Car bazaar

Maybe it’s just the design of the particular parking garage I use, but whenever I steer my car into its gaping maw and see another vehicle following suit behind me, I consider it a bad omen. Ditto for when I’m following someone in front. Every time two or more cars drive into this garage at the same time, it starts off a race of sorts. One car turns left, the other turns right, and both gun it up the gradual incline, jockeying to find that one space, that single magical gleaming empty socket, that will save us 30 seconds on our walk to the office.

The winner gets bragging rights. The loser gets a spot on level 5, which in Parking Garage Land is akin to being stranded in the nosebleeds at Gillette Stadium. With clear skies and a high-powered telescope, you’ve got a fighting chance at spotting the sidewalk.

You don’t really give the term “rate race” much of a thought until you become a part of one.

The bigger the city, the more of a hassle the simple act of parking becomes, and that’s one of the biggest adjustments to make when you’re used to a more rural way of doing things. Even though I grew up in Lewiston, Maine’s second largest city, it was still small enough that you didn’t have to worry about where you were going to stick your wheezy old Chrysler with the dented fender. You drove to a place, said place had a parking lot, and you parked your car and walked inside. Simple. Easy. The way it should be.

Then you meander into a city like Portland and the rules are different; everything’s amplified, ratcheted up about 10 degrees. And so instead of each individual business and home playing host to its own parking lot, you’re stuck dumping your vehicle into a monolithic hunk of concrete about the size of one of Jupiter’s moons. By the time you find a space you forget why you even drove there to begin with, and if you do decide to venture downtown, it takes a canteen, a map and a camel just to make it there in one piece.

Perhaps it simply takes some getting used to, but in six months of commuting to P-Town, that hasn’t happened for me yet. Time is the big issue here. We’re accustomed to think of distances in terms of how long they take to traverse; Ned’s Edible Undergarment Emporium is 10 minutes away, Bob’s Booze Bonanza is 20, etc. For the most part, that means it takes 10 minutes flat to get from your front door to Ned’s, including the 60 seconds required to park your car and the 30 seconds necessary to walk across the asphalt and stroll into his establishment (which, coincidentally, is running a special on milk chocolate jockey shorts). Vehicle arrangements are built into this arithmetic.

Not so in the city. When someone says it takes 20 minutes to get to Portland, they’re speaking strictly about the city limits. If your destination is a restaurant in Monument Square, you have to tack about 15 minutes onto this total -- 10 minutes to find a space and an extra five to hoof it there, assuming you hit all the pedestrian walk signs and have rocket boosters in your sneakers. If you want to eat in Portland before the next Labor Day, your best bet is to be a seagull.

Matters get worse the larger a city becomes. Let’s say you want to go to Fenway Park in Boston. Anyone in southern Maine who loves the Red Sox knows it takes a sliver over two hours to get to Beantown by Amtrak, but that’s just to pull into North Station. From North Station you have to buy a subway ticket, figure out your inbound from your outbound, hop into a rickety Sucrets tin that smells like cat food, and then trudge a mile or more through sidewalks choked with hot dog vendors and college students drumming on buckets. The only way this takes fewer than four hours is if the radiation from an atomic bomb blast gives you superpowers, and one of them is the ability to slow the rotation of the earth.

In 1908, the Ford Model T was unleashed upon the masses, marking the first time that automobiles became affordable to middle class consumers. This was a mixed bag. On the one hand, it spawned car culture and its accompanying benefits, like an interstate highway system and the tacky yet lovable fuzzy dice industry. Henry Ford would have been proud.

On the other hand, it created headaches. Motorists who don’t use their turn signals, school buses that halt traffic every two-and-a-half feet … and high-rise parking garages that charge exorbitant sums for the simple act of stopping and turning off your engine. Henry Ford would have wept himself hoarse.

