Extra! Extra!

What would be the busiest, most newsworthy day ever? I was letting my mind wander and think of this recently. What would it look like if several monumentally important events occurred in the same day? What if there were almost too much news for one day and big stories, which in other days would lead every front page, were relegated to page 16A? Here’s a list of hypothetical huge things that could happen all at once.

The president of the United States is indicted for embezzling billions of dollars from federal funds meant for children. The president resigns in a burst of vile profanity during a perp walk on live television.

The pope dies during mass.

In Omaha, a train crashes into a nuclear power plant and scientists barely manage to prevent a meltdown.

A 7.2 earthquake in China causes billions in damages.

Keith Richards gets hit by Paul McCartney’s limo but miraculously survives.

The vice president is caught red-handed having a kinky affair with a Supreme Court justice.

The king or queen of England abdicates the throne, with the last words to the nation being, “You people disgust me.”

Scientists discover a foolproof cure for cancer.

A stage at a festival concert collapses, badly injuring Adele, Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande.

The Golden Gate Bridge inexplicably turns silver.

The last episode of The Simpsons airs, drawing the largest TV audience of all time, 1.4 billion viewers.

They finally find out what happened to Amelia Earhart.

Philip Michael Thomas gets the last award he needs for his EGOT.

The Cubs win the World Series.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa finally falls over.

The government reveals irrefutable evidence of intelligent life in our solar system.

Congress repeals the Fourth Amendment.

Wow, that would be one newsworthy day.

Don't make us feel older than we already do

I was reading an article (for some reason) about Britney Spears that noted that she has had a music career for 20 years now. This not only made me feel older than I already do but the math here is inaccurate. “Baby One More Time” (I will not use the stupid ellipses in the title) debuted on the radio at the end of 1998 and hit number 1 in early 1999. The album came out in early 1999. That’s not even 18 years. The article mentions something about 1997 and maybe her career germinated then with some demos but basically Britney has been in the public eye since 1999 (besides, 1997 was also not 20 years ago). That’s when I remember her starting. Let’s call it 17 years from 1999 to 2016. Maybe in a few months I’ll give you 18.

Once in awhile I’ll read an article that fudges an anniversary number and it’s obnoxious. Twenty years ago it was 1996, not 1997 or 1998 or 1999. Nineteen ninety-six. A 17-year-old is not the same as a 20-year-old so a 17-year anniversary is not the same as a 20-year anniversary. What, were they trying to get a jump on the Britney anniversary articles?

Never round up. If you’re 37, you are not 40. You are 37. Don’t tell me 1999 was 20 years ago. Please don’t.

I also don’t like hearing things like “the 32^nd season of Survivor.” Yes, there have been 32 seasons of the show but it’s only been on since 2000. There are multiple seasons every year so this seems like a cheat and makes the show seem more venerable than it really is.

I find that years that are long in the past have different characteristics and signifiers from each other. The Michael Jackson red leather jackets of 1983 are different than the Swatches of 1986. The acid-wash jeans and Latin girl pop of 1989 are different then the flannel and grunge of 1992. Each belongs to its era and the years of your youth are very singular. A few years can make a very big difference in pop culture so I don’t like anachronisms or fudging numbers.

This only applies to youth. I couldn’t tell you what the pop culture differences are between 2007 and 2010.

Slurred Speech

Since the age of 4 ½, when I had started tracing the alphabet, I have been slowly getting drunk, writing and typing gradually slurring. My loops and ligatures were baroque but the meaning still pretty clear. If my fingertips ever struck the wrong key, it was like a prodigy playing the wrong note.

Now I lift my head and look at my work and need annotations to decipher it. I tickle backwards and add in the letters that I missed or were indistinct. Read it aloud like it is and they would tell me to sleep it off.

My mind was so clear once. I could put a date on any obscure anecdote. Now mind and writing gradually diffuse like a thundercloud bursting overhead. I cannot recall what I once set down. Is the handwriting and print a harbinger of what will happen to my mind right before the binge takes my consciousness?

A Sad Summer Without Song

The turmoil of the last few months have combined with rampant indecisiveness to produce a summer that has been as miserable as any in modern memory. We are a nation rudderless. We are bereft of imagination. We are without rhythm or poetry.

We are without a Song of the Summer.

I read an article in the Washington Post bemoaning the fact that we haven’t really, as a society, settled on the anthem that in the decades to come will perfectly encapsulate what life was like when we look back to 2016. Sure, the article argued, songs have hit number 1, including those by Justin Timberlake, Drake and marble-mouth moaner Sia. But none really seems to have tapped into the zeitgeist of What We Talk About When We Talk About 2016.

