The other day it was raining when I got out of work and when it’s raining in the afternoon everything’s always a lot grosser, a lot more uncomfortable, everybody’s all wet, but everybody’s doing whatever they can to stay as dry as possible, walking single file around large puddles, carrying around giant umbrellas, even bigger umbrellas, like a golf umbrella, one of those umbrellas that the fruit stand guy uses to protect all of his produce from the rain or the sun, all at the same time, a giant picnic umbrella, really, something you would bring out at the beach to guard you and your family and your ten best friends from the harmful rays of the sun. And I’m a lot taller than everybody else, and I’m never the kind of guy who brings an umbrella to work if it’s not raining in the morning because, what am I, I’m just going to have to permanently carry around this extra two pounds of dead weight every single day? It doesn’t rain that often. If it’s raining in the morning, obviously I’ll bring an umbrella. But I don’t understand where everyone gets an umbrella from when it starts raining in the middle of the day. I go to work in the morning, it’s dry, nobody has an umbrella. I step foot outside in the afternoon, it’s raining, everybody has an umbrella. What did I miss? What am I not doing that everybody else is doing? Because I know for a fact that regular normal non-crazy people don’t just always carry around umbrellas. What else do you have to always carry around? Snow shoes? Maybe an oar in case there’s a flood and you have to hitchhike home on a passing canoe, but the only way they’ll let you on is if you can help with the paddling, and how else would you paddle if you didn’t bring your spare oar? And I’m so much taller than everybody else, so come quittin’ time when everybody races out their doors, trying to beat everybody else in the city to the subway, I’m standing at direct eye level with everyone else’s giant umbrellas, and I’m just constantly avoiding getting my eyes poked out, and because I’m so nervous about those umbrella spokes which, why are they so sharp and pointy anyway, I don’t notice all of the puddles, and of course I didn’t bring my galoshes, so my feet are soaked, and on these rainy afternoons the rush hour commute just feels a lot more crowded, like when people get wet they just expand, and they get slower, and crankier, and I can’t get my metrocard out of my wallet because my fingers are wet, and the plastic that the metrocard is made out of, it completely loses its grip when wet, but it doesn’t matter because there’s a huge line at the turnstile, because it takes people forever to fold up their umbrellas, keep the line moving, put away their umbrellas, shake out the excess water right on my feet, but my feet are already wet so, whatever, keep trying with the metrocard, nobody can really get a grip, and then going underground, on this particular day, really it was very frustrating, but this guy finally just screams out something like, “Jesus fucking Christ! You fucking people need to learn how to fucking move! Fuck fuck fuck!” and I’m just looking at this dude screaming his crazy screaming in the middle of the subway platform and he looks just like me, just like some guy who doesn’t want to be where he is so badly that the stress and the pressure boils over and it just gets to him and he starts shaking his fists at the universe, and I just started getting really angry at this guy, I really considered yelling back because, what the hell? Do you think you’re the only person inconvenienced by this mob of slow moving human beings? Or the weather? Or being wet? Or feeling uncomfortable? He was mad and he got to express himself and now I was mad and I wanted to express myself, but what would I say, “Shut the fuck up asshole!” or “Why don’t you just calm down there pal?” How confrontational would I get? And nobody ever expects these things to work out. It’ll only just escalate. And we’re underground and what happens if things got heated and somebody got pushed and, you know what? Let that guy have his little temper tantrum. I bet he feels like a big man, telling everybody off, telling everybody to stop getting in his way, making his life a little bit more inconvenient than it had to be. You know what I should have said? I should have said, “Listen buddy, why don’t you move someplace far away from the city, where there are no people to get in your way, someplace real dry, where it never rains, and where nobody has to work, and nobody has to commute, and then you won’t be pissed off. That’ll solve all of your problems my friend.” Actually, no I wouldn’t have said that either. That would have been really way too long and there’s no way I would have gotten all of that out without him interrupting me, going back at me, and then I would have gotten all flustered and my blood would have started to boil and I wouldn’t have known quite what to say so I’d just start saying things like, “Oh yeah?” but really loud, because volume always trumps substance. But that would have led to a path towards escalation also and, one time I read this article about how when too many human beings are close together and they start getting pushy that actual waves of energy start running through the crowd, like currents, like people can get crushed, lifted right out of their shoes, and then who gets charged with murder, everyone? Can you try several hundred people for the murder of one person? And how many sentences are we talking about, does everybody take turns in jail for a day or are we talking about individual multi-year sentences? Yeah, I did the right thing. I kept my mouth shut. Somebody poked me in the eye getting off the train, opening up their umbrella. It hurt, but my eye didn’t fall out, I didn’t get in anybody’s face, I just kind of went, “Ow … Geez,” semi-loudly, to nobody in particular. I’m pretty sure the person who poked heard me softly cry out, but I’m pretty sure I heard that same person say something to me like, “You gotta watch out buddy. Lot a people in this city,” all passive-aggressively, everybody hurrying home, hands in their pockets, heads in their hoodies.
