Category: Essays

So once or twice a month, I’ll stop at the local Chinese food place. It’s in a great location. I order my food, walk down to the bank, maybe stop in the drug store or supermarket, and then drop back in on the Chinese food place to pick up my hot, steaming order of Egg Foo Yung. For those poor souls, uneducated in the ways of truly disgusting Chinese dishes, Egg Foo Yung is three 3-egg omelettes, cooked in a wok, and served in a dense brown sauce. If I give you a hard time about your Big Mac consumption, feel free to parry with the Chinese omelette. Egg Foo Yung is like cigarettes: I know it is gonna kill me, it’s a disgusting habit, and if you don’t know why I do it, I can’t even talk to you about it. At least, I don’t throw the un-inhaled portion out into the road whilst driving.

Anyway, the greatest thing about stopping for Chinese is the little side shows. During the winter, as I crossed the parking lot, I noticed a strong odor of burnt wood. It was so strong that, as I entered the Chinese food place, I could smell the wafts of smoke emanating from my jacket. It attached to me that quickly. I commented on it, saying that I didn’t start the fire. Ha, ha. As my order was cooking, the staff in the restaurant was becoming visibly nervous over the smell, until we all saw fire trucks come streaming into the parking lot. Within minutes there were, and I am not exaggerating, a dozen fire trucks in the lot. But there was no fire to put out. The pizza place next door has a wood burning oven, and, apparently, they forgot how to open the flue. There had to be sixty firemen there, easily, all just told to go back home.

Last time I was ordering Chinese, a kid on a bike, probably about 16 or so, accosted me as I walked out of the supermarket, asking me to buy him some cigarettes. What a disgusting habit, I thought. No, that’s not what I really thought. What I really thought was, hey! how come he knows I’m old enough to buy cigarettes? And that got me thinking, as it always does, about being a kid and thinking that 30-year olds were so adult, so mature, and had to have it all together by then. Yeah. But I never did ask one to buy me cigarettes or booze. The kid might have gotten lucky with me if he asked for beer, but only if he asked for the right beer.

I’m a beer-elitist. And this was proven to me on that very same excursion for my Chinese fix. There was an old, bummy looking guy, skinny, coupla teeth, pushing a cart on the sidewalk filled with things hidden by black, plastic bags. Now this strip mall does have a supermarket in it, so I wasn’t going by the cart alone to convince myself that the gentleman in question was a bum. He also carried with him a beer can in a paper bag. That was a topper. But, initially, I gave him kudos for his choice of beer. The can was very long, no 12 ouncer, and was black. In my naive elitism, I thought the guy was drinking a Guinness. It isn’t a very practical thing to do, since, I was thinking to myself, the Guinness can is meant to be poured into a glass. The new glass bottle Guinness, they say, can be drunk from the bottle, but I’d still pour it into a glass, being the beer elitist and all.

And then, I thought about the absurdity of my thoughts, very meta. He’s not drinking a Guinness, you dweeb. A Guinness is about $2.50 a can. It’s gotta be MGD or some such. Idiot, I sighed to myself.
We met up in the Chinese restaurant, my beer-swilling friend and me. He was talking to the cashier about his two daughters coming up from Florida, and that his mom was doing well in the nursing home. I still don’t know what to make of that, except that North Babylon has some chatty hobos.

Then, after I picked up my food and made my way back to my car, I got a message, a message from God’s messenger. You see, “The end is near. You, me, everyone you love, every star, every animal is going to die.” That’s it, folks. Wrap it up; nothing more to see here. The photocopied paper clung to my windshield, and all the rest of us who were just so lucky to park there at that time so we could be saved. Sneaky bastard. I was walking back and forth through that parking lot for the past 15 minutes, and I never even saw her.

