Just in time for the Holidays, I’ve decided to post my old stand-by Christmas Story. This is what those of you missed at Madrone–even the ones who were there, because this group of happy birthday yodelers came in right when I had just wound up. By no means does it stand up to that great cinematic masterpiece of the same name with all its tongues stuck on flagpoles and wild dogs running through your house and eating your christmas dinner, but it is told in the same delicious nostalgia: of half longing and half thanking god those times are behind us. Hopefully, we are all older and stronger and wiser; and if not, at least we’ve got XBOX’es now, and better doping agents, if we want ‘em…

For all my dear friends and family, a toast to you in all your wondrousness…

by B. Tyler Burton

“All I Want for Christmas is Hope,” I told the lady at the Macy’s perfume counter. “That’s nice,” she said, before spritzing me in the eyes with perfume.

It took a few moments for my sight to come back. I joked about that, and she apologized contritely. I had let her believe thus far, for our brief time together, that I was buying this bottle for some sleek Russian bride in cat boots just like her. When she had gone to the back counter to find a particular scent she said smelled of rose petals, I noticed how fine she really was. Firm, child-bearing hips. She would lay awake and play with your hair afterwards.

We conducted our business as two committed individuals. That disgusting little line about girls in cat-boots always having boyfriends holds true, I realized. And that line about those who opt out of Christmas being lonely, depressed, liars shamed by their own lies?…

It was all there, etched into my skin. I was breaking my vow. Buying presents at Macy’s in spite of my personal moratorium on big-box corporate vultures. Sure it was only perfume, and no independant Marxist guerilla-backing parfumeries had presented themselves to me on the bus line I knew like the back of my hand; but to be honest I hadn’t so much as checked the phone book, or even looked out the big glass window.

With days to go before I headed back for Ohio, I had to buy something; if I didn’t, I’d be forced to use the effort expended to drive across the nation as reason enough to excuse my forgetting–which I would, in some cases. I’d use it for friends and less than umbilical connections; but not for my mother. I had to get something for mom. She was who this perfume was really for. The fact that she had always given good, if a little useless presents was not lost on me. Sure, for years since college she had been giving sweaters and socks, and the decline of her reign as interesting gift giver followed something like the decline of the San Francisco 49′ers or the Chicago Bears or the Dallas Cowboys in my own life. These constant transmissions in the holiday background of my attention as I had played on the floor with my cars. Here, I, not having much money–but still having some–wanted to return the favor.

Though sometimes not giving a gift at all might be better. To count your losses of inspiration, and make up for it next time. Certainly, I imagine we all have our stories. The most hellish Christmas gifts that give so much you want to throw them and the tree into the back yard, and then burn it all hot with napalm to make sure nothing ever comes back from the dead like in some sick puppet horror movie.

Take the infamous sweatshirts of ‘89.

Oh, please do. Give a gift, give blood, but don’t ever put anything but a screen-print on a white sweatshirt. With a tee-shirt, an iron-on David Hassellhoff or Ben Vereen is fine. A unicorn on a disco grid pattern like the background from Tron, or even teddy bears playing in rainbows, that’s fair play, too. Something like a Kilmt frieze in puffy paint–of the Kiss–would have been nice and bourgeoisie. Right up my alley at that age. Something abstract would have been enough.

But to print my name right across the front, surrounded by little festive confetti streamers was nothing short of a cardinal sin. With fireworks in different gel crayon colors shooting out in bright CMYK gayness. Big bold yellow, biological pellet ocean blue and intersteller alien blood magenta lightning bolts all announcing the glory that is: “TYLER”, right there on my chest.

I mean, Christ, I was in 7th grade! I’m sure the guys who are beating me up will be happy to know my name while they’re at it, I thought directly. “Oh wow,” I say. “That’s nice.”

“It’s your name,” everyone says, as I hold up my take of the gift rally for the whole clan to see.

Didn’t these people remember how it was to be a kid?

The idea that it was consolidated into that specific four color gamut never hit me until recently. That this was probably the brain child of a bunch of crafty printer moms who’d stolen gobs of ink off the presses at their husband’s shops–or been given a cut tax-free; and now that crafty was in… I’m sure they sold quite well amongst the house-wives of Buttress Run. But one woman’s craft–given a dash of the Lifetime Network, a pinch of Oprah’s tit, and a pint of gourmet ice cream made out of a unicorn’s tears–and that makes for one young cousin’s curse.

Maybe it was the look of sheer horror I did not try to conceal upon my face, but I never saw them make another damn shirt like that, ever again. And good riddance, I thought.

If it had even just said “Him”, instead of my name, now, that would have been, could have been, should have been–I don’t know–cool? No, not really. It was best to set the whole lot ablaze.

Still, a gift rally is one thing. Your parents, on the other hand, are supposed to know you. To know what you like. Even if they patently refuse to buy it for you. My mother, as I’ve said, had always bought me ingenious, if slightly useless things: like harmonicas, and dream journals, which I tore pieces from to make paper airplanes and, later, to roll joints with when we had no other choice. On some pages I even scribbled a few poems, as I wailed away stoned as hell on my jazz harp deep in the heart of the woods.

