Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008

by John Scalzi

  For me, it’s not a matter of Bush being a Republican or a Democrat. It’s a matter of his administration being the worst administration I’ve ever had to live through. It’s unfathomable to me that 9 out of 10 Republicans are willing to set aside their ability to think in order to unquestioningly approve of Bush when he’s clearly a terrible president, and worse, a terrible Republican. Look, I don’t want to suggest I think Republicans should vote for Kerry; I think that would be an unreasonable request. But I think Republicans should seriously consider not voting for Bush: Just go into the voting booth, go through the ballots for every other position, and then just leave the presidential portion blank. Honestly, the House and Senate are likely to stay safely in the hands of the GOP. Kerry’s not likely to get away with much pinko stuff. It’s a safe protest.

  I mean, if you really do believe Bush is doing a good job—a genuinely good job—then vote for him. But if it’s just that you can’t stand the idea of someone who’s not a Republican being in the White House, well, you know. Take one for the team today and get someone new for 2008. Someone who is not incompetent and actually supports Republican ideals—and American ones, too.

  AL KISSES TIPPER:

  A NATION

  SWOONS

  I was wrong about this election. It’s actually turning out to be fairly interesting, not because of anything the candidates are doing (they’re out stumping stumping stumping and will be doing so for the next three months), but because this is an election that is best showing the fundamental disconnect between the people who are paid to comment on the politicians, and the people who, you know, actually vote. The best and clearest example of this was the ruckus among the commentariat about “The Kiss,” the big fat smackeroo Gore placed on Tipper as he was on the way to accept the Democratic nomination.

  Apparently (and I say “apparently” because I did not see it; right up until Gore started speaking I was watching the utterly ridiculous martial arts flick “Romeo Must Die”) when Gore kissed his wife after she introduced him at the convention, he didn’t just kiss her, he, like, totally kissed her—one of those kisses that apparently sent the message that maybe later that night Tipper would find out just how stiff ol’ Al could really be.

  This shocked and appalled the commentators; I believe Robert Novak called it “appalling,” though I may have misattributed the quote and I don’t want to bother with looking it up. Someone called it appalling, in any event. Some even suggested it was a purely political play, a way to show Al wasn’t like Clinton, the implication being that Clinton would never slip Hillary the tongue on the stage at the Democratic National Convention, and were he to try, she might just bite it off right there (and who could blame her). In any event, the pundit reaction to “The Kiss” was mostly negative. That’s just not how things are done in Washington, apparently.

  Most of the rest of the Americans that saw it liked it just fine. The fact that Al felt entirely comfortable slobbering all over his wife on national television, right before the most important political speech of his life, says a lot about the man. It says that his priorities are straight, for one thing; while no one doubts Gore is a political animal, one also gets the feeling that if he were to lose the election, he would be okay after a while—the center of his life isn’t his political career but his wife and by extension his family.

  One couldn’t ever shake the feeling that Bill Clinton would push a puppy in front of an Amtrak train if he thought there were a vote in it; certainly when it came to the office or his wife, the wife had to give. Look at the strained, tight-lipped smile Hillary has whenever you see her and Bill in public together and you can’t help but think that there’s a woman who knows where she ranks on Bill’s “Important Things” list. You see the same knowledge on Tipper’s face, too, of course. It just signifies a different ranking; Tip ain’t exactly the tight-lipped sort, as that kiss went to show.

  And, besides all that—Al and Tipper are married, for Christ’s sake. You’re supposed to want to lay one on your wife. Al and Tip have been married, what? 30 years? Something like that. If you’re a man who can be married that long and still come out and give your wife a snog that makes an entire nation think man, these two need to get a room, you know what? That’s a damn fine marriage you have going there. People like that. People like to see people in love with other people. They especially like seeing people in love with the people they’re married to—and especially after 30 years.

  This isn’t the first time the commentators have been off-base regarding Gore, of course. They didn’t like Al’s speech, either, while the voters apparently went nuts for it—convention bounce or not, you don’t leap 16 points in a poll and take the lead in the presidential race if you didn’t connect with the folks at home. Either the commentators have it in for Gore (which is possible but unlikely; unlike his boss, Al’s not the sort to inspire instinctual vituperation) or they’ve just been away from actual human beings for so long that they’ve forgotten how people really are. That, and they’re not getting any really good lip action, either. Given the general attractiveness of political commentators, this is quite possibly a seriously relevant point.

  I do find it amusing that the commentators seem to feel that the general populace can be swayed by the illusion of sincerity in politics, but when they’re presented with the real thing that it somehow leaves them cold. Well, they got the real thing, in both senses of the term, when Al gave Tipper that lip lock. There’s a family value for you, folks. No wonder they’ve got four kids.

  MOWING

  LIFE LESSONS

  I now present All The Things I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know About Mowing My Five-Acre Lawn, an excerpt of my upcoming (and no doubt soon-to-be-spectacularly-successful) yard care book, Everything I Ever Knew About Mowing I Learned in Just the Last Two Weeks. Any resemblance between what you read here and heartwarming lessons about life and love is purely coincidental. Unless it helps me turn this pathetic idea into another Chicken Soup For the Soul-like juggernaut. In which case, I meant to do that.

