Roll of a Lifetime

   What with all that testosterone overriding their brains' common-sense centers, American males have carved out a special place in the annals of self-destructive buffoonery. 

   No, this is not a piece about Donald Trump.

   But it is about something equally odious--quite literally so: the practice of "rolling coal." 

   Rolling coal, also known as "pollution porn," involves altering the emissions capacities of diesel trucks so that, when triggered, the vehicles can burp thick clouds of malodorous black smoke from exhaust pipes or modified smoke stacks. Some of its practitioners see it as a declaration of freedom (from what, they decline to say), although it is equally arguable that the practice, reduced to its essence, resolves itself to mere dude-bro douchebaggery.   

   The phenomenon has been around for years, and it has attracted media attention. Inevitably, there is even a coal-rolling reality television show, called "Diesel Brothers." (Send your accolades to the Discovery Channel for broadcasting it.)
   Now, no less august a journal than the New York Times, once again firmly placed in the apres-garde, has caught up with the practice. One must therefore, it is supposed, pay attention, even if, at this point, the Times is nothing more than a liberal, Hillary-centric, elite, fading, crooked, rigged and un-presidential fish-wrap, believe me.

    With not atypical hyperbole, the Times calls coal rolling "a new menace on America's roads." To the casual observer, however, it appears more like Dennis the Menace on America's roads. Few coal rollers will win prizes for maturity. They mock "political correctness," liberal politics, and environmental awareness, typical barn-door targets for the sociopolitically submental and the emotionally puerile.
   The Times reports that one Illinois state legislator, who proposed a $5,000 fine for altered vehicles, received a missive from a diesel-truck owner who is named, not unironically, Corey ("Sky"?) Blue. It read, "Your bill will not stop us! Why don't you go live in Sweden and get the heck out of our country. I will continue to roll coal any time I feel like and fog your stupid eco-cars." 

   The "stupid eco-cars" to which Mr. Blue (stupidly) referred included hybrids such as Priuses, which, their advocates say, reduce fossil fuel use and drive "clean," thus preserving the environment. These vehicles raise the wrath of coal-rollers like nothing else this side of, well, Hillary Clinton. The Times reports that an oft-spotted bumper sticker on the altered diesel trucks reads, "Prius Repellent." (The presence of such a sticker suggests that where there is smoke, there is ire--but not, alas, wit.) 

   Nearly half a century ago, the American environmental movement put forth the eminently sensible notion that to pollute the Earth's ecosystems is to one day kill our chances of living on it. 

   The movement has long been in conflict with the coal and oil industries, a tension that extends to today. To fossil fuel aficionados, environmentalists are dopey tree-hugging hippie dingbats. To environmentalists, fossil fuel people are capitalist pigs intent on the destruction of The World As We Know It. Neither side is entirely right, of course--nor entirely wrong. 

    The dudes who “roll coal” seem to think they are taking the fight to the streets. It would be one thing if their smoke-blasting vehicles were confined to the truck-pull competitions whence they originated. There, they would be just another curious (cretinous?) American eccentricity. (As it happens, the Times reports that even many truck-pull amateurs see coal-rollers as imbeciles. "I hate those guys," one says. "I used to do it, smoke out friends, but I grew out of it.") 

   Instead, coal rollers drive on the country's roadways, sometimes targeting pedestrians or bicyclists or even police with billows of choking smoke—literally a breathtaking act of aggression. Others back up to parked Priuses and "smoke" them. (Per the Times, police departments are struggling to contain the threat.)

   The hostility of the rolling-coal “protests” masks a deeper truth: they’re self-defeating. The belching black smoke pollutes the very air those “protesters”—and the rest of us--breathe. The coal rollers appear untroubled by concerns for the health of the children they do or may one day have. (The Times quoted a Utah physician as saying that even short-term exposure to diesel smoke increases the probability of heart attacks, strokes, lung disease and cancer.) 

   These “protesters” then, appear to work against their own self interest. 

   Yet there is a more fundamental disconnection at work. You know that phrase, “I love to be out in nature”? We know what it means: someone enjoys trees, trails, hills, the sea, etc. What’s missing from the sentiment, however, is the recognition that we humans are  “nature.”