My father, however, it turned out, had only given good gifts because of my mom; after the divorce and one Christmas where I literally brought him to the local toy store and pointed out the exact shining golden Zelda game I wanted, he was left blowing in the mercantile wind, without the slightest shred of sense when it came to the act, and slowly he just fell off to placing a card with a hundred dollar bill in it on the aluminum tree and heading straight for the egg-nog he could almost taste the alcohol in without it being there.

In his swan song, though, Dad had bought us matching calendars. It was his last feeble effort at ingenuity. And, received alone, by any of us three brothers, the calendars might have been appropriate, but together, set 1-2-3 upon the carpet, they mocked us for their inattention and insincerity.

They said: “We have all been bought together, in great haste.” Mine with the stuffy history caricature, his with the zany maniac, and the other guy, the scientist, who is that for? “We still have our price tags, even, check underneath,” they screamed. We did, and they did.

Sulking, turning back to the television and the newest Nintendo game, wondering how soon it was that we could go back home.

He had picked out something suited to each of our tastes. That sticks with me to this day. That’s the nuance of these strange little calendars. That I got history quotes, my middle brother a daily pill of Henny Youngman style one-liners; and Tully, the youngest, got stuck (I imagine) with the useless trivia. As first brother I felt I’d been gifted the best one. My dad had seen this and thought of me. Then he’d thought, Why kill one bird when you can shop for three?? Seeing both of my kin, each with their own, my stomach turned. I put the calendar back in its box, saying thank-you, then I turned on the Nintendo.

“Well what did you learn,” my dad asked me later, “What’s today’s fun fact?” I mumbled something about Charlemagne, not taking my eyes off the screen.

It was even worse, the year afterwards, when he repeated the act. Oh, the practicality!

Even the calendars themselves were mostly recycled. Every other fact I’d heard before, or they were altogether too obvious or too obscure. Nothing had changed besides my game system. And, in that department, I was up to 32 bits. So, Joyeux-Noël, eh?

“I just don’t want to buy something because I feel obligated. I want it to mean something. I want it to have style.” I tell this to the sales girl, and she agrees all the way, while reaching for the red phone to security beneath the desk. Another sales girl tags in, to give her a break.

“This is Victoria Principal’s Fragrence here,” she says, and sprays, and all is white a moment. And I hear Bing Crosby on the speakers and, by God, I’m dreamin’ too…

I’m doing a quick, impromptu reading for the Green Party’s Holiday Bash this evening at Madrone (500 Divisadero, SF). Come down and check it out and nosh with some uppper echelon greens while getting the holiday lead out.

Thanks,
B. Tyler Burton

I’m reading tonight at the SF Green Party’s HQ. If you’re in town you should come check it out, and give some support to the underdogs.

More info here: http://www.sfgreenparty.org/events/event-individual.gem?idx=1916

And don’t forget :: the first to ask me to autograph your unmentionables wins a sweet door prize

In honor of the LitQuake Litcrawl this evening…a little discourse on ego…

The Me Poet
by B. Tyler Burton

The me poet is not impressed.
He complains to his audience that no one gets the joke.
The we poet goes on,
indulges
gets in a little bit of trouble
and it only makes you better friends.
Instead of stalking off the stage in a huff,
or trying to explain aloud how much funnier it is
on the page
when it’s J–
instead of Jill
going up that folly hill,
the we poet says, “Fuck am I drunk, I think I forgot to type out the rest of her name.”

Do you have what it takes to ride in a Hummer Limo?

‘Hummer Style…’ (pdf)
by B. Tyler Burton

They say guys never worry about their hair, but tonight is special. Tonight, I’m going out in a Hummer Limo.

It was all Rube’s idea, if you wanna know the truth. But from the moment he told me, I knew I’d be there, riding high, hooting through the sunroof at all those girls that would be so desperately wanting to know just who are those guys in there–they must have style!

Wow! It’s almost seven; and that means just a half-hour till the Hummer Limo pulls around the corner, all stretched and awesome. It’ll be the first time this street has felt important since it was built–whenever that was. Man, this is gonna be great.

Well, it looks like I’m going to have to walk up a few blocks to the big intersection. What a bummer; but the driver says he’s worried that he won’t be able to get enough clearance to turn around in our little cul de sac. It’s too bad my mom and dad won’t get to see me; but they’ll see the pictures. At least, the ones I choose to show them. Just thinking about all the things that haven’t happened yet that I won’t want them to see gets me nervous.

Yes I’m being honest here, this is my first time riding so high in the City…

Okay, so it’s been an hour, and they’re not here. They probably got stuck in some mighty traffic pile-up at the Hooter’s, and they’re just trying to sort out the really hella hot babes from the ones that are just half-to-hella; but it’s getting tougher to feel as excited as I was before. Maybe I should never have said yes. I’m not good enough to ride in a Hummer limo. That’s it, I’m not good enough. They just should have told me. They didn’t have to lie and say they were coming when they weren’t.

