Masquerade ballin'

On a Halloween weekend in the not-too-distant past, I stood in the living room of a longtime friend, a blindfold pulled tight around my eyes, trying in vain to eat a doughnut suspended from the ceiling. This activity is ridiculous enough without any additional help, but as it happened, I was dressed as the video game character Mario, and being sexually assaulted by an amorous pitbull who thought my leg was the hottest thing this side of Mila Kunis. I got the doughnut, but at the expense of my dignity, and in some cultures, I’m pretty sure the dog and I are married.

You can’t buy memories like that.

Astoundingly, this didn’t take place in the heyday of my Halloween-lovin’ youth. And it definitely didn’t take place when I was a teen. By the time I was a teenager, trick-or-treating had become passé, and being preoccupied with coolness and maturity (or the illusion thereof), the only means I had left of marking the holiday was watching bad zombie movies and eating Butterfingers until I slipped into a sugar coma. This made me super fat and lame. But that’s a tale for the psychiatrist.

No, the Mario-dog-doughnut incident was in my mid-20’s, when my affinity for the holiday experienced an Iraq-like surge, minus the civil war and ugly mustaches. It was during this era that I came to learn one of the great truths of adulthood: As long as it’s a holiday, there’s nothing wrong with looking and acting like a total jackass.

It was a liberating revelation. Halloween may be one of the more extreme examples, but these things tend to be cyclical: You like certain things when you’re a small child; in your teens, those same things repulse you; and then in adulthood they start appealing to you again, only this time through the warped lens of adult cynicism and perversion. 

Take dressing up in costume, for instance. For a child, the appeal is obvious. Kids spend an inordinate amount of time lost in their own imaginations, and a colorful costume, being the physical embodiment of that, seems like an almost logical extension of that whimsy. This has its disadvantages, naturally; countless albums are overflowing with photos of young girls standing painfully in the too-tight pink shoes of their fairy outfits; not to mention the boys, suffocating inside their humid, blinding rubber masks of superheroes and pro wrestlers, which are sure to cause mucho embarrassment once they’re old enough to understand the double entendres in “Spongebob Squarepants.” Parents usually pick out their children’s costumes based on the latter’s professed interests, but this often results in cheap plastic garb that makes the poor kid look like a third-world refugee, piecing together a wardrobe out of the washed-up debris from a violent shipwreck.

After the window of young adult disillusionment has passed – a window during which everything is super lame – we adults who’ve retained a sense of childlike goofiness get to experience a reprise of sorts. This is largely due to alcohol and a sense of irony. Dressing up as a Ninja Turtle at Halloween and throwing back a few brews with friends has become an acceptable social activity, which, for an adult, resurrects the holiday’s potential for celebration. This acceptance of grown-up silliness essentially gives Halloween back to us. Dressing up as a Ninja Turtle at any other time of year, of course, is grounds for committal to a mental institution, where we’d be forced to swallow a lot of weird-looking pills, and share a room with a guy who’s had electroshock treatment so often he’s earned the nickname “Sparky.” Either that or we’d get our own reality show on the Learning Channel. So we should thank our lucky stars that there’s a day that allows this kind of behavior.

Not everyone feels this way, naturally. Some maintain that Halloween is just a kids’ holiday, and dismiss it as being infantile and pointless. There’s no doubt that those who celebrate it in adulthood are tapping into a reservoir of leftover childishness; I’ve never had a serious, grown-up conversation about international finance and the global economy with someone who’s painted their face green to look like the Incredible Hulk. But that’s a good thing. For one thing, I don’t know anything about international finance, so it’s refreshing to know that, as long as I’m dressed like Barney the Dinosaur, I won’t have to delve into any subject deeper than the various topless scenes in awful B-movies.

