If the suit fits

I was young when I first heard the phrase “The clothes make the man.” Even then, as a kid, I didn’t buy it. The man makes the man, I thought; the clothes merely prevent him from being naked.

Clearly not everyone shares this opinion. My workplace has an extremely lax dress code -- the only articles that are outright forbidden consist of t-shirts with swear words and slinky lingerie -- but some of the men still wear ties, the women fancy dress suits. There’s certainly nothing wrong with classic business attire, and it looks good and all, but unless you’re dealing with people face-to-face it doesn’t seem strictly necessary. Personally I’d feel more comfortable, and get more work done, if I were wearing sweatpants and a mustard-stained Red Sox hoodie.

On rare occasions I’m forced to dress up, and I’ll admit that I do walk with a certain swagger in such instances. I was sent to a conference in Orlando this summer and rocked my single three-piece suit, feeling very Wolf-of-Wall-Street-ish. But that’s because I was essentially playing make-believe. It was the same sort of swagger I get when I dress up as a Batman villain for Halloween. During the conference I was playing the role of Jeff Rockjaw III, finance expert and world traveler, and this fantasy took me out of myself, allowed me the novelty of wearing someone else’s skin for a while. When I got back to the hotel room it was right back to my typical summer uniform: cargo shorts and a t-shirt so old it’s practically a vapor.

To be sure, there are certain clothing items that should never be considered acceptable, under any circumstances, ever. Fishnet shirts, for example. Or suit jackets with shoulder pads. Or pretty much anything worn in the 1980s.

Think of how much more relaxed we’d all be if “work attire” was a thing of the past, though. There’s a law firm in the building where I work, and oftentimes I see well-suited men and women walking the halls with a kind of self-important air, a detectable aura that screams, “I am a very big deal.” And look, there’s no doubt that their jobs are, indeed, important. Without lawyers, who would blast us with an $80 charge for a five-minute phone consultation? And to think I could have bought food with that money.

The problem with look-at-me-I’m-a-big-shot suits is that they do nothing to help these lawyers actually do their jobs. Sure, they’d struggle to maintain credibility if they showed up in court wearing tracksuit pants and a Pokemon t-shirt, but that’s only because business attire is the norm in that situation. If all of the nation’s courtrooms issued a new proclamation tomorrow -- “Suits optional everyone, just wear what you want” -- I can guarantee you things would be a lot looser. The atmosphere would be less clenched, and there’d be a lot more smiles on a lot more prosecutor’s faces. “Hey, your honor, what’s up? So yeah, this guy right here? He totally did it. Like, not even a question. See this evidence? Boom, in your face, public defendant!”

School principals would be more approachable. Accountants would have more fun. CEOs could put their gamesmanship aside and focus on the things that are truly important, like lowering their golf handicap. This is the nirvana I envision: a suitless world in which people can finally breathe.

Things are slowly moving that direction, with the definition of “formal” becoming more and more relaxed through the centuries. The Victorian era was marked by stark formality; a poorly-worn necktie or an ill-fitting waistcoat could earn a man a reputation for being an outright ragamuffin (a word that should make a comeback, in my opinion). In the Edwardian era, things got a little simpler. Post-World War I, the scene was simpler still, with long coats giving way to the previously informal lounge coat. If the trend continues it’ll soon be acceptable to conduct business in a pajama onesie meant to look like a cartoon bunny.

If men are better off this way -- and they are -- I can only imagine the relief felt by women, who a few short lifetimes ago were expected to squeeze themselves into apparatuses more complicated than the inner workings of a Japanese motorcycle. Bras with hard wires, girdles, frilly dresses with more layers than a Russian nesting doll … all a little overkill. I’ve never been curious enough to wear, say, a ladies’ outfit from the Victorian era, but the complexity seems prohibitive. I’d have to start getting dressed at four in the morning to be ready for lunch, and removing the outfit would probably involve a set of industrial-strength scissors, possibly even the jaws of life. Pantsuits get a bad rap nowadays, but at least you can change in and out of one before your roommate is done slow-roasting her Butterball turkey.

