Dora Beckett was dead for ten minutes before her husband knew. She was gone half an hour before her mother, roused from a fitful old-woman's sleep, let the phone slip from her fingers and slumped against the kitchen wall silent in quivering grief. In three hours her priest knew, four, her boss and after one inexcusable day, the two children she rarely spoke with received the news from the father they barely knew. Yet somewhere between Daniel Beckett's awful discovery and young Emily Beckett's first trip home in years, regulars at a certain Evanston café, notified of their friend's loss, began a quiet day of dirges that stretched from six o'clock in the morning until well past dinner time.   

Dora Beckett had been dead for just over a day by time I'd stepped into the café. At first it was impossible to tell that something was wrong, being an infrequent patron of said café and unfamiliar with the new crop of coffee bean bonhomies keeping the North Shore appropriately jittery. When I was in high school, I used to frequent the café all the time, meeting friends, trying teas, and pretending I had any clue what the Northwestern students were talking about. It was a grungy place back then, less a café than a news kiosk with scones. Sclerotic baristas sang the song of antipathym which by dint of political screeds and anti-establishment rants, rang particularly true my seventeen-year-old self,. Everyone there seemed so sure of themselves, even when they must have known they were speaking nonsense. Faith-based atheism at it's best.

But things have changed since my last visit there in April of '04, and even more so since my final spin as a regular in the fall in 1998. Evanston, like all of Cook County, has taken the path of least resistance and banned smoking from virtually all public places. Air once dense with the stench antagonism and carbon monoxide now smells of brewing coffee and sweet, Indian teas: truly the bete noir of any decent coffeehouse.

Last Thursday, however, there was something else in the air and it didn't take long before I picked up on it. Turning from my book to the sound of free-versing in the distance, I noticed a group of sweater-clad hipster-types sitting in a circle in one the café's larger back rooms. It was an eclectic crew, though primarily undergrad and female, and every now and again one would pass me on their way outside for a puff. This went on for the better part of an hour, my interest in Michener, waning percipitiously. Not seeking to be presumptuous I resisted the urge to ask what was going on until a man behind the counter asked if he could see the "metro" section of my newspaper.  

"There it is," he said to no one. Holding the paper, he pointed to an obituary. "We knew that woman. She used to come in here all the time."

"A regular?"

"Yeah. I always liked her even though most of the people here thought she was a little annoying."

I told him I was sorry about the loss. I think I may have mentioned something about regulars being the "lifesblood" of commercial establishment, but I was just grasping for something to say.

The man nodded and turned his attention toward the crowd. Roughly a dozen people thick, they felt their way through lamentations which, though undoubtedly sincere, smacked of a certain sense of self-aggrandizement. Literary devices abound. True sadness, true regret, true anything does have the luxury of metaphor and iambic pentameter.  

I thought about the dead woman. She was fifty-eight years of age. She was a wife, a mother, a woman. Instead of flowers, her family asked for donations to the American Cancer Society. She didn't die of cancer. I pictured her, despite not knowing what she looked like, sitting at the table across from me. I envisioned her as tall but sturdy with coarse gray hair curling down to her chin, kissing just below her neck. I imagined her in a stocking cap and forest-green fisherman's coat. I pretended that we were arguing over globalization. She would refer to me by my last name and I'd call her "grandma." We were each other's reason for late-afternoon espressos.

I asked a woman who said she was a friend of the family about Mrs. Beckett. She gave me the brief timetable I described at the start of this post. When I told her I had to leave (I was meeting a friend at the vegetarian restaurant down the street), she asked if I knew Dora.

I said, "Yes."

For strong emotion, always use shorter sentences; they convey intensity.

There's a box on a chair and my headphones are on. Books piled high and a paper wide open. A vaguely hostile continence usually works fine, but the best offense has always been a good newspaper. Keep it propped up, elbows in and pages out and nobody this side of Division St. will fuck with you. When alone, always carry a Wall Street Journal; it's cheaper than mace and far more effective.

Alone, waiting for a friend at the deli on Lincoln Ave, it's all one can do to avoid the unholy crew who descend on the solitary like bass players on a drunken Lisa Loeb. Emotional rapists, I sense them, lilaceous and ribald, they hunger. I know they're out there because sometimes, when I'm not careful, one will burst through the speakers of a cell phone, bust out of a Blue Tooth and sop me up.

