Family Matters: Cousin Jimmy

          I got a letter yesterday that my cousin Jimmy died.  Two months ago.  His sister thought she'd write me, but then got busy and forgot, then finally remembered that she ought to tell me.  I was grateful for the news, but it was hardly shocking that a 75-year-old man with a history of kidney problems should die of a sudden heart attack.  And even if I had heard the news in a timely fashion, it wasn't likely to have caused much of a bump in the flat-line of my life in Florida, a thousand miles from Jimmy and his life.  I hadn't seen him in thirty years.  And yet I took the news badly.
          Jimmy and I are of the same generation, born within a year or two of each other, so his death and mine are one and the same from one point of view.  I can't be far behind.  And I'm hardly a well-preserved specimen of the species.  But that's not why I took the news so badly.  Not the whole reason reason anyway.
          Our grandparents, our parents, ourselves, and our children form a genealogical string that connects us.  Neither Jimmy nor I knew our Cifelli grandfather, who died about 1931, but we knew our grandmother, who died in about 1950, and we were first cousins of a generation that was born between 1905 or so and died out in the 1990s.  That generation of six brothers and sisters were all born in America, first-generation Italian Americans, youngsters who made their Old World parents proud by fitting so nicely into the fabric of their adopted country.
          Their children included Jimmy and me, the first fully realized Americans in our branch of the Cifelli clan with no ties at all to the Old Country.  Our parents rejoiced in their Americanism, spoke less and less Italian as the years went by, changed their diet to include turkey on Thanksgiving, and fought furiously for their new country against the old country in World War II.
          They all lived within an hour of each other, which meant my cousins and I were close--and not just geographically.  We were together often, especially on the holidays, our parents having huge dinners for the entire extended family and exchanging gifts for the little ones.  There were piles of black and white photos in boxes that have been long lost by now, all commemorating the milestones of a big family.  We were close.  And we children felt like what we were, the centerpieces of our family evolution.
          But of course, by logic and necessity the family slowly began moving away from Newark, New Jersey to the local suburbs, and eventually to other states.  We kids grew into parents and grandparents, with our own children and grandchildren taking center stage, a new generation totally unaware of the quirky personalities and the hard-working individuals whose blood runs through them, two and three and four generations back.
          That's why I took Jimmy's death so badly.  There was none of that old network of aunts and uncles and grandparents to mourn them, no one to call me in Florida at once so I might have joined the chorus of grievers.  I find myself mourning today not only Jimmy, but his dead parents, his dead brother, my own dead parents, uncles, aunts, and grandparents.  It is nothing less than the death of a genealogical tree that stretched  from the mid-19th century to the early years of the 21st.  I know there are new children who will push on and live out their hopefully wonderful lives, but they will not be connected to the personal histories that I am one of the very few left to remember.  It's silly to be oversensitive about these things--it's our common fate, but still, I hated to lose my cousin Jimmy.                          