I take it all back. My friends are the greatest. They even had a wine cooler left over that they let me have, for free.

Now we’re on our way. No hooting and hollering as we cross the bridge, fellas. The driver must have nerves of steel. He must not be distracted. How would it look to the rest of traffic if he was busy telling us to keep it down as we passed them.

Oh yeah: we all forgot there were tinted windows on this limo. Break out the little wet bar sized bottles of vodka, tequiza, and Thunderbird. Wait! No wet bar? Well, I came prepared. I was a hero, all thanks to this little flask. A little hero, at least, since the flask ran out quick. My friend asked the driver, once we were safely parked and waiting to make our exit, “I thought all limo’s had a bar in back.”

The driver didn’t have to be so unsympathetic. He could have said, ‘Kid, I understand this is your first ride in a Hummer limo, and so there’s a few things about this kind of life you should know,’ but instead he just laughed and asked us if we thought we were “NSynch” or something, which made about as much sense as not having a wet bar, but I thought it was funny, still. I was too excited to really listen. I just laughed at everything. There’d be time to think, tomorrow.

So. We were going to get some drinks, and then Rube reminds us all that we came to the City to ‘ride around in this Hummer limo.’ I was half-way to my hands down some drunk girl’s pants, but I knew he was right. It was so easy to forget the good life, and go back to your old routines; but not tonight. The girl didn’t really say good-bye, she just slumped over in her chair. I think her friend was yelling “Go to Hell,” but I told her I was too busy. “Maybe tomorrow,” I said, “I’ve got to finish up my ride in a Hummer limo first.” And wouldn’t you know it, suddenly she got real friendly, and told me to put my hand back where it was, but on her this time. She tried to come along, but in all the confusion we must have left her passed out on the curb. And Rube says, “I slipped her my last Mick.” “Maybe we can go pick her up off the curb if she’s still there on our way back,” I suggest. But no dice. The driver said forty-two minutes before the clock strikes 12 and the limo has to turn eastward to the bridge.

Before we could really pimp out the rest of our shit, however, the thing just stopped. And then the strangest thing happened. The driver says to hold it one minute, as he waits for this car ahead of us to back up. Closer. It gets closer and closer, and then…with a noise that jarred the fillings in my teeth loose, the front of the limo opens up and swallows the little car ahead of us real quick like. All that’s left are a few Ralph Nader stickers the Hummer limo spits out the tailpipe. If I wouldn’t have been watching I’d have missed it, too. The Hummer limo jumped and shook a second, and I never noticed if the guy in the car got out; but Rube says he was just a hipster anyways. And we all know that’s short for gay.

Mike said something profound, with too many syllables. He’s the smart one, next to Dave, who is too smart for his own good or he wouldn’t be off watching the stupid stars. Dave is so stupid. He called up just this morning to tell us he wasn’t coming. He said there was some stupid meteor shower, or an alignment of the planets, or something that doesn’t ever happen and that he didn’t want to miss. But I told him, how many times in your life do you get to ride in a Hummer Limo. He was not that impressed, he said. Imagine that!

Quick now we’re back on the road. The driver tells us we got more than enough nutriment for the beast to get us back home now, which is good, I guess; Rube wants to stop for some more vodka, and Mike says he’s getting hungry, just like the limo. I tell him I hope he’s not as hungry as the Hummer, and he assures me he’d never eat his friends so long as he had a fat chick and a burger in each hand. “Two fat chicks?” I ask, “Gosh you’re selfish.”

Then I remember the one thing I forgot to do. I need air, bad. I go to open the sunroof; but what’s this? It’s not there? It never was? How are you supposed to have a limo without a sunroof, I said. A little too loud, it turns out. Because suddenly there I am kneeling in front of that big menacing grill, and Rube is holding one arm, and the driver the other, and they’re trying to push me into the mouth. Mike’s already gone, for saying something with too many syllables. It burps up a strip of fabric, and I think I hear what sounds like “No Exit. It’s Sartre.” The voice trails off. Jesus Christ. It’s the sickest smell you could ever imagine coming out of that grill. It’s too horrible I tell them, I thought it was all going to be pretty. And then suddenly the mouth closes and the driver tells us that I’m not substantial enough to eat. The Hummer doesn’t want me.

Oh God. Laying awake now, back in my little insignificant suburb, I wish I never would have said what I did. I wish I would have been good enough, and strong enough, and tasty enough to matter. Reporters snapped pictures of us early in the night, so at least they got our good sides. (But I forget again that the windows were tinted, and so they “got” nothing but the exterior of our glorious flagship.) I think, instead, that I must’ve looked terrible even then, that you could see how less than worthy I was.

Rube says next time we’ll get one with a wet bar; but I don’t know. Maybe next time I’ll just stay home.

Hey All,

I’ve been offered a slot on the line-up for the SF Green Party’s Goodbye Office Art Auction & Blowout Party this October 27th from 6pm to midnight.

Please come out and show your support for the one party that has consistently recommended crucial progressive reform to our country’s electoral process, and not had the opportunity to yet fumble the ball!!

