Philosophy for a Hungry Planet

Sweets for the Sweet

2012-02-14T06:22:00.000-05:00

Hello, Dear Readers. It’s good to see you.

Just the other day, I was listening to the old Van Halen song “Why Can’t This Be Love,” and I realized that Valentine’s Day is once again upon us. Now, I have to admit that Valentine’s Day isn’t one of my favorite holidays, but then again, that’s probably why it’s such an endless source of fascination for me. I tend to be much more interested in the things I don’t like than in the things that I do, and I think most people are like that. I mean, I’ve heard people prattle on and on about how the last order of spicy chicken wings they ate tasted like they’d been marinated in stomach acid, and I’ve seen people derail entire dinner parties with minute descriptions of how reading about Lindsay Lohan’s latest escapades left them with little more than a raging headache and a markedly uncomfortable bloated feeling. But when it comes to things people like, they usually just go, “Yeah, I thought that was good,” and that’s pretty much the end of the story.

I don’t know, though, that I’d say I actually dislike Valentine’s Day. I’m just not that into it. That might be because I’m single, but really, I think it’s more because I just find the whole thing kind of confusing. And personally, any kind of unnecessary confusion just annoys me. I mean, Valentine’s Day just brings up a bunch of questions that, frankly, I’d rather not have to waste my time thinking about. And yet, from at least the beginning of February to the actual day itself, they’re almost impossible to get away from. So this year, I decided to just tackle them head on in the hopes that some little bit of clarity might emerge.

Now, probably the biggest question that this wonderful day of love generates is a fairly simple one: why do men seem to need to be reminded at least three times a day that Valentine’s Day is coming up? Are they really that forgetful? I mean, if they are, why does anyone give them important things like mortgages and jobs and children? After all, these are things whose successful maintenance usually requires some degree of memory.

But if you judged the ability of men to remember anything based on the sheer number of ads reminding them that Valentine’s Day is coming up, you’d expect them to walk into their houses, have their wives ask, “Did you pick up the kids from swimming lessons?” and reply, “What kids?” “You were supposed to pick them up after you got off work.” “I have a job?” “Well, how do you think we’re paying for this house?” “We have to pay to live here?” If guys were even half as forgetful as TV leads you to believe they are, it would be amazing if they could find their way home at night. Hell, it would be amazing if they could even remember that they had homes.

But beyond just forgetting about the holiday, if you just go by what you see in the media, selecting the Valentine’s gift itself is some sort of mysterious experience that men have to be guided carefully through, and that brings up my second question: are guys really that inept when it comes to buying presents? It’s like the media is saying that if TV didn’t tell guys what to get their loved ones, there’s just no telling what they might show up with. “Here, my dearest Valentine, I brought you this candy and these gifts.” “Oh, chocolate-covered cherries! How delicious! And what’s this? A case of beer and a shotgun? What the hell is this about?” And from there, things just turn ugly. Really, really ugly. I mean, as far as the media is concerned, guys aren’t just forgetful; apparently they’re stupid, too.

The funny thing is that at least according to TV, there are really only two levels of Valentine’s Day gifts to choose from: expensive jewelry and stuff you can buy at the drug store. So, it’s not like getting a present is exactly rocket science. If you go the expensive jewelry route, you just walk into a jewelry store, plunk down all your cash on the counter, and say, “I want to biggest, sparkliest thing this money will buy. And could you gift wrap it for me?” It’s so easy that it hardly even requires a brain. And apparently, that’s the angle the jewelry stores are playing—it’s so easy even a man can do it.

Of course, going the “stuff you can buy at the drug store” route is a little harder. After all, if you just walk into a drug store and plunk your money down on the counter, one of the employees will probably grab it and run away. So, you really do have to do a tiny bit of shopping first, and that can be a bit of a challenge. I mean, you’re buying a Valentine’s Day gift that expresses your deep love and true devotion at a place that sells cough syrup and tampons. So, you know, it’s a tricky situation, and your relative level of sincerity is always a bit questionable. But then again, all the Valentine’s Day stuff is usually in one aisle, so at least you get a little guidance. And what you can’t fake in sincerity you can often make up for with sheer bulk.

One thing you rarely see Valentine’s TV ads for, though, is candy. But that’s likely because as children, we're sort of pre-programmed to associate candy with Valentine’s Day. That is, for most kids, the holidays break down into two categories: present holidays and candy holidays. Any holiday that doesn’t involve one of those two things isn’t a holiday to a kid. It’s just a day when you have to dress up and maybe go to church, and then you have to hang out with a bunch of your cousins from Iowa who you don’t even really know very well and wouldn’t be likely to befriend on any other occasion.

As far as the kid-recognized holidays go, though, Christmas and your birthday are present holidays. Halloween, the Fourth of July, Easter, and Valentine’s Day are candy holidays. Of course, if you’re Jewish, Hanukkah is your big present holiday, and Passover has to be a candy holiday, although, frankly, except for the occasional macaroon, it’s not that great of a deal as far as the treats go. But no matter what faith you’re raised in, Valentine’s Day is a candy holiday. Kids might give out Valentines at school, but trust me, it’s got nothing to do liking someone. It’s all about the candy. I mean, if some kid gives you a Valentine that doesn’t have a little candy heart in it, then it’s just a big gyp.

So, it’s not a huge surprise that even men, as feckless and confused as they may be, don’t need big signs telling them to get some candy. Apparently, once they’ve been nagged and hounded and led by the nose to the store, their pre-programming kicks in, and in a way, it’s probably not all that surprising that a large percentage of Valentine’s Day gifts come from drug stores. I mean, around Valentine’s Day, drug stores usually have big signs outside that just say, “We have candy!” So the guys go in, grab the treats, and then proceed to lurch through the aisles in their complete ineptitude as gift-buyers snatching up anything wrapped in red foil that isn’t edible or in a liquid form.

Of course, one thing that you almost never see in the media are ads for what women should give men for Valentine’s Day, and that’s probably because the basic expectation is that women are going to give the…”gift of themselves” shall we say. But that brings up my third question: on any other given night of the year, are women really that unwilling to have sex with their partners? I mean, as a general rule, do they really need to be bribed into it like that? Is that what Valentine’s Day is actually all about—forgetful, stupid men bribing otherwise unwilling women into having sex with them? Well, yes, if you watch television, that’s exactly what Valentine’s Day is about. Personally, I don’t know why anyone would want to participate in it.

And certainly, a fair number of people don’t participate in the Valentine’s Day festivities, not because they’ve taken the inordinate amount of time to think about it like I have but just because they’re single. Valentine’s Day is one of those holidays that seems to say, “this is not for you” if you aren’t in a relationship. But even that doesn’t seem to be entirely true anymore, and that leads me to my fourth and perhaps most perplexing question: why does every cable station seem to think that Valentine’s Day is a great occasion for a re-run marathon? I mean, are single people really that lonely?

Of course, it’s always possible that the marathons are geared toward couples, but if everything goes the way it should on Valentine’s Day, I’m not sure when these people would have time to work in three or four hours of TV viewing. I thought the whole point of bribing someone into having sex with you was supposed to be so you would have something to do that night. And besides, some of the marathons are a little off-color for a romantic evening. I mean, if you’re out on a date and your partner says, “Let’s hurry up and eat so that we can go back to my house and watch eight straight hours of Criminal Minds,” you’re probably going to want to politely excuse yourself and then run to the nearest police station.

So, I think it’s safe to say that most of the Valentine’s Day TV marathons are meant for single people. But are they really the people TV programmers seem to think they are? Are they really such desperate, lonely souls that they have nothing better to do on Valentine’s Day than sit around on the couch watching hour after hour of re-runs, swilling cheap scotch, and crying? Are they people who really need a sitcom marathon to remind them that a boring nebbish like Bob Newhart could get a babe like Suzanne Pleshette and that even Estelle Getty wasn’t sitting home alone on Valentine’s Day? Well, yes, if TV programming is any indication, that’s exactly who these people are.

The funny thing is that most of the people I know in real life are absolutely nothing like their TV advertising counterparts. I mean, most of the men I know aren’t particularly forgetful or noticeably stupid. Most of the women I know think sex is a fine thing and good exercise to boot. And most of the single people I know don’t sit around on the couch drinking cheap scotch. They go to bars and drink cheap scotch.

But then again, advertisers pay millions of dollars to put all that marketing out there. Jewelers make up special pieces just for Valentine’s Day. And someone actually gets paid to program all those re-run marathons. So, it sort of stands to reason that there must be at least some men who really are that forgetful and stupid, some women who really do need to bribed into giving it up, and some single people who are single-handedly keeping the distilleries in business. I don’t happen to know any of these people, but they must be out there. And maybe that’s the real source of my confusion. It’s just that age-old question: who the hell are these people?

I suppose that in end, what irks me most about Valentine’s Day is just that I seem to wind up asking these same four questions every year, and it kind of reminds me of the four questions that are asked at Passover, in which case I should probably just invite all my friends over on Valentine’s Day and hold a seder. I mean, when you come right down to it, Valentine’s Day is a very confusing holiday, and the only thing that keeps me from throwing up my hands and just giving up on it all together is that this year, buried in all the murky confusion and conflicting imagery, I’ve discovered one nugget of universal truth and the one thing about Valentine’s Day that we all understand from the time we’re children to the time we’re old and gray: there’s candy. Forgetful, thoughtful, stupid, smart, hesitant, horny, taken, single, drunk, sober—it doesn’t make any difference at all. Amid the train wreck of confusion that truly is Valentine’s Day, there’s always going to be candy. And that may well be as much clarity as I’m ever going to get on the subject.

Ultimately, I don’t think anybody really understands what they’re supposed to do on Valentine’s Day, and I have to admit that I find something sort of comforting about knowing that at some level, we’re all just winging it. So, on this Valentine’s Day, do whatever you feel you must. Fall in love, give gifts, make love, get drunk, watch sitcoms, whatever. But don’t forget to take some time to pay homage to what is the true essence and absolute core of this holiday’s meaning. In other words, don’t forget to have some sweets. After all, when it comes to Valentine’s Day, love is fleeting as far as I can tell, but candy is forever.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

The Next Best Thing

2011-12-31T23:22:00.000-05:00

Hello, Dear Readers. It’s good to see you.

This past week, I was on my way home from my holiday vacation, and it was pretty much the typical scene. A group of unsuspecting travelers stuffed into an airplane cabin roughly the size of my bathroom. Every available space crammed with carry-on luggage that really should not have been carried on or even carted very far away from the house. Crying babies strategically placed every couple of aisles for maximum passenger irritation. Like I said—typical.

But somewhere between the mountains of luggage and the screaming children, I noticed that I was sitting next to an elderly person and right in front of a crying baby. And I started thinking about New Year’s and about the two holiday characters—Father Time and Baby New Year—that go along with it. And I have to admit that as holiday characters go, they’ve got to be two of the strangest around.

Of course, there’s nothing all that odd about an old holiday character like Father Time. After all, Santa Claus is old, and nobody complains. Then again, Santa is an old guy who brings people presents, so why would anyone complain? And Uncle Sam from the Fourth of July is old, too. I mean, I don’t think there was ever a time before he became an uncle that people just called him “That Guy Sam.” And he’s sort of a perennial “funny uncle,” too. But that makes sense. If Uncle Sam was a father, his kid would be “The Son of Sam,” and that wouldn’t be very patriotic at all.

So, there’s really not anything all that weird about a holiday character being old, but then again, most older holiday characters actually serve a purpose. They have a job to do. Santa delivers gifts and spreads holiday cheer. Uncle Sam makes you want to wave a flag and go join the army. But Father Time doesn’t actually do anything, and I think that’s what makes him seem so strange to me. I mean, as holiday characters go, he’s completely useless.

The funny thing is that in way, Father Time seems like he’s rigged out for something. I mean, the guy has an hourglass in one hand and a scythe in the other, and these are not things that people just carrying around for no reason. The hourglass kind of makes sense, though. After all, he is Father Time, so it seems reasonable that he would have an hourglass or a sundial or at least a decent watch on him. But the scythe is just confusing because a scythe is usually used to harvest something. So what? Now Father Time is a farmer, too? Then why isn’t he wearing overalls? Where’s his tractor? Why aren’t chickens trailing around after him? I mean, what is the deal with this guy?

Of course, the scythe is usually a big symbol of death, but even that doesn’t make sense. I mean, killing people is the Grim Reaper’s job, and that’s one department we don’t need any redundancy in. Besides, what’s Father Time supposed to do? Cut off Baby New Year’s head? Oh, yeah, a headless baby—that would be a really great image for the beginning of a new year.

And think about what would happen if Father Time actually did cut off Baby New Year’s head. Then we wouldn’t have a New Year. We’d just have more of Father Time’s homicidal rampage, and the world really would slowly wind down, one person at a time. And while I’m sure that there are people who get up on New Year’s day and feel like it really is the end of world, that’s just a hangover. It’ll pass, and besides, that’s not really the agenda we want to set for the rest of eternity.

I’m not saying we should just get rid of Father Time, though. I just think we should let him retire. I think the government should give him a nice pension and maybe buy him a condo in Boca. Oh sure, some people would write their Congress people about how that’s government waste and all, and doubtless a few people would complain that Father Time is “just phonin’ it in,” but at least he’d be happy. He’d probably make some friends and learn to play bridge. And he could use his scythe to play shuffleboard. If nothing else, it would be a lot better than him just wandering around in a dirty toga with that hangdog look on his face and sharp weapon in his hand.

In a lot of ways, though, Father Time actually has it easier than Baby New Year does. After all, he’s on his way out. Nobody really cares that much about him. That’s why he can go around looking so disheveled and being such a mess. Once the ball drops in Times Square, he’s out of here. He’s history. He didn’t have a job to do, and he didn’t do it. And as holiday characters go, we’re OK with that. But Baby New Year is a whole other story.

Of course, there are other holiday characters who are babies. My arch-nemesis Cupid immediately springs to mind, and I suppose that if you look at Christmas from a certain perspective, the Baby Jesus qualifies, too, although there does seem to be something kind of blasphemous about calling the Baby Jesus a festive holiday character even if you aren’t a Christian. Luckily, Cupid casts a big enough shadow to prop up the whole Baby Holiday Character category, so at least Baby New Year isn’t out there having to pioneer the whole idea of the festive infant symbol on his own.

But I think Baby New Year’s job has gotten harder as time has passed because we’ve come to expect more out of babies than we did before. I mean, back in the ‘50s, what did anyone expect out of a baby or even a young kid? Look at Beaver Cleaver. Leave It To Beaver is based on the fact that The Beaver actually isn’t very smart. He gets simple stuff wrong all the time, and he tells a fib when there is absolutely no reason to. He’s like an idiot compulsive liar, and he wouldn’t get into half the trouble he does if he had some critical thinking skills. But then again, watching Beaver reason his way out of a problem wouldn’t make for very good TV, I guess.

Yet, that’s how TV sets our expectations for babies and children. We’ve had generations of sitcoms—The Andy Griffith Show, Dick Van Dyke, The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family—that gave us nothing but children of barely average intelligence and underdeveloped morality, and we set our expectations accordingly. Back in the 1960s, we were happy if Baby New Year could actually count to 60 and wasn’t on an acid trip. In the 70s, we were just satisfied that he hadn’t gone disco. And by the ‘80s, just being able to name three hair metal bands was enough to get you into a good college, so Baby New Year had no problem fulfilling our expectations.

But these days, everything is different for babies. We have the little E-Trader baby who stands up in his crib and tells us about how he put stop-loss orders on all the stocks in his portfolio, and Evian has this creepy ad featuring a bunch of roller-skating, breakdancing babies that look like Munchins on crack. And then there’s Stewie on The Family Guy. He’s just kind of a basic super-smart, pervert baby who makes you want to sell your house and move away. I mean, seriously, kids today, right?

At this point, though, TV has so totally sucked us into The Cult of the Genius Baby that we think babies can do anything. A baby walked on the moon? Sure, why the hell not? A baby jumped the Grand Canyon on a motorcycle? OK, that sounds reasonable. A baby won the Nobel Prize for Physics? Yeah, so what else is new? I mean, really, is there anything a baby can’t do anymore?

Well, yes. In reality, babies can’t do a lot of things. Like walk. Or talk. Or use the toilet. Most of them can’t even stand up on their own. I mean, basically, babies do four things: eat, sleep, poop, and go on planes and cry. Occasionally, they laugh and smile and are cute, but for the most part, it’s really just the four things. That’s the reality of Baby World. Unless you actually are a baby, it’s just not that impressive a place.

And no one is really paying the price for our distorted perceptions and unrealistic expectations more than Baby New Year is. You see, unlike Cupid, Baby New Year has a really badly defined job. I mean, Cupid’s job is easy—step one: shoot person in chest with arrow; step two—fly away. There’s really no room for interpretation there. But Baby New Year’s job is to usher in the New Year, and I don’t think anyone actually knows exactly what all that entails.

I imagine that in earlier years, all it amounted to was the Baby New Year showing up, pushing Father Time off the stage, and saying something like, “Happy New Year! And best of luck to ya!” But of course, now, it can’t be that simple. It’s not just an appearance. It’s an extravaganza! There are musical acts and dancing bears and fireworks. Father Time is digitally erased pixel by pixel over the course of several hours. And it’s all streamed live over the internet to cities all over the globe in beautiful high-definition (and stunning 3-D in selected markets).

And ten minutes before his appearance, Baby New Year is probably sitting in Makeup with a Manhattan in one hand and a cigarette in the other swearing at his agent, “What’s with this glittery diaper? I look like an idiot!” “Uh, let me see what I can…” “And geez, what’s this sash made out of? Sandpaper? I’ve got a rash the size of Texas on my chest!” “Well, yes, but you see, the sponsor…” “Oh screw the sponsor! I’m not doing this next year unless I get more money! You tell them that! Do you hear me?”

And then someone yells, “Cue the baby!” And it’s show time.

And two seconds later, it’s all over. The New Year comes, the Old Year goes, and that’s the end of that story. Maybe the New Year Baby did a good job, maybe he didn’t. It’s sort of hard to tell. I guess the only indication that it’s been successful is that Father Time is gone, and seeing as how he has a tendency to wander off even when he’s not being depixelated into cyberspace, that isn’t such a hard thing to accomplish.

All in all, you have to admit that Father Time and Baby New Year are two of the strangest holiday characters going. Father Time’s job is to get pushed out of the way. Baby New Year’s job is to push him. After that, they’re both pretty much unemployed for the rest of the year. I don’t think any other holiday characters work less than those two, and if I was Baby New Year, I’d look out for Cupid trying to horn in my gig.

Anyway, as I sat on the flight back from vacation with an elderly person next to me and a crying baby right behind me, I realized something: this was the same flight I took home last year. And it will probably be the same flight I’ll take back next year. There’s an odd kind of continuity to it, and I really sort of like that because even though the new pushes the old out of the way once a year, my own life just doesn’t change that fast. And I really wouldn’t want it to, either. I mean, when you really stop to think about it, the New Year is a two-second holiday with a cast of the laziest holiday characters going. And it’s great and it’s fun and it’s festive, but what really matters is what we do with the other 31,535,998 seconds before it happens all over again. After all, the next best thing you’ll ever do is always the one thing you haven’t done yet. So, Happy New Year, Dear Readers. And best of luck to ya.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

Trick or Treat

2011-11-09T12:16:00.001-05:00

Hello, Dear Readers. It’s good to see you.

When my sisters and I were kids, my parents tried to instill a lot practical wisdom in us. And I’d like to think that at least some of it took, too. My parents always were and still are big believers in the idea that you just have to use whatever is at hand to get the job done. That’s one thing they really drilled into our heads: you have to be resourceful. And they’re rather ingenious people themselves. My mom is the kind of person who could build a life raft out of nothing but old Ziploc bags and guile. And these days, my father is planning out how he’s going to use the tank from an old water heater to create a super-compressor for his paint gun. I think his ultimate goal is to be able to spray paint the patio furniture from outer space. Trust me, when it comes to being resourceful, these people aren’t fooling around.

I don’t think either my sisters or I have ever been quite that resourceful or had such cosmic plans, though. I especially tend to think on a much less grandiose scale. I mean, as a small child, my greatest talent was the ability to turn virtually anything into a hat. Of course, all that really involved was putting the thing in question on my head and saying that it was a hat, but still, at least it fell within the family tradition. The real test of resourcefulness in our family, though, came every year on Halloween. For me and my sisters, it was the greatest challenge of how to work with whatever you had available. And one way or another, we always seemed to find some way to get through it.

Growing up, we had two Halloween costumes. One of them was a tiger outfit with a striped pair of flannel pants, a matching striped flannel top, and a mask. Without the mask, the whole outfit looked a lot like a pair of pajamas. In fact, it might actually have been a pair of pajamas at one point. I mean, it would’ve been just like my mom to dig up an old tiger mask somewhere and then convince us all that the whole getup was a Halloween costume. She was kind of crafty like that. And we were kind of gullible.

No one really remembers what the other costume even was. It was probably something completely inappropriate like an old Santa Claus suit or a pilgrim’s outfit. So, of course, nobody wanted to wear it. I mean, what little kid wants to go out on Halloween dressed as a pilgrim? No one wants to give you candy if you look like that. If you’re dressed like a pilgrim, everyone expects you to knock on their door and just hand them a turkey. And can you imagine being the little kid who has to go out trick-or-treating as Santa Claus? Grown-ups would open the door, take one look at you, and be like, “What the hell?”

Anyway, the strangest thing was that we had two costumes, but there were actually three kids in our family. So, I’m not really sure what that was about. At one time, of course, only two of us were old enough to go trick-or-treating, but after that, I’m not really sure what happened. I guess we probably just had to go out in shifts. One kid would put on the tiger outfit, do a block of houses, and then go home so the other kid could use the costume. Then the second kid would go out, and the neighbor would say, “Weren’t you just here?” “No.” Then his wife would call out, “Who’s at the door, honey?” “I don’t know. Some kid in a pair of pajamas.” “You mean the one with Santa Claus?” “That was my sister, damn it!”

Then the neighbor would look you up and down with more than a little suspicion and finally drop some candy into your bag just so he wouldn’t have to waste any more of his time trying to figure out if he was being played by a 7-year old over a roll of Smarties. After all, trying to decide who’s who on Halloween can be tricky. I mean, kids aren’t usually that hard to tell apart, but a kid in a mask and a pair of pajamas is a whole other story.

Anyway, after we finally outgrew the tiger suit and whatever the other outfit might have been, we just started making our own costumes. That required a completely different level of ingenuity because we didn’t have a lot to work with. Basically, my parents would let us make costumes out of just about anything that they were otherwise going to throw away. So if you wanted to go as a ghost, you ended up a in sheet that likely had a giant tear going right through some mysterious stain that even three cups of bleach couldn’t get out. You looked like a ghost who’d been mugged and then thrown in the gutter. It wasn’t scary so much as it was just sad.

Of course, there was always the robot route. Being a robot didn’t require much more than a couple of boxes, and my dad always had boxes in the garage. But that was the problem—my father has never willingly parted with a cardboard box in his life. To him, a good, sturdy box is the key to surviving pretty much any disaster situation. Now, exactly what sort of crisis one could fend off using nothing more than a cardboard box is a bit beyond me. I mean, seriously, when was the last time you saw a superhero named “Box Man”? When did anyone anywhere ever defeat a criminal by smacking him in the head with a cardboard box?

But in my dad’s world, those boxes were his first and last line of defense. If there was a tornado, we could hide underneath them. If there was a flood, we could float away in them. If there was a nuclear attack, we could use them to build a bomb shelter. That man had more faith in cardboard than he did in God. The way he figured it, those boxes were all that stood between him and utter chaos. And there was no way he was giving up that kind of security just so some kid could be a robot for Halloween.

Luckily, my grandparents had a trunk of old clothes that they kept around for us to play dress-up in, so if my parents weren’t throwing away anything that would make a decent costume, you could always just go as someone from the distant fashion past. The problem was that most of the clothes were my grandfather’s, and they didn’t exactly fit. So, I’d head off to trick-or-treat in a pair of old pants cinched up somewhere around my armpits, a vest that ended somewhere around my knees, and a jacket that fit me like a full-length dress. And it always went the same way with the neighbors. “Trick-or-treat.” “What the hell are you supposed to be?” Then the wife would poke her head around the corner and call out, “Who’s at the door, honey?” “I don’t know. Some kid in a tweed evening gown.”

I suppose it could’ve been worse, though. If my mom had let us go out dressed in my dad’s old clothes, I would’ve been trick-or-treating in a floor-length Nehru jacket. I would’ve looked like a tiny Communist dictator. And I can just imagine how that would’ve gone over. “Who’s at the door, honey?” “I don’t know….I think it’s Mao-Tse Tung.”

