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.

Game boy

Monopoly is great when you’re winning. You can plop your wingtips up on your ottoman and chomp on your imaginary cigar with glee as you gloat over your prize properties and generally act like an all-around ass. When you’re losing, it’s intolerable. It’s like slow starvation at the hands of a sadistic dungeon master, only in that scenario at least you don’t have to worry about mortgaging Marvin Gardens to afford the rent.

My last game was a head-to-head barnburner against a fop named Jeeves. It was an epic affair. Epic! Just when it seemed he had me on the ropes, with the Boardwalk/Park Place one-two punch in his portfolio, whammo, I nabbed up all the railroads, slapped some hotels down on Indiana Avenue and watched him lose first his shirt, then his dignity. It’s a terrific game for braggadocious geeks like me who revel in their opponents’ humiliation. My chest swelled with a machismo that was equal parts Muhammad Ali and King Kong.

Which made me feel even more ridiculous when I was reminded that Jeeves is a computer.

Nobody plays actual board games anymore, so I have to rely on artificial players to get my nerd on. I play most of these games on computer programs called emulators; they’re basically software that allows your machine to run old video game systems, the Super Nintendos and Game Boys and whatnot. The legality of this is a little hazy -- there are much cooler ways to be an outlaw, lemme tell you -- but it’s generally considered acceptable if you’re downloading backups of games you bought legitimately. Not that anyone checks. I seriously doubt the FBI is going to bust down my door because I’m running the 1991 Sega Genesis version of Sonic the Hedgehog.

As I grow older, my tastes are shifting from rock-em-sock-em beat-em-up games to adaptations of some of the classic board and card games I remember from youth. Part of me knows this edges me closer to the realm of the lame. You don’t get invited to a lot of parties because you absolutely crush it at Clue. There are two reasons why this doesn’t particularly bother me. One, there’s only so long you can test your reflexes stabbing robots in the neck with an eight-foot-long samurai sword before it starts to get tiring. Two, if I’m lucky enough to reach old age, I’ll put the seniors in my independent living facility to shame with my jaw-dropping Scrabble skills. I consider this training. Watch how I play my X tile, Maude, and bow down before me.

And really, what’s the harm in revisiting some of the games I played with family when I was a kid? It’s a nice little jolt of nostalgia. As a grade schooler I used to go head-to-head against my mother in the Game of Life, a classic dice-rolling romp that takes players on a journey from birth to retirement in the time it takes to bake a chicken. You start by choosing a path, career or college, and then nudge your plastic car along the board attempting to hit certain milestones -- jobs, marriage, kids, etc. Now that I’m a cynical old fart there are certain milestones I’d like to add to the game: first shave, first downsizing, first time taking medication for an inflamed thyroid. By the time you reach the game’s end, with a bad case of cataracts and a 401K ravaged by a tanking economy, you’re tired of it all and impatiently awaiting death. Granted, this is a darker version than most people are used to, but I think it could do well among goth types and the emotionally disturbed.

Hearts was another big one in my household. Most people know how to play it now because of its inclusion in Windows operating systems, but in case you’ve spent the past 20 years sewing soccer balls in a Taiwanese sweatshop, all you need to know is that it’s a trick-taking card game in which the queen of spades is bad. Very bad. So bad, in fact, that she can change the course of a game in seconds. Emotions tend to run high during a typical game of Hearts -- at least mine do -- so when the queen is played you start to hear language that’s typically reserved for an army barracks or Quentin Tarantino film. Salty talk that could melt a statue of the Virgin Mary into a puddle. No computer or video game system can emulate this fully. Part of the charm of playing it 25 years ago was to learn new curse words, and this is partially to thank for my ridiculously inappropriate vocabulary, replete with at least 75 variations of “jerk.” In a way, Hearts gave me the tools necessary to survive on the Massachusetts turnpike.

Thanks to my laptop I can still indulge in this stuff. But something’s lost in the translation. A computer player doesn’t curse under its breath when it gobbles up the queen. It doesn’t giggle uncontrollably when you plunk down your Scrabble letters to spell “butt” and “goober.” And the action takes place on a screen instead of real life -- otherwise known as “reality.” Indeed, reality is being increasingly nudged aside by the virtual, and I can feel its absence every time I plunk down a checker or domino and hear nothing but the whirring of a processor in response. The games remain, but the tangibility has been lost.

Only in Monopoly is this an advantage. See, when a real-life player is losing badly, they always have the option to get up from the table and leave. The computer never leaves. It sits there and takes its punishment like a good little robot while I clean its everloving clock. It’s a small comfort in a digital world, but I’ll take it. In a way, I guess that’s progress.