In our relaxed new era, I walk into my office wearing an untucked polo shirt and feel perfectly at home. In another 20 years, who knows? I may be wearing sandals, gym shorts and an Anthrax hoodie. Socially conservative members of older generations may be lowering their heads, pinching the bridges of their noses and muttering things about the depravity and loosy-goosy dress standards of modern life, but bring it on, I say. I find it hard to get work done while wearing a suit because I’m constantly aware of its essential suitness. I adjust my tie and tug at my shirt incessantly, petrified that any loose knot or bunched island of fabric will undermine my professional veneer and spell doom. Frumpy clothes don’t make me feel this way. They just make me feel comfortable, and in the winter they disguise the belly I obtained by nibbling on vegetable chips and cheese-stuffed pretzels.

And I feel no hit to my core maleness in the bargain. Because it turns out, after all, that clothes don’t make the man. They just make it a little less drafty.

Caught in a mosh

One more time won’t hurt, I thought. And it didn’t. At least for a little while.

Honestly, if there had been seats at the venue, like there are in an arena or theater, buying the concert tickets would have been an easy choice. There are only a few things more pleasing to me than sitting and watching a good band perform live, and most of those things involve being naked.

Remove seats from the equation, and you’re talking about a lot of standing around … at best. At worst, you’re talking about a mosh pit.

For a longtime metalhead such as myself, it’s amusing to note how many non-metal fans aren’t sure what a mosh pit is, exactly. They vaguely associate mosh pits with the music they warned their children not to listen to, so they assume it’s something evil -- a goat-sacrificing ritual, perhaps, or some kind of stadium-wide satanic pact made in blood. They’re nothing of the sort, although admittedly it would be kinda cool to see a goat at a concert. Not to harm it in any way -- I’m not into that stuff -- but because goats are cute. In fact, they should be mandatory for all concerts. Wouldn’t you love to see a random goat at the Kenny Chesney show? Of course you would.

No goats in the mosh pit, though. Too brutal, as I rediscovered only recently.

Mosh pits typically begin during the speediest, heaviest songs in a band’s set, the ones with breakneck rhythms and fretwork that could blow the quills off a porcupine. In the standing-room-only section, on the floor in front of the stage, a churning begins to happen, a brewing cyclone of young drunkards and over-pierced malcontents. After a while the cyclone becomes a full-blown tornado and a circle opens up amidst the standing masses, a rapidly rotating maelstrom of bodies and pumping limbs. It’s like the heavy metal version of a country line dance, only way more chaotic, and someone usually ends up eating concrete.

Sounds violent, and it can be … but not maliciously so, if that makes sense. There’s a certain mosh pit etiquette: You can shove and jostle and ram into people, but it’s a faux pas to outright hit anyone. If someone hits the ground, the action halts and someone helps the fallen regain their feet. And if someone doesn’t want to participate, they don’t have to -- although the more passive concert goers in the crowd may be intermittently pinballed around by the pit’s rhythmic undulations. It’s like a raucous rally for a rabble-rousing dictator, only instead of Mussolini on the stage it’s four long-haired musicians who look like the cast of “Designing Women.”

Pits were sort of fun when I was 21, 22. They were a way to channel the band’s energy, to blow off steam. Now that I’m older, calmer and more prone to lower back pain, I prefer the seats. I sip a beer, I enjoy the music, I watch the tattooed freaks stomp around and froth at the mouth. Fun stuff.

Only, when I went to see Megadeth in New Hampshire a couple weekends ago, there were no seats at all. Standing room only. Gulp.

Which I knew going in, of course. When considering whether to go, the lack of seating arrangements was a consideration. Ultimately my love of the band won out. After 30-plus years of recording and touring, Megadeth is in the mid-to-late autumn of its career, so when they come to within shouting distance I’m usually right there with my faded tour shirt and a fist raised high in the air. I have to seize every opportunity to see them before they drink themselves out of the music business and into retail jobs putting price stickers on juice blenders.