They do this because they've lost themselves. Somewhere between the last time they got laid and the moment they stopped caring they dissolved their identity entirely. Once, I was attacked in the Old Orchard food court but a man who wasn't so much a man but a hat with teeth. After ten minutes, this man, this deerstalker cannibal, had chewed his way though every defense and before the afternoon was over, I was pushing a cart of crap from Marshall Field's though the snow-sprinkled parking lot.

That was a while ago. I've battened down the hatches since then. Tightend the ramparts, constructed my Jericho. I've mastered the art of the "fuck off" face and can use it with devastating precision.  It's all about survival when you're on your own, and nothing spells survival better than a highly guarded fortress. Man may be a social animal, but in Chicago social is subjective.

There are only thee feet separating my booth from the bathroom and if need be, my cell phone can ring at the touch of button. I'm ready. I must be. Lest that man, that man I fear more than anyone else, corner me behind a bowl of mushroom barely soup. And that simply cannot happen.

Nothing humanizes like imperfection and there is nothing more imperfect than the human body. It's been the root of intra-personal consternation since the days of Eden, and we could easily spend our lives magnifying and whittling down every flaw, every asymmetry we find in Sisyphean games of whack-a-mole. And what's saddest of all, is that there are some who actually do that: whittle away until there's nothing left.

Sometimes, however, it's these very blemishes that scale the chambers of the human heart and find connections where they never existed before. Perhaps its mutual admission of cellulite, a la "Real Women Have Curves," that forms a relationship, or awkward charting of the migratory path of one's hair follicles. We see the sick in the eyes of our enemies, the mortal in the face of a stranger, and then suddenly they're nothing like who we thought. It's the stain that marks the human race, and like any such spot gives almost as much as it takes. It's not to fill pages that the National Enquirer includes a piece of
"celebrity flaws" every week. Their last issue was entirely devoted to it.

But the most serious flaws aren't topical. Beneath the mole or balding pate lurks a veritable litany of deficiencies that lay far beyond the scope of Rogaine or a stairmaster. I certainly don't have to go into detail here, there isn't person out there who hasn't experienced at least minor physical maladies. There isn't anyone out there who can't vouch for the absolute torment that is the imperfection of illness. I, myself have only had cursory dealings with lasting illness, the most prevalent of which was little more than an extended cold. Nevertheless, I recently discovered that my cholesterol level is a bit high. Now all I can do to keep from feeling completely feckless is eschew chocolate milkshake after chocolate milkshake and down Omega-3 fish oil pills.

High cholesterol, at least in this day and age, is the ne plus ultra of the cottonseed generation, and it is a self-consciously discomforting condition because it plays dangerous close to the "self-pity party," too many of us are so apt to have.  I keep wondering, what I did to poison myself like this? Was it all the chocolate milkshakes? I used to have one every Wednesday and Thursday night. Did I not ride my bike enough? What did I do?

To make matters worse, I hardly look like a Lipitor poster boy: I'm 5'9 and weigh between 125 and 130 lbs. Although hardly a twig, I really am quite thin, so I was beyond shocked when the lab tech (who in this case was my mom) informed me that I had 216 cholesterol level. "It's supposed to be under 200," she said. "Because you're so young, the doctor isn't prescribing a pharmaceutical at the moment." And that was it. Now, when I'm ate my mom's table for dinner, it's all salmon all the time, which is fine by me because I've always fancied icthyoids anyway. 

Still, there's nothing like being told that your life, while not being in imminent danger—I don't mean to make it sound like I was given worse news than I was—to place one's own imperfections in greater clarity. And no just of the physical variety. Now, when I see the infant wrinkles zigzag from the corner of my eyes, I also see my cold, unemotional streak. When I look at my spaghetti arms, I also notice my piss poor computation skills and my quiet impatience.  I see confusion in unruly hair and the class I had such trouble subduing in my unfashionable clothes.

