Pie another day

My father insists that pizza is a health food. “Pizza is a health food!” he says. Then I laugh at him.

Pizza is many things. It’s a marvel of geometry, a delicious feast and a great dinner choice when all you have left in the fridge are two cans of Diet Coke and a wedge of cheese. But that doesn’t make it a health food.

Which isn’t to say it’s totally without nutrition. The cheese has calcium, tomatoes contain lycopene, which helps to ward off diseases, and if the crust is made from whole wheat flour then there are grains and fibers galore, which makes your basic pizza nutritionally decent, if incomplete. Certainly there are worse things you could be eating, like just about anything found in the snack or cookie aisle of your local supermarket. As far as your health is concerned, the only thing worse than a sleeve of Oreos is a chocolate-coated cyanide tablet. Even then, at least the chocolate has antioxidants.

For each of its redeeming qualities, though, there’s something else that bumps pizza down a tick. Depending on toppings, a pizza can be loaded with saturated fat, calories and sodium, which is what those in the nutrition business call the “evil hat trick.” Actually, I’m making that up. But it has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? That would a be a great name for a metal band -- Evil Hat Trick. I”m going to take a break from my thesis for a second to congratulate myself on that one.

Ahhh. That felt good.

Anyway, pizza. It’s unfortunate that its effects on health are complicated at best, because the world would be a thousand times better if we could all just eat it at every meal, and occasionally for a snack. There’s a reason why establishments exist that specialize in pizza and pizza alone, and why most of those establishments deliver it straight to your door. Not a lot of foods have their own business model supporting them. There are no peanut butter and jelly shops, no boiled-chicken-and-broccoli restaurants, no mom-and-pop outfits exclusively serving up breakfast cereal. Even burger joints have to sell something besides burgers to maintain people’s interest -- chicken nuggets, plastic clowns, something. Not pizza. I could open a pizza place tomorrow that served plain cheese pies and nothing else, and there’d be an audience for it. Assuming the pies were good. Which they wouldn’t be, because everything I cook tends to taste like shoes. But still.

Overindulgence is the enemy of waistlines, and it’s hard not to overdo it with a food so delicious. The trick for me is to not let pizza become a weekly routine. It was, once. During my preteen years every Friday was the same: The family would order a couple of large pies and hunker down in front of the TV, munching silently as we watched Looney Tunes marathons on TNT. I was quite a bit larger back then. Pizza wasn’t the only culprit, but it didn’t help, and yet I still didn’t put two and two together, happy to nosh mindlessly while Daffy Duck got bonked on the noggin with an anvil as big as a grand piano. To this day I still associate cheese pizza with Bugs Bunny. I’m not sure what that means from a psychological standpoint, and frankly, I’d rather not find out.

In a way, being a child of the ’80s and ’90s helped to fuel my pizza fascination. Kids of that generation -- especially boys -- were obsessed with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a gang of four anthropomorphic reptiles who fought crime and could kick really high. We liked them ’cause they looked weird and killed a lot of robots. They were also party dudes who were obsessed with pizza, and since the boys in my class all wanted to be like them, we had to be pizza-obsessed party dudes, too. As a food it already lends itself to being a kids’ favorite, but the Turtles’ popularity kicked things into overdrive; everything was pizza, pizza, pizza. The NInja Turtles did more for pizza than the sitcom Cheers did for beer. Although frankly beer doesn’t need the help.

The Turtles were fond of loading up their pies with offbeat toppings, like flies and stinkbugs. Those haven’t crept into the American diet (yet), but that hasn’t stopped people from experimenting with all manner of oddities. “Gourmet” pizza restaurants cater to our strangest whims and cravings. I ordered a macaroni-and-cheese pizza once, mostly out of curiosity, and found it to be surprisingly edible, although it would have been nice if it had come with a complimentary angioplasty.

