Suzanne and Nappy Pong Boy
I went to the X-Men sequel and to a comic book store on Free Comic Book Day this weekend, so you might think that I am used to the unpleasant odors that a body can emit. After all, comics fans are notoriously unwashed and uncleansed, and usually when I enter my local comic book store on a Friday night, it’s filled to the brim with pubescent Magic: The Gathering players, most of whom have yet to discover the sexual appeal of daily ablutions. However, when I walked in on Saturday afternoon, most of the Free Comics Crowd had dispersed, and when I went to see X2: Manchester United on Sunday evening, the panting first-weekend crowd had significantly thinned.
So, no, I can’t blame the smell I encountered on Saturday night on the usual gang of suspects. I was at a Suzanne Vega concert on Saturday night, second row seats. The seat in front of me was unoccupied for the first three songs of the set, when a nappy, bearded, dreadlocked young man sat down. And his personal odor was so strong, it made my eyes sting. And I wasn’t just imagining it, either, because the woman sitting next to me started rubbing at her eyes less than a minute after this humanoid stench had a seat.
I have had people tell me that scent is the most direct of the five senses, because the particles actually are transmitted all the way up to the brain and physically come in contact with the smell centers. Frankly, I think that’s hogwash. If the skin and tongue have receptors that translate sensation and contact with chemicals into impulses that the brain reads and interprets, why would the sense of smell be so much more connected to the outside environment? It also seems dangerous, since when we are smelling something, we are scenting minuscule particles of the object itself. New Car Smell? Because the plastics and rubber are so unstable, they are chemically deteriorating at a vast rate within the first few weeks of creation before stabilizing. New Car Smell is actually tiny pieces of New Car.
All of which leads me to the appalling, inescapable conclusion that my eyes were stinging and my nose was recoiling because I was coming into contact with actual spore-like particles of nappy pong boy.
There is no Sanity Clause
My employer requires — as good, litigious-minded employers do — that I read all of the rules and regulations of the school prior to signing my contract. Despite the presence of an insulting, fascist restriction, I did so.
The clause is as follows:
4.12 : Electronic Information and Communication Policy (E-mail, Voice-mail, Internet, Computers, etc.)
Personal Websites and Outside Computer Use
Employees are prohibited from maintaining home or personal sites that are, or may be, offensive to any member of the school community or which could detrimentally impact the reputation of the school.
Excuse me? I’m sorry, I’m not allowed to publish anything on the web that MAY be offensive to ANY member of the school community? And when my employer says “school community” they mean a huge spectrum of parents, trustees, past trustees, alumni, grandparents, faculty members… Trust me, if I had some of the normal everyday conversations I have with my friends in front of my colleagues, they would be offended. The odds are against me that I have kept this website pure enough to satisfy the unrealistic censorship standards of the above clause.
And let’s not even delve deeply into the fact that this sort of requirement goes far and above the ordinary expectations of an employee. My home life is my own, and my netlife is my home life, so long as it comes from my computer and not the computer at my office. I do not consider that my employer has the right to dictate the rigors of my behavior when I am not under the auspices of the duties and hourly requirements of my job. I showed the above clause to a colleague — who had signed her contract without reading the handbook — who said that it reminded her of thirty-year-gone finger-wagging by employers who told teachers that “living with an unmarried partner reflected badly upon the image of the institution…” Has the internet’s wages of sin become the new breeding ground for such mealy-mouthed moralizing? Freedom of speech is protected everywhere… except the internet? After all, it’s not really The Press and it’s not really Speech, so… it can be censored and regulated and monitored and controlled.
Please, make sure to e-mail my employer with any complaints about the offensiveness of this page and its linked content.
Gulf War II: The Vengeance
It’s been slightly more than three years since the factory-install cassette deck in my car stopped working. Well, that’s not strictly true, there was a two month period in there someplace when it magically started working again, risen like Jesus, before ceasing to play tapes any more. I have wrestled with this is many different ways, but the primary two ways have been: playing music in a portable tape player that sat on the floor, and listening to NPR. The first solution wasn’t; it was a terrible, scratchy, mono-audio substitution, and I can’t believe I spent about fifty dollars on D batteries over the past three years. The second solution was a good one, a mature one. It has allowed me to get in touch with the events of the world and start to form opinions based on evidence instead of gut feelings and knee-jerk responses.
So what did I do on the second day of Gulf War II: The Vengeance? Bought a new factory-install cassette deck from a local junkyard. Time to listen to some music for a while.
