Maybe this is a generational thing, but whenever someone coins a unique
or musical phrase – like “bastardized hieroglyphics” – somebody under
the age of 40 will inevitably quip, “That would make a great name for a
band!”
Despite the fact that they’re joking, they’re oftentimes right. Although
whether that’s due to linguistic brilliance, or a lack of decent names
for contemporary bands, is anybody’s guess. Calling a cool-tempered
bearded dragon a “suave lizard” might make it seem as though you’ve
stumbled upon the greatest moniker this side of “Black Sabbath.” But
that could be a manifestation of the better-by-comparison phenomenon;
the sad reality is that “Letters to Cleo” is what passes for a name
nowadays.
Yes, “Letters to Cleo” is an actual band. Oh, how I wish it wasn’t.
I
guess you’d have to be a music junkie to appreciate just how awful band
names have gotten in recent years. And this isn’t a stodgy, fuddy-duddy
shot at a younger generation’s music; a lot of the actual tunes coming
from these ill-titled artists are really pretty good. A nice example is
“Of Monsters and Men.” What I’ve heard from them so far is actually
pretty decent, but their name is way better suited for a fantasy novel
penned by a pasty dude in suspenders and knee-high socks. In other
words, me in the second grade.
Obviously, modern bands don’t have a monopoly on silly names. “Abba,”
“Three Dog Night,” and “The Teenagers” are all artists of yore that
sound as if they stumbled upon their titles playing word association
games under the influence of government-grade psychedelic drugs. (”The
Teenagers” is particularly silly given that its members now qualify for
senior discounts at the cineplex.) But those have become fairly tame by
today’s standards. I submit as evidence groups like “Goo Goo Dolls,”
“Hootie and the Blowfish,” and “Mott the Hoople.” Apparently we’re
running low on words not uttered from a baby’s crib.
While I’m tempted to suggest pretension on the part of these musicians,
part of me thinks the English language is simply being drained of
anything approaching respectability. There are only so many words, and
so many combinations thereof. All of the good, simple, and memorable
names – “The Eagles,” “Iron Maiden,” “The Cure” – have been snatched up
by generations past, leaving some dictionary-deprived artists to invent
nonsensical gobbledygook, like “Chumbawumbas.” Which, I’m sorry to
report, is as real as a punch to the groin.
Still, that hardly seems like an excuse. If you give a million monkeys a
million typewriters and let them peck away for a million years,
eventually, one of them will come up with a band name less embarrassing
than “Toad the Wet Sprocket.”
Perusing my own collection, I’m pained to see that some of the groups I
truly love have names that would make the bassist for “Hoobastank”
titter like a tickled toddler (while picking pickled peppers). Case in
point: Megadeth. Now, I fully acknowledge that heavy metal is a style
that appeals to only a select portion of music aficionados; most of
them, myself included, think nothing of air drumming violently at stop
lights, which probably explains why co-workers give us wide berths at
the vending machine. But as far as the genre goes, Megadeth is one of
the elite. They’re titans. One year, I went so far as to finagle my way
backstage at a concert, where I was able to meet the band’s frontman,
Dave Mustaine. A tall, golden-haired shredder, Mustaine is a brilliant
musician – but naming his band “Megadeth” was an error in judgment
almost as grievous as developing his own line of coffee. (This is
absurdly true.)
To be fair, “megadeath” – with the correct spelling intact – is an
actual word, hard as it is to believe. You can find it in the
dictionary. But you can also crack open a Merriam-Webster’s and find
such gems as “mollycoddle,” “argle-bargle,” and “snollygoster.” That
doesn’t mean you should name your band after them. “Megadeth” seems like
a name settled upon during a massive coke-and-heroin bender. Here it
should be noted that Dave Mustaine is infamous for massive
coke-and-heroin benders.
It’s a tricky business, naming a band. It’s almost easier to know what not to do than to get it right.
The musical world would be a much less ridiculous place if those
concocting names would follow just a few simple rules: Don’t
intentionally misspell anything (”Limp Bizkit,” “‘N Sync,” “Boyz II
Men”), don’t needlessly include a preposition (”Archers of Loaf,”
“Fountains of Wayne,” “Apples in Stereo”), and don’t make it needlessly
long (”Thirty Odd Foot of Grunts”).
Also, don’t be stupid.
That might seem obvious, but clearly, the
namers of the next band were not following this last, most important
rule. In all my vast research on this topic – encompassing 30-odd years
of music fandom, topped with a 10-second Google search – I have never
seen a name more ludicrous, more embarrassing and cringeworthy, than the
following.
The 2013 Gassman Award for Band-Naming Stupidity goes to:
“Colonel Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit.”
G’night, everyone.
Thursday, June 6, 2013
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Root root root
Okay, so first thing’s first: James Earl Jones has the greatest speaking
voice ever bestowed upon a man. There’s a reason why he was chosen to
do the voice-over work for Darth Vader. I could listen to him read the
assembly instructions for an Ikea bed frame and be completely enamored;
his robust baritone is the therapeutic equivalent of dunking a set of
eardrums into a soothing hot bath with eucalyptus bubbles. I’d stop
myself before the imagery gets too disturbing, but I think that ship has
sailed.
“Field of Dreams” would still be a good movie without him. The 1989 Kevin Costner fantasy about ghosts who haunt a baseball diamond in an Iowa cornfield is a classic – a strange and unsettling classic, but a classic nonetheless, tailor-made for anyone with a sense of baseball’s mysterious, almost mythical history.
But Jones is the scene-stealer, the thingamabob that stirs the whatever. Not that it’s hard to steal scenes from Kevin Costner; the man once played Robin Hood, and in two-and-a-half hours, the only word he managed to pronounce in an English accent was “sword.” It marks the only time in film history when the merry bandit sounded like he’d just stepped off the boat from Rhode Island.
Anyone who’s ever sat in a cool breeze at a minor league ballpark in May and felt completely at peace knows about Jones’ goosebump-raising soliloquy at the end of “Field of Dreams.” It’s the kind of speech that makes roughneck cowboys blubber like ninnies. Predicting that far-flung travelers will be inexplicably drawn to the spectral exhibition games played in that mysterious cornfield, Jones talks about baseball as though it had been laid at humanity’s feet by the Greek gods of Olympus. All in a voice that could melt a stick of butter.
Only baseball can inspire that kind of poetry. You don’t hear a lot of stirring odes to synchronized swimming, or intercollegiate water polo.
At this point, you’re in one of two camps: Those who can relate to baseball’s romanticism, and those who think the sport is as boring as John Kerry reading “The Iliad.” (The third camp – those who couldn’t give a rat’s patootie – have already moved on to a sudoku.)
Summoning my powers of objectivity, I can see how the uninitiated might consider baseball less than enthralling. In a lot of ways, it’s an anachronism – it has no earthly business being played in a century dominated by 30-second commercials, movies on demand, and cheeseburgers prepped so quickly they cause a ripple in spacetime. Baseball doesn’t fit into a world of instant gratification; its pleasures are slow, doled out not by the foot, but by the inch.
That’s what makes it great.
I’m reminded of this every spring, right around the time I first hear that gratifying wood-on-cowhide crack. The sound is like a pair of snapping fingers jolting me out of a state of deep hypnosis; not being much of a winter sports enthusiast, I tend to spend those frosty months actually being (gasp!) productive, which is the antithesis of what summer’s all about. Summer is a season for wasting vast stretches of time eating ice cream sandwiches while watching minor league mascots lose footraces to four-year-olds.
When I was about 10, my father gave me one of those kid-friendly books filled with factoids about the history of baseball. That history is what sets the game apart from, say, hockey, which I believe was invented by the penguins of the Arctic circle. Or football, which was created in a lab by pumping gamma rays into a petri dish filled with bull testosterone.
The story of baseball is the story of the country’s industrial revolution; it’s the story of pickup games played in the streets of Harlem in the late 1800s, of steel-jawed immigrants hitting and catching their way out of coal mines. It’s the story of the Civil Rights movement (Jackie Robinson, anybody?), and of late 20th Century excess. It’s the story of cheaters and their punishments – the story of fairness.
But why am I proselytizing? James Earl Jones’ “Field of Dreams” character, in a speech to his friend Ray, said it far better than I could:
“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again.”
Insert wistful sigh here.
To truly appreciate that, maybe you had to grow up with a sock tied around your brand-new baseball glove to get just the right curve in the webbing. Or felt a tingle rush up your arms as you connected with your first fastball. Heck, maybe a vendor in the stands once pelted you in the kisser with a bag of peanuts – that would do it too, I suppose.
Whatever the reason, it’s got a grip on those of us susceptible to its charms. And yes, the clichĂ© is true: We love peanuts and Cracker Jacks, and we don’t care if we ever get back.
“Field of Dreams” would still be a good movie without him. The 1989 Kevin Costner fantasy about ghosts who haunt a baseball diamond in an Iowa cornfield is a classic – a strange and unsettling classic, but a classic nonetheless, tailor-made for anyone with a sense of baseball’s mysterious, almost mythical history.
But Jones is the scene-stealer, the thingamabob that stirs the whatever. Not that it’s hard to steal scenes from Kevin Costner; the man once played Robin Hood, and in two-and-a-half hours, the only word he managed to pronounce in an English accent was “sword.” It marks the only time in film history when the merry bandit sounded like he’d just stepped off the boat from Rhode Island.
Anyone who’s ever sat in a cool breeze at a minor league ballpark in May and felt completely at peace knows about Jones’ goosebump-raising soliloquy at the end of “Field of Dreams.” It’s the kind of speech that makes roughneck cowboys blubber like ninnies. Predicting that far-flung travelers will be inexplicably drawn to the spectral exhibition games played in that mysterious cornfield, Jones talks about baseball as though it had been laid at humanity’s feet by the Greek gods of Olympus. All in a voice that could melt a stick of butter.
