* * *

This past week, eyes and ears and Facebook avatars across the nation were focused on the oral arguments regarding the equal rights and protections of gay Americans. With media attention fixed completely and thoroughly on this defining issue of our times, we were blissfully spared a scene in which several grown men argued over whether or not to indict a groundhog for fraud.

I apologize.

That was a report from an alternate America. When we finally develop the technology, you should go visit. It’s fascinating. The Second Amendment was written specifically to refer to muskets, corporate tax increases directly fund infrastructure and arts education, and Antonin Scalia is the owner and proprietor of the third most popular cheese-steak shop in south Philly, where the local children all refer to him as Uncle Antie.

In this America, we were indeed subjected this week to a reality in which Michael Gmoser, chief prosecutor for Butler County, Ohio, drafted and issued an indictment against noted rodent meteorologist Punxsutawney Phil.

“Punxsutawney Phil,” read the indictment, “did purposely, and with prior calculation and design, cause the people to believe that spring would come early.” The groundhog was charged with “misrepresentation of spring,” “a felony against the peace and dignity of the state of Ohio.” Gmoser announced within his indictment that he sought the death penalty for the groundhog on the aforementioned charges.

Now, we should give Mr. Gmoser the benefit of several doubts here. We must assume that he has issued this indictment with tongue firmly in cheek, a wry response to the continuing frigid weather in Ohio. We should assume that Mr. Gmoser knows better than to seriously advocate for capital punishment for a crime that normally carries a maximum penalty of fines and short prison sentences, because we wouldn’t want to believe that the death penalty in America is unjustly handed down to certain classes of defendant moreso than others. And perhaps we should applaud Mr. Gmoser for, one could surmise, clearing out the usual gridlock of the court system and earning himself enough time to embark on an imaginary crusade against the offenses of a nine-pound animal in Pennsylvania.

This indictment was rescinded a few days later, after Phil’s handler Bill Deeley confessed to misinterpreting the prognostication related to him by the groundhog. Although linguists have yet to offer a comprehensive study of the groundhog language, we must trust the word of Mr. Deeley, and ponder perhaps if groundhog is a language similar to certain Asiatic vocabularies, containing a multitude of subtle nuances. Perhaps there are several different ways a groundhog can say “six more weeks of winter” or “oh god what is that scary thing on the ground that’s shaped exactly like me.”

And so, in this reality, in our America, we allowed ourselves a three-day distraction from the usual array of frightening and frustrating stories about butchered boyfriends and rape apologists and babies shot dead in their strollers. I stand here and snark, ruthlessly so, but I do, truly, appreciate that I live in this America, rather than another alternate America, where an alternate Butler County prosecutor has stepped beyond the boundaries of satire into full-on lunacy, where the ongoing press of winter has snapped his mind like that of Jack Nicholson’s in a remote mountain hotel.

In that America, Mike Gmoser issues the indictment and announces his intentions to the gathered reporters with a stiff-lipped expression that is at first assumed to be a particularly severe deadpan. He refuses to take any questions, but leaves the podium with an ominous promise that justice will at last be served. As the week moves on, his staff begins to grow fearful that what seemed at first light-hearted has started to tilt ever so slightly off the rails. Gmoser locks himself in his office for hours on end, barking off the Latin name for the groundhog species and asking his paralegals to calculate the exact amount of wood a woodchuck would chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood. The jovial rejoinders from the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club are met with ferocious and escalating barbs. An extradition order is filed, demanding that the “heinous monster and confidence artist known as Punxsutawney Phil” be transported to Ohio to stand trial.

The order is denied, and Gmoser files additional charges against the entire Groundhog Club Inner Circle for aiding and abetting. A small cadre of Ohio State troopers who go bowling with Gmoser on Wednesday nights is dispatched across the border to take the groundhog by force. The ensuing shootout just outside Gobbler’s Knob leaves two men in critical condition and the groundhog missing and presumed at-large.

Gmoser and Deeley agree to meet on a special edition of Nancy Grace in an attempt to discuss the matter in a civil fashion. This goes poorly. By the following morning Internet forums have become sharply divided between Free Phil and Fry Phil camps. Entrepreneurs begin selling earth-toned T-shirts through CafePress for $20 apiece and a conservative meme that groundhog shadows are the direct result of Obamacare begins to take hold in the popular subconscious. A rash of vicious assaults on unrelated ferrets prompts The White House to issue several appeals for calm.

