Bird brain

Traditions are never a hundred percent traditional. And no, that’s not some vague aphorism I found in a fortune cookie.

What I mean is that traditions always have their core elements, plus a bunch of tacked-on personal or family elements that customize them, make them ours. Let’s use Thanksgiving as an example, since most of us are still so crammed with pie we can’t stand up without the aid of household furniture.

Thanksgiving has its own baseline features that are consistent across most families: Turkey, stuffing, orange- and brown-colored side dishes, and that one cousin who gets tanked on Merlot and belts out “White Christmas” during halftime of the Lions game. These are all niceties that go back to the early days, when European pilgrims and Native Americans gathered to feast on hearty food and complain about Detroit’s offensive line.

From there, traditions vary. Maybe your family members dig out the old plastic Christmas tree from the basement and decorate it while their gastrointestinal systems try to make sense of what just happened. Or they break out the Monopoly board and devolve into fisticuffs in a dispute over Park Place. Every home is different.

In Maison Lagasse, Christmas begins as soon as the last drop of beer is drained from its mug. This is due primarily to my mother, who begins her holiday shopping in February and would keep candy canes stocked in her cupboard year-round if it were in any way socially acceptable. Eyelids drooping after a gut-busting gorge, she pops in a favorite yuletide classic -- which for the past several years has been “The Polar Express,” an animated romp that scores points for a Santa Claus who looks like a lumberjack in an L.L. Bean catalogue. My father quaffs Heineken and endures this yearly ritual with relative grace while Mom fights back tears and sings along with the musical numbers in an off-key falsetto. I find myself stuck somewhere between these two extremes, moved by the film’s earnestness but finding myself desperately in want of a clear drink with an olive in it. Sometimes tradition requires endurance. And booze.

Our particular rituals are as comfortable and well-worn as old sweatpants, but to members of another clan our little idiosyncrasies may seem strange. In millions of living rooms across the country, disparate families are up to their own shenanigans. Judging from the stories people have shared online, many of these activities are of the “Aww, how heartwarming” variety, which makes sense because if you’re lucky Thanksgiving is an “Aww, how heartwarming” kind of holiday. (As opposed to Halloween, where the overriding sentiment is “Please, children, don’t leave flaming bags of poop on my front porch.”)

One woman shared her family’s tradition of having a “Thanksgiving tree,” which initially struck me as an unnecessary indoor plant in a season already rife with them. But this is a laminated paper tree; throughout the year, everyone in the family writes down something for which they’re thankful on fall-colored construction paper leaves and puts them in a box. On Turkey Day they tack the leaves up on the Thanksgiving tree and read them aloud. Nice stuff. Another woman said she cooks food based on recipes in her late grandmother’s cookbook, working from handwritten text in her relative’s shaky scrawl. These traditions are so sweet they’re almost sickening, the kind of stuff you see people doing in Lifetime Original Movies with corny titles like “When Caroline Learned to Love Again.”

Not every tradition is quite so saccharine, though. One man, sharing his story on the website pgeveryday.com, said that he and his family have a gun battle every Thanksgiving. They use toy guns, naturally; if they used real ones, each subsequent Thanksgiving would just get lonelier and lonelier, until a day 10 years from now when it’s just one sad man ripping into a turkey in a backwoods motel while evading the cops. His family’s rule, apparently, is that as long as you’re old enough to hold a toy gun, you’re a part of the make-believe melee -- no points, no rules, no winners. Just a bunch of people wagging around plastic Glocks and spraying each other with water while fighting off the encroaching drag of meat-sleep.

Bizarre as that is, there’s one tradition I find even stranger. On danoah.com, one family said that after they’re finished noshing on squash and pie, they all engage in a game of hide-and-seek … with their cars. The gang piles into four or five vehicles, with one car labeled the “it” car, and the rest all seek a quiet place in town where they can park, turn off the lights, and avoid detection; the last undiscovered car then becomes the “it” car, and around they go again. This one gets major props for creativity, but I’m still left wondering what the locals -- not to mention the local police -- think of a bunch of people huddling in cars in the dark in random neighborhoods. Has anyone’s hackles ever been raised? Hopefully these automotive hide-and-seekers don’t live in the same town as the gun-battling family, or else it’s only a matter of time before someone gets a plastic firearm stuck in their face. “Happy Thanksgiving! Now freeze, sucka!”