Only baseball can inspire that kind of poetry. You don’t hear a lot of stirring odes to synchronized swimming, or intercollegiate water polo.
At this point, you’re in one of two camps: Those who can relate to baseball’s romanticism, and those who think the sport is as boring as John Kerry reading “The Iliad.” (The third camp – those who couldn’t give a rat’s patootie – have already moved on to a sudoku.)
Summoning my powers of objectivity, I can see how the uninitiated might consider baseball less than enthralling. In a lot of ways, it’s an anachronism – it has no earthly business being played in a century dominated by 30-second commercials, movies on demand, and cheeseburgers prepped so quickly they cause a ripple in spacetime. Baseball doesn’t fit into a world of instant gratification; its pleasures are slow, doled out not by the foot, but by the inch.
That’s what makes it great.
I’m reminded of this every spring, right around the time I first hear that gratifying wood-on-cowhide crack. The sound is like a pair of snapping fingers jolting me out of a state of deep hypnosis; not being much of a winter sports enthusiast, I tend to spend those frosty months actually being (gasp!) productive, which is the antithesis of what summer’s all about. Summer is a season for wasting vast stretches of time eating ice cream sandwiches while watching minor league mascots lose footraces to four-year-olds.
When I was about 10, my father gave me one of those kid-friendly books filled with factoids about the history of baseball. That history is what sets the game apart from, say, hockey, which I believe was invented by the penguins of the Arctic circle. Or football, which was created in a lab by pumping gamma rays into a petri dish filled with bull testosterone.
The story of baseball is the story of the country’s industrial revolution; it’s the story of pickup games played in the streets of Harlem in the late 1800s, of steel-jawed immigrants hitting and catching their way out of coal mines. It’s the story of the Civil Rights movement (Jackie Robinson, anybody?), and of late 20th Century excess. It’s the story of cheaters and their punishments – the story of fairness.
But why am I proselytizing? James Earl Jones’ “Field of Dreams” character, in a speech to his friend Ray, said it far better than I could:
“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and that could be again.”
Insert wistful sigh here.
To truly appreciate that, maybe you had to grow up with a sock tied around your brand-new baseball glove to get just the right curve in the webbing. Or felt a tingle rush up your arms as you connected with your first fastball. Heck, maybe a vendor in the stands once pelted you in the kisser with a bag of peanuts – that would do it too, I suppose.
Whatever the reason, it’s got a grip on those of us susceptible to its charms. And yes, the clichĂ© is true: We love peanuts and Cracker Jacks, and we don’t care if we ever get back.
Thursday, May 23, 2013
The simple life
Henry David Thoreau once said, “Our life is frittered away by detail.
Simplify, simplify, simplify!” I’m not sure how seriously I should take a
man who communed with squirrels and had a beard that looked like their
mutated cousin; but then, his Wikipedia entry is huge while mine is
nonexistent, so who am I to judge? The naturalist and author of “Walden”
may have been onto something.
Since Thoreau lived in the 1800s, it was naturally easy for him to sequester himself in the Massachusetts wilderness to subsist on a diet of wood chips and loneliness. When he submitted himself to nature to write, the big technological innovations of the day were shoe horns and breast pockets for monocles. Today’s gadgets, with their brightly-colored screens and videos of skateboarders injuring their genitals, would have made the teeth fall out of his head, and into the campfire where he cooked his badgers.
They’d also have made him question whether his call for simplicity is even possible.
I’ve been thinking about Thoreau lately, and not in a jealous, I-want-to-spoon-with-bears kind of way. Rather, impulsive technological purchases have made me think of simplifying my life – and of how difficult the task will be.
So I’m laptop shopping. (Yep. I’m going from Thoreau to computers. Strap in for a wild ride.) It’s a frustrating pursuit. Depressing as it is to admit, computers have become as much of a necessary staple as milk, or comfortable underwear. They’re wonderful inventions in a lot of ways – what else would allow me to write e-mails, watch The Daily Show, and Photoshop images of my head onto the bodies of Greek gods? – but they’ve also insinuated their way into daily life with the inextricable persistence of a benign growth. Not owning one would be as hampering to productivity as chucking my phone, or lopping off my hand with an Ottoman scimitar.
My current laptop is a joke, and not a particularly funny one. It does the basic things you would want it to – I can play music on it, and blog about my hatred of circus peanuts – but beyond that, it slogs its way through heftier applications with the plodding resignation of an arthritic dog. Even video-watching taxes the hardware on this disgraceful machine. Let’s say I want to watch the latest episode of the Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert’s satiric jab at blowhard political pundits. The process goes something like this: Go to Colbert’s website. Click on “Full Episodes.” Select the latest video. Insert earplugs to drown out the clothes-dryer-calibur noise emitting from the overtaxed innards of the ancient beast. Sit through choppy commercials while the computer’s processor awakens from bear-like hibernation. Curse a lot. Watch episode. Kill self.
It’s an ordeal.
So the time has come for a new one, and that’s all well and good. Except, in defiance of Thoreau’s philosophy, I can’t bring myself to simplify. I expect a lot of my tired Dell’s successor.
Being enamored with video editing will do that. In college, I took an editing course in which my instructor assigned a final project seemingly designed to make the fanboy in me quiver with glee: A music video, to be shot MTV-style, and shown to the class on the semester’s final day. Since I generally consider music to be the greatest invention this side of canned cheese, I took to the assignment with relish, cobbling together enough embarrassing footage of my friends to splice together a video worthy of MTV’s heyday – back when it actually aired music videos, rather than mind-numbing reality shows starring loud-mouthed drug addicts and doughy ex-professional wrestlers.
It was a ludicrous masterpiece, capturing the zeitgeist of my college years and impressing my instructor, who gave me an “A” despite being visibly horrified during the screening. It set off an obsession, and soon, with a stockpile of new computer equipment and all the pretentiousness of a young Kubrick, I started dashing off projects of my own: Music videos, documentaries, YouTube-ready shtick, and in an alternate version of reality, a romantic comedy where I get to make out with Scarlett Johansson. (Physics tells us it’s possible to envision a parallel universe in which this does indeed happen. Reason number 257 why I love physics.)
As years go by, of course, priorities change. Videography took a back seat to more pressing matters, like finding employment, and mastering the Star-Spangled Banner on my plastic kazoo. But lately, the old interest is awakening, and it’s awakening to a world of Blu-Rays and high-definition and anamorphic widescreen. It’s time to chuck the steam-powered Dell and update my gear, but that in itself has entailed erroneous purchases and weeks of research that would intimidate the most diligent presidential historian. I can’t imagine Ron Chernow’s 900-page volume on Washington resulted in more gray hairs.
And for what? One last masterwork? One of the biggest problems with gadgets is there are way too many of them; each one a detail, frittering away life, bit by electronic bit.
It’s enough to make a guy want to chuck everything and go live in the wild, bathing in streams and teaching sign language to possums. As much of a video geek as I apparently am, I hear that mantra, echoing: Simplify, simplify, simplify.
Since Thoreau lived in the 1800s, it was naturally easy for him to sequester himself in the Massachusetts wilderness to subsist on a diet of wood chips and loneliness. When he submitted himself to nature to write, the big technological innovations of the day were shoe horns and breast pockets for monocles. Today’s gadgets, with their brightly-colored screens and videos of skateboarders injuring their genitals, would have made the teeth fall out of his head, and into the campfire where he cooked his badgers.
They’d also have made him question whether his call for simplicity is even possible.
I’ve been thinking about Thoreau lately, and not in a jealous, I-want-to-spoon-with-bears kind of way. Rather, impulsive technological purchases have made me think of simplifying my life – and of how difficult the task will be.
So I’m laptop shopping. (Yep. I’m going from Thoreau to computers. Strap in for a wild ride.) It’s a frustrating pursuit. Depressing as it is to admit, computers have become as much of a necessary staple as milk, or comfortable underwear. They’re wonderful inventions in a lot of ways – what else would allow me to write e-mails, watch The Daily Show, and Photoshop images of my head onto the bodies of Greek gods? – but they’ve also insinuated their way into daily life with the inextricable persistence of a benign growth. Not owning one would be as hampering to productivity as chucking my phone, or lopping off my hand with an Ottoman scimitar.
My current laptop is a joke, and not a particularly funny one. It does the basic things you would want it to – I can play music on it, and blog about my hatred of circus peanuts – but beyond that, it slogs its way through heftier applications with the plodding resignation of an arthritic dog. Even video-watching taxes the hardware on this disgraceful machine. Let’s say I want to watch the latest episode of the Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert’s satiric jab at blowhard political pundits. The process goes something like this: Go to Colbert’s website. Click on “Full Episodes.” Select the latest video. Insert earplugs to drown out the clothes-dryer-calibur noise emitting from the overtaxed innards of the ancient beast. Sit through choppy commercials while the computer’s processor awakens from bear-like hibernation. Curse a lot. Watch episode. Kill self.
It’s an ordeal.
So the time has come for a new one, and that’s all well and good. Except, in defiance of Thoreau’s philosophy, I can’t bring myself to simplify. I expect a lot of my tired Dell’s successor.
Being enamored with video editing will do that. In college, I took an editing course in which my instructor assigned a final project seemingly designed to make the fanboy in me quiver with glee: A music video, to be shot MTV-style, and shown to the class on the semester’s final day. Since I generally consider music to be the greatest invention this side of canned cheese, I took to the assignment with relish, cobbling together enough embarrassing footage of my friends to splice together a video worthy of MTV’s heyday – back when it actually aired music videos, rather than mind-numbing reality shows starring loud-mouthed drug addicts and doughy ex-professional wrestlers.
