Monthly Archives: November 2012

Life, death, Super Mario Bros.

I started thinking about life and death way too early in life, and it’s all because of Super Mario Bros. I remember being really little and having my mom try to explain life and death to me in a way that was mostly harmless. When you die you go to heaven. It seemed like a satisfying enough explanation at the time.

But then when I started playing video games I remember the bigger picture coming sharply into focus. Before my family had a Nintendo we just had a Gameboy. Everybody knows Nintendo’s title character Mario, and how in his first game, Super Mario Land, you run from one end of the screen to the other, jumping on bad guys, landing on platforms, eventually making it all the way across to the other side.

And playing that game really made me start thinking about death. It wasn’t when Mario got killed by an enemy or fell down a hole. That wasn’t really death. There were always one-ups to find, extra lives to spend. Even if you totally ran out, you could always just reset and start over. No, what really got to me was the timer on the top right of the screen. If you didn’t get to the end of the level by the time the clock ran out, you just dropped dead right where you stood.

Even worse, as the clock got closer to zero hour, the game kind of paused for a second, and this nervous high-anxiety music clip would play, telling you, “Shit dude, you’re almost out of time. Let’s get going, now!” And then for the rest of that level, as if to heighten the stress, everything would play in fast-motion. Like not only are you almost out of time, but the little time that you have left is going to seem like much, much less.

It sucked because, especially if you were a little kid, and you hadn’t yet mastered the hand-eye coordination necessary to make it to the end of the game, every once in a while you’d finally get past that Ancient Egypt level, to that world where there are little pixies that hop across the screen. And you just wanted to look about and enjoy it for a minute, to try and discover hidden passageways, secret coins. But you couldn’t, because if you spent too much time f’ing around, you’d run out of seconds and it would be all downhill from there.

Or even worse, those levels where you’re in a submarine or an airplane and the board kind of scrolls by itself. You just move up and down and shoot bad guys, and the map moves forward whether you like it or not. At least you can’t run out of time here, but every minute or so a wall made out of blocks comes at you from the right. And so you have to shoot a perfect path across, so when the wall finally gets to where you’re at, you can hopefully slip through the hole that you made or you get crushed. These are all pretty literally representations of time and space and life and death, and I really did understand them at some level, even though I wasn’t even ten years old. The feelings of dread that I got back then, although I’m only able to correctly label them now, they’re the same exact feelings that I get as an adult when I wake up at four in the morning short of breath, dry in the mouth, realizing that my life is this huge illusion, a blip on the cosmic map of what is and what isn’t.

I assume through stuff that I’ve read or conversations that I’ve had that some people go through their whole lives without worrying about stuff like this. Maybe these people didn’t play Super Mario Land as a little kid. Maybe it was holding this little world in my hands, in grayscale, with a very finite amount of time to complete a very simple set of objectives. And even if I did somehow manage to beat the clock, and the wall, and Tatanga, there wasn’t even a guarantee that the batteries would last to the end. We even had this expansion battery pack for our Gameboy that held like eight D batteries. Where was all of the energy getting sucked out to? Why was this thing perpetually running out of juice?

But nothing in Super Mario Land made me feel as helpless as when I’d play Super Mario 2 for the NES. Anybody who grew up in my generation remembers how, after getting through the easy, intro levels, Mario 2 got really hard. There were all of these doors and rooms and you needed specific keys to open everything up. Anyway, there were these certain keys guarded by these circular statues. They weren’t threatening at all, until you touched the key they were there to protect. Once you picked it up, these statues came to life and started flying through the air. They’d fly by once, do a little circle move, try to kill you, and then fly off screen. And they’d keep coming back, following you, terrorizing you for the rest of that level. You couldn’t kill them, you couldn’t shake them, you just had to hope and try and jump out of the way.

And I’d get these same feelings, a huge hole emerging in the depths of my stomach, a physical sensation that I was getting sucked through this hole from the inside out. And again, hindsight is key here, but it’s the same fear of death, fear of time. The knowledge that as much as I’d like to stop time or make it go away or try to get out of its line of sight, I can’t. It’s just going to keep coming. And I can’t jump on it or make it go away and one day that’s going to be it.

