The Random Thoughts of a Sometimes Bored White Guy

Only Dress Like a Tramp This Halloween If You’re Doing It For Yourself

2007-10-24T14:41:00.001-03:00

The icon of quirky observations, Jerry Seinfeld, once recalled that Halloween in the later years of one's childhood became more of a chore than a joy. "Doorbell, costumes, candy, let's pick up the pace here," he recalled in complete deadpan fashion. His musings remind me of those days of early adolescence when I knew I was getting too old to keep up the trick or treating but I didn't want to give up the candy. However, when I finally did stop, it became apparent I had been doing it out of self-imposed obligation instead of any great desire to do it. I didn't exactly notice that I was short on cheap, discounted orange-wrapped caramels nor would it have broken my heart if I did notice.

In other words, I was tricking or treating because I felt I had to, not because I wanted to. Heck, all things considered, I'd rather have been watching the game.

Of course, in adulthood Halloween more about the costumes and less about the candy (but probably a little bit about the drinking). To be honest, however, I cannot remember the last time I ever attended a Halloween party. In fact, I think Halloween ceased meaning anything to me when I turned 16. There was always a paper or project standing in the way. If not that, I was pretty much content with the "Halloween" movies. Honestly, popping "Halloween" into the VCR was about the extent of the effort I put into October 31 for a long, long time. You'd sooner see me out of the house before or after Halloween, not during.

However, years of relative non-participation in Halloween has not left me blind and deaf. I see people's Halloween photos and I hear all the stories. And I can't help but wonder where the line between "dressing seductively for Halloween for fun" and "dressing seductively for Halloween out of obligation" begins and ends.

I know, I know: I'm only the 417,239th person to opine on this subject. I'm not breaking any creative ground here. Go ahead and Google the word "Halloween" with the phrase "dressing like a whore." BOOM! Big-time hits. It seems as though cleavage and hosiery are big time buzz words on the North American consciousness come October. Which reminds me, given that it IS October and it's actually pretty frikkin' chilly on Halloween night in a lot of places, I'm sure that the titular "sure is cold in here" joke will be posited in roughly three out of every four Halloween parties in the Midwest this year. Hardy-har-har-har.

Mind you, this is a phenomenon that, not surprisingly, has taken hold with women far more than men. This is not to say that there won’t be a few thousand gym rats taking the opportunity to dress as a shirtless fireman. You know the guy: in his mid-20s, always looks tanned even when it's ten below, always makes sure that people see him in his workout garb on his way out of work and secretly harbours a desire for the return of Zubaz pants. This guy will show up to the pumpkin day parade wearing the fireman costume with the cheesy Chippendale's suspenders and then conveniently complain about how hot it is in said outfit roughly...three minutes into the party. He will make tangential references to six-packs and beef to draw attention to his abs and pecs so every woman at the party will love him. Every other man at the party will hate this guy and spend every second minute mocking him for the rest of the night, completely oblivious to the irony of the situation when they spend every other minute ogling Tina in her "I'm a nurse, but a NAUGHTY nurse" outfit.

In fact, I think the whole "sexy vocation" theme has taken over the sensibility of Halloween for a lot of adults. Whereas it used to be about imagining a world where the undead inhabit the streets, it is now about imagining a world where the unclothed inherit the office. In fact, if you really want to be lazy about it, you could just show up as your current job description and cut off half your uniform. So Sandra the secretary cuts in her skirt in half and leaves her blouse open and all of a sudden she's "Sandra the sexy secretary." Julie the cop ties up her top in a knot and swaps her pants for hot pants and she's "Julie the bad cop...in a good way." And Sally the Hooters waitress.....just comes straight from work with what she already has on.

As I have stated before, I'm not trying to take away from my appreciation of the female form. I'm sure that I be quite the hypocrite when, mere days after railing against the inanity of obligatory Halloween skankiness, I’ll be found fawning over Mile High Mandy. (Y’know?: She’s the stewardess who will do anything to make your trip more enjoyable). It's just that when the provocative Halloween costume becomes so repeated that it is a prerequisite instead of an unexpected visual.....well, it's still nice to look at a beautiful lady but it's not the same thrill it used to be.

You know how takeout food usually tastes ten times better when you weren't expecting it? Like in that rehashed commercial where the kids and mother come home scared to death because Dad is cooking supper and silly TV viewer, everybody knows it's not a man's job to cook! Then, all of a sudden, like a beacon of bright light, "Dad's meal" consists of the fried chicken he ordered. Everyone is ecstatic. Fried chicken is way better than Dad making us a salad!

If you ate that food everyday and saw it coming, you'd be sick and bored. I'm not saying sexy Halloween costumes will bore us, but you can't replace the thrill of the unexpected. Consider it the difference between the joy of the kids in the “Hot For Teacher” video and the joy of Donald Trump winning the lottery. Both happy but one clearly more interested than the other.

Besides that, now it’s come to the point where wearing something remotely resembling scary induces scowls. Gone are the days when a guy would show up to the bar on Halloween night and go "Wow! Did you see Jessica in that Elvira costume? I've been waiting to see her in getup like that for three years!" These days have been replaced with drunken fratboys remarking, "I can't believe that Jessica had the nerve to show up dressed as a zombie. She wasn't even a HOT zombie! Why doesn't she take the money she used for pancake makeup and buy a pushup bra or something?" Whereas the one scantily clad lady in ten used to stand out and make the horndog's day, now the one in ten that bothers to think outside the seduction box ruins it.

The problem now is that less and less women want to be “THAT person, the annoyance” and still think they can be “THAT person, the hottie standout.” So instead of dressing like a tarted up schoolgirl because it's a fun thing to do, it's dressing up like a tarted up schoolgirl because "Hannah and Holly are too and I'll be damned if I let them get all the attention." That and more people have to work out to get into Halloween shape when it used to be their respite from the workout they did to get into summer shape. Shame, really.

Then again, I suppose it's equally weird that one would advocate being surrounded by people trying to look like grotesque rejects from a David Cronenburg film over anything else. So to each their own.

I guess the moral of the story is dress as you like and people don't like your costume, give them the stale leftover candy from Halloweens past. You know those Rockets/Smarties that actually are the third-rate knockoffs? Save the real deal for anyone who appreciates your creativity.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've been invited to a man-whore Halloween party. I sure hope that showing up dressed like Woody Allen counts.

BMN

Dr. Happy Holidays: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Ignore the "War Against Christmas."

2006-12-23T04:49:00.000-04:00

There's nothing like an imaginary friend to get you through the trials and tribulations of childhood. At the age of five, I had an imaginary friend named Jason. Oddly enough, he didn't really do anything interesting. You'd think with the power to imbue a character with any traits I wanted, I might have given him capability to fly. I could have at least carved him in the image of the Fonz-- complete with leather jacket and surefire capacity to fire up jukeboxes at restaurants nationwide. My imaginary friend lasted for about a month, I believe. I'm not even sure why I had one in the first place. I suppose he would have been better located in the psychosomatic-inducing unpopular days of junior high. Had he been born in 1990, Jason may have lived a long and fruitful existence.

The moral of the story is: if you're going to make something up, it needs to have a purpose. Making something up for the sake of making it up is either delusional or it's art. Maybe both.

So what do I make of the "War Against Christmas?" You may be asking yourself, a) "what is the War Against Christmas?", b) "what does this have to do with imaginary friends?" or c) "what can I drink that goes well with reading this article?" I'll happily answer your first two questions.

First, the "War Against Christmas" is the belief that non-secular forces have hijacked the Christmas season and made it inappropriate to even reference Christmas during breakfast. Second, I've found in my personal experience that the "War Against Christmas" is as unimagined as the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny or K-Fed's singing career.

In my youth, there was a family of Jehovah's Witnesses that down the street. Their house was notoriously unlit and unapproachable every Halloween. The overly noted irony of Jehovah's Witnesses turning away people at their door aside, the general reaction amongst myself and my childish bretheren was "yawn, next house, please." Had my parents worked for a conservative news channel, they may have made an incident out of this. I can imagine what the speech might have sounded like:

"This neighborhood was founded on the values of giving out candy to our kids. It is a simple fact that 98% of the houses on this street celebrate this ritual. Not saying "Happy Halloween" to not offend our neighbours is an outright blasphemy. In fact, I suggest that you boycott everywhere these people shop. Can you imagine giving out candy from the same grocery store which these admittedly well-groomed Halloween-less heathens shop? It's an insult to our local witches, pagans and otherwise prudish sorority girls who inexplicably dress like porn stars on October 31st!"

The easier thing to do would be to accept the neighbour's freedom to clench their candy like Scrooges, politely acknowledge them in public and snicker at them behind their back. That would have been the Canadian way. However, this alleged "War on Christmas" is just that: a war, dammit!! You don't say "hello" to your heathen enemy when there are battle trenches to be dug, blockades to establish and all-around hostile attitudes to convey.

One conservative critic weighed in on the subject last year with the heartwarming text, "The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought." I immediately thought "I don't know what 'worse than I thought' means since I had no idea any such plan existed." Evidently the statistics that suggest that over 95% of people celebrate Christmas were down from what the author was expecting. Evidently a handful of alleged instances where schools and workplaces don't put up a Christmas wreath are enough to convince a group of people that the world is against Christmas and that we'd better nip this resistance in the bud before the 95% becomes 90% and so on. Hell, if that keeps up, we'll be out of Christmas by the year 2065!

Apparently, the REAL evidence that such a war exists is the use of such panaceaic terms as "Happy Holidays" or "Season's Greetings." Such ideas, you see, don't give Jesus his due. The irony is that frontline soldiers in the "War on Christmas" declare their freedom by boycotting stores that don't include the word "Christmas" in their advertising. Many of these same people once protested going overboard with shopping for Christmas in the first place since "Jesus was the reason for the season." So it seems somewhat contradictory that they would suddenly turn to commerce to make their Christian point. Then again, the Ruskies were on our side in World War II, so what do I know?"

Trying to deny the "War on Christmas" is not necessarily that big of a deal for some of you as it may even be news that such a war exists. However, to these "soldiers," you might as well be denying the Holocaust. Of course, the Holocaust was documented with goverment papers, film, photos, graves and mass testimonials. The "War Against Christmas" is documented by a handful of parents who are miffed that they lost the chance to take a picture of their children doing a Christmas play their children probably would have given up for a rousing game of floor hockey. You can see how endless the parallels are.

Now, saying hello during the holiday seas...er, Christmas season has become a verbal landmine. If you tell someone "Merry Christmas," you run the risk of offending the people who certain people are telling you will be offended even though such people I have yet to see. However, they certainly must exist because the soldiers against the "War Against Christmas" tell me they exist. They wouldn't lie, would they? They're soldiers, for crying out loud!

If you tell someone "Happy Holidays," well then you're not supporting the troops, you're making baby Jesus cry and four puppies just died. Just like when you masturbate. You're also *gasp* including the other approximate 5% of the population in your greeting and that's like inviting the nerds to the high school prom. No one wants to do that, they take the worst pictures and overtake the grand march with their pythagorean marching formations.

When it comes to what I accept as a greeting: I have adopted a Swedenesque policy of neutrality in this great war. If someone gives me a "Happy Holidays," I'll take it. If someone gives me a "Merry Christmas," I'll take it. I'll also take "Happy Hannukah," "Happy Kwanzaa," "Solid Solstice," "Excellent Eid ul-Adha," or "Festivus for the rest of us." I am the Lando Calrissian of December: I'll take the best offer that's in front of me.

My neutral stance on being the "greetee" sometimes leads to a likely unjust sense of paranoia as the greeter. If I cheerfully wish a "Merry Christmas" to a frontliner, I may have inadvertently identified myself as a soldier to their cause. It's somewhat like knowing a few Beatles songs, then offhandedly saying you're a fan to someone who has a hanky that Paul McCartney used during the 1965 Shea Stadium concert encased in lucite.

Before you know it, you're being asked your opinion on "the Hamburg years" and which Beatle ex-wife was most responsible for the band's demise. It's all you can do to clench your teeth and say "listen, I really just like the bassline on 'Get Back.' Back off!!" I don't need to wish "Merry Christmas" to someone and then be patted on the back for "fighting the man" for ten minutes. "It's so wonderful that you say 'Merry Christmas,' that's how it should be blah blah blah..." On it goes until the person's voice becomes an adult from the Charlie Brown cartoons. If that's where this "war" is headed, I want no part of it.

It funnily makes me want to abandon giving any indication that there's ANY holiday going on. I think I stuck to "have a nice night" during my last shopping expedition. It went surprisingly smoothly. Of course, in ten years, some critic might take this greeting away from me too. The explanation will go something like this:

"The traditional understanding of "the night" has been hijacked for too long by those Liberal wackos espousing 'Take Back the Night' rallies. By saying 'have a nice night,' you are furthering the idea that the night is not already nice that these nutjobs are putting forth. Stand up for your rights as a non-secular and refuse to say 'have a nice night.' Only say 'goodbye!' You, my friend, won't just be giving a greeting, you'll be DOING something."

And that, I suppose, was the point all along. Saying "Merry Christmas" is no longer an effortless greeting. It is evidently a validation of your sense of self and your ability to struggle. Take pride in yourself as a Canadian/American/Westerner/ etc.: if you say "Merry Christmas," your effort will not be in vain. If I ever resurrect my imaginary friend, Jason, I'll carve him in the image of the ultimate movie villain. He'll be the guy who takes my cookies away from me when I'm not looking. That way, whenever anyone sees me eat a cookie, they'll applaud me for standing up for myself in the "War Against Jason."

After all, it's high time someone gave me a cookie for eating a cookie!

BMN

On The Virtues of Being Low to the Ground

2006-09-05T23:30:00.000-03:00

Every so often a news item will make you do a double-take, raise your eyebrows or flat-out go “say WHHHHAAATTTTTT??” (Note: that will earn you a slap from most sensible folk if you stretch it out like that). Such was the case when I read that a man convicted of a sex offense in Nebraska was given probation over prison after the judge determined his 5’1 frame would endanger him in the mixed martial arts arena you and I more commonly call “jail.”

Most were (quite rightly) upset that someone could receive such a light sentence for such a serious crime. I was mostly surprised that being shorter than average actually benefited a man for once. Add that to the recent story of a 5’7, 140 pound man who lived to 112 despite essentially gorging on sausage and waffles his entire life. The doctors attributed it to his genetics. All in all, it was a great week to be short, enough to inspire 5’6, 145 pound man like myself to engage in a fast-food laden crime spree. They’d never catch me and if they did, they’d let me off on probation and I’d run a Waffle House knockoff chain until I was 118 or became the Pope, whichever came first.

In actuality, I felt like the world didn’t really need another reason to pick on us shorter-statured gents. Now, I’m liable to hear the “you short people and your perverted sex crimes because you know you can get away with it.....” Well, OK, I admit that’s unlikely to happen. Nevertheless, the association could be troublesome.

Spend enough time thinking about the subject and for men like myself, it’s a pretty dire world out there. Every study under our sun indicates that if you want greater health, reach for the sky…..or at least reach beyond average height as better cardio seems to be linked to height so long as you are not grossly above the median. Want to get paid? Max out every credit card on earth for the reasonably expected maximum of 3 inches you’ll get for leg lengthening because four inches evidently equals a 10% increase in pay. Want to get laid? If you’re under the average of the world, time to start investing in elevator shoes or little obscured wooden planks because that’s the best way to max out your chances. One recently published study goes so far as to suggest that height— for both genders— is a reliable predictor of smarts. If so, that makes the odds strong that I am three to four inches dumber than the average man in North America.

While some of these ideas seem laughable upon first glance, they are mostly in keeping with my upbringing. From my youth to today, tall athletic peers were/are often referred to as “assertive,” those smaller than myself (and some slightly bigger) were/are often “pushy.” If you get too big (metaphorically, of course) for your britches, you might get the dreaded “N” word— Napoleonic. This might be hurtful it wasn’t somewhat misguided. Though he stood as tall as I in the literal sense, he was of average height among Frenchmen at the time. So take me back to the late 18th century, my friends, and I’ll invade Italy! Except I’ll be less interested in military concerns and more interested in looting palaces for fine pasta and cordially thanking Italians for passing down my quality of frequent hand gestures.

My mother didn’t tell me I was going to grow “small and short” although she couldn’t have expected much different if she looked across the kitchen to her husband. Whenever I took principled positions, I don’t recall anyone congratulating me on “standing short.” If a male beanstalk contemporary was inhibited or bashful, he was given the assignment of “shy” or “mysterious.” Conversely, I was only sometimes able to dodge being called a “wuss,” though others shorter than I usually had a lower batting average on that front. Even supposed compliments were really often poorly disguised hedges, such as “not bad for a short guy”, which is kind of like hearing “this is pretty good for a Postum cappucino.”

Finally, I don’t remember any female friends of mine lusting after someone “short, pale and handsome.” Come to think of it, I don’t recall a lot of female friends.....so I’m not sure if that proves or disproves my point. Hell, 1980s classic Big taught us that the only way to impress women— and get on the carnival ride of your choice— was to pray to the vending machine of Zoltar for advanced height. Wacky wonderful Hanks hijinx ensued, with the girl and the money in tow.

It’s been said that the preference for taller men and shorter women comes from our evolution where the idea was that a) the man was the provider, the woman the nurturer and b) the man had to be as able as possible to whup ass in the jungle so that there’d be buffalo ribs for dinner this evening and that some other dude wouldn’t steal it. Logic would then dictate that the tallest cultures would be pretty battle-ready so watch out America, your status as a superpower is seriously endangered by…..the Netherlands. That’s right, you heard me: the Netherlands. Apparently, this nation has undergone a L.A. Clippers-esque resurgence in height where they’ve gone from lowly 19th century stature to a 5’11-6’ male average. When they get so ravenous that their food supply is depleted— and when they have no more Heineken to bribe you with for your eats— they will come and kick your sorry ass from here to the Dinaric Alps. Then things might get sketchy.

It is actually a well-taken point since North America and particularly the U.S. is actually falling behind the curve for height increase. Indeed the biggest factor for women seeking out taller men may be they are trying to un-stem the tide. This is borne out as extensively as women consistently seeking out taller-than-average sperm donors. So yes, short fellows, if you were relying on massive sperm donation as a get-rich-quick-scheme, you have yet again been discriminated against!

While my father proved an able exemplar, popular culture certainly failed to hold up its end of the bargain in producing an admired role model of similar physique. Those who did exist often seemed to provide more lament than triumph, much as Dustin Hoffman did when his breakthrough role only came because Robert Redford wouldn’t look as convincing as someone who was sweaty and nervous around women.

In fact, many others seem to go to great detailed lengths to mask the fact that I might be able to look them in the eye. Just recently I turned on the television to see Antonio Banderas with heels so tall, I was waiting for RuPaul to join him for an impromptu catwalk. (Mind you, on top of everything else, our culture tends to discourage heel-wearing in straight men, so forgive my impulse.) Sylvester Stallone has been accused many times of fudging his height since the manifest anguish of a 5’8 man going the distance with Apollo Creed would be too much for cinema buffs to bear. Prince goes to such detail to exaggerate his height that if his heels get any taller and his dancers any shorter, they may reinact “Jack and the Beanstalk” and he will tumble off his platform perch like a beanstalkly-oak.

Even the proud and few longtime success stories are now being threatened. For over two decades, Tom Cruise was a good flag-bearer for those of us wanting to be a financially successful heartbreaking man that didn’t quite cast the John Wayne mold. That was until he decided to forgo his image of normality and re-cast his lot as fighter of glib, jumper of couches and accused Katie Holmes kidnapper. Thanks Tom, remind me never again to use you as a public relations device. At least Jon Stewart hasn’t gone off the deep end yet. Not today at least. Furthermore, he hasn’t gone to the trouble of being filmed to look taller than people he really does not dwarf, much like Cruise purportedly has for much of his career.

The rather long-winded moral of the popular culture story seems to be that one is supposed to be ashamed of being under 5’10 and the only acceptable thing to do about it is lie profusely about it. This is a pretty disheartening moral in the long run. Certainly at some point these celebrities have had to reveal their true stature and find their fans shocked to discover that their idol or hero did not in fact stand 6’5 or some other mythical proportion. I’ve often received that “you’re shorter than I expected” look from people who only heard about me that were then meeting me. Based on these looks, you’d think my failure to measure up (not metaphorically, of course) was a crime equal to assassinating Bono (though he’s alleged to be a few mere cm taller than I).

Dirty looks are no fun. Plus: looking on the dour side of things is usually only good for a few minutes (or 1,500 words) of chuckling, after which it just becomes irritatingly depressing. So I feel that I owe to myself and to my fellow pint-sized brethren to try to isolate some of the finer points of being compact. Sure, you won’t get paid as much, you’ll be bullied in your youth and prospective daters will often turn a blind eye to you. But think of how much you’ll have to look forward to. Advantages such as:

— being able to save money by purchasing youth-sized everything. Only now in my late-20s do I realize that I’ve been going about clothes-buying the wrong way. Sports jerseys may be too expensive for you, but at a youth extra-large, I’ll happy make the investment. Heck, if it wasn’t for the fact that my flagrant facial hair and just-as-flagrant balding disguised it, I’d still be trying to pose as 15 to get into movies cheaper. Some of you may think that pretending to be half one’s age for the sake of saving $15 on a jersey and $5 on the movies should be beneath any dignified adult. I just so happen to disagree. By blending seniors’ discounts with youth-sized savings, I’ll be the king of my retirement complex

— being able to actually breathe on an airplane. Well, actually, you probably won’t be able to do that. You’ll stand a better chance than most others, though. Given that economy seating on most airline services accords only just enough room for an army of ants to sleep comfortably, you’ll be grateful for every foot you don’t have. So that extra money that our tall compatriots make will have to go towards first class if they want to sit as “comfortably” as we do. (Addendum: you probably also have a greater chance of passing yourself of as luggage and getting on the flight even cheaper!)

— being able to consume less to sustain one self. Go ahead, Lurch, buy some extra potatoes to fill your genetically overdone frame and some bigger bars of soap to rid you of your extra bacteria. I can go further than you can on a 77 cent can of ravoli and a 19 cent mini-bath bar!

— being able to weasel your way out of doing heavy chores. Often when friends ask you to lift something, you can reply with “I dunno.....that looks kinda heavy for a guy like me, are you really sure you want me to give myself a hernia?” When someone needs their couches moved or their desks re-arranged, they’ll flip through the rolodex to find the basketball player most convenient to them. Meanwhile, you’ll be sitting at home popping a cool one, watching the game and letting the A/C wash over you. Plus, if someone walks into the room demanding that any other unpleasant task be completed, your chances of sneaking out the back door undetected are at least 25% greater than Captain Longlegs, whose movements will be as understated as a grindcore Christmas album.

— being able to crowd surf, ride carts and generally do all the childish but undeniably fun things that people give up by age 30 because it’s now become physically awkward. Have you ever watched a 6’4 person try to crowd surf? It’s like watching Shaquille O’Neal try to win the Kentucky Derby. So enjoy your seats to the Yanni concert in 2017, I’ll be busy soaring over people at the 17th Pixies Reunion Tour and hijacking kids’ crazy carpets and Slip N’ Slides.

— if nothing else, you will own everyone’s ass at hide-and-go-seek.

So best as I figure, I’ve got it made, at least so long as airplanes don’t double in sizes, youth prices stay as they are and IKEA keeps making those extra wide carts to transfer furniture complete with extra wide parking lot for me to soar through. And Tom, though I may never understand your dissection of glibness or agree with your means of recruiting girlfriends, I won’t bear any resentment towards you for being portable enough to jump the couch without breaking it. In the meantime, I’ll settle down with some waffles and Postum and keep an eye out for that tricky little sex offender on a street near me: because he may be blessed to be small enough to elude many other men’s field of vision, but I can keep the bastard square in my sight lines.

BMN

UPDATE!: Apparently, I'm shrinking. Upon having my 5'6 figure challenged, a new 2006 measurement now has me at 5'5 1/2! Out of Fonzie/James Brown territory and into Scott Ian territory. By the year 2015, I'm willing to bet carnival rides will be out of the question......

Keith Richards Will Outlive the Cockroaches--and is More Welcome in My Apartment

2006-05-23T02:21:00.001-03:00

If moving out has taught me anything, it's that I should never again be allowed to drive a moving van or truck. Aside from that, it's taught me that some exits are all about timing. When a cockroach a day begins to appear in your apartment and you're just about to move out, you have good timing. There's nothing like a cockroach crawling onto your neck at three in the morning to convince you that to reschedule the moving van from a month's advance to tomorrow.

Most humans don't like bugs, this is a given. Yet we reserve a certain amount of contempt for cockroaches. This could be due to the fact that— amongst a taxonomical unit of creatures noted for their ugliness— they are among the grossest things to look at. It is probably even more likely due to the fact that you have to stop short of hiring a brigade of tanks to kill them off. Strangely enough, however, these traits can also be attributed to a man that we hold so near and dear, Keith Richards.

It's been said time and again, even by the man himself, that the only things that will survive a nuclear holocaust are the cockroaches and Keith Richards. Granted, those buggers are difficult to get rid of but personally, I think we're giving the cockroaches too much credit. None of them have would have survived 62 years, then fallen 15 feet off of a coconut tree and lived. Especially if you got them loaded on tequila first. In fact, cockroaches don't even have the constitution to withstand a centipede attack. Keith would make them scatter with the volume of “Gimme Shelter.” Either that or with the tackiness of the “Harlem Shuffle.”

I often have to remind myself Keith Richards is a year older than my father. This is because a) my dad cannot play the guitar solo to "Tumbling Dice” and b) my dad looks about 30 years younger even when he DOES he looks his age. This means that Keith could have been my father. I'm relatively certain that he isn't as my mother is a faithful woman and I do not drink. I also have eyes that are relatively unsallow. My life, was I his son, would probably have been quite interesting. Instead of receiving the traditional lecture on the dangers of drugs, I would have been scolded for not developing immunity to them by age 16. Family reunions would be marked by the ceremonial practice of drawing a roadmap with the lines on daddy's face. Not to mention the annual cop raids.

It's funny when I revisit the footage of the Altamont concert of 1969 where bands played on a stage not fit for your local tavern in front of approximately a bazillion people and the Hell's Angels mistook their pool cues as billy clubs. People talk about the concert (where 3 died) as a tragic "close call" for the Rolling Stones, as a gunman could have taken one of them out "at any time." HA! Keith Richards, dead in 1969? Are you kidding me? There wasn't enough room amongst that crowd to fit the AK-47 that it would have taken to accomplish such a feat. There is a brief moment in the footage in which you see him cross his heart. Actually, I think he was selling his soul and whatever semblance of good looks he had to the devil for an eternal life force.

Given that Richards has forged his bad boy reputation into 40 years of ungodly hard living (and survived the scorn of untrustworthy biker security), it is a worthy proposal that he replace the cockroach as the number one household pest. I make this proposition based on two lines of argumentation: 1) Keith is tougher than your average cockroach and 2) life would be way cooler if he snuck into your house every week or so.

To prove the first premise, let’s consider situations of crisis and how these two unique and prosperous species might handle them:

SITUATION ONE: The species causes itself to be jolted with electrical volts by way of colliding electric guitars with microphones. The cockroach, being 3cm/1.1in of average length, would die in a nanosecond. Keith Richards wears rubber soles in his sneakers and lives to play for another 40+ years.

SITUATION TWO: The prime minister’s wife disappears into the clutches of the species. Enforcement is called in to handle the matter. The cockroach would be wiped out by a massive security brigade that would probably evacuate the entire motel where the family carried the lady. Keith Richards escapes charges for possessing an ounce of smack because a blind lady helps him out in court.

SITUATION THREE: The species is injected with every illegal substance known to humanity. The cockroaches put up a tough fight to the exterminator and but say “Uncle!” after the fifteenth visit. Keith Richards muses “I don’t have a drug problem, I have a police problem.”

SITUATION FOUR: The species is fought off with a vacuum cleaner. Cockroaches are unable to fight the suction and even if they escape, a less dirty floor is less enticing to them. Keith Richards comes to on the floor of many motels and hotels— clean or dirty— and trudges on to the next gig. If a vacuum cleaner hits him at any point, he thanks the perpetrator for straightening out the wrinkles on his face.

SITUATION FIVE: The species is mocked continuously for its grotesqueness in popular culture and common conversation. The cockroaches become the go-to villain in any “creepy crawly” episode of a sci-fi show. Keith Richards has a gorgeous wife and two beautiful children.

Sorry bugs, you lose!

Moving forward to the second half of my statement: if Keith Richards became the new number one household pest, life would be about ten thousand times cooler. Based on the same five-prong test, let’s go over how simple, ordinary encounters with persistent insects would improve if those insects were all guitar players for the Rolling Stones.

COMPARISON ONE: If a man takes his date home and there are cockroaches all over the floor, she will recoil in disgust. She will then leave, rip up his phone number and address book, relocate to another city if need be and obliterate all other pertinent means of contact. If a man takes his date home and Keith Richards is crawling around…..either the man loses his date but gains a house of groupies or the woman sleeps with Keith Richards…..or both.

COMPARISON TWO: Some bizarre individuals keep the most odourless, least hideous or otherwise inoffensive cockroaches as pets, thereby containing them in a case even though pretty much no one wants to look at them. If you had Keith Richards in a case, you’d have a half-decent jukebox.