I’m pretty sure it was a woman who wrote out the treatise on the second-coming of Christ, because of the handwriting, very curly. She didn’t necessarily hand them out, for sure, but I don’t think she’d want to do anything half-assed for the Lord. She seems to have the perennial problem of mixing up “your” and “you’re,” but she did pretty good otherwise. I don’t really want to make fun of this person, but I did get a kick out of this line, which was written lengthwise up the margin of the page: “God loves you, shouldn’t you love him? YES!” Oh, those pesky ambiguous negatives. Yes, I shouldn’t love him? No, I should not love him? No, I should love him? Oh, YES, I should love him. Okay. Got it. Now, I can see this “saving” a Christian who has gotten lost from the flock, and for that we all rejoice, but does it really work on someone who, let’s say, is a confirmed atheist who has written several pieces of Internet propaganda on the silliness of the Christian persecution complex? But, then again, how many of them did she expect to come across in a parking lot picking up Chinese food?

In the beginning of the summer of 1991, as I played a session of Call of Chthulu, the game master, a bartender at the restaurant where I worked, played a particular CD softly in the background. There was something familiar about the music, but it was a bit low to make out. The melodies stuck with me, subconsciously, for the next week, until, at the next game session, when he played the CD again, I asked him what we were listening to. He handed me the case, a bright red image forever since burned in my memory. He told me a story of how his friend was a rep for Sony Music, and this was a band that Sony was very excited about. His copy was a prerelease, and sure enough there was bold type on the back of the CD about how this copy was not for sale and other legalese.

The music, the deep baritone vocals, the sheer power of it all, was apparent at low volume in the background of a role-playing game. He played the CD twice that day, and the song “Evenflow” found its way into my humming and whistling repertoire while at work the next week. It was a great album. I couldn’t wait to buy it when it came out. What a funny name for a band, I thought, Pearl Jam. It would be cool if they caught on, though.

A cusp in music existed at that time. Pearl Jam’s Ten was just a small part of it. (Okay, commercially, it was a huge part of it.) But the album was a wonderful example of what would be called Grunge, and what would dominate the radio and MTV for the next couple of years. It was a happy time for me, audio-wise. Hearing the album, then, I knew something was changing within the music world. The album had longevity written all over it. It happens rarely—the instant classic in everyone’s music collection.

Boy bands, Britney, and Beyoncé have dominated the past eight years of music, much to the detriment of sanity, taste, and record sales. NüMetal becomes the next incarnation of 80s hair band. Despite the lust for the exalted position of “the next big thing” in rock and roll, the stuff is tired as soon as it comes out. Friends used to debate me against the punk-cred of Green Day, but no one now seriously thinks that Avril Lavigne could be punk even if you lit her head on fire and used her to light fireworks.

In 2001, the best selling album was a soundtrack built around songs that were popular 70 years ago. Last year, the best albums were re-releases from previous years. One of these, White Blood Cells, by the White Stripes, originally released the year before, gave me some hope for the state of music to come. It’s a great album. This band would go far, I thought, and they did indeed get some radio airplay and video rotation on MTV2. But the end of 2002 produced a disquieting silence from Jack White, and an odd backlash against the rise of this talented duo. Why would the White Stripes not take advantage of the success of their rising star? Why would they not promote the shit out of themselves and make an even bigger wave?

I needn’t have worried. Elephant, their latest, is the seminal album of this decade. This is the one that we will all have in our music collections, and remember the first time we heard it. I, for one, was in Katherine’s new car, and we were heading to dinner at the Curry Club. I popped in the CD into the player, and by the third song, my head swam with memories from 12 years before—a change in the air, a harbinger of good music to come, an amazing achievement for a humble rock album.

!!!UPDATE!!! – This entry is 4 years old! If you’re looking for a review of the fish sandwich Wendy’s introduced in 2008, read the new review.

Well, local Wendy’s are now serving fish sandwiches. I don’t know if this is just for the Lenten season. I hope not, because, while I don’t eat red meat and am trying to give up eating chicken, I am addicted to Wendy’s French Fries. <topical humor>I’m sorry, Freedom Fries.</topical humor> Anyway, Wendy’s also serves Dr Pepper, always have, unlike the schizophrenic McDonald’s in the area, which run about 3 to 1 against having it. What’s worse is that Taco Bell had just recently solidified it’s Pepsi-block of soda selection, meaning that instead of Dr Pepper, Taco Bell offers some crap called Wild Cherry Pepsi. Oh, the horror.

