Monthly Archives: December 2013

New Years Day in Ecuador

Whenever I get really cold, like one of those deep chills in my bones, I think about the time when I was living in Ecuador, a couple of guys in my town asked me if I had any plans for the day after New Years. I never had any plans, not really, a big thing that I took away from my experience in the Peace Corps was that feeling of being like a little kid. My communication skills weren’t really one hundred percent, and it wasn’t exactly like I knew what I was doing down there, so I basically relied on the good nature of the people of Pucayacu for everything.

So I went from no plans to having plans, they’d take me to these natural waterfalls nearby, we’d cook, we’d swim. Great. And it was great. That morning the guys came by to pick me up. They were in the back of a large dump truck, which isn’t supposed to be some sort of a joke or creative imagery or anything like that. This was a heavy-duty dump truck, like right off of the construction site.

I guess that word of our trip had spread, one invite led to another and this casual daytrip snowballed into a community pilgrimage. Normally it would have been easy for us to take the bus, but apparently these waterfalls were pretty far off the paved roads, and besides, all of the drivers were hung over from the New Years festivities. This guy’s uncle had the truck, and he didn’t mind dumping us off at the waterfalls about an hour and a half away from town.

Seriously, he actually dumped us out. As soon as we got to where the path was no longer wide enough for the truck, he hit the dump button and the whole back of the truck tilted up. “Jajaja!” everyone laughed as we fell over each other, smashing and piling out the back door.

The day was like was any other day in Ecuador, that is, a total adventure. I learned within a few weeks in country that, regardless of what I was doing, I couldn’t rely at all on my expectations of how something was supposed to happen. Ecuador always had a way of throwing me for a loop. Like, it’s only a four-hour bus ride, right? Yeah, it’s actually an eight-hour trip, and there’s a military checkpoint, and you’re sitting next to a guy holding a chicken.

We had a great time, a lot of swimming, tons of eating and drinking. As the sun set, my neighbors had me play volleyball against unwitting opponents oblivious to my spiking ability. A few hours after that, someone said, “Well, I guess we should get going.”

“Great,” I offered. I was exhausted, and I wanted nothing more than to take a shower and get to bed. “How are we getting back, is your cousin picking us up?”

“No, my cousin only had the truck for a little while.”

“So …”

“Yeah …”

And this began what felt like an eternal quest to get home. Like I said, it was a holiday, and even if there were pickup trucks or buses traversing these sparsely paved back roads, it would have been unlikely even on a good day to find a ride capable of getting all twenty or so of us back at once.

After what had to have been two hours of waiting, somebody somehow convinced a passing cattle truck to haul us up the long mountain path. No sooner had we all piled in, standing room only, in a sawdust covered flatbed, did it start raining. Pouring. As we ascended in altitude, the nighttime chill plus the downpour made every second a test of endurance.

We were bumping along the road, I was kind of hunched over so as to try and maintain some sort of standing up balance, and my thin t-shirt and jeans combination was soaked through. And then we stopped because there was a flat time. And nobody uses jacks in Ecuador, you have to walk into the woods and find some stones big and flat enough to pile up underneath the wheel.

I eventually made it home, shivering, wondering if I’d ever get warm again. I know that the mind has a way of exaggerating pain and discomfort, but I remember even in the moment that feeling of being beaten down by the elements with absolutely nothing to provide me with even the tiniest bit of comfort.

Anyway, yeah, so whenever I get cold, whenever I’m walking to the grocery store and I get to the point where I say something to myself like, “It’s freezing out,” I just put myself back in that pickup, I can still feel the rain on my back, and I know that it’s all going to pass, no matter how bad things get, it’s all momentary, I’ll be back in bed soon enough.

Nobody wants to know about your bedbugs

One of my neighbors dragged a mattress out to the curb the other day, and he taped a big piece of cardboard to the side, a handwritten sign in black permanent marker that said: “Do not take! Bedbugs!”