   We live as biological organisms dependent on the biosphere around us. We rely on food for nutrition, water for hydration, and oxygen--produced by photosynthesis in trees--for the breath of life. If you deny yourself food, water, sleep, and clean air to breathe for a week, you're sure to think, act and feel in a way radically different than when you're well rested and fed.  

   That being true, it is plainly in our self-interest as biological organisms to care for the planet which sustains us. To do otherwise is madness. That this notion to some seems radical, even heretical, astonishes even as it does not, alas, wholly surprise.

   But then, there is a certain fatalism alive in the land regarding humanity's prospects. Said one truck-pull fan, quoted by the Times, "The air sucks anyway. Smoke is pretty. I like seeing it." Some young people are convinced that Earth is so terminally blighted that they're looking to artificial intelligence, virtual reality and space colonies to further the human race. Who knows--they may be right.

   So what the hell--let the dumb boys roll coal. They will suffer; their children will suffer; all of us will suffer. But maybe, just maybe, it’ll all work out, and the human race will continue in space.

   But don’t bet that the coal-rollers’ progeny will have a shot at getting there. Space travel will be solely available only to the very wealthy—perhaps including the heirs of those who made a killing off of coal, if not also off of coal rollers.

Rolling coal, revealed.

Rolling coal douche-baggery.

    

   

Walk This Way

   The smallish town where I reside widened the sidewalks of its shopping-district boulevard a few years ago, and boy, are they roomy.
   You'd think, then, that these new, wide walkways would be easy to navigate. You'd also think that Americans would be immune to the dubious charms of a dangerous buffoon such as Donald Trump, but here we are.
   My partner and I were moseying around downtown the other day when we came upon a sidewalk roadblock. Two women stood still and cheerfully chatted. A man standing next to them toyed with his smart-phone, a thickly padded baby stroller resting in front of him. The three of them took up the entire sidewalk, forcing the rest of us to eddy around them like river water around mossy boulders.
   Being a man of great charm, I muttered muted imprecations as we passed, although, courageously, not loud enough to be heard. "It's called a sidewalk," I grumbled, "not a sidestand."
   My partner and I spent the next ten minutes riffing on possible correctives: sidewalk on and off ramps, slow lanes and fast lanes, pull-off areas for the phone-consumed, police foot patrols to slap tickets on walking texters. "Maybe," I mused, "people who block sidewalks with double-wide baby strollers should be sentenced to watching an unending loop of 'Keeping Up with the Kardashians.'"
   This is not the first time I've noticed--and groused about--those who stroll cluelessly. Indeed, it is my long-held theory that people walk the way they drive, and each falls into one of three basic categories.
   There are the determined walkers, who stride purposefully toward a focused goal. On the highway, these are the fast-lane folks who just want to get there.
   Then there are the sidewalk drifters, who sort of shamble about, veering hither and thither with no apparent objective. On the road, these people change lanes without signaling--shortly after traveling six miles with their signal blinking to no purpose.
   Finally, there are those walkers who simply stop in the middle of the pathway, attentive only to their own own internal Global Positioning System, which, as it happens, does not exist. On the road, these are the people whose car you find inexplicably stopped perpendicular to the roadway as they attempt a fifteen-point turn.
   When driving, we all agree to follow the laws governing the road. When walking, we implicitly agree to follow the more misty principle of the social contract, which suggests that, in a public space, it is our duty to be aware of those about us. Public space is shared space, and sharing with others--as most of us learned in kindergarten--requires cognizance of them.
   This idea is at the root of common courtesy, itself a seemingly archaic notion in this season of degraded political and cultural American discourse (hello, Twitter trolls). Indeed, so devolved has our communication become that the very idea of common courtesy now seems a radical one. Civility rests on the idea that each human being possesses inherent dignity and deserves basic respect; civilization itself, then, rests on our ability to mute otherwise unchecked passions (hello, road ragers) for the common good.
   There is, of course, no one way to walk on a sidewalk; varying approaches will arise from varying cultural mores. Fifty years ago, the San Francisco Peninsula was largely Caucasian; now, happily, it is a dynamic mix of people from India, the Middle East, Central and South America, Eastern Europe and the Asian/Pacific Islands, as well as of Americans who see their roots stretching back to Africa.
   People from varied cultures will naturally employ differing ways of walking (and driving). The social contract, then, has to expand to meet everyone's needs and customs. Only someone who ultimately stands foursquare against cultural diversity in their neighborhood promotes the threadbare idea that their way--and their culture's way--is right, while all other ways are wrong. This is tribalism at its least enlightened.
   At its finest, inhabiting the public space, including strolling on sidewalks and driving on roads, is like a sort of improvisational dance. Any dance benefits from partners' awareness of one another. This requires attention and anticipation. Yes, many of us wish to freestyle--I'm looking at you, the group blocking the rest of us as you saunter four abreast--but in the end, we all benefit by noticing, respecting, and perhaps even occasionally deferring to our improv partners, don't you think?
   Now, about the cleanliness of the sidewalks--ah, but let's leave that for another time, shall we?

