Wakey wakey

Staving off tiredness should be considered an artform. It may not quite have the bohemian hipness of sculpting or jazz, and you don’t see awake people on display at the Louvre. But it requires a special set of skills, and maybe the odd chemical or two.

Being a human is so counterintuitive sometimes. You’d think that getting a proper night’s rest would help with being tired, and it sometimes can, especially if you’re running the kind of sleep deficit that spurs hallucinations of unicorns and talking ice cream cones. Rarely, though, does it fully banish fatigue to the dark hinterlands from whence it came. I can get a solid eight hours and still be a dazed wreck by 3 p.m., speaking gibberish and walking into walls as though I’d just downed a fifth of Johnny Walker.

From the look of things, plenty of others are in the same boat. When I glance about my workplace near the end of the business day, I see exhausted-looking faces that are disproportionate to the level of effort being exerted; we work hard, but it’s not like our jobs involve sprinting up stairs with kicking fourth-graders strapped to our chests. We sit on our butts and fiddle with laptops. By all rights we should have enough juice left by evening to do squat thrusts ‘till our thighs catch fire. We never do. It’s all we can manage to keep our eyes open on the commute home.

There’s a term, “RBF,” which has crept into the lexicon in recent years. It stands for “resting (expletive) face,” and refers to the unintentionally mean or sullen look that some people get when their faces are at rest. I would like to submit a new term for Merriam-Webster’s consideration: RZF, or resting zombie face, meant to describe those who have been awake for less than six hours but still look as though they’re sleepwalking through a death dream in a coma. My own face could usually serve as a baseline.

All sorts of strategies exist for battling fatigue, though it’s surprising how few of them actually work.

Coffee is perhaps the most common weapon against tiredness, but I don’t trust it. It betrays you at the worst moments. Everything starts off promisingly, with a jolt of energy so sudden and strong you feel like your brain’s an old appliance that’s been plugged back in, roaring back to life after months in an attic. Then the crash happens. You’re putting along nicely, feeling invincible, and then boom. Brick wall. You go from speeding Indy car to hollowed-out junker, from Superman to Sandman, and it always happens right before an important meeting, or during a presentation to your biology class about the evolution of yak nostrils.

For those who need their drugs to be druggier, there’s 5-Hour Energy, or one of its high-powered imitators. This is for people who’ve tried and failed to crush their coffee beans into powder and snort it like cocaine. The selling point is that it’s stronger and longer-lasting than traditional caffeinated beverages, but that amounts to escalation, which makes me nervous. If you adopt the mentality that more is always better, then before you know it you’re working out of a makeshift meth lab in the hatchback of a Ford Fiesta. “Just a bump before lunch!” you say. Yeah, OK.

In the animated Comedy Central series “South Park,” Mr. Mackey, the principal of the elementary school, is known for his catchphrase, “Drugs are bad, m’kay?” He must have first uttered this line after a hand-shaking caffeine bender. It’s no way to get through the day. Which leaves diet as the most obvious lifestyle overhaul that could potentially put a dent in our proclivity to slip into unplanned siestas.

Does diet make a difference? It can. There was a time in my life when the only food groups I recognized were blueberry muffins and quarter-pounders with cheese, and aside from affecting my health generally, it also gave me the energy of a dim-witted earthworm. Five minutes out on my bike and I’d have to take a power nap just to make it through an episode of “Frasier.”

What a difference lifestyle makes -- I can now make it up a flight of stairs without pausing to take a huff off an oxygen tank. By trading French fries for apples and burgers for turkey sandwiches, I begin each day with the chest-thumping air of a Roman gladiator. The problem is that it doesn’t last, and it’s a fine balance. Too little food, and I’m wracked with hunger pangs; too much, and my eyelids droop like wilted flowers, requiring every drop of concentration at my disposal to perform even simple tasks, like purging my spam box of emails from Nigerian princes.

When in doubt, turn to Google. A simple search for “fighting fatigue” yielded a website called Prevention, which offers nine suggestions for chokeslamming tiredness to the mat. I’ll offer a tenth suggestion: Don’t chokeslam anything to a mat. It’s tiring.

A lot of Prevention’s tips are a bit goofy. Some border on hippy-dippy -- let go of regret, they say, and be more decisive -- while others, like color therapy, seem dubious. Wearing bright orange on an overcast day may be whimsical and a tinge rebellious, but I don’t see a clementine-colored sweatshirt powering me through an arduous work project, unless said sweatshirt is made from a synthesized brew of steroids and speed.

On tip that stood out to me, though, was jumping. Like, literally jumping. Up and down, on a bed, or at the watercooler, or wherever one can conceivably jump. What it does, they say, is pump oxygen throughout our bodies, stir up childhood enthusiasm, and break up the monotony of the day, thus boosting our energy and drive.

So if you’re sitting near a window and you see a bald head bobbing past, you’ll know who it is, and why it’s happening.

Bold move

Birds have got the right idea. Once that wicked winter wind blows, they hightail it for southern climes, where I imagine them sipping pina coladas poolside at a swanky resort, chuckling at we grounded humans. “Silly animals,” they squawk, “with their fuzzy boots and parkas! Toss your drinks back, fellow flyers, it’s time to limbo!”

