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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
There’s only one good part to not being able to have nice things. It’s that almost no one else can have nice things, either. So I was very schadenpleased to read an article today detailing how bad Google’s Instant Mix feature of their new music upload cloudhickey appears to be.
Not because I hate Google. I like Google. They search things for me and they made my phone and probably they’ve got all my passwords and copies of my house keys and they’re watching us. Right. Now.
(Hey, Google! Great to see you, buddy! Just saying nice things about how Big Brother-y you’re not. Hiya!)
But the thing is, I want to great lengths and no small expense — because I was forced to, basically — to obtain a system that makes playlists of my music that’s like other songs that I tell it about. It’s not Google’s tool — instead, it’s a different and very fancy system, with a sophisticated proprietary algorithm constantly analyzing and comparing my music catalog to deduce similarity based on a wide range of subtle musical factors.
It’s also an enormous steaming pile of goat scat.
Much like Instant Mix, from the looks of things, which gives me a certain measure of guilty pleasure in knowing that other people are as frustrated with their playlister as I am. Misery loves cacophony, as the audiophiles say.
(All right, fine. Nobody says that. But they totally should. Somebody write that one down. It’s a ‘keeper’.)
“Misery loves cacophony, as the audiophiles say.”
So how did I wind up with my very own wonky playlist wizard, my personal pea-brained Pandora impostor? It all started nearly two years ago, when the missus and I moved into our new condo…
>– wavy flashback lines –<
>– wavy flashback lines –<
>– wavy flashback lines –<
When we visited this place, we fell in love with it. And part of that hearty throbbing was due to the music the current owners were playing while we toured — from fancy in-wall speakers built into nearly every room in the joint. The folks before them had done a lot of work — and a fat lot of good most of those ‘updates’ did for us twenty years after the fact, when they were all aged and ‘to-dos’ again.
But the speakers were a revelation. With the music flowing from room to room, I could just imagine us there in the space, living our vastly-improved lives together. I’d make a romantic candlelight dinner which we’d eat in the dining room — no couch-munching for us! — while steeping in the strains of some lusty aria or acoustic crooner or whatever CD I thought might get me laid. I’d probably drop my fork or lose a chicken leg on the floor, and wander back to the kitchen, still listening to the music. We’d chase the dog down the hallway for stealing the bird, rush into the bathroom retching because I never learned how to cook a chicken properly, and collapse exhausted and nauseous and unsexified into bed — all the while hearing the music coming out of the walls.
It was like a dream.
(Only in the real dream, we eat KFC and they give us fourteen plastic sporks and the dog is locked in a kennel and nobody needs Maalox and maybe someone winds up getting chickeny finger grease on someone else’s underpants.
Clearly, I need more help here than just the new condo. But it was a start, damn you.)
So we bought the place, eventually moved in and expected the rest to be history. Only the rest wasn’t history. Instead, it was mockery — in the form of a funny-looking tangle of wires snaking from a hole in the corner of the dining room. And in the oh-so-very-silent speakers attached to one end of those wires, and waiting impatiently for fancy stereo equipment to be connected to the other.
Fine, said I. I’ve got my old hand-me-down Pioneer hi-fi I bought back in college — off an actual pioneer, probably, or perhaps a gold-rusher heading west. The wires shot me a thin little smile, as if to say, ‘You think you’re going to plug that nasty thing into me? Nuh-uh, mister. I don’t think so.‘
(Senior prom, all over again. At least back then, I got a limo ride for my troubles. This time, nothing — except a mild electrical shock. And not the good kind.)
Turns out, these were proprietary wires, and they’d only deign to lock circuits with a high-class component. From a specific company. A high-class company, known for their overwrought and expensive audio equipment, and maybe we should just hold off on looking at these wires until our eyeballs unbulge themselves after our first mortgage statement.
So we waited. And every day, the speakers mocked us with their silence. In the bathroom, they sneered. In the bedroom, they huffed. And in the kitchen — well, they mostly laughed at my sickly raw chicken, but they mocked. There was most definitely mocking.
