Mightier than the sword

My Christmas stocking last year was loaded with pens. There were other things, too -- chocolates, lottery tickets, assorted nic-nacs -- but pens ruled the day, enough of them to start a small stationary supply store. They were simultaneously a gift and a message: You will lose most of them, so here’s half the supply in the tri-state area.

It was a not-so-subtle reminder of how disposable pens really are. Even the good ones can be tossed without much thought. These were Pilot pens, the kind that write fluidly in the silkiest, blackest of ink, and a single package of them feels about as important and consequential as a bag of ball bearings. When it comes to writing implements, luxury costs about two bucks at Family Dollar.

Pens are convenient and frustrating at the same time -- convenient because they’re cheap and accessible, frustrating because they need to be cheap and accessible. Nobody ever finishes one. There are maybe seven times in the history of human civilization when someone has said, “Hey, look at that! My pen’s out of ink. Time to grab a new one.” The rest of the time they end up behind washing machines and under floor mats, used twice and then forgotten, like a travel toothbrush. If you collected all the ink from all the world’s forsaken, unused pens, you’d have enough to fill the Grand Canyon and still have plenty left over for three beer pitchers and a mid-sized kiddie pool.

We tolerate this waste because pens are almost considered a universal right, as much a part of our everyday lives as oxygen and cotton underwear. But that wasn’t always the case.

When I was in third grade our class took a field trip to a one-room schoolhouse that had been preserved for historical purposes. Also preserved was a woman of about 120 who play-acted the role of matronly school marm, teaching groups of 20th century children a few quaintly obsolete lessons in subjects such as penmanship and chicken feathering. During the penmanship lesson, the kids all sat at musty wooden desks and were handed the standard writing implement of the pre-industrial school student: The quill pen, a hollowed-out tube topped with a feather that leaked ink like a bulldog leaks drool.

Equipped with the quill, a bottle of ink and a sheet of paper, we practiced writing letters. The real lesson, of course, was how lucky we modern kids were compared to turn-of-the-century pupils, with their Frisbee-sized ink spills and lack of A-Team lunch boxes. After a crash course in using the quill -- dipping it in the ink bottle, getting just the right angle, using the precise amount of pressure -- the cockiest among us thought we were set. We began scratching out our letters: “Dear Mom and Dad…”

Ten words in, disaster. We’d press a little too hard, or slightly alter the angles of our wrists, and poof, our paper looked less like a missive to our loved ones and more like the Rorschach tests they administer to the psychologically distressed. After “Dear Mom and Dad,” dear Mom and Dad would have to interpret the rest. “Look honey, a caterpillar giving a backrub to Joseph Stalin!”

“Frustrated” is too weak a word for how we felt. Our desks looked like the aftermath of a mass octopus slaughter. The take-away was that the simple act of using a pen was once enormously complex, and I imagine that the people who wrote with them were far less cavalier about where they ended up. One didn’t find a trove of of discarded quills scattered about the family outhouse.

Mass production is what made them so forgettable. Walk into a Staples or an Office Depot sometime, and take a look at the pen section. It’s massive. Red ones, blue ones, black ones. Ballpoints, gel pens, rollerballs. Then there’s the extended pen family, the markers and highlighters and mechanical pencils. Collectible pens, pens that change colors, pens that vibrate so the writing is all squiggly. Before long they’ll come out with a smart pen that can surf the web and answer questions about obscure Roman emperors. The pen aisle is really more of a pen wall, a floor-to-ceiling monolith that could be used to protect a city in the event of rising sea levels. And when we lose one, we don’t even look for it. We grab the next one in line and quietly finish our doodle of Snoopy dribbling a basketball.

Pens were already a throw-away instrument by the time computers became ubiquitous, but the advent of widespread gadgetry cemented their status as cheap, ho-hum relics. Why bother with them when you can do everything on a shiny, factory-fresh tablet? But this belies their usefulness and functionality. I fancied myself something of a cartoonist when I was a child, and I have many memories of sitting at my fancy roll-top desk and sketching characters with my trusty Bic and a square of scrap paper. There were no apps in those days, hardly any computer games to speak of, but I never felt bereft -- the blank sheet on my blotter was an avatar for my imagination. All I needed to do was scratch out a few sure-handed lines and geometric shapes and I was deep in the thick of fantasy. Never mind that these fantasies typically consisted of nerdy skateboarders with exaggerated noses the size of cruise ships. It was enough.

Fuzzy feelings aside, it’s a good thing I got about a bazillion of them at Christmas. Unsurprisingly, there are about three left. By my calculations that should be just enough to finally finish that letter to Mom and Dad, assuming I decide not to add a bonus drawing of a guitar-playing dragon. And with some luck there won’t be an ink spill in sight.

