A Mysterious Note

Introduction

It’s hard to blog during the holidays, or so I tell myself. Too many distractions! On top of that, another distraction presented itself recently that has lodged itself so firmly in my brain, I can’t move on, so I have decided to make it this week’s post. Read on because things are about to get weird.

(By the way, I’m typing with a sprained, or at least wanged, wrist so I’m gonna go fast and not worry too much about literary polish … bear with me.)

A weird note

I was minding my own business on Sunday when my wife said, “We got a weird note slipped under our garage door today.” I was immediately concerned.

It would be weird for a neighbor to leave a note, obviously, since they could just knock on our door, wait until the next time we’re out front, or even just text. Unless they’re really upset about something and don’t want to put us on the spot … but then, we’re pretty easy neighbors these days now that our kids’ multi-keg ragers are a thing of the past. (Kidding! I mean, not to insinuate the multi-keg ragers are still going on … I mean, they never were. As far as I know or remember.)

So, I reasoned, this must be some random passerby leaving a note. And that’s not automatically a bad thing—it could have been something simple like,  “The light in your crawl space is on,” which would have actually been true up until Saturday when I finally mustered the resolve (being claustrophobic) to crawl in there and turn it off. But Saturday being in the past, and the note having been described as “weird,” its message would have to be something like a) “I know why your crawl space light was on,” or b) “I turned on your crawl space light … guess how?” or maybe something even more disturbing. But the theory of Occam’s Razor would say the note most likely had nothing to do with the light in our crawl space.

It was still possible to imagine a note from a rando that wasn’t full-on disturbing. For example, somebody once left a note on my Scion XB, a toaster-shaped car I inherited from my late father, that read, “I will pay you OVER BLUE BOOK for this car, RUNNING OR NOT!” with a phone number listed. I was a bit offended, actually. I mean, why would this rando assume there was a good chance my car isn’t running? Do I look like the kind of derelict who keeps a broken-down car parked in front of his house? I was tempted to incorporate the rando’s number in some graffiti, e.g. “FOR A GOOD TIME CALL…” on a bathroom wall.

Not that the car purchase offer was weird, exactly. Of course the Scion would attract potential buyers, it’s totally gangsta! So what would a “weird” note say? My mind raced, trying to imagine someone I might have had crossed paths with who subsequently might feel like leaving a weird note … unfinished business, perhaps? Naturally the first guy I hit upon was the junkie.

The junkie

Now, before you get all judgmental on me for jumping to conclusions about this or that vagrant being a probable junkie, I’m talking about an actual known junkie. A few years ago my wife and I started finding these small squares of aluminum foil in our front yard, burned black on one side. You can imagine this was a bit disconcerting. My wife called the police non-emergency line, and an officer came out. I chatted about it with him, and he confirmed that the foils were from black-tar heroin, and he was pretty sure he knew who was smoking it. It was this 20-something who lived with his mom a few blocks away, who liked to smoke the heroin in his mom’s Mercedes. I spotted the car not long after but only as the guy was pulling away from the curb. I later discovered where the guy lived (or at least parked most of the time). I thought about leaving a note on his car saying, “Please stop smoking heroin in front of my house,” but I wasn’t sure the admonishment would be taken in the right spirit.

Well, a week or so later, I was about to head out for a bike ride, and was in the driveway pumping up my tires (still wearing flip-flops, not yet my cycling shoes, which as you shall see is important). A little old lady happened by walking her dog and started to chat me up. As we talked, I suddenly became aware that the junkie was parked right out front, in broad daylight, getting his fix! The moment was very awkward; I couldn’t exactly tell the little old lady, “Excuse me, I’m enjoying our chat but I need to step away for a moment and terrorize this junkie.” Fortunately she soon continued on her way, and I ran over to the driver’s side door of the Benz. I was going to pound on the window and give the guy a piece of my mind, confident that if the situation devolved into fisticuffs I would have two advantages: a) my opponent was high and I was not, and b) I alone was wearing a helmet. But he saw me coming, put the car in gear, and took off. I ran after him, right down the middle of the street, rounded the corner, and followed him up the next street, as fast as I could. By the time he took the corner onto his street, I was too out of breath to continue, which was fine … I figured I’d made my point. And in fact, this was proved out: the guy never again parked in front of our house. And in case you’re one of my neighbors who has stumbled across this post and are now livid that I’m disclosing information publicly that could lower property values, this was years ago and I haven’t seen that car, nor any burnt foil, in quite a while. The guy was an anomaly. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t have left the mysterious note last Sunday, something like, “I had found your curbside a safe space in which to enjoy my self-medication and it really hurts my feelings that you ran me off.”

To be clear, I didn’t ponder all of this at length, and the amount of time it took you to read the above background is just because you’re getting the story for the first time. For me, all of that flashed across my mind in like a second, with basic images working like macros to swiftly convey the themes: neighbor, rando, crawl-space, black-tar heroin. Within a second that was all past and I was holding out my hand and saying, “Let me see the note.”

The actual weird note

Okay, here is the note (click to enlarge):

There’s so much that’s weird about it, right? First off, it’s on a ripped-off piece of grocery bag, like the guy didn’t have a notepad or even a piece of junk mail to write on. Then, the note starts out in cursive (an arguably odd choice for a rando who scrawls notes on scraps), and then becomes a mix of lowercase and uppercase print. It also mentions CBS, a network that has become so obscure, in this modern above-the-network, cable-cutting Internet era, that I wasn’t even sure they were still on the air. I mean, CBS? Really? I hadn’t been this mystified since that one time my dad said, “Is there a Sears around here? I need to buy some trousers.”

It’s also a little weird to say that a show is both funny and worth seeing … I mean, aren’t all funny shows worth seeing? And doesn’t the fact of the note automatically suggest the show is worth seeing? Who would leave a note saying, “There’s a show on CBS but don’t bother”? I was further nonplussed by the note saying, “on Sunday night,” since the note was left on Sunday. Why not just “tonight”?

Then there’s the matter of the time specified. You’d think that somebody who bothered to write a note recommending a show would be a bit more careful writing out the number. I think it looks like an 8, as does my wife, but our younger daughter emphatically declared that it’s a 5. Her friend S— initially thought it was a 5 but then agreed it actually does look more like an 8. This number is important because if I’m to track down this mystery, I’ll need to see what the show even is. That could help; after all, if it’s a stirring (and yet funny) documentary about a reformed heroin addict, everything would snap into place.

I checked the listings. At 8:00 p.m. there was a sitcom called “The Neighborhood” on CBS. The description on IMDB makes it sound pretty stupid: “A white-bread couple from the Midwest moves to the hood and turn to milquetoast when they try to befriend their rough, street-tough and intimidating neighbors.” I watched a few trailers and man, if those are the highlights, this show is far from funny. In terms of critical reviews, Common Sense Media says, “Regressive racial attitudes and bad jokes mar family sitcom.” So whoever left this note has pretty poor taste.

Unless … this person is tweaking me? Casting aspersions on my taste? But then wouldn’t the note say something more like, “You’d probably like this”? Nothing about the note made sense.

I checked the listing for 5:00 p.m. and all it said was, “Local Programming.” Not sure what that means, though it brought to mind our old independent station in Denver when I was growing up that would show low-budget shows like “All Star Wrestling.” And my brothers and I would actually watch them, because that’s how little we cared about our time and our brains back then. (Yes, I find this as disgraceful as you do.) Anyway, I didn’t worry too much about that because it looks like an 8 on that note. And would 5:00 p.m. wouldn’t really be “night,” would it?

There is exactly one neighbor (i.e., non-rando) I thought might have left the note. He lives a couple blocks away but often passes by while walking his dog. Of course his handwriting and diction would be better, but who knows, maybe he was heading home after one of the neighborhood multi-keg ragers or something. It was just so easy to inquire, I went ahead and sent him an email asking if he’d left me a note. He promptly replied, “No I didn’t. Besides, I’m more of a severed-horse-head-on-the-pillow-next-to-you kind of message-giver.” (I shall endeavor to stay on his good side.)