Finally, we broke down and Christmas’ed a stereo to each other. The previous year’s model, but it ate a big chunk of the holiday budget. I think we exchanged cards — and maybe packs of Juicy Fruit — but that was about it, besides the stereo. Still — months after moving in, and staring at those useless speakers hanging mute in the walls, we finally filled our house with music. Just as we’d hoped all along. I sorted out the electronics, crammed those prissy little wires up where the subwoofer don’t shine, transferred all our music over, and we were all set. And the first thing we were itching to try was the fancy playlist feature we’d been told about at the store.
“‘More of the Same’, we call it,” said our salesman. “Play any song, and the system will automagically find similar music in your library and develop a one hundred-song playlist, right there on the spot. Any musical soundscape you desire, right at your fingertips.”
I asked if it was anything like Pandora — or if their fancy little music box also gave us access to Pandora.
“With More of the Same,” he dripped, “you don’t NEED Pandora.”
Well, that sounded nice. And — thanks to a fair bit of auditory adventurousness on our parts — we had the right library for variety. We’ve got old college rock, new college rock, hard rock, pop, heavy stuff, classical stuff, electronic stuff, jazzy stuff, traditional stuff, world music, funky stuff, and — lord help me, I’ve tried to fend it off — an Elvis Presley Christmas album. I don’t know where it came from, and my wife won’t let me drown it in bleach. So it’s on there, too.
Elvis, however, is not the problem. The problem, it turns out, is one CD worth of music by a band that I’m not a particular fan of — Limp Bizkit. I don’t despise them, but this album turns out to really not be my style. We’ve got nothing else in our collection like it. I bought it a while back for one song, which quickly got rather stale, and I never listened to much of the rest. I ripped it down to MP3s years ago, and forgot it was even in the collection.
Until we hooked up those speakers, and dealt with ‘More of the Same’. We now have — no exaggeration — over eight thousand songs loaded onto that infernal machine. All sorts of music, in genres all over the map. And it doesn’t matter what we play, artist or album or track:
ALL ROADS LEAD TO BIZKIT
Fire up a Beethoven piece — Limp Bizkit’s in the first dozen songs. Spin through an old Replacements set — next up, it’s BIzkit. Mike Doughty — Bizkit. Orbital — Bizkit. Harry Connick, Jr. covers classic songs from the annals of Broadway classics? BIZKIT, BIZKIT, BIZKIT.
The CD has maybe ten songs. Ten out of eight thousand, and I’m fairly embarrassed to own even one. But they’re roughly eighty percent of the music coming out of those speakers. I hear Fred Durst’s voice more than I hear my wife’s. And that is not conducive to happy-time dreamland sleep. Not one bit. It’s almost enough to drive a guy to Yuletide Elvis, just for a change of pace.
Almost.
Maybe someday I’ll figure out how to get music off that newfangled one-track gizmo, and I’ll purge the Bizkit right out from under its nose. Until then, I’m not so heartbroken to hear that this brand spanking new Google playlist service isn’t all its cracked up to be, either. Maybe someday they’ll get the technology right.
Until then, I guess it’s Bizkit as usual. These snarky speakers aren’t going to listen to themselves. Play it again, Fred.
Permalink | No CommentsThere’s a certain art to living with another human being. Whether you’re sharing a room with a roommate, a cell with a cellmate or a marriage with a…er, marriagemate, there are certain rules you follow and games you play to keep life copacetic between you and your fellow living quarters sharer. It’s a complicated dance.
(There are perhaps other, less ‘complicated’ dances that happen with cellmates.
We’re not talking about those today. Or hopefully, ever.)
“That ‘love is patient; love is kind’ crap isn’t helpful. How about somebody tells us ‘love will totally eat your leftover curly fries when your back is turned’?”