And as a little kid these statues would follow me after I had unplugged the Nintendo. I’d imagine them in the periphery of my vision, always far enough behind me that I couldn’t quite get a fix on their exact location, but gaining on me, picking up speed. As much as I wanted to hide away or outrun them or whatever, they were just coming at me, this slow steady pace.

Whenever I’m walking or riding my bike and I’m on a path or a long road where I can see far ahead of me and far behind me, I always get that same sensation, like I’m Super Mario and I’m on the one of those linear levels, and I can see in front of me, all the way toward the end of the path, and I see where I’m at, somewhere, and I’ll look behind to where the road meets at the horizon and I always feel like I can see those same statues moving towards me, far away for now but moving in, closer and closer, steady as she goes and coming at you fast.

The burdens of being just slightly taller than most other people

I’m tall, but I’m not that tall. I always like to talk about how tall I am, specifically because without me constantly mentioning it, nobody else would. And so I’m writing this to serve exactly that purpose. I’m usually the tallest person in the room. But barely. Which is why I really wish I were like three or four inches taller, to really stand out, to really drive home the point that, hello world, I’m pretty tall.

But I’m not taller than everyone, and I get really pissed off when I find myself in a situation where I’m in the same room as somebody who’s clearly taller than me. And they’re all just standing there, like it’s no big deal. And I’ll hear somebody else whisper to another person, “Who is really tall guy over there? I wonder how tall he is.” And I get so angry, because I realize that this person isn’t whispering to somebody else, but they’re whispering to me, telling me to look at how tall that tall guy is. If you’re going to faun over how tall somebody is, and it’s not me, just do me a favor and try telling somebody significantly shorter. Don’t come over to me and rub it in my face about how now I’m the second tallest person in the room.

Every now and then I’ll be on the subway and some really tall guy will walk on the same car that I’m riding. I’m just tall enough that, if I’m standing in the doorway, my head barely touches the top of the car. There’s like maybe a centimeter of space. So it’s perfect. I feel like it was built specifically for me. But then this taller guy comes on and he’s really having a hard time finding a spot to stand, and he can’t, so eventually he’s just kind of crouching, or bending his head uncomfortably, and everyone’s looking at him like, man, that guy is so tall. And nobody is looking at me anymore, noticing how tall I am, but not too tall, just the right height for this train. A few times when something like this has happened I try to find an even more uncomfortable spot for myself, like right at the end of the car, on some of the older trains, there’s like a utility box that juts out from the side. So I’ll stand right under that to try to draw attention to myself, like, look at me, I’m crouching too everyone. But I feel like I just look like an idiot.

I have this little trick to put taller people in their places. But it only works in certain situations. I have to be in a group of people and one of the other people has to be taller than me. But they can’t be too much taller than me, like only two or three inches, tops. And then somebody else has to ask that guy, in front of the group, “Just how tall are you?” And then I have to maintain my composure, not betray the fact that behind my calm exterior I’m practically boiling over with rage. And then somebody else in the group has to look at me, think, well, Rob’s kind of tall, or at least, I always thought he was kind of tall, until I met this much taller person, and, assuming everyone else is thinking the same thing, I’ll ask an open question to Rob, like, “Hey Rob, how about you? How tall are you?”

So yeah, that’s a highly unlikely series of actions to happen all in a row. But if it does happen, I’m ready. I give my height, but I subtract two or three inches. And people are just like, “Really? That’s it?” and they’ll all act confused, thinking that I had to be a little bit taller. But they’re also glad, happy that I’ve been humbled, taken down a peg or two. And you might think that my plan would have backfired, that now I seem even shorter than before. But after a second or two, somebody else in the group will address the tall guy and say, “But wait a second. If Rob’s only that tall, and you’re only two or three inches taller than Rob then …”

Bingo. Then either that guy was exaggerating his height or I must be taller than how tall I said I was. And both of these possibilities will go through everyone’s head, and even if they don’t consciously attach themselves to one of these opinions, they’ll both be there, and so in the back of everybody’s mind, I’ll come out as taller while this other guy will come across as too tall, or trying too hard to be too tall. Whereas I’ll be humbler, bigger in my being slightly shorter.