Still, there’s a better reason for the bald and stubble-faced among us to acknowledge this weirdest of holidays: It provides a bridge back to that pre-teen childhood innocence. That innocence may be perverted by Jack Daniels and Don Diego cigars, but what better than the merging of long-lost playfulness and the freedoms of adulthood? Having survived the everything-is-stupid years, it brings us full circle, in remarkably absurd fashion. It’s pretty far removed from Linus’ Great Pumpkin vision of Halloween, but it’s what we have, and it’s oftentimes worth it.

Not that we don’t run the risk of post-bash embarrassment. If I wake up next to a pitbull this year, it may be time to reassess my life.

Clown college, U.S. Congress-style

In the land of ago, when I was a wee shoolboy with Coke bottle glasses and a well-worn slap bracelet, I knew this kid who developed a system for extorting favor from his parents: He’d hold his breath until his face turned blue as a Smurf’s butt cheeks. It never worked, as far as I could tell. Whenever the little snot wanted the newest video game or an extra ten minutes of play time, he’d enact Operation Tantrum, melodramatically puffing out his cheeks in a manner reminiscent of a South African tree frog. The only thing he ever showed for it was an erosion of brain cells and the vacant scowl of a bad-tempered village idiot.

In thinking about the current U.S. Congress, that was about the best analogy I could come up with.

Oh! Snap! Score one for the Gassman! But seriously, these people are morons.

Now, I haven’t exactly developed a reputation for trenchant political analysis. There are people who do that kind of thing far better than I do. My tastes run more toward the absurd; frankly, I’m more at home talking about Superman and fake vomit than the ins and outs of American government. It’s not that I don’t have opinions; I research candidates, I vote, and I read voluminous tomes about long dead patriots and ex-presidents, which places me squarely in the social domain of cat-loving librarians. Grimly, I follow the news, and things bother me.

But I’m generally quiet about these matters – until something happens that hits a little too close to home.

“Shutdown means no new beer from craft brewers.” That was the headline. The government shutdown, aside from making us look like a country run by drooling lobotomy patients, had apparently closed an obscure agency that approves new breweries, recipes, and labels – this according to an Associated Press article that, ironically, made me wish I were drunk. The story recounts the sad tale of Mike Brenner, who dreams of opening his own brewery, but was being hop-blocked by congressional incompetence. His plans, you see, need to be approved by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, a little known arm of the Treasury Department. Brenner expected to lose thousands for every week his opening was delayed. Meanwhile, suds-loving consumers like you and I came dangerously close to losing out on an amber colored treat, likely decorated with a Viking power-lifting dragons on a boat made of dead bison.

The explanation from deadbeat lawmakers is that it was for the good of the country.

All this, of course, was spurred by the Affordable Care Act, the sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system. Never mind that it hasn’t yet achieved its full implementation, or that its merits and flaws have yet to be wholly delineated by the sheer inertia of its reality. No, these knuckle-dragging troglodytes have already decided that the Act is, in one congressman’s words, “the most insidious law known to man” – more insidious, apparently, than Jim Crow segregation, slavery, Nazi-era ethnic cleansing, and the Spanish Inquisition. Delaying the law, or outright defunding it, is the goal. Which only make sense if you’ve spent the past week huffing exhaust from the tailpipe of a Dodge Ram.

Because there’s no reality in which a government shutdown is a mature, grown-up reaction to political differences.

Look, this isn’t a screed in defense of the ACA. The law eats up more pages than the collected works of Tolstoy, and reading it would seriously cut into some quality Mario Kart time; I’m not about to profess any expertise on the matter. I, like most Americans, will be feeling my way into the new health care system the way you orient yourself in a dark basement: Slowly, and with caution. And maybe some hockey pads and a miner’s helmet.

