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Wed, 28 Mar 2012
Intolerance
When JW moved to town and started attending school with us, our fourth-grade teacher decided it was necessary to prepare the class for his arrival. "I want you to be nice to JW," she said. "His haircut is a little different from what you might be used to seeing. People come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. It's just a haircut. Nothing special. I want you to welcome him to our school and show him what good citizens you are." We all beamed and cracked our knuckles in anticipation. We couldn't wait to get a look at this motherfucker. A few hours later, when he finally finished whatever important public school orientation program had been arranged for him, JW walked into our class. It was way better than we had even dared to hope, for JW had a haircut that, in 1982 and in our particular corner of the Midwest, constituted a giant leap toward social suicide. JW had a crew cut, or, as we called it at that time, a "buzz." Imagine if you will, a pressure cooker. A very faulty pressure cooker. As it starts to heat up, you hear a few random squeaks and gurgles. Then the whole thing starts to shake. The shaking becomes more and more violent until at last something has to give way. A valve cracks. The weakest point ruptures. Suddenly, the steam escapes in one loud, cacophonous roar. Windows break. Dishes fall from their shelf. Someone gets hurt. That someone is JW. When you imagine a moment from your past, it's impossible to gauge the accuracy of your memory. Your mind doesn't record memories, but rather reconstructs them as needed. Here's what my mind reconstructs: a room full of kids, hysterical to the point of tears. Pounding on desks. Pointing. Covering their mouths in shock and glee. I was not innocent in any of this. I don't remember the rest of that day, but I do know that the ostracism of JW did not stop at this one event. You'd think we would have gotten over the shortness of his hair, but we never did. Pantomiming a hair clipper and making a "meeeeeeeeoooooooooooow" sound never got old, and JW never gained any kind of social purchase in our classroom or the school at large. I think the stupidest, most hypocritical part of the whole thing is that none of us had a decent haircut either. A lot the boys had mullets, and when you look at photos of them it's easy to imagine the beginnings of the pubic 'stashes they'd grow in high school. The rest of them had long bowl cuts, the sides poofing out like earmuffs. The girls had bad, mousy versions of their own mothers' hairstyles: lopsided, feathered Farrah-dos that had long fallen out of fashion in the rest of the world, but would hang on seemingly forever in our neck of the woods. My own hair fell into a style I want to call "The Default," the style that arises from an obvious lack of combing, washing, and cutting. JW didn't last long at our school. I don't know why he left. It probably had something to do with his parent's profession, which I also don't know. If I met JW today, I wouldn't recognize him. In fact, if you showed me a photo of him from fourth grade, zoomed in on his face so I couldn't see his crew cut, I probably wouldn't recognize that either. I literally know nothing about him except that he had a crew cut, and that we found his crew cut intolerable. The last time I saw JW, his father came to school to pick him up, accompanied by JW's younger brother who was about five years old. Both the dad and the little brother had crew cuts identical to JW's. That, to us, was the cherry on top of our cruel sundae.
[filepath: /journal/history]
Fri, 13 Jan 2012
Face Off
Get ready. Are you sitting down? Are you sure? Okay. Take a deep breath. You're about to read about my personal grooming habits. I've decided to attempt to start shaving every day. This is startling news, because I'm pretty sure I have never done this before in the history of my facial hair. For much of my late 20s/early 30s I maintained a full beard. For the past few years, I've flirted on and off with the Northern Minnesota werewolf look. Other times, however, I shaved, but only when I deemed it to be necessary. In other words, when my facial hair got ugly and/or uncomfortable, I scraped it all off. This usually occurred about once a week, give or take half a week depending on how ambitious or lazy I was at that particular time. Primarily, this method is inspired by a lack of caring on my part and by having a job where holes in the armpits of your T-shirt are practically a requirement, but on the surface I justify it with the fact that several people have told me that I look better with a few days of growth. I think I know what they mean. A day or so after shaving, my face takes on a sickly gray cast. Maybe two days after that I look pretty good. That sweet spot doesn't last for long, though. Next up, it's scraggly, dirty, full-on neckbeard, which hangs around worsening until frustration drives me to go in clear-cutting with hatchet and axe and two-man saw. So I've decided to break this cycle. To make my project easier, I bought an electric shaver (a Panasonic ES8243 Wet/Dry for all you gearheads). I've never been a fan of the electric shaver. My parents bought me one when I sprouted my first whiskers, since my dad held a passionate belief that men who shaved the old-fashioned way were technophobes. I used that shaver while I was in high school, but as soon as I struck out on my own I started using a Gillette SensorExcel. This was among the first multiple-blade razors, and its two blades seem quaint when compared to the wall-of-blades razors on the market today. Anyway, I used that razor for many years before I got tired of having to take out a loan every time I wanted to re-up on blade cartridges. After that I just started buying the cheapest disposable out there, which is a bloodbath on a stick. Eventually I discovered that the second-cheapest disposables were generally easier on the face and I settled on those, until now. Despite all the advances in technology since I hit puberty, my new shaver doesn't shave much better than the one my parents bought me back in the 80s. It's cordless, which is nice. Mainly the big breakthrough is a little LCD screen that shows how long it took me to shave. I guess this is so I can get really goal-oriented and competitive with myself, striving for shorter and shorter shave times. I'm currently at a little over a minute and a half.
[filepath: /journal]
Tue, 10 Jan 2012
Conversation
Him: "How was your weekend?" Me: "It was great. I read a lot. I slept a lot. Really refreshing." Him: "WHAT? So the whole weekend was worthless?" Me: "Uh, no..." Him: "Well, I suppose there's nothing you can do outside. There's no snow, so there's nothing to shovel. You can't plow your driveway. And it's still winter so there's no yardwork or anything. I guess you might as well just call it a wash and let your whole weekend be a complete waste of time." A little while later, I hear him talking to a woman about how she's planning to take a trip to Mexico. Him: "You can't do that!" Her: "Why not?" Him: "Because it isn't safe!" Her: "I'm going to be at a resort on the beach drinking margaritas. Besides, nowhere is safe." Him: "Minnesota is safe. And if you do that, you'll just end up hating yourself." Her: ... Him: "Trust me. Laying around doing nothing. It won't be long before you'll be finding little jobs to do. Just to feel productive again." Her: ...
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Sun, 08 Jan 2012
Lucidity
A long time ago, I read somewhere on the internet that if you ever suspect that you are not in the real world but are actually in a dream, one way to test it is to look at a something that has a number on it. If the number is wildly inappropriate, or if the number changes after you look away and then look back, this means that you are dreaming and that it's okay to flap your arms and fly to Jupiter, or take off all your clothes and do jumping jacks in the Kmart parking lot, or otherwise fullfil the fantasy of your choosing. Last night I was sorting newspapers at work, and I noticed one with a banner across the top reading "Happy Holidays." At first, I thought maybe they were extending their banner far enough into January to include Martin Luther King Day in their well-wishing, but when I checked the date on the newspaper, it was December 24, 2010. Odd. I looked at the paper underneath it: December 23, 2010. And the one underneath that: December 22, 2010. Maybe someone ordered some back-issues of the newspaper. Or maybe ... maybe this was (DUNDUNDUN!) a dream! I found more newspapers and checked the dates. All of them were appropriately dated. Hm. It didn't feel like I was dreaming anyway. In fact, I'd never really suspected that I was in a dream. But I wanted it to be a dream. About a half-hour later I took a break. There was a copy of the News Tribune in the lunchroom, but by then I'd given up on the idea. I checked the puzzle page. Damn. Someone else had already done all the puzzles. I read my horoscope, and the stars said I was going to have a good day. As I folded the paper up again, the date caught my eye: November 3, 2010. There were two other newspapers in the lunchroom -- the Star Tribune and USA Today. I checked those, but they were not out of the ordinary. I wasn't dreaming. But I was a little confused. I was substantially disappointed. And I was tremendously bored.
