alias Bruce.

Foamy the Squirrel on Gay Marriage

Foamy the Squirrel shows Barack "now that I've thought about it..." Obama how to grow some, uh, nuts on the issue of gay marriage.

 

Thanks to Tina at The Agonist for sharing Jack Cluth's video. 

I'm interested in losers.

I think they are more interesting than winners.

Well, no, I don't mean exactly that. Because winners are interesting in unexpected ways, too. Winning, you realize, rarely turns out to be what the winner expects it to be.

But what I mean about losers is that they are so unexplored and under-exposed. A team or a candidate or a contestant wins The Big Prize and we learn all about their long struggle, their inspirational grandmother, their hard personal choices, their personal daily routine for getting up in the morning and making green tea or oatmeal and doing their Winning Work. Winners want to talk about being winners and reporters want to report about winners and readers and viewers want to know about winners. For a few days or months or years apiece, anyway.

But losers don't always want to talk about losing, and when they do we don't hear enough about it. And we should, because I think it tells us a lot more than winners do.

For one thing, one of the hidden truths about winners is that they were losers, sometimes for a very long time, before they were winners. They tried and lost, tried and lost, again and again, while nobody was watching. They were invisible to nearly all of us while they scuffled along, disheveled and disreputable, and for years and years they kept on doing what they did, in the shadows, for reasons that I'm betting would excite us and teach us a ton if we only knew. That is, before they were suddenly pronounced "winners" by TV hosts and media columnists.

Moreover, losers who never end up winning have a lifetime of that kind of story. Decades and decades of sacrifice and failure and delusion and hope and screaming fights in the kitchen and quiet -- or crazed -- acceptance. If they don't give up, anyway. And even if they do finally give up and let it all go, that in itself is a hell of a tale to be told.

I'm thinking about all of this because my town, Baltimore, is still in shock from watching the Ravens miss a chance to go to the Super Bowl this year after kicker Billy Cundiff missed a 32-yard field goal with 11 seconds left against the New England Patriots. For you non-footballers, translate 32 yards as "a kick you can make with your eyes closed." A newspaper photo showed Cundiff, moments after his life-altering miss, walking toward the sideline, head down, body deflated, the picture of numb defeat. News coverage in the following days had him saying all the true and expected things: he couldn't explain it, he had no excuses.

But that photo of Cundiff raised all the other questions for me: What happened when he and his wife put their kids to bed after that awful day and shut the door to their own bedroom and were alone together with that moment? How does he weave that reality of public failure and humiliation, the worst nightmare of his entire career as an athlete, into the fabric of what is meaningful in his life? How does he see himself? What does he need from his life partner and his friends? How, if at all, does it change who he becomes and what he builds? How does he carry it, use it, release it, feel it? How will it affect the next year, 10 years, entire remainder of his life?

That's what I want to know.

 

So actress Regina King advises black women to consider dating "outside of their race,"

and this is a big deal because it goes against some strong social conventions. In comments released on Vibe.com, King, who is black, said in part:

Of all groups of people, Black women are the least likely group of women that will date outside of their race. When you have everyone else who is willing to explore but a Black woman is like, “I want me a brother,” well, if the brothers are out and they’re open to date everybody and the majority of Black women aren’t willing to look twice when a man outside of their race is sending them messages, then that makes our percentage rate lower and the chances of finding love, because we’re only looking in one specific place for finding love—with Black men.

King is right, of course, and her advice is sound. Further, the ways in which black American women have long been spurned by racist white-centered standards of beauty, and cheated by the shortage (and sometimes the preferences) of available black men, make King's point even more self-evidently sensible. And beyond that, there is the simple truth that good partners come in all colors.

But the fact that we live in a society where a celebrity needs to implore anyone to consider the bold step of "dating outside of their race" is depressing as all hell.

The next person who claims to me that the effects of slavery and Jim Crow are "ancient history" is going to get pushed into a big chair and force-fed Chapter 7 of Cornel West's Race Matters and Chapter 4 of bell hooks' Outlaw Culture.

It's Spring.

So it's spring again and birds are building nests and those people who can are buying houses, with a little bit of help from a colossal burst bubble. The two cutest chipmunks on the entire Eastern Seaboard are chewing their way through my 5-by-5-foot "garden" like little bright-eyed chainsaws, but I cannot bear to live-trap and relocate them because a few years ago when I live-trapped 14 chipmunks in a single month (believe it, it's true) and released them on a strip of prime grassy rodent real estate a couple of miles away along the river, I drove past their new digs one evening and saw an adult fox happily hanging out in this newly-populated chipmunkville, a spot where I had never, ever seen a fox in the five years since I had moved into the area, and believe me, I see plenty of foxes around. I could lie to you and say I couldn't sleep that night. But I sure as hell felt awful, like a cosmic interloper, a lower-grade version of the guy in the Ray Bradbury story who goes back in time and ruins the future by stepping on a butterfly.

So anyway, it's spring, time for all of we creatures to munch fresh crisp plants and be sociable. And one day about a week ago I'm watching two starlings stake out a corner of the gutter above my porch to build their nest, right at the top opening of the drain spout, which strikes me as suicidal given the rainy spring we've had but appears to make sense to the starlings and is I guess a nice round anchoring pocket for the bottom of the nest if they build it to be flood-resistant. They don't particularly seem to care that if their nest holds it will then back up the rainwater like a beaver dam and, as with some previous bird gutter tenants, send sheets of water cascading onto my porch in a downpour. Like Dick Cheney dodging the draft, the starlings have other priorities. It's spring.

