Monthly Archives: February 2013

The Milano: An Ode to Pepperidge Farm

I bought a bag of Milano cookies on a whim the other day at the grocery store. This is totally unlike me. I never buy cookies. Not usually. If I’m going to buy something sweet, it’s always ice cream. But store bought cookies? I can safely say that I’ve never bought store bought cookies in my entire life. Well, I used to be able to safely say that. Now it’s not true anymore. Now I can’t even say that I’ve only bought store bought cookies once. But I’ll get to that.

I brought my groceries home, started unpacking everything, and when I saw this bag there I just kind of made this puzzled face, kind of scratched my head a little, thinking, “Milanos? What inspired me to pick up a bag of Pepperidge Farm Milanos?” I didn’t even know where to put them, like, there’s no specific drawer or kitchen cabinet where I felt they naturally belonged. So I just kind of pushed them to the side.

As the days passed, every now and then I’d look over at the bag and just kind of laugh to myself, ha, talk about random, Milanos. And I never got the urge to eat any. Not once did I look longingly at the bag and think, man, I’d love to just go to town on that sack of Milanos.

But then I had three days off from work. I’m a restaurant worker, and so my days off don’t always coincide with the rest of the world’s days off. Add to those days off a severe three day long cold snap and I found myself with all the right excuses to spend seventy-two hours completely holed up inside. I didn’t want anything to do with the outside world.

I had enough groceries for a while. I ate all of the eggs in the fridge, most of the canned goods. But by day three supplies were dwindling. I felt bad calling out for delivery; the only reason I hadn’t gone out was because it was so cold, like single-digits cold, so cold that I couldn’t bear to be outside myself for more than two minutes. How could I possibly call up a restaurant and force them to send somebody out on a bike to bring food to my house? It’s always awkward, when it’s pouring rain, when it’s freezing cold, and you get a knock on the door and it’s some delivery guy, shivering, soaking wet, “Thanks a lot boss! Here’s three dollars!”

There were like three containers of leftovers in the fridge that, when combined, almost made up a whole plate of food. I microwaved the whole dish hoping that it would be enough to satisfy my hunger. It wasn’t. I started getting desperate, looking through the cupboards, nothing. At last I turned my head to that far spot on the counter. The Milanos.

“Maybe I’m not hungry,” I tried convincing myself, “maybe I only need a little dessert, something to wrap up the meal, take my mind off the hunger.” I opened the bag cautiously. Why cautiously? Because I know myself with sweets. If I really like sweets, it won’t even be a slippery slope, it’ll be a precipitous drop, zero to sixty. That bag wouldn’t stand a chance. I reached in for a cookie.

I hadn’t had a Milano in so long, I had all but forgotten what it felt like to sink my front teeth into those perfectly crisp golden wafers. How do they get the cookies to have just the perfect amount of crunch? I looked on the bag for what I assumed had to be an ingredient list jammed with preservatives and chemicals. But nothing. “Baked with no artificial flavors or preservatives,” it read right on the packaging. And then I started reading the rest of the bag. Each side had a different story. One of them started out, “Ahh … yes. The Milano.”

And I just pictured myself sitting on a plush velvet couch, draped in nothing but silk robes, the very definition of pleasure and comfort. And I’m covered in cookie crumbs, those little paper dividers keeping one level of Milanos separate from the other, they’re everywhere. And I’m getting anxious, I’m worried that I’ve done it, that I’ve exhausted my supply of Milano cookies. But I’m so fat from spending God knows how long sitting on that ridiculously comfortable couch … did I say velvet? It’s actually a suede couch. Even more comfortable. And I’m rolling around from side to side, throwing wrappers in the air when, finally, thank God, a full box, unopened, and I hold it up in front of me and whisper, “Ahh … yes. The Milano!”

And by the time I was done with my Milano induced daydream, I realized that I had eaten the entire box. I couldn’t believe it. The ultimate Pepperidge Farm binge. And I had only gotten through one side of the box. I needed more. More Milano.