Strategically, I knew I had to come up with some sort of plan to avoid unwanted physical entanglements. Standing in one place for two-and-a-half hours is bad enough, but it’s worse when you’ve got a sweaty, drunken lout pinwheeling his arms in the general vicinity of your face.

It’s my luck, I guess, that my favorite musicians tend to be old farts. Older bands typically draw older crowds, and while there are still a good amount of under-30 animals who show up to these shows looking for a cathartic bruising, many are people like me, nearing middle age and in no damn mood to be swatting away half-crazed hellhounds. Rock and metal fans in my age range want a simple concert experience. They want to play air guitar to their favorite solos, swing their arms to all the good drum fills, shout along to whatever cheesy lyrics are on offer, and go home happy. That’s it. We’ll save the bruises for when we fall down the cellar stairs with a load of laundry.

Looking around the venue, it was clear there were plenty of greybeards like myself. This made the strategy simple: Find the point in the crowd where the silver whiskers and receding hairlines began, and plant myself there. So I did. And it was great. Another show under my belt, and I escaped it without some rum-swilling idiot taking me out at the kneecaps.

Regardless, the excessive standing did a number on my beleaguered glutes, which made me ask myself the question: How long can I keep doing this? The floor in front of the stage belongs to the animals, and I left that group forever the minute I started playing Scrabble on the computer. But one day soon my geezer bands will fade into the night; part of me feels obligated to see them whenever I can, seats or no seats. It’s part of an unspoken pact between band and fan: They give me joy, and I give them my body.

A quote from Michael Corleone in “The Godfather Part III” sums it up nicely:

“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”

Streak condition

Author's note: This column originally ran in the Journal Tribune and was meant to reference the fact that my column switched from a weekly format to every other week. Just to give you some context. 'Cause without it, it may not make much sense. Hell, it may not make much sense anyway. You be the judge!

 

So hey. You may have noticed I wasn’t around last week.

I’ll be spewing my nonsense every other week for the foreseeable future, which will allow me time to pursue other interests, like glaring at motorists who don’t use their turn signals. It’s a workable arrangement, but it also breaks a streak: Five straight years of sucking up space on this page without missing a week.

What? A standing ovation? Please, people! Take your seats, take your seats. I’m very flattered.

Whenever a streak comes to an end it serves as a kind of demarcation point, a way for us to make sense of a certain period of time. Sports fans in particular seem obsessed with streaks: winning streaks, losing streaks, hitting streaks. They’re a statistical anomaly, and such anomalies are enticing because they invite analysis as to what engendered the streak to begin with. It’s a way to start a discussion without getting all political and alienating half your social media friends with long rants about the nascent rise of fascism.

And if sports are indeed your bag, then you probably know the name Cal Ripken Jr. Of all the streaks in Major League Baseball, his is perhaps the streakiest. At one point during his 20-year career, the shortstop and third baseman played in 2,632 straight games, earning him the nickname “Iron Man.” (These were the days before the moniker invoked images of a red-and-yellow combat suit.) His accomplishment makes a grade schooler’s perfect attendance certificate look positively pathetic in comparison. It’s easy to go to class every day when you don’t have line drives constantly rocketing toward your face.

When his streak was still active I was at the height of my baseball obsession, so I was lucky enough to see him play. Streak aside, he racked up some impressive stats in his career, but it wasn’t as though he glowed with some god-like inner fire, or performed nutty Cirque Du Soleil-type feats every night. He was just a workhorse. Nothing fancy; he just showed up. Being consistent and doing his job well made him a pretty good role model -- much better than my other role models at the time, who were mostly mutant turtles and spandex-wearing vigilantes. When Cal’s streak ended, it felt like a whole era had come to a close. And it had. During his streak I graduated from two different schools and learned how to properly kick a hacky sack.I may have also started losing my hair around this time, but let’s not rip open <SET ITALICS>that</SET ITALICS> old wound.

Because there are so many freakin’ games during the course of a season, baseball is littered with streaks. The other notable historical streak that comes to mind took place in 1941 when Yankees center fielder Joe DiMaggio hit safely in 56 straight games. Since not all of you are baseball nuts, let me put that in terms you can relate to: It’s like hitting three sevens on the slot machine 10 times in a row. It’s like flipping a quarter and getting heads 100 times straight. It’s like hitting a penny with a pistol at 500 paces. It’s rare. I’m saying it’s rare.