If it were easier for people to migrate, we’d be doing it all the time. Sure, there are the “snowbirds,” those lucky ducks who spent part of the year where blizzards are just a theoretical concept. That requires money and planning, though. We can’t just take off whenever we want to, because not only can’t we fly, but we’re grounded in other ways -- we need homes and supermarkets and convenient access to socks. We’re mired in our homo sapien ways.

But there’s a chance that migration may become a necessity.

I’m talking permanent migration here, the kind that could very well be heralded by climate change. At this point, the reality of a changing climate should be taken as an absolute, and the human role in it regarded with nearly as much certainty. The steep and sudden climb in global temperatures corresponds exactly with the beginning of the industrial revolution, and the greenhouse gases we’ve pumped into the atmosphere since that time tally perfectly with the particulants measured in today’s carbonous, throat-clogging air. The few remaining deniers have no credible case left. That leaves two questions for us to ponder.

One: What do we do about it?

Two: What happens when we inevitably do nothing?

Because let’s face it -- we’ll probably do nothing, or at least nothing that helps. The world’s largest economies, the United States and China, have a financial interest in preserving the status quo; investments in renewable energy may ultimately keep the planet habitable for human life, but it hurts various industries’ bottom lines in the short term, and basic survival has historically taken a back seat to quarterly fiscal reports. This has already had an impact on habitation, as islanders living near the broiling equator have seen their communities flooded by rising sea levels. They’re fleeing for higher, cooler ground, and in about 200 years they may find what they’re looking for in places like Siberia and northern Canada. Ever get a vacation postcard from the Northwest Territories? Your great-great-grandchildren might.

The goal here, however, isn’t to shame. It’s to consider the possible consequences.

There are the societal ramifications, obviously. Let’s say the worst-case scenario develops and the equator becomes totally uninhabitable, a celestial waistband of brown grass and empty McDonald’s parking lots. That means a whole lot of people moving out of Brazil and Thailand and pitching their tents in locales such as Norway and Russia; by 2216 they’ll be resort countries shaded by palm fronds and crawling with sunburnt poolside attendants named Chip. This is significant, because a ridiculous number of people live in these equatorial countries, and if the climate forces them to leave, they’ll be competing with the natives of cooler spots for space and resources. Overpopulation is already a huge problem, and its effects will only be compounded if there’s less livable land area on the planet.

Besides that, the effects on local culture could potentially be unsettling. Some nations are accepting of disparate cultures. Some aren’t. Given the current kerfuffle over immigration policy, our own United States seems to qualify as a culturally intolerant country -- our love for spicy tacos and Kung Pao chicken notwithstanding. It’s ironic, given America’s status as a patchwork quilt of heritage, that there’s such a deep resistance to outside influence and ideas. But it exists, and it’s prevalent in states like Maine, which are historically isolationist by nature. I mean hell, Mainers consider even transplants from neighboring New Hampshire to be “from away.” It’s hard to fathom the number of heads that would explode if the state is overrun by refugees from Columbia, seeking cooler breezes and delicious whoopie pies.

While that’s a lot to consider, the dramatic facelift to the world economy is the dark star on top of this ugliest of Christmas trees. I’m not an economist, but I play one in a column, and I’m guessing it can’t be healthy in the short run to see northern countries’ populations triple while places like Venezuela are left as empty as a Quizno’s.

Since we’re so close to Canada, let’s prognosticate a hypothetical future scenario for our syrup-loving neighbors. In a possible 2216, oranges grow in Toronto. Hundreds of thousands of ex-Argentinians crowd the cigar shops and red-light hovels of Montreal, their flesh erupting in goosebumps as air conditioning cools their bodies. Denizens of Vancouver get up early to start their cars, hoping for a less-than-sweltering commute to work. And with soil now suited to diverse agriculture, Canada becomes one of the world’s breadbaskets, producing food for the few people left in the simmering sun of a once-great civilization. The 12 people still living in Georgia drink orange juice made in Edmonton. The world is topsy-turvy, the switch too sudden, and even the countries with huge population booms are buckling under the weight of massive change. And somehow, Pauly Shore is making movies again. Bedlam.

There are those who would scoff, dismiss my climate worry as overblown and call me an “alarmist.” To which I would respond: Of course I am! It’s an alarming situation. Who in their right mind wouldn’t be?

And you know who’s laughing? The birds. They have no bags to pack. No expenses to burden them. No flat-screen televisions to stuff into the hatchbacks of their Hyundai Accents, no immigration forms to fill out. They just move. When humanity does nothing, those left behind will glance at the sky and say to themselves, “If only I could fly.”

Binge and purge

Someone asked me recently what I did over the weekend, and for a long and panicky moment, I had no idea.

Something had to have happened, surely. Vague, dreamlike memories floated up to me from the murky depths. There was a movie at some point, I think. Possibly Will Ferrell was in it, or maybe it was Jeremy Irons. (Have Will Ferrell and Jeremy Irons ever done any projects together?) I want to say there was a picnic that took place at one point, and for some reason I remember eating eggs. A lot of eggs. Way, way too many eggs.

It shouldn’t be this hard to remember.

And yet this kind of thing happens all the time, and not just to me. It used to be that weekends were the time to go out and have memorable experiences, stories you could share with your coworkers as you settled behind your desk for another week of work. You went to plays. You embarked on a hike and took goofy pictures below a stone monument depicting Civil War soldiers with frilly hair. You drank too much at a bridal shower and passed out face-first in a lump of cake.

