Field of dweebs

Political commentator and consultant Paul Begala once said that politics is “show business for ugly people.” I want to send this guy a cake.

His observation has been true for decades now, but it wasn’t always the case. When this quaint little republic was born in earnest, politics were a straightforward affair: You elected a person, they were your representative, and they voted the way you wanted, or else you tossed the bum out on his pleated-pantalooned keester. Easy peasy, pass the guacamole.

When money corrupted the political system, with Congress capitulating to corporate cash rather than its constituents, it turned into something else entirely. America ceased to be a functioning democracy, and the political arena became a circus sideshow of posturing, preening nincompoops spouting any number of substanceless platitudes to keep themselves locked firm in the public eye. Politics was the country’s first reality show, only there’s probably more wit in an airing of “The Bachelor” than there is in your typical presidential debate.

Clowns, the lot of them. Which brings me a sick kind of joy.

Anyone got any popcorn?

Were I in any way a decent human being, I’d be deeply concerned about the current race. Brow furrowed, I’d watch in consternation as one brain-damaged chimpanzee after another made rounds of ridiculous promises while the spittle spewed from their lips. “I’ll build a giant, gold-plated, diamond-encrusted wall along the border and have it paid for by the three-eyed bounty hunters from Gorgon-5, who owe us a favor!” “I’ll scare off the terrorists by constructing an 80-foot statue of a ruler-wielding Catholic nun shaking her head disapprovingly!” Sure, sure. And I’ll grow wings and poop Lucky Charms.

It’s not the promises themselves that are alarming this go-’round, though. It’s the blithering lobotomy patients who are making them. This election cycle’s contestants boast all the intellectual heft of an old toaster oven. Forget their policy proposals and whether you agree with them; the views of Candidate X might align perfectly with your own, but none of that matters if he lacks the cognitive wherewithal to tie his own shoes. History is littered with idiots, but never before have so many of them been in serious contention for the nation’s top post. Watching them jockey for position is like seeing a litter of cats scrambling over themselves to suckle at their mother’s teat, except cats have better foreign policy proposals.

This is what passes for my incisive political analysis, by the way. A Peabody Award can’t be far behind.

So this is who we are now, a nation that rewards dunderheads. Unfortunate to consider that this isn’t overly surprising. We’ve been tending in this direction for a while now, what with our proclivity to scoff at expertise and reward those who “shoot from the hip” and “tell it like it is.” If a scientist devotes the entirety of his or her professional career to studying climate change, amasses decades’ worth of fact-based evidence, and then makes an announcement that human activity is threatening habitation on the planet, the public reaction is, “Pfft! What does Miss Know-It-All Science Lady know about the issue? Keep reading books, nerd!” Meanwhile, a know-nothing politician with tangible interests in the oil industry tells the public that solar energy is a threat to jobs, and the reaction is, “Hey, ‘jobs!’ I know that word! I admire your lack of education, sir. Give ‘em hell!”

We live in a topsy-turvy bizarro world where right is wrong, up is down, and Pauly Shore movies are nuanced and insightful. Historically, great civilizations have sometimes tripped over their own shoelaces on the road to progress; western Europe had to slog through the Dark Ages before the Renaissance restored public faith in art and science. Take a look at the current landscape, though, and it’s natural to wonder if we can find a way out of this particular rut. Our fractured leadership reflects a fractured society in which everyone is entrenched in their own niche. Instead of coming together every four years to collectively choose a national direction, everyone identifies with a sub-group, or a sub-sub-group, and sequesters themselves in their own comfortable little pocket. We’re like moles who burrow into the ground and never come to the surface to compare notes with the other moles. Not that moles keep notes. They lack opposable thumbs and have brains the size of Fruit Loops. But enough about moles.