“Drink cocktails and bid on some great artwork! Eat rum cake while ranting about politics! All ages and political affiliations are welcome. Those still recovering from drinking too much Obama-lade are especially encouraged to attend!”

Live Entertainment by JAH YZER!! and more TBA

For more info see the original event release page:
http://www.sfgreenparty.org/events/events.gem

He was always scowling. I wondered how, and if he did, and what made him, smile. I was completely aware that perhaps he never did. His store was the kind of place that hired girls with bad drug habits, who showed a bit too much skin and needed a bit too much help to grow up and get on with their lives. Girls who dressed in fishnet stocking and assemblage pieces that were mostly scrap and safetypins. Mad Mulvaric hired all these types and leered at them every moment they were there. Who knew what went on in the back rooms? I imagined some of the company parties, the plowing of acres of coke and maybe Mulvaric even got his digusting self laid. I had a feeling that he was something of this bizarro playboy, who sneered and ate sloppy meat sandwiches in the back room and never changed his shirt but who had the right records (and only records) on his vintage stereo.

He had this one t-shirt that I think summed him up more than anything, with a picture of Marvin the Martian as a hip-hop turntablist in space. He wore it constantly, I think I saw him with it on maybe 85% of the time that I saw him; and for awhile there when I was poor and yet unemployed and imagining myself a hustler I’d saunter by after my late morning bagel (at 4pm) and filter my fingers through the 99-cent rack nearly everyday.

He always stood there right by the door to his little back room, probably because it afforded him an eye of the back of the counter––and you know who was always standing around in their ratty old fishnets. He’d stand at his post chewing incessantly, like guys with large goatees sometimes tend to do, chewing like a walrus on some imaginary sandwich that he was remembering or looking forward to, I could never tell which.

Just recently, I cleaned up my desk; or, I should say, I began to clean up my desk. Because it’s not yet rightly even what some would say organized at this point, and here and I am writing about how I’ve cleaned it and that is just patently untrue.

For those who know me, and my desk, or have desks like such of your own that are so entrenched by things that you’re not yet ready to throw away but have found no alternate place for, you might enjoy the somewhat temporary and odd solution I have employed for the past few years that solves, at least, the problem of all those stray bits of paper I jot ideas down on and just leave strewn about.

For the last several years, I have been tearing off the excess and throwing these scraps, or even sometimes whole notebooks, into an old green plastic picnic cooler. I dredged this cooler up a few days ago and opened it, as I hadn’t for some time, and the smell of six month old air filtered out. And there is something about the odor of those white plastic coolers that just puts me in a happier place. Maybe its the smell of vacation?

While I looked down into this vat of ideas layered in strata going back years, I had an idea. I mean, I’ve been keeping these things…Why not actually do something with them? Now that’s an idea!

Why not share them, finger though them. Of course, I’m not under any delusions. But you never know.

For the foreseeable future, in any case, I’m planning on dredging. And you’re coming with me, dear reader. Because there’s nothing worse than a lonely walk down memory lane.

I hope you do enjoy these “Notes from the Cooler”.

The True Story of Pinky Frasier, The 256th Annual World’s Greatest Liar (pdf)
by B. Tyler Burton

I am the World’s Greatest Liar. No kidding. (That’s a little joke we in the business like to make from time to time.) All you have to do is ask one of my colleagues and he’ll probably give you the straight answer. After a good few hours of hard prying on your part it’s even possible to get the World’s Greatest Liar to tell a truth sometimes. I didn’t say we were politicians.

In fact, to be a liar of the first class you must disavow any interest in politics. (For the record, at least. We have to make our money somehow.) That is to say: no kissing babies, no reapportioning the middle-classes’ taxes to retrofit a cabana in Bali with palm trees that bear sausages instead of coconuts, and absolutely no promising them they’ll get their money back in the end (though this is certainly one of the greatest lies of all). It’s just too easy. And that’s why, in 1932, under the venerable leadership of Sir Thomas Snively, the Chapter voted to permanently exclude all politicians from our ranks (but not our rolodexes). This was probably done out of spite, for Sir Thomas was a self-made man and not a rich boy’s patsy, who came from a family with a long history of Prevaricators in their line; and after years of failing at everything from novel writing to selling electric vacuums that wouldn’t exist for some years afterwards, he must have gotten sick of coming each year to these hallowed halls, forced to raise his glass to the fat cats at the head of the table who had taken the easy route and gone into the business of governing.

As was characteristic of the time, Sir Thomas staged a liar’s revolt, and in a few weeks, with the purported pantaloons of the former chairman hanging from the flagpole, he established this most important edict. “A lie must strike from the bottom up.”

The politicians, furious at first to be excluded from their own club, were rumored to have gathered together in some New York penthouse to grumble over what they’d lost, and were in the process of planning a full-scale counter-revolution of the highest order when the former chairman himself, who had spoken not a word since his guests had arrived, began to double over with laughter. He had retired to the balcony, and none dared follow; but when they heard his howls they had come to see what was the matter. “Gentleman,” he famously declared, “What in the sam hell’re we so worried about?”