Phil, or a groundhog that looks close enough to Phil, is eventually apprehended and brought to trial in Butler County. Protesters stand outside the courthouse shoulder-to-shoulder with cameramen who last week had been assigned to cover the continuing cycle of poverty and violence in urban areas. Legal analysts decry the way that the groundhog’s trial has become a circus, mentioning that people will be able to read all about how the trial became a circus in their forthcoming book Circus: How The Trial of Punxsutawney Phil Became One and Eight Ways We Can Make It More Like a Craft Fair Instead.

And it doesn’t matter how the trial ends. The trial was never about the verdict, the trial was about America’s ability to follow the procedures of determining a crime and assigning that crime a culprit, then letting momentum carry us downstream to the rushing waterfall of our own satisfaction.

But that was an alternate America.

In this America, we tell a joke that an immortal groundhog is responsible for the weather, and then we laugh at the joke. And we don’t make too much out of the fact that a conservative Republican prosecutor in a district that went 62% for Romney would sooner prosecute that groundhog for fraud than admit that maybe there’s something to climate change after all. Not in this America.

At this time last year you were still somehow theoretical. You were on your way and your mother was patiently working through the very difficult process of bringing you forth into the world. For as actual as you were you hadn’t yet become completely real; and you won’t understand the distinctions between those words yet because you don’t understand them individually yet, either.

Your language is instead its own art form, unique because of both its opaqueness and the confidence with which you speak it. Every consonant sound issues from you with such force and with such shades of inflection that I have to believe it means something to you, and instead of wishing you could translate or accelerate your development I wish that I had the time and skill to pick it up in all its subtleties so we could converse in our own alien way. It is as beautiful as you are and like many things of beauty it is appreciated most by the person willing to make the effort to behold it.

Nearly a month ago you managed to take two steps independently of furniture and your mother and I were fortunate enough to be watching you when it happened. You haven’t repeated the trick since, although you will more regularly stand and squat of your own balance. You still prefer to crawl with steam engines and battle cries, from point A to point B in a literal eyeblink. I get the impression that you tried walking just to see that you could do it, but you haven’t yet developed a desire to make it your regular mode of transportation. Soon enough, I’m sure. Like your language, your time is your own right now and I wouldn’t deign to take it away from you.

I wrote you one of these letters every three months of the past year. I don’t anticipate maintaining such a schedule this coming year, although I do expect that the next time you achieve a solar orbit I’ll feel ready to write another, and every time after that. It has been useful for me to take the nebulous plasma of my love and turn it into the only matter I know how to shape.

It’s just that I’m so looking forward to expressing that love to you in my language as you gain the understanding of it, and it makes me a bit selfish with it. I’m hoarding the words for the moments still to come within you. It won’t sound nearly as composed as these letters have been but I think it will be more true, somehow, even for as true as these have been. It will be actual and real at the same time, the way you were when you finally emerged.

Love and understanding, Dad. And Happy Birthday.

Current Music, Florence + The Machine, “Leave My Body”

I was assigned to comment on the controversy over whether or not Kathryn Bigelow’s new film, Zero Dark Thirty, comes off as an apology for our torture policies during the Bush years of the War on Terror. I decided to narrate this as a more fictionalized version of myself on this one, since it’s rare I get to be fictional when I perform solo.

Zero Picture Deal

(C) 2012 Bilal Dardai

Listen Marty, this is Phil. I know, that’s not your name, that’s okay, it’s not my real name either, hell of a party, am I right? But listen, are you sitting down? Where are you, the 101? This hour? Near Burbank? Then you’ll be there for a while, bubbeleh, so shut up and listen.

I was having a talk with my guy, you know, my guy who I talk to, about this Kathryn Bigelow movie, this Zero Dark Thirty coming out, the one about the guys that got Bin Laden? Bigelow. I dunno, with a K I think. You know, one of the women ones. No, you’re thinking of Jodie Foster. No, you’re thinking of Lindsay Lohan. Bigelow. She’s the one we gave a couple Oscars to a few years back so people would stop talking about sexist the industry is. Used to be married to James Cameron. No, you’re thinking of Linda Hamilton. Right. Point Break. Yeah, that’s her.