This fragmentation was happening long before the Internet, but virtual culture has taken the political process by the scruff of its neck and held it up to a funhouse mirror. There’s a home for just about any mirco-opinion that can be conceived. There are online communities dedicated to papier mache hats, for Pete’s sake. You can spend hours on a message board swapping recipes for lentil soup. Heck, even Mike Huckabee supporters can find solace in each others’ bits and bytes, and Huckabee has fewer fans than the L.A. Clippers. They’re a basketball team, by the way.

Now it would be pointless to rant and rave without offering some kind of solution, so here it is: Place the presidential contenders in front of a panel of judges so we can watch them get blasted for their inability to sing “Even Flow” by Pearl Jam. Then make them go through a Gladiator-style obstacle course in which they have to use monkey bars to span a 10-foot-deep pit populated with fire-breathing alligators. When the field gets whittled down to two, they can arm-wrestle for the Oval Office live on pay-per-view television.

It’s not the most civilized means of picking a commander-in-chief. But considering the divided and contentious race we’ve seen so far, it seems like the next logical step.

Like an eagle

In “Fly Like an Eagle,” Steve Miller sang the line, “Time keeps on slippin’, slippin, slippin’ into the future.” I’m not sure if that qualifies as poetry, necessarily, since one “slippin’” would probably have sufficed. But let’s give him a pass, seeing as he was probably loaded with more pharmaceuticals than a Rite Aid.

It’s not quite an accurate statement either, since the future slips toward us, becoming the present for one fleeting moment before receding into history. Still, one gets his point. It’s slippery and slithery and doesn’t stay in our hands when we try to grasp it -- like a wet snake, only not as gross.

That’s why photography has always been so fascinating to me. In a photograph, “now” is always “now.”

Most people think of time in concrete, practical terms: It’s two o’clock, squash is next Thursday, Lindsay’s birthday is in April. We’ve taken an intangible aspect of physics and everyday existence and given it size and shape, our meager little means of exactifying the vagaries of sunrise and sunset. Time’s not as intimidating when it’s divided up into segments. It makes more intuitive sense. Meanwhile, it gives us a means by which we can file and sort and contextualize our individual histories, so when we capture a moment in a photograph, we can can stick it in a folder on our computers labeled “June 1997” and establish a reference point -- sort of a yardstick by which we measure progress and change. Photographs reveal the truth of a moment: That each is one of many in a long, long procession, all of them unique and unrepeatable. Here and then gone. Forever lost, but forever ours.

Not to get all “Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy” on y’all.

It was a long time before I thought of photos in that way. As a kid, I just liked taking pictures. My first camera was an old film job geared toward children; in the bottom-right corner of every image was a cartoon imprint of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, so if you weren’t careful with your framing, your cousin’s face would be partially obscured by a vein-laced bicep and a set of nunchucks. The picture quality was horrible, made all the worse by my subject matter, which at that time tended toward piles of plastic video game cartridges and unflattering butt-shots of slumbering cats. Those old images aren’t what you’d call “art,” but they revealed what was important to me at the time, and so they work as a kind of archaeology exhibit. “World Through the Eyes of an Obsessive-Compulsive Introvert.” I can see the lines forming.

In college I got my first digital. Giddy up.

Young whippersnappers might take it for granted, but what a digital camera allows you to do is essentially curate your own history. A crappy shot instantaneously announces itself as crappy, so you hit a button and poof, into the ether. Folded into in time’s great expanse like most other moments. It’s the proverbial double-edged sword -- you end up with a better collection of photos, but you lose little imperfect moments that comprise the discordant music of a life. Maybe self-editing isn’t the best way to get at the truth of time. Maybe it’s all about volume.

Were you to glimpse the contents of my hard drive, you’d think two things: Wow, this guy listens to way too much heavy metal; and wow, this guy’s got a lot of photos. Folders organized first by year, then by month, stretching back to the days when I had hair and an extra chin. As soon as that first digital was in my hands, every microscopic happenstance, every parking lot conversation and board game melee, became camera fodder. Over the years, it became the record of a life, more revealing than any honey-tongued diary confessional. Time compressed into bits and bytes. Heady stuff.

