Going back through my Facebook timeline, I’ve noticed there are holes: swathes filled only by the colorless, drab blue permeating the background of every Facebook page. 2009 is heartbreakingly blank. The highlights of 2008 are a friend asking, “I didn’t know you were back on Facebook?” which is not a question, and “Life Events” telling me what I already know: I graduated college, I moved home, I started work. Why is this? Why such a superficial and untelling history? Those were the years I was off Facebook.
Sure, sure, there’s a chance I got more things done. I graduated school, got a job, wrote a play, wrote a feature, drove from DC to Albany and back numerous times, made Skype calls to my long-distance girlfriend, spent a good fourth of my life writing daily emails to her, another fourth painfully watching Bones episodes with her. No matter whether I was on Facebook or not, most of my time was occupied. I didn’t get more done. I simply did more things in private.
And here’s the problem with privacy: most of the time, you need someone to keep your life in check. Most people have friends for this, some people pay therapists. Some people use Facebook as this barometer. The problem with my life from late 2007-2010 is that I had no barometer. I had gone dark. I had lost friends, I had been telling no one what was happening, I had gotten off all social media besides LinkedIn. I understand why there are people out there not on Facebook because they don’t feel like they have time, or because they feel it takes up too much of their time, but I’d make a case for not risking it. When they look at their timeline, they won’t see huge blank spaces where their life should’ve been. If they stayed smart, they’ll see they had people who cared, places they went, conversations shared. Most place a lot of emphasis on not putting your whole life on the internet, but transparency can be an amazing tool. Looking at those lost years makes me realize that I shouldn’t have ignored it, and how important it is to be living in public.
I’m back in town again, and everyone knows it.
I feel one hundred eyes on me.
I feel signs going up, shutters, doors closing.
I pull the rope knot tight round the wood, horse kicks.
Dogs bark in the distance. The wind picks up.
I’m surrounded. Voices, whispers, old lips.
Eyes I’ve seen before, faces I’ve lit up.
Mud drips black off my coattail like spit from the mouth.
It snakes through the dirt.
I’ve got dead bodies hidden all over this town,
Under floorboards, behind barns, in the walls of homes on First.
Ghosts follow me to the Town Hotel,
follow me up the creaking stairs to my room with no lights.
I get into the bed. They follow me into my sheets.
Earlier this morning, my friend posted this on my wall:
I don't give credence to any signs like these unless they're written in Comic Sans.
As I bit into some GoLean Crunch! at my desk, I wondered about this picture half-heartedly. I chewed a little, and took another bite, then I let myself wonder whole-heartedly. Eventually, I finished the bowl. Here’s why:
How carcinogenic are those pesticides, really? A known carcinogen is red meat, and I still consume a fair amount of that, even if I’m not buying any red groceries. Cancer is serious, and I really shouldn’t have taken another bite even though at that point I was nearly done with the bowl. It’s certainly a first world problem to not be able to finish your bowl of cereal due to some vague health risks. You know what else is a first world problem? Getting cancer. Why I’d rather finish my bowl of cereal than have a lower risk of cancer is not so much a mystery to me.
Let’s look at the other item on the sign: hormone disruption. Which hormones? All of them? There’s a lot of soy protein in that cereal. Maybe the legions of estrogen being pumped into my body from the soy will instead run into a disruption and I’ll be able to carry on looking like a man, so perhaps this hormone disruption is a good thing. Then again, maybe not. I’m wearing pastel today.
The third reason I finished my cereal is after looking at sentences like “when the USDA tested the grains used there were found to be…” I know it’s probably not a good idea to base decisions about my health based on the quality of sentence syntax, but a guy can’t help himself, am I right guys? Hope I’m not being too passive-voice aggressive, here.
I wrote an article about cereal addiction here before. This is more of article about not being interrupted in the morning until you’ve had your coffee, which increases hypertension.