So listen, I’m talking with my guy and he tells me there is a controversy with this movie and so of course, ding, like a German shepherd, my ears are up. And he tells me, my guy, he tells me this movie, this Zero Dark Thirty, it starts off with this scene where some Arab gets goddamn water-boarded, you know, tortured for information, and then this Arab being tortured he gives up the information and the rest of the movie is about how water-boarding got us the information we needed to go get Bin Laden and then there’s a half hour about how we got Bin Laden thanks in part to all the torture.

Well no, he hasn’t seen it. No, I haven’t seen it either. I just had a kid; I don’t get to see movies. That’s what I’m telling you, I found out about it from my guy who I talk to. Right. Torture scene. Right at the top. And I’m talking real torture, not just those sick mechanical death traps we started putting in all of the October releases.

So he read that these guys, these what-you-call, these bloggers, right, bloggers like on the Internet. One is this guy Andrew Sullivan and the other is this guy Glenn Greenwald. And my guy, he says that these bloggers read about this torture scene from each other. As in, Sullivan read about the movie from Greenwald or Greenwald read about it from Sullivan, I don’t know which. No, my guy doesn’t read Greenwald. No, he doesn’t read Sullivan. He read about Greenwald and Sullivan from some other guy he reads. No, I haven’t gotten around to reading what they have to say yet. I’m sure I intend to.

Oh, no, neither of them has seen the movie either. But my guy tells me that they’re outraged by it. Very, very outraged, as a matter of fact. The sort of outrage that compels you to write I swear to God at least a thousand words about it. And yes, of course, I’m outraged too; it’s deeply upsetting to hear about this thing in this movie that these bloggers I don’t read have said is upsetting about a movie they haven’t seen. I did not rent an Armani and spend five grand at George Clooney’s fundraiser, and I didn’t forget to vote on November 6 so I could live in a country that still believes all those things about torture that we had Kiefer Sutherland tell them during seven seasons of 24.

But we are wandering away from the point here, which is that these two bloggers, this Sullivan and this Greenwald, these guys are two of the bravest fils de salope, pardon my French, I have ever heard of. I am being serious. You don’t know how much guts it takes to speak up and tell the world the truth about events you wouldn’t have the security clearance to know about. As far as I am concerned these two men are goddamned American heroes and what do we do with goddamned American heroes? That’s right. We make movies out of them.

The way I envision it, in my mind’s eye, in the high-def IMAX camera of my mind’s eye, we open with these two guys, and one of them, let’s say Sullivan, he’s waking up in his bed in his boxers, there’s an empty bottle of whiskey next to the nightstand. His mouth tastes like the back of a bus seat. And at the same time, we see this guy Greenwald, and he’s out of bed the first buzz of his alarm, into his track suit, into his trainers, out the door for his morning run. And you cut, back and forth, between this hung over slob and this bright-eyed athlete as they’re going over the first hour of their mornings; Sullivan spilling his coffee grounds on the counter, Greenwald jumping over a park bench, Sullivan dropping a hunk of wet food into a bowl for his cat, Greenwald you get the idea. So you set these two guys up as polar opposites but then, but then, the end of this whole sequence, shoom, split-screen. Both these guys at the same time they sit down at their computers and they open up their blogs.

Ka-bam. You see what I did there? What I just did there? Tell me this is not genius. No I was being rhetorical. Shut up I’m still talking.

We get some close-ups, some pans across their screens, see what they’re writing about. Mundane crap. “Yesterday I had lunch at this place I am never having lunch there again.” Pages and pages of this junk. Guys with nothing to say but a lot of ways to say it. But just wait for it. Wait for it. Wait for it. We see the date. On their phone, or on their desk calendar. Guess the date. I’ll tell you. It’s a Tuesday morning. It’s September 11, 2001. And suddenly for both of these guys. Just like it does for everyone else. It all changes.

So then the rest of the picture follows the ten-year manhunt for Bin Laden and whatever it is these guys were writing about during that whole operation, like a real Lethal Weapon slash All The President’s Men buddy flick and maybe we get that West Wing slash Social Network guy to do the screenplay. But it also follows the film career of Kathryn Bigelow, who I truly believe we could get Sigourney Weaver for; and then these threads, all these threads, they start coming together, and we have this climactic final scene where for the first time Sullivan, Greenwald, and Bigelow are all in a room together. There’s a computer with these guys’ articles about the torture in Zero Dark Thirty up on the screen, and these three have just had this running gun battle up to here, with her trying to stop them from posting their article on the Internet.

