You strumpet!

I have an uncle who says things like, "I'm sorry, but if you have sex without a condom, you have to deal with the consequences!" He's absolutely livid about abortion. But I think he doesn't appreciate how common reproductive  coercion  is. The most obvious version is simply refusing to use a condom and refusing to pull out. A subtler one is withholding birth control from women via public policy via voters like my uncle, which strikes me as awfully ironic. As far as my uncle is concerned, he's speaking for god. To me, he looks like the guy honking his horn in crazed anger at the car not moving in front of him. If he calmed down for two seconds, maybe he'd see that the car in front of him is waiting for a pedestrian. The man blaring his horn thinks he's a great driver and everybody else is idiots. In fact, the man honking can't think more than 1 step ahead, and is therefore a terrible driver. I'm describing the Dunning Kruger effect, basic...

I have a vasectomy so it's physically impossible for me to get anybody pregnant. Since then, I opt not to use condoms for women I a) sleep with on a weekly basis and b) are comfortable with that. I still use condoms when I (hypothetically) sleep with strangers. I also use condoms with anybody who wants me to, including this girl. I know she prefers them, so I always have them ready and use them without a fuss. Then we have a great time. The other night she was crying to me about how upsetting this situation is to her because, quote, "The only person protecting my health is me." She couldn't possibly be safer, she's totally in control of her health, and I respect her decisions with a positive attitude. Nevertheless, she's upset. What's going on there. Well, she's upset in general. No matter what's happening, she can, and will, find a depressing way to look at it. She'll be the first one to tell you this. To be successful in a relationship ...

I feel like in real life, "good guys and bad guys" are for kids and cops. I imagine you could argue, "Well what about Hitler? He was a bad guy." And I guess so, but I think he's more meme than man now. I want to talk about real people, not the extremes of myth and legend. Is it constructive for grownups today to think about the world in terms of good guys and bad guys? My  granddad  was in the Canadian air force in WWII. I just got to spend some time with the man, and he fascinates me. He fixes bubble sextants for a hobby and has never touched the internet. At 90, he just spent a few days out in the bush (that's Canadian for "the woods") with my brother, my son, and me harvesting a few cords of wood to help heat his home this winter. He taught me how to fish, camp, and canoe. He's a treasure trove of stories, and he's a great story teller, maybe my favorite. He told me a WWII story about two men he'd known since childhood. One ...

My fighting girlfriend is fighting with me and poetry isn't doing the trick. I think this time it might be bickering. Bickering is what you do when you're bored and irritable. You fight over dumb shit. We've both got secure jobs, the kids are fine, the rent is paid and there's plenty of food. She's a fighter, god bless her, and like any way of being, it's got pros and cons. There's a school of thought that humans got smart because large tribes split up, and then the smarter sub-tribes killed off the dumber tribes. Which is to say, us-and-them is at the very core of what it means to be human. According to this model, the most obvious and easiest tool to backburner the petty stuff is a common enemy. My brother and I invented an idea for world peace. We suggest armies of totally rad sword bots. These awe inspiring machines of terror will attack cities and towns all over the world. But they're swinging swords, so you can just shoot them. Every now and t...

We had a great time, but things, as they say, did not go smoothly. I slid my kid's passport into the kiosk at the airport and saw, "Travel document expired." My face fell. The kid panicked. First I calmed him down, but I instantly knew what the rest of my day was going to look like. I was gonna recite identification numbers into telephones. I was gonna quest for strange and magical ingredients for a modern incantation to renew the passport of a child. I was gonna wait in lines in government buildings. I was going to give a lot of money to an airline. In what I consider to be my finest bureaucratic hour, I held a new passport that afternoon and we left the next morning. We arrived in the burnt out woods of the Northwest Territories, 2 hours from any kind of civilization by car. We left 90 degrees and humid and arrived in 40 degrees, wind and rain forecast. We forgot the tent poles. Tent 2x4s, really. It's an old school canvas tent that ties. Anyway, the kid panicked...

Why does my 90 year old granddad pester my brother to get married? "When are you going to meet a nice girl and do your duty to society?" He's got great ideas like, "Let the neighborhood girls bring you baked goods." Asking my brother when he's going to get married is like asking the pope when he'll get into rap. It's not beyond the realm of reason, but boy, wouldn't that make the evening news. Why stake your hope on THAT? Well I think things used to be a lot more homogeneous, expectations-wise. Theoretically, every white man believed in Jesus, popped out babies, and definitely wasn't a sissy. Now, even non-whites are (theoretically) afforded access to the economy and human decency. Non-whites! My grandfather isn't entirely at ease with this development. Old homogeneous ideas are, like, there was once a correct way for all parents to raise all children. I'm using correct in the religious sense here. Correct parents had correct kid...