Where you left your keys ...Rick's Cafe Americain

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PHONE: [plays “Linus and Lucy”, by Vince Guaraldi].

ME: Hello?

DAWN: Hi!

ME: Dawn! Hi!  Where are you?

DAWN:  I’m not sure.  I’m lost.

ME:  Oh no.  Do you have any idea where you are?

DAWN:  I see trees.

ME:  That narrows it down.

DAWN:  And little Brady Bunch mini-houses.

ME: Uh-huh?

DAWN:  And a silver Mazda RX-8.

ME:  You’re at my house?

DAWN:  I guess.

ME:  Oh.  Did you ring the doorbell?

DAWN: Yes.

ME:  Did anyone answer the door?

DAWN: Um, no.

ME:  Then we’re not home.

DAWN:  That’s OK.  I’ll just steal some of your neighbor’s children.*

Why was Dawn three hours early?  Because she didn’t get lost.  Yes, that’s right, Dawn added 3 hours to a 45-minute drive to account for the likelihood of her getting lost.  Needless to say, we left that Outback right were it was until it was time for Dawn to go to the airport.  Since she left at ten on Sunday morning, I can only assume she’s boarding the plane about now.

The first thing Dawn saw when she walked through the door was our cat, Guru.  All I can say is, to quote Dawn herself (though not at that particular moment), “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA”.  While I sympathize with Dawn’s very real discomfort with most non-human living things, watching her jump every time the cat brushes against her just never gets old.  Nor do her frequent conversations with the cat:

DAWN: You’re not that big. I could take you.  Just remember that.

GURU:  [blink]

The second thing Dawn saw was the Scrabble box:

DAWN: Oooooh, can we play Scrabble?

RICK: Sure.

DAWN: Can I win?

RICK:  It’s possible.

DAWN:  I want to win.

RICK: OK.**

I was about to set up the board when Ilsa pointed out that Dawn might want to go out and “see” Palo Alto, since she was only here for a day.  Intrigued, I asked what was worth “seeing” in Palo Alto.  And, for the record, if you’re planning a visit, here is the short list:

Number 1: Stanford University. Here, I employed a touring technique known as “drive into the middle of it and get lost, then drive around till you’ve found your way back out.  It was highly effective, and we saw all the key Stanford sights, including the Famous Bell Tower Thingy, the Parking Lot In Front Of The Rodin Sculpture Garden, the Fake Mayan Ruins, the Bike Racks (Dawn’s personal favorite—I’ve never seen anyone get so excited and nostalgic over bike racks) and Panama Street (where Dawn mocked me for referring to the U.S. as “the States”, instead of “here").  25 minutes later I was wondering what else to show her:

RICK: Oh, Stanford has a linear accelerator—want to see that?

DAWN:  Here’s what I heard:  “Ooooh, Stanford blah blah blah blah blah.”

RICK:  It’s the physics equivalent of saying that Stanford has a TV studio filming WB shows.

DAWN:  Ooooooh!!!!  Now THAT I’d like to see!

Number 2: Downtown Palo Alto.  Otherwise known as University Avenue, this is a long drive down a short, congested street lined with restaurants and shops.  Highlight:  Citibank.

DAWN:  Oh, wow, look!

RICK:  What?

DAWN:  A Citibank!

RICK:  So?

DAWN:  That’s my bank!

RICK: Um, great, I’ll be sure to drive by the McDonald’s on the way home.

DAWN: Why?

RICK:  Because they are about as rare.

DAWN:  I get excited when I see a McDonald’s in a foreign country.

Number 3: New LLP’s Palo Alto Office.  We didn’t go here, because I forgot.  And because I don’t know where it is.  And because, why would anyone want to spend their weekend out of town visiting their office?  But if you want to see it while you’re here, Ilsa knows the address . . .

Anyway, after The Tour there was dinner, at Francis Ford Coppola’s restaurant:

DAWN:  I wish I had David Blaine’s powers.

RICK:  Why?

DAWN:  So that I could make this table disappear.

RICK:  Why would you want to do that?

DAWN:  Then they probably wouldn’t notice if I stole my wine glass.

