You are currently browsing the monthly archive for November 2007.
Evel Knievel has died. If I had to make a list of the 10 coolest icons of my childhood, he’d be somewhere on it. I had the Evel Knievel toy motorcycle set. It was even more indestructible than Evel Knievel himself. Great biography. He may be the only person portrayed by both George Hamilton and Sam Elliott.
Well, Pipeline turned five years old today. This also means that Hyperbole is turning five, more or less, since both sites started as a combined project, the short-lived Hootenanny. So happy birthday to Hyperbole.
On one level I feel very good about being able to maintain a site for five years. There have been sabbaticals, which anyone who writes a blog understands, but by and large there’s movement. The content, unfortunately, really would have been well served by an editor or three, and trying a re-write more than once or twice. But, bygones. In the next five years, Pipeline is going to become 10 or maybe 20 times better than it was the first five years. Hyperlink my words.
How will this happen? I will do this via more aggressive hyperlinking, primarily. I might also change the page layout, again. And, I will implement PayPal so I can sell my new paper airplane designs.
Our family has been going nutz with the Klutz Book of Paper Airplanes. There are some really fun designs in there, and of course having a fleet of assorted paper airplanes naturally lends itself to hilarity, depending on how funny you think it is when cherished family heirlooms are suddenly broken.
I remember getting to fourth or fifth grade and all of a sudden all these weird new planes started showing up. The Katydid, Space Cruisers, Professionals, Swashbucklers. I never questioned where they came from; I guess I just assumed that when you got older, the paper airplanes got better. But I sure wasn’t making them. I was stuck with the same crappy dart design, never accurately folded or properly creased, for which I now have a far better appreciation.
Looking back, it seems clear that somebody took the time to check out the right book from the library, and a fleet began to work it’s way slowly through the classrooms. I have a handful of different kids in my mind as possible perpetrators, kids who were either not doing well in school, and thus would have the time to build a Katydid, or kids whose rooms at home were full of old radios and electronics they liked to take apart and put back together. Some kids are just engineers from Day One, pretty much, but not me. It took me about 14,000 days to decide I liked folding paper airplanes.
In fact, within a day the 10 previously far-out designs in the Klutz book could no longer sate my insatiable desire to create new and different paper airplanes using, as always, traditional origami techniques. I went to the internets with high hopes to hone my craft, but those were dashed. It turns out the online paper airplane “community” is awash with paranoia, delusions of mediocrity, and a more than representative sample of the detritus of abandoned web pages. All anybody wants to talk about is their Exclusive Design for whatever, which usually looks like the three other planes you just looked at on another page, but folded in a different order or something. Oh, but that matters! Oh, sure. Different folding order means you get a different structural such and such, and blah, blah, blah. Either that or it’s a ghost town of a web site put together by a sad collection of goofballs who, for two weeks in July of ‘04, decided they were going to develop the greatest web page in the history of web pages devoted to their newfound passion, paper aeronautics.
I remember when it used to be about the planes. Or rather, when it wasn’t quite so much about the planes, but about the camaraderie of folding paper and cutting up in class and smelling rubber cement. But I’m sad to say the online paper airplane community isn’t about that at all.
And then there’s Mitt’s bogus anti-Mormon call campaign. I mean, seriously, Rudy and Mitt? It’s fun while it lasts, but doesn’t the party eventually wake up and change course? Probably to the guy who comes out of this looking better than ever, John McCain. Isn’t he the least flawed candidate for them in terms of being able to hold a coalition together to get the nomination, the one most capable of standing up to the rigors and scrutiny of a Presidential run?
Rudy has nothing to hide, so don’t even ask.
I ate lunch today at one of my favorite places, a little place called Keys Cafe, in this case the suburban version in Woodbury, MN. I was all prepared to sit quietly by myself, which is what I did for the most part, but my attention was divided by the four women sitting at the table beside me.
They were obviously former high school friends, possibly college friends, all in what I would assume were their late 20’s to early 30’s. When I first sat down there was only one, with what looked to be about a four to six month-old little girl. I like babies, so that’s what initially caught my eye. I never really got a look at the mother, who had her back to me. Within minutes the other three friends had all arrived, and a reunion/baby ogling festival soon began.
I like to surreptitiously observe people when I’m in public; I try to divine some reality about their lives based on the narrow window of my experience, however long that may be. I suppose that’s the essence of people-watching, at least for me. I feel like I have pretty good instincts about people, but of course I rarely get the chance to corroborate whether my flash impressions of the people I (don’t) meet are as accurate as I presume them to be. It’s all a matter of sample size, really. I may see a forlorn looking person on the street as I pass by and suppose them to be in a poor relationship, or struggling with the declining health of their parents, or constipated, and of course the narrative I build may not have any correlation to their romantic or gastrointestinal realities.