All I could think about was, what the hell man, who goes around town shopping for mattresses on the side of the road? I mean, somebody might take it, and that somebody is probably going to be really down on their luck. In fact, if you’re at the point where you’re looking at a mattress that’s been tossed out to the sidewalk and you’re thinking, man, I could really use this mattress, I’m guessing that you’re not going to be curious about bedbugs, you’re just going to go ahead and assume, free mattress, bedbugs.

So it’s like, what are you doing putting that sign up? You’re not even giving whoever needs that mattress anything to hope for. Because bedbugs won’t necessarily bite you. Every once in a while you’ll run into a coworker or an acquaintance that has the misfortune of landing a bedbug infestation, and it’s always the same conversation, “I don’t know, my wife got eaten alive, but I was fine, no bites, nothing.”

And that’s assuming that whoever wants the mattress still takes the mattress. You’re not thinking about how hard it is claiming a used mattress from the side of the road. It’s like, used lawn furniture, fine, that’s perfectly acceptable. Even heavy furniture, solid pieces of wood type stuff, I’d say that’s all fair game. But couches? Anything with a cushion? No, there’s a stigma attached to all of that stuff, namely, who has been sitting or sleeping on this? What else have they been doing there? And are there bedbugs?

Of course there are probably bedbugs, you don’t need proof. If someone’s throwing away a mattress, it’s because either the springs have gotten so bent out of shape that they’re busting through the fabric, or it’s bedbugs. My aunt bought a new mattress a few years ago, and you know what she did with her old mattress? She gave it to me. I needed a mattress. I wasn’t about to go shopping for used mattresses, because most used mattresses, unless is something that you’re getting from a trusted family member, I’m telling you, bedbugs.

The street is the last place you want to pick up a secondhand mattress. Anywhere else besides that very trusted family member is the second to last place you want to look. Oh, but someone’s offering a lightly used thousand dollar space-foam mattress box-spring combo for a hundred and fifty? Bedbugs. Seriously, save yourself a trip, it’s bedbugs, and the original owners, having just spent upwards of a grand on what I’m sure is a barely used piece of expensive furniture, they’re just unable to come to terms with the fact that it’s been invaded by bedbugs. They’re thinking, “This can’t be. We just spent all of this money. Surely it has to be worth something. Maybe we can get a couple hundred off of someone on craigslist.”

It’s bedbugs. And that guy standing outside of your house looking at that mattress, putting his arms around the sides, seeing if he can carry it away by himself or if he’ll need to get some sort of a rope so he can drag it away, he’s thinking bedbugs too. He’s thinking bedbugs, but he doesn’t care, because it’s a free mattress, and like I’ve already spelled it out for you, he’s not worried about bedbugs, he’s shopping for mattresses on the street.

And so you put this homemade sign up, “Bedbugs!” all you’re doing it taking away this guy’s fleeting hope, not even a conscious hope really, but a long-shot prayer, that maybe this thing doesn’t have bedbugs. And even if it does have bedbugs, maybe it’ll be the kind of bedbugs that won’t bite him. And so when he’s sleeping at night, and those little guys start crawling out of wherever they crawl out of, and they’re walking all up and down his body, they’re not biting him, and he’s not itching, and by the time he wakes up in the morning, they’re back inside however it is they get back inside that mattress. He’s thinking, this is a nice mattress, and I don’t have any bites. Maybe this thing is bedbug free after all. Maybe I hit the free mattress jackpot.

Not with that “Bedbug!” sign, he won’t. And then think about everybody else on the block, they’re all staring out the window, they’re watching this guy sizing up your bedbug labeled piece of trash. It’s like a scarlet letter, you might as well have spray-painted the side with a giant B. The whole picture comes into stark relief, this guy, he’s going for it anyway, and we’re all watching, the pity, the disgust.

Seriously, don’t worry about a bedbug sign. You want to throw it out? Just throw it out. You don’t label your trash bags, “Garbage!” on trash day. If a homeless person wants to look through it for bottles or whatever, it’s just going to happen. You’re not doing anybody any favors. And plus, now everybody knows your house has bedbugs. You think that’s good for the property value? For the other houses on the block? Keep that shit to yourself man, nobody wants to know about your bedbugs.