But it was inevitable, really. The more cars there are, and the fewer places there are to stick ’em, the more the evils of garage parking become a necessity. And who doesn’t want a car? People who never leave the city, and pigeons. Those are the only two groups.

This is reason number 257 why small cities and rural towns are so appealing. Larger cities -- the ones with parking garages -- are hard-edged and institutional. Their people are hemmed in by uncompromising geometry, and their cars and hemmed in by concrete walls, stacked like sardine cans in a grocery aisle.

Cars are supposed to be about freedom and movement, the thrill of the open road, the sense of possibility when the engine roars to life. The romantic mystique of the automobile is that it allows us access to any place we could imagine that’s traversable by land. They don’t belong in block-like slabs. They belong under open skies, and within easy access to our destinations, with a short jaunt the only thing separating us from hopping in and feeling the wind on our faces.

See? Bet you never thought a trip to Bob’s Booze Bonanza could be such a spiritual experience.

Body by jerk

Our bodies are jerks. When we’re young, they’re seemingly invincible vessels -- prone to the odd scrape or broken bone, but generally lithe and gazelle-like, spriting us from one location to the next with a bouncy newness we take for granted. Then we get older and they betray us, degenerating into a taught coil of various aches and pains. By degrees, they make the transition from new and practical Ford Focus to rusty and rickety Chrysler Lebaron. Even then, Lebarons are one-up on us, because at least they can be used as storage for old snow shovels.

Nobody warned me it would happen so quickly. One minute you think aches and pains are strictly a problem for the elderly; the next, you’re sitting across the kitchen table from your cousin, swapping stories about sore backs and stiff necks, trying to out-pain each other. Bodily decline becomes a competition, except no one actually wins. Maybe the good folks at Tylenol.

That exact scenario took place a couple of weekends ago. My cousin and his parents, now denizens of the tacky neon strip mall known as Florida, made a rare visit to Maine and spent most of a late-spring Sunday at my parents’ home in Lewiston, chatting about vacations and politics over glasses of sticky red wine. Interestingly, the topic of corporeal anguish never came up among the older set. Maybe it’s something you just get used to, like baldness or that odd goiter shaped like Mrs. Butterworth.

“Bart,” as I’ll call my dear cousin, is a couple of years younger than me, and growing up he was the closest thing I ever had to a brother; I’m confident he would say the same about me, since he was an only child and spent much of his time with an obese housecat I’m pretty sure was blind. Until I was 12 or so, I’d see Bart several times a year, playing the angel to his reckless maverick. Then he and the ‘rents hightailed it to the Gulf coast to be closer to Mickey, and he became one of those family members you see “every once in a while,” which in our case means weddings, funerals and anniversary parties for couples married before the advent of touch-tone telephones. Life pulls us in different directions. We do what we can.

Sometimes years pass between visits, but we always pick up more or less where we left off -- as though the intervening time was just a brief hiccup in a lifelong conversation. We are currently at the “Ouch! My back!” stage of our relationship. He’s got a mutinous knee. I’ve got a spine that occasionally feels like a beer can being crushed against a drunkard’s skull. Lacking any fair warning, we’ve gone from wrestling in the backyard to absent-mindedly rubbing our sore spots while whining about doctors and X-rays, braces and muscle creams. Our only recompense is that at least we’re now old enough to drink Miller High Life and use words like “ass” around our parents.

The whole thing took us by surprise, but should it have? It’s possible we just ignored the warning signs. Professional athletes offer us a cautionary tale. Many start their careers young -- some are in their late teens -- and you can catch a strong whiff of their new-car smells even if you’re watching them on TV. The zig, they zag, they dive and hit the ground and get right back up again, and they do it all again the next day because they can (and because in some cases they’re getting paid one-and-one-half bazillion dollars).

That’s a pro athlete at, say, 20 years old. Catch up with them at 35 and it’s a different scene. They’re constantly massaging their shoulders, they’re slow to get up off the field, and when they’re interviewed by reporters after the game -- usually while holding ice packs to their groins -- they look like they’ve just been roughed up by a gang of biker gorillas. Note to self: Write a screenplay about biker gorillas.