It’s so statistically improbable, in fact, that in the entire history of Major League Baseball, DiMaggio is the only player to hit safely in more than 50 straight games; Orioles right fielder Willie Keeler is in second place on the all-time list with a 44-game streak in -- get this -- 1897! I’m not a huge fan of non-ironic exclamation points … but wow! Pro baseball has been around long enough to see two World Wars, the rise of automobiles, the invention of the Oreo cookie and about 17 Friday the 13th movies. One dude hit the 50 mark. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a motherfucking streak.

Nobody but DiMaggio would know what it’s like to have a streak like that come to an end. But some of us have personal streaks to serve as a rough comparison.

Maybe it’s only the most neurotic among us who mentally keep their own record books, but if anyone qualifies as a victim of near-debilitating neuroses, it’s this guy. When I was a boy of about 12, I realized I had a hard time walking on snow and ice. I’d have at least one bad spill every winter, one of those bone-rattling falls that bruises both your ego and your butt. Hindsight being 20/20 this was most assuredly due to the fact that I’m flat-footed and never wear boots. So basically I kept hitting the asphalt because I was physically awkward and dumb.

Until one winter. At 13 -- a lucky age, apparently -- I survived the colder months without any unwanted trips to the sidewalk. Thus began a small streak: Six straight years of remaining upright.

It came crashing down, literally, one icy January on a small residential street in Lewiston. At first it was devastating. Six years down the tubes. Then I realized a weight had been lifted. When a streak reaches superhuman proportions, it takes on a distorted meaning in the mind, imbued with an outsized mystique, and the streak-bearer starts walking on eggshells. So much mental energy is devoted to keeping the streak alive that it becomes a weight on the psyche, and when the streak ends, so does the pressure. Bruised fanny or no, at least I didn’t have to live up to the strange mythology I’d built for myself.

Hard to know if that same mythological thinking applies to this space. Too early to tell. But I will admit to some modicum of relief. Sometimes you have to leave a place and come back to it before it truly feels like home.

Childish things

“Pinocchio” is one heck of a good Disney movie. I know because I sat down to watch it just recently, the grease from a giant bowl of popcorn dribbling from one corner of my mouth. There were no children present, no wide-eyed squeals of delight as the titular character became a real boy. Just me. This is what it’s come to: Watching kids’ films alone and eating myself into a nostalgia-tinged stupor.

Some people might consider this a low of sorts, the act of a depressed man, but I knew better. The way I see it -- or at least the way I’ve rationalized it to myself -- is that I’m simply a guy who’s retained a sense of what made his childhood fun and memorable. The movie brought me comfort when I was a boy, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t bring me some comfort now. It’s a blankie I can cling to while I contentedly suck my thumb.

What’s remarkable is the lack of shame or embarrassment I feel in admitting this. Part of this is personality; I don’t particularly care what people think of me. If I did, I wouldn’t wear Megadeth t-shirts to the supermarket and fart brazenly in front of my mother.

Partly, though, I’m emboldened by a certain trend gaining traction among people of my generation. See, it used to be fashionable to act all grown-up and mature. What’s that line from the Bible? The one about becoming an adult and leaving childish things behind? That used to be the overriding philosophy of anyone on the downslope of adolescence. For men of generations past in particular, it was expected that once you hit a certain age, you put your boyhood obsessions aside, strapped on a tie and stoically went about your grown-up life, dutifully coveting grown-up things like lawnmowers and ratchet sets. Do ratchets come in sets? I don’t even know.

Today we live in a world in which nobody grows up, or has to. Twenty- and thirtysomethings have the same responsibilities, of course. We go to work and bring home the bacon, and sometimes we cash that in for literal bacon, which in turn gives us a very adult case of heart disease. We pay our bills and have homes and families, and occasionally we’ll even go and buy some ratchets, which Google assures me do indeed come in sets. We trudge through life and meet its demands. We keep our farts to ourselves.

