Yearly Archives: 2012

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.

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?