The Weekly Essay

August 31, 2012

Most days when I come home there are mushrooms in the yard. I have to pick them or the dogs might eat them or just grab them up with their mouths, and they could be poisonous. The mushrooms, that is, not the dogs’ mouths. If you think that’s a dumb thing to do remember that dogs don’t have opposable thumbs so they can’t pull out a mushroom reference book and say, "Oh, that’s an Amanita phalloides, I’d better not eat that."

Not that reference books are necessarily a lot of help either, at least when it comes to mushrooms, because so many mushrooms look alike. When I was a kid we had a next door neighbor who had a whole shelf of mushroom books. I used to love looking through them, amazed that fungi come in such a staggering array of shapes and every color of the rainbow. They’re still absolutely amazing to me. I think it’s because I’ve always liked eating mushrooms, but also when I was young, even before our neighbor with all the mushroom books had moved in, my mother had a big ficus tree in the living room. One late spring three perfect bright yellow mushrooms popped up in it. They were so beautiful my mother thought I’d made them out of clay, but they were real mushrooms. Why’d they appear just then? Probably because mushrooms need to have all conditions optimally in their favor. They’re just like the Chicago Cubs winning a game.

Mushrooms will only appear when everything–light, temperature, humidity, real estate prices–is exactly right. I also remember the first fairy ring I ever saw. People sometimes ask me, because they know I’m a trove of useless information, how mushrooms manage to form fairy rings. And it’s really simple: the mushrooms are merely the fruit of a much larger organism. Imagine an apple tree underground and pushing its apples up through the soil. I learned that from my neighbors’ mushroom books. I also learned that there are a few mushrooms that are not only edible but have some really interesting side effects. They can allow you to taste colors for a few hours, or cause you to strip naked and run through public parks while singing Harry Nilsson’s "I Will Take You There". That’s why you have to be careful about the mushrooms you eat. If decide to make a gourmet organic pizza one night with vegetables from your own garden and you wake up in the okapi exhibit at the zoo with no idea of how you got there you probably picked the wrong kind of mushrooms.

According to my neighbor there are a few kinds of edible wild mushrooms that anybody can identify that are delicious. Morels, he told me, are a good example of this, although you should cut them in half to make sure they’re not false morels, which can be poisonous. Inky caps are also easy to identify because after a few hours they turn into a completely inedible mush. And puffballs, he told me, are excellent when fried, but, like morels, you have to cut them in half because what looks like a puffball might really be an immature destroying angel, which can kill you in a matter of hours. That always makes me wonder how people figured out which mushrooms were edible and which weren’t in the first place. There must have been a lot of trial and error, and when the error didn’t result in sitting back and saying, "Mmmm, pumpkin!" while the walls melted around you it resulted in nausea, convulsions, kidney failure, and death. It’s been said that the first person to eat an oyster must have been very brave. I’d say the second person to eat a mushroom was braver. And even a long time after people thought they had a pretty good idea which mushrooms were poisonous and which weren’t mistakes were made.

There’s a theory that emperor Claudius died from eating poisonous mushrooms, although so many people wanted Claudius dead at that point that his wife probably gave the cook some mushrooms and said "Don’t bother cutting these in half." You’d have to be pretty sadistic to rub someone out with mushrooms, though, because it’s a horrible way to die. Claudius’s predecessor was Caligula, who was stabbed more than fifty times by his own guards, and his last words were "Well at least I didn’t have to eat any mushrooms."

August 24, 2012

The following contains some adult language used extremely childishly. Consider yourself forewarned, although, if you’ve been following the news enough recently to have gotten over the shock of hearing BBC reporters talk about the Russian punk band Pussy Riot you’re probably not going to be that upset about my language here. Unless of course you’re okay with hearing certain words spoken aloud but can’t deal with seeing them in print. I had an uncle like that. He loved listening to Richard Pryor albums but a copy of Tropic of Cancer would send him screaming from the room.

Some time ago a guy came up to me on the sidewalk. I was going to say "on the street", but I was walking on the sidewalk. For some reason people always say they were "walking down the street" or "on the street" when they mean they were on the sidewalk. If you’re in an area with sidewalks and you’re walking on the street for goodness sake get off the street because you’re just asking to get hit by a car. (Note: "for goodness sake" is not the adult language I warned you about previously, but it is coming up shortly, so you still have time to turn back.) The guy asked me if I had any change. I said no and apologized and walked on, thinking that was the end of it. For some reason this made him angry and he yelled, "You big pussy!" That was the end of it because I ignored him and kept walking, trying really hard not to laugh at the mental image what he’d said conjured. Although much less surreal than my first mental image I actually found it funnier to picture myself as a giant cat, first as a regular human body with a big Hello Kitty head, but then I decided I’d rather be some fancy breed of cat. Of course my first mental image involved "pussy" being a euphemism for "vagina", which got me wondering. I get that this is a term was meant to insult my manhood, to suggest that I’m weak. When did "pussy" become synonymous with "weak"? Rather than looking at history and the circumscribed role in which women were so often placed I’d like to point out that I don’t know of any other orifice or body part that’s capable or squeezing out another human being. Not to mention all those late night commercials for feminine hygiene products that baffle me and leave me with the impression that women have to worry a lot more about their anatomy than we guys do. This is probably why when I was growing up when many girls reached puberty they were given a pamphlet called "On Becoming A Woman". All we guys ever had to deal with was not being able to wear sweatpants for about three years and the awkward conversation that inevitably followed the discovery of a stash of latex gloves or a copy of Stephen King’s Silver Bullet under our mattress, but that’s another story.