[filepath: /journal]
Mon, 02 Jan 2012
Resolutions
Like most people, I made a list of New Year's resolutions. I won't post them here, mainly because I've found that whenever I post about plans to do something, I never end up doing it. This runs counter to the advice you read online. I'm told that you're supposed to brag about your future plans to everyone, and then the social pressure will force you to actually follow through with those things. I find the opposite to be true. Once you tell people that you're doing something great, they'll mentally categorize you as the type of person who does great things without ever following up and making sure that you accomplished what you said you'd accomplish. There's no incentive to actually follow through as long as you don't mind being something of a fraud, which I don't mind at all. When I come up with resolutions, I start out with a sort of vague, fuzzy image of what I want my life to resemble, and work from there. I absolutely avoid absolutes and specifically avoid specifics. You'll never find a number in any of my resolutions. No plans to exercise 20 minutes a day six days a week. That is a recipe for failure. My resolutions go like this: read more, write more, drink more water. Stretch. These are actual items on the list. It strikes me that the whole list is pretty leisurely. How strange is it that I have to make a list to resolve to do things that are fun? I constantly have to remind myself to stop eating gross food and start eating good food, to stop watching dumb TV shows or movies and start watching good TV shows or movies, to stop wasting time on boring things and start wasting time on fun things. They're first-world problems of the highest order, but still problems nonetheless. Lately I've exclusively been reading short stories, which has worked out very well for me. I've read a few collections in their entirety, but mostly I've just picked up a book here or there and read stories at random. There's no page count, no goals. Each reading session is a complete experience. I choose stories based on the length of time I want to spend reading. If I'm tired, I choose a very short story. If I want to read for a longer period of time, I choose a longer story or several stories. If I put a book down and never come back to it, it doesn't matter. This method lines up perfectly with how my mind works. I always have to use methods like this one to trick myself into doing the things that I actually enjoy doing. My brain is like an obstinate child, and it only seems to be getting worse with age.
[filepath: /journal]
Mon, 21 Nov 2011
I didn't NaNo my WriMo For the second time in my life I failed at National Novel Writing Month. The first time was in 2006. At that time I was working 12 hours a day at my regular job, and when I got to the point where I actually saw the end of the novel in sight, I lost all interest. It was kind of like running a marathon and seeing the finish line a mile or two ahead, then quitting to eat a plate of nachos. I guess I just wanted to know that I could do it, and when it became obvious that it was possible, I gave up. It didn't bother me at all at that time, though, because the novel was ridiculous crap. I don't remember it very well other than that it was a piece of sci-fi absurdism, where each scene was intentionally more ridiculous than the previous scene. I walked away from it like Vin Diesel walking away from an exploding building. This year, I thought I'd give it another try, starting at something like 12:09am on November 1. I had vague ideas about a trio of characters, but mainly I had a certain cadence in mind. This was going to be dark humor about a man who suspects he may have evil tendencies, and tries to counteract these tendencies, but the universe keeps cornering him, forcing him to do bad things. I wrote 1,300 words of this before realizing that my characters were despicable and not very much fun to hang around with. Rather than plod down a road I didn't want to travel, I started over on November 2. My next attempt had exclusively likable characters. The trouble was, I didn't have much plot. I wrote about 16,000 words before calling it quits. I know I used the word "failed" at the beginning of this post, but I hesitate to take that word very seriously. I had two goals I wanted to accomplish with this year's NaNoWriMo, each more important than putting down a novel-length story: I enjoy writing, even though I find it much more attractive to avoid it for other things, so the first goal was pretty easy to accomplish. Number two was really interesting, however. I learned that I can't write a novel the NaNoWriMo way -- in a giant push. I'm not a verbose person. So even though I didn't write a novel in a month, or even come close, I'm still writing. I have a new story in mind, based on a tiny snippet of my second attempt this year. This snippet ended up having no place in the original story. I guess that's another thing I learned. Sometimes you have to write a bunch of extraneous stuff to figure out what you actually want to say. I want to plot out my new story very meticulously. It's okay to sketch, but ultimately you have to draw.
[filepath: /journal]
Tue, 02 Aug 2011
The Waiting 1. Last February, I noticed a rash on my arm, so I went to see my doctor about it. He didn't know what it was, but suggested that I go see a dermatologist. The nurse made an appointment for me at the closest possible date, which was in late July. Five months later, the rash was still there, so I kept my appointment with the dermatologist, where I was assured it was nothing serious. Some tests were done to confirm the diagnosis. Two weeks after that, I received a letter stating the diagnosis and instructing me to call for a follow-up appointment. I called. My follow-up will be in late November. You could literally grow a human being in your uterus in the time it will take me to get my stupid rash treated. I think we need more dermatologists in this town. 2. My workplace has an retirement investment plan that's a lot like a 401k but isn't. I like to forget about this plan, as it's best not to think about it but rather just let things accrue. But recently I wanted to check and see how much I'd saved so I went to the website and tried to log on. I couldn't remember my username, so I clicked on "Forgot your username?" and indicated that I did. Instead of emailing the username to me, the site told me that I would receive a physical letter containing the username within two weeks. Last Saturday, I got the letter. I sat down and tried to log in, but I couldn't remember the password. I tried every password I could think of, but none of them worked. It had been quite a long time since I'd last logged in. Sighing, I clicked "Forgot your password?" I'll be receiving my password in the mail within the next two weeks.
[filepath: /journal]
Wed, 13 Jul 2011
Collector I can't remember why it was exactly that I came up with our new household rule, but it happened about two weeks ago and so far it has turned out to be both brilliant and financially draining. The rule is this: whenever Christa buys a book, I have to buy a record. There are no rules regarding cost equality. It's strictly a 1:1 deal. If she buys a hardcover novel that costs $37.99 and I buy a used record at a garage sale for a quarter, that counts. Likewise if she picks up a mass-market paperback and I splurge on a new 180-gram double album, that's the way the chips fall as well. The thing is, Christa reads a lot. A lot. I have trouble buying crap, and it would be pointless to cheat the system by doing so. I don't want scratchy records in poor condition. Also I don't want Frampton Comes Alive. So saving money by hunting down cheap used records requires quite a bit of effort if you want to get something decent. And in order to get something truly good at a low price, you have to find a seller who doesn't understand the value of what they have, or someone who just wants to get rid of stuff they'll never use. We used to only listen to records in the basement, or "rumpus room" as we call it. That was really fun. We have an old Sony turntable down there that I bought circa 2004 for about $20 on eBay, and a sofa that's just made for lounging. Recently, however, we upgraded to a brand-new turntable to use upstairs while we make dinner. The sound quality was so much better that it just made sense to move all the good records upstairs. Another breakthrough: a few days ago while sitting at the dining room table I was staring off into space as I am wont to do, when my eyes landed on the built-in cabinets lining our walls (which I always considered to be a good-looking but kind of useless addition to the room). I realized that if I took off the doors, these cabinets would be perfect for holding records. So now the records are tucked away neatly into built-in cabinets that look custom-made for that purpose. There's a new turntable that sounds great. I brought the good speakers upstairs as well to replace the Target shelf-unit specials that we originally were using. The setup is pretty sweet.
