God's Own Crunk

Two vignettes, both true, that occurred recently.

On St. Patrick’s Day, I was at a restaurant downtown and stepped outside for a cigarette. It wasn’t the best day for St. Pat’s, as it was extremely windy and cold for that time of year, and it landed on a Sunday. There wasn’t a lot of street traffic. I was standing in a doorway to be out of the wind, and a guy on a flip-phone passed by and glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. He walked a few more feet, got off his phone, turned around and I knew he was about to ask me for money. He began by asking me if he knew where he could get something to eat, an odd thing on a Sunday St. Pat’s since there’s any number of missions and churches downtown (to say nothing of a YMCA) and he clearly wasn’t Hungry. He then began his sob story about losing his job and needing to take care of his wife and kids (they weren’t with them and he didn’t wear a wedding ring) and he insisted he wasn’t asking for money even though of course he was asking for money, and when he finally got around to asking for it, it was so he could “get a couple tacos at Taco Bell,” no mention of his family at this point. Rare is the day that I carry cash with me and I never give money to panhanlders, but I happened to have two ones and a five, and not even feeling generous, just to end the lie that was unfolding before me – he continued to insist he felt bad about asking for money even though he was asking for money – I pulled out my wallet, where the $7 was clipped to the back. I gave him the two ones, and he looked expectantly at the five. “Nope,” I said, “that’s mine.” He looked disappointed, said thank you, and went on his way, probably to laugh with his friends how he’d just conned me out of $2. Happily for him, he didn’t try to actually rob me since I had a blackjack on me.

In the city today, it’s 95 and humid – hottest day of the year by far, so far – and at every Insterstate off-ramp there are more beggars than usual, all with their cardboard signs. Like anyone who lives in a city, I’m for the most part immune to this stuff. The last off-ramp I was on today, there was a very ragged, very thin guy who looked about my age and he had his dog with him, the best friend to all hobos and, right or wrong, a prop that will make me pay closer attention to them. The guy in front of me gave him a dollar. Because I work out of a car most of the time, I carry cases of bottled-water and bottled tea, so I thought I’d try something. I grabbed 16-ounce bottle of Lipton sugar-free out of one of the cases and rolled down the window. “You want a bottle of tea?” I asked him, and he said “absolutely.” He took it, thanked me, said “god bless” and had downed half of it by the time he got back to where he was sitting. He even patted his dog. The man looked my age – he could’ve been in his twenties for all I know – but his bear was long and straggled, his clothes were very worn and very dirty, and he was tan, tattooed and thin. If he was playing destitute or shit-outta-luck, he was doing a Method actor’s performance.

Thus, I might have found a small, personal solution to what I refer to as The Empath’s Dilemma.

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Read it all – gripping prose:

Private McCain called Tuesday night and, after talking to Mom a while, talked to me and told me stuff he didn’t want to tell Mom, who worries enough for the whole family. Attrition due to injuries is not uncommon in Jump Week. By the time they finished the third jump, Private McCain said, they’d subtracted about 20 troops, mostly because of sprained ankles, but also two or three broken legs and at least one concussion. Additionally, there were a couple “refused jumps,” which boggled my son’s mind: “You make it this far and then, you won’t jump?”

via One More Jump … : The Other McCain.

You will probably never be this funny. Hunter Thompson’s essay about the Kentucky Derby is arguably the single funniest piece of nonfiction I’ve ever read (David Sedaris’ very short “Big Boy” comes in a close second /pun). Although the good Doctor’s work lost its humorous patina as his career wore on, his early work was both gripping and hysterical. Many editions of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas come with “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved,” and if you’ve never read it, click the link to read it. Like many young, male writers, Thompson’s work had a huge influence on me as a teenager and early twentysomething – this one, more than any of his other work, had me thinking, “man, I’m jealous I didn’t write that,” the best compliment any writer could pay another imho:

The pitch, even at the late hour and the late date (barely 72 hours before the race itself), was fairly irresistible.1 Send Thompson, still finding his distinctive voice in countercultural journalism, to his hometown of Louisville to cover the drunken, debauched scene at Churchill Downs for Scanlan’s, the anti-establishment (some would say subversive) monthly magazine for which Hinckle was co-editor.

Hinckle agreed on the spot, booked Thompson a ticket, wired him expense money, and then set about finding an artist to provide illustrations for the story. Originally, he had hoped to send a photographer to shoot the event, but after haggling with Thompson, he instead hired the English illustrator Ralph Steadman.2

via Looking back at Hunter S. Thompson’s classic story about the Kentucky Derby – Grantland.