Unfortunately the history of "pussy" meaning "weak" seems to have everything to do with its association with women, and it seems to be a euphemism with a very long history, even though "pussy" also has a long history as a synonym for "cat". After all pussy willows have been called that for hundreds of years, and I doubt anyone looked at them and said, "You know what those remind me of? That Andrew Lloyd Weber musical." But let’s say, just because he obviously wasn’t playing with a full deck, that the guy on the street really was calling me a big cat. It’s not much of an insult because cats aren’t exactly weak either. And I’m not talking about lions, tigers, jaguars, cheetahs, and ocelots, none of which you’d want to meet in a dark alley, or even on a sunny sidewalk. I’m talking about housecats, the ones who will kill birds and other small animals and bring them to you. And that’s if they like you. As I said I wouldn’t mind being a cat, especially a fancy breed, and I certainly wouldn’t consider being mistaken for one an insult. Cats helped end the Black Plague in Europe, although part of the reason for the plague in the first place is that people were suspicious of cats because they were associated with witches. Not that there’s anything wrong with witches, who were almost always women, which further undermines any belief that women are weak because if witches are women and women are weak then why would anyone fear witches, aside from the possibility that witches, unlike most women, weigh the same as a duck? Anyway, cats helped end the plague because the cats ate the rats that carried the fleas that bit the frog that ate the wasp that killed the spider that chased the fly, but I don’t know why she swallowed the fly.

August 17, 2012

When I heard that a British company is banning paper clips my first reaction was to defend them. Sometimes when you hear about something that seems really boneheaded, that reporters giggle about as they discuss it and that becomes a widespread joke and then you start looking into it carefully it really starts to make sense and not seem quite so boneheaded after all. This is not one of those times. Of all the things in this world that are potentially dangerous and that should either be banned or at the very least kept away from people who are too irresponsible to be trusted with them I’m pretty sure paper clips fall somewhere between cotton balls and squid ink. If paper clips were dangerous then I have enough of them just in my office to stage a coup in New Caledonia.

And paper clips aren’t even the most dangerous thing in my office. There’s also a stapler, filled with staples, a staple remover, whose designer based it on a crocodile’s skull, and a globe and several large heavy books I could hit someone over the head with. I have a ball of string that’s more dangerous than any paper clip, even the ones that look like kind of a misshapen star. I know from personal experience how dangerous that ball of string can be because once a co-worker and I tied a pink stuffed hippo to one end of the ball of string and opened the window and started lowering it to the ground to see if I had enough string to reach all the way from the floor where we worked to the ground. And then I realized I hadn’t tied the last foot of string to the rest of the ball so the hippo went into free fall. And you know what’s even more dangerous than a ball of string? An open window on the seventh floor of an office building. Paper is more dangerous than paper clips. I’ve had at least three dozen paper cuts. When was the last time you got a paper clip cut?

But what was really shocking isn’t that an office of presumably intelligent people banned paper clips. What was really shocking was that a representative of a company that makes paper clips came out in defense of the paper clip. And if you’re thinking, "Well, yeah, that’s what he’s paid to do" you’re missing the point: there’s a company that makes paper clips. Okay, I don’t think paper clips are born or that they grow on trees or anything ridiculous like that. I’ve just never had to buy paper clips. I’ve never known anyone who bought paper clips. When I go into office supply stores, which I do pretty frequently, I don’t remember ever seeing paper clips, except the rubber-coated ones that come in different colors and sometimes even have really cool designs. I always assumed, though, that all the paper clips in the world were manufactured in 1923 and that we’ve just been reusing, or rubber-coating, them ever since. Any time I need paper clips all I have to do is take two steps out of my cubicle to where there’s a big box of them. Amazingly whenever the box runs low another office will send over the paper clips they’re not using and it can be refilled. How does a company that makes paper clips stay in business? Here, though, is where they can become potentially dangerous. The paper clip is perfect. What would we replace it with? Chewing gum? There’s no way to improve on its design. But I know someone in some company that makes paper clips-and hopefully there’s only one-is working on redesigning the paper clip. He’s probably trying some jagged edges, or a pointier shape, or expanding the paper clip into some sort of multi-dimensional hypercube that will connect pieces of paper in completely different cubicles. Or at least he was before that whole internet thing stole his idea, but that’s another story.