"Don Jon," the Porn Industry, and Modern Romance

          In September Joseph Gordon-Levitt released his romantic comedy about a young man addicted to porn, Don Jon.  I know that sounds weird, but yes, it's a rom-com and one website ("Wired") calls it "the perfect date movie."
          The film actually has an impressive pedigree, starting with Gordon-Levitt as the writer, director, and star, but featuring as well Esquire's 2013 Sexiest Woman Alive, Scarlett Johansson as the vulgar sex kitten; love interest Julianne Moore as the mature woman young enough for hot sex in the car; and Tony Danza as the low-class New Jersey Italian-American father.  Charming.  And it gets worse.
          The Gordon-Levitt lead character is very much a ladies' man, but he can't get good-enough sex with real women, not even with the Johansson character, so he watches internet porn after real sex, so he can have better sex with himself.  Sweet, eh?  It's the stuff of romance in the new millennium.  The perfect date movie.
          I won't go into the ways in which the movie may actually be better than it sounds (it is), but I will think a little about the size of the porn industry in America, which is the essential bedrock truth that the movie is built on.  Porn is becoming the new sexual norm, not a deviant behavior, not something to be hidden away and ashamed of.  Jennifer Aniston's television Friends watched it.  Celebrity sex tapes are a dime a dozen.  “Normal” couples routinely record themselves in action.  And hotel pay-per-view X-rated movies  make more money than mini-bars do.
          The actual dollars-and-cents size of the porn industry in America is hard to pin down because of the diversity of the products that have different bookkeeping lines in a variety of different businesses, like movies, books, magazines, adult sex shops, internet websites, telephone sex lines, and more.  And that doesn't include the entire hooker industry which is clearly related, but apparently on separate pages in the ledger.
          Not all the porn profits (obviously) are reported to the IRS, which of course makes it literally impossible to calculate the overall size of smut, its real business value.  And yet in a New York Times Magazine article (“Naked Capitalists,” 2001) by the estimable Frank Rich, we learn that if all the numbers were added up, the porn industry earns ten to fourteen billion dollars a year, which, even at the low-end $10 billion figure, makes the porn industry bigger than professional football, basketball, and baseball put together.   And that was in 2001.  
          There are other ways besides dollars and cents to measure porn's popularity, as reported by such websites as CNN, CNBC, and the Huffington Post.  As of this writing, it accounts for 30% of all data on the net, for example, with the most popular sites transferring 100 gigabytes of data per second during peak hours.  Twelve of every hundred websites are dedicated to porn.  At work, 20% of men access porn.  Every second, an estimated 30,000 people are watching it, and from a quarter to a third of them are women.  It turns out that Don Jon is right on point:  art imitates life. 

Privacy: Yours, Mine, and Mark Zuckerberg's

          The notoriously private Mark Zuckerberg, the boy genius who imagined Facebook into existence, is famous for having observed that the age of privacy is over.  In every way imaginable, we sign off on privacy when we post our breakfast menus on his website.  And that's fine, Zuckerberg says, it's the way things are in the 21st century.  Get used to it.  And judging by the wholesale internet intrusions into our lives and the way we shrug it all off, he may be right.  We don't seem to care much for privacy any more.

          But Zuckerberg sure does.  He recently bought four properties around the one he owns and lives in in an exclusive area of Palo Alto, CA for a whopping $30 million, a drop in the bucket to the young man worth a reported $19 billion.  All to make sure he keeps his own privacy.  He has no plans for the properties and in fact is leasing them back to the former owners, who are now tenants and no longer a threat to the peace and quiet (and privacy) necessary for the good life.  Zuckerberg's, that is.  What's next for the mega compound?  Maybe a twelve-foot fence with razor wire.  That ought to keep out the undesirables.

          The age of privacy is clearly not over for the founder of Facebook, just for us.

Keurig Coffee and the Decline and Fall of the American Republic

          "Let's go in the kitchen.  I'll put a pot of coffee on and we can talk."

          All through my part of the twentieth century words like that were part of my life.  When I was a kid, my parents percolated their coffee, the boiling bubbles popping up to the glass top for a few minutes before it was finished brewing.  My wife's family used a drip pot that took several cups of boiling water and let it slowly drip through the fresh-ground coffee beans into the pot below.  Later still the electric drip coffee pot took the place of the real thing (like the way electric typewriters replaced the manuals), and I was unhappy about that too, but at least we still went into the kitchen and put a pot of coffee on.

          Now, however, we have the Keurig Single Cup Brewing System.  My wife and I held out until yesterday, and now the new coffee maker sits on our kitchen counter.  It just doesn't have the neighborliness associated with putting a pot of coffee on, damn it all to hell, and I'm dead certain this is yet another step toward the end of civilization as we know it, or at least as I know it.  Sad.

           I wish our new Keurig coffee didn't taste so good.  It ruins all my self-righteousness.

Calendar Crazy People

[An earlier version of this essay appeared as an Op-ed piece in the Daily Record in Morristown, NJ on January 5, 2001.] 

          Sometimes I think I need to join a support group for calendar crazy people.

          I don't know where or when my concern for the day and month was born, but I do know that I surround myself with constant reminders of moments flying by.  My office at home has an electronic date and time keeper on the desk, plus a page-a-day "rip-off" calendar at my second work station--just in case I forget what day it is when I walk five feet to my other desk, which is directly below the large office clock.  Of course, the computer keeps me fairly well grounded in the day, date, and time too.

