Restaurant Fuel

My dog is dead, and my grief is limitless.

Back in 1997, Tina and I got married and bought a puppy — a black and tan dachshund we named Marshall.  Marshall didn’t live long, dying after a botched neutering.  Tina and I were heartbroken and not in the best frame of mind.  So a few days later, we went to a pet store and bought a crazy little boston terrier that the girl who worked at the store had named “Taz.”  We renamed him “Archie.”

Archie was a difficult puppy, but this is not unusual for male boston terriers.  They have a generous spirit and a kind, easygoing manner, but they are full of energy.  They get bored easily, and they love to destroy things.  But they are equally gentle and loyal.  Boston terriers aren’t right for everyone — like all purebred dogs, they have their quirks.  But Archie was right for us.

I remember at the height of my despair  one early walk I had with Archie.  I was still grieving the loss of the first dog and wondering if this new puppy was a mistake.  We were on the path behind our apartment at the time, and suddenly he stopped, closed his eyes and felt the warm sun on his face.  Then, he sniffed the warm spring air, took a deep breath and sighed.   Suddenly I realized what was happening — he was enjoying the world, the sun, the beautiful weather.

As someone who had previously only owned dachshunds, I was pleasantly surprised — dachshunds are difficult breed, high strung and obsessed with their owners.  But here was a dog that was taking it easy, enjoying the day.  It was this moment that my bond with Archie began, when I realized that his crazy puppy phase was just that –a phase.  That everything was going to be okay.

He was my dog, and I loved him.

Jump forward 11 years later.  Archie, sick and failing, his time so short.  I had no inkling of what his death would really mean to me — how intertwined he was in my life.  My whole daily schedule was centered around his needs — walks, feedings, walks.  He slept with me every night, burrowed into the space behind my knees, warm and comforting.  What would my life be like without him, my friend, my companion, my faithful dog?

Unable to walk, Tina held him on the floor in my mother’s house, our daughters flanking her,  saying their goodbyes.  I was in the kitchen, desperately trying to replace his bedding for what I knew would be his final trip in the car — my mother and I were taking him to an emergency animal hospital to have him put to sleep.

Just as the girls said their goodbyes, Archie looked into Tina’s eyes, and she would later tell me that she saw that he was saying goodbye to her.  And then his eyes rolled back into his head, and his labored breathing ceased.

“Oh my god,” Tina said.  “He’s dying, I think he’s dead.  Come quickly.”

I rushed to her side, but I was too late.  My dog was dead.  Gently, I lifted him from her arms, and placed him inside the crate on the fresh blanket.  His body was limp and still, completely at rest.   I thought about that crazy puppy so long ago who loved to feel the warm sun on his face.  And I felt the vacuum his death had opened in my life.  Never again would we walk through the streets of Adams Morgan together, across freshly fallen snow, the white streets silent and empty except for him and me.

And no longer would my beloved dog be by my side at all times — no matter what, Archie made sure I was never alone.

Now, I tell the girls the story of Archie’s life, as we try to help them make sense of his death.  Anya understands, she knows he’s not coming back.  She avoids talking about him.  But Rachel doesn’t quite get it — she thinks he’s just somewhere else, waiting to rejoin us.  And maybe she’s the one who’s right.  Maybe he is out there waiting for us, waiting for me.

I know this isn’t true.  But I like to delude myself.  Maybe someday, Archie and I will walk Florida Avenue again and stop at every tree.  Maybe he will ride along side me again when I move the car on Thursday mornings for street cleanings, and maybe when it’s late at night and I’m sad and alone, he will be there to comfort me.  To tell me in his quiet way that everything is okay.  We are a pack, a family, and we are together.

Well, I’ve been thinking about watching Good Night and Good Luck again on DVD.  It’s one of the movies I bought during the first year of my girls’ lives when I couldn’t sit down and watch anything without being interrupted.  I believe I had to watch it with the volume down, and the only way I could understand what was being said was to turn on the captioning.

So, I’ve been toying with the idea of pulling it out of my collection and giving it another spin, but I wonder if its impact is important, anymore.