Now, many of us spend weekends in a kind of fugue state, and it’s not hard to figure out why. We stayed in the whole time. Staying in is the new going out.

Being a sloth-like hermit has gotten pretty easy, considering there’s no pressing need to leave the house anymore. If I’m in the mood for a movie, I can either pay 15 bucks to sit in a theater next to a flatulent man who hasn’t showered since D-Day, or I can stream something at home on a TV the size of a school bus windshield. If I need tube socks and a beard trimmer, I can stand in line at WalMart until the decay of Western civilization, or I can make a few clicks on the laptop and have them delivered to my door. If I need fresh air and sunshine, there’s probably an app for that. I’d ask a neighbor or something, but that would entail walking outside.

New terms have entered into the lexicon that testify to our growing staying-in addiction. “Netflix ‘n’ chill” is a popular one; it’s basically slang for settling in front of the television with a choice libation and watching streaming movies or shows, an activity that was once simply known as “watching TV.”

“Binge watch” is a term you’ve probably heard. Binge-watching is Netflix ‘n’ chill on steroids -- you basically just pick a show and fill the ensuing hours consuming episode after episode, blowing through series like a pastry chef blows through cake mix. That’s when you know you’ve hit rock bottom. It isn’t drug use or overeating that indicates a deep spiral. It’s watching so many episodes of “The X-Files” that you know how many moles are on David Duchovny’s neck. (Two, if you’re curious.)

And of course there’s the term I coined myself: “Couch walk.” It’s when you’ve been sitting on the sofa so long that when you finally get up to make for the bathroom, you walk with the kind of stiff hunch usually seen in people who have survived major traffic accidents.

Humanity doesn’t stand a chance.

There are advantages to this self-imposed isolation, of course. It’s easy. It’s comfortable and convenient. Tellingly, it’s also cheap; a subscription to a streaming service typically costs 10 to 15 dollars per month, depending on how many bells and whistles are attached, and you get unlimited, on-demand viewing in return. Compare that to the typical outing at your local cineplex: 15 bucks for a single ticket to a single movie, seats so sticky they could affix a tire to the axle of a tractor trailer, and concession prices high enough to drive a family of four into bankruptcy. When the choice is between eating Milk Duds and keeping your house, it’s understandable that someone would choose creature comforts over gummed-up floors and funeral home lighting. And that’s just the cinema. Seeing a play can be even more expensive, although at least a play offers the possibility that something weird might happen -- an actor forgetting his lines, or a prop smacking someone in the face. Better value, but still pricey.

The ultimate price we pay for this convenience, though, is in the quality of the memories that we’re building. In aggregate, memories are the story of a life. In the 1970s, my father quit his job, packed a few essentials into a broken-down Scooby Doo van with a busted heating system, and drove from Maine to California and back -- no agenda, no plan, just the open road. He’s fond of regaling me with stories from this time. He should be. He left himself exposed, a raw nerve twitching in the fickle winds of the real world, and that’s oftentimes how the best experiences happen. You step outside, you hope for the best, and when the best actually happens, you feel like you’re truly living. Because you are.

That’s worth more than a monthly subscription, but it happens all too rarely.

Which is why, in a break from my peers, I’m resisting society’s ever-increasing reliance on gadgets to deliver at-home entertainment. I Netflix ‘n’ chill. I’ve done the couch walk more than once in my life. But whenever I’m on the cusp of that fugue state, I walk outside, feel the breeze on my skin, and start walking. In 10 years, who knows? I may be the only schmuck out there on the road, galloping along in my battered hiking sneaks, who’s taking in the genuine sounds and smells of earthly life.

If I encounter someone walking in the opposite direction, we’ll probably nod to each other knowingly. Contained in that nod will be a singular thought: “This is where life is.”

Mr. Not-So-Clean

Tell me what this sounds like to you.

You’re in a dimly-lit room. Balls of lint float gently across the floor like miniature tumbleweeds. There’s a fraying recliner with a broken footrest sprawled drunkenly in one corner, and a wooden desk is cocked at an angle beneath a windowsill stacked high with brick-a-brack -- receipts, empty Tic Tac boxes and long-forgotten Batman figurines. There’s a vague smell of must in the air. It is lonely. It is forlorn. It’s unsettlingly quiet, enough to make a child weep for mommy.

Oh, and it’s the kitchen. Add dish clutter to the list.

So! What does all this sound like? A small shack in a refugee camp? A dormitory in a minimum security prison?

Even sadder. It’s my apartment during spring cleaning.

I try to maintain order. I really do. Occasionally I succeed; on a typical day, all the grimy bits are banished to certain strategic hiding spots, like under the couch or behind the refrigerator, where there are big enough piles of cereal box prizes to open up a small dollar store. Stray dirt and junk has this nasty tendency to accumulate, and my day-to-day strategy is to keep it at the margins, far enough away from the main stage that I can pretend I’m neater than I actually am. This is a mental disorder known as Bachelor Delusion. It has its perks.

Most importantly, it’s a time saver. By doing the utmost minimum to maintain a sense of cleanliness and order, you can give yourself a lot more breathing room when it comes to the things that really matter. In my case, that means writing angry letters to politicians and catching up on old reruns of the X-Files. Neither of these activities is especially productive, and the former may lead to the odd restraining order or two, but that still beats getting on your hands and knees and scrubbing the toilet until your arm falls off.

