Working out the Bugs

All right. So I have to drag a friend into this with me.

As always, names will be changed to protect the not-so-innocent. Let’s call her “Mania,” after the Greek goddess that, in myth, helped rule the underworld and personified insanity. Usually I choose an appellation far more benign, but in this case, Mania’s transgression is so grievous, so heinous and villainous and other words that end in -ous, that I had to give her the nastiest moniker possible without outright cursing.

The crime? Talking smack about Bugs Bunny.

The brazenness! The unmitigated gall! Obviously, Mania is out of her gourde.

Now, if you follow my babblings closely – you glutton for weirdness, you – you’ll notice that I’m something of a man-child. In most outward appearances, I seem to be a man. I shave, I pay bills, and I grunt my approval when I bite into a particularly delicious slice of pie. Those are pretty much the prerequisites for admittance into the club, aside from a willingness to scratch one’s self at inappropriate times, like when you’re a groomsman standing at the altar and your buddy’s making his vows. I still owe the wedding photographer a nice steak dinner for that one.

But beneath the veneer of adulthood there lurks the heart of an adolescent. A childish, childish adolescent. This is what happens when you have a hard time letting go of certain things, like Spaghetti O’s and the Ninja Turtles. Although, to be fair, both of those things are extremely awesome.

I consider myself something of a Looney Tunes aficionado, which is like being a wine aficionado, only it results in way fewer second dates. Bugs was always the man, the Michael Jordan of cartoon rabbits. He was, admittedly, kind of a schmuck, but if you’re a cartoon character or a U.S. Senator, schmuckiness is actually an asset. What you want, in any well-constructed seven-minute cartoon, is a troublemaker, someone who can get the ball rolling without a whole lot of preamble. This isn’t King Lear in three acts; this is a pie in the face, a wabbit hunt, and then some kind of comical explosion, all in the time it takes to make a blueberry waffle. That requires an instigator. And, for the creators, probably a lot of beer.

Bugs is the perfect catalyst, because everything he does is for his own amusement. Again, that plays to the whole putz factor, but there’s something admirable about it, too; it gives him a laissez-faire comportment that I think most of us wish we had, to an extent. Not that we actively want to be jerks, necessarily – we can’t all be Tom Cruise. (Oh, snap! Dated reference!) But there’s something attractive about passive confidence, the ability to be an unimpassioned observer to someone else’s farcical follies. It’s possible I’ve given this way too much thought.

Who else, in the Looney Tunes universe, has that Bond-like smirk and swagger? Certainly not Porky Pig. If Mania wanted to rip into a cartoon character, she should have chosen this timid, pantsless priss. Porky’s claim to fame, of course, is the endearing stutter, which I’ll admit is kind of cute. But you don’t base an entire body of work on a single personality quirk, unless you’re Ray Romano, in which case you make your living being slightly dopey. The trouble with Porky is that he’s just too nice. I didn’t tune into The Bugs Bunny & Tweety Show on Saturday mornings to watch a stuttering pig being polite. Maybe that would fly in Canada, oinker, but this is ‘merica. We require a little rudeness from our cartoons.

Years ago, in college, a friend of mine gave me grief for preferring Bugs over characters like Wile E. Coyote and Daffy Duck, who apparently have more street cred, like they’re underground rappers or something. The argument was that Bugs is a figurehead, a mascot of sorts, and is therefore bland and lame. But I can prove he’s not; because if Bugs were real, and caught wind of this silly college boy’s disparaging remarks, he’d burrow a tunnel to Maine (taking an ever-important left turn at Albuquerque), light a firecracker under that wabbit-hater’s butt, and watch as he’s launched into the stratosphere, yelping like a ticklish yodeler. Then he’d munch on a carrot and have Anti-Bugs Boy’s girlfriend fan him with palm fronds. If that isn’t hard scientific proof of Bugs’ greatness, then may an Acme anvil squash me into a human accordion.

Clearly I need to find more important things to get bent out of shape about.

As trivial as this disagreement is, though, I’m caught up in a powerful compulsion to convince Mania of the wabbit’s worthiness. This means one of two things: Either I’m overly defensive of my childhood interests, or I’m dangerously close to going off the rails and doing cartwheels down Main Street while wearing a fairy costume and whistling “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” Those of you playing our home game can start making bets.

Mania, I implore you to re-think your position – consider this your open letter. The rest of you have been witness to a light-hearted dispute, whose resolution is hopefully near. So let’s break it up, people; nothing more to see here.

That’s all, folks.

Way down south

It was at a Waffle House in North Carolina when I realized the South is a foreign country.

Now, lest the Dixies among you feel like chucking boiled peanuts at my head, I should note that I don’t say this disparagingly. It was actually an endearing dose of Southern hospitality that threw the region’s relative strangeness into stark relief; most service industries in the North are dripping with the kind of weary cynicism that could kill a litter of kittens on impact. Beyond the Mason-Dixon line, not so much.

A friend of mine who lives in Asheville insisted I make a stop at the iconic breakfast eatery, since it’s a deeply-embedded Southern institution, like peach pie and racism. Our server, Scott, had an accent dripping in drawl, such that I envision his abode awash in the smell of pig farts.

“Welcome to the Waaaaafle Hooouuuuuse,” said Scott, placing our menus before us. “Tell all your friends: Best foooood, best serrrrrver!”