Goes to show that repetition is all that’s required for something to be a tradition. It can be the goofiest thing in the world, but do it enough times and it’s as ingrained as the natural human instinct to punch a clown.

This year my intent was to start a new Thanksgiving tradition of not eating so much blueberry pie that I temporarily go blind. Can I repeat this year after year? Possibly. But someone may have to hold a plastic gun to my head.

Let the other shoe drop

“Those must be comfortable shoes.”

That’s an oft-quoted line -- one of many -- from the 1994 movie “Forrest Gump,” about a man with a below-average IQ and an above-average heart who somehow finds himself at the center of the 20th century’s most significant historical moments. He offers this observation to a woman sitting next to him on a park bench, and it serves as a launchpad for a series of flashbacks: Forrest running, Forrest leaping, Forrest running some more. He’d know a thing or two about comfortable shoes. He needs them. Without them, his feet would be unusable slabs of flesh, much like Pauly Shore and half of Congress.

I can relate. I need comfortable shoes, too.

Yet they’re so hard to find, and it’s such an important process. Choosing new shoes is like choosing new feet; pick wisely and it’s like walking on the lightest of vapors, your tootsies fortified against the harshness of glass-littered sidewalks and crumbly cow poop. Pick poorly and it’s a special brand of torture, in a league with the dreaded purple nurple. (Protip: Do not do a Google Image search for purple nurple.)

Playing it safe is never a bad option, and it’s been my modus operandi for the past several years. I plow through a pair of shoes in about 10 months, and every 10 months I walk into the same shoe store in the same town, plop my size 12-and-a-half on the same time-worn bench, and say to the same clerk, “Give me more of the same.” Generally this works. My particular model will occasionally cede ground to the latest and greatest upgraded pair, and it’s usually fine, but for the most part I’m able to walk out with fresh clones of whatever I brought with me. Good thing, too, because there’s nothing like trying on 30 pairs to make a person feel like walking into traffic while chewing on a cyanide tablet.

One of the first things you notice when you walk into a shoe store is the absurdly large selection. Two hundred years ago there were three styles to choose from: wooden, leather, and none. Now there are a thousand different categories, each broken down into a thousand sub-categories. Do you go running primarily in the morning, when the sidewalks are glistening with dew? There’s a shoe for you. Do you frequently go mountain hiking, and as soon as you reach the summit, start tap-dancing to “Uptown Funk?” There’s a shoe for you. Do you keep your shoes on in a chlorinated swimming pool because of that weird phobia you’d prefer not to talk about? Our phobia shoes are right this way, valued customer.

Weird feet make the process even harder. Lengthwise, my feet have been at a flat 12-and-a-half since the mid-1990s, when one last teenaged growth spurt gave me the proportions of a sasquatch. But for feet of that length, they’re wider than they should be. If a normal foot is oblong like the tip of a rowing paddle, mine are like ceiling tiles with toes. That makes it frustrating to find a shoe with a good fit. Many a time I’ve thought about simply building my own footwear with a bucket of superglue and the rubber from old bicycle tires.

That would at least be the most economical option, because after you’ve finally sifted through waterproof running shoes, all-weather hiking shoes, air-soled cross-trainers and eco-friendly tennis sneaks, you’re probably shelling out at least a hundred bucks for your chosen pair. And it doesn’t end there. If you’ve got flat feet, like I do, you also have to drop sixty hard-earned clams on inserts for your much-needed bridge support. By the time you walk out of the store you’ve got more money on your feet than you do in your wallet. If you ever find yourself strapped for cash in a bartering situation, just fork over your shoes. The recipient can sell them on eBay for prices that rival those of German auto parts.