COMPARISON THREE: Eliminating cockroaches involves going to your local department store and spending hours on end contemplating whether you want to bait the little buggers or drown them out with chemicals. Buy a two-four at the liquor store and put it at the end of your driveway and Keith Richards will leave your house to go get it. That oh-so-reliable source Wikipedia claims that “homemade roachtraps” are also “reported to be successful.” A homemade bong would likely also be successful in luring Richards away.

COMPARISON FIVE: People will commemorate the presence of cockroaches with “La Cucaracha,” a folk song with thousands of lyrical variants that can be repeated ad nausea. The guitar riffs to “Jumping Jack Flash” and “(Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” start out somewhat similar but really they are two different songs. Albeit hearing “Start Me Up” at every second sporting event sure gets annoying before long.

COMPARISON FIVE: One cockroach can produce hundreds of offspring, littering your house for days, weeks, possibly years. Keith Richards doesn’t have as many children as Mick Jagger.

So take that, humble cockroach! Your reign of terror as the pest of choice in this society is over. I can’t wait for Keith Richards to officially begin his duties as the new prevalent vermin of households across North America. Granted, it will be actually far more alarming and disturbing when he crawls onto my neck at 3AM. But when I move out the next day, there will be rock and roll music, a bitchin’ party and maybe the Rolling Stones will bring a moving van for me. Not a bad alternative to the exterminator. Best of all, Keith will probably bring the coconuts.

BMN

Damn, That Beard Was Itchy! On Second Thought, I Miss It.

2006-04-04T23:43:00.000-03:00

There’s something remarkably delightful about letting your facial hair off on its own tangent.

Maybe it’s the fact that I can’t grow an equivalent amount of the top of my head and the hair on my sides doesn’t grow out much to boot. It could be the follicle version of compensation. In order to forget that the Mohican or even an Art Garunkelesque Chia Pet-do is but a distant dream, I allow the hair on my face to serve as consolation. It’s like the needless Porsche acquisition of hair growing.

Maybe it’s the fact that I’m a lazy bastard. Think of the women’s liberation of the 1970s when an increase in unshaven legs was afoot. Hell, given how annoying and aggravating shaving my face is, I’m completely in sympathy with these people! Gloria Steinem was more than just an inspirational cultural radical; she was a pragmatist.

Maybe it’s the fact that I’m sparing myself a tremendous amount of irritation and bloodshed. At five blades and counting, there’s no telling how much further razor companies will allow me to gouge my face—and allow themselves to gouge my pocketbook—as they continue the relentless pursuit to create a razor bigger than my head.

Maybe it’s because beards supposedly command a certain amount of respect. The evil Spock on Star Trek wore a goatee, no one would have wanted to mess with him. Grizzly Adams wore a big-ass beard and he was able to talk to bears, wrestle wolves and snort cocaine at an impressive pace (well, I only made some of those up….). Upon lopping off a long-standing goatee, a colleague informed me that he’d always wanted to talk to me more but that with my beard, I “kind of scared him a little.” The fact that he stood near a foot taller and probably 60 pounds heavier seemed a bit lost on him. I’m not sure if he thought I had a machete hiding under there.

Whatever the case, there has to be a logical reason why so many of us males have chosen at some point in our lives— some of us more significant portions of times than others— to live the face-hair life. It certainly isn’t because women (or gay men for that matter) prefer it on the average; in fact, some studies suggest that a beard might be a cost-effective alternative to a chastity belt. That’s a long path from the declarations of Roman Era author Lactantius, who decreed beards contributed “to the beauty of manliness and strength.” He had not the foresight to imagine bearded yuppies or me in a weight room.

It’s not as if there isn’t also early historic precedent for the hate-on towards beards either. Apparently during ancient Egyptian time, not only were they considered unattractive but also signified a person in mourning. Come to think of it, if people didn’t find me appealing, I guess that I’d perpetually mourn too. Maybe the people with the beards that didn’t suffer the loss of a loved one were just genuinely unaware of the connotations they were implying. Conversations for these people must have been quite circular: “Excuse me, but why won’t you come talk to me?” “I’m sorry sir, but it seems as though you are in mourning, I found it awkward to come talk to you.” “Well I am mourning!” Oh, what are you mourning, sir?” “The fact that everything thinks I’m grieving! I just want to talk about the chariot races!”

One thing of which I can assure you, thesis #2 (the laziness-maintenance principle) actually falls apart when you’ve lived long enough to consider all the options. Oh sure, if you decide to grow your beard at age 13 and never ever shave again, that thesis might hold weight. Let me be the first to tell you, though: the moment you shave that sucker, prepare for aggravation like you’ve never known before.

First of all, the longer you have had the beard, the more shocked you will feel when you look in the mirror. The last time I shaved my beard off, I suddenly felt as though I looked like I had ten days to live. I wanted to know who had replaced my body with that of a heroin-injecting haemophiliac. This impression was clearly lost on all of my friends and acquaintances that, though taken aback, did not immediately contact the closest medical practitioner to address my malnutrition. I guess the beard had given me a false impression of what passes for a “healthy face.”

You’d think the problems would end with the initial shock but you’d be wrong. If you’ve ever tried to drive a vehicle after such a radical alteration, you’re lucky not to be killed when you become diverted by the COMPLETE AND UTTER STRANGER staring at you in the rearview mirror. Who the hell is that and how did he commandeer the vehicle without my knowledge? Once you survive this incident and subsequent conversations with the officer about your shaky driving, the most constant irritation persists.

There’s itching. Lots of it. Why? Well, one becomes so used to the beard being there and he’s reached up to stroke it in that fake intelligentsia pose one too many times that he returns there as a force of habit. But there’s nothing there. So in lieu of that, the scratching begins. Quickly thereafter, the realization that daily shaving is the only thing that makes this thing stay away. The itching remains and suddenly growing the beard back doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. Then the beard grows back and the horrible realization sets in that the beard is now itchy too. We cannot return to Camelot.

The hairless option is seen as the lesser of two evils for a couple of reasons. First, it is often argued that the most unappealing thing about a beard is the discomfort of the pour soul kissing a man bearing it. Yet for all of this complaining, some of the most commonly appealing beards seem to be the ones that you would think would hurt the most: stubble beards. They have the consistency of your average piece of slightly-used sandpaper but still only half the creepiness and none of the sleaziness of the dreaded pornstache. 80s music star George Michael was often suspected of shooting his videos on a “one-day-after-the-shave-but-dear-God-not-a-moment-later” schedule in order to preserve this swarthy appeal. It also seems to be the look for those men in shaving commercials that are supposed to appear as cleanly shaven as possible but look instead as though they used a trimmer instead. The women in these ads have no trouble snuggling up to these stubbly men as long as it’s a one day effect, not two. It’s almost as if stubble bearers have tricked women into believing that their five o’clock shadow is really not hair at all. Instead it literally is a shadow; a magic, majestic, manly shadow that provides him with his magnificent prominence.

Second, the hairless option has its roots, like so many things, in status practices of the past. When the safety razor was first invented, the best way to show off that you had money to all the ladies you were trying to impress with affluence was to plunk down for it and continually pay for the overpriced refills. Come to think of it, that’s actually exactly the same as today. Except in 2006, shaving isn’t a matter of looking affluent, it’s simply a matter of not looking homeless. I suppose if I was six more months into the beard I sported weeks ago, I’d be all-too-close to resembling starving, possibly drunk philosopher.

There are some “happy mediums” that men have arrived at during the course of history to try to negotiate this tension. Novelist Stephen King has often stated that the best way to look at it is be clean-shaven during the warm spring and summer months and let the blanket of your beard warm you during the fall and winter. I kind of like it; it’s sort of like a “two lives” storyline. I could devise a weird and wacky bearded Bryce who’s a bit of a loose cannon and tell off every second person I know, only to pave the way for the spring/summer onset of level-headed Bryce, the calm, reasonable man that will apologize for all of his wrongdoings and hosts power lunches on Wednesdays. The duality of it all already has me expecting to see Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari on my daily adventures explaining their latest attempts to keep up their cross-dressing ruse before their landlords.

My current compromise is the feather-duster, flavour-savour, beard-but-not-quite-a-beard and slightly bohemian-implying tuft of hair known as the “soul patch.” It’s kind of a brilliant ploy because you can almost get away with not shaving a little longer as the patch offsets the effect of the stubble; tricking the viewer into believing you shaved yesterday. The look in my case draws inexplicable endless comparisons to Anthrax’s Scott Ian. How wearing facial hair that doesn’t even measure an inch suddenly brings out my resemblance to a man with a goatee that at times rivals ZZ Top’s for audaciousness, I’ll never know.

I find “soul patch” to be the most ironic preservation of a title of all time. OK, I admit: I have a “soul patch.” I think I look good with a “soul patch.” But I do not have “soul.” Sure, I have a soul (at least I hope I do…), but if you’re waiting for me to join up with a runaway beatnik group playing a bongo drum and quoting Kerouac, be prepared to wait a while. I don’t think anyone with “soul” under the age of 30 has worn a “soul patch” since December 7, 1979, when Tom Waits celebrated his 30^th birthday. Mostly, it’s me, a bunch of coffee-drinking poets lamenting the loss of a Beat Generation their parents aren’t even old enough to remember and maybe a small group of IKEA bargain-hunters. Nonetheless, the patch provides a small amount of “yes, yes, yes, I’ll stroke this faux beard in a fain attempt to pretend I’m paying attention” without the major irritation of walking around with your face covered with the equivalent of a used-up human brillo-pad.

Alas, the awkward and terrible title may transform my beloved clump of hair from a subtle fashion choice into the 2000s zeitgeist equivalent of the mullet. The last thing I need to do is look back at pictures of myself in my late-20s, early-30s and compare it to Billy Ray Cyrus videos. It’s enough to make me consider clipping it off. However, I’d just be left with the same old dilemma again and again. Scratch my babyface red and try to convince myself that I command enough respect without the beard or scratch my bearded face into oblivion, having people try to tug at my face and try to compensate for messiness with a comb.

On second thought, maybe I can afford to be the 2006 zeitgeist of tackiness. Being compared to Scott Ian never really hurt anybody. If I had to overthink it any further, I’d tolerate the itching, let it grow out and stuff that machete into my big-ass beard. That beats a Porsche for compensation any day.

BMN

Join Me on Selfish Single Day, Won’t You?

2006-02-13T23:26:00.000-04:00

I once heard a wistful standup remark that she really wasn’t so much envious of her married friends as she was envious of their wedding. Her exasperating conclusion was “I don’t want to be married, I just want lots of gifts, attention and a big party!”

You may be thinking that this standup grew up to be Elizabeth Taylor, who’s thrown enough wedding parties in her time to cover for many of us, but such is not the case. Rather, this is expression of a larger-held malaise amongst people who find themselves single on a day when they’d rather not be and have to fight every bit of their instinct not to do something incredibly stupid based on this feeling. They made the movie “Wedding Crashers” for a reason you know.

Now, before you think that I’m about to go off on a rant against married people and other happy couples…..well, OK, maybe you’re half-right and that’s what I’m about to do. However, I’m really more upset with the perpetual insistence of celebrations designed moreso to make people feel bad or guilty than to make people feel good. I’m talking of course about Valentine’s Day.

The supposed roots of Valentine’s Day go back to ancient times. In fact, in Rome, the day after what we know as Valentine’s Day was known for the festival of Lupercus. Women believed that getting slapped with goatskin would make them more fertile. So if you ever receive a home pregnancy kit for Valentine’s Day and think it’s inappropriate, think of how much worse off you could have it. However, the more modern convention of V-Day can be blamed on the English and the French, who titled it such in the 1300s. They concocted some hooey about birds mating to justify it which seems oddly ironic when I think of how many couples will likely commemorate their special day by going to the fanciest restaurant they can find to have some bird laid out before them on a plate. In that sense, it’s just a tad more relevant than having goat for dinner.

These historical underpinnings are referenced as a way for sentimentalists to point out how Valentine’s Day is a legitimate holiday designed to celebrate the uplifting feeling of a committed relationship. Well, pardon me if the eggnog from December has gone sour in my stomach, but I don’t buy it. First of all, if this alleged “holiday” had so many roots, we’d get a genuine day off for our troubles and in case you didn’t notice, we could use that day off in February (well, OK, given that if we live in the Northeast, we might be buried in snow for half of the month, maybe we don’t need a day off). Second, if Valentine’s Day is supposed to be so uplifting, how come I never see anyone anticipate it? The only things I see are:

1) singles bitching and complaining.
2) singles wishing that they could approach the boy/girl of their dreams but haven’t figured out a non-cheesy way to do so on Valentine’s Day that won’t come across as laborious and platonic.
3) some people nervously hoping that they’ve bought/done enough to placate their partner.
4) cranky people who appear incapable of being satisfied by whatever gesture their partner offers, no matter how magnanimous.
5) people that have been in relationships long enough to know they’re supposed to do SOMETHING for Valentine’s Day but not long enough to know just how grand that exact gesture is supposed to be
6) people ignorant Valentine’s Day is coming that have no idea of the firestorm they are about to incur when their partner discovers their ignorance.

When you total it all up, I think roughly 3% of the adult population derives satisfaction from the damn day. Half of those individuals work for the greeting card industry. All just days after the freakin’ groundhog sees his shadow and gives us the business about how much more winter we’re getting. I actually think the furry guy just crawls back into his hole to tell us “THIS is exactly how much I’m looking forward to Valentine’s Day. Males leave the litter after about 30 days when you’re a groundhog. I don’t want to see my wife to find me!”

The prior presumption towards those like myself that snipe yearly at the onset of this rouge-tinted February day was that we are/were miserable loners who are either upset at lack of love, lack of laid-dom or are just flat out jealous of other’s happiness. To them, I say “pshaw!” Since when has anybody ever needed a so-called holiday as an excuse to snipe at their romantic inadequacies? That’s like suggesting that Americans only get bitter that they don’t get to run the ship on President’s Day. I can picture the water cooler conversation. “Damn it Bill! I was perfectly content with my lower level management job until it was fuckin’ President’s Day! Now all I can think about is how I would try to propose tax cuts and how cool it would be to be referred to as the ‘veto’ in the Schoolhouse Rock video! Damn President’s Day, I was perfectly happy until now!”

No, you see, the problem with Valentine’s Day is the seeming JOY that is taken in your singles misery. And if you are in fact NOT miserable single, websites, magazines, newspapers, pushy mothers and any other source you can think of will try to convince you that you are crazy to NOT be miserable in such a state. If they realize that doesn’t work, they will then claim that you’re in denial to the point of aggravation:

Jill: “Look at this extravagantly, unnecessarily expensive box of chocolates Jack gave me, Jane!”
Jane: “That’s nice, Jill. Listen, I have class but let’s talk afte…..”
Jill: “Jack’s buying me roses and taking me to Chateau Où Nous Faisons Plus D'argent Que Vous for some caviar and goatskins. How about you, do you have a valentine, Jane?”
Jane: “Haha, no, but we can talk about your big plans after I have cl….”
Jill: “Someone sounds jealous!”
Jane: “Well no, I was just saying that…”
Jill: “You’re jealous!”
Jane: “Um, OK, if you say so...”
Jill: “I knew it”

This goes on for a bit until Jane is late for class and tells Jill to go up the damn proverbial hill with Jack to fetch some V-Day water. All the better if he trips and Jill comes tumbling after.

Indeed, the denominational wars over the “Happy Holidays” seem like a minor squabble compared to the warring between the single and the coupled. Much as some claim that the celebration of Christmas (and subsequent recognition of it as the biggest holiday of the year) only makes them feel left out, Valentine’s Day is almost like a big fat finger to all of the loners of the world, even those by choice. “Hey, you not taking part in our multifarious card-buying, flower-buying scheme? Well then nuts to you, we’re flooding Netscape with endless articles entitled ‘Still Single? Here’s What’s Wrong’ until you admit fault in your life! Until a dollar can be had at your maudlin expense, we won’t let you rest!”

It’s almost like celebrating “Water Day” right in front of a dehydrated child. It’s bad enough that they are about to die of thirst, but when you splash about in a kiddie pool filled with filtered spring water right in front of the poor child, that’s just revelling in the poor person’s misfortune. Furthermore, if you’re really “lucky”, you’ll be the recipient of some token Valentine’s gesture from someone who feels as though they can alleviate your annoyance with a “just friends” Valentine’s gesture. Usually these either come from someone you want to be more than just friends with or, if not, contain just enough candy to make the irritating point that you’re not experiencing the ‘real’ Valentine’s Day and NOT enough candy to create a sugar high to surge past it.

This would all be well and good if it were for the cause of creating a happy day for all you lovers out there. And believe it or not, there is a soft side to this sarcastic, gruffy bastard. I can appreciate the warm sentiments exchanged between lovers, spouses and swingers all across the world and truth be told (and don’t let it get around), I’m probably just a sweetie at heart. Nonetheless, aside from the 3 or 4 Jills of the world, are those in relationships really better off? Those who aren’t caught in a one-ups(wo/)manship battle with their friends over whose significant others are spoiling them more are caught in a constant struggle with trying to figure out just what level of affection Valentine’s Day warrants. Relationships don’t come with contracts, but if they did, there would simply have to be a Valentine’s Day tax bracket included. Rather than finding a spot on the scale by listing your yearly income, you find your spot on the scale by listing the months/years you’ve dated said person. Of course, the longer the relationship, the higher the tax. This inevitable inflation, of course, leads some couples to forgo V-Day. Before you know it, you’ve gone from a $150 day of flowers, fancy restaurants and luxurious hotel rooms to a cheap tapestry of daisies, a box of discount caramels and a night on the apartment bed watching a bad VHS copy of “Annie Hall” and passing it off as romance.

Come to think of it, that doesn’t sound so bad.

It is a little better than being on the “too early” end of the scale. What do you get the dating partner that you kinda-haven’t-quite-put-a-label-on-it-yet of two months for a day that was designed to celebrate l’amour? One card and one box of chocolates. One card, chocolates and a gift? Just a gift? No gift and no card, but chocolates? Or is the person going to repel in horror if you give them ANYTHING and say “what the heck are you doing, we’re not at the Valentine’s stage yet!!”

You see, Valentine’s Day is no more designed for happy couples than most straight guys genuinely enjoy “date flicks.” Anniversaries are designed for the couple that is keenly aware of where their relationship is and how long it’s taken to get there. V-Day is just a day thrown in randomly to potentially throw the whole works off the tracks.

I’m sure that the aforementioned 3% take great pleasure in the 97%’s misery on this day because it makes them feel all the more special about THEIR day. It’s kind of sad, really, that one needs a single day of lavish gifts to remind them of their self-worth. It’s like the person who cherishes the tape of that lavish wedding even five years after the divorce. (For the record, I’m aware many people celebrate their divorces, but why not formally? “You are cordially invited to the divorce proceedings of Jack and Jill. Formal wear expected, not demanded. At the law offices of So On and So Forth. Light meal and refreshments will be served.” The mere thought of it makes me want to throw the divorce ceremony without even getting married. If anyone is interested in becoming my ex-wife without ever even dating me, let me know. We could probably net at least at $500 of bank out of the proceedings.)

The only REAL benefits to Valentine’s Day can easily be achieved independent of the day itself. The primary benefit is candy and lots of it. Here’s my question: why spend countless amounts of money on candy your partner may or may not like and then watch them give you candy you probably hate and then bitch and complain about it the next day? I propose that we merely create a holiday in February called “Halloween 2.” We’ll all go hog wild and storm the stores at midnight, raiding them for every bit of junk food we can find. We’ll all experience sugar headaches by 7 a.m. and you don’t have worry about being single or married to participate.

Better yet, I propose that us single folk make a day of our own to make those Valentine-mongers jealous. Something that doesn’t involve stuffing money into the floral and card economy that tries to rake us in every winter. We’ll call it “Selfish Single Day”: we make ourselves our own cards out of lined paper with appropriately self-congratulatory sentiments such as “You rock!” and “Hell yeah, no one’s better looking than you!” Then we go out and buy ourselves as much booze and/or caffeine as we want for ourselves and just show up completely inappropriate for work. Instead of buying a sexy clothing item for a significant other, we plunk down $10 for a pair of really comfy, sloppy track pants. When you show up for work burned out and/or hungover and your co-worker says you look terrible, you reply “yeah, but what the hell, I’m single and I answer to nobody but ME! Yeah, you get to be with your girlfriend tonight but I’m gonna eat potato chips, belch as loud as I want and play Hungry Hungry Hippos with the dog. I kick his ass every time but he comes back for more.”

Added benefits to this proposed holiday: romantic music is totally optional. Therefore, your chances of being blindsided by your partner with Michael Bolton or John Tesh on this day are approximately 4000% less than on Valentine’s Day. That’s already a good start. (For those of you that do celebrate V-Day that are reading this, I just hope and pray that if a Barry is in your musical plans, that it’s the right Barry…) Second, you can buy yourself REAL junkfood and not indigestion tablets with little heart message stamped onto them passing for candy. Third, we won’t discriminate: coupled people can celebrate “Selfish Single Day” by telling their partner to take a hike; but I do recommend that you either take out a hotel room for yourself, crash at your buddy’s or negotiate some sort of leasing arrangement on your shared space. As with many other good times, “Selfish Single Day” can get messy, y’know.

When will we celebrate it? Who cares? The day is nominal, just don’t pick Feb. 14. I’m not sharing our day with those glory hogging sap lovers. At the end of the day, I guess I’m saying that there’s no reason to be anything more than arbitrary when it comes to celebrating your independence. Just the same, if you’re an enamoured lover ready to smother your partner with some Valentine’s Day affection, do yourself a favour and avoid the massive expense and save up for a random “we really love each other” and/or “we really lust for each other” and/or “we just started dating and that’s pretty cool” day that you can celebrate at your own leisure down the road.

After all, we all deserve our big party. Let’s just tell the V-Day lovers that we’ll take care of deciding that day ourselves.

BMN

This Just In: Breasts Still Used to Sell Things

2006-01-22T22:55:00.000-04:00

As a heterosexual human male, I freely admit that I admire the human female form. Surely I could play the “sensitive liberal” card and pretend the sight of a scantily clad voluptuous vixen is offensive to mine eyes but this would be a flagrant misstatement. Just as I’m sure that some of you reading this have an equal amount of admiration for the male human form and a select number of you for both.

It’s also no mystery to any of us that advertisers have been seeking to capitalize on this for however long that capitalism has existed. Everyone has heard the mantra “sex sells” at some point in their life and no one has any evidence to dispute it. Yet as sure as the Doublemint Twins had absolutely nothing to do with the pleasant flavourful effects of chewing gum, much of the advertising of the past and today creates no logical connection between the sex appeal of its endorsers and the product itself. I have found that the effects on myself have altered as time moves on. To wit,

Young adolescent: About as horny as all get out and without cable, just grateful for the opportunity to observe the beautiful visages normally reserved for Cinemax.

High school student: As the brain actually matures and develops, becoming increasingly angry at the fact that ads trying to mislead me into believing that said products will give me a chance of even speaking with the girls who are in point of fact either ignoring or mocking me on a daily basis. My paranoid “everything in life sucks” Gen-X high school state of mind tells me that these ads are part of the mockery.

Undergraduate student: It becomes my job to be hip and cynical about everything so essentially I make a sarcastic remark about each and every advertisement I see, sex appeal or no. (Mind you, I also inexplicably become giddy at the slogan “The Foam Goes Straight to Your Brain” and decide to actually purchase a Mug root beer based solely on this adage. Cynical isn’t always smarter.)

In 2006, part of me is just flat out bored but another part of me wonders if we as a collective are getting stupider and stupider and stupider with our tolerance of tangential use of sexual imagery. Perhaps it is because we have accepted that all commercials operate on a certain level of Pavlovian behaviour on behalf of its subjects. This is why fast food restaurants devote entire days to the preparation of a burger for their TV spots: so you will associate the logo of the company with it, only to yet again receive a patty that looks like it was left in the sun for a week and a bun that doesn’t even seem fit to throw to the ducks at the park. The Pavlov principle suggests that even though we are cognizant of the fact that we won’t get what we see in the ad, that subconscious association with the positive imagery will be pull us through to the cash register.

At some point, however, there must be a time where we just become so distrustful of advertisements that we make a conscious effort to write letters to companies that distribute products: “Dear Sir or Madam, your recent commercial for (insert product name here) insinuating that your line of (insert whatever it is these people sell) is somehow imbued with the ability to either attract or invoke qualities of the women from the Playboy mansion is flagrantly false.” In many of these letters, we would add “Further to that, I would not consider (said product) for such purposes and in fact would rather hear about its more practical or immediate qualities.” Unfortunately, I am not currently participating in such a campaign, as it would involve writing somewhere between 50-75 letters a day. Outside of that, there’s also the chance that I might be associated with some fringe lunatic group trying to restrict prime-time programming to home decorating shows and re-runs of “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.”

Nonetheless, I would appreciate the effort on someone’s behalf. A consumer like myself really feels as though some items don’t really need to be— in fact ought NOT to be— “sexy.” Let’s say, for instance, I’m buying a hammer. I want to know how long this hammer will last, not have some inevitable and sleazy pun about “nailing” attached to a cheesecake model. As mentioned in a prior rambling, hardware companies thankfully tend to take the practical road on pushing their manufactured goods and this is not a problem. Remarkably, people still buy hammers.

It therefore seems unnecessary to attach sexual imagery to something like greasy food. OK: attaching chocolate to eroticism, that’s a given. However, why on earth would you put a twenty-something glamour girl or husky bodybuilder in a fast food ad (especially when the former would only regurgitate what she ate and the latter wouldn’t be caught dead in said establishment if he were anywhere but more than 30 days away from a competition)? Did I miss the memo where fried foods became “hot” (in the sexual way, of course)?

This comes to mind because several months ago, I visited an establishment that I shall decline to name lest I become one of their shills. However, you can easily deduce what it is when I tell that they boast having a certain fried wing-like item that is apparently famous across the globe. This is despite the mounting evidence that said institution is more famous for cramming top-heavy females into tank tops that don’t comfortably fit a 12 year old and hideous shorts that Richard Simmons would be embarrassed to claim as his own. Before you jump to conclusions, I did in fact have recommendations from both male and female colleagues that previously mentioned wings were in fact quite sumptuous. The shapely waitress, I figured, was nothing more than a bonus to what would be a delicious serving of unhealthy fried items that perfectly accompanied my football viewing.

Of course, I found such not to be the case. Don’t get me wrong: the bonus was in fact quite lovely and I’m sure such would be the only time in my life I would interact with her (and that’s not just self-deprecation, I just don’t envision such people turning up at the cheapskate venues I frequent. Maybe I’m just stereotyping...). The whole reason for going into the damn place to begin with, on the other hand, was really mediocre at best. I hereby dub thee “World Famously Mediocre and Overly-Breaded Wings.”

Suffice to say I haven’t returned. Some may actually have found a food item they enjoy there yet I’m sure that some naïve individuals turn up because they have somehow psychologically convinced themselves that they are “there for the food.” They aren’t. It’s a bit galling because if you just want to go somewhere to ogle the women, there is already an institution for that purpose. We call them strip clubs. If you want good wings or any other good food item, then for crying out loud: it will not hurt you to visit other establishments where the waitresses dress like normal people and, gasp, there are actually waiters too. You might be shocked to discover that you can and will have a better taste experience. If you really need the visual stimulation that badly while you eat, I’m sure your laptop or some other form of media you take inside can handle the problem.

Although I’m not sure why that would be necessary. I’ve never had my hands and napkins drenched in sour cream and a variety of sauces and thought “Well, this WOULD have been a great meal but my server didn’t cram her breasts into my eyesight once! Upon second thought, these mozza sticks are too crusty and I never cared for sour cream anyway.” I guess I’m weird like that.

There are other products that we accept are in fact for the purposes of arousal. However, some companies have taken the accepted maxim for their product and gone into overkill with its qualities. Take for instance, deodorant. The mere invention of this product was made possible by the keen instincts of a marketer who was able to convince a disproportionate amount of the population that they would never be attractive to anyone smelling the way they smelled. The idea that a deodorant or cologne/perfume will make us appealing to someone is not only plausible but it is pretty much a given that we wear it at least partially in the hopes that someone will be drawn to our alluring musk. So it hasn’t been uncommon to see advertisements operating on the before-and-after principle of some poor sap whose chance encounter on an elevator with the man of their dreams goes awry when body odour gets in the way. The “after” scenario shows that when the party smells of this wonderful product, all is well, the digits are collected and a steamy dinner date ensues. Not necessarily the most likely scenario, but certainly in the realm of probabilities.

Most body spray, cologne and deodorant ads I see these days compel me to laugh at their sheer implausibility, especially those targeted at the straight male population. (Note to advertisers: when your product isn’t related to comedy, this isn’t the best way to get me to buy it). Some body sprays, we are to believe, are SO powerful in their overwhelming capacity to break women’s resistance that they cause women on all floors of your apartment complex to begin stripping, women at restaurants to open buttons on their blouses and flat out start catfights in the musk-wearer’s honour.

Consumer beware! None of these effects may be a positive thing. It could just mean that the body spray raises not only the room temperature by approximately 30 degrees Celsius thereby causing people to need to open or remove clothing. If that doesn’t work, it just gets so hot they get flat out aggressive and revert to “code of the jungle” modes of survival as a coping mechanism.