The obvious problem with this approach is that, when spring cleaning time comes ’round, your workload is compounded. Shoving things aside isn’t the same as getting rid of them, so when you finally heave the couch asunder it’s like an archeological dig: Stratified layers of detritus that you can use to reconstruct the recent history of your life. Sifting through my own debris I can now map out a rough outline of the past 12 months. They started off with a bizarre Cocoa Puffs obsession (half of these brown, crunchy cereal bits ended up crushed into a dusty carpet-cake), and they ended with a yellowed copy of “The Grapes of Wrath.” I still haven’t read it and am now not sure I want to, considering it has developed the faint green aura of a nuclear fuel rod.

Lifelong struggles with procrastination certainly don’t help, but I suspect the main culprit here is upbringing.

My dear mother was a wonderfully dedicated parent, but one of her child-rearing strategies backfired. When I was barely old enough to wipe my own nose, she stuck a vacuum cleaner in my hand and showed me the finer points of removing crouton crumbs from the living room carpet. Looking back, I suspect she had a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Whenever I watched her toil with that ugly mechanical noisebox, she’d pass over the same area so many times I wondered if perhaps she had superpowered sight and could spot subatomic particles with her bare eyes; by the time she was done, the fibers were so sterile they could have been used to swab the blood the from the gashes of a stabbing victim.

When my turn came, I was a little less manic about it. I did several passes, but only as many as I thought necessary to remove all traces of the previous night’s popcorn binge. With an earnestness only children can achieve, I shoved the vacuum’s crude geometry into the tightest corners, determined to show Mom that I had “the touch.”

I did not, apparently, have “the touch.”

She’d be encouraging at first: “Oh, nice work honey, really good job.” Then she’d re-vacuum the area I just cleaned. Not with a cursory pass, either. She’d just re-do the entire section with the same mania she brought to every other surface in the house. To my eye, my designated area was spotless, void of even the most microscopic morsels of pocket lint. Mom, by contrast, saw advancing armies of grime trundling across the floor like the Nazis storming into Poland.

Aside from being deflating to my self-esteem, it taught the wrong lesson. The lesson should have been, “Clean regularly, and you’ll have a nice living area.” Instead, the lesson was, “Clearly you’re bad at this. Let someone else do it.”

Not that I’m laying blame. She got a lot of things right, Mom did, and any lackadaisical attitude toward neatness and order I may have is my own responsibility. Nevertheless, it would have been helpful to have gotten a better foundation in that area; perhaps today I wouldn’t be blowing whole weekends trying to beat back the encroaching hordes of broken watch bands and dust-covered DVD cases.

Love you, Mom.

Let my tale be a cautionary one. If you don’t maintain your abode consistently, you run the risk of ending up like me: waist-deep in trash bags, hands and arms slick with Pine Sol, and staring down a mountain of assorted crap so large it could bury Stonehenge.

Somehow, when Mr. or Mrs. Anonymous coined the term “spring cleaning,” I don’t think that’s what they had in mind.

Invent this

In “Back to the Future Part II,” accidental time traveler Marty McFly makes a temporal leap from 1985 to 2015 -- which at the time seemed like the distant future. As soon as he and mad scientist Doc Brown zip through the decades in their flying DeLorean, they emerge onto a mid-air highway choked with airborne vehicles, swarming like locusts over a cityscape that somehow looks like the plastic toys they used to stick inside Cracker Jack boxes.

Great movie, annoying legacy. Because now all everyone asks is, “How come we don’t have flying cars yet?”

There’s a quick and easy answer to that one. We don’t have flying cars because then everyone would need to get a pilot’s license. And even then, there’d be drivers so abysmally awful that they’d slam into another motorist -- only, instead of the crash victim dejectedly standing by their wrecked car on the side of the road, they’d drop stone-like out of the sky and fall to their probable death, all while morning radio hosts played canned burping noises over sound clips of Ted Cruz stump speeches.

Flying cars would be a nightmare.

But there are other technological advancements that should have been made by now. In many ways our modern era feels like the future; we’ve got high-definition TVs that automatically record our favorite shows, robots that do our vacuuming, and phones that close our garage doors and teach us how to play “Baby Got Back” on a ukulele. Great stuff, all of it, and yet it seems like there should be more.

Take beds, for instance. Making the bed is about as much fun as eating a transistor radio; why is this not an automated process by now? We’ve made cars that drive themselves and GPS systems that use satellites to pinpoint our exact locations, and yet we still break our backs doing the hospital tuck in tricky corners. Whenever I successfully get my sheets on without muttering a string of expletives I feel it’s an occasion worthy of chocolate cake and a high school marching band. It takes time getting everything right, and if I could have that time back I could dedicate it to more worthy pursuits. I could juggle bowling pins and speak fluent Mandarin by now if it wasn’t for the damn bed.

Clearly the solution here is some kind of robot, but not a humanoid robot like Rosie, the Jetsons’ mechanical maid. No, I’m thinking arms that pop out from underneath the box spring, equipped with sensors on the hands that detect sheet location and can plan accordingly. With three programmable settings -- Loose, Tight, and Folsom Prison -- you’d be unstoppable. Think of all you could accomplish. Cooking, cleaning, correspondence, all because you’ve been freed from the shackles of slumber slavery by the BedBot 3000. Patent pending.