I imagine the neighbors started to miss the days when the strangest thing they had to deal with on Halloween was the untimely appearance of Santa Claus, but no matter what you were wearing, they always gave you some candy. These days, of course, a lot of parents are pushing for healthier treats, but back then, if someone had given you a carrot stick, you’d have given it back. I mean, back in the late 1960s, most people believed that sugar actually was one of the four food groups, right along with red meat, lard, and caffeine. And if you were a grown-up, nothing topped off a balanced diet better than a cigarette and a martini. So, it’s not like anyone thought that a little candy was going to kill you.

To me, though, Halloween was never about getting the treats. After all, not all of the candy you got on that night was good. There were always a few pieces of no-name, cut-rate candy that you just knew someone had fished out of the clearance bin at some seedy-looking convenience store. That was always the candy that was either so hardened by age that it would actually break your teeth or so off-brand that it tasted faintly like dirt. Either way, it wasn’t something you wanted to put in your mouth.

Every now and then, too, some joker on the next block over would slip you a throat lozenge and try to pass it off as a mint. And honestly, there are few things more disappointing than thinking you’re about to enjoy a delicious cherry treat and then finding out that it’s really just a Sucret someone dug out of the bottom of old purse. I mean, if you actually had a sore throat, I suppose it was quite a find, but otherwise, it was a big gyp.

Besides, eating candy wasn’t that big of a deal at my house. My mom always kept a little bag of Brach’s candy in the cupboard, and we were allowed to eat some most anytime we wanted to. So, I spent my allowance on stuff that my mom didn’t keep around, like beef jerky and pepperoni sticks and tiny wheels of processed cheese. When I was a kid, I didn’t have time to rot out my teeth or mess with my blood sugar. I was too busy clogging up my arteries.

Anyway, we lost interest in our Halloween candy after about three days, and my mom would finally take whatever was left in our candy bags and dump it all into the Brach’s sack in the cupboard. Then we’d all nibble away at it until one fateful evening when my dad shook out the last piece, popped it in his mouth, and then spit it out with a loud “Who the hell put a throat lozenge in here?” Then he’d turn and look at me. “And why are you still wearing your costume?” “These are my pajamas, Dad.” “Oh.” And at that point, Halloween was pretty much officially over at my house.

The funny thing is that despite all the hassles that Halloween inevitably brought with it, I always liked that holiday. There was never any telling what any of us kids might show up as—a World War I pilot, a secretary from Cleveland, a pre-pubescent version of Jesus. It all just depended on what we had to work with. It was the ultimate exercise in catch-as-catch-can.

In the end, though, I guess trick-or-treating really is good training for life. I mean, what really happens when you go for a job interview? You dress up in a businessperson costume, knock on the door, and go, “Hi. Can I have a job?” Then they give you a treat, or they say, “What the hell are you supposed to be?” It’s just like trick-or-treating. But more than that, Halloween has a great way of reminding us that a little resourcefulness, a little talent for making something out of nothing, is ultimately a good thing. And it’s ultimately a fun thing, too, because let’s face it—deep down inside of all of us, there’s a little MacGyver just itching to get out.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

Got Milk?

2011-09-25T23:42:00.001-04:00

Hello, Dear Readers. It’s good to see you.

There’s an old saying that “you are what you eat,” and to certain extent, I suppose that’s true. Scary, of course, but mostly true. Then again, what you eat depends a lot on what you’ve got around to eat. So, maybe it’s more accurate to say that you are what you would eat.

I think people with families to feed have it easier in some ways when it comes to food, though. Of course, the meal prep and the cleanup are bigger hassles. When you’re only feeding yourself, you can eat right out the can with your bare hands if you want to. It’s not like anyone is going to object. But there does seem to be something about a child’s ability to use silverware that somehow makes parents feel like they’ve done their jobs. So, even now, if my mother calls while I’m eating tuna straight out of the handy-dandy foil pouch, I always mention that I’m using a fork. She seems to find that comforting. Don’t ask me why.

And I don’t know if actual grocery shopping is easier if you have a family or not. One day, I saw a woman in the store with a completely full cart and three little kids in tow…AND she was using coupons. It was amazing. I mean, I have a good deal of respect and admiration for firefighters who run into burning buildings, but I was utterly in awe of that woman. If I had had the money, I would’ve paid for her groceries myself. After all, I think that kind of bravery really should be rewarded.

But shopping for one is a completely different experience. People always say that you should never go grocery shopping when you’re hungry. But that’s the only reason I ever go grocery shopping. I mean, if I’m not hungry, why would I go buy some food? That just doesn’t make any sense to me.

Now, I realize that there are lovely, responsible people on their own who plan ahead and stock up on food accordingly. I am not one of those people. I just figure I’ll worry about what’s for dinner when it’s dinnertime. Besides, if I go to the grocery store when I’m not hungry, I tend not to buy any actual food. Instead, I come home with 48 rolls of 9-ply toilet paper, an entire selection of coma-inducing cold medicine, and batteries. Lots and lots of batteries.

And I don’t know what it is about the As Seen on TV aisle that holds such special meaning for me, but if I get anywhere near that section when I’m shopping without being hungry, it’s like being enticed into an opium den. I mean, I can’t even figure out what half of that stuff is supposed to do, but who cares? Some little thing will catch my eye, and it’s like I can’t turn away. I’m totally mesmerized by that thing. It folds up, it folds out, it expands, it contracts, it absorbs, it repels. It’s magic! Magic, I tell you! And I must have it. Even if I don’t have any idea what it is.

Of course, when I am hungry, I’m not that much better at shopping. When you’re single, you can eat whatever you want to eat whenever you want to eat it. And while that might seem oddly freeing, trust me, it isn’t. I don’t know how many times I’ve come home with ten pounds of some kind of fish I’ve never even heard of. I can’t count how many jars of cocktail onions have found their way into my cart. And every now and then, I just go into an absolute crouton mania. There’s just no telling what I might buy. I remember coming home one time only to find that after I’d put all the food away, my entire freezer was filled up with nothing but frozen waffles and vodka.

I’ve tried the idea of making a list before I go to the store, but it never quite works out. After all, I don’t have time to make a list. I’m hungry. I need some food right now.

At one point, though, I tried keeping a rolling list that I would work on from time to time so that when I got hungry, I could just snatch it up and head off to the store. The problem was that lists like that tend to be rather, well, optimistic. It was more a list of what I thought I should eat rather than what I actually do eat. So, I’d write down stuff like string beans and peas and low-fat milk and bananas, and then I’d get to the store and wonder, “Who broke into my house and made up this list?” And then I’d end up going home with a TV dinner, a jar of pesto sauce, and this lingering feeling of guilt and shame. So, I gave up on that idea a long time ago. If there’s one thing I don’t need in my life, it’s the stress of trying to live up to my grocery list.

My strangest grocery shopping experiences, though, were back when I was finishing college. One summer, a friend of mine and I were both working on the graveyard shift as janitors for the university, and since we needed to keep our nocturnal schedules over the weekends, we did our grocery shopping at about 3am on Saturday nights. Back then, the 24-hour grocery store was a completely new thing, so it seemed like an adventure. A really weird, kind of creepy, sort of scary adventure, but an adventure nonetheless.

Of course, the 24-hour grocery store in our town was really kind of seedy and cut-rate. Their big selling point was that their prices were lower because you had to bag your own groceries. Personally, I think their prices were lower because they never cleaned the place or bothered to replace any of the continually flickering overhead lights. Just walking into that store was like being sucked into a scene out of a David Lynch movie. From what I could tell, they employed nothing but drug addicts. Even the customers looked strangely vacant and potentially dangerous.

I don’t actually remember the name of the store, but they really should’ve just called it The Random Junk and Crap Grocery Store because that’s about what it amounted to. When you walked in, you really sort of expected to see an aisle sign that read “Bloated and Dented Canned Goods.” A section of completely mislabeled food items wouldn’t have been out of place, and to be honest, this was the kind of store that would happily sell you an opened box cereal or a half-eaten sandwich. I think their whole business plan was based on a mixture of apathetic capitalism and brutal honesty. They didn’t know anything about food safety, and they weren’t trying to hide it. But if you insisted on buying groceries from them, they wouldn’t try to stop you.

One of the most entertaining parts of the store was a section located beyond an entire aisle of used cardboard boxes they were trying to sell and just to the side of a fairly disreputable-looking dairy case. That last section was the kind of area that really should’ve been called something like Stuff That Fell Off the Back of a Truck. You never knew what you might find back there. Boxes of prime rib, cases of scotch, Barbie Dream Houses, tube socks. There was really no telling. Whenever I went back to that area, I always sort of expected to find some heavy-set guys sitting around smoking cigars and playing poker. But really, if I’d come upon a chorus line of dancing midgets, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

The funny thing is that as strange as that store was, my friend and I kept going there. After all, they did actually have lower prices, and as long as you made sure that whatever you bought wasn’t misshapen or giving off a foul odor, you were pretty safe. Besides, back then, bagging your own groceries seemed oddly empowering. It was like the store was entrusting you with a sacred duty, and that made you more than just a customer. You were an integral part of the machinery that was The Random Junk and Crap Grocery Store. Whether or not that was something you wanted to admit to your friends was a whole other story.

Of course, the 24-hour grocery store is a really common thing these days although shopping at 3am is still a lot like being trapped in an episode of The Twilight Zone with little snippets of the movie Dune thrown in just to confuse you. What makes shopping even stranger, though, is that the Stuff That Fell Off the Back of a Truck section seems to be a staple in a lot of the bigger, super-grocery stores. In fact, it’s taken over about half the space of those stores. And I might just be Old School, but I don’t ever think I’ll understand that. I don’t think I’ll ever be comfortable with knowing that the grocery store that sells me milk and eggs is also willing to sell me a car and finance the loan. My mind just can’t expand quite that far.

My mom, of course, thinks the idea of the grocery super-store is great because it’s more convenient. I mean, to her, if you need groceries and a new couch, what could be better than finding it all in one place? And I suppose she’s got a point. It really is a lot more convenient. But for someone like me, it’s also a lot more dangerous. After all, if I find myself in a regular grocery store now without being hungry, the worst thing that will happen is that I’ll go home with five rolls of non-stick aluminum foil, two boxes of dryer sheets, and a loofah sponge. And frankly, there are worse things I could do.

But the grocery super-store is just a disaster waiting to happen for someone like me because suddenly I’m not just walking out with a package of light bulbs. I’m walking out with a new set of patio furniture. I’m not just buying a new dustpan. I’m buying a lawn vacuum. And I don’t even have a lawn. Or a patio.

What scares me most about it all, though, is that I really do believe that you are what you look around your kitchen and decide you would eat. So I’m perfectly willing to say that I am ten pounds of lutefisk. I’ll own up to being a jar of maraschino cherries. I’ll stand on the highest mountain and proudly proclaim that I am a crouton. But I’m just dreading the first time I go into a grocery super-store when I actually am hungry. The sheer number of products will be overwhelming, and I have no doubt that I’ll eventually return home dazed, confused, and probably slightly motion sick only to have to look myself straight in the mirror and face the fact that I am a radial tire.

All in all, I miss the days when I was a little kid going grocery shopping with my mom. My whole job then, at least as far as I understood it, was to hang off the cart and grab random things off the shelves. These days, I’d happily pay some little kid to do that for me. Hell, I’d pay a grown-up to do that for me. But there’s something about being a grown-up yourself that makes people think you should have mastered the fine art of grocery shopping by now. And I suppose that to some extent, I have at least reached some level of competency when it comes to buying food. After all, I haven’t starved to death yet. Still, whenever I see some parent in the store with a child, there’s always some part of me that just wants to lean down and say, “Kid, you don’t know how good you’ve got it.” But, hey, I’m an adult, so I just gather up my tube of cake frosting, my bottle of soy sauce, and my block of cheese because, you know, it’s dinner time. And I’m hungry.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

Back on the Chain Gang

2011-09-09T18:49:00.000-04:00

Hello, Dear Readers. It’s good to see you.

So, Labor Day has just passed us by, and I have to say that I think it’s a bit of a weird holiday. I mean, it’s cool because most people get the day off, but it’s odd because it’s a holiday that was basically invented by a labor union for no other reason than they thought that people should get a day off. It wasn’t originally intended to be a celebration of anything, really, except maybe the more mischievous side of union agitation. In fact, if you listen closely on Labor Day, you can almost hear the faint sounds of Jimmy Hoffa laughing his ass off from…well, wherever he finally ended up.

Of course, what’s really tragic is the day after Labor Day. It’s like on Labor Day, everyone says, “Yes, let’s celebrate YOU, the American worker! You are the lifeblood of this country, the machine that drives us forward as a people, the very heart and soul of everything that makes this nation great!” And people wave flags around and have parades and feel the need to publicly read Carl Sandburg poetry out loud. Then the next day, it’s like, “And now you better drag your lazy butt out of bed and get to work, or you’re fired.”

Well, so much for the celebration of the exalted American worker. After Labor Day, if you want a day off to relax and reflect on your contribution to this great land of ours, you have to get it the old-fashioned way. You have to call in sick.

Now, I have to admit that I’ve long had a somewhat defiant attitude about calling in sick when all that’s really wrong with you is that you’re having a bad hair day or don’t have any clean clothes to wear. To me, these are perfectly valid reasons to stay home. I mean, you’re probably doing your co-workers a favor by not subjecting them to your distressing hairdo or your filthy, dirt-encrusted clothing. But more than that, I think a sick day should be a private thing between you and your not entirely guilt-ridden conscience. And I can trace that attitude right back to its source: my first professional job.

You see, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I had a job with a big corporation, and for the most part, I liked the job just fine. But that company had the strangest sick leave policy I’ve ever seen. Basically, you got “short-term sick leave,” which was a day or two, and you got “long-term sick leave,” which was five days or more. The strange thing was that you only got five short-term sick days per year, but you got four weeks of long-term sick leave. And it wasn’t cumulative, either. At the end of the year, the slate was wiped clean, and everybody just started over with the same amount of sick days.

The idea, as far as I could ever tell, was to discourage you from calling in sick because you got so few short-term days that you didn’t want to blow one just because you felt kind of sort of cruddy. As far as the company was concerned, if you felt kind of sort of cruddy, you could drag your sorry butt into work and just sit in your office feeling that way. After all, we had an infirmary on site in case things turned ugly, so as long as you weren’t actively bleeding from a major artery, the company just figured you could come to work.

Of course, in practice, the sick leave policy worked the exact opposite. If you got a stomach bug that normally would’ve taken two days to get over, you stayed out for five days so that you could take long-term sick leave. After all, if you came back after two days, you’d used almost half of your short-term days. But if you stayed out for a week, you’d only used a quarter of the your long-term time. So in the end, the sick leave policy wasn’t even about the number of days you were out sick. It was just about fractions. And apparently, whoever made up the sick leave policy wasn’t very good at math. Or predicting human behavior.

Anyway, at one point, I think the company must’ve caught on to what was happening, but instead of changing the policy, they just tried to make it scarier to call in sick by requiring you to specifically list what was wrong with you. Now, I don’t know what kind of twisted soul ever thought this up, but listing what was wrong with you wasn’t just a matter of writing down, “I had the stomach flu.” These people wanted details. Disgusting, horrible details.

So, if you had an ear infection, you couldn’t just say, “I had an ear infection.” You had to describe the blinding, crippling pain. If you had a cold, you had to tell them all about your runny nose, furry tongue, and pounding headache. If you sprained your ankle, they wanted an essay on the swelling and torn ligaments. Like I said, I have no idea what kind of sick mind ever thought that up.

I also don’t know what kind sick mind ever thought that would work. I mean, all it did was encourage people to exaggerate or just flat-out lie. In my department, the phrase “projectile vomiting” became so commonplace that it ceased to even raise an eyebrow among the most sensitive of employees. In fact, we would just sit around making up the most disgusting descriptions we could think of. It was everybody’s favorite office game.

Eventually, though, we realized that even though the “Gross Me Out” system was probably the brainchild of some genius manager in Human Resources, it was the administrative assistants over there who really had to deal with it. And I don’t think they wanted to read that icky stuff any more than we wanted to write it. And beyond that, if you used terminology that they wouldn’t be likely to know right off the tops of their heads, they wouldn’t look it up, either. But really, who would? I mean, if part of your job involved reading the kind of stomach-turning stuff people had to write on their sick leave forms, why would you want that torture to go on for one second longer than it had to?

All that mattered was that something sounded reasonably disgusting enough. As long as you cleared that hurdle, you were golden. Well, OK, maybe not golden, but at least you were sick as far as the company was concerned.

The problem, though, was that I’d never been any good at lying, especially about being sick. I’d always come up with something like “beriberi,” which sounds a lot more like a frozen drink you’d buy at the Taco Bell drive-through than a nervous system disease. Or I say that I had “dengue fever,” which would actually make sense…if I lived in Nigeria. And when I couldn’t think of anything, I tended to panic and write down stuff like “rabies” or “ebola virus.” Then I’d always imagine some HR person reading that and thinking, “And you only needed one day off to recover?” Thunk. Denied.

But there was even more pressure on that job because you couldn’t just go with a disease name, even if you could come up with one that actually sounded like a real illness and wouldn’t need to involve a mad dog or a trip to a sub-tropical region in Africa. It was all about the symptoms with that company. So one day, I got out my dictionary and just started making up symptoms that were basically honest but could still pass the HR retch test.

And in honor of The Day After Labor Day, I’d thought I’d pass them along.

Symptom	What It Really Means	Why It Would Work

Acute Bellicose Rupture	You got really, really angry with someone really, really fast. And then you snapped.	Well, it just sounds awful, doesn’t it? “Bellicose” sounds like the first cousin of a varicose vein, and a rupture just sounds really messy. Besides, “acute” makes it seem like a real emergency, and that’s always a plus in an excuse.

Chronic Ennui	You are frequently bored in a really hanging-around-in-a-French-café-wearing-a-beret-and-smoking-an-unfiltered-cigarette-left-over-from-WWII kind of way.	“Ennui” sounds vaguely gastrointestinal and not in a particularly pleasant way. But more than that, it’s chronic. That means you can use it over and over and over. It’s recyclable. It’s eco-friendly. It’s the ultimate green excuse.

Generalized Malaise	You’re just kind of tired and uninterested in doing much of anything…like, say, going to work. In fact, the very thought of going to work makes you tired and uninterested.	The idea of a generalized illness puts people off right away because there’s no telling what’s wrong with you. There’s something wrong, but it can’t be pinpointed. That’s the beauty of it. It might be nothing. It might be epidemically contagious. Who is to know? And besides “malaise” is a French word…and most people would rather avoid French words.

Impacted Truculence	You have a scathingly harsh sense of judgement wedged into your psyche. When someone says you have a stick up your butt about something, this is what you have.	How many phrases do you know of that start with the word “impacted” and turn out to be something good? This isn’t a symptom anyone is going to want to personally verify. Trust me.

Infectious Juvenility	You’re so immature that it will affect others. You won’t just come to work wearing a big clown nose. You’ll bring enough big clown noses for the whole office.	It’s infectious. And infection scares people. No one wants to be around anyone who is infected with anything. No one will even take the chance of making you come in to work if you say you have this.

Intumescent Jackassery	You have a swollen, engorged sense of foolishness. You’re puffy with giddiness.	Actually, I don’t think this one would work. I just always wanted to write the word “jackassery” on a sick leave form. I love that word. It’s like tomfoolery on steroids.

Localized Apathy	You don’t care about one specific thing…like, say, going to work. You care about other stuff…like TV and candy. But you don’t care about going to work.	It sounds kind of serious but still like something that, given enough time and rest, you can recover from without having to have something amputated. It’s definitely one to use if you’re going for the sympathy vote. You might even get flowers out of the deal. If nothing else, it automatically authorizes you to walk with a limp.

Oozing Turpitude	You are leaking moral corruption and general depravity. It’s kind of like having cystic acne on your soul.	Would you really want to see something that’s oozing? I wouldn’t. And neither would whoever is checking your sick leave excuse. It’s like the free pass of the sick leave world.

Paralytic Indolence	You’re too lazy to get up. In extreme cases, they couldn’t blast you off your couch with a fire hose.	Well, you’re paralyzed. That’s never good no matter what the reason behind it is. And no one expects you to come to work if you’re paralyzed.

Relapsing/Remitting Hedonism	You are far too occupied with the pursuit of pleasure to come to work. It can also just mean that you’re too drunk to show up.	It relapses, it remits, it’s all over the place! It’s completely unpredictable. It could surface at any time. And hedonism sounds like the result of some sort of genetic mutation, so nobody is going to question it. In fact, if you say you have this, most people will feel sorry for you. And then they’ll avoid you.

The trick to using the symptoms, though, was to combine them in ways that sounded like real illnesses. What started as a small bit of intumescent jackassery, for example, could quickly develop into full-blown infectious juvenility that could ultimately result in a bad case of oozing turpitude. And, of course, a good case of impacted truculence could always quite easily lead to an acute bellicose rupture. I think Hallmark even makes a card for that. And who could ever predict when chronic ennui, a generalized malaise, and a stubborn case of localized apathy would collide into the perfect storm of make-believe illness?

You had to be kind of smart about what symptoms you put together, though. After all, the HR people tended to gossip, and it wasn’t like you were never going back to your job again. So, you probably wouldn’t want to combine something like relapsing/remitting hedonism with paralytic indolence. That makes it sound like you were too lazy to get off the couch and come to work because you were too busy drinking cheap scotch and watching movies on “the special TV channel.” And that’s really not the image you want to get back to your co-workers and managers. I mean, if that’s really why you didn’t come to work, you probably would be better off just saying that you had rabies.

The funny thing is that for all the time I spent making up those symptoms, I never actually used any of them. In fact, I rarely missed work, mostly because by the time I was awake enough to even think about calling in sick, I was already in my car and halfway to the office. Still, I always kept that list in my desk drawer, and even after I left that job, I’ve always had a copy of it around. And I’d love to say that those excuses were my way of flying in the face authority and of sticking it to The Man, but really, I still keep the list around just because it makes me laugh. And because it reminds that if everything in business really made sense, it wouldn’t be any fun at all.

So, sometime soon, schedule an afternoon appointment for some reparative therapy to address your acute nutritional deficiency syndrome. In other words, take a long lunch. And don’t feel too bad about it, either. I mean, we take one day out of the whole year to extol the virtues of everyone who works for a living. On all those other days that are most decidedly not Labor Day, you have to fend for yourself and remember that in the end, it really is the resourcefulness and ingenuity of the worker that makes a country great.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

Always Something There To Remind Me

2011-07-02T22:30:00.002-04:00

Hello, Dear Readers. It’s good to see you.

This past week, I’ve been thinking a lot about mementos. No, not Mentos. Those are little mint things. I’m talking about mementos—all those various little souvenirs of experience that pile up over the years. It’s stuff like that t-shirt you got at the last Stones concert or that trophy you won in the local bowling tournament or that glass eye you got after your last bar fight. It’s all the stuff that reminds you of where you’ve been and what you’ve done.

Now, I’m a very sentimental person, so mementos mean a lot to me. In fact, my friends often joke that the best way to get revenge on me is to give me an ugly shirt as a present. I’ll never wear it, but I’ll never have the heart to throw it out. I’ll be stuck with it until the end of time. I’m one for keeping keepsakes, no matter how much I don’t like them.

I’m one of those people who has never thrown away a personal letter or card. I’ve taken a clipboard from every company I’ve ever worked for just for the memories. I’ve even been known to print out CT scans of my kidneys and hang them on my fridge. I’m all about creating evidence of having had a life, and that’s what mementos do. They’re tangible proof of having been there and done that.

In a way, though, some of the biggest successes I’ve had in life have left behind such strange souvenirs that I really have no idea how to deal with them. I mean, a couple of weeks ago, I passed a big, important exam at school, and I walked away with pretty much nothing to show for it. Well, I did get a piece of paper saying that I had convinced four professors that I actually knew what I was talking about, but I had to turn it in at school the next day. So, I’d spent months studying for this test, and as it got closer and closer, I had pushed everything else in my life aside to get ready for it. And in end, the only souvenir I got from that whole experience was an incredibly messy apartment. I got a stack of unopened mail that took up most of the coffee table, a fridge full of mostly rotten food, and a pile of laundry that was actually taller than I am. So, I had to decide if I was going to clean the place up or just cover everything with a coat of polyurethane and enshrine it for all time.

When you really stop to think about it, though, there’s really something sort of fascinating about having to deal with a mess. Probably one of my earliest memories of having to deal with one was when I first started mowing the lawn. Of course, I didn’t start out at lawn mowing daughter status. In my family, all three of us kids started out on clipping duty. We divided up all the edges of the lawn that my dad couldn’t get close enough to with the mower, and then we went around on our hands and knees with hand clippers and clipped the grass.

I hated that job. First of all, it took forever, and it seemed like it was always at least 110 degrees outside every Sunday when my dad wanted to do yard work. And I always seemed to end up with the crappy green pair of clippers that I swear to God had been manufactured sometime around World War I and hadn’t been sharpened since the day they rolled out of the factory.