Nowhere is the delicate balance between selfishness and altruism more pronounced than in the icebox. Specifically, wherever leftover food is involved. There are three distinct kinds of leftovers recognized by the Universal Domestic Cohabitation Council, Subcommittee on Refrigerated Foodstuffs:
No touchy!: In the case where one roomie has ordered a ‘private’ meal of some kind — either alone in the house, or out at a restaurant — and stashed the remainder in the fridge for later, these remnants are deemed to be OFF LIMITS to the other household member, unless expressly stated otherwise.
In writing. Preferably as part of a blood oath, on camera and with a notary public present to witness. Accidentally — or ‘accidentally’ — eating someone else’s half a birthday enchilada or special chicken wings has started more roommate feuds, fights, brawls and splits than perhaps any other factor known to roomiekind.
(Honestly. He-Man once snarfed half a salami hoagie Skeletor was saving for dinner one afternoon. That’s how the whole thing started. True story.)
Leftovers may also be prescribed as ‘no touchy!’ by virtue of a special writ, usually consisting of a snarky passive-aggressive Post-It note to the effect of ‘MINE! MINE! MINE!‘ attached to said leftovers. Should these notes appear more frequently than once per quarter, the Anal-Retentive Overpossessive Asshole clause of the mutual housing agreement may be triggered.
(Or you can lick everything that shows up in the fridge with a note. No jury would convict you.)
Owner’s dibs: On certain occasions, leftovers are deemed to be ‘shared’, but priority for first choice of the remaining morsels clearly belongs to one person. Usually whoever paid for the pizza or subs or moo goo gai pan in the first place. The ‘second chooser’ is free to partake, but if he or she doesn’t offer first choice to the payer, then they’ll be paying for their own damned food next time, that’ll teach ’em.
This is also known as the “moochers can’t be choosers” rule.
First come, first nosh: In most other cases — splitting a pizza pie, ordering Chinese food together, lugging home half a jumbo bucket of greasy chicken skins from the southern fried poultry joint — all bets are off. Whoever raids the fridge first gets the first pick of the spoils — or all the spoils, if there’s only one serving left. Save the special cases, private meals and prissy note labels above, roommate leftovers generally fall into this category.
And it’s the only rule in play for a married couple.
This married couple, anyway. If I want the last slice of double-pepperoni, then I’d better get to it first. Doesn’t matter where it came from, who brought it into the house, who paid for it, or what kind of exclamation-laced note might be attached. All’s fair in love and war, and the contents of the fridge are fair game in marriage.
(These are things they should tell you during the ceremony. That ‘love is patient; love is kind’ crap isn’t helpful. How about somebody tells us ‘love will totally eat your leftover curly fries when your back is turned’?
That’s the shit you need to know going in. They couldn’t have shoehorned that into Corinthians somewhere?)
Most of the time, this isn’t a huge concern. We often wind up with enough leftovers for a full meal apiece, so timing isn’t so important. Or one of us saves something the other doesn’t like much, so we’re in the proverbial gastronomical clear. She can store any dish with raw tomatoes in the fridge as long as she likes, and I’m not getting near it. Likewise really spicy food or raw onions for her. She might sprinkle holy water on it or poke it away with an oven mitt. But eat it? No chance.
Then there are the more difficult times — when planning and conniving and yes, outright scheming are required to guarantee an uninterrupted supply of slowly-aging but delicious food. Like the last slice of pizza, or that half a box of fried rice, after the rest of the dishes are gone. These are the lifeblood of the non-cooking husband — another meal accomplished without turning on a stove, reading a recipe or tipping yet another delivery person.
(You think I’m kidding. I’m sending the pizza guy’s kid through college. When he shows up one day and pulls our order out of a brand new Bentley, I’ll know that maybe — just maybe — we’re calling just a tad too often. Maybe.)
But how to maximize my refrigerator meal payout? Ah — that’s where the scheming comes in. What needs to happen to avoid sorting out an actual fresh meal? I just have to get to the leftovers first. And there are three strategies for that:
1. Be nimble; be quick: Sometimes getting there first just means getting there first. If that means eating dinner at five-thirty like a beshawled dottering grandma, then so be it. Dinnertime is what you make it — and if you want dinner to include leftovers, then I might have to make it the middle of the afternoon. That’s called striking while the iron is hot.