It was a ludicrous masterpiece, capturing the zeitgeist of my college years and impressing my instructor, who gave me an “A” despite being visibly horrified during the screening. It set off an obsession, and soon, with a stockpile of new computer equipment and all the pretentiousness of a young Kubrick, I started dashing off projects of my own: Music videos, documentaries, YouTube-ready shtick, and in an alternate version of reality, a romantic comedy where I get to make out with Scarlett Johansson. (Physics tells us it’s possible to envision a parallel universe in which this does indeed happen. Reason number 257 why I love physics.)
As years go by, of course, priorities change. Videography took a back seat to more pressing matters, like finding employment, and mastering the Star-Spangled Banner on my plastic kazoo. But lately, the old interest is awakening, and it’s awakening to a world of Blu-Rays and high-definition and anamorphic widescreen. It’s time to chuck the steam-powered Dell and update my gear, but that in itself has entailed erroneous purchases and weeks of research that would intimidate the most diligent presidential historian. I can’t imagine Ron Chernow’s 900-page volume on Washington resulted in more gray hairs.
And for what? One last masterwork? One of the biggest problems with gadgets is there are way too many of them; each one a detail, frittering away life, bit by electronic bit.
It’s enough to make a guy want to chuck everything and go live in the wild, bathing in streams and teaching sign language to possums. As much of a video geek as I apparently am, I hear that mantra, echoing: Simplify, simplify, simplify.
Friday, May 17, 2013
Dimpled balls
There are people who play mini-golf professionally. This blows my mind.
Mini-golf – in case you’ve been captive in a Sri Lankan dungeon since the age of steam power – is a putting game based on the premise that people won’t become murderously enraged by having their balls swatted back to them by spinning windmill propellers. Its origins are fuzzy, so I’ll just go ahead and assume it was created by a mad scientist, probably German, whose goal was to make children cry while their families slowly went insane.
All that will sound excessively harsh in light of the revelation that I, an easily frustrated man, try to make it out to a mini-golf course at least once a summer. No clue why I put myself through the ordeal. Mini-golf is one of those slippery experiences whose negative effects evaporate from memory faster than disappearing ink. In that way, it’s very similar to my relationship with hot-dogs. Every summer, I get super excited whenever someone offers me a hot-dog, and it’s only halfway through eating one that I remember I hate them.
To be fair, I don’t outright hate mini-golf. It can be vaguely fun as long as nobody’s keeping score, which is usually what ends up happening anyway, even if it didn’t start that way.
The whole thing begins innocently. You and your golfing buddy grab your balls (oh, grow up), and a scorecard with one of those nubby eraserless pencils that are always sticky. You walk to the first hole and you think, “What’s the harm in keeping score? This first hole looks easy enough; simple straight line, piece o’ cake. We’ll be done the whole course before my ice cream starts to melt.”
Forty-five minutes later you’re on the 9th hole, listlessly whacking balls around without even looking, telling your partner, “Whatever, I’ll just take the six.”
It’s as though the game was invented so the non-checkered-hatted masses could taste a bit of the frustration of actual golf. Every once in a while I’ll tune into CBS on the odd Sunday to watch “60 Minutes,” only to find it delayed by a professional golf tournament; and while my initial reaction is usually disappointment, I’m invariably sucked into the drama of watching grown men cursing at a ball the size of a mutant grape. If mini-golf is an exercise in frustration, golf-golf has got to be the most painful ordeal this side of a Greek pan-flute concert.
In real golf, Mother Nature is the windmill, conjuring gusting winds that steer well-hit balls into tangled woods or giant kidney-shaped ponds. Even the greens, so flat-looking on TV, are riddled with dips and curves in a complex geometry that would have driven Einstein to give up math and form a barbershop quartet. The next time you’re watching TV and come upon a golf tournament accidentally (because nobody seeks it on purpose), watch the faces of the guys in third or fourth place. They look like they’re pouring over gruesome crime scene evidence.
Mini-golf is a microcosm of that reality. Its one saving grace is that when you make a lousy shot, you don’t have a ten-minute walk to the ball. You simply step over the cowboy’s outstretched boot, hop across the Hobbit-sized waterfall, and chuck your pink ball into the adjoining video arcade. There it will stay until staff comes around and digs it out from behind the dusty Pac-Man machine from 1983.
But hey, some people are gluttons for punishment. These unfortunate souls can be found playing in the World Minigolfsport Federation, and unlike the old World Wrestling Federation, where “World” is a term meaning “Gold’s Gym in Arkansas,” the mini-golf league is truly world-wide. World championships are held on odd-numbered years, while continental championships are played in even-numbered years. Divisions within the federation make space for the full scope of humanity: Men, women, the old, the young, and in all cases, the alarmingly disturbed.
All kidding aside – most kidding aside – these players have my respect. It takes a person of a certain amount of fortitude to practice whacking a piece of plastic through a clown’s eyeball until you’ve got it just right. And maybe this is just a shot in the dark, but something tells me these valiant men and women aren’t exactly pulling down Tiger Woods money; you don’t see a pro mini-golf player hawking Buicks on network television. No, I’m pretty sure these players have kept their day jobs. Which is even more impressive, since it must be hard to train for tournaments when you’re responsible for closing up shop at Bed, Bath & Beyond.
They’ll serve as inspiration the next time I subject myself to 18 holes of pure silliness. Who knows? If I master the windmill, there could be a future in it for me.
A strange, strange future.
Mini-golf – in case you’ve been captive in a Sri Lankan dungeon since the age of steam power – is a putting game based on the premise that people won’t become murderously enraged by having their balls swatted back to them by spinning windmill propellers. Its origins are fuzzy, so I’ll just go ahead and assume it was created by a mad scientist, probably German, whose goal was to make children cry while their families slowly went insane.
All that will sound excessively harsh in light of the revelation that I, an easily frustrated man, try to make it out to a mini-golf course at least once a summer. No clue why I put myself through the ordeal. Mini-golf is one of those slippery experiences whose negative effects evaporate from memory faster than disappearing ink. In that way, it’s very similar to my relationship with hot-dogs. Every summer, I get super excited whenever someone offers me a hot-dog, and it’s only halfway through eating one that I remember I hate them.
To be fair, I don’t outright hate mini-golf. It can be vaguely fun as long as nobody’s keeping score, which is usually what ends up happening anyway, even if it didn’t start that way.
The whole thing begins innocently. You and your golfing buddy grab your balls (oh, grow up), and a scorecard with one of those nubby eraserless pencils that are always sticky. You walk to the first hole and you think, “What’s the harm in keeping score? This first hole looks easy enough; simple straight line, piece o’ cake. We’ll be done the whole course before my ice cream starts to melt.”
Forty-five minutes later you’re on the 9th hole, listlessly whacking balls around without even looking, telling your partner, “Whatever, I’ll just take the six.”
It’s as though the game was invented so the non-checkered-hatted masses could taste a bit of the frustration of actual golf. Every once in a while I’ll tune into CBS on the odd Sunday to watch “60 Minutes,” only to find it delayed by a professional golf tournament; and while my initial reaction is usually disappointment, I’m invariably sucked into the drama of watching grown men cursing at a ball the size of a mutant grape. If mini-golf is an exercise in frustration, golf-golf has got to be the most painful ordeal this side of a Greek pan-flute concert.
In real golf, Mother Nature is the windmill, conjuring gusting winds that steer well-hit balls into tangled woods or giant kidney-shaped ponds. Even the greens, so flat-looking on TV, are riddled with dips and curves in a complex geometry that would have driven Einstein to give up math and form a barbershop quartet. The next time you’re watching TV and come upon a golf tournament accidentally (because nobody seeks it on purpose), watch the faces of the guys in third or fourth place. They look like they’re pouring over gruesome crime scene evidence.
Mini-golf is a microcosm of that reality. Its one saving grace is that when you make a lousy shot, you don’t have a ten-minute walk to the ball. You simply step over the cowboy’s outstretched boot, hop across the Hobbit-sized waterfall, and chuck your pink ball into the adjoining video arcade. There it will stay until staff comes around and digs it out from behind the dusty Pac-Man machine from 1983.
But hey, some people are gluttons for punishment. These unfortunate souls can be found playing in the World Minigolfsport Federation, and unlike the old World Wrestling Federation, where “World” is a term meaning “Gold’s Gym in Arkansas,” the mini-golf league is truly world-wide. World championships are held on odd-numbered years, while continental championships are played in even-numbered years. Divisions within the federation make space for the full scope of humanity: Men, women, the old, the young, and in all cases, the alarmingly disturbed.
All kidding aside – most kidding aside – these players have my respect. It takes a person of a certain amount of fortitude to practice whacking a piece of plastic through a clown’s eyeball until you’ve got it just right. And maybe this is just a shot in the dark, but something tells me these valiant men and women aren’t exactly pulling down Tiger Woods money; you don’t see a pro mini-golf player hawking Buicks on network television. No, I’m pretty sure these players have kept their day jobs. Which is even more impressive, since it must be hard to train for tournaments when you’re responsible for closing up shop at Bed, Bath & Beyond.
They’ll serve as inspiration the next time I subject myself to 18 holes of pure silliness. Who knows? If I master the windmill, there could be a future in it for me.
A strange, strange future.
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Feeling a bit flush
Here’s what’s frustrating about answering nature’s call in a public restroom: It’s always a crapshoot.
Whoa! Zing!
But seriously, folks.
I got to thinking about this at a Chinese buffet. At this point, the less specifics I divulge, the better off we’ll all be. What should have happened, in a good and just world, is that I should have walked into the restroom at said buffet and been gently welcomed by the scent of Lemon Pledge. Every surface should have sparkled like the lighted interior of a South African diamond mine. My sneakers should have squeaked against well-scrubbed linoleum tiles. And – this would have been a cool bonus – a tuxedoed gentleman named Waddington should have wiped dry my freshly-cleaned hands as business adjourned.
Yeah, none of that happened.
What happened instead was so horrific they should award me the Congressional Medal of Honor.