And what it illustrates is that, whether we’re recording it or not, the human experience of time boils down to nothing more than the assemblage of experiences. Comprise enough of them -- slam your hand in a car door, attend your daughter’s high school graduation, see Motley Crue’s farewell tour -- and brothers and sisters, you’ve got a life.

Friends and me, 2004.  I'm the dude in the Metallica shirt.

At my good friend Rick's wedding.  I'm on the far right.

I was a Journal Tribune photographer at one time. In September 2011, I drove down to McDougal Orchards in Springvale to grab images for a feature story on apple picking season. That kind of stuff is always a crapshoot; sometimes you come across someone doing something interesting, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes they don’t mind being photographed, sometimes they do. Sometimes you feel like a nut … well, you know.

Luck was plentiful that day. Bounding through fields of late-summer green was a boy no older than four, decked out in a red Spider-Man shirt and toting a cloth sack filled to overflowing with Cortlands, the apples of his eye. I submitted myself to the necessary awkward moment with his parents -- “Gee, can I photograph your son? Thanks a bundle!” -- and set myself up at the base of a tree, where fresh fruit awaited his eager, sticky fingers.

It only took one shot, That’s all it ever takes. He reached out for an apple, I hit the shutter, and voila, there’s your front page. I don’t know if it’s necessarily the best shot I’ve ever taken, but there’s something about the composition, the splash of primary colors, and the look of unmitigated joy on the boy’s face that make it a favorite of mine.

Forever four.

Strange to think of that boy now. In the intervening years he’s more than doubled his lifespan, growing and changing and no doubt morphing into an altogether different person, miles from the diminutive bundle whose scant body weight was balanced by a sackful of fruit. He’s in the second or third grade, perhaps. He’s starting to identify his strengths and weaknesses, the things that define him. Possibly he has a crush on a girl.

None of that will ever be known to me. All I have from him is that one moment, innocent and seemingly inconsequential, preserved for eternity in the lens of a battered Nikon. He’ll be four years old until the earth is dust, when everyone who’s ever lived has returned to a cold and impartial cosmos.

A speck of time to remind us of its unrelenting nature -- slippin’, slippin, slippin’ into the future.

Ballin'

Balls! What a concept.

Balls for baseball, balls for pool, balls for football and basketball too. Balls for cricket and tennis and bowling, balls used in golf that just keep on a-rolling. Rugby’s got balls, and so does lacrosse, so if you don’t love balls, then dude, it’s your loss.

It’s an amazing invention that no one ever talks about.

Why should they? It’s not like the ball is a hot new innovation. Certain ancient Egyptian monuments depict people playing some sort of ball game (I’d squibble my gizzards if it was soccer), and in Homer’s epic poem “The Odyssey,” the protagonist spots a character named Nausicaa playing ball with a bunch of maidens, thus laying the foundation for the modern WNBA. So it’s been around.

What’s more, most of are introduced to the whole ball concept while we’re barely old enough to make a play for grandpa’s nose hairs. When considering buying a toy for a pint-sized youngun’, you really can’t go wrong with a brightly colored ball of some kind, providing it’s not small enough to be swallowed or inserted into any bodily orifices. This gift idea also works across species, including dogs, cats and for some strange reason, seals, who handle balls better than most of the starters on the New England Patriots’ receiving corps.

Which means we shrug when we see balls of most varieties. Spotting one is a non-event, inspiring exactly zero “Dear Diary” entries. Yet most of us have at least one ball story.

