OF A GOLDEN AGE

Miss Manners offers perspective for nondrinkers:

If people would stop monitoring what goes or does not go into other people’s mouths, the world would go around a lot faster.

Miss Manners also finds peculiar the notion that only some horrid prohibition keeps everyone from drinking at every opportunity. And, incidentally, that no one is driving home.

The dismissive reply is a cheerful, “I just don’t like it.” Enjoyment is not a matter for debate, and whether it is the taste of alcohol that you don’t like or its effects need not be stated.

Last night I went to bar trivia with Ed, a fellow nondrinker, so when our team won a round of beers we got 7up instead.

I spent most of the weekend dusting, most recently standing on my bed to clear heavy dust off the arms of my ceiling fan. Uh oh: My love of old books means my apartment is a tornado of dust bunnies at all times.

I DIGRESS. Dick Van Dyke is one of my favorite favorites when it comes to classic television, and yesterday’s Sun-Times had a little feature on Van Dyke in honor of a freshly released memoir. (Does it seem to anyone else like we’re swimming in an ocean of memoirs lately? Are they the reality TV of books, is this here to stay?)

He talks about the Dick Van Dyke Show, a sitcom which has aged beautifully and costars the very young, very beautiful, and equally witty Mary Tyler Moore; Van Dyke says he had a crush on her while they made the show together. I learned he underwent treatment for alcoholism and chose to be a public face of something considered, at the time, to be the territory of vagrants and bums.

Plus he has a 39-year-old girlfriend (!!!) and four children who are probably all older than the girlfriend is. “They all turned out great,” he says of his children. “Not a horse thief in the bunch.”

Today was my second sick day from work. I can’t remember the last time I took two days off for sickness and it is not something I enjoy, but bringing contagions to work while I’m too feverish and phlegmy to work anyway? Well, that’s not really worth it for anyone.

My across-the-hall neighbor Ray and I were exchanging ailment stories (my cold vs. his upcoming exploratory knee surgery = clear winner?) and he said, “You know what would make your cold go away real fast? A little bit of tequila.” He gestured with his forefinger and thumb.

I said I’d give it some thought.

Today at 7-11 on my way back from an emergency food-and-medicine run, I brought an enormous fountain Diet Coke to the counter. While we exchanged pleasantries, the checker said, “You sound real bad.” I laughed and then coughed. “Yeah, I have a cold,” I said. “Diet Coke’s probably not the best cure.”

“You should drink a little bit of tequila,” the checker said.

Last night outside of a 24-hour eating establishment, a friend of mine drunkenly informed a stranger that I would “dazzle” him with my intelligence, which was a hilarious remark on its own.

Then, in the next five or ten minutes, said stranger made me fall for two “Made you look!” tricks.

Can you dazzle someone with gullibility? I think the answer is self-evident. In my defense, he tried it twice more after that and I’d finally caught on.

I was pulling leftover pizza out of the work fridge when a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon rolled out and landed on my toes.

Friends, I have had a terrible cold for going on a week now. In case you ever wondered how it felt to be on NyQuil for six days in a row, the answer is: Exactly how you imagine. Like a high schooler after a Thunderbird bender.

Speaking of bum wine, did you know Mad Dog is actually Mogen David?? Hilarious. I’ve only ever tried Manishewitz, which tastes like Welch’s Concord Grape Jelly thinned with vinegar. Once at a weird college seder my delightful (and, contrary to this story, brilliant) friend Maxy accidentally spit it all over himself as his chair fell over backward onto the floor.

In an outrageously prudent (and somewhat sly) move, Ohio’s state government gives all G.I. bill veterans in-state tuition at Ohio’s public universities. Ohio is the seventh-most populous state and has 13 public universities with an additional 24 regional campuses throughout the state. With nearly 500,000 public-university students enrolled at press time, Ohio seeks to swell that number to 700,000 or more. The state’s dilemma, the article explains, is that college students attend in Ohio and leave for other places.