          And yet, despite this collection of date reminders, I recently felt the need for another, so for 2001 I added a standup calendar on my main desk at home, so I can now see the entire month, although in my own defense, this one came in the mail from an organization of disabled people who painted the pictures with their feet--how could I throw it out?  For Christmas I received a new one, something called a "golf calendar" so I can keep track of each round--my score, my partners, my putts, and my "most memorable happening."  (That's what it says, but I've never been able to figure out what it means.)

          When I go downstairs, there's another "rip-off" on the kitchen counter plus the all-important wall calendar, where my wife keeps track of all our dinner dates, vacations, and miscellaneous appointments, like when the gas repair person is scheduled to fix the glow bar in our oven.

          When I leave the house, I usually carry two calendars--the oversized and bulky one for my briefcase and the slenderer pocket-size one for those occasions that I am without my briefcase.

          Perhaps there is some dark psychological issue at stake here and I am in a classic case of denial, but it all seems very healthy to me.  I believe that by keeping track of days so carefully, I am controlling their passage.  That is, I think that if I live by the day and date (plus a to-do list of course), I slow time down a little.  This I know is just an illusion, but it has a good effect, so every Christmas I stock up on calendars, spread them around the landscapes of my life, and even give a bunch to friends and family.

          The irony is that with all this interest in time, I'm always late.  I have absolutely no interest in getting anywhere "on time."

          As the moment to leave for a dinner appointment nears, for example, my wife sits patiently with her coat in her lap as I dawdle.  Oh, it doesn't seem like dawdling to me, like trips upstairs to get a handkerchief or my backup eyeglasses or my scarf.  What's a man to do?  Rush out half dressed?

          The truth is I just don't like to rush--which means that to some people I am infuriatingly slow.  (That doesn't bother me much either, which seems to exasperate them even more.)  I have, in fact, made slowness an art.  Sometime I even spout quotations to the rushing hordes, as for example the Roman proverb, "Make haste slowly."  And years ago I took to saying "slow is fast," my paradoxical way of rephrasing the familiar "haste makes waste."

          Of course, I get my share of quotes back, which paraphrase down in something like respectable language to "get your lazy butt moving."  But I just make a note in my calendar to write an essay about it.  When I'm good and ready.

Collecting Quotations

On and off for many years now, I’ve been collecting quotations that I like, like this one from Eleanor Roosevelt I saw recently in a magazine:  “You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.”  Nice.  It put me in mind of one by Susan Sontag:  “I envy paranoids.  They actually think people are paying attention to them.”

In no special order, here are others, some serious, some humorous, that I like very much.

“I am glad of a day when I know what I want to do in it.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson

“To make a goal of comfort or happiness has never appealed to me.” Albert Einstein

“Truth is the offspring of silence and meditation.”  Isaac Newton

"If there is no wind, row."  Latin proverb

“I am still learning.”  Michelangelo

"To live long, it is necessary to live slowly."  Cicero

“Consummate politeness is not the right tonic for an emotional collapse.”  Joseph Conrad, Victory

"Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose."  Mary Shelley

“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”  Horace Mann

“Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow cycles of nature, is a help.  Gardening is an instrument of grace.”  May Sarton

“Don’t be afraid of missing opportunities.  Behind every failure is an opportunity somebody wishes they had missed.”  Lily Tomlin

“Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall.  Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day.”  Robert Louis Stevenson

“A satisfactory life cannot repeat itself too often.”  Mark Van Doren

“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”  William James

         

“The average man, who does not know what to do with this life, wants another one which shall last forever.”  Anatole France

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”  Theodore Roosevelt

“The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”  Hannah Arendt

“The thought of suicide is a great consolation:  with the help of it one has got through many a bad night.”  Friedrich Nietzsche 

“'Be yourself' is about the worst advice you can give to some people.  Anonymous

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."  Albert Einstein 

Three from Mark Twain. . .

“If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.” 

“No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session.” 

“The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.” 

One from Bishop Desmond Tutu. . .