I wish it were acceptable for guys to wear high-heels. I wish there were some sort of a shin implant, where I could surgically make my legs even longer. I wish I had a shrink ray, so I could zap anybody I see that’s taller than me.

The economics of sitting down

I wish I could be a taxi driver. It seems like the best job in the world. I love to drive, I love listening to music, so on paper anyway, it just seems perfect. But then I think about the physical toll sitting down all day would take on my body. Every once in a while I’ll drive upstate, to Massachusetts. It’s like a three hour drive. Recently I drove up to Buffalo. That was close to six hours. It was a long, long time sitting down. My lower back hurt so much by the time I finally got to the hotel. I went to the gym to see if I couldn’t run it off, but I couldn’t. It was like I actually injured myself just sitting down.

But I wonder, if I were a full-time taxi driver, would those lower back muscles strengthen up? Maybe I’d get really good at it, but then all of my other muscles, the muscles I usually use for walking and stuff, they’d start to atrophy. And I’d just be stuck, sitting.

And traffic. When I drove up to Buffalo, the majority of the trip was spent simply trying to get out of the city. It’s the worst. Every once in a while I’ll think, maybe I should buy a car. It could really come in handy. But then I’ll get stuck in an epic traffic jam and I realize that this city is no place for driving.

Except for taxi drivers. That’s got to be the best, being a taxi driver who gets stuck in traffic. It’s like if you’re an office worker and the power goes out. You just sit there and hang out, right? It’s not like anybody can get any office work done nowadays without computers. And you still get paid, right? I guess, for a taxi driver, getting stuck in traffic all depends on if you have a passenger before you get stuck. Because once they’re inside the meter keeps running. Sure it’s a little slower if you’re at a dead stop, but whatever, a paid break is a paid break.

Recently my brother and I took a cab home from somewhere and for whatever reason the driver got on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a notorious parking lot. Sure enough, we get on and it’s just bumper to bumper, nobody moving. This driver was loving it. We sat in there for like half an hour before we finally insisted on getting out right there and walking towards the nearest exit. The driver was like, “You can’t just get out of the cab here.” But we did. And we beat every single car to the nearest exit. It was terrible though. We still had to pay like thirty bucks, then walk to the subway, then wait for the subway. The whole point of not taking the subway was to get home quick.

But whatever, every once in a while you have to pay the idiot tax. That’s what I call it when you just lose money for no other reason than making idiot decisions. Like going to Atlantic City for the weekend and losing hundreds of dollars playing Texas Hold ‘Em. Great idea Rob, you thought you’d just walk up to a table of card players and win? I only played two hands and lost everything.

But that wasn’t the idiot tax for that trip. The idiot tax was when I decided to go to the ATM and win a little back playing Blackjack. I’m telling you, twenty-five dollars a hand. Lose. Lose. Lose. Lose. Nice playing with you sir. And that was only part one of the idiot tax. Part two was taking another hundred bucks out and hoping I could instantly win it back on one round of roulette. Nope. It’s like if you get caught urinating in public. The idiot tax.

I don’t know, maybe I wouldn’t be a great cab driver. Any job where you have to rely on tips is always going to be disheartening, because tipping is optional, and given the option, some people will always be like, nope, no tip.

Maybe if somebody invented a taxi where you could stand up while driving. That would be so much better actually. Why aren’t all cars designed this way? Scientists are always wagging their fingers at us, telling us that we’re all getting so fat because our bodies aren’t meant to be living such sedentary lifestyles. So make all cars standing room only. As a bonus, you’d be able to fit a lot more people inside. Airplanes also. And movie theaters. We should just eliminate seats all together, so everybody has to stand all the time.