Macaroni and cheese is undoubtedly an offbeat topping, but that’s nothing compared to what’s found around the globe. Australians put kangaroo and crocodile meat on their pies. The French lather them with fried eggs. Brits top theirs off with haggis, Palestinians load them with pine nuts, and Swedes often opt for banana curry. A lot of those toppings sound gross -- you might as well put Skittles and strawberry jam on a pizza -- but they also, in their culturally unique and gag-reflex-triggering way, represent what’s so appealing about pizza. It’s customizable. No two are the same. You can put whatever you want on a pie. Marshmallows. Honey Nut Cheerios. Circus peanuts. Every steaming tray pulled from every oven is as unique as the individual ordering it, the ultimate representation of culinary diversity. No wonder it’s one of the world’s most popular foods. It can be everything to everyone.

Despite all that, it’s not a health food. It belongs in the same category as French fries and cheeseburgers, a treat that works best as an infrequent indulgence. Sorry, Dad. If you want to make healthy food choices, the NInja Turtle diet may not be the best way to go.

The higher they are...

Don’t watch “The Walk” on a large television screen. If you have a fear of heights you’re liable to lose control of some very important bodily functions, and you’ll be stuck explaining to any housemates why you have an oscillating fan pointed at your living room couch.

Consider that a backhanded compliment of the movie’s special effects. If you’re unfamiliar with the plot, it relates the true story of Philippe Petit, a French high-wire artist who rose to international fame in 1974 by walking on a wire strung between the two World Trade Center towers. And while the towers are sadly gone now, you’ll remember that they were very, very high. Like, 110 stories high. Birds feel queasy at that altitude.

Recreating the towers digitally and in the studio is a marvel of movie magic, with frankly some of the best special effects I’ve ever seen, and while it made for enthralling viewing, it also created some queasy, uncomfortable moments. I knew the imagery, while realistically rendered, was fake. I knew Petit wouldn’t fall off his high-wire, because he’s still alive, and in fact worked as a consultant on the film. But that didn’t matter. When Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who portrayed Petit, is shown suspended in mid-air halfway between the two towers, with only a thin cable supporting his body, I had to clutch a pillow to keep from passing out. There’s a chance I sucked my thumb at some point, but nobody can prove that. In fact, forget I said anything.

Not everyone has a fear of heights, and maybe those people came away from the movie whistling a happy tune. Maybe they watched it on a stadium-grade IMAX screen, merrily gulping Junior Mints with nary a disruption to their gastrointestinal systems.

My fear of heights runs too deep for that kind of fortitude. If it were any worse I’d have to carry a brown paper bag with me at all times, for hyperventilation purposes. For kicks I’d also abandon walking from place to place in favor of rolling around face-down on a skateboard. The closer to the ground, the better.

Acrophobia is the official term for an extreme or irrational fear of heights, but very few people meet its criteria. In order to be a full-fledged acrophobe you’d have weep violently or revert to a catatonic state simply by climbing a flight of stairs. True acrophobia is a serious medical condition, and there are really only two means of treating it: Judicious use of potent medication, and living in an eco-pod buried miles below the surface of the Earth. If you opt for door number two, I suggest bringing a book.

What I have is more closely described as “visual height intolerance.” Up to one-third of the population experiences this to some degree. It’s not intense enough to warrant pharmaceutical intervention (drats!), but it can complicate certain situations.

Take ladders, for example. I regard ladders in much the same way I regard snakes and Pauly Shore fans: Dangerous creatures that are to be avoided at all costs. There are ladders barely taller than I am that inspire in me a horror-movie kind of fear, and this turns mundane tasks into complicated affairs. It should be a relatively simple matter to climb the six steps necessary to lift myself into the attic so I can retrieve my old VHS copy of “Mrs. Doubtfire.” The chances of injury are minimal. Tell that to my brain’s panic center, which blazes bright red whenever that rusty contraption is wrested from its hiding spot. The wobbling, the creaking … yeah, no thanks. I’d sooner drink a gallon drum of tomato ketchup.