Soliciting theories

My wife and I talked over the possibilities about this note. Her theory is that somebody was trying to break into our garage to steal stuff, and had the note on hand in case he got caught—he could just say he was leaving a note. But I’m not buying it, because there was no damage to the door; it would have been a broad daylight break-in when we were obviously home; nothing in the garage would really be worth stealing; and, since the rando wasn’t caught in the act of anything, why did he leave the note? Furthermore, why would it be such an unrealistic one, scrawled messily on a scrap?

I texted a photo of the note to P—,  a friend of mine, asking for his theory. He suggested the note was from a spurned lover. He might have been implying that my wife has been cuckolding me, or he was casting aspersions on my fidelity. Most likely he was being sarcastic or at least facetious. I replied that a spurned lover would send a perfumed letter, or attach the note to a brick thrown through my window. I also pointed out that a spurned lover would be more likely to recommend a Lars von Trier film than an insipid comedy. P—  replied, “I think this person is dumbing it down to your intellectual level … I know the truth hurts.” As you’ve gathered by now, this input was not helpful in solving the mystery.

My younger daughter suspects it’s a homeless guy who somehow had the chance to see this show and is using all the influence he has, and the tools available, to recommend it to others, sliding notes under as many doors as possible, and that there’s nothing special about us to explain why we received it.

Her friend S— has a slightly similar theory: that’s it’s one of the producers of the TV show, promoting it in a grassroots way. In this latter case, I wondered aloud why this promo was on a scrap of paper, handwritten , instead of something photocopied. S— just shrugged.

I asked my brother B— for his take. He guessed it was “someone with an addled mind, or under some unnatural influence?” I’m intrigued by “unnatural” vs. “drug or alcohol.” The broader term “unnatural” doesn’t rule out the supernatural. Still, not a particularly compelling theory. As to 5 vs. 8, my brother couldn’t decide which and suggested I “just tune in to CBS straightaway and start watching, just in case.” I think this was disingenuous because he knows I don’t have cable, or even rabbit-ears. (Do Gen-Zers even know what rabbit-ears are/were? Well, my brother sure does. As kids we’d take turns standing next to the TV holding the aerial because that made it work better.)

I asked my older daughter for her theory. She suggested that the note is a puzzle of some kind, and that solving it would gain my wife and/or me entry into some elite club or cult. If we can’t solve it, we’re not allowed in.

Now, before you read further, it may well be that you have your own theory. If not, take a moment and think of one now. What, to you, seems like the most plausible scenario? Who wrote this note, and why?

Epiphany!

As I pondered all these theories, I suddenly had an epiphany, of the non-religious variety. Is it redundant to say “suddenly” I had an epiphany? Probably, since epiphanies don’t really dawn gradually on a person. Unless they do … probably the insight had been creeping up on me and suddenly achieved escape velocity. Maybe that’s always the way with epiphanies. But I digress (and I could go delete the last few sentences except I’ve kind of fallen in love with them … and yes, I’ve been warned against this, but like I said earlier, I have a sprained or at least wanged wrist).

The epiphany, alas, does not concern the origin of this note, nor its purpose. The note itself remains a mystery. The epiphany, rather, is this: whatever the intent of whoever left this note, the note has become like a Rorschach test. The theory a person puts forth can help shed a little bit of light on “where he or she is at,” as the expression goes. I decided to take a look at the theories in light of what I know about who advanced them:

Theory	Theory’s author and his/her traits
Would-be burglar looking for plausible alibi	My wife, a protective mother
Junkie who used to favor our front yard	Myself, a protective father with a typical male thirst for hand-to-hand combat
Spurned lover	P—, an obviously lonely middle-aged man ;-)
Homeless man seeking to have influence	My younger daughter, a student who has yet to step onto the world stage
Producer of the show trying to grow his audience	S—, a film student and budding filmmaker
Person who is addled or unnaturally influenced	B—, a religious man with a wary eye
Puzzle/intelligence test to screen potential club/cult members	My older daughter who is studying for the MCAT and is understandably nervous about it

Call to action

A minute ago I asked you to pause and come up with your own theory about who wrote this note and why. Now you see where I was headed: you can use your own response as a window into your soul. And with that, I’m going to call this a post … it’s Christmas Eve, after all, and I should be eating cookies with my family. Thanks for tuning in. Come back Sunday at 5 or 8 p.m. PST for another episode of … whatever!

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From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XIII

Introduction

This is the thirteenth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, and Volume XII is here. (The different volumes have nothing to do with one another and can be read in any order, or underwater, or not at all.)

The Bits & Bobs series is the reason I’ve been called “a master of the short, short form” by … nobody! These are excerpts from emails, letters, etc. that I wrote to friends and family before I started this blog and channeled all my literary compulsion into this single endeavor. Read on if it’s bedtime and you’re jittery, or even better, read this aloud from your phone to some rando on the bus.

October 13, 1995

Thanks for offering me the TV, but no thanks, I’m good. I don’t miss having one, and when someone asks something like, “Did you see ‘Friends’ last night?” I kind of enjoy replying, “No, I don’t have a TV.” No matter how offhandedly I deliver this message, I probably come off sounding sanctimonious and superior, which causes my interlocutor to judge and despise me, which of course everyone enjoys doing, so I can feel good about doing someone a favor in giving him that pleasure. Often, I’ll be asked, “No TV?! How do you keep up with the news?” The answer is, I mostly don’t, since we don’t get a newspaper either. I figure if something’s important, I’ll hear about it one way or the other. I get enough news by reading the headline thru the window of the newspaper vending machine while I’m waiting for the bus. What’s the point of being more informed than that? What am I going to do about anything? Is there a cautionary tale in the OJ Simpson murder case? As long as I understand that 1) our country is a vicious planet-plundering machine, and 2) people are dying all over the world and I have it so good, and 3) we won’t know how the Raiders will stack up this season until we see them play Dallas, then I think I’m informed enough.

November 12, 1996

Since I’m not hosting Thanksgiving, I guess it’s really not my call as to whether you invite B—. But since you asked, my personal opinion is ABSOLUTELY NOT. First of all, in the best of scenarios, the guy is a jerk, a pain in the ass to have around, he’s ugly, and he stinks. I know that it’s customary that one’s parent is automatically entitled to bring his or her spouse to a holiday gathering, but with a divorce pending it really seems like we ought to have some wiggle room here. Of additional consideration are the specific facts of the case: B— has zero tact, zero hygiene, and zero sense of humor, and he has shown rising resentment at the fact that we Albert boys are typically kind, tactful, humorous, fun to have around, inoffensive visually, and known either for no odor at all, or for a swarthy, masculine sweat smell that isn’t unpleasant (lacking, as it does, that strange and somehow non-human scent element that makes you want to hurl, that afflicts certain men perhaps at random, or perhaps as a form of punishment). If you said you were considering inviting Charles Manson, I would be more ambivalent; after all, he would at least be interesting company. We could interview him and gain insight into the life of a sociopathic, psychotic killer. But with B—, we’d just have a whining, complaining, jittery, humorless little pot-bellied man lashing out against everything and everyone in his environment, wishing he could be somewhere else—playing bridge, perhaps, accumulating the points necessary to be an All-Time Grand Master Great King and Grand Poobah of that discipline. Finally, I offer you one additional consideration: if B— were to attend (and I don’t know why he’d even accept other than to deliberately be a pain in the ass, in addition to having nowhere else to go), I might be tempted to tell him what I really think of him, without the extraordinary tact and restraint I’ve demonstrated here. But of course, it’s all up to you as you’re the host. So please do feel free to invite him, in which case I will simply cancel my flight and make other arrangements, such as biking over to McDonalds on Thanksgiving, even if I can’t be sure it’ll even be open.

