Comments, part 3

They aren’t always antagonistic. There are sites in which the interchange between writer and commenters rises to the level of community. Comments are supportive, enriching, additive; they cast further light. Indeed, the distinction between “writer” and “commenter” is blurred as commenters move from being fans toward being equals. The comments may be more substantive, and more interesting, than the original communication.

The best example of this type of community may be Andrew Sullivan’s blog, now on the Daily Beast. Sullivan consciously sees himself as blogging for “his people,” an intimate audience. He digs stuff out and puts it in front of them. His interests guide the conversation, but their comments—incorporated into the blog proper rather than relegated to a comments section—are often, even usually, the bulk of a given post. Sullivan is like a conductor, inducing and choreographing opinions around his own. Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic is the same way.

Dick Cavett’s blog at the NYT is more of a fan community; there are lots of paeans to the master, and nobody sees him/herself as a peer. The vibe is lots older, but at the same time, the comments he attracts are substantive, insightful, witty, well crafted. New Yorkers, private-school grads. Again, he sees himself as the maestro, and it’s as if they don’t want to disappoint him.

Bittman’s, when it ran, was of similar quality. There was lots of interesting stuff there, stuff you wouldn’t want to miss. (The comments on Cavett’s are so voluminous, in addition to being so choice, that they actually become a burden.)

What do these blogs have in common? Each begins with a recognizable personality, someone people know and like to read. So it begins in good will. The right-wingers who heckle and bully don’t go looking for these sites, or they are kept off. Then there’s a reaching out, a willingness to connect and converse, a recognition of community and a fondness for it on the part of the ringmaster. The desire is to converse, to share, not to hector. There is a mutual respect, a real feeling of community, and it keeps community members coming back.

...and Mr.Hyde

The other side of commenting, of course, is the opportunity it presents for bullying. Freed of the obligation to name himself, a commenter can indulge his inclination toward abuse. And boy, do they ever. And boy is there a lot of anger out there, balanced on tripwires. And yes, most of them seem to be men.

They swarm like bees at every utterance of Will Bunch, the lefty Daily News columnist, impugning his motives, manhood, allegiance and intelligence. Some of them clearly aim to provoke. One of Bunch’s more satisfying tactics is that he is not provoked. He will very occasionally respond to a comment, but always with humor, a light all-purpose sarcasm. He never rises to the bait. They always do.

There’s entertainment value in that. Still, to scroll on and on through the numbing chatter can only be depressing. Who knew there were so many crude, angry, abusive, and unthinking people breathing out there in the ether? Reflexively they rattle off the same angry talking points, berating each other as much as their host, a mob of bare-knuckle midgets spoiling for action.

More depressing still are the defenders of the faith, self-appointed attack dogs of the Catholic right who see it as their mission to bring down any whisper of modernism, never mind progressivism. They are as unpleasant as they are certain, and they too will trot out the same unthinking responses from the dusty sets residing in their closed-off minds. I am only a little bit unfair to these trolls, most of whom will drag down and muddy in the name of love.

Maybe it’s my selection of sites, but it seems to me that this crude bullying is predominantly a tactic—the tactic—of the right. It’s what these “foot soldiers” have been taught and learned from each other. It’s how they’ve been encouraged to fight back.

Comments welcome

Salon had a Mother’s Day column from the uber-hip writer-mom Annie Lamott. The intensity of the negative response shouldn’t have surprised me. People unloaded all sorts of vitriolic baggage on poor frizzy-haired Annie, accusing her of being a whinging, self-pitying, spineless, exploitative, hippie back-scratcher, and piled in tales from their own more successful parenting experiences. The tone was downright hostile, the behavior shark-like, as the first wound inflicted seemed to inspire imitators until there was nothing left but bones sinking to the bottom.

Two elements bear, I think. One is Lamott’s own (to some) insufferable persona. The other is the topic. Witness the Tiger Mom flap and a thousand others, mothering confessionals bring out the raging insecurity in all of us. But what caught me was the corrective effects these comments had on me.

I had read the piece through casually, lulled by its felicity and humor, and come to the end of it identifying with much, thinking even of passing the link on to L. But moving on to the comments kind of slapped me awake. Yes, the nastiness was in places excessive (in others humorous), but in many cases the point was well taken. I found myself agreeing with the trend of the commenters, changing my mind.