New York lay sparkling beneath them like a jewel to be cut, polished, and sold back to those who should have owned it from day one. Later that evening it’s told the chairmen, his few closest advisors, and the chief of police made a good racket by going from speakeasy to speakeasy, drinking the place out of liquor, then sending in the vice once they’d made their departure to the next hole in the wall.

That’s the story, if you believe it. I can’t imagine them retiring from a fight so easily; but history, she has a way of making everything into a lie without any of our help.

As for me, and my accomplishments? As for what it was exactly that led me to raise my glass to the great seal above my head? Well, my resume is anything but glamourous. We all learn to lie because of our parents. And the more religious your parents are the better a liar you become. My father’s love was more of what you’d call the Old Testament variety, with many a slinging of belts and fists and bottles in my direction. When I wasn’t close enough, he’d call me over to his side, very kindly at first, then he’d wop me atop the head with the sole of the shoe he was shining for instance, and when a prop did not manifest itself old dad was never shy to bruise his own knuckles. God bless him. If it weren’t for him, I’d never have got so good at lying.

Truth is, that my dad was probably a really responsible guy. Truth, she distances herself as far from us. But, to be quite honest, I am often ashamed at how utterly realistic my lies are; and if all’s to be out I must go ahead and say I do  admire and even envy a good bit of surrealism now and then. That’s how I came to marry an Irish girl, in fact.
After learning to lie to my father, my mother was no trouble. This cascaded into a watershed of fiction beginning with my first days in school. I was a profound excuse-maker. Once I even got the teacher to believe she had assigned herself homework. It was that day, I believe, when I first heard my calling. I was canonized on the spot, into something of a God for the rest of that week; children brought me ice-creams, fake Spanish dubloons from Radio Show Contests, Civil War antiques, and they asked me for advice on how best to break their failed test grades to their parents.
It could only go one way for me, I figured. I had a talent; and God was sparing with those, as my father had said. And he never lied, except to my mother. And never about God.

He told me once, “That good lord, he can see into your heart, son. There’s no way you can hide from him.” Which is why I resolved then, that if I ever did encounter God I would not try to outfox the master himself; but so long as I was dealing with mere mortals, I figured, What the hell?

Lying got grades changed, got wicked teachers fired, got bullies sent to the principal’s office never to return. Lying got me into one of the best colleges in the nation where, naturally, I began to study psychology, history, and prepare myself for a career in law.

I made quite a name for myself as a champion of the common man, a feared predator of industry; but, as luck would have it, I grew more despondent by the day.

I’d come to realize the hard fact of life: that you can only lie so much to a shrewd woman before she comes to learn your tricks. The divorce was an unhappy one; especially because we weren’t even married at the time, though I had been telling everyone I knew that we had been for years. The stories got out of control, and, frankly, I lost interest in the game.

For a while there I even began to tell the truth, to anyone who would listen; you could find me in bars, at the lonely, vacated end on a stool, hoping to pull some sad sucker into a conversation of the highest moral ground. I was often alone in those days, because who wants to hang out with a grim truth teller? I lost interest in shaving; I lost my practice when I admitted in court that half of the evidence was fabricated; and then I met Silus Hornsby.

I had corralled him into one of these epic diatribes on the state of our nation one night. He was new to the area, he’d said; and that was all I needed. After listening quite patiently for nearly an hour, I let Silus have the floor. He told me many things; and, yet, nagging at my throat the whole time was the certainty that everything this man was feeding me was as fresh as the beer they brewed right on site here.

“I don’t believe a word of it,” I finally said. “That part about the Prince of Spain paying you to purposefully destabilize the Spanish language with dialects…It just–”

“Sounds a little…untrue?” Hornsby asked with a smile the size of which might have split his head open.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“My friend, that’s of little importance,” Silus told me. “You are who we all used to talk about.” He gathered his cigarettes from the bar and with a loud, chest-clearing cough said, “I’ll tell you though, one thing before I go; a liar who goes straight will never find his way in the world. The truth just isn’t convincing enough coming from our hackneyed lips. All you end up doing is sounding like you’re making raspberries…

“You know, I bet,” he grinned. “I bet you can’t even stretch a few facts, just for fun anymore.”

And so I was introduced to the ‘Order of the Beneficent Prevaricators.’ It was an honorary membership, they told me; a conditional acceptance had been made based upon my former accomplishments; but it was just a probationary period. If, at the end of one year, I had not turned myself around, I would be thrown out onto the curb. “And that,” they all said, with that same wry smirk of Silus’, “Was no lie.”

The throwing out of the politicians itself was just an effect of the great schism that had occurred within the order some fifty years back. Sir Thomas Snively was a humanist to his very core, and he could not just sit back and tell stories to the charwomen while men of dubious character raped and realigned the faith so that it stunk of wealth and self-importance. His creed has been engraved upon our seal from that very day: “A lie must strike from the bottom up.” Seeing this, and the jester beneath it, who is our mascot, tickling the feet of kings while he robs their royal pockets, emboldened me to the challenge.

