He used to leap around naked in front of thousands of people weekly while touring the nation in Hair, a rock musical about sex, drugs, and draft-dodging. On my first day of 9th grade at a snooty prep school, my 70-year-old history teacher proclaimed to the class that my father had sat naked on her lap during a matinee in Baltimore. I never quite recovered.
But then I met Tina Alexis Allen and discovered I had it easy. Really easy.
For months on end, I’ve been watching in shock as seemingly impossible things keep happening: The most innovative nation on the globe elected an actual imbecile. Hooded Klansmen marched proudly in our streets. Regulations aimed at slowing our environmental doom were casually reversed.
Now researchers are making a scientific case for using two spaces between sentences in typed communication, instead of one. Two profligate, puffy spaces. Instead of just the sensible single space.
And this, my friends, is where my head explodes. This is where I say, By god, you animals, no more. No more will I stand idly by and watch barbarous, maniac-manned bulldozers ram at the pillars of our human progress. Feh, ye foes of formatting! We have come too far from the clomping Smith Corona Sterling and the humming, ham-fisted IBM Selectric dumping unsightly utilitarian gaps in the midst of our otherwise pretty paragraphs, to ever — nay, ever! — go back.
A dozen years ago, despondent at the dearth of a Target in our town, I scrawled out a joke petition to bring the all-providing Bull’s Eye to Santa Barbara and emailed it to friends. Just for cackles ’n’ snorts. Turns out the entreaty expressed a longing that was shared deeply — and widely. Friends sent it to friends, and within a few weeks it had amassed thousands of local residents’ signatures, including the mayor’s.
For years after, developers tried in vain to bring a Target to town. This year, at long last, we finally get one! Well, we get a quarter of a normal-sized Target. Locals are all asplutter over the traffic and parking snarls they’re sure the store will spawn. And those of us who make pilgrimages to our merchant mecca in neighboring counties wonder how a 32,000-square-foot retail space can hold all of the throw pillows, jaunty Panama hats, diabolically soft jammies, decorative storage solutions, pink kettlebells, Boho goblets, chunky espadrille wedges, and Soap & Glory face masks with which a modern woman likes to deliriously overstuff her red shopping cart. How, I ask you!?
Even so, there’s another important issue that’s being overlooked as we ponder our new Target, and I want to call developers’ attention to it before construction begins: the bathrooms.
The hypocrisy of my life is corroding my insides, and confession is the only cure. Outwardly — in dinner conversations, on social media, at girls’ nights — I go all frothy-mouthed about gun control, all soapbox-y on the nefarious NRA, all high-horsey over our nation’s sick obsession with firearms.
But in a dimly lit corner of my home, probably even as you read this, my sweet 12-year-old son who still orders off the kids’ menu is entertaining himself by assassinating animated strangers with a digital assault rifle — the very weapon now dominating public debate.
He’s playing Fortnite, the viral video game that 45+ million people are currently obsessed with. It’s a Hunger Games–style scenario: You drop into a dystopian landscape with 99 other players and try to be the last player alive at the end. An AR, a shotgun, and a sniper rifle help you accomplish this goal.
I’ve never allowed shooting games in my house before. “It’s not a shooting game,” my son insists. “It’s a survival game.” Well … you survive by shooting people.
Everyone who’s been to high school knows it: Jocks top the student hierarchy. They earn the yearbook’s Most Popular designations and dictate, by their mere arrival, where the coolest after-prom parties are.
But when a group of outspoken, articulate, enraged students galvanized the nation after last month’s massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, it wasn’t a pack of athletes. It was a ragtag troupe of theater kids.
That’s right: drama nerds. Who typically hover hierarchically down around stoner, delinquent, brainiac, and band geek.
Much has been sermonized about the incivility of modern American discourse: We’re too polarized, too entrenched in our own viewpoints. If we spent less time ranting and more time actually listening to our ideological opponents, this might be a less hatey, less shooty place to live. And heck, (say it with me now) we “might even discover that we’re not as different as we think.”
So this week I reached out to a pair of Jesus-preaching, evolution-denying, gun-owning abortion opponents to see if we could find common ground. And guess what? We’re precisely as different as we think.
There’s tough-love parenting, and then there’s just “tough luck, kid!” Wisconsin GOPSenate candidate Kevin Nicholson got a heaping helping of the latter last week when his Democrat parents each donated $2,700 — the maximum amount allowed by law — to support his opponent’s campaign. Which is bound to make Easter dinner exceptionally awkward.
But it got me thinking about the times I’ve rooted against my own kids, and whether it was the right thing to do. Since, you know, they’re not even Republicans.
Nobody wants to think about their parents having sex. Or their parents’ friends. Or, really, anyone their parents’ age. Because old-people sex is not hot.
We know this because countless magazine covers, soda commercials, music videos, and romance flicks tout taut-skinned hardbodies and shiny newness as indisputable turn-ons. Society is very clear: Gray hair ain’t no aphrodisiac … unless it’s on a guy … who’s charming a significantly younger woman … in a Viagra ad … as nature intended.
But then something freaky happens while you’re busy worshipping at the Church of Titillating Youth: You suddenly become your parents’ age. Gray hairs and all. And you realize that while you and your somewhat slack-skinned softbody are not likely to nude up in a music video anytime soon, you’re still fiendishly hot — and have oodles of sexin’ left to do.
So you write about it.
Ladies, I gotta come clean. From the first time I saw it on a social media post, #metoo has rubbed me the wrong way. And I don’t mean, like, in a #metoo way.
The first wave of confessions was powerful — a silent but staggering wail that exposed the shocking pervasiveness of sexual assault and oppressive harassment in a nation that regularly applauds itself for equality.
For me, though, the hashtag became a maimed meme when women began tossing unsolicited ass pats and insufferable catcalls into the mix along with the egregious, menacing affronts. Though these may all be evidence of men treating us like property, it feels both insensitive and overly fragile to lump together the rapiest of rape with the old man saying, “Hey, how about a smile, sweetheart?”
Then came the naming and shaming, the firing and blacklisting and the systematic picking apart of each public apology like flesh from a carcass. That’s when my hackles went on high alert — and for a couple of good reasons:
A Requiem for Trolls Gone By
Published by Starshine Roshell on June 2, 2018I’m Nostalgic for Nasty Online Commenters
For a decade, they plagued me. Called me bitch, boob, bigot. Speculated about my weight and marriage. Pronounced my children morons. They spewed countless frothy phrases at me from the online comment section at the end of my columns.
Now they’re gone.
In February, the Santa Barbara Independent joined the growing crowd of news sites shutting down their online comments. Reuters, CNN, Bloomberg, NPR, NBC News, the Chicago Sun-Times — the websites of media companies are slamming their windows on the fast-flying fingers of the fractious fruitcakes who spend their days anonymously picking fights with writers, public figures … and, well, mostly with other fractious fruitcakes.