Is this a measure of my own lack of conviction? Maybe, but it’s also an illustration of the value of online commenting, rough and tumble though the exchanges may be. It is also a source of trepidation—and, optimistically, tempering—for me as a writer.

I have had one directly hostile letter to the editor sent my way in all my years of writing articles. Not even hostile, really, just crossly critical. My response? I was incensed. How dare this benighted fogey criticize what I had written? Given the chance to respond, I laid into the guy full-force, lavishly indulging my rapier wit, safe in the knowledge that I’d have the last word—in that issue, at least. Afterward I felt like a jerk, as I so often do.

The shoe’s on the other foot.

Who needs it?

“Facebook is insidious.” That’s what my old friend Roger says. I’m not sure he isn’t right.

I’m on Facebook. I see its value, in connecting me with distant friends, allowing me glimpses of their lives. I’ve learned of deaths and pregnancies, illnesses and awards, affinities and pet peeves. I’ve learned a lot of things I never would’ve known. It’s nice to feel connected.

Too often, though, I’ve been annoyed by political harangues and hot air, and by people who feel the need to broadcast everything, filling my wall with boasts on their kids and pictures of their knitting and chain-letter nonsense.

It feels weird to have conservations on Facebook that used to take place in the relative privacy of email: a back-and-forth with one person to which any number of others are privy. I feel exposed, and like a voyeur when I follow such conversations between others.

Mostly, though, I experience Facebook as a facilitator of envy. Tina’s wall-to-wall coverage of her latest world travels, Doug’s paeans to the weather in Hawaii, where he just got a new job, Benji’s photos of the zillion-dollar estate she’s selling, Lanse’s descriptions of his new success as an artist... The carefully presented facades and accomplishments, the temptation in response to puff myself up into something I’m not. It’s high school gossip all over again.

The best gauge is this: Almost every time I get on Facebook, I get off feeling roiled and un-peaceful, envious or superior or just annoyed, but less grounded, and less content with my life than before I got on. These days, therefore, I mostly stay away.

Money to Burn

I’m itching to buy something. Just got paid for some freelance work, a tidy sum for a fun project that I put a lot of time into, and now I’m looking for a tangible reward.

No, I can’t just put it in the bank. This is extra money, for extra work, and I have to use it—some of it, anyway—for something extra. Something I would never otherwise purchase.

Disposable income, they call it. For a long time, when L wasn’t working, I didn’t have any. Things were tight; whatever extra I got went into the kitty. Now, though, I can hold some back, in a separate account, to do with whatever I please.

Over the years, depending on the interest du jour, it has pleased me to reward myself with a Conga drum, an MP3 player, a camera, a sautee pan, a mountain bike, and a ukulele. Objects of good or even excellent quality, a level of quality that I would otherwise deny myself. And they have brought me much joy.

Sometimes it will be something small—a bottle of fine whiskey. And sometimes large, like a wood stove—a thing I have dreamed of for many years but would never spend the money on. What pleasure that stove has given, and not only to me, in the months since its installment!

Nor does it have to be something for me. I’ve bankrolled vacations and donations, concert tickets and clothes, splurges on L and D and others that have done my pinch-penny heart a world of good.

This time, not surprisingly, given the recent renaissance, my focus is on running gear. And that puts me in a bit of a quandary, because I have always been philosophically opposed to such accoutrements. My pure, spiritual, Zen-of-running side, in other words, is currently rolling up and down the barroom floor in a fierce and enduring clinch with my gotta-getta-Garmin side.

There’s no telling how this tussle will come out right now; there’s too much dust in the air. But the pleasure of searching and learning and dreaming is starting to give way to exhaustion.

A man possessed

Wii golf looks to be my latest obsession. We went to the neighbors’ for dinner on Saturday, and I played a few rounds with O. It was strangely addictive, requiring just enough skill to hold my interest and keep me playing. On Sunday afternoon I played with D at home, and later that night after he was in bed, compelled to keep at it and better my score. I can see the attraction. I can also spy already the end of this bender in the fact that it’s the same nine holes played over and over. Lucky for me.