At the time it was released, it was one of the few mainstream Hollywood films that put the Bush administration on notice for what they were doing to us.  The McCarthy/Bush parallels at the time were incredibly strong and anyone who opposed the war or the administration was scared that some big ugly jack boot was going to drop.

But now with Bush on the way out for good, I think there’s a sense among many on the left that our problems are over.  Me personally, I’m not all that fired up about it anymore.  With the Dems in control of too houses of Congress, most of the damage to our civil liberties is now contained.

So without the specter of an all-powerful witch hunting political party hanging over our heads, does Good Night and Good Luck still work?  Maybe as a historical document, but like later seasons of Battlestar Galactica, it’s lost a lot of its potency as a work of politics.

Tina’s out tonight setting up her Artomatic installation, while I’m at home with the girls.  Rachel and Anya are running around the house with buckets on their heads, singing the tune to “Here comes the bride.”  It’s kind of funny.

My dad, who died in 1993 and never heard of the Internet, is listed on a Web site of dead Airforce airmen.  There are pictures, which are credited to my mother.  It’s strange to see him there.

Sorry it’s been a million years since I blogged — I’ve been working on a film treatment, redesigning a Web site at work, and even finding time to play Grand Theft Auto IV. But I’m procrastinating fiercely at the moment, so I’m taking the time.

I am sorely depressed about the election. I used to read political news all day long at work as it dripped into me via an RSS reader, but now I mostly ignore it. I am convinced now that Obama is toast — it’s like all the people in American who didn’t want him to be President found their excuse with Reverand Wright, so all they do is blah blah blah on and on and about it in the media to the point that the words Obama, Reverend and Wright all blend together and form one pastiche of a human being. One would think that Obama and Wright are the same person, or that Wright is running for office. It’s insane.

George W. Bush was never held to account for any of his dubious associations, nor has Hillary Clinton. There’s a double standard at play here — a standard that only applies to Barack Obama.

So anyway, that’s why I’ve been avoiding the election.

GTA IV is awesome, by the way.

I can’t stop listening to “San Bernardino”, from the new Mountain Goats LP, “Heretic Pride,” so I thought I’d share.

There is a line you cross the moment you become a parent, it’s like your old self is some bizarre alien species.  Hearing your child (or in my case, children) cry just as they’re born is the most magical moment a parent will ever experience.  That cry — that scream of defiance against the sudden shift from the internal world of the womb to the external one — is proof that your child has been born and is wonderfully alive.

It was that moment that I crossed the line.  Rachel’s voice was first, then Anya’s.  And this song perfectly captures that moment and that feeling of change.

I’m sorry to say, but my hopes for the primaries in Texas and Ohio tomorrow are not good. The Clinton machine went negative, playing to the obvious fears of blue collar voters in both states, and the polls indicate that they’re now reaping the rewards.

It has been an exciting campaign — Barack Obama really does represent our best chance for another Roosevelt or Kennedy, but I fear his great potential will go unfullfilled. The Clintons are ruthless and indefatiguable. This really is Hillary’s only shot at the presidency, and her team is playing like it is.

They’re also playing by the old rules of division, blue states and red states, and they will no doubt run a campaign in the fall much like they did in the primary — chiefly, by focusing all their efforts on a few “swing” states rather than mounting a true 50-state strategy like Obama ran in the primary. The Clintons subscribe to the Rovian believe of slicing the electorate as small as possible, and hope that the majority of interest groups end up backing you by +1%.

It will be a nice surprise if Obama pulls things off tomorrow, but at this point I’m not hopeful. I believe very strongly that even if he ultimately wins the popular vote and the delegate count, the nomination will still go to Hillary through the superdelegates. All they have to do is make a case (which they’re already in the process of making) of a late surge, and essentially all earlier votes for Obama will be invalidated.

But I don’t believe this will be the end of Obama. Hillary will fall to McCain in November, and Obama will have another shot in four years — possibly even a clear shot, given McCain’s age and the stresses of the Presidency. I don’t think McCain can last for two full terms.