Ladders are a walk through a dewy meadow compared to the Ferris wheel, though. Ferris wheels are torture devices for the height averse. You’d think that roller coasters would be far worse, with their violent dips and drops, but no; roller coasters are models of speed and control, and paradoxically I feel safe in their wind-whipping velocity. A Ferris wheel has no velocity. It’s slow. It’s clunky. It allows you to feel every micromovement, every cross-breeze and creak of its motor, and as passengers are loaded and your compartment reaches the top, it just stays there -- eerily still, swaying ever-so-slightly as the far-away Earth remains distant and unreachable. In those moments I chance a look down, and that’s when I start envisioning various scenarios, all ending with TV news reporters and a solemn-looking cleaning crew armed with mops and buckets. It’s awkward to have such dark thoughts at a venue that serves slushies in plastic alligator cups.

Nature brought us to this point. Human beings evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to be comfortable at a certain height, and then whammo, during the past century or so we’ve seen the rise of towering skyscrapers, passenger flights, parachuters, base jumpers and the International Space Station. The species got vertical in a hurry, and frankly our brains haven’t had enough time to catch up. We’re still wired to be OK with a medium-sized tree. Anything higher than than and about a third of us, by some statistics, start to majorly spazz out.

Which makes Petit a freak of nature, doesn’t it? Maybe that’s why people gather in large crowds to witness a good high-wire act -- it’s far more gutsy than anything we’d even think of attempting. People like Petit have got that little something extra, a biological override that allows them to do things we normal folks can’t. Conceivably, we’ll soon be able to swallow that kind of courage in pill form and start sprinting up ladders with wanton recklessness. The Ferris wheel won’t be so terrifying. And we can keep those oscillating fans in the backs of our closets.

A man can dream. In the interim, a man can crawl. It may look silly, but it never ends with a splat.

Over the top

My head felt like it was going to explode.

That’s what happens when your body is under an enormous amount of strain. My friend “Zippy” and I had been locked in an arm wrestling battle for what felt like an hour and a half, and it occurred to me that if I reached any deeper into my remaining energy supply I’d probably burst a vessel and collapse in a bloody mess. Zippy would have a kitchen to clean, several phone calls to make, and I’d have lost the match. This would not have been a favorable scenario for anyone involved. At least he would have gotten an epic story out of it: The time he killed his friend with the sheer force of his biceps.

Maybe that thought occurred to me in the moment, maybe it didn’t. I don’t really remember much except the fiery pain pulsing through the right side of my torso, the kind that usually signifies either a catastrophic heart attack or an especially greasy burrito. All I know is that our epic stalemate had to end, and if that involved my capitulation, well, I’d just have to live with it. Better than a compound fracture.

Relief washed over both our faces when I finally laid my hand down. We’d been arm wrestling for far longer than is normal, minute after excruciating minute, and the veins in our temples were throbbing alarmingly, seeming to communicate to each other in some weird biological Morse code: Stop it fellas, you’re being ridiculous.

It was the first and only time I’d ever hugged my opponent after an arm wrestling match. Usually when someone wins one of those things there’s a lot of macho posturing, a cavalcade of high-fives and fist bumps and testosterone-drenched grunts. Then someone cracks a celebratory beer or eats a slab of beef or something. Not this time. We bonded like locker room athletes or men at war, stronger as friends because we had survived something together, a test of wills. There may have been tears. Manly tears. Very very manly.

But that’s the problem with arm wrestling. It’s way more manly than any casual activity should be.

At some point, some guy -- I’m assuming it was a guy -- decided that this chest-pounding test of strength would actually be an acceptable way to pass the time. Apparently this guy was Egyptian; according to the Ultimate Armwresting League, paintings depicting a type of arm wrestling were discovered in Egyptian tombs dating to about 2000 B.C. So people have been doing this for a super long time, which may explain why it’s still so popular in frat houses and basement rec rooms. People are tapping into a primal need to pit their strength against someone else, to brag and flex and preen like a ’roided-out peacock.