Or how about this: an automatic gift-wrapping machine. Sure, some of you may enjoy the act of wrapping, but for people like me -- we’ll call them “men” -- it can be an intimidating and harrowing experience. Lacking both a game plan and any sense of manual coordination, each of my attempts seems to get progressively worse, with simple, ordinary items transformed into gross monstrosities. A Jeff-wrapped gift is the packaging equivalent of a bad hair day, all cowlicks and chaos. I don’t even use wrapping paper half the time. My presents are usually covered in some kind of newspaper, and if I really like you, I’ll use the Sunday comics, even taking the care to ensure that Garfield stays intact. That’s the utmost sophistication I bring to the table, and there are others just like me, walking the earth with our clumsy hands and cluelessness. We need help, and I’m not just talking about a shrink.

That’s where the still-hypothetical Gift-O-Matic 3000 comes in. (All of my fake inventions end with “3000.” Makes them seem super advanced.) You stick an electric shaver onto a conveyor belt, watch it go through a mysterious box that looks like the X-ray apparatus at airport security, and poof, out comes a gleaming package that looks like it was wrapped by Grandma Cobblepot herself. I still haven’t worked out what actually happens inside the mystery box, but if someone wants to work that one out, I’ll gladly sit back and collect royalties.

So many things could be automated if we just set our minds to it. Corn shucking. Electronics dusting. Xenophobic YouTube comment-posting. Tire inflation. Basketball.

Yet even as it comes rushing toward us, the future seems to slip further and further away. When Hollywood cranked out the “Back to the Future” movies, last year was still 30 years away, and there existed nothing but possibilities -- a ceaseless train of innovation heralding a world in which sneakers tied themselves, wet jackets were dried in seconds, and you could cook a pizza in less time than it takes to scrape gristle off a frying pan. Some of the predictions of those movies have actually been realized: Hoverboards, for instance, have more or less arrived, making it possible to “skateboard” on air. Other predictions missed the mark. Dust repellent paper? Do kids these days even know what paper is?

Someday we’ll be closer to achieving a Marty McFly future. Until that happens, it’s high time we set to work on eliminating the few remaining nuisances of daily life; I mean, you can’t carve out time for hoverboarding when you’re breaking your back over a queen-sized bed that smells like fabric softener and cats. Let’s get to work on my fake inventions, and while we’re at it, I’ve got one more to throw into the mix: Robot police cruisers. For safety reasons, we’ll need them to patrol the skies if flying cars ever actually happen.

You’re welcome, patent office. Now give me my royalties.

Freak on a leash

You wouldn’t figure there’d be enough people interested in wearing purple lipstick to keep the product afloat. Then you go to a hard rock or heavy metal concert, look around, and think, “Oh. There it all is.”

To think I’d come so dangerously close to forgetting about the freaks. I don’t say “freaks” in any derogatory sense; in fact, it’s rather a term of endearment, as I once considered becoming a freak myself back in those heady, halcyon college days. But that’s one of the nice things about attending a metal show. You can oggle the weirdos all you want, because the weirdos want to be oggled. There’s frankly no other way to explain an earlobe gauge the size of a monster truck hubcap and a tattoo of a dragon smoking a “cigar.”

There’s so much atmosphere at a concert you could wash your mouth with it and spit it out. And it’d probably taste like Bud Light.

It’s a scene I would have basked in 15 years ago, but when most people reach a certain age, they have to distance themselves from the extreme-rock aesthetic. Personally, I chose a career path that consistently takes me out of the house and places me before sets of human eyeballs, so I’m forced to look somewhat normal -- if you can call it “normal” to be giraffe-level tall, shaved bald and sporting a nose that could be a paragliding sail. Any embellishment at this point would not only make it difficult to get a job, but would likely get me banned from any public establishment that hinges on people keeping their food down.

Concerts are a reminder of what could have been, had things gone differently. If I had become a musician or some other kind of independent artist -- instead of a corporate shill writing copy for beer money -- I could very well look like the over-tattooed lovechild of reality star Jesse James and a bottle of Kentucky bourbon. In this alternate reality, my beard is dyed red and extends to my belt buckle in a spear-like geometric tangle; I wear rings in places where rings are not appropriate; and every T-shirt I own is black and adorned with some sort of skull, many of them flaming, even though bone isn’t flammable and there’s no good reason to set fire to one anyway.

Then again, there’s always the chance that alternate-reality me is a pansy, just like the real me. Jeff Two probably looks as ordinary as a high school guidance counselor.

No matter which reality I’m in, though, people-watching has always been a favorite hobby -- particularly at concerts, where there are so many people to choose from, freaks or not.

I’m generally into bands that have been around a while, and so their fans tend to be older; “adults,” if you will, people with cars and mortgages and a taste for non-gas station wine. They go to concerts in jeans and T-shirts, yet their sensible haircuts and expensive watches give them away. They’re not what you’d call enthralling subjects. They stick to their seats and bob their heads to the music in a manner suggesting some degree of sophistication, occasionally taking out their fancy smartphones to show off the fact that they have fancy smartphones. They’re respectable and practical, a model to which the younger folks can aspire. They’re also boring to watch.

What you want in a good concert people-watching scenario are the “independent spirits,” typically 18-28-year-olds who work at Hot Topic and wear dog collars on their wrists. Next time you attend a heavy metal festival -- which I’m sure ranks highly on your list of priorities -- find a cluster of these jewel-studded souls and observe their behavior. They promise thrills much greater than those on offer at your local zoo’s monkey cage.