Thirty-five is not remotely old. Not even close. But it’s old enough for systems to start breaking down, and Bart and I should have known it, watching past-their-prime athletes like Roger Clemens wincing their way onto the field. We made the common youthful mistake that everything lasts and the future will never arrive, and now we’re paying for it. It doesn’t help that we have the doughy bodies of chocolatiers.

As discouraging as this revelation can be, though, I choose to remain positive about it. We’re entering a new phase, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. If the previous phase was all about pushing our bodies to their biological limits, this new epoch sees our bodies playing more of a support role, acting as a transport device for our brains -- placing it in front of people worth talking to and places worth seeing. And food worth eating. Especially food worth eating.

When you consider a guy like the late Christopher Reeve, Bart and I complaining about swollen ankles seems pretty trivial. The man who played Superman in the 1970s (and who was never bettered in this department) became a quadriplegic about 20 years ago after a horseriding accident, and yet he was probably more active afterward, becoming an advocate for stem cell research and returning to film to act and direct. Way to make my cousin and me feel like weenies, Christopher. The next time we see each other and start whimpering about our carpal tunnel syndrome, I’ll whip out a picture of the Man of Steel just to give myself a much-needed jolt of shame. Which I’ll probably forget about as soon as I tweak my neck.

There’s no telling how long it’ll be before I see Bart again, but perhaps we can start using the various stages of life as benchmarks for when a good catch-up session may be appropriate. Now it’s muscle soreness and crappy bones. When we start needing special glasses to read the nutritional information on a can of peas, we’ll know it’s time to schedule a visit.

Repair despair

Nobody’s ever walked into a computer repair shop with a smile on their face. Distress is the only reason for being there. Computers are great until they fail, in which case they become one of the worst scourges to ever blacken human civilization, only taking a backseat to racism and plaid earmuffs.

So when I lumbered in and heard the cheery little ting of the bell above the door, I took it as one of life’s mocking ironies. The previous evening, my laptop had decided it was sick of TED Talk videos and scholarly articles on the mythology of Batman, and refused altogether to connect to my internet WiFi. What’s more, its capability to detect any wireless networks at all had been disabled. This was deeply troubling to me, because without the internet I can’t log onto Facebook to see third-grade buddies post pictures of cookies I’ll never eat.

Hunkered over a pile of switches and motherboards with a screwdriver in one hand was a man of about 30 who I’ll call “Boogerface.” He’d have gotten a nicer code name if he was a nicer guy. His repair shop was small -- two adjoining rooms, one with chairs and magazine racks hemmed into a corner by an industrial vacuum cleaner, one with a work table and piles of gadgets in various states of dismemberment. I immediately felt silly with my little internet problem. Dude looked he was dismantling a bomb.

Initially he didn’t exhibit any red-flag behavior. I explained my problem and he assured me it would be a quick fix, directing me to take a seat in his waiting area, which had all the claustrophobic charm of a plastic Porta Potty.

The problems began when “Daffodil” entered the shop.

Daffodil gets a sweet pseudonym because she was clearly a very sweet woman. Aged between 60 and 65, with bottle-red curls and a precariously placed pair of Canasta glasses, she immediately exhibited the characteristics of a chronically pleasant lady: A quick smile, a friendly “Hello,” and the kind of delicate gait that suggests she likes her fun low-volume. A book club lady, a cribbage-and-Yahtzee lady. The kind of person you hope visits you on Christmas morning.

Boogerface apparently had a less favorable impression, because when he called Daffodil into his work area, he did so with the terseness of a drill sergeant holding in a fart. Apparently, Daffodil’s computer troubles were of a moderate-to-severe nature; she’d left hers at the shop overnight, and because I was shamelessly eavesdropping, I picked up on the fact that she’d had several of her important files backed up for their protection.