[filepath: /journal]
Sun, 03 Jul 2011
Patch Adams and the Severed Digit
While chopping up root vegetables for dinner on Monday night, I sliced the tip of my left pinky finger almost all the way off. Christa said she had a "premonition" about it, and I kind of did too, which leads me to believe I was actually just chopping like a maniac and we both realized I was being reckless without really acknowledging the fact before it was too late. It hurt. Even before I saw it, I knew the extent of my injury. I could feel what had happened, and there was a moment between cutting my finger and looking at my finger when I hoped what I was feeling was not true. When I finally opened my eyes and looked down at it, though, it looked exactly how I pictured it. Semi-severed, gushing blood. It seems that whenever I injure myself, the injury falls into a grey area between severe and not severe. It's severe enough to cause me a great deal of concern, but I'm unsure whether it's severe enough to warrant a trip to the emergency room. I've been to the emergency room and I know how it works. They look at your gashed finger and think, "he'll live." Then they send you over to sit in a corner and watch informercials for the next five hours while they stitch some drunk's face back on. I didn't go to the emergency room. Surprisingly, it was easy to stop the bleeding. I just stuck it the whole thing back together and applied pressure. Voila! Home surgery at its finest. I promised myself that if it started bleeding again while I was at work, I would go have it stitched up professionally. It never did. A few days passed and all seemed well. I changed the bandages frequently. I kept it clean. I applied antibiotic goo. After about four days, however, things started to turn for the worse. It got red and the severed part started to peel back, obviously no longer attached and probably no longer even viable. I went to urgent care expecting them to just chop it all the way off. I check in, explain my problems to a nurse who takes my vitals, and wait for the doctor, a looming man I will refer to as Patch Adams. I start explaining my situation to Patch who shouts "antibiotics!" and writes a prescription before I finish my first sentence. He then leans back as if to say, "Problem solved. Anything else I can do for you?" I ask if the antibiotics will interfere in any way with my rheumatoid arthritis drugs, or vice versa. He leans in for a closer look at his laptop and says, "According to the computer, you should be fine." Okay. I ask him what I should do about the semi-severed bit that's still hanging there all lifeless. He tells me it will fall off on its own, and that if he cuts it off there will be more scarring. I ask for a Band-Aid. Here he starts rooting around in the cupboards for Band-Aids, and doesn't know if he can find one. I start looking around for hidden cameras. He eventually locates a Band-Aid, which I can see through the wrapper is a cartoon Band-Aid made for children. He peels the backing off, tosses the Band-Aid itself face-down on top of his notes, then attempts to bandage my cut with the waxed paper backing strip. "Oops, wrong one," he says. Then he notices that the actual bandage is stuck to his notes. I figure he'll go for another Band-Aid at this time but no, he just peels the spent one off the paper, ripping it somewhat, and applies it to my finger. It's at this point that he notices it's a purple cartoon bandage. "Hey, this is for kids," he says. "Well, you got Garfield anyway." It's Daffy Duck. This, friends, is why I usually just do my own surgery at home.
[filepath: /journal]
Sun, 26 Jun 2011
Morning Adventure It's 9am when I call my dad to see if he wants me to help fix his crumbling front steps, a chore I was kind of looking forward to. If I'd been asked to do this when I was 15, I would have said, "Sorry, Dad, you'll have to do it alone. You always taught me to wear out the old tool before starting to use a new one." But I'm an adult now and hopefully less of a dick. "No, I can't do it today!" he says. "I have a gun show to go to." "Okay," I say, thinking: Hm. I must've missed seeing a flat surface that doesn't have a .357 magnum on it last time I was there. Can't leave the bathroom sink undefended and unarmed! That's the most vulnerable spot in the house! "We can do it tomorrow or something." Normally, I'd just go home and refresh my Google Reader over and over until I fell asleep. But I was mentally prepared to do something outside. Driving home, I noticed that there was a lot of yard sales going on in the neighborhood. I figured I'd go home, then walk around the neighborhood under the guise of shopping for junk but really just taking advantage of an opportunity to wander around snooping in people's garages without getting arrested. Yeah, the thing is, I think, I don't have any cash. And even if I did, I'd probably end up finding something I wanted, then I'd have to try to carry it home on foot. This idea sucks. This is how I end up driving to the bank to cash a check, then driving to a rummage sale a few blocks from my house. "I'm only interested in one thing!" an out-of-breath old man says jogging down the alley toward the sale. "String instruments! Do you have any guitars?" "I've got guitars," says the guy manning the sale. "Lots of guitars. None of them are for sale." "Okay, okay," says the old man. "Can't talk — I've got 20 more sales to go to." Finding nothing interesting at the sale, I decide to drive over to Superior, Wisconsin to the Vinyl Cave and look at records. This is what I've been spending money on lately. Records. It's kind of become a nightly ritual in our household to listen to records while we make and eat dinner. There are worse vices. But Vinyl Cave had nothing for me so I decide to hit Retro Mall, a new antique store downtown. (Is that an oxymoron? I'd don't think so ... new ... antiq— never mind.) This place is awesome. Moments within entering the door I find two records I want to buy, in near mint condition, for $3 each. "Do you have a record player at home?" the guy working at the store asks. "I'm looking for one of those portable ones where you can listen to records in a stack." "I have two," I say. "They're just normal, average record players." "You can't play them in a stack? I want to play them in a stack. They don't make music anymore. When those synthesizers came out — I thought no one would ever make music again. That it would all be done automatically. I guess people make music but it's all that rap stuff. People talking to themselves." The rest of the store is a maze of old costumes, furniture, and weird junk. I literally get lost twice. Another time I end up looking at a section I've already seen, without even noticing it. I take my records up to the front of the store to buy them. "You want to buy those?" the guy asks. I nod. "Okay. Right after I make this phone call." What the hell is he serious? I think. Then I realize that this is way preferable to the insincere, corporate glad-handing customer service they dole out at chain stores. Hi, I'm Chad and I'm here to maximize your shopping experience. This guy at least speaks my language. He picks up the receiver on an antique Goofy phone and dials a number. I browse the stuff near the counter while trying not to eavesdrop, but it's impossible since he's yelling everything he says. The gist of the conversation is this: There seems to be an estate sale going on this very minute. The people there have come into possession of all their grandparents' antique stuff. There are some quality items. They have no interest in making money. They just want to get rid of the stuff. He repeats the address — I want to be conservative in my estimate here — thirteen times. I figure this is fate telling me that I need to go to this estate sale. I jump in my car and speed off, repeating the address out loud over and over. It isn't until I get to the place that I realize it's in the worse neighborhood in town. Duluth doesn't have "bad" neighborhoods, really. Still, every city of this size or larger is capable of ranking neighborhoods from best to worst, and this is block is definitely in contention for being the worst. I'm not sure what could be so great or desirable in any of these houses, which seem like glorified tarpaper shacks. Plus, there are almost no cars parked on this street. I thought an estate sale was going on? There should be tons of cars lining the block. I look around for a sign advertising this estate sale and can't find one. Finally I locate a sheet of green paper tacked to a telephone pole near the alley, a note written in pen in a hand too small to read unless you are standing right next to it. The entrance to the house is in the alley. I drive down the alley slowly, thinking, there is no way I'm going into this house. This is some kind of a setup. This is how you lose a kidney. I get to the house and notice that the entryway is on the second floor, at the end of a staircase that is half-staircase/half-ladder. We're talking about, I'd say, a 75-degree incline. Rickety. Paint flaking off. Dry rot. Once again, I think, I'm not going in there. Then I notice my friend Jamie descending the staircase. Jamie has his two kids with him. The place seems less ominous suddenly. "How is it?" I ask. "Any cool stuff." "One thing they have is an old jukebox full of country records," he says. "But this place, this place is ... well ... just go look at it." So I park my car in a vacant lot alongside some graffiti that expounds the virtues of cannabis and climb the rickety ladder stairs into hell. The first thing I notice is the smell. At first I think, did they even bother to move their grandparents' bodies out before having the estate sale? But after being exposed to it for a second or two, I realize the aroma isn't as much decay as it is a burny, chemical smell. Meth lab? Or maybe just an extra plasticky house fire. Inside the door, an enormous man sits in a kitchen chair, leaning forward to block entrance into the apartment. "Excuse me," I finally say. He lazily looks up at me before sitting back to allow me access to the goods inside. At this point, the chemical smell is in full force. I start to cough. There is junk everywhere, and some of it is even cool, but I want to bolt. I don't know why I can't bring myself to bolt, and the only reason I can come up with is politeness. For some reason I need to be polite to this guy who doesn't even realize that he's blocking your way, and doesn't care one way or another anyway. I poke around for a bit, even though I would never bring any of this toxic stuff home no matter what the price. I find the jukebox, which is turned on and operational. I find a stack of old 78s. The record on top has a plain white label with ancient handwriting that says, "newspaper headlines." As intriguing as this is, I have to bolt. I scamper down the ladder stairs without even saying thank you. When I hop in my car, I realize that I can still taste the apartment in my mouth. I roll down the window and hawk some spit into the vacant lot. It doesn't help. Around the corner I see Jamie and his kids walking down the street. I pull over and say, "That place was poisonous!" "Yeah it was," he agrees. All the way home, I keep swishing spit around in my mouth and hawking it out the window. I can't shake the taste. When I get home, I brush my teeth for about five minutes, then use mouthwash. It helps a little, but the taste is still there.
