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I’d like to be an activist, but politics is so serious and depressing. I’d like to start a group of artistic activists — performance and visual artists who would use their talents to have fun and promote awareness and appreciation of suburban culture. Hey, I’m suburban, I can’t help it. That’s how I was raised. I’m tired of being ashamed of being from the Burbs and wishing I could be hip like the Inner Loopers. We can’t appreciate something we take for granted, so we need to promote awareness, poke fun, gently nudge the minds of our fellow burbans. Can we separate the wonderful gifts and priviledges of the suburban life from the tired cliches of blandness aassociated with it? Well. it’s *my* pipe dream…

suburban dissonance manifesto

celebrate suburbia
embrace the Multiplex, the Minimart
love the pot luck dinner, the Chinese Buffet
appreciate esplanades and jogging trails
hug a soccer mom

celebrate suburbia, but
don’t make it your world
don’t take the Master Plan too seriously
don’t sway to its rhythms

Instead, keep yourself a step off the beat.
Sing a little off key.
Create some dissonance.

Have a drum circle in a local park.

Get 50 people, all dressed alike,
go stand by the fountain at the mall.
When anyone asks you what group you’re with,
say you don’t know these people.

Put poetry and art on local bulletin boards.

Adopt a convenience store. Buy the clerks lunch.

Hop the local shuttle bus with your friends.
Ride for a few hours. Sing bus riding songs.
Bonus points if you sing in harmony.

Get some brooms and sweep through town. Literally.

Make fingerpaint murals. Invite passers-by to help.

Make people look twice.
Make people think
and laugh at themselves.

Give them something funny to share
over breadsticks at the Olive Garden.

Be peaceful. Be respectful. But be weird.
Get all the necessary permits, but don’t seek approval.

Let people stare. Make them wonder.
Cultivate funny looks.

It all worked out for once. I was able to find babysitting at the last moment (Thanks Allison!). We had a way to get Girlzilla home from swim practice (thanks Cindy!). And our evening calendar was otherwise clear. So we went on our first real no-kids-along date in a few months. Wahoo!

We ate at a neighborhood Italian Cafe called, unassumingly, Italian Cafe. The food was great. The atmosphere was just perfect — it had that homey, mom-and-pop feel that Heidi and I love. We like to go to places and have four-star food but we like to be able to enjoy it wearing shorts. Anyway, we shared a stuffed artichoke as an appetizer. It makes a great appetizer because it is green and therefore gives you the illusion that you are starting out with a healthy vegetable dish. Made me feel as if I had earned my respectable if not spectacular bowl of al dente pasta with spicy Italian sausage.

Then we went to see a movie. I know, not very imaginative. But hey, going to see a movie without at least one kid along is a rare treat for us these days. I’d chosen About a Boy because it had gotten good reviews and was based on a book by the guy who wrote High Fidelity which is a favorite of mine. We were both pleasantly surprised. Not only was it a serviceable date movie, it was a damn fine film by any standard. It made me want to go out and buy Nick Hornby’s new book and dig out my old Badly Drawn Boy CD.

The jewel of the night, besides the carefree time with my darling wife, was the takeaway moral of the movie. Without giving too much away, the central conflict is the seduction of a carefree, controlled, but ultimately empty life of adult autonomy vs. the chaotic, inconvenient life of being connected to others. You can guess which side I am for.

At the end of the film, the main character’s narrator voice says something like, “Being a couple isn’t enough. You have to have back up” as a disparate group of friends, lovers, and family members prepares for a meal together on the screen. That was the jewel moment for me.

I thought of Allison and Cindy, our “back up” that made our night possible. I thought of us last Sunday Night, sitting down for dinner with extended family and an invited friend. I had visions of future dinners, holidays, and gatherings that I knew I wanted to make happen, just to build that same kind of community feeling I was seeing on screen. I get that same kind of feeling (at times) when I go to my Church, but why should that feeling be confined to Church or any other institution for that matter?

Making that kind of thing happen — bringing people together — is Heidi and my strong suit. It’s what we do. And it’s definitely our future as well.

Being a Church person, I hear much lamentation about the decline of the nuclear family. This is ironic to me because the advent of the nuclear family — a married couple and children — was decried at the time as being a degradation of family values itself. The isolation that came with the nuclear family structure and the rise of the suburbs, especially for women, was a driving force in the social changes that led to its ultimate decline. What got left behind by the nuclear family was the extended family, the community, the neighbors. Seduced by promises of autonomy, privacy, and personal prosperity, families lost their “back-up.” We need to get it back.

