Monthly Archives: September 2013

Fro-yo with Andre after work

I got off the subway and I ran into Andre, he must have been in the same car as me, but I didn’t see him, which is fine, I mean, if I saw him, like if I looked in his direction, I would have been like, should I wave? Should I go over and talk? But this was better, just, here were, bumped right into each other. “Hey Andre, what’s up?” and he was like, “Oh hey man, just coming home from work.”

Did he see me on the subway? Like if we hadn’t run right into each other, would he have said hi? No, that’s a crazy thing to think about, and besides, we were on good terms now, mostly good terms. I mean, the last time we saw each other, we didn’t have like a direct confrontation or anything. Maybe enough time has passed where a random encounter like this didn’t have to be awkward or forced. Maybe we really could be friends again.

“So what are you up to?” I asked, “Do you want to go grab a drink or something?” He told me, “I’m actually on my way to that new frozen yogurt place a few blocks down. Do you …” and normally I would have said something like, frozen yogurt, gross, something way too aggressive, like I would have been joking around, kind of, but that’s not really a funny joke, it’s just me opening my mouth and putting people off. So what if I think frozen yogurt is gross?

“Sure, let’s do it, I love fro-yo.” And even though I paused to consider my words before speaking, fro-yo still slipped out. Why did I say fro-yo? Who says fro-yo? “Ha, fro-yo,” he said it, he said ha, but he wasn’t laughing. Was he making fun of me? I have no idea where fro-yo came from.

We get to the frozen yogurt place and it’s got this Greek name. “Hey Andre,” I ask, “Is this one of those sour yogurt places?” and he said, “Well, all yogurt is a little tart, just add some honey or fruit, it’s really good.” The cups were all the same size, and so I incorrectly assumed that it was like at Seven-Eleven, when you fill up a Slurpee, you fill it up all the way to the top.

I held down the crank on the yogurt machine and made myself a ridiculously oversized serving, way too much that I’d actually eat, and I was just complaining about Greek yogurt in my head, I don’t know why I automatically went for as much as the cup could handle. And then I got to the register, the clerk made me put it on a scale. “You have to pay by weight?” I probably said it a little too loudly, Andre looked over from the next register, he had like a golf ball sized portion in that oversized cup, “Thanks a lot!” he tried to avoid my gaze as he paid the cashier and left her a dollar in the tip jar positioned in front of the register. “Thank you sir!”

A tip jar? “Twelve seventy-nine,” the cashier interrupted my train of thought. I’m serving myself yogurt, spooning on my own toppings, putting the cup on the scale … what would I be tipping for? Here’s a tip, thanks for letting me buy yogurt from this yogurt place. I dropped the twenty cents or so in the tip jar, but the cashier didn’t say anything.

Andre and I walked toward the back and I tried to be like, “A tip jar? Can you believe they …” but he cut me off, he started waving toward a group of people in the back. They were all like, “Hey Andre! What’s up man?” and I didn’t know anybody. I think I maybe recognized a face or two from Andre’s grandmother’s funeral a while back, but I couldn’t think of any names or anything.

I waited to be introduced, but nothing. Andre took the last chair at the table so I had to go to a different table, this one lady was on her laptop and so I kind of had to interrupt her, “Hey, excuse me miss, can I use this chair?” and she said, “No, I have my backpack on that chair, sorry,” and even though that’s totally not how you do it, like, take your bag off the chair, you don’t get two chairs, I kept my cool and asked someone else at a different table.

Finally I’m back with Andre, with his group of friends, he was talking and I couldn’t really squeeze in between where he was sitting and where his two friends were sitting on either side. I found a sort of empty spot at the other end and I tried to do a really quick round of introductions, but it was all just, “Hey,” “Hello,” stuff like that, nobody was really talking to me.

After ten minutes or so of unsuccessfully trying to interject myself into the conversation, I made a move to get up. Nobody said anything. I walked over to Andre, “All right man, I’ve got to get going,” and he was just like, “All right dude, see you later,” like that was it, no objection, no effort to make plans for some other time. Like why invite me out to yogurt? I didn’t want yogurt. I fucking hate Greek yogurt. I tried not to show how pissed off I was, but I didn’t feel like interrupting everyone to say goodbye so I just made a beeline to the door, dropping my yogurt in the trash on the way out. It must have been too hard of a drop, because some of the yogurt wound up flying up out of the trashcan onto the wall, the cashier was like, “Hey! Wait!” but what was I going to do, ask for a mop and a bucket? No, I took off, I didn’t look back. How about buying a bigger trashcan for your stupid oversized yogurt cups? Fucking fro-yo, fucking Andre, never again man, never again.