A sad Sunshine State of affairs

Florida is like junk food. It’s okay in small doses, but overlong exposure to its artificial preservatives will eventually kill you.

Color-wise it even has a candy-coated veneer. Every time I go back I’m reminded of this. Traveling to Orlando for work a couple of weeks ago, I took a shuttle from the airport to the hotel and got a pretty comprehensive tour of the area as various parties were dropped off in town. Pastels and sudden bold splashes of pink bombarded my eyeballs, to the point that I was unsure whether I should check into my room or start hunting for Easter eggs.

That’s what folks in medicine call a symptom. The disease is tackiness. I need to be measured in my criticism here, because it’s easy to hawk spitballs at a place that’s not your own. Beyond the Mickey Mouse ears I’m sure the state has its own unique and worthy culture, traditions that would ignite in anyone a very human spark of recognition. But it also has Hulk Hogan and a five-story animatronic King Kong. So it’s kind of asking for it a bit.

Since work was my reason for being there, there’s a possibility this trip brought some bitterness to the fore that didn’t exist in the past. It’s hard to appreciate the good things about a place when you’re slogging away on your laptop in a hotel room while pool sounds and laughing families are right outside your window. If I’d had more money I would have paid to swap places with someone for a day or two, with them covering a stuffy suit-and-tie convention and me doing tequila shots in steakhouses and eating shrimp with butter. Come to think of it, that would make a good premise for one of those cute Disney “swap” movies. Guess it’s time to get my agent on the phone.

I’ve got a long history with Florida though, and in my memory it’s always has that Crayola sheen. My introduction came courtesy of a trip to Disney World my family took when I was 6. At that point in my life I only had eyes for Pinocchio, so anything potentially unsavory about Florida -- the cloying humidity, the neon green fanny packs -- never even registered. I was eating ice cream and hanging out with Donald Duck, which to a child that age is the equivalent of sipping fine Chardonnay while getting a foot rub by Scarlett Johansson. It never mattered that I was surrounded by a forest of legs with tube socks pulled up to the knees. It’s possible to have a genuinely magical time on that odd little sandbar, assuming you’re in kindergarten and severely nearsighted.

Later in life you start to develop a more discerning eye. My aunt, uncle and cousin moved to Florida when I was in my early teens, and at 14 I flew down to spend time with them. I had just come back from a transcendent experience as a student ambassador touring Australia, so I was feeling especially worldly that summer, toting around my hand-carved boomerang like I was Crocodile freakin’ Dundee. We did the customary tours of various theme parks, which my cousin and I were still young enough to enjoy, but the rest of the time we just sort of hung out -- getting up late, running around outdoors, playing video games until our eyes fell out of our sockets. It was during these moments, the slice-of-life moments, when I really started to take in my surroundings. And, perhaps unfairly, I was able to compare it to some very fresh mental images of the land down under.

That was when I first noticed that almost everything in Florida hurts to look at. Combining the overbright aesthetic of Las Vegas with the sun-bleached weariness of a desert shantytown, the landscape and architecture is by turns piercing and dull -- it’s like a pair of hot pink boots that have been coated in sand and left outside to dry for about 2,000 years. Even the vegetation is all sharp angles and jagged edges. Palm trees have a weapon-esque quality to them, as though you could rip them from the ground and stab a dragon with them. This might be cool if dragons actually existed, but alas, they do not, and so palms have somehow missed their true calling slashing the breasts of mythical beasts.

Flat, unvarying terrain does little to help the situation, especially since said terrain has been developed by businesses to the point of saturation. When my cousin got married in 2010 I traveled to Florida yet again, and my uncle gave me the nickel tour of a 45-minute stretch of highway in and around the Port Charlotte area. He pointed out various towns as we passed through them -- “This is Punta Gorda, this is Englewood Beach” -- but there was nothing distinctive to discern one municipality from the next. Strip malls gave way to strip malls, pink gave way to pink. Flat remained flat. Finding a shoe store or a place to buy a TV would have been a cinch, but anything resembling local character had been washed away by commerce. It reminded me of old computer games from the 1980s where you move to the left side of the screen and then your character reappears on the right, caught in an endless loop. At least those ancient games are still fun to play. The only downside is that they never programmed a Target into King’s Quest, so the hero Roland can never find a decent place to buy a pacifier and a DVD of “Get Shorty.”

Touching back down in Portland I was reminded of how much I love Maine, with its lush green, mountainous vistas unmolested by Disney stores and Foot Lockers. As an occasional vacation destination, Florida has its place. As for the rest, well, when Dorothy said “There’s no place like home,” she wasn’t lyin’.