But if I get a longer sample, say a lunch hour full of conversation and glances and “private” conversations when one of the parties goes to the bathroom, I feel pretty comfortable with my impression. I’m not saying you can judge a book by its cover, but I’m usually pretty comfortable judging vapid women by their mind-numbing conversations, large (real) wedding rocks and even larger (fake) racks. Actually, only one of them had what I would consider to be artificial physical enhancements, at least that I could see. Man, you should have seen that baby’s eyes get big when that women pulled her in close!
As their lunch went on, I came to feel sorry for one of the women. She was pretty, but also had probably put on some weight since whenever they were friends. She had the jogging suit going on, and she just seemed uncomfortable with herself generally, especially talking to the two women who were what I would describe as “high physical maintenance”. They looked like they spent a lot of time and effort on what they wore and how they looked. Let me emphasize, there’s nothing wrong with that, necessarily. Yes, I’m totally putting my own biases and presuppositions on those women. That’s the kind of thing that always sounds wrong when somebody else does it, but not so bad when you do it because you tend to trust your instincts and experiences, to a point.
So anyway, the jogging suit woman. I think she felt bad about the fact that she probably, I suspect, was once the cat’s meow of this whole group, and now she didn’t seem to fit. But, she was still a part of their world; she hadn’t exactly started following the Dead and cast off her old life and values, at least outwardly. She was still Aging Former Suburban Cutie, just one trying to hide her figure under a bulky designer sweatsuit rather than fit it into stretch pants and a fantastic designer sweater. She looked bored with the two former cheerleaders, and I caught the tell-tale eye roll at one point that she thought nobody would see. I wished she had shown up to that meeting in a leather jacket, or with a tattoo, or at least a better self-image.
As I said, I never saw the mother of the baby. I couldn’t see her expressions or read her body language when her enhanced friend asked her if she had a chance to get to the gym since she’d had the baby. (That’s when the eye roll happened.) I can’t tell if the mother was annoyed by the lack of gym time or the question itself, or maybe none of the above. But I wondered about her little girl. Would she grow up thinking more of her body than she thought of herself? I caught her eye a few times and she smiled, but whether due to my facial expressions or her own gas is difficult to say. It’s hard to convey “You’ll always be perfect by just being you” with a face stuffed full of cheeseburger, but I tried the best I could.
Nice WCCO story about the baby book our friend Rhonda created…
I’m plowing through Chuck Klosterman’s “Killing Yourself to Live“, a gift from Pipeline Person JimH last Christmas that has taken me nearly a year to work my way to reading. As per usual with the books people give me, I’m wondering why it took me so long to get there.
People have been recommending Klosterman to me for quite awhile now. I believe this happens for two reasons, the first being that Klosterman has interesting and funny things to say about being a twenty/thirtysomething in today’s culture, and second, because I think some people see similarities between my writing and Klosterman’s writing. Now, let me be clear: It is obviously an absurd statement for me to compare my writing with that of an accomplished writer like Chuck Klosterman. I’m not making any sort of value judgement here. I’m only saying that since we both tend to write memoirish content that can veer in several directions, and are generally contemporaries in age, that there are similarities. At least, this is what I’ve been told by some people, unfortunately none of whom are Chuck Klosterman or people who are in a position to make me famous like Chuck Klosterman.
The problem, or course, with reading a lot of Klosterman (or any writer with a specific style) is that it can be difficult to not have your writing come out sounding exactly like that writer’s writing. Even now, what I’m writing comes out in Chuck Klosterman’s voice, which is fucked up because I’ve never even heard Chuck Klosterman speak. But I have an imagined painfully detached North Dakota drawl for Klosterman invented in my head, and when I read his work I apply said fictional voice, and now what I’m writing has that voice rather than my own slightly twangy Kansas hipster tongue that I usually imagine my writing to be in, which isn’t my actual voice in real life anyway.
And I’ll admit it. I’m envious of Chuck Klosterman. David Sedaris, too. All the writers, really. They get to live their lives by different rules. Snort coke with a guy you just met 20 minutes ago at the site of the Great White tragedy? Why not? He’s a writer. It’s all background work for him, no matter how wacky. He even gets to do it on an expense account. But if I tried that there’s no way it would work out. Why the fuck would I even be in Rhode Island in the first place?
I was thinking about all of this today while eating lunch at Wendy’s, when I saw something I had never seen at a Wendy’s before. They have a Greeter. Actually, he wasn’t a Greeter so much as a Follow Up Guy, one of those people who periodically walk around a restaurant and ask people how their meals are. As near as I could tell, this was the guy’s only function. And, I’m pretty sure he was retarded. Yeah, I know, bad word. I wouldn’t use it in conversation, but in my head I don’t hear “differently abled”, or “learning disabled” or whatever. I hear “retarded”. It’s not a snide or condescending word in my head. It just means somebody who’s not altogether completely normal, whatever that means.