December 12, 1996

Did you hear about this woman who sued DEC for her carpal tunnel syndrome? It’s kind of odd. The reason she won her case is that DEC had done employee training on ergonomics & stress-injuries, but didn’t give the same training to its customers, and didn’t post a carpal tunnel syndrome warning label on the keyboards they manufactured for sale. Flagrant disregard for health and safety! So why didn’t this woman sue her own employer for not giving her ergonomics training? Probably because DEC has deeper pockets. So I’m going to sue UPS (both because I hate them and because I like money). The way I figure it, there’s no way they don’t train their employees to lift heavy objects with bent knees, using the leg muscles and not the back muscles. And yet I’ve received many a heavy box from UPS without a warning label of any kind. I’m also considering a lawsuit against the novelist Danielle Steele because her novels are famously “impossible to put down,” are usually well over an inch thick, and come out a couple of times a year. That’s a lot of reading, and it’s a known fact that too much reading causes myopia (heck, John Milton went blind from it), and yet not one of Ms. Steele’s books (so far as I know) has a warning label about too much reading causing eye strain. Ms. Steele is loaded (her Pacific Heights home is right next to a member of Metallica’s) so she’ll probably settle out of court and I can quickly make some pretty good money.

December 17, 1996

Well, our office holiday party just finished. It was at this place called MacArthur Park, a restaurant with a large lobby area that my company rented. E— wasn’t able to come because she had a city council meeting to go to. Because of my injured foot I spent most of the time sitting down instead of milling about. There were these “crab” cakes that tasted kind of like tuna salad—they were definitely stretched. There were also these ribs that were remarkably bland given that MacArthur Park is famous for its ribs. There were also these sautéed mushroom sandwiches, open-faced, which were startlingly good. Finally, there were these half-baked apples with bacon around them that were okay. You’ve never seen such a sober bunch, not in terms of spirits but . . . boy, it’s hard not to commit double-entendres here. Let’s just say that nobody was even one sheet to the wind. Very non-drunk, and therefore non-rude and non-embarrassing, which I like. Still, it’s not quite as festive as when you have a sit-down dinner and people get up and make sentimental, half-clocked, maudlin speeches like at my old work, where people were desperate to eat as much food and drink as much booze on the company’s dime as possible, out of spite. Anyway, I behaved myself as well; that is, I managed to keep from eating so many mushroom sandwiches that I became gassy or hurled or something. The only problem is that now my best suit smells a bit like cigarette & cigar smoke. But I’m back in the office and it’s not even 7:00 p.m. (And what am I doing in the office? That’s a very good question and I’m afraid I have no answer other than I decided to walk home and it’s on the way.)

Undated, ca. 2004

We are up visiting Mom. When we arrived here, I was surprised by two things. First, she was not here to greet us—turns out she’d been called in to work at the hospital. Second, there was something really wrong with S— [her cat]. His entire body was trembling, and he struggled to stand up. There was a frightening jerkiness to his movements, like early Hollywood animatronics or first-generation CGI. He had a wild, feral look in his eyes and was emitting low, metallic yowls. He was like half cat, half Terminator, and it seemed he could be capable of anything.

E— led the kids to safety while I called Mom at work. She told me S— had been recently diagnosed as diabetic and put on new medication, and given the crisis she’d come right home. In the meantime I called the veterinarian, who determined that the cat’s blood sugar had crashed and that he probably wouldn’t survive the trip to her clinic. She told me to try rubbing corn syrup into the cat’s gums with a Q-tip. It was his only chance, she advised. Corn syrup? Seriously?

Hoo boy. This wasn’t going to be easy because as you know, S— is a bit of a tricky cat to begin with, having that strange tendency to occasionally turn on you. Like, he’ll be contentedly sitting in your lap, relaxed as could be, and then will suddenly try to bite you. And that’s when he’s behaving normally, not when he’s having a life-threatening blood sugar issue. Heck, if my own life were in danger I might try to bite people, too.

I set out the Q-tips, poured corn syrup from the jug into the cap, and steeled myself for the ordeal.

The beast must have known that his life was in danger but without understanding why. His reaction was to mount a strong defense. In other words, he was in full kill mode. As I approached him, he lunged, narrowly missing, his teeth snapping audibly together. “Aren’t you afraid he’ll bite you?” E— asked. Um, yeah. Of course.

I wrestled the poor creature onto my lap, trying to pin down his windmilling hind legs. S— was making good headway on my forearms with his barbed-wire claws. My base impulse was to hurl him away from me, but with great resolve I stayed at it. When I was able to overpower the animal and hold him still, I felt less panicky. A human, I reminded himself, is stronger than a cat.

A long moment passed, S— straining uselessly. Still pinning him down, I inspected the deep scratches he’d made on my arms and considered the etymology of “cat-o’-nine-tails.” Eventually S—, exhausted, went limp and I set about rubbing the corn syrup into his gums with the Q-tip. I worked quickly, carefully pulling back his lips with one hand and working the Q-tip with the other.

Suddenly the stricken creature came back to life, as though hit with a thousand volts, snarling and trying again to bite his tormentor. I got a good grip on his body. I could feel the knobby bones across his back. His front legs were a blur as he flailed, and I jerked myself back to keep my face out of biting range. This attack, too, petered out and he slumped again. I pried his jaws open and rubbed some more syrup in. He still trembled, and periodically he weakly tried to bite, but he was too weak to fight anymore. Eventually, amazingly, as I continued rubbing the syrup into his upper and lower gums, the treatment began to work. S—’s shaking stopped, and in time he seemed to relax. By the time Mom arrived, he seemed stable, and he survived the trip to the animal hospital. They gave him some basic treatment and now he’s sound as a pound. It seems he had developed some kind of fleeting diabetes, and when it went away, the medication he was still on messed up his (now non-diabetic) blood sugar. Wacky!

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From the Archives - Careergate

Introduction

I recently came across a letter to my brother from 1995, recalling a shameful episode from my past, dating back to first grade. This being a slow news day, I figured I’d post it here. I’ve fleshed it about a bit, from memory. Believe me: I remember this ordeal all too well.

Careergate — July 9, 1995

In first grade, we did a big unit on careers. First we watched some film loops (remember those?) about various careers including middle manager, quality control technician, and comptroller. Naw, just kidding, it was the normal assortment of clichéd vocations like doctor, nurse, construction worker, teacher, farmer … the stuff it’s easy to imagine and picture, even if it represents only a sliver of the wide variety of actual careers out there. Various parents came in to talk about their careers as well, though I didn’t pay much attention. The only one I remember well was a long-haul truck driver. He described, in great detail, the methamphetamine regimen that kept him awake at the wheel, along with its various side effects. (Okay, fine, I made that part up.) Then we kids had to decide what we were going to be when we grew up, and make a big poster showing ourselves on the job. The year before, my brother Max had chosen “ambulance driver,” mainly (I believed then, and continue to believe) because he thought he could draw a pretty cool picture of an ambulance. My parents were pleased at his choice and made a nice fuss over him.

I didn’t put much thought into deciding on my career. I believed at the time, naïve as I was, that I would have a chance to revisit this decision later. I had no idea that this initial stab at a career plan would forever cement my reputation among my peers, my teacher, and my parents. So I thought about the project for about thirty seconds before deciding I could probably draw a TV set, and that it would be fun to draw a TV showroom with not only a few TVs in it, but also a big picture window, through which you could see the street and a cyclist riding by. I thought it would be a nice challenge to draw this well enough for the window not just to look like another TV. So I chose the career goal of TV salesman.