Take the recent Megadeth show in Bangor, for instance. Megadeth is one of those groups that’s been thrashing around for more than 30 years, and so they definitely draw the fine-cheese-and-wine-cellar crowd, believe it or not. But because of the nature of the music -- snarky, aggressive, unapologetically juvenile -- the freaks are there too, coming out of hiding with their neon-colored hair to compare body art and piercing count. The graying temples share floor space with the nose rings in a show of cross-generational solidarity that almost makes you want to cry. Although that could just be the stench of BO.

My friends and I are somewhere in the middle of these two factions. Not young and not old, we occupy that weird gray area in between. We still wear our absurd T-shirts, but eschew the moshpit trappings of the general admission floor in favor of the relative comfort of the bleacher seats. They offer a great vantage point for peeping. In the course of about half an hour, we spied a young woman with the sides of her head shaved, long pink hair extending halfway down her back and a lip ring that could sink a medium-sized fishing vessel; a middle-aged man with a tattoo of a snake coiled around his neck; and a cluster of long-haired teenagers banging their heads so ferociously they should be tapped to power a wind turbine. And this was during the opening act.

I was filled with a sick and cynical glee.

It’s anyone’s guess as to what these people are like in real life. In my experience, they often have the capacity to surprise you; you expect them to be retail slaves toiling behind the counter of a strip-mall Best Buy, but half the time they’re insurance brokers who hide their tats until it’s absolutely appropriate. Concerts bring out their inner rapscallions, and they make the price of admission more than worth it. Even if there were no bands playing I’d still buy a ticket, because why not? This is the human zoo. We’re all pretty fascinating creatures, if you take the time to look.

Besides, you’ll never see such an impressive ocean of purple lipstick outside of a Minnesota Vikings game. That much I guarantee.

We're men, we're men in tights

From the 1930s to about the 1960s, westerns were a pretty big deal. I’m still trying to figure out why; best I can tell, movies about cowboys tend to drag, featuring long passages with minimal dialogue, and extended close-ups of ugly men hawking globs of tobacco into spittoons. If you have a weird fetish for stubbly old cranks, then I could sort of see the appeal. Of course, if you have a weird fetish for stubbly old cranks, you probably don’t make it to the cinema very often. A basement and a reliable Internet connection are probably your best friends.

We associate westerns with a certain era because at a certain point, Hollywood pretty much stopped making them. You see one trickle out occasionally, but half the time they have some incongruous modern twist, like robot dinosaurs that the cowboys kill with bazookas. Save for the odd throwback here and there, westerns are a dead genre.

Perhaps the same fate will befall the superhero movie.

The two genres don’t have a lot in common at face value. Westerns are slow and sparse; hero flicks are speedy and overstuffed. Westerns are cheap to produce; hero flicks cost more than the gross domestic product of Tanzania. Westerns feature macho outlaws dressed in ridiculous outfits; hero flicks … okay, so they have something in common.

But the main quality they share is that they saturated the market. Since westerns could be cranked out on shoestring budgets, the local cineplex was silly with tales of jug-hatted desperados making a go of it in the rough-and-tumble plains. You couldn’t escape them. They were the cinematic equivalent of mosquitos, only you couldn’t get rid of them with incense and cartons of Virginia Slims.

Superhero movies are complex, big-budget affairs, but they’re prevalent because they make their money back and then some. Google the 50 top-grossing films of all time and a shocking number of them feature protagonists who wear underwear on the outside of their pants. And that’s not even taking into account teenage wizards, lusty vampires or giant blue hominids in loincloths. Assemble all of these odd characters in one room and it’s like the hallucinatory dreams I used to have during puberty.

Full disclosure: I love superheroes. I was a huge comic book nerd when I was a kid, which meant I spent a lot of time indoors and didn’t know any girls. Comics were a window into a giddily absurd fantasyland, awash with primary colors and soap-style melodrama. The good guys got to wear Halloween costumes every day of the year, and the bad guys had absurd names like “Dr. Doom” and “Killer Croc.” Everything was exaggerated and distorted. This is a medium ostensibly run by adults, but clearly their creative imaginations are deeply rooted in childhood; how else do you explain metal claws popping out of someone’s hands, or a man who turns into a big green beast whenever he gets mad? Desert wanderers succumbing to heatstroke have had less vivid visions.

The glut of comic book films over the past decade-plus are tailor-made for people of my generation -- unabashed geeks who crave an adult spin on their childhood indulgences. A lot of these movies actually work, and they owe their success to computers; with digital animation you can take an absurd concept, like Spider-Man tussling with a masked goblin on a flying surfboard, and make it look as real as someone’s front porch.

This is in stark contrast to anything made prior to 1989. I remember watching a Captain America movie that was produced sometime during the early 1980s, and it was like seeing home footage of a mentally disturbed man having a very public nervous breakdown. His supposedly “indestructible” shield bent in the wind like an oversized Frisbee, and his costume seemed stitched together from the full-body onesies favored by small children with Kool-Aid mustaches. In the modern iteration, he comes across as remotely plausible, at the very least inspiring you to suspend your disbelief. Thirty-five years ago, he was a walking, talking cry for help.

Westerns had a pretty good run -- their peak lasted around 30, 35 years, give or take, equivalent to the lifespan of an average sea urchin. If superhero movies are in for a similar reign, then they’ve still got a long way to go. That’s good news for anyone itching to watch Superman and Batman beat the everloving snot out of each other, bad news for those who feel a cape is only appropriate on a magician.

