Thursday, February 25, 2010 :::
In a partial reenactment of one of my favorite articles from The Onion, a contingent of well-heeled activists has vanquished the specter of affordable housing, crushing it as an Escalade would an impoverished child. I'm of two minds here. Certainly I'm relieved that my home's value will only plummet at a medium rate now, rather than extra fast, and I'm glad I won't have to deal with increased traffic. At the same time, though, you'd have thought they were constructing a bombed-out tenement building with squalor pre-installed or something, given the fervor from some of the residents.
I avoided the public dialogue, as you can imagine. There was a hearing at a local church on Monday, apparently a standing-room-only affair, and the extent of my participation was driving by the parking lot on my way home from work and mentally noting that attendance looked great. In my mind, it was far more likely a household or two from the country club across from the church had already pulled some strings and scuttled the housing project. It was a foregone conclusion that materialized in a dark, smoke-filled study somewhere.
I also steered clear of the online dialogue, thought it was fascinating to skim it. Look below the article, if you'd like. Some of the participants are barely literate and seem hellbent on pushing a strange cocktail of Chicken Soup for the Soul, populist sentiment, conspiracy theory, and deep philosophical undertones culled straight from an Us Weekly editorial. For me, this entry was the crown jewel:
"Rich white people win again.
No fare!!"
No fare indeed, and thanks for the input. You teach us so much! You teach us all.
What the comments say and how they're said may entertain to a point, but why people are sharing is an entirely different beast. This is what interests me the most. If you surf over to The New York Times, the users will be far more cogent, maybe a little snarky, but coherence aside the question remains: what compels someone to post a comment on the Internet? The journalist who wrote the article proper probably isn't crying out for additional input. It's not like this was an opinion piece. And yet there exists a fundamental human need to voice your thoughts to an audience too preoccupied with doing likewise. Wait--did I just describe social media? Perhaps I've happened upon the very <3 of the matter.
Posted by Ben at 11:59 PM
Tuesday, February 23, 2010 :::
To say we adjourned on the promise of a non sequitur would only be partially correct because, well, I'd like to think of it more as a fun sequitur. We're talking about a dog, after all, and dogs are fun, are they not? They can also be loyal. Demanding. Dirty. Noisy. And, as a stark alternative to buying a yearlong supply of oatmeal, a dog would be a far better use of my time, chiefly because raising one would require I learn how to share my minutes, rather than spend them all on myself.
Back in December, during a regular trip through the kennels, I spotted the perfect specimen. Lab mix, six weeks old, and, whether because of her gimpy leg or by sheer dint of personality, mellow. This last point was particularly important. I know what energy level I evince, and I ain't jogging with anybody, man or beast, unless a flash flood or alien invasion necessitates it. Certainly younger dogs change as they grow, but she was unmistakably low-key, especially when compared to other puppies, and I decided to commit. Thirty minutes later, as they led her from the meeting room back to the kennels, I signed a form and was given a simple directive: be there in the morning, 11 AM sharp, and claim my dog.
I was set, or so I thought, and the rest of the afternoon was spent locating a vet and hitting the brick-and-mortar circuit for my doggie sundries. It felt horrible to do this, but I also asked and answered the question of how much, exactly, the health of this animal was worth and accordingly earmarked an amount to fix her leg. I wanted to make this thing work, you know?
The next morning, on the big day, I was late. I left work late, ran into mid-morning traffic with multiple goddamned trucks sitting on the left lane, and, in a fitting coup de grāce, followed some old dude who was going 35 in a 45 for a few miles off the exit. At 11:12, I peeled into the shelter, only to find another family with the dog--my dog--in the meeting room. A dozen minutes. We're talking 720 seconds here. What followed was an agonizing hour of waiting and hoping the family would pass on her, but that door slammed shut when one of the daughters cloyingly declared, "No more pound for you, puppy." Obviously the puppy in question couldn't even understand this, since I had yet to teach her vocabulary.
I had lost her. There were no five stages of grief. I had basically told Kübler-Ross to suck it and skipped straight to acceptance. That same day, I canceled the vet appointment, returned all my puppy provisions--bed, bowls, food, leash, collar, brush, toys, cleaner, treats--in a wretched epilogue to the whole affair. Perhaps I could've kept some items, but the food would've gone bad eventually, I reasoned, and the collar was bought for her color, and tying up a couple hundred dollars in depreciating canine assets wasn't the best use of income.
There was one refrain in the postmortem that I found patently ridiculous. Now, I understand the sentiments came from a good place, but after being assured multiple times that the puppy had gone to a good home, that maybe this arrangement simply wasn't meant to be and that I'd eventually find the right pet, I had heard enough. I found the right pet. And I failed. I could've taken a different route, left work earlier, done a thousand different things to shave off 12 minutes, but I didn't. It was incompetence, not fate, at the wheel.