This of course is still not necessarily all that absurd compared to the perfume ads that people such as Calvin Klein and other not-legally-or-otherwise-proven-though-everyone-is-suspicious-they-are-pedophilic fashion designers have been foisting upon women for decades. Apparently some perfumes double as weight loss aids as the only people seen sponsoring the item weigh in the area of 80 pounds or less. There are other side effects: such perfumes will cause all colour to drain from your life forcing you and everyone around to live in a black-and-white world, you will be compelled to walk down sidealleys in your underwear and crude cloths passing as shirts and you instantly become incapable of talking in anything higher than a whisper. You will pay $100 per bottle for this privilege. Best of luck to you.

For all of the exaggeration that these ads possess, beer commercials remain the forerunner for convincing people that product purchase is a one-way ticket to unbridled physical appeal. This is actually based on a number of scientifically proven formulas. First of all, beer makes people look better. The models in these ads? This is what the people around YOU will look like, they promise, if you get enough of these brewskis down ya. Second, when you purchase beer for these people, you will look better to them. Hence, you too are one of these fine looking people and you qualify for any reality dating show. Who wouldn’t be happy with that? Third, beer makes your dumbest and most incoherent statements such as “you, you, you…..it’s just that…it’s like you’re six feet off the ceiling!” sound like profoundly intellectual commentaries on world affairs. Ergo, people will think you’re clever and if you run into the right person, you might find yourself in a tenured position at your local university.

Of course, these advertisements are now (perhaps only because of insistent pressure from government-types) tempered with a decidedly sober caveat: “Please drink responsibly.”

Riiiiiight. As if they WANT you to do this. There would be no DVDs of brain-cell deprived (at the moment, anyhow) lifting their shirts in repeated intervals for men’s amusement and everyone would actually know the people they woke up beside. This would be quite horrifying for many men who discovered the high school teacher they hated and women who discover that guy who was “kinda cute” the night before played Oliver on “The Brady Bunch.” For all the popularity-craving youth, testosterone-driven fratboys and equally estrogen-driven sorority girls, this would never do. Truth be told, if all consumers of the product drank responsibly, many would probably say to themselves “why the hell did I bother purchasing this barley-ridden piss-tasting cesspool when I could have purchased the more expensive but far more savoury wine?” (Note: The author is well aware that there is wine equally cheap and terrible to any bad beer. Just in case you were thinking of disputing that point.)

“Please drink responsibly” is just a catchy way of saying “We at said beer company fully endorse sketchy hookups, humorous incidents of cars going into ditches and bizarre case of mistaken identity. But please, no date rape, drunken driving deaths or finding out that you legally changed your name to Adolf Benito Hussein. We don’t need the bad publicity.” You see, they really do care about us.

There’s always channel flipping during the mind-numbing TV spots, ripping ads out of magazines and just blocking out that use of Photoshop-edited cleavage hawking dating websites. There’s also just avoiding all of these media put together. I suppose putting blinders on to ignore the insipid billboard ads while driving is a decidedly bad idea and flagrant vandalism of those boards would certainly lead to an arrest and would probably only encourage the companies’ embellished and digressing uses of finely tanned pecs further. There are certain unintelligent forms of expression in life that you just have to accept.

I can only recall my experience with the gorgeously busted waitress those many months ago. I don’t remember her name but I do remember that the food wasn’t very good and my favourite team lost that night. I think I’m correct in my interpretation that I lost money unwisely that night. In the meantime, I’ll go look up travel options certain that such beautiful-people-wielding purveyors of substandard fast food and other such items would never try to sell me overpriced airline tickets.

Hey, wait a minute…..

BMN

Malls Must Love Jesus Because They Celebrate His Birthday Far in Advance

2005-11-19T03:31:00.000-04:00

It is a sad reality that I just don’t like shopping malls. It didn’t used to be that way. A highlight of this middle-class child’s life in the 1980s usually involved mall visits in some way. The possibility of a new He-Man or “sling’em, fling ‘em” action figure was usually enough to make me believe that going out to the stores was the most exciting thing I could possibly be up to on a Saturday afternoon. Trips to other cities were made more exciting by the prospect of bigger malls, which in hindsight I could compare to being excited about being transferred from one tax office to a bigger tax office for your audit.

Who can say what specifically soured me to the mall experience? Maybe it was that time when I was 15 and no one came to pick me up from the local mall. I was left to wander up and down the same stores for hours on end with no one to talk to, all the while passing all the despisable yuppie kids who— unaware of my vehicular dilemma— were probably laughing at what they thought was my vain attempt for their attention. It might have been when the trip to the mall became less about toys or recreation and more about clothes (about 85-90% of my male friends seem to agree, we find clothes-shopping to be strictly a functional practice whereas 85-90% of the women I’ve known would make it a rec center activity if given their druthers).

I actually think it has more to do with when I realized the overwhelming negativity of the mall experience as a whole as compared to, say, going to an independently owned hardware store. If you’ve had the latter experience, you know that it’s a pretty bare-bones thing: you go in, you are subject to a few product-ads that go nowhere beyond function (“Buy the new Brand X multipurpose screwdriver! Now 25 pc.!”), ask for what you want, get it, and leave feeling like your social status is no better or worse than what it was when you walked in. You won’t get off so easy at a mall. Surrounded by billboards hawking movies like Just Friends (the title of which probably led a number of people to believe that their lives had been co-opted for script) is enough to ruin anyone’s day but the stringing together of a number of stores hawking a number of products comes together to send the message that what you have is either a) not big enough and/or b) not expensive enough and/or c) not sexy enough and/or just plain not enough.

Of course, I won’t suggest an alternative to this bricolage lest I be labeled an evil hippie socialist but also there is a time of the year when I actually ENJOY stepping into this gorge of capitalistic opportunism: the week before and after Christmas. Anyone who visits their hometown for more than a few days for the holidays can probably relate: you stop into the mall to pick up that last item you forgot to buy. Then, all of a sudden, you look about 100 metres in front and to the left of you. You squint and think, “is that…..?” Sure enough, “it is.” Some person that you haven’t seen since Grade 11 Chemistry class or that summer concert from seven years back and has moved about 1,500 miles in one direction or the other is home for the holidays. S/he has stopped at the ice cream stand to figure out if this dissolving dot stuff really works. You stop to chat and have a wonderful reminiscence of when the teacher spilled the methane thus causing everyone to evacuate or when that band started poorly covering Alanis Morrisette songs (causing a quicker evacuation). Three hours, the process has repeated itself with at least two other people and you feel a little richer for the experience, even if you forgot that gift you were going to get for your mother.

Now, history has taught me that when it comes to holidays shopping, regardless of denomination, the populace consists mainly of three types of people:

1) People who wait until Christmas Eve to do about 95% of their shopping.

2) People who have not only purchased months ahead of time, but have a timetable for their 2006 and 2007 gifts penciled into their itineraries

3) Normal people….., well OK, I’m kidding. In this case, I refer to those of us who don’t put it off to the VERY last minute, but do most of it 2-3 weeks beforehand.

Granted, group #1 is becoming smaller and smaller by the day, it seems (at least in Sydney, Nova Scotia). Recent attempts to find a panicked Xmas Eve brouhaha have ended in disappointment whereas my parents would regale me with stories of their early courtship ventures into such territories that rivaled rugby scrums. I guess since the NFL will have games on Boxing Day this year, I really shouldn’t need to go to the mall to find such hard-hitting action. I am nonetheless sure that the victory dances of last-minute Christmas gift buyers would easily be more enthralling. Sure, wide receiver superstar Chad Johnson can do his Riverdance, but could that really stack up to 72-year-old granny doing a polka-inspired jig after beating out four rivals for a pair of socks with a Scottish ensign?

Group #2…..well, as sure as Martha Stewart will always have a following, these people ain’t goin’ anywhere. Memories of my high-school French teacher flood to the mind: telling us all that her latest cross-border trip provided ample opportunity to nail down her stocking stuffers. That provided me with great comfort as I counted down the days to spring break. What I could never imagine is what these people do when they discover in August that a “giftee” has already purchased the same item: only four months to rectify the mistake! Despite my sarcastic mocking, these are actually the people that you can admire for their superior Boxing Day shopping skills. Find wrapping paper a needless extravagance? Group #2 doesn’t because they bought all the wrapping paper they needed in 1992 at a Boxing Day warehouse sale. It’s only a wonder that the three crates of eggnog of the bargain hunter behind them didn’t go sour while they were hauling it out of the checkout line.

Since Group #1 is fighting off extinction and Group #2 doesn’t really need a red flag (or bow, in this case) to instigate their Christmas spree, I assume that the power brokers that run your local malls and mine are left to target Group #3 as “Christmas shoppers.” However, they must see us as extremely restless. Is there any other explanation for why they find it necessary to turn the shopping malls into a Christmas love-fest and motivate us to get to the Christmas gifts at an earlier and earlier date with each passing year? Consider the day that I began this opining: I woke up sometime after you, the reader, had your lunch to observe that it was November 18, 2005. For those that are either so imbued in denomination’s similar holiday or are reading this after a long respite to the Amish country, this means that Christmas is one month and seven days away.

Do you know what this *should* means for Group #3? It should mean at least another couple of weeks to prepare for the onslaught of Christmas marketing. Time to prepare for attempts to create another Cabbage Patch Kids phenomenon that will surely result in overpricing, bruises for all and some useless toy that will either be so ugly or so annoying in hindsight as to cause at least a third of the children who receive it to require therapy by age 25. Yet when I visited a shopping mall near my apartment today (for the sole purpose of utilizing the food court, I swear), I was bombarded with lights, pine and a lineup to see Santa Claus at a mall high-class enough that I was tempted to line up myself to see what exaggerations the man in the suit would promise or withhold from me (“You’re wearing jeans at the Lenox mall: bad boy!! Santa won’t bring you a Mercedes until you go metro!”).

Now, while disappointed that the season is being rushed, I was certainly in no way surprised by this development. First, the gi-normous wreaths on the outside were kind of a dead giveaway. Second, this is the U.S., not Canada, and since Thanksgiving is around the corner down here, this is basically considered a license to start calling it “the holidays” and schools will enter the competition of “2, 3 or 4 days off for the kids?” Third, and most significantly, people have been rushing the season for years.

Now I hear what you may be saying and I pray that you do not lump me into a certain group of “Holiday Haters.” I can already see some of you conspiring to tie me up in a chair and to force me to watch It’s a Wonderful Life on loop until I stop welling up and bawling like a newborn infant when George Bailey’s friends rescue him from his impending legal and financial peril. These drastic actions are unnecessary.

In fact, I love and treasure the holidays. I think it is the best time of the year: any time that involves the combination of being away from work and spending time with family and friends and indulging in presents ought to be held up in the highest of esteem. I’d even love it without the presents of which I receive an unusually generous amount from my parental supervisors considering my thirtieth birthday is roughly 17 months away. It is because I love this sacred time of the year that I feel it must be defended against this premature celebrating.

This rushing of the season was precipitated, I believe, by local radio stations of the past deciding that Christmas could start whenever the program director felt like it should. So if s/he wanted “The First Noel” to work its way into heavy rotation starting October 15^th of that year, more power to ‘em. The cliché goes that if Christmas is so wonderful, why not ring it in as early as possible? Oh, if everyday could be like Christmas (or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa and any other day of similar grand specter), it would be a better place.

I concur but simply playing “Walking Around the Christmas Tree” while college students are still recovering from their midterms will not foreshadow such a utopian vision. I want to enjoy “Deck the Halls”…..don’t wreck it on me while playing it on the air while I have three papers and marking assignments dragging me down. Then I will stop associating with Christmas and start taking it as a for-granted song that accompanies the drudgery of the day-to-day non-Christmas existence. You might consider this a selfish— and rather brooding, at that— sentiment, but honestly consider the majority of North American children ages 4-13. Are these people not for whom this commercialized Christmas is designed (well, OK, don’t answer THAT question. SHOULD it not be for these people)? Their last day of pre-Christmas school isn’t going to come for weeks! Why in the name of anything sacred would you taunt and tease them with the image of days off spent tobogganing? Granted, in the South, you’d have to put the toboggan on wheels. Nevertheless, these visions only serve to irritate the poor children and make them think of Christmas music not as celebratory but a huge provocation.

For better or worse, the mass acquisition of that quaint old-fashioned local radio station has caused a complete reversal of this trend. Nowadays, you’re lucky to even hear a Christmas song on December 25^th, let alone on any day of the week before or after it, lest it interfere with the regular rotation of nu-metal, bubble-gum pop and bands grasping for the Eagles-banality ring. When I prayed for radio stations to stop playing the Christmas tunes so early, I didn’t think such a drastic reversal would be in the works.

Suffice to say, the mall-owners didn’t get the memo. Not only are children going to be tormented on the weekends by visions of a Christmas that’s further away than we’re letting on, but the grating billboards of Hollywood blockbusters are accompanied by assorted advertisements tying the usual overpriced wares to “the season.” Today’s visit saw me come upon the same lingerie ad in four different places assuring us that these holidays needn’t suffer from a red brassiere shortage. Funnily enough, I did not see any accompanying warning of “buying this overpriced flimsy fabric will not give you this body. Expect your partner to look the same on Christmas morning.”

I suppose it’s comforting to know that the right products are being pitched at the kids.

This pre-emptive Christmas strike is detrimental, in my opinion, to the cheerier-than-normal service I come to expect during the Group #3 shopping time range. A burned out cashier on December 24^th would be a given, but on December 14^th? Would the shopping gods please have mercy on me? On occasion, I’ve had my wishes of holiday cheer returned with a look of sarcasm that would melt titanium. The look that says “this is the fourth day this week that I’ve been asked to double-shift and I’m tired of talking about tinsel, boxes, trees and family reunions with gabby customers. Kindly take your purchase and avail yourself of this store before I use this wreath as a ninja star.” I think this is perhaps also contributory to a reluctance to advance on anyone under mistletoe lest they respond to a gesture for a kiss with a tight fist to the clavicle. Mind you, during an unrushed season, that might happen anyway if you bought that person the wrong present.

It seems I am now falling into the trap: so anxiously expecting how worn-out everyone will be these holidays that I will anticipate them no more. The only solution—one that I propose to everyone—is to shut yourself off from the outside world. Call in sick as often as possible and complete your work tasks at home to keep the boss off your back. I even suggest setting your cell phone, computer and manual calendars back at least one week. This way, when your family suddenly knocks on your door to inform you that they want you over for eggnog, you’ll find yourself startled with joy that “the holidays are here already! Why, I’d forgotten they were so close by!” Pop in your CD of Bing Crosby or Ray Charles heralding the season, sprinkle some nutmeg over your Christmas beverage. Take comfort in the fact that every time you hear that song, you will think of happy reunions with friends and family rather than the time you had to scrounge past pine needle decorations to find a plastic witch to put up on your door for Halloween. At this rate, by 2010 you might find yourself conducting a similar struggle while purchasing back-to-school supplies.

Our bosses, supervisors and overlords could decide to give us four months off to ease this transition. If that is the case, I might consider it. Otherwise, I’ll keep working in-house for as long as it takes to keep “the holidays” from drowning into the pool of just another working day.

BMN

All That and a Bag of Attitude-Laden T-Shirts

2005-09-15T22:40:00.000-03:00

Being the king of self-effacing humour, I am no stranger to insecurity and many of the confidence problems that plague everyday people. (Oh, I’m sorry, did I say “king?” Um, I mean “prince,” um or I mean….I’m just saying I’m good at it…..I think). Why, if it wasn’t for feeling like there was about 1,000 things wrong with us before we walked out of the door of the house every day, capitalism would not be able to thrive as it does. Think about it: what does 90 percent of consumerism base itself on? Supposed self-improvement and salty snacks (the latter of which counteracts much of the former).

Since it is advertisers’ mission to convince you that the rest of the world is just that much better off than you are, I probably wouldn’t be surprised if therapists are working overtime trying to keep up with the patients coming in declaring their sense of worthlessness. However, if you don’t have the hundreds of dollars to plunk down for the psychiatric help, you can either do one of two things. You can stay up late and wait for the “just four easy payments of $39.95” plan that will guarantee to make you a better person. Or you can plunk down twenty dollars for the T-shirt that will reform your self-esteem and turn it all around.

Didn’t you know? It’s not how you look, how you talk, how you act, your sense of style or even which “reality-based” TV shows you are or aren’t familiar with that will make you cool. What will do it is that slogan-bearing T-shirt that announces to the world “I am better than you.” The brighter and bolder the font the better. Also make sure that the shirt is the smallest size you can get away with; thereby accentuating your chest and ensuring that lurkers and letches everywhere will see it.

I see this quick-fix self-help approach is very much in vogue amongst Generation-Y. You may have heard of them. Those rapscallions that came on the heels of us Gen-Xers and declared our negative “curse-our-parents-with-their-jobs-for-life, hate yourself but only half as much as you hate the world and smoke pot strictly for the numbing not for the giggling” attitude “SOOO out like bottle sized phones, man.” All things considered, their approach to life is not necessarily all that bad. All the cynicism towards the world, all of the coffee-drinking, all of the promiscuity and drug taking, but without that little self-loathing thing that those born from 1967-1980 had. At least outwardly speaking.

Thus early-twenty somethings and late teens can often be seen walking down the street bearing mantras such as “You Wish,” “Too Hot For You” or “Get in Line, Pal.” All designed to let you, the passerby, know that you are in the presence of greatness. Something that you will be made aware of again when you pass by someone ten seconds later bearing something of equal or greater sass. After all, the best way to get people envy you and want to talk to you is to let them know how unworthy they are of it. People go wild for that.

As peppy and forthcoming as these shirts may be, they do lack a certain specificity. For example, what exactly do you mean, “Too Hot For You?” You don’t even know who “You” is when you put that shirt on. Are you referring to yourself or your ability to handle climate that I can’t? Given that I’m a Northerner living in the South, maybe it really IS too hot for me. I’ll have to take your advice to your heart….thanks, sweetheart. This is why I can’t wear shirts like this, I’m just too much of a pragmatist. If you threw a shirt at me that read “You Want Me”, I wouldn’t be thinking “Oh yeah, the women are already hanging off me!” Instead, I’d be thinking, “But why and who and when? Is this shirt going to make a gruff looking gay biker chase me all night? Because if it is, then just return it right now!”

So in order to combat this non-specific issue, many shirts proclaim that same “dontcha wish” mentality but with a more pointed reference to a quality, job or quirk that the person possesses. This often leads to double-entendre so cheesy that even I wince with great impunity, as I might when I greet a police officer at a bar proudly wearing the proclamation “Cops Do It By the Book.” Others, of course, are just part of an ongoing competition between bar-goers to attract the attention of potential dates, since obviously a slogan-bearing shirt can be a great conversation starter for those who can’t think of anything to say. “Blondes Really Do Have More Fun” declares one. But wait! I’m confused. The last shirt I saw said, “Brunettes Have ALL The Fun” so how can that be? Obviously in order to make your point, you’re going to have to be prepared to get into an argument with someone via flannel typography. It kind of reeks of that 80s cartoon where the characters’ dialog is conducted entirely through whatever they are wearing. I keep waiting for a raccoon animation to pop up from under a barstool wearing a shirt contributing the mundane dialog like “I am having fun” or “How are you?”

Sometimes the shirt itself conducts the conversation: insistent that you look at the back before you get the whole picture. “I hear you…” one shirt reads. I’m already scratching my head and thinking, “funny, I didn’t say anything. Should I be worried about you? Hearing voices is the first sign that psychotherapy may be needed. Or do you have ESP? And if so, what incriminating thoughts of mine do you possess?” Before I get too concerned, I notice the “…”. I thus proceed to make every effort to catch the back of the person, even if they are in a sitting position which I assure you doesn’t make me look like a pervert in the SLIGHTEST definition of the word. Nevertheless, once I have found the back without getting hit or sued, I read the completion of the thought, “…I just don’t care.” The purpose of the shirt, I think, is to make me feel bad about the insignificance of whatever it is I have to say. I’m just relieved that ESP-girl doesn’t care what I’m thinking. There’s a lot of incriminating evidence locked up in this brain, after all.

While this phenomenon is particularly hot now, it is not in any way new. I would probably have to look very far back to find the original shirt that stated “This isn’t a bald spot, it’s a solar panel for a sex machine.” I’m relatively certain it must have been in the 1980s, though, because I can’t imagine that Telly Savalas wouldn’t have been sporting that puppy on “Kojak” eventually had it been in the 1970s or sooner. Actually, had he worn it during his run as CBS captain during “Battle of the Network Stars,” there’s no way that ABC would have won the day and NBC’s Bob Conrad would have been too psyched out to go on any of his delusion-induced hissy-fit tirades.

The “solar panel” example is not an uncommon theme for many of these “attitude” shirts: take a (presumably) negative adjective and turn it into a positive without changing the actual quality being described since it clearly cannot be denied. Everyone agrees it would be pretty stupid of me to wear a shirt that read “This Isn’t a Bald Spot: My Top Hair Refracts Light That Illuminates Its Colour.” Besides being a) confusing and b) too long to fit onto the shirt, it also c) defeats the purpose of wearing the shirt in the first place. Denial = zero attitude. If you’re already sporting the physical or social qualities that society wants, such a shirt might seem redundant, which would hence explain why some feel as though they can resort to the aforementioned generalities.

On the other hand, others have been trying to co-opt the supposedly negative a la “solar panel” thus leading to the creation of companies such as “Geek Squad” and people wearing shirts proudly declaring “I’m a dork!” Somehow, seeing a woman with measurements of 37D-23-36 or a 6’2, 230 pound man straight out of L.A. Fitness wearing such an item just stands out as a little off. As a defensive dork who feels his only badge has been torn from his chest, I feel like running up to them and saying “Wait a minute! Have you spent so many Fridays home alone that you considered renaming it ‘Isolation Eve?’ Have you ever been rejected by a wo/man because you ‘lost them’ using ‘words that are too big’ trying to explain your views on music/movies/culture? Have you ever gotten the ‘I’m not ditching you, I’ll be back in a second’ treatment at least more than once a year? If not, step aside, pal, you’re no dork!” I haven’t even watched an episode of “Star Trek” in my life (and have only seen half of the “Star Wars” films) and I still qualify as more of a “dork,” “geek” or “nerd” than these poseurs.

But that’s another rant altogether.

Suffice to say, all of that huffiness on my part is not going to do me any good if I express it through column writing, seething and general crankiness. The only solution is to get a T-shirt of my own that informs the world of how great and wonderful I am. My goal is threefold: 1) to appear cool and therefore have everyone want to hang out with me, 2) to have my shirt inform all females of a sex appeal that they have not immediately perceived and therefore make them want to be my wife and/or girlfriend and/or concubine and/or threesome participant and 3) to ensure that while doing so, I don’t wear anything that will make me look ridiculous in three years when goals 1) and 2) will still be pertinent. I can imagine how the conversation might go at a novelty-shirt shop…

Me: "Excuse me," Clerk (either a bubblegum chewing 18 year old female distracted by her copy of “Glamour” or a 24 year old tattoo-laden male distracted by his copy of “Paste”): “Yeah, man, whaddya want?”
Me: “I’m looking for one of those cool ‘dig me’ shirts, what do you recommend?”
Clerk: “Dig what?”
Me: “Y’know, ‘dig me, this is ‘all that and a bag of chips’, I’m the shit!’ Get me?”
Clerk: “Oh, yeah yeah yeah……..hmmmmm…….let’s see, what do you dislike about yourself?
Me: “Me? Um, gee, I dunno, I’d have to think about…"
Clerk: “You’re bald, we must be able to do something with that."
Me: “No, not the ‘solar panel’ shirt. OK, I appreciate the sentime…”
Clerk (clearly too young to know what the hell I’m talking about): “‘Solar panel?’ I don’t know what you’re talking about but I was thinking this:”
(Shirt reads: “Smooth Head Equals Smooth Operator”)
Me: “Ehhhhh, um, I don’t know, that actually has more than one meaning and I’m not trying to attract…..”
Clerk: “Oh yeah, right, totally gay,” (probably more apt to be uttered by the tattoo-laden male) “OK, let’s see, you’re pretty short, right?”
Me: “Well, you can see, so that’s a pretty dumb…”
Clerk: “Dude, you’d totally rawk with this on:”
(Shirt reads: “Short Everywhere But Where It Counts, Baby”)
Me: “Does the shirt really need the ‘baby’ on it, I mean, really, ‘Austin Powers’ was eight years ago…”
Clerk: “Do you get it? Where it counts, you know what I mean….” (annoying nudging follows)
Me: “Um, yeah, ha ha. You know, maybe I’m just being too snooty because I’m a grad student…”
Clerk: “Oh man, definitely got the shirt for you, then! This one just came in:”
(Shirt reads: “GTA: Greater Than Average”)
Me (with a look of absolute resentment): “That looks like a six year old designed it.”
Clerk: “Or this?:”
(Shirt reads: “You Get An ‘F’ With Me”)
Me: “Pal, shirts that remind people of school when you’re at a bar are just weak.”
Clerk: “I dunno, maybe we could order that solar panel shirt you were talking about earlier, that sounded kinda out there.”
Me: “Look, forget I brought the whole thing up, just get me that ‘Airwolf’ tee. At least it has retro-charm.”
Clerk: “Yeah, man, helicopters look good on anything.”

On second thought, I’m thinking that it might be wise if I just choose to pass on this whole “smarky-shirt” phase. It could be that my literacy level is such that I understand too much of what these shirts mean. Whereas someone might see “Baddest Bitch in This Joint” and read “Damn, that’s one fly muthafucka that I wanna hang with,” I just read “Damn, that insecure person sure wants to assure themselves that they’re a ‘bad bitch’ by having us nod and approve it as their banner.” I suppose I might ‘lose someone’ with ‘big words’ trying to explain it. I’m more inclined to buddy up to someone wearing more self-effacing shirts such as the “I’m With Stupid” pointing at the crotch or to somebody wearing an animated parody of whatever the latest media craze is. Somehow I just don’t feel like spending the first five minutes of the conversation talking about the greatness of a complete stranger is tantamount to any great entertainment.

No great loss for the shirtmakers since I can usually only afford to upgrade my wardrobe once a year anyway. I do get the feeling, however, that it is now a great idea to try to find an “Airwolf” shirt. If I can just find someone who’s managed to get an airbrush of “Matt Houston” on their top, we can hang out and knock back a few anytime. (And maybe watch any new “Battle of the Network Stars” to see if any CBS captain can live up to good ol’ solar-panelled Telly’s legacy).

BMN

My Dusty Utopia

2005-08-20T20:09:00.000-03:00

If there's one thing I never put off, it's procrastination. I make it a point to put off about 10 things before I get out of bed in the morning. That's after I put off thinking about getting out of bed.....a sloppily made bed since I usually put off making the bed until after I get home at the end of the day at which point I just say "frig'er" and plop down to whatever arrangements the blankets are already in. They do say that a familiar bed is a healthier one, after all. It should therefore come as no surprise that for much of the year, I live in a self-made mess of carefully put off cleaning assignments.

Like most entrenched habits, this one started as early as I can remember. I am not sure if your parents were like mine but if they were, they probably scolded you every Saturday to "clean up this dump" (in my case, referring to the potential toxic-waste site that was me and my brother's bedroom). The lecture repeated itself week-in, week-out with the intention of reinforcing the message that maybe, just maybe, seeing your own bedroom floor wasn't such a bad idea. It might allow you to see if the carpet had changed colour at all. These speeches usually had about a 10% success rate i.e. once every two months or so, I would actually do as I was told (or advised, I suppose) and get the room back into ship-shape.

"Ship-shape" in my case meant shoving everything that was humanely possible to fit in a New York studio apartment into my closet. The foolish naiveté of the household cat was exposed when he actually thought he could venture in there and find his way out in less than a day. He would more often than not find himself drowning in a pile of old wrestling magazines, worthless unread books and approximately 50 layers of clothing. I have a theory that 80% of teenage boys are unable to comprehend the concept of "hangers." Don't get me wrong: They know how they work, they understand how to operate them. They just don't see how the clothes will get any more wrinkled laying one item atop the other than they would as folded carefully over well positioned coat hangers.

Teenagers are, of course, idiots.

As I recall this tedious process of "stick this under the bed," "shove this in the drawer" and "finally throw away this wrinkled up receipt for a lollipop I bought in 1983," I recall the words of my mother. Always one to repeat a useful adage to undiscerning ears, she would not so not sarcastically tell me of my room's sorry state, "you do know that if you just put things away like you were supposed to, your room wouldn't be messy to begin with!"

Well, of course, my dear mater but then where would the procrastination lie in that? Putting my clothes in the laundry chute immediately after I'm done wearing them? Actually keeping my tapes in their proper places on the rack instead of tossing the cases separately from the cassettes themselves? Folding my clothes for the next day in a designated spotless area? Why...the whole thing sounds so mechanistic, it could come right out of "Mein Kampf!" I'll keep my socialist utopia of dustbunnies and the bedding of ten shirts and pants for the cat, thank you very much!

You may be thinking to yourself, "what is the purpose of expounding on teenage sloppiness? That's like opining on the dishonesty of politicians." You would be correct, but you might also erroneously assume that all individuals grow out of these phases of illogical thinking. Oh, how wrong you would be. It only takes a week of "I'll get to those clothes later" and "I'll sort through those letters later" to develop old habits. Sure enough, after putting off my daily 10 items and finally hauling myself out of bed, I look around and think to myself (and this happens probably half of the year), "what the hell happened to the apartment?"