On top of that, I’m allergic to grass, so I’d never get more than a few minutes into the job before my eyes would tear up, my nose would start running, and I’d break out in an itchy rash. But then again, pretty much everyone in my family had hay fever, and everyone was suffering. So you could swell up like a big, itchy, teary-eyed tick, and you still weren’t going to get out of doing your clipping.

But more than just the allergy stuff, I hated clipping because there were bugs. There weren’t a lot of bugs, of course. I mean, we lived in Colorado, not Georgia. But most of the clipping was around my mom’s gardens, so there were always bees and wasps and caterpillars and spiders, and I secretly believed that there were probably poisonous snakes and plague-ridden rats hiding out in the flowers, too. The worst area was the tomato plants. There was just no telling what you might find over there. As far as I was concerned, that whole garden was like one big pit of primordial ooze capable of spontaneously generating the most heinous insect life any kid could imagine. I’d make almost any deal with little sister to get out of working over there, and she knew it.

My dad was pretty picky about the clipping, too. You had to clip at the same height that the rest of the grass would eventually be cut at, and if you did a shoddy job, he’d make you go back and do it again. It’s not that he was really such a maniac about the lawn, though. After all, this was the suburbs back in the early 1970s, long before everyone just hired a lawn care company to come and deal with the grass. This was back in a time when parents still realized that their children were an invaluable source of free labor, and no kid in my neighborhood under the age of 15 had ever seriously uttered the word “no” to either of their parents. But beyond all that, lawn care was a competition sport with the fathers in my neighborhood. It was what they did before mixed martial arts came along. So, you weren’t just clipping the grass. You were part of a team. You were fighting for your family’s honor and an entire week of bragging rights.

Anyway, once you got to a certain age in my family, you were promoted to lawn mower duty. My older sister got that job first, but I don’t think she liked it that much because it took longer to mow than it did to clip. And she was all about spending the least amount of time possible teasing the Great God of the Heat Stroke. So, one summer when I was about 12, my sister stepped down, and I was magically lifted out of the ranks of the grubby-faced, swollen-eyed clippers and elevated to the status of Assistant Deputy Chief Lawn Mowing Daughter. It was one of the proudest days of my life. And it’s also when I got my first taste of what dealing with a mess is like.

Back in those days, you see, no one had a mulching mower. So, we collected all the grass in three huge burlap sacks. Of course, if my dad just put the grass bags out for the garbage pickup, then they’d throw his bags away, too. And I think he’d had those bags since about 1960, so he wasn’t about to give them up. He was really very attached to those grass bags, and in a way, it was kind of oddly touching. But it also meant that all that grass had to be disposed of some other way.

So, along about five o’clock on Sunday evenings when all the neighborhood parents were having some iced tea on the back patio and all the kids were watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom on TV, my dad let me know that we were going to dump the grass. Then he’d give my mom the high sign, grab his car keys, and from there, the race was on. The race against what, I don’t know. But it always seemed like we were racing against something. We’d run out and toss the grass bags into the back of the station wagon and then go speeding out of the neighborhood as fast as we could without attracting any undue attention. The trick was to get out of the our subdivision and over by the railroad tracks as quickly as possible. From there, we’d drive several miles out into an area of overgrown fields, and after glancing nervously around several times to make sure no one saw us, my dad would peel screeching off the road. Then we’d jump out of the car and empty the grass bags as fast as we could.

It was all pretty routine, but the way my dad acted about it, you’d have thought we were dumping toxic waste or disposing of a body. It was like we were on a mission for the CIA, and I was always sort of surprised that he didn’t insist we both wear ski masks. I mean, it was a positively clandestine operation, and to this day, I have no idea why. Nonetheless, as soon as the grass was dumped, we peeled out and put some serious distance between us and that abandoned mess. When we got home, my mom would just say, “Did you get it taken care of?” and my dad would nod silently. After that, no one ever mentioned it…until, of course, the next week when we had to do it all over again.

So, what I know about mess management, I learned from my father. Basically, you dump your mess on somebody else’s property and hope like hell that no one saw you do it. That’s the suburban approach to dealing with chaos. And from the time I’ve spent living in big cities, I think it’s a big part of the urban strategy, too. The only difference is that the suburban style is a “dump and drive” kind of thing while the urban one is more of a “dump and run.” And that makes sense. A lot of people in big cities don’t have cars, and if they do, they’re parked somewhere in a garage six miles away. You have to take a cab to get there. It’s not exactly convenient.

In a big city, you can’t really abandon your mess any father away than you’re willing to carry it, but the interesting thing about the dump and run strategy is that it ends up requiring a level of secrecy that even a cagey guy like my dad would have a hard time with. I mean, if you dump an old couch half a block from where you live, you can’t really get that far away from it. You can’t pretend that you don’t know that couch. But you have to. Otherwise, everyone will know that you dumped it out there, and then it’s only a matter of time until some angry neighborhood improvement people show up at your door demanding that you go get your car from the garage on the other side of town, pick up that couch, and go abandon it somewhere out in the suburbs.

And it’s not like you can avoid the couch, either. If you only got half a block away from where you live before your trusty helper said, “I’m not carryin’ this piece of crap one step farther” and just dropped it, you’re going to have to pass by it at some point. And that’s when things get hard. You can’t just pretend you don’t see the couch because then everyone will know you dumped it there. I mean, it’s just suspicious to act like you don’t see a couch sitting right there. And people in big cities aren’t dumb. They catch on to stuff like that. But then again, you can’t just stop and stare at it. You can’t stand there in a fog of nostalgia over all the great times you had on that couch. That’s a dead giveaway that you’re somehow connected to it. Or it’s a dead giveaway that there’s something really wrong with you. Either way, somebody is going to a call a cop, and you’re going to be sorry.

So, the trick is to be able to walk past the couch and notice it while saying to yourself, “I don’t know that couch, I’ve never seen that couch before,” over and over and over again. Just don’t say it out loud. And don’t linger. Keep moving at a normal pace. And try to appear ever so slightly irritated that someone had the nerve to abandon a couch on your block. That’s the key. In an urban post-dump situation, it’s all about attitude.

Of course, the urban dump and run strategy isn’t much use to me with my current mess. I mean, I live in a nice neighborhood apartment complex. I know most of my neighbors, and at least some of them have been in my apartment. They’ve seen my stuff. So, if I started dumping it on the sidewalk outside, they’d probably think I was being robbed. And worse, they’d think that all I owned was really crappy stuff. And even worst still, they’d bring it all back. They’d carry it up three flights of stairs and then call the cops to report the crime.

So, I’d come home one night to find all my junk piled outside my door and some stone-faced police officer ready to take my statement and get a dragnet going. And then I’d just crack under the pressure. I’d not only admit to having dumped my own stuff, I’d own up to every bad thing I’d ever done in my whole life. Then I’d start confessing to bad stuff I just thought about doing. Eventually, I’d start claiming responsibility for things I didn’t even have anything to do with. By the end of it all, I would’ve copped to the Kennedy assassination. It would be a nightmare.

Anyway, the urban approach to dealing with my apartment was pretty much out of the question. So, I thought maybe I’d look to my sisters for a little advice. But both of my sisters live in rural areas, and mess management in those places is a whole other thing. Well, actually, it’s more of a no-thing than an other thing. People in rural areas don’t notice everything they own; they just pay attention to the stuff they’re using. People in the country don’t deal with messes; they just ignore them.

I mean, I could go to my little sister’s ranch, and there could be 10,000 Barbie doll heads laying in a heap in one of the pastures, and if I pointed it out and asked, “What’s that?” I can almost guarantee that the first words out of my sister’s mouth would be “What’s what?” “That big pile of Barbie doll heads.” “What big pile of Barbie doll heads?” Then she’d stop and look over for a minute and just say, “Oh, those. I don’t know. They were here when we bought the place.” And that’s the rural mess management approach. If you’re not using something, then it just doesn’t exist. It doesn’t matter where it came from. If you can’t use it and your cows aren’t choking on it, then it’s invisible.

The same thing even goes for bigger things like entire buildings. My older sister’s place is in the mountains, and it’s got a lot of little weird old wooden buildings on it. I was out visiting her recently and pointed to one and asked, “What’s that?” and she said, “What’s what?” (I know, typical. I really should’ve seen that coming). “That building over there.” “Oh, it’s a smoke house.” “When was it built?” “I don’t know. It was here when we bought the place.” “What’s in it?” “Nothing.” “Do you use it?” “No.” And that was the end of that. I still don’t know how it happened, but that smokehouse just disappeared right before our very eyes. We weren’t using that. So it didn’t exist. It was like it had phased right out of our space-time continuum. I remember rubbing my eyes several times, but it was too late. I couldn’t see it, either. I’d already gone rural.

By the time I’d taken the long flight back from my sister’s house, though, I’d returned to my normal self. And it’s kind of too bad because when I walked back into my place, all I saw was the messiness. But I also had an amazing realization: for most of my life, I’ve been trying to use the rural mess management approach. And it’s never worked, mostly because I’ve never actually lived in a rural area. After all, if there’s one thing you absolutely have to have to use the rural approach to messiness, it’s a whole lot of “rurality.” As a strategy for a one-bedroom apartment, it just isn’t that good a plan. I mean, I really couldn’t ignore 10,000 Barbie doll heads piled on my bed no matter how hard I tried (and I don’t think I could push the creepiness factor of something like that aside for more than about 10 seconds). And I couldn’t just disregard an old smokehouse in the middle of my living room even if it had been there when I rented the place. It would block my view of the TV too much.

So, I finally came face-to-face with the fact that I couldn’t just dump the mess, and I couldn’t just ignore it. The last resort of mess management was the only option I really had: I was going to have to bite the bullet and clean my apartment up myself. I was going to have to do my laundry and clean out the fridge and deal with all the mail. I’d be erasing my big souvenir of having passed my big test, but then again, I figured I could always just go to school and ask them to make me a copy of the form that says I passed. I mean, I suppose there’s something to be said for that kind of simple problem-solving. And ultimately, too, I think a xerox copy is going to be easier to hang on my fridge than ten pounds of unopened mail, a rotten avocado, and a dirty shirt would be. If nothing else, it’ll smell better.

These days, I try to work on my apartment whenever I can, and it’s slowly coming along little by little. Every time I create a new oasis of clean, I get a little glimmer of hope, and I take a moment to stop and give myself a pat on the back for all the hard work I’ve done. After all, when you rise to the challenge of cleaning up your own mess, it’s an accomplishment. It makes you feel good about yourself. Still, I have to admit that every now and then, I think back to my days as Assistant Deputy Chief Lawn Mowing Daughter, and I get a little teary-eyed, probably for several different reasons. But more than anything else, those memories remind me that no matter where I go or what I do or how big of a mess I make, in my heart-of-hearts and soul-of-souls, I’m always just going to be a kid from the suburbs. There’s always going to be some part of me that wants to abandon that mess in someone else’s apartment. And there’s always going to be an even bigger part of me that just really, really wishes my dad would show up with his station wagon, a few hundred burlap bags…and a couple of ski masks.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

It's the End of the World As We Know It

2011-05-16T19:10:00.000-04:00

Hello, Dear Readers. It’s good to see you.

Just this past week, I heard that the world is supposed to come to an end on May 21^st. My dad said that he heard it was May 20^th, so already there’s some controversy brewing. I don’t actually know too much about this prediction except that I found out about it when I drove past the university in my town and saw a bunch of people with signs out marching around and yelling at passing cars about it. And of course, that struck me as a little strange. I mean, if the world really was coming to an end, would you spend your last days marching around with a sign and yelling at cars? I wouldn’t. I’d go get drunk. I think most people would go get drunk. So, until I walk out of my house and see pile after pile of drunk people lying around, I’m going to be a little skeptical about this end of the world stuff.

From what I understand, the guy who made this prediction based it all on Bible math, too. And apparently, that’s a type of math they don’t teach in school because most of the people who’ve tried to use it haven’t been very good at it. The current guy actually first predicted the end of the world back in 1994, but after it didn’t happen and everyone lived, he went back and rechecked his equations. Then he was just sort of like, “Oh, sorry, I made a mistake.” And it was probably something simple, too, like forgetting to carry over a two or subtracting something wrong. But this time, I think he used a calculator, so he’s pretty sure he’s got the numbers all worked out right. I suppose there’s something comforting about that.

Of course, he isn’t the first person to predict the end of world (either time he’s done it). The Mayan calendar says that the world will end December 21, 2012. I’m not sure at what time. I hope it’s sometime after 7 pm, though, so I have a chance to get in a few last reruns of Law and Order before I’m launched into oblivion. That probably sounds flippant, but I mean, seriously, how are you supposed to plan for the end of the world? What are you supposed to wear? Do you need to take two forms of ID? Will there be long lines? Should you bring a book? Does anyone ever take that kind of stuff into account when they’re predicting the demise of humanity? No. Does anyone ever publish an informational pamphlet or put together an instructional video? No. They announce the end of the world, and you’re just supposed to wing it from there. Personally, I don’t think that’s a very good plan.

The other thing that always struck me as odd about the end of world according to the Mayans is that it’s based on the end of the Mayan calendar. Now, I’m sure it’s a perfectly good calendar, but just because it ends, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the whole stinking world goes up with it. I mean, maybe the Mayan calendar maker just got tired of doing it. Maybe one day, he walked into his office, looked around, and went, “I hate this job. I want to learn to paint and be an artist instead.” So, he just quit making the calendar. Then when he got in trouble for it with his boss, he just made up some lie about how he’d finished the job because the world was going to end on the last date he’d worked out. And then his boss was probably like, “Oh, OK, well, thanks for your years of service to the Mayan people. Here’s a gold sundial. Have a nice life.” And that was that.

And have you ever noticed how people who predict the end of the world always predict it WAY far in advance of their own time? I mean, you never turn on the news and hear, “Floyd Feeney, noted mystic soothsayer of Paramus, New Jersey, has predicted that the world will end next Thursday at 2:15 pm, Eastern Standard Time.” No one ever predicts the end of the world within their own lifetime. That would be creepy. And inconvenient. Oh, sure, there’s always a crabby next-door neighbor who sits out on the patio ranting about how the world is going to hell in a hand basket and is going to come to a crashing halt “one of these days,” but that’s really not quite the same thing.

Personally, I think the end of the world is something that people predict far in the future so they don’t have to worry about it themselves. After all, the height of the Mayan civilization happened around 900 A.D., and they didn’t predict the end of world (however it happened) until 2012. So, it’s not like they spent a lot of time worrying about it themselves. I mean, what did they care? They didn’t walk around going, “We’d better hurry up and finish those temples. We’ve only got a thousand years left.” It’s sort of like how I feel about the Earth’s loss of rotational momentum. Yes, the Earth is slowing down. And, yes, that’s going to be a big problem. About a billion years from now. So, what do I care? I just need it to keep spinning for about 50 more years. Tops. After that, I don’t really give a rip if it spins or not. I figure that’s pretty much how the Mayans felt about the end of the world. It definitely fell into the category of “someone else’s problem.”

It’s funny, though, how fascinated people are with stuff like the end of the world. But I suppose that makes sense in a way. After all, if the world really is going to end on May 21^st, I’m sure as hell not going to pay my phone bill. And I’m going to call up my credit card companies and tell them to take a flying leap. But I’m absolutely not doing any of that stuff unless I know for sure that the world is going to end I mean, I know there’s a country song that says that you should live like you’re dying, but unless you really are, it’s not that great of an idea.

But maybe the thing about why we’re so into the ends of things is just because we figure that anything that has a beginning also has to have an end. It’s hard to imagine one without the other. I mean, people go to a movie and wonder how it’s going to end. No one walks in and wonders if it’s going to end. No one ever stops and thinks, “Maybe I shouldn’t go into this theatre. Maybe this movie won’t end. Ever. And then I’ll have to stay here. For the rest of my life.” No one would ever go to the movies if it involved taking that kind of a risk. Luckily, our little human brains just don’t think that way. If something begins, then it eventually ends. That’s the deal.

And it’s amazing how much of our everyday lives is built on that idea. I think that’s one of the reasons why immortality isn’t such a great thing when you really stop to think about it. People always say stuff like how sad it would be to be immortal because all your friends would die before you did and because the love of your life wouldn’t last for your whole life. They tend to think of the big, emotional stuff. I wouldn’t want to be immortal because of the little things. I mean, the total percentage of my immortal life that I would have to spend waiting in line to renew my driver’s license would be staggering, and I can’t imagine what my VISA bill would look like after two or three hundred years. And it just scares me to think how much useless stuff I would buy over the course of a millennium or two. Someone would walk into my house a hundred years from now, pick up object, and ask, “Is this a priceless antique?” and I’d have to say, “No, it’s a Slap Chop. Would you like me to dice you an onion?”

And work would just be hell. At staff meetings, I’d hear the other employees whispering, “She never has any new ideas.” “Well, what do you expect? She’s been with the company for 350 years.” The worst part would be that I’d never have enough money to retire. I’d go in to see a financial advisor, and he’d say, “How much do you have in your retirement accounts at this point?” So, I’d show him my numbers, and he’d look them over and say, “Well, if you want to retire in five years, I think you’ve got plenty of…wait a sec, it says here on your form that you’re immortal.” “Yeah, that’s right.” “Oh, well, then this isn’t going to be nearly enough.” I mean, really, how do you finance eternity? So, I’d have this suckwad job…and I’d have to do it forever. That really is not my idea of bliss.

We also seem to have this idea that immortal beings are ageless. They aren’t. They’re deathless. That’s a different thing. There’s nothing saying that just because you don’t die you don’t age. And that would be terrible. I’m in my late 40s now, and just thinking about exercise wears me out. Imagine what I’d be like in my late 400s. I’d barely be able to drag myself off the couch…except that I’d have to so I could go to my suckwad job. Finally, one day I’d just call in sick, and the secretary would say, “And why can’t you come in today?” “Because I’m almost 500 years old, ya jackwagon. I’m tired.” And then she’d cover the receiver, but I’d hear, “She’s so crabby all the time.” “Well, don’t take it personally. According to her file, she’s been that way since the late Victorian period.”

Probably the worst part of being immortal, though, is that the neighborhood kids would constantly be trying to kill you. They wouldn’t believe that you were really immortal, and everyone would want to be the one who finally proved it. You’d be out in your yard, and some kid would come veering off the street and try to run you over. The more imaginative ones would try to blow up your house. The next-door neighbors would probably try to poison you. And all to no avail. Which would, of course, only make them try harder.

So, that would be life as an immortal person You’d have to drag yourself off your couch to go to a sucky job that you could never retire from, you’d have to sit through any number of insulting staff meetings, and then you’d go home to a house full of Slap Chops, Showtime Rotisserie Ovens, Miracle Blade sets, Magic Bullets, and assorted sizes of ShamWows. You’d be so wrinkly that people would often mistake you for a gigantic Shar-Pei, and you’d spend a fair amount of time at home tweezing grizzled gray billy goat hairs off your chin. And every time someone knocked at the door, it would be some teenager with a gun or a knife or baseball bat who came over to try to kill you. You’d spend most of your free time in the hospital, and trust me, no health insurance company would touch you with a ten-foot pole.

So, that’s the thing: the way we live is completely based on the idea of a beginning and an end. You’re born, you go to school and learn some stuff, you piddletinker around for a while and pretend you’re an artist, then you get a job, you piddletinker around for a while and pretend you’re a businessperson, then you retire, and eventually you die. That’s how it’s set up to work. A beginning, an end, and some stuff in between. That’s life as we know it, and we have a very hard time picturing it going any other way.

And maybe when all is said and done, that’s what makes the idea of the end of the world so strange. We get that things end. In fact, we expect them to. We just don’t expect all of them to end all at once. And that’s what makes the idea of everything ending at one time as unbelievable as the idea of things never ending at all. So, no, I don’t really think that the world is going to end on May 21^st. But then again, as my father always says, “Plan for the worst. Hope for something slightly less horrible.” So, I guess this week would be a good time to go out and treat yourself to something special just in case the world actually is going to end on Saturday. And while you’re at it, you might as well pick up 10 or 20 bottles of wine. Personally, I’d recommend a nice pinot noir. I’ve always heard it goes well with an apocalypse.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

Tar-zen's Day Off - Part III

2011-04-27T08:45:00.003-04:00

Hello, Dear Readers. It’s good to see you.

Last time on Philosophy for a Hungry Planet: “In my case, things had really had turned out well, and at that point, all I had left to do was to walk up to Jennifer Batten, look her straight in the eye, and say, “Here’s your vintage Pez dispenser.” And if I could’ve just done that, it would’ve been great. But that, of course, Dear Readers, is a whole other story…”

And now, the conclusion of “Tar-zen’s Day Off”…

My adventures never seem to work out quite the way I plan them to. And sometimes, that’s not such a bad thing. I suppose it’s all just somehow connected to what an adventure comes down to for me. Now, my father is a guy who always expects the absolute worst, so if he goes on an adventure, and everything doesn’t just go to hell right in front of him, then the whole affair has been wildly successful as far as he’s concerned. He’s a man constantly surprised and delighted by normalcy.

For my mother, though, a successful adventure is all about the plusses and the minuses. It’s about the ratio between what went right and what went wrong. And after a certain percentage of things have gone right, the adventure is a success no matter what else happens. So, if she has two hours to go shopping and wants to hit five stores (and she could do it, too, because the woman is a genius at the art of efficient shopping—it’s like she was born in Terminator mode), lots of different things can happen. If, of course, she just gets through the five stores, it’s a success even if she doesn’t find anything. But if she goes through five stores and finds three things on sale, it’s cause for a medium-sized celebration. If she finds something on sale in all five stores, that calls for a parade. However, if she gets through three stores without finding anything and then gets a flat tire, the adventure isn’t a success. But that just basically means that she has to get the tire fixed and then claim “do-over” status for the next day. I mean, my mom is not a woman who accepts defeat. If, however, she gets through three stores, then gets a flat, then finds a pair of shoes on sale for 85% off at a store while she’s waiting for my dad to come and get her, then the whole adventure is a raging success. I mean, 85% off anything pretty much trumps any disaster of any type when you’re shopping. So, my mom never really knows if an adventure has worked out until she gets home and does the math.

In a way, I’m kind of like a combination of both my parents when it comes to adventures. Like my dad, I usually expect the worst. I just don’t plan for it like he does. I just sort of sit around vaguely fearing it. And like my mom, I look at the ratio of good and bad things that happen when I decide if an adventure has been successful. I try to take everything into account, and I tend to be rather generous with myself. But I’m also very different than either of my parents because to me, every adventure comes down to a moment. It comes down to The Moment. And whether or not The Moment comes off right is the biggest factor in how successful the adventure really is to me. The only thing is that half the time, the moment that I think is the The Moment doesn’t turn out to be The Moment at all.

Driving into downtown Toledo with my friend on the Saturday afternoon of the guitar festival was like driving into the opening scene of an old Star Trek episode. Now, Star Trek was interesting because you could tell what was going to happen just by the way the episode started. If they got shot at before the opening credits, you knew the whole episode was going to be about outsmarting some vicious enemy race of green Orion pig-people, one of whom Kirk would inevitably fall in love with. If they went into a time warp and found themselves sitting in paisley shirts in the front row of a Jimi Hendrix concert, you knew that they were going to have to figure out how to restart the warp engines and create a time distortion using nothing but some old tabs of LSD and a discarded bong. If they beamed down to a planet whose atmosphere was composed almost entirely of milk, butter, eggs, and assorted breakfast meats, you knew that at some point, McCoy was going say, “I’m a doctor, not Paula Deen…or Jimmy Dean…or whoever!” and that the crew was going to have to eat its way out of danger. I mean, science fiction is nothing if not predictable.

The Star Trek episodes that I liked most, though, were the ones that started off when the Away Team beamed down to a planet that was deserted but shouldn’t have been. The first line of those episodes was always, “Where is everybody?” and let’s just be clear that as least as far as TV shows go, no good ever comes from asking that question. On Star Trek, it always meant that some nameless, faceless security guy in a red shirt was going to get attacked by some weird alien creature that looked like a big flying piece of barf. And you always knew that was going to happen because any Star Trek character who wasn’t a regular was inevitably going to get killed or podded or disfigured in some horrible way before the first commercial came on. Those people just never fared well. And then no matter what form the attack had taken, the next line would always be, “What is that thing?” That’s the most popular line in science fiction. Oddly enough, it also seems to be the most popular line in teenage romance movies. But I digress.