I have a new vision of family values. I want to recover the old extended family, community, neighborhood model of family only updated for the times. Kind of like an unholy marriage of the “family” structures found on the TV shows Friends, Cheers, and Seventh Heaven. I hope that in the future we don’t go for more than a week without having a non family member at our dinner table. I hope that we can use our gifts to make our home a gathering place, however much of a pain in the ass that can be at times. So now I am certain I know what I want for Christmas this year. I want an air hockey table. And eventually, a hot tub.
A few things that might make our house a more desirable place to be, especially for our kids’ friends when they are teenagers.

I also realize now that I need to develop some male friends. Not at-work friends, not other-half-of-couple friends, but just a guy or two to do stuff with. Usually, having guy friends involves a fair amount of time to “hang” and I don’t currently have much “hanging” time. But it’s something to shoot for. All I know is that I have a renewed resolve to seek — and to *be* — back-up.

We had a good Memorial Day. We had the TV on all day, which is not at all like us, watching the Trading Spaces Memorial Day Marathon on TLC. We love that show. I love to see the transformations of the rooms, I like the idiosyncracies of the decorators, I like the art ideas they have. I love the idea of making a lot from a little. I also have a crush on carpenter Amy Wynn Pastor. Not that kind of crush, tho she does look fetching in a tool belt. It’s kind of like an “I wouldn’t mind my daughter growing up to be like her” kind of crush. And, at its best, the show is like a slowly unfolding train wreck — when the designers get a wacky idea like putting hay on the walls and you just know the couple’s gonna hate it in the end. I try to look away but I just can’t.

As for the Memorial part of Memorial Day, not a whole lot of overt observance. My father-in-law did spend the day watching WWII documentaries and war movies. A picture of my grandfather, whom I never met, was watching over us all day. Robert Bacon, after whom I am named, died in WWII when my mom was a little girl. His death had a huge effect on my Grandmother, Margie Lauderdale, which in turn had a huge effect on my mother.

What would our family have been like if Robert Bacon and not Leo Pokorny had been my granpa? Who knows? How would it be different if Margie had stayed married to Robert and been (maybe) happier in her life? Who knows? Would my mother have been happier as a girl?

I’ve never been clued into all the details of the family soap opera — every family has one — but I can definitely say that when Robert Bacon paid the ultimate price for his country, his family and descendants paid dearly as well. How about remembering all of the mothers and daughters and families whose stories have been steered off path by the lossess of war? So, I did a bit of remembering on Memorial Day, mainly for my mother and her mother before her, wondering about an alternative story that never happened.

I’ve submitted myself to another ring: ChristBlogs. I’m formally identifying myself on the web as a Christian and I’m willing to accept the consequences. I am now officially at odds with a lot of people out on the web today, but that’s okay. I will walk in both worlds.

I am a very enthusiastic Christian, except for one problem. I love the people, but I can’t relate to the sappy, hokey, cultural kitsch that surrounds my religion. I am much more comfortable in secular culture, which of course presents me with more than a few moral challenges. But I’d rather struggle as a Christian in the secular world, engaging the culture, than huddle in the safe Christian pseudoculture we’ve created for ourselves. Not to say that there aren’t some good Christian artists, poets, and musicians out there, but I was raised on rock and roll baby. Third Day and DC Talk are great, but they alone don’t do it for me.

Anyway, I feel like I’m risking being rejected by both sides — not orthodox enough for the Christians, and way too religious to for the typical web dude. We’ll see how it goes.

Mom and Dad are sweeping down from the plains of Oklamhoma to stay with us for the Memorial Day weekend. Looking forward to seeing them. I don’t have much planned, so I hope they don’t expect any formal agenda. I would really suck as a cruise director. I’d be all, “Okay, there’s some shuffleboard on the lido deck, cards are in the closet over there, we have a pool. Knock yourselves out.” What I’d really like to do is chain my parents to the table and force them to play dominoes all weekend, but I’m pretty sure they’d like to do something else since they’re from Oklahoma and Dominoes is like the state sport or something. Every time they come down my Mom always says, “Now, you don’t have to entertain us by playing all those games…” Which in reality probably means, “Please, please, please, can we do something else? See a movie? Anything?” But I’m heartless and cruel and will force them to play at least one full evening of Chickenfoot. Besides that and meals, we don’t have much planned.

I did a dumb thing this morning. I downloaded all this cool music to burn myself a chill mix CD. I was going for funky, chillout techno with a touch of ambient atmosphere. I arranged all the tracks just so and burned my CD. I nailed it — just the right mix I was going for. So, did I remember to record which track was which? Of course not. I had a bunch of cool tracks from groups I just discovered — Zero 7, Theivery Corporation, Emperor Penguin, Tosca, etc. — but I have no idea who did what song. Smart, huh?