Posted by Ben at 11:59 PM
Thursday, February 18, 2010 :::
Secondhand Rants will return on Tuesday, February 23.
Posted by Ben at 12:00 AM
Tuesday, February 16, 2010 :::
King Calm once asked me how exactly an unattached guy spends his free time and now, months later, I've finally located a satisfactory reply. When he first raised the question, it occurred to me I've never really codified the minutes I churn through daily. I've simply never needed to do so, you know? But when you've been happily married for 16-odd years, with five children in tow, such knowledge has likely been relegated to the province of lore, and it falls onto people like me to recount the highlights, much as a bard would.
At the time I offered a truthful, albeit boilerplate answer, something to the effect of television and napping, which nevertheless felt disingenuous when I bumped into the entire clan in front of a Linens 'n Things a few Saturdays later. I was knee-deep in the "n' Things" aspect of the chain, furtively heading to my trunk with four high-end humidifiers stacked in a shopping cart, each one destined for a decidedly non-humidifying end, and the meeting was awkward. That's neither here nor there, though, and it's a story for another time, or perhaps never at all.
The important point is there were echoes of this last evening. Now, I didn't run into anybody I knew, nor was I flush with Venta-branded air cleaners, but there were great strides made in answering the question. Here it is: most of my time is spent in a celebration of selfishness. Forget, if you can, the negative connotations of the word. I'm merely stating a fact here. My minutes are invested in how best to optimize my life, and in the case of yesterday night it was an issue of breakfast. Oatmeal, specifically, and whether I could purchase enough to last me a year in one fell swoop.
Short answer? I could. And I did. To any outside observer, the ceremony of purchasing boxes and boxes of Quaker Instant Maple & Brown Sugar would appear strange, but it made perfect sense to me. I hate shopping for food. I hate it doubly when staples randomly disappear in a given week, courtesy of the goddamn Coupon Game. You know what I'm talking about: you're shopping for milk, eggs, or Cheerios, only to find gaps strategically situated throughout the shelves. It's, like, where did all the fuckin' cheddar cheese go?
So when the prospect of crossing "buy breakfast" off the list for more than a year presented itself, I seized it. A preemptive strike, as it were, and it took about 90 minutes to move the payload from store to pantry. There were logistical concerns, to be sure, including pricing and amount consumed per day and expiration dates. But I was pleased with the time spent, and after three trips in and out of the store, my Swedish chariot was loaded with 960 packets of the stuff, its haunches straining under the weight of milled oats. As far as how all of this relates to my renewed search for a dog, well, I'll explain more next week.
Posted by Ben at 11:29 PM
Thursday, February 11, 2010 :::
Every once in a while, when the numbers align and circumstances lock into place, I find myself reaching for a book, then going one step further and actually opening it. But it doesn't stop there, oh no! In rare instances I proceed to look at the printed word and, yes, read. The last time this happened was in 2008 and now, two years later, another reading kick is close at hand. It may have already begun, in fact.
Now, I scan the news daily, and sites like Consumerist and Urban Dictionary are mainstays. I'm lettered, you might say. Books, however, are a different matter. Perhaps it's the ceremony of acquiring them--the wait from Amazon, the drive to the library--that transforms them into veritable events. They ask of you a level of effort that far outpaces what you commit to Hulu or a video game and, let's be honest, after 50 pages of anything those tiny letters start to get boring. Certainly I've heard of people tearing through Harry Potter novels or downing the latest tome of business knowledge in a single sitting. When I think back to A Confederacy of Dunces, though, a book I very much enjoyed, I remember trudging through it in 30-page increments.
Fiction is one thing, but non-fiction? I'd much rather have that knowledge beamed directly into my skull, but more on this later. Since we're on the topic of beaming information, let me be clear: I'm avoiding e-readers for now. They're slick and convenient, sure, but if I must consume a book, I'd much rather hold the real thing. The heft, the paper stock, the progression of pages--there's a tactile appeal to it all. And the title sitting on my desk right now, oddly enough, is the AP Stylebook and Libel Manual, a relic from a journalism class I had the pleasure of dropping in college.
It's kind of like reading the dictionary, obviously, and I'm not tackling it cover to cover. That would be crazy. I'm randomly flipping through it instead, learning about everything from agricultural parity to fair use to libel of the dead. Fascinating as all this stuff may be, the manual really became valuable when it drove me to a copy of The Atlantic Monthly, which led to a mess of multi-page articles. I'm on my way to finishing the whole issue, so I can only imagine what's next. Perhaps a written work that contains one-, two-, three-, maybe even four-hundred pages? The problem with zapping too many ideas into your brain is you become, at best, a repository of half-baked thoughts. That's what I've been doing the past two years, with all my favorite news sites, and this may partly explain how I got into this mess. I forgot how to savor something.