So Wendy’s is probably my favorite fast food. The Spicy Chicken Sandwich is probably the best chicken sandwich made on an assembly line somewhere in Peoria, period. But, as noted, I’m waffling on the chicken. I keep meaning to give it up, but that would mean that I would have to have a garden salad or a baked potato whenever I went to Wendy’s, just to get my French fries and Dr Pepper. A baked potato and French fries? Please. So, I’ve always had fantasies about the legendary Wendy’s Fish Sandwich. (I have a very mundane fantasy life.) I just knew Wendy’s would make it better than any other fast food chain.

Incidentally, it has recently come to my attention that I mispronounce “Wendy’s.” Apparently, I am unable to combine the simple phonetic combination of “when” and “dees.” I say, “wind” and “dees.” This has caused me much embarrassment and soul searching. I don’t even hear the difference when others say the two words. One, of course, means that conditions are brisk and breezy; the other is the best fast food chain in America, but it sounds the same to me.

So, one can imagine my excitement that the mythological Wendy’s Fish Sandwich finally arrived on our Long Island shores. I am deeply saddened to tell you that it sucks. Sucks balls nasty. Okay, not really balls nasty, but it ain’t good. The fish is the standard chopped up white fish that all American’s enjoy in our fish sticks, and, in fact, the breading is similar in constancy to a high school cafeteria’s Friday Selection. The similarities to high school food do not end there! The fish patty is soggy and limp (yet the coating is crispy when bitten into. Isn’t modern science amazing?), and the taste is bland and, well, really bland. They throw the obligatory single iceberg lettuce leaf that is a signature of all Wendy’s sandwiches, add a bit of tartar sauce, and put it on the always tasty, always moist, potato bread bun. The bun is the best part, but the tartar sauce wasn’t bad.

Sigh. So that still leaves the lowly McDonald’s Filet O’Fish as the best drive-thru fish sandwich out there. Checker’s is close, but they only offer it around Lent. Burger King just went through another test-market-liked-this-one-better change of their secondary menu items, which made their once huge, meaty BK Big Fish sandwich into an almost perfect clone of the Filet O’Fish, but the McDonald’s still remains champ because their tartar sauce has dried onion in the mix. Oh, Wendy’s, where did we go so wrong?

And yet, I will order it again, the next time I visit Wendy’s, in the naïve hope that my purchases will speak to the boys upstairs that there is a market for this type of thing. And I’ll probably ask ’em to throw a slice of cheese on it, too. Because, really, all I’m looking for is a sandwich to go along with my fries and drink.

My father gave me a good bit of advice before the onset of the cold weather. “Son,” he told me, “get yourself a pair of thermal underwear.” His business demands a lot of time spent outdoors, which generally isn’t a problem in the summer, as long as one looks out for dehydration, but the winter gets uncomfortable quickly. Layering clothes helps quite a bit to stay warm, but I cringed at the thought of wearing thermal underwear.

Russell’s Law of Thermal Dynamics #1: Clothing that grandmothers want you to wear are lame, nerdy, uncomfortable clothes.

My grandmother always told me to wear thermal underwear, t-shirts under my t-shirts, scarves, gloves, knit hats, and heavy winter jackets as soon as the temperature fell below 62° (16° C for my Canadian friends). Grandma liked button-down shirts with starchy collars, ties, shoes instead of sneakers, non-tube socks; although she’d buy me a bunch of tube socks every birthday for the upcoming school season. In short, when I was 5 until, let’s say, 27, I hated all of the clothing that my grandmother would have liked to see me in. But then something happened.

Russell’s Law of Thermal Dynamics #2: When you can buy your own lame, nerdy clothes, at least you can make sure they’re comfortable.

Correlation to Law #2: Grandparents buy uncomfortable clothes for their grandkids.