And I’m not talking about rickshaws either. That probably wouldn’t be the best job. I’m sure lugging people around like that has got to be grueling. And you don’t stand a chance against a car. I mean, if you get into an accident with a car, you’re dead. Unless everybody had rickshaws. Then that wouldn’t be so bad. But wait a second, if everybody is standing up, then what’s the point of a rickshaw? Because they’d be standing up also. And since they’re already standing, they might as well be walking, because that’s what the drivers are doing. I guess if everybody stood up, everybody would go out of business. Can you imagine how long that line would be at the unemployment office?

The cure

What if scientists found the cure to obesity? But there’s a catch. You’d lose weight all right – almost all of it. You’d only be able to maintain a body weight that could, at a bare minimum, just nominally keep you alive. You’d look like you were starving. People would come up to you off the streets and be like, “Hey Mister, are you OK? Can I buy you a sandwich? Please?” And you’d feel fine, I mean, you’d feel as fine as somebody could who barely had anything protecting their insides other than a thin layer of skin. But would it be wroth it? Would you take that medication? I personally love free sandwiches, but I mean that’s still a pretty big decision to make.

Or what if this magical weight loss formula only worked depending on how much weight you currently carried? Like if you were three hundred pounds overweight, you’d go in for the treatment, and you’d come out looking way too skinny, like almost dead. But if you were only fifty pounds overweight, you’d only lose some of the weight, not all of it. And so people would try to find that sweet spot, that weird weight where, if you weighted exactly X amount of pounds, and went in for the surgery, you’d come out looking fine.

What if this stuff wasn’t just for obesity? What about depression? Would you rather be so morbidly depressed, unable to even get out of bed, ever, or would you rather my hypothetical cure? The cure would be that you’d constantly be so happy, that you’d be laughing uncontrollably, all the time. You wouldn’t be able to stop. Maybe if you tried really hard, like worked at holding in the laughter as hard as you could, you’d be able to pause it, but only for a second. Because as soon as you got yourself under control you’d remember something funny you read on some guy’s funny-business blog and you’d start laughing again.

Allergic to peanuts? That sucks. Peanuts are awesome. But you know what’s even worse? Being allergic to everything in the world except peanuts. Once I get rich I’m going to funnel trillions of dollars into a drug company to make a medication that does exactly that: cures people of their peanut allergies but makes it so they have to only eat peanuts for the rest of their life. And I’m serious with the “only peanuts” business. Like not even any salt. Just plain unsalted peanuts. And after a day I’d go visit the people who signed up for my drug trials and I’d lecture them, “Well, was it all worth it? Isn’t this what you’ve always wanted, to be able to eat peanuts?” And they’d cry and beg for the antidote, and I’d say, “You fools! There is no antidote! Bwahahah!” and they’d try cry and scream, but they wouldn’t be able to because, think about it, imagine that feeling you get after eating a whole spoonful of peanut butter. It’s like cement in your mouth. That’s what these people would be dealing with forever.

Hair loss is such a common problem among men. So common that you would have thought some genius pharmaceutical researcher ought to have come up with a solution by now. I think you can all guess where this one is headed: a topical solution that, when applied to the head, causes hair to fill in all the bald spots. But it doesn’t stop there. It fills in every single spot on your body where there isn’t any hair with thick, dark locks. It gets better. For all of the places where there was hair, those hairs fall off. So you just see these guys that look like giant apes, except for bald lines where their eyebrows were and weird hairless patches on the sides and back of their heads. The effect would be even more pronounced on guys who had hairy arms or hairy backs. They’d look like a bunch of freaks.

I could do this forever. Not sure about Viagra? I’ll invent a pill that’ll give men permanent erections. How about restless leg syndrome? My treatment gives a lasting rest to your poor legs, but the rest of your body starts gyrating uncontrollably. Guess what my insomnia pills do? They do the exact opposite of what my narcolepsy pills do. What about an osteoporosis procedure that makes your bones so healthy and so strong that you can’t even lift them, in fact, they’re so heavy they fall right out of your body as soon as the therapy is done? Maybe that last one was a little too much …

Strep throat sucks. It’s a good thing that I didn’t invent penicillin first, because if I did, it would cure your sore throat but give strep to everything else. Can you imagine how painful strep hand has to be? Or strep face?