But lawmakers are supposed to pick up where my knowledge of the law leaves off – and many of them don’t, offering quantifiably false statements about “death panels,” which sound like the judges in a zombie version of American Idol. These are the mouth-breathing dunces who temporarily prevented Brenner from opening his business. And while craft beer is a wholly serious matter – these days, there’s little else to help us cope with widespread ineptitude – our suffering brewmaster was far from the only shutdown victim. Veterans pursuing their education didn’t receive federal tuition assistance. Nutrition programs, foster care payments, financial assistance for the poor and anti-elder-abuse programs were hit hard, particularly in the Native American community. Private businesses at or near federally operated parks opened their doors to silence and tumbleweed. And why? Because a gaggle of Washington do-nothings took the Operation Tantrum approach to governing: Holding their collective breath until their faces turned blue.

All for the good of the country, of course.

I know I’m supposed to offer some kind of prescription at this point, but how do you fix something so systemic? Not to be all doom-and-gloom, but a pair of statistics don’t help the outlook much. The first, from veteran pollsters Gallup, finds that public approval of Congress has tanked to about 11 percent; not surprising, given that most of the schmucks on Capitol Hill conduct themselves with roughly the intelligence and decorum of acid-dropping circus clowns. The second stat, reported by Outside the Beltway, finds that in 2012, the re-election rate for congressional incumbents was 90 percent. For those keeping score at home, that means nine out of 10 of these bozos got to keep their jobs.

Taken together, what do these stats imply? That everyone hates congress, but nobody’s willing to change it.

It would be too easy to say that the American people are getting what they deserve. It’s a representative democracy, after all; congress is a reflection of us. We hire these idiots. But I refuse to believe that any nation, founded on our principals, guided by our ideals, outright deserves this level of lunacy. Anonymous once said, “Scratch a cynic, and you’ll find a disappointed idealist.” And so there’s a flame of idealism in me, still gently flickering, that gives me the faintest light of hope – hope that Americans will put down their iPads, turn their backs to reality television, and pay a little more attention to the things that matter. Because this isn’t a game. We’re playing for keeps, and it we don’t step it up soon, then we’ll deserve every ounce of what happens next, and have no one but ourselves to blame.

For the good of the country, we can, and should, do better.

Word to your mother

Hummus doesn’t sound like hummus. That is, the word itself doesn’t sound like what it describes. Hummus the delicious edible is a paste or a dip, usually made of chickpeas mashed with oil, garlic, lemon juice, and tahini. It’s delectable. Hummus the word sounds like it’s describing a fungus growing on the underbelly of a wet log. It sounds like a crust forming around the dried orifices of a dead sea creature, or a tracheal disease suffered by saxophone players. It’s not a word that should be describing food.

It’s a rare misstep in a generally elegant language. I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about that language, and not just because I sit here week after week trying to find delicate ways of describing armpit farts. Being a bibliophile is part of it; I’ve often got my nose lodged in a book, which is far less painful that it sounds. A lot of it, though, is a preoccupation with history, and a fascination with how things evolve over time.

Because language, like any living thing, experiences an evolution, doesn’t it? All you need as proof is a romp through Dickens, where you’ll immediately encounter outdated words like “coddleshell,” “thither,” and “rantipole” – which, surprisingly, are not descriptions of bizarre sexual positions.

That linguistic evolution means all words have an origin, which is an interesting thing to think about. (Especially when you’ve got time to spare, and no cable. Check and check.) What’s amazing is that most words sound exactly like the object or concept they’re meant to represent. Take “rock,” for instance. Maybe this is simply because we’ve lived with the word for most of our lives, but doesn’t it sound exactly like it’s describing a rock? It’s hard, blunt, and no nonsense – the way a rock should be. Same goes for rock music, by the way, which helps explain why much of that tribal art form feels like a glorious bludgeoning from a brick-fisted brute.

Come to think of it, “bludgeon” is a pretty spectacular word, too. You can almost feel the blows. Too bad the mere utterance of a phrase can’t summon its corresponding sensation in its entirety, or else I’d spend the end of every day sprawled face-down on my couch, muttering, “Back massage, back massage...”

