Yearly Archives: 2013

Stuck in a downpour on some street in the city

It rained the other day for maybe twenty minutes, but it was a hard rain, it came out of nowhere. The sky was blue in the morning, it was blue all the way through lunchtime, but at around one or one thirty, all of the sudden it started getting black, really dark. I didn’t know what to do, because I had my bike with me, and so it’s always this dilemma, do I chain it up and make a break for the subway? Should I attempt taking it with me underground? Or might I even feel desperate enough to try and bike through the storm, to tough it out for the four or so miles back to my house?

I didn’t have any time to think either, because once the rain started, it was pouring. There was no gradual build up, like usually you might feel a few drops here and there, something that eventually turns into a steady sprinkling. No, this was like a light switch, off to on in an instant. I was already twenty-five percent soaked, and while I briefly considered chalking it up as a loss, I worried about the cell phone in my pocket, what if the intensity of this downpour was enough to breach the waterproof properties of my backpack?

My decision was to find some coffee shop or deli to duck into for a few minutes, to stay dry while simultaneously thinking through a next step. But where specifically could I go? The coffee shop and deli ideas didn’t really appeal to me. For one thing, I’m sure everybody else on the street was having the same thought, and so I’d be fighting the crowd just to get inside.

And if I made it in, then what? I could just picture the people behind the counter at either of those locations, all of them thinking, “Here we go, lots of customers, time to move here.” But nobody really wants anything to eat or drink, we’d all just be seeking refuge, maybe pretending to look at the menu, “Give me another minute, please,” acting like paying customers, finally some manager or owner making a loud announcement, “Look, this isn’t a shelter, it’s a business. Buy something or leave.”

It came to me, the giant bookstore was only a few blocks down. That would be perfect. I could pretend to read books, or I didn’t even have to pretend, the employees there don’t care if you’re spending money or not. I started to run but there were obstacles everywhere, all of the sudden everyone had an umbrella out.

And this I never understand. How is it that everyone in the world is so prepared for an unexpected downpour except for me? Where are people keeping these umbrellas? Because I never notice them when it’s not raining, like if there’s a stretch of five days in a row without so much as a drop, you’d think I’d see umbrellas sticking out of bags or people holding umbrellas. Have you ever seen city umbrellas? They’re huge. It’s like we’re all so used to everything small, small apartments, small portions, virtually no personal space everywhere, but then it starts to rain and there’s a mass protest, “I don’t care if there’s not enough room for everyone in this city to carry a giant four-foot diameter umbrella, I’m doing it, you get out of my way.”

All of the umbrella spokes are exactly at my eye level, and so I wasn’t only trying to beat the rain, but I was attempting to avoid having anything gouged out. Where do you even buy a giant umbrella anyway? The only ones I ever see are the cheap-o black plastic kind, the ones that, even if you’re using them, you’re still getting wet. Depending on how you hold it, either your back’s dry, or your front, but not both. I always thought, that’s the price we pay for living in a city, right? We can’t all have giant umbrellas. There’s simply not enough space on the streets.

I finally made it to the bookstore and the usually vacant looking security guard standing out front put his hand up, “Sorry boss,” he told me, “You’re soaking wet.”

“Exactly!” I protested, “That’s why I’m trying to get inside.”

“No can do,” he wasn’t even looking at me, he was still blankly staring across the street, keeping his eyes open for potential shoplifters I guess, “You’ll get all of the books wet. It’s not going to happen.”

“What do you care?” I was getting pissed off now, “I could spend all day in this bookstore reading every single book on the shelf for free. Talk about wasting money. But now you’re worried that I might wet a page or two? What kind of a business model is that?”

It was a pointless argument. I was already soaked. I figured that I might as well make the ride home, I couldn’t get any wetter. By the way, I was wrong, I could get wetter, so wet that it felt like my sneakers had become supersaturated, each step a dramatic slosh-slosh sound.

I came back to that same bookstore the next day and made it a point to collect a huge stack of books. Then I went right by the entrance and sat Indian style while I pretended to read every book, licking my finger each time I turned the page. But the guard didn’t even look my way, not even once, even though I kept coughing, a big, fake, “Cough! Cough!” sound. And I was too busy paying attention to the security guard that I didn’t even get to really enjoy any of the reading. I was just pretend reading really. What a waste of a day. What a waste of two days, if you count the first day that I spent just totally getting absolutely soaked to the core.

Fun facts about golf

Did you know that golf balls are filled with acid? That’s why they’re so bouncy. You ever try bouncing a golf ball on your driveway, on a paved surface? You don’t expect it to bounce so high, because it’s hard, it’s like a rock, like try throwing a rock on your driveway, nothing, just a loud smack. But golf balls bounce, because they’re filled with acid.

You ever see a golf ball cut in half? Never. You hit them over and over again with your golf clubs and nothing, no cracks, those things are going to outlast all of us. But say you’re getting curious, say you cut one open with a saw or a sharp blade. Don’t do it, I’m just saying, say you tried it out. All of that acid would come pouring out, it would dissolve the whole golf ball from the outside in. That’s why you never see any broken balls lying around, because they automatically self-destruct.

You don’t ever think to yourself, how do they get the acid inside the golf ball? Like, take a golf ball and take a good, close look. Don’t worry, that acid is safe behind the hard surface. Look even closer. Do you see any seams? Nothing. It’s totally solid, like how did they get that acid inside in the first place?

Sure it’s not a big deal to imagine some sort of modern technology making that happen. I’m just throwing ideas around, but maybe they suspend the acid in some sort of a magnetic field, and then they form the shell in a liquid state outside of it, and then the whole thing is flash frozen – ZAP – presto, golf ball. Fine.

But what about in the early ages of golf? You know that golf was invented over two hundred years ago, right? Talk about crazy, I can’t imagine playing even nine holes right now, with a cart, with an unlimited supply of balls. It’s too hard. Those ancient Scottish golfers, one of them was talking to his friend, he’s like, “Hey man, I’ve got a great idea, we’ll make a really small ball and whack it with some sticks across fields, ultimately trying to get it into a little hole in as few whacks as possible.”

And the other golfer was like, “You know what? That actually sounds kind of fun. Here, let me try.” But I don’t know about you, but my first time holding a golf club, teeing up at the driving range, I’d never swung at a ball before, it was a disaster. The ball went up and to the left and didn’t even make it out of the box I was standing in.

The first time I teed off from an actual course wasn’t any better. Ninety percent of my shots went straight into the woods, which, I’m guessing in ancient Scotland, that golfer would have been like, “Oh well, I seemed to have lost that ball, sorry. Can I try again? Practice makes perfect.”

But how? Try again with what? Another ball? Where did that first golfer get that ball in the first place? Are you telling me that these guys two hundred years ago had access to acid machines or whatever is that they use to make golf balls? Or lawn mowers? How were they keeping the greens short enough to putt on?

What I’m getting at is that none of it makes any sense. Golf is wildly popular now, yes, but the idea that golf ever made it past the drawing board stage seems highly unlikely, impossible even. I mean, sure, there wasn’t any Internet or anything, and so, I don’t know, what were they all doing out there, shepherding? Herding animals? I guess that could have been boring enough to the point where hitting a ball hundreds of yards in the opposite direction might have seemed like a slightly more entertaining activity than standing around doing nothing.

But how did they get access to the acid? And I haven’t even brought up the clubs. Do you know that the heads of the woods are actually hollowed out and filled with nitrogen? It’s something about evening out the hitting surface. I don’t understand it. I don’t claim to understand it. So how did these Scottish guys figure it out hundreds of years ago? It doesn’t make any sense. What am I not getting here?

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?