Today we flew back home to Maine, but first I saw a man naked. We were standing in the line at the airport and then I looked up and there was a man there without any clothes on! I repeat: no clothes at all. It was really scary because who goes to the airport without any clothes on? I didn’t know what else he might do. I started crying but I don’t know why.
My parents talked about the man the whole flight back, but maybe that’s because they knew I was crying about it. Like I just told you berfore, I don’t know why I was crying. Maybe it is because he was fat and old and when I think of a naked man I think its going to be Zac Efron, but now I will always think of old fat man. His butt was flabby and moved even when he was standing still, and I don’t really get that. Also but the worst part was his front side. That hair there was everywhere and looked like my grandmother’s head, and his pee pee was sticking out of there too. It was like a little wrinkly nose. When we were in Port Land we went to the Zoo, and there were these naked mole rats there and it looked like a naked mole rat. Not just because of the name naked though! Because it also was wrinkly and looked like a naked mole rat who couldn’t see anything and was really scary because it had these big teeth and the teeth were the first thing that knocked into each other when the mole rats scurried around in their tubes. The pee pee was like that it was frightening and always seemed like it went first before everything else like a mole rat biting its way into things with its tiny teeth.
Mom and Dad didn’t know I was listening but they said they heard the fat old man say he was “humiliated” when the security people felt him for bombs. I don’t know cause shouldn’t he be even more humiliated after he took his clothes off and was naked? I’m going to go to sleep now, but I can’t stop thinking of the naked mole rat and the teeth.
Using Google Maps and some slick design, the digital agency/design collective Doejo has created Map of the Dead, a zombie survival map, and has peered into my soul more poignantly than I have ever been able to, asking me what am I doing with my life. Using the map, one may find out whether he or she is living in a “zombie danger zone,” essentially a death sentence, marked by the color red. Most, if not all of L.A. is an ocean of red: death sentence. I look at the little street view man symbolizing the location of my harrowing descent into madness. He’s holding a rifle, but in real life, I don’t own a rifle. Hollywood magic.
Doomed.
A few blocks to the west lies the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, which usually serves as an enchanting recreational area for the park-starved Los Angeles. Sigur Ros will be playing there next month. On the zombie survival map, however, the Hollywood Forever Cemetery is nothing but a hazard. Zombie survival map doesn’t believe in forever.
Essentially, I am doomed. The only safe zones seem to be the Hollywood hills, miles away. In Runyon Canyon and Griffith Park exercise minions race up and down the hills as if on a track, mindlessly consuming a steady diet of smoothie brain food: strawberries, whey protein, flesh, They get stronger, faster. Zombie survival map tells me that “if I have the skills,” airports may hold a helicopter or airplane to aid my escape. And then, as if proving something I already knew, as if rubbing it in, it doesn’t list LAX. In any case, how could I get there? The cars crawl along the 10 like undead soldiers. There’s no way I could get there in time on any other Wednesday.
During the zombie apocalypse, at least people will start to walk again. The streets will fill up with people whom I used to see inside cars. No longer will they sing to themselves or conduct business over Blutooth, but at least there will be some commotion out there, some life scuffling across the sidewalk.
Here in Southern California, we are anticipating a catastrophic earthquake. The history books tell us it is time that we slide into the sea. What are we doing here still, then? We are doomed. Only masochism can explain why we haven’t moved. So what about when we no longer feel, when our skin turns green, when the night falls and the moon lets us know it is over? Zombie survival map makes me ponder the existential. Zombie survival map makes me think about my rifle.
the middle aged man
loses slowly
the use of his knees
the middle aged man
finds difficulty
sitting in seats
while his friends continue
with their usual cricket game.
i have begun to sit at cricket games
so to speak.
i’ve gotten up to play
made eyes at you twice
sat back down.
i betrayed both teams
by making love to all sides
sat back down.
he keeps playing
he keeps running
and i don’t relate to sports analogies,
but i’m trying.
this man is sitting in a wheelchair
and someone is pushing him in.
broken arms
mosquito-thin legs,
and finally when he goes home
his eyes and skin reel, tingle
he cannot anymore
he cannot anymore
he listens to the radio
the crack loud, bam, cheer run.
he can no longer play
he can no longer compete.
and perhaps i need to say
i’m finding difficulty
sitting in seats.