Monthly Archives: October 2012
I’m so deep. Really, really serious. And deep.
I’m sure everyone feels like this once in a while, like you don’t have any control over your life. Ultimately, none of us really have any control. But day to day there are a lot of little decisions that we make, what to wear, what to eat, that kind of shape these feelings of, if not control, than at least something, something like steering, like we’re providing a direction, even if we’re just kind of loosely nudging ourselves, guiding the day toward eventually getting into our beds at night.
But how many times do the days just kind of blend into the weeks? All of those little decisions that I talked about before, picking out clothes or figuring out what to eat, so many times they aren’t even really decisions at all. For a complete lack of imagination I can’t even decide what I’m hungry for, and so I’ll whip up one of the many meals I can prepare in thirty minutes or less. And it’s hardly a matter of taste. It’s, what do I have around the house? How quickly can I put something into my belly so I can stop being hungry and return to wasting time on the Internet?
So it’s this weird, I want to say paradox, but that word just sounds big for the sake of being big, and I’m not even sure if I’m using it in the correct way. But it’s a dilemma. It’s something that makes me scratch my head and think, I get so bored sometimes, I feel like I don’t have a lot of control of where life is taking me, but how often am I not even taking advantage of all of the little decisions that I could be making throughout the day?
I mentioned food. Let’s look at clothing. Is it really a choice to figure out what pair of pants I’m going to wear? They all look the same anyway. Jeans. Sweatshirts. Whatever’s clean really. But what if I started wearing a kilt? Or a pair of yellow slacks? That would be a definite decision, a taking of some sort of a stand. But what would I be saying? I’d be saying that I’m going to do something different. I’d be saying that I’m taking a measured interest in exactly how I’m going to dress myself. But more than anything else I’d be saying look at me everyone. Here I am planet Earth. Please pay attention to me.
And part of me wants that, but I don’t want attention just for the sake of attention. It’s one thing to get noticed for doing something cool or interesting, but its another thing to get noticed just because you’re so out there, so completely past the norms of convention, that you’re really just an aberration, that something’s wrong with you. You keep behavior like that up long enough and all of the sudden you don’t have a job, and you’re wearing crazy clothing all by yourself, and you’re talking to yourself on a park bench.
I don’t even really know what I’m talking about right now. I just look at my life, which I’m very happy with. This isn’t a complaint at all, just an observation or a reflection. Everything I do is steeped in choice. Even on the most boring days I’m constantly making choices. How many of these choices are just automatic, just because that’s the way that everything is automatically done? And all of these choices add up. They make me the person that I am. The food that I eat. The clothes that I wear. The things that I do when I’m not working.
I get up in the morning. I take a shower. I leave my house to get a bagel. I walk on the sidewalk. Why do I walk on the sidewalk? Because that’s how this city was laid out. By who? I have no idea. But I’m living my life based on the way that society has been engineered and built by countless people who lived throughout history, all who made their own countless little decisions that somehow shaped this world that I live in and established the rules and behaviors that I follow and conform to simply by being a de facto member of society.