I want to ride the Hyperloop

You’ve heard about the Hyperloop, right? Right. It’s awesome. It’s going to be awesome. Someday. The Hyperloop is a futuristic means of transportation, a giant global infrastructure project being championed by Elon Musk, the South African technology tycoon who founded Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and PayPal. He’s a modern day George Jetson. Actually, that’s not right, Jetson was a lackey, a corporate drone. Musk is a real life Mr. Spacely, our future overlord boss, just much more benevolent and cool.

The Hyperloop is going to be a series of tubes connecting various locations across the globe. I don’t claim to understand the specifics of the science, but if someone put a gun to my head and demanded that I explain how it works, I’d say that I think it has something to do with the tubes creating some sort of a vacuum. Inside that vacuum, we’d put bullet-shaped cars inside, propelled by magnetic energy.

That’s the best I can do to make sense of what’s going on. But in layman’s terms, what this means is that we’re going to be able to travel from New York to Los Angeles in something like forty-five minutes. It gets better, because the more time a car spends accelerating inside the Hyperloop, the faster it will eventually travel, meaning that a one-way trip from New York to Beijing might be possible in as little as four hours.

Four hours to China! That’s insane to think about. You could plausibly take a long weekend and travel across the globe for a last-minute getaway. Assuming that the prices aren’t prohibitively expensive, and that there are plenty of available seats. I’m guessing that there are going to be a lot of logistical hurdles involved in making this a realistic means of transportation for the average nobody.

It’s inspiring to know that there are actually industry leaders out there making wild proposals that might eventually change the way human beings consider global travel. When I was a little kid, ideas like this were confined solely to the realm of science fiction. Star Trek had the holodeck, even more mundane feats like access to cellphones and Internet were still limited to universities and professionals.

So much has changed in my lifetime alone. In the past century, human beings went from inventing airplanes to developing commercial aviation as an industry to landing spacecraft on various bodies throughout the solar system. I always like to think of the world that my grandparents were born into, how nobody had TVs or telephones. Cut to the present day, my surviving grandparents are in their eighties, my grandmother uses her iPad every day.

What’s that like, witnessing such incredible leaps in global technology? What’s the world going to look like when I’m an old man? Is it really that crazy to imagine an infrastructure of tubes crisscrossing the planet, making travel across the globe as painless as a car ride out of state?

It’s fantastic that we have visionaries like Elon Musk ready, willing and able to invest their personal fortunes into improbable dream projects that might someday benefit all of humanity. It is also a little sad because, up until recent decades, big impossible projects used to be the realm of government agencies. NASA got us to the moon, our elected representatives led us to a bold new era of spaceflight and scientific advancement. The government’s role in innovation today pales in comparison.

I want to see it, I want to take a ride on the Hyperloop so badly. I don’t want to be an old man taking his first cross-planet tube ride at the end of my life, I want to be able to make use of it right now. Let’s get to work, I want this project fast-tracked and operational while I’m still young enough to appreciate how amazing this is going to be. Because future generations, they’re going to grow up with it, they will take it for granted, kind of like how little kids today are being raised on the Internet. But not me, I’ll really, truly, unconditionally love the Hyperloop. I think I already do.

Originally published on HonestBlue.com

I’ve got a hole in my pocket

I’ve got this pair of shorts with a hole in the left pocket. Few problems in life shake me to the core like a small tear on the inside of a pocket. It should be easy, to either stop wearing those shorts, or to fix it so there is no more hole. But I’ve been dealing with this all summer, nothing’s happening in terms of me remedying the situation, and it’s progressively getting worse, that small opening consuming a greater and greater percentage of pocket space every time I put these shorts on.

It must be some sort of a bug in my otherwise relatively normal human programming. For some reason, I just can’t connect the dots, come up with a way to make this problem not be a problem anymore. My inability to find a solution, I think it stems from the fact that there’s not a lot going on in my brain in terms of me thinking about my pockets. They’re something that I take for granted. All of my pants have pockets, all of my shorts, even my pajamas have pockets. Did I make a conscious decision to shop for clothing that comes with pockets? No, it’s automatic, it’s something that I’ve never had to go out of my way to even consider.