[filepath: /journal]
Mon, 23 May 2011
Brown Noise I don't like hearing other people's music. It doesn't matter what kind of music we're talking about. I'm tempted to say that it's slightly worse if the music is something I wouldn't listen to, but that isn't true. Even if the music consists entirely of all my favorite songs, if I have to hear it through a wall, my inner Tom Cruise still flips all my rage dials to max and dances on my brain stem clad in nothing but wayfarers and Y-fronts. We all know what that's like. A few days ago, one of the teens next door must have had a sick day, because pretty much immediately after their mom SUVed herself off to work, the radio came on at full volume and stayed that way for the rest of the day. When I say "radio" I mean radio. As in DJs and car commercials. Have I mentioned this is not an apartment but a house? There is no sharing of walls involved here. They are inside, I am inside. Windows closed. Dishwasher running. Actual earplugs screwed into my head. I could still hear every word. Maybe not every note, but certainly all of the bass notes. Have I mentioned that I sleep in the daytime? You can't really complain about noise during the day. I mean, you can knock on the door and try to reason with a 16-year-old who's playing hookie, if you think that's going to help you get to sleep. You can attempt to call the police, and explain to them that your neighbors are playing the radio inside their house with the windows shut at noon on a Thursday. Go ahead and try that. So I did what I could. I dug out the fan, plugged it in, aimed it at the ceiling and turned it on. This actually helped quite a bit. Then I put swapped out the earplugs for earbuds and downloaded a white noise app for my iPhone. And that was when it happened. That was when I found my favorite sound ever: brown noise. I should point out right away that I'm talking about brown noise, not the brown note, which is still theoretical at this time. If there really was an iPhone app that would play a brown note, you'd know about it because all the middle-school teacher in the world would simultaneously quit without hesitation upon its release. No, I'm talking about brown noise, aka red noise, aka the sound of heavy rain, waterfalls, rivers and the like. It's totally dope. I was asleep within minutes. Anyway, here's my idea: We already have eyeglasses to improve your sight, and hearing aids to improve your hearing. What I propose is exactly the opposite. We need equivalent devices that temporarily eliminate your hearing and/or your sight. It would be easy, really. I mean, they kind of already exist, but they need to be made more stylish and more socially acceptable. You want to tell me about your day at work? No problem. Hold on a second while I turn this up. While I'm at it let me put on these glasses. Okay, there we go. Much better.
[filepath: /journal]
Tue, 17 May 2011
Highway to the Prednisone When it first started, it felt kind of good. Of course, I had no idea what was going on. I had a tough couple of days at work, and each day I woke up feeling sore all over. "Nice," I thought. Years ago, when I first started my job, the job got me into pretty decent shape. Since then, I'd become efficient at everything, and hence got a lot less exercise. I'd never really experienced a situation in which soreness was a bad thing. The pain got worse each day, and so I started taking it easy. By far, the worst pain was in my hamstrings and knees, but truthfully I felt bad all over. Finally I told Christa that I thought something was wrong with me, and I described my symptoms. Her first reaction was exactly what I'd been thinking: Lyme disease. Finally it got to the point where I couldn't go to work at all. I called in sick and made an appointment to see my doctor. The visit was brief. I described my pain. My symptoms. The doctor made me lean back on the table while he manipulated my legs. I can't describe that pain. He walked out of the room and returned with a blue sheet of paper. Stretching exercises. He told me I had tendonitis in my hamstrings. I asked about taking more time off work and he said he couldn't help me with that, muttering something about some other bureaucratic department I should contact while he ran out of the room with the word "lawsuit" flashing above his head. I tried the stretching exercises. They didn't help at all. In fact, they caused more pain than I had before. I went back to work and tried to do my job. People there were understanding. I figured out a way I could rest more while I was there. It wasn't enough. Each day when I woke up ... that was when it hurt the worst. I would lay in bed and dread the thought of trying to stand up. Sometimes it would take up to two hours to get out of bed. And then I'd have to walk down the stairs, which can only be described as a "process." All of this got progressively worse until I could barely walk at all. At that point I called in sick and went to the emergency room. My ankles were swollen. My wrists also hurt. Obviously this wasn't tendonitis. The ER doctor said what I had thought all along. This is most likely Lyme disease. He ran tests, which wouldn't be processed for several days. He prescribed antibiotics for the Lyme disease and narcotics for the pain. I spent the next week watching TV in a narcotic haze, which sounds fun, but lost its shine after about two hours. The Lyme test came back negative. My regular doctor was at a loss. But really there was only one option left: an autoimmune disease. He sent me to a rheumatologist. The rheumatologist tested me for Lyme disease again, and also for a handful of viruses as well as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. Everything came back negative, which didn't really mean anything in the case of RA, since RA reads a false negative in 30% of cases. He prescribed prednisone, which had me feeling relatively great almost immediately. Hyperactive, insatiably hungry, but able to walk at least. Over the next several months, we set about ruling out every possible disease other than RA. Eventually, there was no other choice. Rheumatoid Arthritis it is. RA is no picnic. Do a Google Image search if you want to see some nasty worst-case scenario nightmares. If you're not into body horror, just think of Igor in the old Frankenstein movies. Just think of twisted old ladies in rocking chairs in the Appalachians. No one knows what causes this. They say it's partially genetic and partially environmental. Apparently I've been exposed to something, some virus or some toxin, that flipped a switch inside me. My immune system now thinks my joints are the enemy. Lucky for me it's 2011. RA is still incurable, but there are treatments for this now, unlike 20 years ago. Sure, they're expensive, somewhat dangerous treatments. But there are treatments. I'm thankfully no longer on prednisone, which is a temporary fix with a lot of inevitable side-effects. I can walk just fine. You wouldn't know that I'm diseased if you met me. So has my life changed in the past year? Hell yes. I think the worst thing has been being hyper aware of every little problem with my body, always wondering if something is a new symptom or a hideous side-effect of the treatment. It usually turns out to be something unrelated and benign. But I'm still in the beginning stages of treatment and there's a lot to figure out still. We don't know if my current treatment (a type of chemotherapy that I take in very small doses) is going to really take, or if I'm going to have to switch to something more serious. Last August, I quit drinking alcohol as it can potentially complicate my treatment, which is already very hard on the liver. And the way things are now, quite a few of the things I eat are beginning to disgust me. I can't believe the poisons we put into our bodies on a regular basis. I'm not sure where I want to go with my diet. It's already pretty good but I want it to be better. Yeah. Shit happens I guess is my philosophy. The Rheumatiz is pretty bad, but there are far worse things. I try to keep a good sense of humor about it, which is pretty important.
