...but at least he's got manners

Somehow, I got sucked into “Mad Men.” I almost didn’t want it to happen. The AMC drama had become so popular that it had arguably crossed the threshold into trendiness, and I’ve got a deep-seated aversion to most overly trendy things; I’ll make exceptions for Batman movies and whiz-bang products that make it easier to cook eggs. Beyond that, I’ve always felt that a trend was like a cold: It spreads, it consumes people’s lives for a while, and then when it disappears, nobody misses it. Neon windpants, anyone?

But with less time in recent months to devote to full-length movies, I’ve started filling up my Netflix queue with hour-long dramas to kill those odd stretches of single-guy nothingness. “Mad Men” was well-reviewed, and its star, generically handsome Jon Hamm, had somehow become a popular actor in the last couple of years, slowly and unnoticeably becoming a household name with the quiet stealth of a slow gas leak. So I thought, “To hell with it.” It was either that or back-to-back episodes of “Charles in Charge.”

Lo and behold, I was hooked. It’s good stuff. There’s something interesting, though, about Hamm’s character, the heavy-drinking, womanizing Donald Draper: He’s slowly becoming the epitome of the “anti-hero,” the guy you so love to hate that you end up loving him again. He boozes, he cavorts, he smokes like a raging barn fire – and yet, when crappy things happen to him, we feel bad about it. We sympathize with a guy who’s essentially a bastard. He could throw a small dog through a department store window, and when the cops give chase, there’d be a part of us going, “Run, Don! Be free! It was just a Shih Tzu!”

Draper is far from the first of these anti-hero types to command our grudging affection. The TV-and-film landscape is practically littered with them now, nudging the whole concept closer to the realm of cliché. It’s getting harder and harder to find a good guy who’s actually good; most of them are meaner than a rum-drunk carnie with a bad attitude.

That’s a dramatically different landscape than the one captured on film 50, 60 years ago.
Back then, in the age of trenchcoats and sultry secretaries, even the hard-edged heroes were virtuous. Take the legendary repertoire of Humphrey Bogart, who remains cool despite his lack of hair gel and an effective drop-kick. Bogart’s most famous role is that of Rick in “Casablanca,” and on first glance, Rick’s not the kind of dude you’d want behind you at the ATM at three in the morning. He’s coarse, his eyes are suspicious and wary, and his diet consists primarily of Lucky Strikes and vodka martinis – traits that would nowadays land him on the hot seat opposite Dr. Phil. But by the end of the movie, he pulls off a gesture so stunningly noble that we the audience, in full aw-shucks mode, castigate ourselves for not seeing his virtues sooner. There were plenty of tough guys in 1940’s cinema, but every one of ‘em had a heart of gold. Which probably explains why they were able to live so long despite starting each day with a bowl of bacon fat and a half-gallon of gin.

I’ve gotta wonder what Bogart would think of Walter White, the protagonist of AMC’s “Breaking Bad.” Played by the awesome Bryan Cranston (in a role that’ll make you forget he was ever the dad on “Malcom in the Middle”), White is one of most interesting characters on television – a high school chemistry teacher who, after finding out he has terminal lung cancer, comes up with a unique payment plan for his chemotherapy treatments: Using his chemistry skills to manufacture crystal meth. (Amazing how they keep recycling these tired old storylines, right?)

There’s no heart of gold in this man’s chest. Walter White is the end result of decades of change in who the “heroes” are in popular fiction. It used to be a prerequisite that a protagonist be moral, honorable, or at the very least able to take a pie in the face with relative good grace. Now we root for killers and troubled drug pushers. The only thing redeemable about White is that he looks good in a fedora, which is no small feat for a bald man. I know.

They’re a double-edged sword, these anti-hero types. They’re fascinating character studies, and burrowing into their strife-addled minds reveals a mine field of turmoil and angst – the stuff that makes us nibble our nails to the quick when things get tense. But are we drawn to these characters because we recognize our own lesser qualities in these rough-hewn scoundrels? Does art imitate life? Am I asking too many rhetorical questions?

I’d hate to see these jerks disappear altogether; they’re too interesting, and effective as the fulcrums in these morality plays. But it would almost be a relief to find a little balance – a Forrest Gump for every Don Draper.

“Well-Meaning Nerds of the Northeast,” starring yours truly? I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.