This is a real ramble of an essay here. But every now and then I just can’t help but thinking crazy stuff like, why don’t we all live in oval houses instead of squares? Why are jeans blue instead of green? What makes the default option default?
Really?
I just read an article in the paper today critiquing the phrase, “Really?” and its overuse in popular culture. First of all, as a frequent user of the phrase, I’ll attempt to mount a defense. I’d also like to say, “Really?” but apparently it’s being used too much, it’s cheapening the English language, it’s destroying our culture. I’d like to say it again right here. But I won’t. I won’t indulge those who find the phrase too low-class, too pedestrian. Besides, instead of actually going ahead saying, “Really?” I’ll just write, “I’d really like to say ‘Really?’” This is great because it really adds a lot of words and sentences to my writing, which I’m always in a desperate need of.
The arguments against “Really?” besides what I already mentioned above, are that’s it’s a way for lazy people to communicate snarky sarcasm without actually having to think up something intelligent to say. I’m sorry, but isn’t that a good thing? Shouldn’t we all be getting to the point where we can transmit vast quantities of information without having to waste so much breath? It’s like the Internet. It’s like emoticons. It’s like the Smart Car. That’s what the spirit of today is all about. I’d write the word zeitgeist here, but I’ve noticed way too many so called newspapermen throwing around Germanic words in the past few years, and quite frankly, I’m a little disappointed.
But, ahem, really? When I’m talking to somebody, I want it to be as short and sweet as possible. The only things that I like to be longish are these blog posts, because I can look at them and think to myself, “Wow Rob, you really did it. You really typed up a lot of stuff here.” And that’s including my use of the phrase, “Really?” I’m reading back into my archives, and I’m noticing that I use the phrase at least once a blog post, once a paragraph if it’s a really good one.
So I’m reading this article and I’m just boiling over with rage, thinking to myself, there’s no possible way that whoever wrote this could add to the insult. But he does. He goes on in the later paragraphs to make fun of some of my other trademark phrases, like “Seriously?” and “Honestly!” What a jerk.
The author’s name is Neil Genzlinger. I only put that in because I wrote the author as a he and I didn’t want the reader to think that I’m just assuming all newspapermen are men. Also, I hope that Neil is one of those journalists who has a Google alert set up for his own name, and he’ll get an email when this goes up and he’ll be like, “Really? I’ve never heard about this web site. Hmm,” before he opens it up, and the title is just going to be, “Really?” And his face is going to get all red. “I hate that phrase!” he’ll shout and his significant other will be like, “Neil! What did I tell you about screaming at your iPad!” and he’ll be like, “Honey! What did I tell you about calling my Samsung Galaxy Smart Tablet an iPad!” and the significant other will be like, “You know what? I’m not doing this anymore. I’m staying at my mother’s tonight,” and Neil will be like, “Really?”
And I’ll have won, because it’s not a bad phrase. It’s great. It’s got just the right mix of tone and brevity, which I actually like to call briefness, because it’s much more a word of the people than brevity, but I don’t want to give Mr. Genzlinger any more ammo for his award winning commentaries on modern American English and its misuse by the unsophisticated mob of public that makes up contemporary society. And besides, you know why I’m getting so upset here? It’s not that I’ve gotten called out as being one of countless lazy writers who uses the phrase “Really?” when he can’t think of anything smarter to say. No, I’m getting pissed off because I actually invented and pioneered the use of the phrase. Seriously. I really did. Honestly.
What kind of evidence do I have to back up such a bold claim? I have a ton of evidence. But I’m not going to stoop down to Neil’s level of gotcha journalism. No, I’ll let him sit at his desk, stewing in his own sense of smug self satisfaction, thinking that he’s won. But I did invent it. I really did. And if anybody should be writing an article about the overuse of the phrase, it should be me. I should be writing it. Because it’s mine, and everybody else is just copying me. I started it. When I use it, it’s great. When everyone else uses it, it loses all of its characteristic zing. And so maybe I will write that article. I’ll write about how everyone who uses the phrase, “Really?” is just a huge poser. And in this list of everybody, I’ll include in it my good friend Neil and his article as just another example of some lazy writer who couldn’t think of anything to write about that day, and so he just picked out one of my most popular phrases and tried to piggyback his way into the editorial hall-of-fame.