“When the white missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land.  They said, ‘Let us pray.’  We closed our eyes.  When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.”

Seven from Thomas Edison. . .

“The chief function of the body is to carry the brain around.”

“I have not failed.  I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

“You will have many opportunities in life to keep your mouth shut.  You should take advantage of every one of them.”

“Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.”

“Show me a thoroughly satisfied man and I will show you a failure.”

“To invent you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”

“I pity the man without a purpose in life.”

Three from Henry Ford. . .

“One of the greatest discoveries a man makes is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn’t do.”

“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.  Anyone who keeps learning stays young.”

“It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste.”

The Genius of Oscar Wilde. . .

“I have always been of the opinion that consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

“The only form of fiction in which real characters do not seem out of place is history.”

“Prayer must never be answered:  if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.”

“Missionaries, my dear!  Don’t you realize that missionaries are the divinely provided food for destitute and underfed cannibals?  Whenever they are on the brink of starvation, Heaven in its infinite mercy sends them a nice plump missionary.”

“Mr. _______ is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull.”

“As a writer, he has mastered everything except language.”

“You forget that a thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”

“Education is an admirable thing.  But it is well to remember that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”

“Anybody can make history.  Only a great man can write it.”

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.  Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.  Books are well written, or badly written.  That is all.”

“Work is the curse of the drinking classes of this country.”

“To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting.  It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.”

“Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover, when it is too late, that the only thing one never regrets are one’s mistakes.”

“The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true.  That is the fatality of Faith.”

“One can live for years sometimes without living at all, and then all life comes crowding into one single hour.”

“I hate vulgar realism in literature.  The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.”

“One should always be in love.  That is the reason one should never marry.”

“Men always want to be a woman’s first love; women want to be a man’s last romance.”

“One needs misfortune to live happily.”

“I can resist anything but temptation.”

“Moderation is fatal.  Nothing succeeds like excess.”

The Quotable Robert Heinlein. . .

“There is no conclusive evidence of life after death—but there is no evidence of any sort against it.  Soon enough you will know, so why fret over it?”

“If you don’t like yourself, you can’t like other people.”

“A motion to adjourn is always in order.”

“Money is a powerful aphrodisiac.  But flowers work almost as well. “

“One man’s theology is another man’s belly laugh.”

“Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves.  Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.”

“A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.”

“Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man.  How’s that again?  I missed something.”

“Everything in excess!  To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites.  Moderation is for monks.”

“The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universe, wants the saccharine adoration of his creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery.  Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history, organized religion.”

“The second most preposterous notion is that copulation in inherently sinful.”

“A woman is not property and husbands who think otherwise are living in a dream world.”

“If you happen to be one of the fretful minority who can do creative work, never force an idea; you’ll abort it if you do.  Be patient and you’ll give birth to it when the time is ripe.  Learn to wait.”

“Never underestimate the power of human stupidity. “

“Always yield to temptation; it may not pass your way again.” 

“A skunk is better company than a person who prides himself on being frank.”

“Formal courtesy between husband and wife is even more important than it is between strangers.”

From the World According to Edward. . .

“The only middle-class virtue more highly over-rated than good table manners is punctuality.” 

“A man’s biological imperative is to produce sperm.  It’s what he does, 24/7, all his life.  A woman’s biological imperative is to coax it out of him.” 

Miscellaneous Funny Quotations. . .

“I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.”  Groucho Marx

“He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.”  Billy Wilder

“Some people see things that are and ask, ‘Why?’  Some people dream of things that never were and ask, ‘Why Not?’  Some people have to go to work and don’t have time for all that shit.”  George Carlin

“It would be easier to grow sentimental about motherhood were the prerequisites higher.” John Ciardi

“Nobody in football should be called a genius.  A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.”  Joe Theismann

“Marilyn Monroe was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way a midget is good at being short.”  Critic Clive James

Review of a two-line poem:  “Very nice, but there are dull stretches.”  Comte de Rivarol

 “I’m often wrong, but never in doubt.”  Ivy Baker Priest

 “I love mankind—it’s people I can’t stand.”  Charles M. Schulz

Review of a bad novel:  “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly.  It should be thrown with great force.”  Dorothy Parker