“Non-Musical Silence” by Marilyn Manson (The album Antichrist Superstar consists, in addition to the regular tracks, of 72 tracks of silence, each four seconds long, followed by a song called “Untitled”)
“You Can Make Your Own Music” by Covenant (a 4 minute and 33 second silent track, in reference to John Cage’s song “4′33″)
Ever since they instated that you witness your own funeral on your 45th birthday, everyone had a much easier time being middle aged.
Excessive sports cars sales plummeted. Marriages went unadulterated. Thousands of children spared embarrassment.
It was hard not to pick out the flowers that I actually wanted, though. It was hard to put on a suit they picked out for me, one with pointed lapels, when I never liked pointed lapels.
My wife pulled me in close to her. “You were wonderful. You have a wonderful funeral.” I appreciated this, especially since nobody was supposed to talk to me, but I didn’t agree at all. The flowers were wrong, the suit was wrong, the guestlist was wrong.
This is why I realized that it’s not really the funeral that matters. It’s the afterparty to the funeral, when you can get drunk, when you don’t have to worry about the stupid little flowers, when you don’t have to worry about the stupid wrong suits. Sitting in the front row, though, looking at my imaginary self in the coffin, I shuddered and racked my brain:
A team of researchers in England wasted all our goddamn time determining which is the catchiest song ever made.
After carrying out “under-cover data collection in night clubs across the North of England,” which is what it seems they might be doing anyway whilst wasting all our goddamn time, they “did a musical analysis of a large subset of songs regarding the vocal performance on the recording as well as the structure of the songs,” so we can all assume they hit the karaoke clubs for sure.
After not curing cancer, they concluded that pop songs are catchiest when sung by a male singer, for historically, males led people into battle, so the male vocal register incites the same psychological reaction. Additionally, if he usees his “high chest voice, pronounces the consonants of the lyrics clearly and puts a lot of vocal effort into his performance,” even better. No one wants to try to sing along with someone who makes it look easy. Because then who feels like the asshole? We do. An example of a ‘high effort’ male singers included Jon Bon Jovi. The researchers actually determined that.
Miraculously, the scientists found that UK residents were likely to sing along “if it is late at night, if it is a weekend and if the song has been in high up in the UK charts at some point.” What these scientists might discover if applying their brilliance to another field, such as quantum physics or neuroscience, we can only fear.
“We hope that our study will inspire musicians of the future to crack the equation for the textbook tune,” opines musicology expert Dr Daniel Müllensiefen, who became really excited to use the word ‘textbook’ in a sentence.
The Top Ten Catchiest Pop Songs (As Determined by Dr. Müllensiefen’s Team in England)
After staring at my computer screen for several seconds, I started to panic, realizing that I had just checked Gmail, Facebook, then Twitter successively, and to do so again in such a short amount of time would be absolutely mindless and throw me into bouts of concern about my work ethic and acquired habits. So to throw myself a curveball and hopefully derail my inevitable typing of the letter “g” into my Firefox URL bar, I suddenly found myself Googling “I can’t stop eating cereal” in the upper right hand corner instead. The results were surprising: 4,910,000 of them.
This post contains a lot of links, only given to display the impressive number of these cereal addiction cases — so no need to click on all or any of them. Google came up with plenty of sources, but cited the UK and US versions of Answers.com as the top two results. There, I found myriads of concernedconsumers (consumers in the “I down a whole box in one sitting” sense of the word) who had feelings ranging from mild fear to overwhelming guilt about their breakfast cereal consumption and inability to stop. Most of the voted upon “answers” were of course overwhelmingly unhelpful, both the sympathetic (“When I was pregnant I ate like a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch every day!”) or the, well, assholes (“Well…. that stinks”). Thankfully, there is some actual advice given at more weight-loss oriented sites.