Greet expectations

Sometimes I don’t see what’s right in front of my nose. Nothing exemplifies this like the greeting cards that are tacked up on my refrigerator, which -- I realized just the other day -- date back to 2014. At several points I must have taken them down to clean off the fridge, then tossed ’em back up without thinking, a kind of reflex only involving the lizard portion of my brain. That, folks, is what you call oblivious.

In my defense, though, they’re greeting cards, which don’t typically attract a lot of attention. They’re not diamonds or rabbits or even a square pizza; these things are unusual, and you tend to notice them no matter the circumstances or location. “Look Ethel, is that a rabbit eating a square pizza? And he’s wearing a diamond necklace! Egads!”

Greeting cards are pretty mundane items, all told, and yet there’s an entire industry built on them. This has always been slightly puzzling to me. The basic idea behind a greeting card, of course, is that you want to send a message to someone, usually in acknowledgement of an event or milestone: Congratulations on finally passing that kidney stone, I’m so sorry for the loss of your pet catfish Rasputin, etc. So you browse the racks at your local drugstore, find some art and some words that vaguely express your sentiments, and say, “Yep, close enough.”

It’s extraordinarily rare to come across a card that’s perfect, absolutely perfect, so “close enough” is the prevailing sentiment when you finally make your selection. Which means the whole Hallmark business model is based on people shrugging and going, “Meh.” I’ve rustled up more enthusiasm buying tube socks.

This apathy tends to show up on the insides of these cards as well, where truly heartfelt sentiments are in short supply. A genuinely touching card is a rare event, like a 100th birthday party or a coherent Pauly Shore movie. The precisely worded, poetic message crafted by the greeting card writer is often followed by a quickly scribbled “Miss you!” or “love xoxoxox” from the sender, which leaves you with a hollow artifact you might look at once or twice more and then toss. Or, if you’re like me, you stick them on your fridge and leave them there until they start to decay like some slow-rotting apple core.

Every once in awhile you get a good one. When I was in high school I had a girlfriend (amazingly) who gave me a birthday card with a pretty lengthy, handwritten missive on the inside, in which she expressed heartfelt sentiments that made the prewritten message seem like stilted fortune cookie text by comparison. It’s the first card I can remember that I actually wanted to keep, and I did so for a long time -- in fact it’s probably still in an attic somewhere, steadily collecting mold alongside old paperback novels and a 1997 copy of Game Informer magazine. Never mind that the relationship ended in spectacular fashion when she left me for a dude on a motorcycle. It’s still a nice memory. I learned two things during that time: Greeting cards can be more than just a piece of cardboard, and I need to buy a motorcycle immediately.

Unless you know somebody who’s willing to write something genuine, the best cards to get are the ones with money or gift cards in them. Not to be materialistic or anything, but if you’re not going to put a little elbow grease into the message, then at least slip in a bonus; it’s unexpected, and it gives the recipient the same feeling they’d get if they hit up three cherries on the slot machines. My aunt was pretty good about this. Every year on my birthday, from the time I was a child, she’d slip a $10 bill in the card and tell me to go nuts, usually in a thick French Canadian accent. Of course she kept this up until I was about 30 or so, and at that point, $10 didn’t really make many waves in my bank account. Adjusted for inflation and cost of living she could have gotten away with dropping me a hundred-spot and throwing in a case of Heineken for good measure. But it was sweet, and always appreciated. The gesture was what mattered, although heck, 10 bucks is 10 bucks, and at the very least it helped pay for those tube socks.

I always preferred gift cards to money, though. The starkness of plain ol’ cash is kind of intimidating. There are too many possibilities and inevitably I end up overthinking it and spending it on something stupid and foolish. I got 50 bucks from my grandfather once and blew it on a giant wall-sized poster of Saturn, thinking I would re-decorate my apartment with some kind of space theme. Never once did I consider that my decorating skills are on par with a lobotomized rhesus monkey who’s high on angel dust. Gift cards give me a mission, a focus. Greeting cards even come with little slots for them now. This is smart. These companies finally realized that people don’t want trite little haikus -- they want a trip to Best Buy so they can buy a tablet computer the size of a solar panel.

My family doesn’t buy me cards anymore, and they know not to expect them in return. I’m not saddened in the slightest. Whenever there’s an event, like a wedding or a holiday, I either pick up the phone or show up in person. Sentiments worth sharing are worth sharing in our own voices. A greeting card can only be a pale imitation of what we really want to say, and even if we’re not glib or eloquent, there’s more poetry in the gesture than there is in spending seven bucks at a drugstore.

Not that there aren’t exceptions. Those cards on the refrigerator aren’t outstanding in any way, but they’ve got longevity going for them. Maybe I’ll keep them there. One of them’s got a snowman on it, but  if nothing else it lends the place a little charm.