Any Northerner who’s plopped into a booth at an analogous eatery knows how starkly different this interaction is from the typical Yankee greeting: “Welcome to Joe’s Grease Pit. Whatya want?”
It was my first intimation that I had ventured into a vastly different land, one of cheeriness and aw-shucks affability. This isn’t news to some, and on some level, I guess I should have been expecting it; whether Southern friendliness is a cliché or not, it’s a trait they seem to have gladly adopted as their identity. I promptly ordered a dish involving grits, partly to do in Rome as the Romans do, and partly because it seemed wise to vary my food intake from the usual diet of Raisin Bran and Pabst Blue Ribbon.

On that first creamy bite, I knew the trip was a good move.

And really, any kind of trip is a good idea, if we can finagle it. This is the part where I spout off a bunch of trite bromides about expanding vistas and broadening horizons, which, while sickening, are absolutely true; sometimes the only way we gain a cohesive view of the world is by getting the heck out of Dodge and seeing it for ourselves. How else would I have discovered that North Carolina is home to a tiny town called Bat Cave? For a guy who grew up reading Batman comics, visiting an actual place called Bat Cave ranks up there as one of life’s more bizarrely cool experiences. It’s like a history buff visiting the birthplace of Jefferson, only Jefferson never roundhouse-kicked The Riddler in his solar plexus.

At this point, I had already visited Florida on several occasions, mostly to see family, who long ago decided there weren’t enough hurricanes and Disney characters in their lives. But as interesting as those experiences were, Florida doesn’t really qualify as the South. Crammed to its sandbars with cold-weather refugees, Florida is a Northern state that took a vacation to Georgia once and then just stayed there. It’s an odd mix of young Latinos and old white people from Connecticut, which doesn’t exactly constitute an accurate cross-section of Southern culture; it’s more like a reality show in which disparate groups are forced to live together in a tiny house so the home audience can make bets on which faction snaps the soonest.

The little town of Bat Cave, by contrast, was a mircocosm of all that I had hoped to see. Driving through it on our way back from a state park, a friend and I noticed a man sitting on the front porch of a lonely house by the side of the road, sandwiched someplace between East and West Nowhere. Flanked by a prominently-placed Conferedate flag (of course), the man was hunched over in his rocking chair, busily re-stringing a rustic-looking banjo. On his front lawn, placed by the side of the road, was a large sign proclaiming, “Meet Jim, the original North Carolina hillbilly! Have your picture taken!” Legend has it, said my friend, that Jim the Hillbilly spends all of his waking hours on that very porch, engaged in various Southern-type activities, which I took to mean pastimes involving shotguns and tobacco. Sure enough, as we made a second pass to get a glimpse of this living tourist attraction, Hillbilly Jim flashed a tooth-bereft smile at us, and filled his mouth with a wad of dip that could have patched a hole in the International Space Station. It was kind of awesome, unless you were his lone incisor, in which case it was the equivalent of getting your face pounded by a mafia thug with lardy beef hands.

We toil to fill our vacations with grand, sweeping crescendos, but it’s oftentimes those smaller happenings that make a trip worth it; glimpses of lives lived elsewhere, of micro moments in a macro world. Somehow, in the midst of a whirlwind week, I found what I was looking for in the seemingly insignificant (and admittedly gross) personage of Hillbilly Jim, in the charm of a restaurant server, and in a ridiculous amount of peach pie, which made me walk like a man who just sat the wrong way on a fence post.

A stranger in a foreign land, I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d ever be there again, or what moments may await.

Tell you what, though: My first stop’ll be at a Waffle House.

Pat-down party

TSA stole my shaving cream.

Maybe that elicits chuckles from the more travel-tested veterans of the airways, and maybe I deserve it. I was, after all, foolishly trying to sneak a canister of Edge Pro Gel onto my flight, which violates the first rule of air travel: No fluids, no almost-fluids, and nothing that hangs out with fluids on the playground. Fluids are a bad influence. That’s why coffee beans are such shiftless punks.

It was something I tossed into my suitcase without thinking, and I’ll take credit for the mental lapse; the list if items you can take on a plane has been whittled down to pillowcases and those foam bats they give to anger management patients. That makes it difficult to condense your life into a collection of appropriate travel items, since even the most innocuous products can be used to cause a terrorist-related kerfuffle. You never know when an al Quaida operative will hijack a plane and start shaving everyone.

Oh, I’m sure that shaving cream components can be used to make some sort of bomb or something. That’s why I didn’t complain when the TSA dude came over and told me that I should either check my carry-on bag (for an additional 30 clams, of course), or just chuck the shaving cream and bring the bag on board. Since waiting around at a luggage carousel is an experience about as gratifying as picking the spinach from one’s teeth, I took the hit and tossed the Edge. But I noticed something interesting about the TSA screener guy: As he was giving me my options, he had an almost apologetic look on his face, and a resigned tone of voice, as if what he was really saying was, “Look, I know this is silly. I can see my reflection in your head, so it’s obvious you plan on using the shaving cream for its intended purpose. But this is my job. So just toss the cream and we can go on with our day. Plus, I’m jealous of your muscles.” I may have been imagining that last part.

It was a minor hiccup in an otherwise smooth security screening, but it still underscores the level of paranoia that permeates the process. In addition to prohibiting liquids, kitchen utensils, Pokemon dolls and life-sized busts of Richard Nixon, they also make you remove a great deal more clothing than I’m strictly comfortable with. The list is currently confined to belts and shoes, but both of these items are necessary components in the precarious smoke-and-mirror show that barely conceals my scrubbiness.