Here’s someplace I want to hit this Summer:

Hyde Park Miniature Museum
March 24 - November 2002
Brazos Projects
2425 Bissonnet
Free
We are delighted to once again be able to view this remarkable collection. Brazos Projects, the non-profit space from Brazos Bookstore, takes on a monumental project when it completely reconstructs the Hyde Park Miniature Museum opening in March through November, 2002. D. D. Smalley compiled a remarkable collection of 4,000 plus objects ranging from the precious to the insignificant and allowed folks to marvel at his Montrose attic in the 30’s and 40’s. Civil War cannon balls, 140,000 cancelled postage stamps neatly piled in a cigar box and amber-lensed field glasses for spying honey bees are only a few of the finds in the museum. Rice University Architecture students will work with drawings of the original site made by Larry
Harris during the 1994 de-installation for an authentic recreation. Orange Show volunteers, who helped to save the site in 1994, and University of Houston Art Students, will also reinstall. Helen Winkler Fosdick, who restored the sitein the 1970’s, will
organize volunteer docents. Writers in the Schools will develop educational activities and conduct school field trip tours. Smalley’s grandson, artist Frank Davis, will consult on the reinstallation and give guided tours.

Here’s a link index of the online poems of our current poet laureate, Billy Collins. A fine public service from the folks at Bigsnap. Here’s a good one:

Child Development

As sure as prehistoric fish grew legs
and sauntered off the beaches into forests
working up some irregular verbs for their
first conversation, so three-year-old children
enter the phase of name-calling.

Every day a new one arrives and is added
to the repertoire. You Dumb Goopyhead,
You Big Sewerface, You Poop-on-the-Floor
(a kind of Navaho ring to that one)
they yell from knee level, their little mugs
flushed with challenge.
Nothing Samuel Johnson would bother tossing out
in a pub, but then the toddlers are not trying
to devastate some fatuous Enlightenment hack.

They are just tormenting their fellow squirts
or going after the attention of the giants
way up there with their cocktails and bad breath
talking baritone nonsense to other giants,
waiting to call them names after thanking
them for the lovely party and hearing the door close.

The mature save their hothead invective
for things: an errant hammer, tire chains,
or receding trains missed by seconds,
though they know in their adult hearts,
even as they threaten to banish Timmy to bed
for his appalling behavior,
that their bosses are Big Fatty Stupids,
their wives are Dopey Dopeheads
and that they themselves are Mr. Sillypants


–Billy Collins

Okay, I decided to end my web hermit existence and make my little site here available to more than the three people I’ve told about it. I have been blog-journaling for about two years with all of three infrequent readers, so now its time to push that hit count up into the triple digits! Woohoo!

Self-promotion starts at home, so I’ve joined the H-Town Blogs ring.

This Guy’s pretty funny to read, tho we have about zippo in common. He’s like the anti-me. Except we do love the coffee bean. Yessiree.

A nice mid-week theology source: God, Humanity, and the Cosmos. I think I may be some sort of neo-neo-Thomist

The Meta Library is a great source of ponderous prose for those days when you’re in the mood for some heavy thinking about the Big Guy and his doings.

Another reason to be a fan of Margaret Barry a.k.a Mighty Girl is her latest article on sophisticated drinking. I’d always pictured myself teaching my daughter to drink properly, once she comes of age of course. If she’s going to imbibe, which I’m sure she will sometime in her late youth, I want her to do it safely, with knowledge, and with a bit of flair. Definitely before we send her off to college. Speaking of flair, this is a great site, though not intended for the likes of me: Ladies United for the Preservation of Endagered Cocktails.

Oooh, I found some good papier mache recipes. Can you tell I’m starting to think about summer crafts?

I’m such a geek, but I used to love these two things, Math and Origami. Brings back memories –I haven’t done origami in years. Maybe Girlzilla and I can do some this summer.

I was away all weekend with my wife giving an engaged encounter weekend. Heidi and I enjoyed having time to sit and talk about us, our dreams, our life. With a household like ours, time for more intimate, deeper communication is rather limited, so it was nice to get away and work on the relationship a bit.

I wish I could say it was a good weekend. Actually it probably was. Most couples appeared to have a good weekend together, and there was a fair amount of good feedback. We collected a lot in donations and got about ten couples to indicate interest in volunteering.

But, as always, my mind focuses in on the stuff that went wrong. Our question and answer section was hijacked.

