Loose Cans

€1120, actually, and add to that at least €150 in uncounted cash tips, and you have what I think can be reasonably referred to as a ton of money--especially when you calculate it in dollars: $1650.

In three weeks. Papa got PAID.

Damn, but isn't this cool.

Rollicking, updown week. First, lows. Paralyzing postelection hangover lingered long. Walked around in a stupor along the liffeying river Des Peres d’Espair. Spoke in a moan. Read salon.com, your endless parade of comments, Greg Palast on how Kerry really did win--you P-utz, you just had to send that to me--and the Guardian. The Guardian of civil liberty’s front page said it all: the page was all funereal black, two tiny white words in the center:

Oh, God.

Read that in West Coast coffee over massive cup of black nursing my first-ever hangover not brought on by drink. Day of absurd communality among Americans. If it said “yo” instead of “oi,” “that guy” instead of “your man,” or “ten-thirty” instead of “half ten,” you talked to it. Trying to force the fade of the feeling of the ineluctable futility of the expatriated. The mere talking, the common accent, the familiar dipthonging, was more important than what the whimper said. These fragments we have shored against our ruin.

An Arlen Specter of hope, briefly, when the then-presumed next chair of Senate Judiciary, warned Bush against sending hard-line righties up for Supreme Court nomination, as the GOP still--small things to be thankful for--doesn’t have the 60 required for a filibuster-busting cloture vote. This was interpreted as Specter drawing a line in the sand, throwing sand against the wind. Line turned out to be spectral, phantom, invisible as the wind. Focus on the Family and others went nuts and pilloried Specter, one of the few thinking Repugs, as anti-family, pro-gay and pro-choice. Whether or not he’s out on his ass remains to be seen. He’s backpedaled furiously in the past few days, saying he would of course support any of Bush motions. If Bush wants Gonzales, okey dokey. If Bush wants Roy Moore, party on. If Bush wants to borrow the Constitution from the Library of Congress and wipe his ass with it, s’cool with me, bro.

Days were spent in this stupor. Went back to work on Thursday night (begged off Tuesday, saying--truthfully--that there was no earthly way I was going to be functioning. I missed the Bridget Jones 2 launch party, which was a pity. No, Darcy & co weren’t there. It was a bunch of Irish celebs I never heard of. Elaine described one, George Murphy, as “a little pants who thinks he can sing,” and whom she nearly carded. I would have enjoyed that. Maybe I’ll card someone, just for the hell of it.

But when I went back, it was all, “Loocy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do!” ‘Splained it all night. Everyone was sympathetic, but most just wanted to know Why? I ‘splained to them why. It became clear to me why. We’re not on the brink of civil war. We are actively fighting one. Red is pitted implacably against Blue. What is an election now? It’s two things: bringing out your base and bringing in your swing. I’d say, what, 10% of the electorate is swing? The asshole “undecideds?” I felt like an undecided voter last spring, actually. The choice was, continue to live at the hated Halls, but this time with friends, launderette, security, high-speed internet, Luas, space, lower rent and high-pressure shower, or get the hell out of Halls, which is all I wanted to do, and move into City Centre. In the end, actually, I chose Halls. I chose healthcare, social services, education, fiscal discipline, reparation of broken bonds with allies over unilateralism, isolationism and bigger deficits. As it happened, Sadie decided she was coming back, taking back the place in Halls I had thought bequeathed to me, and you may remember the dilemma. Finally, the decision was made that neither would live there, and here we are. Perfectly happy, living together more compatibly and comfortably than we ever thought possible--the conversation never flags or stagnates, and I’ve not thought once about killing her with a machete--even if fucking everything is broken (chairs, dresser, oven, curtain rod), the water pressure sucks and our bills are, inexplicably, through the roof. I will return to this momentarily.