Or while the tandoori chicken is cold. Whichever you prefer.
2. Salvage the dregs: The key here is to leave leftovers unappealing enough that my wife wouldn’t want to eat them. So even if she hits the fridge first, she’ll find nothing but pain there — plain white rice, half a sad wilted salad or four lonely French fries.
That’s when you swoop in and reap… well, the same pain, actually. There’s nothing pretty about this solution. But food is food, and heating leftovers is still better than making food happen any other way, so it works in a pinch. I’m not too proud to eat three-and-a-half old pizza crusts and call it a meal. Are you?
No. Don’t answer that.
3. Suck it like a vampire: Sometimes, it’s not about being hungry. it’s just about the food. Maybe that last egg roll looked too good to pass up, or those nachos have been in there a few days already and nobody really wants them, but you can’t bear to throw away food. So you eat it not because you want to — but because it has to be done. At three in the morning.
Why three in the morning? Let’s face it — these are not decisions you want to make, or to follow through on, in the light of day. If you’re going to scarf the rest of that cheesesteak sub because you promised you’d finish it, or choke down fourteen stale fortune cookies just so they don’t go rancid(-er), you don’t want any witnesses. Including yourself. Pick a dark corner of the kitchen, retrieve your burden and make it disappear. It’s for the best.
I’d say you’ll feel better in the morning — but who are we kidding? If you’re lucky, the raging heartburn will drown out the pangs of regret. But at least the leftovers will be gone. And you’ll have plenty of agonizing time on the john to congratulate yourself about that. So — ‘yaa-aa-ay?‘
All of these strategies work well enough around here — or did work, until recently. My wife finally caught on, and put the kibosh on my conniving ways. She’s the one who puts the leftovers away most times, and she’s taken to chopping a layer of nasty inedible fresh tomatoes on top of whatever she wants to fight for.
I can’t even look at it straight until she comes in and takes the top layer, leaving — if I’m lucky — some untainted bits of deliciousness underneath. In one icky swoop, she’s undone nearly two decades of scheming and strategy development. Clever girl, that one. And she leaves me no choice.
I’m going to start leaving Post-It notes. That rice pudding I’m after might be covered in tomato yuck, but dammit, I’m still claiming it as my own. ‘NO TOUCHY, YOU!!!‘
Don’t know what the hell I’m going to do with it, since it’s clearly inedible. But I’m claiming it. I might starve to death around here, but I’ll go down scheming. It’s all I’ve got left.
Permalink | No CommentsI owe my mother an apology.
(No, not for a lousy Mother’s Day gift. I sent flowers. And they were LOVELY, thank you very much.
Yes, I know she’s obligated to say that, even if I sent a vase full of long-stemmed mummified cat turds. But I didn’t. I sent genuinely lovely flowers.
Besides. There’s no 1-800-CAT-TURD service. And CTTD doesn’t deliver on Sundays.)
Also, I’m not apologizing for poking mild fun at her recent computer virus infestation. I’ve been there. And I’m helping her to spec out a new one.
And I never told her to click on that monkey. You can’t win an iPad. Stove hot. This is how we learn, right, ma?
Rather, I owe my mom an apology — sort of — for a thing I’ve sometimes mocked her for. To be fair, my mocking was all done in my head. She never even knew about it; it was all imperceptible sad head shaking and rolling my eyes at her in my mind.
(Not rolling my eyes into my mind, of course. That’s not mockery. That’s a grand mal seizure. Different thing.
Just as a tip — if you find yourself writhing on the floor or swallowing your tongue while mocking someone, then you’re probably doing it wrong.
Or you just mocked someone with a wicked left hook. Either way, needs more work.)
“I learned something about the ‘soft c’ and ‘supple t’ and all sorts of other letters that sound like something you’d find in the Alphabet Sutra.”
So, here’s the thing.