At first I thought this Follow Up Guy was just a regular employee, but then I heard him approach the guys at a table near me and start asking them how their food was. His earnestness was a dead giveaway that he was special. He cared how their food was. You just don’t get that at a place like Wendy’s. The other giveaway was that he was like 50 years old. Again, I’m not dissing the guy at all. He looked happy and productive, such as it was, and that’s all to the good. There’s another Retarded Follow Up Guy who works at a pizza place I frequent for lunches, and he’s the same deal: Nice, friendly, older, the kind of guy who’s not so obviously different that you think anything of him until you pay close attention to the fact that all day long he just goes table to table asking people how their food is. I suppose, now that I think about it, that if these guys were doing a “normal” job I wouldn’t think anything at all about them. So maybe it’s the job that’s Retarded, and not them.
And I stand by that assertion, that having a middle-aged man walk around all day asking people how their food is in a fast-food place is retarded and bothersome, because the food is always the same. Does anybody ever offer these people legitimate feedback on their meals? I have to think these guys would short circuit if I ever said my pizza was too garlicky, or my fries not salty enough, simply because I doubt it’s ever happened, even in the training videos they (theoretically) had to watch before walking the floor. Jesus, that parenthetical was so Klosterman.
So the Retarded Follow Up Guy at Wendy’s strikes up a conversation with the guys I heard him greet. One of the patrons has an eagle or a wolf or something on his shirt, and the RFUG starts talking about how he loves nature, loves those nature shows, loves to hike in nature, walk in nature, and so on. And on. And these guys, rather than blow the dude off, carry on a conversation with him about nature and shirts they like to wear.
It’s not a crowded Wendy’s, so I figure I better deploy my iPod, because under no circumstances can I have this person engage me in conversation. I don’t necessarily even have to have the thing on; usually just having the earphones on will do the trick. Hell, I don’t even need an iPod; just having headphones on is the social equivalent of being in a private glass bubble, one that even an RFUG wouldn’t dare attempt to penetrate. It doesn’t have anything to do with what I perceive to be his mental capacity; I don’t want anybody not in my immediate party to address me in any way in a restaurant unless they are giving me my food or my change. Obviously, I’ll make an exception for a cute cashier or waitress, but even then I like to keep the talk small, because I’m not a jet set writer like Chuck Klosterman who can bed women in several different states at once and then use it for professional and comic relief. My wife wouldn’t understand that at all, and for good reason. So I keep it impersonal and distant at all times, which works out well because…
“Is everything OK, Sir!?”
Fuck! I dicked around too long looking for a specific album to play on my iPod, and now the RFUG is standing so very close to me and looking at the half-eaten Spicy Chicken Sandwich on my plate. And the truth is, the sandwich sucks. But it’s not his fault, nor is it Wendy’s fault, because I knew the sandwich would suck. I knew it would suck because I eat it at least once a week (usually via the drive-through), and I’m sick of it. The first time I ate the Wendy’s Spicy Chicken sandwich was in March of 1994 in Towson, Maryland. And it was good, a revelation at the time. And the ten or so times after that it was fine, too, up until sometime in 1997 or so when I had consumed approximately 100 Spicy Chicken Sandwiches. But I’m a creature of habit who somehow thinks a fried chicken sandwich is “better” for me than some of the other crap in my lunch rut, and so this unhappy relationship continues. All of which raises the question of Who Is Really Retarded In That Wendy’s?
But I can’t tell this guy my sandwich sucks, obviously, because that would invite a genuine interaction. I then make the rare step of participating in eye contact with this man. I’m not sure why. Curiosity, perhaps? Maybe I trust him, pulled in by his earnestness, and that’s what I think I see when I look at him. He needs to know, and I tell him.
“It’s really good.”
And rather than stay, or ask me about my shirt, or the iPod, or my Klosterman book, he smiles and walks on to the next table. I didn’t even get a chance to deploy my “Move on, fella” cues; he can tell I’m not a person he can have a genuine interaction with. He’s much, much smarter than I gave him credit for, which seems to happen a lot.
I have to make a stop in the restroom before I leave. I have no problem with using public toilets to do necessary business, unlike some friends of mine who will not sit on a public toilet under any circumstances. I don’t know if their refusal is a cleanliness issue, a privacy matter, or something else. As I sit reading Chuck Klosterman’s account of a discussion about Kafka and Duane Allman with a teenage waitress in North Carolina, I hear two men enter the restroom. There is only one stall, and it has currently been converted at least in part to my personal reading room. I realize my time there is short, and one of the men gives the stall door a couple hard shoves. I briefly wonder if the RFUG ever comes in here to ask people how things are going, but as I said, time is short and I open the door and emerge from the stall.