   

 
 
 

Dreamed Team

   Here is a riddle for you delectation, contemplation, computation:

   Q: When is a sports team not a sports team?
   A: When it's a sports team!

   You're welcome.
   One of the things you notice when you move from The Big City to the suburbs is how many people in the auslands wear sports-related merchandise. In the fall, on the San Francisco Peninsula, the merch hails the 49ers (a football team, for those of you who wisely spend time other than following sports franchises); in the winter/spring, the Warriors (basketball); in the summer, the Giants (baseball).
   Not that people in The Big City don't wear sports gear or live and die by gridiron or diamond or court wins and losses. It just seems more evident in the suburbs. Warriors flags flapping from car windows; Giants t-shirts stretched across swelling bellies; 49ers beanies pulled low over winter-chilled scalps--these things advertise a kind of fealty in a way that, at first, seemed odd to me.
   I was not much of a sports fan as a boy. Oh, I watched ABC'S Wild World of Sports every Saturday afternoon, and on long summer days would head out to the driveway or the yard to mimic what I'd seen. I'm a Harlem Globetrotter! I'm a downhill skier! I'm a motorcycle racer! I also read Tennis, the magazine of, well, tennis, because I played the game. But I couldn't throw a baseball accurately to save my life, and I was too small for football and too short for basketball. So I never developed the kind of team loyalty some kids do.
   Anyway, my fealty was more to rock bands than to sports teams. Because I found other like-minded souls--not an enormous challenge in the sixties and seventies--it seemed completely normal. I knew who'd played in what band, what year, and who'd guested on whose record. Only years later did I understand that this attention to musical minutae was mirrored in how others could name the great players of the great teams in the great years that those teams had won the Series or the Superbowl or the League Championships.
   As did many in late adolescence and early adulthood, especially in that era, I went through a period of anti-establishment rage, which dovetailed with coming out as a gay man. When your wider society tells you, explicitly and implicitly, that you don't belong, you tend to reject that society and to create some variation of your own. To me this meant, in part, decrying sports, the purview of "straight" "jocks," those jerks--so the story went--who beat up queers.
   A funny thing happens if you keep on living: perspectives shift. In 1999, when I was forty-two, a friend took me to the now defunct Candlestick Park to see a Giants game. I loved it. My sociopolitical resentments had evidently dissolved just enough that I could enjoy not only the athleticism (to a guy who can't throw accurately, a great double play is mystical), but the cheerful fan fellow-feeling. This last was not novel to me; as rock guy I'd spent plenty of time with tens of thousands of others, in arenas and stadiums, dancing and cheering as music blasted. Still, the experience left an impression.
   The next year, the new, in-town Giants stadium was to open. (It should have been called Willie Mays Park, but the corporate money funding the thing also named it. It opened as Pac Bell Park. It is now known, odiously, as AT&T Park.) My friend and I decided to split season tickets that first year. Our seats were in the nosebleeds, out beyond the third base line--Oakland, across the Bay, appeared a short swim away--and we sat in them on Opening Day, April 11, 2000.
   I never sat in them again. For the roughly forty games I attended that year, often alone, I'd gain entry on the ticket and then scout an empty seat close to the action. I'd sit there until someone showed up, and I'd find another. (Kids, don't try this. Follow the rules. Do what Mom and Dad say. Brush your teeth. And so forth.)
   As most artists (and fans) are, I was obsessive in my pursuit to understand baseball. I did some research. I bugged baseball-versed friends for insights. Plus, I just liked being at the park, so I attended game after game after game.