(As an aside before the ‘thing’: I’ve become aware of using that transition a lot around here. It’s not a huge surprise — with the number of tangents and interjections and yes, parenthetical asides, there’s always a need to get back to the topic at hand. So “back at the ranch” and “to make a long story (marginally) short(er)” and the eponymous “where the hell was I?”, of course, tend to crop up a fair amount. I’ve just noticed myself typing “here’s the thing” a lot lately.
According to Google, sixty-three times total within these pages. The one up there makes sixty-four. Huh. I thought it’d be more than that, frankly.)
Anyway, where the hell was I? Ah, right, secretly mocking my mother. So, here’s the thing:
(Sixty-five!)
Mom cooks a fair amount, and she’s pretty good at it. Also, she’s a fan of spicy food — an inheritable trait, thank Mendel; otherwise, I’d be sweating capsaicin and chugging moo juice with Dad when we get together for meals. As she’s gotten more adventurous on the stovetop over time, she’s incorporated recipes and ingredients from other parts of the world. In my experience, she can make tasty dishes out of all of them. But occasionally, she has trouble pronouncing them.
That’s to be expected. Many of these spices and dishes have completely unfamiliar names in entirely foreign tongues spoken by people in faraway lands who have been raised to make sounds and phonetic constructs that our clumsy American mouths can barely conceive of. So if Mom doesn’t ‘*gghhl*‘ or ‘*rrrrhh*‘ or ‘*kkzzznnqqqddd*‘ in just the right way when she describes the menu, I’ve got no superior ground to stand on. I can’t say them the right way, either. Just give me a number seven. And go easy on the number three. I’m having a number two later, and I’d prefer it didn’t feel like a number four. IfyouknowwhatI’msaying.
There’s one ingredient in heavy rotation, though, that doesn’t seem quite so outlandishly exotic. It’s from our own continent, just down the block in Meh-i-co, and there are only three syllables to deal with: chipotle.
(Five, if you say the full ‘chipotle pepper‘, I guess. But ‘pepper’ is a gimme. Nobody gets ‘pepper’ wrong. You don’t hear stuffed suits at fancy restaurants asking for ‘salt and puh-PAIR‘ with their meals.
Except maybe the French ones. Unh hunh hunh.)
Now, I took a little Spanish in school. So I have a little different outlook on the verbal handling of chipotle than, say, my mother. I learned something about the ‘soft c’ and ‘supple t’ and all sorts of other letters that sound like something you’d find in the Alphabet Sutra. So when I pronounce chipotle, I do my best to ‘go native’:
‘shee-POTH-lay‘
I’m no expert, of course, and I’m probably not entirely correct.
(For the record, Wikipedia says it’s pronounced ‘chi-POHT-lay‘. So I’m not that far off. You say chi-POHT-ato, I say shee-POTH-ato. I think the difference is more in my guessing ‘official’ phonetic sounds than in the sounds themselves. I wouldn’t know what a ‘schwa’ looked like if it bopped me on the epiglottis.)
Also, I can’t say the word without moving my head in a sly little way and imagining I’m wearing a matador outfit. With a pencil-thin moustachio and especial toro-fighting zapatas.
(Bright red. Big treads. Lots of traction. Gore-proof.)
So far as I know, Mom never took Spanish. So I’d expect her pronunciation to be a little different. A little more Midwestern U-S-A:
‘CHEE-pote-lay‘
Nothing wrong with that. There’s an entire restaurant chain that’s spelled ‘Chipotle’, but probably pronounced ‘CHEE-pote-lay‘ ninelty percent of the time.
Or so I thought. This is where the internal eye-rolling comes in. Because Mom doesn’t actually pronounce these peppers as posted above. Instead, she’s always called them:
‘chi-POL-tee‘
Which is clearly something very different. To get the sounds above, you’d actually have to grab one of these peppers, yank its ‘T’ and ‘L’ the other way around and spell ‘chipolte’ out of it. And that’s just simply rude to our neighbors to the south, if you ask me. I mean, we took their land a while back, and fought a war and put fences along the borders — now we’re manhandling their pepper letters? It’s too much, in my book.