It is probably the case that Mrs. M— explained how the posters would be put on prominent display for all to see, including the parents who, on Parent Teacher night, would be pleased as punch at how Bear Creek Elementary, and Mrs. M— in particular, were grooming their children for highly successful and prestigious lives. But I wasn’t paying attention and thought this was another pointless project that would be soon forgotten. That is, I didn’t realize I was about to shame myself and my entire family, as I was too engrossed in the task at hand to see the big picture. I thought my drawing came out fairly well. It showed a man at a counter taking some money, and the happy customer with his hand on the TV set. In the background was a window: if you looked closely, you saw, through this window, a bicyclist riding by. I was most proud of that scene through the window. I felt it embodied happenstance—a little snapshot of life, caught by random, totally unrelated to the sales transaction. Naturally, I didn’t think these things in these words, but the feeling was there.

I find it noteworthy that I undertook the project without so much as a glance at what my classmates were doing. I was accustomed to being unorthodox, since I was raised if not by wolves, at least by slightly odd parents who in some ways diverged from mainstream society: we didn’t watch much TV, certainly didn’t follow sports (I mean, we didn’t even know the basic rules of football or baseball), used good grammar, were often ignorant of pop culture, and were put on the swim team instead of in Little League. I so often felt lost in the world that I’d just learned to accept this feeling and went through life in a fog, long pondering a great many mysteries but never thinking to ask anyone about them. For example, I couldn’t understand the Snickers ad showing a candy bar being sliced up to show off the peanuts and peanut butter nougat, and ending with the words, “No matter how you slice it, it comes up peanuts.” I’d never heard the expression “no matter how you slice it,” so the entire ad was a mystery. Who, I wondered, goes around slicing up Snickers bars, and why?

And, when I listened to the Carole King album “Really Rosie,” and its title song, I couldn’t fathom the point of the lyric “I’m really Rosie and I’m the most/ Beat that drum, make that toast.” I mean, okay, beating a drum to celebrate someone, sure … but making toast? “Wow, you’re really the most, let me make you some toast. Whole wheat or white?” I had no idea people clinked together glasses of wine or champagne while wishing each other well … I’d never seen such a thing. In my family we drank powdered milk from plastic cups and never offered up good tidings.

So, when I finished my career poster and happened to glance at what my classmates had done, I think I actually felt smug at how hackneyed their career plans were, compared to mine. All the boys in my class chose fireman, doctor, policeman, or U.S. President, and the girls chose actress, nurse, or nun, maybe even saint. You’d think Mrs. M— would kind of snicker at the utter predictability of it all, but she fawned all over them like they were child geniuses. When she got to my poster she kind of turned her nose up. “Where did you get this idea, TV salesman?” she asked, with a distinct note of contempt in her voice. “We didn’t have any parent presentation on this. It wasn’t in the film loops. You wanna sell TVs?”

I just shrugged. I had long before written Mrs. M— off completely. She had lost my respect by tearing masking tape with her teeth, while telling us not to do it; by chewing me out for wiping my nose on my sleeve, which I knew full well was an unassailable privilege of childhood; and by holding a special meeting with my mom to discuss my poor attention span. (My mom described to me the entire encounter. She’d been unconcerned, either because she didn’t see my daydreaming as a problem at my young age. Confronted with the negative report, Mom replied, “I’m sure he’ll come around eventually.” Mrs. M— slammed her fist down on the table and retorted, “That time has got to be now!”)

Anyway, I wasn’t about to reassess my career goals: the picture was already drawn. I asked Mrs. M— what she thought of the bicyclist in my poster, seen through the window, frozen in time. Isn’t that cool? A lone rider trapped forever in a two-dimensional depiction of life itself? Pedaling, and yet going nowhere? Caught in the act of existence? Alas, it would take someone with a college degree in literature to assemble the body of rhetoric necessary to defend my picture, and I was just a dumb kid. I pointed at the bicyclist, and said, “Look at him! He’s not on TV, he’s really there, through the window!” Mrs. M— just rolled her eyes and moved on, freshly flabbergasted by my idiocy.

Even after this icy reception of my poster, I was kind of proud of it, hanging right there on the wall with all the firemen, presidents, nurses, and doctors. I remember feeling a strange kind of pride: nobody else had a window in their pictures. And besides, Chris Phillips’ fireman looked exactly like David Brown’s. Same ladder, same fire hose, same burning home in the background, everything. Moreover, what I saw were a lot of hats. Fireman’s hat (well, helmet), policeman’s hat, nurse’s hat. Like on “Sesame Street,” with its “These are the people in your neighborhood” song. Such simple, foolproof choices. Nobody had even attempted to capture the essence of simultaneity: the skew paths of the featured persons (salesman, customer) vs. this unimportant background character, who is unaware of the brazen, undiscriminating promiscuity of existence, like a nameless renter in a giant apartment building who’s unacquainted with the neighboring tenants. If nothing else, I derived a peculiar pleasure from being the only future TV salesman in my whole class.

Well, I hadn’t heard the end of it yet. I guess it was one thing for my mom to shrug off Mrs. M—’s criticism of me in a private conference, but to have her kid’s utter lack of ambition showcased there in front of all the others at Parent Teacher Night didn’t go down too well. Perhaps she was oppressed by all the proud parents there, all of them giddy in the anticipation of their children’s futures, entranced by the obvious nobility represented by their career goals. Firemen saving homes and families! Nurses helping doctors! Doctors saving lives! And what was her kid planning? To facilitate mass brain erasure by selling televisions?

When she got home Mom gave me a hard time about it. She seemed disappointed, and possibly embarrassed. I could no longer be cavalier about it… I had to face the evil of my ways. I took a hard look at myself, and I didn’t like what I saw. A TV salesman … it was disgraceful. I hadn’t been brought up to sell TVs; our dad didn’t even allow us to watch TV! Since he was so seldom home to police this, he had removed the knobs from the TV set so we couldn’t operate it, forcing us kids to reach in with needle-nose pliers and endure powerful electric shocks! Officially at least, TV was beneath our family’s intellect. So where had I gone wrong? How could I so breezily trash my personal brand among my fellow students, not to mention with my family? Was this what I stood for: a livelihood based on brainless transactions, selling boob-tubes to people so ravenous for simple entertainment, all I had to do was basically collect the money, like some schmuck working a toll-booth?

My mom’s criticism was like catnip to my eavesdropping brothers, who treated this like a major scandal, like I’d murdered somebody’s pet or something. They endlessly mocked me for it, to the point that our dad overheard (or had my mom actually told him?) and now he was all sore, too. Looking back, it was kind of an amazing academic performance on my part: I’d made an entire family feel bad. I was miffed at my parents for making such a big fuss, angry at my brothers for teasing me, and felt bad about myself for having so little ambition. My brothers, though delighted at the dustup, surely lost (even more) respect for me; my parents felt bad about me, of course, and also about themselves, and perhaps about my school. Perhaps my mom even wondered if my TV salesman ambition was rooted in some kind of rebellion, lashing out against my dad’s prohibition of TV in our household, in which case this shameful episode may have increased her animosity toward him. As for my dad, who knew full well that he himself was perfect, any defect in us kids was surely my mom’s fault, so he was probably almost as miffed at her as at me. I think it takes a pretty special school project to do all that.

One thing was certain: all of this could have been avoided if I’d just toed the line and gone the conventional path, deciding to be a cop or fireman or doctor, instead of following my fancy. It’s a good thing I was an arrogant little bastard and mostly uneducable, or I might have taken a bad lesson from Careergate. Instead, I just kept muddling on in my clueless way, shaken by the incident but not stirred to any action, such as trying to do better. Story of my life, I guess.