I got up and sprinted toward the grocery store. To hell with the cold. I didn’t care if I hadn’t brushed my teeth yet, if I was still wearing pajama bottoms. I headed right to the cookie aisle and grabbed as many Milanos as I could fit into the basket. “Excuse me,” I grabbed some clerk’s attention, “Do you guys sell Milanos in bulk?” They didn’t. No time to get to Costco.

From the other side of the box, “Entertain inspirations. Embrace decadent cravings. Reward yourself. Open … Taste … Delight.” Yes, yes, yes! I felt like everything I’ve been looking for in life, the questioning, the search for answers, for meaning … it had all been right here, this Milano bag. These cookies have changed my life. I don’t need anything else. I don’t want anything else. Or anybody. I don’t care what I look like or what anybody thinks of me. As long as I have my Milanos. I’ll never run out of ideas for things to write about ever again. It’s going to be all about Milanos, every day. Thank you Pepperidge Farm.

Getting philosophical

A couple of years ago I tried to be all smart and sophisticated so I downloaded all of the works of Plato onto my Kindle. And I sat there and read for a little while, and I tried really hard, to furrow my brow, to give off the image of a man thinking, really thinking, like a deep serious thinking. After a while I realized that I didn’t need to try that hard, because the text was so complicated that I really didn’t have to put any effort into looking confused, my brow was actually furrowing naturally. This went on for like twenty minutes, and then I started getting bored. I really wanted somebody to come in the room and be like, “Wow, Rob, you really look like you’re working on something pretty tough, what is it?” and I’d say, “Oh, you know, just Plato, just brushing up on some Plato.”

But nobody saw me. My wife walked by, but she didn’t ask what I was reading. And after her sitting across from me for like five minutes, I finally said, “Hey, don’t you want to know what I’m reading?” and she said, “No, not really.”

And then I told myself I’d take a five minute break, let all of that philosophy sink in. But that was it. That was the last time I opened that. I read for like twenty minutes and the progress bar at the bottom of the Kindle hadn’t even moved up one percent. There’s no way I was going to get through any of that.

I took some philosophy classes in college. All prerequisite stuff. It was all really tough, not the class, but the assignments. “Go home from class, ignore all of your friends playing Super Smash Brothers down the hall, close the door to your room and read seventy-five pages of Descartes.” Actually, that was pretty much my entire college education, choosing between going to the library or staying in and watching The Boondock Saints with everybody in the dorm. No thanks. I’ll just take a B please.

Every once in a while I’ll read an article or book about a famous person, a writer, Abraham Lincoln, somebody accomplished. When writing about how smart somebody is, the word to use is devour. This person devoured books and newspapers. They devoured Plato.

Besides being an overused word, devour never connected with me. I like reading, but devouring the classics? Being able to not only read an old book, but to sit there and be unable to pull myself away from the page? That’s something that I don’t have inside. One time a couple of years ago I downloaded a bunch of old books. I started with Crime and Punishment. After spending an hour just trying to get through the first ten pages, I realized the enormity of the challenge ahead. Still, I pressed on. I wanted to prove to myself that I could finish one giant old book. It took me forever, but finally I did it.

And then I looked at all of the other giant books I had downloaded, War and Peace, Moby Dick, Infinite Jest, not to mention all of that unread Plato. There’s no way. I just can’t get myself to be engaged. And these are all recognized masterpieces, right? What’s missing from my life, what does somebody else have inside of them, to be so engaged in a book that, right now, I can’t sit through for even ten minutes? I want to be able to feel like that too.

I’d probably have to have no electricity, I’d have to live by myself somewhere with nothing else to do. But that can’t be all of it. There are people out there who study this stuff. They have to like it. What are they getting that I’m not? What am I doing wrong?

And then I think about the word devour again. And the only thing I can think of that comes close to applying in my life are comic books. For a good eight years, from high school through college and a couple of years after, I read comic books religiously. I would buy basically every single comic book that came out each Wednesday. And yeah, I guess you could say I devoured them.