Still, I never said anything to Mom about it. I figured it was just her, and let it go. Chipotle can’t come up that often in day-to-day life; how many conversations about a Mexican pepper can one woman have with people out in public? She might get a funny look or two, but probably it’s a non-issue. Eventually, I forgot all about it.
Until tonight, when the missus and I were half-watching an episode of Diners, Drive-ins and Spiky-Haired Douchebag on Food Network, and there it was. Some little restaurant, with a plucky wired chef, concocting and serving and describing his all-the-rage chipotle creation.
That is, his chi-POL-tee‘ creation. That’s how he said it. And how the customers said it, and how everyone there said it through the entire segment. My eyes rolled so far so fast, I nearly had that seizure I warned you about.
But I learned something. I thought it was just Mom with her funky chipotle pronunciation. But no. A food professional, and everyone he served, were doing the very same thing. I did a little further digging, and found that it’s actually a fairly common question. I had no idea.
Of course, none of those people are right. But at least my mother has company. And now I’m just going to assume that she picked it up from someone else, like some pronunciation flu passed on from a sickly carrier of the disease on to her. She’s the real victim here.
So — sorry, ma. I promise never to roll my eyes (unbeknownst to you or otherwise) over the way you say ‘chipotle‘. Though I might try to gently correct it some day — maybe the word will get back to whoever it was that started the mangling in the first place. Like phonetically staking the head vampire, or something. That’s a nice thought.
Oh, and the mildewed thing? Yeah, that’s still on the table. You’re not off the hook for everything here. Say ‘hola‘ to Dad for me.
Permalink | 1 CommentI’m rethinking my stance on early humans.
Oh sure, I’ve always been impressed with the early Homo clan. The habilis, the neanderthalensis, sapiens, of course. And erectus is always the life of the party.
(‘Erectus’? Why, he barely even knows us!)
I’ve always given these people — and almost-people and reasonable-facsimiles-of-people and someday-may-be-people-if-they-just-learn-to-stand-up-straight-and-invent-the-internet-already — a lot of credit. I mean, some of us started from rather humble beginnings. But these guys came out of the freaking trees. Just the logistics of that are mind-blowing.
(Like, do you rake the lawn in the fall if you live in a tree? And is the ground the ‘lawn’, or the branches? Do you pick the leaves off and let the squirrels deal with them? Tape them back on for decoration? I’ve got no idea. And these guys had brains the size of a Skittle. I don’t see how they ever worked this stuff out.)
“When you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps — without the advantage of knowing what a ‘boot’ is, what you’d strap it to, or whether it would clash with your kicky sabertooth-skin-and-mud ensemble — then you’ve really accomplished something.”
So I figured there’s a lot to be said for these early humanoid pioneers. When you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps — without the advantage of knowing what a ‘boot’ is, what you’d strap it to, or whether it would clash with your kicky sabertooth-skin-and-mud ensemble — then you’ve really accomplished something. Or so I thought.
See, my reverence for early humans always came from the idea that they kept themselves busy evolving. Whereas we might waste time picking out a fancy smartphone cover or taking pictures of our food, these folks were doing practical stuff. Growing new brain parts. Opposablizing their thumbs. Setting up GeoCities pages, probably. I was always in awe of these creatures, our intrepid ancestors, who — in the span of a few short hundreds of thousands of years — learned to stand upright, to use tools and to communicate effectively.
Then I had to wake up at six-thirty this morning. And everything changed.
I emerged from the primordial ooze of the bed, schlumpy and dazed. I’m sure something dragged on the floor as I lurched toward the bathroom — knuckles, knees, maybe an Underoos assflap — but by the time I got there I was at least partially unhumped and standing on just my feet.
I spent a few minutes trying to make water come out of the shower head. I knew I’d seen it happen before, but the voodoo magic to make it occur escaped me. Banging on the shower head with my fists didn’t seem to work. Screaming unintelligible nonsense at it wasn’t helping, either. I tried to bribe it, but it refused the cash. I was out of ideas. Clearly, coercing a shower head is a little different than dealing with a Congressman.
