Junk food in the trunk, dude

Some days are just so awful they can only be fixed with bacon.

On these regrettable days, these bacon-as-comfort-food days, it feels as though a lot of hard work is being erased. I try to stick to a decent diet, I really do, and when I can string together a few days of dietary discipline I start feeling pretty damn good about myself -- my energy is higher, or so I imagine, and I stop checking the underside of my jaw for signs of double-chinnage. These are the days I feel invincible, like I could strap on my cleats, dash 40 yards and catch a perfect Tom Brady spiral in stride. With my butterfingers I’d probably catch it right in the teeth, but still.

When disaster strikes it all comes crashing down. The willpower, the fortitude, gone, poof, scattered confetti-like into the wind. Suddenly the bananas and pistachios in my kitchen look less appealing, the oranges and sunflower seeds downright repellant. Dreams of double-decker beef patties buzz about my head like fruit flies. And sure enough, when I allow myself to get a little naughty, I really do feel better -- for about a minute. Then I start checking for extra chins again.

They call this “comfort food.” More like “diabolical food.”

It’s amazing how food and stress are so intimately linked. You adopt a healthy diet -- trading in cookies for apples, ice cream for fruit smoothies -- and you actually can feel your stress evaporating with time, perhaps because your body doesn’t have to chug along with its veins clogged by meat grease and lard. But encounter some form of intense external stress, like a looming deadline or some dour family news, and the food that makes you feel better isn’t the kale and carrots and lean chicken to which you’ve grown accustomed. No, it takes a ball of fried pork topped with whipped cream and M&Ms to hit the ol’ reset button.

Years ago I came face-to-face with the psychologically soothing powers of food-like sludge. I had recently dropped a significant amount of weight, enough to fill several of the sandbags they use to keep rivers at bay during flood season, and was feeling pretty good about myself. Then a tragedy struck my tightly-knit group of friends, the kind that blots out everything else for a while. The switch in my diet was immediate, from fat-free this and low-calorie that to whole Toblerone bars and giant pizzas with cheese stuffed in the crust. It seemed like my only recourse. And it sort of worked, at least for a little while, until my pants once again started cutting off blood flow to my lower extremities. That was when I knew it was time to switch back to carrots.

Everyone links food to stress in their own unique way; some people get frazzled and stop eating altogether. My friend “Bertha” is like this. You can tell how smoothly her life is going at any given moment by how frequently she wears cut-off shirts that bare her midriff. A wafish sliver of a person, Bertha doesn’t have much wiggle room weight loss-wise. She could spend a month consuming nothing but peanut butter cups and Cheez Whiz and still shimmy through a set of prison bars. That’s why I root for her life to go well: When it doesn’t, I worry that she’ll evaporate like morning dew.

Others, like me, find solace at the bottom of a Skittles box. And like a stereotype of a pregnant woman, I’m attracted to bizarre food combinations. I once scooped myself a towering pile of frozen Cool Whip (justifying it by telling myself, “Hey, at least it’s not ice cream!”), and decided it would be far too bland without a little something extra. Lucky for me -- and unlucky for my love handles -- I had a bag of gummy bears handy. Whipped cream and gummy bears: It seems astounding to me now, but at one point in my life this constituted a legitimate late-night snack. It couldn’t have been more unhealthy if I’d topped it off with cigarettes and Elmer’s glue.

Nothing good comes from stress eating. Sure, you experience a momentary distraction from your woes, but once the moment passes you’re left with your original troubles plus a stomach ache from all those peanut butter-covered pretzels. The trick is to rid your home of junk food. This is a good practice generally as it encourages healthful eating, but for the stress eater it has the added benefit of ensuring you don’t bury your hardships under a mound of sugar. It’s one thing to fret over your workload, quite another to fret while your gastrointestinal system tries to process that eighth cream-filled doughnut.

My mother always taught me never to waste food, so on some level it feels wrong to grab fistfuls of cereal bars and cans of whipped cream and just toss them out the window. But it’s a necessary step toward eliminating gut-busting snack options. The only edibles in my home that currently quality as snack food are fruits, whole grain cereal and air-popped popcorn, none of which have been known to spur obesity unless they’re doused in a half-cup of melted butter. While butter would up the pleasure factor considerably -- butter makes everything better -- that’s been ousted, too. Its replacement? Butter-flavored cooking spray, which is a nice, zero-calorie stand-in that prevents me from curling into a fetal position and weeping out of guilt and shame. Now I only reach those epic lows after breaking down and reading celebrity gossip on TMZ.

Despite all that, some days simply call for bacon. This is what take-out restaurants and sandwich joints are for. Paradoxically, keeping a junk-free home makes junk all the more pleasurable -- like a diamond, the rarity of a greasy hunk of meat makes it shine all the more.