And Sullivan says to Bigelow, “Back off, lady. We’ve got the truth on our side, and the whole world is gonna know what you did in your movie.”

And Bigelow says to them, really seductively, and her outfit’s been ripped in several exciting places, and she says to them: “You haven’t even seen my movie. Why don’t you wait until you view the scene in context before you offer your criticism, and then we can have an honest discussion about the recent history and utilization of torture in America’s foreign policy, in the hopes that such a discussion will enlighten us all on exactly what kind of world power we wish to be. By blustering on about my film without having seen it you compromise your credibility.”

But Greenwald looks Bigelow right in the eyes and he says to her, “You just don’t get it, do you. We’re internationally respected bloggers with very strong opinions. We don’t need credibility.”

And he hits the Post button. Bam!

Well no, Jesus, no of course it didn’t happen like that. I mean, not that I know of. I don’t talk to these guys. So fine, okay, we change some names. Anthony Mulligan. Ben Brownwald. Colleen…Shmigelow. That’s easy. That’s done. The important thing is that we tell these bloggers’ story, about how they fought back against the Hollywood machine and even if they didn’t win they made the studio system bleed a little. Oh, Warner Bros. or Paramount, for sure.

And listen, I already have an idea for a marketing campaign. We hire this blogger to start posting articles about the film, see, before he has a chance to see it. I think you feel me here. Let’s go get lunch and talk this through. Hasta luego.

* * *

Current Music: The Shins, “Australia”

This is both of those.

After weeks of desperate problem-solving and angst and ultimately our total heartbreak, my wife and I came to the conclusion that ours is no longer an adequate home for our younger dog, Cassie. She’s a five year-old coonhound, going on six, but her puppy tendencies have never fully subsided despite all manner of training and discipline–she simply needs more attention and exercise than we are now able to provide, between our new work schedules and the demands of an infant child. Although I’ve never personally been worried about her behavior around Robin–the two have gotten along very well together, even when he bats at her head a touch more than tenderly–I also know that with the drop in her outdoor activity she’s become more excitable at any prospect of play, more destructive when suffering boredom. When the doorbell rings she stampedes toward the door, not realizing that there may be a crawling baby in her path. Any toy or pacifier thrown on the ground without our knowledge is eventually discovered and mangled by her insistent jaws, and there would be cause for concern on the day that Robin begins to understand ownership and attempts to take back his property by force. In a perfect world Cassie would be able to go for jogs with my wife the way they used to before my wife got pregnant; in a perfect world we could devote a couple hours a day to bundling up the baby, letting Cassie hop into the trunk, and taking her to the dog beach at Montrose. In a perfect world the developers of the grassy lot two blocks south of us would have allowed the neighborhood to maintain it as a dog-friendly area, as it had been for years, instead of deciding that it should stay locked and unused except during high school football season (in a perfect world the irresponsible dog owners who didn’t clean up their pets’ messes wouldn’t have ruined it for the rest of us). I have a lot of blame, rational and irrational, to go around for the situation at which we’ve arrived. In a perfect world I would never have made the life choices that meant I would not have the means to continue caring for this loving, infuriating, adorable creature.

I’m avoiding the logical progression of these sentences.

Because it has become, despite all of our attempts to rationalize and strategize, a near-impossible situation to have Cassie remain with us, we need to find her a new home. Both Dana and I are absolutely dead-set that we will not send Cassie back to Anti-Cruelty, where she had first been deposited as a trembling, neglected six month-old called Shelby, fresh off of a truck from Tennessee. When we adopted her she underwent her hysterectomy and was released from medical care in a span of hours, placed in our car still groggy from the anesthetic, still grungy from the shelter cages. She caught pneumonia within 48 hours of arriving home and we spent a long evening at the animal emergency room, spending $2,000 we didn’t have and signing forms that gave the doctors consent to put her to sleep if her suffering was extraordinary.

We will not send her back to a shelter. There is already on my conscience my utter failure at being able to keep her; I will not live the rest of my life, as I am sure I would, envisioning the rest of hers surrounded by cold concrete floors and steel bars until she became ill enough to be taken down the hall and poisoned. I’m aware that there are no-kill shelters but I also know how they seem to be in a constant state of at-capacity.