But we also sleep on Iron Man bedsheets. We watch cartoons and eat cereal for dinner and proudly adorn our mantles with collectible Justice League action figures. The new adulthood is a strange amalgam of past and present, our pacifiers still clutched tight into our later decades. My grandfather, who passed away last year, would likely have been very confused to discover that the dominant piece of art in my living room is a giant poster of Batman.

He may have chalked it all up to proof of generational degradation. Yet I’m not so convinced it’s entirely a bad thing.

Being a nerd, I was reading a 2010 study in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science which claimed that our core personalities, the set of traits that make us us, are set for life by the time we’re in 1st grade. That means we are who we are, more or less, when we reach the age of 8 or 9. Tender years, those. When I was 9 I was shy and tentative and enjoyed solitude, all characteristics that have survived to the present day. I can’t shed these things. They’re embedded in me, the way your brashness is embedded in you, and the proclivity for laughing at pies in the face is embedded in your uncle Mortimer. (The one with the hook nose who everyone avoids at parties. You know the guy.) Nobody would ask us to jettison our personalities when we grew up, and we couldn’t if we tried.

Yet we’re expected to jettison everything else we liked when we were 9. If grandfathers ruled the world, I’d be forced to scrap all my Ninja Turtles video games, toss my New Kids on the Block tapes and burn a giant pile of X-Men comics. They would be replaced, respectively, with computer solitaire, big band records and the collected works of Charles Dickens. Those are all good things, but when do I get to drop the seriousness and read junk and watch trash? The mind needs a good palate cleanser now and then, and few things are better for that sort of thing than the stories and characters that appealed to us in our formative years -- back when our idea of a balanced diet was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and birthday cake. Occasional frivolity is healthy.

Not everything survives from those early years, of course, and not everything should. Long gone are the sippy cups and belching contests. The scooter is ancient history. The glitter pens are too, and none too soon. But a lot of those core interests, the Disney flicks and collectible figurines and whatnot, are pretty foundational; letting go of these childish things would seem like some sort of betrayal, a repudiation of my younger self. And I think a lot of Gen Xers and older Millennials feel the same way. Every adult knows life is hard, and every adult deals with it in his or her own way. Ours is to cling fast to the things that brought us comfort, because they’ve never stopped bringing us comfort, and that’s OK. If that makes us nerds, well, that’s OK too. At least we’re nerds with some sort of orientation, a compass in labyrinthine times. More people could use that, frankly.

Which is why, on a random Wednesday night in August, I sat below a Batman poster and watched “Pinocchio” for the first time in 30 years. It felt good. In fact, in another 30 years, I just might do it again.

Junk food in the trunk, dude

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crash course

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Divide and conquer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jibber jabber

“Hot enough for ya?”

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

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

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

“Sure is windy today, isn’t it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Year me out

Birthdays used to follow a familiar pattern. I’d spend the day riding bikes and getting up to some general shenanigans with friends, and when I got back home there’d be toys and cards stacked on the coffee table like a display at Toys R Us, minus the creepy giraffe. My mother would film my reactions as I opened presents. This foreshadowed the YouTube trend of posting videos in which people react to various stimuli, like music or old video games. If I’d been born a couple decades later, I could have been an internet star. A missed opportunity: Yet another incentive to transition into the cranky old fart phase of my life.

At some point, birthdays became way more chaotic. As a child my circle was tight. All my friends knew each other, they all knew my parents, my parents knew all the other parents, and the only people resting outside of this insular sphere were the relatives who lived out of of state --  the ones who sent me Christmas cards with obscenely large checks in them. (Thanks, Uncle George.)

As I grew older, that small sphere became several overlapping spheres. Not all of my friends know each other; I can’t just invite them all over for a pool party and call it good. Their ages vary, their political affiliations are all over the map, we have different common histories, and the mix just wouldn’t make sense. Plus I don’t have a pool. So there’s that.

Instead, my birthday has gradually morphed from one big event into several smaller events taking place over the course of many days. It’s exhausting. Nice, but exhausting. In a very real sense, and in more ways than one, getting older is going to kill me.