“‘Whom are you?’ said he, for he had been to night school.”  George Ade

“I’ve posed nude for a photographer in the manner of Rodin’s Thinker, but I  merely looked constipated.”  George Bernard Shaw

“Mr. Atlee is a very modest man.  But then he has much to be modest about.”  Winston Churchill

“It was wonderful meeting you.  Usually a man would have to go to a bowling alley to meet a woman of your stature.”  Woody Allen

“Golf is a game invented by the same people who think music comes out of bagpipes.”  Lee Trevino

“If you can’t say something good about someone. . .sit right here by me.”  Alice Roosevelt Longworth

“If other people are going to talk, conversation becomes impossible.”  James McNeill Whistler.

“No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while, you’ll see why.”  Mignon McLaughlin.

 “You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.”  George Bernard Shaw.

“I took a speed reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes.  It involves Russia.”  Woody Allen.

Egotist:  “A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.”  Ambrose Bierce.

“It is inconceivable that the whole Universe was merely created for us who live in this third-rate planet of a third rate sun.”  Alfred Lord Tennyson.

“I prefer the wicked to the foolish.  The wicked sometimes rest.”  Alexander Dumas. 

“To err is human, to forgive is an impertinence.”  Anonymous.

Abstract Art:  “a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.”  Al Capp.

“You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.”  Al Capone.

“I have given up reading books.  I find it takes my mind off myself.”  Oscar Levant.

Christian:  “one who follows the teachings of Christ insofar as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.”  Ambrose Bierce.

“The classes that wash most are those that work least.”  G. K. Chesterton

.

“A democracy is a government in the hands of men of low birth, no property, and vulgar employments.”  Aristotle.

Television:  “an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn’t have in your house.”  David Frost.

 “A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.”  Robert Frost.

“England has forty-two religions and only two sauces.”  Voltaire.

“Be careful of reading health books.  You might die of a misprint.”  Mark Twain

“The French aren’t much at fighting wars anymore.  Despite their reputation for fashion, their women have spindly legs.  Their music is sappy.  But they do know how to whip up a plate of grub.”  Mike Royko.

“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance.  In Switzerland they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce?  The cuckoo clock.”  Orson Welles

“I’m not a snob.  Ask anybody.  Well, anybody who matters.”  Simon Lebon

 “I am deeply superficial.”  Ava Gardner.

“Humility is something I’ve always prided myself on.”  Bernie Kosar, NFL QB

“Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.”  Anon.

“I used to be a heavy gambler.  Now I just make mental bets.  That’s how I lost my mind.”  Steve Allen.

“Religion has actually convinced people that there is an invisible man living in the sky, who sees everything you do and wants you to follow a special list of ten things or he’ll send you to a place with fire, smoke, death, and misery forever and ever.  But he loves you.”  George Carlin.

“If only God would give me a clear sign.  Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.”  Woody Allen.

“Give me my golf clubs, fresh air, and a beautiful partner, and you can keep my golf clubs and the fresh air.”  Jack Benny.

“The Dodge-Plymouth dealers have just had their annual raffle, and they’ve given away a Catholic Church.”  Lenny Bruce.

“TV evangelists are the pro wrestlers of religion.”  Rick Overton.

“If you live to be a hundred, you’ve got it made.  Very few people die past that age.”  George Burns.

“Having sex is like playing bridge.  If you don’t have a good partner, you better have a good hand.”  Woody Allen.

“Can’t we silence those Christian athletes who thank Jesus whenever they win, and never mention His name when they lose?  You never hear them say, ‘Jesus made me drop the ball.’”  George Carlin.

“Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem.”  Woody Allen

“A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kickboxing.”  Emo Philips.

“Lawyers believe a man is innocent until proven broke.”  Robin Hall.

“Kill one man and you’re a murderer, kill a million and you’re a conqueror.”  Jean Rostand.

“Having money doesn’t make you happier.  I have fifty million dollars, but I’m just as happy as when I had forty-eight.”  Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“We are here on earth to do good unto others.  What the others are here for, I have no idea.”  W. H. Auden.