When people do private things in public spaces, that’s just what happens, sometimes. That’s how it is for men, at least. I haven’t been inside a women’s restroom since I accidentally walked into one at an Orlando airport when I was six (sorry, Denise), so I can’t speak for the fairer sex. There’s a part of me – a very childish part – that thinks women’s restrooms are like the insides of FabergĂ© eggs. A place saturated with sunlight and rainbows, where hand towels dangle from the horns of unicorns and Sarah McLachlan plays the grand piano in a silk bathrobe. It’s possible I’m an ass.
Most men’s rooms, by contrast, could easily be mistaken for the torture room at Guantanamo Bay. It’s the place where dreams go to die.
That’s the worst case scenario, anyway.
The best a guy can hope for is a men’s room like the ones at the TD Bank Garden in Boston. I took the train there last summer, and with one too many Mountain Dews under my belt (literally), the john was destination numero uno. There’s a moment before walking into a public restroom when I steel myself for the most horrific scenario possible. I tell myself the floor tiles will be cracked and pooling with water from a busted pipe, or that the person who used the facility just before me had enjoyed a breakfast of beer and cabbage.
That way, when the room is well-maintained, as it was in Boston, it comes as a pleasant surprise. The Garden restroom seemed less like a place where people do their business than a command center for the International Space Station.
Everything gleamed. Everything. The faucets, the tiles; the throne itself. The level of cleanliness was borderline disturbing, and it’s ruined other restrooms for me.
Because it’s a roll of the dice, isn’t it? Sometimes you can make an educated guess as to the room’s condition. In the case of the Garden, it makes a certain sense that clean would be the norm – it’s a major hub in a major city, with mop-welding crews on hand to fight the good fight against seediness and grime. But take a trip to the can at a roadside Arby’s in rural Kentucky and you may be lucky to make it out alive.
It’s the uncertainty that makes it so daunting to do familiar business in a foreign land. It’s a feeling akin to receiving Christmas packages from an inconsistent gift-giver: Will this be the snazzy sweater I drooled over in the perfume-choked aisles of Macy’s, or a ten-pack of garish underwear with drawings of Snoopy on the butt cheeks? Unwrapping it is the only way to find out for sure.
In the case of the Chinese buffet, I should have been more prepared for disaster. Such establishments can be a hoot, but they generally exist to service those who are feeling gluttonous and undiscerning. That alone should tell you everything you need to know about what the restrooms might be like, but it’s more than that. With a few notable exceptions, buffets can’t even keep the buffets clean. When the trays are overflowing with gooey lo mein noodles, ignorance is bliss; there could be a silver dollar from the California gold rush era hidden at the bottom and nobody would be the wiser. But take a look at the half-empty pizza tray the next time you’re pigging out. Next to the hardened little squares of half-hearted pie will be freckle-sized clusters of crust, glued to the tray by a film of grease that could stop a bullet. It stands to reason the commode would be similarly neglected, the stuff of Stephen King novels and Vietnam flashbacks.
And what can we do about it? Not much. When nature calls, we’ve got to answer it.
Really, the best way to keep these places clean it to not dirty them up in the first place. That means treating your stall as if it were your bathroom at home, minus the ugly ceramic cat on the wall that I keep telling you to take down. It stares at me. Sell that thing on eBay, already.
The women, I have more faith in. The men? Well, let’s just say I’m a man myself. We’re pigs. And the world, it turns out, is our sty.
Whoa! Zing!
But seriously, folks.
I got to thinking about this at a Chinese buffet. At this point, the less specifics I divulge, the better off we’ll all be. What should have happened, in a good and just world, is that I should have walked into the restroom at said buffet and been gently welcomed by the scent of Lemon Pledge. Every surface should have sparkled like the lighted interior of a South African diamond mine. My sneakers should have squeaked against well-scrubbed linoleum tiles. And – this would have been a cool bonus – a tuxedoed gentleman named Waddington should have wiped dry my freshly-cleaned hands as business adjourned.
Yeah, none of that happened.
What happened instead was so horrific they should award me the Congressional Medal of Honor.
When people do private things in public spaces, that’s just what happens, sometimes. That’s how it is for men, at least. I haven’t been inside a women’s restroom since I accidentally walked into one at an Orlando airport when I was six (sorry, Denise), so I can’t speak for the fairer sex. There’s a part of me – a very childish part – that thinks women’s restrooms are like the insides of FabergĂ© eggs. A place saturated with sunlight and rainbows, where hand towels dangle from the horns of unicorns and Sarah McLachlan plays the grand piano in a silk bathrobe. It’s possible I’m an ass.
Most men’s rooms, by contrast, could easily be mistaken for the torture room at Guantanamo Bay. It’s the place where dreams go to die.
That’s the worst case scenario, anyway.
The best a guy can hope for is a men’s room like the ones at the TD Bank Garden in Boston. I took the train there last summer, and with one too many Mountain Dews under my belt (literally), the john was destination numero uno. There’s a moment before walking into a public restroom when I steel myself for the most horrific scenario possible. I tell myself the floor tiles will be cracked and pooling with water from a busted pipe, or that the person who used the facility just before me had enjoyed a breakfast of beer and cabbage.
That way, when the room is well-maintained, as it was in Boston, it comes as a pleasant surprise. The Garden restroom seemed less like a place where people do their business than a command center for the International Space Station.
Everything gleamed. Everything. The faucets, the tiles; the throne itself. The level of cleanliness was borderline disturbing, and it’s ruined other restrooms for me.
Because it’s a roll of the dice, isn’t it? Sometimes you can make an educated guess as to the room’s condition. In the case of the Garden, it makes a certain sense that clean would be the norm – it’s a major hub in a major city, with mop-welding crews on hand to fight the good fight against seediness and grime. But take a trip to the can at a roadside Arby’s in rural Kentucky and you may be lucky to make it out alive.
It’s the uncertainty that makes it so daunting to do familiar business in a foreign land. It’s a feeling akin to receiving Christmas packages from an inconsistent gift-giver: Will this be the snazzy sweater I drooled over in the perfume-choked aisles of Macy’s, or a ten-pack of garish underwear with drawings of Snoopy on the butt cheeks? Unwrapping it is the only way to find out for sure.
In the case of the Chinese buffet, I should have been more prepared for disaster. Such establishments can be a hoot, but they generally exist to service those who are feeling gluttonous and undiscerning. That alone should tell you everything you need to know about what the restrooms might be like, but it’s more than that. With a few notable exceptions, buffets can’t even keep the buffets clean. When the trays are overflowing with gooey lo mein noodles, ignorance is bliss; there could be a silver dollar from the California gold rush era hidden at the bottom and nobody would be the wiser. But take a look at the half-empty pizza tray the next time you’re pigging out. Next to the hardened little squares of half-hearted pie will be freckle-sized clusters of crust, glued to the tray by a film of grease that could stop a bullet. It stands to reason the commode would be similarly neglected, the stuff of Stephen King novels and Vietnam flashbacks.
And what can we do about it? Not much. When nature calls, we’ve got to answer it.
Really, the best way to keep these places clean it to not dirty them up in the first place. That means treating your stall as if it were your bathroom at home, minus the ugly ceramic cat on the wall that I keep telling you to take down. It stares at me. Sell that thing on eBay, already.
The women, I have more faith in. The men? Well, let’s just say I’m a man myself. We’re pigs. And the world, it turns out, is our sty.
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
A real schmuckin' futz
This needs to be made clear straightaway: I usually love cats.
Usually.
That’s not the most masculine admission, of course. Gender stereotypes being what they are, it would be much more acceptable for me to proclaim a love of ugly, hard-nosed dogs named Buster or Killer – animals that chew meat and smell like armpits. And I love them, too, providing they don’t pee on my laptop. Cats, though, are almost painfully cute, low-maintenance creatures that cuddle and purr and pounce on things. A cat and a laser pointer can provide hours of entertainment, more so than a Pauley Shore movie, although that’s largely because Pauley Shore is dumb.
Every animal, unfortunately, is capable of its own evils. You’ll never see a cat threaten a nuclear strike, or force you to watch “Real Housewives of Atlanta.” But once in a while, a feline comes along that makes you glad it doesn’t have the opposable thumbs necessary to operate a switchblade.
This the story of Schmucky the Cat.
That’s probably not his real name, but we all know cats only respond to the sounds of can openers and deflating balloons, so I’m just gonna go ahead and call him Schmucky. It’s a well-earned moniker. Schmucky has the temperment of an injured Iranian soccer player, combined with the glowing personality of Stalin. If Schmucky were a man, he’d have a face tattoo and massive biceps from years of arm-wrestling in dive bars.
Sadly, I can’t avoid this objectionable beast. See, my apartment is uniquely situated: There’s the apartment proper, where I can shadow-box and play air drums to Kool and the Gang in complete privacy, but in the back, there’s access to a room I share with one of my neighbors. This room basically amounts to a massive shed – a giant sawdust-smelling tinderbox that’s perfect for storing old microwaves and back issues of Nintendo magazines. I use this storage space to house dumbbells and freeweights, because I’ve convinced myself it’s not too late to transform a physique that resembles a melting lump of wax.
Trust me, I’m not trying to sound manly. I’m about as manly as a scented candle. But I mess about with my weights because it makes me feel like less of a sloppy bum. Until recently, I could do this in relative peace. That was before Schmucky – my neighbor’s orange tabby cat – commandeered the storage room and turned it into his own private bunker of hatred.
I’m usually good with cats. In fact, at a friend’s recent birthday party, I was nicknamed the Cat Whisperer, although to be fair, it was a nickname I invented myself, and no one believed me. Still, I have a way with animals. I consider it a personal failure if I haven’t earned an animal’s friendship. Or at least its respect, which it expresses by not pooping on me.