Pack attack

Packing for a trip is like gearing up for an excursion to outer space: Forget one important item, and you spend your time stranded without the comfort of your favorite stuff. It’s the adult equivalent of missing your beloved childhood blankie, minus the crying and sucking of thumbs. Usually.

In a couple of weeks, I’ll be headed for the sun-baked climes of North Carolina, a trip whose timing – smack in the middle of summer – portends my immediate incineration upon stepping outside of the airport. With this in mind, my focus in recent days has been to stock up on water and sunblock, survival items that aren’t likely to go unpacked amidst my fervent stuff-gathering. My fear, as I compile a list of essentials, is that I’ll overlook an item that, while not in the strictest sense necessary, would still take the edge off what’s basically a voyage to an alien planet.

It’s amazing how attached we get to inanimate objects. In high school, I knew a kid who was hopelessly tethered to his special hacky sack. A hacky sack, for anyone who’s never worn a hemp necklace, is a tiny bag, usually made of knitted fabric, filled with beads. You and a group of baggy-pantsed friends stand around in a circle and kick, knee, or elbow the sack from one person to another, with the goal of not letting it hit the ground – no hands allowed. In the days before smartphones turned America’s youth into zombie-eyed video game addicts, this is what high schoolers did to kill small stretches of time. That is, when they weren’t giving the chess club captain a wedgie that could only be extricated with the help of an excavation crew.

This kid’s hacky sack was as irremovable as a poorly-located goiter. During tests in various classes, he would keep the sack on his desk and knead it absently, as if it were a soothsayer’s crystal ball, feeding him answers through his fingertips. Having formed attachments to such silly and inconsequential items myself, I know exactly what would have happened if, during one of these exams, his beloved hacky sack had been taken away: He would have panicked, become distracted, forgotten how to calculate the force of the earth’s gravity on an eight-pound baby, and failed physics. Lacking the necessary credits, he’d have flunked out of school, become overwrought with despair, and joined a biker gang infamous for its manufacture and distribution of crystal meth. This would have landed him in prison with a seven-foot-tall cellmate named Butch, and all because some jerk (me) thought it’d be funny to toss his hacky sack into the girls’ bathroom.

Dubious? Look up the “butterfly effect.” It’s science.

Anyway, these attachments we have to things, harmless as they are in everyday life, become more pronounced when we gather our resources for a prolonged trip. They also force us, often for the first time, to take a good hard look at our more ridiculous affinities. Let’s say you’ve got an obssessive-compulsive attachment to that special-edition Mr. T carving knife you once used to etch monkey butts onto tree stumps at summer camp. The butts were particularly detailed and lifelike, and you decided the knife was a sort of good-luck charm. Well, good luck getting that knife on the plane. TSA’ll take one look at it and have you locked in a room with the crazy-eyed mumbler from Tibet and the dude with the cheap bomb superglued to his belly button. Best to leave the knife at home and interpret every spilled wine cooler as a sign of your resultant bad luck, hoping all the while that Mr. T can spare a thought to pitying a fool.

A lot of these kinds of items, though – the ones we just can’t do without – are perfectly acceptable to bring onto a plane. Yet we forget them anyway. And why? Because packing is a daunting task. It forces us to miniaturize our lives, make them travel-ready, pocket-sized. That’s a tall order. Before leaving, I somehow have to figure out which components of my life will fit into a small suitcases and a carry-on travel bag, which makes me think of all the circus clowns they somehow manage to stuff into those tiny cars. Is there a well-known trick to that, or is it one of those age-old, sacred clown secrets kept under wraps by the mysterious Order of Bozo? ‘Cause it’s a skill I could sure use right about now. There are only so many ways you can try to squeeze in your shaving gear before you think it might be time to grow a beard.

It’s embarrassing to admit that the “must-have” item throwing off my travel mojo is, of all things, my laptop. It’s not what most people would consider essential to a vacation – not as much as, say, pants. But if I get tired of reading on the plane, I’m going to need something to do, and there’s only so much entertainment you can squeeze out of a pair of cargo shorts. (Oh, get your mind out of the gutter.)

At least a laptop isn’t the sort of thing you tend to forget. I just hope that whatever I sacrifice to bring it along won’t prove too important or necessary. Maybe I’ll leave my hacky sack at home.

Commence le festival!