Unfortunately, most of the people who engage in the sport recreationally fit a certain description: Young, drunk, and with fewer brain cells in their skull than there are Quakers at the North Pole. It’d be interesting to see statistics on how many emergency room visits are caused by arm wrestling-related injuries, although I imagine most of the people waiting to see a doctor have concocted some cover story that makes them seem less foolish. “It was the darndest thing, doc, I was rescuing a dog from a burning building and my humerus just snapped! It was a big dog -- German Shepherd. I swear!”

Not everyone’s like that, though. As the existence of the Ultimate Armwrestling League would suggest, it’s an actual sport, and its athletes take it pretty seriously. That’s where things get interesting. These aren’t college kids. They’re serious adults who train rigorously for these events, I assume by repeatedly lifting refrigerators filled with steel ball bearings.

A couple of years ago I used my privilege as a journalist to cover a regional armwrestling event that took place in Biddeford. Ostensibly this was for a story, but part of me was just curious, expecting to see some kind of circus-level freak show. Imagine my surprise when I saw a regulation table, pinstriped referees and a throng of amped-up female competitors, many of whom looked like they could have gone head-to-head with the men. This wasn’t a halfhearted throwdown in some dude’s kitchen. Add some stadium seating and a few spotlights and this could have been broadcast on ESPN, complete with its own theme music. Something heavy and fast, with a singer who sounds like he regularly bites the heads off live chickens.

It’s consistently amazing to me that so many alternate worlds run parallel to ours. While the rest of us commute to our office jobs and walk in parks and watch “Survivor,” there’s a whole universe out there in which hard-charging men and women do endless bicep curls at the gym so they can squash their opponents at regional semi-pro armwrestling events. I assume these people also eat a lot of steak. You don’t get muscles like that by eating Skittles.

Events like that put my cute little rivalry with Zippy into perspective. At the Biddeford event I saw what arm wrestling, in an ideal world, should be: a rigorous athletic competition in a bar that serves killer cocktails. There was nothing athletic or noble about what Zippy and I did. Our private showdown wasn’t about competition, it was about burning off excess testosterone and staking a claim to virility. Afterward we both felt a little foolish. Aside from hurting ourselves and flirting with serious injury, we hadn’t really accomplished anything of value. Without a trophy on the line the whole endeavor was a waste of both our times.

Besides, everyone knows the true test of manhood is premature balding and a foul mouth. Your move, Zippy. Your move.

Speakeasy

When I discovered I’d have to spend an entire semester doing public speaking, I just about soiled my knickers.

Autumn of my sophomore year of college would be a months-long heart attack if I couldn’t figure out how to overcome my stage fright, I realized. Public Speaking 101 was a required course, and even though I’d done some acting here and there, reciting pre-written dialogue is vastly different than firing something off extemporaneously. I’d have to be me. I’d have to research things and know stuff. I’d have to learn how to get through the first five minutes of every speech without fainting like a man in the throes of heatstroke. It was intimidating.

Unpleasant things I would rather have done include swallowing an entire package of frozen hot dogs; belly flopping onto a pile of jagged cinder blocks; and singing “I Feel Pretty” on a karaoke machine in front of a gathering of New England Patriots cheerleaders.

Fear of public speaking is pervasive among the general population, to the point where more people are afraid of getting up in front of a crowd than they are of dying. It’s a telling statistic. Society has basically said, “What, you want me to toast my brother and his new bride at their wedding? No thanks. I’d prefer suffering a massive coronary while hunting elk in Siberia.”

Everyone’s got their own reasons, I guess. Mine is shyness.

It’s tough being shy. We live in a society that rewards A-type personalities, those outgoing, conquer-the-world types who flash their bleached teeth at every stranger and turn them into a friend. A-types are like street-level celebrities, endowed with a gravitational pull that sucks people into their orbits, an ever-growing coterie of enraptured satellites. Life is set up for them to succeed, if they take advantage of it. Certain things become easier -- making friends, advancing in a career. If you’ve ever seen someone rocking the crowd at an open-mic poetry slam, without a whiff of awareness that their sonnets stink like muscle cream, well, that’s probably an A-type. They can do public speaking. They were made for it.