And I know it’s a guy. Not to be too hard on my own gender, but I’m pretty sure a woman looks at a paper clip and sees a perfectly good functional object that does what it’s supposed to do and doesn’t need to be changed-and, to be fair, most men are the same way, while there’s a certain subset of men who look at the paperclip and think "How can I change the design of this in such a way that it becomes completely useless?" This is why women do things like discovering radium while men do things like building atomic bombs, which should be banned because everyone’s too irresponsible to be trusted with them. Have you ever seen what happens when one of those falls off a desk? Although it is possible that it was a woman who called for banning paper clips, and not just any woman, but someone’s mother who was afraid that someone might straighten a paper clip and poke their eye out. Only mothers tell us not to play with sharp things because we might poke our eye out. Fathers, on the other hand, never say this, because they secretly hope we will poke our eyes out, because a big old eyeball just lying on the ground would be a pretty cool thing to see. And then they’d like to see what happens when you stick a firecracker in it and light it. I’m pretty sure Enrico "One-Eye" Fermi did this with his dad.

August 10, 2012

I carry a lot of cards. I have my driver’s license, I have an employee ID, I have a card for the place where I go swim, not to mention credit cards, voter registration, and a library card. My favorite burrito place gave me a card with pictures of little burritos on it. Every time I come in and order a burrito they stamp one of the pictures. After I’ve bought nine burritos they’ll give me the tenth one free. This isn’t unusual. There’s a sandwich place that has given me a similar card, except instead of stamping it they use a special punch that makes a little hole in the shape of a check mark. At least that’s what it looks like. I’m not sure what exactly it’s supposed to be, otherwise I’d be tempted to use an X-acto knife and earn free sandwiches that way, although I’m just unethical enough to only think of that without being willing to actually do it. Plus I wouldn’t want to cause the person who’s working behind the counter to lose their job, because, being the lowest ranking person there they’d probably be held responsible for my chicanery. And as far as I’m concerned in most cases the person working right behind the counter is the most important person in the place because they’re the ones making my burrito/sandwich/coffee/milkshake/burger/jet-engine backpack, which is why I always leave a tip.

For the benefit of foreigners and other aliens the term "tip", or "protection", means a gratuity given to a service person, theoretically to reward them for doing a good job but mainly to make up for the fact that long ago some bonehead got the bright idea that waiters, waitresses, and other people in the service industry were making too much money, so they should only receive about a third of the minimum wage and tips would make up the rest. And this might work if everyone remembered to leave a tip, and if professions like movie theater attendant weren’t also considered "service industry". When was the last time you tipped the person who gave you your movie ticket? And it also annoys me that, unlike restaurants, where you typically leave the tip wedged under your plate when you leave, or, increasingly, tack it on to your credit card bill, in coffee and burrito places you go up to a counter to place your order and there’s a box next to the register that says something like, "We [heart] tips!" or "Karma, dude". And I’m happy to toss in a dollar, as much as it annoys me to be called "dude", but it always seems like I put in my dollar when the workers all have their backs turned, so no one notices my generosity.

And even that isn’t what bothers me. I don’t expect a reward for doing the right thing, after all, but I always think they think I didn’t give them a tip and the reason it’s taking so long to get my latte is because they’re in the back stirring it with the dead mouse they found behind the freezer. Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised if others have tried carving punch marks into cards, and maybe that’s why more places are switching to plastic cards. The plastic cards are even more annoying. Yes, it is troublesome to hang onto the paper cards, but after you’ve purchased nine jet engine backpacks and gotten your tenth one free you throw away the card, or they throw it away for you, but at least it’s paper and biodegradable. In ten thousand years an alien will sift through the charred remains of our culture, pull out a plastic card, scan it, and say, "Wow, this guy sure ate a lot of cheese danish," and another alien will say, "Well, I hope he at least left a tip." And even though being able to reuse the plastic cards is an advantage I also never know when my next reward is coming. It seems to be random. There’s a coffee place where if I spend anywhere between ten and fifty bucks-I have no idea which it is-I’ll eventually earn a free pastry which would otherwise cost me a whopping ninety-nine cents. I have a movie theater card too. Every two or three movies or so I earn a free small popcorn, and every five or six or who knows how many movie tickets I purchase I earn a free ticket. But in both cases the awards aren’t cumulative-I have to take my free pastry, free popcorn, or free ticket because I won’t earn another one until I do no matter how much I spend. And they expire after a certain amount of time. Why is that? It’s not like they’re putting a bag of popcorn aside as soon as I earn one and I need to eat it before it gets stale or the mice behind the refrigerator eat it. Theoretically these are supposed to be rewards for customer loyalty, but I think it would be better to reward the prodigal customer who’s finally come back after six months of patronizing the competition. I also have a card for a local microbrewery, by the way, because if there’s one thing that my life was lacking it was an excuse to drink more beer, but that’s another story.