Festivities this year were divided into three parts, with Phase 1 kicking off at a Chinese buffet in Auburn. The parents wanted to take me out, and when they ticked off a list of possible restaurants, the buffet was clearly their preferred option; you could see it in their eyes, the way they glowed with thoughts of congealing pork juice and sugary dough balls. Something about Chinese buffets attract the older set -- maybe it’s the limited interaction with servers, the whole get-down-to-business mentality on which these places are built. Either way, I didn’t really care. I was hungry and wanted food, and pretty much anything would have sufficed. A bag of marshmallows, a jumbo squeeze-bottle of Cheez Whiz, whatever. So I picked the buffet.

What I failed to consider was that my parents have a hard time understanding accents, and have little patience for those who can’t understand theirs. I'll admit I occasionally struggle with accents myself, but there are subtle ways to handle it, without causing offense or straining international relations. Dad in particular does not take the subtle route. His strategy in making himself understood is to ratchet up the volume until his drink request is audible from small fishing settlements in northern Canada. Ordering a Heineken last week, he sounded like a man shouting instructions to a battalion through a failing walkie-talkie. I spent much of dinner trying to tuck my head into my body in turtle-esque fashion.

Phase 2 of my birthday weekend was quite chill, a low-key hang session with my friend “Greg.” Greg and I go back almost 30 years -- we met and became buddies in grade school -- so he’s the perfect candidate for mutual reminiscing on birthdays past, someone who’s been around for most of them and has witnessed my slow transition from quiet, unassuming nerd to quiet, chronically assuming dweeb. Friends like this are perfect for helping a person mythologize certain aspects of their history; sometimes an event becomes more real if you’re given the context and language to turn it into a story you can tell at backyard barbecues. Yet every year this exercise becomes ever more disconcerting, because it’s a reminder of just how many birthdays are behind me. Slowly, our conversations have gone from “Hey, remember when we went clay shooting in the sand pit?” to “Hey, remember when our backs didn’t hurt?” Someday, the answer to that latter question will be “no.” Cue ominous music.

“Karen” was the centerpiece of Phase 3. She’s another friend who goes back decades -- I have a lot of those -- and she’s my heavy metal buddy. It’s important to have one of those if you’re a metalhead; it’s a much-maligned and often misunderstood musical genre, and if you don’t know at least one person who’s on the same wavelength in that regard, you spend a lot of time alone watching nostalgia documentaries on VH1. She took me out to dinner and a local metal show, and lemme tell you, if you think the big-name acts are ridiculous, try banging your head to the yokels who carry around their own drum heads. General rule of thumb: If you’re a metal band who’s too small-time to have roadies, your music probably sounds like two milk trucks crashing into a collapsed suspension bridge.

All three phases were terrific, a sustained streak of unabated awesome. In aggregate, they were also draining. As lucky as I am to be surrounded by people who care, there’s something to be said about the simplicity of childhood, with celebrations concentrated into a single event -- Slip ’N Slides, chocolate cake and plastic lawn chairs, the whole production. One of the things that’s nice about being a kid is the naive belief that everything will always stay the way it is; we’re oblivious to time’s fracturing effect. We don’t yet realize, in any real sense, that friends move away, parents grow old, and circles of influence become splintered by politics and religion, careers and choices. All that exists is the present moment.

Luckily, because my mother was once obsessed with her camcorder, those moments are preserved for posterity. And they’ve recently been digitized. You know what that means: YouTube stardom, here I come.

Cray crays

Something about me attracts the crazies.

Maybe “crazies” is a bit harsh. “Eccentrics” may hit closer to home, but any way you want to define them, they have a way of finding me, perhaps sensing I’m a bit eccentric myself. It reminds me of the way a morsel of food will attract insects even when there are no insects in sight. I am officially a slice of watermelon. Never thought I’d say that.