Crash course

Here’s a big dose of maudlin for you: I’m going to die in a car someday.

Full disclosure compels me to confirm that, no, I am not Nostradamus, nor do I have the kind of chilling visions that would make me a character in a bland network primetime drama. If I can avoid automotive catastrophe (and if the world doesn’t blow up soon), I’d like to see old age, and die peacefully in a bed clutching a Batman pillow. Doesn’t seem like much to ask.

What fills me with dread is my history of absurd car accidents. Four times the car I’ve been driving has been totaled -- and I’m using the passive voice because, it’s worth noting, I was responsible for only one of those crashes. And it was stupid. I was inching forward at a stoplight, my foot missed the brake, and I love-tapped the SUV in front of me, leaving the occupants unharmed but totaling my crummy Hyundai because Hyundais are tin cans. I would have been safer driving one of the bumper cars from Funtown.

The other three times, disaster found me. I’m a bit of a wreck magnet.

If you’ve been in one, you know what a sickening feeling it is. A typical car accident unfolds in stages, each more stomach-churning than the last. In many instances, Stage 1 occurs before the collision even takes place; as two cars vector toward each other, the reality of what’s about to happen starts to sink in, and you watch the events unfold in a kind of dreamlike stupor, not unlike the soupy state of consciousness that follows waking up in the night to pee. Human brains are marvels of split-second scenario planning, and they start flipping through possible outcomes -- He’ll miss me at the last second! He’ll clip me, it won’t be that bad! The rapture will come and I’ll just disappear! -- before whammo, your rear bumper is toast and one of your wheels is barreling down the road toward a Burger King.

Even after the crash happens there’s a brief moment of denial. You check yourself for injuries, find none, and then a part of your brain starts whispering, “Hey, you imagined the whole thing. Bad daydream, that’s all. If you keep driving you can still make the 7 o’clock showing of ‘Spider-Man.’” Then you exit the car and survey the damage, and it looks like the giant from Jack and the Beanstalk fame was just playing soccer with your sedan. Reality asserts itself at this point, and depending on your personality you may have a brief flash to something comforting. A favorite blankie from when you were 4, perhaps. That’s when a bunch of annoying adult stuff ensues.

Making sure people are OK is the number one priority, of course. Injury is the one thing that can make this awful situation exponentially worse. Let’s say you lucked out and everybody’s fine, no sprains, no broken bones, no limbs corkscrewed around the rosary dangling from the rearview mirror. At this point, thoughts turn to the exchange of insurance information, and as soon as that happens it is completely appropriate to freak out and start weeping like a toddler with a skinned knee. Most people will tell you it’s best to remain calm, keep a level head. But you know what? You just survived the impact of two 3,000 lb. hunks of metal and plastic. This is one of those life moments when a small tantrum should be considered acceptable. Other such moments include the death of a loved one and watching your first Pauly Shore movie.

If it’s a fender-bender, you can drive on home and stew privately, hoping your insurance covers repairs to the butt-shaped dent on your passenger side door. In a total wreck situation, you’re stuck with the added indignity of having to grab a ride, all while your beloved Honda is towed to its grave by some bearded dude named Russ. During my latest brush with car-destroying misfortune, I had to borrow my mother’s car -- try feeling like a man doing that -- and simultaneously juggle car shopping and insurance company stuff. It made me pine for the simple days of horse-and-buggy transportation: Your wooden wheel broke, you replaced it. Your horse died or got sick, you stole one from an evil whiskey-swilling desperado. You even got a nice protein-packed meal in the bargain.

Cars, for all their promise of freedom and adventure, can be a massive headache. Not often, and not usually to an unreasonable degree. But sometimes. A lot of this is due to user error --  certainly I was a tool for missing the brake entirely, and in the three accidents in which I was a victim, “error” is the mildest word to describe what happened. Every once in awhile, something happens to remind you of just how unnatural an automobile actually is. They’re massive piles of heavy materials traveling at speeds that can’t be attained by the fastest of animals, not even a cheetah who’s high on angel dust. Bad things are bound to happen, and frequently do.

Given my uncanny ability to be in the wrong place at the wrong time (with the wrong foot), it’s reasonable to surmise that one of these accidents will be the Big One. It’s disappointing realizing that my likelihood of dying in a crash is higher than, say, dying honorably while defending the city from a band of evil ninjas. At least the latter would make me a legend, or at the very least make for an epic obituary.

But at least there’s good news on the horizon: Google is trying to perfect its driverless cars, and if they’re as safe as they say, I may live to an old age yet. That means I’ll need a Batman pillow, and I’m thinking it’s safer to just order one on Amazon; the less time I spend on the road, the better.