   As most artists will, I presently funneled my impressions into an article I wrote that summer for the newspaper at which I then worked. In the piece I likened baseballs players to cats, and in my own cats' mortality saw glimpses of my own.
   As most artists do--I'm sorry, but we are terrible people for the rest of you to depend on--after completing and submitting that piece, I entirely dropped baseball. No tickets the next season, no games on TV (I didn't have cable), no sports merch, no nothin'.
   Until, that is, this year.
   I bought a TV this past spring and faithfully began to watch Giants games. I fell in love with the announcers, "Kruke and Kipe." I attended a few games at AT&T park, sometimes alone, sometimes with my partner. (I like baseball; he likes food--he's partial to the park's crab sandwiches.) And I became, again, a Giants fan, which of course led to thinking about the whole idea of sports fandom.
   To love "The San Francisco Giants" (or any other team) is, in essence, to love an idea. Yes, the Giants exist in reality: the organization, the players, the gloves and bats and uniforms. But players' careers last, at best, a decade and a half; they come and go. Managers, too. Same with pitching and hitting coaches. Any fan loves the players on the team in a given season, but a long-term fan loves the idea of the team as much as its earthbound reality.
   In this way, loving a sports team is like loving one's country. A nation, first and foremost, is an idea formulated out of guiding principles. To an idealist, a country at its heart is pure: it stands for something (or many things). When these things--democracy, justice, fairness, equality--manifest in reality, the country achieves greatness. Most of us past the age of twelve understand that humans are complicated creatures, too much so to hew perfectly to any ideal or set of them. And so in a place like America, we have three hundred-plus million people with an idea of what the country stands for and means, and most of us disagree on what that is. (Happily, this is a democracy, so we can disagree freely.)
   Countries, like humans, are subject to the corrosions of time, the whims of Fate, the winds of change. In this lies life's melancholy. The suggestion that we might "Make America Great Again," for example, while perhaps coded to suggest certain racial realities, really is a simple appeal to the idea that America--or any of us citizens--could stand out of time, athwart Fate, changeless. This, of course, is a delusion.
   The same is true with a baseball team. Perhaps that's why, on some deep level, fans hew to teams and fly the colors: it's national pride writ small. Humans are by instinct tribal creatures; we're hard-wired to stay in the group. If we hadn't done so at the dawn of humankind, we'd have been eaten by the tigers in the jungle. In human endeavors, this instinct manifests in ways both great (close-knit communities) and grotesque (rabid nationalism/nativisim). Loving a baseball team, being part of the tribe--here's a safe and easy way to identify with a group, to be for something, to belong to something.
   That a fan belongs to an overarching idea rather than a fixed, longterm reality--therein lies sports' melancholy. The "San Francisco" 49ers now play at a stadium in Santa Clara, nearly an hour south of the city. The "San Francisco" Warriors, the basketball team, has long been "The Golden State Warriors," since they play in Oakland. (A new arena may be built for them along the San Francisco waterfront. Will they again be the "San Francisco Warriors?" Stay tuned.) Only the San Francisco Giants play in San Francisco.
    But who cares? Watching a Crawford-Panik-Belt double play--perfection. A Hunter Pence homer? Sweeeeet. A Madison Bumgarner strike-out? Excellent. And that's enough for this reconstituted Giants fan.
   Summer is coming to an end and the baseball season is waning. Why not, then, simply keep the eyes open and the heart awake to these last few precious games. Win or lose, the playing's the thing--the only thing that really counts, until the stadium lights finally go dark.