In some respects, going to a festival concert is like trekking across a barren desert: If you don’t plan ahead and stock up on provisions, you’ll end up a miserable mess of unsatisfied human impulses. The same can be said for brothels, but nevermind that for now.

To be clear, a festival concert is different from your standard, run-of-the-mill rock concert. A typical rock concert, if there’s an opening band, usually lasts about three hours max – the length of an epic historical movie, or the time it takes John Kerry to finish a sentence. Depending on how far you’re willing to travel for this three-hour show, the whole experience eats up a good chunk of the evening and sets you back about 75 bucks. Unless you’ve opted for concert beer, in which case you may need to borrow against your 401K.

A festival concert is a different beast. As the name implies, it devours vast stretches of time, and in some ways feels like a bazaar on an alien planet, where the hours ooze by in un-Earthlike ways, and hanging beads on kiosk displays hide the faces of exotic creatures. In the festival’s case, these creatures are humans who are slowly being consumed by flaming skull tattoos and metal implements that give their heads the light-refracting qualities of misshapen disco balls. Whether on Earth or Tatooine, chances are they’ll charge you 80 clams for a plastic necklace.

With myriad vendors, kiosks, and peddlers hawking merchandise, making one’s way from the venue’s entrance to the main stage can be a gauntlet of temptation. This is where it pays to have experience at these things. The T-shirts, the trinkets, the food – all of it is ridiculously overpriced, and it’s sold mostly to those tragic souls who are caught unprepared. Many of these unwitting concert-goers have the shell-shocked expressions of dying squirrels. (Not that I’ve ever stopped to examine the face of a dying squirrel. That would be creepy.)

Anyway, the best way to escape these things with one’s wallet intact is to plan ahead – and more importantly, to eat ahead.

Because food is really where they screw you to the wall. Unless you’re a camel, chances are you can’t go more than a few hours comfortably without consuming something. That’s why people continue to eat Snickers bare despite the fact that they’ll cause someone’s waistline to blow up faster than a dying star. In a festival situation, the trick is to locate something beforehand that resembles actual nutritious food, and then eat so much of it that the ensuing stomach cramps are only marginally preferable to death.

Just last week, I journeyed to the lush mountains of New Hampshire to attend a day-long concert in the middle of the woods. Because of the venue’s remote location – and the inflated food prices sure to be found within – a buddy and I stopped at a small general store on the border, where we grabbed enough provisions to see an 18th Century army through a merciless winter. After choking back a sub the size of a toddler, we split a box of chicken and potato wedges, the latter being so shockingly large that had the potato been whole, it could have sunk a medium-sized fishing vessel. I felt like I was having Thanksgiving dinner at Ted Nugent’s house.

If all that sounds a bit disgusting, it’s because it was a bit disgusting. But it also lasted us throughout the evening, and by the time the headliner took the stage, the miracle of digestion had made it possible for us to walk to our seats without leaning on each other for support. The resulting calories gave us the energy to sustain the self-punishment of headbanging through squealing guitar solos. That’s really all you can expect from nourishment, aside from the minor detail of continued living.

It was thanks to this planning that we were able to avoid the inflated food prices of in-house vendors, freeing up those funds for other purposes, like skydiving lessons or black tar heroin.

But that unfortunately does nothing about the price gouging itself, which is prohibitive to crampless eating. You see this kind of gouging elsewhere. Grocers will sometimes raise the price of bread and milk before a natural disaster, for example; and you’ll sometimes see a spike in air conditioner prices right before a heat wave, which is why I always buy mine while my ankles are still wet from snow-encrusted tube socks. But only at festival concerts, and in a few other scenarios, can you expect to pay eight bucks for a beer, six bucks for a water, and five hard-earned greenbacks for one of those giant pretzels the size of steering wheels. The pretzels sounds like a good deal until you realize its marble-sized salt granules just make you thirsty for the six-dollar water.

Only a prolonged mass boycott could change things, but that seems unlikely, given that most music fans don’t approach festivals like a week in the wilderness.

And so the price-conscious soldier on, with potato wedges that are hard to lift without assistance from a professional wrestler. It’s not the ideal system, but it’s survival. Daniel Boone would be proud.

Maybe. Probably not.

Bias? Damn near killed us!

