Monthly Archives: November 2012

President of the end of the world

I’m running through a little thought experiment in my head. I always try to do thought experiments, but I always wind up getting stuck on the definition of a thought experiment. I know that Einstein could sit there in his study and just think up crazy scenarios in his brain, and they’d actually run and he’d gain serious wisdom and insight out of them. Me, I can’t really keep things in my head for too long, like images or numbers. It’s always much easier if I have some paper, a pen, something to write everything down and to look at.

But I was thinking about an experiment, let’s call it a situation, let’s say we discover that a gigantic asteroid is on a collision course with the earth, and that it’s scheduled to hit twenty years from now. There’s nothing we can do. We’re just completely outmatched. It’s going to be a guaranteed collision, guaranteed mass extinction, nothing left.

So let’s say that this information goes public. My question is, what would happen with presidential politics? Twenty years is long enough for a number of scenarios. We could have two two-term presidents, four one-term presidents. What would be their pitch to the American public? How do you get elected President of the end of the world?

I’m sure that we’d find some way to divide ourselves into teams of two. And you just know that there would be people willing to run. You might even think that there would be even more than just your usual band of egomaniacs and snake oil salesman, because an issue like the end of the world has so much divisive potential.

Just take the issue. Will the world end in twenty years? All of the scientists are saying yes. They’re the ones that alerted us in the first place. It’s crazy to think that everybody would listen to the scientists. Can you imagine if both parties of a presidential race came out on a serious subject and agreed? But no, they’re always too scared that if they speak the truth, the other one will point his or her finger and call it all nonsense.

That was a little confusing. I just think that we’re so divided today, that if something huge like World War II came around, nothing would get done, because both parties would be too scared to make a move, to disrupt the status quo. Look at the big issues of the day. We’re in severe need of some modern gun control laws. We have global warming to deal with, which is obviously a real problem. But what are both parties talking about? They’re talking about nothing. Because the first person who goes out against what’s normal, the other guy will be able to point his finger and call the other side un-American.

OK, I’m kind of veering off course into an unexpected political rant here, but that’s OK, I’m just going to go with it and hope it all ties in together at the end. You’d be surprised at how often that works, honestly. Anyway, the asteroid is coming. Finally, under serious pressure from the scientific community to at least acknowledge the fact that we’re all about to get blown up, one of the presidential contenders gets up on stage and offers a plan of how we’re going to spend our last two decades. Let’s try and see if we can’t abolish war, poverty. Let’s see if we can’t feed everybody, tend to all of the sick. Let’s make these last twenty years twenty of the best years in human history.

And the other guy would point his finger and laugh. He’d say, “Listen to this clown. We’re not going to die. We’re not going to get hit by that asteroid. We’re Americans. We’re the greatest country in the world. Nothing can stop the human spirit. Nothing can stop us. We just have to believe. We just need faith.”

And that would be it. And so the original guy would come back and say, “You know what, I was just kidding. I don’t believe we’re going to get hit either. Just elect me President. I really want to be President.”

And that would be it. President of the end of the world. I really got off track here. I had originally wanted to make a funny story about two guys campaigning a really crazy campaign to be president during the earth’s final days. But then I realized that all of those threatening stuff and political nonsense sounded a little too true to be made up. And then I started just writing amateur political commentary. And now here is this last paragraph, I’m really just writing for the sake of typing words, giving a terrible explanation as to how and why we’ve wound up at this sentence. And I think I’ve already done this exact ending to a rambling blog post like maybe two or three times already. But I’m not even going to try to find which ones I’m talking about, because there are so many, and that would take forever.

Fight!

I need a fight song. Something catchy. Something that, whenever anybody hears it, they’ll experience a strange mix of emotions. Their adrenaline will get going, so the first automatic response will be fight or flight. But for some reason, my fight song will disable the flight option in everybody who hears it. At the same time, people will start to get really scared and panicky. But the song is going to work on even more different levels. While the anxiety builds, people will become paralyzed by their fear. They’ll want to scream out, run away, do something, but they’ll be helpless. And that’s when I’ll make my entrance. Because that’s how I’ll use my fight song.

My high school had a fight song. But for some weird reason, fighting was strictly forbidden. I remember one time I was eating lunch in the cafeteria when some kid lunged across the room at another kid and started pummeling him (there was no music, fight or otherwise.) The lunchroom moderators broke it up and I’m pretty sure both kids got kicked out.