Ugly things deserve the word “ugly,” a glottal and cumbersome adjective; “beautiful,” appropriately enough, is delicate and flowing. You get the idea. If biological evolution is a product of natural selection, whereby the fittest genes survive, then language must evolve by much the same process, with the most appropriate words surviving the rigors of time and culture. “Twerking” may well be the most fleeting of slang, here and then gone, but “diamond” is forever.

Evolution is never perfect, though, regardless of what’s doing the evolving. In the animal kingdom, look no further than the duck-billed platypus, nature’s awkward goober. If the platypus was a person, it would be Andy Dick or Flava Flav – that weird little creature at the party that nobody wants to talk to, but no one’s quite sure how to avoid. Have you ever seen one of these things? It’s a bizarre and nonsensical mix of seal, duck, and five-pound sack of flour. It’s not a bad animal, certainly, and deserves to live life unperturbed as it goes around doing ... well, whatever it is the platypus does. But it’s a curiosity. Nobody really knows why it’s here.

Then you look at language, and there are platypuses all over the place. Take “kumquat.” A kumquat is a small fruit, vaguely orange-like, but the word itself sounds like it’s describing some congealing secretion oozing from a lump of roadkill: “Hey Sally, check out that dead skunk! It’s leaking kumquat all over the road!” Come to think of it, words that describe food are often incongruous and strange. We take a small cup of tasty fruit-filled goop, and we call it “yogurt.” We shouldn’t. Because while yogurt is yummy and contains some healthful ingredients, the word is better suited to embody the dry gunk that forms around the lips of a dehydrated mountain climber. “Hey Bertrand, here’s a tissue for that yogurt. Drink some water, fool!” And on it goes.

When I was in grade school, my friends and I would play a game – a common one, I’m sure – in which we would pick a word, like “road” or “limit,” and repeat it over and over again until it shed its meaning and became just a string of nonsensical sounds. Aside from fulfilling our obligation to be annoying nine-year-olds, it also highlighted the elasticity of language, and its apparent arbitrary nature. Not that we would have been able to articulate it in those terms, exactly, but on some level I think we realized that a lot of words are just inherently silly. We don’t think about it because we use words every day. But who’s to say that a tangerine couldn’t have been called a “waggleflop,” or a snow lion a “donglebutt?” It’s all just meaning ascribed to letters and sounds.

Amazingly, there are linguists who make a living thinking about this stuff, albeit with less absurdity. I’d love to pick their brains sometime. If I was more socially ambitious, I could envision a grand, wine-fueled dinner party choked to the rafters with tweed-wearing linguists and writers, merrily debating the etymology of “bucket” and “hose,” “poet” and “prose.”

Maybe someday, if I ever move out of Maine and into an art-house period film. But what would you serve a crowd like that? For an entrée, I’m thinking hummus.

Go go gadgets

Electronics used to be a simple thing. You needed a new TV or a new phone, you simply strapped on your Keds, zipped over to a big-box retailer, and came home and plugged it in. Easy stuff. Merchandise was reasonably priced, and installation was a two-step process that took about as long as a Justin Bieber pop hit, only by the end of it you didn’t feel like stuffing you ears with wads of pig lard.

Nowadays, it takes longer just to research the right brand than it does to pursue an advanced astrophysics degree. At some point, even the simplest appliances became the stuff of nerdy sub-culture; if you haven’t kept up with the latest technological innovations, you run the risk of populating your home with a mélange of incompatible devices that, collectively, are about as useful as an ox cart in a bowling alley. Everything needs to be synchronized, and free of bugs or pesky glitches. Considering the interconnectedness of our digital apparatuses, achieving cooperation between them carries roughly the same odds as buying a winning lottery ticket while being struck by lightning. Twice.