Either way, I’ve got to believe they’ll come a day when these films reach the point of oversaturation. They’re not there yet, given the box office numbers, but there’s only so many times you can tell the story of the Caped Crusader before the audience collectively yawns and starts shopping for garden gnomes on Amazon. Hollywood has become addicted to “rebooting” these franchises -- scrapping continuity, enlisting new writers, casting new actors, and approaching the stories with a fresh angle -- and that’s fine, for now. But there may come a day when even die-hards like me say, “You know what? I’d love to plunk down fifteen bucks to see ‘Batman Adopts a Puppy,’ but maybe I should watch a nice historical drama instead. Is ‘Churchill Eats a Crumpet’ streaming on Netflix yet?”

The day is coming. When it does, who knows? Maybe westerns will be back in vogue by then; like fashion, there’s a chance these things are cyclical. Or maybe genre mash-ups will be the order of the day. Just imagine: cowboys wearing capes and skin-tight leotards. Hide your children, folks.

Air today, gone tomorrow

If you crammed four live kittens into a plastic carrier, cut windows into the sides, loaded it into a giant catapult and sent it careening through the sky, those kittens would probably know what it feels like to fly on one of the major airlines. All they’d need is a pretzel and a dog-eared copy of Skymall.

Just don’t say “dog-eared” around them. They hate that.

Or hey, here’s a better idea: Don’t load kittens into a catapult. Chances are they’ve got nowhere to be. They’re not like we humans, with our burning need to travel long distances quickly. Of all the differences between people and other species, one of the strangest is our tendency to gather in large groups and sit facing in a certain direction. We do it at concerts, we do it at the movie theater, and we do it on airplanes, even though the most scenic thing in front of us on the plane is a shock of brown hair tied back in a ponytail. They should put a window on the bottom of the aircraft and have all the seats facing downward. Bet the crowds at the jetport would thin out in a hurry.

Air travel is an experience like no other. Somehow it manages to be quick, convenient, and a complicated pain in the butt, all at the same time. Sure, you can start a day in Maine and end it in California, but by the time you walk out of the terminal it feels as if you’ve spent nine hours under interrogation from a pinstriped mobster named Johnny Big Hands. And boy, what he does with those hands.

You know it’s going to be an ordeal as soon as the TSA asks you to remove your belt and shoes. The shoes I can understand -- people have used their shoes to smuggle bombs, and bombs are bad. (Just ask Pauly Shore. Zing!) Requiring us to remove our belts seems a bit excessive. Most of us don’t wear full-fledged utility belts, so they don’t seem like prime transporters of contraband, unless someone’s stupid enough to sheath a hunting knife and a couple of grenades. What are we, Batman? Yeah, I know, terrorism and safety and yadda yadda yadda. It just doesn’t inspire a great travel mood when your pants are one misstep away from falling down around your ankles. Next person who laughs at my Salvador Dali underwear gets a stern talking-to.

That’s nothing compared to the waiting, though. You’re advised to get to the airport an hour and a half before your flight, which seems prudent, but once you get your tickets and go through the TSA screening, you mostly just sit. And sit. And then you sit some more. Travel veterans use this odd dead-time as an opportunity to wander the terminal and check out some of the shops, knowing that hours of additional sitting await them on the aircraft. But that can be a trap. If you’re apt to make purchases as a form of entertainment, you can find yourself walking to the gate with 12 extra books in your carry-on and an $8 bagel causing havoc in your gastrointestinal system. Plus, admit it: You weren’t even hungry for that bagel. Richard Simmons weeps for you. And by you I mean me.

Once you’ve settled in on the plane, the quality of the flight can vary wildly depending on your seating assignment. On a recent jaunt to Chicago I was stuck in the middle seat, which is fine if you’re the size of a Keebler Elf. I hover around 6’4” and have the wingspan of a pterodactyl, so assuming the role of sandwich meat isn’t what you’d call an ideal situation. For me, being bookended by two dudes is like squeezing into an old pair of jeans after a week of eating nothing but Cadbury Eggs and cake. All you can do is draw in your shoulders, keep as still as possible, and hope against hope that neither of your aisle mates decides to cut a righteous fart.

Sometimes you get lucky and there’s a video screen installed on the back of each seat. With a complimentary set of headphones you can settle in for a three-hour marathon of “The Big Bang Theory,” which coincidentally is one of the torture techniques formerly employed by federal interrogators at Guantanamo Bay. These screens are a great idea in theory, but in practice they’re a pipeline to some pretty questionable content, considering all the reality shows now in production that revolve around eating or just being weird. You can get access to higher-quality shows and movies, but for a price -- which means it’s possible to pay theater prices to see “The Peanuts Movie” yet still watch it on a screen the size of a spatula.

And of course there’s the disembarking process, which is far from a model of efficiency. Passengers typically grab their belongings and file out row by row, so if you’ve got a seat near the back of the aircraft there’s just enough time to plow through “War and Peace” before your number’s called. If you’re on a jumbo jet, you can teach yourself a new language and read Tolstoy’s tome in the original Russian. In a world run by Willie Wonka, the bottom of the craft would simply open up like a trap door and everyone would fall from their seats into a giant kiddie pool filled with foam. Oompa-Loompas would hand over your carry-on bags and shepherd you to the gate with cattle prods. It’d be a ruder process, but at least you’d make it down to baggage claim before your family files a missing persons report.