I once had such lofty ideals of apartment cleanliness. They made a degree of sense since I'm an individual with very few things. The feelings of "cultural capital" shame instantly wash over me as I visit a variety of apartments from peers featuring all of the coolest posters from the coolest shows and the coolest record collections and the coolest paintings and the coolest DVD collections and coolest book collections and coolest home recording system and the coolest home entertainment system and the coolest means of providing cool air. If only I had all of this stuff, than indeed I too could qualify as the, um, coolest. However, in my tiny one bedroom apartment, where the hell would I put it all? For that matter, would I get to half of it?

Adopting the "keep it simple stupid" mantra, a wide-eyed BMN moves into his new apartment with a few CDS, some furniture, a normal-sized TV, one DVD player, etc. Y'know: the basics. A few posters, nothing special. This will be a piece of cake, right? There is positively, absolutely, certifiably no way this apartment will ever be messy in our lifetime. How on earth could I possibly make this apartment look bad?

Two years later, I assess the "tab": spilled coffee on the couch (was it twice? three times?); unopened bills (well, I pay online....but I might need the records, right?), photocopied readings for school (well, I *meant* to buy filing cabinets...honest I did, but it's on top of the procrastination pile every morning); books, most of which are also for school (shove 'em into the unused suitcases. That oughta hold 'em); inexplicable wall stains that reappear hours after I scrub them; floor scrape marks (hey, a guy's gotta move his stools); a damp closet floor (check the water heater, my ass...it was working fine before you came and made a mess of the place); stacks of unopened phone books (they smooth out things though, might wanna keep 'em) and just general cluttered miscellany on the table that I never really use as a table. Indeed, they have a word for guys like me. This word is "slob."

Somehow, I still don't quite understand it. I take my garbage out. I put my dishes in the dishwasher (in fact all too frequently). I use air freshener. I scrub the toilet and the bathroom floor. Certainly nothing that would qualify me as Martha Stewart but assuredly something that would keep the apartment looking.....I don't know.....more like a 28 year old's apartment.

I will give myself credit: I've upgraded myself to the status of a 23 year old's apartment. There's dirt and marks, somehow the place always seems to smell a little stuffy and even with lids and caution, coffee still goes flying. Nonetheless, I *have* upgraded my skills to where at least 50% of the floor is visible. I recall visiting some friends' places in my early-20s and feeling as though I had discovered the remnants of the Hindenberg in a little suburban squalor. I was surprised and a little shocked to discover that not only did the vessel contain humans and hydrogen but approximately 1,053 boxes of pizza that scattered all across the land. I suppose instead of crying "Oh the humanity!", Murrow might have been tempted to cry "Oh the flaming crust!" On my more curious day, I may have wondered if you could leave a plastic soda container and a half-wrapped, half-eaten burger sitting in one place for more than 13 months without having one or the other grow mold-legs and get up and walk away. Thanks to the joy of 20 year old slacker apartment leasers, that mystery has been solved.

The office is not much better than my "Mature Enough to Be 23" dwelling. Some people are just better off having officemates. When I first inherited office space, it was shared with others who were inclined to call the rest of the day's affairs off and alert national security if a spec of dust appeared on their desk. Imagine my surprise as during my first teaching assignment, I discovered that they were actually using the compartments of their desks as actual compartments. I guess I had thought that that was strictly for display purposes. When I asked to borrow a pen, they could reply in record time because they "had a place for those." I had a place for my pens too. It was the first empty space in or on the desk that I could find.

Now I inhabit an office of my own. I have evolved to the point that I do usually have a writing utensil at the ready. My coffee mug is usually clean. I manage to cover up at least half of my wall space with a variety of posters designed to show my variety of interests and disguise the scuff marks of the previous tenants. I even have helpful reminders: the stern basketball coach bobblehead in front of me and a knife-wielding Michael Myers of Halloween fame to the right of me reminding me to stay on task lest I have to run 50 laps AND get stabbed repeatedly during the process. Yet an 8 1/2" twitching statute and the sheen of a butcher's knife on a movie poster are not motivation enough, it would seem, for a man to keep a tidy office.

Two years later, I assess the "tab": spilled coke on one of the chairs (or was it coffee again? Or both?), a pillow lying under my desk that I haven't found a neater way to stash (but I might need an office nap, right? Or maybe several...), scattered papers (I can't throw them out, I might need to cite them!), only one drawer which should probably be filled with the papers but isn't (what do I have in there anyway?), assorted books that need to be returned to their respective owners and libraries, unused tote bags (but they're tote bags...you tell people about where you've been with tote bags) and ball caps I wore to the office but decided I didn't need to wear back home. Oh, and golf clubs. You never know when the inspiration to hit a quick back nine will strike. But it's probably going to be daytime and you're probably going to be at work.

So it has come to this for the graduate teaching assistant. Beginning of the semester cleaning
time, both at home and at work. Empty cassette cases have given way to unplayed records that stand in a stack since I decided to buy them before having the money to buy a decent record player. The wrestling magazines have given way to unfinished papers and music magazines that sit not in the closet but on the coffee table that hasn't had a coffee mug placed on it in over a year. Most clothes have made their way to the hangers and drawers but alas, some still escape and sit in their wondrous piles. If you perk your ears up enough, you can hear them crying in the night: "Iron me!" All the while, they compete with the soundtrack in my head, playing a constant loop of my mother's voice: "you do know that if you just put things away like you were supposed to, this place wouldn't be messy to begin with!"

I suppose I don't know. Late-20-somethings can, of course, be idiots from time-to-time. Count this one among them.

When I finally move up to the world of big-time wages, I'll just hire someone to pick it all up and put it in its proper place at the end of the day. Then that fascist fantasy of clean floors, organized desks and chairs that bear no scars of caffeine abuse will finally come true. The dustbunnies will just have to hop away and into the waiting arms of another slovenly doddling teenager, with whom I'm sure they will have a solid relationship of at least 20 years.

BMN

This Column Contains 40g Total Carbohydrates (13% Daily Value)

2005-07-17T22:12:00.000-03:00

Being a graduate student is not unlike taking up the priesthood of the Catholic Church: a vow of chastity and poverty. OK, well, the chastity thing was probably just happenstance but definitely poverty. Thus being in the position of having to make a food budget out of a few bucks, a couple of coupons and some small bits of string, I learned to make buddies with pasta very quickly. Not that we really weren’t already fast friends. Au contraire, I think there had already been entire weeks of my life that had been devoted to clearing out the macaroni and cheese in my parents’ cupboard. Therefore, a steady diet with my ol’ faithful combined with ramen noodles (which I believe cost $0.0000000001 a gram when you work it all out...) have contributed greatly to my continuing forward in the mighty battle of educating myself.

However, as this decade (and my poverty vow) began, a dark cloud loomed on the horizon pointing the finger of shame at me for indulging so mightily at the mantra of bags and bags of dried noodles. The cloud was in the shape of an “A” for Atkins and its lightning strikes are still felt to this day.

For those of you who have been under a rock that has been secured under a boulder in a cave enclosed underground of the Appalachians, the Atkins diet has become the diet of the ‘00s. It actually turns out that the diet was invented in the 70s and that its founder passed away this decade— which you would think would be the absolute WORST timing for the diet’s popularity to spring but when have I ever been able to predict the whims of the Western world? Of course, we’ve lived through a number of diet fads; many of which still resonate on some shelf at your local grocer.

For example, there are the shake diets that involve you eating one solid meal a day while spending two others on liquids and spending roughly the rest of the day in the bathroom. There are the diets that basically tell you to drink nothing but a juice product over a period of 2 to 3 days and just watch the weight disappear!! Also watch your red blood cell count and respiratory system disappear with it!! Then there was the mid-90s trend of eating whatever you wanted but making sure you threw it up before your body ever gleaned any nutritional value from it. This particular fad was inspired by the onset of waifs in fashion that apparently convinced women that it was desirable to look like a leukemia patient who has opted not to take the “cell transplant” road to recovery but the less-traveled “heroin for breakfast” treatment. There was a period of my undergraduate life where it was hard for someone to meet women because one would ritually knock them over without actually making body contact with them. The breeze created by walking was enough to send them flying out of view before their faces became visible.

So suffice to say, it’s not hard to be distrustful of anything carrying the word “diet” since the most notable effects of them post-1960s have been massive vomiting, hallucinating, various psychological counseling and the runs. The Atkins’ diet promised to put a stop to all this with its wacky idea that solid foods weren’t so bad, vomiting wasn’t the answer and really you could eat all you want. It sounded just adorable enough to be liberating for anyone trying to put off some pounds until you heard the catch. The diet’s mantra was best expressed not as “eat all you want” but as three words: Carbohydrates are evil.

At least that’s what I thought the gist of it was until I started seeing all of the adjectives that preceded the dreaded “c” word. Not words like “monosaturated” or “dried” but more active terms like “net”, “impact” or “effective.” Turns out that it is THESE carbohydrates in particular that are ESPECIALLY evil.

Now when I first saw the term “net carbs”, I was inclined to think of a couple of things. I immediately thought of Reggie Miller taking big balls of carbohydrates and successfully draining three-pointers: sinking them through the hoop with “nothing but net.” Once that absurd pontificating finished itself, I then conjured up an image of weather-beaten fishers dragging up their salmon or bass for the day and dragging up a bunch of carbs with their catch. “We can sell these carbs at 10% below the market price and beat the foreign importers!!,” they triumph and they pull into port. In all seriousness, the adjectives turn out to be the great weapons of the mass marketers who need a runaround to continue to sell their usually sweet and usually fattening products to us without scaring us into thinking that we’re dragging ourselves into a carbohydrate soaked haze. Now mind you, these are the same mass marketers who tried to assure that they could satisfy us without sugar.

Well, it just so happens that sugar has carbs so the low-sugar/sugar-free craze has returned and it is yet to be determined if any tumours or legions will result. You remember the last time, right? When the aspartame phase kicked in and Paula Abdul (post-“Straight Up”, pre-“American Idol” and probably at the time straight up idolizing Arsenio’s....) and Elton John were hawking diet drinks that contained just “one calorie?” Then one day someone raised the possibility that aspartame did bad things. Terrible things. Possibly cancerous. Rotted the brain, you know. Of course, we all needed to be thin so no one really cared and there was aspartame in my pop today. Just as well, since I rarely go for the “diet” option so I can probably take the hit. If you’re drinking six of these puppies a day, however, you might find yourself to be the stupidest thin person you know. Come to think of it, that probably explains where Hollywood gets most of its female personalities.....

However, the aspartame has itself some competition. Saccharin– which oddly enough you won’t find in bread the food but WILL find in Bread the band– continues to find itself in many an artificial sweetener. There is also this strange substance known as sucralose. It is a strange testament to how badly people want to push a concoction that echoes sugar’s effects while completely dissociating themselves from the idea of sugar itself that the patent owners chose to adopt the slogan, “It takes like sugar because it’s made from sugar.”

That would make it sugar, then, wouldn’t it?

Seemingly, no. Now, I wouldn’t walk around to prospective homebuilders trying to sell an “alternative to bricks” by saying “they look like bricks because they’re made from bricks!” They would either cut off the sales session or just slap me in the face and say, “just give us the damn bricks.” Nonetheless, you CAN sell sucralose this way even as it bears an uncanny resemblance to the sugar your parents and mine put in their cakes. Evidently, the makers of this product suck some of the hydrogen and oxygen out of sugar and replace it with chlorine. If you did too much of this in a swimming pool, people would drown and their bodies would feel as though they were on fire while doing so. Conversely, if you do this with your sugar, it reduces the carbs, gives you a multiplication effect where only 1/umpteenth of the sugar you would normally need is used to and nobody drowns or burns (unless you’re attending some weird witch trial where the jury take several coffee breaks).

Which brings us back to the carb craze that inspired me to investigate these artificial sweeteners in the first place. The good news with many of these sweeteners is a wholesale reduction of carbs altogether. Therefore, the mass marketers don’t have to worry themselves with relying on/creating/fabricating any troublesome labels to offset some of those nasty “c”’s. It is when you get the whole food and drink items that you get to see the adjectives at work. If a “net” carb has nothing to do with basketball or fishing, then just what the heck is it, anyway?

The “net” carbs are what you get once you weigh the overall carbs in grams vs. the protein content of a product in grams. So now my analogous mind went from basketball to fishing to the movies. I imagined a Braveheart-esque scene in which Mel Gibson bravely led the “fiber troops” into battle with the evil British carb troop. “They can take our lives, but they will never increase OUR FAT CELLS!!!”, he cries. I’ve actually read that food companies add fiber to their product, presumably to make the odds in this war closer to even. So it’s kind of like Mel only has three buddies at his side as the war commences and then just as the swords clang, he has a backup infantry coming in from the right flank; blindsiding those limey carbs. The fiber troops offset the carbs to a man until whomever is left from the mighty British troupe run amok in the human bloodstream; waving Union Jacks wherever they go.

But not quite. You see, there is the description of “impact carbs.” I thought that maybe these were special contents that were constructed in a lab and put in, say, that chili you eat at your aunt’s house that knocks you flat on your back and has you begging for a milk tap to cool your throat. At least that’s what the word “impact” connotates. Hard hitting like a bodycheck, like a Bruce Lee chop to the abdomen.

Turns out the “impact” carbs are what are left when the “net” carbs finish ravaging with your sugar alcohol. “What’s that?,” you say, “Alcohol? And I thought sugar had carbs in it? And can I get pulled over for high ‘sugar alcohol?’ If so, what is the limit?” All valid questions and all questions I have absolutely no answers for. I think it’s probably because I was getting drunk on cotton candy and sugar packets while I was leafing through the nutritional info I could find on the subject so my recollection skills aren’t so good. I ended up with a nasty hangover and a sudden urge for greasy eggs and bacon. From what I remember, there is a sugar alcohol known as maltitol, which sounds an awful lot like a skin condition. I really think scientists need to call conventions before they concoct names for these things lest I run around my hometown or city screaming “I have maltitol!! I have maltitol!! I have maltitol!!” thrusting my hands about like a zombie threatening to infect the town with my disease. My sweet, sweet, sweet tasting disease.

Carbohydrates are often found in starches, which is why my beloved pasta has taken such a hit in the dietary plans of people across North America. Mind you, this has led to an amusing effort to “low carb” or “no carb” products that it would seem unthinkable to de-starch, like bread (the food). Now imagine, if you would, taking a product like bread that is, say, ONLY THE DOUGHIEST FOOD PRODUCT IN THE WORLD and saying “we have to make this less doughy!” It’s a lot like manufacturers saying “this tennis ball bounces too much; we’re trying to cut down on the bounce so that players can gain muscle by hitting a lead weight. Can we work on that?”

As peculiar as that thought is, what’s more puzzling is the fact that low carb diets have created some unusual nutritional principles that I’m still trying to get my head around. Consider hamburgers. I love ‘em, you probably love ‘em and even if you’re a vegetarian or vegan, they’ve at least one variety just for you. You were likely also told that the fast-food versions of these suckers (and yes, that even includes the veggie kinds…) weren’t all that good for you. Well it turns out our low-carb friends agree. The reason, of course, is because— sin of sins— hamburgers have BUNS! Besides possessing the tackiness of non-subtle double entendre, buns also possess massive carbs because they are a bread product. So by all means, order the burger and take the bun off. It’s the BUN that’s been causing you to gain all this weight and have heart attacks. I guess the copious amounts of grease these burgers are prepared in are just a helpful lubricant for your artery system.

What has been lost in the clamour for “carb free” this, “low carb” that, “sugar free” this and “aspartame” that is the actual function of carbohydrates. Turns out that while indeed some of these little buggers turn into fat, the primary function of them is to act as fuel, especially for *gasp* the brain. I drank a regular can of cola before sitting to put down these words, so one could hypothesize that some or all of the 40g of carbs (all net, all impact) were burned not on the treadmill but sitting right here at the keyboard thinking of the next thing to type.

It’s probably not a coincidence that graduate teaching assistants make salaries that are only slightly higher than your local paper carrier. It is this meager salary that forces them to buy plenty of noodles. Noodles = carbs. Carbs = brain power. Brain power = better papers. Burn those carbs and solve the world’s problems by just thinking about a lot of things really really hard. It all makes so much sense.

Of course, most are not graduate students and would rather look good in tight jeans than an academic gown. So it seems that we’re right back to where we were when we sipped ten diet pops a day and stuffed our faces with sugar free cookies that we grew to love after they initially tasted God-awful– allowing our brains to shrink while we hope desperately to thin out while sitting on our lazy asses on the couch. Will this help us look the way we want to while avoiding exercise? Maybe not, but at least we’ll be dumb enough to be entertained when we watch Paula Abdul assess the talents of the fragile minded manufacturers of pop (the music, of course, not the drink).

BMN

Missing Connections and Altering the Lives of Those We’ll Never Know

2005-06-21T00:46:00.000-03:00

There are certain moments in life that you can't get back. For instance, I can't travel back in time and become a childhood viewer of "Jem" just so that I can fully reminisce on the reference “We are the Misfits, our songs are better!” Sure, I can be informed about all of the qualities of the villainous band on the show but the fact remains that my opportunity to be a childhood fan is gone forever, perhaps quite rightfully drowning in memories of He-Man and (maybe not so rightfully) the Care Bears.

Of course, we generally don't lament our choice in TV cartoon watching as much as we do the other lapses in life. Say, maybe a time that we told a 300-pound drunken pitfighter that he was "a dope smoking cocky shithead." That's something we wouldn't mind going back and undoing. Or how about a time when we were heard to mutter about the proclivities of a certain female in the room at the party only to find out it was our boss' daughter. That's a moment in time we'd like to fix.

The more interesting moments that affect our lives, though, are the little ones. You may have been walking down the street one day and you saw someone run hurriedly by you and you wondered to yourself: "My goodness, that person is in an awful rush, what could be going on?" Yet common courtesy befitting you, you don't bother to begin chug-a-lug-lugging alongside the individual to find out what the commotion is about. Just the same, intelligence and decency prevent us from tailing police officers to see what their high-speed chase is all about even though we’re morbidly fascinated.

The fact of the matter is that we really don’t lose anything by not pursuing our curiosity in these cases. I’m reasonably sure that I’m better off for not bulleting down freeways to follow cop cars or running in platform shoes to tail a pedestrian in his or her wacky interpersonal adventures. When we look back at little moments, it is usually certain opportunities that we passed up: something that could have landed us a job, a promotion or maybe even an entirely different profession.

Judging by a certain popular website that is making the rounds, the most pressing concern are those moments that could have landed us a significant other.

You may have heard of the website Craigslist: a sort of nationwide classifieds for internet users. Need concert tickets? Someone might be pawning them there. Looking for an engine for your 1975 Corolla? Make a post in your area and see if someone can help you out. Need a date? Post some info about yourself and see if anyone’s interested.

Now that I’ve retired my one paragraph title of “World’s Greatest Craigslist Shill”, allow me to describe the most fascinating section of the site and actually return to my original rumination on curious moments. The site provides a section entitled “Missed Connections.” Were you looking at that guy on the train and think that maybe he was looking back? He got off three stops before you and you wondered if a conversation between the two of you would have led anywhere? Theoretically, not a problem. You simply post in this section that you’re a this-and-that years old straight female that is so-and-so tall and you were looking at a male of a yadda-yadda build on the North-South train at such-and-such a time. You’re spared the indignity of a “don’t talk to me, weirdo!!” if the party is not interested and if by chance, he reads your post and was looking at you the way you thought he was, who knows what might happen?

Well, there’s a reason I use the word “theoretically.” The probability of such a tactic working is not only reliant on the other individual’s interest and reading the site, it also depends on your ability to be as specific as possible in describing the fleeting encounter as possible. This can hit a multitude of snags as I have learned from reading about Atlantans’ attempts to “re-connect.” Observe:

“Where: Walmart on cobb parkway, when: Sunday night around 9pm, Me: white male wearing black shirt & black shorts saw you and thought you were the prettiest lady in walmart!! I gave you eye contact w/ a smile. Didn't want to freak you out so I played it cool. Hopefully you'll read this and I'll get a response.”

I’m not sure that he phrased his compliment as well as he could have when he said she was “the prettiest lady in walmart!!” This might only mean that she was prettier than a cashier who resembled Ernest Borgnine. Still, it seems pretty clear, right? The individual described his attire, gave a place and a time. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still a chance that there could be a female that mistakes her experience at the same monolith corporation’s store for someone else’s but the chances are moot. Yet other descriptions are not nearly as specific:

“(Post entitled “Wanting You, w4m”, no age provided) i want you so bad, but you always blow me off.”

Congratulations Ms. Whatever-Your-Name-Is. You’ve just joined the millions upon millions of Americans who get blown off on a daily basis! Your brilliant strategy for handling this is to post something so vague that roughly 90% of the population of the city can e-mail you back thinking you may be referring to them. I hope you don’t check your e-mail at work because you may be held accountable for the crash that occurs when every single straight male mistakes this post as referring to him.

Of course, I’m kidding…no one’s going to write you back.

In fact, this vaguity is less harmless than the type that is just vague enough to include many but specific enough to cause problems. Consider:

“(Post entitled “Saturday night puppet – m4w – 29”) we sat in the second row near the door. you looked at me. i looked at you. you were there with a guy. hopefully he's just a friend. if so i'd like to meet you. i'll get you wine in a bigger glass.”

Just one detail missing— the show in question. Even if we are to assume that the “puppet” in the title of the post means that it was a puppet show, who knows how many of those happen in the surrounding areas. Some man logs on, reads this post and harangues his girlfriend for two months non-stop about flirting with that guy at the puppet show because he bought her wine and he’s 90% sure he saw his girlfriend looking at A guy so it must be about her. Every time she goes to a bar with her boyfriend, she gets “I suppose you think that guy (gestures towards a man likely of questionable employment) would buy you more drinks than I would!” To which she replies, “I keep telling you that I only drink one glass of wine a day!!”

Oh, the potential awkwardness of encounters that are nowhere near one’s social circle does not stop a “MC’er” from going into great detail about their feelings and…urges. For any PG readers, please forgive the inclusion of this more suggestive pining,

“You are the receptionist for our company. You are a total hottie and I would love to see you outside of work. Love your ass and the way you show just a little of your tits with your tight shirts. They would be amazing to play with and I know you are interested in me, so let's make it happen!”

Interesting that the person in question knows that she’s interested but found it more appropriate to express it on a section of a website parading as a novelty attraction of creepy stalkers and weirdos (with a nice little “draw a diagram” description of his carnal interests to boot). Now, I don’t know too much about strategizing when it comes to the opposite sex. I also know firsthand that face-to-face or voice-to-voice interactions are often incredibly stressful, but I’m relatively sure that an e-mail asking to go out for a drink definitely ranks ahead of this post on the list of strategies for wooing your co-worker. Furthermore, Atlanta is a city. Cities have lots of companies. That means Atlanta has lots of receptionists, many of whom are female and it is probably not an unsafe bet to then assume that quite a few of them have worn a tight shirt to work at least once in the past month.

Can you imagine being a well-respected man working your way up the ladder in your profession? You make the mistake of maybe looking at the receptionist a little too long one day after this post is made. All of a sudden, your supervisors send you a memo saying that they have been alerted to “inappropriate conduct” on your part. Before you know it, the pert receptionist is crying sexual harassment stating, “I don’t like how he looks at me and I SAW WHAT YOU POSTED ABOUT ME ON THE INTERNET!!” The scenario is repeated in ten other companies and lawyers feast on the new outpouring of male workers inappropriately discussing their female colleagues. The original poster probably just gets a reply from these ten women; assumes the woman “he knew was interested” really wasn’t all along and just moves to New York.

Mind you, anything based in the present at least eliminates a lot of possibilities. Every now and again, you encounter a post referring to some past that may or may not be distant…..
”(Post entitled “JH…what gives? – w4m” no age listed) Our short time together was so much fun. I thought we had a connection? You blew me away, and now you've blown me off. Was I really the only one who felt butterflies? I can't believe I was so wrong about you.”

Now this could refer to just about any man with the initials “JH” at any time in their life. Are you Jason Hewson and you lived in Atlanta for a year as part of a school exchange? Maybe that girl you took chemistry classes with wrote this. Are you Julian Hardy and you had “butterflies” with that woman you worked with at the coffee shop in the Buckhead area? Maybe she wrote this. Maybe some woman that James Hetfield met backstage at a 1987 concert but ditched for some other groupie is just reflecting her scorn.

If people are scatterbrained enough to post such inanities, I can only imagine how much of a stretch it is that someone that moved away from the area visits the site looking for an admirer from days past. If his initials are JH, he sees the post and thinks, “finally my day has come!!” He writes back and says “I felt butterflies too!” She replies “let’s make it happen then!” Thus he flies from Sweden to Atlanta, Georgia to meet his old flame. He finds the address given in the e-mail and knocks on the door and instead of seeing the 5’4 27 year old black female he thought was remembering college days past, he sees a 16 year old white daughter of a rather irascible single father with an urge to take his bad day at work out on someone of a similar gender. All at the low low cost of $1000 U.S.

Of course, maybe I should just heed the advice of a poster who scolded all of the posters “to get a life.” Fairly ironic in that the person in question must have visited the site at least once themselves for some reason. Makes me wonder why I visited the site to begin with, actually. Well, I suppose that girl at the restaurant that one time looked over at my table more than once. If only I could remember the time…the place…what the girl was wearing…what I was wearing…

Oh well, I’m sure these are all minor details. I’ll just write something up and post it; I’m pretty sure if she reads, she’ll get the idea. I just hope that it wasn’t that receptionist. She’s probably already taken.

BMN

Always Read The Label. Ignore It Immediately Thereafter.

2005-05-17T17:53:00.000-03:00

I cannot think of a more telling sign of the onset of "maturity" then when one begins the regular practice of checking the labels of that which they eat. There was a time when I would walk into a convenience store, no questions asked, and buy two packs of bubblegum which I would gradually gather into my mouth all at once, never mindful of the consequence of all of the sugar-induced damage I was causing to my teeth. I would then swig down a cola loaded with aspartame, blissfully unaware of the cancerous legions my brain was likely to incur.

In 2005, I don't chew two packs of gum at the same time although yes, it is true that I still overdo it with the carbonated beverages from time-to-time. If I was to pinpoint a time when things changed (at least somewhat), it was probably when I became a speech teacher. Never again would I be unaware of the food pyramid because I would hear about it at least once a semester in a student's informative speech. For those uninitiated (and at this point, I can't imagine why you would not be), the food pyramid is a nutritional guide to how much of this and that per week make up a healthy diet.

I was inspired by this onslaught of information on "so many vegetables" (which I was surely neglecting) to "use sweets sparingly" (which I was surely ignoring). From this, I deduced that the labels on our food and on all other products for that matter probably had some sort of real substantive meaning that needed investigation. Sure enough, if you read that helpful little white strip on the back, you'll see most of what you need to know on the sugar, the sodium, the cholesterol..... basically everything that ever made you afraid of eating a single thing until you briefly considered eating nothing but acrylic until your dying day. The problem is that you cannot help, at times, but be distracted by all of the other things that surround that white strip.

For example, suppose that you're coming down from a long day at work and you feel a need for a little pick-me-up. Knowing that a caffeinated dose of carbonated fuel will do the trick, you stop by your local grocery store to pick up a case. Upon looking at the can, spitting at you in bold print is the following: "Very Low Sodium."

Well.....whoop-de-do to the world!!! The proclamation stands above all other "nutritional information" as a beacon of integrity. For a brief moment, I'm inspired to stand up at the register and scream to the fellow customers: "Observe my active lifestyle! I am drinking a low sodium...no, scratch that...VERY low sodium beverage! Take that, you cheese-puff retaining lard-asses! While you're all suffering from the inevitable heart attacks that shall befall you, I'll be playing golf on the Cayman Islands with my pristine sodium count. Toodle-loo, suckers!"

Of course, I don't do that. Besides avoiding the arrests and the litigation, I quickly come to my senses and realize that this benefit is instantly offset-- or should I say MORE than offset-- by the extravagant amount of sugar and acidic material this beverage contains. Of course, the makers of the product wouldn't be so kind as to put right next to the proud "very low sodium" moniker, "very good battery acid substitute." Somehow, they don't want people buying it for that purpose.

Then again, it wouldn't be the first time that product-makers would decide that the best way to be helpful would be to only point to one thing and not the other. During the production of one of my endless number of noodle repasts, I was trying to remember how much milk and how much water I needed. I looked on the back and discovered not only the amount of milk and water needed, not only that I needed a little margarine as well but that the makers of this product recommended, nay INSISTED, on the use of a very BRAND SPECIFIC margarine. Well, imagine my disappointment that a) I was not using that brand that in a 100% certifiable coincidence is also owned by the parent company of this pasta but that b) I use vegetable oil spread and not margarine.

I felt just a little emptier after my meal that day.

I wonder if maybe the noodles would taste better with ANY form of spread if its makers took it upon themselves to improve the product. Proclamations of "new and improved" and "33% more" abound the numerous foods (and other household items) are scattered all about the competing products. As Jerry Seinfeld remarked about a certain detergent making company, "how white can the whites get? They're already blinding us with white! But it's just not good enough." I guess that the same goes for the distribution of food products; I'm sure that there are scientists whose job it is to determine what constitutes a "new and improved" flavour or taste. In fact, I'm sure some of them consulted those working on the New Coke and look at how well that worked out!