Some day or another, I’m convinced that Barack Obama will be president of the United States. Maybe not in 2008 — the Clinton machine, despite all their failings, is still too powerful a force in the Democratic party. They don’t deserve to win the nomination, but the party will surely hand it to them.

So tomorrow I’ll be avoiding the election coverage. There’s no reason to get any more depressed about this than I already am. I’ll keep my fingers crossed throughout the day, but I don’t think it will be enough.

Valerie Dryden, a photography student at the Corcoran College of Art in Washington, has been photographing our family for the past several months. Taking thousands of photos, actually, as part of her senior thesis. That thesis is now finished, and last night was the opening of an exhibition of her photos at the Corcoran. Tina has more photos up on her blog if you want to see them.

I have to say, it was a bit odd to see myself and our family up on the walls of the gallery. Stranger still to see people recognizing us from the photos. The public nature of our participation in the project began to sink in for me — that we really had opened up our lives for people to examine in a way that we have not in our various blogs, podcasts, etc. In all our projects, we control the message — but here, the camera controls the message. It’s objective, and with thousands of photos taken, any effort to try to control how we’re presented is more or less lost. What remains is the real thing, unfiltered, unmanaged. Granted, the photo selection was managed by Valerie and her professors — and the selection has its own thesis, tells its own story — but it was weird to realize that we had opened our lives up to this. And in many ways, it is a more honest depiction of who we are than anything else we’ve done or participated in.

There was one photo in particular — where Tina and I were kissing each other goodbye — that showed us in a way that we rarely reveal to our friends and family, much less the world at large. My friend Jake pointed out to me that he had never seen us kiss before — therefore, the photo was his favorite, because it showed a side of us we never reveal even to the people we’re close to. And I have to admit, I was surprised to see the photo on display, maybe even a little embarrassed. We actively suppress intimate moments in our relationship — we keep them private, just between us. We’ve made a lot of our lives public, from the original Restaurant Fuel ‘zine, through our blogs and now through our three podcasts. So it was a shock to see us up there on the wall, gigantic, kissing. Our true inner lives on display.

And that I suppose is just why Valerie’s project was a success. Because even with subjects who are actively aware of how they’re perceived and are accustomed to managing and compartmentalizing their public persona, the truth came out. And it’s truth — whether objective or subjective — that makes the best art.

photo credit: soggydan

Well, it appears that John McCain — famously self-righteous about his high moral standards, honor and honesty — may have had an affair with a lobbyist in 1999, just prior to his first bid for the Republican nomination.  Daily Kos has a run-down on the scandal here.

Now I must confess, I do like John McCain.  He’s the only Republican for whom I would possibly vote, and the damage to his reputation from this is incalculable, as is the damage to his campaign for the Presidency.   In comparison to Barack Obama and his long marriage and young family, the divorced and unfaithful McCain loses the moral high ground in its entirity.  Against Hillary, I think it definitely destroys any advantages he had over her.

But you have to wonder why the hell these people do stuff like this.  If normal people can’t keep their own infidelities secret, then why do politicians assume they can do it?  Particularly with so many people — not just the press, but staff, opponents, opponents’ staff, the public, etc. — watching them all the time.  It was inevitable that something like this would come out eventually.

It’s my belief — call it Jeff’s Axiom — that there are no such things as secrets.  Once someone else knows a bit of forbidden information, it passes from person to person like a virus until it’s revealed to the world at large.   The fact that John McCain could keep this under wraps for 9 years is surprising, but what’s not surprising is that the moment he locked up the nomination it came out.  McCain and his staff should have known and predicted this would happen.  The fact that they didn’t shows that they’re really not going to be up to the task of campaigning against Barack Obama (or possibly Hillary Clinton), with an energized Democratic movement behind him (or her).

photo credit: numlok™ 

Doesn’t it seem strange that with 10 straight losses, Hillary Clinton still clings to the desparate notion that she can win this thing? Any other candidate, including Obama, would be under intense pressure to bow out of the raise if suffering from similar losses. It’s always the next state where she’ll turn things around — we heard it this week with polls showing her ahead, and pundits expecting a Hillary resurrection. And then Obama beats her by 15 points.