Divide and conquer

Big government versus small government. Left versus right. King Kong versus Godzilla. Two of these conflicts have plagued the country since its inception. The third is downright hilarious, especially if you’ve been up for three days chugging Jolt cola.

There are a lot of things that divide us these days, not least of all a polarizing president who looks like an orangutan covered in tabasco sauce. But even before President Tweet barged into office with arms swinging and mouth bloviating, the question of how strong the federal government should be has been a hot-button issue of sorts, a topic you’re likely to avoid at Thanksgiving unless you prefer your family gatherings to end in a curse-laden bare-knuckle brawl. Part of our national identity has always entailed argument over what our identity should be.

Some of us seem to be awakening to this for the first time; all you hear now from talking heads and Facebook warriors is how divided we are, how polarized our politics have become. Really, though, the rifts have been there all along. It’s just that they’re under a digital microscope now, their dimensions warped and exaggerated by the curvature of the glass.

After 240-plus years of this stuff, you start to wonder if these differences can be resolved at all.

Ask the Founders what they think of the pace and volume of modern political discourse and they’d likely soil their pantaloons, their powdered wigs spinning in a Tasmanian Devil-like blur. After spending about a decade getting him up to speed on technological developments -- “Wait, so we’ve walked on the moon? And I can show the entire world a picture of my cat’s bowel movements?” -- I can see John Adams crawling back into his casket with a half-muttered “Forget this.” Because while the big-government-versus-small-government debate is as old as the Liberty Bell itself, our approach to discussing our differences has changed dramatically. And not for the better.

Jefferson was a small government guy. Were he alive today he may well align himself with the libertarians, those get-off-my-lawn conservatives who’d prefer to freewheel it on the lip of anarchy, with their legal drugs and cowboy stares. He’d watch Tucker Carlon and listen to Johnny Cash. He’d grow his own weed.

Washington was interesting in that he abhorred the very idea of political parties, but if he were forced to choose, he’d likely be a big government guy; he certainly was during the Revolution, when a nonexistent federal infrastructure made it almost impossible for him to get weapons for his troops. Were he alive today, he’d watch Rachel Maddow and listen to Dave Matthews Band. He’d buy his weed from Jefferson.

They fought over this stuff all the time, those two, but they did it with a civility and tact that are now as extinct as Pauly Shore’s acting career. In the 1780s, even the most vicious of political disputes were hashed out with logical, reasoned discourse. In our current age, even issues such as who can use what bathroom are settled in a manner better suited to professional wrestling. Indeed, our current president once participated in a professional wrestling match himself; perhaps that’s ultimately how he intends on governing. I can see it now: Elizabeth Warren wants to fund Planned Parenthood, Ted Cruz doesn’t, and they settle their differences in a steel cage match by pelting each other repeatedly with metal folding chairs. No facts, no debate, no patience with another’s point of view. Just piledriver after piledriver, and oh, how the foam fingers will fly.

Sure, there have been fisticuffs in Congress before. In 1856, South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks walked up to Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner right in the Senate chamber and beat him with a walking cane. (He apparently then went on to pin Sumner for a three-count to reclaim the Intercontinental Championship.)

But from the mid-20th century forward, things were relatively peaceful in the capitol, save for the odd Watergate or two. This suggested to many -- or at least it suggested to me -- that we had crossed some sort of threshold, maturing beyond the frightening physicality of frontier politics and becoming something better, more grown-up. Something of which Washington and Jefferson would have been proud.

That matters have regressed to pre-Civil War levels suggests one of two things: Either this stuff is cyclical, or we’re headed for a long and painful decline.

Maybe it was inevitable. Big versus small, left versus right: They’re baked into the pie, and so it’s conceivable we can never fully extricate ourselves from that existential conflict. There are other factors at play -- the decline of American education, the spread of technology, an increasing general distrust in institutions -- but the base culprit is our very DNA. That makes finding any prescriptive solutions darn near impossible.

But with the White House and Capitol Hill in chaos, it’s increasingly clear that the solutions have to come from us. It starts with being engaged and informed. It starts with caring. These are attributes in depressingly short supply these days, but the rise and fall of public engagement is never a straight line; there are peaks and valleys, and I still hold out hope -- possibly against my better judgement -- that we’ll be hitting a peak soon. I’ve never been a flag-waiver, or someone who tears up during the National Anthem, but this is my home, and I want what’s best for it. I think most of us do, and so if there’s hope of wrangling ourselves out of this sinkhole, it lies in our shared belief that we can be more than what the past year and a half has made us. We can be better. We have to be.

Failing that we can always make a batch of popcorn and watch King Kong and Godzilla maul the crap out of each other. If we can’t make reality better, Plan B is to escape it entirely.