Anyway, going into downtown Toledo was just like landing on a planet with an infestation of flying alien barf creatures. It’s not, of course, that there actually were alien barf creatures flying through the air. That would’ve just been weird, even for northeast Ohio. It’s just that the whole town was completely deserted. I mean, I have never seen an urban area so utterly devoid of human activity in my life. There were no stores open. There were no cars on the street. There were no people anywhere. From what I could see, not even homeless people want to hang around in downtown Toledo on a Saturday afternoon. And I was going to say to my friend, “Where is everybody?” but I figured there was no point in setting that tragedy in motion, so I just kept it to myself. Luckily, though, neither one of us was wearing a Red Security Guy Shirt of Death, so I figured that we had at least a pretty good shot at making it to the guitar festival alive.

The festival itself was held at the Toledo School for the Arts, and it was actually a very nice place. More than that, though, it was populated. And I found that oddly comforting. I mean, you can only watch so much science fiction before you need a good dose of regular old humanity to calm you down and reassure you that you are, in fact, on planet Earth. A Valium often doesn’t hurt, either.

When we got into the actual festival, the first thing I wanted to do was to go up to the room where Jennifer Batten was chatting and signing things between shows. But I just wanted to peek in. I mean, up until that point, I’d only ever seen her on YouTube. As far as I knew, she actually was only three inches tall and only appeared for five minutes and forty seconds at a time. I really didn’t have a sense that she was a real person. To me, she was kind of like a tiny, on-demand eclipse. Only with a guitar.

So, I figured that before I actually had to talk to her, I should try to get my brain around the idea that she wasn’t just a musically-gifted little imp who had somehow escaped from my computer and run off to Toledo. Otherwise, the only thing I could’ve thought to say to her was “What the hell are you doing here?” And that kind of stuff just tends to make people think you’ve got a whole collection of tin foil hats somewhere.

Needless to say, then, I was perfectly happy to just hang around suspiciously in the doorway, looking scared and vaguely fearing disaster. To be honest, I’m really quite good at that. Luckily, though, my friend was with me, and it was (thank God) trusty companion to the rescue again.

Now, the thing about trusty companions is that more than just being the voice of reason, they’re also action-oriented. They do stuff. They’re brave. I mean, think about it. Was roaring out in the Batmobile to catch criminals really ever Batman’s idea? Oh sure, he’d hang around in the Batcave and talk about what the Riddler was probably doing, but it was always Robin who basically said, “Holy ‘and-gee-we’re-just-sitting-here-scratching-ourselves,’ Batman!” That was what really got things going. And that always seems to be the way it goes. The Lone Ranger would probably just ride around in circles shooting off his guns without Tonto to say, “You get that the bandits are right over there, don’t you?” And even in the old movie Gunga Din, it’s the trusty companion/water bearer Gunga Din who takes the initiative during the final battle to climb to the top of the tower and signal for help. Of course, he gets killed in the end (typical), but at least he takes action.

I think my favorite brave trusty companion, though, has to be The Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. He’s almost foolishly brave, but he’s also a guy who can make a decision. After all, he’s the one who really leads the charge to steal the Wicked Witch of the West’s broom. True, the others are there, but The Tin Man is, well, a little hesitant, and The Cowardly Lion is, well, cowardly. And Dorothy just isn’t any good when it comes to doing battle. I mean, she never even puts down her purse-basket. It’s like fighting alongside the Queen of England. But The Scarecrow has a plan. He goes in there hell-bent for leather and flying monkey ass. He’s kicking butts from the word “Go!” And when you stop to think about it, his bravery is really something because it’s not like he is the toughest character around. The Cowardly Lion at least has big lion teeth and claws. And The Tin Man actually has a weapon. But The Scarecrow is made of straw. He’s fragile. For Christ’s sake, he’s flammable. But he’s the main trusty companion and the bravest one there.

But maybe even more than that, The Scarecrow is really loyal. I mean, when you think about it, Dorothy Gale is really just a young woman from Kansas on a crime spree. In the course of the movie, she kills two people and slaps an animal. Of course, she doesn’t mean to kill The Witch of the East when she first gets there. She just lands on top of her. So, that’s like vehicular homicide but with a house. But then The Good Witch of the North comes down, steals the ruby slippers, and puts them on Dorothy’s feet. So, that’s conspiracy to commit robbery right there. And of course, Dorothy doesn’t actually mean to kill The Wicked Witch of the West, either (although, let’s face it, she’s not too broken up about it). So, that could just be second-degree manslaughter. But then, she takes the broom. So, then it’s felony murder. I mean, if Jack McCoy had been running the D.A.’s office in Oz, he would’ve fried Dorothy Gale up in a skillet. But The Scarecrow is always there for her, defending her actions and taking her side. He’s like the perfect public defender. And when Dorothy leaves Oz, she tells him that she’ll probably miss him the most. And that’s probably true. After all, given the string of felonies she commits as a teenager in Oz, she’s probably going to need a good lawyer at some point in the future when she gets back to Kansas.

Fortunately, I was pretty sure that meeting Jennifer Batten wasn’t going to involve quite that much intrigue or anywhere near that level of violence. I mean, I just don’t have the delinquent potential of a Dorothy Gale. And I haven’t got a house to drop on someone. Besides, it was a guitar festival, not a scene out of Dog Day Afternoon. Al Pacino wasn’t prancing around in the hallway yelling, “Attica! Attica!” So, it probably wasn’t the toughest challenge my trusty companion had ever faced, although it may well have been the strangest. Anyway, my friend did a very smart thing and just started walking around in the room looking at various displays. So, I managed to pry my bony fingers off the doorjamb and follow her. And the next thing I knew, we were standing at the t-shirt and CD table…five feet away from Jennifer Batten. The Moment was at hand. At least that’s what I thought.

Both my friend and I had gotten t-shirts and CDs, and my friend stepped right over to have her CD signed. Like I said, trusty companions are nothing if not action-oriented. Then it was my turn. I actually had a picture that I wanted to have signed, so Jennifer Batten signed it. Then with all the coolness I could muster, I said, “Oh, and I have something for you.” And then I pulled out…the Pez head! I handed it to her and said, “I’m Retroversion on Twitter. Here’s your vintage Pez dispenser.” Now, I have to admit that it took her a second to remember the tweet exchange, but she seemed pleased nonetheless. After all, adults are a lot like children in some ways: giving them toys makes them happy even if they have no idea why they’re getting them. So, she immediately put the Pez head in her purse and zipped it up. I mean, even if there had been some terrible mistake, it wasn’t like I was ever going to see that Pez dispenser again. It was like “Score! Pez head!” She actually did remember the tweet exchange, though, and she laughed, thanked me several times, gave me a high-five, and really did seem to get a kick out of the whole thing.

So, it had gone off well. And I got a kick out of it, too. After all, Jennifer Batten is so good at playing the guitar that it’s almost scary, and even though I’d only ever seen her as just a little tiny bit of a person on my computer, she always seemed kind of larger-than-life to me. But there at the Guitar Fest CD and t-shirt table, she seemed like a regular person who just liked to laugh and play music and write goofy things on Twitter. Right at that moment, she didn’t seem so much bigger than I was.

And then she stood up.

Jennifer Batten, Dear Readers, is eighteen feet tall. I swear to God.

And I don’t know exactly what it was that threw me, but let’s just say that if I had ever believed that she actually was just a miniature guitar player who lived in my computer, I was rather thoroughly disabused of that notion right then and there. I mean, the woman is tall. I felt like a kinder, gentler version of Dorothy standing right in front of the great and powerful Oz. I started feeling around for my purse-basket and looking for Toto. I had an almost uncontrollable urge to curtsy. I began to wish I could just go back to Kansas. And I’m not even from Kansas.

And then it happened: I had a vowel movement. It was like I suddenly realized that I would likely never have the chance to talk to this person again in my life and so I needed to say everything I had ever thought of saying to anyone anywhere ever right at that moment. It was like I opened my mouth, and the entire contents of every page on the entire Facebook website came spilling out of my head as one long series of incomprehensible guttural noises, grunts, and squeals. And the whole time, I just kept thinking, “Is she getting taller, or I am falling down?”

Luckily, my friend pulled me out before I completely lost consciousness. It was like something out of a war movie where one guy gets shot and the other guy has to drag him to the nearest aid station. Then again, this was the Toledo School for the Arts, not a scene out of The Guns of Navarone. It’s not like there was a MASH unit anywhere around. So, my friend dragged me down to the cafeteria and got me some water and chips, and that seemed to speed my recovery right along. Food is always the best medicine. My friend has a couple of kids, so she has special mom-knowledge and knows stuff like that. My only regret was that I hadn’t thought to bring along an oxygen tank and a tranquilizer gun for myself.

Fortunately, with the encouraging words of my trusty companion, I got back on my feet pretty quickly. True, I had wrecked my own moment, and under my dad’s theory of a successful adventure, there was no hope. Everything had gone to hell right in front of me. Under my dad’s logic, something like this was a perfectly good reason to just go out, find a cliff, and throw yourself off it. But under my mom’s theory of adventure accounting, enough things could still go right to make it all a success.

So, at that point, I pretty much had two choices: I could hang in there and try to get enough other things to go right to make the adventure work out, or I could throw myself off a cliff. In that light, it wasn’t such a hard choice to make. I really wanted to live. Besides, we’d left my friend’s car in Findlay at Jeffrey’s Antiques, so I figured that I at least owed it to her to survive long enough to give her a ride back. I mean, even the worst disaster of an adventure doesn’t really justify stranding someone in Toledo.

Anyway, my friend and I went to see Jennifer Batten’s show about an hour later, and it was really great. I’ve heard her describe what she does as “multi-media for ADD,” and it’s kind of true. She plays electric guitar in sync with backing tracks that she’s already recorded while films that she’s made show on a giant screen. And it’s not namby-pamby, make-you-feel-all-warm-and-tender-inside, New Age-y music. It’s some serious hard rock and fusion. So, you sit there and there’s so much coming at your eyes and your ears that it just overwhelms you. And it’s really cool. You just really get carried away by it. I mean, it’s really something, and I have to admit that I was surprised at what a powerful experience seeing her play live was. But even more than that, the whole show was a huge plus on the big adventure balance sheet. I was going to be back in the black in no time.

After the show, my friend said, “Let’s go get our t-shirts signed,” and then she just walked over and started talking to Jennifer Batten. And all I could think at the time was “You’re a braver man than I, Gunga Din (just don’t go up in the tower).” And it was totally true. If it weren’t for my trusty companion, I would’ve still been on the other side of the building clutching the doorjamb. Either that or I would’ve been lying on the floor in front of the CD and t-shirt table. Crying. Whatever the scenario, it wouldn’t have been pretty. So needless to say, I was really happy to have had such a good friend and trusty companion with me.

Anyway, when my turn came to have Jennifer Batten sign my shirt, I just kind of thrust it forward and grunted. That seemed like the safest move for me. So, she signed the shirt, and I managed to mumble “Thanks” and started to walk away as someone else came up. But as I was walking away, she said, “Hey, thanks again for the Pez.” And right at that moment, all I could think of was that commercial from the ‘70s when the little kid gives Mean Joe Green a Coke. Mean Joe just power-drinks that Coke, and as the kid is walking away, he says, “Hey, kid. Catch.” and throws him his jersey. Then the little kid goes, “Wow, thanks Mean Joe.” I’ve seen that commercial a million times, and it’s so touching that it almost makes you cry. But right at that moment, I really understood exactly how that little kid felt. I very nearly said, “Wow, thanks Mean Jennifer,” and I was almost surprised not to have heard the “Have a Coke and a Smile” jingle playing in the background. Luckily, though, none of that happened. If it had, I would almost certainly have burst into tears, and at that point in the day, I really felt that Jennifer Batten and I had been through enough together.

On my way back home, I was doing the adventure math in my head, but I already knew that in the end, this adventure had been a parade-level success. It was right up there with finding something on sale in every store. I mean, in all honesty, Jennifer Batten is an extraordinarily nice and friendly person, and the only thing even remotely intimidating about her is how well she plays the guitar. And even though a few things on my adventure had gone wrong, more things had gone right. My balance sheet was definitely in the black, and it was actually one of the best adventures I’ve had in a very long time. When I got home, the first thing I did was call up my mom and tell her all about it.

The funny thing is that despite everything that had happened, I never quite felt like I got The Moment. And I missed that because to me, The Moment is kind of like magic. It’s the thing that makes me realize why I even went on the adventure to begin with. It’s what made it all worth doing. So, even though the adventure had been a success, I still felt like it wasn’t over. And indeed, it wasn’t. The next day, I went on Twitter, and there was a tweet from Jennifer Batten. It said, “Thanx Ohioans for coming to the shows and esp 2 the ladies bearing a vintage pez! It pays 2 tweet!” But what really capped the whole thing off and ultimately turned out to actually be The Moment of my whole adventure was the last line of the tweet. It said, “Next time bring me a Chevy Silverado…” I laughed out loud when I read that. I thought it was cheeky. And I like a little cheek in a person. But even more than that, it made me realize that I love a challenge and that sometimes doing something goofy just because you can is reason enough.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

Tar-zen's Day Off - Part II

2011-04-08T23:50:00.003-04:00

Hello, Dear Readers. It’s good to see you.

Last time on Philosophy for a Hungry Planet: “Of course, the festival itself and all that the trip entailed would’ve made my imaginary stalker proud, and I would definitely have been someone worth following on that day and maybe even for several days before that. But that, Dear Readers, is a whole other story…”

And now, Part II of “Tar-Zen’s Day Off”…

You really have to wonder sometimes what makes people want to go on an adventure. It’s the same sort of thing, I guess, that makes little kids want to stuff crayons up their noses or that makes usually rational adults decide to remodel their kitchens even though they know absolutely nothing about home improvement. There’s something sort of silly and maybe even downright stupid about it, and one part of your brain knows it. So, while you’re sizing up the difference between how big a crayon is and how big your nostrils are or peeling up perfectly good vinyl flooring just because you’ve got the power tools to do it, one part of your brain is going, “What the hell?”

But another part of your brain is thinking about how you’ll be the envy of every kid in the second grade when you show up with crayons hanging out of your face or how jealous your new kitchen floor is going to make the people next door. And that part of your brain is going, “What the hell!” It’s a challenge. It’s an adventure. And most people just can’t walk away from either. That’s what makes humanity great. It’s also what keeps pediatricians and general contractors all over the world in business.

My whole adventure in Toledo started one day on Twitter when Jennifer Batten said that she wanted a tornado machine. She put out a tweet that gave a link to a piece of art a guy had created that was basically a tornado chamber and wrote, “If you loved me, you’d buy this for me. K?” And I thought that was funny. But more than that, I thought it was cheeky. And I like a little cheek in a person. So, I replied to it and said “I can’t afford to love you. How much art is involved for just a general sense of fondness?” And then, much to my surprise, she tweeted back, “Hmmm…maybe just a vintage pez dispenser : ).” So right then and there, I decided that when I went to Toledo to see Jennifer Batten play, I would give her a vintage Pez dispenser. It would be an adventure. And it would be less trouble than remodeling a kitchen…and far less painful than the crayon thing.

Now, I was never that into Pez heads as a kid because they just weren’t that big in my neighborhood. And besides, I was a SweeTart devotee. My favorite was the giant SweeTart. It was about the size of a hockey puck and took just about as long to gnaw through. I mean, eating one of those things was a project. By the time you were finished, your tongue was so swollen that you could hardly speak and several of your teeth were usually loose. But, God, they were good. I’d eat little SweeTarts if I couldn’t get a giant one, and failing that, I went for Smarties. So, I never knew too much about Pez. They just didn’t register on my candy radar.

But if there’s one thing I love to do, it’s find things. In fact, sometimes I even lose things on purpose just so I can find them later. And I’m particularly good at finding old things because there are only two rules to doing it: know what you’re looking for, and know where to look. But even beyond that, I was raised on shopping. It’s in my blood. The first book I learned to read was called Ann Likes Red, and it was about a little girl who goes shopping for a complete outfit—dress, shoes, hat, gloves, and purse. I myself felt no connection whatsoever to the character, but I was totally into the story. The only part I didn’t like was that Ann’s mother was apparently OK with paying retail, and in my family, that was like being OK with committing a felony.

Anyway, step one was to learn everything I could about vintage Pez stuff. I figured that would take about an hour. I figured wrong. The sheer amount of information available on collecting Pez dispensers is mind-boggling. I mean, it’s like a shadow industry. It’s like people are dealing them out of the backs of unmarked vans in alleys all over the country, and I wouldn’t be surprised if trading in vintage Pez dispensers is propping up puppet governments all over the world. And everything I read pretty much boiled down to one thing: there are a few things you can look at, but dating Pez heads is really hard (and anyone who has ever dated a Pez head will back me up on this…but I digress). Anyway, I finally got a decent idea of what I was looking for, so I turned to my local network of vintage stores and dove in.

Now, one of the other, lesser-known secrets of effective shopping is knowing who to be when you walk into a store. People always say that you should just be yourself in life, and as a general rule, I agree with that. You should be yourself. You just shouldn’t do it all the time. As I’ve learned from watching my parents work over pawn shop dealers and outsmart used car salesmen through the years, when you’re awash in the world of the previously-owned, being your honest, genuine, trusting little milquetoast self isn’t going to get you anything but screwed. You have to be whoever you need to be if you want to get the best deal.

My father, of course, excels at implying that he’s somehow connected to the Mafia or is part of some secret government agency, but when I go into an antique and collectibles store, I turn into Omar Shariff in Lawrence of Arabia. I’m not exactly sure why. It probably has something to do with the lighting. But I become dark and swarthy and mysteriously handsome. I may even grow a mustache. I’ve never actually checked. But above all else, I become remarkably and almost magically shrewd. I slice through rows of collectible merchandise, my black robes fluttering behind me. I cut through stacks of vintage clutter, my eyes keen to the best deals. I am, without a doubt, the courageous leader of the Bedouins, capable of magnificent and heroic feats of commerce. I am a shopping force to be reckoned with, a master at the art of haggling, a whirlwind of consumer savvy, a woman dressed as a man dressed as a woman…no, wait a sec, that’s Victor/Victoria.

Anyway, there were no vintage Pez heads to be found in any of my usual stores. In fact, there were no vintage Pez heads to be found in my whole freakin’ town. So, I may have been beloved as the brave leader of the Bedouin nation, but I was completely and utterly denied as a Pez collector. And yet, I refused to give up because if there is one thing I know for sure about finding vintage stuff, it’s that in the end, it’s a lot like setting up the perfect one-night stand: you have to know what you’re after and have a good idea of where you might be able to get it, but ultimately, it all just comes down to luck and dogged persistence.

So, at 5:15 pm on the day before I was supposed to go to Toledo, I found myself 42 miles from home, standing in front of the pearly gates of collectors’ heaven: The Heart of Ohio Antique Mall. I didn’t actually fall to my knees and call out to God, but it would’ve been appropriate. The Heart of Ohio is one of the biggest antique malls in the United States, and it’s the mother ship to collectors across the Midwest. And it’s also a lot like a bordello—you’ll find what you’re looking for, but you’ll pay retail for it.

Anyway, I quickly realized that being Omar Shariff would be of no use whatsoever in that situation. I mean, becoming dark and swarthy and mysteriously handsome just isn’t all that helpful when you’re a woman in a hurry. What I needed was Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator, a ruthless shopping machine perfectly willing and able to push small children and old people out of the way if necessary. I also mixed in a little Jim and Tammy Bakker and managed to convert three store employees to my search using nothing but a detailed description of the beauty of my vision and the promise of the glory that would await us all when we found a vintage Pez head. If I had tried a little harder, I probably could’ve gotten them to give me all their money, too.

By the time they closed the store at 6:00 pm, my flock and I had managed to look in all of the 350 showcases in the place. We had covered most all of the booths, and in the end, there were seven Pez dispensers. Seven. Out of 116,000 square feet of stuff. Five of them weren’t really vintage, so that left me with an easy choice between just two. I picked the one that I thought was Porky Pig since it was in the best shape, but I have to admit that he was kind of a strange looking Porky Pig. He had some seriously pronounced cheekbones, and his ears were slanted back and kind of pointed. He actually looked sort of Vulcan and really just ever so slightly evil. But he was a vintage Pez. Mission complete. Zero casualties. It was everything a cyborg shopper could hope for.

And yet, one thing about it all didn’t seem quite right. That Pez dispenser was just too clean. Now, there are very few times in life when you actually want things to be dirty. I mean, when you’re doing laundry, you don’t want the clothes to be crusty and mildew-ridden. Just that kind of “worn once” feeling will do. And when you take a shower, you don’t want to rinse yourself off and see water that looks like it came out of a drainage ditch pouring off your body. Most people don’t ever want to be that dirty. In fact, I think most of the cleaning we do is really about feeling like we’re restoring order to chaos, and you don’t need to have to remove a layer of visible filth do that.

But when it comes to old stuff, a little dirt isn’t such a bad thing. You expect a little old dust pile-up in the crevices. You aren’t surprised by a slightly sticky feeling. That stuff is like your guarantee of aged-ness. You don’t want to find it on old people, but you do want to see it on old stuff. So, having a clean Pez dispenser made me more than a little paranoid.

Anyway, I ended up finding out a couple of things about that Pez head. First, it was made sometime in the late 1960s, so it was vintage, despite how clean it was. And it wasn’t Porky Pig. It was Practical Pig from The Three Little Piggies. He was the responsible pig in the bunch who always ended up having to make some sort of device to trick the Big Bad Wolf and rescue Fiddler Pig and Fifer Pig, both of whom were just kind of like your basic stoner pigs—not real smart but really into having a good time. So, it always fell to Practical Pig to save the day, which he inevitably did through wit, ingenuity, and quite often, sheer guile. For a barnyard animal, he was pretty impressive.

Unfortunately, Practical Pig should’ve had a hat. And he didn’t. And that was a problem. I was sure that I would stumble on one eventually, but unfortunately, I didn’t have “eventually” to work with. I was leaving for Toledo early the next morning. And as I sat in front of my computer searching for every antique store between my house and Toledo that would open early enough for me to go there before the guitar festival, I realized that this had become more than just an adventure. This had become a quest.

Of course, when you really stop to think about it, pretty much all good adventures involve a quest. And it’s usually a quest for an object that isn’t all that important in and of itself. I mean, to get back to Kansas, Dorothy has to bring the Wizard of Oz the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West. That’s her quest. She has to go get a broom. If I was the Wizard of Oz, I would’ve asked for something better, like maybe that huge crystal ball the witch has. You could probably get some serious cash for that on Ebay. And if I was Dorothy, I would’ve just gone to the Emerald City Costco and bought a broom. I mean, seriously, how would the Wizard ever know? He doesn’t do his own shopping. He never leaves his…wizard room.

Anyway, I found myself at 10:15 am on the morning of the guitar festival standing outside Jeffrey’s Antique Gallery in Findlay, Ohio, 45 minutes away from Toledo. Jeffrey’s is the sister store to the Heart of Ohio, and even though it’s not quite as big as the mother ship, it was the biggest place between my house and Toledo. It seemed like my best shot at either finding Practical Pig’s hat or a completely different vintage Pez head.

I was meeting a friend there, and that was a good thing. A trusty companion is an essential element in a good quest because if you go out questing on your own for too long, you tend to get a little weird. After all, a quest is really about getting completely obsessed with finding a somewhat trivial object, and at a certain point, you need someone who hasn’t been sucked into your quest to pull you out of it. You need to have a voice of reason so that you can be as unreasonable as you have to be to go on a quest in the first place. Without a trusty companion, you’re pretty much working without a net.

Of course, it doesn’t always work even if you do have a good, rational companion. I mean, look at Moby Dick. Starbuck spends the whole novel saying, “Look, Ahab, let’s just catch some whales and go home. We don’t need to be chasing that white one all over hell and back.” And you’d really think that Ahab would’ve listened to him considering that Moby Dick had already bitten off his leg. You’d just think Ahab would’ve learned not to mess with that whale. But of course, Ahab won’t listen, and he ends up getting pretty much everybody killed.

But think about how different the story would’ve been if Starbuck had said, “Look, enough with this white whale thing already. Do you not get that this fish is crazy?” and Ahab had said, “You’re right. I don’t know what I was thinking. That bastard whale already ate my leg. Let’s just go home.” It would’ve been a very different novel if Ahab had only listened to his companion. True, it wouldn’t be great literature, and no one would’ve had occasion to name an entire chain of coffee stores after the first mate, but at least the story would’ve had a happy ending.

Of course, in contemporary times, it seems like the trusty companion has fared a little better. Then again, maybe not. I mean, Goose is the voice of reason in Top Gun on Maverick’s insane quest to reclaim his family’s honor (which is kind of worthless since both his parents are dead and he himself has no children), and Maverick gets him killed. And then, of course, in Road House, Sam Elliot shows up as the trusty companion/mentor to Patrick Swayze, who is hell-bent on using his clout as a bouncer to bring true justice to some dipstick town of about 30 people…and Patrick Swayze gets him killed. So, maybe the moral of the story here is that the next time someone offers you a job as a trusty companion, you might want to think twice before you take it.