For a long time no one in the village even knew they lived in a dessert. Like bacteria unfurling in a petri dish, members of the tribe got up each day and, in accordance with their own wants wills and desires perfected the art of ephemeral forever. They sang operettas, scrubbed crockpots, injected drugs, ran other over without the slightest hint of remorse, raised children and raised a boatload. They did this blindly, but only party so because somewhere the ghettos of each villager's soul, the bitter truth lay packing on meat.

Still, it took years before anyone understood that they'd soon be completely out of water.  It took another millennia or so before anyone could speak it aloud. But eventually, and here's where things really go awry, once every understood the reality of their situation and stood agape in the shadow of their present shamelessness, they did what came naturally to those unused to the indignities of self-incrimination. They panicked. And, as is usually the case with worriers, they tore themselves to pieces.

Despite their fear, however, the belief that things would get better was a so wrought in their schema, that no one save the passionately insane considered leaving the village for potentially greener fields elsewhere. Those who did were never heard from again—not to sound too terribly cliché.

Most villagers pitied the souls that wandered off, giving them up for dead or indentured servitude.  Still, as life in the village deteriorated, a certain divine lore emerged from the tracks of the departed, and tribes consolidated rumors and legends about those who left in acts camaraderie unheard of in days before the big drought. Patiently, the codified myth, parsing through what felt wrong and what seemed right. Unable to reconcile reality, villagers became fanatical in their pursuit of mystery. Historians slept with guns and typewriters were buried beneath inches of iron and concrete and brought out only on special, ceremonial occasions.

People no longer recognized their homes or families and drifted like wraiths through the necropolis. All villagers could focus on was a way out: out of reality, out of fantasy, out from under the sun, out from beneath the sun. They thirsted for escape, aching for it so strongly; that eventually it became the only method they had for identifying themselves.

Some escaped.

Gone.

Others remained; remembering and forgetting, diving in and out of themselves, pretending and not pretending, laughing but not really laughing, committing acts they always knew they would but feigning surprise at doing so. And then, of course, they all died.

Stuck.

Look at me. I'm wearing a vintage brown "Boomer's Boxing School" t-shirt under an even darker brown, single-breasted sport jacket. Hell, the damned thing even has peanut-butter colored pinstripes; which, sigh, match the laces on my shoes.

My name might as well be Pierce or something. It's pathetic.

Even worse, I'm hanging out with a bunch of dudes tonight. Indeed, it's my friend Mark's birthday. Poor bastard.

So here I am, looking Euro-Trash as all get out--a phrase that has its roots on the  fair continent-- and I'm not even seeing my girlfriend.

Sucks.

***Hmm...I just re-read what I wrote. How many of you were tempted to start singing "Misty" after the first sentence? Just wondering.

There's an article in the Marketplace section of yesterday's Wall Street Journal about how The Arctic Monkeys, England's newest and greatest hype, has failed to meet any American crossover expectations. Ostensibly, this came as a shock to radio producers on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly after months of cloying reviews from one British (and American) paper after another. One magazine even had the cajones to claim that the new Arctic Monkey's record was more important than the Clash's "London Calling."

Their debut album, "Whatever People Say I am, That's What I'm Not"--clearly not directed at the editors at Mojo—only sold 34,000 copies stateside—less than 10% of the 360,000 unloaded on our salivating British brethren. Although the Wall Street Journal focused primarily on the business-side of the deal, this is the Wall Street Journal after all, the article did cite cultural and linguistic barriers as determents to state side success. After all, who in the United States wants to listen to some Limey brat warble about "tracky bottoms?" Please. We Yanks need something we can relate to, like 50 Cent.

And let's not forget how grating that whiny English accent becomes after fifteen minutes. Don't these kids know that in order to obtain real success in America they need to lose the ol' "nippa & chippa"? Look at folks like Elvis Costello, Manfred Man and Graham Parker. Hell, listen to "Yesterday" and find me any trace of Liverpool inflection. It's all but non-existent.

Maybe it's just me, but it's that damned accent that keeps me from watching Kiera Knigthly films. That and the fact that she's always calling me at 2 in the morning for a booty call. Kiera, seriously. It's over. Move on, sister.