Daffodil remarked at one point that she was having trouble navigating through her newly reorganized files.

“Have the new versions of these documents been saved?” she asked. “I guess I don’t understand how these are laid out.”

“How do you not understand?” Boogerface shot back with the petulance of a know-it-all school bully. “They’re all right here.”

“Yes, but before I came in, they --”

“Can you let me finish? See here. They’re all in this folder, and --”

“Yes, but my question is --”

“Let me finish. They’re all in this folder, and when you look at ‘date modified,’ you see which version is the most recent.”

“Yes, but --”

“This is not very difficult.”

And on and on it went. It was mostly Boogerface’s tone that implied impatience and belligerence, to the extent that I half-expected him to rise to his feet and challenge Daffodil to a no-holds-barred steel cage match on pay-per-view. Keep in mind that this is a woman who likely knits mittens for her grandchildren.

The shopkeeper’s attitude suggested a deep lack of professionalism, but more than that, it betrayed a profound ignorance of how members of certain generations perceive all things digital. People in their 30s -- like me and Boogerface -- came of age at a time when computers and the internet were just getting off the runway. We were perfectly positioned to evolve along with the technology, and as such, we became familiar with the language and the skills necessary to incorporate it into our lives. Older generations, by contrast, grew up with gramophones and cars the size of humpback whales. You don’t see a lot of people over 50 logging into Playstation’s online network to play “Grand Theft Auto” against cyberhackers from Algeria.

Disrespect wasn’t Boogerface’s only transgression, though. He also made an inherently unpleasant situation worse.

Computer repair is a lot like car repair. We need these hunks of junk to remain in the flow of daily life, but we don’t really know how they work, and when they go on the fritz we rely on the expertise of professionals to get them back into fighting shape. That’s not easy. Not only do you have to cede control to someone else, but you’re inviting them into a strangely intimate corner of your life. If you doubt that, consider this: With computers, as with cars, it’s probably best to give the insides a good once-over just to make sure the guy with the wrench doesn’t stumble upon anything embarrassing. The last thing you need is some schmuck like Boogerface knowing you’re into X-rated videos of seven-foot-tall transgender bodybuilders named Bubba.

Since it’s so awkward for the customer, these repair folk have an obligation, it seems. To fix your device, yes, but also to make the process as smooth for the customer as possible. Maintenance is a stressful and often messy chore, and it helps to be tended to by someone with a soothing bedside manner. Otherwise you end up bickering with a guy whose temperament is better suited to the trash-talking swagger of mixed martial arts.

Ironically, since Boogerface helped restore my laptop’s internet capability, I can leave his business a negative review on Yelp. And no one will be yelling at me to let them finish.

The text generation

You know it’s time for a new phone when it starts calling people randomly. They call this “pocket-dialing,” or “butt-dialing” depending on how close you like to keep your device to your derriere. Mine does it so often, it’s clear that this five-dollar Tracfone contraption is slipping into the electronic equivalent of old-age dementia. It happened most recently on a jaunt through Portland’s Monument Square; I dug it out and noticed it was in mid-call with a mysterious “someone.”

“Someone” texted me minutes later: “Who is this? I just missed a call from this number.”

A reasonable question. “This is Jeff,” I texted back. “Sorry, I must have pocket-dialed you by mistake.”

“Oh,” was the reply. “Well I don’t know you.”

Yeesh. “Someone” likes to cut right to the meat of it.

At least that was the impression. But that’s the fundamental problem with texts: Since the point is to bang them out quickly, you don’t have time to do any real “writing.” In other words, you don’t sit there tweaking the language so that everything has tone and context. “Well I don’t know you” seems like a terse statement, but maybe it wasn’t intended that way. Given the limitations of the format, there’s no real way to tell.