She’s gone from a dog who hid from new humans to one who readily trots up to them and sniffs at them deeply. She loves to chase balls and errant socks and the beams of laser pointers. She does not make friends with every dog she encounters but the ones she likes she Loves. She has a darkly eye-lined face that reminds one at times of Margot Tenenbaum. Her bark is crisp and sharp and occasionally inappropriate, her bay classically hound-dog. When you hold a treat in your hand she sits intently and sweeps a half-circle across the floor with her tail. When I run down the hall she gallops joyously after me and slides headfirst like a star baseball player. On evenings that my wife has been out of town I have slept on the couch with her curled up contentedly in the crook of my knees.

It’s as easy for me to write all of the memories and reasons I love this dog as it is hard for me to write that I need to find her a home that is better suited to take care of her.

This is the sentence where I ask to be contacted if yours is that home.

That was, perhaps, the hardest one of all.

Current Music: Ben Folds, “Fired”

Last year was my first experience with Tom Waits’ “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis,” one of those songs that by many rights you should have heard before you did, but that perhaps it was best that you hadn’t heard until you did. It’s sad and beautiful on its own, of course, in its original recording from 1978′s Blue Valentine. What I had not expected to find was the devastating power of the song to form deeper narratives through its own reinterpretation.

Consider the first recording, with Waits at the piano alone, the infamous broken-shot-glass vocals now fully realized, the traces of his earlier, jazzier stylings all but gone. There is the sense of opening one’s mail and standing in the fading light of the afternoon and trying very hard to remember the name of this woman, there are a handful of pencil-sketched memories that make the reader smile. There is the unconscious way that the card is placed into the inside jacket pocket; out of sight, out of mind, next to the heart.

Consider this live recording, with Waits in a room of close friends and perfect strangers, as if in the back of the bar. The vocals now lackadaisical, the text misquoted, the audience chuckling at the words in the handwriting and the person behind them. The storyteller suddenly more complex than mere recipient. The manner in which this could seem mean, could seem dismissive, but also the way that the note has agitated the stilled solution of his memory, has made it all but impossible for him to speak about anything save the card he received from an acquaintance long gone by.

Then, finally, consider this cover from the swooning, soaring throat of Neko Case, which isn’t, I would argue, a cover of Waits’ song at all, but a performance of the Christmas card as it was being written by the titular woman in Minneapolis…a desperate but enjoyable lie in which the writer is able to imagine herself as timelessly beautiful for an all-too-brief moment.

The order above is arbitrary, mind; I can’t imagine an arrangement of these 15 minutes that won’t cause a distinct bruising of one’s soul.

In the day-trips I’ll make into writing fiction, voice and perspective are the aspects I visit first while I try to determine the shape of the voyage. It’s important to me to remember that even people who have the same story do not have the same story, and that the way they may choose to reminisce with each other about that story might be a story in itself.

Happy holidays, wherever you’re from.

This past summer, I wrote and performed a play titled Dictionary Dardai Maintains His Standards, a response to the death of “Encyclopedia Brown” creator Donald J. Sobol and a platform document from the Texas Republican Party. A gentleman named Myles, visiting Chicago from Los Angeles, saw the play and asked for a copy, which I sent him along with the following assignment:

What I am asking of you is this, since you are out in Los Angeles, the setting of so much great detective fiction. Please find and take a photo of the office door of a private investigator. Black-and-white preferable, and ideally it’s the most perfect name for a private detective you can find in LA…the sort of name that makes you say, “Well of COURSE they’re a PI, with a name like that.” Then just send me a copy of that photo, either digital or a hard copy, and we’ll call it even.

Months later, I received notice from Myles that he was embarking on his assignment. Over the course of the next two days, I also received the following communications, the first directly from Myles:

Things took a dark turn. I may be in over my head. Stand by for details.

And the second from an email address I didn’t recognize:

Tell your nosy friend not to go snooping around where he’s not wanted, if he knows what’s good for him. Or things could get “explosive.”