To be quite honest, I don't understand why all this cross-cultural confusion has come as such of a shock to studio heads. With the exception of the two British invasions—the one from the 60's being very much American inspired, as John Lennon himself has pointed out—British music has never translated well here. Case in point: The Smiths. Here's a band that practically ruled England for a couple years during the mid-80's but a quick Google search indicates that they never even broke the top 40 here. Why?

Now I like the Smiths so I'm not sure I can answer that, but a few reasons do pop to mind. They paraded their Britishness so gratingly, and so explicitly that it often carried the weight of jingoism. Despite Morrisey's anti-nationalist rhetoric, this does tend to turn people off.  Ask Toby Kieth why his albums don't sell in Manchester. Or maybe it's because so many Smiths songs sounds like they're streaming from an old Zenith television set somewhere below a CTA Brown-Line station. Whatever the reason may be, The Smiths and their Arctic offspring lack the Gravitas needed to make it here in America. And let's be honest, that's where the money is.

But with a lackluster American debut already in the bank, industry questions about the Arctic Monkey's future—whether they should focus on the UK or give America another shot—will almost certainly grow. How can it not? Who knows, maybe they can come back with an album that doesn't sound like a reject from the "Trainspotting" soundtrack. Good luck to them on that.

Oh, and good luck on Saturday Night Live, mates.

I didn't catch most of the Oscars but I liked what I saw.

John Stewart was funny enough, I suppose. The musical numbers were only moderately tedious, and Michael Moore wasn't there, so at least we could all watch without waiting for the other shoe to drop. There's something to be said for that.

Not that it matters by now anyhow because no one I know can recall any of the winners, save of course for that "Hard Out Here for a Pimp" group. What's their name? Whatever.

Oh, and it only had the second lowest ratings ever. Whew!

But here's what bugs me: why are winners rushed off the stage three seconds after they pick up their award? Not to give Hollywood any more credit than it's due, but the Oscars is its night after all, so why shouldn't they be allowed to incoherently ramble for a bit? Is it so that those of we in the Midwest can watch the news at 10:30 instead of 11? Give me a break. Reese Witherspoon worked hard to get that pretty. At least give her a few minutes to make a fool of herself.

And besides, does it really matter whether the Oscars are three hours and twenty minutes or three hours and fifty minutes? After the 3-hour mark it all becomes an LSD hallucination anyway.

Since when is throwing a Muppet into a commercial clever advertising?

It now appears that Kermit and the gang have become the puppets of last resort when fresh, young advertising executives who haven't done enough coke yet, run out of ideas.

Boss: What can we say about Pizza Hut, Jenkins?

Jenkins: Gee, I don't know boss. That it doesn't taste like cardboard?

Boss: Right. But how do we sell that to consumers?

Jenkins: Hmmm…That's a tough one boss.

Both:  MISS PIGGY!

Jenkins: And if that doesn't work, my two-month old daughter is available!

Boss: Jenkins, you're a genius.

We don't talk about it much, but every Jew in America has an Ash Wednesday story. Kind of like how every Chinese restaurant in America has a Christmas story and every gentile— in the north Chicago-land area, anyway—has a Yom Kippur story. Most of these tales of ethnic bewilderment adhere to a similar albeit extensive story line. Basically, it involves running into a member of another religion/ethnicity/ect at their most spiritually exposed and being unable to process it. Call it a momentary loss of liberality.

Hmm..I should probably back up a minute here. Not every Jew has an Ash Wednesday story, just those I've discussed this with. Heck, I'm sure many Hindus can also attest to an Ash Wednesday story or two, let alone all the world's Protestants. So it's not just us. No "Zionist Secrets Revealed" here. Sorry, Ms. Zerbisias.

Although, I think the Jewish reaction to Ash Wednesday represents something unique in the modern "us & them" ethos that keeps the world spinning. Whenever I see a Catholic with an ash cross on his head, I am overwhelmed by two contradictory feelings, both taking turns at predominance. Either I am grateful or I am concerned.  

Maybe it's the notion, however subconscious, that on this date some two millennia ago, our status as "killers" was sealed and shouts for our slaughter given international legitimacy. Not that I consider Ash Wednesday a call for the defensive. On the contrary, Ash Wednesday is perhaps the only holiday in the world which, almost by default, forces people of differing faiths to understand, though never fully accept, the things that divide them. We tread carefully though, because for one day a year, it's literally in our face.