Anyway, I don’t think my friend had thought much about any of these issues because she agreed to meet me at Jeffrey’s Antiques and to go along on the final leg of the quest. And besides, I had no intention of ejecting her out of a fighter jet even if the quest did go bad. I mean, the woman has a family, for God’s sake. The only thing I wish is that we would’ve at least had some questing knight gear. But these days with all the heightened security around, no one is likely to let two women in metal helmets with swords pass without at least some suspicion. And beyond that, shopping in a suit of armor is harder than you might think.

At any rate, I had already gone into the store and converted at least one employee to my quest before my friend arrived. And as I was standing outside making a mental note to myself to start a ministry when I got home, she pulled up, and our quest began. And I have to say that as trusty quest companions go, she was really quite excellent, especially given the relative amount of danger she’d put herself in just by taking the job.

Jeffrey’s itself isn’t exactly the easiest store to navigate around in, and most antique malls are like that. In a way, they’re disorienting like casinos are, but they’re not that way on purpose. It’s just the enormous amount of stuff in every booth that makes it hard to take it all in. But I have to admit that my friend was even more diligent than I was when it came to looking through things. I was on hyper-quest by then. I had gotten to the point where I actually believed that if there was a vintage Pez dispenser in that place, it would call to me. I would be able to smell it from 50 feet away. I would hear tiny squeals coming from its tiny Pez head. So, you know, I had kind of lost my perspective. I was just using The Force at that point. But my trusty companion just kept moving along at a steady pace through the store while I attempted to commune with the great Pez god in the sky.

After we’d looked through every booth there, we had found only one Pez dispenser in the entire store. It was a Santa Claus, and it wasn’t as old as the one I already had. So, I started to get a little dejected. And it was then that my trusty companion did what the best trusty companions do: she reminded me that the object of the quest didn’t need to be perfect. I already had a vintage Pez head, and as she saw it, “That’s gotta get you something.” Translation: enough with the white whale already. And she was right. After all, it wasn’t like Jennifer Batten was holding my mother hostage and was going cut off her fingers unless I delivered an absolutely perfect vintage Pez dispenser. I mean, the whole adventure started with a tweet, not a ransom note. And I have to hand it to my friend—she was the voice of reason when I needed one.

As my trusty companion and I got into my car and continued our trek to Toledo, I realized that in an odd sort of way, the hatless Practical Pig kind of was the perfect Pez head to give to Jennifer Batten. After all, besides just playing the guitar and writing music, she also does glass art and steampunk sculpture. And she made most of the films that go with her songs. All in all, she’s a rather handy person, and if there was someone who really could make a cool hat for Practical Pig, it would be her. So, I guess that in the end, my quest had worked out in just the way that it should have. And maybe that’s why people go on adventures in the first place—just to see how things are going to turn out. In my case, things had really had turned out well, and at that point, all I had left to do was to walk up to Jennifer Batten, look her straight in the eye, and say, “Here’s your vintage Pez dispenser.” And if I could’ve just done that, it would’ve been great. But that, of course, Dear Readers, is a whole other story…

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

Tar-zen's Day Off - Part I

2011-03-25T23:26:00.007-04:00

Hello, Dear Readers. It’s good to see you.

This past week, I did something monumental: I left my house. For an entire day. And, OK, so maybe that doesn’t seem like such a watershed event, but then again, I’m the kind of person who, aside from occasionally finding myself semi-conscious at Lowe’s, really just leaves the house to buy groceries and do laundry…and basically I live next door to a grocery store and across the street from a laundromat. So, it’s not like I have to go that far. And it’s not like it’s that much of a safari, either. One time I was going to the store, and it started to rain, so I had to run. That’s about as exciting as its ever gotten.

I sometimes try to imagine what it would be like if I had a stalker. That person would die of boredom, I have no doubt, and the only way I’d even find out about it is if the pizza delivery guy showed up at my door one day and said, “Here’s your pizza. And there’s some dead guy lying out on your curb.” It would be like an opening scene from Law and Order, and in the end, I’d probably get arrested for depraved indifference to a maniac. And even if my stalker didn’t die of chronic ennui waiting for me to do something stalker-worthy, I’d probably just find a Post-It note stuck on my door one day that said, “I can’t take it anymore. I quit.”

Anyway, this week I decided to take a day off from my regularly-scheduled, rather sedate life and go to Toledo (Ohio, not Spain—I only took one day off, and besides, if I ever went to Spain, I’d call my stalker first just to let him know that there was hope for me yet). I went there for a guitar festival and to see Jennifer Batten play because I am definitely a fan of hers. But in the course of my journey, I discovered something: after a certain age, being a fan of anyone or anything is more difficult than you’d think because at a certain point, you just have to start making it up as you go along. But that, as it turns out, isn’t such a bad thing for someone like me.

Now, plenty of grown-ups like plenty of things, but being a “liker” is different than being a “fan.” The word “fan,” after all, is really just a shortened form of “fanatic,” and I don’t know too many grown-ups who like to describe themselves as “fanatics.” I mean, there’s just a certain point at which it begins to take on a negative spin that can get you into a whole lot of trouble with a whole lot of government agencies. Besides, adults are supposed to be level-headed and rational, and if there are two things you don’t usually see in a fanatic, it’s an even-temper and common sense.

Children are, of course, the best fans on earth because children are inherently fanatical. About everything. I mean, you can put kids down on a grassy patch, and they’ll start running around in circles screaming about how great grass is. And when you take them off the grass, they let out these blood-curdling screams like you’re just killing them…until, of course, you put them down on the pavement, at which point they become fanatical about that. Children have a ton of energy and really, really short attention spans, so they’re just tailor-made to be fans. All you have to do is point them in the right direction.

But imagine if adults had that kind of energy and distractibility. Imagine having the cubicle next to that guy. He’d spend all day running around in a circle in there screaming “I love this office! I love this office!” Imagine being in a staff meeting with someone who spends the whole time jumping up and down yelling, “I love this project! I love this project!” “But Jeffrey, we’re going to be done with it next week.” “No, but why? Why can’t we keep doing it? I’m doing it! I’m doing it more and you can’t stop me!” “But Jeffrey, the client—“ “I hate the client! He’s wrecking everything!” And then the wailing and the sobbing and the pleading would start. Eventually, he’d end up rolling around on the floor screaming while everyone else tried not to notice. “He does this every time we have a meeting.” “Just ignore him. He has to learn that he can’t always get his way.” “Yeah, but isn’t he our manager?”

Of course, as children turn into teenagers, things do start to change. Teenagers roll around on the floor less…or at least for different reasons. And being a fan starts to take on another dimension. Teenagers won’t be fans of just anything like children will be, and even when they are fans of somebody, they often won’t admit it because other teenagers might not think it’s cool. But that only lasts so long. At some point, teenage fans discover that they are not alone, and then all that repressed fanaticism boils over. There’s mass screaming and crying and swooning and fainting. And if they’re Justin Bieber fans, there are also usually a few death threats involved.

One of the strangest incarnations of teenage fanaticism, though, has to be the throwing of underwear at a performer during a concert. I think that happened to Elvis a lot, and as far as the Beatles went, it was like an undergarment bomb exploded every time they went on stage. A friend of mine told me that just recently, someone threw a bra at Joan Jett during a concert. So, you know, it happens, but you have to admit, the whole practice is a little strange. I mean, c’mon people—it’s underwear. If fans were throwing money or even coupons, that would be one thing. But it’s underwear, for Christ’s sake. What are you supposed to do with an entire stage covered with that? Just think of the safety issues.

It’s also strangely (and thankfully) a practice largely confined to teenage girls. I mean, can you see some guy lobbing a jock strap at Steven Tyler or Eric Clapton? Do you suppose John Lennon ever worried about getting beaned with a pair of boxer shorts? I don’t think even female performers have to worry about that kind of thing because from what I’ve seen, guys just aren’t that willing to part with their underwear. They’ll yell and scream and carry on, but they’re not giving up their drawers.

And luckily, it’s a totally age-related thing, too. After all, the bigger and more sensible you get, the bigger and more sensible your underwear gets, and at a certain point, you’re not just throwing your panties on stage; you’re tossing a big ol’ pair of grandma pants up there. And not only is there something that just seems offensive about that, there actually is something offensive about it. Imagine being a musician trying to play a song and having a pair of underwear the size of bed sheet come flying at you. It wouldn’t just be bothersome. It would be traumatic. “I keep having this nightmare, Doctor, and all I see are these huge underpants with big teeth and claws coming at me.” It would be a miracle if that performer was ever even able to get on a stage again.

As fans get a little bit older, they eventually just start taking over the look of whomever they happen to be into. When I was in college in the 80s, you had three choices: British punk, New Wave, or preppie. I bounced between New Wave and preppie because with New Wave, you got shoulder pads, and with preppie, you got Weejuns. It was very practical. I personally didn’t have enough safety pins to pull off punk, and wearing a mohawk involved putting too much gunk in my hair. Besides, I was from the suburbs. We didn’t really know what punk even was, but we were pretty sure it was scary and kind of bad. Of course, there were always a couple of Madonnas around then, too, and that was cool unless some Pat Benatars showed up, in which case there was likely to be a fight. My personal favorites were the people who were into Grace Jones. They were all men, of course, but at least they could work the look. And they went well with the Princes, who were, of course, all women.

After a certain point, though, the real world sets in and that kind of fandom gets impractical. After all, you can’t really show up for your job at the bank dressed in a Lady Gaga meat dress, and not too many people want stock advice from someone doing a gangsta rap look. I mean, when you get to the point where you have to dig your Day-Timer out of the crotch of your pants hanging somewhere down around your knees, you know it’s time to trade in your bling for a Blackberry. Past a certain age in life, you just have to accept the fact that dressing like a pimp is only appropriate if you actually are a pimp.

But that’s when being a fan starts to get hard because you have no plan to follow. Sure, there might be mass hysteria, but you’re too tired to participate in it for more than ten minutes. Besides, you might pull a muscle. And you’re no longer willing to risk getting your spleen bruised by standing directly in front of a giant stage speaker because while the physical pain would suck, the medical bills would kill you. And if you start screaming and yelling and carrying on like you did when you were a teenager, people will look at you funny…and then they’ll call the cops on you. And while I’m sure that being a 40 year-old woman dressed up as, say, Hannah Montana isn’t actually illegal in most states, I don’t know too many people who want to have their sorry asses dragged into a police station for questioning over it. So, the challenge of being a middle-aged fan is figuring out how to express your fanaticism without incurring a hospital bill or triggering a police investigation.

Then again, while it can be fraught with danger, the absolute lack of direction for fans over 40 is a really good thing for people like me because I’m really pretty terrible at being a fan. And I always have been. I wasn’t the kind of little kid you could put down on the lawn and watch run around screaming about what a wonderful thing grass is. I was allergic to grass. If you put me down on a patch of it, the only thing you got to watch was me getting hives. And I wasn’t the kind of teenage fan who ever even considered throwing a pair of underwear at a performer. I liked my underwear. I needed my underwear. And my mom would’ve killed me if she found out that I was just randomly throwing it at people because, hey, underwear is expensive, and it’s not like it grows on trees.

Ultimately, I think that being a fan over 40 is kind of like the great equalizer. It’s the point at which inherently terrible fans like me get to catch up. It’s where just saying, “I’m a fan” is enough to qualify you as a fan. The most you’ll ever have to do after that is enter your credit card numbers into the Ticketmaster website, and there’s certainly no reason for you to dress up or scream and carry on just to do that. But beyond even that, being a Jennifer Batten fan over 40 is kind of like sweet revenge for all incompetent fans everywhere. Batten is basically an electric guitar virtuoso who does a multi-media show, and the whole point of going to see her is that you show up, sit down, and shut up. You’re supposed to watch and listen. If you got up and started jigging around and screaming and flinging undergarments hither and yon, about half the audience would probably call the police. Hell, Jennifer Batten would probably stop and call the cops on you herself. If nothing else, you’d almost certainly get some of the most memorable WTF looks in music history. It’s the kind of situation where a calm fan is a good fan, and given that I am often positively inert, my prowess at being a fan is very nearly the stuff of legends.

So, this past weekend, I went to Toledo. I saw an amazing musician play an incredible show. But even more than that, I actually was a fan. And it was wonderful because what I discovered is that it’s virtually impossible to fail at being a fan when you’re over 40. No one expects anything from you. You just have to utter the magic phrase, “I’m a fan,” and you are one. Technically, you don’t even have to show up for anything. So if you do, it’s like you’re a super-fan. And for someone like me, that’s like heaven on earth. It’s the best of all possible worlds. Of course, the festival itself and all that the trip entailed would’ve made my imaginary stalker proud, and I would definitely have been someone worth following on that day and maybe even for several days before that. But that, Dear Readers, is a whole other story…

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

Space For The Papa

2011-03-18T23:36:00.010-04:00

Hello, Dear Readers. It’s good to see you.

Every now and then, I have these odd moments when I realize that I’m exactly like my parents. For the most part, of course, I like to believe that I’m my own person. I have my own ideas about how the world should work and about what’s important. My mother, for example, thinks that panicking is a complete and utter waste of time. I, however, believe that panicking is a skill that should be practiced and practiced often, even if it means freaking out over pretty much nothing at all. And I have my own concerns, too. I mean, my father worries about things like running out of empty cardboard boxes and bungee cords; I worry about things like renting an apartment and having the landlord tell me that I should definitely let him know “if the snakes come back.” So, in as far as being your own person means having your own problems, I’m definitely my own person.

Then again, it’s not so strange to think that I’m going to be like my parents in some ways. After all, these are the first people who took a shot at defining “normal” for me, and the older I get, the more I realize that there is a distinct possibility that my parents had no clue what they were talking about when they did it. In our family, “normal” really just means “not radically abnormal,” and even if something falls into the “radically abnormal” category, we’re still kind of willing to keep it around if it’s not too dangerous and sort of fun.

I mean, as kids, my little sister and I used to buy rolls of caps even though neither of us had a cap gun. We’d just lay out the rolls in the backyard and hit them with a metal bar. And occasionally, we’d scream and yell, too. We figured that if we did it just right, the neighbors would think there was gunplay at our house. I don’t know why we wanted them to think that, but we did. Of course, we also used to tack bottle caps onto the bottoms of our tennis shoes and walk around pretending we were wearing golf cleats. So, we were a little strange, but then again, one of our friends down the street was a boy who used to come over and dress up in my mom’s old evening gowns, and I guess that in the ultimate scheme of things, being a gun-toting golfer kind of paled in comparison to being a pre-pubescent transvestite. But he was a nice kid, and in all honesty, he could pull off a red strapless dress better than anyone else in the neighborhood. And that counted for something with us.

Anyway, one of the many, many odd things that my father used to do was to go out and wander aimlessly through Pay ‘N Pak. And that’s exactly how he termed it. He wasn’t going over to Pay ‘N Pak to get a few things. He wasn’t going out to buy some stuff. He was going to “wander aimlessly through Pay ‘N Pak.” And that’s exactly what he did, too. I don’t think my mom ever had to worry about anything with him except that he was going to spend every penny they had buying stuff there.

One day, I’d been out with my dad running some errands, and as we were getting ready to head home, he looked over at me and said, “Let’s go wander aimlessly through Pay ‘N Pak.” I, of course, agreed. I mean, being asked to accompany my dad on a trip to Pay ‘N Pak was like being invited to go on a safari with British royalty. In my family, it was an absolute honor second only to being allowed to use the lawnmower.

Anyway, we headed off toward the gleaming green sign in the distance. Now, what Pay ‘N Pak actually was is a little hard to describe. In some ways, it was like the forerunner of Lowe’s and Home Depot in that they specialized in building materials. But they also carried auto parts and sporting goods, and really, there was no telling what you might find there. It was one of the original stores aimed at the residential do-it-yourself crowd, and they had pretty much everything you would need for that. They were really one of the first warehouse stores around, and going there was quite an adventure, especially with my dad.

So, we went in, and I quickly discovered that my dad wasn’t lying about the “wandering aimlessly” part of that trip. We just went from aisle to aisle looking at things and just getting more and more sucked into the experience. It was what my wide-eyed, 10 year-old brain imagined an acid trip would be like. You see, one of the ways that my father and I are alike is that whenever we see some object, we immediately start thinking of things we could make with it. And of course, Pay ‘N Pak was filled with nothing but things you could make things with. So, there we were, mesmerized to the point of hypnosis by displays of plumbing supplies and endless rolls of electrical wiring and shiny, shiny tools, and at one point, I think my father may have had to loan me his handkerchief to wipe a little drool off my chin.

Finally, we ended up in front of a large bin full of some kind of electrical switches and gadgets that were on clearance. I didn’t know what any of them did, but I thought they were very pretty with all their different colored wires and clicking switches. I wanted all of them, and if I had had any money when I was a kid, that’s where it would’ve gone. Anyway, my dad sorted carefully through the bin for a while and finally picked out some to buy. While we were waiting in the check-out line, I turned to him and asked, “What are those things anyway?” He held one up, turned it over a few times, clicked its switches, and then said, “I have no idea.” I’m pretty sure that’s why he felt he needed a whole bag of them.

Anyway, I was thinking back to that adventure the other day when a Lowe’s employee tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Can I help you find something?” I was standing in front of a wood paneling display with absolutely no recollection of how I’d gotten there. I vaguely remembered entering the store and seeing that I had a tube of vinyl floor adhesive in my hand, I assumed that I must’ve been fully conscious of my surroundings at some point, but somewhere between the grout aisle and a whole row of rubber tubing, I’d just been sucked into the zone. So, I had wandered trance-like through the store until that employee brought me back. “Is there something I can help you with?” Of course, one part of my brain was like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly screaming “Help me! Help me!” but the bigger part of my brain was busy wondering how hard it would be to panel the ceiling of my apartment with genuine simulated wood grain aluminum, so all I was able to get out was, “No, I’m fine.”

I’m not really sure of what happened next. I only remember it in flashes. Kitchen cabinets, closet organizers, plywood sheets, washer/dryer sets, venetian blinds, rebar, table saws, cases of batteries, rows of light bulbs, it’s all a blur to me. And I don’t know how long I was in there, either. All I know is that when I went in, it was light out, and when I got home, it was dark. And I had a tube of floor adhesive, some silicon grout, a deluxe painter’s tool, a mini brush set, and a plastic storage case. I felt like Anthony Perkins in The Manchurian Candidate, only everything was more beautiful and Angela Lansbury wasn’t there.

It wasn’t until I finally got around to thinking about the project I had to do, though, that I realized the way in which I am exactly like my father: we are both on the universal quest for space. And by “space” I don’t mean the Final Frontier. I mean “storage.” After all, you can only buy so many curious gadgets and electrical devices at Pay ‘N Pak, bring home so many cars and motorcycles from police auctions, and drag so much lumber out of dumpsters at construction sites before you find that you have no place to put all that stuff. And that’s when the real challenge begins, and you realize that you have to create some storage space.

Now, my goal in life is to containerize everything I own. I could happily live in a house made of nothing but clearly labeled Rubbermaid storage bins. In fact, if I ever have a house, I want it to have giant flaps that come down all around it and tie together at the bottom. And I’m going to install an enormous handle on the roof. Basically, I want it to be like I’m living in my mother’s purse. That way, if I decide to move, I can just pick up my whole house with a crane and put it down somewhere else. That’s my dream in life. I want to live in a giant carrying case.

My parents, though, have been a little more realistic about their storage issues. My dad always has a stack of empty cardboard boxes at the ready, and he can build shelves out of virtually anything. All the houses my parents have owned have had unfinished basements, and without fail, the first thing my father did to all those spaces was build closets. In fact, in one house, he never finished the rest of the basement. He just built two huge closets, and as far as he was concerned, the basement was finished.

In the house my parents live in now, they really sort of outdid even themselves. The place already had an attic and space above the garage, but in addition to the two garden sheds they built in the backyard, they also added a whole other room on the side of the house. And it’s a big room, too. In terms of square footage, I think it’s bigger than my whole apartment. And nearly one-third of it is taken up by two gigantic closets, which were, of course, the first things my father built. In fact, I think that if my mother hadn’t been involved with building the addition, there would just be four bare walls, a plywood floor, and those two beautiful closets.

But probably the most outstanding thing about the addition is what’s underneath it. My parents dug out a four-foot hole under the entire room and left it as a crawl space to use for storage. The only problem is that they didn’t put a door on it. Now, in their defense, part of the addition is built next to what used to be an exterior wall, and since the crawl space is underground, they would’ve had to dig the hole about five feet deeper if they wanted to put a door from the basement into it. And I just don’t think they wanted to go to that much trouble. Besides, if they had done that, then the crawl space would’ve just become an unfinished part of the basement, and my dad would’ve just built a closet in it. So, the rest of the space would’ve gone to waste.

As it stands now, some brave soul who is immune to being repeatedly bitten by spiders has to climb in there through what used to be a basement window. No one in my actual family will do it, but it’s usually possible to pay off some unsuspecting neighborhood teenager to go in. Once. Failing that, my parents have had good luck in talking my ex-brother-in-law into taking the plunge, which is quite the feat given that at 6’6”, he’s probably not the easiest person in the world for my parents to shove through a basement window.

The thing is that I can just imagine some archeologists 2000 years from now doing an excavation and discovering my parents’ house. They would no doubt believe that my parents were some kind of royalty just based on the amount of stuff they had stored around. And when they uncovered the crawl space, they would be certain that they had stumbled upon a treasure room just like the one in King Tut’s tomb. They might even find my ex-brother-in-law’s mummified body in there. Then the whole collection would be put on display in a museum, and people would come from far and wide and would pay good money just to gaze at a discarded oscilloscope, our old Christmas tree, a tiny stuffed alligator, and ten PC Jrs.

Of course, all that really makes you wonder if everything we think we know about the ancient Egyptians is wrong. Maybe they were just people like my parents. I mean, maybe the Sphinx was just the ancient equivalent of a lawn ornament that someone picked up at a scratch-and-dent clearance at the ancient version of Costco. Maybe all those gold trinkets were just mystery gadgets from the ancient prototype for Pay ‘N Pak. Maybe the Pharaohs were just nice people living in the suburbs who figured, “Well, we might as well get some stuff since we’ve got this whole pyramid to fill up.” I can just picture a bunch of ancient Egyptian settlers trying to escape from the rat race of city life standing out in the desert in t-shirts that say “Go big or go home.”

I, myself, don’t have a suburban pyramid. I live in an apartment the size of a coffee cup, and in fact, my current stock of building supplies is just for sticking the edge of the kitchen floor back down. But after I’ve got the floor back where it belongs, I’ve got a 1950s metal cabinet just waiting to be moved over there and filled up with stuff. So, I can’t work on the grand scale that my father, the true master of space, does, but I’ve definitely got the potential. And it’s funny that as much time as we spend as adults convincing ourselves that we’re nothing like the people who raised us, the simple truth is that every now and then, we’re exactly like them. And there’s something sort of nice about that because a family tradition, no matter what kind of foible or downright nutty thinking it’s based on, is still a family tradition. And I think it’s good to pass something more than just your genes down the generational line. But beyond all that, when you really stop to think about it, there’s just a certain amount of practicality to it all. I mean, I don’t know about you, Dear Readers, but I don’t know too many people who couldn’t make good use of a little more closet space.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

With a Little Luck...

2011-03-11T23:28:00.003-05:00

Hello, Dear Readers. It’s good to see you.

A couple of days ago, I was listening to a song called “Hooligan’s Holiday,” and it reminded me that St. Patrick’s Day is coming right up. Now, I have to admit that I’ve never had any great feeling for St. Patrick’s Day. When I was a kid, all it meant was that you had to wear a green shirt to school or all the other kids would pinch you. In fact, some of them would walk right up and slap you. And to me, an entire day devoted to avoiding bodily harm just isn’t much of a holiday, especially if you’re not even Irish.

Of course, when I got into college, St. Patrick’s Day was more of a “drink-at-will” kind of thing. It was perfectly fine to be drunk at ten o’clock in the morning on that day. But then again, it was college. It was pretty much OK to be drunk by ten o’clock in the morning on any day. So, it’s not like St. Patrick’s was all that big a thing.

After I graduated and got my first professional job, St. Patrick’s became one of those holidays whose hype kind of outweighed its reality. It was fun, of course, to think about going out to a bar with your co-workers and having a few beers, but the problem was that most of time, St. Patrick’s occurred on a weekday. So that meant that you’d be sitting at your desk paying for that night out all the next day.

You could always call in sick, but it doesn’t take a genius employer to figure out that anyone who calls in sick on the day after St. Patrick’s Day isn’t really sick. I mean, you can make up a good excuse like you have an ear infection or something, but trust me, it won’t work. Even if you actually have an ear infection.