Blissfully unaware of how complex the market had become, I’ve passed the last few years happily with my junky ol’ TV, an old-fashioned cathode ray tube with roughly the mass and circumference of one of Saturn’s moons. Movies comprise most of what I watch on that old beast, and I’ve never been a fan of the way they look in high definition; when you go to the cinema, you’re looking at an image created by light passing through a piece of celluloid, and the resulting picture has a certain softness, and warmth, that I find attractive. Old TVs do a passable job of replicating that. New LCD and plasma units, by contrast, sterilize an image to the point where I expect the screen to start reeking of Lemon Pledge. Plus, if I had a burning desire to see Pauly Shore with any more clarity, I’d just go to his mother’s basement and visit him in person.

But at some point, having one of those clunky boxes in your living room makes it look like a historic re-creation of old-timey living you sometimes see in history musems; all that’s needed to complete the scene is a dusty gramophone and a butter churn next to a mannequin wearing bib overalls. Then there are the technological limitations. Newer TVs are capable of displaying a laptop’s screen through the magic of a simple HDMI connection, which comes in handy for an Internet-dependent cheapskate (read: me) who watches most of their television online. As easy as it is to resist the allure of gadgets – phones in particular have become obnoxious distractions – the prospect of firing up YouTube on a television tantalizes my inner geek, which sounds dirty, but isn’t. Every time I watch a streaming video of a drunk rodeo cowbow mooning a limo filled with prom-bound teenagers, I think, “Now how can I see this man’s butt cheeks on a much larger screen, and in higher fidelity?”

Well, simple. You spend hours of your free time researching prices and screen sizes, measuring various parts of your living space – and then finally snapping, streaking naked through the office with a pair of boxer shorts over your head and screaming out Al Pacino’s soliloquy from “Scent of a Woman.” And if you really want to go crazy, ask people for their opinions; the conflicting advice will create a paradox that tears apart the space-time continuum. “Don’t go with Magnavox, the contrast is terrible!” “Sony? Hey, if you like your colors dull and muddy, go for it!” Seriously, something as basic as a TV should be more... basic. When I bought my old CRT unit, I paid 20 bucks for it and had it delivered by a shirtless asthmatic driving a rusted pickup with Yosemite Sam mudflaps. The whole thing took an hour.

All this amounts to what’s known as a “first-world problem,” which has become a hot buzz phrase with the kiddies. The meaning is straightforward: In a world with no shortage of third-world problems, such as starvation and malnutrition, a first-world problem is a comparatively petty grievance uttered by privileged people in wealthy countries. In other words, I’m being a whiny schmuck. A mere hundred years ago, a guy like me would ride to work in a horse-drawn carriage, pass evenings playing solitaire by the light of a dwindling candle, and then die of scurvy in a straw bed dotted with rat droppings. We take it for granted, but something as simple as an electric lightbulb is a miracle. The crappiest television, colorless and blurry, would have brought Napoleon to his knees.

The ultimate question then becomes: Do I really need a new TV? Will the tech boost really improve my life, or should I be happy with what I have? Over the past decade or so, the overwhelming preponderance of gadgets has made it harder than ever to keep up with the Joneses, highlighting the quandary of whether we should give a rat’s patootie about the Joneses in the first place. While they’re drowning in a screen-lit ocean of malfunctioning gadgets, I’ve resorted to shocking yet satisfying measures, like soaking in sunlight and breathing oxygen.

That makes me a throwback, I know. But that comes with advantages: I’m a throwback with a tan.

Kiss the cook

It took me about an hour to pan-fry a chicken breast on my first ever attempt, which is pretty pathetic when you think about it. Considering how quickly meat cooks when tended to by someone who actually knows what they’re doing, devoting an hour to that simple task is like a Christmas enthusiast carving out a week to decorate the tree. The job gets done, but obviously, someone forgot to read the instruction manual.