And they tell me I can track my rewards online, which just seems like a path to insanity. I have too many online accounts and too many passwords to remember as it is. I don’t need a dozen more to go with all the merchant cards I’m carrying, or some hacker examining my taste in movies. It’s a lucky thing I don’t fly more than once every two or three years or I’d probably be obsessed with tracking my frequent flyer miles and trying to take advantage of those double-your-miles-while-we’re-tripling-the-number-of-miles-you-need-to-earn-anything offers. Actually the only people I know who fly enough to worry about their frequent flyer miles are the ones who do it for work, which always makes me wonder. If you have to fly for your job and your company reimburses you for your travel costs who gets the free ticket you earn? Anyway, I say to all the companies that give out cards: don’t reward your customers by making them jump through hoops. Sometimes even the places that give out paper cards are guilty of this. Earlier this week I went to a sandwich place and handed over my card that had been punched nine times, and the guy behind the counter told me I couldn’t get a large sandwich, only a regular, even though I’d bought nine large sandwiches. And it doesn’t say anything about limitations, restrictions, provisos, quid pro quos, or my mileage varying on the card. So he called over a manager, and the manager said, "I’ll let it go this time," which is the kind of attitude you can afford to take if you’re a manager and not dependent on tips. And I’ll be honest and say that if that were the stated policy I wouldn’t try any chicanery, pettifogging, or knavery-I’d accept a slightly smaller sandwich, but I expect truth in advertising. So I wrote to the main office to ask them to make their policy clearer. I got back a very nice reply that their policy is your tenth sandwich can be whatever you like, although a jet engine is extra, and by way of an apology they’d be sending me a card with nine holes punched in it so I could get another free sandwich. Now I just feel bad for the guy in the main office who, at this moment, is preparing my card with an X-acto knife.

August 3, 2012

I could say it’s been one of those weeks, but it’s always one of those weeks. Random thoughts from my journal:

Fear makes cowards of us all.

Someone left one of those boxes of assorted chocolates in the office kitchen. Within half an hour everything except the grapefruit caramel log was gone.

In high school a guy tried to get me to take LSD with him by telling me about one of his bad trips. His name was Dave, and he told me after he’d dropped acid, flown the windowpane, licked the blotter, hit the goose, made a date with Lucy in the sky with diamonds, turned on, tuned in, dropped out, and eaten a sugar cube he bought from a guy on the corner that could have been laced with, for all he knew, a hundred percent real sugar, he went to the bathroom. And while he was sitting on the toilet the dark blue floor tiles grew little legs and arms and big nasty fangs. And then they got up and started walking around and talking to each other, saying, "You know Dave? I hate him. Let’s get him!" And so he spent the next six hours standing on the toilet while the tiles attempted to reenact the Battle of Shiloh with him as the Confederacy. I don’t know why he thought this would make me think taking LSD was a good idea. All it really did was make me afraid to go to the bathroom.

A post office down the street from me has a a bunch of head shots of "famous" people. I don’t recognize most of them. I think I should take my own in and sign it and give it to them. Then people will start stopping me on the street to say, "Hey, aren’t you…that guy…in…that thing?" And I’ll just smile and say, "I get that all the time."

Occasionally I’ll see a sign on a door that says, "Door must remain locked at all times." There’s a term for a door that must remain locked at all times. It’s called a "wall".

Somebody threw an empty chardonnay bottle in our front yard. Somehow I can’t picture someone drinking chardonnay in a Firebird screaming "Whoo!" while his buddy in the passenger seat hits mailboxes with a baseball bat. That sounds more like a shiraz drinker.

Boxes of assorted chocolates always have a handy diagram that’s supposed to tell you which one is the orange cream, which one is the coconut flake, and which one is the cockroach cluster. Why is it, then, that none of the shapes in the diagram look anything like any of the chocolates? And why is it, no matter how carefully I try to match what’s in the diagram I still always end up biting into the grapefruit caramel log?

Eventually I’ll get around to procrastinating.

It’s a common trope in science fiction shows and movies that the aliens from any planet all speak the same language and subscribe to the same set of beliefs. So all Klingons are warriors, all Vogons are bureaucrats, all Ewoks are really annoying, and all aliens on Doctor Who speak with British accents. This always makes me wonder whether the writers for these shows have ever met or heard anything about anyone who lives more than five miles from them. But sometimes I wonder if aliens think the same way about us. Maybe the reason they haven’t landed yet is because they keep abducting the wrong people and thinking, "Whoa, if this is what Earthlings are like we’d better stay away from that place."