But I knew I was in for a challenge when I met Schmucky. Truth is, Schmucky’s kind of a putz. The first time I walked into the shed and saw him standing stiff-legged in front of my dumbbells, he hissed a hiss that could strip the varnish off a park bench. As I approached him slowly, cooing and trying to chill him out, he backed away but kept his teeth bare, as if daring me to make a move. Any move. Anything at all that would justify his lion’s ancestral call to go mental on my tender ankles.
Needless to say, it was a bit disconcerting. As Schmucky disappeared all ghost-like into one of the room’s hidden nooks, as felines are want to do, I started my workout routine without incident, thinking he had run off to smoke a Marlboro and cool down. Then, as I stood to do curls, a venomous hiss erupted from just above my head.
Schmucky, that crafty little ninja, had found a way up into the rafters, and squatted on one of the beams, scowling at me and threatening violence, all within a foot of my fleshy bald scalp. I whirled around to face him, as much as a man can be said to “whirl” when he’s carrying dumbbells, and beheld a face so sinister, so distorted by rage, I had to fight the urge to bolt for my kitchen in search of garlic and a wooden cross.
I sat down on my workout bench, continued curling, and locked stares with my nemesis.
There’s a scene in “Rocky IV” – undoubtedly the most ridiculous of the Rockys – in which Sylvester Stallone’s title character stands in the middle of a boxing ring prior to his big fight. His opponent is a towering Russian killing machine who looks like a ‘roided-up Dolph Lundgren, possibly because it’s a ‘roided up Dolph Lundgren. The two fighters stare each other down in the seconds before the opening bell. The Russian, with a stone face and soul-dead eyes, says to Rocky, “I must break you.” And for 15 rounds, he nearly does.
Clearly, Schmucky has seen “Rocky IV.” He’s got his Dolph Lundgren impression down to a science. And he does it every. Single. Day.
There are a number of things I could do. I could move to Switzerland and join a circus. I could become a sword-swallower and travel the world, disturbing people. Or, you know, I could talk to my neighbor about it. There’s that.
Then, perhaps, the long nightmare will be over, and I can once more regard cats as cute little fuzzballs. Non-murderous fuzzballs that won’t stuff me into the trunk of a Lincoln Continental.
Your reign of terror will soon end, Schmucky.
So go ahead. Make your move.
Usually.
That’s not the most masculine admission, of course. Gender stereotypes being what they are, it would be much more acceptable for me to proclaim a love of ugly, hard-nosed dogs named Buster or Killer – animals that chew meat and smell like armpits. And I love them, too, providing they don’t pee on my laptop. Cats, though, are almost painfully cute, low-maintenance creatures that cuddle and purr and pounce on things. A cat and a laser pointer can provide hours of entertainment, more so than a Pauley Shore movie, although that’s largely because Pauley Shore is dumb.
Every animal, unfortunately, is capable of its own evils. You’ll never see a cat threaten a nuclear strike, or force you to watch “Real Housewives of Atlanta.” But once in a while, a feline comes along that makes you glad it doesn’t have the opposable thumbs necessary to operate a switchblade.
This the story of Schmucky the Cat.
That’s probably not his real name, but we all know cats only respond to the sounds of can openers and deflating balloons, so I’m just gonna go ahead and call him Schmucky. It’s a well-earned moniker. Schmucky has the temperment of an injured Iranian soccer player, combined with the glowing personality of Stalin. If Schmucky were a man, he’d have a face tattoo and massive biceps from years of arm-wrestling in dive bars.
Sadly, I can’t avoid this objectionable beast. See, my apartment is uniquely situated: There’s the apartment proper, where I can shadow-box and play air drums to Kool and the Gang in complete privacy, but in the back, there’s access to a room I share with one of my neighbors. This room basically amounts to a massive shed – a giant sawdust-smelling tinderbox that’s perfect for storing old microwaves and back issues of Nintendo magazines. I use this storage space to house dumbbells and freeweights, because I’ve convinced myself it’s not too late to transform a physique that resembles a melting lump of wax.
Trust me, I’m not trying to sound manly. I’m about as manly as a scented candle. But I mess about with my weights because it makes me feel like less of a sloppy bum. Until recently, I could do this in relative peace. That was before Schmucky – my neighbor’s orange tabby cat – commandeered the storage room and turned it into his own private bunker of hatred.
I’m usually good with cats. In fact, at a friend’s recent birthday party, I was nicknamed the Cat Whisperer, although to be fair, it was a nickname I invented myself, and no one believed me. Still, I have a way with animals. I consider it a personal failure if I haven’t earned an animal’s friendship. Or at least its respect, which it expresses by not pooping on me.
But I knew I was in for a challenge when I met Schmucky. Truth is, Schmucky’s kind of a putz. The first time I walked into the shed and saw him standing stiff-legged in front of my dumbbells, he hissed a hiss that could strip the varnish off a park bench. As I approached him slowly, cooing and trying to chill him out, he backed away but kept his teeth bare, as if daring me to make a move. Any move. Anything at all that would justify his lion’s ancestral call to go mental on my tender ankles.
Needless to say, it was a bit disconcerting. As Schmucky disappeared all ghost-like into one of the room’s hidden nooks, as felines are want to do, I started my workout routine without incident, thinking he had run off to smoke a Marlboro and cool down. Then, as I stood to do curls, a venomous hiss erupted from just above my head.
Schmucky, that crafty little ninja, had found a way up into the rafters, and squatted on one of the beams, scowling at me and threatening violence, all within a foot of my fleshy bald scalp. I whirled around to face him, as much as a man can be said to “whirl” when he’s carrying dumbbells, and beheld a face so sinister, so distorted by rage, I had to fight the urge to bolt for my kitchen in search of garlic and a wooden cross.
I sat down on my workout bench, continued curling, and locked stares with my nemesis.
There’s a scene in “Rocky IV” – undoubtedly the most ridiculous of the Rockys – in which Sylvester Stallone’s title character stands in the middle of a boxing ring prior to his big fight. His opponent is a towering Russian killing machine who looks like a ‘roided-up Dolph Lundgren, possibly because it’s a ‘roided up Dolph Lundgren. The two fighters stare each other down in the seconds before the opening bell. The Russian, with a stone face and soul-dead eyes, says to Rocky, “I must break you.” And for 15 rounds, he nearly does.
Clearly, Schmucky has seen “Rocky IV.” He’s got his Dolph Lundgren impression down to a science. And he does it every. Single. Day.
There are a number of things I could do. I could move to Switzerland and join a circus. I could become a sword-swallower and travel the world, disturbing people. Or, you know, I could talk to my neighbor about it. There’s that.
Then, perhaps, the long nightmare will be over, and I can once more regard cats as cute little fuzzballs. Non-murderous fuzzballs that won’t stuff me into the trunk of a Lincoln Continental.
Your reign of terror will soon end, Schmucky.
So go ahead. Make your move.
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Banal cavities
When I open up my Internet browser, eager to waste large chunks of my
life watching YouTube videos of cats being surprised by things, the
first site that fills my screen is the home page for Yahoo. I have no
earthly idea why. Yahoo is a terrible site. It’s the kind of site I
would direct people to if I wanted them to suffer from a violent
epileptic seizure. Advertisements zip across the screen in the form of
colorful animated graphics, and often when I click on what I think is
the link to my mail, I click the ad instead and get directed to another
terrible site; usually one that promises killer financing on a sport
utility vehicle that looks like a melting plastic sculpture of
Stonehenge.
It’s an obsessive-compulsive yearning for consistency that prevents me from choosing a better site for my start-up page. What adds to the torture is the news crawl in the middle of the screen that cycles through the latest trending articles. This news crawl is a depressing, dumbed-down version of what you’d see on a traditional newspaper’s front page. A front page organizes stories by what’s important; Yahoo organizes stories by what’s popular. And there’s rarely any overlap. Occasionally an item is both important and trendy, such as a piece about the president’s State of the Union address. But that’s usually because it provides anonymous browsers with a convenient forum for racist diatribes and rants about how Hitler was a brilliant painter. The comments section of these articles is like the Ku Klux Klan subdivision of hell.
Most of the popular stories, the ones that generate the highest traffic, fall into three categories: Celebrity news, hot dating tips, and viral videos of ferrets that dance to Van Halen’s “Jump.” The Internet, which promised the world a new means of global expression, has become a digital version of Cosmopolitan magazine.
It’s the celebrity news that bothers me the most, although to be fair, that’s not really a ‘Net thing – it’s just a thing. Has been for a while now, and I’ve never understood it. Have you ever seen Entertainment Tonight or Inside Edition? Hot tip: Don’t. Never before has there been such a dizzying parade of pointlessness. The idea behind celebrity journalism is that we should somehow care about a pop singer’s latest meltdown, or what fashions Best Actress nominees are sporting on the Oscars’ red carpet. As mild curiosities, these “news” items should occupy our attentions for no longer than it takes Charlie Sheen to flush a gram of coke down the toilet. Yet they now dominate headlines.
Sadly, public fixation on frivolity isn’t hard to understand. We’re all voyeurs, to an extent.
A few years ago, I was living in an apartment that towered over a shorter, squatter apartment building across a narrow driveway. As I was standing at my kitchen window, gazing out at the moon and being all writerly and deep, a flicker of movement below me caught my eye; I looked down at the apartment facing me and saw something so bizarre, I couldn’t register it at first: A man doing jumping jacks in his underwear. An extremely pale fellow (extremely pale), in tighty-whities, getting in some exercise at 10 o’clock at night. Immediately, I recognized this as a private moment that I shouldn’t linger on, and I did eventually pull my gaze away... but only eventually, because c’mon, it’s a dude doing jumping jacks in his underwear. It’s human nature to want to linger on such a weird spectacle.
That’s kind of what celebrity news is – a bizarre spectacle from which it’s hard to avert your eyes. And back when such news was limited to a half-hour of television per night, it was a simple thing to keep from getting too much of it in your diet. Just as it’s easy to not eat Snickers bars when you don’t keep any in the house, it’s easy to not give a second thought to Lindsay Lohan when she’s not constantly in your face.