This time I did not set about directly to open up my legal practice again; but went the route of conservation, inventing new species at whim, getting tracts of land taken off the auction block and returned to the public’s hands instead of being fenced away so that certain fat cats could look unencumbered upon a horizon all their own. Finally, with a stroke of fiction, I convinced the state of North Dakota that it did not exist, and for this I was awarded the legion’s greatest honor.

“Tonight I stand before you, a man again, because of your help.” I straighten my bowtie. I shuffle and restack my notecards.

“The long accomplishments of my career have been recorded faithfully into the book of chairmans by our clerk,” I speak into the microphone, “What little there is true is anyone’s guess. Now I stand before you, this hall of colleagues, who I can for the first time in my life call the most litigious group of unscrupulous bastards I have ever had the pleasure of knowing.”

“Here here,” the shout comes up. “Three cheers for the World’s Greatest Liar.” The whole crowd erupts before me. “Speech.” “Speech!” They shout. And as I pull from my breast pocket the additional note cards I have hidden there, a hush falls over the audience, until they all realize the cards are blank.

“Here here! Here here!”

Dance break.

But don’t go now, I’ve only just begun…

Used to be in the movie theater, before the show, there was a musical introduction, be it from a simple piano stashed to the side of the screen or, in the more reputable houses, an organ would rise from the depths to grind out a few tunes before the picture began.

Well, here at the Jabberlope I don’t much have the budget for those things; but I did find this guy on Twitter, who was willing to work for a few Steel Reserves and a handful of steel wool.

I wanted to say something about the new refresh of the Jabberlope.com and all the seven thousand six hundred and fifty-four reasons you should add it to your RSS reader and pluck down your eyeballs from time to time when the occasional update comes through: but here I got drunk and forgot...

Cptn. Corn Panties will be here all week. Please direct all donations to the waste bin around back of the Chinese take-out joint.

She was invited to a party on the hill, the invitation said “black tie,” she wore white. Guests mingled about her as she drifted deeper into the halls of this mansion that seemed to go on forever; she was guided by her nose. The scent of dinner dripped off the curtains, and she realized with some dismay that she hadn’t eaten anything since two, so hurried had she been to make sure her make-up was in place. Around a corner she made her way, and down a hall lined with statues of Roman origin, men in togas, profound men, men with things on their minds, dead men; but not a woman in sight. They were busy washing the togas, she thought. Her nose was immaculate, in size, shape, form and function. It led her right to the dining hall, though no one else seemed to be dining. A man at the end of a long table bid her, “Sit down.” She noticed when he raised his arm that blood stained the cuff. He plucked a tuft of feather from his lip, she thought, then wiped it daintily upon the side of his plate. A butler issued forth from beneath the table. He stood up, straightened his collar, his coat-tails, and took the covered silver-platter from the table where he’d set it as he made about with his straightening. This he set in front of her; and when he removed the lid, she was eye to eye with a pigeon, fried, its feathers arranged just so around the body. All eyes, those of the statues in the hall, of the guests who had suddenly taken notice, of her host who had the blood dripping cuffs, and his servant, were on her. The fork in her hand quivered. She felt humiliated. “But this is just the beginning,” said her host, and with that a bolt of electricity shot from a small generator to a series of wires running round the circumference of the room. A great avian scream filled the room and hundreds of bodies, little bird bodies, were falling heavily to the floor. At the clap of his hands, the guests set about them noisily, not bothering with plates or silverware or to remark the stains on their fingers and cuffs and dresses. They ate them, bones and all; only the girl’s remained where it was, on the plate. She resigned herself to her fate. Crack went the bones between her teeth…

Two bums sit under an over-pass, a torrent of rain flushes everything beyond the little concrete shelter. One of the bums sits furiously typing away on a small electronic device. “Hey, what you got there?” the other bum asks. The first says, “Shh, quiet,” until he is done pecking out a few more strokes, then he turns to his friend and says, “Now that I got this here Twitter the whole world comes to me. Watch this.” A few moments later a car rolls by and a white guy with nice glasses and no tie rolls down the window. In his hand is a bag of fruit. “Say,” the white guy says, “I thought you might need this.” The bum walks up to the car and takes the bag of oranges and tells the white guy thanks and he drives away. Later, the second bum speaks with a mouth full of oranges, “Say, that’s impressive,” and they both laugh.

There is this professor. He doesn’t teach like normal folks. He asks questions, he insinuates, he pulls out the small personal details about your life without you even knowing it and suddenly you have learned something more valuable than the socket states of electrons. He encourages you to bring food to class, but if you do then he will ask you to hand it over and he will share it with the rest of the class, or rip it in half with the skill of a monkey if you bring, say, a banana…

We stroll into class a bit late. But that’s de rigeur. Russel is our escort, and he introduces us. He has assured us people do this all the time. They just come and listen even if they’d had the class last fall, or yesterday, or are just coming in to check it out, like we are. Russel is taking an independant study class with him this semester

“So I told him I’d already bought the book he told me to buy, and he says, ‘What book?’ And I tell him, and he says, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a good book. What about it?’ And I ask him, “Well, what am I supposed to do?” And he just says, ‘Whatever you want, man, I don’t care.’”