Shy folks, a generally misunderstood bunch from the start, have got it tougher. We keep to ourselves. We’re less bold. We have value -- we’re oozing with value, we have value leaking out of various bodily orifices -- but society tends not to acknowledge that value, at least not to the same degree. Our neurotic, eye-contact-avoiding, non-small-talk-making ways seem strange and off-putting to people, and we’re often dismissed as standoffish. Which is a hard label to avoid when you’d prefer to drink hot lava than make small-talk on an elevator with the UPS guy.

When a shy person finds out there’s no avoiding Public Speaking 101 -- no alternate courses, no academic-based witness protection program -- there’s a certain panic that sets in. “Public” and “speaking” are two words that induce anxiety even when they’re independent of each other; combined, they have a power like nuclear fusion, white hot and face-melting. If acting in a play is the equivalent of singing in the safety of a shower, raw public speaking is like singing a schmaltzy ballad under the cutting spotlights of Madison Square Garden. Naked. And strapped to a giant bullseye.

Things I’d rather do include juggling live grenades on a Tilt-a-Whirl; making small cuts all over my body with an X-Acto knife and swimming in a lake filled with lemon juice; and French-kissing a giraffe while an Armenian cover band plays “My Heart Will Go On” by Celine Dion.

Getting up in front of a crowd, for an introvert, requires an act of heroism that the A-types will never understand. This holds true even if the crowd in question is a small group of sleepy college students who frankly couldn’t give a crap how well you can command a room. A natural speaker stands in front of all those people and plays them like a musical instrument, running up and down scales just to show off. A person like me feels the weight of all those eyes, the burden of attention magnified through our neuroses, and no matter how well prepared we are, all our language and vocabulary liquefies in our brains. A cogent, eloquent opening statement comes out as, “Uhhhh…” This is right before our bladders fail.

Our instructor warned us not to memorize our speeches; better, he said, to break our presentation down into talking points and then speak in a more off-the-cuff manner. This comes across as more natural, he argued, and I totally saw his point. I also blatantly ignored it.

Using acting experience as a crutch, I wrote my first speech in a conversational style and memorized it word-for-word, rehearsing until I knew I could deliver it with a smooth and misleading charm. My classmates never knew that the person speaking to them wasn’t Jeff, per se, but a fictionalized version of Jeff,  a character created for the occasion: glib, polished and without the faintest whiff of comic book geekery.

What most people don’t know about the chronically shy is that they’re inventing characters like this all the time, going about their lives in what amounts to jungle camouflage. The smiling, chortling face that neighbors and coworkers see is oftentimes hiding a primal desire for solitude and silence. And in my case, a deep yearning for novels about werewolf slayers with square jaws and names like Brock.

So when Public Speaking 101 comes up on our course schedule, we invent ways to survive. We have to. It’s what we do.

Of course, things we’d rather do include scaling a cliff wearing a backpack filled with live tortoises; volunteering as a sparring partner for a boxer with anvils for hands; and doing a thousand jumping jacks on a bed of hot coals while being shot at by an epileptic sniper.

I fought the tablet, and the tablet won

Despite owning one, tablets are still largely a mystery to me. And no, I’m not talking about giant stone slabs, although frankly those would be more my technological speed. You don’t need a user manual when all you’re working with are a hammer, chisel and a chunk of rectangular rock.

It’s amazing how the very definition of the word “tablet” has changed so dramatically in recent years. For me, it once evoked images of Moses trudging down Mount Sinai with God’s commandments, finally providing his people some much-needed clarity on the whole murder issue. These days, a tablet is something you use to play “Candy Crush Saga” while waiting for your checkup at the dentist. Not quite as epic, I’d say.