Jesus, I can’t believe I got a whole blog post out of this. You’re welcome/I’m sorry.

Stuck in the elevator with five guys and one pizza

Last week I got stuck in an elevator with five other people. Luckily, one of them happened to be a pizza delivery guy and, you guessed it, he still had his pizza that he was supposed to be delivering after he got off the elevator. I immediately told the group that this pizza represented our only chance at survival if this elevator remained trapped for an extended period of time. The pizza delivery guy tried to brush me off, “Let’s just hold on for a second,” while somebody else tried pressing some of those emergency buttons on the wall.

The buttons didn’t do anything. I’ve always had the suspicion that most elevators just have a bunch of fake buttons to keep people from freaking out. It’s the same thing with those rounded mirrors in the top corners. You think there are any cameras behind there? There aren’t. The only reasonable explanation for those mirrors is so you can check everyone else riding in the elevator at the same time as you. And for real, that’s not a serious explanation. It’s just a trick, just like the fake buttons.

One of the buttons worked, the one that rang that alarm bell. But it was a real bell, and it was definitely attached to the elevator that we were stuck in, so I told the guy to stop pressing it, because it was super annoying. He protested, arguing that somebody outside would hear the ringing and call for help.

“Call who? Who are they going to call?” I was getting impatient. “You’re just like one of those idiots who starts blaring their horn in bumper to bumper traffic. There’s absolutely nothing to be done about the situation except annoy everyone else with a really loud noise. Sounds like a great plan. Now can we please get back to this pizza while it’s still hot?”

I saw the pizza guy pull in his box a little tighter. What kind of a pizza place sends out its pies without one of those thermal bags? It must be that place right down the corner. Which led me to another question. Who the hell would order delivery from one block away? That’s just really lazy. Come on, take a five minute break, stretch your legs. You’ll save money on the tip. No, whoever took the time to make an actual phone call to a pizza place right downstairs, asking them if they’d send up an employee to deliver their pizza, they probably wouldn’t be worrying about a tip anyway.

But that was beside the point. It’s actually a good thing that someone was lazy enough to call, because otherwise I wouldn’t be in here with this pizza. But then again, if that person had just gone downstairs, maybe I’d have had to wait for an additional elevator, because I’m a gentleman and I always insist on holding the doors open for everyone else, and then I wouldn’t be stuck, someone else would. I’d be stuck upstairs for a few minutes, waiting for an elevator that wouldn’t be coming, but I wouldn’t be literally trapped, like I was right then, I would have given up eventually and taken the stairs.

But no thermal bag? That’s a shame. We could have all waited half an hour, forty five minutes, tops, before we had to address the food situation. “Just back off, all right buddy?” the pizza guy warned me. Please, don’t warn me. What’s a warning going to do in a situation with six people stuck in a tiny elevator?

“Here’s how it’s going to go,” I announced. “We each get one slice, while it’s hot. It’s the only fair way.”

Because who likes to eat cold pizza? I do. I actually like cold pizza. I don’t prefer it over hot pizza, but it’s still good. I don’t like my pizza to be piping hot, but just you know, five, five to seven minutes out of the oven. But room temperature pizza is great too. I’ll even eat it cold out of the fridge. I’ll even eat a frozen pizza out of the freezer. I’ve never done it, but I could. I could just let it thaw until it was room temperature. Or I could just chomp on it still frozen, just biting and swallowing.

That wouldn’t be ideal, but I could make it happen in an emergency. And that’s what this was, an emergency. I was pressing the pizza issue under the guise of its temperature, but I was really just trying to force everyone’s hand, make a move, right now, for the first round of pizza. I’d make it out to be like we’d divide it, evenly, and that everybody would get to either eat their slice right away, or save it for later. I was counting on the fact that most people weren’t currently dying for a slice of pizza. Hell, I wasn’t even that hungry. I just ate like five tacos.