Late bloomers are forever playing catch-up with the world. Much as it pains me to admit it, I’m now at an age where supermarket cashiers refer to me as “sir,” and I’m pretty sure I can’t sit down anymore without emitting the long, slow grunt you hear from movie cowboys tweezing buckshot out of their buttocks. Considering that, it stands to reason I’d know how to prepare chicken by now. And I figured it out, but only after a slow process of trial and error, marred by cursing and the kind of smoke one associates with the rubble of a cannon-blasted Civil War fort.

Cooking, man. It’s a pain in the neck.

Cooks and chefs inspire both my admiration and my jealousy. To take pleasure in the act of cooking is a gift that should never be taken for granted – as bizarre as it seems to schlubs like me, who view it as akin to enjoying a donkey kick to the you-know-whats. The people who dislike it do so for their own personal reasons, and in my case, it’s impatience. I don’t want to spend half an hour preparing something, and then ten measly minutes eating it. That ratio of wait time to gratification is okay for amusement park rides, but lemme tell you, eating chicken is no roller coaster. Unless you undercook it, in which case the pang in your gut is about the same.

There’s only so long you can avoid it. Years ago, when I first moved into my own place, I thought I had the problem licked: I’d just eat cereal all the time. In full know-it-all whippersnapper mode, I rationalized this decision by sticking to the cereals that were supposedly “healthy,” like Special K and Raisin Bran. Those cereals are perfectly fine if they’re confined to a single meal, but when you consistently pass these off as dinner, there’s only so long before your mouth starts watering at the sight of chipmunks and small birds. Bodies crave the kinds of nutrients only found in real food, not the fare that comes in boxes decorated with pink dinosaurs riding unicycles.

With a newfound commitment to a little concept called “health,” I knew it was time to start expanding my options. It’s a classic bachelor move to start eating lots of take-out, but it’s difficult to find take-out options that don’t ultimately end in a pair of defibrillator paddles and a backless hospital gown. It also gets ridiculously expensive. A recent visit to a local sandwich shop resulted in soup, some stringy roast beef, and almost 10 fewer dollars in my wallet – money I could have spent doing something worthwhile, like catching a movie, or getting a henna tattoo of a Magic 8 Ball on my head. There are only so many five-dollar footlongs a dude can pound down before he realizes, “Hey! I’d better cook something!”

Plagued by that pesky impatience, it was difficult to find meals that could be prepared quickly; subjected to any drawn-out, time-gobbling meal prep, I’d feel like I was wasting away in a doctor’s office, waiting for a friend while blankly staring at a Highlights magazine. I settled on chicken because it’s relatively hassle-free – compared to, say, carving a marble statue, or building an internal combustion engine from scratch. Simplicity notwithstanding, there were still early attempts that left uncooked swatches of meat in the middle of each bite, increasing both my risk of bacterial poisoning, and palpitations brought on by rage. The last time I got that angry at a dead animal was when a skunk croaked in front of my driveway.

It’s hard deciding whether a propensity for cooking, or the lack thereof, is a product of nature or nurture. Are people just genetically programmed to feel a certain way about it? My mother taught me some rudimentary cooking skills when I was a wee tot, but I was generally unresponsive; mostly, when I think back to those long-ago kitchen sessions, it’s the cookie-baking that stands out in my memory: Mom with her giant bowls of dough, and me watching rapturously with the fevered attention of a dog begging for table scraps. I came away with love handles and a crippling sugar addiction, but no real culinary mastery beyond macaroni and cheese. Sometimes people ask me if I’m related to the famous chef, Emeril Lagasse. No, I tell them, I most assuredly am not.

Hindsight being 20/20, I wish I had paid more attention, because as uninspired as I felt pouring over recipes, it would have come in handy later in life, when the nose-studded sandwich maker at my local sub shop was the guy who basically kept me alive. That chefs actually make their livings preparing food for others inspires my respect, because it speaks to a skill and passion I can’t even fathom. Slowly, I’m making progress, but I’ve miles to go before I reach the promised land.

The next step? Beef tacos. Cows, you’ve been warned.