Slowly, it dawned on me to concentrate on the little control level further down the wall. It wouldn’t take the money, either — is there a hidden camera in the shower, or what? — but when I punched at it, a little trickle of liquid shot down into the tub. With a little trial and error, I eventually had a solid stream of water that was at a temperature somewhere between the bottom of the La Brea tar pits and a skinny dip off the Bering Land Bridge.
I finished my shower to find the dog outside the bathroom door, head cocked and looking at me with her usual expression that says: ‘Grhmph?‘
So I said: ‘Grhmph?‘ It was the best I could manage at the time. No brainy thinking thing before seven in morning am doing.
Gradually, we reached some level of mutual understanding. It was like our own rendition of ‘Dances with Wolves’ — a ‘Waltzes with Weimaraners’, if you will.
(Yes, she’s a pit bull. I’ve got nothing clever for that. Move it along, smartass.)
She made it clear, through a series of short barks and pawing at her dish, that she needed food. I conveyed that I was busy passing out exhausted on the kitchen floor, by passing out exhausted on the kitchen floor. She indicated that she was eagerly ready to take her morning constitutional around the block for a little sunshine and exercise, by dropping a turd on the living room carpet. I countered by communicating the opinion that she was a stubborn little bitch and I should have sold her to a Vietnamese takeout place years ago, by… well, by saying exactly those words, pretty much. There may have been some interpretive dance involved, as well. It’s kind of a blur.
We came to an accord, which involved me feeding her, cleaning up her shit and walking her around the block. Because clearly, I’m the Poland in this little superpower play.
But as we sniffed and peed our way through Mrs. Rinaldo’s hydrangeas, it occurred to me what had just happened. All those things I’d been so impressed with the cavemen and their ilk for doing way back when, I’d just accomplished in under an hour. Hell, if I’d lit a match and domesticated a horse or something, I’d have basically taken humanity from gorillas to DaVinci, all in one morning. Those little hairy-knuckled pea-brained slackers took hundreds of thousands of years. That’s not impressive, after all. Maybe if they’d spent less time hunting and gathering and futzing with their AOL dialup connections, they’d have tackled the important stuff faster.
Like me. I’ve apparently got this ‘evolve and adapt’ thing on a fast track over here. Any of you people want an extra arm or ESP or ultimate enlightened consciousness, you know where to find me. I’ll grow something for you and let you know how it turns out.
Unless I’ve got to get up before eight to do it. That shit is for the Neanderthals.
Permalink | 1 CommentI was cruelly tricked by my wife this weekend. She knows how I feel about shopping. I don’t like shopping, I’m not good at shopping, and I get very exasperated and pouty if I’m forced into shopping.
You’d think she’d understand. She feels the same way about reading this nonsense. But do I strap her in the car and drive her out to the suburbs to pore over these pages?
Only rarely. And never on weekends.
So this ‘shopping’ thing just wasn’t fair, dammit.
She knew better than to try a headlong shop-assault on me. We’ve been married a long time, and we’ve immunized ourselves against each others’ deadliest weapons — like the ‘puppy-eyed pleading question’. Oh, sure, that move worked fifteen years ago. She’d wander over to the couch some Saturday morning, poke her little toe into the ground and shyly say:
‘Hey, um, honey… do you want to go to the mall with me today?‘
And I’d look up into those big emerald eyes with her eyebrows all scrunchy, and it’d be all over. Six hours later, I’d find myself slogging through some Ann Taylor outlet or Victoria’s Secret Slightly Irregular Panty Paradise, lugging six bags of swag with no end in sight. But over time as a husband, you learn some things. You adapt. You survive.
Rule number one: don’t look at the eyes when a shopping trip comes up. Medusa could turn a man into stone with a glance; wives somehow transform us into pack mules for an afternoon. Personally, I’d prefer being made of granite. Seems easier to sneak a nap on the couch that way.