I used to read a lot of biographies. The problem was I always knew how they were going to end: the main character would die. I haven’t read as many autobiographies, but even though I’m pretty sure no one has written an autobiography after they died I think all autobiographies should end the same way: "Well, that’s all for now. I’m going to go off and do some stuff now that you’d probably find interesting, but you won’t be able to read about it here. So, anyway, I’m going to stop typing now. If you see me around you can ask what I did next."

Coming up next: five reasons not to make lists.

July 27, 2012

Unless I’m mistaken an itch isn’t that different, physiologically, from pain. The difference is we take care of an itch by scratching it, which should cause more pain, but instead makes the pain go away. This is the weirdest thing. When you cut your finger you don’t make it go away by setting your finger on fire. But I think an itch is just a really low level pain, and scratching causes the release of endorphins which make it feel better. Or in some cases make it feel really good. Sometimes you have an intense itch and you really feel like there would be nothing better than covering a two-by-four with some five grit sandpaper and just rubbing it all over your back. And sometimes you get those weird itches that feel like they’re really deep under your skin, and no matter how much you scratch you can’t get to them. When I get those I know how a cat chasing a laser pointer feels.

And when you were a kid in the summer did you ever just roll around on the grass? It was worth it, too, until you got up a few minutes later and you felt like your entire body was covered with ants. Once that happened to me and I realized I’d been rolling on an ant hill. I really shouldn’t have covered my body with honey first, but that’s another story. Some itches feel better than others. Once I stepped in some poison ivy or poison oak or poison kumquat or something and my foot itched. It didn’t just itch, though, it itched in a very specific spot, right inside the arch. And scratching it was pure bliss. I’d scratch a bit, and then the itch would go away, and I’d start jonesing for the next itch, even talking to my foot, saying, “Come on, man, I gotta have my endorphin fix.” Yes, I’d been told that if you have a rash or allergic reaction you shouldn’t scratch it because that will just make it worse, but I wanted to make it worse. Then I discovered what “worse” meant when tiny blisters appeared in the affected area, but I kept scratching. I scratched until the blisters broke open and seeped pus, and the pain was excruciating. But there was still something about the searing intensity of the pain that was deeply gratifying. A light breeze blowing over the underside of my foot would give me paroxysms of exquisite pain. It was pain that hurt so good. It was pain that made me insane in the membrane.

Even now I get giddy thinking about it, which I realize is pretty disturbing, but I promise I’m not going to go tramping through kumquat patches. I’m just saying that there’s a little masochist in all of us, and I think that even though generally it’s not considered socially acceptable to scratch in public I think we should anyway. Remember those idiotic shampoo commercials where a person was about to ask someone they found attractive for their phone number when suddenly the attractive person scratched their head and it was a complete turnoff? I think they stopped doing those commercials because they realized we all have occasional itches, we all scratch, and it’s not like the attractive person had been dipped in honey and rolled on an anthill—not that there’s anything wrong with that. Not scratching is one of those social niceties I don’t understand. For the most part I have nothing against social niceties. I think they’re the quicklime or sand or cow snot or whatever the magical ingredient is in mortar that helps it hold together the walls that are metaphorically our civilized society. But not scratching is one I don’t understand, although there was one time I was talking to a guy who’d worked in the film industry. Like most creative people he had little time or interest in social niceties. Anyway, we were talking about the films of Kubrick, Kurosawa, and Jim Carrey, and he kept scratching his crotch. Or rather he was talking about the films, because I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. I’d say, “Yeah, I—“ and he’d scratch and suddenly be off again about the semiotics of Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. And I realized that maybe if he just allowed himself to itch it would distract him long enough for me to say something. Or maybe not. All I really know is all this talk about itching and scratching makes me want to go get a two-by-four covered with some five grit sandpaper.

July 20, 2012

Sometimes when I’m walking home and I pass people in my neighborhood they’ll wave and maybe say, "How’s it going?" And I’ll say, "Good, how about you?" And then they don’t say anything, which always irks me. It’s not that it’s small talk. I know some people find this sort of meaningless exchange annoying, and wish we could just avoid it entirely. George Carlin said that he always hated it when people said, "Have a nice day!" because it was an order. He felt that if he wanted to have a lousy day no one should be allowed to prevent him from doing so. And I admit he’s got a point. I always try to remember to say "I hope you have a nice day!" because I assume most people are going to want to have a nice day, but I don’t want them to feel like I’m putting them under obligation to have a nice day. And thinking about it I should probably add, "if that’s what you want." I realize a lot of mistakes in history have been the result of bad assumptions. At least I assume that’s true.

Anyway, maybe some people really want to have lousy days. Hey, if you’re one of those people, I hope you have the worst day of your life, if that’s what makes you happy. And I have known some people who seemed to be happiest when they were miserable. Many years ago I worked for a customer service company that was owned by a guy who had a net worth of 25 million dollars and who was probably the most miserable person I’ve ever met. This may or may not prove that money buys happiness, since I don’t know whether he spent any of his fortune, but that’s another story. I never saw him in the afternoons so, luckily, I never did think to wish him a nice day, but sometimes I’d see him first thing when I came in and would say, "Good morning!" And he’d always snap, "What’s good about it?" and walk away. I’m pretty sure now that all that misery made him happy, and that he believed everyone in the world would be happier if they were miserable too, so he created a customer service company. Because if there’s one thing I learned working there it’s that nothing spreads misery more than customer service.