I got into one fight in high school. I was a freshman. There was this kid who lived in my town but went to a different middle school than me. Ninth grade rolls around and all of the sudden we’re on the same bus. I’m like, “Hey man, my name’s Rob, nice to meet you.” And he automatically starts calling me Robbie, in a little baby voice, making fun of my backpack, threatening to beat me up.

So I stood my ground, kind of. I didn’t back down, but I didn’t really have any good comebacks or anything. So it would be him making baby voice imitations of everything I said, and laughing with all of his d-bag friends on the bus, and me just kind of, you know, standing my ground, but just boiling over with rage, red in the face, unable to think of anything to say.

This went on for maybe two months until one day that was it. The fight song went off in my head. And while I like to say now that I’m totally anti-fighting, that there always has to be a better way to solve an argument, back then I was fourteen years old. I was about as tall as I am right now, but I only weighed maybe a hundred and fifty pounds. I was just really ready to prove myself, as a man, as somebody not to mess around with, as somebody who had his own fight song.

And maybe this guy thought I’d be easy pickings, because when I told him we’d settle it in the ring, there was just this non-reaction. And he just kept making fun of me and picking on me as if I hadn’t suggested we settle things mano-a-mano. So finally I had to like spell it out for the punk. “I am going to beat you senseless.” Stuff like that.

Looking back, the whole situation was incredibly ridiculous. If I were this other kid, I would have gone to the principal’s office, telling him that it was me being the one acting threatening, who kept bringing up physical violence, getting me kicked out and then laughing hysterically in the corner while I emptied out my locker. But no, he eventually agreed to the fight. We had to do it off of school property, obviously, because even though the school had a fight song, yeah, I already wrote about the no-fighting rule.

So we’re riding home on the bus and my bus stop was first. So this guy’s like, “I’m not getting off at your bus stop. You have to come to my bus stop.” And I was just like, “You got it.” And when the doors closed and my house disappeared in the distance, everyone knew it was on. And then it was his house. And we both got off. But, you know, we couldn’t fight right in front of his house. Somebody might come outside, his mom or one of his little sisters. So we walked around the corner.

And it was like, all right, I’ve got the fight song blasting in my head, let’s go. But I always remembered something my dad told me, something about never starting a fight, but never letting anybody else finish one. So I was consciously aware of me not wanting to be the first one to throw a punch. And then I started thinking to myself, punch? I don’t even know how to punch. I’ve never really punched anything. Where is my thumb supposed to go?

So we kind of just circled each other for a little bit, throwing a lot of taunts. While everyone on the bus had expressed what I thought was a sincere interest in the fight, I guess that nobody really wanted to get off at different bus stops and walk the rest of the way home, so there was just this one other kid with us. Finally, my bully reached out and pushed me, tapped me sort of. It was kind of aggressive I guess. Whatever, it was physical contact, so as far as I was concerned, he drew first blood.

I reached back, made a fist, and swung as hard as I could. It was really a lot less dramatic than I thought it would be. I guess I didn’t have enough muscle to really make my hand do any damage to this guy’s face. After I made contact, we both sort of just wrestled, each of us not wanting the other to make another fist. From a block’s distance, it might have looked like we were dancing.

It wound up with both of us on the ground in one of those mutual headlocks where if I let go he would have had me, but if he let go, I would have had him. It was a weird dual, very clenched embrace. And the last thing I remember was that other kid, the spectator, him running off. Some adult passerby in a car stopped, walked over to us and pried us apart. Neither of us knew him, he was just some dude breaking up a fight.

I walked home. I thought to myself, well, I was the only one who got a punch in, so I guess technically I won. The fight song grew louder in my head. I felt the adrenaline surging through my body, but this time I felt a release. I stood up for myself. And the next day that kid didn’t make fun of me. He didn’t say anything. And that’s what it was for the next four years.

I remember seeing him towards the end of senior year at a party or something. We just kind of made eye contact, nodded toward each other. My archenemy. I wonder if he heard it as we were locked together on the ground. I wonder if he heard my fight song. I kind of wish I really had a fight song, like on the computer, an MP3 that I could play and get myself all worked up. But, like I said, fighting is pretty stupid. I’m an adult now. What if I got in a fight and broke my nose? That would be ridiculous. How would I explain myself? “You don’t understand, this guy was making fun of me!”

Idea generator

The other night I was laying in bed and right before I fell asleep I had this great idea for something to write about. But I knew it was never going to happen. Even during the day, sometimes I’ll think of something, a stupid joke, a story, and I know from experience that I have to write it down immediately, because regardless of how hard I try to keep things in my head, if I don’t write it down I’ll forget about it.