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Tue, 03 May 2011
Tech Nostalgia So not only did I respond to Christa in that last post, but Jodi also weighed in on her blog, listing various reasons why she isn't quite ready to start reading books electronically. She makes a lot of good points, but what I want to talk about is this sentence, which really grabbed me: About a month ago, I was searching for something online — I can't remember what — and I came across a photo of a computer that I used to own in the late 90s. It wasn't my computer, but it was the same model, an IBM Aptiva E-Series. It was just a plain, off-white tower, with a CRT monitor, ugly speakers, and a "rapid access" keyboard that had a lot of useless-but-colorful buttons that were just shortcuts to various IBM websites. The keyboard also had dedicated CD player controls on the upper-right-hand side, which was actually kind of nice. Anyway, I saw this photo and immediately I felt a pang of nostalgia for the old machine. I've owned a lot of computers, but this one was special. I learned a lot of things from it, and did a serious amount of creative stuff on it. It was on this computer that I first learned HTML. I created not only my first website but also my first blog on it. I also wrote the code for the blog that eventually became my most successful internet endeavor to date. I paid $150 for that computer. Its list price was something ridiculous, like $1500. But I remember getting all these deals and rebates. There was money off for buying all the components in a package. Each component had a mail-in rebate. If you signed up for internet access at the point of purchase, you'd get a huge chunk of money off. I had to shell out a lot for it at the time, but almost all that money trickled back to me eventually, which was great because I was really poor in those days. Don't get me wrong. I don't want the damn thing back. It had a 4-gigabyte hard drive. (I have USB sticks that are way bigger than that.) The monitor broke three times. It didn't come with a CD burner, but I installed one and eventually wore it out. I still have those ugly speakers for some reason. They're in the garage. Recently someone broke into our garage, rooted around, and didn't take anything. No one wants enormous, 90s-era computer speakers. Not even me. I don't feel nostalgic about any of the other computers I've ever owned, except maybe for my 15" G4 Powerbook, which was my first Mac and cost more than the car I was driving at the time I bought it. That computer's logic board crapped out during an electrical storm. I still haven't recovered from the loss, and dream of one day restoring it to its former glory. This is not actually feasible, since logic boards cost like $900 and are incredibly tricky to replace. I think the hardware I use, for some reason, is capable of helping or harming my creativity. Is that stupid? I don't mean this in a superstitious way. I mean that certain machines work for me as extensions of my creative mind. There are computers I want to use to their fullest. I want to open them up and dig around inside of them. I want to fully learn how they operate. Others computers, they don't intrigue me. I don't feel comfortable with them. When I replaced that dead Powerbook, I replaced it with a decent enough laptop that started a creative low point for me. I did almost nothing with that thing. I didn't write anything noteworthy. I didn't organize the files I saved on it. Even my music collection ended up being a mess when that was my main machine. Some computers do it for me, others don't. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with price, or power, or the way they look. It's almost like the whole thing is trial and error. I wish I knew the formula.
I never look at Enid, my laptop, sigh dreamily, and think "wow that reminds me of a really good post I read."
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Tue, 26 Apr 2011
You haven't changed a bit It took me at least half of my life thus far to realize that not everyone has a small indentation on the left-hand side of their hard palate, a neat little saddle-shaped groove perfectly suited for resting the tip of their tongue. I remember trying to describe that particular body part when I was a kid, and getting frustrated when no one knew what the hell I was talking about. Eventually, somewhere in my mid-20s, it struck me that this was an idiosyncrasy created by my habit of pressing my tongue on that particular spot. Chicken, egg, etcetera etcetera. Evolution didn't put a groove there so that I'd have a place to habitually press my tongue. I habitually press my tongue there, therefore I have a groove on the roof of my mouth. My chin has always had a strange shape to it. It's roundish on the bottom, and right where most people have a small indentation, I have a large crease. I had a lot of trouble with this crease as a young child, because when you're four years old you kind of eat with your entire face. A large crease right below your bottom lip is a great place for Spaghetti-Os sauce to lodge itself. Anyway, I always thought this crease was hereditary, a part of my elaborate and obviously beautiful DNA makeup. Truthfully, I never gave it much serious thought because it's always been there. The thing is, none of my relatives have this kind of a chin. Certainly no one in my immediate family has it. I can't think of any distant or mid-distant relatives who have it either. I've never seen it in any old, grainy photos of my ancestors, but then again, I've never actively looked for it there. It's only been in the past few months or so that I've realized I created my weird chin, just like I created the groove in the roof of my mouth. I've always slept on my side in something like the fetal position. But I'd never noticed that I sleep with the first knuckle of my left hand firmly pressed against my chin. Apparently I've been doing this for four decades. Who knew? I have all kinds of bizarre shit like this going on, and it goes way beyond the physical. Ever since I could talk and continuing into the present day, I have always misused the interjection, "Ow." Or rather, I use it both appropriately and inappropriately. Inappropriate moments I use it include: when I touch something cold, when I see something embarrassing, and when I almost drop something. This is, as far as I can tell, completely uncontrollable. I'm not a big believer in free will. The concept doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Sure, people change, and people are capable of changing themselves. But in my experience, people change by becoming more like their real selves. Maybe believing that is some weird unexplainable habit of mine as well.
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Mon, 18 Apr 2011
Two Wheeler All winter, I've had big plans to start biking to work this summer. A few weeks ago, I guy I know informed me that gas prices were going to skyrocket this summer. "Dammit," I said. "I've been planning on using a bike for transportation once the weather warms up. If gas prices go up and other people start biking too, that's going to put a serious dent in my self-righteousness." My reasons for wanting to bike are manifold, and probably predictable. For one thing, I now live just a little over a mile from work. Last week I was going to make a CD for my car, since I've been driving in silence for quite some time now. When the burn malfunctioned, I just shrugged and realized that I really don't need music for my two-minute drive anyway. My "commute" lasts less than one song. Silence is not even noticeable; it's not like I'm going to be bored. I figured out awhile back that I average fewer than 20 miles per week in my car. There's the 1.5-ish miles to and from work every day, which adds up to about three miles for those of you who are even worse at math than I am. The grocery store is in the opposite direction from work, and is about a mile away. Sometimes I have to/want to go downtown for a doctor's appointment or to go to a movie or to the public library. I really would like to get that mileage down somewhere around eight or nine miles a week, if that's possible. A few years ago, I tried biking to work, and that adventure lasted exactly one day. I did live further away from work back then -- about three or four miles of hilly terrain which normally wouldn't have been a problem -- but in addition to that I also did just about everything wrong. For one thing, I picked what was probably the hottest day of the summer to start biking. I woke up really dehydrated, and instead of gulping down water in preparation for my ride, I gulped down coffee, which is a diuretic. Then I strapped a black helmet to my head and took off. When I got to work, I didn't feel well at all. I hydrated some, but my job is very physical and involves a lot of sweating. Eventually, some flu-like symptoms set in, and instead of going home sick, I toughed it out. Then I rode my bike home again, like an idiot, and when I got home, I was dizzy and shivering with fever. I think I might have thrown up. I'm confident that that won't happen again. For one thing, my hours have changed, which means I'll only be riding in the cooler hours of the day. For another thing, I now know what heat exhaustion is. The bike I own now is about 15 years old, and is not the ideal bike for general transportation. It's geared way too low. I've been meaning to upgrade for quite some time, but it's hard because there's nothing wrong with my old bike. Today I went to a local bike swap, but all they had were huge, knobby-tired mountain bikes, and skinny, vintage road bikes priced in the $600-$800 range. If those are my options, I'll stick with my old Trek. Will I actually do this? Well, I want to. There are no good reasons not to. But like most things of this nature, the bad reasons are very compelling. We'll see if they wind up being too compelling. Yeah, we'll see.
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Wed, 13 Apr 2011
I'm walkin' here ... Last week I had an awful day. Mainly, I just hated people. I hated their faces, and especially, I hated their voices. This happens to me from time to time. I kind of wigged out. I need a vacation, I thought. I know I just had a vacation. But that was in Los Angeles. I need a vacation away from people. I wish I could take a vacation and just go off in the woods somewhere. It's been so long since I've been to the woods. That's what I need. That whole thought process actually occurred to me, in those exact words. And then, these exact words popped into my brain: Oh wait! I live in Northern Minnesota! I completely forgot! I'm already in the woods! Fifteen minutes later, I was bounding down a trail, surrounded by the smell of white pines and the sound of a raging creek swollen with the spring melt. It was morning. Birds shrieked everywhere. I never saw a single person the whole time I was out there. I returned with a permanent grin stuck on my face. Anger? What anger? I've been taking a lot of morning walks lately, but most of them have been in town. It started as a desire to take photographs of dirty alleys and abandoned buildings. People who live in my town always talk about how beautiful it is. And it is beautiful, but it can also be ugly at times, especially in the so-called "spring" when the sun is low and glaring in the sky and everything is brown and covered in a winter's worth of salty garbage left behind once the snow has receded. What I'm saying is I've spent a lot of time in the grime. So much that I actually forgot that these little patches of filth are surrounded by water and forest. Go figure.