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Super Bowl FAQ - A Guide for Foreigners

Vlog

I have had mixed reactions to my vlogs. One reader indicated that I disparage the vlog format so much that he feels too self-conscious to view a vlog, even mine. Another said that he liked my last post, but didn’t want to watch the vlog version because he would find that embarrassing—as in, he would be embarrassed for me if he watched it. Look, here’s the thing. A friend of mine who’s a successful blogger recommended that I always provide a vlog option, and I trust his advice, hence the vlog below. If you think he’s right, well then, click Play and enjoy. Otherwise, please don’t be embarrassed. Just scroll down for the text. (Or hit Play, close your eyes, and pretend it’s a podcast.)

Introduction

I am no expert about American football. That might make me seem like a poor authority to consult about the Super Bowl. But most Americans are far too steeped in football lore to be of much help to a foreigner. Ask almost any football fan what a “down” is, and you’ll get an answer like, “You know, a down. Like, third down and six, that kind of thing.”

Since albertnet is a truly global blog, with 11% of my pageviews from Russia and 7% from Hong Kong, I thought I’d help the rest of the world understand the whole Super Bowl phenomenon. (I know, I should have posted this well ahead of the game … I just got busy. At least this will help you process what just happened.)

Super Bowl XLIV Frequently Asked Questions

Is this year’s game really Super Bowl XLIV?

Ooh, you caught me. I didn’t know so I just guessed. I was kind of hoping nobody would try to convert the roman numerals. The Super Bowl started in, like, the ‘60s? So we’re at, like, number 55? I don’t actually know. Sorry.

Is Super Bowl one word or two?

It’s two, but most football fans probably aren’t very particular on the spelling (of this term or any other). Just don’t call it the Super Bowel. They might think you’re a wise guy or something.

Has football significantly contributed to the study of linguistics?

Somewhat. It has given us a couple of new heteronyms: offense and defense. In normal usage, these are pronounced “uh-FENCE” and “de-FENCE.” In football, it’s “OFF-ence” and “DEE-fence.” More on heteronyms here.

Does the whole country watch the Super Bowl, or just the states with teams in the game?

The whole country watches, because regional differences aside, the game is just plain American so we’re all emotionally invested in it. I supposed it’s kind of like how France follows the Tour de France even though a Frenchman hasn’t won it since 1985.

What’s the best thing about the Super Bowl?

This is a tough question. Most of the anecdotal evidence I’ve accrued points to the tasty snacks fans get at Super Bowl parties, but lots of people do also love the commercials. I think everyone agrees the game itself doesn’t rank very high because, oddly enough, it’s usually a blowout.

Can everyday fans watch the Super Bowl in person?

Heavens no, you have to be practically royalty to afford a ticket, and that’s during a normal year. This year, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, you have to a) be a healthcare worker or b) have naked pictures of God. The promoters have greatly reduced the number of fans they’ll allow in the stadium.

Will this game be a COVID superspreader event?

Oh, very likely when you consider all the Super Bowl parties obstinate fans will insist on hosting across the country. But nobody will know for sure for a couple more weeks.

Is the Super Bowl halftime show totally amazing?

The halftime shows are designed to be amazing spectacles, but just like big-budget superhero movies they’re almost never any good. About the most this show ever accomplishes is some overwrought scandal, such as when Janet Jackson’s boob popped out of her outfit, or when M.I.A. flipped off the audience and was subsequently sued for $16.6 million for “tarnishing the [National Football] League’s goodwill and reputation.” I guess that’s pretty amazing.

Regarding this M.I.A. lawsuit: did the NFL have a valid point?

The NFL doesn’t exactly have a squeaky-clean track record. For one thing, they have come under fire for tolerating domestic violence by their players, as described here. They also have a long history of turning a blind eye to rampant concussions, and as detailed here took great pains to block research on the topic. Their fans, being remarkably tolerant of all this, should be able to handle getting flipped off, and as far as I’m concerned the NFL has tarnished its own goodwill and reputation. M.I.A., in her defense, rightly mocked the NFL for claiming to be wholesome.

Is the football itself really made out of pigskin?

Not anymore, but in the early days it was made from a pig’s bladder.  Details here.

Who is playing in the Super Bowl this year?

I recently learned that it’s the Kansas City Chiefs and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

What is a buccaneer?

Buccaneers were basically French pirates, except that they were licensed by the British government, who, according to Wikipedia, “legalized their operations in return for a share of their profits.” In some cases the Royal Navy actually assisted them. Wikipedia goes on to say, “Among the leaders of the buccaneers were two Frenchmen, Jean-David Nau, better known as François l’Ollonais, and Daniel Montbars, who destroyed so many Spanish ships and killed so many Spaniards that he was called ‘the Exterminator.’”

Is that a fitting image for a sports team?

Perhaps not, but then, there has been controversy about the name “Chiefs” as well.

When’s the last time your local team made it to the Super Bowl, and were you excited?

Honestly, I can’t recall.

Dude, your San Franciso 49ers were in the Super Bowl just last year! Pull your head out!

Wait, seriously? I must have known that. But really, this kind of thing barely registers with me. Not all Americans are rabid fans. Where popular ball sports are involved, I always root for the opposing team, ever since the San Francisco Giants won the 2012 World Series and fans ran amok, even setting a city bus on fire. Especially given the pandemic this year, I’m relieved that neither the 49ers nor the Raiders are in the Super Bowl.

You are aware that the Raiders are no longer in Oakland … right?

Wait, what? Oh, yeah … I guess I remember something about them moving to … Vegas, was it?

Originally the readers asking you these questions seemed to be from Europe, but those last few were apparently from testy locals. What’s up with that?

I’ll take questions from anybody, or nobody.

How many Americans typically watch the Super Bowl?

According to Statista, around 100 million Americans watch the big game on TV. Last year it was 99.9 million, and viewership peaked at 114.4 million in 2015. Here’s a graph.

How can you be so uninterested in a championship game that’s this popular?

To be honest, I’m a little bit disturbed by any sporting event that relies heavily upon tribal impulses for its excitement. (This is not limited to football or to America; consider soccer hooliganism in England, which according to this study is “thought to reflect expressions of strong emotional ties to a [soccer] team, which may help to reinforce a supporter’s sense of identity.”) I air my misgivings not as an outsider, but as somebody who has not only tasted but deeply quaffed the thrilling feeling of team identification.

In 1986, for some reason my brother Bryan and I, both still living in our hometown of Boulder, Colorado, decided to watch our home team, the Denver Broncos, in the AFC Championship Game against the Cleveland Browns. As described here, “Broncos quarterback John Elway, in a span of 5 minutes and 2 seconds, led his team 98 yards in 15 plays to tie the game with 37 seconds left in regulation. Denver won the game in overtime by making a 33-yard field goal.” Bryan and I were elated. We jumped to our feet and did dual high-fives in the air (no small feat for two non-gymnastic cyclists). Then, as the aerial camera pulled back to show the frankly ugly Cleveland Municipal Stadium on a dull winter day, the announcer said something dramatic like, “With this devastating loss, the fans in Cleveland will head home to bleak, meaningless lives, with nothing left to live for.” I shook my head and in a very self-satisfied way reflected on the abysmal, low state of the Clevelanders, and was relieved at knowing myself to be so obviously superior to them.

Then I thought, wait a second! I don’t even like football! I’ve never even been to Cleveland! It was a real wake-up call, and I thought about it again five years later when I read St. Augustine’s Confessions (in the original Latin, if you must know), particularly this passage concerning a young man who, dragged against his will to the gladiatorial games, is determined not to be caught up in them:

A great roar from the entire crowd struck him with such vehemence that he was overcome by curiosity. Supposing himself strong enough to despise whatever he saw and to conquer it, he opened his eyes... As soon as he saw the blood, he at once drank in savagery and did not turn away. His eyes were riveted. He imbibed madness. Without any awareness of what was happening to him, he found delight in the murderous contest and was inebriated by bloodthirsty pleasure. He was not now the person who had come in, but just one of the crowd which he had joined, and a true member of the group which had brought him… He looked, he yelled, he was on fire, he took the madness home with him so that it urged him to return … taking others with him.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not actually afraid of becoming the kind of rabid fan who gets so worked up he celebrates “his” team’s victory by torching a city bus. But any temptation to submit to this hardwired tribal instinct gives me pause.