The addition to a product is just as fascinating. Apparently, despite the number of studies reflecting struggles with obesity and numerous more reflecting that our serving portions are above dietary recommendations, the solution to our culinary difficulties is to add "25% more" to an existing product. Mind you, the fact that package/can/box that I find many of these products in looks no bigger than I remember it does give me cause to stop and wonder when the product ever was 80% of what it is today. The only logical thing, of course, is to take out a calculator and try to discover how many ounces $1.69 used to buy me. If my father taught me anything: it's not what the product costs now, but what it used to cost, that matters.

Distributors don't often trust us to do these calculations. If they can make the math simpler on their labels, they go right ahead. Consider the trusted travel purchase of the disposable razor. I really don't have any set number in my head of how many I need, how many I want or what the best value will be. It's an impulse purchase of a pressing need inspired by the forgetfulness to pack the over-priced "non-disposable" razors that I left sitting on my dresser. Razor companies have already given us much assistance by differentiating between male and female razors which is obviously terribly important lest you use the wrong one and deprive yourself (or wrongly privilege yourself) to an extra conditioning strip. So I know that they'll all give me a good shot on value.

I walk to the razors aisle and am faced with the following choices:

"Brand A, 3 (+2!) razors" $2.99
"Brand A, 6 (+4!) razors" $5.99
"Brand B, 8 cartridges" $4.39
"Brand C, 3 (+2!) razors" $3.19
"Brand C, 5 (+5!) razors" $6.19

Well, OBVIOUSLY, I should go with choice number five: 5 is clearly a bigger number than 2 or 4 after all.....

It's still amazing to me that the makers of Brand Z managed to fit 10 razors into that package of 5. I can only imagine the emergency meeting that caused this series of events to take place. Indonesian plant workers were content to package materials as they were until the word came down from their superiors: "We care TOO much about our customers to give them JUST five razors, unpack those boxes....we're going to give them MORE!"

When my trip ends with five razors left over and my stubble minimized if still fairly present (territory we've covered previously), I know that my money's been well spent. Good thing I looked at the packaging and made an informed choice. Next time, I go into the store with only five dollars to my name, I'll just say to myself, "$5/bonus razors = ratio, compare ratios for products a, b and c and solve for x."

I'm hoping that I continue to get the indications of what is "98% fat free", what has "more" than a previous unacknowledged amount and an arithmetic breakdown of tangibly countable items. I think there's a white strip somewhere on some of these products but I can't really remember its function anymore. I won't let it bother me as I'll be too busy trying to figure out the best way to get the bonus pack of bubble gum so that I can shove 10 (+ 5!) pieces for a more valuable flavour experience.

BMN

We’re Beautiful, You’re a Loser (1000+ Complete Strangers Can’t Be Wrong)

2005-04-20T00:45:00.000-03:00

You don’t have to be an academic type to understand or have heard of the concept of “cultural capital.” The idea behind Pierre Bordieu’s musings was that human beings barter in more than just cash and other goods and services, but that we acquire the capital of “coolness” over the course of our lives to give ourselves the appearance of importance. Anyone who has ever seen two testosterone-filled males, particularly in front of a female that they both find interesting, meeting for the first time has witnessed this principle in practice.

Male #1: “I understand that you work for a construction company. I was chief supervisor for one for two years.”
Male #2: “Oh really? That’s interesting, I was manager of a chain for three years; did you work under me? What chain did you work for?”
Male #1: “Oh, this was awhile ago, so it was probably a different time. I’ve been jetsetting in the past two years, y’know, Italy, France, Germany....you ever been?”
Male #2: “Funny you mention it, I have two residences in France and three businesses operating in Italy; have you ever....”
Female #1 interjecting: “Um, excuse me, what are your names again?”

As a teenager, I thought that this practice of one-upmanship was limited to “jockular” types, only to discover the pretentious world of indie rock where sedated people normally maintain the appearance of deferred ego to the point that they argue over existential theories rather than trade barbs on accomplishment. These individuals instead put such pomposity aside to join together for goals that would benefit the entire planet such as global financial re-structuring, environmental awareness and the complete dismantlement of Matchbox 20. That is until the issue of music awareness comes up and before you can say “penis (or clitoris) envy!”, it becomes a “Battle of Who Can Cite More Obscure Bands and B-Sides in Five Minutes” war:

Indie Rocker #1 (wearing cords and a $2 shirt purchased at Value Village): “That song really reminds me of the latter day Orange Juice records, especially “Lovesick”, although more the live version. You had to have the UK 7" to hear it.”
Indie Rocker #2 (also wearing cords and a $5 shirt with tags ripped off it to make it appear as though it *were* purchased at Value Village): “It’s alright but I’m more of a fan of electro. I just heard this old track I hadn’t heard before today,“Automan” by Newcleus...”
Indie Rocker #1 (scoffing as though the second person has suggested they have only just recently discovered electricity): “um, yeah, I loved that record when I was in high school....”
Indie Rocker #2: “Yeah, actually, I was more into louder music in high school, metal like Night Sun and punk like Husker Du...”
Indie Rocker #1 (scoffing at “Husker Du” as though Warrant or Cinderella was the band mentioned): “well, yeah, but Husker Du always seemed a little too formulaic for me......”

This goes round and round and round until 50 cups of coffee have been served, 17 napkins have been crumpled and the waitress brings two bills, neither exceeding $3, to two individuals jockeying for musical fandom superiority for neigh on three hours.

I could list a plethora of other examples of how people flex their cultural capital muscles in order to make themselves appear the most important person in the world (even if they are 37 years old, living in their parents’ basement and working at WaffleWorld). However, none is more amusing than the current trend of online friend lists. In fact, if you are reading this, there is a 50/50 chance that you are already logged onto one.

The idea of online friends lists was introduced to me by a professor preaching the very idea of cultural capital. It seemed a good way to meet people in the hustle-bustle world of the city where people bring the term “aloofness” a new and dynamic quality. The principle (or at least as it seemed at the time) operates as follows: you join the site. You find people you know on the site and add them to your list. From there on, you can both a) find people that you lost track of ages ago and b) meet new people that look interesting to you.

If you’re on the perpetually single treadmill, the invitation is enticing. You get online and show people that you actually exist on this planet and don’t just exist behind a keyboard 23 hours a day. A testimonials section provides the evidence that *gasp* you have interacted and formed social bonds with other human beings. From then on, you browse the website to find attractive single people in your area. And it is there you discover cultural capital at work.

First off, let me clarify that on the looks scale, I don’t think that highly of myself but I’m not placing myself on the ogre scale either. I look in the mirror and see a reasonably good looking, intelligent and personable individual who doesn’t look immediately like a felon, wrinkled bulldog or sea otter. However, when confronted with the “feature profiles” on an online friends list, one generally may have mistaken their entry as the passage to the FLEX website.

Young 20-somethings demonstrate their beefcaky maniless with profiles that read “I’m Dan and I like to party. I like all sorts of music and I’m into just about anything! Hit me up at 1hungstud1069@webcast.net.” Their friends list is unusually large; suspiciously so in fact. Thus one investigates the testimonials list. The first three testimonials read as follows:

“Hey hot stuff, thanks 4 tha add. Give a holla!!”
“We should get together and have a ‘workout’ of our own hahahaha; thanks 4 tha add.”
“Thanks 4 tha add. Holla!”

I begin to consider the possibilities and one of three things come to mind: a) muscular guys attract a lot of people who use numbers for words, b) this individual has a lot of friends who talk about a whole lot of nothing (must be all the exercise and sex) or c) this individual does not know 90% of the people on his list but nonetheless feels obligated to add them to his list to increase his sense of self-importance.

Therefore, many of the females that I come across at these websites may appear miraculously gorgeous at first, but one glance at their profiles reveal a similar vagueness and lack of commitment to describing oneself in any great detail. The formula is as follows: Say you’re into “a lot” of things, you like “everything” when it comes to music, never say that you’re promiscuous but offer some vague hint that you “love getting into trouble” (which I think is supposed to suggest sexual hijinks but to me suggests petty theft and arson) and list an e-mail address for online chat along the lines of “aLtErnAtInGcaPSstIlLPiSSbMnOFf@girlygirl.girl”. Commit to as little as possible on your hobbies, lest you offend 5 of the 1,239 horndogs with fake beefcake photos who think that by adding you to their online friends list, they somehow now have a shot having sex with you (and finishing up in time for their next WaffleWorld shift).

Sometimes I like to play the role of the lusty nerdboy (which is probably not that much of stretch on some days) and fire off an e-mail to one of these 36-24-36 types. Except rather than reaching for the nominal add, I actually try to engage in what I believe Pierre Bordieu would reach into his vast collegial vernacular and describe as.....actual conversation. Without operating with full sarcastic bombast, I write “Hey, you look great in your display pics but your profile is lacking...what’s the word...um, content. Care to tell me about yourself?” I then giggle like a mischievous computer geek who just asked out the prom queen knowing full well that she’ll uncomfortably jostle in her seat and pretend the advance never happened.

I await the day that I fire off a message to a busty twentysomething that attempts some discovery of depth to be greeted with an actual response. I anticipate the response will go somewhere along these lines, “Fuck off, you perverted little weirdo, I’m hot as hell and reject twenty men on a daily basis, I don’t need an interesting profile!! I’ll continue to use meaningless vague well-meaning generalities to describe myself because I have physical dimensions to pull it off. And guess what? I don’t even know what ‘vague well-meaning generalities’ means! I don’t have to, I’m beautiful, dammit!!!”

Then I’ll print the e-mail out, frame it and view it as a constant reminder of how I failed to be number two thousand one hundred and twenty three on the list. It might give me something to shoot for when I interact with my smaller list of people whose only vice is an actual desire to communicate with those they call "friend."

BMN

My Voice Is Under Arrest, But At Least I Have Visitation Rights

2005-04-02T05:29:00.000-04:00

You might remember that when piracy of music online began to evolve full force, a litany of legal might and muster arose to counter it. Amongst the din of voices crying “fair” or “foul” in the whole downloading debate was a very small but nonetheless hopeful hippy-like clan defending the philosophical value of art. They cried catchy, idealistic catchphrase such as “Just let people have the music” or “Take back the music.” One particular utterance stands out in my mind, though: “Music should be free.”

Well, after being out in public spaces my entire life and hearing what I’ve heard, I’ve come to a radically different conclusion than these liberal folk. Music should not always be free. Sometimes music should be accosted, assaulted, arrested and put into prison. For the good of the society.

Singing to amuse one self is a practice that I’m sure harkens back to the beginning of time well before we ever had any sounds committed to disk, film, optics or the plastic those cool fake Sesame Street records were made out of. Cavepeople likely had the opening bars to “Smoke on the Water” figured out many millennia before Ritchie Blackmore received his first guitar lesson (and their version was probably even longer). In fact, I’m willing to bet that the most shrill voiced member of every tribe devoted at least two hours a day to perfecting the final note of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” even though they had no way of knowing that such a song would ever exist.

In the Western world, most people make airing out their musical inclinations a part of their morning routine. This should sound familiar: fall out of bed, hit the floor, assess for injuries, dig through the clothes you haven’t picked up for a watch, look at the time, cart yer arse to the bathroom, take a shower (and hope the curtain holds up, but we’ve already addressed this) and sing at the top of your lungs safely in the privacy (emphasis on *privacy*) of your own home.

Now, it is true that some of us human beings can sing. If I didn’t believe this was case, would I listen to as much music as I do? However, I daresay that the shower singing alone in most Western households might deter break-ins and burglaries all on their own. The thought of breaking into a house only to hear the warbled mistonations of Michael Bolton’s “How Am I Supposed to Live Without You?” is enough to make anyone disavow thievery and join the monastery. Well, actually, come to think of it, just hearing Michael Bolton himself might be enough.

However there is one thing to be said about singing in the shower: the echo chamber provided helps to dilute some of the pain that might be involved in hearing someone that wouldn’t make the lineup of Canadian Idol rejects. Not too long ago, while visiting the family homestead, I brought a tired, disheveled band over to crash. We opened the door and heard rather unusual emanations from the upstairs area that sounded like it might resemble a falsetto. Knowing that the house no longer has any cats that could be strangled, I turned my attention to the bathroom door and indeed found that my brother was the culprit. The song in question was “Rock Your Body” by Justin Timberlake.

What must be stressed as I recount this anecdote is that while the singing of a JT (as his friends call him, I’m sure) song is fairly offensive in and of itself, my brother’s voice was not. The shower provided enough of a cavern to bleat out any overly nasty effects. Unfortunately, a similar cavern exists in everyone’s heads; convincing them that they can sing anywhere at any time when the reality is otherwise. I’m sure that if my voice really did sound the way that it does in my head when I sing aloud, I wouldn’t be sitting in this apartment right now, I’d be down the street at the Roxy sharing my gift with the overly obnoxious indie-rock set or something to that effect.

Oh, how many hours I’ve spent laying out my favourite Alice in Chains tune. And no doubt were anyone there actually witness to the event, they would wonder whether the poignancy of the song stemmed from the pain and sorrow of the late “heroin-makes-a-good-breakfast-or-any-meal-for-that-matter” frontman Layne Staley’s inner demons or the pain and sorrow of hearing my voice mangle his vision. However, I’ve heard my voice into a microphone...I know the real score. I’d like to take that microphone with me on the streets of Atlanta or any other city in North America for that matter and let some people in on the similar aural disfigurements they are subjecting me to on a daily basis.

I cannot figure out which is worse: a large 20-something male bungling Smokey Robinson classics at a train station before dozens of people (some of whom count themselves lucky to have their mp3 player with them that day) or a gaggling group of 18 year olds at an airport on their way to Spring Break creating great anguish for my eardrums and they coo out the latest strains of Ashlee Simpson.

I’m sure the former incidents are inspired by countless individuals reading stories about people like Boyz II Men, who had the distinction of being one of the few groups that could sing a soft porn soundtrack and have it play at a Baptist reception and ruffle not a feather. These men raked in the millions in the early 1990s and they were apparently discovered by simply tracking down a person with the “ins” and breaking out an impromptu performance. Moxy? No doubt. Talent? In spades. Such that I have never witnessed in the countless performances of R&B I’ve heard at MARTA stations, city sidewalks, campus walkways and so on.

Dragging out a note too long while singing the national anthem is one thing, dragging a note out to its weary death and then flogging it disgraces whatever nation you hail from. It is especially distressing to hear truly soulful songs from the 1950s and 60s be taken to the woodshed so cruely. Yet the subject matter at least reveals hope that someone out there has an ear for good records, if not for themselves, unlike the poor round of sorority sisters that surrounded me a few weeks ago at Logan Airport.

First of all, being at Logan Airport is enough to make a person speak in tongues (but I must say that the fudge sold in this terminal was quite excellent, I’d even plug it if I could only remember what it was called). Try sitting down to a book with three girls with zero control of pitch or key “gracing” us with the wonders of the latest Top 40 drivel. Mind you, I didn’t actively recognize what they were singing. I shouldn’t be so judgmental of people by their attire and mannerisms, it’s well within the realm of possibility that they were offering a Britney Spearsish pastiche of Guided By Voices. But if that be the case, then a plague upon them for staining Robert Pollard’s songwriting in such a fashion.

It’s these types of incidents that turn a music lover like myself who listens to 1000s of songs into a craver of solitude. If I wanted to hear and participate in amateurish garbage unaffected by wonders of pitch correction in a studio (a gift that had record executives worldwide exclaiming “Eureka!! Now we don’t have to worry whether or not the voluptuous woman in the lobby can sing!!”), I’d attend karaoke. A strange event devised for drunk people, gregarious glory hogs otherwise missing the talent (that would be me) and probably stoned people as well, the raucousness of the event overrides the eardrums’ ability to feel the adverse effects of warbling. There, I let loose with unrelenting abandon, knowing I have full license to suck as much as I please.

I’m otherwise content to keep my singing voice in public to as low a volume I can manage. Or least peacefully assemble around it and take it the minimum security confines of the Bryce McNeil Shower Prison, where the roaming grounds are wide and infinitely more forgiving.

BMN

Tales of a Complete Bar/Nightclub Incompetent (or “Small Cards Will Get Me Chicks Someday”)

2005-02-28T08:29:00.000-04:00

I’m sure that at some point in your life, you’ve had the “deaf person salesperson” moment. You know the one. You’re sitting in a library, quieting reading your book, when an innocuous individual hands you a card saying “Hello, I am deaf. I am selling these trinkets as a way to make a living” or “I am giving out these sign language translation cards. Donations are welcome.” These advances are met, I’m sure, with a variety of responses ranging from “C’mon, you’re not shucking me for a couple of bucks on a lousy rock because you can’t hear” to “Neat, these sign language cards fit right in my wallet” (in case you’re wondering, I’ve had both responses in my lifetime although I articulated the former in a far classier manner).

At first, these “entrepreneurs” seemed rather strange to me. Until ten years of going to bars sunk in, that is. Now it occurs to me that I ought to walk up to random attractive women with cards that read “Hello, I am not technically deaf or mute but I am rendered incapable of having good conversation in this environment. I am handing out these cards as a way of meeting women. Dates in an environment where I can better represent myself are welcome.”

There’s something to be said for the “bar environment” that encourages a feeling of social anxiety that an outspoken, energetic individual like myself would not normally experience. I need to clarify something: I never go to the bar as a means to meet women or people in general. I generally go to the bar for one of three reasons: 1) to see a band I really like or may really like, 2) to socialize with already established friends or acquaintances or 3) to see a band I really like or may really like. Now as you can see, this means that 66.7% of the time, I am potentially left to my own devices in terms of getting to, leaving, and navigating the venue I attend. Thus, plenty of time in between sets to “scope out” the place. And unless you’ve been living in a cave since the 1930s, I should inform you that scoping out most major bars means you will encounter a wide variety of very attractive women, often very provocatively attired.

So it does not take long for the single person to go from thinking “I’m gonna go into this bar, see this show, then get the hell out of here (and maybe grab a slice)” to “Damn, I gotta get with one of these women.” Plenty of studies have been done to establish how venues further encourage this train of thought with designs usually intended to cram human beings as close together as they possibly can without creating the feeling of being in a Turkish prison (or maybe that IS the feeling they’re going for...). This is accompanied by advertisements in the restroom usually portraying a rather sleek looking man, probably straight from his Muscle & Fitness photo shoot, pressed urgently against a woman who looks like she was on her way to a bathroom of her own to “purge” only she came across this lanky fellow and decided she’d rather fuck first.

Not surprisingly, the condom machine is not far from these posters. This implies “You lazy dumbass, you don’t have ANY condoms at home, do you? The same condoms your school probably has for free by the bucketload at its health clinic.” This is probably either a) true or b) the majority of patrons are too drunk to remember whether they are so lazy that they don’t have condoms at the ready or if they even ever enrolled in a postsecondary institution. While the mix of “muscle meets bone” on the poster and the sloppy revelry in the men’s room is not all that titillating, it does encourage one to seek some sexual vista awaiting outside the doors of the same place where conditions often roughly resemble an abandoned valley of pig slop.

In short, the entire design of the average bar just screams out “YOU CAME HERE TO GET LAID, GET A MATE, OR AT THE VERY *LEAST* TO GET A PHONE NUMBER. IF YOU DIDN’T, YOU CAME FOR THE WRONG REASON.”

With that effective psychology of persuasion communicated, all I have to do is approach one of these attractive women and make my move. Piece of cake, right? I’ve been said to be so talkative that half my cab fare might likely come from finishing a tete a tete on the upcoming baseball season. I find a pretty young woman sitting at the bar. This will be simple. I will go up to the bar and within minutes, this woman will be won over by my wit and intellect. I’ll be basking in affection in a half-hour, forty-five minutes tops.

I continue to tell myself this a half-hour, forty-five minutes later, when the band has finished, the next band is setting up and I’ve returned to the same place having said absolutely nothing to anyone.

At this point, it is probably painfully obvious that correspondence in the average bar or nightclub is not my forte. I think much of this has to do with much of the requirements that I need in an average situation to make conversations work. Like most people, I need a good lead-in to establish the conversation. This lead-in should be something that plays to my strengths and does not make me look like a stalker, pervert or felon. I also tend to want to actually engage in discussions that go past five or six sentences. Nothing incredibly intellectual is necessary but there needs to be depth of some sort. “‘Hey, how about that weather?’......‘yeah, sure is warm’........‘supposed to rain tomorrow though...’ ....‘really?’...‘yup’” has probably not started many great relationships in our time or anyone else’s for that matter (with the possible exception of meteorologist’s conventions...which means that maybe if you ever encounter social awkwardness in life, you should consider attending one to spice up your love/social life).

Of course, I can’t exactly expect my requirements to be met at a bar. First of all, alcohol is involved. With 90% of the women drunk, you can’t really expect them to see much past their hands let alone carry on an interesting dialogue. I’d expect if by 12:30 A.M. if you asked them what bar they were in, it’s likely they’d answer “Portugal!” in response and then pass out. That’s if they’re not calling each of their girlfriends in alphabetical order to “dish” only to panic the next day and wonder exactly what incriminating evidence(s) they may have divulged. Sadly, that correspondence does not even reach much in the way of depth other than “.....sooooo fat” and something about ice cream wedged in.

Second, most women show up at the bar dressed to appeal to your.....um, base instincts. While this is part of what diverts one from the “I came to see the band and then leave” course, it is also a handicap if you are trying to portray yourself as sexually interested but simultaneously non-maniacal. Here’s a typical scenario: I see a young lady in a short skirt, stiletto heels and a satin top that looks to be two sizes too small. Obviously the first step to starting any good advance is to avoid any ridiculous cheesy pick up lines. So you move in with a very friendly “hello, how are you?” and if you are lucky, you get a friendly “fine” with a smile. You introduce yourself and she introduces herself and you’re then stuck with the task of trying to find something in your surroundings that will induce the REAL conversation. So other than the woman in this attire who I know little about at the moment, all I have is the substandard rap music, the (presumably) sex-inducing decor and the same old Saturday night situation, the best I can muster is “tell me about yourself.”

Now, while reeking somewhat of “I use video dating services once a week”, this tactic would not be all so bad if “tell me about yourself” actually led to.......well, the telling about one self. But this woman (or at least most women I seem to strike up conversations with at a bar) went to the “play hard-to-get.....even when it comes to basic rudimentary get-to-know-yous” school of socializing. You might get a line of employment to go on, you ask them how they like their job and you get “it’s OK.” As this fascinating conversation dies a death more agonizing than an Air Supply album, you return to this rather....suggestively attired young lady and you’re left with the following options:

1) “So talking to you reminds me, my car needs new airbags.”
2) “Um.....although this conversation is mind-numbingly awful, I’m forced to continue it based solely on your physical appearance and the fact that no other person within a 50 foot radius is wearing a conversation-stimulating T-shirt......but mostly your physical appearance.”
3) “So.....wanna do it?”

(Note to all women who aspire to use the bar as a place to meet a potential mate: Unless you’re looking for someone who’s thinking “wanna do it?”.....look somewhere else.)

Upon examining these options, #1 generally leads to either stares of resentment or a slap. #2 is simply too complex for 1 AM. #3, while the most straightforward, tends to either perfectly sustain the maniacal/pervert vibe I’m looking to avoid or works perfectly if you are 6'2 with slightly greased hair and wearing the latest David Beckham approved metrosexual sweatshirt. These would be the ones known as “hot guys”, I believe and I’ve been told that these types actually make up roughly 1-5% of the North American population. While I’m sure this is true, the rules change drastically the moment you enter a bar. You see, in a bar, the ratio of attractive to unattractive men seems to go from 5-95 to........you and a few slouchers to everyone else.

OK, I’m exaggerating. In fact, if the venue is exclusively for bands, quite often the “hot guy” is instead the guy who weighs no more than I do even after six to eight inches of a height advantage, almost INEVITABLY has moptop hair (it’s over forty years later, ladies and gentleman, and Beatlemania has not died), three day stubble that I get chastised for by every woman I know and smells like unwashed corduroy. I’m not sure why that last part is such an essential element to the “emo” sex appeal, but I am relatively sure that a) I do not smell like unwashed corduroy and b) I do not want to smell like unwashed corduroy. I also do not look like David Beckham or for that matter anyone else that could remotely pass for an athlete unless you consider accountants athletes (I’m relatively sure most people do not).

I am also relatively sure that on the rare occasion I get past the aforementioned dilemma of choosing a conversational path, I will soon find out from the woman that she is either dating or checking out one of these gentlemen. At least that’s what past experience has often told me.

Now, whatever handicaps– appearances or otherwise– that men might encounter trying to build a rapport with women at a bar, the number one rule of advice from women is almost always “confidence wins.” This simple principle dictates that even if you look like Jabba the Hut after a ten day vacation in Guantanamo Bay, you need to present the image that YOU are in fact the object of HER desire before she even knows who you are. So essentially, you have to look past the David Beckhams and emo/rock boys and scoff: “lousy incompetents, you couldn’t please that woman on your best day while I could make her swoon while reciting the Yellow Pages backwards standing on one leg.”

By all means, this is a pretty sound and seemingly empowering principle. It is pretty safe to assume one should want to feel like they’re desirable and it is certainly safe to assume the woman wants to talk to someone attractive. No one wants the company of self-pitying whiner (or a whiny internet columnist for that matter...). Now, mind you, engaging in a stimulating conversation is a good way for me to feel confident about myself but it seems that this option is out. Since I can’t attain it that way, I reconsider the environment.

All that I need is to pump myself into feeling attractive.....a psychological re-balancing, if you will. Since loud rock music has rarely ever left me feeling lacking for energy and exuberance, at a show, I have a natural outlet. If I’m at what I call a “bar bar”......well, I’ll just wait through ten songs I hate for the one I like and I’m sure that will work. Dammit, I’m gonna be so psyched and into myself by the time the last band’s set is done (or a 7-8 year old song like Biggie’s “Hypnotize” works its way into the rotation), I’m going to be able to sweep any woman off her feet in five– nay, three– minutes with my unabashed self-assuredness. And I remain convinced that I will be able to do so at the next show I go to when I hail the first cab I see.

All I need is the sign language cards. Women love it when you can’t talk, right?

BMN

The Missing Etiquette In Public Transit

2005-01-20T01:17:00.000-04:00

When I was a child, I used to joyously marvel at the long staircase at my grandparent’s house whenever we visited for the summer. The fact that it was six times longer than the staircase in my family’s household served no end of amusement. I would tumble down it with absolutely no concern for my body or anyone else’s safety. There’s a good reason for this. It is because I was a kid and therefore hyper and very easily amused.

When I was 10, encountering an escalator was extremely fascinating. I could probably have derived hours of entertainment from putting inanimate objects on coasters and watching them sail up to the second level of the MicMac Mall. I would run up the down escalator as if I was the first person in the universe to ever conceive of the idea. This is because I was a smalltown kid and therefore an easily excitable jackass.

Now I’m going on 28 and I like to think that this has rewarded me with a bit of maturity. Stairs and escalators are means of getting me from point A to point B. The 190 foot escalator at Peachtree Center Station in Atlanta probably fascinated me for about 30 seconds but I’m a little less awed after having “scaled” it over a hundred times. The reward of my newfound maturity is an attention to unwritten protocol that allows “traffic” to move faster. Yet apparently someone forgot to inform people well in their 20s, 30s and beyond when I’m a hurry to make a 3:00 class and I’m stuck behind two dimwits who have to decided to stand perfectly still on the left side of the escalator at the transit station.

Now, maybe I was drugged up when I went to driving school, but my impression was that the left lane of the road was the “fast” lane. Ergo, if you wanted to go FASTER than Granny Fanny in front of you, you could access the left lane and proceed forward at a speed proclaimed unsafe for rollercoasters without crashing into her bumper. It’s just the common courtesy of the highway. I believe the same thing should apply to escalators.

Yes, I’m perfectly aware that the escalator was designed to reduce walking. Yes, I’m aware some people need to stand still on the escalator because they are carrying heavy objects. That’s what the right side of the escalator is for. But when I’m in a hurry to get to class and my only option is scale the rising metallic passage, aren’t I entitled to a “fast lane?” Especially when the individuals tying up the left side are neither crippled, elderly, infants or carrying anything remotely cumbersome. They stand there talking on their cellphone about the latest reality TV show involving D-list celebrities more obscure than Richard Moll. It’s all I can do to avoid clipping them in the knees but I just know that once I do that, it will spiral into a series of events involving spilled drinks, broken bones and a woman named Selma sitting on my throat.

The problem delaying me to my destination is that no one wrote a rulebook for the proper etiquette of public transit. It is unwritten rule #1 that the escalator has two sides: the fast side and the lazy one. If you want to sit and twiddle your thumbs, stay to your right. If you want run like a strung out Wall Street executive on crack as I often find the need to do, you have the left side. Yet here I once stood, two to three times a week, standing behind someone who could just as easily be an Olympic sprinter while the right side is clogged with people who understand the unwritten rules. Leaving me with nothing to do but stand and fidget.

Nowadays, I’ve observed the part of the train that stops closest to the escalator and I bolt out of there like a diarrhea ridden man that just finished four pinto bean tacos. I’m not getting held up anymore. Unless of course, I get bumped from the spot in front of the subway door. Which is just as likely to happen due to the ignorance of certain individuals who are unaware of unwritten rule #2 of public transit: if you want someone to move, either say “excuse me” or deal. Instead, a stocky 40 something woman who missed her calling to be an NFL linebacker decides to simply walk on the train and stop three steps in– oblivious and ignorant to whomever may have been standing there before.