And sure, you could just try being honest about it. I did that once, actually. I was working for a guy I’d known since graduate school, and I’d been out partying the night before. So, I just called in and said that I was too hung over to come to work. I thought he was going to fire me on the spot. The next thing I knew, I was just blathering out a veritable smorgasbord of more reputable symptoms and illnesses: “Did I say I was hung over? I’m sorry, I meant to say that I’ve got an ear infection…and a worrisome growth on my arm…and I can’t see out of my left eye…and I was bitten by a rabid dog.” And, OK, I just threw the rabies thing in at the end out of sheer desperation, but I personally think it’s what ultimately saved my job. I mean, no one is going to take the chance of making someone who might have rabies come to work. At any rate, I learned an important lesson from the experience: the truth is a powerful thing. Don’t use it unless you have to.

These days, I think I’ve reached a point where drinking just takes more effort than I want to put into it. I mean, if I go out, I have to put on clean clothes and iron a shirt. I have to make sure I’m wearing matching socks…or that I’m wearing socks at all. I have to go to the ATM and get some money. And since I’m at an age where the letters “DUI” actually mean something to me, I have to figure out how I’m going to get to and from the bar. And considering that I can’t be bothered on most days to go check my mailbox in the entryway downstairs, going out to a bar is a project somewhat akin to climbing Mount Everest for me. Just thinking about it is making me want to go lie down for a while.

But beyond that, I think I don’t go out on St. Patrick’s Day because of leprechauns. I don’t find them scary in quite the same way that I find Cupid terrifying, largely because they don’t seem as prone to physical violence and can’t fly, but leprechauns are just confusing. And given that I take my cue on how to celebrate holidays based on what their holiday characters do, that kind of confusion is not a good thing.

I mean, leprechauns aren’t jolly. And jolliness is kind of important in a holiday character. Think about what Christmas would be like if Santa was just some crabby old crank. He’d come tumbling down your chimney, throw some presents at your tree, and complain about the cookies you left for him. He’d probably give your presents a good, swift kick before he left, spit on your stockings before he climbed back out, and pry a couple of shingles off your roof just for good measure before he took off. Luckily that isn’t what happens, but it points out just how important Santa’s general level of jolliness actually is. If he wasn’t jolly, he’s just be a fat guy on a rampage breaking into your house.

But leprechauns aren’t jolly or even particularly friendly. They’re solitary woodland fairy-people. They hang out in the forest and make shoes. They don’t want to know where you live, and they don’t want you to know where they live. They don’t want to come to your house, and they don’t want you coming to their houses. They don’t even like to hang out with each other. So what’s that supposed to tell us about celebrating St. Patrick’s Day? That it’s best if you just spend it at home drinking by yourself and resoling your loafers?

And leprechauns also aren’t proactive, and that’s actually a bigger deal in a holiday character than you’d think. I mean, Halloween witches aren’t exactly friendly, but they’re decisive. They’re going to seek you out and scare the crap out of you. That’s their deal. They take action. And the Easter Bunny doesn’t wait around for people to ask for a basket of candy. You don’t have to put in a request or send a letter. He just brings you an Easter basket. Even if you’re diabetic…or Jewish. Witches, the Easter Bunny—these are not holiday characters who wait around waiting for something to happen. They spring into action. They provide guidance for people like me.

But leprechauns spend most of their time running away from people. They have no plan for you. They don’t even want to know you. So, what’s the message here? That beyond sitting on your couch drinking alone and fixing your shoes, you should also refuse to answer the phone? If someone comes to your door, you should hide in the closet? What kind of a holiday is that?

And don’t even try to kid yourself into believing that leprechauns are on your side. They aren’t. They don’t give a rip about your happiness or well-being. I mean, Santa wants you to be nice, and he’s willing to bribe you with presents for it. The Pilgrims want you to be thankful, and they’re willing to feed you to get that. The Easter Bunny wants you to eat candy, so he brings you some candy. And Cupid wants you to fall in love, so he shoots you in the chest to get you there.

But leprechauns just want you to leave them alone. They aren’t going to search you out. They don’t want to give you their secret pots of gold. They already don’t like you, and they’re not trying to hide it. They’re not really against you (because that would involve being pro-active), but make no mistake—they’re not for you, either. They really have no investment in you at all. They just don’t want you to steal their pots of gold. So, if you take your cue from the leprechauns, you just spend St. Patrick’s Day at home alone, drinking, putting new soles on your shoes, fearing that you’re going to get robbed, and alternately hiding from the phone and your own front door.

All in all, I think that if you follow the leprechauns’ example, you’re going to have a pretty crappy St. Patrick’s Day. But luckily, most people don’t follow the leprechauns. Most people go out and get drunk with total strangers. They’re very social. And they don’t worry about losing their pots of gold. In fact, many people lose their wallets and car keys at some point during the drunken revelry and don’t even notice. And people don’t hide when the phone rings. I mean, if you’ve had enough to drink, you’ll randomly answer someone else’s phone, and the only reason you’ll hang out in a closet is if someone else is in there with you.

When you really think about it, most people do the exact opposite of what the leprechauns do on St. Patrick’s Day. And maybe that’s the point. I mean, if you look at the history of Ireland, the list of other countries and groups that have had a boot on the neck of the Irish people is long and distinguished. And yet the Irish themselves just refuse to be squished. They just keep getting back up, and there’s really something admirable about that. Maybe not following the leprechauns is what the holiday is really about. So, maybe this year I’ll break with my own slugabed tradition, iron my favorite green shirt, and go out for a beer. After all, there is a saying that on St. Patrick’s Day, everyone is Irish. And, you know, there just may be something to that.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

Over the Airwaves...

2011-03-04T23:42:00.005-05:00

Hello, Dear Readers. It’s good to see you.

This past week has been, well, kind of boring. Here in the Midwest, we’ve had rain nearly every day, and even when it hasn’t been raining, the sun hasn’t been out much. But I think weeks like this one offer a great opportunity to sit back and reflect on life. You have time to relax and reconnect with the things you love. And for me, reconnecting with what I love means only one thing: television.

I love television. I really do. I’ll happily sit through a four-hour layover in any airport anywhere as long as there’s TV. I’ll visit a total stranger in the hospital if the room has a television. And while I’m not entirely sure there is such a thing as the afterlife, I know that if there is one, there’s going to be TV. I can’t possibly imagine eternity without it.

Television is to me what Facebook is to a teenager, only in some ways, I think it’s even better because you don’t really have to interact with TV. It won’t cyberbully you or let you drunk-post embarrassing nude pictures of yourself. It doesn’t think you’re a jerk. It doesn’t think you’re anything. It’s a television.

The only interaction you’re likely to have with it is changing the channel from time to time. You can talk to it, of course, but trust me, it won’t talk back. It’ll just keep making noise and showing you pictures because it’s like the Terminator: “That’s what it does. That’s all it does. And it will not stop until you are dead.” And even then, the cable company will probably keep sending you a bill.

But more than just a continual stream of sight and sound, one thing that I know for sure is that television has radically affected the way that I see the world. I feel, for example, no need whatsoever to travel to any place I’ve ever seen on TV. Why would I? I’ve already seen it. I mean, I saw a program on Borneo once, so as far as I’m concerned, I already know what I need to know about that place. And what I know about that place is that it seems kind of humid and has a lot of bats in it. That’s enough Borneo-related information for me. If there’s more to be known, I’m sure someone will produce a show about it.

Beyond that, though, I think TV has also helped me to understand others better throughout my life. When I was in 9^th grade, for example, a kid from New York transferred into our high school, and I think he was from either Brooklyn or Queens. And right there, I was just sure that his father was a cab driver. That, of course, made perfect sense to me. In the late ‘70s, Taxi was one of the most popular sitcoms around, and where was it set? New York. And beyond that, it seemed like every cop show I watched was set in New York and always featured a cab driver who’d seen something suspicious or remembered having dropped off a blood-soaked man somewhere in a bad neighborhood.

Of course, there were other cop shows set in other places in that era. Hawaii Five-O was on, and The Streets of San Francisco was around, too. But I didn’t know anyone from Hawaii, and all I ever got from The Streets of San Francisco was the distinct impression that the entire city was uphill in every direction…and that it needed to be painted. So, I couldn’t really connect with the non-New York police dramas. Besides, it just seemed like there was better TV crime in New York.

Anyway, I was convinced that this kid’s father was a cab driver because to me, there were only three kinds of people living in New York: police detectives, cab drivers, and victims. Those were the choices. (I thought all criminals on TV were just from “somewhere else”). And I don’t know why I didn’t think the kid’s father wasn’t a police officer except that the kids in our school whose parents were in law enforcement usually either talked a lot about it or were total delinquents who no one ever saw because they spent all day everyday in the principal’s office. This kid just showed up for English class every day and did his homework. Other than that, he was mystery. So, to me, that was proof positive that his dad drove a taxi.

I suppose that I could’ve just asked him, but here’s the thing: when he first arrived at school, our teacher had him introduce himself. So, he said who he was and told a little bit about himself. There was a quiet hush after he spoke, and then we all quietly turned to each other and whispered, “What did he say?” He had such a thick New York accent that no one in our class of suburban Denver kids could understand a thing he said. From what I remember of him, he was a nice enough kid. But then again, he could’ve been saying the most horrible stuff, and I never would’ve known. Whenever I talked to him, I just smiled and nodded. There are few things that TV doesn’t prepare you for, but an authentic regional accent is one of them.

Of course, it never dawned on me either that no one in his or her right mind would leave a job as a cab driver in New York to take up the same profession in the suburbs of Denver. In my neighborhood, cabs were regarded much like long distance was: rare and expensive. I mean, there could be any level of hullabaloo going on at my house, but it took only three words to bring everyone to immediate, reverend silence: “it’s long distance.” And the same thing went for cabs. Any distance under 30 or 40 miles that could be traversed by foot did not require a taxi as far as anyone in my neighborhood was concerned. It was just too expensive. According to my father, just going from our house to the airport would’ve required a second mortgage. And that must’ve been the common opinion because the only cabs I ever saw as a kid were on TV, and I was well into college before I actually rode in one. So, I can’t imagine how anyone could’ve made a living as a cab driver in the suburbs back then. You would’ve had to have charged $1000 a mile just to break even.

These days, I recognize that television may be a little slanted in its presentation, but I’m still sort of unconsciously swayed by it. To this day, I’ve never been to New York. At this point, I’ve seen so much Law and Order that I firmly believe that every New Yorker starts the day by tripping over a dead body lying on the stoop or out in the street. I mean, seriously, don’t the police ever find any of these dead people first? Can’t the cops just patrol around late at night looking for corpses so that everyone’s morning commute can start off on a more positive note?

Anyway, I think one of the other things that I really love about TV (and there are so many things that it’s actually difficult to choose) is that it’s comforting. Many is the time, for example, that I’ve turned on the Doppler channel and just watched the weather loop play over and over again. It’s very relaxing, especially if you mute the sound so you don’t have to listen to all those annoying severe weather alerts.

But I have to admit that when it comes to being comforted by my television, nothing works quite as well as a good infomercial. Of course, to get a good infomercial, you have to stay up until around 4 am, but it’s worth it. You’ll drift off to sleep believing that not only will tomorrow be a great day but also that every delicious moment of the goodness is well within your grasp.

Now, one thing you have to understand about TV commercials in general is that the audience basically breaks down into three categories: people with money, people with debt, and people with problems.

Commercials aimed at people with money tend to air at a certain time: when people who have jobs aren’t at them. They’re usually commercials for cars or electronics or beer. Now, you’d probably think that beer commercials would be better aimed at people with debt and people with problems, but beer companies are smart. They know that people with debt don’t have any money to buy beer. And they know that people with problems can’t usually drink because it interferes with their medication. People with money can afford to buy beer, and once they’re drunk, they can afford to impulse buy a bunch of other stuff. So, it’s kind of a win-win situation.

People with debt are a whole other story. Most of the commercials aimed toward them are ads for legal services, and they have a kind of help-I’m-slipping-down-the-side-of-a-big-hole sense of desperation about them. They’re just about scaring you into action, and they usually give you some nightmarish visuals to underscore the tragedy that is your life. It’s always stuff like someone losing an arm at work. All your belongings going up in a huge ball of flame. The police running your sorry ass into the station. Your children being chased by rats. You know, that sort of thing. A few pictures and some screaming. That’s all it really takes.

It’s less about debt than it is about the consequences of having debt, and not surprisingly, most of these commercials air in the afternoon during all the judge shows. I guess the advertisers figure that if your life is so tragic that you’re just sitting at home watching hour after hour of judge shows (and crying), you’re ripe for being terrorized by the mere suggestion of how much worse your life could get if you don’t call this toll-free number right now.

To find the commercials geared toward people with problems, though, you have do a little looking because these are the ads that take up most of extremely late-night television. You have to be up at 3 or 4 am in the morning to really bask in the magic that is this kind of advertising. But then again, I think the advertisers must figure that if you’ve got problems, you can’t sleep. So, you’ll be up. Unless, of course, your problems are debt-related, in which case, you might be awake, but you’re probably hiding under the bed and can’t see the TV anyway.

Commercials for people with problems come in a variety of forms. They can be regular-length ads or infomercials. They can be about cosmetics, financial freedom, fitness, cooking, cutlery, vacuuming sealing, air filtering, whatever. It really doesn’t matter because in the end, they all address the same problem: you’re dissatisfied with who you are and the stinking life you got. You want more. And you don’t even really care what it is or who sells it to you. You probably don’t even want to buy the product. You just want someone to explain it to you. Over and over again in a calm, predictable way. And that’s where infomercials shine.

And that’s what I love about infomercials—they are absolutely predictable. Nothing ever goes wrong like it does in real life. You can saw a suspension bridge in half, and this knife will still cut through a tomato. You can pollute the air in this sealed chamber with plutonium, and this air filter will still make it clean enough for babies to breathe. You can take a turkey that’s been buried at the North Pole for 10 years, and this countertop oven will still cook it in only 18 minutes. The high-torque blenders never spin off their bases and spew avocado and mayonnaise all over the place. The cosmetics never give anyone an itchy, peely rash. The fitness programs never result in pulled muscles and torn ligaments. The workbenches never collapse under the weight of half-ton truck, and the spiral saws never go awry and saw through a live electrical wire. In The Magic Land of Infomercials, nothing ever doesn’t work exactly the way it should.

And I think it’s that promise of cosmic order that most appeals to people with problems. The minute Ron Popeil says, “But wait, there’s more,” you just want to fall on your knees and cry out, “Yes, Ron, yes, there is more! There is more!” And suddenly you believe in better living through cutlery. You’re convinced that the key to happiness is in being able to vacuum seal everything you own. And if you had a spiral saw and a sturdy workbench, you would surely build a yacht and sail away, sipping all the while on delicious frozen drinks in their own mugs that take only 10 seconds to make.

Life in The Magic Land of Infomercials is beautiful and calm, and you really do sort of have to love that because real life is real messy for the most part. Things blow up in real life. They catch on fire. They self-destruct. But that never happens on an infomercial, and even if you’re like me and never actually buy anything off TV, just having someone explain (at length) how beautiful life could be will send you off to sleep better than a glass of warm milk. Ron Popeil doesn’t look anything like my mother (thank God), but he can tuck me in just as well.

Back when we were little kids, my sisters and I used to laugh about the fact that our grandfather had a TV in virtually every room. It was funny because when television first started to become popular in the 1950s, he swore he’d never own a set. But there is something about TV that just gets to you. I grew up eating dinner with Mary Tyler Moore once a week and running home at lunchtime in the summer to see Perry Mason win a case. These days, I’ll stay up until 2am just to see Captain Picard save the universe and to watch Tim Allen figure out that he’s being a jerk for the millionth time. Television is just a part of my life, and it’s not a bad part, either. So, it rains, it snows, it hails—whatever. Somewhere on my TV, the sun is shining, and that’s all I need to know. Well, that and where I put the remote control.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

Under Your Wing...

2011-02-26T13:54:00.001-05:00

Hello, Dear Readers. It’s good to see you.

The other day, I was rereading some of the comments that various readers have left for various posts, and I came upon one left by the ever-delightful Jan4 that said that she now wanted an entire army of flying babies. Well, OK, so that’s scary in and of itself, but it did get me started thinking about the idea of having my own private army to do some things for me that I don’t particularly want to do for myself.

Now, an army of flying babies would have its pros and cons. Imagine walking into a Bed, Bath, and Beyond or a Pottery Barn with a whole army of flying babies. At first, people would just think that the babies were sweet and cuddly. They’d point upward and say, “Look at all those little babies flying around. Aren’t they cute?” And no one would bug you or your army because everyone would think that the babies were so delightful. That would definitely be a plus. After all, babies really are cute…until, of course, they turn mean. And that could be both a pro and a con. If the babies turned mean because they had to protect you, that would be good. That’s their job. But what if all the babies just got tired and cranky because they needed a nap? Then they’d just start screaming and attacking at random like a swarm of angry bees. They’d be totally out of control, and that would not be good. You’d probably end up getting trampled in a mass stampede along with everyone else who was trying to get away from those winged little horrors.

And what if the babies needed a diaper change? You’d have to bring down your entire army because someone made a boom-boom. And that would just be embarrassing, not to mention time-consuming. So, a whole army of flying babies has its promise, but in the end, it’s maybe not the best strategy.

So, what kind of people would make the best private army? Well, I don’t know, and to be honest, I may not be the best person to consider this question because the only experience I have with running my own army is from a game I used to play with my sisters called “Kingdoms.”

Now, as children, we owned pretty much every board game made, even some of the more obscure ones. We had a game, for example, called “Careers,” and the idea was that as you went around the board, you landed on squares for different professions and either made or lost money depending on that. You could go around once, become a doctor, and make $300,000, in which case, nothing else that happened in the entire game could possibly have that much effect on you. Or you could end up becoming a dock worker whose pension fund gets audited by the IRS, in which case, you spend the rest of the game trying to help your union pay off its legal bills. I really think a better name for that game would’ve been “Fate” or maybe “You and Your Stinkin’ Bad Luck.” I mean, it was really pretty hardcore for the age-10-and-under set.

Anyway, after my sisters and I would play a board game a couple of times, we would get tired of it, so we would think of other ways to use the games. That’s what Kingdoms was about. You chose a couple of board games, and out of all the pieces, you made up a kingdom. My older sister’s kingdom was always a place of sound economic principles and prosperity for all. She worked out trade deals with the other kingdoms and was generally a good corporate citizen. My kingdom always operated on more of an isolationist policy. In fact, we were absolute xenophobes. We wanted nothing to do with the other kingdoms, and to be honest, it’s kind of amazing that my sisters continued to include me in the game since my idea of playing was just to go off in a corner, set up my kingdom, and then announce our core foreign policy: leave us alone.

My younger sister’s kingdom probably brought the most excitement to the game. They were always barbaric, war-like people who would just randomly attack the other kingdoms for no reason at all. They didn’t want your land. They didn’t want your goods and services. They just wanted to attack you. And they usually didn’t even bother to declare war on you first. They just marched over and said, “Hi. We’re here to attack you.” And then it was like, “Let the plunder begin!” My older sister’s kingdom spent all their time trying to negotiate with my little sister’s kingdom. My kingdom spent all its time trying to invent a cloaking device.

So, I don’t really know that I’m the best person to be considering who should be in a private army, but then again, having had quite a bit of experience with being on the wrong end of a plundering, I suppose I have some unique insights.

My first thought was that the perfect private army people would be Justin Bieber fans. After all, they can read, write, do math, and feed themselves. So, right off the bat, they’re a better choice than flying babies. And they’re insanely loyal, which, let’s face it, babies aren’t. Babies will go where the food is. They’re like that.

The only problem is that some of the Bieber fans are mean. Really mean. These are middle-school girls who will go on Twitter and make death threats. And when you stop to think about organizing these girls into an army, well, that’s maybe not such a good idea. I mean, personally, I think it’s only a matter of time until the Bieber fans turn on Bieber. After all, he’s not Peter Pan; he’s going to grow up eventually. And I can’t imagine that anything would piss the Bieber fans off more than that. He’ll probably fall in love one day and want to settle down and start a family and all that stuff, and at that point, the Bieberites will just turn on him. They’ll set upon him like a pack of wild dogs. So, yeah, they’re loyal, but it’s kind of difficult to really determine what they’re loyal to. And that could be a problem.

My next thought was of a private army made up of Heidi Klum clones. Now, that would be something because they wouldn’t be mean. They wouldn’t have to be. They’d be beautiful, so they could get away with anything. Imagine if they came to plunder on my behalf. They’d show up and say, “Give us your land and your goods,” and the plunderees would just say, “No, please, you’re so beautiful. Just take this stuff with our compliments. And if it’s not enough, please feel free to come back and enslave us. We’d enjoy that. We really would.”

But at a certain point, the Heidi Klum clones would inevitably become self-aware, and that would be a problem. They’d wake up one day and say, “Hey, wait a minute. We’re beautiful German supermodel clones. We can have anything we want, so what the hell are we doing wasting our time plundering on your behalf?” In fact, the Heidi Klum clone army would probably end up insisting that I plunder for them…and bring them bottled water and fresh fruit every 15 minutes. So, ultimately, that plan probably wouldn’t work out so well, either.

After that, I decided to give it one more shot. I wracked my brains trying to think of who would make the perfect soldier in my private army. Then finally it came to me: Rocky Balboa. He’d be perfect—he’d have no tiresome moral or ethical issues about plundering (he was, after all, a leg-breaker for a loan shark in the first Rocky), he’d be loyal but not delusional about it, and if anything, he’d become less self-aware as time went by. After all, as Apollo Creed pointed out to him in Rocky III, “It doesn’t take a man to stand there and get your head beat off,” (and really, have truer words ever been spoken quite so poetically?), yet Rocky is exactly the kind of guy who would stand there and get his head beat off if you told him to. So reaching a point of self-awareness at which he would turn on you would become less and less of an issue as he incurred more and more brain damage.

There would only be one real problem with Rocky, though: you can’t get Rocky without getting Adrian, too. And frankly, that woman is just a buzzkill. I mean, in every Rocky movie except the first one (well, and the last one, of course, because the writers finally just killed her so she isn’t in that one), about half the plot is Adrian having a big problem with Rocky fighting. And we all know it’s stupid because all the movies are about Rocky fighting. I mean, no one is going to pay good money to see Adrian talk Rocky into becoming an accountant.

So, if I had a whole army of Rocky Balboas, I’d decide that we should go plunder somewhere, but then Adrian would have a big problem with it, and Rocky would have to tell her that as a man, his job is to protect and to plunder and that he never asked her to stop being a woman (whose job is apparently just to complain), so she shouldn’t ask him to stop being a man. And then she’d remind him that the doctor said he couldn’t plunder anymore or he’d go blind, but then he’d start training for it anyway, and Mickey would show up and tell him that “for a 45-minute plunder, you gotta train hard for 45 thoooouuusssaaannnd minutes, and you ain’t even trained hard for one.” Then Adrian would slip into a coma for three or four days, and when she woke up, she’d look at Rocky in a close-up, soft-focus shot and say, “There’s only one thing I want you to do for me. Plunder, Rocky, plunder!”

Of course, by then, I probably wouldn’t be in the mood for it anymore. So, we’d forget about the whole thing for a week or two. And by the time I decided that I wanted to go out and wreak havoc with my army again, Adrian would’ve reverted back to her old self, and we’d have to go through the whole thing all over again. So, an army of Rockys would never actually do anything but generate emotional turmoil. And I’m just not up for that. I can generate enough emotional turmoil all on my own, thank you very much.

I finally thought that maybe part of the problem with having a private army was the plundering part, so I thought that I’d just try to concentrate on having a private protection army. So, my first task in creating it was to decide what exactly I thought I needed to be protected from. But when I really thought about it, I realized that these days, I don’t leave the house unless I absolutely have to, so I don’t feel threatened by all that many things. There’s the usual threatening stuff of course—cold and flu viruses, dry flaky skin, Don Knotts, lima beans—you know, the normal things people worry about encountering at home and are never fully prepared to deal with. But with the exception of Don Knotts, I don’t know that those threats really warrant an entire army. I mean, how many people does it take to hand me a cold pill or squeeze out some moisturizer? How big an army do I need to dispose of a lima bean?

In the end, I just decided that being self-sufficient is better, and I’d love to say that I came to that conclusion through a beautiful realization of my power. But really it wasn’t that. A couple of months ago, I read an interview with a musician I really like who does a one-woman show, and the interviewer asked her why she didn’t have a backing band with her. I expected her to answer that doing the show by herself gave her a greater sense of artistic freedom or was personally empowering or something like that. What she actually said was that basically, dealing with a band could be a hassle and that she didn’t want to have to feed them or listen to them complain. And I guess that having gone through the brain exercise of trying to set up my own private army, I can totally see where she’s coming from. I mean, sometimes, being self-sufficient and taking care of yourself can be a wonderful thing. Doing your own plundering can give you a real sense of empowerment and accomplishment. But I also kind of think that most of us would happily let others do our bidding for us if it wasn’t such a complete, freaking pain in the ass, and I really do suspect that in the end, most of us take care of our own problems because it’s just easier than having to deal with a flock of flying babies, Justin Bieber fans, Heidi Klum clones, or the Balboas. There is, after all, absolutely nothing wrong with not making things harder than they really need to be, and as Rocky himself once said, “There ain’t no law against ducking.”