Wii golf thus joins the long list of enthusiasms that have taken complete possession of me at one time or another, flings brief and intense that typically run their course in a week or a couple of weeks before I lose interest and drop them for a year or two, when I may just as typically be bitten afresh and go through the whole thing again.

Thus have I accumulated piles of newspaper sections, each one folded to the day’s Sudoku puzzle, so that I’d be sure to have one to solve tomorrow and the day after. Or gone on extended binges of Solitaire and online chess. I can say the same too for spates of watching movies or baseball or playoff basketball or the soccer World Cup. For a month every four years that tournament becomes my favorite thing, soaking up most of my waking attention. When it’s over, it’s over. I may miss it for a couple of days, but then, in spite of my intentions, I forget about soccer entirely for four years until the Cup returns and grabs my attention again.

The same pattern fits my impulse to cook. For long stretches I don’t just cook, I inhabit cooking—studying recipes, watching cooking shows, trying new techniques and ingredients, cooking meal after meal, cooking like a fiend.

It may seem dilettantish, scattered. But these passing enthusiasms, storms or waves of interest, have been a source of immense pleasure in my life, of consuming interest, and I am thankful for them. The abiding mystery is that I don’t control them. The wind bloweth where it listeth.

Chiropractic works

One Friday night in late February, shortly after L’s brother and her mom had arrived for the weekend, I stood up quickly after squatting to feed the wood stove, and felt dizzy. I’m used to this; I’ve known the same response since I was a teenager. My dad has it too. I stand and feel the world close in for a second, before the blood rushes to my head and the lights come back on. I’ve always chalked it up to being tall.

Sometimes I will steady myself, put my hand to the wall, but I’ve never blacked out or fallen. This time, though, it was different. The light-headedness didn’t resolve as quickly as it usually does. Worse, it was accompanied by a tingling in my left arm, running from shoulder to fingertips, unlike anything I’ve ever felt.

The first time it happened, I sat back down at the dinner table, where the whole family was eating and talking, and quietly hoped it would go away. Slowly, the feeling did fade and I felt better, but when I rose from the table it happened again: the light-headedness and the tingling. By now, I was mildly alarmed, fearing I might be having a cardiac event. I quietly called L into the bedroom, and told her what was happening.

A few minutes later I was sitting in the emergency room, with L on one side of me and her brother on the other. The ER doc pulled out the stops: EKG, X-rays, blood work, I don’t even remember what-all. Clearly he was thinking cardiac. But he found nothing, and after three or four hours he turned me loose. “If it happens again…”

Sunday afternoon it happened again. I was lying down, alone in the house, when the phone rang. I jumped up to answer it, and wham: the blackout feeling and the crazy tingling.

This time the admitted me. I spent the night in the ICU, and had what the docs called the million-dollar work-up. Cardiac, neurological, stress test, everything. Again, nothing showed up.

Over the next month, I saw half a dozen doctors, and even wore a heart monitor for a couple of weeks. I was prescribed an anti-anxiety drug and a thyroid medication. I had a couple more trips to the ER, and nobody could find anything. I had five days, a week without symptoms, and just when I thought the whole thing had gone away, it came back.

Finally, I went to see a chiropractor. He listened to my story, palpated my spine, pulled and stretched and rubbed. When he had me relaxed, he deftly “cracked” my neck, cradling my skull like a dinosaur egg in his huge and knowing hands, and immediately I felt better, lighter. Walking home, I felt like I a weight had been lifted off of my chest, that I could breathe again for the first time in weeks.

It’s been a month since that visit. I have not had any more tingling in my arm or any feelings of impending black-out. I can’t find any convincing medical description of exactly what a pinched nerve or an “impingement” is, but I am convinced that something of the sort was at the root of my mysterious problem. My dad said to me, half-jokingly, “You don’t believe in that stuff, do you?” meaning chiropractic. “All I know,” I said, “is that after he cracked my neck I felt better, and I haven’t had a problem since.”

