Fatherhood

This is either a great picture of modern day fatherhood or the next billboard for Rev. Stuckley's Abstinence Only Crusade:

Okay, so what's going on here:

That is me and my youngest, Rosalyn, at the Buffalo Wild Wings in Newport News, VA.  With one hand I am trying to eat my spicy garlic buffalo wings, with the other hand I am trying to hold Rosalyn and tear off pieces of Naan bread for her to eat to keep her from crying (she had only napped for 1 hour 20 minutes all day and was very tired -- for this reason she refused to sit in her high chair and thus I am trying to balance her in my lap in addition to everything else).  I had to be very careful to make sure none of the spicy garlic sauce got onto the Naan bread, which wasn't too spicy but probably bad enough to make her rather uncomfortable.

Rosalyn and Elizabeth are great, wonderful, usually very well behaved and easy kids.  Yet I often remark, as we hustle and bustle our two kids (only two!) from one place to another and soothe, feed, cajole, support, and teach them, that our mere presence in such and such a place is probably one of the best advertisements for birth control there can be.  Perhaps tonight the young people at the table next to us, whose buzz was seriously harshed while my daughter cried out in indignation to the fuss fuss gods, will take the extra time to wrap it up or block it up or do whatever the hell it is that young people do these days with it to keep it from happening while it is being done.

I live to serve.    

Well, it was not to be.

About a week ago Condi and I were sharing a bland breakfast of bran flakes and coffee when our conversation shifted from issues geo-political to football.

Ms. Rice is, of course, on a committee of what must be a thousand people who have been tasked with deciding which four teams are the best in college football and therefore worthy of getting into the first ever NCAA FBS Division Playoff.  It is a long conversation, one that is already as tiring as how teams can increase their BCS rankings, but sitting in her breakfast nook on a sun dappled Sunday morning she assured me that in her mind the Hokies were in it after trouncing all over Ohio State at the hallowed horseshoe on September the 6th, 2014.  

"All they have to do," she told me as she prepared to demurely shovel more processed bran into her mouth, "is keep wining."

The Hokies were indeed in the conversation.  Playoffs were on the lips of the Hokie Nation, visions of glory danced before their eyes like sugar plum fairies with huge tits, people were hopping on to "Heyletstravelsomewhere.com" to see how much a trip to the championship game in Dallas would cost, and Frank was thinking that maybe with Tech in the Playoffs he would finally be able to open a successful restaurant in Hampton Roads.  It all looked very, very promising.

Challenges abounded, of course, and the first was getting past East Carolina University.

ECU!  Those fucking pirates!  They have often been tough to beat, and I remember when I was but 9 years old and ECU rolled into town and beat the Hokies on the holy ground of Lane Stadium.  After the game ECU fans cruised around Blacksburg in their pick-up trucks, spitting chaw out the windows and going up to little boys and girls saying  "The Hokies lost!  You are stupid!" and they'd steal the children's cheap supermarket playground balls and take them away to do God knows what with them...probably serve them on a plate doused in a vinegary barbecue sauce with a side of slaw.

I was one of those children.  They called me stupid.  And they stole my ball. 

I never liked ECU after all that.  

Even so, I found myself at work as the game got underway.  I took a peak at ESPN.com and I was stunned when I saw that ECU had racked up, quickly, 21 points on a misty day in Blacksburg.  It was so terrifyingly excellent that it conjured up visions of how Napoleon surprised the Russians at Austerlitz by attacking the Prazen Heights through a dense fog.  I expected either a smashing victory by the Pirates or a sterling comeback by the Hokies.

But then I got home and started watching the game and it became...awful really.  Desultory.  Dull.  I must admit that while the Hokies found themselves in a senseless struggle reminiscent of The Somme, with neither side willing to budge, bludgeoning each other to death in the trenches, I abandoned my team in their time of need to watch the first half of the Manchester City / Arsenal match (which was a rather exciting 2-2 draw).  I had recorded the soccer match, I could have watched it at any time, but I chose this time to do it.  I hear the alumni association is looking for me so they can take away my Fan Card, burn it, and sprinkle the ashes over the grave of the Widow Wadman, thereby excommunicating me from the Hokie Nation forever.  

They'll never find it.  I've hidden it in a place that they would least expect...along with the treasure.  

Anyways, I picked up the game again in the 4th quarter, and now things were hotting up nicely.  Virginia Tech had engineered a comeback the likes of which Frank Beamer had never been able to manage, the score was tied and Tech had the momentum.  And then...

And then it just all fell apart, in a poof of purple and black smoke.  

The Hokie's playoff chances prove to be elusive as supervillain Kaiser Soze. One second they were there, and then the next "Poof!", they were gone.