Emoticons and emojis are an attempt to address this. In case you’ve spent the past several years making spearheads out of rocks in a South American jungle, emoticons are facial expressions you make using the symbols on your keypad; “:-)” is a smiley face, “:-(“ is a frowny face, and “:-O” means you’ve just walked in on two grizzly bears making love in a subway terminal. Emojis are the next phase of this unholy evolution, replacing the keyboard symbols with simple graphics, apparently to save users the trouble of typing in three whole keys with the shift button down. I mean heck, we’re not athletes, right?

I get why these symbols exist. Without them, a lot of these messages would lack emphasis, and we, the recipients, would be left squinting at our screens to tease out the authors’ intent. They’ve become a sad necessity in a world that values pictures over words, cartoons over language. In the battle for self-expression, composing our thoughts is losing out to yellow faces giving thumbs-up gestures and winking in creepy fashion, like high-powered Wall Street shakers or construction site chauvinists. We’re losing our narrative.

Surely the pace of modern life has something to do with this. Our days are packed with details, most of them small, but all vying for snatches of our time -- emails, texts, calls, Facebook posts, archery practice and ear hair grooming among them. (Some are more specific to our lives than others.) As a people, we no longer have the luxury to lick the tips of our quill pens and scribble out eloquent missives to friends and relatives. In the early days of this country, a relatively short 200-plus years ago, “Well I don’t know you” would have been written as, “I admit I am altogether unfamiliar with your personage, so please forgive my inability to ascertain your identity.” Wordier, but if John Adams had written it, he surely wouldn’t have felt the need to draw a cartoon of a man shrugging his shoulders in confusion. He also wouldn’t have been butt-dialed from a cell phone, but you see what I’m driving at.

Not that there’s anything wrong with expedience, per se, but when abbreviations, colloquialisms and general informality infiltrate the common vernacular, it spells doom for the language. It cripples our ability to effectively communicate ideas. To illustrate this, let’s contrast public statements from two disparate political figures -- one from the 19th century, and one from the 21st. In 1863, during the height of the Civil War, the Union suffered heavy losses at the Battle of Gettysburg, spurring a patriotic resurgence that would ultimately lead to victory. Shortly after the battle, on the field where scores had been slain, President Abraham Lincoln delivered one of the most eloquent and stirring speeches in American history. He said, in part:

“(I)n a larger sense, we cannot dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Now here’s a 2006 quote from Donald Trump: “Rosie O’Donnell’s disgusting both inside and out. You take a look at her, she’s a slob. … I mean she’s basically a disaster.”

I’m not saying our texting culture was directly responsible for this pitiful linguistic decline. But it didn’t help.

If language is how we communicate, then our very ability to exchange thoughts and ideas is in jeopardy. Brevity has its place, but sometimes more is needed. If the trend continues, there may come a day when we encounter a texting, smiley-face-sending millennial, utter to them a sentence containing more than five words, and watch in disappointment as their attention span turns to dandelion spores, scattered by the faintest breeze.

“Well I don’t know you,” they’ll say to us vapidly. And then they’ll walk away.

Now weight just a minute

Two-thirds of Americans are overweight or flat-out obese, and it’s not difficult to see why. On May 5, a.k.a. Cinco de Mayo, my workplace sprung for a buffet-style Mexican feast, and everyone flocked to the break room to stock up on pork and beans and other thigh-enlarging treats. Even the skinniest wisps among them loaded their plates as though they were on the brink of a weeklong fast, strips of gooey meat swinging from the sides of their paper plates like mud-spattered turkey wattles. And who could blame them? Mexican food is delicious.

A little too delicious.

Weight-wise, that’s one of this country’s biggest problems: Everything is super-yummy. If you’re staring at a morsel of food you don’t like, there’s surely some condiment or garnish in the house, or at the nearby market, that ups the yummy factor considerably. We put yummy sauces on non-yummy foods to make them more yummy. We put peanut butter on celery because celery isn’t yummy enough on its own. I really need to stop saying the word “yummy.”