And then the Internet happened. More specifically, sites like Yahoo, which figured out that candy generates more traffic than vegetables.
Like candy, a tiny bit of Hollywood gossip isn’t unforgivable. It’s easy entertainment, and has its place. That place, however, isn’t splattered across my computer screen. The fact that it’s cheap, and requires little effort on the part of the reader, has resulted in a populace that can more easily identify the Octomom than it can its own Secretary of State. This isn’t a skill I see coming in particularly handy, unless a terrorist cell captures you and tells you your release is dependent on whether you can provide her real name. (Hot tip #2: It’s Nadya Suleman. I may have just saved your life.)
It’s not wrong to have heroes. I, for example, am a huge fan of Al Pacino – but because of his acting, not because he picked his nose at a Los Angeles Starbucks. The former is art, of a kind, and is worthy of attention when properly earned. The latter?
Well, the latter is just a guy doing jumping jacks in his underwear.
It’s an obsessive-compulsive yearning for consistency that prevents me from choosing a better site for my start-up page. What adds to the torture is the news crawl in the middle of the screen that cycles through the latest trending articles. This news crawl is a depressing, dumbed-down version of what you’d see on a traditional newspaper’s front page. A front page organizes stories by what’s important; Yahoo organizes stories by what’s popular. And there’s rarely any overlap. Occasionally an item is both important and trendy, such as a piece about the president’s State of the Union address. But that’s usually because it provides anonymous browsers with a convenient forum for racist diatribes and rants about how Hitler was a brilliant painter. The comments section of these articles is like the Ku Klux Klan subdivision of hell.
Most of the popular stories, the ones that generate the highest traffic, fall into three categories: Celebrity news, hot dating tips, and viral videos of ferrets that dance to Van Halen’s “Jump.” The Internet, which promised the world a new means of global expression, has become a digital version of Cosmopolitan magazine.
It’s the celebrity news that bothers me the most, although to be fair, that’s not really a ‘Net thing – it’s just a thing. Has been for a while now, and I’ve never understood it. Have you ever seen Entertainment Tonight or Inside Edition? Hot tip: Don’t. Never before has there been such a dizzying parade of pointlessness. The idea behind celebrity journalism is that we should somehow care about a pop singer’s latest meltdown, or what fashions Best Actress nominees are sporting on the Oscars’ red carpet. As mild curiosities, these “news” items should occupy our attentions for no longer than it takes Charlie Sheen to flush a gram of coke down the toilet. Yet they now dominate headlines.
Sadly, public fixation on frivolity isn’t hard to understand. We’re all voyeurs, to an extent.
A few years ago, I was living in an apartment that towered over a shorter, squatter apartment building across a narrow driveway. As I was standing at my kitchen window, gazing out at the moon and being all writerly and deep, a flicker of movement below me caught my eye; I looked down at the apartment facing me and saw something so bizarre, I couldn’t register it at first: A man doing jumping jacks in his underwear. An extremely pale fellow (extremely pale), in tighty-whities, getting in some exercise at 10 o’clock at night. Immediately, I recognized this as a private moment that I shouldn’t linger on, and I did eventually pull my gaze away... but only eventually, because c’mon, it’s a dude doing jumping jacks in his underwear. It’s human nature to want to linger on such a weird spectacle.
That’s kind of what celebrity news is – a bizarre spectacle from which it’s hard to avert your eyes. And back when such news was limited to a half-hour of television per night, it was a simple thing to keep from getting too much of it in your diet. Just as it’s easy to not eat Snickers bars when you don’t keep any in the house, it’s easy to not give a second thought to Lindsay Lohan when she’s not constantly in your face.
And then the Internet happened. More specifically, sites like Yahoo, which figured out that candy generates more traffic than vegetables.
Like candy, a tiny bit of Hollywood gossip isn’t unforgivable. It’s easy entertainment, and has its place. That place, however, isn’t splattered across my computer screen. The fact that it’s cheap, and requires little effort on the part of the reader, has resulted in a populace that can more easily identify the Octomom than it can its own Secretary of State. This isn’t a skill I see coming in particularly handy, unless a terrorist cell captures you and tells you your release is dependent on whether you can provide her real name. (Hot tip #2: It’s Nadya Suleman. I may have just saved your life.)
It’s not wrong to have heroes. I, for example, am a huge fan of Al Pacino – but because of his acting, not because he picked his nose at a Los Angeles Starbucks. The former is art, of a kind, and is worthy of attention when properly earned. The latter?
Well, the latter is just a guy doing jumping jacks in his underwear.
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Twisting turning through the never
This is the moment I’ve been dreading.
Years ago, when I still bothered with the radio, I would occasionally tune into the oldies station to catch some pleasantly time-weathered tunes from a bygone era: The Temptations, Roy Orbison, even the Monkees when I was feeling particularly masochistic. Production techniques being what they were back then, most of the songs sounded like they were performed by ghosts in a tinfoil submarine, but that was part of the charm. That, and the odd knowledge that that the music was created before I was born, in a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and Lyndon Johnson hosted weekly card games with Napoleon and Jesus.
Gradually, as music previews became available online, I bypassed the radio altogether. Even though there was a part of me that missed hearing those strangely comforting jingles for car dealerships and auto parts stores, the radio – which I had always used as a means of deciding what music to buy – slowly lost its purpose.
When you leave something alone for long enough, it can come back to surprise you. Flash forward to a couple of weeks ago, when I logged into my Facebook account – so often a source of dismay and consternation – and saw the following message from a friend: “So I heard ‘Enter Sandman’ by Metallica in the car today ... on the Oldies station!”
Sandman. Metallica. Oldie.
Jeff sad.
To realize just how sad, you have to understand my relationship with this band.
Music has been a huge part of my life since I was old enough to fling boogers. It’s the best thing to happen to ears since the invention of ears. For years, I would hungrily absorb the albums that were scattered about the house: Hendrix and Joplin, Clapton and the Eagles. The kind of stuff that sends classic rock DJs into paroxysms of unbridled glee, usually right before commercials for laundry detergent with pleasant-smelling bears on the box. I loved what I was hearing, but I was always drawn to the heavier, guitar-oriented stuff; the squealing, hypnotic solos at the end of “Hotel California” would give me shivers so violent you’d think I was camping in northern Canada without the requisite sealskin underwear. But I yearned for something more forceful, more cutting.
In high school, I discovered Metallica’s self-titled album – nicknamed “The Black Album” for its ominous monochrome cover. “Enter Sandman” was the first song. I chose a remote, unoccupied corner of the house for my inaugural listen, because frankly, I was nervous. It had always been suggested to me (without justification) that heavy metal was an inherently evil music, the stuff of devils and ritual sacrifices and Tokyo-bashing lizard monsters. With a shaking finger, I hit “play,” and found that the intro to “Sandman” was surprisingly mellow. A simple guitar lick, and then the bass drums, building. And building. And then at just the right moment, bam – a full-bodied riff that could grow chest hair on a baby.
It was heavy. It was crunchy. It was glorious. And unlike many of the bands that had provided my life’s soundtrack to that point, here were musicians that were still writing, still touring, and still vital. Talk about a revelation. It was like a sledgehammer to the face, only enjoyable, since I imagine it would be unpleasant to take an actual sledgehammer to an actual face.
There are monks in Tibet still awaiting experiences so transformative. And now, the album that essentially changed my life is the stuff of oldies stations. Time to buy a pair of glaring white golf pants and start drinking Ensure.
It’s an odd feeling. You spend the majority of your youth thinking that time is a river so long, eons will pass before its waters rush you onward to maturity and beyond. You think the future will occur in roughly never. “And then never comes,” to quote Metallica’s James Hetfield, which I do frequently because I have no life.
Of all the various rites of passage, hearing your generation’s music on an oldies station is one that nobody really anticipates. Parents and educators spend a lot of time prepping you for a number of life’s “firsts,” but radio never enters into it, and so when I saw my friend’s comment, I had nothing to fall back on, no automatic response drilled into me by some colorful mascot with an oversized head.
But no big whoop, because I figured this one out myself: It’s okay.
It’s okay to get older. It’s okay to have your music relegated to antiquity, not least of all because it’s someone’s arbitrary decision anyway. Frankly, graduating from the “hip” youth demographic is a relief, because now I can enjoy what I like without questions of coolness being part of the equation. Maybe the secret to aging gracefully is not caring.
What matters is that music still gives me an electric thrill when it comes booming out of my speakers, a phenomenon no accumulation of decades can touch. It’s immune to a radio station’s labels. And that, in a very real sense, makes it timeless.
Years ago, when I still bothered with the radio, I would occasionally tune into the oldies station to catch some pleasantly time-weathered tunes from a bygone era: The Temptations, Roy Orbison, even the Monkees when I was feeling particularly masochistic. Production techniques being what they were back then, most of the songs sounded like they were performed by ghosts in a tinfoil submarine, but that was part of the charm. That, and the odd knowledge that that the music was created before I was born, in a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and Lyndon Johnson hosted weekly card games with Napoleon and Jesus.
Gradually, as music previews became available online, I bypassed the radio altogether. Even though there was a part of me that missed hearing those strangely comforting jingles for car dealerships and auto parts stores, the radio – which I had always used as a means of deciding what music to buy – slowly lost its purpose.
When you leave something alone for long enough, it can come back to surprise you. Flash forward to a couple of weeks ago, when I logged into my Facebook account – so often a source of dismay and consternation – and saw the following message from a friend: “So I heard ‘Enter Sandman’ by Metallica in the car today ... on the Oldies station!”
Sandman. Metallica. Oldie.
Jeff sad.
To realize just how sad, you have to understand my relationship with this band.