Here’s one. In high school I belonged to a clique of music dorks and drama nerds with the combined athleticism of a stoned sea urchin. Every once in awhile, when we weren’t rehearsing showtunes or spending allowance money on vanilla lattes (a rowdy bunch we were), we’d head down to the local ballfield to play pickup games of softball, which typically devolved into four-man batting practices as the outfield trickled home to solve algebra problems and apply acne cream. On one such outing, I found myself locked into a rare groove: While I generally couldn’t hit a grizzly bear with a bat the size of a solar panel, I was seeing the ball that day with eerie clarity. We had long given up on trying to complete an actual game, so I settled into the batter’s box, eyeing underhand pitches from a classmate and drilling them one after another into a summer field of purest green.

I got cocky. Big mistake. Because balls are unpredictable, see. Their spherical shape gives them a tendency to spin and curve in unanticipated ways, and only a veteran batsman would have known, with near 100-percent certainty, which pitches were too dangerous to try to pummel. After crack-whipping about a dozen consecutive softballs into the center field expanse -- and feeling very Ted Williams-like in the process --  the pitcher lobbed me a meatball that trailed to the inside, arcing in toward my hands.

Had I been playing a for-real game, I would have taken it for ball one. But I was on a roll. In unconscious imitation of the Incredible Hulk, I wanted to smash, smash, smash. So I swung the bat, and instead of hitting the ball flush with the barrel, I nicked it with the handle, which normally would have resulted in a foul tip, some bruised knuckles, and a string of expletives that could have melted the chrome of a Cadillac fender.

Instead, the ball’s spin and trajectory met the angle of the bat handle awkwardly. It caromed off my Louisville Slugger and hit me square in the face.

An inch or two to the left and it would have broken my nose. It was a softball, remember, meaning it had roughly the size and heft of a small dog. And my nose is a pretty big target. Long and beaklike, it’s a miracle it hasn’t gotten clipped by a passing bus.

As it happened, the ball slammed into my right cheek, just below the eye. I wore thick glasses at the time, and the right lens was caught by the force of the projectile and driven into the flesh just below the cheekbone.

Four stitches. Thanks a lot, ball.

Another type of ball or spherical object and it may not have done quite as much damage. If I’d gotten hit with a golf or ping-pong ball it would have caromed off my glasses with a cute little ping sound and that would have been the end of it. For that matter, if it had been a clown nose, I wouldn’t have felt it at all. But it would definitely have raised the question of why I was standing in a field hitting clown noses with a baseball bat.

I like to envision what the future may hold; you could call speculation a bit of a hobby of mine. Yet predicting the ball’s future is nearly impossible. The concept may be old, but specific balls for specific things are new -- your baseballs and basketballs and American footballs. These sporting implements couldn’t possible exist before the inception of their respective sports, and those sports were all invented within the last couple hundred years. The oldest of them, baseball, is still younger than the Liberty Bell, which in turn is much younger than ancient Egyptian civilization, which in its turn is only slightly older than Larry King. So over the next 200 years, it’s possible we’ll be filling stadiums for sports that haven’t even been invented yet, played by balls that are beyond the scope of our imaginations. Heat-seeking balls that change course in mid-air. Balls that sprout wings and fly. Super-intelligent balls that can avoid volleyball spikes and then beat you at chess. Anything’s possible.

So simple and perfect, the ball. So versatile. Just be sure you don’t take one in the face. It’s never a good time.

I dreamed a dream (and now I'm hungry)

Nobody knows why we dream. Millions of years of evolution, eye-popping advancements in neuroscience and general scientific research, and yet there’s not one person on this planet who can explain to me why I dreamt last week about being locked in a jail cell with Steve Urkel from “Family Matters.”

This actually happened.

The only reason I can still remember it is because the dream was so disconcertingly real and vivid that when I awoke, it took a matter of minutes before I realized I was in my apartment, sweating and clutching a Garfield stuffed animal. (Hey, don’t judge me.) Some of the details are fuzzy, but I remember looking through a set of bars at a gawking gaggle of old high school classmates, some of whom I haven’t seen since pagers were considered cool. Sitting next to me on a bunk bed was the iconic 80s sitcom nerd, decked out in his trademark glasses and suspenders, asking me if I had any cheese.