Hit the road, Jack

Someone needs to come up with a more rigorous definition of “road trip,” because the internet is no help in the matter. Wikipedia, everyone’s favorite source for factually dubious information, describes road trips in vague terms, saying they typically occur over a “large land mass.” This is not useful. One could conceivably label Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as a large land mass, but few people would call it a road trip if you ran over him with a Cadillac Escalade.

Without a firm definition, it’s hard determine whether or not I’m actually a fan of road trips. I guess it would depend on their length. Journeys that take less than a day to complete -- “day trips,” if you will -- are fine. They can even be a lot of fun, depending on where you’re going and who’s keeping you company. Anything longer than that and you start thinking about hotels and driving in shifts and lots of other pesky annoyances. When the simple act of going to the bathroom becomes a complex logistical concern, that’s where I draw the line. Human civilization being as advanced as it is, I am definitely not OK with peeing behind a roadside cactus.

If that makes me a weenie, I’m at peace with that.

Roads trips have a certain aura of romanticism, I’ll give ’em that much. Whether this is due to Hollywood portrayals or people’s actual experiences is hard to tell. Movies like “Thelma and Louise,” “Little Miss Sunshine” and “Logan” certainly make them seem enticing, but then again you never see Thelma disentangle herself from the car after 12 hours to massage her tingling butt cheeks. Logan never walks around in circles wincing because his leg’s been asleep since Tulsa.

A cowboy I’m not. In the old west, hardscrabble journeymen would spend days on horseback living on nothing more than loose tobacco and moonshine whiskey (or as I call it, the Humphrey Bogart diet). Heck, even before that era, folks would plod along endless stretches of country in stagecoaches and horse-drawn carriages, sweating mercilessly into their bonnets and leather chaps, bottoms sore from wooden benches. People today are soft -- and by people, I mean me. I won’t even drive to work without a functioning heater and a bottle of vanilla-flavored seltzer water.

Certain prerequisites have to be met in order for me to undertake any sort of prolonged journey, and chief among them is an attractive destination. I’m not scrunching my 6’4” frame into a Hyundai Accent for an entire day to see a ventriloquist perform at a rural community college. Acceptable endgames for road trips include family visits, epic concerts, extended stays in exotic cities, or a closed-door meeting with a magic genie to discuss the terms of my three wishes. Anything short of that and I’m staying home and reading X-Men comics.

Road trips are most useful when you’re covering a distance too short for an airline and too long for a bicycle. About 10 years ago a group of friends and I decided to spend a few days in Montreal, structuring this excursion around a rock concert because we’re all massive dorks. It took roughly nine hours to get there, and with six of us crammed into a van, that was about my limit. The company itself was great -- I’m lucky to hang with a good bunch -- but what seemed like a comfortable seat at the outset slowly became a Medieval torture device, the cushions sinking their way into my aching glutes like a nickel into a wad of Silly Putty. By the time we stopped off at a roadside burger joint for our first restroom break, my body was chair-shaped and useless, folded in two in a sinister human origami experiment. I wonder how many travelers at the pit stop saw my hunched-over frame and thought I was looking for a missing contact lens.

Height was an issue, too, because with that many people in the van I had to twist and writhe myself into a position that wouldn’t be intrusive to other human beings. While not as bad as sitting in the middle seat on a plane, it still created issues, and surely contributed to my road-related aches and pains. There’s a rough mathematical formula that can illustrate the relationship between freakish height and road trip pain: Height times duration divided by vehicle equals ouch.

Survival in these situations is largely dependent on preparation -- which means you should have plenty of gas, money and food. Especially food, and the junkier the better. I try (and often fail) to avoid junk food, but long road trips are the reason why potato chips, Cheetos and Twizzlers were invented to begin with, and if you’re not chomping on something-or-other while the exit signs whiz past, you run the risk of losing your freakin’ mind. Road trip games are mostly tedious and the best music in the world is only enjoyable for so long, but bring a cannister of kettle corn and some pickled sausages and you may just make it to Newark with your sanity intact. Of course there’s still the question of why you feel compelled to drive to Newark, but hey, if you’ve got family in the New Jersey mafia, that’s your business.

Road trip season is coming, and fast. Soon I’ll be driving down Route 1 and grinding my teeth in deadlock traffic as travelers from Quebec, Massachusetts and various Martian space colonies all fight for space at beaches and water parks, restaurants and summer bungalows. Few annoyances aggravate me more than car-clogged roadways, but this year my plan is to focus on this thought: Each car contains a story. The family of four screaming through Saco in their Virginia-plated Mazda made an epic trip for tangible reasons. And for all I know, they’ve made all the right moves -- the cash, the fuel, the Pringles in their oblong tennis-ball cans. Are they visiting grandma? Do they have a summer home in Camp Ellis? Ah, the allure of the unsolvable mystery.

