational orientation of different sit-coms. That's the direction in which the situation penetrates the front door and converges on the actors. We were watching Bob Newhart and Jeffrie pointed out that the door is on the left in Bob's apartment and the situation moves from left to right, as opposed to The Jeffersons which moves from right to left. We ended up with four categories, actually five. I don't remember the show that well, but Jeffrie contends that in Chico and the Man, situations just materialized in the center of the set. Otherwise, there was the obvious right (All In the Family, Simpsons), the obvious left (Good Times, That's My Momma, Sanford and Son {This became known as the "ghetto-left." The door moves to the right once an African American character/family has "moved on up" or allied themselves with an upper middle class white family--Different Strokes or Gimme' a Break}), the central hallway entrance with a jail-cell or other cage to the right (Taxi, Barney Miller, Carter Country), and the door directly behind the couch or main conversational area (Home Improvement, Seinfeld, Three's Company {though Three's Company's door was slightly to the right})
     There were a few anomalies. We couldn't remember Benson (though I think it was left to right) And we disqualified shows like Family Ties for which the situations emerged in equal measure from both the front and back doors. Also, sit-coms which were shot and edited like "short films" such as Malcolm in the Middle, Mash or Scrubs, were not considered.
     I decided that my house moves from left to right, if I ever acquire a wacky neighbor who regularly bursts through the door with hair-brained schemes, though his back will always be to the camera since the couch is against a wall. For my house to work as a show, it looks like the action will have to take place in the kitchen where I will stutter and speak in double entendres while pouring drinks, doing dishes or unpacking groceries.

SEPTEMBER 2002
REMEMBERING 911
     I listened to the radio most of the morning, not NPR but the college station. They had a memorial service.
    The television, blank and inert, may as well have been a foreign enemy or sleeper cell. If I didn't give it an opportunity, it couldn't take advantage of one. At 10:30 or so, we stared each other down. I won.
     In the afternoon, I drove around town and college students heedlessly crossed the path of my car like it was a prop in a haunted house which would reliably stop short in the nick of time.
     Deciding that large groups of  people were not going to behave the way I  wanted them to, I went home and spackled the attic wall (Literally, that's not a euphemism.)
      By prime time, I broke down and turned on the tv. Bill Clinton was on Letterman, articulate and all-knowing. I had forgotten how smart he was. It really shines through when he's not in charge of anything and isn't fielding blow job queries. I wished he was still president.
     I thought about Bush speaking in front of Ellis Island,  about all of the "resolve." Every time he says that I imagine Resolve Carpet Cleaner--that he's going to lift a can of it from behind the podium and spray foam in the faces of evildoers. "They underestimated our economy-size Resolve. Look at the size of it. It's the biggest Resolve ever made...Resolve."
     When all was said and done, the closure was surprisingly thorough. As if the country had been waiting all this time to reclaim that particular square on the calendar, to take 911 back from Al Qaeda and our own media leviathans.
     But IT (The media and administration's mystical manipulation of Sept 11th which had been holding us by the psychic short hairs for the past 365 days) did not want to leave. It struggled to maintain control, manifesting itself in hurricane winds, its eyes changing from yellow to orange, its hand getting under us, suggesting that it could flip the continent like an omelet.
      Then, all of a sudden, it withered like the rainbow stripe down a television screen where the "taped" and "taped-over" meet, coughing one last omen through the New York Lottery-- Three little numbers, returned to their rightful owners, as we mark an X through September 11th.
      I went to bed, drunk, but feeling like I'd just lived through one of the most unexpectedly pleasant days of my life. (Being unemployed helped)
     When people ask me about 9/11, I hope I remember this very peaceful day in 2002. It was a good one. I miss it.
     Of course, closure doesn't come without a price. September 12th was like the grand re-opening of We're-still-a-bunch-of-dicks-land. I was still unemployed and average folks were walking tall again, letting doors slam in the faces of their neighbors, giving each other the finger, gunning their engines, throwing water bottles over their shoulders, and dumping appliances into the ocean. Everyone seems to believe they've dodged a final bullet.
     Bush entered the U.N. looking like a wronged and skittish school lad in that oversized chair, then listed his grievances about Iraq whose representatives stoically lounged in their cubbyhole, chewing gum like the Lords of Flatbush.
     Those guys couldn't have looked any shadier. I think they were gambling and handing suspicious little brown bags to other countries when the camera cut away.
     And the U.N. looked ridiculous. Once again the world, deliberating its fate, does so looking like a branch of Junior Achievement that has quietly assassinated its adult advisors, dressed up in their clothing and taken over the universe. Or even worse, like the VMAs, what with the profound camera cuts between enemies: Israel and Palestine or Bush and Iraq. You get the impression that If they had seated everyone a certain way there would have been slap fights and spit-balls; Sharon calling Arafat a little girl. ("Yeah, keep booin'...") Bush mistaking the microphone for an "excellent guy of the millennium award."