Still, all inter-faith circle-jerking aside, real feelings of anxiety percolate every Ash Wednesday and it's not by accident that I spend most of that day avoiding eye contact with certain individuals. Those ashes means something to non-Catholics in general and to Jews in particular. In many ways they signifiy the day the first shoe finally dropped.

I'm exaggerating, surely, in today's America it's really very easy to be a Jew. None of us are concerned about being refused access to the Bryn Mawher country club or being forced to live (or not to live) in certain neighborhoods. There are no pogroms, no fever-swamp "Elders of Zion" kind of stuff, and besides the occasion kook professor or far left/far right zealot, few people here seem out to "get us." I'm not saying anti-Semitism doesn't exist, just read Pat Buchanan or Alexander Cockburn (the later wrote an entire book about how blaming the Jews for X,Y or Z while openly advocating the wholesale destruction of their state isn't at all anti-Semitic, and anyone who says so is just tying to stymie "legitimate criticism of Israel." A rather funny read in a pathetically self-delusional kind of way.) as evidence of that.  I myself have experienced it only twice, and the second time was more ignorant than malicious.

Yet still, part of being a Jew is an acceptance of the "otherness" innate in ourselves and other religions. Part of that "otherness" remains the often violent gulch that twins our mutual pasts; and nothing exemplifies this better than ash on the forehead. This is in contrast to the "oneness" proclaimed by Eastern faiths, a philosophy that sounds nice in theory but as a Jew, I simply cannot abide. This is nothing new, by the way, Jewish thinkers have long drawn distinctions between "oneness" and "otherness" so don't think I'm being terribly original here. Nevertheless, I still believe these concepts must overlap and conjoin.

I'm not going to delve into my Ash Wednesday story, it's rather dull and not pertinent to the point I'm trying to make. The fact that I even have a story to tell is evidence enough of the intractable presence of religious "otherness." None of us will ever be able to remove ourselves from the isolation tract so long as religious anxiety remain unabated.

Paranoid and intolerant? Maybe. And the deeper one's faith the harder it is to sensitize  one's self to the pains that divide us. When such seemingly innocuous things like ashes on Ash Wednesday inspire trepidation—no matter how much respect coincides—than things have turned sour on the corner of faith and know-how.

Clearly there is so much more to being a Jew or a Catholic or Muslim or an atheist than the beliefs that divide. No one needs me to tell them that. But don't underestimate the positivity inherent in those very differences that can teach us so much about the world.

The man with the gray satchel is never on time. Often he runs late and we can see him jogging frantically down the road, bag jerking violently off his back. He may be early from time to time as well, but those days are undoubtedly rare. He appears every day though, heavy clad in a ski jacket carpenters jeans. Sometimes he wears a stocking cap but today he didn’t.

His name is David and he hawks the Chicago Sun-Times for ten hours a day on the corner of Pulaski and Peterson. Thin and graying with a perfect goatee, he looks a little like Henry Louis Gates Junior sans the thousand-dollar suite. I told him that once he looked at me like I’d just told him he resembled like Henry Louis Gates Junior.

“Is he good-looking,” he asked?

“I guess,” I replied. “But they don’t usually print his hedcut in the Wall Street Journal.”

“Well that’s not Sun-Times. Buy the Sun-Times, man. Only fifty-cents”

I don’t often buy from David because, well, since columnist Deborah Pickett got married, there’s been very little need to continue picking it up. If there’s no chance I can use her column to score points via e-mail, then there’s just no reason to waste half a buck on such a second-rate newspaper. I stopped watching Rachel Ray for the very same reason.

Still, I’m one for consistency, for guarantees no matter how untenable, so when David told me that today might be his last day, I was crushed. He’d found a better job, one that did not require him to spend hours enduring the cold Midwestern winter, and for that I was pleased. Conditions have taken a toll on him and he looks well older than his forty-two years. Still, a leak had sprung from the vessel of my life leaving me spinning just slightly off target.

I shook his hand. “Good luck to you, sir. I really will miss you.”

He thanked me, nodded and grabbed his satchel. It was only 4 p.m. and his shift was far from over.