This is a tragic break from one of America’s most venerable and august traditions, which we have celebrated since way, way back in 2012. Back then, every American agreed that Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” deserved the lofty title of Song of the Summer. Those who initially resisted, like me, finally gave in when the dentist of pop culture forced my mouth open wide and crammed the song down my throat until I agreed that its charms were immeasurable. Immeasurable.

You know who I feel the worst for? The writers who have tried to kill endless summer afternoons, wearing sweaters to guard against the artificial chill, without having a song to fill those column inches and megabytes with. How long and bleak the days must seem for people at Upworthy or Buzzfeed without having any fodder to recap the Songs of the Summer of the past or produce a slideshow about the current contenders.

What does this lack of music say about 2016? Nothing good. Nothing I really want to explore, lest I go mad. Maybe some dark horse will ride into the rapidly collapsing August with an unbelievably breezy pop song that will mandate that America stands up and dances. One can hope.

As the leaves begin to fall and the coming winter mimics the chill of the grave, what am I supposed to use as the campfire of memory to warm myself with if there is no Song of the Summer?

Floss!

The recent news that America’s dentists had dropped the recommendation to floss due to a lack of evidence that it prevented gum disease didn’t make me throw my dental floss in the trash in vindication. It actually reminded me to floss more.

Even if there are no high-quality studies that support the benefits of flossing, I think it’s still beneficial. If nothing else, flossing removes food particles from your teeth. Even if that doesn’t prevent periodontal complications, you’re still cleaner and your gums won’t bleed whenever you touch them. I really doubt flossing would leave you worse off.

No, I don’t floss every day but I do try to do it. I learned a hard lesson years ago. After avoiding dentists for years (mostly out of pure laziness), I had some problems and started going again. Things had been quiet in my mouth for years but all of a sudden, I needed a root canal (the surgery wasn’t bad but the pain before it was blinding) and ended up having a tooth pulled for reasons I barely remember. I also found out I had problems with my gums and needed a gum graft. This cost a not-insignificant amount of money, not all of which was covered.

My teeth look OK now but they have had a checkered history. I went to an orthodontist for eight years and had braces for two separate terms (like Grover Cleveland’s presidential administrations) plus retainers, headgear, rubber bands and everything else you could think of. I had my wisdom teeth out in high school.

After all that, my mouth is still jacked up. My mouth is just too small for all my teeth and tongue. My entire jaw kind of shifts around: sometimes my teeth on one side will meet and sometimes they won’t. (My dentist seemed sort of incredulous at this but I told him it was that was for as long as I could remember.) Still, it’s a vast improvement on my teeth as a child.

I guess I had just been through so much orthodontia as a child that I became lax as an adult and skipped the dentist for an embarrassing amount of time. Still, I’m going to keep flossing, evidence or not. Don’t neglect your teeth, kids. 

Who I Let In

In middle age I have come to realize who I will move from and who I will not, who I let in and who I keep out, who I will accommodate and who I will deny.

I am not the doormat who would cower and scurry before the sight of an esteemed hood ornament in the rear view mirror, especially since I have lived long enough to know the real demons to fear will not ram our bumpers. Now I know I can maintain my lane and nothing so terrible will happen, at least nothing that will not fall immediately from memory’s grasp.

Now I move when they hang behind me like someone who does not want to interrupt a conversation. If they are polite, I will be polite. But for those who scream and blink down the highway, like they expect the Red Sea to part before them because their truck or sports car or SUV is so badass that it would be a crime to restrict it to 80 mph, I cannot be moved. At least, not until my stubbornness gives way when you try to run me off the road.

Til then, you’ll just have to sit behind me and fume, buddy. My gesture when you pass my 75 might seem harsh to you, and I am not proud of it, but you deserve it for driving like a jackass.

A Test

They will grade every step I take. They will pull out clipboards and check off boxes that I cannot see. All referendums on the dad I will be.

Every move I make, it seems, is a test. Waiting for a call, weak and dumb, means laying down when the need for action yanks me out of bed at 3 a.m. A dozen escalating messages in a week shows I am too Faberge egg to handle the gavel that will not bang. Any whisper of frustration in my voice, any goofy joke missing the mark, shows them who I am and who I will be and they will shift the search.

I am the only one grading me, I know. Most likely, they barely notice.