Posted by Ben at 11:59 PM
Tuesday, February 09, 2010 :::
The only thing keeping me awake at this moment, besides an abiding passion for typing adjectives into a digital publishing platform, is a handful of Sour Patch Kids. They're delicious, a scientific fact I don't intend to contest tonight, and the real issue at hand is how aging has exerted its grim, inevitable grip on me. It's shortly after midnight now. If I were to travel back ten, even five years, I'd be getting my second wind at this hour. But since I don't have a time machine, I'm stuck in the here and now, firmly at the till of a wholly different time machine that only moves forward, ever forward.
It's not like I had a particularly tiring evening. Mainly I ate at a business dinner, worked in a few sips of wine, and now, four hours later, it feels as if I've finished a half-marathon, or how I imagine a healthy run would feel. I suppose if I did exercise regularly, energy levels would be elevated, but the marked difference would still be there. I'm getting older, and there will be consequences.
There just isn't any way around it. I've been noticing white hair on the rise, which is a trend that speaks ably to the larger narrative, I believe. Reversal isn't an option here. The slow march is going to happen, whether I like it or not. Certainly I can get by with plucking now, but there will soon come a point when the ratio shifts and removing all the whites may, in fact, result in baldness, if it hasn't already happened on its own accord. I could attempt to mask the white, defy it, with hair dye, though I'd risk looking like Coach K or Astro Boy. I wonder if the answer is to simply let it be, gracefully. It may be time to sleep on this.
Posted by Ben at 11:59 PM
Thursday, February 04, 2010 :::
The heaviest toll exacted by the flu, I realized in a Sudafed-induced haze yesterday, isn't the phlegm or the sniffling or the scratchy throat. It's the way the bug slowly herds your thoughts onto one track, limiting your focus to whatever task is at hand. Gone is the ability to think in parallel--devising a solution to a work issue while you're cooking, for example, or picturing the opening lines of an e-mail as you pump gas--and in its place is the slow plod of thinking in single file. It's about completing one task, then the next, then the one after that, until you reach the promised land of another pill. Fortunately for us, my brain is queued with two items right now: to cram three paragraphs into Blogger, then embrace a few hours of oblivion.
Since we're talking about thinking, if that makes any sense, I may as well update you on my quest for mental acuity. The executive summary: I've been feeling markedly slower recently, and in an effort to fix this I've prescribed for myself a regimen of sleeping more, writing regularly, playing chess, and eating better. I figured I'd maintain a record here--patchwork, of course--to track whether these measures will even work.
Obviously I'm still writing, but it's not enough, since I was doing so when the wrinkles in my brain began to unravel. Still, I'd like to propose the written word is at least slowing my descent into the mire, and I'm not particularly eager to discover what would happen if I did otherwise. Sleep, too, has been welcome but ineffective. I've been punching in seven to eight hours each night, a veritable turnaround in the span of a week, and aside from being slightly more alert I'm not feeling the difference. Food is next on the docket, I guess. No fries ingested this week, thankfully, but I haven't exactly let up on the refined sugars either. Food it is, then, because the prospect of having chess--chess, for fuck's sake!--lined up for the weekend is simply mortifying, even for me. There are anti-social depths to which even I would dare not sink.
Posted by Ben at 11:04 PM
Tuesday, February 02, 2010 :::
Our thousandth post should've arrived with fanfare befitting the coronation of kings, the likes of which would call for a sumptuous dinner spread, rivulets of rich country drink, court jesters, song, an elephant, and possibly even a beheading. That's what's supposed to happen when you hit the big one-oh-oh-oh, at least on paper, but reality instead lavished upon me a case of the flu. The nerve! I thought I had beaten the odds, landed on the right side of the bell curve, and I was certain my luck was all but guaranteed when I survived a recent storm of office coughing and multiple encounters with the afflicted.
When you play with fire one too many times, however, especially the magic fire of disease, there will be consequences, and accordingly I've reaped the harvest of my hubris. It isn't the dreaded swine flu, I don't think, because I haven't been hacking my lungs out or running a fever or anything like that. I'd like to think it's a more dignified strain, marked with a stoic congestion and light discomfort, but we'll see if matters worsen. I may as well be upfront here, too, and declare that the thousand mark we've reached tonight includes the "we'll be back on so-and-so date" posts, which is clearly lame. Blogger still reads "1,000," of course, so it's a milestone nonetheless. I just didn't want to tell a half-truth, only to be promptly struck down by lightning midway through a sneeze.
In case you're expecting a speech, some kind of tawdry collage of reminiscing, let me assure you I mainly want to go to bed right now. There is one memory I'd like to share, though. I remember, back in the day, considering a commenting system for this site, driven by the belief that your voice should be heard here. This didn't happen, obviously, and I'd like to recommit to never implementing this feature. Think of it as renewing a vow of your silence. I don't care for you to talk back! And even now, while Twitter consummates its dark grip on the populace, this corner of the Internet shall remain, as ever, a one-way conduit of information.
Posted by Ben at 11:16 PM