Just count to five

I was out getting some pizza for lunch. The guy gave me my slices, I paid, took a few steps toward the door and then thought, wait a second, I should have bought a soda. So I took a step back toward the counter, but the pizza guy was facing the other direction, he was standing by the oven, having a conversation with one of his coworkers.

I was really hungry, and I wanted to get home and eat that pizza as soon as possible, but I didn’t want to be a jerk. Still, one second turned into two seconds, and I began to fear that I might be stuck there in pizza counter limbo, my food getting cold, nobody realizing that I hadn’t actually left the building, that I was still standing there, patiently waiting to be noticed, just a soda, please, I’ll be on my way.

By the third or fourth second, I remembered this one time I was at a bagel shop on Long Island. There were maybe four or five people ahead of me in line, but the guy right in front of me, you could just tell he wasn’t in the mood to be waiting, he kept fidgeting, looking around. As soon as the person in front of him paid and walked away, there was this two or three second pause where the cashier didn’t automatically turn his way and ask, “Yes? Next?”

She closed the drawer on the register, she took a bottle of Snapple out from under the counter, and she took a sip. As she was putting the cap back on the bottle, Mr. impatient in front of me, he screams out, “Can I please just get a sesame bagel with butter?” like really nasty, it was a yelling, he yelled out his order, like a total crazy person.

And I have no idea what this guy’s life is like. Maybe he had some sort of a family emergency back home, maybe he needed food in his stomach immediately, it’s pure conjecture. But I don’t know, regardless of whatever it is that you’re going through, I don’t find it ever acceptable to just shout things at people, “You! Give me a bagel!”

She didn’t even say anything. She just got him the bagel, put it in a bag, and he walked out in a huff. It was one of those moments where I really wanted to say something, a, “Take it easy, buddy,” something not too aggressive, but just aggressive enough. But I always get afraid of these random confrontations. It’s like, when I’m at work, I always think, man, if I didn’t have my job to worry about, I’d totally say something to this rude person or that inconsiderate guest. But then I get an opportunity like this in real life, and the moment passes without my having even mustered the courage to do anything.

And I get it, all the time at work, sometimes people have to wait, sometimes people refuse to wait. I think I write this almost every time I mention work or customer service, but you get a certain type of person who sits down and, while you’re in the middle of saying, “Hello!” or, “How’s it going today?” they’ll cut you off and bark out, “Diet Coke. No ice.”

Whenever I complain about stuff like this, or whenever I hear conversations regarding rude customers and their lack of pleasantries, there are always a few sure rebuttals, stuff like, “Well that’s your job,” and, “I’m not paying to be friends with you. I’m paying for a Diet Coke.” Yeah, you’re paying for a soda, you’re paying for a bagel.

And this argument is total bullshit, this idea that because you’re paying, because you are exchanging your money for something, that you don’t have to be nice. Sorry, I don’t mind being polite, but I’m hungry, and it’s my money involved, and so if you don’t like my acting like a dick, I’ll just go ahead and spend my dollar fifty for a bagel somewhere else.

Business is business, and so if push ever did come to shove, if that lady at the bagel place decided to fight back, it would have been a screaming match, the owner would have gotten involved, “Please, sir, I’m so sorry. Please, have this bagel, on the house. We appreciate your business. Please, I beg you, I’ll fire this lady. I value your patronage, don’t leave, here take another bagel, a free dozen.”

Unfortunately, this is the reality of customer service. I’m paying, so even though I shouldn’t be a jerk, I don’t have to not be a jerk. Because I’m paying. If you try to distill every human interaction into a monetary transaction, this is the natural result, where it’s perfectly acceptable to bark out orders or chew out the man or woman behind the counter.

And then the fifth second turned into the sixth second, I snapped out of my daydream at the pizza place, the pizza guy finished his two-sentence conversation and turned around. “What’s up boss, you need anything else?”

“Yeah, can I just get a soda please? Thank you.”

“You got it.”

And I went home, my pizza was still hot. Sure, I think I lost like seven seconds total, and yeah, I guess you can’t really put a price on time. Time is money, right? But everything was cool, I didn’t have to shout out, I didn’t have to interrupt. Everybody just needs to chill out and take a breath. Just count to five, man, just count to ten or eleven.