I can almost understand the hubbub over shoes – would-be terrorists have been caught trying to sneak bomb components in their Reeboks before, and they’re a natural place of concealment for shameful items, like membership cards to the Pauly Shore Fan Club. Belts, however, are another story. If anyone wanted to bring a knife or a gun on board an airplane, a belt would be about the worst means of conveyance possible; it would require the kind of high-tech utility belt favored by Harlem cops and Batman. The focus on belts takes attention away from far more likely hiding places, almost all of which are hilarious noise-making bodily orifices.

It’s tough knowing how to feel about these screenings. When they were first implemented after the 9/11 attacks, everyone started quoting Benjamin Franklin, the founding father whose head most closely resembles a sock puppet. “They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety,” said Franklin, right before electrocuting himself with his kite. It’s an elegant turn of phrase, and has the ring of truth; but whether that truth is as relevant today as it was in the 1700s is debatable – especially considering that, in Franklin’s day, the very idea of passenger airlplanes would have been a preposterous fantasy. Americans are quick to credit the founders as having an infallible, clairvoyant wisdom, but they were prone to err as is any other human being. The safety purchased by the screenings is only as temporary as the airline industry itself; and for all this talk of rights, a curious few defend the right to visit Aunt Ester in Soux Falls without meeting a violent death. That doesn’t mean it makes sense to ban shaving cream and oggle belts, necessarily, but they’re precautions that should be judged on their own merits, not uniformly disparaged as an affront to liberty.

Here’s a hot tip, though, for any travelers: Don’t wear loose pants.

That was a lesson I learned the hard way. Because I have the fashion sense of a third-world refugee, I still wear pants that were a snugger fit in my heavier days. So when the screener people in Charlotte told me to remove my belt and raise my hands in the air, I naturally felt that bad things would ensue. It’s one thing to tell people you wear sky-blue underwear; it’s quite another to show them.

Luckily, the guy on pat-down duty showed me some much-needed mercy. As my cargo shorts slowly started their shameful journey south, the gentleman stopped them, and said to me, smiling, “You can hold these up, you know.” An act of ocular self-preservation on his part, I’m sure, but a gesture I nevertheless appreciated.

It’s a credit to good fortune that they don’t confiscate our belts outright. With loose pants and no shaving cream, I’d have spent my whole vacation as a stubbly, pantsless malcontent, scratching my beard with one hand and blocking the view with the other – a victim of airline security, doomed to ponder the price of freedom.

Cereal killer

In the entire supermarket, there is no aisle more wondrous, more whimsical and magical, than the cereal aisle.

That fantastical corridor, brimming with smiling chocolate vampires and mischievous rabbits, has actually resuscitated some of my crabbier moods. When I die, there would be a thousand worse fates than to have my ashes sprinkled somewhere between a box of Fruity Pebbles and those wheat squares stuffed with fake fruit goo.

From time to time, I’ve been known to rail against the evils of processed foods, which generally possess all the chemical integrity of a beaker filled with anthrax. Cereal’s really no different, when you break it down. Even the healthier brands, the ones supposedly made with bran and wheat and the sweat of angels, are loaded with the kinds of additives that ancient Egyptians used to mummify their pharaohs. And thank goodness for that, because if you’ve ever had a spoonful of the “natural” fare that’s made without high-fructose corn syrup, then you know what it’s like to eat a cardboard box wrapped in an old pair of sweatpants.

So sure, I feel a bit hypocritical. But that’s only because I’m a hypocrite.

In all of my newfound efforts to adopt a more natural diet, exceptions are routinely made for Raisin Bran and Rice Krispies, Cheerios and Cocoa Puffs. At their best, they contain a sprinkling of healthful ingredients, buried under an avalanche of synthetic muck that makes Mother Nature weep into her cabbage patch; stuff like lecithin, which could be the name of an evil wizard in a series of fantasy novels, and tripotassium phosphate, which sounds like it could power a jet engine. At their worst, they could eat a hole through a cinderblock on a hot day.

And yet there I am, week after week, standing in that glorious aisle and grinning like a dunce at cartoon bears and elves. There’s something about a pantry stocked with silly cereals that allows one to retain a sense of childhood amidst the worries and responsibilities of adulthood; it’s hard to be concerned about the electric bill when you’re mowing down on little puffs shaped like rocketships, or guiding Tucan Sam through a maze on the back of a box of Fruit Loops.

Even the crummy cereals are redemptive in their way. When I was a kid, the video game giant Nintendo got into the cereal business (an odd pivot to be sure), and introduced a variety in which half the box was filled with pieces that looked vaguely like Super Mario Bros. characters, and the other half with the Legend of Zelda. As far as actual food went, it was pretty bad. Basically a low-rent Lucky Charms, a medium-sized bowl of it would coat your mouth in a film of wax so formidable, it would ensure that your teeth and tongue could survive a nuclear bomb explosion. Since it was mostly sugar, anything greater than the suggested serving amount could blur one’s vision, which I’m pretty sure doesn’t happen when you start your day with a glass of orange juice and half a grapefruit. I can’t even count the number of times I cheated death by pouring a bowl of that uninspired science experiment.

But I’d keep begging for it. Because as terrible as it was, it tickled my imagination. Cereal 1, oatmeal 0. That’s the magic of it, I think: Each variety is a unique concoction, a creative and original work of art. Sure, the creators are men and women in labcoats, trying to find just the right blend of petri dish detritus to get us addicted to nutritionless junk; sure, the artists are painting with preservatives that could fossilize a badger. Take a look, though, at other processed foods. You don’t get overtaken by whimsy staring at a Lean Cuisine. You don’t stand in front of a freezer filled with pre-made pizzas and feel like you’ve just stepped onto a ride at Universal Studios. If you do, then it may be time to review your whiskey intake.