Jibber jabber

“Hot enough for ya?”

If you want to chip away a little at my soul, that’s probably the question you want to ask me.

There’s small talk, and then there’s minuscule talk. I’ve never been good at it. There are people who can carry on an entire conversation sticking only to topics like weather, kids and sports, and they’ll gab merrily about all three without actually exchanging anything of substance. It’s a pretty admirable skillset, really, a gift unto itself. My mother has it. My father can fake it. But somehow it skipped a generation, and so when someone corners me in an elevator and tells me it’s a real scorcher out there, I never know exactly what to say. When someone states the obvious -- “Dogs sure do bark, don’t they?” -- it doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for creativity.

Elevator awkwardness is kind of my forte. And I’m in elevators almost every day, so the fact that this has become an ongoing issue is just one more in a long string of life’s absurdities. Generally, my strategy when I stand next to someone in an elevator is to stare straight ahead and say nothing, sometimes glancing around as though blank walls are somehow immensely interesting. Movements like this are calculated to make me come across as super casual and easy-going. Every so often, though, the person standing next to me ventures to say something, and this is when I start to freak out a little and wish I had the power of invisibility, bestowed to me during some implausible comic book scenario involving an asteroid and a vat of chemicals.

“Sure is windy today, isn’t it?”

As stock conversation-starters go, that one’s pretty common. The possible responses to it are pretty stock, as well. “Yup, sure is.” “Yes, indeed.” “Yeah, it’s pretty bad today.” “Yesterday was so much nicer!”

Society has collectively decided that these are things we all must say to each other. A restless lot, humans aren’t content to be silent when trapped in confined spaces with strangers. So we have our scripts, the familiar dialogue flowing from our tongues with the practiced precision of stage actors. That’s the part I can’t wrap my head around. If we have nothing substantive to say to each other, why say anything at all? There’s no reason a quiet elevator should be uncomfortable, unless of course the person standing next to you is muttering to himself about decades-old government conspiracies. In that scenario it might be prudent to mentally review the judo moves you learned in your last self-defense class.

If these moments of forced conversation were limited to elevators, that wouldn’t be so bad. Without the prospect of social fatigue, I can almost see myself sucking up the willpower to say things like “It’s soooo hot, but at least it’s not snowing!” Unfortunately -- for me, anyway -- we find ourselves in these kinds of situations constantly. Sometimes we’re waiting for a receptionist to check someone’s availability, and we cut through a few dead seconds with forced pablum about the paint-by-numbers art on the walls. Or we’re on a professional call and have to wait for someone else to join the line, and we end up jawing with some PR guy in Virginia about what kind of trees they have there.

Or we’re walking down a hall with someone who’s escorting us to a room. These moments are the worst. You’re ambling along trying to think of something to say, but the only thing you and your escort have in common is the hall itself, so a lot of times you make comments so inane you can’t believe they came out of your mouth. “Wow, this is some really nice carpeting.” Ugh. It’s the conversational equivalent of elevator music.

At this point it may be tempting to peg me as standoffish, and I’ll admit to a certain streak of misanthropy. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. I enjoy the company of friends. I revel in long, deep-diving conversations about politics and science, and can riff on inane, esoteric subjects like art-house films and the relative merits of books versus e-readers. Feed me a nerdy topic, like which actor plays the best Batman, and I’ll geek out so long and hard you’ll be rooting around in your saddlebag for a muzzle to shut me the hell up. Like anyone, I’ve got my comfort zones; meet me in one and I’ll come across as normal, or at least normal-adjacent, notwithstanding my tendency to avoid eye contact and relate everything back to Metallica.

Empty pockets of aimless chatter are what get my teeth grinding. If a social moment is pregnant with the expectation of speech, I find it far more effective to give someone a personal compliment; this avoids generic chit-chat in favor of something specific and tangible. Usually it’s not too hard to find something to compliment, and occasionally you’re served up a hanging slider and can belt it into the cheap seats. One time I saw somebody wearing a Rush T-shirt -- Rush is one of the greatest and geekiest rock bands of all time -- and simply said “Nice shirt.” It was a throwaway comment and not at all original, but it started off quite the nerdy conversation about favorite albums, favorite eras, and whether singer Geddy Lee’s high-pitched squeal could in fact shatter an opera glass. Our shared nerdiness bonded us. That’s a conversation with a stranger I can get behind.

Just my luck that I don’t get to make the rules. Society has its norms, and I risk being a pariah if I don’t yield to them -- to some degree. But I reserve the right to salvage what’s left of my sanity, and that means drawing the line at elevators. The best elevator is one that’s empty. In a quiet box, cut off from the world, I can almost find peace.