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Curriculum Vita, c. 1995: First writing, mostly journalism; then teaching writing ; then mélange of both, slightly better paid; then writing for money, PR etc., much better paid. This much well into midlife. For someone with my set of skills, the combinations aren’t uncommon. A comparable sequence could be filleted from many an author’s or professor’s biography. But in my case, no single career emerges. Midlife, I arrive at mid-lives. Never mind that in the early 1990s, the adaptations I made proved an evolutionary miracle. The PR work brought in the fattest paychecks I’ve yet to cash, and I saved the farm. Saved the tomato and basil in the backyard, anyway, in a walk-worthy neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. I gleaned a few last kernels of domestic bliss for my wife, my daughter, and myself. Yet then when I lost the farm—when my marriage collapsed, c. 1995—chief among my resolutions was to get a doctorate, literature or creative writing, ideally both. I committed to an academic vocation. As I looked back over the juggling I’d done, it was the balls I’d recently put in play, the ones wrapped in money, that appeared to have accomplished the least. I’d rescued the family only to see it go to smithereens. What better demonstration could I have for the hypocrisy, the false promise , that lay at the heart of advertising and PR? What better proof of the risk in dealing in lies? Even my status as parent had been downgraded to “joint custody.” To earn a PhD seemed like juggling more substantial materials, good honest bricks of book learning. If I learned to handle those bricks, I might yet build an enduring home. But these are metaphors. That’s in my set of skills, the metaphor, and it will do for an essay. It gets across what I was thinking when I decided to go for a doctorate. But then as now, I had no hermeneutic that would explain Vocabularies and Their Subversion A Reminiscence j o hn do m in i 188 03 Part 3_Manu 7/1/2010 5:30 PM Page 188 away the odds I was up against. On my actual CV, in incontrovertible blackon -beige, my bachelor’s carried a date from decades before. I had wattles, crow’s feet. Then there were the logistics, even more unpromising. My Portland had nothing by way of doctoral studies in my area. The nearest halfdecent opportunity required several hours’ drive. Time and distance and growing old—no tricks of semantics. Especially when the pain and diªculty of earning my PhD weren’t mine alone.   Concepts of addiction therapy, in dialectic: Al-Anon versus AA; medication versus dependence; personal counseling versus 12-Step sessions; “compulsive lying” versus “a fearless moral inventory.” My daughter (she’s asked me to not to use her name for this piece) was entering her teens as her mother and I divorced. The worst time for a kid to see her family destroyed. She su¤ered the hormones and fragility of her own midlife, middle school. Not that the girl didn’t have resources, a deep account of childhood happiness banked against the tragedy. Likewise Mom and Pop had worked through counseling, salvaging a couple of better years out of the decline and fall. We’d finished up with a legal mediator rather than going lawyer versus lawyer. “A good divorce,” I learned to call it, this ritual scarring of my late-life initiation. I accepted, too, how my ex now claimed certain areas of our daughter’s interests, while I was relegated to others. My special province was that of my higher learning: culture and the arts. Music, for one, provided the girl and me the same connection as it had since elementary school. We’d jammed together a bit, starting out on guitar and recorder. But by the time the marriage broke down, my playing couldn’t keep pace with hers. Rather, in my two-bedroom bachelor space as in my former home, we would boogie to the rock ’n’ roll that my daughter had discovered for me. Nine times out of ten this meant hard-hitting women, voices and rhythms burly with a turmoil she must’ve found sympathetic . This meant Madonna, most famously, but also first-wave women rappers like Mary J. Blige and Salt-N-Pepa, plus the rage-metal of early Alanis and L7. The evening of her thirteenth birthday, I...

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