So many varieties, each with the tantalizing promise of a gleeful dopamine blast. In an ongoing effort to trick myself into thinking I’m eating a food more nutritious than cake, I tend to gravitate toward the cereals with nuts and dried fruits; it probably takes a box and a half to ingest the same vitamins and minerals found in a single wedge of orange, but doing the math would destroy my fragile fantasy. Better to think I’m doing good by my vital organs, instead of armoring them under a scrim of toxic waste.

Every once in a while, though, the mental gymnast in me finds an excuse to indulge in the super-sweet, ridiculous sludge that honors the memory of that now-defunct Nintendo cereal. And really, as indulgences go, a sweet cereal isn’t that bad. There are worse things I could be doing to my body, like dousing it in lighter fluid and doing long-jumps over a campfire.

I talk the talk, but I don’t walk the walk. I’m the first to shake my head judgmentally at the prevalence of boxed meals and synthetic foodstuffs; I’m also the first to grab a box splattered with primary colors and sporting a frog wearing a baseball cap. Maybe it’s an addiction. I wouldn’t rule it out.

I mean, have you ever had Cinnamon Toast Crunch? It’s the stuff dreams are made of.

Battle royale

We really shouldn’t care.

There’s a faction that thinks we should. In the past few weeks they’ve taken to the airwaves, print and the Internet with the breathless excitement of a small child racing to tell his parents about the frog he caught in a mason jar. The difference is that a kid catching a frog, quaint and ultimately inconsequential as it is, has the benefit of being somewhat interesting. Especially if you’re the frog, which you’re probably not, since frogs can’t read.

But a baby? Well, those are born every day.

In all due respect to William and Kate, I don’t mean to suggest that the birth of a human being is a trivial event. Heck, I was born once. I suspect most of us were. I rather like that I was born, since in the intervening years I’ve had the opportunity to ride a camel, go to Disney World, and master “Yankee Doodle Dandy” on a plastic kazoo, none of which would have been possible if my parents hadn’t split a six-pack one cold December evening and thrown caution to the wind. Things haven’t all been roses – I’ve had the unfortunate experience of seeing Justin Bieber pee into a mop bucket (thanks, YouTube!) – but all things considered, my birth was one of the most important events of my life, second only to the time I broke a personal record by stuffing half a bag of marshmallows into my mouth. College, am I right? Good times.

So yes, the birth of the royal baby (which I refuse to capitalize) is a happy event, in the sense that it’s always a happy event when a baby is born healthy, and without that freakish sixth finger that makes it difficult to find a practical set of gloves. It’s nice to think of the young couple contentedly doting on the rosy-cheeked little tyke, especially since, while they do it, I’m thousands of miles away, safely buffered from the scent of the royal poop.

Just don’t ask me to don a party hat and celebrate. We are, after all, talking about one of thousands of babies who are born every day, none of whom are likely to enjoy the international attention received by the brand-new Brit. At this point, the only child likely to garner such media coverage is whichever one emerges from the womb scratching a tiny goatee and postulating solutions to the world’s energy crisis. And, unlike the heir to the throne, Goatee Boy will have done something to deserve it.

“But wait!” you say. “The royal family is a treasure, and this birth is a monumental event!”

 To which I respond: “Bollocks!”

Before I rip into the British for worshipping a family that’s done nothing to earn its wealth, I should note that we do the exact same thing in this country – and I’m not talking about the baby fever of the past few weeks. In the United States, we obsess over reality “stars” that essentially contribute bupkis to society, save for crappy TV shows that serve as nothing more than placeholders for Sham-Wow commercials. These celebrities – a term I use loosely – make oodles of money for the sole act of inviting cameras into their homes, shamelessly stimulating our voyeuristic impulses and acting all the while like their newfound fame is a birthright. They’re the winners of a warped karmic lottery, but by the viewing public’s own consent, see themselves not as lucky, but entitled; benefactors of their own perceived awesomeness. They think they’re royalty, and who can blame them? We do nothing to convince them otherwise.

In all fairness to the royal family, there’s a pretty wide gulf between them and Honey Boo Boo. They host charitable events, hold meetings with foreign dignitaries, and draw tourists to the British isles, which is a considerably larger contribution to their country’s economy than simply hawking laundry detergent and nose-wrinkling body spray. Although I’d love to see Prince William in a Snuggie commercial, sipping wine and twirling his feet around in a pair of Cookie Monster slippers.

But is all that worth the expense? I’ve been doing a little digging. I hesitate to use as strong a word as “research,” since that implies things like effort, and giving a hoot. But by snooping around, I turned up a recent article by Olga Khazan, global editor for The Atlantic, which estimates the cost of subsidizing the royal family at about $51 million annually – before factoring in things such as security detail, and the cost of preparing for royal visits. That swells the price tag to something in the vicinity of $307 million, according to Khazan. It’s a hefty price to pay for British citizens, and all for the privilege of watching the Queen wave to a crowd from a parade float shaped like an anthropomorphic teapot.

At least we don’t pay a tax to watch Honey Boo Boo. Imagine if we did. I picture legions of anti-tax patriots, clad in frilly petticoats, chucking televisions into Boston Harbor.