Really Neil?
I’m not scared of heights, I swear
The other day I was f’n around online and I came across this video of these guys that climb all the way up to the top of really high structures, like antennas out in the middle of nowhere. The head climber attached a camera to his head, so you got a pretty realistic point-of-view type film, of this guy just climbing higher and higher up to the top.
Let me tell you, just by watching this video I experienced a strong physical reaction. My stomach got shaky, queasy. It’s the same feeling you get if your car goes over a hill really fast, or if you’re on a ferris wheel that takes a dip at the same time as the carriage starts rocking. I was terrified for this guy. This particular antenna that he was climbing was about as high as the Sears Tower in Chicago. Once he got as high as an elevator would take him, he basically had to climb an open ladder. And it just kept going up and up and up. And then finally he gets to a platform, but that wasn’t even close to being the end. Then he had to climb an even smaller ladder, this one was basically just a pole with pieces of metal coming off the sides. It was like a half-ladder, like a ladder’s inverse.
And this guy wasn’t even using any harness or anything. The video said that constantly attaching and detaching and reattaching a harness would slow him down. He had a little clip that he would stick to a rung every now and then so he could lean back and rest. Like he would actually just lean back, his feet on the ladder, but then just releasing the weight of his body against this chord that he affixed his life to, just taking a rest from climbing up this never ending pole, leaning back against the void.
Oh yeah, and he’s carrying his tools up behind him, also attached to some other rope, and the whole pack weighs maybe thirty pounds. And he finally gets to the top, this tiny piece of platform maybe three feet squared, and he pulls up his pack of tools and starts changing some light bulb at the top.
First of all, what kind of a sociopath designed this antenna? Aren’t we at a point in technology or society or civilization or whatever where we can build an antenna with maybe a ladder that’s surrounded by a scaffolding so that this guy could climb without a legitimate risk of falling to his death? And to do what, change a light bulb? I’m no genius inventor, but maybe they could install a light bulb at the top that would attach to some type of mechanical elevator, so when it dies, you can just press a button and it would come down for a change instead of a human being going up.
But whatever, I guess eventually whenever you have tall structures somebody’s going to have to go up and at least make sure everything’s OK. And this is what kills me. That’s an actual profession out there of people who climb up buildings and bridges and antennas. It makes me sick to my stomach. I wouldn’t say I have a fear of heights, but thinking about these people doing this sends my body into a panic.
Every time I think about it, my palms start sweating. What kind of a physical reaction to heights are sweaty palms? How does it make any sense at all? If I’m up somewhere really high, chances are, if I want to survive, I’m going to have to grab onto stuff and hopefully climb down in one piece. How is this easier with slippery hands? What the hell evolution? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to have a magnet grip, or maybe Spider-Man’s wall crawling powers?
But what really bothers me is that this is part of the human experience. Every once in a while I’ll get stuck in my head and I’ll think about my life and how comfortable it is, but how outside of my own tiny existence there are people going through all sorts of crazy shit, like free climbing up a giant antenna. And I think to myself, well, I’m a human being, and they are human beings too, so the only difference between myself and person changing a light bulb at the top of the world is, well, there is no difference. It’s really just a matter of elevation. I can very easily picture myself up there, and my imagination is obviously a very good one, because I’m able to trigger these stupid panic responses, like nausea and sweaty palms.
And what if one day I find myself living under a totalitarian regime, and I get drafted as a laborer by the state, and they put me in some worker camp, and they look at me and say, “You. The tall guy. Come on, we’ve got a new job for you.” And the guy pulls out a light bulb and smiles. And as I lose control of my bladder and beg to be spared from this human experience that I desperately do not want to experience, this psychopath smiles even harder, knowing that he picked just the right guy for the job, and he takes out a gun a cocks the barrel back and he says, “Climb.” And I don’t have a choice.