I’m lucky in the sense that I’m perfectly content to buy, and wear, one pair of all-purpose shoes at a time. This mitigates the cost and inconvenience of shopping somewhat. Not everyone can get away with that. Maybe your job requires specialized footwear, like boots, and your company won’t buy them for you because the CEO is embezzling money to pay for his Ritalin addiction. Maybe you’re a fashionista and need to own at least 14 pairs at all times. Maybe you’re secretly The Incredible Hulk and you destroy your Nikes every time you get angry. Could happen.

Whatever the scenario, it’s a lot of time and expense. It used to be that time and expense were rewarded with a personalized touch at the local shoe outlet, but an almost imperceptible shift has taken place over the years: Clerks are no longer allowed to touch your feet. When I was a child, the friendly shoe-slingers at the mall would reach down and measure my foot with one of those metal doohickeys, then help me slip into pair after pair, even threading and tightening the laces for me. This was almost luxurious, in the way that being fanned with palm fronds on a tropical beach is luxurious.

Now they just hang back and awkwardly watch as you do all the work yourself. Nobody informed me this change was going to occur. Never got an email, never got a letter. I’m sure it’s a liability thing; some clerk somewhere probably got kicked in the teeth by a customer with over-sensitive reflexes, or a litigious shopper sued for injuries when a strong-handed salesperson squeezed their ankle a little too hard. These changes happen for a reason. But this robs the whole shoe buying experience of its charm, which is all it ever had going for it to begin with.

Why can’t I just go and quickly find a comfortable pair of shoes? If he were a real person, I’d do my shopping with Forrest Gump. He can spot a decent set anywhere.

Now that things have cooled off...

We need to talk about what happened last week.

I run the risk of splitting my audience here. When you write columns about salads, shoe shopping and beer, you’re not writing for Democrats or Republicans, Independents or Libertarians. You’re writing for people who want to relax and indulge in something frivolous. I’m not trying to change the world here, just make it a little more colorful and a little less bleak.

But when a country elects a man like Donald Trump to be President of the United States, I take it as a cue to break with tradition. Spoiler alert: I’m not a fan of this man. I am among the chorus of those who find him a racist, repugnant, boorish boob lacking in intellect and moral authority, a totalitarian bully who fuels prejudice and inspires hatred. People are panicking. I am one of them.

It’s unnecessary to delineate my reasons for feeling this way. You know all the arguments, the scandals, the history. No need to go into them now that the election is behind us. It would be redundant, and besides, it’s easy to be the Monday-morning quarterback and analyze why things went the way they did. It’s quite another to ponder what might come next, and if what I saw on November 9 was any indication, what comes next won’t be pretty.

A couple of years ago I made the decision to become a high school teacher -- a modest and attainable goal, and one that I’m still pursuing. The course I’m currently taking at the University of New England requires me to make bi-weekly trips to Biddeford High School to observe instruction in various English classes, and I was slated to visit the school the day after the election. Normally, when you walk into a school during peak hours, there’s a sort of baseline thrum that permeates the building, as though the act of learning in itself is capable of producing a tuning-fork-like frequency. On this day there was a silence you only hear in the vacuum of deep space.

The second class I observed was a sophomore honors class -- a small one. Seven students sat in a tight cluster of desks intimately arranged in a semi-circle; I sat among them as the teacher presided at the front. The students’ assignment over the past several classes had been to conduct an analysis of a stump speech made by several presidential candidates over the course of the nearly yearlong campaign. With the election results still fresh, and a lack of sleep still evident in the pouches under the kids’ eyes, the discussion took on new meaning. You don’t typically address political stances during school. Outside of a social studies or current events class, it’s not exactly appropriate. This day was different. Given the assignment, and the tension in the air, politics was inescapable.

Clearly in need of catharsis, and perhaps emboldened by the intimate class size, the students shared their thoughts on what had happened. Most of their opinions were expressed through the teenage smokescreen of uncertain giggles and lighthearted banter, which is about what you’d expect from kids who had yet to see their 16th birthday. One girl wasn’t feeling quite so breezy.