Ohio has a notoriously strong private liberal-arts sector, but for perspective, the total enrollment of the state’s 55 private campuses is about 135,000. (Oberlin College is one of the top liberal-arts colleges in the country and has fewer than 3,000 students.) Private universities do not differentiate in-state and out-of-state tuitions because they have far fewer tax dollars in the mix. My alma mater, Beloit College, drew three-fourths of its roughly 1,300 students from outside Wisconsin, and highly selective schools like Oberlin or Grinnell College in Iowa draw even higher ratios.

According to the state of Ohio’s website: “Ohio is Committed to Ensuring that Our Nation’s Veterans and Their Families Receive the Services and Support that They Deserve. Ohioans recognize and celebrate the sacrifices that all veterans have made in serving this country. We believe that these veterans and their families should have the greatest possible access to the benefits that they have earned and Ohio is eager to do its part in honoring veterans’ dedication to their country.”

I say sly because Ohio is being patriotic and fiscally responsible in one fell swoop. President Bush recently signed a huge increase in the G.I. bill and for the state of Ohio that means enrolling any number of guaranteed paid-tuition students. The money never passes through the hands of veteran students; it’s merely funneled from federal to state government, with no opportunity to default on loans or spend beyond means.

In a time when our homecoming veterans are struggling to find support for alcoholism and other drug dependencies, I wonder how the combination of civilian life and college life will play out. In that article, the reporter makes a really compelling point: today’s U.S. military is much more strict about the troops’, uh, recreational habits. To some extent I understand that when a man is military age but not legal drinking age, it forces the military’s hand. At the same time, as the men of M*A*S*H 4077 taught us, the hardest jobs require the hardest unwinding.

Many universities, especially public ones that are scrutinized and bureaucratized*, crack down on drinking and force students into hourlong dorm-room binge sessions. This is, of course, dangerous and counterintuitive. Welcome to public policy.

* As a side note: Firefox’s spellchecker recognized “bureaucratized” but not “military’s.” Those pesky possessives.

while i was working at the student center this afternoon, the vice president for enrollment asked me if i had a bottle opener.

last night, Beloit’s newest comedy troupe, 12,000 b.c., performed in the Moore Lounge. they’re staging the same performance tonight. the show was pretty funny, largely due to the presence of one particularly hilarious and performance-experienced student. they did a combination of sketch and stand-up comedy.

one stand-up routine involved a standard set of Beloity jokes — commons food, making eye-contact when you’re walking on the sidewalk, drug use — but he made one point that really struck a chord with me. he said that everyone has a vice, and everyone in turn has a vice that they choose to be judgmental about. he also pointed out that people decide which vices to judge based on which ones they themselves enjoy. that part isn’t particularly revelatory. but he said every person has a personal pyramid of vices.

so you might say, “I drink, but at least I don’t smoke weed.”

“I drink and smoke weed, but at least I don’t do blow.”

“I drink, smoke weed and do blow, but at least I don’t shoot up.”

and so on and so on until, the comedian said, you reach “I do all that shit but at least I don’t fuck animals.”

it was hilarious but he’s also spot-on. people’s standards for what they’ll rationalize to their friends is amazing. Beloit students are also remarkably deft at passing these kinds of judgments about other people’s habits.

a good friend and I talk about straight edge pretty frequently because we’re both nondrinkers. (“straight edge” is a subculture based on various subjective tenets but largely defined as people who don’t indulge in any mind-altering substances.) he identifies as straight edge and goes to straight-edge shows. I, on the other hand, usually tell people, “I don’t drink. but I’m not straight edge or anything.” in my mind, it’s as much a protective mechanism as a legitimate subculture — I don’t need a group of people to validate my decision to do what’s right for myself, do I? that seems silly to me. what i notice about nondrinkers, though, is that they often DO need this support. maybe if my friends weren’t so awesome and maybe if my parents hadn’t made me so comfortable with myself, I would want this kind of group mentality. as it stands, I’m always sad to see the divide between kids who drink and kids who don’t. it’s usually out of mutual fear of judgment. sober kids assume drinkers will think they’re squares, and drinkers assume sober kids will think they’re overindulgent.