Stunned Hokie fans wept in the stands, Christ Episcopal took some advice from the Rolling Stones and painted their red doors black, and a clearly discombobulated and shell shocked Bud Foster gave a post game interview in which he said "you know" no less than 48 times in the span of no more than 5 minutes (really, my wife counted.  She was beside herself with laughter and I couldn't help but have my mood lifted by her rather delightful and extraordinarily Slytherin-like display of Schadenfreude).  

Are the playoffs out of reach?  Probably.  Not only is it very unlikely that Tech can play at a level high enough to get out of the season with the one loss and an ACC title (I just don't think they have the consistency), but even with that I think it will be quite hard now to convince the committee that Tech is playoff worthy; I'm sorry, but one can give Condoleeza only so many back rubs.  

Seriously, I think I'm getting tendinitis in my thumbs.   

     

The Goldfinch Post Mortem

So you've read the Goldfinch.  You've set it aside.  You've picked up Middlekauf's history of the American Revolution, The Glorious Cause, but skipped all the boring crap about the stamp act and parliamentary representation and gone ahead to the fun part where the bullets start flying. You've watch the Hokies mostly trounce the Tribe pretty well dibby doe doe doe, and watched Tony Stewart climb into his stock car once again and go fast turn left go fast turn left go fast turn left go fast turn left go fast turn left go fast turn left go fast turn left go fast turn left go fast turn left go fast turn left go fast turn left go fast turn left until he got a flat tire and finished 41st and the Antony Bourdain's Boudin 400 brought to by Tiddlywinks:  Tiddlywinks! They're not just for truants and wise guys any more.

In other worse, you (and by that I mean "I", though I must admit I didn't watch the Nascar race) have had a chance to digest the book and really try to figure out what it is that Donna Tartt is getting at.

I think the big flick of the book is how is it, where is it, that we find meaning in our lives.

Theo's mom dies in a terrorist attack.  Naturally, as we try to identify him, we wonder how he is going to pick up the pieces.  Let's face it, his story is not that unfamiliar to us all.  From terror attacks to mass shootings random and senseless death has touched the soul of our nation time and time again and the media have brought the various tragedies into our living rooms.  We get to know the survivors and the family members of those who have died and we ask ourselves "how will these people go on?"

We assume they will, because in despite of an ongoing malaise our nation is still a rather optimistic one.  So it is that even as I wondered "how will Theo go on" I assume that he will find a way to piece it all together, I assume he will be able to build a meaningful life on the back of the tragedy that has claimed his mother and altered his life forever (Theo is both a survivor and someone who lost a loved one).  When the Barbours take him in and he meets Hobie shortly after the bombing I assumed that that was the place where he would find meaning, that slowly he would build a life on those two points of light.

But it's not to be.  His father comes with his drug dealing bartending girlfriend Xandra and they whisk him away to Las Vegas where there is really....nothing.  The desert is expansive, they live in a deserted subdivision, Xandra and Theo's dad are often not around.

Theo does meet his friend Boris (who to me is a mix between the the lead singer of Gogol Bordello and Dimitry Karamazov).  Friendship can bring meaning to life, and it is true that Boris's act of love to try to get the painting back and in the end call the art cops does redeem somewhat the situation for Theo, but with the drug use and the alcohol I feel that Theo is just kind of passing his days away.

The use of drugs was kind of troubling in this story.  Tartt never condemns their use.  Sure, there are plenty of hangovers and bad days and the physiological trap of addiction is well spelled out - she does not romanticize, I'd say.  But the characters keep using and they don't seem to suffer much in the way of consequence.

I almost came to feel that the drugs are more of a metaphor for how, in a nihilistic worldview, we are all just really marking time until the ultimate truth of our lives (our demise) is realized.  Theo fills that void with drugs, and he would say that the rest of us fill it with houses, kids, music, art, religion.  We are all fooling ourselves.

And yet the book is also sort of saying that that is the point.  Much as the Goldfinch in the painting stares out at us over 400 years with dignity despite his hard life (he is chained to his perch after all) so it seems that for Theo the meaning in life is facing up to the lack of meaning in it with dignity.  Therefore those things (art, love) which pull us out of our despair are what make life worthwhile....and to love those things which are timeless in a sense grants us some immortality even as we know that the truth of our lives is that all of this can end and will end, possibly at an instant.

Do I agree?  By baptism I am contractually obligated to call such a worldview a bunch of fiddle faddle, and argue that my relationship to God holds the ultimate meaning in life.  But relational Christianity is a tough thing for me, and as one who feels God's absence more than God's presence, I'd have to agree that having dignity for the sake of honoring the beauty of life is about as good a meaning as anything else I can think of.

784 pages is a long way to go for "Life is Short", which is something that Theo tries to impart on the reader as the book closes.  Thankfully I think that Tartt is scratching at something a little deeper than that.