Look, I’m not going to say that she can’t do it, but after a week of negative campaigning — with some pretty tough lines of attack at that — she still wasn’t able to close the gap in Wisconsin. In fact, if you were to compare the actual results to the polls, the gap actually widened.

The only thing staying in the race serves is to 1) give weight to the conspiracy theorists who believe that she’s going to steal the nomination, and 2) keep our party from having a candidate who can engage John McCain over the summer. If this things drags on until the convention in August, there’s nothing stopping McCain from campaigning against Obama on one flank, while he’s still engaged with Hillary on the other.

If Hillary had any honor or decency, she would concede if she lost Texas and Ohio, but we know now that she has none. The sad fact that we’re all waking up to now is that the “smears” and “slanders” the Republicans launched against the Clintons were 100% true. We were just unwilling to believe it until we saw her use the same sleazy tactics on another Democrat. She’ll fight this all the way to the convention, and continue to use strongarm tactics on delegates to try to subvert the will of the voters. The party is now splitting into two factions, and if something isn’t done to reconcile the two soon, the ultimate winner of the nominations risks losing half the party due to the Obama-Clinton rift.

If Hillary continues her losing streak, I hope her advisors, friends and colleagues in the party will have the good sense to pressure her to get out of the race. If she wins, fair enough. But if she loses, she needs to wake up to reality and concede.

I picked up Heretic Pride, the new LP from the Mountain Goats today.  Emusic, usually my stalwart resource for new music, doesn’t have it, yet.  I ended up picking it up from iTunes.

I have been a fan of the Mountain Goats and John Darnielle since about 1996 or so.  There’s not a lot of bands or artists I listened to back then that I still listen to now.  In recent years, he’s worked on a trilogy of “memoirs” — albums that deal directly with his past.  I love two of the three records — The Sunset Tree, which chronicles his childhood with an absuive stepfather and We Shall All Be Healed, about his time with a group of friends in Portland addicted to crystal meth (or so I’ve read — I’m sorry if this is an inaccurate description).  Both records are beautiful and honest and contain many of his best songs.  Get Lonely, the third in the triology, was a great accomplishment, but wasn’t a very pleasant record to listen to — the loss and sadness of that record made it somewhat inaccessible to me.

It’s hard to remember now back when his records were like collections of short stories — glimpes of characters in the throes of life.  But that approach returns on Heretic Pride, and it is a welcome return.  Although the Mountain Goats continue on a a trajectory away from John’s lo-fi roots, the themes of the record and the stories here are familiar to anyone who has stuck with him over the years.  There’s even appearances from old friends who contributed to the Mountain Goats in the early days, most notably 1990’s lo-fi king Franklin Bruno and The Bright Mountain Choir, whose back up vocals have been sorely missed from many years of Mountain Goats records.

It’s hard to describe the rush of emotion I get when I listen to this record, particularly to “San Bernardino,” a song that tells the tale of a young couple who take to the highway and ultimately give birth to their son in a motel bathtub.  Despite what one might expect from the subject matter, it is infused with a tremendous sense of love and hope — it’s as beautiful and moving as anything he’s ever written.  Perhaps it’s the greatest example of John as an artist, it may very well be my favorite Mountain Goats song.  When he sings “It was hard/but you were brave/you are splendid/ And we will never be alone in this world/whatever they say/we will be okay,” any parent knows exactly what he means.  If anything, the song documents the transformation of two individuals into a family, and it does so with such empathy and love that it’s hard to believe that John hasn’t been there himself.

Other standouts to me include “Sax Rohmer, Pt. 1,” the eponymous “Heretic Pride,” “Autoclave,” and especially “Lovecraft in Brooklyn,” which finds the Mountain Goats venturing into true rock music for the first time.

Here’s the new video for “Sax Rohmer, Pt. 1:”