My point is that I think I understood the undecided voter. Halls promised so much. Everything I needed would be right at hand. And yet I couldn’t shake the unconquerable sense of, well, hatred I felt for the place. The remoteness, the surveillance, the sense of being neither here nor there. Stuck between a rock and a vague place. A place I didn’t love, but which would have been better the next time around, against a place--independent living--I knew nothing about. This must be how the undecided voter feels: after all the scandals, from Enron to Abu Ghraib, the hellhole quagmire in Iraq, the loss of jobs, the deficit going off like fireworks, the economy in the toilet--things even They can’t spin--and he STILL can’t make up his mind. Wow, is he a dumb fucker or what? I was.

This is not, however, what's important. What's important is the unshakeable bases. Red stays red, blue stays blue. These two are not close to coming together. They're pulling apart. Edwards was right, though not quite the way he meant it: we are living in two Americas: red and blue. The two will never coalesce, ever. They will go at each others' throats forever, until one is eradicated. I have an invincible conviction that political orientation in America is almost entirely geographical: the more urban, the more populous, the more the need to coexist and compromise, the more diverse, the more bolted our fates are to those of others', the more liberal. The more rural, the more man feels himself an island, the more necessarily self-reliant, the less immediate and obvious the need to consider the situation of others, the more conservative. This is borne up in every election. Look at Missouri. In the gay-marriage ban ballot initiative a few months ago, when MO went 70-30 for it, only one single county in the entire STATE voted against it: St. Louis. In Kansas City, this past election, only one county (KC is divided into its own weee counties) voted Kerry: Jackson county. That's downtown, urban KC.

People ask me a lot why Americans are like that, why we're so happy to flip off the rest off the planet and go it alone, and I always reply that it has to do with space. We go it alone because we always have. Manifest destiny, the push westward, sphere of influence (one of the loveliest phrases in the history of diplomacy), and so on. Red Americans do not know the friction of sharing borders, not even those in Southern Texas or on the Canadian border. In the case of the former, there's a big fucking wall, and in that of the latter, they're not exactly foreign. There is nothing foreign or genuinely unamerican in the red states, which is why they so happily go about labeling things "unamerican." Because a thing needs its other in order to define itself: no good without bad, no peace without war, and no American without foreign. They need some Other to demonize, to marginalize, so that they can stand on its shoulders and survey their domain, the threat of the invented Other safely squelched. This is also why Americans, deep down, or even right up on the surface, feel so absolutely that the motto of every other nation on earth is, "We're number two!" Because nothing has ever presented itself to challenge that assumption. I do firmly believe, however, that in some sense, the population bomb will be a booming boon. Civilization moves towards increased urbanity, never away from it. Malthusian checks don't happen in America. We're not running out of food anytime soon. So cities will start cropping up in Montana and West Texas, and white people will have to learn how to work with the Mexicans, and not relegate them to the back rooms and night shifts (manifest marginalizing). Barring this, or if we're just too impatient, New York should just secede from the union. Because we're the most unamerican of all. I really think we should be our own country. You know, fuck the statehood shit. A whole new country, where everybody can keep fucking everybody till we all the same color. I don't tell people I'm from the states, I tell them I'm from New York. It's completely different. The People's Republic of New York. I'm sick and tired of being "american." Fuck Americans. They're dragging the rest of us down. Sick of the stigma. We could make a great country. Here's a comments question: who would you put in office? Who would be in the cabinet? Who'd run what? Yogi Berra for president!

But I mention the arrival of bills. This, ultimately, was what jolted me back to life. That, and the fact that I worked Thursday from 6 to 2:30am, Friday from 7 to 5:30am, Saturday from 6 to 5am, and Sunday from 6 to 1am (and then went partying). But you know how dull, lingering pain can be displaced by a newer, sharper pain? How the arrival of a rock on your foot distracts you from the ache in your head? Well, that’s what happened when the Eircom internet bill came. €104. It was supposed to be €20 for 60 hours a month. We don’t even know what happened. I’m not going into it. I think they included an installation fee of around €70, which the realtor’s supposed to pay, that not-callin’-back cocksucker, but even so. Shit. We’re pretty pissed. And then the fucking Energy bill showed up yesterday. €62. What the fuck? They added something like €25 in hidden charges and VAT. Jerks.