Just two days ago I was lucky enough to be invited to a lecture at Laney College by Amir Sabzevary. What had first started out as an odd stop-gap between a beer after work and seeing Sacha Baron Cohen’s newest comedy masterpiece, Brüno, turned out to be something altogether mellifluous and wonderful and unlike any other lecture I had ever borne witness to. Here was a professor, a teacher and not just a lecturer.

The lesson that day was on the Ten Commandments. Before that, a quick review of some religions. But mostly he just asked people to introduce themselves again (more than likely, at least somewhat, for our benefit), and somehow it just got the ball rolling. While he went around the room, he parsed his sentences with bits and pieces of the various religions.

I had a professor, similar to this, in college. His name was Lee Brown. Some people complained that the way he taught it was impossible to take notes to, that it was impossible to organize. And yet he never asked for anything but for you to contribute your thoughts, in the end, so why bother taking anything down but those bits and pieces of wisdom that occur to you while you’re sitting there sucking up air. Lee Brown used to take us out for beers at the local graduate bar, and he invited us over to the small house on a side street, nearly invisible to the street behind its large shrubberies, that looked like something out of the Hobbit; and there he served us hummous and baba gannoush- or it was someone else who brought that, I don’t remember.

Later, I heard from a friend who kept more in touch with him that he’d come out to San Fran and they’d met up there and still at 80 years old he was talking about poon tang- and she was sure, she said, that he was hiring hookers.

“Well good for him,” I’d told her. As far as I know, he’s still teaching, too- and inspiring people. The best educators, though they be challenging to authority and the forces of calm, cool order, develop too much of a following from those who are seeking more out of college than just a factual printout, who are seeking to gain in wisdom as much as in knowlege, and they are tough to remove; they find their place- right where they need to be.

About Amir Sabzevary. A student on his Laney review page had this to say:

Definetely different. No prof anywhere who teaches like him. If you have life ? his class is a must. To remain an unthinking robot his class must be avoided. You will either fall in love with him or hate him but you will not remain indifferent. He will inspire, anger, frustrate you. He will make you laugh, cry and think. Incredible and adorable.

One of the things that stuck with me most was that he said the ideal government, in a way, must be a theocracy. But not like Iran; “a piece of shit”, he called it; but something better- better than capitalism, which fails to nourish the heart as it nourishes the pocket. Better than just cold science that doesn’t believe in a spiritual ethic as much as it believes in legal precedent. Better than just surviving, there is living. Because the Buddha did not say, “Life is suffering”. He said it had the potential to be brilliant. We have just made it suffering by striving for permanence in a world that is anything but…

We skipped out a little early, refreshed and full of love, our girls hands in the palms of our own, the sun going down as we walked across the parking lot, a tatter of newspaper whipping by in the not so chill wind.

>And Brüno? Don’t believe what any of these blow-hard critics have to say, Sacha Baron Cohen is making the funniest comedy there is today in the world. Brüno is über-alles, and as fantastic as Borat. What you might say is there’s just not as many Kazakstani reporters writing for major publications and web outlets.

The most enriching thing about my job here at the Breakthrough Institute is that I get a keen perspective on who is really making progress in the fight to bring sound science to the debate on climate change, and who is, alternately, just braying into the wind. Unfortunately, there’s no real shortage of the latter.

The election of Obama notwithstanding, things just haven’t seemed to really change much for the better as quick as we had all hoped [at least as far as climate policy goes*], and these days the people we will soon have to blame for the failed policy are the ones on “our side”.

That said, I’ve never been much a fan of our side or their side; I’ve always just kind of gone my own way, because once you pick a side the hive mind expects you to be at once a devout cheerleader for each and every cause that side dreams up–which is stupid.

Take the stop the war movement, or the public push to save ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge). I never really understood how dressing up as a bloodthirsty Uncle Sam or a sad polar bear, and then going around marching through the streets, was going to lend credence to your argument. As much as I hate how stuffy everything must be on the policy side, I can appreciate the need for a little decorum. Would you like every courtroom to be run by Judge Judys? Nah, I didn’t think so. And you wouldn’t want the leader of the free world tromping around in raver pants sucking on a hemp lolly either. No matter what he (or she) supports, it’s just better that we abide by some modest standard. With the world moving ever towards the casual, we’ll have a president who wears ironic t-shirts to work in about 50 years whether we like it or not, so why hasten the process and de-legitimize ourselves while we’re at it. One of our Breakthrough fellows from last year sums up this argument pretty well here, in a ascerbic take on the whole “street theater” movement (“Save the Polar Bear Suits for the Afterparty”).

This policy also applies to what I like to call “useless action”.