So I wake up in the morning, I put on a pair of pants or shorts, I take all of the stuff out of my pockets from yesterday and put them into my new pockets. This process repeats itself until I come across this particular pair of shorts, the one with the tiny hole in the left pocket, the hole that I notice every time I put my hands inside, to look for my wallet, to give my hands a little rest while I’m standing around idly.

And for the majority of the summer anyway, the hole was noticeable, I couldn’t help but play with it, this thing that was in my pocket but wasn’t, it’s a very minor absence of pocket, really. It was directly at the point at which the seams of my pocket came together, imagine an ice cream cone that has the slightest gap at the bottom. But I don’t usually keep ice cream in my pocket, and so there wasn’t anything melting down my leg, no urgent, “this hole is causing a problem” warning blaring in my head.

Aside from those instances in which I was physically touching that hole, I never thought about it, not at all. And so that’s part of the reason why I can’t really figure this thing out. It’s only on my mind when I’m in absolutely no position to do anything about it. As the weeks went on, the hole naturally started to grow, imperceptibly at first, but one afternoon I took a seat and felt one of my keys reach through the hole to jab me in the leg. That was sort of uncomfortable, I thought to myself, maybe I should get this hole fixed up when I get home.

But I’d get home, I’d get ready for bed, I’d throw the shorts in the laundry pile, and the hole wouldn’t register in my thoughts until I’d be wearing them sometime a week later, I’d already be out of the house, and I’d feel it again, maybe I’d feel the key. Shit, I’d remember, the hole would come rushing back to my thoughts as this unresolved dilemma, something that I’d neglected to fix.

Sometime last week I was walking down the street when I heard the sound of a coin fall to the floor. I looked down and there was a dime. Was this mine? Did this fall out of my pocket? I picked it up and put it back in, thinking surely the hole couldn’t be big enough to where actual coins were falling loose. A few blocks later I heard the same sound, but I put up a wall, tried to ignore the experience.

Later in the day I found myself spending a lot more time thinking about the hole in my pocket, time in which I’d usually spend not thinking about my pockets, about holes. I put my hand inside and fished around. Wallet: check. Keys: check. Coins … coins? No coins. In my denial I had convinced myself that while maybe, maybe I had been losing some dimes, they are the smallest after all, there was no way that I’d be dropping nickels, quarters, giant chunks of metal unable to stay in my possession.

This pocket was literally starting to cost me financially. Sure, spare change lost isn’t going to necessarily break my bank, but if I’m passing quarters, was it that out of the question to lose my keys? Could I foresee a future in which I’d be locked out of my house, on the phone contracting the services of an expensive emergency locksmith, wondering how I’d be able to prove my residence so that I’d be able to have him let me back inside?

Now I’m only thinking about my pockets, it’s like a mental tick, I’m reaching inside and moving my hands around to the point where people are starting to give me weird looks. You don’t understand, I want to tell them, I’ve got a problem, I’ve got a hole in my pocket. Only, I’m not wearing those shorts anymore. This pair of pants has no holes at all. But try telling that to my brain, to my wandering hands. I can’t tell the difference between good pockets and bad, my reaction is so involuntary at this point that I can’t even remember which pair of shorts I was talking about in the first place. I open my closet and look at my wardrobe, am I really going to have to throw everything out, to start completely over from scratch?

I came close to making an effort to getting up off of my ass and looking for a sewing kit, but I got distracted by the Internet and then next thing I knew, I was sitting at this desk writing this whole pocket lament. I know exactly what’s going to happen, the weather has been getting a lot cooler lately, I’m already finding myself wearing long pants more and more as the summer gives way to the fall. I’ll eventually put all of my shorts away and I won’t think about any of this until next April, at which point I’ll get up one day and think, wow, what a beautiful spring day! It’s the perfect weather for a short-sleeved shirt and a light pair of shorts. And I know just the pair I’ll pick, with just enough time for me to take a nice first-day-of-spring walk before going to work, arriving back at my house exactly when I need to grab my stuff and head back out the door. But what did I do with my keys? Where did all of the stuff in my pockets go?