Is it true that there is a spike in domestic violence every year during the Super Bowl?

I am relieved to be able to say, after some light research, that this is an urban myth. As reported here, a “2006 study published in the Handbook of Sports and Media that examined over 1.3 million domestic violence police reports from every day of the year in 15 NFL cities found only a very small rise in domestic violence dispatches on (or just after) Super Bowl Sunday, but nearly a quintupling of domestic violence police dispatch reports around major holidays such as Christmas.”

What’s the deal with cheerleaders?

Unlike European sports, American sports feature skimpily clad women dancing around to celebrate their team. I suppose this simply provides a welcome spectacle for anybody who has lost interest in the game.

Do bloggers ever feature cheerleaders, for similar reasons?

Look, here are some now!

Is it true concussions are a serious problem among high school cheerleaders?

Yes, as detailed here.

Boy, you really are a buzzkill, aren’t you?

Why, yes. Yes I am.

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Ignorance vs. the Internet

Introduction

It is an article of faith among most modern non-Amish Americans that the Internet, with the limitless access to information it puts at our fingertips, is essentially a good thing. I’m here to suggest it’s not that simple. Choosing ignorance may often be the better strategy.

The Internet lifestyle

If you work in an office, you surely see people slumped over their computers most of the time. Some of them are using these new standing desks, but they’re still hunched. I’m usually hunched too. We are all beyond reproach, however, because we are doing this for a reason: we’re making money.

Kids are another story. Watching teenagers in their natural habitat nowadays is more boring than watching animals at the zoo. These kids just sit there, not slumped over necessarily but zoned out, slack-jawed, staring into their screens as if pithed, totally passive. We parents tell ourselves that it will be okay because they’re all digital natives and will be the next Zuckerberg.

Of course it’s absurd to complain about this because a generation ago teens were all rotting their brains out with TV, which was arguably even worse. At least they’re getting all kinds of information now, right?

Well, that’s actually the problem. They’re being trained to over-consume putatively useful information, which bad habit they’ll carry into adulthood. At least I outgrew “Simon & Simon” and “Remington Steele.” My kids are already watching grown-up talk shows about politics on YouTube, which doesn’t look like a behavior with a finite lifespan. My older daughter keeps quizzing me on this or that dull political topic and I never have anything to say. I used to tell her to ignore all that because she can’t even vote, but she’ll be of age as of the next election. So now I tell her, “Learn enough to figure out how you’ll vote. That’s not a ton of information. The issues, and the differences between the parties, are not subtle. Don’t overdo your research.” But it’s hopeless. Her entire generation seems hell bent on consuming this mountain of information. Because it’s there.

Of course there’s a ton of useless entertainment on the Internet, too, and modern kids are continually cycling among like ten browser tabs, doing the screen equivalent of the Hometown Buffet if it had taste spoons. I’ve throttled down the streaming video on my kids’ WiFi to 250K, so for them it’s like a slow-loading slide show, and super lo-res, almost like a child’s finger painting. It’s such a poignant experience watching this sad process unfold, my kids melting into the furniture as their brains ooze into the ether. But it would be even sadder if they were having the best possible Internet experience, or if they were having this experience while out in the world. (Lacking smartphones, at least my kids are aware of their surroundings when out and about.)

But doesn’t everyone need to relax?

I had a college roommate who played video games (on my TV) 24x7. When the rest of us called him out on it, because we wanted to rot our brains out to, say, “Star Trek – The Next Generation,” he would say, “Okay, just a minute,” and then play for another hour. When we verbally assaulted him and assassinated his character, he’d say, “Hey, man, after a hard day in class I just need to unwind, okay?” This was a joke because he sent most of the time shouting profanities at the screen.

My kids don’t do that, thankfully, but it would certainly be a stretch to say the Internet is, for them, fundamentally a platform for relaxation. The World Wide Web is loaded with rich repositories of stress. For my older daughter lately, its greatest source of strife is the collection of websites dealing with college admissions. Naturally, this application process is a potent source of stress no matter what, but the Internet is like a cat-o’-nine-tails these kids can and do flog themselves with. Let’s compare the college application process from my generation to the current one.

When I applied, I had my target school and my “safety” schools, just like the modern kids. My high school counselor said I’d have a decent shot at getting into UC Berkeley. My grades weren’t perfect, so I knew it wasn’t a sure thing so I applied to a bunch of other UCs as well. I think I spent like half an hour looking them up in “US News & World Report,” which gave me their ratings (number of stars) and a little paragraph on each. I mailed in applications to most of them and then pretty much got on with my life. The die was cast and at some point I’d get either good or bad news.

There was no real info about when I’d hear back, what my odds really were, or anything like that. Anybody I happened to talk to about college assured me I’d never get into Berkeley. I didn’t argue; I mean, what would be the point? They had their hunch, I had mine, and there wasn’t much evidence to support either position.

Some months passed, during which I barely thought about college. Then I started getting responses. Berkeley rejected me, and the rest accepted me. I made a plan to go to some UC, didn’t really matter which, and then transfer to Berkeley as a junior. Everybody assured me I’d never get in that way either because Berkeley didn’t like transfer students, etc. Again, I just shrugged. Who had any real info on this stuff? As it happened, my friends were wrong the second time around: one day I got a packet in the mail saying I’d been accepted. So I went. That was about it.

My daughter started her college application process like a year in advance. She combed the Internet for every scrap of information pertaining to every college she considered applying to. She maintained a master spreadsheet tracking them. She could quote massive amounts of statistics about each one: acceptance rate, average weighted GPA of students accepted, average SAT scores, national ranking, self-reported student satisfaction levels, lifestyle ratings, you name it. Tracking all this info was like a part time job. Meanwhile, there are apparently scores of websites where other students post the bloggy equivalent of “you’ll never get in there,” etc., and tips and tricks for applying that are probably about as reliable as homeopathic medicine. All this adds up to a massive time and energy sink for my daughter, her friends, and probably most college-bound teenagers these days.

But hey, it’s probably a better use of time than playing video games, right? Well, not necessarily, the way the stress can accumulate. The colleges seemed to tease my kid almost continuously, deferring her and putting her on waiting lists and announcing the approximate date when they’d inform her of her fate, etc. My daughter, and apparently most of her friends, were really stressed out during this process, their futures seeming to hang in the balance. When my daughter was deferred and then, months later, finally rejected by Northwestern, she was terribly distraught and immediately began researching the odds of transferring in later. When that answer was less than encouraging she started looking at transfer acceptance statistics for all the schools she’s interested in. She basically leaped from one conveyor belt to another. Sure, gathering information feels like the first step in an action plan, but she won’t be transferring for like two and a half years … what’s the rush?

(Of course I am not just talking about my own kid here. I’m sure her behavior around college apps is not unique or even remarkable for her cohort. And my kids’ overall Internet use is either typical of their generation or lower.)

When I applied to transfer to Berkeley I had no idea what the acceptance statistics were. If I’d wanted to worry over this, and pick at everything like a damn scab, I wouldn’t have had any real means to do so anyway. Where would I have researched this stuff? The public library? Yeah, right. I just shrugged and hoped for the best.

Now the Internet provides more college info than anybody could possibly have the time to ingest, which we naturally assume is valuable. But has anything really changed? Sure, our kids can bury themselves in data, but does that actually increase their chances of getting the college they want? Not that I can see. They’re just flagellating themselves, greatly exacerbating the already wrenching ordeal of college applications, and building up a giant body of facts and statistics to use in bemoaning their wretchedness to parents and friends. A generation ago, all we had to say was, “I was rejected,” which was a mercifully brief report.