What happened was I got a job that required “business casual” attire. Despite my insistence that blue jeans and a relatively clean Pink Floyd t-shirt qualified, the dress code required the expansion of my wardrobe into old, undisturbed realms that I had not visited since my Confirmation. I had to wear ties and Oxford shirts and something called Dockers and shoes that had no swish nor rhymed with “bok.” I quickly discovered that spending just a little more money for these dreadful clothes afforded me comfort when I wore them. I swear, the first time I wore dress shoes that didn’t make my toes feel like they were being crushed, I thought the whole square-toed, stiff-shoed experiences from my childhood were some kind of ritualistic foot-binding that my relatives thought could bring in more money for my dowry. Not only were the shoes I was wearing comfortable, but, as I began to pay attention to my sneaker-clad peers, they were actually pretty good looking.

Russell’s Law of Thermal Dynamics #3: Man makes the clothing. You look as cool as you are willing to spend, in money and time.

Pretty much overnight my entire outlook towards clothing changed. T-shirts under dress shirts made sense, because the t-shirt was softer and prevented chaffing of the sensitive parts of a man’s chest. Boxers were so much better than briefs, because, well, let me just assure you that the binding feeling I got with those childhood shoes had nothing on the binding feeling that jockey’s give me. Dress socks were another genuine surprise. The thin elastic ones that you can see through were big hits a couple of generations ago, and, as noted, are purchased exclusively now to punish grandkids. But there are thick, cushiony socks in every imaginable earth-tone, and they look better in those comfy dress shoes, too. Nothing screams “I live with my mother” more than a grown man in Dockers, loafers, and tube socks. I learned to coordinate and accessorize. Ties still bothered me, and will forever. I can’t tie them correctly, and no matter what the knot or fabric, ties are meant to be noosed around the throat without a gap between the collar and the tie knot. I did buy ties that looked good, but I have never appreciated them like I have the socks, shoes, belts, etc.

Russell’s Law of Thermal Dynamics #4: What comes around goes around. Soon you too will wear what your grandmother wanted you to.

But winter clothes were still stuck in my mind as things for four year-olds. So when my father suggested thermal underwear to keep warm this season, I silently scoffed. And bought a pair. As soon as I put them on, I noted the similarity to comfy flannel pajamas. Flannel pajamas are another thing that Grandma would give to me on holidays. I resisted wearing them until one particularly cold winter, and now I look forward to getting them every Christmas. Getting back to the thermals, they just work. I’ve been outside in freezing weather for hours at a time, and my nose gets a little frosty, but that’s about it. I’m about to invest in several other pairs. I wear two layers of shirts, which means a t-shirt under a t-shirt. I wear gloves. I’m not wearing a knit hat, but I’m not opposed to it at this point. Even my dorky winter jacket is a comfort to me. I’m not ready for a scarf. Not yet. It must be something about the neck. And yet, every day I go out for work, I think to myself that this is how my grandmother wanted me to look when I went out to the bus stop, but I insisted that I was comfortable in just my denim jacket and blue jeans with the hole in the knee. What a stupid kid I was.

The youth of today have another vice that is particularly annoying for an old man like myself — line-jumping. Sure, we knocked over mailboxes and were rude in public for no reason, but, by golly, when we stood in line, we we’re perfect little solders.
Maybe not, but the sheer boldness of the line-jumpers surprised me on my latest foray to Great Adventure, a theme park in New Jersey. The standard was for a group of four or so, already deep into the line, to invite another group of supposed friends up to their position. This is just wrong.

Allow me to rationalize. Most of the rides at Great Adventure are set up for four people or two sets of two people. So if three people are saving a space on line for a single person, well, that would have been a seat that would end up empty anyway. Therefore, I’m not against the volunteer who gets refreshments for the rest of his party from rejoining his friends. Far from it, we need more of that type of good-ol’ American idealism in today’s kids.

But four or more shouting for several others to join them in the middle of the line? Not in my country.

And they were not the worst, because they had some, albeit wrong, justification for line-jumping. No, the worst were the girls who pretended not to be doing anything wrong. Let me explain.