You call this a winter?

I wrote this a couple of weeks ago, and of course it’s below freezing now, but whatever, at the time it was warm and wet:

It’s already December, but we haven’t had any serious winter weather yet. There have been a few cold days, but there hasn’t been any bitterness to the chill, no temperature you’d be able to describe as bone-chilling. And the past few days have been pretty rainy, so it’s like, I’ll go outside, I’m wearing what I think should be appropriate mid-December gear, a sweater, gloves, a scarf, and it’s all too much, it feels like it’s maybe pushing fifty degrees, I’m starting to sweat, and my feet are getting wet through my sneakers.

And I try not to let my mind focus on things that I really can’t control, but I wonder what the Northeast is going to be like if we keep having warm, wet winters. I remember a few years ago, we had one of these autumns that was almost tropical. I read in the newspaper this article about how these giant mushrooms were growing all over the city. Of course you had groups of starry-eyed foragers going on about how much money they’d have had to spend on shitakes if they hadn’t had the good fortune of stumbling into some rotted log in the park, but the fungus was seeping into peoples houses, weird oblong-shaped shrooms were sprouting from the cracks of people’s walls.

And this is just the start, right? Pretty soon we’ll have giant palmetto bugs year round, I mean, they have those in DC, it’s only a matter of time before those more tropical pests move up north. And what about snakes? Are we going to get snakes? Isn’t black mold a really big problem? How do you tell black mold from regular mold?

I’m sitting here freaking out about how I’m not going to be able to survive the gradual change in temperature, but right now, today, it’s actually pretty cold out. I think me sitting here and finally feeling a chill inside my house, inside my body, it’s what prompted me to think about the weather in the first place, about the lack of winter. It’s already December and on this one particularly cold day, I’m feeling like it’s the oddity here.

But I think I like winter. I don’t know. It’s always great up until my knuckles start cracking and bleeding from being too dry. It’s just like the warm weather. I enjoy it until my skin starts breaking out alongside my temple. I don’t know what my body wants, really, because as soon as the temperature starts to swing in the other direction, I’m only afforded a brief window of comfort before I start reacting negatively to the climate.

I’m probably just complaining too much. I know that I’m freaking out. I’m sitting here by the window and I can feel the winter air through the walls. For everything that I complain and worry about, I still can’t imagine how human beings dealt with the weather a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago. If I get too cold I can just hop in the shower, steam myself back to homeostasis.

But how did the pioneers deal with winter? You spend all of this time chopping down trees and building yourself a house out of wood, and then the winter comes and you’re freezing and you’re wet and you’re stuck inside that box of wood, insulation hasn’t been invented yet, and so if I can kind of feel this not-even-that-wintery weather through the walls of my modern house, I can’t imagine a log cabin or whatever providing much comfort against one of those historical winters that you just know had to have been much more severe than the seasons are today.

And I always think about George Washington, that famous painting where they’re all crossing the Delaware on Christmas. Like, Jesus, that had to have been freezing, icy water sloshing up over the sides of that boat, and what did they make winter coats out of back then? Animal pelts? There’s no way that they could have been even close to as warm as I am with my contemporary double-layered jacket. I have waterproof boots, wool socks, man, those guys must have been miserable for months at a time.

I wonder if those soldiers in that boat knew that everything that they were fighting for, it would all lead to this, our modern world, where some guy gets to sit at his computer and write on the Internet about how he’s afraid of wild mushrooms or about how it’s too warm this winter. If I were in their position, I would’ve been like, fuck this, this shit’s crazy, let’s just all move south. Yeah, we’ve got to deal with snakes, and palmetto bugs, and spiders, and malaria, but cold wet feet for three months at a time? And what happens when we finally cross that Delaware, we’ve got to go to war? Battlefield injuries with no antibiotics? Yeah, sorry General, I’ll be back in just one second, you guys get in the boat without me, I promise I’ll be right back.