  1. You Must Mow Counter-Clockwise. The reason for this is that the blades of death attached to the underside of the lawn tractor take the mulched, decapitated grass stalks and fling them out from the right side of the mower. If you mow counter-clockwise, you get an evenly-distributed dusting of mulch that feeds and fertilizes the lawn much in the same way that beef fats and by-products are used in cow feed to plump up your incipient hamburger (or were, until Mad Cow Disease. Stupid Mad Cow Disease). But if you mow clockwise, you blow the mulch into a continually smaller and higher pile of ever more finely chopped grass particles, until what you’re left with is an unstable ziggurat of grass motes which will collapse upon you at the slightest provocation, saturating you in mower leavings and making you look like the Swamp Thing’s wimpy, suburbanized cousin, Lawn Thing (“Lawnie,” as he is known, derisively, to his kin). You will never get the grass stains out.

  2. You Must Not Sweat the Baseball Diamond Pattern. Look: If the Yankees are paying you 75 grand a year to mow a diamond pattern into the Field That Ruth Spat Tobacco Juice Upon (as I believe it is formally called), then by all means make a diamond pattern with your lawn mower. If they’re not, you might as well try to get through your mowing as quickly as possible because you’re just going to have to mow again next week (If the Houston Astros are paying you to make a diamond pattern, go the extra mile and make the diamond look like the Enron “E.” I’m sure they’ll get a big kick out of that one). Any temptation to mow any sort of design into your lawn other than the most utilitarian round-and-round spiral is probably a good sign that you need either to get away from your lawn more often, or you need to be whacked in the head with a sturdy board. It’s your choice.

  3. Try Not to Think of the Lady Bugs. Over the course of mowing, you will undoubtedly mulch dozens of these friendly, colorful, useful beetles; you’ll see them clutching the ends of grass stalks, their red, speckled carapaces winking like a 3rd graders’ craft beads just before
you run them over and either crush them with your tractor wheels and fling them into the abattoir of whirling blades slung to your tractor’s undercarriage to be diced into confetti. Try not to feel guilty about their tiny little deaths, even though you have the sneaking suspicion that killing lady bugs is the only thing that actually enrages Jesus, and that each lady bug you whack gets you a century in purgatory, where demons force Bowflex commercials upon you until your sins are completely scraped away. Try not to think about the lady bugs at all.

  4. Your Lawn Will Try to Shame You. Your front tractor wheels bend down grass stalks, which keep them from being fully mowed, so when you look back, you’ll see little wheel-width-wide rows of slightly taller grass, mocking you to the other grass stalks. Remember your place on the evolutionary ladder, go back and teach those leaves of grass a lesson. Mock you, will they. Let’s see them mock finely-edged blades of metal whirling at thousands of revolutions per minute! Yeah, who’s mocking who now? Huh? Huh? Huh?

  5. No Matter How Much It Seems to Be So at the Time, Those Birds Really Are Not Trying To Attack You And Peck Out Your Eyeballs. They’re just after the bugs that are busily fleeing your mower. Honestly, that’s all it is. Oh, fine. Wear protective goggles, you baby.

  6. When You Are On Your Lawn Tractor, You Must Wave to Anyone Going By On the Road. And if you live in rural America, as I do, you must especially wave at the farmers cruising by on real tractors; you know, the ones that make your lawn tractor look like a frisky Maltese next to a Great Dane. The farmers really get a kick out of you waving to them; they sort of chuckle and think to themselves I bet that idiot thinks he looks real sharp on that toy as they wave back. Given the sorry state of the American family farm (evidenced by the fact that Congress and the President just sent $190 billion of our tax dollars to prop them up), I feel it’s my duty as a patriotic American to give the local farmers at least one thing to feel smug about.

  7. You Will Eat a Bug. Probably more than one. The sooner you accept it, the sooner you can get past it. Just as long as it’s not a lady bug. Jesus is mad enough at you already.

  Y’ALL WANT

  WOOD

  I wouldn’t want to be the one to reinforce stereotypes, but then, the guy who sold us half a cord of wood this weekend was exactly what you’re supposed to expect from someone from West Virginia. He was this good ol’ boy named Lon, or Lee, or something, and his sophisticated, market-researched way of determining if’n we all needed wood was to come to the door, tap a couple of times, and then ask: Y’all want some wood?

  W’all did. Or Krissy did, which amounts to the same thing. We have a wood-burning stove in the front room, which I cleaned about five inches of ash out of last weekend; it’s as if the previous owners of the house burned all the incriminating documents before they left. Having cleared the way for additional incinerations, Krissy didn’t want to waste a moment. She may be the only pregnant woman in the world who is cold all the time; she was planning to curl up to the stove’s blistering hot metal surface and sigh contentedly.

  What became immediately apparent is that neither Krissy or I had any concept of what how much wood was in a “cord”; it’s one of those units of measurement, like “hoghead” or “fathom,” that doesn’t have much use in today’s zippy, high-tech world. It is, in fact, 128 cubic feet (I looked it up just now). We got a good approximation by watching Lon/Lee/Whomever pile a cord of wood on our neighbor’s driveway. He ended up with a pile nearly large enough to build a log cabin, with an addition for the inlaws. We decided we didn’t need anywhere near that much. The in-laws aren’t visiting any time soon. So we got half a cord.