I did not, in fact, have any cheese. It’s a testament to how real the dream was that I remember being disappointed about this.

There have been a handful of times in my life when I’ve yearned for some kind of in-depth dream analysis, and I’d love to hear a professional’s take on my faux acid trip. A psychiatrist would no doubt find symbolism in every little detail: The high school entourage representing a yearning for familiarity and the past, the jail representing my entrapment in the present. Steve Urkel representing my love of dairy products. That’ll be $125, please.

It’s unclear from my five minutes of Internet research that there’s any validity to dream analysis. Were I to seek it out, it would be with the same indulgent interest I’d express in getting my palms read -- entertaining, sure, but a lot of hocus pocus, nothing to be taken too seriously. Because the fact is that we still don’t know the purpose of dreams. There are theories, some more plausible than others, and there are encouraging lines of research being conducted. But the brain is still largely a mystery. For all I know I was dreaming about jail because of that nasty crime I’m thinking about committing. Which reminds me, I need to buy a length of rope and a 12-pack of industrial-strength suction cups.

For all the research that’s been conducted, there are only subtle clues here and there as to what this dreaming business is really all about. Some believe it’s a way for the brain to process memory and emotion. There’s an area of the brain called the hippocampus, and disappointingly, it has nothing to do with hippopotamuses playing disc golf and learning algebra; rather, it’s a big lump of brain that theorists surmise takes short-term memories and transfers them over to the neocortex, where long-term memory is stored. It’s possible that dreaming helps along this process of essentially moving stuff around from one storage unit to another. So the Reader’s Digest version would go something like this: You go to bed having just learned the shocking news that your half-sister Alice once partied in the back of Snoop Dogg’s tour bus. A week of dreams, and then poof! You’ll never forget it. As much as you might try. And try. And try.

And of course there’s the psychoanalytical take. In the words of the informative but boring-sounding Medical News Today, dreaming “provides a psychological space where overwhelming, contradictory, or highly complex notions can be brought together by the dreaming ego that would be unsettling while awake. This process serves the need for psychological balance and equilibrium.” 

In other words, dreaming keeps you from going nuts. Possibly. Obviously it’s not a foolproof method, judging from the number of people who are crazy enough to sit through the “Alvin and the Chipmunks” movies. But maybe it helps.

Although it would do little to explain the wacky dreams that sometimes take place during childhood; I mean, how much psychological maintenance do you need when your primary concerns are nougat bars and Star Wars? I’ve had two recurring dreams in my life, and both took place when I was very, very young. In the earlier one, Superman was dead, and his ghost was haunting my hometown, which in the dream was an old-timey, Ichabod Crane-type village with smoking chimneys and shoddily-clad townspeople washing linens in buckets by dusty roadsides. My mother and I were Ghostbusters. Assigned to the Superman case, we zapped the zombified comic book character with our ghostbusting implements, which were made from the dead branches of a nearby maple tree. His ectoplasmic essence was trapped inside the contents of a dog-eared comic, where he belonged. When I awoke I had mixed emotions: Yay for me and my spectre-defying mom, boo to the idea of the favorite son of Krypton lying dead on a sheet of flimsy newsprint. I hadn’t been that confused since … well, ever, since I was 6.

Now I ask you, what in the name of Clark Kent would a dream like that do for my psychological stability? I’m guessing not much, since I grew up to write columns about heavy metal and duck farts.

Since nobody seems to have a definitive answer to the dream question, perhaps the truth lies in none of the above. Over the past few years I’ve noticed that my dreams are always more vivid during bouts of heavy reading, so it’s possible they’re nothing more than the subconscious expression of our imaginations -- a slumbering creature stretching its limbs, testing its boundaries. The jail, the spectators, all of it just shadow puppets cast by the more impish inclinations of our minds. Too bad no one can say for sure.

One of these days I’ll ask Steve Urkel. Maybe he knows.