When we first got into the park, my friends and I headed to the Great American Scream Machine, because it is so clearly visible from the parking lot as one enters the park. This ride is an old-school roller-coaster where people sit two by two in each car. It’s fun but a bit rough on the neck if one is not relaxed. The line was pretty short, and we were close to riding the coaster when I noticed a pair of teenage girls, 17 years-old or so, asking a single male rider if they could get on together on that particular turn, instead of waiting for the next ride. The man reluctantly agreed, because he was riding with his wife and daughter, who were sitting in the same car. Why did he give up the seat for these two? Because they were not unattractive teenage females.

So now the guy was going to ride the next coaster by himself with a couple of strangers. Sucker, I thought to myself, and it was a bit of witty conversation with the others in my party for a short length of time.

After the Scream Machine, I was eager to get to Medusa, which is a tremendously fun coaster for those keeping track. The line for this ride was apparently short for most of the day until we got onto it, for it was spilling outside the corrals that are set up to keep people in line, literally. Normally, the corrals are set up maze like to allow for the maximum density of people-herding in the smallest amount of space, but, as noted, the line hadn’t been long enough to justify people walking through an empty, but curvy, labyrinth to get to the ride. Until, that is, we showed up. Then an aged security guard was chaining rows together to get the proper line-flow going.

He was right behind us, yelling at various youths who were taking advantage of the chaotic line order to get ahead of a few dozen people. One pair of advantage-takers were the teenaged girls from the Scream Machine. They were about to cut ahead of my party.
“Whoa, whoa,” I said to them. I do actually talk like this. “Hey, you’re not going to do to us what you did to that poor guy before.”

The two looked incredulous. “What are you talking about?” the curly-haired one said. She turned out to be the only one who would deign to talk back to me.

“Back at the Scream Machine. We saw how you got that guy to give up his seat,” I continued. I was not to be swayed by their looks of innocence. The spokesman for the two denied involvement in my conspiracy theory. And they tried to move in in front of us anyway, despite my protestations.

“Naw, naw, naw,” I said, waving my arms and shaking my head. I moved in front of the two to prevent them access to the line ahead of me. “You’re just going to have to go back to the end of the line.” I crossed my arms, leaned against the railing, and gave them my smuggest look.

“Your fly is open,” said the curly-haired girl.

There was just the slightest pause, before I shot back, “That’s okay.” Then I turned and faced the front of the line. I had won the battle, but at what cost?
Several minutes later, I confirmed and corrected the altitudinal error of the zipper on my shorts, as surreptitiously as possible. And, of course, the two girls were within sight of my party for almost the entire day, but we never had another confrontation. And others continued to cut the lines. Damned kids.

It took nearly 4 months for an unofficial response to Fickled Pink by my former manager, Suzanne. I believe that the more popular search engines are now listing my site in reference to the company name, “Pinkhaus.”
Initially, as I wrote the essay, I wondered how coy I should be in presenting the parties named. I was going to change the names to protect the innocent, but then I concluded that no innocent parties were involved. This was my story about my life, written with my voice.
Should I have included a disclaimer stating that the essay was written with bias and makes me look better and the others tarnished from the bright light that is the whole truth? Duh. This is my blog. Let them tell their side of the story on their site. It should be readily apparent by any and all onlookers to my site, and that particular essay, that I am quite the slacker. I could have tried harder to keep my job. In fact, it was financially foolish not to try. I am a stubborn, pigheaded person. I believe this is readily apparent in my writing.
So was I surprised by the response that Suzanne sent to me, one weekend, out of the blue? Well, yes and no. Yes, but only because of the timing of it? Why not weeks before or a year later? What made her read that particular piece then? As noted, I assume it was because she did a keyword search, and was surprised to find my web address. Why do a keyword search for her own company? Because they have just undertaken a restructuring of their website. The beginning of that restructuring was noted in