Of course this overall phenomenon doesn’t end with higher education. I’ll bet most college seniors do a great deal of fretting over how they’re going to find a job. They probably bury themselves in even more data then. Myself, I did nothing. I just did my schoolwork and put off thinking about what would come next. I graduated, stayed in the Bay Area because there are plenty of jobs here, and applied for the first reasonable job that came along. I was hired inside of a week, and started my adult life.

Years later I had people asking me (and my wife), “Wow, you graduated in 1992? So you started your career during that horrible recession?” I didn’t know what to say, other than the truth: I was totally unaware of the recession. Nobody told me about it, and I didn’t read the news. My wife had exactly the same experience. We both wandered blithely into the job market and found work, just as we’d both nonchalantly transferred to UC Berkeley without knowing or caring how feasible a plan that really was. If our total lack of regard for the situation on the ground had any effect at all, it was probably just being less nervous during our interviews. So to me, this modern era of analyzing everything to death via the limitless Internet just looks like a way to maximize stress.

On the brighter side

But the Internet has a bright side, right? It helps us celebrate life! If we have a great hot fudge sundae or a really tasty beer, we can share that experience with our friends and family!

Well, as much as I do enjoy Beck’sting, of course all this social media has already devolved into soul-crushing one-upmanship, as has been bemoaned and documented so thoroughly I need not grow that mountain of evidence and opinion any more here. But there’s a less commonly cited downside to celebrating our activities, triumphs, and little life pleasures over the Internet, which I’d like to point out.

I’ve been reading this article in “The New Yorker” about Outdoor Voices, a clothing company whose marketing theme is “doing things,” by which they mean any kind of exercise—doesn’t have to be a marathon or a Tough Mudder—and feeling good about it. The feeling good part generally involves showcasing your activity, yourself, and your cute outfit via Instagram, with the hashtag #Doingthings. Now, if the opposite of “doing things” is being totally sedentary and stuck to a screen of some kind, then I’m all for it … but why does the act of not staring at a screen have to rely on the Internet to promote and celebrate itself?

Let me tell you a story. I coach a high school mountain bike team, which means I get plenty of exercise and access to the outdoors. Sometimes, though, depending on what group I ride with, I do a little extra riding after practice, to get in some good hammering (which is what leads to the really sweet endorphins). One evening I got home from the team ride, changed into my road shoes, grabbed my road bike, and headed back out. Going up a nice 12% grade in the Berkeley hills, I came upon one of my student athletes. Just like me, he’d decided to go do a little “stealth training” of his own! Just for the love of the sport! I was really stoked to see this.

“Getting in a few extra miles, eh?” I asked him. He replied, “Yeah, I’m trying to get 10,000 feet of climbing in one day.” Wow, I thought … some kind of personal ambition, I guess, maybe almost like a little vision quest. How totally cool. “Is this just something you cooked up on your own?” I asked. He said, “Well, it’s kind of a Strava thing.”

My heart sank. Of course this was more than just a private little bike ride. Nothing is private anymore. Everything is celebrated. There are t-shirts that say, “If it’s not on Strava, it didn’t happen.” What an annoyingly cynical slogan. It’s pretty much the nail in the coffin of riding for riding’s sake. Now, every time we swing our leg over the bike, we’re guaranteed kudos.

Not that I have anything against Strava per se. I don’t happen to use it, because I’m too old and slow to care anymore how I stack up against others, and moreover I don’t want kudos. More to the point, I don’t want to give kudos because it takes too much time … time I could be riding more, cleaning up my bike, reading a book, or all the other stuff I don’t have time for. Can’t I just make a blanket statement that I love cycling and applaud you for doing it in general? And am I not making enough of a statement by donating my time and energy to coach these kids, in hopes of turning them into lifelong cyclists? Why does pushing ever more data up to the Internet need to be a part of that?

What is to be done?

Look, I’m not trying to suggest that you should curtail your Internet use. I’m just promoting a bit more awareness, so that when you’re sponging up info via this platform—or any platform, frankly—you might pause here and there and ask yourself if the info your getting is really worth the time and trouble. Is it making you money? Is it making you happy? Is it making you better? And if you have kids, you might consider talking about all this with them. (They won’t listen, of course, but as parents we gotta try, right?)

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Ride Report - Dead Indian Memorial Road with Brother, Nephew, and Daughter

Introduction

My bike club doesn’t have too many rules. The main one is: don’t talk about bike club. No, this isn’t a lame joke; the point is, don’t bore your spouse with details of the rides, the races (if any), the coffee, or the makeup tips. (Makeup tips? Yep. For example, “After sweating out half a gallon on the indoor trainer, I alternate Dior L’or De Vie with TNS Essential Serum to hydrate my skin, even out the tone, and improve the texture without blocking my pores.”)

That said, most of us do write about bike club. For the more adventurous this means a race report, which traditionally focuses on the food. It’s been a couple years now since I last raced, so I have to make do with ride reports. Here is my report of the assault four of us made on Dead Indian Memorial Road, a 13-mile climb near Ashland, Oregon. The four of us are my brother Bryan, his son John, my daughter Alexa, and your humble online correspondent.

Executive Summary

Our Thanksgiving Day ride was gear-intensive, cold, beautiful, even colder, frigid, fun, and has been described as “a non-stop laugh riot” (Steve Persall, Tampa Bay Times). Peak elevation 5,300 feet. Precipitation: none (whew!).

Short version

Dammit all to hell, I’m writing this in a motel lobby and some employee just came over and turned on the TV. I’m the only one in here … do I really look like I want a TV on? 

• Ride stats: an additional 2-4 inches of snow expected in the Cascades, and a couple more inches in the Mount St Helens area. Oops, sorry, I was channeling the TV news. Why are they reporting Washington weather? I’m in southern Oregon!
• Breakfast: waffle, two sausage disks, yogurt, coffee (black)
• Pre-ride snack: Fritos, of all things (there was a bag in my brother’s van which we drove to the ride start near Ashland)
• During ride: one Clif Block Shot, mountain berry flavor
• Glycogen window treat: Mom’s homemade fudge, baby! Man, I’d ride through a pool of liquid nitrogen to get that. Also, pickled herring (two kinds: plain and in sour cream).
• Dinner: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, cranberry relish, candied yams, French-cut green beans, buckets of gravy, and pumpkin pie with whipped cream. (Duh!)

Long version

If you’re considering adopting a furry friend this holiday season, make like Elvis and put a couple bullet holes through the damn TV! Man, there’s no escaping this thing. (I can’t go to my room because my family is in there enjoying an L-tryptophan doze. )

Wow, 32 inches of snow on Mount Baker this morning and the news lady says she thinks it’ll be a lot more, and she should know because she woke up at 4 a.m. to spend 90 minutes styling her hair. I only care (about Mount Baker, not her hair) because I rode that climb awhile back (click here). Okay, I promise I’ll stop letting the TV news interfere with mine.

I wanted to be able to skip lunch and eat a minimum of during- and post-ride snacks, so that I’d have the hugest possible appetite for Thanksgiving dinner. So I ate one of those motel breakfast bar waffles, that have the uncanny property of never sticking to the waffle iron. I looked up the ingredients of that batter once, and discovered it contains both propane and butane (seriously). I also had two of the crazy salty sausage patties, and as a result I am now growing breasts. I think it’s all the hormones in the meat. At least I found some yogurt without any Splenda in it. That’s getting hard to do.