On Friday, September 29, Roger Waters and his many-piece ensemble rolled into the First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre (FMBA) in Tinley Park, Illinois. Up until several years ago, the FMBA was called the New World Music Theater, then it spent a few years as the Tweeter Center (an alarmingly hilarious name for anything), and now apparently another corporation has gobbled it up. The FMBA is enormous, somehow more imposing than even a Major League ballpark because of its structure of metal tubing with little visible support. This isn’t a place you want to be if there’s a natural disaster, so luckily I was crammed in there with twenty thousand other people who were largely intoxicated. Pretty awesome.

I missed the first half hour of the show for a variety of Murphy’s Law-type reasons, but as my friend and I pulled into the FMBA, we realized the show had started and Waters was playing “Have a Cigar” from Wish You Were Here. Parked in the third-to-last row of a gravel parking lot at least four blocks long, we heard the strains of “Fletcher Memorial Home,” a compelling idea yet boring song off of Pink Floyd’s mediocre 1983 album Final Cut. Waters played some of his solo material—remember the opera he was writing last year, about the French revolution, apparently?—which, though fairly unmemorable, was both intensely political and accompanied by beautiful visuals on the huge, Pulse-like screen behind the band.

The FMBA, as an amphitheatre, is all outdoors—there’s a roof over the seating area but no walls, and the back of the venue is an expansive, slanted lawn. We had seats, which I thought would mean actually getting to sit and watch the show instead of being jostled by gross drunk people. That was a silly assumption. First, I’m not sure why anyone needs to stand during a Pink Floyd show—it’s not like you’re dancing, assholes. Sit down. A drunken man behind me and two meatheads in front of me almost came to blows over the meatheads’ insistence on standing. The drunken man’s belly bounced against the back of my head while he swore vividly at the meatheads. I put the hood of my sweatshirt over my head and prayed for a miracle. No dice.

Second, is it really worth missing part of “Comfortably Numb” or “Money” to go and buy nachos? This was less irritating than the people who paraded in and out of the show with beer every fifteen minutes for two hours. If you’re going to abuse something, isn’t the point of a Pink Floyd show to get really, really stoned? A huge portion of the crowd was shitfaced and belligerent, swaying like morons and making bathroom runs every other song. I did catch a lot of wafting marijuana smoke but it paled next to the communal beer breath. Beer was $9 at the FMBA, too. Giving these assfaces the benefit of the doubt in terms of tolerance, they were spending between $50 and $100 on alcohol.

Back to Roger Waters, though. After a 15-minute break halfway through the show, he and his band returned to play Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety. Everything I said before about the crowd acting like imbeciles intensified during my favorite song of all time, “Money,” but shortly thereafter they finally calmed down and sat in their goddamned seats, even the meatheads. Finally standing up at an appropriate time, the entire crowd took to its feet to sing along with the last track on the album, “Eclipse.” This created a near-spiritual, arena-shaking feeling that lasted through the end of the song; the ovation after Waters and the band left the stage; and their encore of “Another Brick in the Wall, Part II,” “Vera,” and “Comfortably Numb.”

This is the best concert I’ve ever seen. The musicianship of Waters’ band is technically flawless and the arrangements were tight; even the sound, projected from enormous quad speakers, was shockingly clear. Waters created an ideal mix of his own questionable solo work and early and late Floyd. An unexpected highlight of the night was a female backup singer’s spot-on rendition of the sweeping, ecstatic “Great Gig in the Sky.” What broke my heart about this performance, though, was the absence of the rest of Pink Floyd—no matter how good the Dave Gilmour-alike on the guitar (or the second Gilmour-alike on vocals) sounds, he is not part of Pink Floyd. He’s a hired gun. Especially on tracks like “Comfortably Numb” and “Breathe,” defined by Gilmour’s smooth, slightly-raspy voice, any number of imitators could not recreate his presence. I’m sure that at a Gilmour concert I would feel the same way about Roger Waters’ absence. When a band composed of men in their 60s still looks, plays and sounds great, why can’t they just get it together to play some shows?

The Rolling Stones tour incessantly and in much larger venues—80,000 people in Comiskey Park at upwards of a hundred dollars apiece is a pretty outrageous scale, probably to demonstrate to the world that their forty-plus-year career is not over yet. Even the mediocre Gin Blossoms are reuniting, for chrissake. It’s time to make nice again, Waters and Gilmour. At least Paul McCartney isn’t trying to switch your songwriting credits around.