“If that doesn’t work, I think nightmarish thoughts of overstuffed parking lots and chatty cashier jockeys and pear-shaped octogenarian ladies modeling thong bikinis outside the dressing rooms.”
She learned a while back that turning on the charm for a trip to the mall doesn’t cut it any more. If I think there’s even a chance of a shopping ‘invitation’ coming, I slap on a pair of dark shades, bury my face in a pillow and ‘LALALALALALALA!!!‘ until she’s safely out of eyeshot. If that doesn’t work, I think nightmarish thoughts of overstuffed parking lots and chatty cashier jockeys and pear-shaped octogenarian ladies modeling thong bikinis outside the dressing rooms. That usually steels my resolve — or makes me nauseous enough to get out of going.
If all else fails, I fake my own death. I once stopped breathing for a full twelve minutes, just to get out of a Black Friday ‘early bird’ sale at Target. True story.
So the missus has picked up some new tricks of her own — like the one she unleashed this weekend, while I was merrily lazing away a Saturday afternoon melding my ass into the couch cushions. She nonchalantly brushed by on her way to the kitchen, dropping this off as the walked past:
‘Y’know — we should really have a grill.‘
She let the words hang in the air for a bit while she poured herself a Diet Coke. I tried not to give in — I knew it was a trap of some kind — but dammit, she was right. We should have a grill. Our condo has a deck, and we just had it rebuilt in the fall. We had a grill back at our house — too old and grimy and possibly leaking explosive propane fumes to bring with us, or to operate legally in any modern First or Second World nation, but still. We had one.
And now, we don’t. But we should. Now that she brought it up, I was appalled for us. How dare we not grill delicious dead animals on our very own deck? The nerve of us people.
By the time she sashayed back through, sipping her soda, I was hooked. More than hooked, I was riled up and ready for action. This called for a trip to the closest available home supply concern, to right the injustice which even now threatened to tear our way of life asunder.
Yes, never you mind that I was only just reminded of this unforgivable travesty a few brief moments ago — or that the situation, vis a vis our shameful grilllessness has been unchanged for the better part of a year and a half. These rational and measured observations are no match for the righteous indignation now coursing through my veins. To the chariot, my good woman! We must away, to claim that high-BTU flame-cooking power which is rightfully ours!
In other words, I played right into her hands. If I’d swallowed the bait any harder, I’d be shitting fish hooks all week.
Many of you married — or as-good-as-married — men will already know what happened next. We hustled out to the nearest Home Depot to, read my lips now, “look for a grill”. Two hours later, I awoke from a daze to find us trudging back to the car — in a downpour, I might add — toting twenty-four individually-potted pansies of various shades of pink, forty pounds of topsoil, three sacks of mulch, lawn bags, heavy gloves, a small spade and something called a Garden Weasel. But no grill.
I think I’m beginning to see who this “Garden Weasel” actually is, if you reap what I’m sowing.
So what did we get out of the deal? Well, we got wet. A lot wet. And we got some new flowers for around the deck in back that I’m assured are just lovely specimens. And we got a bunch of lawn supplies, the better to clutter the remaining eight square inches of our storage area not yet crammed full of crap. And I, personally, got hoodwinked, like a lamb led to slaughter.
But not a lamb led to grilling, because that would require a grill. Which I don’t have. And may never have now, because when my wife brings it up next time, I’m going to assume it’s just a ruse to drag me off to some shoe sale expo or Pantyliners ‘R’ Us, and I’m going to say, “no, thanks”. No thanks, no grill, no wet pansy flowers, and no separating ass from couch until at least Monday morning. Maybe later. Depends on what’s on TV.
Don’t get me wrong. I still want that grill. But the gauntlet’s been thrown. Let’s “look for a grill” no longer means the thing that I think it means. It evidently means getting drenched along with a bunch of green-thumbed goobers who didn’t know enough to stay the hell in the house on a lazy weekend afternoon.
Or they fell into the same trap I did. The call of the flame is powerful, indeed. But the ruse of the wife? Diabolical.
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