Remote control

It’s a curious thing how a switch in the mind can suddenly be turned on after long lying dormant. This happened to me recently with regard to the television in the kitchen. We installed the thing when the kitchen was remodeled, eight years ago now; it perches on a black metal stand at the end of a jointed arm bolted to the wall, so that it takes up no counter space. It is a somewhat guilty pleasure, but a pleasure indeed: cook’s companion, weather guide, boon to dish-washing. Many the Phillies game I have checked on, the political debate I have sampled, the episode of Scrubs I have caught the end of. Without this television I would have no experience of either Everybody Loves Raymond or Deal or No Deal.

Placing a television in the kitchen has its hazards, however. Chief among them is food spillage, which, except on Superbowl Sunday, is not as much of a threat in the den. When a television set sits suspended above the coffeemaker, when a busy cook or a dishwasher is handling the remote control on a daily basis, problems are bound to ensue. In our case, the poor remote suffered so many wet thumbs and splashes of spaghetti sauce over the years that it gradually ceased to function. First the number keys, then the mute, and finally the on-off button became stubborn and unreliable. We were left with a crippled TV. To turn it on or change the channel required accessing the controls on the front of the set itself. In an age of fewer channels and less obnoxious commercials, this might not have posed a problem. But when you have to toggle 28 times to get from CNN to MSNBC, and 40 to get from PBS to Nickelodeon, it becomes a source of considerable frustration.

The point is we lived with this frustration for a very long time. From the first refusal of the “Previous channel” button, when I thought we needed new batteries, to the current state of all-but-total paralysis, where only the “5” key works, the remote had been in a state of advancing failure for at least two years. And for the length of that time, we had suffered with it, toggling those arrow buttons up and down every time there was a commercial or other lull.

Finally, yesterday, when Lori said she had some things to pick up at the store, it occurred to me to ask her to purchase a new remote, the kind they call a universal, that can be programmed to work for anything. The very concept is amazing.

Anyway, she brought home the device, I quickly got it programmed, and our troubles were over. After two years of struggle, we instantly had a television that was no longer crippled. What a relief!

But the question I’m asking myself now is: What the hell took me so long? Why on Earth did I keep muddling along with the damaged remote for two years, shaking my head, lamenting, cursing, before it finally occurred to me to just replace the damn thing? Why did it take so long for the Sun to break through the clouds?

I can identify the precipitating event. I had started to worry that the accumulation of all that rapid-fire toggling, that rough handling, was going to end up damaging the television itself. And the next thought was that if the set broke we were not going to replace it; we didn’t have the money, and anyway how would we manage to get one that would fit in as well as this one did? It was the fear of losing the source of pleasure that finally pierced through the inertia. When that fear became real, the idea took shape.

A trivial example, perhaps, but it shows how we fall into ruts in our daily living.

Counterfeit

We were both heading to Spokane for a conference. This fellow Ron, who by chance had the seat next to me on the plane, hails from Boston, works in media relations. He’s a self-assured, opinionated presence, youngish, a bit of a hipster. He had a David Foster Wallace poking out of his knapsack, like a ship’s prow, and was passing the time by going over with a pencil a short-story draft from a fiction workshop he was taking. He paused now and then to chortle at the inadequacies of his absent classmate.

“Read this,” he said giggling, pointing at one particular howler. After I nodded and smiled appreciatively, we conversed for a while. It was October, playoff time, and he—amiably slumming—professed to be part of Red Sox nation, a diehard fan. He told of cruising through Cambridge after the last out in ’04, the year the Curse was lifted. What it was like to be in the streets, how he high-fived an overexuberant drunk leaning out of a taxi and almost had his arm taken off. What a scene!

Pretty soon, though, his story started to unravel. He couldn’t remember the name of Josh Beckett, Boston’s towering, soul-patched ace—“the big guy, the pitcher” was the best he could muster. And the awkward way he spoke about Fenway—“It’s one of the oldest ballparks in the country”—suggested he’d been there once, recently, and had known nothing of the hallowed grounds before that. I threw him a look, but we moved on to another topic.

It was not until an evening reception a couple days later that my suspicions were irrevocably confirmed. It was the day of Game 6, the pivotal win against Cleveland. Ron, craving attention, piped up about having watched the first few innings in the hotel bar. Boston had jumped out early when J.D. Drew, the underachieving right fielder, uncoiled on a 3-1 fastball with the bases loaded. “It was incredible!” Ron gushed. “The Red Sox made a grand slam!”