Speaking from my own personal experience it seems like people only go into customer service because they’re not qualified to do anything, including providing customer service. It’s probably why most receptionists are better paid than customer service people. A receptionist may be like a roadblock between you and the person you ultimately want to speak to, but they can at least get you going in the right direction. Customer service is more like a dead end. Sure, I managed to help some people, but those were the failures, the ones that got away, so to speak. At the time I felt bad about the people I’d failed to help, but now I realize that my diligent but unsuccessful efforts to help them raised their hopes just enough to completely dash them to pieces, which meant they went away more miserable than when they’d called in the first place. And for some of them I’m sure that made their day a lot better. Anyway, the reason it bugs me when someone says to me "How’s it going?" and I reply "Good, how about you?" is because when they don’t say anything I realize they’re not really interested in the answer. At least they’re not interested in the specifics of the answer. I could very say, "Well, I’ve got a touch of the pyorrhea and my left leg’s getting gouty, which means it’ll snow before week’s end, and my wife reprogramed the GPS so it talks like Buddy Hackett, but other than that I’m not doing too well. How about you?" No, the reason strangers say, "How’s it going", and let me emphasize that it’s not even a question, is because they’re testing me. They’re making sure I’m not high on bath salts and about to jump on them and chew their faces off. They’re hoping for a nice, normal, straightforward response, although sometimes when I’m walking along I get so lost in my own thoughts that I don’t notice another person coming from the opposite direction and when they say, "How’s it going?" it makes me jump and panic and yell, "I’m just putting the salmon balls away!" Although the fact that they’re concerned enough about me to ask how it’s going does make my day a little better.

June 29, 2012

The people who produce all forms of media are always looking for new ways to suck in audiences, possibly because the old line attributed to P.T. Barnum about there being a sucker born every minute was right, but also because it’s hard to keep audiences when the overwhelming amount of what’s produced sucks. Back during the Great Depression, for instance, movie theaters gave away free dishes, and then in the fifties they tried things like movies in 3-D, which was so successful it took them nearly sixty years to get around to mass marketing 3-D movies again, although most of us still aren’t buying it.

Recently I heard about show that’s currently only being produced on the web, but the idea is that you’ll call a phone number and listen in while footage plays on the screen. In other words it’s sort of like a drive-in movie–and we all know how successful those are–except that instead of being able to hang a little speaker on your car window you’ll have to keep your ear pressed to your phone. And the idea is that it will also interact with your Facebook, Twitter, or other social media account and whatever else you’ve been browsing on the web to create, in the words of one reporter, an "immersive experience". The first series being produced is, naturally enough, a cop show, because every other show on television these days is either about cops or doctors. And I don’t have a problem with that–hey, I even like some of those shows about doctors who moonlight as cops and who have a werewolf for a partner–but I do hope they’ll avoid one of the dumbest recurring features of most cop shows. You’ll mainly see this on a show like Law & Order: Misdemeanors, where a group of rough-talking, soft-hearted plainclothes cops devote their entire lives to using DNA evidence to stop jaywalking. The cops will be in their office in the precinct and walking out to go to a crime scene. One of them will say something like, "Hey, did you hear about Bruce?" And then when they get to the crime scene and are getting out of the car the same cop will say, "He’s finally getting help for his gambling addiction."

I’m not a cop and I don’t live in New York so I have no idea how long it takes them to get from their office to the car, or how long most of these car trips take, but I still can’t understand why they have to put an entire conversation on hold while they’re en route to a crime scene. Especially when they’re riding in the same car, which must make for some really strange silences. Or possibly the other cop sits in the car screaming, "What? What about Bruce? Are you going to tell me? Say something!" Anyway, it doesn’t matter what these "immersive" shows are about. Do we really need or even want a show that simultaneously interacts with every electronic device in our homes–computer, television set, telephone, microwave, toaster–in an attempt to make us watch? If this is the future of television I’m worried that some night I might decide to read a book only to have television producers come into my home and strap me into a chair like Alex in A Clockwork Orange. I’ve already been in some focus groups that were like that, but that’s another story.