That there’s now a tablet in my living room feels like a betrayal of some deeply held ideal. See, for years I was vehemently anti-tablet. I reckoned they were a time-waster, nothing but an oversized smartphone minus the ability to actually make calls. I bemoaned their contributions to dwindling attention spans, their forceful advancement of the virtual on everyday life. And I was right. People now fill every second of their downtime with touchscreen adaptations of Wheel of Fortune -- rather than, I dunno, sitting and thinking about stuff. Which people used to do.

Grudgingly, though, I came to admit that they can be useful. Sometimes. Ugh, I’m choking on the words.

My cautious acceptance of them began about a year ago, on a flight to Las Vegas. The two-leg trek out west was a lengthy one, and while I came prepared with the requisite book and Game Boy (yes, I still have a working one), a little variety is the best antidote for airline-inspired boredom. Prior to leaving, I thought I was really clever: I packed my laptop, reckoning I could just fire it up and surf the web, do some writing, maybe ask Google why suddenly I’ve had to trim my nose hair so damn much.

Soon after lifting off the ground at O’Hare in Chicago, I whipped out the trusty laptop, flipped up the screen … and then panicked. If you’ve ever sat in coach, you know how little space you have in front of you, and I quickly realized there wasn’t enough room to flip the screen up all the way. Instead of being open at a comfortable 100-degree angle, my machine was stuck at a useless 45 degrees. The only way I’d be able to see the screen was if I retracted my head into my body like a turtle and cut out eye slits in my chest cavity. Lacking the necessary surgical implements, this was out of the question.

At this point I had two options. I could admit defeat, tuck the laptop away and simmer in bitterness. Or I could fly into a rage, turn to the nice-looking man seated next to me, and punch him right in his nice-looking face. I chose the former. I think that was wise.

For the first time in my life I found myself thinking, “Boy, I sure could use a tablet right about now.” It would have been so perfect. How easy it would have been to lay it flat on the tray table in front of me and swipe and tap my way across the internet. If the mood had struck I could even have watched a movie on it -- one of my own instead of the dreadful fare they were showing on our tiny individual seat-back screens. Most of the airline’s offerings were box-office bombs starring once-famous sitcom stars with bad mustaches. I don’t know if you’ve flown the friendly skies lately, but they’re not exactly screening “Casablanca” on these things.

For my purposes, buying a tablet brand-new is pretty unjustifiable; I’d be shelling out hundreds of dollars for a seldom-used brick that can stream Stephen Colbert interviews and do little else. So to have one on hand for those rare moments of need, I decided to nab a used machine, thinking they couldn’t be that expensive. After all, we’re talking about a device that weighs less than a baby and boasts fewer features than a library copy of “Anna Karenina.”

Reality stinks. Even used, tablets often sell for $200 or more, which is money better spent on things that keep me alive, like groceries and Netflix. You’d think these contraptions were made out of solid gold and the tears of ancient dragons.

Short of robbing a jewelry store, starting a pyramid scheme or selling off my prized collection of Superman comic books, there were few things I could do to justify spending that kind of dough on a tablet. You don’t shell out 200 clams for something you anticipate using solely on airplanes, unless it’s a device that mutes the sounds of snoring coming from the narcoleptic dude who fell asleep on your shoulder five minutes after takeoff.

That’s what friends are for. A buddy of mine was looking to unload his and so I managed to snag one for cheap. Now all I have to do is mow his lawn for a month and iron his pleated khakis. That’s a fair trade, I guess.

Only now the tablet is mocking me. There it is on my coffee table, cackling, grinning devilishly as it plots to hook me on the two-dollar tap-and-swipe games in Google’s app store. “Soon.” it’s saying in its best Rod Serling voice. “Soon you’ll be whipping me out on your lunch break so you can check your Facebook feed and look up recipes for low-fat banana bread. Soon you’ll be face-timing with San Francisco tech geeks and shooting YouTube videos on a screen the size of a frying pan. Make no mistake, Lagasse: You will be mine.” It says all that and more, although that could just be the peyote talking.

Buyer’s remorse aside, it’s nice to have one lying around, just in case a need arises. If God ever gives me a new set of commandments, I’ll be able to carry them around a lot more easily than Moses did.

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.