One of these days I may make a trek myself, but I need a destination first. And gummy sharks. Mostly gummy sharks.

Live free and die Bard

Seeing someone up on a stage getting whacked on the noggin with a giant foam sword sure did bring back memories.

I was shadowing a high school English teacher recently, picking up some tips to the profession, and a very useful piece of intel I gleaned is that kids like to get out of the classroom. Seems sensible enough. I like classrooms myself -- the smell of books, the crummy desks with 20-year-old “Ozzy Rulez” inscriptions in the tired wood -- but a change of scenery is nice every now and then. And when your class is reading lines from “Romeo and Juliet,” moving on down to the theater makes a lot of sense.

Most of the students in the\is teacher’s freshmen class are not thespians (although some should be). But that didn’t matter. They had copies of a play they seemed to be invested in, and they had foam swords the size of telephone poles. If you can’t have fun with those ingredients, then either you’re not trying hard enough or you’re deep at the bottom of a months-long coma. Probably from getting clocked upside the cranium.

Watching the kids prance about the stage seemed to make time fold in on itself; these kinds of moments happen in life occasionally. One minute you’re you, carrying with you the many decades of baggage that go along with that, and the next you see something that brings you back to a specific moment or era of your life. If this were a TV show or YouTube video, now would be the time when the screen gets all wavy and we flash to an actor playing 17-year-old Jeff. Since we’re working without visual effects, just picture a gangly nerd with Coke-bottle glasses and thin strings of hair-like material dangling from his head. I really should have worn more hats.

It was an era in which “Seinfeld” was still airing original episodes, people rented movies at Blockbuster and played them on their VCRs, and “facebook” meant falling asleep and drooling on your loaned copy of “Fahrenheit 451.” I was a junior and desperately in need of an identity. As a freshman I had tried playing football, but was so abysmally bad at it that’d I’d spend most of our games drinking Gatorade on the sideline and daydreaming about what changes I would make to the Batmobile. (We’ve never seen Batman driving around with rumbling bass. Add some subwoofers, holmes!)

Then a girl approached me. Many of my best and worst life decisions have been made because a girl approached me. This particular girl gave me a script she had written for the student-penned one-act play competition that was coming up; hosted over two nights, the “one-acts,” as they were known, were basically a series of vignettes that allowed the kids full creative control, which usually meant they stunk like elephant farts. The girl wanted me to fill a small part in her one-act, an old west period piece in which I’d play the saloon keeper. I accepted because she was pretty. Yes, I was quite lame.

My weakness for long eyelashes, however, ultimately resulted in a non-girl-related epiphany. To that point I’d never given a thought to performing onstage. Why would I? I was a shy kid, and shy kids, I reckoned, belonged in basements with their pizza box footrests and their endless cases of Diet Dr. Pepper. But shyness often stems from a fear of how others will judge or perceive you. When you’re pretending you’re someone else, your performance can be judged, sure, but you can’t be judged on the basis of who you are -- because who you are is nowhere in sight. That first night at the one-acts, I wasn’t Jeff Lagasse, awkward teenager with an early-onset combover. I was Nameless Saloon Keeper, a man with a drawl who poured whiskey and said things like “y’all.” As long as I was prepared and knew my lines, I could actually get up in front of crowds and feel somewhat comfortable. That was a huge revelation.

It’s hard to pinpoint why high school ranks so consistently on people’s “best of” and “worst of” lists when they look back on their lives. Maybe it has something to do with the time of life in which it occurs, or the neat four-year box it comes in, a container that makes it easy to reference. Ultimately I think it has to do with the lessons that are learned, and I’m not talking about reading, writing and ‘rithmetic. I mean life lessons, those moments when you discover the boundaries of who you are. Or, if you’re lucky, when you discover you have no boundaries at all.

Theater taught me a lot of those kinds of lessons. It also taught me smaller ones, like how skin-tight leggings on hairy male legs make them look like headless ferrets. Or how difficult it is to maintain a Southern accent for two hours without feeling the need to play a banjo. Or how you should never try to sing a high note after eating lots of cheese.

Watching the freshmen run through their lines the other day, I couldn’t help but wonder if one of them would be inspired to do a school play, maybe trade in their foam sword for a plastic one. What wonders await them: the long rehearsals, the heady sound of applause, the itch of cheap wigs manufactured during the Korean War. I hope at least one of those kids gets to experience that. And I hope the rest find their equivalent, because getting to place those high school years on your “best of” list is an accomplishment that endures even after some of the other ones have faded. Finally belching out “America the Beautiful” in its entirety feels great at the time, but man, what a fleeting victory that is.