Made a grand slam? They made one? There was a moment’s pause. The guys within earshot eyed each other uncomfortably. No one challenged Ron directly on his faux pas: This was a meeting of science writers, after all, some of whom were on firmer ground talking about neutrinos. But from that moment on, everyone knew—I knew, at any rate—that this fellow Ron was not to be trusted.

New specs

Two months ago I finally went to the eye doctor and got new glasses. It had been seven or eight years, or longer, since I’d had a new pair. My prescription hadn’t changed dramatically in all that time, but I had long noticed blurriness at the edges of my vision, near and far, and lately it had started to bother me.

When I got checked out, I found that I was in an in-between place as far as my vision was concerned. As I had noticed before the machines confirmed it, I needed some help at both ends of the spectrum: reading and stargazing. To really sharpen both ends, however, would require bifocals, and getting bifocals would entail a significant sacrifice at the mid-range, where I actually do most of my seeing: from computer work to driving.

I could opt for trifocals, the optometrist told me, but even he didn’t seem too keen on that idea. The amount of lens area you have for each range is very narrow, he admitted, and that can be hard to get used to.

After some futzing around, I let him talk me into a compromise. I would get basically the same prescription—“We’ll sharpen it up a little,” he said helpfully—in a different frame. I guess the frame was what I wanted all along.

It’s surprising how quickly a pair of frames can look out-of-date after eight or ten years of seeming fine. I was wearing a gold-rimmed frame with full-size rounded lenses, and had been perfectly content with that, but as soon as I had given myself the go-ahead to start pulling new frames off the shelf and trying them on, the old glasses became anathema. How old and fusty they made me look! How had I stood them so long?

I tried on at least 20 pairs, and quickly narrowed down to five, all similar in style, and very different, updated, from what I’d had. Finally, with Lori’s help, I cut it down to two variants of the exact same style: smallish rectangular lenses with top-only frames. One frame was black, the other gun-metal gray.

The black were stylish. I actually thought they made me look kind of cool. Lori seconded the notion. The gray were, well, gray. They were perfectly serviceable, neat, up-to-date, but they didn’t flatter me as much. They didn’t make me look dashing. They did come, however, with a pair of magnetic clip-on sunglasses that were exceedingly handy. The cool pair offered no such option.

I’m ashamed of how much I agonized over the final decision. It was a clear-cut choice between practicality and cool. I tried as hard as I could to manuever myself into opting for cool, and then I wrestled myself out of it. I made and remade the decision a dozen times, wasting an awful lot of energy. In the end, with my family waiting and he store closing, I went for the safe choice—and as soon as the ink was dry on my signature I was kicking myself. How typical of me! I sneered. What a dull gray little man I am, never having the courage to follow my heart’s desire! It was only the saleswoman’s repeated assurances that I had a full 60 days to change my mind that enabled me to leave the store at all. I was miserable for a week.

Now, with the 60-day deadline just passed, I am reasonably content that I made the right choice after all. The gun-metal frames seem to suit me just fine, and I find myself snapping on the sunglasses all the time. Every time I do I’m glad I didn’t opt for the Maserati. (But then I usually think, these sunglasses don’t really help that much.)

Here’s the kicker: Frames aside, I’m still frustrated with my vision. From about two feet to six feet I’m all right. Closer, I just take my glasses off. But farther than six or seven feet I’m squinting as miserably as before.

So what the hell does all this mean? What have I learned?

That I am still a slave to vanity, for one thing. Despite wanting, or professing to want, the opposite, I am as much as ever prone to get caught up and make a foolish decision based on appearances. My prayers for release from this damnable condition are conducted with fingers crossed behind my back.

This half-heartedness is the other thorn that tears me. Even now, when the tide of second-guessing has gone out, I find myself unable to let go, to be completely sure that I made the right choice. What a continuing torment it is to me, what a wasteful drain, to never to be able to be whole-hearted! And to waste such energy on something so trivial! To always worry, in matters great and maddeningly small, about whether I’ve done the right thing!