When you slap that bumper sticker on the back of your car that says “Keep Tahoe Blue”, you’re not really doing much. Now, I won’t protest that just doing subtle things like putting a bumper sticker on your car are wrong, they should just be called out as they are, which is pretty damn near useless except for its noted effect at putting some eyeballs to the ink and connecting the concept with a few more neurons on the highway than it would have met with previously. So whilst sitting in bumper to bumper traffic, a few more peeps can glimpse a vision of a clear, blue getaway, and maybe they will do something about it–something beyond just slapping a similar sticker on the back of their car.

Because while this sort of “non-action” is all well and good, what really irks me beyond belief is the dangerous assumption by people — like Greenpeace, and Friends of the Earth and 350.org (a site I will excoriate a bit more in detail briefly) — that this is actually contributing to change in the slightest.

It’s like saying, well I put a “Change We Can Believe In” sticker in my yard, so hopefully none of the scary black folks who live in our quickly gentrifying neighborhood will ever have a beef with us, because we “believe in change”. … Well, are you doing anything ELSE about it?

Most recently, the website 350.org began running a campaign that has been furthered by none other than the content hungry LA Times that aims to “change the world” with an awareness day this October 24th that will put 350 people doing various things all around the world to publicize this little stat that they feel is so crucial : “that 350ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere is the current safe maximum number agreed upon by various scientists for the earth to continue functioning in stasis” — that is, without major cataclysm…

Our plan is simple. We asked people around the world, through our website, to hold organized actions on Oct. 24 — from high in the Himalayas to underwater on the Great Barrier Reef, from Easter Island to inner-city America — in an effort to take that number and drive it into the human imagination. … Already, more than 700 actions have been planned in a third of the countries of the world. There will be 350 bicyclists leaving on 350-kilometer trips, and 350 surfers on the waves in one beach town after another; 350 divers at the Great Barrier Reef.

Environmental groups from across the spectrum have pledged to help, as have human rights organizations such as Oxfam, and big networks of young people in the developing world, and leaders from every faith community — hundreds of churches have pledged to ring their bells 350 times on Oct. 24.

Great point about the numbers, Bill. But I think us ringing 350 bells isn’t going to get us much closer to getting any real money for clean energy research. Neither is 350 people dressed as polar bears. Or 350 surfers surfing new breaks that didn’t exist before the most recent sea rise.

If empty PR and/or blog traffic is what you’re after, then by all means go right ahead. I just wonder what would happen if all this energy we put into “theater” was redirected into actual meaningful protest and action. Then again, if we did that then we’d have to fire the people in charge; and I doubt those presidents who blog for their own ineffective org’s are all too ready to step down…?

I’m just saying: maybe you should demand change instead of speaking about it in a rap song released on creative commons…

It will not be easy, and it will not be clean, and more than likely some people will get hurt; but those are the casualties of real movements.

Do something, sure; but why not do something smart…

* UPDATE: The Obama administration is making great strides in most arenas, accomplishing all but a 180º turnaround on just about everything that Bush was doing horribly wrong. On climate change, and the clean energy solution his stance has proven to be cautious (at least preliminarily) and rather pedestrian. If this is change we can believe in then how do we end up with the Waxman-Markey cap and trade solution? How do we get Diane Feinstein coming out with open opposition to solar plants in the desert because of a turtle? The answer that it’s liberals doing what liberals do best, and that is: destroying each other, is not what I’d call productive. We need to end the infighting, and along the way some things will have to be sacrificed. Hopefully, what we will end up with is something other than just a liberal back-slapping circle-jerk. Only time will tell…

I work for a great company called the Breakthrough Institute. My two bosses, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus wrote an amazing thesis called the Death of Environmentalism, which argued that global warming, unlike the rest of the problems faced by the environmental movement thus far (like CFC’s and other specific pollutants), was bigger than just a small tweak here or there. For the atmosphere to chill out, it’s basically decarbonize or bust. And that requires large public investment.

The book they went on to publish would advocate for the same, while coupling it with social science research done by our partner firm American Environics, a public opinion and social science research think-tank which I also work for (it’s complicated, but we all share the same projects: one company grew out of the other. To make it fun, we share the office with a third company, who’s (almost) completely unrelated–except for the fact that they field our data survey. These wacky interconnected times!!)

In between balancing the books, and managing the office and keeping the server running I also sometimes find the time to pen a blog or two about what’s fucked today with climate policy or social science. I try not to make any jokes, as that is paramount to not being an unserious dude–as unserious dudes, it seems, cannot be serious about changing the world. It’s like wearing a suit at church was in the 1950’s. But if that’s what ya gotta do, then that’s what ya gotta do, right? (Let a few slip by occasionally, but who’s counting…) Walk the walk, brother. No use yammering at the gates if all you got to do is to cut your hair and put on a nice natural fiber shirt and then you can at least get the media on your side.

Sure, I would like to be playing a more analytical and prosaic role, as opposed to managing the books. But I’ve been a greenie to the core, and a dissatisfied one for nearly half that. As such, given the opportunity, it feels great to be a part of something unique. Plus, I can turn out a pretty good blog post or two, given the chance.

Check out my stuff here, collectively. (http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/tyler-burton/)

Also, what I’ve done for American Environics here. (http://americanenvironics.com/blog/tyler-burton/)