“My mom came into my room this morning sobbing,” she said. “She held my head in her arms and told me she didn’t want me to live in fear.” With that, tears of her own started forming at the corners of her eyes. She dabbed at them with a tissue as the girls on either side of her put a hand on her shoulder.

“It’s like rape culture is okay now,” she said.

I can’t begin to tell you how much that broke my heart.

Look, let me say a few things here that are obvious. The vast majority of Trump voters are not bad people. Most aren’t racist, or misogynist, or filled with hatred. And most of them certainly wouldn’t want to make a 15-year old girl cry and fear for her safety. Trump voters, as far as I can figure, were motivated principally by economic concerns. They believe -- rightly or wrongly -- that recovery from the financial crisis is sluggish, that their jobs are in jeopardy and their livelihoods in peril. I don’t agree with that assessment, but I understand the unease. Most adults have felt something like it at some point in our lives.

But here’s an important distinction: While most Trump voters are not racists or misogynists, they have elected a racist and a misogynist. It sends a message, to Americans and to the world, that this is who we are now -- a nation that willfully disrespects women, that judges people based on their country of origin or their sexual orientation, that rejects Muslims while providing safe haven to the intolerant and the spiteful. It sends the message that we are an ugly people motivated by bluster and bile.

Except I don’t think that’s who we really are. History is peppered with moments like this, when a man like Trump ascends to power despite our claims to logic and reason. It never lasts. Either the country falls, or it comes to its senses. This, I sincerely hope, is buffonery’s last gasp, a final violent thrashing before it dies forever. If we prove too strong to fall, we will heal. And hopefully Trump’s base will come to realize that brash indignity is not the mark of a leader, nor is it the ethos by which we should live our lives.

Mostly, I hope the girl in that honors class never feels she lives in a country that rejects her. Perhaps this will inspire her to act. And in the ensuing decades, when she’s fought successfully to create a better world, who knows? Her name may just appear on a ballot. My pen may just fill in the oval next to her name, and our democracy will only feel the 2016 election as a faint scar on its underbelly, faded and healed over with time.

That’s how this thing is supposed to work. I choose to believe -- and to hope -- that that is who we really are.

Troll patrol

In Norse mythology and Scandinavian folklore, a troll is a squat, humanoid creature who lives in a cave and hides beneath a bristly bush of coarse whiskers. They’re mischievous little suckers and are rarely helpful to humans, rather taking pleasure in seeing us upset or besieged by hardship. Kinda sounds like an evil Danny DeVito character, but nope. Trolls.

That’s in mythology. But trolls exist in real life. Oh yes. Click on any article on any news site, view any video on YouTube, and scroll down to the bottom of the page to see the comments section. There they are. Spouting racist remarks, engaging in wanton stupidity, and making controversial statements solely to upset people and send them into a frothing tizzy. Where once they lived under bridges, trolls now make their home on the internet; it’s their cave, and anonymity is their beard.

They must be stopped.

Take one comment posted under a recent news item about Hillary Clinton’s email woes. The article, entitled “Clinton calls on FBI to release ‘full and complete facts’ about email probe,” and posted on Yahoo, is about what you’d expect: A play-by-play of the newest revelations found in Wikileaks’ latest trove of formerly top-secret emails. News like this inspires a lot of conversation and heated debate, as it should. A robust conversation is one of the cornerstones on which the democracy is founded, and besides, tense debates make dinner with the family a lot more interesting. Without them, we’d just robotically shovel cold pasta salad into our mouths and try to pick out patterns on Grandma Betty’s ill-advised dining room wallpaper. “Look, I see an Egyptian pharaoh dunking a basketball into an aquarium filled with sea otters!” Ugh. Nobody needs that.

Online comments are a travesty, though, siphoning out any lingering traces of rational thought and replacing it with the kind of playground banter you’d expect from either third-grade delinquents or major-party presidential candidates. Here’s a comment on that article from a poster calling himself Basil: “LET'S SEE IS MICHELLE STANDS BY HR SIE WITH THIS MESS- CAN'T GO MUCH LOWER CAN YA.”