It took us all morning to suit up, perhaps because we were trading around a lot of clothing and felt overwhelmed by all the options available to us. I’d been watching the weather forecast for a week and it seemed entirely possible there would be rain, which at the higher altitudes would mean snow. (Last year we—i.e., Bryan, Alexa, and I—had to turn around 2/3 of the way up because the road was iced over.) My nephew John is locally famous for never having the right gear on these rides … imagine pedaling 120 miles in high-top sneakers. He’s done that, twice. This time I brought him some leg warmers, some cycling shoes, and some cycling pedals to go with those shoes. Was this an absurd mother hen kind of behavior not grounded in any real need? Well, I asked if he had any leg warmers and he said, “I was gonna ride in sweats.” He even tried to politely decline the cycling shoes and pedals on the grounds that it was too much hassle. Also, he didn’t have any gloves. Bryan had a wide assortment of gloves but not many that matched. John ended up rocking a baseball batting glove on one hand for the ride up, and giant wool socks, worn like mittens, for the descent.

Alexa knew about the weather forecast, but hadn’t packed any leg warmers for the trip. Why not? Because her leg warmers are white. She and her mom are in 100% agreement that females cannot wear white leg warmers. (They were both present when I paid good money for these leg warmers and I wish they’d spoken up then.) So Alexa had to wear the leg warmers I’d brought for John, whose dad surprised me by having a second pair handy. Whew!

Here’s Bryan’s 1984 Team Miyata, which John rides, equipped with my loan of some of the more high-tech pedals on the market (the spring is just a piece of carbon fiber), juxtaposed with the pedals I removed from the bike, which I’m pretty sure are the most high-tech toe-clip-style pedals ever made:

We finally got on the road at 1:30 p.m., which is at the outer limit of when it would be wise to begin this ride. We’re so far north, the sun sets at 4:42 p.m. at this time of year. Plus, the sun just isn’t that strong here, probably because there’s no sales tax revenue to bribe Mother Nature with.

You already saw the “before” photo, above. It was close to 50 degrees out and somewhat sunny when we started. The landscape is spare, sparse, Spartan, spacious, and special. Here’s a photo showcasing the scrub.

The ride starts in this basin where the air is extra cold. Then the grade gets steeper, you start working harder, and you warm up a bit. At mile 6 (guess how I know this?) Alexa was able to roll up her sleeves. Isn’t it great that it’s still possible to write non-metaphorically about rolling up sleeves?

The three men on the ride had old-school (i.e., non-compact) cranksets. That’s why I’m able to use the word “men” in that last sentence. Alexa has a compact crank—not because she’s female, mind you, but because she’s still a kid and that’s what her dad outfitted her with. One day she will rip all our legs off, but on this ride she took advantage of her low gearing and drifted back at times. As she and her teenaged friends like to say, “Don’t judge!”

As the sun sank and we gained altitude the air got progressively colder. I was pretty comfortable in a long-sleeve merino wool long-sleeve base layer I bought for my brother Max last year. He mailed it back to me because—get this—his arms are too muscular to fit in the sleeves. (We should all have such problems, eh?) Look, snow:

The scenery got more impressive all the time, perhaps because my oxygen-starved brain shut down unnecessary applications and became more perceptive to the natural world. The Russian writer Mikhail Lermontov, in A Hero of Our Time, says (through his narrator), “In simple hearts, the sense of the beauty and grandeur of nature is a hundred times stronger and more vivid than it is in us, enthusiastic tellers of tales.” Lermontov’s translator, Vladimir Nabokov, provides this footnote: “This is, of course, a romanticist notion. It is completely untrue.” I love both of these writers and wish they could have been on our ride. Here is some of that grandeur:

Look at the crepuscular rays on the right there. My brother says they might be “prepuscular” rays, though I’m not sure that’s even a word. (He has joined me in the lobby. Whoops, there he goes. Guess he got bored.) I think I’ll go with “sunbeams.”

It got mighty cold. I have to say, it would have been worse except the wind tended to be at our backs. This filled me with something like guilt, or maybe karmic fear. Like, we are only blessed with this tailwind because somebody, somewhere, is riding into a frigid headwind. Or, if we enjoy this tailwind now, we will pay later. That said, I paid into the karmic weather system big time last August: click here for details. Anyway, you can tell it was cold because Alexa has put on her arm warmers.

Here we are at the summit.

Note the wool sock on John’s hand, used as a mitten.  Also, see how Alexa’s got her hood pulled up under her helmet? I’m really glad for that hood. During the climb, as we noted the temperature (36 degrees), I asked Alexa, “You brought a warm hat, right?” She had not. I asked if she had been aware it would be cold. She countered that I didn’t tell her to bring a hat. Now, my wife and I believe in employing the “natural consequences” style of discipline. For example, if your kid drags her feet getting ready in the morning, you don’t nag her—you just allow her to make herself late for school so she’ll have to accept the consequences. But this doesn’t work in all cases. Yeah, I could let her descend Dead Indian in the frigid cold without a warm hat, to teach her a lesson, but it would be such a painful ordeal, it’d be tantamount to corporal punishment. So I was on the brink of deciding to loan her my hat (meaning I would go hatless and suffer terribly, because enduring pain is part of being a parent) when she remembered her hood. Problem solved!

The descent was beautiful, very cold, and impossible to photograph. We could see it was snowing at the higher elevation. Across the country people are mourning Florence Henderson, who played the mom on The Brady Bunch. Am I mourning? That’s a strong word. I never liked that show much, to be honest, and was not personally acquainted with Ms. Henderson. You know what I’m mourning? The fact that this TV news has once again infiltrated my story.

Alexa was in fine spirits as we descended. If you have a surly teenager (a phrase I now realize is redundant), just get her out on a bike ride. She may be quiet and withdrawn at the beginning of a ride, but as all the adrenaline and endorphins work their magic, along with the majesty of nature and the thrilling speed of the descent, she’ll likely become ebullient and downright chatty. I have witnessed this magic hundreds of times (dating from my own teenage years).

Unfortunately, I couldn’t hear most of what Alexa was saying because we now had a headwind and I was wearing this silly plastic jacket (on loan from my brother) that rattled in the wind at like 80 decibels. At one point I thought Alexa said, “I spotted a towhee!” but actually she’d said, “I saw a spotted towhee!” I saw it too and it was a very pretty bird. I had a great-uncle-in-law who loved bird-watching. “Yesterday I saw a double-breasted mattress-smasher!” he once boasted. He could get away with this because he was old. I can get away with it, I hope, because I’m quoting an old guy.

On the lower, shallower slopes Alexa said, “I can’t wait until we get to the van. I’m gonna crank the heat all the way up!” I replied, “Sorry, Alexa … didn’t you hear? The van’s heater is broken.” She looked crestfallen and said, “You’re joking.” I said, “Yes, I am.” And I was. “Why are you like this?” she complained. This is how you stamp down the rapport you’ve built up with your offspring during a bike ride. You stamp it down because you can: because this rapport seems an inexhaustible resource, so long as your kid keeps riding.

We drove back to my mom’s house where preparation of the Thanksgiving meal was nearing completion. Alexa had heard a rumor about fudge. I asked my mom. “Yes, there’s fudge,” she whispered, “but I’m not giving it out until Sunday. But I do have a secret stash, just for the bikers.” Oh, man, it was unbelievable. You know how you go to those fudge places in malls, like Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, and it costs more than cocaine, and kids jump up and down and want to order everything, even the stupid little stuffed animal? That stuff is like old modeling clay compared to my mom’s fudge. This stuff is nirvana. In the exercise-enhanced palates of cyclists, the sense of the beauty and grandeur of fudge is a hundred times stronger and more vivid than in players of board games. Before you decry this as a romanticist notion that is completely untrue, go climb a 5,000-foot mountain in the blistering cold. And then get your own damn fudge, I’m not sharing.

Bryan and I capped the glycogen window snack with a couple of beers, mainly so that I could Beck’st my friends.

Then we munched on the herring that I mentioned already. After our showers we tucked into that Thanksgiving feast, with perfectly stoked appetites. Life is good!

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