If I weren’t dumbfounded by the lack of manners, I’d concoct some scheme to oversell this indignity. I’d go flying in the air and land on my neck. I’d cry foul and threaten a lawsuit against the woman, the subway system and every man, woman and child that witnessed the event and didn’t jump to my defense. The train driver would be distracted by the ensuing racket and miss three straight stops and the news story covering the event would hopefully bear the headline: “Ignorant Woman Ignores Personal Space, Public Commuters Suffer.” That would make people understand the implications of their actions.

Of course, maybe I would have happily accepted sitting down (and missing out on the headstart that minimizes my escalator drudgery) if I could have found a seat. Or more accurately, found TWO unoccupied seats since it is apparently it’s against the sensibility of 90% of the population to take the inside seat lest *gasp* another human being that they didn’t know decided to sit next to them. I stand and look at 24 seats occupied by 16 people. I ask one of the eight people who have decided to give their tiny laptop priority seating over me if they could allow me to take its seat. I figure that they would be sensible enough to understand unwritten rule #3: seats on trains were designed for human beings to sit on. They look at me as if I’ve insulted their parents, their grandparents and the Dalai Lama.

I might decide that I don’t care how delicate their electronic device is and try to leapfrog over the offender’s head to the seat that was so designed for people like me. This of course would likely end with me flat on my back, more lawsuits and 14 passengers laughing their ass off at my expense.

Of course, I do not do this. It might be because I am sympathetic to this individual’s decision to avoid human contact. Especially when unwritten rule #4, avoid flogging items insincerely, is being so flagrantly broken on a continuous basis. Yesterday, I walked onto the bus (after zipping past everyone on the escalators and stairs in record time) and saw a gentleman follow me and proceed to hand a young lady what appeared to be a religious pamphlet. “Something for you to read and think about,” he preached as he then passed along these sheets to anyone else who didn’t find looking at their shoelaces more engaging (about three people). “What courage and conviction,” I marvelled to myself, “this gentleman is willing to subject himself to public mockery for the sake of his religious beliefs.”

The gentleman then proceeded to invade all but one inch of the young lady’s personal space and flashed her smile that would offend even an eighty year old nymphomaniac with cataracts. He attempted to talk the woman into having a conversation with him, going on a date with him or just about any activity that would involve him maintaining a violation of said personal space. Apparently, buried somewhere in the Bible is the Commandment “Thou shalt use mine words to get thy mack on.” It must have not fit on the first set of stone tablets and got lost somewhere in the back pages of Revelations.

To add to this moxy, the spurned gentleman decided that the very first stop would be his exit. You know that stop. The one that’s roughly twenty feet from the station. The one that only exists for people getting ON the bus, not people getting OFF. The one that is closer to the original starting point than my stop is from my apartment.....by about 40%. Thanks to this noble gesture, the green light that would have motored the lot of us along faster turns to a red light and the religious pamphlets are given a little more time to sink in.

Yeah, in case you didn’t figure it out already: unwritten rule #5, the first stop is for people getting on only, the last stop is for people getting......well, you know what I mean.

I suppose that the general discomfort that these rule violations cause me pales in comparison to 99 other things that happen to all of us in the run of a day. It also probably only deprives me of five extra minutes all told. Five minutes I can use to imagine the joys of being a six year old tumbling down the stairs, close to 22 years removed from being an anal retentive man in the city. One day I’ll get so lost in that fantasy, you’ll find me in the heart of Atlanta snowballing 190 feet to my certain death and taking anyone in my way with me. If any of those victims happens to be a Bible thumping sweet talker too lazy to walk a 50 meter dash, I hope one of you females spared the indignity of his rambling will write me a pleasant epitaph.

BMN

Holidays and Resolutions: A Symbiotic Relationship

2005-01-04T01:46:00.000-04:00

Certain times of the year give themselves away with their distinctive markings at the beginning of a new calendar year has several. Bargain hunters are out in full force; buying $10 shirts and next year’s Christmas cards. University students are weeping like babies because their 2-3 week free room and board rental is expiring and they are returning to the “welcoming” respite of a jail cot bed and mildewed roofs. People crumble back to their jobs; some having to rationalize to their boss why they tried to sleep with the secretary during the yearly office party. State of Tech is playing Nowhere University in the Sponsor Bowl to answer the undying question of which the 17^th best team in American college football is.

And of course, there is the matter of New Year’s resolutions. If you were a wise person like I pretend to be, you would have long ago made a solid and fast resolution to disavow yourself from New Year’s resolutions for life. It’s a far easier promise to live up to and completely absolves you from ever making one again lest you reveal yourself to be a lily-livered coward. Some are not content with this option. Destined to make themselves miserable, they begin each year with oaths to themselves they can’t possibly keep and by mid-February, they’re on a couch talking to their therapist about their failure to get their life together.

Why does the replacement of the calendar inspire so many to make resolutions in the first place? Realistically speaking, there is nothing apocalyptic about the arrival of a new year. The turn of the new millennium demonstrated to us that just because we roll three numbers on our time keeping device, this does not ensure that God will pay us a visit or that the great plains will be flooded to oceanic levels.

The real reason, I conclude, that people feel compelled to make resolutions at New Year’s as less to do with the timing of a new year and more to do with that day’s placement right after the holiday season. Honestly, if New Year’s Day was switched to October 18, I cannot imagine that people would be resolving to do much of anything other than sit on their lazy arses and watch a multitude of brain-dead prime time programming.

But post-holidays, all of our bad habits are on full view and display. This is emblematic in the actual promises that people attempt to make. For example, you rarely (if ever) hear anyone make the resolution “I’m going to travel more this year!” on January 1^st. Some may feel the need to do this, but they’ll make such a promise and a random, indeterminate date. There’s nothing inherent about the holidays that brings the lack of travel to the forefront of their mind. But other promises that are VERY often heard tend to be more revealing of the season. Such as,

“I’m losing weight this year!”— Of course you feel the need to lose weight: your stocking was stuffed with candy, Christmas dinner was ladled with enough gravy to choke a horse and you attended five functions in five days where you could barely shake anyone’s hand because you were otherwise grabbing for every potato chip you could find. Not to mention people who sleep at the ungodly hours that this society has deemed “normal” (i.e. 11p-7a or something like that) are actually crashing at 4 am and discovering crappy infomercials for exercise products that otherwise eluded them the rest of the year.

So it’s only fitting for these people to think that a) they’re terribly out of shape and b) they have a perfectly affordable range of solutions at their disposal. The holiday diet and exercise regime (which consists mostly of drinking wine and then falling over for some) is enough to put 20 pounds of fat on Mr. Olympia. Chances are you’re probably in fine shape and you really don’t need to do anything other than to not repeat the gorgefest you just spend two weeks on i.e. avoid cruise ships and your weight will return to whatever it was or should be. Of course, this promise is not nearly as amusing as…

“This year, I’m quitting/cutting down on drinking!”— First of all, if you’re a drinker and your teenage years taught you anything, you’ll know this promise will never stick anyway, anyhow. Yes, it seems like you ought to cut down on your alcoholic consumption. Especially if you judge yourself on your new year’s behaviour, when you tried to hump the lampshade and vomited on the neighbour’s dog. The thing is, you probably wouldn’t have done that on April 4^th. And if you did, you would have been surrounded by more than enough sober people to have you arrested or at least thrown into the drunk tank for the night.

People certainly consume their fair share of spirits at any time of the year, but New Year’s is a lot like the Stanley Cup of drinking: People risk injuries that they’d never risk in the regular season for a chance at glory. So during the summer days of liquor-festing, being merely plastered is probably enough. During New Year’s Day, you’re competing with an entire nation of boozehounds trying to have the ultimate “it all started with” story. If your liver remained painless for 364 days of the year and the receptionist didn’t have to give you eyedrops before you even made it to your spring doctor’s appointment, chances are your drinking “problem” isn’t as bad as it seems. Now mind you, if your weekend is also regularly known as the “missing days”, then maybe you really should cut down. A lot. Speaking of cutting down, all of the clutter underneath the tree on Boxing Day is usually enough to make a few people say on January 1^st,

“I’m going to be neater/more organized this year!”— Funny that I rarely hear this resolution from those who don’t observe Christmas. Maybe that’s because those of other faiths don’t stick a tree up and then litter it with as much paper, candy and glitter as a person can stand and then let it sit there for a week to shuffle, re-shuffle and settle into a huge pile of untidiness.

Christmas observes a sharp divide between Christian households. Some are neat and tidy due to the prompter-pickeruppers who believe that Boxing Day is another word for “Cleaning Day” and proceed to eliminate any evidence of a Christmas tree or gifts or any other such paraphernalia. They never had to make a resolution to be neat, they already write down their dishwashing times in their daily planner so they don’t mess up the cycle (pardon the pun). Most others, however, have floors not fit for walking lest you like stepping on the remnants of the forest in the form of glossy paper or possibly the house pet who is likely trapped under there somewhere.

This disaster area is not much worse than the mess that travellers leave behind when they go home to visit the ‘rents for the holidays. People generally can’t be bothered to keep a clean house or apartment in the days leading up to a Christmas departure because they know that space will be of no immediate use to them. So people return home from their Xmas respite to find a household in tatters and come to the logical conclusion that they’re the biggest slobs in the universe; completely ignoring their next door neighbour coming down with a hernia from carrying a litany of trash bags to the end of their driveway.

The point is: your mess is probably not a unique phenomenon. You’ll clean up that space, admire its shininess and then in a week flat, it will be messy again. Still it will be your mess, a mess you can understand (which spot on the floor do I drop the magazines again?….) and your unkempt life will proceed unhindered and healthily for a long time to come. Perhaps rather than looking to the outside, you should look inside to see what needs fixing. Of course, if you do that and reflect on the holidays, you might make the tired and trite promise,

“This year, I’m going to be a better person!”— No other New Year’s resolution could ever be so self-demeaning as this proclamation that “Right now, I’m an absolute asshole and this needs fixing!” You probably feel like an asshole because you just spent 7-20 days traipsing all over your hometown visiting people you haven’t spoken to in roughly a year and beating yourself up for not keeping in better touch with them.

Now you vow that things will be different. You’ll call more. Write more. Text message more. Except you decide that you need to do this with 30-60 different people and then you realise that you don’t have the time to do all this and then you get exhausted thinking about it and then you do nothing differently than you did last year. Let’s face it: if you actually kept in as much touch with all these people as you do during that concentrated amount of time in December, you’d eventually remember how annoying 90% of these people can be in the first place. Chances are, 90% of them will remember how annoying you can be too. Then someone will mutter something, someone else will hear it and then before you know it, everyone’s at everybody’s throats.

Christmas is trying enough when you have to put up with the more annoying relatives and the “friends” who ended up being “friends” because they’re really just “friends of friends” for a couple of hours at a clip. Imagine if you tried to put up with them for the whole year or they with you? Sure, charitable sentiments are worthy of harbouring but don’t kid yourself that you’ll be able to throw as much money into charity as you did in the Salvation Army box on Christmas week on a regular basis. Your accountant will go into spastics and 90% of the money you throw out will probably get lost in a sea of bureaucratic red tape. If you wonder if you need to be a better person this year, ask yourself: do people spit on me in public places? Have I been hung up on more than ten times this year? Have I racked up more restraining orders than party invitations? If the answer to all of these questions is “no”, then chances are you are a decent human being and there’s no need to beat yourself up about it.

All of this holiday rigamaroo is enough to make me even more cynical than usual about human nature. So cynical in fact that I feel like I should spare people of my caustics and be a more optimistic person than I was in 2004. Then I remember that more-than-a-decade-old promise that I made to never make such resolutions. So if nothing else, I owe it to myself to continue being a cranky bastard. Anything else would be going back on my word. Auld lang syne and I’ll see all of the old and unimproved lot of you at the New Year’s party in 2006 where we’ll have egg nog and watch Jake make out with the CD rack.

BMN

I’ll Have a Regular Tall With My Dry Cleaning, Please

2004-12-18T16:31:00.000-04:00

When you were growing up and your parents or caretakers were trying to mould some impetus on your part to get your life in gear, you probably at some point heard them cite some industry that produced something indispensable. “People are always going to need teachers” or “Plumbing might not be fancy, but it’s reliable.” These people were probably somewhat presumptuous to assume that robots would not one day come along to usurp Handyman Bob, the man with a wrench for every pipe and a belt too tight for every pair of pants he brought to work. They were also probably overvaluing the actual worth of an education in a society that encourages us to sooner eat millipedes covered in caviar grindings for the sake of entertainment than to pursue a degree.

If our overlor…….er, caretakers had the right idea they would have pointed us in another direction. They would have pointed us to the corner with round tables, small right-angled chairs and a batch of crumpled up sugar packets and half empty plastic receptacles of dairy and soy products. They would have pointed us to the sweet, sweet nectar of heated caffeinated beverages.

Coffee has a hold on the Western world the likes of which hasn’t been seen since Michael Jackson was a black man with certified non-pedophilic tendencies dancing in an obscenely tacky red jacket that I wanted for Christmas. What’s particularly interesting about this mesmerizing is that the hypnotic effect is universal. There are different “auras” that coffee brings up but rest assured that bean harvesters everywhere could profit from someone in your family or network of friends.

The most common conception of coffee drinkers is the one cherished by a powerful Seattle company whose name I need not mention. You know the type: the witty urbane professionals or overly ambitious college student whose deep concern about international politics is in direct conflict with their endless concern with being seen in the right hat. If the professional, they wear an understated suit that they’ll only happily tell you is a tool of their corporate oppressor while they pay for their $4.50 steamed latté. If the student, they’ll be wearing corduroys designed to look as though they were stitched in 1972. “No one listens to good music these days,” they cry while they ignore the critically acclaimed local guitar player that has been brought in to play an afternoon set.

Such people would never be caught dead ordering “a coffee.” Even if that is what they want, they’ll instead quietly say in a granola-conditioned voice, “I’ll have the house blend, please.” What this means exactly I will never know. I know no one that sits in their house, buying eight different brands of regular coffee, then carefully counting the number of beans s/he will draw from each brand and then putting it in a coffee grinder they carefully replace once a month in order to create a “house blend.” Or is “house blend” supposed to be the same as “house mix” in music? (Hmmmm, Mixmistress Sultana presents: “EuroCoffee V 9.1 (w/ guest appearance by Q-Tip).”)

This complicated procedure is in stark contrast to the lowbrow aura of coffee as the symbol of the road. Crowds of weary truckers convening in a diner so run down that the trailer park sheriff refuses to eat there because the local Denny’s is an improvement. Grumbly Joe stumbles into the joint having just driven 18 hours across the coast and he orders the 24-hour super deluxe breakfast designed to clog each artery in a systematic fashion. The waitress pours him a coffee without him even asking, by the end of his meal, he will have had seven refills and he won’t even be jittering slightly. Just try asking for a “raspberry mocha” in a place like this. You might hear a lot of wincing and get typical “we don’t take kindly to folk like you” stares from the patrons. You might also get day-old breakfast blend with actual raspberries floating in it. If only the owner would spring for them.

Finally, there is also the image of coffee actually having an effect on your body. This image is too far removed from the trucker who needs 20 cups before noon or the upscale professional who makes espressos part of their power workout. But there are still the few, the proud who only drink coffee enough so that it will have its intended effects during peak work periods. Why, even as I write this, a group of groggy eyed university students are poring over a paper ten pages too short (but five pages too long for anyone that bothers to read it) with a tall mug bearing the logo of their school filled to the brink with extra strong java that you could slop on a baseball bat for gripping. “Drink coffee, succeed, be smart!” thinks the 18 year old frosher, naive to the addiction they are about to wroth upon themselves.

Such is the universal appeal of coffee that you can’t go wrong by hawking it, no matter what profession you actually find yourself in. Why, imagine my surprise when I happened upon a laundromat that doubled as a “café.” “Sit, relax,” the company encourages you, “and enjoy richly harvested Columbian beans residue while your clothes tumble in an endless spin cycle. Why, you’ll feel like your ripped jeans and Foghat T-shirt will have gained $50 in status just for having been washed here.”

Even more amusing to me is when gas stations decide to give the area with coffee machines and flavoured cappuccinos an actual title. This, I presume, is to connotate that you walk into a different world once you enter that corner. “Come to JavaStop, where the world’s finest coffee is served……..by you………in the corner of a gas station…….where Susan hasn’t mopped the floor for the past seven hours and the flies are starting to convene around the spilled Glosettes.” Actual money was spent on the signs and on licensing the “brand name”, I think to myself, as I mischievously mix the French Vanilla with the English Toffee, the attendant none the wiser.

There must be something to the “come for anything else but stay for some liquid love” approach especially when I find myself walking into bookstores and completely bypassing everything in it other than the coffee shop. Oh, I’m sure that one day I’ll slap myself in the face and force myself to get cultured by purchasing an anthology on Eastern philosophies but not today. I’ll just go right up the stairs, turn to my right, then another right and straight to the coffee shop where I’ll ask for the half decaf-mochasomething with whipped cream but no cherry please. I’ll proceed to head right back out the door with nothing else but the flavour of my purchase and the solace that I’m helping to fund the literacy of 0.5% of the nation.

You may come across a drooling twelve year old with no direction in their life; currently planning on casting their lot with the fan club management of Lindsay Lohan or becoming a consolidator of blog hosting companies worldwide. Tell that young lad or lass to abandon these fads and get to designing a good logo for a coffee shop. Or better yet, tell them that people might not always need plumbing. But they might need a plumber who carries a wide variety of dark blend beverages in 16 different flavours in the back of their van. With any luck, their “Plumb N’ Gulp” business will gross enough money to have them sipping their spicy chai on a fancy retirement resort before they turn 40.

BMN

Ol' Red Gets Lucky

2004-10-28T22:59:00.000-03:00

11:40 p.m. EST, October 27, 2004, I felt a profound sense of disappointment. The Boston Red Sox, a hard-luck team whose fans had spent my 18 years as a baseball fan trying to convince me they were cursed, won the World Series championship. The disappointment is rooted partly in the fact that I’m a Toronto Blue Jays fan and thus any other AL East team (but ESPECIALLY Boston or New York) winning the championship is repugnant to me. However it was more due to the fact that their fans had blinded me into thinking that a World Series for the Red Sox would auger something apocalyptic. The moment that Keith Foulke pitched the ball to Doug Mientkiewicz, I was expecting something along the lines of an earthquake or some volcanic eruption or possibly Jesus Christ himself coming down to Earth just to say "hi."

Certainly the Boston city streets jammed with the mass annoyingly identified as "Red Sox Nation" (I’m waiting for this nation to demand a seat at the next United Nations conference). I was expecting something more riotous. I was waiting for everyone from Vermont to Maine to take pilgrimages to Boston in which the entire city would collapse beneath the masses that inherited it. Or I was expecting, as a friend once suggested, the mass of Red Sox fans to march to the Bronx and collectively moon the Yankee brethren.

None of these things happened but I had gotten to thinking about the biggest benefit of the entire scenario: being spared of the portentous whining of Red Sox faithful. How could they really react to such fortune?: they’re so used to complaining. Then I realized what a cynical bastard I’ve become and the truth hit me straight on the nose.....I am, or rather WAS, a single representation of how the Red Sox faithful as a whole are.

You see, the analogy of a baseball team to a person is not that hard. All you need to do is think of the archetypes from your old high school or from within your local community. You’ll probably find that there’s someone who resembles one or more of the following:

Boston Red Sox (2004 MLB Champs, Last Previous MLB Title: 1918)–
The prototype of "Ol’ Red" was that person who hangs out with the popular crowd (in baseball, the contenders) but never seems to get laid because of it. This causes him/her great anguish and stress and s/he will NEVER shut up about it: badgering anyone who will listen (um, I did mention I became a human version of the Red Sox, right? Sorry, everyone.). Enjoyed a previously sadomasochistic, almost sexual, friendship with his/her best buddy (in baseball, leading division mate) "Yank" in which s/he got perversive pleasure/pain out of being dominated both mentally and physically. Took any comparison to other love-losers like "Cubbie" or "Ol’ Whitey" as a grave insult and stated that their pain didn’t compare because they "haven’t been as close" and therefore "have never known what it’s like to have a chance to have a boy/girlfriend anyway."

Tired of "Yank’s" abuse, Ol’ Red rebuilt his/her confidence by striking back one day and said "*I’m* taking the local beauty queen/fitness hunk to the next dance (in baseball, The World Series) and I don’t care if s/he already had an outfit picked out for the occasion to go with YOU (in baseball, having a 3-0 lead). However, much like people who are so used to being down on themselves, s/he is dumbfounded on having the prized relationship (in baseball, being the World Series champions). Thus s/he is a state of celebration but leery that something will happen to mess it up (basically as every Red Sox fan waits for the sky to fall now). May seek therapy to prove to themselves that they really deserve to be happy.

New York Yankees (26 Time MLB Champs, Last MLB Title: 2000)–
"Yank" is the guy or girl you knew in high school who was identified as being the most popular person in the school and had the high-class whores and trappings (in baseball, 26 World Titles) around him/her to prove it. This wealth of friends and commodities was despite the fact that you knew infinitely more people that hated "Yank" than liked him/her. "Yank’s" success in life is due in no small part to their wealth which has been carried on over generations and has allowed them to buy whatever friends and items that they’ve ever wanted. Despite the fact that everyone badmouths "Yank", everyone is dying to be seen with him/her (i.e. Yankees games sell more tickets) because it instantly means you’re important. "Yank" is known to complain about situations that most other people would die to be in (i.e. four straight playoff appearances even without a World Series title) because s/he is very much used to having his or her way. Like many spoiled rich brats of this ilk, "Yank" has a demanding and domineering father, George, who demands only the best from his precious child.

Chicago Cubs (Last MLB Title: 1908)–
Much like "Ol’ Red" used to experience, "Cubbie" has no luck in romance. Imagine the prototypical "nice guy" or "nice girl" that you presently know that has no real rewards to show for their virtue and this is "Cubbie." This despite the fact that everyone loves him/her and thinks s/he is an attractive and wonderful human being. Often told by friends that "you’re a wonderful person and one day everything will work out (i.e. Dusty Baker and Sammy Sosa have to lead you a title somehow). A friendly and lovable character but shy at the same time and thus doesn’t go out as much (in baseball, having the least amount of night games) which might contribute to being so luckless. Wo/men would love to go out with such a "nice guy/girl" (in baseball, MLB would love the Cubs in the playoffs more often because it would mean better ratings) but usually succumb and go out with the same dumbasses they always do (somehow MLB has to deal with the Yankees and Braves instead every year).

Chicago White Sox (Last MLB Title: 1917)–
As frustrated with his/her lot in life as "Ol’ Red" was and "Cubbie" is, "Ol’ Whitey" is even further frustrated because s/he doesn’t have enough friends to bitch to about his/her problems even if s/he wanted to (read: the Cubs and Red Sox curses have gotten all the press whereas the White Sox drought has been all but ignored). Imagine the most unpopular student in your high school that no one actually PICKED ON but just sort of nodded to when they passed by them in the hall, and this is "Ol’ Whitey’s" fate. Once made desperate pleas for attention to get noticed more (e.g. staging a "Disco Demolition" night and suggesting orange baseballs) but gave up when it did little to increase their social activity (e.g. very few playoff appearances). Sits in the back of the classroom or coffee shop while "Ol’ Red" complains, "Yank" brags and "Cubbie" accepts condolences and wonders why s/he isn’t receiving the same pity. S/he sits and accepts this situation for the most part, occasionally mumbling under his or her breath. You never invite "Ol’ Whitey" to the party even though you don’t actively dislike them, s/he just never springs to mind and every now and again you say "we should invite ‘Ol’ Whitey’ next time," but you’ll never go through with it.....

Montreal Expos (RIP 1969-2004, only one playoff appearance)–
"Spo" was your sick friend who died of terminal illnesses even though s/he wanted to die sooner. Lobbied for assisted suicide REPEATEDLY (in baseball, several moving attempts and the city of Montreal basically pleading with MLB to take this team off their hands) but was instead forced to die a slow undignified death by doing therapy (read: litigation) instead. "Spo" was once very handsome/pretty & smart and showed such promise (i.e. the late 70s/early 80s Expos looked destined for greatness) and people felt sorry for him/her when s/he got sick but were too grossed out to visit the hospital (i.e. actually go to some Expo game to cheer up the team). Much of "Spo’s" ill health and depression started when s/he was moved to a broken home (quite literally, from Jarry Park to Olympic Stadium).

Florida Marlins (Two MLB titles in only 12 seasons)–
Call the human version of this team "Gatsby" as in the "Great Gatsby": total nouveau-riche. The mysterious new guy in the neighbourhood, no one really knows who s/he is or where s/he came from but how did s/he get so much (in baseball, 2 World Series titles) so quickly? Like many who value wealth over friendship, a completely disloyal figure who will happily shun everyone to enjoy their success in solitude (read: the great firesale of players post-1997 MLB title).

Tampa Bay Devilrays (.398 winning percentage in seven seasons)–
Like "Gatsby", "TB" is new to town and isn’t really getting along with anybody (i.e. can’t seem to win more than four games in a row and no one cares). Small house is generally laughed at when people visit their neighbourhood (the AL East) usually to visit "Yank" or "Ol’ Red."

Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants–
The Hatfields and McCoys. Stood across the town (in baseball, the state) from each other yelling "this town (in baseball, New York) ain’t big enough for the both of us!!!" Then the authorities (read: the team owners) got tired of their arguing and kicked them out. They both just landed in the same town (in baseball, California) and are still standing across from each other yelling "this town ain’t big enough for the both of us".....

Atlanta Braves (13 straight division titles, only one MLB title)–
"Turner" has a cozy job and a successful life (in baseball, a string of playoff appearances no one has ever had before) but somehow seems to underachieve. The friend you constantly nudge to try harder to get the big promotion from their boss (read: more World Series titles) but s/he sort of lazily does nothing about it. Manages their current level of success nonetheless because of sheer talent; pushed by other friends to quit their job and go somewhere else where they might get promoted (read: risk losing current success and actually make a big talent and/or management change for the reward of possibly doing more in the playoffs). "Turner" is also much like a neighbour in your hometown with a steady money-producing industry (say, fixing cars) with a middle-class house and a gorgeous lawn whose life from the outside appears to be a crashing bore (read: either produce something in the playoffs or start sucking in the regular season, this is getting tiresome to watch).

There are other personality types one could make, I’m sure. If you’re not much of a sports fan and are, say, more inclined to watch "The O.C." or old re-runs of "Sex and the City", just apply the personality types you find on that show to the teams that your friends root so relentlessly for. It might give you a whole new reason to root, root, root for the home team......or castigate them for being so annoying. Anyhow, in the meantime, I’m off to stop complaining, re-build my confidence, tell my domineering friend that he can take his "me first" attitude and..........

BMN

Everything I Learned, I Learned On The Street.....Well, OK, Not Really

2004-10-16T04:29:00.000-03:00

Anyone who grew up in small town or city can appreciate and understand the joys of being able to go for a daily stroll without being interrupted by someone in need of change every second block (or by people who tell you they don’t need change only to tell you that want you to buy them something which is supposed to actually be less demanding of you than change somehow). This is an extremely endearing quality to someone like myself who prides himself on taking himself on foot to many locations. Walking home from the bar is likely something that will get most people arrested when they either excrete the night’s alcoholic consumption on the sidewalk or smash a beer bottle that they shouldn’t have been allowed to walk out of the joint with. But for a teeotaler like me, a 3 a.m. jaunt home is par for the course.

Enter life in an urban setting. Since my current record of *ahem* leadfootery combined with unsound budgeting precludes me from navigating the metropolis of Atlanta, Georgia with a vehicle, I am left to choose between public transportation and my feet. Those who have ever lived or visited Atlanta know that the efficiency of the MARTA bus system is often on par with the sprinting skills of Bob Dole so suffice to say, I still walk a lot. Walking in Atlanta certainly brings more encounters than a stroll in Sydney, Nova Scotia.

So bring on the beggars, be they the well-meaning, the weirdos and the generally unexplainable personae as I make the 75-90 minute jaunt from the "joys" of graduate school to the comfort of my overpriced single abode. The standard conversation is now so familiar, the script runs through my brain in my sleep sometimes...

Stranger (often with eyes staring in two different directions and very strange body odour): "Excuse me, ____________ change." (You can fill in the blank with anything from "I need a bite to eat, could you spare some" to "I flew in from New York and even though I put together the money and planning to get that far, I am now in need of 25 cents because that will help me get a cab so could you spare some"
Me: "Sorry dawg." (Yeah, I say "dawg." The stranger could be tall or short, male or female, loud or quiet, threatening or non-threatening and almost always never looks like a "dawg." But I always say "sorry dawg." It’s instinctual now).

Anyone who has ever lived in a major city shrugs their shoulders at this development because it’s part of the daily ritual. It happens so often, it doesn’t alter your life. Highly ironic, really, since the genuine misery and suffering of 90% of these people is something that ought to have a greater effect. However, the efficiency of our society being what it is, we somehow expect this to be the norm.

So instead, the greater lasting psychological impact comes from rarer encounters. Those times when these hobos and vagabonds attempt to impact your life with pearls of wisdom that no sage from my school could ever come up with. Or when someone decides to clear up some items that you may have been confused about.

For instance, you’re walking along and you see the cars slowly passing by towards the centre of the city. You notice a carload of college-age females and they see fit to roll down the window and inform you "We like penis!" They continue along their journey.