I had to stop eventually. My collection grew to be way to big, like I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do with all of my old comics. They’re taking up space. Everybody thinks that comics have some sort of collectible value, but I don’t buy that at all. If I go to a comic store and buy an issue, it’s going to be the same copy of the same issue that you can find numerous printings of in any comic store across the country. It’s simple supply and demand. All of the old comics are valuable simply because, at the time, nobody hung on to their old books. And so the first appearance of Superman is really valuable just because there are only like ten copies left.

But modern books? Every fanboy in the world keeps his or her comics sealed away in plastic bags. There’s no chance of anything becoming rare or vintage, unless the publishers decide to restrict the supply. And why would they? They’d sell less comics.

I don’t even know what I’m talking about. It’s probably because I never paid attention during philosophy class. It hurts too much to really think about what all of those old Greek guys were talking about. Like Plato comparing the soul to a charioteer trying to handle two horses. Or Nietzsche imagining staring into the abyss. Please. I don’t even know what any of that stuff means. When somebody writes my biography, it’s just going to be photocopied reprints, the Infinity Gauntlet and the Squadron Supreme and the Secret Wars and Maximum Clonage and the Age of Apocalypse and the Crisis on Infinite Earths. And nobody’s going to buy it. Or even write it. They’re all already written.

I want to be better

I wish I were better at guitar. I’ve been playing since I was in the ninth grade, but my skill level never really developed past decent chord strumming and very basic finger picking. It’s a combination of reasons, really. Lack of natural talent, sure. I’d never describe myself as a natural. But that’s not everything. I’m a firm believer that practice, practice, practice can overcome any built-in limitations. And over the course of my fourteen year history with the instrument, yeah, I’ve picked it up at sometimes regular intervals and worked on stuff, songs and techniques. There’s been some improvement. But I should have been able to learn all of my accumulated skill in a fraction of the time, a year really. I love playing but I get so frustrated whenever I spend too much time making stupid mistakes, not really getting my fingers to do what I know they should be doing.

I wish I could slam-dunk. I’m tall enough where you’d think just by looking at me that I could totally slam-dunk. And I can’t. I can’t even palm a basketball, but my hands are gigantic. Yeah I can jump and get my hands over the rim, but there’s just something missing. I can run. I can jump. I can hold a ball. Why can’t I slam-dunk? A few times in my life I’ve stood right under the basketball and jumped really, really hard, holding the ball in both hands, and sort of touching the rim as the ball went in. Slam-dunk? I’d say yes, but really, no. It gets me nuts when I see people significantly shorter than me fly off the ground and dunk it in.

Snowboarding. I’ve been snowboarding like five times and I could never get the hang of it. Little kids can snowboard. Every fifteen year old can snowboard. Why can’t I get the hang of it? At this point I don’t even try anymore. If I’m going to spend three hours in a car and sixty bucks on a lift ticket, I’m not going to waste my day falling down the mountain. I’ve gotten to the point where I just tell myself that I like skiing better. And I guess I do. But I’m not even that great a skier. I just kind of go, it’s automatic. I’m not doing all of those crazy controlled back-and-forths like all of the real skiers do. And then when I’m going down, a whole group of snowboarders will zoom past and I’m just like, how the hell?

Drawing. Illustration. I’ve been basically drawing the same picture of Spider-Man over and over again since I was in the second grade. Which sucks, because when I’m presented with a pencil and blank sheet of paper, I get a really strong feeling inside, all of the potential, the possibilities for creative expression. But I can never come up with anything interesting to draw. I can do a pretty decent still life, but that’s just pure technique, strictly an ability to replicate what I see in front of me. I’ve taken drawing classes. I’ve gotten pretty good at faces, features. But hands, fingers, proportions. It’s all so hit or miss.

Poker. Every time I try to play poker I make an idiot out of myself. I know the rules. I’m a fairly intelligent guy. Why can’t I develop some sort of winning strategy? Not even a winning strategy. Why can’t I develop some sort of a non-losing strategy?

Pumpkin carving. I hate how, every fall, I go online and see all of these photos of ridiculously intricate pumpkin carvings. One time I tried following a pattern of something that I found online and there was no way. I’d get that knife in and I didn’t even think about the angle at which I was cutting. And then making a sharp point? Or a nice round curve? It looked terrible.