No conception of time

I’m always going to bed way too late, like I try to commit myself to being asleep by midnight, but it never happens. I don’t know why, but whenever I try to get myself to abide by a schedule, time has a way of skipping past my consciousness in twenty-minute chunks at a time. So I’ll be on the computer, it’s eleven forty-five, I think, OK, fifteen more minutes and then I’ll go to sleep. And then it’s past two in the morning.

That’s OK, I’ll tell myself, as long as I get up early, I’ll make up for the lost time. But my alarm goes off and my body gets out of bed and walks across the room to shut it off, all without even disturbing me from my sleep. And then it’s ten o’clock. Which, yeah ten is kind of late to sleep in, but I work at night, and so it’s not totally unreasonable. And besides, I still have five or six hours before I have to head back to the restaurant, I should be able to make constructive use of my time.

And then it’s noon, and I’m still in my pajamas. And actually starting the day, it shouldn’t be this hard. But there are so many little steps that I need to complete to get past this late morning limbo that I’m stuck in. I need to brush my teeth, go to the bathroom, get dressed, make the coffee, take my dog for a walk, come back in, eat breakfast, and then brush my teeth and take a shower.

But I’ve been thinking about it too much, how I’m going to get started right away, how if I can ust concentrate on completing each mini task as efficiently and quickly as possible, I shouldn’t really have to spend more than half an hour, tops. But now it’s getting close to one-thirty, and so the idea of breakfast is slowly starting to merge into where lunch should be. I’m figuring that I’m probably only going to have enough time for one meal, something closer to three, I’ll make myself a big sandwich or I’ll buy some pizza and I can just eat my cereal as a dessert.

It’s too much thinking, I can’t believe I’ve already spent this much time not doing anything, two o’clock already and I’m still in my pajamas. Wasn’t I supposed to get some writing done? Didn’t I have plans to go for a run, maybe get to the gym? Nothing’s going to fit into my schedule anymore. And I’ve got to be real here, I don’t have a schedule, I don’t have anything, not even a basic conception of how long a minute lasts, ten minutes, half an hour.

Shit, I’ve really got to get going, at this point I’m going to be late for work. It’s OK, I’ll just drink coffee when I get to the restaurant. Hopefully I’ll have enough time to grab a stale bagel at the coffee shop next door. What about my writing? Well maybe I’ll get some done when I get home from work. That’s what I’ll tell myself, even though I know it’s never going to happen.

Or, I wish that I could tell myself that it’s never going to happen. If I were sure that there was no chance of me coming home and starting my productivity at close to midnight, I’d put it out of my head, I wouldn’t entertain the possibility that it could happen. But once out of every thirty or forty times, I actually will come home and start working. I’ll get this insane focus to just sit down and crank out some writing. And it’s not forced and I’m not compulsively checking the Internet every ten seconds.

I’ll plow through three, five, ten pages of writing, this is crazy, I can’t even get ten pages of writing out if I have a whole day off, something that I’ll dedicate strictly to productivity. And I’ll be so into it that I’ll start to fool myself, like yeah, I’m doing it right now, there’s no reason why I won’t be able to get this done tomorrow also.

And so I’ll wake up late the next day, but it won’t matter, because I’ll have gotten done so much work the night before. And I just loaf around all day before going to work but, whatever, I’ll just do that nighttime thing that I did last night. But I’m sitting at my computer and it’s happening. And then it’s three in the morning, I give up, I think OK, I’ll just get up early in the morning and make up for all of this time wasted. But why can’t I ever hear my alarm clock going off? And what am I doing all day when I should be up and going? Why does so much of my life feel like I have no control over anything, not big-picture stuff, not even minute-by-minute decisions? It’s like I’m sitting on top of a giant cork that’s exploding from a huge bottle of Champagne or … no, that’s ridiculous imagery, I’m trying way too hard, it’s like I’m on a really long waterslide, lots of twists and turns, I’m constantly feeling my body lift off the tube, and then I’m pressed up against the side, all I can really do is try to keep my neck somewhat straight, there’s too much water in my eyes for me to see, but hopefully I can keep my nose and throat open long enough for me to take the occasional breath of air … no, that’s equally crazy, I still feel like I’m forcing it, and I can’t believe this took me forty minutes to write, I was banking on twenty, and now I think I’m going to be late.