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Tue, 12 Apr 2011
Time Traveler When I was about ten years old, I developed what I thought was a great scientific way of discovering whether or not I'd ever get to travel through time. The way I saw it, barring anything tragic, I'd get to live way past The Year 2000. And back in the early 1980s, everyone knew that as soon as The Year 2000 hit, we'd most likely have time machines, sidewalk conveyors, and phaser guns, whatever phaser guns are supposed to be. The plan went like this: I would simply commit a specific date, time, and place to memory. Of course, I could write this information down and keep it with me at all times if I wanted. But the best way would be to just remember it. Let's say the date was September 24, 1983, the time was 5:45pm, and the place was my childhood bedroom. I'd simply remember these coordinates (I'm fairly certain that's how I described the information in my mind: as "coordinates") and in the future when I finally got the chance to travel through time, the first place I'd travel would be to those coordinates. The 10-year-old me would wait at that place and time for the future me to arrive. That way, I'd have confirmation -- immediate confirmation -- that someday I'd be a time traveler. The plan was foolproof. I chose my set of coordinates, making sure to remember a time that was 20 minutes ahead of when I got the idea to commit the coordinates to memory. That way, I could sit and wait in anticipation of the arrival of Future Me. Future Me never showed up. I found this kind of disappointing, but I shrugged my shoulders and went downstairs to watch The A-Team or something like that. About a week or two later, I started thinking about my plan again. Too bad it never worked. It would have been nice to see Future Me last ... Tuesday? At ... was it 3:25? DAMMIT. I'd already forgotten the coordinates! No wonder it didn't work. Clearly, memorization wasn't going to do the trick, so I'd have to write everything down and keep it in a safe place if I wanted this to work. I picked another date, time, and place. I wrote the information down on a piece of notebook paper. I waited. Once again, Future Me didn't show. Frustrated, I threw the paper away. But wait. If I threw the paper away, then how was Future Me supposed to find it? It wasn't enough to write the information down. I would have to commit to keeping them safe and accessible for the rest of my life. That's the only way it would ever work. So this time I wrote down the coordinates. I waited. Again, no Future Me. Still, I put the paper in a safe place where it could remain undisturbed until I needed it. As I'm writing this, it's 2011. I'm sorry to report to my childhood self that I still do not have access to a time machine or a phaser gun. I've used sidewalk conveyors in airports, though. And I have a really cool pocket communicator that I'm sure you'd love. I have no idea where that paper went, or what I wrote on it. It doesn't matter though. If could travel through time, do you really think I'd go visit that little freakazoid?
[filepath: /journal/history]
Thu, 31 Mar 2011
Ratholing I don't really believe in the impending 2012 apocalypse. Don't get me wrong, I wholeheartedly believe that the world is going to hell and that we're on the cusp of something terrible. Definitely. But all that Mayan mumbo-jumbo is ridiculous. This has nothing to do with prophecy. Simply put, you can't look at what we're doing to the planet and actually think we'll continue to get away with it indefinitely. Still, there's not much that an individual person can do at this point to stop it, aside from growing a long beard, donning a secondhand army jacket, and ranting on the corner while holding a makeshift cardboard sign. It sounds like a hell of a lot of fun, for sure. But it's not terribly effective and it makes life even more awkward than usual when the in-laws come to town. The only sane thing to do in this situation is to start squirreling away lots of non-perishable food items along with household necessities like toilet paper, guns, and Hardy Boys novels. Normally, in this household, we do our shopping European-style. That means that although we keep a healthy stock of various items such as spices, sugar, flour, beans, rice, and the like, we generally shop for food on the day it will be made. All told, we probably hit the grocery store about four or five times a week for small, produce-heavy shopping trips. In other words, if a catastrophe were to happen here tomorrow, we'd have a few days of unsatisfactory meals made up of tomato paste and vanilla extract before totally caching our pantry and having to fight the zombie hoards to get to the Rice-a-Roni aisle. DIGRESSION: I once stumbled on a message board where people were talking about the bird flu. This was maybe three or four years ago. The people on this board were getting very prepared for a pandemic, and leaving no subject unexplored. One of the more fascinating threads was about how, in the event of a mass chaos and looting, to dispose of cans and the like without drawing attention to the fact that you have food in the house. One person said that they had designated a spot in the crawlspace under their house where they planned to dig a hole and bury the cans, as any kind of wrappers or food waste stored in a visible location would be an invitation to hungry, desperate people who might do you harm. For a long time now, I've wanted to have a well-stocked pantry. Though my parents always bought a lot of food, I grew up in a highly populated house where the food stock turned over very quickly. But every now and then I'd visit friends whose cupboards were stacked with food choices. At any given time, it seemed like their parents could whip up any one of twenty meals, and there were always plenty of choices for snacks that any of us kids could just go in and grab any time we wanted. That probably isn't the healthiest way to live, but I think there is a lot of room for compromise. I'm not going to go out and buy 20 cases of Coke. I'm not going to use the whole thing as an excuse to eat more. But there's something great to be said about running out of toothpaste, then, instead of going to the store to buy more, simply going down to the toothpaste shelf in the basement where you have enough Aquafresh to fight cavities well into the 2020s. You'll need strong, healthy teeth and claws if you want to do battle against the robot armies, John Connor. All of this, of course, is just my way of telling myself that it's okay to join Sam's Club. Your life may depend on it, Barrett. It's completely justified. Ach. No. No it isn't.
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Wed, 23 Mar 2011
The Hierarchy J: There weren't very many photos from your trip on Facebook. Didn't Barrett take any photos in L.A.? C: No. He kind of runs hot and cold with his hobbies. He gets interested in something for awhile, then loses interest when he discovers something else. Then he picks it up again. J: So what is he interested in now? C: The Sopranos. This is true. But it's also worse than that. Sometimes, I think of all my hobbies, interests, and creative endeavors in a sort of hierarchy of procrastination. At the top of the pyramid are the things I am actually good at, along with things that are good for me. In other words, these are the things that I should be doing with my free time, things that either expand my horizons and/or lead to growth in some important aspect of my life. Reading and writing are in this category, along with some other highly rewarding things like photography. Also here are things that I don't necessarily enjoy, but are very important. House projects fall under this category, and they take up a lot of the same kind of creative energy and time. Underneath that, however, are things that I'm merely interested in. These are less advocations and artistic endeavors and are more along the lines of hobbies. Included here are artforms that I'm not actually good at, but are still fun to try out. For example, awhile back I really got into baking my own bread from scratch. Fun, yes. And healthy. But not really necessary. Mainly, I just wanted to try it, and while I do enjoy eating fresh bread, I don't really need to bake it every other day. At the very bottom are random media interests like the above-mentioned Sopranos marathons. I never watched The Sopranos when it was actually on. (Well, I caught a random episode here and there but I didn't know the storyline or details about the characters or anything like that.) Another thing I've been getting into lately is contemporary music videos. So what happens is, I get into B so I don't have to do A. Then I get into C so I don't have to do B. Then I get into D so I don't have to do C. What makes all of this stupid is that A is something rewarding that I really enjoy. Hell, so are B and C for that matter. But procrastination is so addictive that I dream up all kinds of ways to avoid doing fun, enjoyable things. Ultimately, it doesn't even matter, because it's my free time and I shouldn't feel guilty for spending it one way rather than another. For some reason, though, I do.