I get that it’s a tradition, this royal nonsense. But so was witch-burning, slavery, and dropping acid at Phish concerts, none of which did a damn bit of good for anyone. (Well, aside from making Phish tolerable.) The royal family isn’t an inherently evil or immoral institution, but it is outdated. Shame it can’t be dissolved with the ease of an antacid tablet.

I wish young Prince George a healthy and happy life. Beyond that, I simply can’t muster the strength to care.

...but at least he's got manners

Somehow, I got sucked into “Mad Men.” I almost didn’t want it to happen. The AMC drama had become so popular that it had arguably crossed the threshold into trendiness, and I’ve got a deep-seated aversion to most overly trendy things; I’ll make exceptions for Batman movies and whiz-bang products that make it easier to cook eggs. Beyond that, I’ve always felt that a trend was like a cold: It spreads, it consumes people’s lives for a while, and then when it disappears, nobody misses it. Neon windpants, anyone?

But with less time in recent months to devote to full-length movies, I’ve started filling up my Netflix queue with hour-long dramas to kill those odd stretches of single-guy nothingness. “Mad Men” was well-reviewed, and its star, generically handsome Jon Hamm, had somehow become a popular actor in the last couple of years, slowly and unnoticeably becoming a household name with the quiet stealth of a slow gas leak. So I thought, “To hell with it.” It was either that or back-to-back episodes of “Charles in Charge.”

Lo and behold, I was hooked. It’s good stuff. There’s something interesting, though, about Hamm’s character, the heavy-drinking, womanizing Donald Draper: He’s slowly becoming the epitome of the “anti-hero,” the guy you so love to hate that you end up loving him again. He boozes, he cavorts, he smokes like a raging barn fire – and yet, when crappy things happen to him, we feel bad about it. We sympathize with a guy who’s essentially a bastard. He could throw a small dog through a department store window, and when the cops give chase, there’d be a part of us going, “Run, Don! Be free! It was just a Shih Tzu!”

Draper is far from the first of these anti-hero types to command our grudging affection. The TV-and-film landscape is practically littered with them now, nudging the whole concept closer to the realm of cliché. It’s getting harder and harder to find a good guy who’s actually good; most of them are meaner than a rum-drunk carnie with a bad attitude.

That’s a dramatically different landscape than the one captured on film 50, 60 years ago.
Back then, in the age of trenchcoats and sultry secretaries, even the hard-edged heroes were virtuous. Take the legendary repertoire of Humphrey Bogart, who remains cool despite his lack of hair gel and an effective drop-kick. Bogart’s most famous role is that of Rick in “Casablanca,” and on first glance, Rick’s not the kind of dude you’d want behind you at the ATM at three in the morning. He’s coarse, his eyes are suspicious and wary, and his diet consists primarily of Lucky Strikes and vodka martinis – traits that would nowadays land him on the hot seat opposite Dr. Phil. But by the end of the movie, he pulls off a gesture so stunningly noble that we the audience, in full aw-shucks mode, castigate ourselves for not seeing his virtues sooner. There were plenty of tough guys in 1940’s cinema, but every one of ‘em had a heart of gold. Which probably explains why they were able to live so long despite starting each day with a bowl of bacon fat and a half-gallon of gin.

I’ve gotta wonder what Bogart would think of Walter White, the protagonist of AMC’s “Breaking Bad.” Played by the awesome Bryan Cranston (in a role that’ll make you forget he was ever the dad on “Malcom in the Middle”), White is one of most interesting characters on television – a high school chemistry teacher who, after finding out he has terminal lung cancer, comes up with a unique payment plan for his chemotherapy treatments: Using his chemistry skills to manufacture crystal meth. (Amazing how they keep recycling these tired old storylines, right?)

There’s no heart of gold in this man’s chest. Walter White is the end result of decades of change in who the “heroes” are in popular fiction. It used to be a prerequisite that a protagonist be moral, honorable, or at the very least able to take a pie in the face with relative good grace. Now we root for killers and troubled drug pushers. The only thing redeemable about White is that he looks good in a fedora, which is no small feat for a bald man. I know.

They’re a double-edged sword, these anti-hero types. They’re fascinating character studies, and burrowing into their strife-addled minds reveals a mine field of turmoil and angst – the stuff that makes us nibble our nails to the quick when things get tense. But are we drawn to these characters because we recognize our own lesser qualities in these rough-hewn scoundrels? Does art imitate life? Am I asking too many rhetorical questions?

I’d hate to see these jerks disappear altogether; they’re too interesting, and effective as the fulcrums in these morality plays. But it would almost be a relief to find a little balance – a Forrest Gump for every Don Draper.

“Well-Meaning Nerds of the Northeast,” starring yours truly? I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.

Pack attack

Packing for a trip is like gearing up for an excursion to outer space: Forget one important item, and you spend your time stranded without the comfort of your favorite stuff. It’s the adult equivalent of missing your beloved childhood blankie, minus the crying and sucking of thumbs. Usually.

In a couple of weeks, I’ll be headed for the sun-baked climes of North Carolina, a trip whose timing – smack in the middle of summer – portends my immediate incineration upon stepping outside of the airport. With this in mind, my focus in recent days has been to stock up on water and sunblock, survival items that aren’t likely to go unpacked amidst my fervent stuff-gathering. My fear, as I compile a list of essentials, is that I’ll overlook an item that, while not in the strictest sense necessary, would still take the edge off what’s basically a voyage to an alien planet.