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

Out of Chaos...

2011-02-18T21:44:00.005-05:00

Earlier this week, I realized that February is a month just chock full o’ holidays. Well, maybe not exactly “chock full,” but there are four different days of note: Lincoln’s Birthday, Valentine’s Day, President’s Day, and Washington’s Birthday. Of course, Lincoln’s and Washington’s Birthday just kind of get wrapped into President’s Day, so I guess there are only two working holidays in the month. But still, that’s something. And besides, February sometimes has that weird extra day in it when it’s a leap year, and I think that day should be declared a holiday, too. I mean, you can never have too many holidays as far as I’m concerned.

Anyway, President’s Day is coming up this Monday, and personally, I think that’s a holiday that deserves a little more attention. Of course, the holiday itself is a bit lacking in some respects, and I guess that’s why it isn’t as big a deal as, say, Christmas. It’s not a gift-giving occasion for one thing, and I think that’s too bad, although I really don’t know what would be considered an appropriate gift for President’s Day. Maybe tiny little soaps cut into the shape of the White House would work. But it isn’t like little children make out lists of what they want for President’s Day and send it to George Washington, The White House, USA. No one makes a plate of cookies and sets them out President’s Day Eve for when Lincoln comes to leave you some presents. You never hear about people buying expensive jewelry for a loved one or sending flowers for President’s Day. True, a lot of stores have sales and send you coupons for 15% off in the mail, but it’s a bit of a loveless gesture really. It sort of lacks that personal touch.

And President’s Day doesn’t have a lovable figure attached to it, either. Now, we all know that I don’t find Cupid all that lovable and really think he’s sort of terrifying, but at least he puts a face on the holiday. Christmas has Santa Claus, and Thanksgiving has a whole slew of adorable pilgrims. But President’s Day has nothing. And again, what would possibly work? President’s Day is a celebration of dead presidents, so there are some obvious problems with the lovable figure there. I mean, Cupid, Santa Claus, The Pilgrims—they never age. You never see old Christmas cards that picture Santa as a young man. He’s timeless. But when you’re dealing with real historical figures, well, that’s another thing. I suppose we could create cuddly versions of the Washington Monument or plush velour stuffed toys of the Lincoln Memorial, but it just wouldn’t be quite the same. It would be hard to imagine little children toting around stuffed monoliths in the same way they carry around teddy bears. I imagine a cuddly Washington Monument toy would be good for hitting other children or maybe tripping them, but it’s just really not the kind of lovable figure this holiday needs.

I think that maybe the biggest problem President’s Day has, though, is that there’s some confusion as what the hell the holiday is even really about. I mean, different presidents and even some people who weren’t presidents are recognized on President’s Day. And that’s just confusing because if there’s one thing a holiday needs to be clear about, it’s what’s actually being celebrated. After all, there truly are more obscure holidays in the calendar, but they’re clear. People know, for example, what Arbor Day is about. It’s about trees. There’s no confusion there. No one has tried to sneak a tiny mention for perennials or flowering shrubs into the holiday. It’s about trees, and on Arbor Day, you’re supposed to plant a tree. It’s very clear. No one thinks you’re supposed to recognize the day by chopping a branch off an elm and carrying it from bar to bar as you get progressively more drunk. Arbor Day is about trees. You plant a tree, and then you go home. People get that. That’s why that holiday works even though most people have no idea when it even actually occurs.

But President’s Day is really kind of a mess. It started off as just a celebration of Washington’s Birthday, and it used to be celebrated on Washington’s actual birthday—February 22^nd. But then Lincoln got assassinated, and people naturally got very sentimental about that, so they started celebrating Lincoln’s Birthday on February 12^th. At one point in the 1950s, there was even a national committee formed to promote the establishment of President’s Day as a celebration of the office itself. That day was going to be on the original Inauguration Day—March 4^th. And interestingly enough, in Alabama, President’s Day commemorates the birthdays of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who was, by the way, born in April. So, it’s a mess. A real mess. The only thing about it is that at least all that celebratory fervor eventually just got rolled into one day. Of course, the date of that day changes (figures, doesn’t it), but it’s always on the third Monday in February. And to the extent that there is any sort of uniformity at all in President’s Day, we have the one man who was brave enough to sign a law combining all those birthdays and commemorations into one floating holiday to thank. And that courageous man was…

Richard Nixon.

Yeah, I know, you’re going “Richard Nixon? What are you, kidding me?” But it’s true. In 1971, he signed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act into law and essentially created what we know today as President’s Day. He’s the reason all those stores keep sending you coupons. He’s the man behind the suspension of mail delivery on Monday. So, as strange as it probably sounds, if there’s one face that really is the face of President’s Day, it’s Richard Nixon’s. He is to President’s Day what the Pilgrims are to Thanksgiving. Whether that’s a good thing or not is debatable.

But I have to say that I have this weird connection to Nixon, a sort of odd camaraderie from my childhood. You see, my grandfather, for some strange reason, always kept a framed picture of Nixon hanging on the wall in his basement, and I’d go over to my grandparents’ house and look at that picture and think, “Geez, what a crank.” I mean, even in his happiest moments, Nixon always just looked cranky to me. And I could identify with that because as a child, I was a bit of a crank myself.

Well, I don’t know if I’d say I was a crank so much as I was really just kind of a curmudgeon. I was the kind of little kid who would yell at other little kids to get off our lawn. And I was pretty sure that staying up past 11 pm was inherently immoral and that stunted growth was just the price you paid for it. I mean, seriously, had I not been only 8 years old at the time, I probably would’ve voted for Nixon.

The problem was that as a young curmudgeon, I was continuously bushwhacked by my own unflappable sense of moral decency and fair play, and nowhere was this more evident than in the way my little sister managed to outfox me at virtually every turn. One game we used to play involved the Sears catalog, and the rules went like this: you had $1000, and you had to spend as much of it as you possibly could. You were only allowed to buy one of every item, and the person with the least amount of change coming at the end won the game. Being the curmudgeon that I was, I’d always spend my turn trying to figure out the way to get the most value for my money. My little sister, on the other hand, would just buy a pool table that cost $999.99. It was kind of a short game.

She did the same thing when it came to playing one of our favorite games: doctor’s office. I don’t really remember, but I think my older sister was the doctor, and our next-door neighbor was the receptionist (because even as children we knew that doctors didn’t answer their own phones). My little sister and I were the patients, and I always had the exact same problem: a broken leg. And it seemed to me like that should’ve required some immediate attention. But my younger sister out-foxed me every time. She would call up on our little plastic phone and say, “Hi. I can’t breathe. When should I come in for an appointment?” And of course, our receptionist would answer, “Right away!” So, there I’d sit in our makeshift waiting room with my broken leg, silently cursing the corrupt nature of the medical profession and sure that my little sister had gotten in first because she had better insurance than I did. It was just a no-win situation from the start.

I was also the kind of child who walked around shaking her head and deploring the sorry state of “kids today,” especially when it came to music. When I got my own room when I was a little kid, my parents gave me a radio to keep me company, and in my neighborhood, the kids all listened to The Jackson 5 and either Donny Osmond or David Cassidy. You actually had to choose between Donny Osmond and David Cassidy because you just weren’t allowed to like both. I have no idea why. (My little sister, however, outsmarted everyone by liking Bobby Sherman). I ostensibly went for Donny Osmond, but the truth is that even the Osmond Brothers were a little wild for me. While everyone else was listening to Top 40 on the radio, I was listening to Ray Coniff and Perry Como. I mean, I was an absolute easy listening music junkie. I couldn’t get enough of that stuff. I was a cranky 9 year-old senior citizen, a card-carrying curmudgeon plain and simple, and quite possibly, the oldest living child on earth.

And I felt that I shared it all with Richard Nixon. I’d look at his picture and kind of mumble to myself, “Mr. President, you’re the only one who really understands me.”

The culmination of it all was when my best friend and I decided to write letters to the President in 4^th grade. The year before, three of my friends and I finally won a bet with one of the teachers who said that she would give 50 cents to anyone who could find a word without a vowel in it. We finally came up with “mm-mm-mm” from the Campbell’s soup commercial, but we had to verify that Campbell’s actually thought of it as word before we could collect our winnings. So, our teacher helped us write a letter to Campbell’s, they wrote back, and we did end up getting our 50 cents…which we had to split four ways.

But the idea that a kid could just write a letter to someone and that that someone might actually read it was empowering. So, my best friend and I, heady with power and glee over the Campbell’s soup triumph, decided to aim for the top and write to the President. I don’t recall what I wrote in my letter, but I think it was something along the lines of “Dear President Nixon, Hi, how’s it going? I hope you are enjoying being the President and living in the White House.” Of course, by the time we wrote our letters, Nixon had already begun to wade into the Watergate scandal and pretty much had economic problems running out his ears, so I doubt that he was enjoying being the President very much at that point and was probably thinking about how sad it was going to be to get evicted from the White House.

Now, I can’t speak for my friend, but I myself had no clue about politics when I was in 4^th grade. For all I knew, Watergate was the name of a town in Kansas. And I wasn’t even all that sure where Kansas was. I just knew that it wasn’t very close to me. Writing that letter was really just about feeling like you could actually write to the President, and when we actually got some educational material and a key chain from the White House in response to our letters, my friend and I were utterly famous (at least at our elementary school) for about week (which is practically an eternity for a little kid). And besides, it was Richard Nixon, my partner in all things curmudgeonly.

A couple of years after that, Santa Claus brought me a Van Halen record for Christmas, and I sort of started to loosen up and admitted to myself that Nixon had really just been a crutch for me. Still, I would have liked to have had my grandfather’s framed picture of him for my own house if for no reason other than the nostalgia.

In the end, I guess you can say what you want about Richard Nixon, but you can’t deny that if nothing else, he brought order out of chaos when it comes to President’s Day. So maybe he really should be the face of that holiday. Maybe little children should dance around on the third Monday of February clutching little stuffed Richard Nixon dolls and singing happy songs. Maybe the perfect holiday vacation for President’s Day should be a trip to China, and maybe the perfect gift is a deluxe set of wiretapping equipment. But whatever you do, don’t let President’s Day pass you by this year. Take some time to really think about all that Richard Nixon has done for you. And oh yeah, I guess you might as well give some passing thought to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, too.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

In the Face of Danger...

2011-02-11T16:58:00.002-05:00

Hello, Dear Readers. It’s good to see you.

Earlier this week, I was listening to this wonderful song called “Fearless,” and it got me to thinking about all those little everyday acts of bravery that we manage to pull off whenever danger stares us right in the face. Most of the time, we just react out of instinct, of course, because it’s really pretty hard to be consistently aware of all the dangerous stuff that might happen at any given moment. I don’t spend a great deal of time, for example, worrying about what I’d do if, say, I found a poisonous snake under my couch. I suppose it could happen, but I don’t think about it a lot. Now, my dad worries about things like the frequency at which a subwoofer might burst into flames and the elevation at which a horse might explode, but he’s retired. He has a lot of free time to fill. Most people aren’t like him, and that’s probably a good thing.

This coming week, though, I’m going to have to be a little more like my dad and a little more prepared for danger because this coming Monday is Valentine’s Day. And that means only one thing—Cupid is coming. And that throws more fear into my heart than a flaming subwoofer and an exploding horse combined. The issue with me isn’t love, though. I’m not afraid of falling in love. Hell, I’ve fallen in love for the rest of my life, like, five times already, so it isn’t that. No, it’s that when you stop to think about it, Cupid is really kind of one scary guy. It takes some nerve to stand up to Cupid, but it takes a lot more cunning to just out-and-out hide from him for a whole day.

So what’s so scary about Cupid? Well, first off, he’s armed. He’s a churlish little imp-child with a weapon. And it really is the weapon that distinguishes Cupid as Cupid. I mean, if you just saw Cupid without the weaponry, you’d probably think, “Wow, a half-naked baby with wings. I wonder what that’s about.” But give that half-naked baby a bow and arrow, and suddenly, it’s very clearly all about love. Cupid is in the building.

And think about how we talk about love when it comes to Valentine’s Day. No one “wades forth” or “skips happily” into love. Cupid makes us “fall” in love. And when you’re really in love, you “fall hard” for someone. So, in a way, I guess the armaments kind of make sense. After all, if someone shot me in the heart with an arrow, I’d probably fall down, and I’d probably fall pretty hard. Of course, I wouldn’t necessarily fall in love unless I happened to be standing next to an open pit full of love when I got shot, but I think the idea of wounding you is more about just immobilizing you so that the magic potion on the arrow can take effect. That way, when you wake up, Cupid’s potion has worked its magic, and you fall in love with whatever you see first. Of course, under that logic, it’s kind of amazing that more people don’t fall in love with the pavement or the interior roof of an ambulance since those are probably the first things they’d see when they came to…but I digress.

But aside from just the necessary wounding that’s apparently an integral part of falling in love, I think the archery gear is a little too much on the violent side. So, I tried to imagine what else would work. At first, I thought that maybe just a rock would do. But I have to admit that when I really thought about it, a half-naked baby with a rock didn’t seem much more inviting than a half-naked baby with a bow and arrow. I mean, that’s just got “head injury” written all over it, and while a head injury will often make you fall down, it’s not quite the same thing…especially when you get back up and discover that you don’t remember how to walk.

And of course, just a big stick probably wouldn’t work either for a couple of reasons. First, there’s the pesky brain trauma issue again, but more than that, the whole point of using an arrow is that Cupid doesn’t have to be right up on you to make you fall in love. For a stick to work, it would have to be something more along the lines of a 20 foot pole, but even then, Cupid would have to come at you with a fair amount of force to actually make you fall down. And then, of course, he would run the risk of impaling himself on the other end of the pole, so that probably wouldn’t be such a good plan. I suppose Cupid could always take a swinging whack at you, but you have to be pretty strong to swing a 20 foot pole with much accuracy, and I just don’t think Cupid is in that kind of shape. He is, after all, only a baby.

So, I guess when you really stop to think about it, a bow and arrow really is the best equipment for making people fall in love.

The thing is that on every other day of the year, Cupid is probably a pretty nice guy. He probably just sits at home on the couch eating Cheese Curls and watching television. And wondering when he’s going to grow some hair on his chest. He probably feels like a totally misunderstood little half-naked baby. But then Valentine’s Day arrives, and his frustration boils over. And he just snaps. That’s the only explanation that makes sense to me.

But beyond the weaponry and the anger, what I find most disconcerting about Cupid is that he has wings. I mean, he’s a flying baby, and there are few things I find quite so terrifying as that. Even the concept of flying adults doesn’t worry me quite as much, not because I believe that adults are inherently better-behaved than kids are but just because I know that grownups tend to be busier. They have less free time to cause trouble. Babies have nothing but free time. Put a pair of wings on a kid, and you’re just inviting disaster as far as I’m concerned.

I mean, things that fly are sometimes scary in and of themselves, but they get really scary when they’re things that aren’t supposed to be able to fly. As a young child, I remember seeing a picture of a flying fish in a book about animals and just thinking that that was about the freakiest thing on earth (and it really kind of is). To this day, I have no real interest in going to a beach because I’m so haunted by the image of a giant fish (with fangs, of course) flying out of the sea and coming after me. And think about the villains in The Wizard of Oz. Sure, the witch was scary (and she could fly), but the things that scared me most were those flying monkeys. They didn’t need broomsticks. They had wings. They could fly all on their own. And is there anything more terrifying than a winged, flying monkey? Well….yes. A winged, flying angry baby with a bow and arrow.

But just imagine having a kid who could fly. When kids are little, you have to watch them all the time, but at least they’re on the ground for the most part. And when they’re not on the ground, it’s usually because you put them somewhere higher. But imagine taking a little kid who could fly to the park. You’d look away for a moment, and the next thing you knew, that kid would be halfway to Toledo. At family barbecues, some distant relative would inevitably make a snide remark about how it’s always your kid who is circling around overhead like a vulture, and doubtless some cranky old man with a BB gun on the next block over would eventually take a shot at your child just for flying too close to his roof.

And of course, a flying child would be mischievous. Of course, he/she would cause trouble. Who wouldn’t? I mean, as an adult I could tell myself that if I could fly, I’d do humanitarian things. I’d take medicine to sick people and food to the hungry. I’d help those in need and fight crime. And I might really do that stuff. But mostly, I’d fly around dropping tiny bags of oatmeal on people’s heads. I’d land on top of people’s cars when they were stopped at red lights just to freak them out. I’d hover outside of people’s windows late at night and watch their televisions. I’d perch in the trees like a giant gargoyle just because it would be creepy. I would be a terrible, evil flying person, and I know that. So why would I expect a flying child to be better-intentioned than I am? Why would anyone expect Cupid to behave?

So, I don’t really wonder why I’m afraid of Cupid. I wonder why everyone else isn’t. I mean, why do we think Cupid is such a wonderful being? He flies up when you’re not looking and shoots you in the chest with an arrow. What exactly is so romantic about that? I mean, I’m all for Valentine’s Day, and I’m as crazy about love as the next person, but I’m pretty sure that what Cupid actually does is a felony in most states. He probably isn’t doing hard time somewhere just because he’s too good at getting away—I don’t think even Dog the Bounty Hunter could catch that flying half-naked baby.

Seriously, though, if you’re going to celebrate Valentine’s Day this year, do enjoy yourself. Have a wonderful dinner out. Eat all the chocolate you can get your hands on. Stop and smell the roses. If you’re already in love, you’ve got nothing to worry about. If you aren’t in love, you’ve still got a few days and an entire internet to do something about it with. As for me, I’m going to slip into a Kevlar vest and spend Monday in the house. With the windows closed and the curtains drawn. I can’t beat Cupid, so I’m just going to try to trick him into believing I’m on vacation. And in the meantime, I guess I should probably get a flashlight and check under the couch for poisonous snakes.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

Into the Whiff...

2011-02-04T16:49:00.002-05:00

Hello, Dear Readers. It’s good to see you.

Let me start today’s post with a confession: I am a single woman with no children, and I own a bottle of Axe men’s bodywash. And of all the things I own, that’s the one thing that everyone who comes into my apartment never fails to comment on. I mean, I live in an apartment that’s the size of a coffee cup, and I own 140 clocks. I have a birthing chair in my bedroom, and a confessional next to my fainting couch. But all anyone ever asks is, “What’s with the Axe?”

Now, I find various things in my bathtub from time to time—some cat toys, a Barbie Doll head, a spatula—that can’t be easily explained away other than to say that, you know, things turn up. It’s all part of the big mystery of life. And there are other things that really are just shower-related purchasing mistakes. There is, for example, a bottle of volumizing shampoo in my shower, and while there’s certainly nothing wrong with wanting a little volume sometimes, it’s a big mistake if you already have thick hair. I used it once and went from being someone with a fairly short haircut to looking like the Bride of Frankenstein. The only upside is that I was instantly eight inches taller. It didn’t just volumize my hair; it enlarged it. The only smart thing I did was not put it all over my head—I would’ve come out looking like a float in the Macy’s Day Parade. And I would’ve had a beard. So, yes, buying that was a mistake. But the Axe was completely on purpose, and I think that’s what throws people.

So, why do I own men’s bodywash? Well, to put it bluntly, I like the way it smells. And I know, I could easily avoid the strange reaction people seem to have to my having it just by saying that I bought it by accident. But I didn’t. I’m that person who goes to the store, flips open the caps, and smells the soap. I spray the room fresheners. I squeeze the toilet paper. I want grocery shopping to be a scratch-and-sniff, give-it-a-test-drive kind of experience, and if I’d been a little more vigilant about that and had stopped to wash my hair while I was at the store, I probably wouldn’t have a bottle of volumizing shampoo rotting away in the corner of my shower.

Of course, some of the room fresheners do have a scratch-and-sniff thing on them, and I appreciate that. But I can’t quite get past how they explain what those products do. Last time I saw an ad for one on TV, it said the product surrounded and eliminated “odor molecules.” What the hell is an “odor molecule?” Who’s making these ads up? The people from Star Trek? What’s next? A college degree program that only takes 20 minutes because all you have to do is show up for an injection of “smartness molecules”? Of course, you could argue that steroid use in sports is exactly this kind of situation, but it’s a little more complex than that. It’s not like they can just shoot a guy full of “home-run molecules” and have done with it.

Then again, if those air fresheners actually can seek out and destroy odor molecules, it’s even more scary because then room spray becomes like a new form of life capable of understanding what smell is and deciding for itself whether or not something smells bad. It’s like the Terminator saga, only on a really, really tiny scale. “What are you doing, honey?” “Oh nothing, just unleashing some judgmental biotechnology all over our couch.” I mean, what happens if your room freshener doesn’t think you smell good? Does it just eat you alive?

I don’t know about you, but I don’t need that kind of pressure in my life. I don’t need to wake up every morning and worry that I don’t smell good enough for my room freshener to let me live.

Anyway, the thing is that owning a bottle of men’s bodywash makes perfect sense to me. Yes, I know that Axe is for men, but it seems like an awfully inconvenient thing to have to keep a man around just so I can smell the Phoenix scent. After all, it’s not like I could just park some guy in the corner, cover him in bodywash, and be done with it. I’d have to feed him and let him use the computer sometimes. He’d probably get lonely and try to engage me in conversation occasionally, and there’s no doubt he’d eventually start complaining about what I was watching on TV. He might smell good, but the whole situation would just be annoying, and it seems like having a gooey, soap-covered man in my house is an awful lot of trouble to go to when I could just buy a bottle of Axe for myself and smell it whenever I wanted to.

Actually, I read an article not too long ago that talked about the relationship between scent and sexual attraction, and it said that how someone smells is a significant factor in mate selection. So, I guess men’s bodywash is supposed to attract women. And I guess it works. After all, it attracted me. I love Axe. But if sexual attraction really is based in part on scent, then they should just make a cologne that smells like a low-interest mortgage and a paid-off car loan. For the younger set, someone could invent a fragrance that smells like a new credit card. I mean, seriously, from what I’ve seen of life, it’s the sweet scent of financial stability that ultimately attracts people to each other.

For those of us who don’t care that much about money (mostly because we don’t have any), I think other scents are more attracting. For me personally, my top three sexual attraction scents would be bacon, hazelnut coffee, and Christmas trees. So, I guess until I meet someone who always smells like a holiday brunch, I’m going to remain single.

The thing is that scent isn’t restricted just to our bodies because, at least most of the time, we’re wearing clothes, and that’s where things get really tricky because the names of detergent and dryer sheet fragrances are almost as nonsensical as the existence of odor molecules. I mean, what scent is “fresh linen” anyway? My fresh linen smells like mountain scent dryer sheets. And even the name of those dryer sheets is misleading. I’m from Colorado, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the mountains. And I don’t recall ever having taken a deep breath while looking out over a beautiful mountain valley and thinking to myself, “Gee, it smells just like a dryer sheet.” For the most part, the mountains smell like pine trees, unless you’re really close to a river, in which case they have kind of a funky odor that, trust me, no one would want to immortalize in a fabric softener.

I think the only laundry detergent that actually manages to completely triumph in the logic of fragrance is Gain. And that’s because Gain ads just refer to “the smell of Gain.” Gain makes no fragrance claims except that it smells just like itself. It’s a completely self-referential laundry detergent, and there’s just something about that that I find immensely comforting. It’s a kind of logic that you just can’t argue with. It doesn’t smell like a mountain spring. It doesn’t smell like fresh mown hay. It just smells like Gain. It’s positively tautological, and I love that.

The idea that some scents are supposed to be for men while others are for women, though, is an interesting kind of double-edged sword. On one hand, I don’t like the idea that I can’t just smell like whatever I want to smell like. I mean, this is America, and I’m pretty sure I have the right to fragrance freedom. It’s in the Constitution, isn’t it? On the other hand, I discovered about a year ago that there’s a strange advantage to buying into the idea that some scents are supposed to be for men while others are for women.

I was getting ready to go to a party, and I had run out of gently relaxing, super-moisturizing, anti-aging, feel-like-a-natural-woman shower creme. So, I just grabbed the Axe and used that. On the way over to the festivities, I noticed that I was driving faster and with considerably less care for the safety of others than usual, and at one point, I flipped off a pedestrian for no reason at all. Once I got there, I revved my engine and performed a super-human parallel parking maneuver at 30 miles an hour. I had no idea what had gotten into me. Anyway, I was standing out on the porch, and as I raised up my cup to take a drink, I smelled my hand. It smelled like a man’s hand. Then I turned to the woman next to me and said, “Smell my hand” (yeah, it was that kind of a party). She took a whiff and said, “You smell like a guy.” And damn if I hadn’t just completely turned into one. I went around for the rest of the night slapping people on the back and crushing various objects with my bare hands. I felt not only worthy of but absolutely entitled to a higher paying job and more respect from my peers. I could tell dirty jokes without blushing and summon a fart at will. It was like magic, and all in all, except for the almost irresistible urge to publicly scratch myself in inappropriate places, it was a wonderful experience. And as I was using my car to just push someone else’s out of the way so I could get a better parking spot when I got home, I realized something: men’s bodywash is mojo in a bottle. It’s the most amazing stuff on earth.