Yummy. Dangit!

This fixation on flavor obfuscates what should be a simple truth -- food is fuel. Its primary function is to provide nutrition for the body, not entertainment during “Simpsons” marathons. Yet a lot of people treat eating as though it’s a hobby, something akin to crossword puzzles or plastic canvas. Early humans, the ones who wore mammoth skins and did cave paintings, wouldn’t understand that kind of behavior, beholden as they were to the scattershot food gathering of the time. Although I’m sure a bowl of Cherry Garcia ice cream would make them converts in about half a nanosecond.

There’s a traceable chain of events going on here. Consumers like tasty food. Tasty food is mass-produced. Mass-produced food is cheap. Cheap food is unhealthy. Unhealthy food causes weight issues (and general health headaches). And the ankle bone is connected to the shin bone and so forth. That’s why even poor people struggle with weight: The only grub they can afford is crap. Forced to choose between a seven-dollar salad at Whole Foods or a 99-cent burger at Wendy’s, economics forces them to make a choice, and all too often that choice results in difficulty climbing a flight of stairs.

I don’t speak about heavy people disparagingly. I was one of them once, so I get it. When I was in grade school I lived about a five-minute walk from McDonald’s, and I took advantage of this luxury whenever I could -- much to the detriment of my chin, which went into hiding for so long people thought it had been relocated through the Witness Protection Program. There were no salads at the Golden Arches at that point, only oil-drenched fries and razor-thin slices of “meat” made mostly from grease and walrus knuckles. It’s as though a coterie of mad scientists had perfected a secret formula for unhealthy weight gain, with the populace their unwitting guinea pigs. Which incidentally are another ingredient in their burgers.

The weight piled on almost without my noticing it, and plenty of others report the same thing. The pounds just happen, until one day you look in a mirror and no longer recognize yourself. It’s not a fun feeling. And while it’s true that there is some measure of personal responsibility involved -- we do choose the foods we eat, after all -- it taxes both our wallets and our willpower to make the right choices. What sounds more appealing, a juicy Red Delicious apple or a double helping of soft-serve ice cream piled atop a generous slice of chocolate cake? Rest my case.

Crud. Now I want cake.

Michael Moss, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2010, wrote a book a while back that explains why. In “Salt Sugar Fat,” he writes that most processed foods are pumped full of -- you guessed it -- salt, sugar and/or fat. This is partly to preserve the food, but a large part of the motivation is to make the food more yum-- uh, tasty. The fact that tastier food sells better is easy to understand on an intuitive level, but there’s something more insidious going on: Those ingredients can trigger addiction in much the same fashion as dangerous drugs like heroin and cocaine. Food manufacturers essentially hook us on their products, much like those swell folks at the big tobacco companies. The only difference is that, while human beings can survive without cigarettes and grape-flavored cigars, they can’t survive without food. Our choice is between tasty food that kills us or yucky food that keeps us alive. Like in presidential elections, we’re faced with two unsavory choices.

Meanwhile, the weight piles on. And on. And on.

There’s not a lot of food in my home, and that’s by design. If there were, I’d eat it. Clementines and bran-based cereals comprise the bulk of my “snacks,” because if I were to stock up on Chips Ahoy cookies I’d get bored one night and drain an entire sleeve of them, staring vapidly at the electric clock on my stove and humming the theme song to “All in the Family.” That’s not the relationship anyone really wants to have with food. There’s only one feeling you get after an episode like that, and it’s not elation or a sense of self-worth.

A week later and somehow I still feel bloated from the Mexican food. I brought it on myself, because there’s another trap you can fall into. You can behave yourself on most days and then, reasoning that you’ve “earned” it, binge shamelessly when the opportunity presents itself. My Cinco de Mayo feast certainly qualifies, considering I downed enough burrito meat to feed a pack of ravenous wolves.

Though, in my defense, it was super yummy.