- Someone who means business

My search for aptronym private eyes was a wild goose chase. The best was Eric Hunt of Hunt Investigations in Orange County. I went there: it’s a Mailboxes Etc. No door. So I went to the best building in downtown LA that I know: the Petroleum Building. It was built in the 20′s and feels like a place where Raymond Chandler would have worn through shoe leather pacing up and down the halls and smoking like a chimney while waiting for his lit agent or just to get lit. See attached photo. That font alone has got to settle my account. In fact, when you read this email, I’d like you to imagine it is all typed in that same classic art deco font…

Thanks for the invitation to adventure. If you’re ever in LA let’s go get a milkshake.

And these photos:

It’s not that I don’t understand the manufactured importance of money. But at some point my life’s going to end, and in the moments before that I’m not going to remember how and when I made money and what I spent it on later.

This, though. This I’m going to remember, and this I’m going to want to remember.

There’s a Rocky Horror fan out there who still owes me a photograph from a late-night showing of as many people as she can find dressed as Riff Raff. But even if I never get that photo, I enjoy knowing that this is what I asked for, more than I’d enjoy the coffee or sandwich I could have bought with cash compensation.

Thanks, Myles. Hope to take you up on that milkshake someday.

Current Music: eels, “Going To Your Funeral [Part 1]“

Two things to add as coda.

1) After my initial post, a number of friends of mine stepped up with matching or exceeding donations to President Obama’s campaign, immediately offsetting the damage done by my pledged Romney donation. My friend Zachary Miller, whose own political activism and knowledge makes me look like a 6th grade social studies textbook, felt inspired to create an entire online fundraising apparatus in support of President Obama and Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

All told, Zach raised $1,160 for Obama and $120 for Stein.

2) I decided to pen a brand-new letter to go with the check, in light of events since:

To The Campaign of Governor Mitt Romney:

Enclosed please find a check for $45 to Governor Romney’s campaign to become President of the United States. This money is not being sent because I in any way support the candidacy. In fact, this money is being sent because I lost a wager. Like many of the companies in which the Governor’s asset management firm Bain Capital invested, I made a bad bet, and appropriately, the Governor has yet again profited from such a bad bet.

I’ve fulfilled the terms of my bet by sending you the donation but have chosen to do so during the last days of the campaign season in the hopes that the campaign will have little use for it. I send the money hoping that none of it is used to fund yet another outright false attack ad, or to help offset the costs of a campaign appearance in which the Governor will firmly state a position that he didn’t have two weeks, two months, or two years ago.

If your campaign has any principles at all it will process this campaign donation and send it along to the Red Cross so they may continue helping the victims of Hurricane Sandy. I would hope I didn’t have to specify, but just in case, I mean that you should send the $45 in cash along to the Red Cross, not buy $45 in canned goods to hand out to your supporters so that you can snap photos of the Governor manufacturing his empathy. I also mean that you should send the $45 to be generally distributed, not simply earmarked for the swing states where you think you still have a chance to win.

Alternately, you may send the money to the soup kitchen where Representative Ryan pretended to wash an already cleaned pot for the similar purpose of appearing genuine.

If it’s any consolation, I couldn’t see myself voting for any Republican in the current mode of the GOP. Even if I agreed with the candidate or the party’s positions on the economy, foreign policy, or deficit reduction, I could not in good conscience support a party comprised of people who consider my gay and lesbian friends second-class citizens, worthy of the abuse and scorn that they receive; consider my law-abiding Muslim family to be latent terrorist threats; who have spent the last year trying to offer semantic excuses for rape; who would rather watch a child die for lack of medical treatment than give up a percentage of their shiny toys.

Anyway. Here’s some money. Do whatever you wish with it. The terms of my wager were to send you a contribution of $45; I was not required to send it to you with respect.

Sincerely,

Bilal Dardai

Enough, then. Go vote. Build the America you want rather than the America somebody else thinks you deserve.

Current Music: Martha Wainwright, “Factory”

A week after that, I have my first real, honest-to-goodness nightmare about something horrific and deadly happening to you, a nightmare that wrenches away the title of Worst Ever from whatever minor monstrosity had ravaged my subconscious up until then.

Today you have been alive for approximately as long as you were incubating within your mother; you remain full of smiles and curiosity  and have added things like preferences and desire. You are standing with the support of furniture, and attempting to climb; you are taking your toys apart and in rare instances putting them back together. It becomes increasingly difficult to recall what you were like when you could barely do much besides the most basic functions of a complete living thing.