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Sun, 06 Mar 2011
Horror of Humanity I once tweeted, "The only reason I've never pushed anyone down a flight of stairs at Target is that there is no flight of stairs at Target." Actually, all public places in mall-like areas equally give me a case of the screaming meemies. Knowing this, I try to go during off-peak hours. If a store is open 24 hours, I'll gladly go at 4am to avoid as much cognitive dissonance as possible. Target opens at 8am, but if you think that getting there at 8:01 on a Tuesday morning will save you from insanity, you're dead wrong. I hate when couples are cruel to each other for no reason. By the time I'd collected my four or five Target treasures and started heading for the checkout, I'd overheard two pointless arguments, one of which involved a husband repeating his wife's words in a whiny, mocking voice. I took my place at the one open checkout behind a couple in their 50s. The woman watched every move the cashier made, angrily micromanaging the bagging portion of her job. "I want these frozen foods kept separate from the non-frozen foods!" she instructed. "They have to be separate, do you understand?" The cashier said that she did understand. She checked out a stack of pot pies as the woman watched. When she got to the end of the stack, the woman shrieked, "WAIT! That last one was a different price! Why was it a different price?" The cashier held it up and told her that it was a different size from the rest of them. It was a little bigger. "Well. I guess we know how THAT happened," the woman said. "SOMEBODY picked these out ALL BY HIMSELF." The husband giggled nervously and said that he tends to just buy the flavors that he wants to eat. The wife then sighed, flabbergasted, and said to the cashier, "THAT CANOLA OIL GOES IN A BAG BY ITSELF!" She indicated a gallon jug of peanut oil. I smirked, imagining the woman frying her eggs in it and subsequently gagging. She'd hate it, and be stuck with a whole gallon of it. Hopefully, she's allergic. Of course, the husband would be blamed, but I didn't feel bad for him either. This is what he deserves for not manning up and flushing that marriage down the shitter back in the 80s.
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Mole Man So I'm watching American Pickers and it's the episode where the Pickers are being led around the property of a guy the locals refer to as the Mole Man. He's short and dodgy, and it's hard to determine his age though he appears to be in his 50s. He wears a purple hoodie with the hood up and cinched tight around his face. Immediately you realize that the guy is nuts. The Mole Man leads us around the exterior of his property, warning to be careful near a rickety wooden tower, which is apparently full of old books. There's a one-room schoolhouse, which he purchased, disassembled, and then reassembled in his yard. Eventually we get to the entrance to his underground network of tunnels, and that's where things get good. I call Christa over to check this out. Christa doesn't like this show, but I think she'll appreciate this whack job who's hoarded old toys and Christmas decorations and whatnot underground, burrowing further into the earth whenever he needs more room for his junk. Admittedly, it's nice junk and a lot of it has real value. He's not the type of guy you see on other shows who hoard, y'know, used Kleenex and dead gerbils. He's a collector, with an eye for beauty, even if he is insane. Christa eyes the Mole Man up, and eventually points at him. "If not for me," she says, "that would be you." To tell you the truth, I waffle between two extremes. Though what she's saying is a joke, I can definitely see where it comes from. I'm not a hoarder. Not at all. But I am the kind of person who might find an old piece of junk laying on the side of the road and think, "Cool." I could image that, unchecked, I might descend into a lifestyle that involved mass acquisition of useless items. This would involve a lot of "giving up" on my part, though. While I am attracted to useless stuff that simply looks cool, I'm also repulsed by the useless stuff I already own. On one hand, it's kind of nice when these useless items suddenly become useful. I love those times when an unforseen need for something arises and I think, "Hey, I have one of those," before scampering down to the storage room and digging to find just that. But for the most part, one of the things that makes me really happy is uncluttered space. When I say it makes me happy, I'm not kidding. Clean spaces literally make me smile. Maybe that's just because I'm not used to seeing them. I don't know. One of the things I pride myself on is my ability to travel light. When going somewhere for a week or so, I rarely need more than what will fit inside a backpack. What does a person need beside clean socks and underwear anyway? A decent pair of shoes, an ATM card, a phone, and maybe a book. Sometimes I have this fantasy that I extend that to the rest of my life. That we get rid of all this material junk and start living a stark, clean life where everything we need is stored electronically on tiny devices that can easily be stowed out of sight. You have a bed and some comfortable places to sit, some clothes which are neatly put away. It's all very science fiction meets Dwell magazine. I think on some level that would make me happy. But then. Then there would be that time when you're making a great dinner and you need that weird combination egg separator/vintage meat fork/flour sifter combo, and it isn't there, so you either have to go out and buy one or somehow make do, and you look around your clean Gattaca living space and think, "maybe the Mole Man was right after all."
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Tue, 15 Feb 2011
Onslaught One of the most difficult things about owning a 90-year-old house is trying to convince wild animals that it's not a great place to live. This is a battle that I find myself fighting all too frequently, and usually it ends with a humiliating loss on my part. The best a person can do, it seems, it to drive the menagerie back into the walls and out of the general human living spaces, at which time you think you've solved the problem, but of course there's no way to actually be sure of it. We currently have a three-headed army keeping us at seige. Mice Some people are squeamish about killing mice, but I will do whatever it takes to lessen the numbers of this little motherfuckers, if not stamp them out entirely. In their case, I've always found poison to the be the best weapon against them. If you ask the internet how to get rid of mice, almost every site you come across will try to dissuade you from using poison. Simply put, they are all wrong. Is it inhumane? Who cares. Does it work? Yes. Do the mice die and rot in your walls, smelling up the place? Generally not. The poison dries them out, either leaving husks of mouse-mummy in their hiding places (as warnings against their kind when they attempt further infestations) or driving them outdoors in search of a water source. I'm not entirely sure the mouse problem has been fixed. There's been no signs of chewing lately, and we haven't heard them crawling around in the walls. But you never can be too sure. It's best to be vigilant. Squirrels There are definitely squirrels living in the attic right now. We knew there had been squirrel problems before we bought this house, and were led to believe that these problems had been dealt with. I think they were. But new squirrels have chewed their way in again, and are having a squirrel party in the attic, burrowing in the insulation and probably humping up a storm. I'm not sure how to get rid of the squirrels, other than live-trapping them and driving them out to some remote location to set them free. You can actually do this with squirrels, provided that you don't have like a whole extended squirrel community living in your attic. I've never actually seen a squirrel up there, only evidence of their nightly shindig, so I can't believe there's more than one or two. The problem then involves finding their entrance and patching it up. It seems almost futile, since more squirrels will simply bust open a new hole next winter, but I guess it has to be done. I'm waiting for the weather to warm up to do any of this, because it seems more human and because I'm lazy. Birds There's a huge flock of birds that I think might be starlings that like to infest the front porch. They aren't there now, of course, because they're still rocking out in Miami or wherever they spend the winter. But they'll be back soon, and it's important to at least attempt to prepare for them. The front porch roof has these little round holes under the eaves, presumably to let air in and keep the wood from rotting. Each of these holes is plugged with a plastic vent to lessen the entryway. This is no problem for the birds, who simply pry those vents out and move in. My guess is that I'm going to have to buy some more vents and somehow glue them in place with an ultra-strong adhesive that the birds can't budge. This is another one of those things that seems almost futile. But I guess I have to try. The idea of dozens of birds living in your house is disgusting, even if the birds aren't living inside your living space but only in the porch roof. Besides, I think they're messing with the wiring of the porch light, because it doesn't work properly. That's pretty scary. Does everyone have these problems? I think a lot of people do, especially around here where most people live in older homes. But it's one of those things where if you don't share these problems, you're freaked out and think that there's something wrong with the people who do.