Evidence of this came last week in the form of a transient woman whose crusty bun of hair looked as though it might crumble like soup crackers in strong crosswinds. I was relaxing in Portland’s Monument Square, chomping on a nectarine, when a young man approached asking if I would sign a petition. The woman -- I’ll call her “Penelope” -- sauntered over and began engaging with the man. It was a bad sign when she didn’t know Susan Collins and Angus King were her senators. It was an even worse sign when she sat on the bench next to me and started talking about how she rummages for food in other people’s trash.

Petition Man quickly got our signatures and hoofed it, practically leaving a cartoon puff-cloud behind hm as he set land speed records racing down Congress Street. He and I both knew that Penelope would soon be launching into breathy and meandering discourse on all things transient; she exuded this quality immediately, much the way Kryptonite emits a lime-green glow of radiation. Petition Man, needing more signatures, had a pretense for leaving the scene. All I had was a nectarine. Lucky me.

Penelope settled deeper into the bench as her eyes assumed a far-way look, the kind that usually precedes a long philosophical rant. What choice did I have but to sit there and listen? My lunch hour had just begun, and though I could have lied and said “Sorry, I have to get back to work,” chances are she would have stayed on the bench for a few minutes, started walking again, and spotted me finishing my fruit while hiding ineffectively behind a hot dog vendor. I’m always caught in these situations, and so I stayed put and listened patiently while sucking on the pit, secretly wishing I had the power to morph into a bird and fly to safer ground. Nova Scotia, perhaps.

What a tale she told. Penelope seemed less a hard-luck case than the hobo type, deliberately choosing a transient lifestyle for reasons that are still unclear to me. Maybe it’s the romance of it. Originally from Massachusetts, she spends the warmer months roaming the northeast, camping and squatting and eating cheap calories in the form of discarded bread and bad lettuce. She seems to live in some alternate, concurrent reality, a Mad Max dreamscape running parallel to our own workaday lives. Her story would have sounded almost quaint if she hadn’t smelled like old pottery. Maybe these types of stories are more charming when you don’t feel like burying your face in a bucket of potpourri.

And I just sat there and took it. There’s a quality these people sense in me; maybe it’s that I don’t talk much. They look at me and see a giant ear they can squawk into. Which, come to think of it, is a half-decent idea for a cartoon character: Eary McLobe, a superhero whose power is soaking up the ramblings of loquacious drifters. Gotta copyright that before Marvel pounces on it.

To clarify, my unease had nothing to do with Penelope being disadvantaged. I donate to food shelters and drop bills into buskers’ guitar cases, and feel the requisite liberal dismay when poor folk are unfairly targeted by bad public policy. My beef was that she was both chatty and insane. Much like the woman who approached me in almost the exact same spot some three weeks previous.

Same park, same time of day, different bench. Turkey sandwich this time. I was staring into space with dead bird in my mouth and thinking about nothing at all when another woman, I’ll call her “Fiona,” settled in next to me and started massaging her calf, which was pockmarked with mosquito bites and looked like a deli ham. With no preamble -- no “Hey, howya doin’” or “Mind if I sit here?” -- Fiona told me all about her knee surgery, and how much it hurt, and how entertainment options in Portland were limited for a woman of her age. Apparently her idea of entertainment is finding random turkey eaters and picking up on conversations they didn’t even realize they were having. Beats going to clubs, I guess.

Fiona is one of those people who’ll expound at length on her own travails while expressing no interest in the lives of her listeners. These people are amusing, but exhausting. In about five minutes I knew about her family, her living situation, her hobbies and her medications. If I’d had a second sandwich I might have been able to stick around long enough to grab her social security number and the passcode to her apartment building. I said about five words, none of them revealing, but in retrospect I probably should have said more. I missed an opportunity to concoct a flesh-and-blood fictional character from scratch. A more inventive mood might have produced Randy Shephard, an amorous farmer whose indiscriminate fornicating practices have resulted in a stock of very shy and confused cows.

Buried underneath my bemused frustration is the lurking suspicion that maybe I’m one of the crazies myself. In 30 years I may well be interrupting people’s lunches to expound on my theories about using wormholes to travel through time. I’m strangely OK with this. As long as I still have access to fresh nectarines, it’s a fate I can handle.