Unless your friends are the open-minded, cool-headed sort, it’s probably a good idea to avoid any kind of discussion about politics if you still want invites to their backyard barbecues and all-night keggers. Political divisiveness being what it is, voicing support for a candidate or policy is a good way to get paperweights chucked at your head. Civil discourse has become the jousting event on American Gladiators.

Fortunately, a guy like me has friends who can discuss opposing viewpoints without bare-knuckle fisticuffs. That’s a nice luxury for a man to enjoy.

Less enjoyable is that, if talking to a conservative or libertarian, I can never gain traction in these discussions – because I belong to the “liberal media.” The ultimate trump card, “liberal media” is a phrase that effectively ends all conversation, because it re-casts everything I’ve said as biased and invalid. Never mind that it’s a myth as fanciful as the gods of Olympus, or a thought-provoking Pauley Shore movie. It’s a cheat code, an end-run around any serious examination of a person’s own logic.

When relating stories involving personal acquaintances, I like to change their names for two reasons: To protect their identities, and because naming things is fun. So allow me to share an anecdote about my good buddy “Skeletor.”

One thing I should make clear is that Skeletor’s an awesome dude in just about every way. He’s gregarious, generous, thoughtful, and has that rare ability to grow a lumberjack beard overnight, indicating testosterone levels that could mutate a small animal. But he’s a believer in an inherently liberal media, a vast machine that is somehow controlled by a sinister puppeteer with a donkey emblem on his chest and a cape made of food stamps.

About a year ago, I sat with him in his computer room while we discussed the issue, and while the conversation was civil and free of acrimony, at some point in the evening he did something telling: He turned to his computer screen and opened up the Drudge Report, an unabashedly right-leaning news site with blatantly leading headlines such as “Bill allows criminal illegals safe harbor,” and “Obama: Anti-Christ, or just a big fat doodie-head?”

Oh, Skeletor.

While he doesn’t share many of their more distasteful characteristics, he does unfortunately belong to that group of people who blast the mainstream media for liberal bias – and then in the next breath, praise conservatively biased news outlets for telling the “truth.” That there exists a choice of legitimately neutral news organizations is a thought that never occurs to this group. It’s not controversial enough. It’s more exciting – and more gratifying to one’s ego – to believe that there’s a small, savvy elite who have figured out how to get their news from “real” news sources that “tell it like it is.” (As an aside, putting words in quote marks is “fun.”)

Do some news outlets have an indisputably liberal bent? Of course. When reports surfaced that the IRS had targeted conservative political groups for special scrutiny, and that the Obama administration may have known about it, anchors at MSNBC set land speed records racing to their desks to defend the president – with pundits like Lawrence O’Donnell stopping just short of painting a watercolor of the chief executive wearing fig leaves and a Roman toga.

And, as any yin must have its yang, MSNBC has Fox News, that paean to tunnel-vision Republicanism. Windbags like Sean Hannity were perplexed when the George W. Bush administration wasn’t immediately followed by the rapture, so convinced were they that he was the second coming of the messiah.

So yes, biases of every political stripe exist in media. That’s been the case since the 18th century, when state’s rights newspapers accused President Washington of promoting a strong federal government so he could subvert the burgeoning republic with a monarchy.

But it’s been the nonpartisan faction of the mainstream media – led by honest, objective journalists – that has broken some of history’s most important stories, and held governments and politicians accountable. Watergate, the atrocities of Vietnam, abuses at Guantanamo Bay; these were all stories broken by the media. Not some guy in a basement blogging his conspiracy theories about Martians brainwashing Americans through subliminal messages in Clorox commercials; the media. The people who break their backs, and in some cases risk their lives, to deliver impartial information.

Look, it’s a way more complex media landscape than it was 40, 50 years ago. That’s obvious. We’ve come a long way from the days of good ol’ reliable Walter Cronkite. It’s harder to know which media outlets are objective, and which are trying to advance a partisan agenda. But it’s not impossible. The further one gets from the broad center of media, the more likely it is to encounter bias, not less. That’s what’s sad about the post-millennial electorate: Because shunning something mainstream is attractive to people, everyone retreats to their respective corners, fomenting dissent from the fringes, where true bias is born. In seeking the truth, they actively avoid it.

Restoring the public’s trust in real journalism is key to ensuring that the fringe outlets don’t become mainstream themselves. How do we do this? By convincing Skeletor to delete the Drudge Report from his Internet bookmarks.