Truth is, like any addiction, the best way to overcome it is to not give yourself the option of relapsing. Do not buy yourself cereal. Do not have milk in the house. If you think that may be too harsh, you can try keeping only one kind of cereal in the house. The lack of variety will help you from going back to it again and again. A third option would be to restrict any sort of eating after a certain time, say, 10pm, or only allow cereal on certain days of the week. The more black and white the rules, the easier it will be to follow them. The only danger is yo-yoing. I’ve gone without cereal for a few days only to bring home a box of Cheerios and down 5 in a day.
Yo-yoing can be used for good effect, however, if you are trying to build muscle or doing intense exercise. If you plan on cutting carbs one day, and know that an inevitable flood of CTC (Cinnamon Toast Crunch) will be soon entering your mouth the next, try to plan those bowls after your workout.
Let’s not be too hard on ourselves. Cereal is so amazing. The reason why it’s easy to keep eating is because a) there is huge variety. Sure, it’s basically made from the same stuff, and it all tastes like cereal, but as long as there are puffs, flakes, grains, crunch, pebbles, Charms, wheats, oats, bran, and o’s, there will always be something craveable for the next meal. b) it’s easy. No cooking required, and nothing to heat. c) Few people still believe that cereal is good for you, despite the Lucky Charms boxes that blare “Whole Grains” at you in bright blue, but the truth is, it’s not bad enough that eating it constantly will actually hurt. Depending on your poison of choice, there is enough fiber, fortified (artificially added) vitamins, and sometimes protein to poorly mimic a balanced diet. The problem is that excessive use will inhibit any chance at weight loss — the sugar will cause insulin spikes and the carbs may leave you lethargic and increase cravings and hunger later on in the day.
All this aside, I will never stop. I will try, I will fail. I will stop trying.
Writing this article has made me hungry. There is a box of Corn Flakes in the cupboard, a half gallon left of skim milk in the fridge, and I went to the gym today. I’ll be in the kitchen.
EXPECTATION: Donald will bring the Ménage à Trois wine to the casual office party, and everybody will be impressed with its generally appealing taste.
REALITY: Donald brings the Ménage à Trois wine to the casual office party, then after many glasses of it, lets everyone in the office know you’re gay.
II
EXPECTATION: Everybody will accept you for you who you are, and will actually be impressed with your ability to keep it a secret and not let it get in the way of working relationships.
REALITY: Terry, the pony-tailed art director, takes a sudden interest in feeding you shots in the back room, then helps you back to your apartment later that night. He helps you up the stairs to your apartment door, carrying you up one step at a time, his hand groping around your lower back for the perfect amount of leverage, and then you can’t remember anything after that.
III
EXPECTATION: You will wake up and Terry will be making your breakfast. The smell of eggs and sausage (where did that sausage come from?) will remind you of the summer you spent at Boy Scout camp for some reason, waking up in the lodge and following the smell of breakfast to the next building over. You’ll sigh and roll over in bed. You won’t know what happened the night before, but at that moment, you won’t care, because it’ll actually feel right.
REALITY: Terry is gone. You spend the day looking for your wallet. You buy a bottle of malt liquor from the grocery store with a few dollars you found in your pants pocket, lie on your couch, and drink yourself into a stupor.
IV
EXPECTATION: You will call Terry, spew insults at him, threaten legal action, and he only laughs. A few minutes later you’ll get a call from your boss telling you not to come in on Monday because of the terrible thing you did to Terry the night before. You will try to call somebody for help, a friend, someone who will know what happened, but no one will answer their phone, or even worse, nobody will talk to you ever again. REALITY: Donald brings the Ménage à Trois wine to the casual office party, and everybody is impressed with its generally appealing taste.
March 6th, 2011
