Losses

Once again, leave it to the Best Show to keep me hip to the NJ-centric sundry and various . After however many years, it would seem that perennial Houlihan's antagonist Bennigan's has shut its heavy doors on the great Office Park night.

Growing up I spent Sundays at my paternal grandparents, so as to round out a weekend with Da. They lived in a nice, picture-of-Christ-laden apt in Caldwell, w/i decent proximity to a good many eateries that, had they lived on until the 2000s, would've been deemed "proto-American casual dining" by people who do the deeming. While we'd sometimes shake things up and go out for somebody's expensive Sunday Brunch somewhere, mostly we'd keep it in the Bennigans/Houlihans pocket. I'd order chicken wings for an appertizer and rock chicken fingers for my entree: God bless!

It'd be Dad and my grandparents and my sister and I, and later, my Grandfather's home healthcare provider. It got so it'd be his only time out of the apt, as the Alzheimer's encroached. After brunch, I remember my dad leading up and down the apartment hallways with his walker, like somehow you could cross-train yourself out of such an organic dilemma as Alzheimer's. Oh Bennigans! In your locale, your victuals and in your vibe, everything salty and empty about middle-class Jersey. But there's a lotta my white ethnic semi-autobiography in those wax-paper-lined chicken baskets, too. A lotta emptiness and salt lives on in my innards, still.


Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose
Sometimes you got still the blues for me
I could run away, a long time to stay
Sonic Youth, Winner's Blues

My last day campaigning was yesterday. It was oh-very Catholic School, cleaning out my desk and wondering who, if anybody, 'll inherit my textbooks. What is this flame inside me, so I know that it's right and necessary to live in my Lane County home and dissertate a while - but so that I also know I'll be down this painful battlefield road again? It's more than solidarity or love, more like somewhere in between anger and hate. It's my own, very ideological equivalent of an energy source, as renewable as capitalism's slobs/snobs dialectic.

It'll keep me plunging in and out of corporate receptacles intermittently, no doubt. But not tomorrow, and not today. Dissertation prospectus due Friday. Is a bathetic social science possible? One thinks of Joyce, Marx, Woody Allen. Oh, academy! Not forever, just for now.

Thank Christ for deep familial trouble, or otherwise the series of political beatdowns that accompany life on the Left could really give you a facial tick (too late!)