It’s amazing how attached we get to inanimate objects. In high school, I knew a kid who was hopelessly tethered to his special hacky sack. A hacky sack, for anyone who’s never worn a hemp necklace, is a tiny bag, usually made of knitted fabric, filled with beads. You and a group of baggy-pantsed friends stand around in a circle and kick, knee, or elbow the sack from one person to another, with the goal of not letting it hit the ground – no hands allowed. In the days before smartphones turned America’s youth into zombie-eyed video game addicts, this is what high schoolers did to kill small stretches of time. That is, when they weren’t giving the chess club captain a wedgie that could only be extricated with the help of an excavation crew.

This kid’s hacky sack was as irremovable as a poorly-located goiter. During tests in various classes, he would keep the sack on his desk and knead it absently, as if it were a soothsayer’s crystal ball, feeding him answers through his fingertips. Having formed attachments to such silly and inconsequential items myself, I know exactly what would have happened if, during one of these exams, his beloved hacky sack had been taken away: He would have panicked, become distracted, forgotten how to calculate the force of the earth’s gravity on an eight-pound baby, and failed physics. Lacking the necessary credits, he’d have flunked out of school, become overwrought with despair, and joined a biker gang infamous for its manufacture and distribution of crystal meth. This would have landed him in prison with a seven-foot-tall cellmate named Butch, and all because some jerk (me) thought it’d be funny to toss his hacky sack into the girls’ bathroom.

Dubious? Look up the “butterfly effect.” It’s science.

Anyway, these attachments we have to things, harmless as they are in everyday life, become more pronounced when we gather our resources for a prolonged trip. They also force us, often for the first time, to take a good hard look at our more ridiculous affinities. Let’s say you’ve got an obssessive-compulsive attachment to that special-edition Mr. T carving knife you once used to etch monkey butts onto tree stumps at summer camp. The butts were particularly detailed and lifelike, and you decided the knife was a sort of good-luck charm. Well, good luck getting that knife on the plane. TSA’ll take one look at it and have you locked in a room with the crazy-eyed mumbler from Tibet and the dude with the cheap bomb superglued to his belly button. Best to leave the knife at home and interpret every spilled wine cooler as a sign of your resultant bad luck, hoping all the while that Mr. T can spare a thought to pitying a fool.

A lot of these kinds of items, though – the ones we just can’t do without – are perfectly acceptable to bring onto a plane. Yet we forget them anyway. And why? Because packing is a daunting task. It forces us to miniaturize our lives, make them travel-ready, pocket-sized. That’s a tall order. Before leaving, I somehow have to figure out which components of my life will fit into a small suitcases and a carry-on travel bag, which makes me think of all the circus clowns they somehow manage to stuff into those tiny cars. Is there a well-known trick to that, or is it one of those age-old, sacred clown secrets kept under wraps by the mysterious Order of Bozo? ‘Cause it’s a skill I could sure use right about now. There are only so many ways you can try to squeeze in your shaving gear before you think it might be time to grow a beard.

It’s embarrassing to admit that the “must-have” item throwing off my travel mojo is, of all things, my laptop. It’s not what most people would consider essential to a vacation – not as much as, say, pants. But if I get tired of reading on the plane, I’m going to need something to do, and there’s only so much entertainment you can squeeze out of a pair of cargo shorts. (Oh, get your mind out of the gutter.)

At least a laptop isn’t the sort of thing you tend to forget. I just hope that whatever I sacrifice to bring it along won’t prove too important or necessary. Maybe I’ll leave my hacky sack at home.

Commence le festival!

In some respects, going to a festival concert is like trekking across a barren desert: If you don’t plan ahead and stock up on provisions, you’ll end up a miserable mess of unsatisfied human impulses. The same can be said for brothels, but nevermind that for now.

To be clear, a festival concert is different from your standard, run-of-the-mill rock concert. A typical rock concert, if there’s an opening band, usually lasts about three hours max – the length of an epic historical movie, or the time it takes John Kerry to finish a sentence. Depending on how far you’re willing to travel for this three-hour show, the whole experience eats up a good chunk of the evening and sets you back about 75 bucks. Unless you’ve opted for concert beer, in which case you may need to borrow against your 401K.

A festival concert is a different beast. As the name implies, it devours vast stretches of time, and in some ways feels like a bazaar on an alien planet, where the hours ooze by in un-Earthlike ways, and hanging beads on kiosk displays hide the faces of exotic creatures. In the festival’s case, these creatures are humans who are slowly being consumed by flaming skull tattoos and metal implements that give their heads the light-refracting qualities of misshapen disco balls. Whether on Earth or Tatooine, chances are they’ll charge you 80 clams for a plastic necklace.

With myriad vendors, kiosks, and peddlers hawking merchandise, making one’s way from the venue’s entrance to the main stage can be a gauntlet of temptation. This is where it pays to have experience at these things. The T-shirts, the trinkets, the food – all of it is ridiculously overpriced, and it’s sold mostly to those tragic souls who are caught unprepared. Many of these unwitting concert-goers have the shell-shocked expressions of dying squirrels. (Not that I’ve ever stopped to examine the face of a dying squirrel. That would be creepy.)

Anyway, the best way to escape these things with one’s wallet intact is to plan ahead – and more importantly, to eat ahead.

Because food is really where they screw you to the wall. Unless you’re a camel, chances are you can’t go more than a few hours comfortably without consuming something. That’s why people continue to eat Snickers bare despite the fact that they’ll cause someone’s waistline to blow up faster than a dying star. In a festival situation, the trick is to locate something beforehand that resembles actual nutritious food, and then eat so much of it that the ensuing stomach cramps are only marginally preferable to death.