And I, for my part, have taken on new levels of fear and awareness–your rapidly improving ability to move in the world has given me new perspectives on the many ways the world will attempt to harm you. Part of this is your own lack of balance, your overdeveloped sense of adventure and your near non-existent sense of self-preservation. I recognize this as something you received from both your mother and I. I spent many years of my childhood scaling trees that dwarfed the houses nearby and I fell from these trees on more than one occasion, although fortunately never from any height that proved debilitating or fatal. I remember the effort to bike over to the top of the winding, treacherous hill on Stonewall Avenue in order to zip down it at breakneck speed but forget how fortunate I was to never have broken my neck. Your uncanny knack for finding and speeding towards the most dangerous part of any room feels familiar, and amusing, and terrifying, and I’m both proud that you have daring and sorry that you received it.

Part of it is knowing that the world is full of wonderment but that one of the things you’ll wonder is just how such a beautiful world can be so cold and cruel.

I’m a bit ashamed to admit that it seems to have taken me a ridiculous amount of time to internalize the complete scope of what you are and what you mean. I’ve been writing you these letters every three months as if somehow you’ll hit a year old and the hard part will be over. I haven’t truly believed that. In my heart, I know that I’ve never been that naive. I did comprehend that some things would get easier, to the point of vanishing entirely, while other things would appear and get harder.

What was never quite in focus, until recently, was the idea that things were going to appear and become easier and harder for you as an individual, having to deal with some things on your own. I’ve been preparing myself to handle the challenges of what will happen when you begin walking, and talking, and everything after, without recalling that these will be your challenges as well.

I love you dearly, and all love is blended with irrationality. I’ll continue working on the balance between my love and my blindness.

For now, you should continue working on the balance of your body relative to the floor.

Love, obviously, Dad.

I don’t have an in-depth analysis of everything involved here, and I’m not an unbiased observer. Nine times out of ten I’m going to side with teachers over corporate executives because no matter what corporations may have done to improve the quality of my life teachers were essential in helping me figure out how and why I wanted to live that life in the first place. Teachers existed before money and teachers are still necessary in parts of the world where there’s nothing worth starting a business over. I don’t believe in demonizing every soldier or every police officer for the actions of the brutal in their ranks and I can’t understand why it’s become more acceptable to do the same thing to teachers because some of them happen to be complete crap at the job.

I do know that one of the issues at the heart of the dispute is the idea that you can assess the worth of a teacher through the lumbering sabermetrics of test scores and cold data evaluations, that you can then extrapolate those results into the worth of schools entirely, and then use that steel-jacketed assessment to have the school forced up against the wall and executed. You can then release strongly worded press statements declaring that the failure of the schools has led to the failure of the neighborhoods those schools used to serve and therefore the money must be diverted to creating greater security in those neighborhoods through an increasingly militarized constabulary, through state-of-the-art prisons.

You can do those things. If you want. If you stand to profit from those things. You can do them.

Almost exactly two years ago a Los Angeles man named Rigoberto Ruelas, Jr. committed suicide because a major metropolitan newspaper decided to assess his quality using the same models being pushed forth by city administrators in Chicago today; because that newspaper’s methodology found this man lacking. I wrote a play for Too Much Light about the incident and as I read columnists attempting to justify the practice I can’t help but think about him again, can’t help but remember that there are real human costs that come from treating humans as math problems. From treating humans as a thing to be solved.

Man Bites Dog, Dog Eats Homework
© 2010 Bilal Dardai

The prop for this piece is a series of front pages from the Los Angeles Times, taped together so that they gradually accordion out across the stage. KURT starts on stage right.

KC: Rigoberto Ruelas Jr., a 39 year-old fifth grade teacher at Miramonte Elementary in South Los Angeles, was found dead this week.

CAITLIN enters, unfolds the page further.

KC: Rigoberto Ruelas, Jr.
CS: A 39 year-old fifth grade teacher at Miramonte Elementary School in South Los Angeles.
KC: Was found dead this week.
CS: At the bottom of a ravine.
KC: Of an apparent suicide.

PHIL enters, unfolds the page further.

KC: Rigoberto Ruelas, Jr.
CS: A 39 year-old fifth-grade teacher at Miramonte Elementary School in South Los Angeles.
PR: Was found dead this week.
KC: At the bottom of a ravine.
CS: Of an apparent suicide.
PR: His co-workers said he had been “distraught” and “despondent.”