Viennese pastry cooking. Holy shit. I found this cookbook in my mom’s kitchen called The Cooking of Vienna’s Empire. And I know my way around a kitchen. But I picked what I thought looked like the easiest recipe, a sachertorte. It was a disaster. Getting the layers of cake from one pan to another. The raspberry jelly tasted like industrial glue. Why can’t I make a decent cake? These things aren’t outside of the realm of human possibility.

Knife sharpening. There has to be a way to keep your knives sharp without taking them for a professional sharpening every month. I have like two of those stones, one of those long sharpening rods. I think they have to be just for show, just a way to get people to spend money at kitchen-good stores. I’ll sharpen back and forth, slowly and deliberately for like fifteen minutes, and then I’ll go to slice something and the blade slips and cuts my finger.

Wound management. Whenever I cut myself, I never clean it just right. Like I’ll wash it out, but then I won’t let it dry enough, or I’m not putting enough pressure on it, elevating it just right, but it keeps bleeding, and then I add too much Neosporin so the band-aid doesn’t stick, it falls off when I’m at work, and then somebody finds a band-aid in their soup. Or the band-aid sticks too well, like I keep it on for days, and then when I finally peel it off the skin is all white and sickly looking.

Man, I just wish I were better at things.

Delta Airlines: You Suck

I’ve got a bone to pick. It’s with Delta Airlines. I’ve put this off for way too long, almost two years now, almost no chance at receiving any restitution, but I figure what the hell, I’ve got a story to tell at least. It all started in 1984 when my mother gave birth to a beautiful little me.

OK, seriously, my wife and I were living in Ecuador, serving in the Peace Corps, and come time to end our service, the US government gave us the option of buying us a ticket back to New York or giving us some money and allowing us to shop for ourselves. “As long as it’s an American airline,” the government said, “and you have to pinky swear.”

We took the cash and booked a flight out of Guayaquil for a pretty reasonable price. Whatever. Airline tickets are a huge scam anyway. Did you know the price you find on the Internet all depends on where you’re searching from and what kind of operating system you use? (Yeah, it’s kind of an Internet rumor, but I’m presenting it as fact here, and look, here’s a link I found from some web site I’ve never heard of before substantiating my almost baseless claim.) We found a good deal from Delta and we went with it.

It was a really numb, emotionally taxing day and a half. There were too many thoughts and feelings to process. We sat there in the Guayaquil international terminal just ready to be away, back somewhere, somewhere not so in between, you know, that hollow feeling you only really get in an airport, that delayed sense of not going anywhere, not yet, but not really remembering having been anywhere else. Wow, I’m so deep.

Anyway, it would be stupid of me to sit here and write out all the ways that everybody already knows why they hate airplane travel, the lines, the waiting, the more lines, the security, the pat downs, the random screening, the taking your laptop out and putting it in a separate bin, the buying a bottle of water for six dollars right before security and then security telling you that, sorry, you can’t bring that bottle of water past the checkpoint, that you can spend another six dollars on the other side. Just, please, it’s so fucking annoying. I’m getting actually upset just imagining it enough to write about it.

And even on my best of flying experiences, you get to your terminal, finally, and the plane is never going to leave when it says it is. Boarding always takes way too long. Much longer than you’re expecting. And taxiing. And then sitting on the tarmac forever. And then finally taking off. That’s best-case.

When things go wrong though, they don’t tell you about it all at once. No, that would be too painless. Annoying, sure, but let’s see if we can’t take this situation and stretch it out past the limits of human suffering. OK, yeah, that’s a stretch. But it was a colorful sentence. I’m sure AIDS and cancer are much more of a cause of human suffering that a layover. But just indulge me.

They just keep you there in the terminal for a little bit longer. Maybe an hour. Maybe two. And then maybe they’ll actually start boarding, pretending like some sort of progress is being made. But then, no, OK, actually we’re all going to have to do a reverse boarding, and then what’s the problem exactly? But every passenger is asking that same question, “What’s the problem? When are we going to New York?” and so clearly those people aren’t satisfied with their answers, so why add to the chorus of discontent?