Oh, Basil. You had me at Caps Lock.

Let’s pick this one apart, shall we? First of all, this Basil fella has clearly never heard of punctuation. Now, maybe it’s that I’m studying to become an English teacher, or that I write for a living. Maybe it’s simply that, in a pinch, I have two brain cells left over in the ol’ noggin that I could rub together to start a fire. Whatever the case, the lack of any periods or commas immediately undermines any impact Basil is hoping to achieve here. Heck, I was feeling generous and gave him a period at the end, free of charge. One wonders if he was actually attempting a sentence or, in a fit or rage, got into a physical altercation with his keyboard. I’m a little ashamed to admit it, but I kind of hope the keyboard won.

Second, the typos. So many typos in such a short span. Everyone makes a typo once in awhile. Nobody’s perfect, except maybe Bruce Wayne and the guy from the Dos Equis ads. But nowadays, computers are pretty smart. They’re generous enough to underline our typos with red squiggly lines so gaudy their light could be used on runways to help land passenger jets. Even if Basil never developed the habit of proofreading -- which is a pretty safe bet -- seems to me he would have noticed that his sentence was festooned with more lights than a cruise ship. HR? SIE? These are not words. They are acronyms for human resources and Scottish Institute for Enterprise, respectively.

Third, his argument. There isn’t much there to chew on. Should I go into why? Forget it, I’m skipping this one.

There are two possible reasons why Basil’s sentence turned out the way it did. Either the last book he read was “Horton Hears a Who,” or he’s coming across this way intentionally, snickering as he lays the bait, and flat-out guffawing when otherwise normal people respond with the expected condescension and outrage. If it’s the former, well, one more reason why more cash needs to be pumped into the educational system.

If it’s the latter, he’s a troll.

Pernicious little creatures, these trolls. On the surface they seem fairly harmless, shouting into a million tiny black voids tucked under news items and videos of dogs catching frisbees. Avoiding them is a fairly simple task -- just skip over the comments section. They’re repositories for humanity’s worst instincts. But that’s easier said than done, especially if you’re a young person who spends any chunk of your free time online. The example I cited is fairly tame, someone who may or may not be trying to get a rise out of people with choreographed idiocy. Trolls can be meaner, more cutting. They can infiltrate a teenager’s Facebook feed and inundate them with disparaging remarks, leading to emotionally or physically destructive behavior. They can spread hatred and ignorance. They can kill.

Scandinavian lore describes trolls as kidnappers and usurpers of family farms and estates; they could only be struck down with lighting, as wielded by the god Thor. We need a Thor for these new trolls -- someone with a giant hammer who can lay the everloving smackdown on these cretins. At its best, the internet is a media and communications tool that makes our friends a little closer and the world a little smaller. At its worst, it’s a reflection of our ugliness and judgement, a means by which trolls can crawl out of the shadows and hijack any inclinations we have toward civility and discourse.

With the internet an open medium, it’s a difficult problem to address. So perhaps we need to literally summon Thor. Does anyone out there know how? A mythology-based video game from 1994 says you can summon Thor by hitting up, left, left, B, and A while the screen is paused. I’ll see if I can dig out my old Super Nintendo controller and make this happen.

The body politic

Pictured at the top of the flyer is a woman with her arm lovingly placed around the shoulders of a man dressed in plaid, both of them walking away from the camera into a dense forest speckled with red and golden leaves. Superimposed over the top of the photograph is a graphic that reads, “Maine has a long tradition of responsibility.”

Somewhere, some marketing professional deserves a raise and a cigar. This is how you hook people: A picturesque tableau and a vague slogan in a serious font, printed on a piece of industrial-strength cardboard that could withstand the shrapnel from an exploding landmine. The whole thing screams quality. Nicely done, team. You’ve got my attention.