Just last week, I journeyed to the lush mountains of New Hampshire to attend a day-long concert in the middle of the woods. Because of the venue’s remote location – and the inflated food prices sure to be found within – a buddy and I stopped at a small general store on the border, where we grabbed enough provisions to see an 18th Century army through a merciless winter. After choking back a sub the size of a toddler, we split a box of chicken and potato wedges, the latter being so shockingly large that had the potato been whole, it could have sunk a medium-sized fishing vessel. I felt like I was having Thanksgiving dinner at Ted Nugent’s house.

If all that sounds a bit disgusting, it’s because it was a bit disgusting. But it also lasted us throughout the evening, and by the time the headliner took the stage, the miracle of digestion had made it possible for us to walk to our seats without leaning on each other for support. The resulting calories gave us the energy to sustain the self-punishment of headbanging through squealing guitar solos. That’s really all you can expect from nourishment, aside from the minor detail of continued living.

It was thanks to this planning that we were able to avoid the inflated food prices of in-house vendors, freeing up those funds for other purposes, like skydiving lessons or black tar heroin.

But that unfortunately does nothing about the price gouging itself, which is prohibitive to crampless eating. You see this kind of gouging elsewhere. Grocers will sometimes raise the price of bread and milk before a natural disaster, for example; and you’ll sometimes see a spike in air conditioner prices right before a heat wave, which is why I always buy mine while my ankles are still wet from snow-encrusted tube socks. But only at festival concerts, and in a few other scenarios, can you expect to pay eight bucks for a beer, six bucks for a water, and five hard-earned greenbacks for one of those giant pretzels the size of steering wheels. The pretzels sounds like a good deal until you realize its marble-sized salt granules just make you thirsty for the six-dollar water.

Only a prolonged mass boycott could change things, but that seems unlikely, given that most music fans don’t approach festivals like a week in the wilderness.

And so the price-conscious soldier on, with potato wedges that are hard to lift without assistance from a professional wrestler. It’s not the ideal system, but it’s survival. Daniel Boone would be proud.

Maybe. Probably not.

Bias? Damn near killed us!

Unless your friends are the open-minded, cool-headed sort, it’s probably a good idea to avoid any kind of discussion about politics if you still want invites to their backyard barbecues and all-night keggers. Political divisiveness being what it is, voicing support for a candidate or policy is a good way to get paperweights chucked at your head. Civil discourse has become the jousting event on American Gladiators.

Fortunately, a guy like me has friends who can discuss opposing viewpoints without bare-knuckle fisticuffs. That’s a nice luxury for a man to enjoy.

Less enjoyable is that, if talking to a conservative or libertarian, I can never gain traction in these discussions – because I belong to the “liberal media.” The ultimate trump card, “liberal media” is a phrase that effectively ends all conversation, because it re-casts everything I’ve said as biased and invalid. Never mind that it’s a myth as fanciful as the gods of Olympus, or a thought-provoking Pauley Shore movie. It’s a cheat code, an end-run around any serious examination of a person’s own logic.

When relating stories involving personal acquaintances, I like to change their names for two reasons: To protect their identities, and because naming things is fun. So allow me to share an anecdote about my good buddy “Skeletor.”

One thing I should make clear is that Skeletor’s an awesome dude in just about every way. He’s gregarious, generous, thoughtful, and has that rare ability to grow a lumberjack beard overnight, indicating testosterone levels that could mutate a small animal. But he’s a believer in an inherently liberal media, a vast machine that is somehow controlled by a sinister puppeteer with a donkey emblem on his chest and a cape made of food stamps.

About a year ago, I sat with him in his computer room while we discussed the issue, and while the conversation was civil and free of acrimony, at some point in the evening he did something telling: He turned to his computer screen and opened up the Drudge Report, an unabashedly right-leaning news site with blatantly leading headlines such as “Bill allows criminal illegals safe harbor,” and “Obama: Anti-Christ, or just a big fat doodie-head?”

Oh, Skeletor.

While he doesn’t share many of their more distasteful characteristics, he does unfortunately belong to that group of people who blast the mainstream media for liberal bias – and then in the next breath, praise conservatively biased news outlets for telling the “truth.” That there exists a choice of legitimately neutral news organizations is a thought that never occurs to this group. It’s not controversial enough. It’s more exciting – and more gratifying to one’s ego – to believe that there’s a small, savvy elite who have figured out how to get their news from “real” news sources that “tell it like it is.” (As an aside, putting words in quote marks is “fun.”)

Do some news outlets have an indisputably liberal bent? Of course. When reports surfaced that the IRS had targeted conservative political groups for special scrutiny, and that the Obama administration may have known about it, anchors at MSNBC set land speed records racing to their desks to defend the president – with pundits like Lawrence O’Donnell stopping just short of painting a watercolor of the chief executive wearing fig leaves and a Roman toga.

And, as any yin must have its yang, MSNBC has Fox News, that paean to tunnel-vision Republicanism. Windbags like Sean Hannity were perplexed when the George W. Bush administration wasn’t immediately followed by the rapture, so convinced were they that he was the second coming of the messiah.

So yes, biases of every political stripe exist in media. That’s been the case since the 18th century, when state’s rights newspapers accused President Washington of promoting a strong federal government so he could subvert the burgeoning republic with a monarchy.