But I’d eat my slice right away, thereby starting at an advantage of an even fuller stomach than everyone else. If we were really stuck in there for a while, everyone else would probably wisely save their slice for when they got really hungry. And in that situation, I’d think about the two extra slices in that box. Because there are only six of us, but eight slices of pizza, seven if you discount the slice that I was planning on having eaten immediately.

Then when everybody else finally broke down and went for their rations, I’d protest, “Come on! There are two perfectly good slices right there. I deserve one. I finished my slice yesterday. I didn’t think we’d be in here this long. You can’t all just eat pizza while I’m starving. I’ll go crazy. I won’t allow it!”

And people would tell me stuff like, “Well, you shouldn’t have eaten your slice right away. In fact, you were the one who told us we should eat our slices when we wanted to.” And that would just drive me into a rage. I’d start the craziest confined quarter temper tantrum until somebody said something like, “Fine, just give it to him. Jesus.” And that way I’d get two slices.

But eventually there’d be the issue of that last slice of pizza. I thought, I’ll probably have to wait to make a move, but I could press it a little faster if I could insist that we didn’t have too much time before it spoiled. In which case I’d insist on a lottery for the last slice. It would be silly to try and divide the last piece. First of all, nobody had a knife. It would be a mess. Secondly, there’s no way one sixth of a slice of pizza is going to satisfy anybody’s hunger. Better to give it away to one person.

Of course I’d rig the results. But everyone would be so famished, delusional with hunger, that they wouldn’t be paying attention to me fixing the contest. Only I would have my wits about me, because I’d have two slices of pizza digesting in my stomach, buying me just enough time to outwit everyone else. I’d win, I’d grab the slice, and then I’d have eaten three slices. That’s how you do it. That’s called making the best of a bad situation.

But actually, that plan wasn’t really the best. There was a whole pie there that I could have had all to myself. I immediately shifted my plan, which was tough, because I had already made such a big deal about us being stuck in there for potentially forever. But now I was all like, “You know what? I’m actually pretty sure I hear people working on the elevator. We should be out of here in twenty minutes, tops.” It only takes me twenty minutes to eat a whole pizza. Ask anybody. “So, wait a second,” I continued, “I actually ordered a pizza. I think that’s for me. Going up, right? Yeah, totally my pizza. So why don’t we just settle up right now, if you don’t mind, this is my lunch break, and I’m afraid my bosses won’t let me take an extra lunch break, because I always pull the broken elevator routine and, well, you guys know how it is, right? Here you go.”

The guy protested, but I was way more aggressive. I shoved a twenty in his face and grabbed the box. As I got into my third slice, I thought, this is awesome. I’m like a king here. I’ll out-survive everybody else in this elevator. But then the doors cracked open. It was two guys with some crowbars.

“Jesus!” the one guy said, “Why didn’t anybody press the alarm button? You know that’s the only way people know to call for a crew, right?”

And everybody filed out and I was stuck with a totally not so hot pizza that I paid for. My next trick was going to be getting my twenty bucks back after I had eaten the pizza, but I guess that wasn’t going to happen. And then I went up to work, I felt so sick from eating the whole pie, and my boss was like, “Rob! What the hell? You can’t just disappear for half an hour at a time! And to think I ordered you a pizza for doing such a great job. Good thing that idiot delivery boy didn’t even show up. I called up the pizza shop and apparently nobody in your generation knows how to work, because he took the day off also. I hope they fired that good for nothing piece of …”

And I just had to sit there and take it, because I had already pulled the stuck in the elevator excuse last week. That’s an excuse you can’t roll out too frequently, because the first time, the boss just thinks, that sucks, but the second time, in a week, he starts complaining to the super, “What’s with the elevator breaking down twice this week?” and the super looks at him and goes, “Twice?”