That’s what happened to us. We sat around, all afternoon, all night. Pretty soon the airport started to shut down. I didn’t even know airports closed. Deltas wouldn’t tell us anything. When the flight was going to leave. How long we were supposed to just sit there waiting. They made us feel even more like cattle, more even than the regular plane traveler does who hasn’t had a huge delay.

Other passengers weren’t as patient as we were. One lady had an actual rage fit that lead to convulsions and her being sent away in a wheel chair. At least she got to sit. We were on the cold tile floor. Delta promised to try to find us hotels. Mission not accomplished. Some buses arrived eventually, but lacking that killer instinct to push aside fellow human beings in the name of looking out for numero uno, the buses left full, us still trying to find a comfortably clean spot on that vast airport floor.

It’s a good thing we didn’t get on that bus. It turned out not to be a hotel, but a brothel. Honest mistake. There are lots of brothels in Ecuador. Could have happened to anyone. More yelling. More convulsions. More wheelchairs. Finally, just when a riot was all but certain to foment, Delta tells us that, sorry, the plane is broken. A new plane will be coming in from New York. Eventually. At some point in the future. Definitely not tonight.

They never got us hotels. I literally spent the night squirming on the floor, falling asleep every ten minutes but waking up ten minutes later, some arm or leg deprived of circulation, screaming pins and needles for some blood. It was one of the worst nights ever. You ever pull an all nighter? You know how, when you wake up in the morning after a good night’s sleep, your breath is terrible, you need to brush your teeth? But without sleep, it’s worse, you can kind of feel it coming on gradually, the bad taste, the grime accumulating on your molars.

Understanding of our discomfort, Delta promised us four hundred dollars each in compensation. That was really nice of them. I’d endure a night of suffering for four hundred dollars, totally. And so everything looked like it would work out. We got on a flight the next day and eventually made it back to the States, where I resumed my ambitious career waiting tables and started this blog where I write a bunch of nonsense every day.

Oh yeah, but that four hundred dollars? What Delta secretly meant was, “We’re going to tell you four hundred each, to shut you up for the night, but when you get back to the US, it’s actually going to turn into one hundred each. And it’s not going to be real money, it’s going to be Delta Dollars,” or whatever stupid bullshit name some brilliant marketing whiz came up with to label its “store credit only” policy.

Sorry! And your compensation for the shittiest flying experience ever is … even more bullshit, but only a fraction of the bullshit that we promised. Fuck you Delta. I wrote email after email, vowing to myself and to the Internet that I would not accept the one hundred dollar voucher, that I was promised four hundred dollars by several Delta employees and that I had better get four hundred dollars. But nothing. This went on for months.

Finally I had to fly somewhere and I clenched my teeth, swallowed hard, and cashed in my one hundred dollar bonus. But that’s it. Delta, you have lost a customer for life. The next time I have to fly, anywhere, and you guys pop up as the cheapest option, I’m going to pay more, I’ll pay that extra hundred, two hundred, three hundred dollars, just to give myself the satisfaction of knowing that I’ll never give you so much as another cent ever in my life. I have never wished the demise of a company more than I hope you guys go belly up out of business. You are everything that’s wrong with America, its bloat, its arrogance.

We went back to Ecuador last summer. There was a problem with the return flight. But LAN Ecuador, our carrier for that trip, immediately put us up for the night in a really nice hotel, they paid us something like four hundred dollars each, cash, they gave us food, they said sorry, they valued our business, and they meant it.

I’ve made a big to-do about getting to my point here, but it’s this: Delta, you are the worst airline in the history of aviation, of transportation. I hate you. I’d rather have flown TWA Flight 800. I’ll never fly you again. I promise.

I stopped short on my bike and hit myself in the balls

Last night I was riding my bike home from work. It’s the best way to end a workday. There’s a letting off of steam, an unkinking of the lower back. At night it’s even better. There are hardly any cars on the road, you know, in comparison to the daytime at least. There are all but no other cyclists, so I’ve got the Queensboro Bridge entirely to myself. At night I can ride home via 21st Street, a much more efficient route to my house, but one that’s all but choked in traffic during the day,.