Player two, start

When I was a little kid I always wanted to play Super Mario Bros. as Luigi, but unless you’re playing two-player, that’s never an option, and two-player regular Mario is terrible, each person taking a turn on the same level. It was impossible, trying to sit still, having to wait around for my brother, everything taking forever, just jumping over that hole in the ground such a challenge.

But as the oldest brother, I couldn’t let anybody else be player one. And so we’d start the game up, I’d be Mario in his classic red and brown and I’d have to watch my little brother get to start up as Luigi, classic Luigi, white overalls on top of a green shirt. Was there any difference? Aside from the colors, could Luigi do anything different than Mario?

I guess because they were identical, I always assumed they were twins, the Super Mario twin brothers. But then in subsequent games, Luigi developed his own distinct personality, character traits that set him apart from Mario. He was taller, I could definitely identify with that, because I was always the tall one in my family. He could jump really high, I guess to go along with the whole tall thing. He seemed like a natural older brother, and thanks to Super Mario World 2, I was given the option to start as Luigi.

Unfortunately he’s way too slow, and that high jump, it takes forever to land back on the ground. Not that Mario’s any better. He’s just regular, as regular as he was in regular Mario One. But I hesitate to draw any significant conclusions based on that sequel, because it was a really terrible game, and everyone always wound up opting to play as Princess Peach, whatever, not for any stylistic reason, none that I’m aware of anyway. No, the Princess could fly, or float, it was a huge in-game advantage.

Mario 3, Mario 4, it’s back to basics, the focus squarely on Mario, Luigi never mentioned, not featured on the box artwork at all. He’s merely a placeholder, “Player two, start!” I’d go through the whole Super Mario Land alternating between player-one and player-two just so I could have a chance to beat King Koopa as Luigi. When I finally did it, I was disappointed to see the game scroll through the victory credits as if Luigi didn’t even exist.

“Thanks Mario! You’ve saved the Princess!” even though Luigi would be standing right there, holding the Princess. I think it was Luigi anyway. But it was probably just Mario, no height difference at all, just a Mario twin, a clone, I don’t know, maybe they were short on cash for those third and forth games and they were like, all right Mario, you’ve got to play Mario and Luigi’s parts for this one. Here, put on this green cap and overalls, it’s almost player-two’s turn.

Mario 64, Luigi doesn’t exist. Jesus, even Yoshi gets a cameo at the very end. Spare no expense for Mario’s trusty dinosaur sidekick, but what about his brother? His own sometimes-identical-twin brother, absolutely no respect. And then they’d release Mario Kart or Mario Tennis and fine, Luigi would be there, but strictly as a filler character. They don’t even give Luigi a proper villain. Where Mario has Wario, which is cool, they play on the whole upside-down M for Wario, when it came time to give Luigi his own doppelganger, they created Waluigi, like it was just, whatever, through Wa in front of Luigi and turn the L upside-down on his hat, nobody cares, nobody’s going to pick him, make him really slow and useless so that nobody wants anything to do with him.

He just gets a bad rap, Luigi, I always feel bad for him, like he’s the more relatable of the Mario Brothers. They give him his own game, finally, for the Game Cube, and it’s like purposely unplayable. He can’t jump, he can’t do anything, he’s stuck in a haunted mansion and his avatar is onscreen trembling every time he has to do anything.

I remember when I was a little kid we’d go to the skating rink or bowling alley and there’d always be a small arcade section set up somewhere by the lockers. A few places had this Superman arcade game, a pretty standard side-scrolling beat-‘em-up single player. But this being a big arcade machine, there was a second joystick, and if you somehow successfully begged your mom for a quarter, and someone else also happened to procure twenty-five cents at the same time, you’d both deposit your money and Superman would be joined by a second player.

Who was it, Batman? Green Lantern? No, it was another Superman, the exact same graphic as player-one, but they just filled in the entire costume red so as to differentiate from the original. It’s a pretty basic arcade game, you’d fly to the right and zap a bad guy, eventually the computer would be too much to outsmart, and your mom refused to give you another coin for an extra life or two.

That second Superman wasn’t meant to be anything, it was just a way to accommodate two quarters in the machine at the same time. But I always thought, man, who is this guy? Does he ever get pissed that red-and-blue Superman gets all the fame, the publicity, comic books, movies, everything, and here he is, this guy decked out in solid red spandex, he’s apparently got all the same powers and abilities as regular Superman, but that’s it. That’s all he gets, this maybe cameo on some shitty arcade stand. Is he from Krypton? Does he have his own secret identity? Doesn’t matter. He gets nothing. Not even a name. He just nominally exists. Wouldn’t that drive you crazy? Doesn’t he deserve at least a little backstory?