The text at the bottom of the flyer began to seduce me, but I quickly put the brakes on. This was a political flyer, and I long ago vowed not to make decisions in the voting booth based on flyers, pamphlets, TV commercials or the advice of anyone named “Skip.” It’s just a bad idea. Allowing a political campaign to influence your vote is like turning to the Riddler for an impartial opinion of Batman.

In this case, the flyer was from the “Yes on 3” campaign. I’m leaning a certain way on this one, but haven’t yet made a final decision; better that I read up on the issue before pulling the metaphorical lever. Such being the case, I wouldn’t deign to tell you how you should cast your vote. I can only say that if you also received this flyer, and are thinking of filling in the oval next to “yes” because of it, it’s worth noting that Mr. and Mrs. Plaid likely got paid a butt-ton of money to appear in the photo. And they’re probably from Idaho.

Manipulation is the name of this game, and it works. It’s predicated on the idea that voters are basically lazy and will accept whatever information is easily available. That’s a pretty cynical worldview, but it’s accurate: The winners of these contests tend to be those who spend the most cash on advertising. If there’s a case to be made that corporate donors and “big money” should be expunged from politics, it’s that elections can be purchased, and they very often are.

Key to manipulation is the art of exaggerating things. Let’s conjure up a hypothetical scenario to see how this works. Assume Candidate A, Belinda Boogerbritches, once changed her religious affiliation to Protestant after moving to a predominantly Protestant community. Shady stuff, right? At around the same time, she gave an interview to a local newspaper in which she divulged that she’s not really a cat person. A fluff detail. Shouldn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

But Candidate B, Billy Blubberbuddy, smells fodder for an attack ad. One night, Susceptible Voter is at home watching “Celebrity Mustache Groomers” when the screen goes dark. A grainy, black-and-white photo of Belinda slowly fades into view. An ominous voice rumbles, “Belinda Boogerbritches says she’s a woman of faith. But did you know she’s only been a Protestant for three years? What was she before that? SOME say she worshipped … SATAN! And she’s on record as saying she hates animals. Is that who we want in Washington? A Satan-worshipping animal hater? Billy Blubberbuddy has been a Protestant all his life. And he loves animals so much” -- cute footage of Billy petting a puppy -- “that he once adopted 12 mangy golden retrievers FOR NO REASON AT ALL. Billy Blubberbuddy. Good with God, good with dogs, good for America.”

Truth has been stretched; baseless insinuations have been made. In two weeks, Susceptible Voter walks down to his local grange hall and colors in the circle next to Blubberbuddy’s name. Another seamless transaction.

In some ways, these tactics mirror those used by the fringe churches that revel in talk of damnation and hellfire. The sweeping hyperbole is almost identical. A couple of years ago I spotted a pamphlet left by my front door featuring a sketch of a smiling woman on the cover, with a caption reading that while Willomena was basically a happy person, she had decided to renounce God. Open the pamphlet and boom, there’s a drawing of poor Willomena as a skeleton engulfed in flames. The accompanying text warned of eternal suffering if she did not REPENT, and the screams issuing from her mouth looked like the storyboards for a Wes Craven gore-fest -- only Wes Craven movies are easier to watch on a full stomach.

Right or wrong (probably wrong), the church had a point to make, and made it by appealing to the emotions rather than the intellect. It offered more dire warnings than it did information. It’s hard to imagine this tactic working on all but the most desperate of souls, but that’s a problem for the church; political campaigns have the advantage of budgets, infrastructure, and good taste. Mr. and Mrs. Plaid are far more effective ambassadors for their cause than a mountain of charred bodies. Their effects on voters’ minds are more subliminal.

Which means we all need to be on guard. It’s been a wild, wacky campaign season, and it’s easier than ever to get caught up in the scandalous nature of what we watch and read: He’s a grabber! She’s power-hungry! He’s a dolt! She’s a crook! Around and around they go, and after a while it feels more like “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” than an actual election. We forget there are local races, local issues, and we become susceptible to misinformation because it’s oftentimes the only information we have.

So do your homework folks, ’cause this one matters. Oh, and while you’re at it, maybe invest in a plaid shirt. Apparently that’s all you need to star in your very own ad.