We usually have this QA section for couples to ask questions and get frank, honest answers from a priest and the team couples. Apparently, one or two couples stuffed the box with questions and their questions had an agenda. Now, I didn’t have a forensic team verify my theory, but there were these two very conservative Catholic couples attending the weekend, and I’m sure they were the ones who stuffed the box — they apparently were interested in discussing at length all of the very most controversial teachings of Catholicism. Premarital sex, birth control, cohabitation, etc. This wouldn’t be so bad if there were some other topics to discuss, but *all* of the questions were about these topics. And with each question, at least one of these conservatives would chime in smugly about how such and such was a mortal sin and a grave moral evil. So, since many of the couples were interfaith and most were in the stage of young adult life where they tend to stray from the church anyway, you can guess how this religious browbeating went over.

Unfortunately it wasn’t until about halfway through the session that Heidi and I figured out that we’d been had. And of course, since I had made a point of telling them the day before that we wouldn’t shove Catholicism down their throats, I looked like a grade-A asshole. And we were in a difficult position — while we wanted to put the best, most reasonable face on the Church’s teachings, we, as leaders of the retreat, could not back away from representing them faithfully. So I’m sure we looked like we were in cahoots with these more-Catholic-than-thou types. Geez, every time this one girl — who sounded like she was equal parts valley girl, Mother Angelica, and Cardinal Ratzinger — opened her mouth I said to myself silently “Shoot me now, please.” Indeed.

So the damage was done and it colored the rest of the weekend. Sigh. And when the reviews came in, the negative ones were some of the most vehement, vitriolic, and nastily personal spews I’d ever read. I’m used to reading complaints about the format and design of the retreat (which I agree is outdated myself), but some of these reviews attacked us personally. And so that’s where I am, still brooding over the negative stuff. I hate being like that — I can forget every compliment, but the one criticism will stay with me.

And so that’s why I have this journal. To vent, right? While I was pissed at the two holy roller couples, I also get pretty annoyed with people who come on a Catholic retreat like ours and get all offended with us for, well, being Catholic. Hello? You’re getting married *in the Catholic Church*, you should expect to hear a fair bit about Catholicism.

I mean, come on. If you are currently living a life that is in conflict with Church teachings, and you’re currently seeking to get married as a Catholic and sign up for all that entails, well, don’t you think it’s reasonable to expect to hear some stuff about your current choices you don’t want to hear? No one’s forcing you to be Catholic. There are lots of secular ways of preparing your relationship for marriage. And there are lots of pretty buildings to get married in. If you are just too chicken to tell Mommy and Daddy that you don’t want to be Catholic and you come on our retreat to appease them, then you don’t have the right to get all up in *our* knickers about being Catholic!

And to the two or so couples who used their feedback forms to attack us personally, I certainly hope you don’t make a habit of using your words as spitefully and vengefully with each other when you’re mad. Cause if you do, your marriages will be toast.

There, that felt better….

It was Geek Pride Day at the movies yesterday — Attack of the Clones opened. We were there for the 11:00 a.m. showing at the neighborhood metroplex. Geeks were out in force, badges tucked discreetly away, various e-gadgets set to vibrate, spirits running high. It was a veritable sea of Dockers, wire frame glasses, and ill-advised facial hair. You had to be a Star Wars maven to really like the film. The lame romance dialogue was grudgingly endured. How else would we get little Luke and Leia in Episode III? But that was redeemed by the one scene where Yoda goes totally Jedi on some Sith ass. Droid fu. Clone fu. Less Jar Jar, more Samuel L. Jackson. All in all a better movie than Episode I.

I got home yesterday and the house was empty. Okay, I’ll admit I kind of timed it that way so that I’d have a bit of a nap before the family descended from swim practice. Well, I got a call just as I was changing out of my hot work clothes. It was Girlzilla. Apparently no one was home when she needed to go to practice. I find out later that Heidi was delayed at the doctor with the babies (Note to self: Never leave an “I’ll be late” message with an Alzheimers patient). So Girlzilla, on her own initiative, left a note and biked down to the pool on her own, then called back once she got there. Pretty good responsibility and initiative for a ten year old. Then when I got there, she was swimming industriously with the rest of the kids. I was proud of her. She can sure step up and be a responsible, mature person when she puts her mind to it. Quite a contrast to the whinefest she put on at practice earlier in the week.

Speaking of becoming more mature, the girls in Girzilla’s fourth grade class will be seeing THE FILM today. Which will be followed by THE TALK, I assume, by Heidi. Actually, she already knows the basics — what a ten year old needs to know about what happens with sex and stuff — but I guess THE TALK will mainly consist of review, question and answer, and maybe an introduction to the next chapters. I don’t mean to leave it to Heidi. I’d be happy to be part of THE TALK and discuss THE FILM. But Girlzilla is surprisingly modest and a bit bashful and I’m sure would appreciate just talking to her mother. THE FILM is a milestone for sure, but what I’m really not looking forward to are THE HORMONES. Oy.