After dinner, Ilsa went bed and Dawn and I sat down to play some Scrabble.  Now, this happens to be the time of night when Guru likes to fly around the living room at full speed, flinging himself onto one of the couches and scrambling about spider-like on its vertical surfaces, so Dawn was a bit distracted.

GURU: [flies past Dawn on his way to the nearest couch arm, where he hangs momentarily suspended by his claws]

DAWN: Eeeeeyyyaaaaahhhh!!  [deep breath] I think you should go be with your mommy, cat.

GURU: [blinks]

DAWN:  You’re not so big.  I . . . could . . . take you?

GURU: [blinks]

DAWN:  Eeeeeyyyaaahhh!!!

I won’t bore you with the details of the game itself, but I will share the final board, which shows how Dawn earned the title, “the [Salvador] Dali of Scrabble”:

For those of you who are interested, according to Dawn a “jif” is a “hurry”; “bonrelaxer” is “a very good relaxer”; and “zariy” is an adjective that refers to something that makes the Baby Jesus cry (for example, the word “bonrelaxer"). Apparently, “Zariy” is also a popular name in the world of pre-pubescent cartoon fan-fiction.  I have no idea what a “codet” is, but I think it was featured in the DaVinci Code.

Needless to say Dawn won (as per our prior agreement), and a good time was had by all. 

We can’t wait to have Dawn back, and I only hope that the next time she comes out this way she won’t be lured by strangers with Bavarian candy.  After all, the doors on a Bimmer all open the same way.

* OK, she didn’t actually say that.  But that’s what Dawn thinks our neighbors thought as they peered from behind their blinds to watch her loiter on our street for half an hour.

** I meant “OK, we’ll play”.  Dawn heard, “OK, you’ll win”.

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James Frederick Dwight, proprietor of the SoxBlog, actually is family.  Well, sort of, anyway.  We’re related by one marriage (mine) and one engagement (Mother of Ilsa and Father of James).

Soxblog has been up for a long time, but I haven’t linked to it before because, well, I was afraid that once James and I got going in the blogosphere, Christmases and Thanksgivings might be a little awkward.  Still, I don’t get to see him enough, and I enjoy arguing—er, engaging in discourse with him.  Besides, Rick’s needs an intelligent conservative voice to penetrate the liberal echochamber, and our former resident Bush wacko seems to have gone all Jack Torrance on us ("All work and no play makes Rick a dull boy . . .").

So, without further ado, and in honor of the Red Sox’s record-breaking (and curse-breaking?) win in the AL, I welcome SoxBlog, and spirited political debate, to Rick’s.

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Today I have received (so far) no less than four identical e-mails from a company calling itself “ALL-IN” and offering their product—a dinky rubber bracelet that says “ALL-IN” on it.  This ordinarily would just be some really annoying spam from people with an incredibly lame product.  Except that they are seeking to capitalize on Lance Armstrong’s efforts to raise money and awareness in the fight against cancer.  Their marketing gimmick? “Just Like The Lance Armstrong “LIVESTRONG” Bracelets, only for POKER PLAYERS!!!”.  and Oh, and all the money goes into our crass, cynical, greedy little pockets.  Here’s another one that made me cringe: “Made famouse by lance Armstrong’s “WEAR YELLOW” campaine and the “LIVESTRONG” bracelet, the “ALL-IN” Bracelet is sweeping the Poker World!”

Help strike a blow against spam, stupid products, greedy bastards, and cancer, all at the same time.  These “ALL-IN” bracelets are going for $3.  Please, go to Lance Armstrong’s site and donate $3 (or more!) to the Livestrong foundation.  Then, send an e-mail to info@allinbracelets.com telling them to stop harrassing poker bloggers while exploiting charitable endeavors for personal gain.  You might also mention what a stupid idea their product is in the first place.

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The young have a well-documented tendency to resist the dominant paradigm and rebel against the perceived status quo.  We also share an equally strong (and often competing) desire to be part of something, to identify with some group.  At the younger end of the spectrum, this produces the often starkly segregated cliques, clubs, and gangs that define most junior high and high school communities.  In the later teens, twenties and thirties, it often results in a sort of “conversion”, usually triggered or defined by social tectonics.