Okay, I just called the realtor and yes, we’re getting ballpark €70 back on the eircom bill, which brings that total down to a more manageable €45 per person. Still, though. Damn. Mostly it was the initial, undeadening shock which mattered. Plus he said he’d get on the landlord about fixing our fucking broken furniture. I’ll believe it when I see it.

So those were the lows. But there were also highs. Sadie’s mom was around for a week or so, which was fun. Motherly, but not at the cost of coolness. Good to have a mom around. Then, the 35 hours of work in four days. I really like this place. The people I work with are terrific. I’m getting really good at spinning bottles in my hand. With the pourers on. But they have to be less than half full otherwise I spray booze all over the place. Still, it looks really cool. I’m learning to hate customers again. I’m learning not to feel bad about stopping service (‘Sorry, not taking any more orders;” “Sorry, we’re closed;” “GO HOME!”), and I don’t apologize anymore when I charge people huge sums of money. It’s liberating. And they’re giving me huge sums of money, too, which is also liberating. I can buy quality goods. Basically, I know how much money I had before I started working. I intend not to go below that mark again. Work takes two weeks to pay my rent. After that, it’s mad money. Tip money, which is well in excess of €150 so far (I picked up €75 in tip on Friday night alone; this guy at residents’ bar was just hurling money at me), pays for groceries. I almost never have to go to an ATM. Finally, I can adhere to both Kander family mottoes: Keep the eggs moving, and never dip into capital. It may not seem like much, but the fact that I can now make good scrambled eggs and support myself financially is a personal achievement I regard as being far more significant than getting into college.

But it’s not nearly as significant as the great white father’s recent milestones: first, Esquire magazine, on page 116, left column, recognizes one of his as one of the top five men’s rooms in America (a restaurant called Bogart’s, one of his last, but where I’m not allowed to work onaccounta the client was a ghastly bitch). Then, possibly the only thing that could have made me prouder than I already was: yes, Ms. ~A, the “crawmom” story in the Metropolitan Diary was his. I remember when he submitted it. My father had a story published in Metropolitan Diary. Page B2. I am so proud of Papa I’m popping.

Sadie, her Moms, a new arrival from Juneau named Kristen, who is definitely passing muster, and I went to see a free showing of I Heart Huckabees. It was brilliant. Like a Charlie Kaufman movie, but so much more relevant, plausible, real, powerful and funny. It was perfect: they didn’t take themselves even remotely seriously, and it was the most accurate deconstructionist parable I’ve ever seen. It’s all about the play, the aporia, the unreadability and undecidability between the binaries (infinity and nothingness, in this case), and it (arche-)paints it photorealistically. It’s everything a movie needs to be: we even get to see Lily Tomlin dive, Jackie Chan-style, through a car window into the backseat. The cast is fabulous, too: Jason Schwartzmann, Jude Law, Naomi Watts (really terrific, as ever), Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin (personal favorites), Isabelle Huppert and, with far and away the most inexplicably spectacular performance, Marky Mark. It’s ridiculous. There’s no earthly reason he should be able to act that well. I’m going to see it again pronto.

Lastly, I’ve begun a dialogue with Ted O’Neill. If all goes well, and unless Mikey P. dissuades me, I will almost certainly find myself in Chicago next year. I’ve talked to all concerned parties, and we are go for launch. Now I need someone to tell me what the number of the HM College office is. I need my transcript. Mama, I’m coming home.

Today, you may have gathered by the length of this post, is the first in a while I’ve had almost entirely to myself. I have to head over to the tax office briefly to hand in some documents (until I get this PPS number, like a Social Security number, the highwaymen in the Irish gummint take 42% of all my earnings. They’re jerks. I get it back, but they’re still jerks), and then I have to buy a cheap pair of black pants, as my only pair has a small rip in the knee and they get so crapped up at work that I have to alternate pairs. But it’s nice to just sit here and blather. Now I’m hungry. I have some mince I need to use up. Caitriona has given back the new David Sedaris book that Sadie bought for the three of us. I haven’t read it yet. At last.