[filepath: /journal]
Wed, 09 Feb 2011
Bug-Eyed and Loving It One day last week, I got so cranked out of my mind on coffee that I thought I was going to tear off my own skin. I don't know what happened. I don't think I drank very much more than I normally do, but I did make it somewhat stronger than I normally do. Without going into too much detail, I wigged out and cleaned the kitchen, groaning in frustration the whole time at all the clutter. I dropped everything I picked up. I tripped over everything that was trip-over-able. And I did all of this when I already was pressed for time. It would have made far more sense to just leave the house early, or to sit on the couch and drink some water, but no, I was possessed by evil, apparently. That night, I devised a plan to stop drinking caffeine. Or rather, I looked up plans on the internet, and then modified them to suit my ideas of what is workable for me. The plan was to keep track of how much caffeine I drink in on average, then try to reduce it by 25%. After a week or so, I'd knock off another 25%. Then after a few days, I'd only drink caffeine every other day. Then every two days. I'd keep reducing the frequency and amount in this way until my habit was broken. This plan lasted about 24 hours, before I intentionally drank two large energy drinks (the most I've ever had in one night) and stayed awake for like a whole day. That was actually intensely pleasant. Remember those cut-shots in Requiem for a Dream where they'd show someone's pupil dialate and you'd hear that servo-motor sound effect? Yeah, like that. Drink. "VVVVVVTTT!!!!" Cut to me doing parkour in the living room at 5am. My plan wasn't to quit entirely. I just wanted to break the actual physical addiction. I don't like the idea of needing caffeine, even if I have no problem with enjoying caffeine. I think energy drinks are not long for this world. Whenever I drink them, which is usually about once or twice a week, I'm always appalled by how great they make me feel. I keep picturing a time in the future, like 60 years from now, when people say, "Can you believe there was a time when you could just walk into any convenience store and buy a can of panax and guarana?" It'll be like when Coca-Cola used to contain cocaine. Here's something I've realized in recent months: There are all kinds of legal stimulants you can buy at gas stations and grocery stores. But the only legal depressant you can buy over the counter is alcohol. They ("they" being, I don't know, the Man I guess) don't want you going in that direction. What? You want unhealthy, tooth-grinding amounts of energy that makes you get off your ass and do stuff, preferably for the economy? Sure! Pick something from that wall over there. Oh, wait. You want to calm down, relax, and reduce stress? Well, I guess you can have a glass of wine, but really, a better way to reduce stress is to clean out your garage and then go shopping. So I guess I'll have to try the caffeine ween again this week, before someone stages an intervention. Wish me luck.
[filepath: /journal]
Tue, 08 Feb 2011
The Hard Winter It snowed this morning, and I wanted to write a tweet that said, "I love when it snows, because then Minnesotans are shocked and dismayed on Facebook by the fact that it's still winter in January, rather than by the fact that once again Monday has followed Sunday." That's way longer than 140 characters, and I tried few times to edit it down to size before giving up. There's already too much bile on the internet anyway. No use adding to it. It's true, though. Minnesotans constantly complain about the weather, as if it has ever been balmy at this time of year, what the old timers would call, "the hard winter." Up until January, winter is easy. Up until January, winter means Christmas and presents and pies and quiet nights by the fire. In January and February, everyone's inner Jack Torrance comes out to play. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. I, on the other hand, love the hard winter. It's this time of year when I actually begin to dread the end of winter, and what that brings. I hate on December 22 when people become fake excited that the days are getting longer (yeah, like 10 seconds longer or something like that). You know what I hate? Long days. June. There's nothing worse for a nightshifter than the sound of birds chirping at 3:30am. For me, daylight means the end of the day, the end of the fun. I hate when that comes early. In the wintertime, sleeping is great. I don't know the exact number, but there's something like 14 hours of darkness right now, and when the sun does manage to creep up above the horizon, it doesn't really have its heart in it. It puts in a weak effort, then heads back down for the night. Meanwhile, I'm drinking energy drinks and doing karate kicks. I don't need the sun. That's what I have a vitamin D prescription for. Sure, you have to dig you way out of your house every couple of days. Sure, it physically hurts to be outside. But it's quiet out there. It's dark. And it's pretty. I think if you live here and you don't like the winter, you might need to reevaluate your life choices. Because winter in Minnesota lasts a long, long time.
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First-World Problems I've come into some money. Actually, I shouldn't phrase it that way, because that makes it sound like a lot more money than it really is. I'm not talking about quit-your-job money, or buy-a-new-car money, or anything close to that. But throughout the end of last year, I worked a lot of overtime. I worked my ass off, in fact. Involuntarily. It sucked. While I was working so much, I made a promise to myself: That when it was all over, I would take a big chunk of the extra money I was making and buy myself something awesome. I didn't really think much about what I'd get. I didn't think about it at all in fact. I just knew that eventually things would return to normal, and when they did, I would reap some kind of super-exciting award, yet to be determined. This brings us to last week, when I finally felt that I could breathe easy. The overtime seems to have eased up. The holidays are over. The time seems right for me to splurge. The thought was fun for about twenty minutes. I thought about it. And I thought about it some more. I spent a whole night thinking about it. But in the end, there wasn't one thing that I really wanted. That isn't to say there isn't anything that I need. Need is not the issue here. I need lots of stuff. But this was supposed to be spent on wants, not needs. It was supposed to be fun. I don't have a lot of wants that can be purchased. I want more free time. I want that free time to occur during the day, rather than in the middle of the night. I want to be able to stop having to explain my weird lifestyle to other people. I want to see movies in the theater. You can't order any of this stuff from Amazon. Likewise, I don't have expensive tastes. My wardrobe consists of a closet full of $5 black T-shirts from Target and a couple pairs of Old Navy jeans. I drive a Ford Focus with no options. I check books out of the public library. I do have an iPhone 4, but these days I generally listen to music on Pandora for free. Besides, I got a $50 iTunes gift card for Christmas. I'm typing this on a computer from 2003, whose keyboard was literally built in 1984 -- both work great. Sure, I could put the money toward one of my needs, such as more insulation for the attic, or gutters for the garage. I could replace some of my grungier black T-shirts or buy some new thermal underwear. But that would be lame. I mean, I like being warm and all that, but I didn't make all those sacrifices for an attic full of foam or a pair of long johns. I've been thinking about this for days, and I still haven't come up with anything. I feel stupid complaining about it, but it's actually kind of depressing. What do I want?
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The Old Stomping Grounds About a year ago, we moved to the neighborhood of my childhood. It's hard to explain why I like this part of the city so much. It isn't nearly as pretty as the areas near the lake, although it does have its charm. There are absolutely no good restaurants out here, except for a couple of diners. Entertainment options are practically nonexistant. It's a lot like living in a very small town. I guess it just feels comfortable to me. One of the things that strikes me as interesting as I walk or drive down the neighborhood streets is how familiar I am with the bums and/or weirdos who wander around out here. Many of them I actually remember from way back when I was a kid. That guy with the huge backpack staring up at the flagpole outside of McDonald's? He's been doing that since 1985. He'll probably be doing that for many years to come. Some of these people are really beginning to show their old age. Others are around my age or even a few years younger. I know some of their names. Others I only know by sight. It's easy to become nostalgic as I travel through the neighborhood. I often eat breakfast in a greasy spoon on Grand Avenue. Sometimes I'll look out the window and try to remember what it was like before they tore down the buildings across the street to make way for Kmart. Sometimes I think picture the old wooden railroad trestle that used to snake its way through the area. The buildings are gone, and the trestle is gone, but the whack jobs who used to hang out underneath the trestle are still around, and chances are, they're probably shopping at Kmart. Maybe these people are part of the reason that I feel comfortable out here. Not that I want to be friends with them or anything, but they're part of what anchors me to the place. In a world where everything morphs so rapidly, things change here glacially. I might not know what 2015 will look like in the world at large, but here in this neighborhood, I can rest assured that that blonde lady with the orange bandana will be somewhere within nine blocks of Memorial Park. Walking down Grand Avenue or Central Avenue, it's easy to travel through time. I'm so intimately familiar with these streets that at any given moment, I can blink and be back in 1990 or 1981 or even forward to 2020. They only things that change are the cars. I have to mentally alter those, but otherwise it's no problem at all. And as I do this, someone in one of the cars inevitably says, "Hey," looking at me. "There's that guy."
[filepath: /journal]
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