It’s one thing to have a good idea and then to lose it. It’s another thing to remember having the idea but not being able to remember what that idea was. That’s what this is like. I clearly remember having the idea, recognizing it as something that, if not being a necessarily great idea, it was something that I could have gotten a whole blog post out of. That’s always the hardest part of these things, just figuring out what I’m going to write about.

I wish I had some sort of an idea generator. Like a partner. He or she would come up with the ideas, and I would write them out. Obviously this wouldn’t work out, because I would insist on taking all of the credit. “Not even a shout-out?” my idea person would ask me after the first week or so of collaboration. “Nothing!” I’d scream, insisting that I was doing all of the real work, refusing to share even the tiniest morsel of praise. So that probably wouldn’t work.

Unless I could get a string of partners, and use them all up one after the other. Individually, each collaborator probably wouldn’t stand for my bullshit more than a week. But if I just kept finding a new one, I’d theoretically have a supply of never-ending ideas. But that would probably take up so much of my time, posting ads on craigslist, hiring people to give me ideas, denying them credit, putting more ads up for more people, stopping all of my ex-partners from collaborating against me, warning others not to do business with me.

And I just thought about it, what, am I supposed to be paying these people? That would never work out either, because I’m not making any money from any of this. And with me still unwilling to share any of the credit, why would anybody want to work for me? What would be the trade-off? I got it, I could post ads on craigslist telling people I’m looking for a collaborator, and that I’m willing to pay, big time. But I’d write that I need to see some potential ideas, to give me a taste of what this person has to offer. And that would be it. I could just use those sample ideas indefinitely.

But even that seems like a lot of work, constantly going onto craigslist. I’m sure there’s tons of anti-spam policies preventing that type of Internet exploitation. I could offer experience or college credit maybe. No, nobody really buys that.

You know what I need? Some sort of an idea generating software. Something where a computer will just tell me what to write about every day. In fact, now that I’m thinking about it, I could just go on Wikipedia and click on the random article button and see what comes up. Hold on, let me give it a try.

OK, I don’t think this is going to work out. I clicked the random article button and the first thing that came up was a profile of some retired German soccer player. Even worse, he’s a goalie. I practically fell asleep as soon as I started to realize what I was looking at. I mean seriously, talk about obscure, random nonsense. What could I do with any of this? Germans: boring. Soccer: boring. Goalies: boring. Retired: boring. Boring, boring, boring.

I’ll try one more time. Hmm. This time it led me to Alternative Rock. I guess that’s slightly less boring. I like Pearl Jam. I like Bush. But it’s too general. And even though I like the music, I’d say the alt-rock scene is a little too douchey. Just think about alt-rock now. Nickleback. That’s it, I can’t even go any further naming shitty bands. I wouldn’t even call it alt-rock anymore, it’s just rock, or just lame. The whole idea of alternative rock was that it was different right? And so I guess bands today that would have called themselves alternative are instead calling themselves indie. But that’s a whole different level of lame. And whereas what I’m thinking of when I think of alternative rock music was awesome when I was in middle school, now it’s almost like classic rock, just because it’s been around forever. I hate listening to classic rock. First of all, I hate the DJs. They just talk and talk and talk. Second of all, they never play the really good songs, they just play Hotel California and Stairway to Heaven on repeat, which would for alt rock translate to Jeremy and Machine Head on repeat, followed by really annoying commercials that always seem to last longer than the actual music.

So yeah, whatever, the random button on Wikipedia got me about two paragraphs, but I’m looking for like actual blog post material. This all started with an idea I had right before I fell asleep. Sometimes I’ll have these ideas during the day and I’ll write myself a little note on my iPhone, reminding myself of my spontaneous genius. Other times I’ll go for my iPhone, but like a two-year-old with an attention span of a jar of mayonnaise, I immediately get distracted by how awesome my phone is and then I start playing with apps and settings. But that night in bed, I was like half asleep. I thought to myself, shouldn’t you get up and try and write this down? But I was so comfortable, I was just like, nah, I’ll just write some bullshit in the morning about how I forgot about what I was going to write about.

Howdy folks

I want to start saying howdy. Howdy folks. I wonder if I just start saying it, if people will give me a reaction or not. I won’t even try to ease it in. It’ll just be like one day I’ll wake up, go to work, and when I get to work, whoever sees me first and goes, “Hey Rob,” I’ll just respond, “Howdy.” I’m picturing this playing out in my head and I’m wondering if that other person would say anything at all. Probably not. If somebody said howdy to me in the morning, I’d just think to myself in my head, well that had to be about as painful as this day is going to get, and so maybe I’d be relieved. But I’d really just be glad to be away from whoever said that to me.