They are large, burly men. I know that somewhere behind them there is a sink but I can’t see it, as the duo takes up practically the entire bathroom while they wait to relieve themselves. Rather than try to part them to wash my hands, I simply leave. I know that’s not “clean”, but there was a bad vibe in the room, which I perceived to somehow involve the fact that I had been reading a book and the two of them were standing and waiting for one stall to use between the two of them, which in my mind meant they were about to have a conversation about who had the more urgent gastrointestinal situation to confront.
As I walked out the door one of them said, “I’m going to call Kevin while I’m taking a shit. He hates that.”
I saw a deer get hit by a car yesterday. It happened about 50 yards in front of me as I was driving. I saw the deer well off to the left, saw it move as if it were in slow motion across the other side of the parkway, and could tell well before impact that the car in front of me was going to hit it if it didn’t brake.
It didn’t.
When I hit deer, twice so far, my first reaction after surprise and terror is anger. I’m angry at the deer, angry that there are so goddamned many of them, angry that they don’t have the sense to use the crosswalks or run parallel with traffic rather than perpendicular to it. Somewhere in the back of my mind there is a sadness that such a large and wild animal died, but it often comes later and pales in comparison to my own relief for my safety and anger at having to deal with the insurance company.
Oddly, I had never seen someone else hit a deer until yesterday. It was kind of disturbing to witness. It was a large female deer, just out for a nice gallop, and then it was over. It stumbled slightly and then fell into the median after it was struck. I don’t think it suffered much, thankfully, hopefully, but who really knows what a wild animal feels? You couldn’t really tell it had been hit other than the small explosion of fluid and intestines that shot out it’s white, bushy rear upon impact. The woman in the car never saw it, and once I saw that she was OK and calling for help, I just drove on. But it saddened me, and I can’t really say why. Minnesota wouldn’t miss a thousand deer, much less one. But it was big and fast and a beautiful shade of tan, and had probably walked among the suburban McMansions and strip malls for many autumns. Seeing it quivering there on the side of the road just seemed crass and wrong. God’s beauty wronged, or something like that.
I decided to call my fantasy basketball team “The Departed” this year. It’s a play on the name of the movie, as well as the overriding theme of this season for me, which is that Kevin Garnett is no longer in town. My logo was a photo of Garnett holding his new Celtics jersey.
Then Robert Goulet died. I loved Robert Goulet, mainly because of his willingness to laugh at himself. His appearance with Triumph the Comic Insult Dog (“Don’t touch Goulet!”) was an unforgettable, though apparently un-YouTubeable, classic. In tribute to Goulet’s “departure”, I made Goulet my new team logo. And with that, I had a new theme: people died all the time, so I’d just make The Departed a sort of tribute franchise.
Several lesser celebrities passed on immediately after Goulet, including Chad Varah, founder of the Samaritans, who have been of great help to other owners in my league suffering at the hands of my juggernaut of a team. Unfortunately, none of these lesser lights seemed appropriate to carry the mantle for The Departed. When Kanye’s mother (and manager) died I considered promoting her, but couldn’t find a suitable photo of her. Not famous enough, I guess. If only it had been Kanye…
Then Norman Mailer died. Money. He’s now the logo, and I decided to adopt his bravado and assery into my league persona for the week. In a welcome change from a week of smoking cigarettes, drinking scotch and singing songs from Camelot, I’ve been bragging about how great my team is, how the only fantasy manager who could possibly compete with me is Hemingway, but of course since he’s dead that just leaves me to dominate my other owners like so many weak women.
But I never particularly cared for Mailer, and now I’m ready for a new logo. As a result, I find myself checking this Wikipedia page with disturbing regularity. The problem isn’t that people of some import aren’t dying; as you can see, there are multiple applicants daily. The problem is that most of them are from other parts of the world. Take the most recent entry, for example: Vijay Kumar Khandewal, an Indian parliamentarian. Had he been an American parliamentarian, we might have something. But if I made Vijay my team logo, at what point do I stop? As you can see, there is no shortage of deaths that are notable to at least some portion of the world community.
So many names. So many people passing on who have not graced our sports pages, or the cover of Entertainment Weekly, or given a political speech covered by our breathless pundits. And yet, they lived full lives, they struggled to make their world better, even if most of us never knew of their struggles, their triumphs, or what they looked like. Well, Pipeline People, Vijay Kumar Khandelwal lived a full life, and today he died.
And what was one of Vijay’s favorite hobbies? Hockey. Vijay worked for better education and a better environment in India, and Vijay loved hockey. Here’s hoping the ice is smooth wherever you are now, Mr. Khandelwal.
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