But it’s been the nonpartisan faction of the mainstream media – led by honest, objective journalists – that has broken some of history’s most important stories, and held governments and politicians accountable. Watergate, the atrocities of Vietnam, abuses at Guantanamo Bay; these were all stories broken by the media. Not some guy in a basement blogging his conspiracy theories about Martians brainwashing Americans through subliminal messages in Clorox commercials; the media. The people who break their backs, and in some cases risk their lives, to deliver impartial information.

Look, it’s a way more complex media landscape than it was 40, 50 years ago. That’s obvious. We’ve come a long way from the days of good ol’ reliable Walter Cronkite. It’s harder to know which media outlets are objective, and which are trying to advance a partisan agenda. But it’s not impossible. The further one gets from the broad center of media, the more likely it is to encounter bias, not less. That’s what’s sad about the post-millennial electorate: Because shunning something mainstream is attractive to people, everyone retreats to their respective corners, fomenting dissent from the fringes, where true bias is born. In seeking the truth, they actively avoid it.

Restoring the public’s trust in real journalism is key to ensuring that the fringe outlets don’t become mainstream themselves. How do we do this? By convincing Skeletor to delete the Drudge Report from his Internet bookmarks.

I hope he doesn’t bristle at the suggestion. ‘Cause honestly, I don’t want to stop being invited to his cookouts. His potato salad is to die for.

Red it

Every time I see a Starburst candy I think of driver’s ed.

I was 16 and trying to stay awake through a lecture on the proper use of turn signals when the instructor glanced at his watch and indicated it was time for a 15-minute break. I remember blinking and looking around the room like I had just been jolted out of a months-long coma. The other students in the class – a handful of boys and girls around my age, plus one forty-ish woman who avoided us like we were knife-wielding locusts – all shared the same supine expressions of boredom. And what do you do when you’re bored and have a small break? You eat junk food and stare at the wall. Naturally.

The driving school was situated on lower Main Street in Lewiston, and the vending machine was just outside the front door, underneath an awning that looked as sad and weatherbeaten as the rest of downtown. The machine itself wasn’t exactly a ray of sunshine. Far from being the colorful, reassuring vending machines of Disney theme parks and generic office buildings, this one was so barren and gummy with neglect it could have been a prop in a cheesy slasher movie. (The lack of Snickers foreshadowing a gruesome event; that kind of thing.) Surveying my options was a depressing exercise. It was either Starburst or a bag of old-looking trail mix that was probably a stiff breeze away from being dust. I picked the Starburst.

Say what you will about candy – it rots your teeth, it framed Roger Rabbit, etc. – but it got me through the ensuing lesson on not lingering in the blind spot of a Mack truck.

Zombie-like, I sat at my desk and systematically plowed through an entire sleeve of them. But as I munched, I noticed something strange happening: Without thought or planning, I had set aside all the red candies, piling them in a corner and saving them for last, to be devoured in a final orgy of berry bliss. Whenever I eat, I always save my favorite item for the end, for one last crescendo. I had done this with my Starburst without even thinking about it.

And of course it was the red ones. It’s always the red ones.

The candy itself doesn’t matter. It could be Starburst, Skittles, or any one of a million fruit snacks shaped like Hannah Barbara characters. Invariably, the red ones are always the best. It’s a universal rule; the sun rises in the east, all good things come to an end, and red Jolly Ranchers are better than blue ones. Everybody in the world feels this way. I know because I conducted a study in which I asked two people who were sitting somewhat close to me.

If all this is true, then it’s also true that purple candies are usually the worst – sad news for a color I generally like, since it’s the color of grape juice and at least one Teletubby. There’s something cloying and overpowering about a purple candy, especially its aftertaste. One or two are fine, but after that they make the taste buds recoil and pucker up tight as a snare drum.

To be fair, much of my aversion can be traced to Skittles, which became a mini-obsession in the summer of 2002. If that seems ridiculously specific, it’s only because Skittles got me through a seasonal job working for a telemarketing company, during which I cold-called people in the middle of their chicken dinners to ask if they’d mind switching long-distance carriers. (Yeah. I was one of those guys.) There’s something depressing and soul-deadening about doing a job designed for the sole purpose of bugging people. You don’t do your best work when you feel apologetic about it. I would overcome these misgivings by spending my breaks tossing back bags of Skittles, which accomplished two things: I gained ten pounds and developed an aversion to purple. Early on, I learned to eat the purples ones first and then work my way up the Skittles hierarchy, which everyone knows goes orange-yellow-green-red. Again, this is all highly scientific. I advise you to watch for my groundbreaking paper on the subject, entitled “Ravings of an Obsessive-Compulsive Sugar Addict.”

It says something about my personality (probably something unflattering) that I’m so fascinated by the propensity of red to be a candy’s top flavor. It’s not even the same flavor from brand to brand; it can denote strawberry, raspberry, watermelon, or cherry, and yet it’s always the best-for-last prize in a candy bag’s bounty. Maybe candy manufacturers recognize red as being an action color, and assign to it the taste best favored by the control groups that sample their products. Or maybe I’m going slowly insane, and this is my last rumination before snapping and swinging from a chandelier with my underwear tied around my head. This should be considered a distinct possibility.

But it’s a testament to a sugary treat’s addictive powers that I can trace the red revelation back to a singular moment that took place when I was a teenager. It certainly stuck in my head moreso than those lessons about lane-changing and parallel parking.

Which, if you see me on the road, is something you may want to keep in mind.