Month: March 2012

I am leaving for Chicago this after noon with my little sister and my niece. After getting off work at 6:30, I will head to class by 8 (hopefully with time to get a double shot of espresso), then pay rent, drop off overdue library books, pack, and get out of here by 1 pm.

I was there last year at around this time and my mom and I went to the movie "Cedar Rapids" which in retrospect was not a good choice. We went to the planetarium and the zoo as well. But this time I am thinking we should get some culture. Maybe the art museum? It looks like it might rain while we are there. I kind of want to visit someplace other than downtown.

– On the way to work on the Greenway I found an injured rabbit just sitting there. Its friend was sitting nearby despite all the passing bikers. It was a very sad sight.

– I also found an individually wrapped bite-size Snickers bar on the ground. Yes, I picked it up. And yes, I ate it.

– I interviewed for the thing in the thing. It went well. I am so thankful for Savers and the $17 gray business suit I bought there a year ago.

– On Science Friday I always pictured the host, Ira Flatow, as looking like Alan Alda. But today he had Alan Alda as a guest, resulting in a personal mindwarp. They sound alike so I imagined two Alan Aldas talking to each other about science facts. It was very strange.

Factoid: Alan Alda’s real name is Alphonso Joseph D’Abruzzo.

The Greenway was free and clear, the stars were out, the air was cool at 60 degrees, the ventilation reaching my armpits and crotch was perfect, and I even had time to stop for a bite.

But I am looking forward to the very height of summer. I want long days. Cicadas buzzing their brains out. Stinking profusions of life. Not even life, really, but the point in summer where things are mostly dead and decaying in the heat and humidity. I want to accidentally eat at least one bug per mile on my bike to work. I want the rate of youths yelling "fag" at me to go up to a rate of once or twice a week, in another indicator of summer. I want odd nighttime encounters with all the weird people who seem not to be around the rest of the year.

I like those days when not only are the days hot, but the nights are hot too. Hot enough to sit on a beach at midnight in a tee shirt and shorts. I like when it is so hot that your drink is sweating and you fantasize about iced coffee all day. I can’t wait to go camping and look up at the summer triangle and the Perseid meteor shower and hear mystery animals making mystery noises in the dry brush.

But this kind of weather is nice while it lasts. Sweater weather is precious and I’ll definitely enjoy it while I can.

They keep telling me it’s good to have a hobby. Everyone should have a hobby, they say. But gerbils have a hobby too – it’s called running on a fucking wheel for hours at a time. I am reminded of Roy Basch in "House of God" who was urged by his colleague to jog. He took the advice and found he could allow the plokka-plokka-plokka of his foot-strikes to drown out his increasing disillusionment with his work. He realized his job lacked meaning and that he may even be harming people, and that running satisfied some physiologic urges in order to make him more complacent and less disturbed by it during the rest of the day.

Or consider birdwatchers. I am more and more aware of the way an innocent pleasure in nature can lead to idiocy. I am guilty of it too: droning on about where and when I last saw a northern shrike and its behavior and surroundings and the condition of its beak and plumage, and so on. People will go on and on about such things in the presence of others who don’t know what they are talking about. Sort of like how the New York Times cannot go a single day without mentioning Virginia Woolf even though neither I nor anyone one else I know have ever read a book by her. And if they have read her, it was 20 years ago in college.

Even a veteran birder on the Minnesota birding digest email list mentioned this. In fact he came to the other subscribers for help: he asked if he had come to a point where birding was more an obligation than a hobby. He felt he had to get up each day and write down each bird he saw, feeling that a trip to the nearby wildlife sanctuary was necessary and that he would be letting himself and others down if he did not record both the mundane birds and the possible rare sighting. The hobby had taken on aspects of compulsion and duty, and he was worried. I didn’t respond, but if I had I would have mentioned a concept in econ 101: opportunity costs. That is, you are not necessarily wasting your time, but it can’t hurt to think of all the other things you could be doing.

So I have resolved to pursue my interests with passion and focus, and always within the bounds of reason. If I find myself spending an hour a day on the crossword puzzle, for instance, I will throw the thing down and do something else. If I am boring people with bird talk, I shut my stupid face. And so on.

How, unless you are as tired out as me, can you hope to understand the simple joy of finding a French translation of Calvin and Hobbes at the library ?

At "Hidden Beach" on Cedar Lake this past summer I was minding my own business and catching some rays for the bod when a guy clothed in greasy-seamed denim from head to toe came up and chatted the hell out of me. He was the kind of guy who keeps talking even when you have tuned him out but is so nice that you can’t tell him to go away. He did not look like a homeless person but like someone who spends a week on one friend’s couch, a week on mom’s couch, and so on.

After hearing about his current and past living situation, his bike trip up north, his past alcoholism, his current drugs of choice, and other parts of his life story, he began to complain about how Hidden Beach has changed. It’s not what it used to be, he said. "Back in the day there weren’t all these young people, the stroller crowd, the police, blah blah blah. We used to be able to drink and smoke out here all we wanted and sleep in them bushes over there before they cut them down."

Though he didn’t say so, it became clear that what he missed was this: the days when he could get black-out drunk without having the police or paramedics being called. Eventually a cop did come around, and (surprise, surprise) they knew each other by name. This dirty strip of sand was so precious to my chatty new friend that he was willing to hold forth on how it had been ruined until he was red in the face. He joined with some others there, who also looked semi-homeless and a little drunk.

In a similar way I have noticed that on 4chan b/, a message board devoted mostly to anime, jerking off, and trolling which I visit every once in a while for these purposes, there are vicious comments directed at anyone perceived as a "newfag." Commenters on the site are constantly complaining about newfags, which they also refer to simply as cancer. Yet most people on the site seem to be teenagers, despite the huge amount of gore, pornography and cruelty there.

Both places – the dirty little beach and the fapping website – show how strong emotions get when people feel something is their own, no matter how pathetic it is. People get so upset when their own little mountain of shit is threatened.