Pants on fire

“How do you like the casserole?” my mother asked.

My fork stopped about halfway to my mouth. On it was a pile of said casserole, bits of pasta with burnt edges held together by some kind of paste I can only assume was Elmer’s glue. Wafting from this cluster of food-like material was an odor you typically associate with county fairs, the ones with big belching heifers and dirty chickens.

I had two options. I could tell her the truth, which would hurt her feelings and cause awkwardness around the dinner table. Or I could flat-out lie and tell her the casserole was spectacular.

“It’s really good,” I said, and left it at that.

This minor exchange took place nearly 20 years ago, but I’ve never forgotten it because I still haven’t lived down the guilt of having lied to my mother. I’m hardly the first person to have done this; people lie to their mothers all the time, and usually about bigger stuff, like why they stayed out with their friends until one in the morning, or why their breath smells like a Coors truck that crashed into a pot dispensary. At least it was a white lie, meant to salvage her feelings. That takes the edge off a bit, although it stuck me with that casserole for months.

Lying is a part of being human. We’ve all told white ones, and most of us have told some not-so-white ones. Usually we get the more malicious lies out of our system when we’re children, still experimenting with various personality styles. I still remember a sixth-grade classmate, “Miles,” inventing a story about a gang of older kids who supposedly ambushed me while trick-or-treating one Halloween, threatening to steal my bags of candy. According to this fictional tale, I was so overcome by fright that I burst into tears and fled, cutting across neighbors’ lawns and mewling like an injured kitten. This was obviously a lie meant to embarrass me, but I got the last laugh. I weighed nearly twice as much as Miles, and spent most of the next day’s morning recess eating a chicken sandwich while sitting on his head.

Pathological liars are the worst, because their lies are obvious and come at you so rapidly it can actually be fatiguing. They rarely have any purpose to them. My parents own a duplex, and when I was a kid there was always a revolving door of families moving in or out of the second-floor apartment; the Johnsons would arrive, stay for a year, and then once the bedrooms were sufficiently stinky and the walls scribbled up in children’s handwriting, they’d leave and make room for the Smiths, who’d stink up the works even more. It was an interesting way to grow up.

When the “Humperdinks” moved in I was encouraged to make friends with their son, “Chet,” who was about my age. I tried. But Chet was a pathological liar. We were in the backyard swimming pool one summer afternoon, and I made the classic mistake of telling him something about myself. I mentioned that I liked the novels of Stephen King.

“I wrote a book once and sent it to him,” said Chet.

I waited a beat, anticipating that there might be some forthcoming punchline, maybe a “Just kidding” or a “Gotcha.” Nothing. Chet didn’t even recognize the silence as being uncomfortable. He just smiled and waited for me to respond.

“You wrote a book? And sent it … to who? To Stephen King?”

“Yup! And he wrote back and told me it was awesome! He said it was the perfect book!”

I hated this kid.

Even at the tender age of 12 I considered myself something of a writer, but even if I hadn’t been, even if I’d been a budding street juggler or rodeo clown, it would have been easy to sniff out this particular lie. It was just too preposterous, and for so many reasons that I actually have to arrange them in a numbered list: 1) You don’t write novels at the age of 12. 2) If you do, you have to be some kind of savant. Chet Humperdink was no savant. His main interests in life were Sonic the Hedgehog and coffee cakes. 3) You send novels to publishers, not to Stephen King. 4) If you do, he’ll do the sensible thing and throw it out. He doesn’t have time to provide feedback on people’s passion projects. 5) In a bizarro world where he did read people’s manuscripts, he wouldn’t call any book “perfect.” There’s no such thing. And 6), if you can write novels at the age of 12, you’re probably not living in a duplex in Lewiston and flunking sixth-grade English. Probably. I’m going with the odds on this one.

Summoning up the most skeptical tone in my repertoire, I asked, “So what’s your book about?”

“Are you calling me a liar?”

Yes, Chet. Yes I am.

In a way I was fortunate to have encountered a person like Chet early in my life. Nothing beats the liar out of you like seeing someone do it badly. Nobody’s ever 100 percent honest -- you can’t survive life without a modicum of tact, and small lies are often a form of this -- but you can be as honest as you can within the bounds of reason. By all means, compliment someone’s clothing even if it’s ridiculous. Please, praise your art-challenged child on her awful drawing of a monkey flying a spaceship. But when you start spinning outrageous yarns about playground ruffians and best-selling authors, you’ve crossed an ethical line in odious, cringe-inducing fashion.

Oh, and Mom, if you’re reading this, I didn’t mean what I said about the casserole. That was a total lie. I swear.