MEGAN enters, unfolds the page further.

KC: Rigoberto Ruelas, Jr.
CS: A 39 year-old fifth-grade teacher at Miramonte Elementary School in South Los Angeles.
PR: Was found dead this week.
MM: At the bottom of a ravine.
KC: Of an apparent suicide.
CS: His co-workers said he had been “distraught” and “despondent.”
PR: After a report in which the Los Angeles Times had assigned rankings to city teachers based on their students’ test scores.
MM: And had rated him a “less effective” teacher than his peers.

BILAL enters, unfolds the page further.

KC: Rigoberto Ruelas, Jr.
CS: A 39 year-old fifth-grade teacher at Miramonte Elementary School in South Los Angeles.
PR: Had nearly perfect attendance over 14 years on the job.
MM: Organized volleyball games and other outings for the faculty.
BD: Reached out to students from the poorest areas of his community.
KC: Tutored them after school and on weekends.
CS: Encouraged them to go to college.
PR: Told them to listen to their parents.
MM: Convinced them not to join gangs.
BD: Was found dead this week.
KC: At the bottom of a ravine.
CS: Of an apparent suicide.
PR: His co-workers said he had been “distraught” and “despondent.”
MM: After a report in which the Los Angeles Times had assigned rankings to city teachers based on their students’ test scores.
BD: And had rated him a “less effective” teacher than his peers.

Pause. Everybody folds their pages back into the first one as they speak and gather around KURT.

BD: Rigoberto Ruelas, Jr. is remembered by faculty and former students as.
MM: “Well-respected.”
PR: “Dedicated.”
CS: “Passionate about his mission.”
KC: “A caring teacher who put his students first.”
CS: His co-workers said he had been.
PR: “Distraught” and “despondent.”
MM: After a report in which.
BD: The Los Angeles Times.
MM: Had assigned rankings to city teachers.
PR: Based on their students’ test scores.
CS: And didn’t bother to learn anything else about those teachers.
KC: Until after they’d killed themselves.

CURTAIN

Current Music: Sufjan Stevens, “Chicago (Multiple Personality Disorder Version)”

“Magnetic Personality” by Jen Ellison and David Stinton, from The Neo-Futurists Hall of Presidents

As I’ve mentioned here previously, this fall I’m a participant in The Neo-Futurists’ production of 44 Plays for 44 Presidents, part of the much larger Plays for Presidents Festival, which involves over 40 other theaters nationwide putting on their own productions of this play.

One part of each theater’s project was to “adopt a president.” Each theater is responsible for filming a version of their adopted president’s play and sending that to the festival’s curators, who will edit all 44 separate videos into one giant version, to be made available for viewing online.

Theaters are also encouraged to create other work, either related or unrelated to their adopted president. For our part, as the theater in charge of Obama, we’re converting our large lobby space — affectionately referred to as the State Park — into a politically themed high school basketball court. You can see the amazing designs below, from longtime Neo-Futurists set designer Dan Broberg (floor logo by Phineas X. Jones).

Part of the overall idea is to create an audience-interactive experience that simulates Obama’s tenure so far…by creating a set of basketballs that are painted to represent several of the policy fights and other tribulations he’s had to deal with since taking office, such as:

• Health Care Reform
• Economic Stimulus
• Guantanamo Closing
• Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act
• SCOTUS Appointments
• Osama bin Laden
• War in Libya
• Auto Industry Bailout
• Gulf Oil Spill
• Unemployment
• Debt Ceiling
• Iraq War
• Afghanistan War
• Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Repeal
• 2012 Election

The ball representing “bipartisanship,” naturally, will be deflated.

As an audience member, you are then invited to shoot these basketballs at the hoop and see how your alternate Obama presidency fared.

In order to make this happen, we need about a dozen basketballs. If you happen to have a basketball you’re no longer using and wish to donate it to this project please contact me as soon as possible to arrange a drop-off or pickup, via my social media or by emailing bilald [at] neofuturists [dot] org. If you don’t have a basketball to donate, please feel free to pass this call out to somebody who might. We’ll be deeply grateful, and will include your name somewhere on the walls of the gymnasium.

Current Music: Walter Gieseking, “Reverie for Piano, L.68″