So in the middle of these two starlings' house-hunt, I'm watching from my window when suddenly, on the lawn near the porch, a fight breaks out between two adult starlings. I can't tell if it's the two would-be mates, or two rivals vying for the right to the prospective partnership, or two altogether different starlings with their own bone to pick, because I know nothing at all about starlings except for 1.) the little bit I learned about their anatomy while stuffing and preserving a starling during a taxidermy phase in my adolescence and 2.) the factoid, from my days years ago working in horse stables where starlings were a nuisance, that live starlings don't like seeing dead starlings, which is why when we found a dead one we would hang it by its legs from a rafter in the shed row to scare away the others. I can't say whether this actually worked, but to us it was a sworn ritual -- kind of like the belief that hopelessly failed kings of American industry will become keenly globally competitive by being propped up and allowed to keep their jobs -- so it didn't matter.

At any rate, these two starlings are going at it, and I don't mean World Wrestling Federation whacked-with-a-folding-chair fakery. This bout has the look of a fight to the death. The two warring birds are all over each other, beaks serially knifing at each other's necks and abdomens, wings a slashing blur, one bird pinning the other to the ground and seemingly ready for the kill when suddenly things reverse and the first is then held down in the grass for a seemingly imminent lethal beak-slash to its vitals, but then things reverse again. I almost can't watch. I know that one way or the other I am soon going to be carrying away and disposing of the bloody bodily remnants of a onetime starling. I have spent time as a critter low on the food chain in the Alaskan tundra and I have had a very large gun pointed at my head in an alley in a big East Coast city and I am telling you: this bird fight is about the most vicious thing I have ever witnessed. It lasts at least a full minute, the all-out thrashing and stabbing, and I cannot believe both birds are even still alive. 

And then, as if on cue, the two birds suddenly separate and fly away. Cleanly, briskly, with no apparent damage. I'm google-eyed in my upstairs window and I cannot believe it.

I learn later, when I look it up, that starlings, like the Pilgrims, are an invasive and aggressive species deliberately introduced here from England, in this case to control insects, but things haven't quite worked out happily. Starlings swoop in, sometimes in flocks of thousands that stymie entire towns and inspire desperate local anti-starling initiatives, and they physically attack and displace native birds, and they fight brutally and frequently with other birds (often woodpeckers, apparently) and among themselves for practically any reason: for food, for mates, for nests. Most of the fighting is by males (does this surprise you?). Anecdotal accounts and photos, e.g., here and here, portray starlings fighting, sometimes to the death, over suet and other food, and destroying the eggs of other birds. A Time article from 1930 bemoans the "plague" of bad-assed starlings that descended on Washington, D.C. that year. One monograph tells of starlings poking their beaks into small birdhouses to break the eggs and trash the nests of other species, even though the starlings themselves cannot use the birdhouses because their bodies are too big to fit through the holes. A 1962 article download from The Wilson Bulletin ornithology magazine provides an observer's incredible minute-to-minute diary, with hand-drawn action illustrations(!), of a full hour-and-15-minute blood match between two male starlings.

These birds are mean suckers.

As it happens, just a couple of days before I saw the starling brawl, I found two smashed starling eggs (they are blue like robin eggs, only slightly darker and smaller) on the lawn, not far beneath the sought-after gutter nest site and in almost the exact spot where the birds later fought. So there are all kinds of possibilities here: Rival starling attacks nest, trashes eggs, and tries to sidle up to the female to raise a new family in the same spot. (I'm not sure a female whose eggs have just been crushed would invite the egg-smasher over for tea. But I'm not a starling.) A fight ensues, and one of the contestants wins. Or: after the egg-fight an entirely new pair of starlings moves in to inherit the nest site. Or: the egg-smashers are actually the pair of crows who live around here, and the starlings fight over who now gets to squat in the gutter. Or: the fight has nothing to do with the eggs or the nest but is actually over the suet that I happen to keep in ample supply on my bird feeder year-round, mere steps from the scene of the combat. I know I'm spoiling the birds with suet in the warm months when there is plenty of natural protein around, but life is short and I figure raw natural selection isn't everything.

So in any case, in the wake of the lost eggs and within minutes after the fight, a male and female starling do in fact shack up in the gutter atop the downspout and immediately get to work building a nest, each zooming back and forth between the corner of the roof and some nearby pine boughs rich in dry needles and dead blown grass and leaves. A full beak on every trip. Upon landing, each bird disappears into the cup of the gutter, and there is an immediate brushy rasping sound which conveys, I'm guessing, their expertly weaving the nest material into position in their aluminum shelter. This goes on for a good while until, actually, I stop watching because I have work to do. As of this writing, a week later, the starlings have taken up full residence. If the two of them can defend their turf and build a domestic relationship of compatibility, respect, and active listening, they should be fine.

So what is the meaning of this story? Beats me. 1.) Our desires come in seasons and we are willing to fight for them. 2.) We need more women presidents. 3.) It's amazing and beautiful that parents manage to raise families at all. 4.) The gaggles of young heterosexual prom-gowned giggling clickety-heeled girly-girls and young acned grunting hooting hunching boyish-boys and young baseball-capped stride-swinging wise-cracking lesbian non-girly-girls and young sashaying, mutually-mocking, uproariously laughing gay boys -- all of whom, among many others, I see all the time at the hangouts where I write -- are all doing exactly the same obediently ritualistic thing. 5.) Animals are animals. All of us. 6.) I need screens over my gutters. 7.) It is good to spend as much time as possible watching things happen.

It's spring.