But isn’t it all true? Doesn’t every ripple of who we are, no matter how we might overanalyze, say a little about who we are and who we would be?

Blame the Sun

It's all the sun's fault, really. It insists on shining, high-contrast as a kid's painting against the shocking blue sky. That nuclear orb forces me to spend a Sunday afternoon paying homage to it. Letting its reflected glory refract off artificial salt water and bronze me. It gets hard in August to find a reason not to.

Inside, more dust than I am comfortable with collects in those corners of the world you ignore until the sun hits at that unflattering angle. Any number of projects go neglected. There are pages to parse, pages to fill. There is always another load of laundry, always another decoration to secure, even another prestige arc to binge on. But so little of it is portable enough to linger on our deck with us.

If it goes undone, blame the sun. I would say it forces my obedience but who am I kidding? I am a willing acolyte, dreading the day when I finally have to go indoors.

Crowdfunding Self-Sufficiency

If only there were a way to crowdfund self-awareness for people. “Unconventional parents” Matt and Adele Allen, without a trace of irony, are raising money to “Help us achieve our ambition of being self-sufficient!” (https://www.fundmytravel.com/campaign/ng3EQl5kGR )

“Our ultimate goal is to become self-sufficient,” they say in run-on sentences, “the way of making that happen is by moving to Costa Rica and buying a big plot of land where we can grow food, and have access to wildlife and nature in it's natural state. That's where we need YOUR help, we would love if you could donate any amount and help us achieve our dreams.”

To sum up, they would like you to donate money so they will become self-sufficient, relying only on themselves (after other people pay their startup costs). Judging by their donations page, nobody is biting. They have raised £245 of the £100,000 they need to fund this journey of bootstrapping and ingenuity. The comments are closed now but I checked them a few days ago and they all were people asking if the Allens could really be so unaware of the irony of asking people for money for this.

The Allens believe in “off-grid parenting” with no rigid bedtimes, home schooling, indefinite breastfeeding and natural medicine. Fine, but so do a lot of people and I’m sure they fund all that without handouts from strangers. None of those things is terribly remarkable and certainly not some unique project worthy of giving them my credit card numbers.

These funding sites can be a great tool for good causes and I’m not going to tell people who to give their money to. Personally, my budget for charity is limited and I’d rather give it to someone with a disease or in some terrible circumstance rather than someone making an optional lifestyle change. This is a naked cash grab. These people want strangers to pay for their flights and new house on another continent. Hard pass.

Oh, but then after the checks for £100,000 clear, they’ll be self-sufficient. I see. Hey, somebody donate some money to us to pay off our mortgage! Then when Junior comes, we can stay home from work and homeschool him. And we’ll teach him a valuable lesson that the window to self-sufficiency is having other people pay the startup costs.

The Allens are living out that old adage: Give a family a fish and they’ll eat for a day but give them a six-figure donation and they’ll be self-sufficient forever.

202: Woo-Hoo!

Today is The Day. It’s a life-affirming, life-changing day. It’s the dawn of a new epoch. They finally finished widening the lanes on Route 202! I felt like pulling my car over, getting out and starting a parade!

My commute this morning, at least a few miles of it, was over three luxurious lanes, rather than two cramped and crappy lanes. I left my house 10 minutes late and still got to work 10 minutes early. The construction crews looked to be pretty much done a few weeks ago so I had been waiting with great anticipation. For the last few days, they had been putting the finishing touches on everything: dusting the concrete, hanging photos and arranging potted plants to give the highway a little atmosphere.

Now it’s all open and that sign that lists the commute ahead will start saying “6 miles, 6 minutes” instead of “6 miles, 483 minutes.” I don’t know what to do with this few extra minutes per day. Maybe I’ll take up needlepoint or stare soulfully out the window.

Few people alive today remember what 202 was like before all the construction. The world was different then. Hillary Clinton was just an obscure Cabinet member, we used our smart phones strictly for talking rather than for Pokemon Go, Isis was an Egyptian goddess, and Justin Bieber was a bratty teen who had not yet danced his way into the hearts of America. Those three pristine lanes open into a world very different than when the first orange cones went up.

Amid all this joy, let us pause and remember those old-timers who went to their graves never knowing when the road work would be completed, never knowing the joy of four lanes merging into three instead of four merging into two.

Now I look forward very much to my drive home. I’m sure the other 20 miles of my commute will be choked with traffic due to rampant overdevelopment, a lack of alternative roads and inadequate infrastructure, but for a few miles, I’ll be blissfully sailing along.