Music has been a huge part of my life since I was old enough to fling boogers. It’s the best thing to happen to ears since the invention of ears. For years, I would hungrily absorb the albums that were scattered about the house: Hendrix and Joplin, Clapton and the Eagles. The kind of stuff that sends classic rock DJs into paroxysms of unbridled glee, usually right before commercials for laundry detergent with pleasant-smelling bears on the box. I loved what I was hearing, but I was always drawn to the heavier, guitar-oriented stuff; the squealing, hypnotic solos at the end of “Hotel California” would give me shivers so violent you’d think I was camping in northern Canada without the requisite sealskin underwear. But I yearned for something more forceful, more cutting.
In high school, I discovered Metallica’s self-titled album – nicknamed “The Black Album” for its ominous monochrome cover. “Enter Sandman” was the first song. I chose a remote, unoccupied corner of the house for my inaugural listen, because frankly, I was nervous. It had always been suggested to me (without justification) that heavy metal was an inherently evil music, the stuff of devils and ritual sacrifices and Tokyo-bashing lizard monsters. With a shaking finger, I hit “play,” and found that the intro to “Sandman” was surprisingly mellow. A simple guitar lick, and then the bass drums, building. And building. And then at just the right moment, bam – a full-bodied riff that could grow chest hair on a baby.
It was heavy. It was crunchy. It was glorious. And unlike many of the bands that had provided my life’s soundtrack to that point, here were musicians that were still writing, still touring, and still vital. Talk about a revelation. It was like a sledgehammer to the face, only enjoyable, since I imagine it would be unpleasant to take an actual sledgehammer to an actual face.
There are monks in Tibet still awaiting experiences so transformative. And now, the album that essentially changed my life is the stuff of oldies stations. Time to buy a pair of glaring white golf pants and start drinking Ensure.
It’s an odd feeling. You spend the majority of your youth thinking that time is a river so long, eons will pass before its waters rush you onward to maturity and beyond. You think the future will occur in roughly never. “And then never comes,” to quote Metallica’s James Hetfield, which I do frequently because I have no life.
Of all the various rites of passage, hearing your generation’s music on an oldies station is one that nobody really anticipates. Parents and educators spend a lot of time prepping you for a number of life’s “firsts,” but radio never enters into it, and so when I saw my friend’s comment, I had nothing to fall back on, no automatic response drilled into me by some colorful mascot with an oversized head.
But no big whoop, because I figured this one out myself: It’s okay.
It’s okay to get older. It’s okay to have your music relegated to antiquity, not least of all because it’s someone’s arbitrary decision anyway. Frankly, graduating from the “hip” youth demographic is a relief, because now I can enjoy what I like without questions of coolness being part of the equation. Maybe the secret to aging gracefully is not caring.
What matters is that music still gives me an electric thrill when it comes booming out of my speakers, a phenomenon no accumulation of decades can touch. It’s immune to a radio station’s labels. And that, in a very real sense, makes it timeless.
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Pour some sugar on me. Then toss in some salt.
If I didn’t think he’d lecture me about sodium content, I’d love to take Michael Moss out for a congratulatory beer.
Moss is an investigative reporter for the New York Times, and author of the book “Salt Sugar Fat,” a manifesto about the evils of the processed food industry. Those three ingredients are among my favorite things in existence, next to heavy metal and puppies, but that’s precisely what the big food conglomerates are banking on: They pump up their products full of heart-clogging grime because that’s what hooks us. We’re like smokers addicted to nicotine, only tobacco kills us marginally faster than wafer cookies, and doesn’t taste as good. Until Phillip-Morris unleashes their new line of wafer cookie products, at which point I may start eating cigarettes.
There are skeptics, sure. They roll their eyes at what they interpret as a conspiracy theory. Then they eat a cheese-covered doughnut and wash it down with Yoohoo.
But Moss – who counts current and former food industry executives among his sources – bases his findings on first-person accounts and oodles of scientific research. What the research reveals is pretty clear: Junk food is addictive. And we already kinda know that, don’t we? We constantly use the language of addicts when we talk about food. “Oh my goodness, I can’t stop eating these!” “I was going to stop at three, but I have no self control!” “You can’t eat just one, can you?” Cake and chips are a metal pipe and a dank alley away from being crack.
If all that sounds a bit hyperbolic, it’s because most people aren’t privy to some of the shadier practices at the companies that make chocolate-covered pretzel sticks, syrup-filled marshmallow hot-dogs, or whatever else is stopping our hearts these days. It’s tempting to merely shrug one’s shoulders and assert that bad eating habits are a matter only of choice, that obesity is an epidemic simply because people lack good sense and self-control. That a good many folks lack self control is obvious – stop into any roadside diner south of the Mason-Dixon line, and the burgers there swell to the size of a healthy baby – but that’s not the whole story.
See, employed at these big food corporations are men and women in lab coats. When you’re wearing a lab coat, chances are you’re one of three things: A doctor, a scientist, or someone at a Halloween party dressed as a doctor or scientist. Working at companies like Kelloggs and General Mills are several of these lab-coat-bedecked individuals, and they’re not checking Count Chocula’s blood pressure.
They’re using the science of chemistry to determine what they call the “bliss point” of your favorite sugary treats. That’s the point where a food becomes so irresistibly tasty that you just have to have more of it. Which means you purchase more of it. Which means food executives get to buy silk pajamas for their Shi Tzus.
Years ago, I was young boy living just up the hill from a fast food restaurant. On clear days, when I was outside riding a bike or playing catch, a wind would occasionally blow in from the west and carry with it the glorious smells of French fries and beef patties. Now, when you’re a kid, you don’t have a lot of money. Lawn-mowing cash and allowance savings comprise the bulk of your portfolio. So when a friend was visiting, and we had a hankering for something quick and cheap, where do you think we went? At a five-minute walk, the burger joint seemed like the obvious choice.
They taught us nutrition in school, but a child of 8 or 9 doesn’t really internalize the importance of such a message – especially with the smells of greasy goodness filling his nostrils. A kid, a parent, anyone can fall into a cycle of bad choices given the right circumstances. Which was why, from 9 to about 13, I was hopelessly obese.
Yep. With two chafing thunderthighs and a pair of sweatpants that could shelter a Brazilian soccer team.
Growing awareness of a proper diet – and a growth spurt that shot me up about a foot in four years – helped. But for months, I delayed my impending lifestyle change with a mantra familiar to anyone who’s tried to quit smoking: “Tomorrow. I’ll enjoy myself for one last day, and then I’ll quit tomorrow.”
Only, at some point, tomorrow has to become today.
And how many people have faced that dilemma needlessly? Personal responsibility is important, but at some point we need to start asking businesses to be responsible as well. Which probably means a health warning similar to ones found on packs of cigarettes. And a ceasefire on all these new food “innovations,” like cheese-stuffed pizza crust, and icing-filled doughnuts topped with M&Ms and bacon. Actually, I just made that one up myself. You’re welcome, Tim Horton’s.
Look, if it’s someone’s birthday, I’ll eat cake. I’ll even toss back a couple of cookies on occasion. Every once in a while, that’s okay. But the big food players don’t inflate their margins on every once in a while. They’ve got this down, literally, to a science.
So hoist your beer, Mr. Moss. For pulling back the curtain, you’ve earned it – just keep in mind those empty calories.
Come to think if it, I’ll order you a light.
Moss is an investigative reporter for the New York Times, and author of the book “Salt Sugar Fat,” a manifesto about the evils of the processed food industry. Those three ingredients are among my favorite things in existence, next to heavy metal and puppies, but that’s precisely what the big food conglomerates are banking on: They pump up their products full of heart-clogging grime because that’s what hooks us. We’re like smokers addicted to nicotine, only tobacco kills us marginally faster than wafer cookies, and doesn’t taste as good. Until Phillip-Morris unleashes their new line of wafer cookie products, at which point I may start eating cigarettes.
There are skeptics, sure. They roll their eyes at what they interpret as a conspiracy theory. Then they eat a cheese-covered doughnut and wash it down with Yoohoo.
But Moss – who counts current and former food industry executives among his sources – bases his findings on first-person accounts and oodles of scientific research. What the research reveals is pretty clear: Junk food is addictive. And we already kinda know that, don’t we? We constantly use the language of addicts when we talk about food. “Oh my goodness, I can’t stop eating these!” “I was going to stop at three, but I have no self control!” “You can’t eat just one, can you?” Cake and chips are a metal pipe and a dank alley away from being crack.
If all that sounds a bit hyperbolic, it’s because most people aren’t privy to some of the shadier practices at the companies that make chocolate-covered pretzel sticks, syrup-filled marshmallow hot-dogs, or whatever else is stopping our hearts these days. It’s tempting to merely shrug one’s shoulders and assert that bad eating habits are a matter only of choice, that obesity is an epidemic simply because people lack good sense and self-control. That a good many folks lack self control is obvious – stop into any roadside diner south of the Mason-Dixon line, and the burgers there swell to the size of a healthy baby – but that’s not the whole story.
See, employed at these big food corporations are men and women in lab coats. When you’re wearing a lab coat, chances are you’re one of three things: A doctor, a scientist, or someone at a Halloween party dressed as a doctor or scientist. Working at companies like Kelloggs and General Mills are several of these lab-coat-bedecked individuals, and they’re not checking Count Chocula’s blood pressure.
They’re using the science of chemistry to determine what they call the “bliss point” of your favorite sugary treats. That’s the point where a food becomes so irresistibly tasty that you just have to have more of it. Which means you purchase more of it. Which means food executives get to buy silk pajamas for their Shi Tzus.
Years ago, I was young boy living just up the hill from a fast food restaurant. On clear days, when I was outside riding a bike or playing catch, a wind would occasionally blow in from the west and carry with it the glorious smells of French fries and beef patties. Now, when you’re a kid, you don’t have a lot of money. Lawn-mowing cash and allowance savings comprise the bulk of your portfolio. So when a friend was visiting, and we had a hankering for something quick and cheap, where do you think we went? At a five-minute walk, the burger joint seemed like the obvious choice.