Honestly, shit like this keeps me up at night. I just, I just really hope that I never, ever have to do something like that. Or even watch another video like that again. I should just stop using the Internet. Or leaving the house. Or writing out these crazy imaginary scenarios that only get more vivid and descriptive as I write them out. Jesus Christ my palms are really sweating now. Like my keyboard is soaked. I can’t believe it’s still functioning, because it’s so wet.
Wow, I’m feeling really tired today
I’m so tired. Like I couldn’t even get out of bed today. Like I’m still in bed. I slept for maybe twelve hours. I don’t know why I’m still so beat. I’m seriously still under the covers. I keep trying to get up but my eyes, even if I can force them open for more than two seconds, it’s like my eyelids are just weighed down with extra gravity, and then when I eventually give up and they slam shut I keep telling myself, just fight it Rob, just stay awake, even if your eyes are closed, just don’t fall asleep, just concentrate on mustering the energy to pry your eyes open again. And then by the time I actually open them up and I look at the clock I realize that I in fact did fall asleep, that my willpower was nothing compared to how tired I am, that an hour has passed and this day keeps slipping further and further out of my hands.
And so I’m resigned to the fact that I can’t get out of bed. It’s just too much today. I feel like a parasite must be attached to my body somewhere, sucking me dry, leaving me this empty husk of a person, unable to stay awake. You might be asking yourself, how are you writing this Rob? If you’re so exhausted, stuck in bed, how are you at your computer writing? I’m not. I gave up on trying to get out of bed. I’m on my phone, typing it out on the touch screen. It’s taking forever. I’ll get stuck on a word for like two whole minutes, back and forth, me trying really carefully to hit the right letter, but because my fingers are so big, and the screen so tiny, and I’m so tired, I just don’t have the energy necessary to really aim my fingers, and I keep messing up. And then when I finally get a word right, the phone thinks I’m trying to spell a different word, and it does me the favor of changing the word automatically, without even asking, and I’m back to square one. It sounds like a long and tedious process. It is. I’ve been working on this blog post for the past eight hours. I’ve already taken like twelve naps.
I feel like my body has started hibernation, like a bear. If I’m really quiet I can’t even hear my heart beating, because even though I’m still alive, (I have to be alive, right?) my heart is still beating, but the beats have slowed down so much, to such a crawl that if I try to listen for an individual beat, it sounds like I’m dead, because the spaces in between each beat are just too long, way too long to maintain concentration on listening, I can’t keep the focus for that long, and so maybe there was a beat, but I missed it, I fell asleep or something.
Hibernation isn’t just about sleeping and a slower heart rate. Everything’s slower. My metabolism is just barely on at all. And that’s too bad, because right before I went to sleep last night I made myself a huge plate of fettuccine alfredo. I figured I’d carboload, give myself the fuel for a productive tomorrow. But I can just feel every strand of fettuccine just hanging out in my stomach. And I’m trying to will my digestive system into action. I’m like, “Come on stomach! Metabolize!” But nobody can control their organs, not consciously, and I’ve wasted so much of my non-energy on just visualizing my intestines, trying to kick-start the whole Krebs Cycle (Krebs Cycle? I don’t think I used that right) into action.
When did I miss twelve phone calls? Who even calls any more? Inbox full? How long have I been asleep? I don’t remember having this full beard. Who installed this catheter? Why would whatever hospital I’ve woken up in spend so much time making sure the catheter is installed correctly but not bother to give me a shave every now and then? Can I take out this IV? Is this feeding tube really necessary? Hello?
When Rip Van Winkle woke up the colonists won the American Revolution. Maybe I’ve woken up and the conservatives have finally won the Romney Revolution. That was a funny joke. Maybe a little too funny. I actually laughed a little too hard and I think I’ve in the process wasted all of the energy that my body was slowly starting to build back up, and now the laughing is over and I’m just so sleepy, maybe I’ll just take little a nappy-nap, just for a minute, because my eyes are so heavy.