In 1986 Sports Illustrated, then a glorious magazine about sports, in its college basketball issue, had a spread of the best players in the country from 12-18. Marcus Liberty was the best 18-year-old, Alonzo Mourning was the best 17-year-old, and Allen Iverson was the best 13-year-old. I followed Iverson’s career from that day forward. I followed the news about what would’ve been an otherwise obscure fight in a bowling alley that nearly derailed his career, I watched him at Georgetown, and I was thrilled when he went to Philly to play for what I always referred to as “Dr. J’s Sixers.” His career was quite good for the bulk of it, but I don’t think he ever shook the perception of thugness – some of which he fueled with his rap career – that began with that fight in the bowling alley while he was still a teenager.

Iverson, for the bulk of his career, was not only a scoring macing, but the hardest working man on any floor he happened to be on. People think of him as selfish for events like the “practice” press conference, but to watch the man play was to watch a guy who gave his all ever single game, something that can be said about very few NBA stars.

We’re about the same age and it’s silly to have favorites at this age, but he, like Dr. J, remains one of my favorites – great piece at Grantland, btw:

Iverson’s endurance as a cultural icon will change with the politics of the country in 10 or 20 or 30 years, but it also, strangely enough, depends, in large part, on how Iverson’s life plays out from here. The details in Kent Babb’s report were grim and included an anecdote in which Iverson, facing his ex-wife in a divorce proceeding, pulled out the pockets of his pants and shouted, “I don’t even have money for a cheeseburger.” Tawanna Iverson then loaned her ex-husband $61. Now broke and battling severe alcohol problems, Iverson has one last big payday coming to him: about $30 million from a Reebok contract locked up in a trust that he cannot touch until 2030, when he will turn 55 years old. The central question about Allen Iverson has changed from “Will he ever play again?” to “Will he live long enough to claim his Reebok money?”

via Allen Iverson and the SLAM Era – Grantland.

Go to the link for the context – it’s a picture of two Google searches and their autofill options:

80% of the questions asked by men are selfless in nature. They are questions about how to please a woman and make her happy. 70% of the questions asked by women are selfish in nature. They are questions about how to get noticed by men, and how to manipulate men’s affections.

These are the male and female ids auto-exposed. Female solipsism is powerful and is an inextricable part of their nature as sexual beings. Women are hard-wired from the womb to turn their focus inward, because their eggs are biologically more valuable than sperm. Men are hard-wired to turn their focus outward, because that is how they acquire status and how they win the love of constitutionally diffident women.

via Women Will Qualify You, So You Must Resist Their Efforts | Chateau Heartiste.

One of the beautiful things about American-English is how it can be twisted just right to make a person think twice – sort of like that tasteless title that intro’d this piece. Because I was recently at Rowan Oak, I think of the bride who was a widow before she was a bride. The Sutpen’s were doomed, we know this.

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Take it away, Guy:

Around 15,000 years ago when man first began to domesticate Europe and Asia’s wolves—from which all modern dogs descend—there was a tacit but clear contract between us. Along with his liberty and independence, the wolf gave up life’s struggles in a state of nature. He was given his share of the hunter-gatherer’s meal and a place by the fireside. In return, man received a loyal companion whose better senses alerted him to the nighttime raids of predators and rival human groups, whose greater speed and stamina could pursue wounded prey far beyond our own capabilities, and whose faster reproductive cycle and maturation rate meant he could be more quickly replaced should he be killed at the end of the hunt.

via The Ancient Contract Between Man and Wolf – Taki’s Magazine.

Per Derbs:

Two. The normal living accommodation for working-class Britons in the postwar years was the “council house” or “council flat.” (A flat is an apartment. Hence the ESL teacher’s favorite illustration of a sentence that means entirely different things in British and American English: “I’m mad about my flat.” The Brit is thrilled with his apartment; the Yank is angry at losing a tire.) These were properties the local municipality or county owned and rented out to poor people.

My parents got lucky. They reached the front of the council-house line—there was always a waiting list for these properties—in 1948. That was during the socialist government voted in at the end of WWII. The government’s Housing Minister was a flaming Welsh orator named Aneurin Bevan, who had declared that nothing was too good for the working man. The council houses built under his patronage were really nice houses.

I grew up in one such house, and my parents were still living in it, and still paying rent to the town, when Mrs. Thatcher came in. Early in her administration she got a law through Parliament allowing council-house tenants to buy their property at a discount depending on the length of time they’d been resident. At 33 years my folks qualified for the maximum discount of 50 percent. I financed the purchase of their house at £12,000. Thus in March 1982 my parents, aged 82 and 70, lived in a property they owned for the first time in either of their lives. (That house would sell today for $190,000-$200,000.)

via Capitalism’s Champion – Taki’s Magazine.