I hope he doesn’t bristle at the suggestion. ‘Cause honestly, I don’t want to stop being invited to his cookouts. His potato salad is to die for.

Red it

Every time I see a Starburst candy I think of driver’s ed.

I was 16 and trying to stay awake through a lecture on the proper use of turn signals when the instructor glanced at his watch and indicated it was time for a 15-minute break. I remember blinking and looking around the room like I had just been jolted out of a months-long coma. The other students in the class – a handful of boys and girls around my age, plus one forty-ish woman who avoided us like we were knife-wielding locusts – all shared the same supine expressions of boredom. And what do you do when you’re bored and have a small break? You eat junk food and stare at the wall. Naturally.

The driving school was situated on lower Main Street in Lewiston, and the vending machine was just outside the front door, underneath an awning that looked as sad and weatherbeaten as the rest of downtown. The machine itself wasn’t exactly a ray of sunshine. Far from being the colorful, reassuring vending machines of Disney theme parks and generic office buildings, this one was so barren and gummy with neglect it could have been a prop in a cheesy slasher movie. (The lack of Snickers foreshadowing a gruesome event; that kind of thing.) Surveying my options was a depressing exercise. It was either Starburst or a bag of old-looking trail mix that was probably a stiff breeze away from being dust. I picked the Starburst.

Say what you will about candy – it rots your teeth, it framed Roger Rabbit, etc. – but it got me through the ensuing lesson on not lingering in the blind spot of a Mack truck.

Zombie-like, I sat at my desk and systematically plowed through an entire sleeve of them. But as I munched, I noticed something strange happening: Without thought or planning, I had set aside all the red candies, piling them in a corner and saving them for last, to be devoured in a final orgy of berry bliss. Whenever I eat, I always save my favorite item for the end, for one last crescendo. I had done this with my Starburst without even thinking about it.

And of course it was the red ones. It’s always the red ones.

The candy itself doesn’t matter. It could be Starburst, Skittles, or any one of a million fruit snacks shaped like Hannah Barbara characters. Invariably, the red ones are always the best. It’s a universal rule; the sun rises in the east, all good things come to an end, and red Jolly Ranchers are better than blue ones. Everybody in the world feels this way. I know because I conducted a study in which I asked two people who were sitting somewhat close to me.

If all this is true, then it’s also true that purple candies are usually the worst – sad news for a color I generally like, since it’s the color of grape juice and at least one Teletubby. There’s something cloying and overpowering about a purple candy, especially its aftertaste. One or two are fine, but after that they make the taste buds recoil and pucker up tight as a snare drum.

To be fair, much of my aversion can be traced to Skittles, which became a mini-obsession in the summer of 2002. If that seems ridiculously specific, it’s only because Skittles got me through a seasonal job working for a telemarketing company, during which I cold-called people in the middle of their chicken dinners to ask if they’d mind switching long-distance carriers. (Yeah. I was one of those guys.) There’s something depressing and soul-deadening about doing a job designed for the sole purpose of bugging people. You don’t do your best work when you feel apologetic about it. I would overcome these misgivings by spending my breaks tossing back bags of Skittles, which accomplished two things: I gained ten pounds and developed an aversion to purple. Early on, I learned to eat the purples ones first and then work my way up the Skittles hierarchy, which everyone knows goes orange-yellow-green-red. Again, this is all highly scientific. I advise you to watch for my groundbreaking paper on the subject, entitled “Ravings of an Obsessive-Compulsive Sugar Addict.”

It says something about my personality (probably something unflattering) that I’m so fascinated by the propensity of red to be a candy’s top flavor. It’s not even the same flavor from brand to brand; it can denote strawberry, raspberry, watermelon, or cherry, and yet it’s always the best-for-last prize in a candy bag’s bounty. Maybe candy manufacturers recognize red as being an action color, and assign to it the taste best favored by the control groups that sample their products. Or maybe I’m going slowly insane, and this is my last rumination before snapping and swinging from a chandelier with my underwear tied around my head. This should be considered a distinct possibility.

But it’s a testament to a sugary treat’s addictive powers that I can trace the red revelation back to a singular moment that took place when I was a teenager. It certainly stuck in my head moreso than those lessons about lane-changing and parallel parking.

Which, if you see me on the road, is something you may want to keep in mind.