Your first inclination is to chalk such brash confessions to the alcohol although at 7:23 in the evening, that seems an odd time to be on a bender. You then figure that perhaps they’re hinting at your penis although continuing to drive away from the penis that you are clamouring for while offering no visible means for the owner of that penis to get a hold of you is not a grand profession of such desire. So you figure that these college co-eds are must be trying to clear up some misperceptions about women that drive by in cars in urban areas. Best as I can figure, they think that pedestrians like me believe:

a) that the roads are strictly for men and asexual women
b) that lesbians make better backstreet drivers
c) that women who don’t ride shotgun are more apt to find phallic objects in the backseat scattered about by previous slob passengers and that they therefore are apt to lose their desire for penis.

Well, if I thought that before–even though I and 99% of walkers in North America didn’t– then I don’t believe it now. Thank you, horny college women, for alleviating my doubts about the sexual proclivity of people I don’t know and will never see again.

There must be something about being in public areas that causes people to profess great, um, expositions about genitalia. Why, a few months ago, I walked towards the subway that cuts my 75-90 minute walk down to a 30-40 minute one when I came upon three gentlemen having a conversation. No doubt they were discussing ontology and its many variants in the postmodern world. During this exchange of ideas, one of the well-read gentleman loudly proclaimed "I ain’t never seen a cunt that hairy in my life!"

Now if that seems an abrupt and obnoxious placement of profanity in this column, it is only to communicate how loudly this thought was spoken before the masses of people at Five Points Station. So if you’re putting together a conference of intellectuals professing deep thoughts on females’ privates grooming, come down to the South and stand at the hub of Five Points and I’m sure you find a number of potential keynote speakers. Especially seek out this fellow since apparently he is an expert on the, um, furriest discoveries in that area.

Crude and with volume these thoughts may be, they are at least easily understood like legible writing. For instance, leaving a concert, I was accosted by a gentleman whose raggedy attire and lack of dental hygiene led me to believe that he would soon join the many, the not-so-proud and ask for some coinage (alas, in this case, I actually didn’t have any and thus could refuse such a request with no heavy conscience). Instead, he attempted to engage me in a dialogue explaining his sorry state. This is the best written text I can offer:

"Hey! Ay, ma’. Why you godu be run’ weight thinkin’ sum aws tryn da hurt somebody? Lidden ma’, I jus seyn. I jus seyn. Look, I know dat people disresp’in ma ca I homele. But ah can’ help it, I’m homely."

I stopped him at that point and told him my train would soon be leaving but it was a fascinating glimpse into his psyche. Oh sure, the obvious route is to assume that by "homeLY", he meant "homeLESS" but please, let’s give the man more credit than that. Now: what the rest of his gibberish meant is beyond me but I think he was trying to perhaps give a effect-and-cause-and-effect explanation for why people don’t like him.

You see, in the 1980s, Reaganomics devastated the economy and the man lost his job as a nutmeg salesperson. Having gone to school solely to fill that job (you see, things were far more specialized back then, kids, they didn’t bounce around from job to job and they walked to school in the snow uphill...) he lost his home and all means to support his personal hygiene. Shortly thereafter his social skills were called into question since no one wanted to stand next to him. Before you know it, he was getting into bar fights for nickels and quarters. Because his fighting skills were questionable at best because nutmeg salespeople are by nature mild-mannered, he generally got his ass kicked. Thus once his face was pummelled beyond recognition, he was homely. Therefore he can’t get a job even though he’s been reading the trades the last four years and could give you great stock advice. All because he’s homely.

Finally, every so often (more often then you’d think), someone comes along during your walk with a special manic look in their eye. You wonder if they *really* need the change more than the last person or if they’ve seen some horrible accident. They begin to speak and with bated breath you await the source of their urgency.....

"Agaaaaaaaggggghhhhhhhhuuuuuuuuuuuu!! Aaaaggggggguuuuuuuuwwwwwwww!!! Uuuuuuueeee!!!!"

I’m flabbergasted. Even lowering your head and walking away as though you heard nothing doesn’t do that justice. There are some thoughts that are so deep, so ponderous, so "next level" that no other human can understand them. I guess that series of stretched out monosyllabic expressions is amongst them.

Far be it from me to think that all of this craziness and potential starvation for people on the streets is maybe an indication that the world’s a mess that needs to be fixed. (Mind you, I’m told by longtime residents that it’s as simple as bringing the Olympics here. All of sudden then it appears as though EVERYONE as a job and no one is starving and there are no raving lunatics). I guess there’s only so far school can take me. I think maybe I’ll quit school and visit the Appalachians. In the tranquillity of that setting, I can more thoroughly meditate on all of the wisdom I picked up on the streets and return a wiser man.

BMN

Next On Your Sports Station: “ASSHOLE”at 9pm, “AXIS AND ALLIES” at 11

2004-10-02T05:10:00.000-03:00

The issue of sport being necessarily defined as an athletic pursuit has gone on for decades. Former baseball player/resident lardass John Kruk accentuated this debate in the early 90s when a lady remarked that he wasn’t much of an athlete and he quickly replied, “Ma’am, I’m not an athlete, I’m a ballplayer.” Growing up in Canada, I was (and remain) endlessly fascinated with the fact that curling is considered a sport. I do love it so and I see where it is a physical activity so I’m not disputing that it is, but the fascination is with the curlers themselves who look about as athletic as my junior high math teachers.

In case you’re wondering, my junior high math teachers did not double as gym teachers.

Indeed many sports continue to come under fire for how much of the results really have to do with the “sporting” element at all, the most specific example being NASCAR and Indy Car racing. Drivers will tell you until they are red in the face that they train fastidiously to do what they do and they are probably right but still a litany of critics will argue that the machines play a bigger role in the winner than the drivers. I can’t fault these critics for that line of thinking. I prefer to give all the “credit” for my speeding tickets to my vehicle as well; figuring that the inanimate object can better afford the fine than I can.

Other sports, more specifically Olympic sports, come under fire not because the athleticism does not determine the result but rather that the skill is so insanely minute as to be unworthy of having a competition over in the first place. Luge springs to mind. The problem with luge is that none of the viewers see the years of training that go into having the type of body that will ensure you can go down an icy incline that bloody fast. All they see is a bunch of seemingly sexually ambiguous fellows striding down a rollercoaster-esque ride, the deciding factors being who can point their toes better and who excels at remaining flat.

Although I don’t care to watch auto car racing or luge, I’ve always held a high amount of esteem for the ventures as sports. Living now in the southern U.S., I accept wholeheartedly that NASCAR is going to occupy vast amounts of the sports coverage. I don’t necessarily LIKE it but I accept it. But there are other things that serve to irritate me over time. Such as when I turn on ESPN every night and encounter the same thing: a bunch of terribly dressed fat white guys (with a black guy or woman here or there) sitting around a table looking at each other cross-eyed while picking up and putting down cards.

Speaking as a Canadian living in America, I’ve always felt that there has been a great deal of respect and love that we nations have for each other. More friendly neighbours across the world spectrum you will not find. Sure, Americans like to prod us with their “they’re not a real country” jokes and we in turn like to occasionally nudge back with references to Americans’’ cross-cultural ignorance. But these gestures are almost always in good fun.

I draw the line at “good fun” though when I see that more Americans would rather watch poker on ESPN than hockey. That’s insane. It’s ludicrous. It’s unwarranted.

I’m trying to conceptualize how poker belongs on any channel other than its own or a game show network. Sure, ESPN has been known to play loosely with the term “sport”, inexplicably giving us spelling bees between fragile young minds on national cable television (how that became a test of sporting prowess, I’ll never guess. Who do you know decides to “play” spelling bee as an activity? Jeez, even a loser like me would rather resort to endless rounds of tic-tac-toe.). Yet these events are usually relegated to when sporting fans are at their dead-end jobs or sitting on the sofa with chip crumbs on their worn out jerseys looking for a dead-end job in a classified ad they pulled out of the dumpster near their apartment. Poker, on the other hand, is regularly broadcast in PRIME TIME on America’s NUMBER ONE sporting network.

Poker purists will argue that the strategy, the physical enactment of that strategy (i.e. the “poker face”) and the endurance over a number of hands give their “sport” its legitimacy. Fair enough, I certainly won’t argue that poker is challenging (especially since I suck so badly at it) but under these conditions, shouldn’t we expect to see the following events on prime time ESPN anytime soon?:

1) World RISK Championships – I call Australia! Physical skills needed involved placing pieces on the board without knocking anything else over and being able to roll dice endlessly without calling for an alternate. Players would be required to not use performance enhancing drugs; specifically caffeine, speed, cocaine or anything else that would give them an edge in staying awake through the game against their dozy opponents.

2) The National Gathering of Connect Four Players – Precision skills needed to drop pieces through a narrow slot (much like a basketball through a hoop, see?) and participants need to have the training of a baseball catcher because they are kneeling down throughout the entire game.

3) Dungeons and Dragons Regionals – Testing the ability to maintain physical endurance to listen to endless instructions about a fantasyland that will never exist despite lack of training to do so (anyone that actually exercises for more than 10 minutes a day is considered “enhanced” and ineligible). Ratings would likely suffer, however, in lieu of being unable to find a colour commentator that would have the foggiest idea of what the hell was going on.

4) The Trivial Pursuit Association – Players’ training regimen involve a carefully planned out diet devised to prevent their blood pressure from reaching dangerous peaks when they spend ten minutes agonizing over the name of a capital of a forgotten state on the other side of the world that will never have bearing on their life again. Participants also advised to engage in constant “lifting”: picking cards up and placing them back in a cycle of repetitions.

5) The new WWF: (Where’s Waldo? Federation) – Eyeballs are given a strict daily regimen of darting movements to stay strong and fingers are toughened in rigorous paper-cut training to allow for the fastest possible “location” times and turning of the page to the next scene.

I guess the fact that none of these “sports” are usually ever played for money has something to do with why they will never hit the big time. I strongly advise all athletes who engage in these physically rigorous endeavours to begin placing major stakes on their trades so that they will receive the respect their agility deserves. In the meantime, I am going to petition all sports networks to strongly consider organizing a “Go Fish!” tournament to lead into the “World Series of Poker.” I figure that with a few years of solid ratings, it should join poker and “Family Feud” as Olympic sports just in time for 2012.

BMN

aLTeRNatInG beTWeen anNOYinG anD ReAlY fuKiNG aNNoyIng

2004-09-22T01:30:00.000-03:00

I always dreaded the day that I would start “showing my age.” I knew it would happen before I got old, per se. I figured that at some point, there would be something that would get my nerves, my first reaction would be “those kids today!” and I’d be ready to cart myself to the nursing home before I’d even turned 30.

The challenge in this case is: how on earth could anyone be any more annoying than the whining, depressing and self-righteous-while-slacking than my generation? We co-opted every form of laziness (myself included) and seemed destined to never better ourselves in any, way, shape or form. I looked around at my graduating class in 1995 and said to myself, “Yep, we’re teenagers. And by God, do we ever show it.”

Now, I’m 27, that age where you’re old enough to look down at the next generation but young enough to associate with many of them. You’d figure that teaching undergraduate students would be the experience that would make me lose faith in humanity until I then remember being surrounded by people who sat struggling to fill in the first blank when we got our Antro/Soc midterm. I suppose the fact that “Name:” wasn’t phrased in the form of a question had thrown them off.

Nah, nothing that the next generation of youngsters could do to make me think that they weren’t, at the very least, on par with Generation X. Alas, I’ve underestimated how vapid people can become. The evidence need go no further than someone trying to add me to an online friend list like so:

“hEY yOU’Re PreTy cuTe, lIke thAt pIc wIth yOuR Cat, hE’s A cUTie :p aWww :) aNyHoW, aDd me Up lUV to cHaT!!! :) :)”

OK; far from me to be on a high horse here. I’m as much partial to using lame-ass internet abbreviations “LOL” when I’m neither laughing out loud or blending the names of Oasis brothers. I slip up when spelling things. I often spell “love” “luv” like a stupid valentine’s candy designer. I’m as flawed as anyone on these parts. But when it takes me just as long to read one sentence with no words longer than six letters while than it does to read a paragraph from the works of Karl Marx, I think there’s a problem.

Let us review some of the problems with alternating caps. First of all, it makes typing harder than it’s supposed to be. Just typing up that sentence as an example forced me to consider cancelling my classes tomorrow. Second, it makes READING harder than it’s supposed to be; it’s the difference between walking a straight line and having to walk jagged abrupt inclines. And finally, every person that communicates to me strikes me not as a friend or as a real person but as someone with a business proposition that I would normally receive in about 20-30 junk e-mail a day. You know the ones....

“mAkE iT biGGEr!! sHe wiLL bE caLLing OuT fOr Moree!”
“ViEWmYWeBcAm....IaMWeTanDHorNy!!XoXoxxoXoOOX”
“tHe HoNorAblE KinG AdIn nEEdS aN aMeRiCAn baNk aCCOunT fOR.....”

Either that or twelve year old schoolgirls. Oh ya, there’s nothing that as a responsible graduate student in his late-20s that I'd rather do than correspond with pre-pubescents and people trying to hawk pills, webcams and phony investment schemes. I’ll put on that on the queue with the sockhop and taping this week’s episodes of TRL.

My biggest fear, however, is that as this generation gets older that I will encounter this in other venues of my life. I’ll be proctoring an exam and 17 students will request extra time so they can re-write the questions in alternating caps so they can better understand them. I’ll go to the sporting event and read “hOmE - 2 ViSItOrs - 3" and the uniforms will read “jOhNsON”, “mARtiN” and “hE hATe mE.” I will leave the game and on the way home, I’ll stop off at the Needs to pick up some bEEf jErKy and cOcA-cOLa.

I just pray that we don’t start talking this way: alternating volume at inexplicable points. Then I’ll be forced to make the “up”, “the” and “already” parts quiet when I tell every person in the universe that I’m in no mood for discourse and anymore and would they “PLEASE SHUT the FUCK up already?”
It all has to be loud for me to get my emotions out but what’s the point if these kids don’t understand it?

Yup, I’m old before my time, just like I predicted. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll call a cab to take me to “pINeWooD VaLLeY HoMeS.”

BMN

What’s in A Slogan?: Stupidity

2004-09-04T19:20:00.000-03:00

There was a little-viewed early-90s film featuring Dudley Moore entitled "Crazy People." In it, Moore’s advertising agent character experiences a sudden epiphany and decides that honesty is the best policy and extols both the virtues AND vices of the products he hawks. This being the movie world, these imperfect slogans work and the character is hailed an accidental genius.

Hearing about this movie as a kid, I couldn’t have imagined the approach working in real life. I’d imagine that my version of brutal honesty wouldn’t work if I was a music marketer. I can imagine some of the slogans I would spew forth: "John Mayer– Because You’re 10 Years Late For the First Coming of Dave Matthews." "Nickelback– Because You Can Commit Suicide Metaphorically." "Nelly– Delayed Puberty and Skip-Rope Chants Make For New Rap." Sometimes it’s best to avoid jobs that involve tact (at least in my case).

Even still, occasionally you get the impression that Dudley Moore’s asylum character has found his way into the employ of some ad agencies judging by the questionable mottos that have somehow passed the filters. I understand that you have to say a lot with little space when designing these catchphrases. But sometimes, adding one or two more words would do so much. That or scrapping the whole thing altogether. Let’s look at some examples.

Petsco: "Where the Pets Go"

We’ll start with this piece of oversimplification. This statement either suggests one of two things are question: where pets want to go or what it is that Petsco does. As far as the latter is concerned, I think you’d have to be suffering from an extravagant amount of brain damage to not have figured it out. "Petsco: why, I thought that they shipped nails?" Now in terms of where pets "want" to go: pets wouldn’t know Petsco from a zoo. If they did, they’d be more advanced than we’ve come to know them to be. And they wouldn’t need to be pets. They’d probably have picked out upscale studios in New York at a surprisingly reasonable price.

Timex "Life is Ticking"

It’s not unusual to expect advertisers to threaten you to buy their products. Security companies essentially scare the bejesus out of you by insinuating that your house/apartment/studio/street-box is under constant surveillance by would-be thieves.

Yet it isn’t the most prudent thing to try to persuade consumers to purchase the very item that will threaten them. That’s what "life is ticking" suggests to me. Buy our watch and be reminded of how each second brings you ever closer to rotting death. Be distracted as you try to sleep by the annoying ticking of a little metallic hand that is as aware of your mortality as any deity that you hold near. Nothing can save you from the doom that our watches remind you is impending.

Jesus, all I want to know is if I’m going to be late for class. I don’t need to be reminded of the contrast between my earthly existence and a more metaphysical reality.

Colgate "A Toothpaste So Advanced, It Works in Between Brushings"

I can forgive this but it does creep me out somewhat. There is such a thing as overselling. This might work on some people (more accurately, lazy types who take it mean that the toothpaste works on its own, thereby negating the need to brush at all). But for others, it conjures up images of a toothpaste taste that won’t go away, even when you’re trying to enjoy your morning orange juice or coffee. Those flavours don’t mix. Why not tighten it to: "So Advanced, It Works More Than Most?" Sounds a bit silly yet it’s somehow catchier to me.

National Express: "People Get On With Us"

This falls under the "stating the obvious" category. It doesn’t tell me if the customer is satisfied. It doesn’t tell me that LOTS of people are getting on. It’s just telling me people are getting on. I should hope, it’s a transportation company! Now, if they changed it to "People Get OFF With Us", THEN they’d be on to something.

UPS: "Consider It Done"

No, I can’t. If it was done, I wouldn’t be consulting you in the first place.

Checkers: "Ya Gotta Eat"

My all-time favourite. The slogan borne of complete and utter obligation. Eat here because you have to eat at some point during the day. They must have envisioned some pretty simplistic conversations when they dreamed this up: "So, dude, you wanna go to Checkers?" "Naw, man, I don’t wanna." "Hey man, YA GOTTA EAT!" "Oh right......well, OK. I was gonna starve myself for three days but I guess this’ll be better." It should be noted that they probably consulted a group of anorexic teens when deciding upon this three word declaration.

It’s even more amusing to use this as your pitch when there is usually no shortage of places to eat ANYWHERE in North America. The Checkers I’ve seen in my area is across from a Domino’s and a gas station with a big horkin’ convenience store. Has there been an onslaught of Checker’s placed in Antartica that I haven’t heard about that this is directed to? But hey, who am I to argue with the Madison Avenue folks that wrote this gem. Even better, they put it into a catchy jingle:

"Yagottaeat, yagottaeat, yagottaeat"

That’s not a commercial that entices me to try a juicy hamburger. It’s an inane lecture song from a grade-school videotape preaching the values of diet. The fact that this is what comes to mind is highly ironic seeing as the food you eat at Checker’s, delicious though it may be, probably only ranks slightly ahead of sawdust pressings on the nutrition scale.

On the plus side, I’m sure once Bill Gates takes over the world and co-opt it to "ya gotta...." whatever the computer function it is that ultimately no one else will be able to allow you to do.

The amazing thing is that the people that work on these advertisement campaigns make one helluva living for themselves. Kinda depressing when you think of all the people that never got out of high school that could probably devise better catchphrases based on their conversations with fellow chain-smokers outside of the local liquor store. If you’re ever hard up for work, just throw a bunch of random words in a hat and mix them up until they form something that sounds snappy. It might not make sense but it’s bound to sell something. Then march your ass over to every ad agency you can find until someone appreciates your Bowie-esque genius.

It’ll be, at worst, nothing more illogical than what we’ve heard before. I guess the people that sold MUG had it right (about themselves), the foam really does go straight to your brain.

BMN

Shower Curtains and Their Inherent Guesswork

2004-08-25T23:14:00.000-03:00

I’m not saying that noise in the morning is always a bad thing. As an apartment neighbour, I could be better. OK, it’s not everyone’s ideal situation to wake up to the MC5 blaring out of the speakers but I happen to think that occasionally that gets the day going.

The one thing that does disturb me are the sudden and unexpected noises. The clanky noises that seem to come when you are completely preoccupied with another action. Such noises that occur as I reach to pull the shower curtains aside and pull down the entire bar that holds them up.

I’m caught by surprise by the weak resistance provided and bite my lip to avoid shrieking like an eight year old girl reacting to a spider. Looking down at the havoc that ensues is like seeing your entire day of events just go spiralling down the drain (if there wasn’t a curtain there impeding the spiral somewhat). Especially if you’re an "on-the-run" kinda person like I am.

I "wake up" better if I’m in a hurry. I make no apologies for it, it’s just the way that I am. I’m possessed with more energy if getting up acquires the efficiency of a military exercise: Point A to B in a limited period of time and with all goals (breakfast, shower and– on most days– being fully dressed) achieved. The slightest miscalculation causes me to reorganize on the fly and re-assess priorities (I’ve usually been wise enough to place being dressed over breakfast. But hey: a well fed naked man could probably accomplish more than you’d think. Say, like getting arrested with more efficiency than a homeless person.).

The shower curtain coming down completely unravels the tightly scripted plan. After assessing the damage of falling on my ass on the side of the tub and then to the floor, I fill the air with a healthy dose of obscenties. This is actually the best part of the procedure. Quite honestly, not enough days start with an obscenity-laden tirade. For those that are married, imagine starting the day by greeting your wife/husband with a "shit/damn/fuck/hell/bastard/bitch" and then allow him/her to do the same. Laugh and face the day.

But then after the cursing has subsided, I am left with a myriad of options that I don’t want to take the time to weigh out: a) take the shower, fuck the curtain, fix the mess later, b) fix the curtain and take the shower, c) fix the curtain because if I don’t, it will irritate me the rest of the day but know that there’s no time for a shower, d) knock over everything else in the bathroom so that the chaos is uniform and e) just leave to face the world a dirty and unkempt man.
Of course, here’s why I choose a). Because I *am* the kind of person who will be irritated if the curtain isn’t fixed. And I refuse to go out and face the world as a dirty and unkempt man. Subject everyone to some five o’clock shadow, well, that’s my speciality: but no uncleanliness. Here is where the problems start.

The shower bar in the apartment is clearly devised by a sick mathematical failure. I look like a reject from a flag girl team trying to angle the bar in ten thousand different directions while keeping the rings balanced. I’m not a gymnast or fencer, this isn’t my thing. I literally have to envision this ridiculously simple task as an Olympic event in order to "psyche" myself up to complete it.

"and he approaches the walls........the bar is up......it’s leaning right......leaning right......the first post is there........and now he’s leaning up...up....the curtain rings are falling, Gerry! They’re falling!......"

This is the tradeoff for living in an apartment I agreed to live in before I moved to the city. In the future, I will make a point of checking these things out. "Does the place have a washer/dryer? Does it have a dishwasher? How clean is it? How much is rent? Are the shower bars haphazardly placed between the walls or are they cemented in place?"

Because the only noise that I want when I start my day is loud distorted guitars. Any other clanging should be left for architecture flunkies who can’t measure properly.

BMN

This Would Be Better to Read Had I Been Almost Asleep When I Wrote It

2004-08-19T02:05:00.000-03:00

I’ve read that humans only use a minute amount of their actual brain power. I don’t remember what document I read it in because let’s face it, if I could remember, I’d probably be defying the brain capacity of the average human. I came to believe that this was a falsity, however, when I began to explore the process of sleep. I considered labelling it a falsity when I was able to remember the word ‘falsity’ but I think the sleep argument is stronger.

The fact is that I probably come up with some of the greatest ideas that humankind would have ever known when I am 85% asleep: barely conscious enough to recognize that I have a brilliant thought, but not able to get much further than that.

Why? Why does the human brain function so creatively and brilliantly at this time when we are supposed to be idle? After coming up with an extensive list that would have filled a thousand pages, I turned over and went back asleep again. In my more normal, what the dictionary would describe as "awake", moments I created a shorter list of reasons why we function so well when we aren’t functioning much at all.

1) No physical exertion whatsoever. Let’s face it, how I can concentrate on being smart when I also have to walk AND chew gum? Do you know how many calories I burn with the movement of my jaws alone? And how about all the work my fingers have to do flipping the pages of the books that I read? Oh sure, these are minute movements that don’t feel the slightest bit exhausting but when totalled up at the end of the day, they represent a massive amount of energy that could have gone right back to the cerebral cortex to ponder how to make time travel possible (FYI: a great way to go to sleep is to lie down and vow to yourself that you WILL figure out how to make time travel possible).

2) Surrealism. Let’s face it, that 85% asleep, 15% awake state is like the marijuana-fueled moments rock starts go for without the worries of long-term effects or rank odour on clothing. These are the first moments where the brain anticipates its true possibilities. Basing any hypothesis on a world where pink chainsaw wielding panthers with studded collars rule the country in an egalitarian government threatened only by the veto of wall mould makes zero sense when your mind is on the planet Earth. But when you’re not quite as awake as you were during the day, you realize that soon (in the dream world) this governance could be a very real possibility (and you’d better have a plan for it because panthers are hungry and wall mould makes any human ill).

Let’s face it, I’m not revealing any great mystery when I say that most of the allure of dope to people is its ability to make them placid and lucid. Dopeheads are just trying to be 85% asleep all the time.

3) Necessity. We have too many distractions in this modern world. Why, right this second my computer, some books and my television are all in my line of vision and I haven’t even turned my head to do it. That 85% asleep stage is the rare– very rare– occasion where we’re actually AWARE of the distractions that plague us, but too physically tired (that’s right: TOO physically tired) to give in to them.

It’s not entirely far-fetched to conceive that we’ve all had moments where we WANTED to
turn our brains off but since we were so close to getting to sleep, it hardly seemed worth the effort to reach for a book let alone get up to do anything like turn on the TV or computer. It’s like Simpsons Episode #1F22 when Bart comes to the realization that he has to "spend the summer with his brain." Once you hit that moment of almost-asleepiness, you’re forced to acknowledge that your mental awareness is all you have left to amuse you. Then the sky’s the limit for what you can attain.....if only someone else were recording it.

I truly believe that the transcendental state of yen that everyone has sought since the Beatles met the Mararushi pales in the spectacle of this brief moments of mental twilight we achieve every night. Even 1990s pop culture authority Seinfeld paid homage to the concept by having Kramer acknowledge Da Vinci’s wacky "20 minutes every three hours" scheme which could also be described as the "stay a drowsy genius" plan.

The point of such schemes shouldn’t be to maximize our waking hours. I argue that it should be to make the waking hours we already have as tiring as possible. Then hopefully, if one or two people stay awake, they can take down all the brilliant ideas we conceive of on a daily basis. We could form a new cult: call ourselves Necessary Lazy Surrealists. We could save the world AND even have enough brain power to figure out how that world would sustain itself while we catch up on all the sleep we’ve lost.

BMN

Like An 80s KISS Song Looking For A Simile

2004-08-07T00:21:00.000-03:00

I don’t know about you, but nothing screams "amphitheatre" to me more than has-been rock acts of the 1970s and 1980s. The venue that says "we can’t fill the arena downtown but we’re still barely making the five digits range." The one where 2/3 of the capacity is in the seatless area so that the fans can disperse all over and make the crowd look bigger than it is.

Being one of those ‘small town rubes’ that never got the chance to see the majority of big rock acts ply their trade in their "heyday", I am a prime target for these amphitheatres. How wonderful to see Rush as they can still ply their trade better than most, but being there also reeks of "wish I coulda been there in 1983 when you guys were touring Signals." I mix in with a crowd of people that either share my predicament, or were born after Signals came out and those who were there and have been to 40 Rush shows since.

So when KISS comes to town, you best believe that I’m there with bells on. It’s a gesture of respect. Respect for what KISS has done for stage shows and rock and roll? Perhaps. But more out of respect for the sheer poetic contribution to the humanities.

For example, KISS was the band that taught me to fear "ooh yeah." Paul Stanley threatens that he’s "just about to ooh yeah" in "100,000 Years" and I didn’t know what that meant or that "ooh yeah" qualified as a verb. But he sounded serious and the bassline in the song is bitchin’ so if someone in an argument tells me they’re gonna "ooh yeah", I immediately back off. I’m not taking any chances. "Ooh yeah" could hurt a lot.

Despite the fact that the original lineup of KISS brought the most fame and fortune, I believe the band’s most notable contribution to the canon came long after the originals had disbanded. The late 1980s brought a deep, heartwrenching search not for love, or for what love was (a lyrical journey Foreigner had the courage to embark upon) but rather for what love was like. It seemed as though the band’s position had been firmly established in 1982 when Gene Simmons belted out that it was "like a hurricane" in the anthemic "I Love It Loud." So when you levitated above houses, looked to the right and saw cows and third-rate trailer parks sailing around with you, you knew you were in love. KISS fans would lament the loss of their heroes’ facepaint and various lineup shifts. But they could go to bed at least comfortable in the knowledge that love was like a hurricane.

But something snapped in the latter half of the decade. Maybe Paul and Gene were missing their alter-egos so terribly that they felt the need to go on an emotional quest. Maybe the hairspray of the band and its groupies was so fierce that their minds went bonkers. But by 1987, a "hurricane" no longer aptly described what love was like. On the eloquently-titled "Bang Bang You", they officially changed their position on love, deciding it was "like a cannonball." This gave teenagers the impression that they were all circus freaks waiting to be fired into nets for audiences to applaud simply they had funny feelings for the girl in the front row of math class.

It was clear that this so occupied KISS’ minds that they couldn’t put out a new album in 1988. All they could muster was two tracks for a "best of" collection in which they tabled two possibilities. On the subtle "(You Make Me) Rock Hard", it was "like a glove and it fits just right" whereas on the even more obtuse "Let’s Put the X in Sex", it was "like a muscle" and Paul saw a girl that "made him want to flex." I liked the glove-fitting analogy just because it sounded.....cozy. But the muscle idea alarmed me: Love cramps up? Love develops charlie horses? Love shows off at the gym if it’s overdeveloped?