I understand that people who produce media want as much of our attention as they can possibly get, but is this really the way to do it? Whatever happened to those virtual reality helmets that were the next big thing in entertainment? I’m not sure, although they seem to have been as popular as drive-in movies. And here’s something else to consider: there are movies, TV shows, books, and even pieces of music that, for me, are already immersive experiences. There are works of art–and I do consider some movies and TV shows works of art–that I enjoy so much that I willingly lose myself in them, if only for a short time. Yes, it takes some concentration on my part, and, yes, the phone might ring or something else might interrupt the experience, but that’s life. That’s reality. If a friend or family member should need help and try to reach me I’d rather not be tying up the phone or the computer or the toaster with some show. Something that tries to prevent the outside world from interfering with those sometimes annoying, sometimes necessary interruptions isn’t entertainment. It’s more like induced psychosis. And if they really have to resort to this gimmick to hold our attention maybe the real problem is the shows they’re making aren’t good enough to make us care what happened to Bruce.

June 22, 2012

For summer:

Who needs a circus when slime molds sent
Butterscotch veins through the rotten stump
In the backyard? One giant cell
Swimming with nuclei undivided by walls,
As I learned from National Geographic. Summer
Was a slime mold, and I feathered out
From the edges to escape boredom.

I only remember the audience on the other side.
They had little lights on cords
That they spun around. This was part of my first circus.
The audience was supposed to be part of it. Not me.
I was too young to be given a little light.
I must have been too young
To follow any of what was going on.

Were there sideshows, displays of freaks?
Let’s say there were.
At home I had a gift
From a woman who lived in Florida:
An octopus that squinted forever in formaldehyde.
It was twisting its tentacles to fit
The shape of the mayonnaise jar when it died.

Who needs a circus when we had mud daubers
Ratcheting their oil slick wings
In the driveway where the gravel had worn away?
At the end of summer we could
Smash their adobe tubes and set free
The corpses of spiders. Getting matches
Was too, or at least was until

Our supply of blue-tipped strike-anywheres
In the neighbor’s garage was exhausted. He never
Caught on as far as I know. My best friend
And I would talk to him
When he came home from work. He stood
Over us seemingly a mile tall, taller
Than either of our fathers, and said,

I know I had some matches around here.
He was single, mostly lived alone, left his basement
Open all the time so his dogs could fend
For themselves when he disappeared in his boat
On long sailing trips. My best friend
And I knew the interior of that basement better
Than he did, and we thanked

Him for being an absentee packrat.
At any time we needed we could lay our hands on
A flashlight, a Harpo Marx horn, newspapers,
Puppies, an artificial tree, a rattlesnake bite kit,
Fifteen wrenches, or an old sailing ship
Carved in relief on lacquered wood
And sailing forever on a sea of dust.

Who needs a circus when I could see Mickey Mouse
Chopping a broom into pieces so
Like a starfish it grew into
An army of brooms carrying buckets of water?
Fantasia was re-released, but before VCRs
It was worth going. I found
A cigarette lighter on the sidewalk

Outside. My mother told me to throw it away.
I pulled the little metal wheel at the top and made
A spark, but no flame.
The lighter was dry
And disposable, no room for a refill. I secretly
Slipped it like an amber jewel into my pocket.
In the dark of my room the spark lit only itself.

It may still be there.
An elephant was hanged in Tennessee. That was
Before I came along. Who needs a circus
When they could attend a big death for free?
Mary lifted her trainer and cracked his head as easily
As one of the cantaloupes she’d been reaching for.
The law could not be circumvented.

We must have travelled by where it happened,
Between the railroad and the highway on one of our trips
East for a relative’s wedding or funeral or some
Other reunion. Who knows why we went? The lines
Along the side of the road were abstract animation,
Designs that were changing and changed like flipping
Through a book of pictures, each only slightly different.

Who needs a circus when the hotel
Came complete with an indoor pool?
I needed goggles; the chlorine
Burned my eyes. And don’t look directly at the lights
Of the tanning bed. And the slick red brick
Walkways aren’t safe for running. I slipped
Over into an underworld clear through tinted green.

That wasn’t the summer we went to Maine,
But maybe the summer after
When I tried to relive the places we visited there:
I built aquaria out of boxes, and paper scallops
Red as magic markers could make
Fled on strings from starfish so thick with glitter
And glue their blue arms were radiant as ice cream.

When the leaves started to fall
I noticed the little shack on the hill
Off in the distance where new condominiums
Were being built. Who needs a circus
When the tree in the front yard
Swarmed with ladybugs
With their yellow-flecked larvae

On the trunk? I put a handful
In a jar and put it on my nightstand.
They formed their tiny accordion cocoons
And twenty-four hours later a spectacular
Explosion threw a new generation against the glass.
It was too cold for them outside,
But they had no other place to go.

Who needs a circus when June bugs
Climbed up the panty-hose trunk
Of my Aunt Lena’s leg? She didn’t even notice.
She was too busy heading for the most fragile
Piece of furniture in the house: the antique
Rocking chair barely wide enough to hold her.
Rabbit-faced Uncle Rupert disappeared

Into the folds of the overstuffed couch.
When the chair split underneath
Her Aunt Lena had to be helped up by
My grandfather and father. Afterward they both
Rebuilt the chair, reinforced the seat
With a steel plate, but even after that
My grandfather sidestepped Aunt Lena

Whenever she came to visit and made sure
He sat in that chair himself. The chair
Must still be around with a steel plate like a veteran
Of the Battle of the Bulge.
I remember now, though I don’t know why,
That we left the circus early.
I wonder what I missed.

