True heartbreak, the kind that incites a painful wash of sadness, regret, and a little anger, can only come from carefully collecting your dinner, then having it smeared all over the floorboard of your car. That’s right. Collect. This is how food is obtained according to the laws of bachelorhood, where your surroundings become a convenient platter and all the world is a sumptuous spread. Leftover pizza? Main course. Gum on the sidewalk? Dessert.
Out of meeting leftovers I cobbled together a delicious meal of sandwiches and potato salad, even added a pickle for aesthetic value, and in my mind dinner was set. I carefully placed the plate on the passenger seat and then, five minutes later, the plate carefully left the seat on its own accord. You see, a traffic light had turned yellow, I pretended to be a responsible driver, and I braked a little too quickly, launching my dinner into the abyss.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” I shouted, mostly because I needed some kind of return from this debacle, and vulgarity was the juiciest item left on the menu.
A couple globs of Woolite later, my car was as good as new, sans new car smell. But you know what? It still stung, and dejected I returned to the kitchen. To cook. I wrote off the loss as a kind of indirect workout.
Here’s the destination for this weekend. I’ve been told it’s trendy. We never discussed my trip to uptown, did we? Short answer is the experience was just off the corner of Slightly and Lame.
Try as you may to staunch the flow of media, earnestly guard against its time-thieving wiles, it will eventually overtake and dominate you. This is like natural law or something, so what happens when you have more entertainments than time? You employ the 50-second test, which we discussed in disciplined academic detail a few months ago, and basically it involves giving a piece of media less than a minute to grip you.
I don’t think it’s entirely unfair. Published authors allegedly spend tremendous effort on the first chapter, presumably to compel you to continue reading their works, and I don’t see why movies, for instance, should be any different. I paid to put your shiny behind in my DVD player. Now dance. You might suspect the 50-second test, brief and time-saving as it may be, allows you to sample all media, indeed transform you into a kind of ecumenical moviegoer. Wrong. Just as you would intuitively avoid something like Hostel, so too would Pride & Prejudice invoke fear and vomit well before the play button’s pressed.
So, M:I III. Patently delicious. I don’t think you’ll find innovation in it, certainly none of that “plastic bag swirling around in an alleyway” shit, but damn it if J.J. Abrams can’t write. This is the guy who did Lost, you know? Or at least the first few episodes of the series, until that ship sailed straight into the danger zone. He knows motion, smart motion, and the movie had me from the word go.
But Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, despite the title’s willful disregard for punctuation, may have been the better movie. Sure, it’s got style, but the dialogue? Crackles. I felt bad, guilty even, for missing it in theaters. I think I’ll live it down, though. What I won’t live down anytime soon is the fact I also watched Resident Evil: Apocalypse. I failed the 50-second test, in this case.
The last thing you want to find when you roll out of bed one morning, sky still dark, neck a little sore, is a beloved pet who has ingested a piece of plastic three times as big as his head. This would be Le Pew, the more devious of my two guinea pigs, and what he ate was everything but the contents in a green bag of hay. In case you’re expecting some kind of parable about packaging, well, don’t. I couldn’t have imagined a more delicious manifestation of consumable marketing for me and mine.
Obviously I plied my little buddy with fiber, spurred ever onward by my imaginary competency in the veterinary arts, and during the deathwatch that curious inverse relationship became particularly sharp: you know, where something you took for granted suddenly becomes immeasurably valuable and equally unattainable. But the little bastard survived, as is the nature of guinea pigs in the march of science, and normalcy has returned to this corner of Charlotte.
Firefox 2.0 is out, by the by, and I’m almost certain it’s faster. It’s also more infuriating, because in its quest to streamline user experience, it apparently streamlined the address bar right out of there. The address bar, understand. The special feature that lets you surf anywhere other than your homepage. If you’re in the same boat, just right-click the gray up top, hit “Customize,” drag in a “Space,” and then drag in the “Location Bar.” Simple, right? In our next installment, we’ll take a quick look at how to press the space bar in 34 easy steps.