Well, one year after these proclamations, KISS finally turned out a trilogy of declarations on the achingly brilliant "Hot in the Shade" album (only the 18th best studio album they’ve ever done). In "You Love Me to Hate You", love was akin to a chain that needed to be unlocked. Love was thus not unlike what kept people from stealing your bike. I realize now that if I’d had a girlfriend at the time, my bike wouldn’t have been stolen in Grade 8. It had nothing to do with me carelessly leaving it behind in a ditch. Their confusion reaches a peak in "Love’s a Slap in the Face." The title would tell us love IS a slap but the chorus tells us it’s simply "like a slap in the face" but they can’t even make up their minds in that song, since one of the verses declared love was "like a ball and chain." Victorian writers never captured the spirit of paradox so eloquently. A slap in the face is sudden. A ball and chain is slow-motion drudgery. Yet love, you see, is like *both* of these miserable physical conditions.

Alas, none of these songs were truly as appreciated by the unwashed masses as the supposed "classics." Thus the original interpretation of love (that it was like a hurricane as you recall) stands as the definitive one. It was the only one KISS was going to present on this evening.

Sure enough, when I arrived at the Hi-Fi Buys Amphitheatre, the building was packed with people who appreciate deep thoughtful music. We’re talking a serious intellectual crowd here. People who at the end of the show sit drunk in the front seat of the vehicle they are about to drive away proclaiming loudly "I am SO anti-Democrat" as if they are doing the Democrats a disservice by announcing this. People who debate whether Dokken or Cinderella is the best concert act going today. People with mullets that you thought went extinct with snap bracelets. Women with beautiful shapes that they have grossly overtanned in the past 20-30 years, waiting for their husband to go to the concessions so they can lean in and tell their son/daughter that the bass player on stage is their real father.

And yours truly was privileged to be amongst this crowd of high-brow music lovers.

Not that I immediately got the KISS-fix that I was seeking. No, first I was subjected to the strains of a band that looks like they would have fit right in on the early-90s "hair rock is about to go out but we don’t know it" movement. What the actual name of this band is, I do not know and I do not care. After what felt like several hours of that, Poison hit the stage. They too have been known to wax philosophical as their deeply complex refrain "unskinny bop all night and day" indicates.

These type of deep lyrics were the forerunner to KISS themselves. As KISS hit the stage, pyrotechnics and all, their lyrical bombast was supplanted by the singer who can’t stop himself. About halfway through a KISS show, something happens to Paul Stanley. He begins to see not just the songs but every single solitary moment of the concert as a musical. Thus normal in-between set banter cannot be done justice by simple transcription. If I tried it would go something like this:

Paul: "Tha–iiiiiiiiiiiiiii-nnnnnnnnnnnn-kkkkkkkkkkkkk yooooooooouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu. We...I said, WE-iiiiiii-eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee loooo-uuuuuuuu-vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu! I said WE! LOVE! Yoooooooooooouuuuuuuuuuuuuu, Atllllllllllllaaaaa-yyyyy-aaannnnnn-ta....."
(I leave to go to the bathroom. I stop to admire the overpriced merchandise. They’re also standing in front of a concession stand with T-shirts. I hit the bathroom. I take my time washing my hands. I run back frantically realizing I may have missed the truly illegal lusting of "Christine Sixteen." I get back just in time to hear:)
Paul: "........yooooo-uuuuu-uuuuuuuuuuuuu Atlanta Georgia!! This next song.....I said, thiiiiiiissssss neiiiiixxxt....."
Me (to fellow spectator): "What’d I miss?"
Spectator: "Nothing, he’s been stretching his vocal cords for five minutes. I think Gene bagged three girls in the front row while Paul was introducing this song, though."
Me: "Gotcha."
Paul: ".......is calllllllllllllllled ‘Chrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrisssssssssteeeeeeen SIX................TEEN!!"
And so forth.

KISS played for roughly an hour and a half. Actually, I could more accurately say they played for about 20 minutes, there was a five minute break before encore and Paul sang outros and introductions for the remainder of the show. It was every bit the intellectually stimulating experience I have ever asked for. Bob Dylan never delivered such a socially relevant and captivating show.

I ran to the buses as the final fireworks of "Rock and Roll All Night" died out. Sweaty and rawked out, I sipped my C2 (realizing this is as good as C2 may ever taste to me) and asked myself if I truly loved the performance that I’d just seen. I didn’t levitate and there were no trailer parks flying alongside me. There was trailer park trash though.....I guess love is like a bus ride home with C2, overstimulated RATT fans and a provocatively dressed mother-daughter combo. And I love it loud. As the KISS army would so eloquently say "Heyyyyyy-yaaiiiiaay-yeah. Heyyyyyyy-yaaiiiaayyy-yeah!"

BMN

The Erraticism of the Noise Upstairs

2004-07-28T22:44:00.000-03:00

I like to sleep in. I know that this hardly places me in the minority but I’m in the minority in the sense that I’m one of the few who has attempted put my desires into actions. Whenever life presents me with the opportunity to sleep in and accomplish daily duties at the same time, I take it. And let me clarify that when I say "sleep in," I mean anytime past noon. If you wake up at the clock reads "A.M.", you either slept for close to a day or you didn’t sleep in at all as far as I’m concerned.

This skill was honed over time and I had learned to sleep through things that normally put other people off. Even when relocating, I managed to adjust to my surroundings and learned to sleep through campus rumblings or traffic that ran past my bedroom window. As a younger lad, delivering papers alongside 18 wheelers whizzing by a speed that would decimate a small forest didn’t do much to raise the below-vegetation awareness level that I had while I dropped papers on doorsteps on autopilot. But lately, it seems like I’ve discovered the noises that will ensure I can never sleep (or sleepwalk) the same way again: The noises of loud upstairs neighbours.

What I find particularly interesting is the variety of dissonance that neighbours can provide. It would be cliche and predictable to tell you that "my upstairs neighbour fights with his friends on the phone all of the time and it keeps me up." That would be a single identifiable way to isolate the problem. But quirky, anonymous upstairs neighbours never make it that easy.

Yes, I know. They shouldn’t be anonymous. I should make an effort to walk the mere few feet upstairs to actually peg faces to these people. All I’ve been able to discern about their identity is that there appears to be a male, a female and now a dog in the residence. And I’m relatively certain they are black and that I’ve seen each of them for about a grand total of 1.5 seconds. People don’t make a lot of conversation at my apartment complex. It’s quicker that way.

These people could not have lived above me all my time at this complex. I’ve deduced this from the fact that I lived peacefully for a semester here. Then one day, inexplicably as I was trying to sleep (no doubt on a Saturday morning when any normal individual should be sleeping if they aren’t working or golfing), I heard loud thumping from above.

Normally, such trivial noises can be put aside. But it was simply too fascinating for me to ignore. What was this series of noises? The banging was abrupt at times, other times continuous, always loud, sometimes in a "SLAM!" format and sometimes in a screeching format. Within five minutes, I’d theorized article moving, wrestling, sex, a schizophrenic breakdown or a game of Twister gone wrong as various explanations as to what accounted for this racket. But then, as I worked out the mechanics of each act, no explanation could fully stick.

That’s the biggest problem with anonymous upstairs neighbours. Sometimes, their noise is a mystery. They incorporate those mysterious noises into their more obvious noises to create a disjointed harmonic of discussion and slamming to leave you forever intrigued with them. Except you don’t WANT to be intrigued, you want to sleep.

They seem to intrigue you on purpose too. Sometimes you’re convinced they’re fighting. Human curiosity getting the better of you, you concentrate more intently to hear the "dirt." You discover they’re yelling at each other because it makes them laugh. Other times you’re convinced they’re committing random acts of cruelty causing each other to yell in pain. Until you further investigate the sounds and discover that DEARGODNOTHERE’SABABYUPTHERENOW!!!

Yup, now we have noisy neighbours with a noisy baby (who judging by the sounds of it, hates being changed, hates being fed, hates living in an apartment and hates life in general) and a noisy dog.

The latter is particularly disconcerting. I plead guilty that whenever visiting the ‘rents, I talk to the family cat as though he were an infant (even though in cat years, I think he’s 158). But I may do it for about 30 seconds in the run of a day. My upstairs neighbour (the female one) finds it necessary to talk to her dog in this way roughly once per 30 minutes. Loudly. Both indoors and outdoors. The dog responds by barking at every single entity– living or not– loudly and frequently. Does she talk to the dog because the dog is too loud or is the dog too loud because its owner talks all the time? I haven’t figured out which.

The most alarming element of this entire procedure is that not only have they destroyed my peaceful slumber but I, by being no more than who I am, have altered theirs. Why one night/morning, upon getting ready for bed, I heard what could accurately be described as amourous rumblings directly above me (no, this wasn’t nine months ago or further in case you’re wondering...). This was a new development, in so much as that I was actually able to accurately describe what I was hearing. Other than figuring that it was a blessing that SOMEONE in the apartment complex was getting laid, I thought nothing more of it until about four seconds later when I coughed. And they stopped completely.

Feeling guilty about having ruined their fun, I was left to ruminate on how I could have smoothed over the mistake. Part of me was inclined to yell "what's matter, functional troubles?" but it occurred to me that I was relatively 98% sure the male was three times my size and I wasn’t interested in having my peace restored.....by being placed in a hospital cot. Another plan was to quickly download some adult materials, play it and turn the volume on high in some feign attempt to act as though anything remotely sexual was occuring in MY abode. Thus they would feel less embarrassment. This plan lasted about 0.5 seconds when.........well, I don’t need to tell you why that plan lasted 0.5 seconds.

I’m not sure what’s to be done but all I know is that when my team allows a goal, fumbles, stumbles or otherwise screws up, I will be yelling at the television like a mad lunatic. When I’m forced to combobulate in the morning, I am going to play the MC5 if I feel I need to. And if I need to cough THREE times while my upstairs neighbours are fighting, fucking, feeding or otherwise following through with actions that begin with the letter "f", I’m going to do it loud and proud. So they ain’t shutting me up. Not by a long shot.

I think maybe I’ll get a cat.....that ought to mend the fences.

BMN

Give Me Your Percentages

2004-07-18T14:37:00.000-03:00

“Single” is a word that’s far too overreaching for its own good. There: I said it. It needed to be said and I’ll say it again. “Single” is a word that’s far too overreaching for its own good.

Some words begin with a simple set of dictionary definitions. Then after a long, evolved series of usages, the number of meanings grows beyond the denotative. The dictionary even evolves and catches up in time. Take “coffee” for instance. The definition for “coffee” has expanded to include “an informal social gathering at which coffee and other refreshments are served.” The dictionary-writers realized that the expression “let’s go for coffee” was simply used too much and that when people were using it, they weren’t stating “let’s go for the beanlike seeds of the Coffea tree that are widely cultivated in the tropics.”

It was an easy switch. Unfortunately for our good friends at dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster’s and the like, other words attain significance that becomes far greater than anything they can grasp. Like a yeasty confection gone wrong, their magnitude increases monumentally to something ugly and grotesque. Words are allowed to have multiple meanings, but when those multiple meanings clash, it creates a painful wash of misunderstandings. “Feminism” is one such word (Yeah: go ahead and define THAT in three sentences or less without getting an argument. I dare you.). “Single” is another.

The problem? Some seem to believe that “single” means “not accompanied by another or others; solitary.” Others seem to believe that it means “unmarried.” Those that subscribe to the latter do not classify “that person I’ve been seeing off and on” or “my fuck buddy” or “the person I’ve been dating for years but I don’t want to put a label on it” or “the person I’m seeing but am currently in a dispute with” as impediments to describing themselves as “single.”

It’s confusing. It’s annoying. I hate it. It must stop.

But how? What is the solution to this problem? Women who are trying to court the interest of other men would much rather say that they are “single” than go into a complicated two-paragraph explanation of their lives. Imagine the atmosphere that this would create in the first two minutes of a first date:

Me: “So, you’re single?”
Woman: “Well, I’m currently in a two-month detente with John that I was dating for ten months but nothing serious ever happened between us. By “nothing serious”, I mean we didn’t have sex or tell each other we loved each other but we did fondle each other incessantly on random occasions but not since the detente started except for one night two weeks ago. I have sex with my friend Dave on the side but only once every two weeks and we’re just friends. And I occasionally go for coffee with my friend Steve and he doesn’t know that I’m just doing it to make John jealous and that nothing serious will ever happen (expand “serious” in this case to include the fondling that I *do* do with John). But I might be interested in seeing you for more than making John jealous. I haven’t decided yet.”
Me: “Um, OK. So if I don’t try to sleep with you tonight, will you blow me off or what?”

Doesn’t sound very enjoyable, does it? It reeks of hostage negotiations. However the undeniable truth is that if we got all of this information on the table before we met up with potential romantic partners, we’d eliminate so much stress and humiliation. I wouldn’t find myself sitting across the table from the girl that I thought was single until 90 minutes into our get-together only to discover that her definition of “single” differed from mine.

So am I arguing that such people are dishonest and malevolent creatures? Well, sometimes. (Read: I have zero interest in you but your interest in me assuages my ego so I’ll stretch it out for as long as I see fit). But not always. If I’m dating someone for six months and I’m filling out a tax application and I check “single”, I’m not lying, am I? Of course not. But the parameters of the terminology are constricting. The solution needs to involve a quick, stress-free way to accurately gauge one’s availability.

My answer to this dilemma: percentages. Everyone loves percentages. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t be besieged with polls everyday (32% of transient chain-smokers that watch “Charles in Charge” reruns think that George Bush should select Steve Guttenberg as his running mate.....even if he isn’t Republican). What needs to be established is a rubric of percentages that prefix the word “single.” This way people can give a more succinct description of their status without having to write a treatise to explain it. Teenagers would study the rubric in high school and commit it to memory so that in their “prime single years”, they could “speed date” with the best of them.

Attached in the blog below is the “system of singlehood.” Follow this system. It is complicated to be sure. But much like English makes no sense until you ingrain the rules into your way of speaking, this would be no different.

Once everyone got the complicated steps out of the way on their and learned this language, the above transaction could have been far tighter and condusive to romantic discussion:

Me: “So, you’re single?”
Woman: “25%”
Me: “I’m glad I didn’t waste any money on condoms then.”

See what’s been established? We’ve gained a) a witty repartee b) the alleviation of pressure (since I now know that I’m merely being used for jealousy purposes but that sex won’t be involved, I don’t have to worry about “blowing it”) and c) a complete understanding of where the person is coming from. And consider how much the clarity’s improved before even *I’ve* stated what *my* percentage is. This example only demonstrates HALF of the system’s efficiency.

I can only hope that school systems everywhere take serious consideration of my plan. But since many of these schools are still working diligently under the pressure of parents who would rather abolish the mentioning that human beings.................y’know.....................copulate and stuff, I figure I’m in for an uphill battle. But in the quest of reducing pressure, awkwardness and humilation, I think it’s worth it.

DISCLAIMER: “The System of Singlehood” is not designed to assuage doubts of prospective dating partner’s sanity. I’m working on it. I promise.

BMN

The System of Singlehood (Read Above First)

2004-07-18T14:35:00.000-03:00

Start from the principle of "100% single." This term means "I haven’t dated anyone in the past six months. I haven’t so much as had a brief moment of intended physical contact with the gender(s) of my interest in the past six months. The only emotional ties I have established with such individuals has been clarified and understood to be strictly platonic." Whether you will add qualifications to this or in fact disprove this thesis depends on which category you place yourself in.

The rules are within each category are sometimes complicated. But the first step is simple: find your category of deduction from the following five. Then read the instructions of ONLY that category and apply:

CATEGORY ONE (Been Dating): For every person you’ve dated or made online inquiries about, deduct one point per (Limit of 15 point deduction. That’s pretty generous, don’t you think?). (If it goes no further than this, include ADDendum and apply).

If you’ve had physically intimate relations with any of these individuals, up the deduction to 3 points per person (5 points for actual coitus). If you’ve not yet cut off the possibility of having simliar meetings/conversations with each person, also up the deduction to 3 points per person. If both of the prior two stipulations apply, combine the deduction to 5 points per person.

CATEGORY TWO ("Platonic Friends"): For every person you’ve had sex with the past six months, deduct two points. Unless it hasn’t been established that you are no longer to have sex. Then deduct ten points. (If it goes no further than this, visit ADDendum and apply). If it has not been established in explicitly spoken terms that you were merely "fuckbuddies", "BFFs", "friends with privileges" or other such terms, up the deduction to 15 points.

CATEGORY THREE ("Serious Relationships Lacking Definition or Status"): If you have a relationship that involves both physical and emotional intimacy that has yet to end with "it’s over" but you are seeking other possibilities, deduct 50 points, 60 points if the length of that relationship exceeds a year. If you aren’t seeking other possibilities but want to use someone to make that person jealous, heighten the deduction to 70 points (75 if you’ve ruled out physical intimacy as part of the jealousy plan).

CATEGORY FOUR ("Swinger"): If you’re in a committed relationship that allows for physical/emotional frolicking with others, deduct 80 points. If you’re in a relationship that hasn’t been defined as "open" but you want to use someone to make that person jealous, lower the deduction to 70 points (75 if you’ve ruled out physical intimacy as part of the jealousy plan). If being "open" involves threesomes or any similar expansion of the relationship, your percentage must be followed by "seeking expansion" (e.g. "I’m 20% seeking expansion"). If your open relationship is a marriage, up the deduction to 90 points.

CATEGORY FIVE ("I’m taken, OK?"): If you’re in a committed relationship and seeking nothing. Deduct the full 100 points.

ADDendum ("I admit it, I’m luckless"): If your inexperience with emotional connections with the gender(s) of your interest literally expands to having NONE in the past three years or more, ADD 25 points. If it goes beyond three years to EVER, add another 25. If your inexperience with physical connections (not necessarily coitus) with the gender(s) of your interest literally expands to having NONE in the past 3-5 years, add 15 (3)-20 (4)-25 (5 or more) points (limit of only 20 if you did progress to first base or beyond). If it goes beyond "five years or more" to EVER, add 25 points (limit of only 20 if you did progress to first base or beyond).

BMN

COSMO: Where the Dumb Guys Go to Get Smart

2004-07-09T22:22:00.000-03:00

I’ve figured it out. All that time that I felt that certain women were hypocritical for preaching the values of intelligence in a man while choosing some of the biggest boneheads as mates, I was completely blind to the true mental capacities of these jocks and half-baked rock stars.

You see, the simple fact of the matter is this: these men don’t have enough capacity left in their brain to appear smart because they have exhausted all of their cognitive powers on the 1,329,339 ways to please a women in bed. There is no other logical answer.

I came to this conclusion after passing by the newsstands today and seeing the latest Cosmopolitian magazine. I’ll be upfront, I have only ever actually read from one Cosmo. My brother analyzed one for a university paper. This particular issue shocked me (shocked in this case referring to the reaction you give to snow in Winnipeg) by informing me of the new ways that a man could please a woman in bed.

Recalling the helpful advice that issue had offered on how to use one’s tongue in the boudoir, I looked upon today’s issue and remarked “Wow, they’ve found even MORE ways for a man to please a woman in bed. Even more ways than they found two months earlier.” I think they alternate every month between “things that you can do to drive him wild” and “things he can do to drive you wild.”

It became all so crystal-clear, how could I have been so blind to it all? Now, I don’t pretend to be intellectual (well, other than when I’m in grad school, where I put the act on hard and thick). I consider Doonesbury to be particularly obtuse and beyond my grasp and that’s even when it’s in three panels. But so many women have told me that I “sounded smart” or “was smart” and yet I couldn’t have bought a date from most of them even with a Kennedy-esque inheritance. I reflect upon this and realize that in these women’s minds, they did the math: “after forming an opinion on politics, music, television, music, the community, music and other forms of music, what energy does this guy have left to read Cosmo and update his brain on the 1,789,203 ways to please a woman? Hmmmmmm, carry the one.......OK, when I carry that one over on subtraction, I have to carry another one over from there.......um........I’m getting negative figures here........well, he can’t really have any.”

So that guy that has nothing more to say in a conversation other than “wanna do it?” and “you know anyone who can score me good weed?” isn’t scoring with the chicks at will because of his conformity-approved rebel status or devilish good looks. Instead, the woman has clearly deduced that this man has stored his brain cells (whichever ones he’ll keep when she finds him the dope dealer) almost exclusively for the well-hidden stash of Cosmopolitan issues in his closet. After all, no one could truly be that brutish and grunting without first displacing the normal biological amount of reasoning into some other useful form. This man will be an intelligent lay who probably knows the one leg up, spin, then switch, spin, both legs and flip routine on pg. 76 of the May 1999 issue. And aren’t those the best kind (I mean the best kind of lays, not routines)?

Yes, the facade that pornography teaches us– that women are in fact lecherous tramps who overlook brains for muscles, large phalluses and occasionally swarthy mustaches– are nothing more than a cover for the truth. Women are looking for men who devote their energy exclusively to Cosmo’s advice on sex. Because in order to keep up with it all, you have to be able to read issues dating back to 1979 and retain every single piece of advice (as I am relatively sure that nothing has been repeated) in order to be the epoch of sexual supremacy.

And don’t let this onslaught of men’s magazines fool you either. I’m 99% sure that the sexual advice given in Maxim, FHM or Testosterone Monthly– no matter how thick those magazines may be– is just posing as advice to throw off the nerd population who got suckered in by the Carmen Electra cover and figured that they would be able to seduce the stripper downtown of similar talents in three hours flat by reading the gems inside. The grunting types keep these articles on proud display to throw off their nerdier friends when they visit their rat-infested apartment and try to scour for secrets on their friend’s prowess with the ladies.

So in order to achieve a greater sex life, I have decided that I need a three-point plan. The first point is to scour E-bay, Amazon, flea markets, hairdressers and spas for every single Cosmo I can get my hands on. The second point is to devote one month of my life to “brain drain” in which I erase anything in my brain that before I may have thought to be useful. The dialog of MuchMusic VJ’s that aren’t sock puppets should probably allow me to achieve that goal under time. The third point is to spent hours poring over every single piece of advice that these magazines have to give, working from the days of bell bottoms and less-than-slightly hairy armpits to the days of.............bell bottoms and waxed armpits.

I figure that my behaviour from that point forward will pretty much give away that I’m not devoting any of my precious brain space to the art of conversation. So if a girl walks up to me at a bar at that point and tries to engage me on the subject of the weather, my reply of “you’re fuckin’ brilliant” while I fixate on her tube top will give her the signal that I’m an expert on alphabetical oral sex.

And as an added bonus, I won’t have to waste my time trying to laugh at Doonesbury.

BMN

Four Blades and Eighteen Paramedics

2004-07-01T20:03:00.000-03:00

Technology has brought us so much to behold with awe. Television. Telephones. The internet. Easy Mac (because remember how hard it was to make macaroni and cheese before that?). However, there is one quest that our best and brightest have been continually stymied by despites decades of research. The quest for a closer shave.

I suppose my perspective is slanted by the fact that my definition of a close shave is a fairly rigid one. When I shave, I assume the persona of the steadfast RISK-player who prolongs the game to its bitter end much to the protest of everyone in the room. Most normal games of RISK end with the victor content to accept his opponent’s concession and everyone stops so that the game doesn’t have to take another 90 hours. However, there are those stubborn few who refuse to accept concession: they want the satisfaction of wiping every single enemy soldier off the board.

This is me when I shave. Not content to accept the stubble’s concession of “OK, you got rid of 95% of the growth, I give in, we’ll play again in a couple of days, let’s hit the shower”, I force all participants to continue so that I can wipe all traces of the enemy off of the board. Problem is, the board in this case is my face and sometimes, in fact, my entire scalp. “C’mon this is excruciating!!”, the stubble cries, much like my friend Peter when RISK is dragged out far beyond when the conclusion has made itself apparent. Yet I soldier on, intent on total domination, completely oblivious to the damage I’m doing to the “board.”

Pardon me for being picky but is it too much to ask that when I finish shaving that my face (and yes, entire head) be as smooth as silk? Isn’t this what razor manufacturers have been promising all this time? They have certainly done their very best to produce a total feeling of inadequacy to any male who should emerge from his shaving hibernation with so much as a trace of a whisker that would scratch against the porcelain skin of the beautiful model he is expected to rub faces with on a day-to-day basis (face rubbing is a particularly essential part of life in shaving commercials).

These advertisements have hypnotized and convinced me that the “perfect shave” is not only possible but desirable. So I eagerly await each new advance in blade technology like a brainwashed mutant. Three blades? Fabulous. A conditioning strip? That’s what was missing the last time, sure. Oh, wait, TWO conditioning strips. Well, that probably explains why the blade didn’t follow through properly, I’ll buy that. No wait: FOUR, yes that’s it, FOUR blades, that’s what we need.....

I’m convinced this will all end with me on an operating table being stitched up while the doctor proclaims “I didn’t anyone would actually be foolish enough to USE the new quattro-triple-quintuple razor, but here’s the proof!”

Yes, I’m sad to say it, but I’m not afraid to test this technology as it advances. I’m also not afraid to stick with the shaving process to a brutal end if need be to get the smoothest results possible. Sure, that smooth skin will be hiding under eight coats of blood and I will be extremely glassy-eyed but if it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to eliminate every whisker!

BMN

Grease is For Monkeys and I'm No Grease-Monkey

2004-06-15T22:25:00.000-03:00

What I am about to confess to you is the sin of sins. Disregard my lack of a cell phone until very recently. Disregard that I’m illiterate on the “cutting edge” television that is HBO (Sex and the City? Those two go together? And who is watching a show on choirboys?). Even disregard that I’ve yet to watch (and refuse to watch) "E.T." No, I have committed the ultimate sin against humankind.

I am a 27 year old middle class white male in North America...and I am gearbox-illiterate.

Yes, I know nothing about how the engine of a car works. I’ve been shown how to change a flat, oh......say 36 times now and despite the activity consisting of sheer mechanics that even a pre-pubescent imbecile could understand, I just stand there and say “could you run that by me again?” When two men jabber on about the fuel injector or the thingamabob that makes the coolant not leak from the whatsamadooley, I nod in an imprecise gesture of understanding.

Yes, it’s hard to walk down the street with a reasonable level of balance. If you’re wondering why I trip and fumble so much, it’s not because I’ve been cursed with a lack co-ordination that makes it impossible for me to dribble a basketball and walk simultaneously. No, it’s because it’s hard to maintain equilibrium when your masculinity has been compromised by the shame of knowing nothing about cars in this car-obsessed world.

The amazing thing is that I grew up down the street from a peer who couldn’t get enough of that information. In a sense, walking home from school with him was like another class during the day. I did math, english, gym, science and health from 9-3pm. From 3-3:10pm was a brief seminar on cars. But it was strictly pass/fail and there were no tests. You passed as long as you attended. Seeing as how there was usually no one else my age to walk home from school with, I had no choice but to attend. Rest assured, if there had been examinations, I would have flunked and maybe the public schools would have gotten wind of my lack of compulsory skills by giving me a simple three question test.

1. Does the sight of a well designed muscle car give you an erection so stiff that you put the Red Cross on alert to come give a transfusion to your brain from the blood loss?

(To which I would write “no”)

2. Describe in the most VIVID DETAIL POSSIBLE your ideal experience as a driver in the future.

(To which I would reply, “My car starts when I turn the key. I move forward in a straight line when necessary, curving only when I command so by turning the wheel. I arrive at point B with no arrests, convictions or injuries.”)

3. Name as many car manufacturers as possible.

(To which I would write, “Chevrolet, GM, Ford, Matchbox and Tonka.”)

This would surely have raised the concern of the school’s guidance counselor who would have seen that I wasted no more than a sheet of looseleaf on the endeavour (and that I had in fact ripped that sheet in half so that I could fashion a crude mini-paper airplane out of the blank space). “He calls that vivid detail!,” he would cry, “he didn’t even talk about the sound of the engine or its viscosity. This person isn’t fit for university, why: he’s not fit to be a man.”

Indeed, the pride and joy moments of male bonding seem to center on cars. If you’re looking for some real get-together with the boys that you haven’t hung out with in a while, go buy a car. Sit back and wait for their animal kingdom-esque senses to kick in “*sniff* *sniff* I smell an auto purchase! I must go!” They will quickly arrive at your driveway, asking you to pop the hood so you can show off the engine. They will sit inside it and test every single feature. They will ask you for evidence of any and all warranties and cling to your telling of the price-haggling as though it were the finale of "M.A.S.H."

It’s not like this should have been a complete mystery to me as a child. Do you think it might have occurred to me to sit in the engine corner of the room at 4-H when I was busy making a candle so ugly that the cast of "Queer Eye For the Straight Guy" would have sued me for emotional distress? Hey, I was surrounded by chicks making candles and there wasn’t another guy in sight, I figured I was making the right call! I sure didn’t see anything exciting going on in the engine corner where one loyal student sat attentive to workings of that part of the car that makes that thing run smoother than it does if you put regular oil in the hole where that other stuff goes.

Well, now in my adulthood, I know that I don’t know how to make a candle but that guy can probably help his wife/girlfriend/prison buddy/chums/parents/lawyer/etc with any car trouble they may have. And I just stand here with my CAA card- praying to God that five uses a year will be enough to bail me out of trouble.

Because Every Blog Needs An Intro.....

2004-06-15T22:23:00.000-03:00

...and this is mine.