I love it because the first part of my trip is all uphill. I climb up First Avenue. I climb up the first half of the bridge. But once I peak, once I reach that crest, I’m good. I can just coast all the way down. It’s like pure joy, just riding and enjoying the acceleration without having to really work for it. I get off the bridge last night and I’m flying, I’ve got tons of speed and momentum, and I’m about to cross a side street, one that I cross every night at this hour without ever coming across a car.

But this time it’s a bus. And it’s coming at me full speed. I hit the brakes hard. The bus driver sees me and he hits his brakes hard also. Whenever you’re going this fast and you have to make this abrupt a stop, and it’s happened to me a couple of times already, you’re going to wind up falling off the bike.

It’s just a matter of how you’re going to fall off the bike. It’s usually over the handlebars, that’s just physics I think. I’ve flown off and landed hands first, palms outstretched. One time I swear I did I flip in the air and miraculously landed on my feet. But it’s a learning experience, every short stop, every time an opportunity to try something different, to try to avert the pain.

This time as I clutched the brakes I kind of stretched my legs out front, hoping that I’d be able to contribute to the braking with my heels. And it actually kind of worked. This was the only time I wasn’t forcibly ejected from the bike. But off the bike I eventually went, because as I braked, and as I tried to keep my feet on the floor, my body got ahead of my grip on the bike, and the next thing I know, my groin made forceful contact with that pointy part of my handlebars, that spot where the post comes out of the frame but then juts forward before splitting off in both directions outward.

I guess here’s where it’s going to get graphic, but only because the damage I sustained was solely limited to that one region. I can’t even write it without feeling like I’m being obscene. I guess it’s my Catholic upbringing. But it’s what happened. I got kicked in the nuts. Smashed at high speed, my body on one side, my bike on the other, and my poor, sweet balls unfortunately wedged right in the middle.

And I know that, statistically speaking, half of my readers are going to know exactly what I’m talking about here. Every guy gets hit in the nuts at least once or twice in his life. It’s a very unique sensation. And I only know this from my own prior experiences, but when I made contact with my bike, while the pain was excruciating, I knew that it was but a precursor, nothing compared to what would come next.

One time in grade school I was playing football and I missed the catch with my hands, instead taking the pass directly to my crotch. It had to be my first true experience with just how real things can get down there. The initial shock is enough to make you cry out in agony. But then that pain starts to grow. It magnifies in amplitude. And just when you think it can’t get any worse, it starts to spread upward, to your pelvis, to your lower intestines. The next thing you know you’re lying in the fetal position, desperately clenching every muscle in your body, nothing relieving so much as an ounce of the exponentially growing torture from inside.

And that’s what it was like for me, last night. I had the initial pain, and I thought, shit, I better get home before this gets bad. I pedaled, harder, faster, it was no use. I had to get off the bike. I had to get in the fetal position. It must not have been that far, because as I’m lying on the sidewalk, on 21st Street, at somewhere around midnight on Wednesday, I see somebody approach me. It’s the bus driver. He’s looking at me really worried, even though he didn’t come even close to hitting me. Not really. It could have been close, but we were good. And he’s just staring at me, apologizing, and I wanted to be like, hey, it wasn’t your fault, it was my fault, this is what I get for reckless biking.

But I couldn’t even get out the words. I was in too much pain. And I started panicking, thinking that he might be thinking that my lack of a response would be some reason to call an ambulance. So I struggle to my feet, get on my bike and ride home, slowly, really slowly, each pedal another turn of the screw, right in the nuts, my poor, precious nuts.

It still hurts. And again, maybe the women out there will think it an exaggeration, and yeah, I’m sure childbirth is its own type of horror, a pain exclusive to women, something to which I can never offer a comparison, but guys, you guys know. Getting hit in the balls, that really fucking sucks. And the pain, it lingers for days, weeks even. I can’t believe we’re not all required to wear protective cups, please, help to spare us from the potential nightmare that is getting struck down there. Ouch. And it always happens. Years later. Decades later. You’ll forget all about how bad it might hurt, when you get hit in just the right way. And then you do, you always do, you know exactly what you’re in for. It’s not pleasant. It really, really sucks.