So, that’s what’s with the Axe, Dear Readers. I like the way it smells, but there’s more to it than that. As a woman, I can be pretty strong, but as a man, I am literally unstoppable. I mean, once I’ve slipped into fragrance drag, there’s just no holding me back. And that’s not really such a bad thing because every now and then, I need to be slightly braver than I actually am. I think the trick to navigating the wide world of scent is just realizing that there is no real logic to it and that the most important thing is to be able to smell like whoever you need to be in any given moment. And if you can’t whip that up all on your own, that’s OK because if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my experiences, it’s that sometimes, courage really does come in a bottle.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

With Your Permission...

2011-01-28T18:58:00.001-05:00

Hello Dear Readers. It’s good to see you.

I spent this past week trying to figure out how to secure all the necessary permissions to eventually use a song in my blog, and let me tell you, it was a dizzying mass of confusion. And for the life of me, I don’t even know why I’m bothering to try to do this legally. As an aspiring young attorney once told me, it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission, and I have to say that I’m beginning to believe that he was right.

Actually, several of my friends have asked me why I’m so intent on using the song legally, and while I gave them all a good, righteous answer about the need to respect the rights of others and to recognize that music represents the labor of someone else who deserves to be paid for it, the truth is just that I don’t want to run afoul of the law. I’ve seen too much Law and Order to knowingly give some hell-bent-for-justice D.A. with a moral superiority complex a reason to chase me down. I mean, if this was Law and Order, I’d use the song illegally, someone would hear it, that person would get murdered, and I’d somehow be dragged in and charged as a co-conspirator. And at that point, the best I could hope for would be first-degree manslaughter with a sentencing recommendation, only if, of course, I was willing to roll on my accomplices, which I couldn’t do because I wouldn’t even know who they were because all I would’ve done was use a song on a blog without getting all the necessary permissions. So, I’d pretty much be screwed.

And I’m not the kind of person who would do well in prison. Can you imagine me and my fellow inmates sitting around in the Big House talking tough? They’d all be exchanging charges—armed robbery, felony assault, possession with intent—and then they’d get to me: “What are you in for?” Then I’d have to put on my scariest face and say in my most menacing voice, “Copyright violation.” And of course, it wouldn’t work. I mean, seriously, you could say “copyright violation” in a tone so belligerent that it would peel paint off a car, and it still wouldn’t keep you from getting a beat down on a daily basis if you were in prison.

I’d try to fight back and stand up for myself, of course, but I can just hear the taunting now as some hardened convict steals my last pair of socks—“Yeah, so what are you gonna do about it? Reprint something I wrote without my permission?” What a nightmare! Martha Stewart could pull off prison, but let’s face it, I’m no Martha Stewart. Heck, I’m not even Jimmy Stewart…and he played a guy with a six-foot tall invisible rabbit friend in Harvey.

I think the hardest part of it all for me, though, isn’t really figuring out who to ask for permission or even trying to determine how things have to be licensed. It’s the whole idea of having to ask an actual live human being for permission to do something. And sometimes I really wonder if that doesn’t have something to do with my childhood.

Of course, in my family, you never started with my father unless you really wanted to be shot out of the sky right off the bat and pretty much for good. “Dad, can I hold my breath for ten seconds?” “No, you’ll get brain damage.” “But I hold my breath when I’m swimming all time.” “And see what it’s done for you? If you hadn’t wanted to swim, you’d be at Harvard right now.” “But Dad, I’m only eight years old.” “I don’t care. I better never catch you holding your breath again. Ever.” “But I have to hold my breath if I’m underwater.” “Then you’re never allowed to be underwater.” “But what if I’m in a flood?” “I absolutely forbid you to ever be in a flood.” “Well, what if it’s only raining?” “I will not have my children out in the rain.” “OK, then, what if it’s just sort of cloudy?” “That’s the most dangerous time!” “What if it’s completely sunny?” “No daughter of mine is ever going to leave this house on a sunny day. And that’s final!”

And on and on it went until all you were allowed to do was sit motionless in your room. For the rest of your life.

So, we always just started with my mother because at least she was slightly more rational and less likely to make sweeping proclamations that permanently barred us from ordinary, everyday activities like leaving the house. The trick, though, was learning to translate what my mom said into what she really meant. I finally, though, managed to work out a rudimentary chart of my mother’s typical responses to the question “Mom, can I…?

My Mom’s Response	What It Really Meant
No.	What the hell is wrong with you?
We’ll see.	No, and stop talking to me right now.
Go ask your father.	No, and stop talking to me right now.
You don’t need to [name of activity]	No, and stop talking to me right now.
Maybe another day.	No, and stop talking to me right now.
I guess if you really feel you must.	God, there really is something wrong with you, isn’t there.
Yes.	Whatever, just stop talking to me right now.
That would be great.	Am I going to have to give you money to get you to stop talking to me?
You should definitely do that.	How much money am I going to have to give you to get you to stop talking to me?

Of course, the upside to being able to translate my mom’s answers was that if you could get her to some form of a “yes” answer, you could ask a couple of follow-up questions and get a little more out of her. My sisters were both much better at that than I ever was, though. I rarely made it through more than two answers before I got shunted over to my dad. “Mom, can I go to the movies with my friends?” “Oh yes, you should definitely do that.” “Cool. In that case, can I have $10?” “Go ask your father.” Oh no, shunted! “Dad, can I have $10 for the movies?” “No, you’ll sit too close to the screen and go blind.” “What if I sit in the back row?” “Then you’ll be too close to the speakers and go deaf.” “How about if I just stand out in the parking lot?” “Go ask your mother.” Oh no, reverse shunted! “Mom, can I go stand out in the parking lot while my friends go to the movies?” Long pause, quizzical look. “No.”

And as I’m walking off to go sit in my room for a while, I hear her mumble to herself, “What the hell is wrong with that kid?”

Of course, getting the various permissions to use a song on a blog can be kind of intimidating, but it doesn’t involve nearly the level of human interaction that dealing with my parents does, and I actually find that kind of comforting. I mean, I think about something like Capitol Records, and I can’t even conceive of that existing as a human organization. To me, it’s just a big, round, skyscraper in L.A. that I’ve seen on TV a bunch of times. It looks like a dead Transformer. It’s just a building. And I have no fear whatsoever of writing to a building to ask for copyright permission, and even if it says “no,” I don’t get that upset. I just can’t take anything a building does to me that personally.

The music publishers like ASCAP and BMI seem even less intimidating than the big record companies. I mean, they’re just collections of letters, and how threatening is a collection of letters? Oh sure, things like “IRS” and “FBI” are just collections of letters, and they can certainly throw some fear into you. But it’s not the organizations themselves that are so scary. It’s their agents. And we’ve seen those people. They’re all over TV. But when was the last time you saw a TV show about the high drama and intrigue of working for the American Society for Composers, Authors, and Publishers? Seriously, that’s just a ratings disaster waiting to happen. So, having to deal with ASCAP or BMI or SESAC doesn’t faze me at all. It’s a form and a credit card payment. To me, they’re just kinder, gentler incarnations of Skynet that haven’t quite become fully self-aware yet.

And even though the main agency that grants mechanical licenses for interactive streaming, (which you have to have but no one really knows why because no one really knows what interactive streaming even is) has a human name attached to it, it’s still just basically a form and a fee. You can actually e-mail them and ask questions about what kind of license you need, though, and they will answer you very quickly. But the reply you get won’t be from an actual, specific person. It’s just a reply from a department. So, I just envision them as a large cubicle farm, and there isn’t anything that particularly scares me about acres of cubicles.

(It is worth mentioning, though, that I initially e-mailed the agency to ask if I needed a license, and I got back a response telling me that I did and directing me to a part of their website where I could obtain it. The thing is that upon further checking, I discovered that they don’t seem to represent the owners of the song I want to use. So, I wanted to write to the agency and ask, “Why do I need to buy a mechanical license from you if you don’t represent the owners of the song?” but I could already imagine the reply: “Because if you don’t pay us, we’ll send you to prison.”)

Anyway, the only really scary part of all this has been contacting the copyright owners because they aren’t a big record company. They’re a very small record company, and to me, that means only one thing—actual real live people. Shunting, reverse shunting, double-shunting, the big shunt fake-out. God, the possibilities are endless. But I knew that if I didn’t contact them and ask for permission, I’d be halfway to lockdown before I even knew what hit me.

The thing about writing to a small company is that all I have to go on is their name, and that’s hard. I need a company to be called Happy Shiny People Music or We Already Like You Records to really be comfortable dealing with live humans. This company is named Wild Mess Records, which just seems kind of neutral to me. So when I sat down to write an inquiry e-mail a couple of days ago, my first thought was “I got nothin’here.”

But I wrote the e-mail anyway. And then I decided that they probably wouldn’t be interested in my life story or creative vision, so I started editing it. And then I just kept editing it until I finally read it and thought to myself, “Great, now you sound like the shadowy figure on the grassy knoll.” But then I got this image in my head of how I’d look in handcuffs if I used the song illegally. And then I started to panic. And then I just hit “Send.”

And I think of that e-mail now, printed out by mistake, and subsequently tossed in the dumpster, where a homeless man picks it up and reads it through. He imagines me living in a seedy motel room somewhere on Sunset Boulevard, furnished with upturned wooden boxes and wobbly chairs while a lone table with only three legs sits in the corner, incoherent graffiti covers the walls, and a sandwich lies rotting on the counter of a makeshift kitchenette. He takes a moment to thank his lucky stars that he’s not living my life and then lets the page drift slowly off on the breeze out into the street, where a smart woman in a business suit picks it up, reads it through, and as she crumples it into a ball and tosses it into a nearby trashcan, thinks to herself, “Jesus, what the hell is wrong with that kid?”

But despite the obstacles, real or imagined, I have two things going for me: time and an insanely dogged sense of persistence. Well, that and a really deep-seated fear of incarceration. For what it’s worth, though, I actually do respect both copyright law and performance rights because I know their histories, and I understand why they exist. And I’m really not up for a daily prison-yard beat down, either.

(By the way, the song I’m chasing hither and yon is Jennifer Batten’s “He’s Calling.” It’s a great song, and Batten is an extraordinary musician. I mean, there are days when I put that song on and then immediately have to leave the area because I know I’m not cool enough to be in the same room with it. So, crank up your mojo, and go check it out for yourself).

Anyway, in the end, I suppose that my young lawyer friend is correct. It is easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission. But asking for permission forces you to go beyond what you’re comfortable doing. It gets you to take chances and to deal with risk. And it requires you to learn and to understand exactly what you’re asking permission to do. But maybe above all else, it just obligates you to keep asking the one question that really is the glue on which a civil society is built: “Do I look good in an orange jumpsuit?” Well, do ya, punk?

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

As Time Goes By...

2011-01-21T16:54:00.002-05:00

Hello, Dear Readers. It’s good to see you.

At the end of this week, I have a birthday coming up, so getting older and how we think about that has been on my mind lately. It’s a strange thing, for example, that even after an baby is over a year old, we continue to refer to his or her age in terms of months for a while. I don’t know why we do that (and neither does anyone else—I’ve asked around), but personally, I think it’s because it makes the baby seem older. “Eighteen months” just sounds older to me than “a year and half.” It makes the baby seem wiser and more worldly, like someone you would actually trust for stock advice. Of course, I can understand why we drop the use of months after a while. After all, I don’t think I’ve told anyone that I’m going to be 588 months old at the end of the week. That doesn’t make me sound wise and worldly. It makes me sound ancient. In the extreme.

A good friend of mine actually came up with a great way of conceptualizing herself when she turned 45. She said that she preferred to think of herself as three 15 year-olds. Unfortunately, for this birthday, that won’t work. The only thing this birthday will resolve neatly into is seven 7 year-olds, and I’m just not up for having to be that many people at one time. True, I could be my own Brownie troop, but all that means is that I’d be entitled to wear a uniform (well, several uniforms, actually). And that’s just not enough of a draw for me. I had a hard enough time pulling off a Brownie uniform when I actually was a Brownie, and besides, there’s just something about a middle-aged woman in a Brownie uniform that strikes me as perverse, especially when you add on the matching beanie.

So, I’m going back to my old standby of looking at my birthday as an anniversary. I like thinking of it that way because it makes it seem like I married myself and that this year’s 20^th anniversary of my 29^th birthday denotes some sort of monumental achievement in communication and compromise. It stands as a shining testament to my love and commitment to myself and to my willingness to persevere through all those times when being me was just a big, giant hassle. Anyway, I like the idea of celebrating a birthday as an anniversary. It makes it seem so much more noble than just admitting that I don’t have the ability to prevent time from passing, and besides, it makes people have to do math to figure out how old I really am.

When it comes to getting older, though, I have to admit that I’ve always been intrigued by my parents’ attitudes. My mom is easy to figure out: she just refuses to get old. She’s just not doing it, and that’s the end of that story. My dad is more of a challenge, though.

My father’s side of the family had a strange sort of reverie for old age and infirmity that seemed almost Southern. Of course, they weren’t from the South, which just made it all the more odd, but anyway, that’s the kind of environment my dad was raised in. So, I think there was a part of him when he was younger that just couldn’t wait to get old, but then again, there is a part of him that just never seems to age.

The thing about my father is that he is the undisputed Master of Crazy Ideas and Hare-Brained Schemes, and that is one thing about him that has never changed. One of his earliest ideas that I remember was the front-yard driving range apparatus. We lived in a nice middle-class suburb, and our house was on a corner lot. So, our front yard was bigger than everybody else’s and worked fairly well for practicing hitting golf balls as long as you used wiffle balls. But my dad got tired of hitting wiffles after a while, so he thought up a way to hit a real golf ball. Basically, he got a big, thick square of hard rubber matting, embedded a golf tee in it, and anchored a long, elastic chord to it. He then drilled a hole in a golf ball, ran the chord through it, and secured it on the other end with a bolt. Then one evening, my sisters and I all assembled on the front lawn to witness my dad’s new invention in action.

He took a couple of practice swings and then stepped onto the rubber mat. He took a beautiful swing, and we all watched as the ball sailed out past our yard, across the street, and halfway over our neighbor’s yard. Then the chord reached its maximum stretch, and at that moment, that gently flying golf ball changed direction and became a ballistic weapon headed right at us. And of course, since it had a bolt in it, it came complete with its own shrapnel. All I really remember after that was my dad screaming, “Get down! Get down!” and three grubby little children hitting the grass as fast as possible. After the Golf Ball of Death had passed over us, we all raised our heads…only to see it flying right back at us. After several passes back and forth overhead, the ball finally lost its momentum and dropped to the ground, at which point, we all jumped up and yelled, “Do it again, Dad!”

Now, I suppose it’s worth mentioning that my father may not have realized that hitting a golf ball attached to an elastic cord would have that kind of effect, but then again, I suppose it’s also worth mentioning that the man was a physics teacher, for Christ’s sake. Anyway, my mom made him disassemble the front-yard driving range apparatus, but I’m pretty sure he’s still got all the parts somewhere.

More recently, there was the attempt to solve the problem of the dog and the car. More specifically, my parents’ Corgi, Nigel, was getting old and couldn’t jump up into their SUV anymore, and neither one of my parents could lift him. So, my father decided to build a ramp for Nigel. That way, he figured, Nigel could go up the ramp, they could just put the ramp in the back of the car, and they could get it back out when they got to wherever they were going. It all sounded perfectly reasonable.

Now, my dad is at that age when a strange thing happens to old men: no matter how much money they might have, they refuse to pay for anything they think they could otherwise get for free. I mean, I know old guys who wouldn’t pay a penny for a dime because they couldn’t stand to part with the penny. They’d rather just walk around in the street until they find a dime on the ground.

So, a couple of years ago, my dad started keeping an eye on what the neighbors were throwing out on Trash Day. Of course, given that there are several other old men in the neighborhood, he isn’t the only one scouting out the scene, and I think Trash Day is kind of like a cross between the Olympics and a World War II re-enactment. But my dad has truly earned the title of Dumpster Diving Diva because he is devious, perfectly willing to lie to his neighbors, and completely capable of tripping his friends if it means getting to the good trash first, and I have to admit that the other guys in the neighborhood have a certain grudging respect for him on that account.

And I can just see some of the younger couples on the block watching the Trash Day drama unfold one morning. “Honey, that old man is in our trash again.” “Well, just don’t feed him…and don’t even go out there. This one’s got a BB gun.” I imagine those young people standing at the window yelling “Shoo! Shoo!” at my father, which of course only serves to alert the other old guys that there is a good stash of refuse at their house, and from there, it is only a matter of time until the whole thing blossoms into a swarming situation.

Anyway, my father finally dragged the pieces of an old bookcase out of someone’s trash one day, and he used the wood to construct Nigel’s ramp. Unfortunately, there were two things he hadn’t factored in. First, Nigel had an absolute phobia of ramps. He wouldn’t go near the thing, let alone walk up it. Of course, he may have known more about where the wood came from than he was letting on, but at any rate, the dog simply refused to participate no matter how much my parents coaxed, cajoled, and finally just threatened him. So, there was that.

The second thing is that in building the ramp, my father had become so heady with glee over having gotten the wood for free that he hadn’t thought much about weight issues, and in the final tally, the ramp weighed more than the dog did. So, my father built the ramp because my parents couldn’t lift the dog into the car, but even if Nigel had been willing to use his ramp, they couldn’t get it in the car anyway, so Nigel could never get out.

My father’s next plan was to dig a giant trench in the driveway. The way he figured it, if he couldn’t raise the dog, then he would lower the car. As luck would have it, though, Nigel (who was around 14 years old at the time) passed away before my dad was able to find a backhoe in someone’s trash, so my parents’ driveway remains intact to this day.

The strangest thing is that the time between the front-yard driving range apparatus adventure and the great dog ramp experiment spans nearly 40 years, and in between, my dad has come up with any number of other, whacked-out, crazy ideas (the plan to daisy-chain ten PC Jr computers together to make one normal machine is one of my all-time favorites). But I can honestly say that my parents, both of whom are in their early 80s now, haven’t changed one little bit from who they were when I was a kid. They aged, but they just never got old. For my mom, it’s all about simply flat-out refusing to get old, and for my dad, it’s the excitement of dreaming up his next hare-brained, ill-conceived project. And I really hope that somehow both of those things are genetic traits that I inherited.

So, the next time you start to feel the creepy hand of time sneaking up on you, take a page from my mom’s playbook—just say “no,” and go back to playing your favorite video game on your iTouch. Then take a cue from my dad—think up the craziest way possible to solve a simple problem, make the project as complicated as you can, push it right to the boundary of just plain stupid, and then have it. And while you’re working on that, consider a question first posed by the great Satchel Paige: “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?”

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

In the Beginning...

2011-01-14T13:12:00.004-05:00

Hello, Dear Readers. It’s good to see you. This is my first post, so it seems only fitting that I should spend my time (and yours) letting you know what this blog is about since the title could be taken in several different ways. So, let me start off with a question…

Do you ever wonder what philosophy really is?

Probably not, I’m guessing. I mean, “What is philosophy?” isn’t a question that comes up as often as, say, “Can I park my car here?” or “Does this milk taste bad to you?” After all, those really are the kinds of important questions that shape our everyday existence because they have real consequences. Not being able to say what philosophy is doesn’t generally produce catastrophically negative results, and it’s a lucky thing that it doesn’t. Can you imagine a world where someone could be dragged out of the shower, hooked to a tow truck, and dragged nude through the streets just because he/she couldn’t define “philosophy”? After about a week, the entire planet would be nothing more than a giant impound lot filled with ignorant naked people, and I don’t know about you, but that’s really not the kind of world I want to live in.

But, look, just in case that sort of Kafkaesque nightmare does arise at some point, here’s one definition of “philosophy” from the dictionary widget on my computer (which as far as I’m concerned is the fount of all the linguistic knowledge you’re ever really going to need)—philosophy is “the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence.”

Well, OK, so that’s huge. And kind of hard to see any practical application in, but hey, if it’s all that’s standing between you and the impound lot, it’s worth memorizing. So do it. Do it now.

The entry also adds that this definition is especially applicable when philosophy is considered as an academic discipline, and I think for most people, that’s the only way they ever consider it. I mean, I don’t know too many people who think of philosophy as a recreational activity or as a particularly good substitute for television. Such people probably do exist, though, and they’re probably sitting at home right now. Alone. In the dark. Crying.

(Being an academic philosopher also pretty much requires you to wear a tweed jacket, smoke a pipe, and have a beard. Even if you’re a woman…or violently allergic to rough-textured woolen fabrics. But, hey, no one ever said that the pursuit of knowledge wasn’t going to involve a little sacrifice).

Now, I have nothing against academic philosophy. Actually, I’m all for it. In fact, I think more parents should force their college-aged children into studying it. I mean, the world has enough business majors and aspiring sports psychologists. We need some people who can think about the inherent pitfalls of a purely analytic philosophical system if for no reason other than the sheer entertainment value of witnessing that kind of intellectual turmoil. And besides, nothing toughens a kid up for the harsh sting of the real world like a stiff course in symbolic logic.

But that isn’t really the kind of philosophy I’m interested in here. Trust me, I don’t want to involve myself in anything quite so daunting. Rather, I’m interested in the kind of philosophy that ordinary people engage in every day because whether we choose to see it or not, we ask philosophical questions all the time. Who hasn’t discovered a dead car battery and asked, “Is this really all there is to life? Endless heartbreak and despair?” Who hasn’t drifted off in a staff meeting, inadvertently focused in a on a colleague’s chest and wondered, “Are those real?” Who hasn’t been completely ignored in a restaurant and thus forced to ponder the veracity of one’s own existence? I mean, seriously, it’s not like philosophical questions are things we have to go looking for.

But beyond just conducting philosophical inquiries into somewhat trivial things, my interest is in looking at a specific class of trivial things, and that’s where the “Hungry Planet” part of the title comes in. First off, though, no, this isn’t going to be a blog about food or cooking. Blogs about culinary journeys of self-discovery have already been done, and besides, given that I’ve never successfully broiled anything without starting a fire, any cooking-based spiritual quest that I might go on would necessarily be a journey through hell and would likely involve a trip to the Emergency Room. So, I’m passing right over that route.

As well, this isn’t a blog about world hunger because I don’t have an awful lot to add to that discussion. Hungry people should be fed, and that’s about where I stand on that. Of course, how to feed all those hungry people is a whole other matter…which is likely being discussed productively and at length in someone else’s blog.

This blog is about hunger more broadly construed because at its core, hunger is about desire. It’s about want, and from what I’ve observed, most people don’t hunger after gigantic, life-altering, world-changing things. Global peace? Sure, most people really do want that, but they’re more likely to break into a libidinous sweat over the perfect set of radial tires or a TV so powerful that it can peer into Rachel Maddow’s soul. Real justice? Well, that would be nice, but I know more than a few people who would much rather have a good explanation as to why we kicked Pluto out of our solar system but decided not to rename Uranus as long as we were revising our view of the universe.

And I’m really no different than any other ordinary person. I want things, too. I want to figure out how I can qualify for the Meals on Wheels program so I don’t ever have to make dirty dishes again. I want to own 1000 pairs of underwear so I only have to do laundry every 2.73972603 years. I want to know if sleeping in a pair of Depends just for the sake of convenience is really such a terrible thing.

And don’t worry that I’m ultimately going to conclude that people shouldn’t want whatever they want or have whatever they’ve got because I’m no advocate for living simply. Personally, I think that life should be lived in as complicated a manner as is humanly possible and that an opportunity to become emotionally over-wrought or utterly confused should never be passed by. I mean, life is about learning, and no one ever learned anything by being level-headed, fully-informed, or completely devoid of meaningless possessions. We don’t, of course, have to elevate small questions to a level of global importance and then act as if the continued rotation of the earth depends upon our answers, but then again…what the hell! Let’s do it!

So that’s what this blog is about. It’s not about asking, “Can I park my car here?” It’s about asking, “Why can’t I park my car any damn place I want?” And it’s not about asking “Does this milk taste bad to you?” It’s about why I think it’s better to encourage your friends to engage in behaviors that might make them throw up than it is for you to engage in those activities yourself. It’s about all those random little philosophical inquiries that all of us make everyday into what we want, why we want it, and how we’re going to get it. And it’s served up hot and fresh every Friday.

It’s philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.