  Our pile didn’t look any smaller than our neighbors, which led me to believe that the Wood Guy had no idea what a cord really was, either; he just kept piling it out until he felt he had piled sufficiently. And because he was good, decent folk, he’d rather err on the side of generosity. Hell, they got tons of trees out there in West Virginia, just waiting for the choppin’. We paid the man, he thanked us very courteously and then headed off, leaving us with a waist-high pile of wood in our driveway.

  About half the wood we managed to arrange on our porch, within easy access for the cold winter ahead, but then we ran out of space. I had to borrow the neighbors’ wheelbarrow and take the rest round back to the workshop. It was a big wheelbarrow, but it still took ten trips. By the time I was done, my forearms looked like Popeye’s, minus the anchor tattoo. All those trips served to remind me why I had gone to college; it was to avoid doing work exactly like this. Well, guess I screwed up again.

  BEING POOR

  Being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs.

  Being poor is getting angry at your kids for asking for all the crap they see on TV.

  Being poor is having to keep buying $800 cars because they’re what you can afford, and then having the cars break down on you, because there’s not an $800 car in America that’s worth a damn.

  Being poor is hoping the toothache goes away.

  Being poor is knowing your kid goes to friends’ houses but never has friends over to yours.

  Being poor is going to the restroom before you get in the school lunch line so your friends will be ahead of you and won’t hear you say “I get free lunch” when you get to the cashier.

  Being poor is living next to the freeway.

  Being poor is coming back to the car with your children in the back seat, clutching that box of Raisin Bran you just bought and trying to think of a way to make the kids understand that the box has to last.

  Being poor is wondering if your well-off sibling is lying when he says he doesn’t mind when you ask for help.

  Being poor is off-brand toys.

  Being poor is a heater in only one room of the house.

  Being poor is knowing you can’t leave $5 on the coffee table when your friends are around.

  Being poor is hoping your kids don’t have a growth spurt.

  Being poor is stealing meat from the store, frying it up before your mom gets home and then telling her she doesn’t have make dinner tonight because you’re not hungry anyway.

  Being poor is Goodwill underwear.

  Being poor is not enough space for everyone who lives with you. Being poor is feeling the glued soles tear off your supermarket shoes when you run around the playground.

  Being poor is your kid’s school being the one with the 15-year-old textbooks and no air conditioning.

  Being poor is thinking $8 an hour is a really good deal.

  Being poor is relying on people who don’t give a damn about you. Being poor is an overnight shift under florescent lights.

  Being poor is finding the letter your mom wrote to your dad, begging him for the child support.

  Being poor is a bathtub you have to empty into the toilet.

  Being poor is stopping the car to take a lamp from a stranger’s trash.

  Being poor is making lunch for your kid when a cockroach skitters over the bread, and you looking over to see if your kid saw.

  Being poor is believing a GED actually makes a goddamned difference.

  Being poor is people angry at you just for walking around in the mall.

  Being poor is not taking the job because you can’t find someone you trust to watch your kids.

  Being poor is the police busting into the apartment right next to yours.

  Being poor is not talking to that girl because she’ll probably just laugh at your clothes.

  Being poor is hoping you’ll be invited for dinner.

  Being poor is a sidewalk with lots of brown glass on it.

  Being poor is people thinking they know something about you by the way you talk.

  Being poor is needing that 35-cent raise.

  Being poor is your kid’s teacher assuming you don’t have any books in your home.

  Being poor is six dollars short on the utility bill and no way to close the gap.

  Being poor is crying when you drop the mac and cheese on the floor.

&
nbsp; Being poor is knowing you work as hard as anyone, anywhere.

  Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually stupid.

  Being poor is people surprised to discover you’re not actually lazy.

  Being poor is a six-hour wait in an emergency room with a sick child asleep on your lap.

  Being poor is never buying anything someone else hasn’t bought first.

  Being poor is picking the 10 cent ramen instead of the 12 cent ramen because that’s two extra packages for every dollar.

  Being poor is having to live with choices you didn’t know you made when you were 14 years old.

  Being poor is getting tired of people wanting you to be grateful.

  Being poor is knowing you’re being judged.

  Being poor is a box of crayons and a $1 coloring book from a community center Santa.

  Being poor is checking the coin return slot of every soda machine you go by.

  Being poor is deciding that it’s all right to base a relationship on shelter.

  Being poor is knowing you really shouldn’t spend that buck on a Lotto ticket.

  Being poor is hoping the register lady will spot you the dime.

  Being poor is feeling helpless when your child makes the same mistakes you did, and won’t listen to you beg them against doing so.

  Being poor is a cough that doesn’t go away.

  Being poor is making sure you don’t spill on the couch, just in case you have to give it back before the lease is up.

  Being poor is a $200 paycheck advance from a company that takes $250 when the paycheck comes in.

  Being poor is four years of night classes for an Associates of Art degree.