But here I am grousing about the miracle of human flight. Even a couple hundred years ago, such a thing would have been inconceivable; put James Madison in the window seat on a nonstop to Philly and he’d probably go insane. As comedian Louis C.K. pointed out, “You’re sitting in a chair in the sky. You’re like a Greek myth right now.”

Like it or not, our current method of passenger aviation is the best we can muster … for now. Still, I’ve grown rather fond of the catapult idea. Think I’ll tinker with that one for a while.

Hit me, dealer

When I was a grade school pipsqueak growing up in Lewiston, a video arcade called “Aladdin’s Castle” set up shop in a local mall. For nerds, it was a watershed event. Mine was the first generation to become obsessed with video games, and a video arcade is to gaming what a movie theater is to film: A way to transform a home entertainment offering into a legitimate outing, something requiring a car ride and clean pants. Our parents didn’t get it -- they were of the go-play-outside generation -- but we kids were enraptured. The loud noises, the colored lights: It was like stepping inside a giant disco ball filled with glittering jewels, and if you were handy with a Skee Ball you could leave with a big plastic dinosaur. Kitschy, but fun.

Las Vegas is sort of like that, only it pulses with mutant strength and scale. Imagine a video arcade that doesn’t end. Garish neons and deep shadows battle for space on the casino floors, rolling beeps and pings banish the silences of the night, and every face is lit by the glow of something artificial -- the screen of a slot machine, the lonely spotlight over a gold-rimmed blackjack table. There are even plastic dinosaurs, although most of them are either wearing bikinis or holding giant pot leaves.

Seeing it all in person for the first time last week, it occurred to me that Vegas is basically a mammoth video arcade for adults. Adults with vices. And disposable incomes. And a hankering for bazooka-sized chili dogs.

Granted, my perception of Sin City was limited by my mission and duration of stay. This was no vacation. I was in town for work, spending most of three full days in the Sands Expo, writing stories based on coma-inducing Powerpoint presentations, and taking photos of expensive ties knotted around wealthy necks. Paying the bills in a most bizarre fashion. What I saw of the prototypical Las Vegas experience was snatched in odd moments of free time, mostly at night, when you could stand in front of a 20-foot-high CVS sign and get a suntan from its near-nuclear glow. I’m convinced the city is powered by a secret underground sun.

My admittedly intermittent exposure to the nightlife seemed like an accurate impression regardless. The first full night I was there, I arrived at Planet Hollywood to meet some coworkers for dinner. I’d gotten there early thanks to a cabbie who had no respect for traffic laws, so I found a bar near the casino and nursed a beer while I waited. Nipping at the bottle as I passively watched a basketball game on TV, I was distracted at one point by the guy sitting next to me, who was hunched over a video poker device installed directly into the bar. He was muttering to himself in a manner that suggested deep mental instability, and rubbing at his forehead as though he expected a genie to pop out of his skull. His other hand kept pumping in dollars, punching buttons, pumping in dollars, punching buttons. He was clearly losing money, and I was about to feel sorry for the dude, but then I was approached by a waitress wearing fishnet leggings and a corset. One wrong move and certain anatomical features would have come tumbling out like the inflatable slides on the sides of airplanes. I think she asked if I wanted another beer. I’m not entirely sure.

As she was leaving, I looked from her back to Poker Guy and thought, “Well, I guess this is sorta what I expected.” Gotta give the city props for truth in advertising.

Technically I shouldn’t be sharing any of this, because what happens in Vegas is supposed to stay there, isn’t it? Any minute now some brass-knuckled goon will materialize in my living room and snuff out his cigar on my forehead. There’s a code. Only I’m pretty sure I’m exempt from all that, because this was business, not pleasure; I showed up, I wore a suit and said words like “synergy” and “analytics,” and then I left. This lent me an objectivity that not a lot of people in Vegas can boast. When I checked out of the hotel I spied an old man in the casino cranking on Lucky Strikes and blankly pulling the lever on a slot machine. This was at 3:30 in the morning. Did the old man realize how bizarre and vaguely sad this whole scene was? Probably not. But I did. I was unique in that I was sober and could still afford to buy socks.

It’s a strange town. The bad things you hear about it seem to be mostly true -- the tackiness, the audiovisual assault, the $12 snowglobes. Despite all that, there’s great stuff there if you do a little digging. Midweek, I was assigned to shoot photos of a private event at Madame Tussaud’s famous wax museum, which features sculptures of people who make way more money than me. It was closed off to the general public for the night, but since I was a fancypants media person, I was privileged to duck in ahead of the crowd and set up shop. It was creepy from the onset, but in a cool way. With the shindig still half an hour away, I found myself alone in a room with fake Will Smiths and Sandra Bullocks staring at me with inanimate eyes, giving off a faint zombie vibe that would have been right at home in an epic haunted house. Larry King smiled at me over a pair of wax suspenders. The moment was so surreal, I had to chuckle to myself; in the midst of the glitz and hubbub, there existed a moment of serenity so unexpectedly perfect that, for a while, I didn’t mind all the neon and cheese. It’s an offbeat culture, but it’s culture nonetheless, and there’s value in experiencing that kind of thing.

As magical and gratifying as Aladdin’s Castle was, it’ll never top that.