They taught us nutrition in school, but a child of 8 or 9 doesn’t really internalize the importance of such a message – especially with the smells of greasy goodness filling his nostrils. A kid, a parent, anyone can fall into a cycle of bad choices given the right circumstances. Which was why, from 9 to about 13, I was hopelessly obese.
Yep. With two chafing thunderthighs and a pair of sweatpants that could shelter a Brazilian soccer team.
Growing awareness of a proper diet – and a growth spurt that shot me up about a foot in four years – helped. But for months, I delayed my impending lifestyle change with a mantra familiar to anyone who’s tried to quit smoking: “Tomorrow. I’ll enjoy myself for one last day, and then I’ll quit tomorrow.”
Only, at some point, tomorrow has to become today.
And how many people have faced that dilemma needlessly? Personal responsibility is important, but at some point we need to start asking businesses to be responsible as well. Which probably means a health warning similar to ones found on packs of cigarettes. And a ceasefire on all these new food “innovations,” like cheese-stuffed pizza crust, and icing-filled doughnuts topped with M&Ms and bacon. Actually, I just made that one up myself. You’re welcome, Tim Horton’s.
Look, if it’s someone’s birthday, I’ll eat cake. I’ll even toss back a couple of cookies on occasion. Every once in a while, that’s okay. But the big food players don’t inflate their margins on every once in a while. They’ve got this down, literally, to a science.
So hoist your beer, Mr. Moss. For pulling back the curtain, you’ve earned it – just keep in mind those empty calories.
Come to think if it, I’ll order you a light.
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Mint me baby (one more time)
We get attached to the silliest objects.
In the comics, you always see Linus clutching his blanket protectively, shielding it from Snoopy’s prying muzzle. I can’t admit to being a huge fan of “Peanuts” – every time I read a strip with no dialogue that ends with Charlie Brown crying on a pitcher’s mound, I always feel like I’ve wasted some small part of my life. But there’s something truthful about Linus. He represents those of us who have trouble letting go of certain things. He also represents chronic thumb-suckers and looks like he has spaghetti on his head, but we’ll forgive him that for now.
In some sense, we’ve all got our Linus blankets – our feel-safe objects that comfort us, and without which we feel strangely empty. Usually this is something small and disposable, like a routine morning coffee, but don’t discount the eccentrics who have assumed more permanent affectations – the old man with the gleaming silver cane who doesn’t actually need it, the would-be pirate with a patch covering a fully functioning eye; people like that. There was a time, lamely, when I once considered carrying around a tennis ball, thinking that if I intermittently bounced it through hallways and off the sides of buildings, I would shed my identity as Weird Aloof Guy and become Edgy Tennis Ball Guy. This fantasy lasted about a week before I realized that the two identities would simply merge, and I’d be the weird aloof schmuck with the annoying tennis ball fixation. Add to that a complete lack of motor control, and you can see why the only Dunlops I touch are covered in dog slobber.
Gum. Wristwatch. Giant sunglasses that could provide cover from enemy gunfire. We are all the sum total of the choices we make, large and small, and the small ones are fascinating to me. Look hard enough, and you can see little character flourishes in just about everyone – including yourself, Mr. Double-Espresso with Cinnamon Shavings. Sometimes, though, these choices can morph into a semi-permanent routine that can become addicting.
I started mulling this vague and mystifying topic while roaming the supermarket last week in a hunt for mints. I’ve talked about mints before, but perhaps I failed to convey just how important they’ve become. Let me put it this way: If they announce tomorrow that they’re halting production of IceBreakers Frost, I’m taking one of my remaining mints to a scientist so he can determine its exact chemical composition. Then I’m starting a lab in my living room, where I’ll sequester myself for days at a time, replicating with a lover’s exactitude that cool, crisp, winterfrosty goodness that starts each and every workday. The police will receive confusing reports and suspect that I’ve started a crystal meth lab, and when they bust down the door and storm the living room, I’ll simply smile and offer them a mint. We’ll all share a laugh, and sit around sucking homemade IceBreakers and watching “Mad Men.”
I like mints.
Somehow, over the past year, they became my tennis ball, my Linus blanket. And that’s all well and good, except now I fall into a panic whenever I can’t find some – a feeling that would be all too familiar to smokers, heroin addicts, and anyone who’s had more than one Thin Mint. (Seriously, Girl Scouts, those are pretty rad.)
Last week’s grocery outing was a harrowing experience, the stuff of cold sweats and flashbacks. My basket filled with provisions for the week, I lumbered up to the impulse-item rack to grab a couple containers of my favorite mid-morning treat, only my mid-morning treat was gone – just the gaping maw of an empty cardboard box in its place. Nothing on the rack but Certs and a gum called Orbit. Certs are a pale substitute, and Orbit? Who chews Orbit? Astronauts on the International Space Station? Weak.
Thus began the great IceBreakers hunt of 2013. It’s a testament to my sad and pathetic mint addiction that my real groceries, the milk and the rice and the boneless chicken breast, were temporarily forgotten, left behind with the Orbit and that other weird gum that looks somehow Scandinavian. It was only after a frantic and frenzied search that a solitary container – one lonely soldier tucked into his foxhole – appeared behind an overhanging price sticker. Relief washed over me, the kind only rivaled by that of re-elected presidents and shark attack survivors.
They say the first step to overcoming an addiction is admitting you have a problem, and I admit that fully. But as long as it doesn’t harm anyone, and gives me minty-fresh breath, I’ll shrug and pony up the mint money without qualm. As Linus well knows, sometimes it’s worth a little inconvenience to hold onto small creature comforts.
Plus, let’s face it. They’re way tastier than tennis balls. Trust me on that one.
In the comics, you always see Linus clutching his blanket protectively, shielding it from Snoopy’s prying muzzle. I can’t admit to being a huge fan of “Peanuts” – every time I read a strip with no dialogue that ends with Charlie Brown crying on a pitcher’s mound, I always feel like I’ve wasted some small part of my life. But there’s something truthful about Linus. He represents those of us who have trouble letting go of certain things. He also represents chronic thumb-suckers and looks like he has spaghetti on his head, but we’ll forgive him that for now.
In some sense, we’ve all got our Linus blankets – our feel-safe objects that comfort us, and without which we feel strangely empty. Usually this is something small and disposable, like a routine morning coffee, but don’t discount the eccentrics who have assumed more permanent affectations – the old man with the gleaming silver cane who doesn’t actually need it, the would-be pirate with a patch covering a fully functioning eye; people like that. There was a time, lamely, when I once considered carrying around a tennis ball, thinking that if I intermittently bounced it through hallways and off the sides of buildings, I would shed my identity as Weird Aloof Guy and become Edgy Tennis Ball Guy. This fantasy lasted about a week before I realized that the two identities would simply merge, and I’d be the weird aloof schmuck with the annoying tennis ball fixation. Add to that a complete lack of motor control, and you can see why the only Dunlops I touch are covered in dog slobber.
Gum. Wristwatch. Giant sunglasses that could provide cover from enemy gunfire. We are all the sum total of the choices we make, large and small, and the small ones are fascinating to me. Look hard enough, and you can see little character flourishes in just about everyone – including yourself, Mr. Double-Espresso with Cinnamon Shavings. Sometimes, though, these choices can morph into a semi-permanent routine that can become addicting.
I started mulling this vague and mystifying topic while roaming the supermarket last week in a hunt for mints. I’ve talked about mints before, but perhaps I failed to convey just how important they’ve become. Let me put it this way: If they announce tomorrow that they’re halting production of IceBreakers Frost, I’m taking one of my remaining mints to a scientist so he can determine its exact chemical composition. Then I’m starting a lab in my living room, where I’ll sequester myself for days at a time, replicating with a lover’s exactitude that cool, crisp, winterfrosty goodness that starts each and every workday. The police will receive confusing reports and suspect that I’ve started a crystal meth lab, and when they bust down the door and storm the living room, I’ll simply smile and offer them a mint. We’ll all share a laugh, and sit around sucking homemade IceBreakers and watching “Mad Men.”
I like mints.
Somehow, over the past year, they became my tennis ball, my Linus blanket. And that’s all well and good, except now I fall into a panic whenever I can’t find some – a feeling that would be all too familiar to smokers, heroin addicts, and anyone who’s had more than one Thin Mint. (Seriously, Girl Scouts, those are pretty rad.)
Last week’s grocery outing was a harrowing experience, the stuff of cold sweats and flashbacks. My basket filled with provisions for the week, I lumbered up to the impulse-item rack to grab a couple containers of my favorite mid-morning treat, only my mid-morning treat was gone – just the gaping maw of an empty cardboard box in its place. Nothing on the rack but Certs and a gum called Orbit. Certs are a pale substitute, and Orbit? Who chews Orbit? Astronauts on the International Space Station? Weak.
Thus began the great IceBreakers hunt of 2013. It’s a testament to my sad and pathetic mint addiction that my real groceries, the milk and the rice and the boneless chicken breast, were temporarily forgotten, left behind with the Orbit and that other weird gum that looks somehow Scandinavian. It was only after a frantic and frenzied search that a solitary container – one lonely soldier tucked into his foxhole – appeared behind an overhanging price sticker. Relief washed over me, the kind only rivaled by that of re-elected presidents and shark attack survivors.
They say the first step to overcoming an addiction is admitting you have a problem, and I admit that fully. But as long as it doesn’t harm anyone, and gives me minty-fresh breath, I’ll shrug and pony up the mint money without qualm. As Linus well knows, sometimes it’s worth a little inconvenience to hold onto small creature comforts.
Plus, let’s face it. They’re way tastier than tennis balls. Trust me on that one.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)