Let’s say I say howdy to somebody in the morning and I don’t get a reaction. So I keep it up. I keep saying howdy to everyone I see that day. Are people going to start talking amongst themselves? “Hey, did Rob say howdy to anybody else this morning?” Or am I overinflating my already inflated sense of self, just assuming that people are even paying attention to me in the morning, let alone having side discussions about my greetings?

I have to reverse the situation again, imagining somebody else saying howdy to me. I’d totally ignore it. I’d think to myself, well, somebody sure wants a little extra attention today. And I’m not going to be the one to give it to them. But it would probably eat away at me inside. Howdy? Is that person even from Texas? Do people really say howdy in Texas or is that just something they do on TV?

Every once in a while I’ll meet somebody new and we’ll have a totally regular conversation and maybe ten or fifteen minutes into it I’ll ask, “So where are you from?” and they’ll be like, “Oh, St. Louis, Missouri” or “Dallas.” And I’m just like, what? You don’t even have what I imagine to be a Southern accent. And so I’m lead to believe that people don’t really talk like that in real life, you know with the drawl and the “Hey y’all,” and the “Howdy pardner.” Either that or the effects of national TV have finally changed all once regional accents, making everybody talk the way everybody talks on TV, which is what I just assume to be regular.

But even that’s not the case, because I live in New York but I don’t talk with the whole stereotypical New York accent. I’d try to write it out phonetically, but that’s what other people do when they’re trying to make fun of New York online, like on message boards and stuff, and I always think to myself, I don’t know anybody that talks like that in real life.

Well, even that’s only partially true. Sure I’m not personally friends with anybody who talks like they just walked off the set of the Sopranos. But I’ll run into somebody who really lays it on pretty thick every now and then. And I always think to myself, all right buddy, I get it, you’re out New Yorking me. And this is something I’m very sensitive to, because I didn’t grow up in New York City, I grew up like five miles across the Queens border on Long Island. And so it’s always this tough situation, every once in a while I’ll come across somebody who’s all about New York, born and raised NYC, much more New York than me, I never leave New York kind of New York. And what do I do, do I fight it? Do I embrace my Long Island roots?

Honestly I think all of my problems might be solved by simply incorporating howdy into my everyday vocabulary. It’ll give people a bunch of mixed messages that I won’t ever feel inclined to explain. I started this nonsense imagining everybody’s individual reactions to me saying howdy. But even if nobody said anything, even if everybody just pretended to ignore it, there would come a day weeks after I’ve started saying howdy on an individual basis where I’d walk into a room with several if not all of my coworkers, and I’d say something like, “Howdy folks. How’re y’all doing today?”

And maybe nobody would say anything. Maybe they’d be like, “Where did Rob grow up? New York? Long Island? Atlanta?” But again, I’m probably over imagining the whole thing. And really, I’m reading this back to myself, because that’s what I always do, I read it out loud to make sure it sounds natural, and I can’t get through it. I keep getting stuck on the howdy, like I just can’t get myself to say it. And maybe that’s what would happen in real life. It would just sound awful, ridiculous, and people would start to hate me.

But it’s silly to make fun of how we talk. It’s all English. And sure, it’s easy to caricature the differences, but we’re all more or less on the same page. Although it’s funny. I never met anybody who had a really Boston-like Boston accent. And I’ve seen videos of JFK talking and I’m just like, what’s wrong with that guy? Did he have a stroke or something?

Free Association

I always wanted to try a free association. To just get one word out and talk about immediately what comes to mind, and then what comes to mind from that, and so on. But I can never think about the starting point. Like what’s the first word going to be? I guess I could just pick anything, but it wouldn’t really be a free association, it would be forced, somewhat planned.

I’ll just say anything. Cars. Cars make me think of going fast. Of speeding. I’m thinking about my poor driving record. One time I got four speeding tickets in a month. It was terrible. I went to the court date for the first ticket to try and weasel my way out of the fine. I waited in the courthouse for a while until the prosecutor offered me a plea bargain: half the points, half the fine. No way, I told him. I wanted to argue this one out. The judge heard my case and then banged his gavel. Full points, full fine. “Hey wait a second, is it too late for that plea bargain?” “Yes.” Another gavel bang. “Do you really have to bang that gavel every time you finish a sentence?”