My only regret about one-acts is that I didn’t write my own. Probably just as well, though. The whole plot would have consisted of two comic book nerds arguing over whether the Batmobile should have racing stripes.

Age against the machine

People have told me I shouldn’t complain about getting older. “You’re young!” they say. “Wait another 30 years and then start moaning.” I get what they’re saying, but I look at it this way: If I were playing football in the NFL, the analysts would be talking about how I’m slowing down, how my reflexes aren’t what they used to be, how I tend to break wind whenever I sit down. So I say griping about it is fair game.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I am not, in fact, an NFL player. The most athletic thing I’ve ever done is whacked my noggin on my elementary school’s jungle gym.

I do, however, lead a fairly active lifestyle, and it’s a good thing, because frankly if I didn’t get some regular cardio the stairs at my work would literally kill me. They’d find me curled up with my thumb in my mouth and my other hand clutching a half-eaten bag of bacon bits.

When you engage in regular exercise you’re constantly bumping against the upper limits of what you can achieve physically, and I’m pretty sure this makes you more aware of how age is affecting you. A dude my age whose fitness routine consists of sucking down frozen yogurt and unfiltered Winstons in front of “The Late Show” might not notice getting older, because his lifestyle generally doesn’t require him to lift anything heavier than his orange tabby cat. Apparently this fictional man has an orange tabby cat.

Folks who are somewhat active very quickly notice that certain tasks have become more difficult, seemingly overnight. Here’s an example to chew on.

Around 2005 I decided I was getting too tubby. When I lifted my hands above my head my shirt would lift up to reveal a protruding belly that looked like a giant gob of Silly Putty melting in the desert sun. Inspired to lose weight, I started walking. A lot. Every day, rain or shine, I’d chug up the steepest hills I could find, dash across intersections with puma-like urgency, and get my heart pumping so fast it could be used to power a small electric clock. The more weight I lost and the stronger my leg muscles got, the faster I could walk, and after years of doing this my gait looked like the double-time movements of those old baseball players in 1930s newsreels. It was pretty bananas.

This routine was probably at least half insane, but it came with some health benefits. My wind was incredible, and physically I felt like I could perform any task. Do a high-jump over a chain-link fence? No sweat. Perform a triple somersault over a pit teeming with flesh-eating crocodiles? Piece of cake.

Flash forward to the present day and these walks have started to change. Roughly halfway through my two-mile route I now find myself thinking, “Well, I could finish my walk, or I could call a cab and be home watching ‘Wheel of Fortune’ in about 15 minutes.” It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s coming. And when it does, the sportscasters in the booth will say, “Remember when Jeff wasn’t such a decrepit old fart? Boy, those were the days.”

Boy, they sure were.

Then there was the last blizzard of the season, mere weeks ago. For the past decade-plus I’ve used blizzards and snowstorms as opportunities to go on truncated walks, partly for the challenge and partly because I have a form of mental illness that should probably be treated with pitcher-sized cocktails of high-test pharmaceuticals. Trudging through streets buried under ankle-deep snow has always given me the illusion of visiting an alien planet -- an uninhabited world totally bereft of cars, people or those aggressive little dogs the size of Tonka trucks who pee on the sidewalk. You see your neighborhood very differently when you’re out in these conditions. Which is great, if you’re 25.

If you’re not, it’s probably time to donate your ski pants to Goodwill. I confidently ventured out into that churning tempest, and for the first 20 minutes or so, I was OK. The accumulating snow on my jacket made me look alarmingly like a giant marshmallow Peep, but I was holding out admirably -- until I saw the car.

At a T-intersection, this was. A peach-colored sedan had turned from a highly-traveled, freshly-paved road onto a residential street that was hidden under two tons of wet powder. Stuck in mid-turn, the sedan’s front wheels spun helplessly, and the driver’s head was cupped in the palms of her hands in frustration. Being the only person in sight in the middle of a late-winter rager -- and being the valiant hero-type -- I offered to give her a push. Someone want to give me a pat on the back? I can’t seem to reach.

Twenty minutes and several hard shoves later, and the car was finally unstuck and on its way. But my body paid the price. The muscles in my lower back were screaming so loudly I could practically hear them. “Dude!” they yelled. “Would you stop it, already? You can miss a walk once in awhile, you boneheaded blunderbuss! Next time there’s a hint of frost just heat up some cocoa, pull up Netflix and be done with it.” My back muscles are apparently quite loquacious.

Given these developments, no, I don’t think I’ll wait 30 years to start whining about age. Right about now feels right. Assuming this is a preview of things to come, I need to get a head start on my cantankerous griping. If I want to get really good at being an old crank, I’m going to need the practice.