Lost Time
I feel like I’ve spent all day fiddling with my computer. Working on The Brothel for a good part of the afternoon, trying to follow Nick Locking’s directions on how to personalize colors and format choices. Then home where my irritation with my inability to download a particular BitTorrent file led me to the Digital Archive Project which led me in turn to eDonkey which led me to fiddling about with Mac OS X’s UNIX emulator, Terminal. Flush with my partial success at installing eDonkey, I decided that had the ability to install the CLI version of UnRar for the Mac as well. Which led me to remember that I couldn’t get that webcam driver to work the other day…
Long story short, I remembered what it is about computers that attracted me to them so much years ago: the ability to lose all sense of time as one spirals around the gravity well of perfection, getting ever closer with each successive pass. Time stretches and eventually loses all meaning in a gravity well, and I love the possessive way in coding and commands and tinkering and noodling can leave one gasping for air and sleep when one finally surfaces and switches off the cathode ray gun. And while air and sleep are sweet after such a dive into the darkness of minutiae, I find that the lure of minutiae remains undiminished the next morning…
I, however, have 150 pages to read before tomorrow, and now I have four fewer hours in which to read them. Time to make some tea.
Who Was That Masked Man?
Her car was standing, still, in a mostly empty parking lot, and yet she had her hazard lights on — that’s what first caught my attention. It’s not as if she’d pulled off to the side of the road, she was in a deserted parking lot, but still worried about accidental collision. That was my first instinct that some assistance might be required.
It was fun to swoop in, change the tire of a damsel in distress, brush my filthy hands together, and march back into the darkness and into obscurity. I explained certain things as I was changing the tire: she needed a better lug wrench, for example, as the one she had was standard issue, meaning it was too short to really get sufficient torque to unscrew a pneumatically secured lugnut. I had her put the e-brake on, so that the car would be slightly less likely to collapse and crush me once I had removed the tire. Hopefully next time, she’ll be slightly better prepared to take care of the situation herself, if some dashing stranger didn’t happen along.
But two things ruined the cinematic quality of the moment — nothing that I did; I was perfect. I had the trenchcoat, all the tools required, the hat that kept my face in shadow as I knelt beneath the streetlight. But she made two fatal missteps that hamstrung the cohesive, anecdotal quality of the circumstance. The second thing was that she screwed up my exit. Listen, I understand that she might not have been as familiar with the cultural standards of such an event, but when I start to walk off after a Job Well Done, shouldn’t she instinctively know that she’s supposed to wonder to herself, “Who was that masked man?” and tell stories later about The Man With No Name? She’s not supposed to call me back and ask what my name is.
But the first thing that set the whole thing slightly off-kilter was her response to my arrival. I strode up, cooly assessing the situation: hazards on, tools strewn on the pavement, wrappings clean and just unsealed, girl on cellphone trying to get instructions on how to change a flat. And upon seeing me, she said, “Oh, never mind. I’m all set,” and hung up. She just expected that I’d help her. She just expected that I’d have the expertise. And while I feel I ought to be flattered, as I don’t normally assume that I cut the sort of figure that carries about such absolute competence, my immediate reaction was to be put off. Don’t just assume that I can help you, Miss. In order for you to be properly grateful afterwards, you have to be wary at first. To blindly accept the assistance of strangers doesn’t elevate the moment sufficiently.
Single-handed Ropeburn
Evidence of my single-handed victory in a game of tug-of-war on Friday. I felt particularly masculine and effective until I realized that the burn marks were not going to fade with anything resembling speed. I have enough scars and marks on my hands to make me self-conscious, and a large red brand was not the fashion statement I have been searching for — regardless of how in vogue scarification may be on the Left Coast and other depraved areas of the planet.
Things I Didn’t Know About My Apartment
Things I didn’t know about my apartment when I rented it:
The Memorial Day parade starts right outside my front door. For the last ten minutes I’ve been listening to National Guardsmen, High School Marching Bands, the American Legion, and the Brownies walk past my window playing drums and bagpipes and trumpets in competing dissonant overlap.
How did I miss this last year?
Vanity Plates
New Hampshire reputedly has a greater percentage of personalized license plates, or “vanity” plates, than any other state in the Union. Apparently, one of the freedoms we live with or will die without is the freedom to express ourselves in six or fewer alphanumeric characters. Which, while it isn’t anything to be proud of — you should have heard me bellowing obscenities at the hapless fool who decided to choose QUIGON as his license plate — means I spend an inordinate amount of time deciphering people’s bumpers.
Sitting behind a car with the plate IMOK, I spent about thirty seconds asking the driver — rhetorically — what, precisely, he mocked. Then I got it.
And now you know who you should all mock.
Superstition?
It is a common superstition that it is bad luck for a black cat to cross one’s path.
But how does one interpret the omen of an enormous wild turkey flying across a two-lane highway in front of one’s car?
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