He didn’t really bang it after every sentence, but that would’ve been funny. If I were a judge that’s what I would do. I’d bang it constantly. I’d interrupt constantly. A judge’s power is totally unchecked, right? All of the groveling, all of the pleading, “Your honor,” this, “Your excellency,” that. Here you go your honor, a special judge costume and a special judge hammer. No go ahead and feel free to serve as long as you like your honor, nobody else wants to be judge. You take as much time as you want.

I remember one time I drove to Canada and I stopped right before the border to grab a sandwich or something. In a used car lot right next to the sandwich shop there was this old American muscle car for sale called “The Judge.” I knew it was called the judge because it was labeled on the back, “The Judge.” I wanted it so bad, right then and there. If I had the money at that moment there wouldn’t have been anything that could’ve stopped me. That’s why I always worry about my impulses and my decision making processes. Because even though ninety percent of the time I might have a pretty level head on my shoulders, every once in a while I’ll see something like The Judge and the next thing I know I’ll be in this random car dealership in Canada, asking them if they’d take my 2002 Hyundai Accent for an even trade, not thinking at all about insurance, not thinking at all about gas. All I’d think about is feeling fantastic.

My grandmother is a Canadian. I always felt like I’m a kindred spirit with our neighbors to the north. What is national identity? What does it mean to be American or Canadian? Canada is a different country, but what does that even mean? I live closer to the Canadian border than I do to Texas, and I definitely feel like I have a lot more in common with someone living in Montreal than someone who lives in Dallas. One part of me says it’s crazy to have a country as big as the United States, that there’s no way we can really share a national identity, that there’s too much keeping us apart, cultures, food, religion. But then another part of me argues that shouldn’t all of humanity be able to unite behind some sort of universal identity? Like we’re all human, we’re all going through the same life, let’s unite behind that.

But even though there’s me in New York, Canadians up North, and people far away in Texas, collectively, we all have tons more in common than people living in Afghanistan, drone strikes and jihad and deserts and tribes. But it can’t just be geography. There are people right here in New York, homeless people and rich people that are living wildly different experiences than mine.

One time in college I had this idea to dress up like a homeless person, beg for change for a whole day and then write an article about it for the newspaper. So I grew out a ridiculous beard and got ready, but I never followed through. Part of it was people telling me that I was crazy. Another part of it was stories I heard about the NYPD just picking up homeless people and dropping them off in homeless shelters. I also got a weird idea in my head that I might accidentally beg on some more established homeless person’s turf, and they might get confrontational. And also I get really lazy, and I wasn’t the most dedicated college student, and so I probably thought about sitting outside for the whole day and got discouraged by how bored I’d get. So I shaved my beard and walked around with a crazy mustache for a week or so, getting laughs, taking stupid pictures of myself.

I always think to myself that if I were in college now I’d take it much more seriously. But I’d probably do it the same, spending way too much time hanging out with my friends and not enough time in the library. College is this weird place where you’re supposed to study and learn stuff, but you’re only in class like twelve hours a week. I thought that college was much easier than high school. I put a fraction of the work and effort in and I got about the same grades that I did four years earlier. I mean, I’m not running my own company or anything, but I did fine. Good enough. Gave it the old college try.

We’d play this game called Edward Forty-Hands. I wrote about this already I think, but the idea was to tape two forty-ounce beers to your hands and drink them both before you could ask to have the bottles removed, so you could pee, because that’s a lot of liquid, and it’s really just you vs. your bladder with the clock as a referee. We also played this game called Power Hour where you’d set a timer and everybody drank a shot of beer every sixty seconds for an hour. It doesn’t sound like a lot but, think about it, you’d wind up drinking like six beers in an hour. In college I also drank whole beers out of a funnel.

I think it’s so funny that the drinking age is twenty-one yet parents across the country send their kids to go live away at schools where all they do is drink. It’s a big joke. Somebody thought, “I know, we’ll just up the drinking age. That’ll stop them. Those idiot kids.” But you can still buy a gun. Or smoke cigarettes. Or vote. Just no drinking. Yeah. Great idea leaders of society.

So how are you supposed to stop a free association? I feel like I could go on forever. Getting started was hard, sure, but I think shutting myself up is going to prove to be even harder. Where did I start, cars? That’s crazy. I don’t know how to end it. Oh man, I’m looking back and I just realized that I missed a perfect opportunity to wrap things up, full circle, when I was talking about drinking age and smoking age. I could have mentioned driving age, and it would have connected with cars. And I could’ve concluded that I let my mind wander and not only did I bring it right back to where I started, but I did it in exactly the amount of words that I usually use to write a blog post. That would’ve been a good ending.