I submit that many young people, exposed to the (unquestionable) liberal bias of many high schools and most universities, reacted in the typical young-person manner: they became conservatives.  In a sense, being a Young Republican is the equivalent of being one of the Goth kids in high school.  The individual defines him or herself in contradiction to the dominant paradigm, and joins with others, similarly rebellious, to form a subversive, yet supportive, identity.

Now, what happened when these young upstarts left the ivory tower and found themselves in the—gasp—mainstream?  The “Conservatives” took over Congress, then the White House.  The “liberal media” is so jammed with conservative mouthpieces it’s developing TMJ.  Why, you can’t spill a tall Toffee Nut Latte without splashing a conservative blogger anymore!  So, for a while, the conservatives pretended they were still oppressed.  Many are still doing it—turn on Fox, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, or pretty much any AM station and see if you don’t hear someone complain about the liberal media.  But for the more intelligent ones, the deception couldn’t last.

But is it so bad to be part of the mainstream, part of the dominant class?  You can’t be a rebel forever, right? Once these people hit their mid-twenties to mid-thirties, its often too late to switch tracks.  You may gaze longingly at your liberal friends, in their “Kerry-Edwards” t-shirts, passionately talking about the comeback trail, planning and plotting and hoping.  And you, what do you have, smugness?  Not really.  And that’s not nearly as much fun anyway.  Admit it—it’s more exciting to be the underdog, and youth wants excitement.

Of course, we “liberals” aren’t much more well-defined than you “conservatives”.  So much so that the “we” and “you” in the last sentence are probably out of place.  In fact, the only thing holding us together as “liberals” is a desire to see Bush gone—more on that in a moment.

But its not being mainstream that’s hurting conservativism, it’s that conservatism has lost its way, has lost itself.  I believe the main problem facing young conservatives today is that nobody knows what the hell a conservative is anymore.  What does a conservative stand for?  It used to be easy.  Conservatives were against Communism, the Federal Government, and Hippies.

But the Evil Empire was hoisted by its own petard, the hippies all bought Hummers, and the “conservatives” in the White House are pumping up the federal government so hard that Barry Bonds is looking to get in on the action.  So what does it mean to be a conservative?

Are conservatives for or against gay marriage? stem-cell research?  abortion?  government spending?  government regulation of the private sector?  socialized medicine?  the invasion of Iraq? the environment?  These are surely complex issues susceptible to a variety of reasoned views—but what’s the point of calling yourself a “conservative” if you don’t share at least some of the views of other conservatives?

The “conservative movement” just isn’t.  I bet if you put twenty randomly-selected conservatives in a room, they would align themselves in a hundred different ways depending on what issue you gave them.  And I bet there wouldn’t be a single issue on which they all agreed, with one possible exception: supporting Bush.  Because—just as liberals are tied together most strongly right now by their desire to see regime change in the White House—“conservatives” can only define themselves by the tip of the pyramid.  Bush says he is a conservative, and that he speaks for conservatives.  How, then, can you be a conservative if you do not support Bush?  (This solipsism seems to work remarkably well, although I think it has and will continue to lose Bush votes among the more intelligent young conservatives).

Bush has fulfilled his promise of being a “uniter”, but he has done so in the only way he knows how: by dividing.  You’re either with him or you’re against him, and few have the courage to stand against him if it means standing against their own.  What the conservatives need to realize is that, at least for the moment, there is no “conservative movement.” The Bushites have so trampled and distorted any defining ideology or policy with their political juggernaut that there is no meaningful connection between the spectrum of views and the schema being applied.

I’ll bet a whole lot of “conservatives” have spent the past four years feeling like they should feel like they’ve won, but wondering why, deep down, they don’t feel that way.  The answer will come from asking the right question:  what have you won?  I’d venture to say that the previous administration was a far more representative—and effective—“conservative” government than what we have now.

So get over yourselves.  Get over the label.  Figure out what you believe in, and what you want—and what you need, and what your children will need—and think about who is more likely to give you that.  If you need to find new labels, as you probably do, reorganize.  Identify yourself with a coherent group, and call yourself whatever you want.  Get about making choices based on what you think is right, not what you think you’re expected to do.  And if you can’t quite get over the high-school mentality, relish this thought: once Bush is out of the White House, we liberals will go back to being a fractious bunch of whiners tilting at windmills. 

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Pick up the nearest book.
Open it to page 23.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.