June 15, 2012

The mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, recently drew a lot of criticism for announcing a plan to ban the sale on sugary drinks in sizes larger than sixteen ounces. Some people have criticized this by calling the plan part of a "nanny state", which is sort of like Big Brother, but in a long dress and a hat with fake cherries on it.

People have also said that the decision to purchase and drink a gallon of sugar-saturated water should be a matter of personal responsibility. But the ban is an attempt to address the growing obesity problem, and I’m not sure it’s such a bad idea. First of all I’m not sure when nannies became a bad thing. Nannies aren’t parents, which may actually be an advantage. Allan Sherman, who you probably know as the guy who sang "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah, here I am at Camp Granada" says that he got fat because his mother told him "Clean your plate. There are children starving in Europe." So he cleaned his plate seven or eight times a day, and he admits that all that happened was he got fat and children in Europe went on starving, probably because Allan Sherman was eating all their food. It’s true that his mother wanted him to eat so he’d grow and be healthy, but a nanny might have been smart enough to stop him at his third plate. Then there’s the matter of personal responsibility.

I happen to be in favor of personal responsibility. Each of us learning to take responsibility for our own actions is a great thing, especially since part of that is keeping in mind how our actions affect others. But why is the pressure of individual responsibility always put on the consumer? Why is it always, "Don’t drink all of that 78-ounce soda even if that’s what they gave you at the drive-thru window" or "Don’t breathe in the asbestos we put in your building" or "Don’t drink or bathe in or go anywhere near your tap water if you live near a chemical processing plant"? How about a little corporate responsibility for a change? And smaller drink cups mean less plastic and a reduced volume of soft drinks being sold, which would keep costs down, so, theoretically, everybody wins. Everybody, that is, except for the plastic and soft drink companies, but I think even the plastic companies should agree that the world could use less plastic. And in the United States soft drinks are mostly made with corn syrup, not cane sugar. I think the science is still out on whether corn syrup is just as healthy as sugar, but sugar isn’t exactly healthy to begin with, and I’m suspicious of the corn syrup companies running commercials that tell us our bodies can’t tell the difference between corn syrup and cane sugar. Here’s a fun fact: our bodies can’t tell the difference between phosphorous and arsenic either. That doesn’t make arsenic good for us. And shouldn’t all that corn be going to make ethanol anyway?

To get back to personal responsibility, though, it also helps sometimes to have some help, some guidelines to remind people when to be responsible. An example psychologists have used is that in studies when people are given a soup bowl that continually fills from the bottom most people will keep eating long after they’re full. It’s a finding that is used to support the large drink ban, and it also raises a serious question: where can I get one of those bowls, and do they come with clam chowder? Here’s what I think is a better example of guidelines helping people be responsible: every day when I go to work I cross the street at a clearly marked crosswalk. It tells pedestrians like me "This is where you should cross the street", and it tells drivers "You have to stop for pedestrians here. Anywhere else feel free to run ’em over!" How about stop signs? Strictly speaking no one’s forced to stop at a stop sign. The sign is just there to remind people that there’s a good reason they shouldn’t drive through the intersection at full speed, and even though there may not be consequences for ignoring a stop sign, stopping is the responsible thing to do. I also get the argument that people feel it’s intrusive, and I’m sure there will be those who rebel against the ban, even if it really does turn out to be effective. I used to know a guy who stopped wearing a seat belt when it became a law that you had to wear a seat belt while driving. I would say this is like cutting off his nose to spite his face, but technically it’s more like playing Russian roulette to spite someone else’s face. And the ban really only affects the size of the drink you can purchase. It doesn’t affect how many drinks you can buy. Why is it a problem for somebody who’s really that thirsty to buy ten or twelve sixteen ounce sodas? Modern cars are designed with a minimum of a hundred and seventeen cup holders anyway, and think of all the flavor options you’d have. It also doesn’t affect the content, which I’m sure is good news for those of us who like a nice tall glass of syrup in the mornings. And those who really find the ban so onerous should keep in mind that sooner or later Bloomberg is going to open his umbrella and fly away over the chimney tops of Manhattan. His replacement may lift the ban, but even if it’s not lifted industries are very good at adapting. Back when companies started labeling certain foods as "low fat" government regulations were put in place that defined what could be called "low fat". So the companies adapted and started labeling foods that didn’t meet the standard "lower fat", "less fat", "reduced fat", and "whole wheat fat". And the soft drink industry will adapt. For one thing we’ll start seeing drink machines that dispense clam chowder.