The revolution is absolutely going to be televised

The revolution is most definitely going to be televised. There’s going to be wave after wave of TV cameras, all jockeying for a good angle, a decent vantage point, and the anchors are going to be sitting at their news desks, “Good evening ladies and gentlemen, we’re bringing you live to frontlines of the revolution,” and all of the hippies are going to be sitting there in their plush leather recliners watching MSNBC on their sixty-seven inch plasmas, holding their worn paperbacks in their hands, “But … but … but I thought that the revolution wasn’t going to be televised.”

And he’ll look up at his bookshelf, at the rest of his “library,” his “collection,” Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repair, nobody knows how to operate a motorcycle, Steal This Book, purchased for $6.99 from the sixty-five percent off clearance rack at Barnes & Noble, “I’m sorry, can you actually give me a different Barnes & Noble tote bag?” the memory flashes through of that particular transaction at the store, “Do you have any with Angela Lansbury’s face on it?” but they didn’t, he had to settle for an Alex Trebek.

It was probably still there somewhere, buried under all of those receipts being saved, the ones from Petland Discount, “Try shopping at Petland Discount!” the circular read, “If you buy twelve jumbo bags of cat food, the thirteeth’ll be on us!” which, if you think about it, that’s actually a pretty significant savings, what, $37.99 a bag? Sure, Purina is somewhat of a premium item, but just think about all of they money you spend on your food, on your dietary well-being, those are the thoughts running through the heads of everybody picking out cat food and dog food.

But try it, try to save those receipts for a full twelve months, because that’s what it amounts to, twelve bags, twelve months, roughly. And it’s not just the receipts, it’s the proof of purchase, it’s taking that giant empty cat-food bag out of the giant plastic cat-food bag dispenser that you bought to keep that dry cat-food smell somewhat localized to one area of the kitchen. “Have you seen the scissors?” questioned, lobbed out to no one in particular.

“Just don’t use the kitchen scissors!” the answer pointed straight back, but where else, upstairs? In the study? More clutter, more receipts. And if you forget a month, whatever, that’s just one month, you’ll get to twelve months eventually, you’ll get to twelve receipts, twelve proofs of purchase, you keep reassuring yourself, I’ll save that $37.99 eventually.

But the neighbors mentioned something about Petco, how they used to have a similar deal, a similar means of maintaining its customer base, free cat-food, keep coming back, until they stopped. One day it’s twelve receipts, twelve barcodes, one free bag. Today, not so much. How much longer until Petland Discount follows suit?

So it’s upstairs to the study, the home-office, whatever you want to call that side room where the desktop computer sits forever turned on, on top of that old desk, warped in the middle from the weight of its now antique boxy monitor. It’s always a challenge, looking for the scissors, for anything, moving aside stacks of coupons for Gillette Fusion razors or free archery lessons, coupons that surely must have expired by now, try not to make too much more of a mess, kicking up layer upon layer of old dust.

Accidentally nudging that old mouse and the computer jolts awake, how long was it asleep anyway? Ever since the wife bought that laptop, which you were initially against, and why? Why put up a fight over something that wound up making life a whole lot more convenient? You need to look something up on the computer? There it is, no need to go upstairs. But why not get rid of this old machine? Sitting here, eating up electricity, bandwidth, radiating heat, sucking up time and energy.

KaZaa still loaded on the screen, although it’s unlikely that any data is being transferred to or fro. And look, Steal This Album must have finished downloading sometime over the course of the past six years or so, technically that’s a success, no money wasted on this … this music cd? It’s not some sort of a revolutionary audiobook, no, it’s a heavy metal record, System of a Down, that’s probably a little disappointing.

“Breaking News” you can still hear from downstairs, it’s MSNBC, it’s Chris Matthews and he’s tossing to a correspondent, live from Egypt, live from Tahrir Square, “Chris, look at it, this is the revolution! It’s happing right now!” right on TV, right in front of the cameras, pass the popcorn, kick back and enjoy the show, because the revolution is absolutely going to televised, it’s going to be saved on our DVRs, you can watch as much footage as you want on Youtube. The hippies had it all wrong. They had everything wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.