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QUAIL DREAM I HAD
I dreamt I was riding an ATV down a bumpy, weed-cracked sidewalk, jumping over thick tree-roots and bouncing into dusty gutters.
The street was, by some forgotten landmark, recognizable as the one on which I was born, and I stopped in front of the neighbor's house to look at this "quail."
One of its wings was caught up inside of the door screen and the other one flapped wildly as it noiselessly clapped like a moth. But what drew my attention was this other quail which was in fact the size of an emu, and with a long, interrogative, shaggy, prehistoric neck. (Like the Pipsquack or Richard Ashcroft.)
Lying In the neighbors' driveway was what appeared to be a dead guinea pig. I dismounted and took a closer look.
That's when a woman and her niece came out of the house. They in no way resemble the people who actually live there now, but my dream had cast others--a little girl, and her baby-sitting aunt, who ran out of the house to interrogate me. The aunt looked like Sandy Duncan and may have been carrying a golf club. The niece stood behind the her, clutching her denim skirt
I said "Have you seen this?"
"I've got friends coming, and the police will be here at any moment."
"But I'm your neighbors' son," I said, spelling my last name.
"Bullshit! You look like a criminal."
"But I'm not."
"Well then how do you explain this!?" She shot out her arm to indicate the guinea pig carcass. The niece began to cry.
"The quail did it," I said.
And just like that, we were at the top of my parents' driveway, (next door) loading up a hand-truck with abandoned containers of what I believed to be the byproducts of agricultural bioengineering--small cardboard barrels with stains on them. (It made sense in the dream.)
As we were doing this, quail of every size and mutation gathered at the foot of the driveway. My thoughts ranged from "God help us all!" to "These birds are making me hungry."
Two quail, which had been genetically modified to grow into little walking advertisements, hobbled toward us. They were shaped like freestanding rectangular cigarette ads you see at gas stations, but with organic feet and tiny vestigial heads that were barely visible. Printed across one of them, in nearly perfect Franklin Gothic fonts inked by blue luminescent down, were the words EAT MORE FAT.
As the woman, her niece and I regarded the words, the tiny vestigial head screeched "Eat more fat!"
I understood that these modified breeds of quail were created to advertise products or suggest lifestyle choices to quail farmers; that one in a hundred quail would grow into a disposable advertisements-- like the first Polaroid in a cartridge actually being a coupon for more film.
Surely, this was the end of the world. The three of us descended the driveway, hand truck in tow, gently nudging the freakish quail with the insteps of our shoes.
I looked back at the cart of stuff, just as a ten gallon bottle of Chanel #5 rolled onto the driveway and creacked open, startling the aunt, the hundreds of quail and myself.
We all jumped.
The perfume spilled out and sluiced down the driveway to fill the cracks in the sidewalk and pool near the storm drain.
"Is this stuff expensive?" I asked.
"I'll say," answered the aunt.

And that's when I woke up.

Honestly, I don't even know what a quail is

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