I’m getting my car inspected at the local Pep-Boys, so I go into the retail section and look for some sort of clever sticker that I can apply to my LeBarge. Currently, the only ornamentation of any kind is an AARP sticker warning the young hoodlums not to steal my car.
Patriotism is the theme of the current bunch of stickers. This doesn’t surprise me, but I gotta be different, so no flags, no “America will kick yer Arab-ass,” no “God Bless our Godblessed Ameri-God-ca” for me. I admit the Eurostyle sticker with black “USA” type surrounded by a white oval did intrigue me, but these, too, are very over used these days, with 1 of every 3 cars around here displaying the Vermont “VT” version of these things. Oh, yeah, guys, it is so amazing that you drove 4 hours into a bordering state to go skiing. I’m so impressed.
Anyway, the other stickers are all Harley-Davidson, mag-wheel, super-car type things, and I’m just not into that, despite having pure American V8 power under my hood. Shit, I’d lose all those sucka, suped-up tiny Jap cars in no time, but, check it, I ain’t about that.
If they had a Welsh-flag sticker, I’d put that on my car. My old VW had one. I’m moderately proud of my WASPish geneology, plus the Welsh flag has a really cool red griffin on it. It gives me some street cred to, since everyone knows that the Welsh were trodden upon by the English, but there was no Welsh flag.
Surprisingly, nothing with the Yankees, either. The Yankees are my biggest chink in my dare-to-be-different armor. Boy, it sure is difficult to be a fan of one of the most successful baseball teams of all times. But part of my blood is pin-striped blue, so I don’t fight it. Yankees rule, but not at Pep-Boys.
So Pep-Boys fails me, an iconoclast looking for some sort of mass-produced item to represent my uniqueness. Damn them. What will I ever put on my car to share with the world how clever and different I am? Oh, wait, I know I’ve got one of those Apple Computer stickers around here. That’ll do.

Good Lord, but life is funny.

And how can I justify an essay that starts with such a trite sentiment? Ah, even clichés begin in truth. And life is a funny… um, funny what? What the heck is this life? Is it just a small bit of time on a lonely watery rock in the middle of nowhere? Too nihilist. How about a test by a lonely watery god to see who deserves his love? Too illogical. Maybe it is a series of event that happen between birth and death? Too literal, but obviously the way most of us lead our lives.

There in lies the inherent irony. The vastness of life on this earth and the lack of it in the greater, much greater universe gives us a sense of importance, isolation, insignificance, and intelligence. Why are we here? Because we’re here. Roll the bones, as Rush tells us. Chance is our friend; chaos is our enemy. What does any of it mean to a guy who needs to feed his family and slaves for meager wages? Go tell it to the Times, he might say. He doesn’t need penny philosophy.

The greatest minds of the human race were all penny philosophers. No matter what they’ve learned, and what they tell us, the vast majority of humans just are. They exist on vague promises of earthly or heavenly riches, rewards that they will never see, but they carry on, because, well, because it sure beats dying. Everything in the Universe exists just as it did billions of years ago, with minor adjustments to matter distribution. We discover how the universe really acts and we hand out Nobel prizes, but the first man to discover that nightshade is poisonous taught his tribe a valuable lesson by dying for science. Our knowledge of anything is simply the discovery of what the Universe is doing on our local level, and it would happen whether or not we wrote about it in a science journal.

And this is funny. Nowhere to go, nothing to learn about, and all of the rest of the world trying to muscle in on the little bits we manage to collect for our families, or ourselves, we carry on. We love. We smile. We laugh. We sing. We give. We praise. We write. We grow.

Richard Feynman was a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic weapon. He also was an avid drummer. He approached drumming much in the same way as a tribal musician approaches percussion. He hit the leather of the drum with his hands in a way that pleased his internal idea of rhythm. He marveled at the vibrations that the drum created. He was probably more interested in the physics involved with percussion than he was in splitting atoms, but he is more noted for the later, of course. But, easily, Feynman is the scientist that I think of when I hear about the childlike qualities of geniuses. It is not a put-down. It is not even about innocence, which anyone spending any amount of time with a child realizes is just not a proper adjective for the whirlwind of mud-caked hands and surreptitious cookie jar raids. What a child has in abundance is joy of discovery. We often mistake this for innocence. But Feynman was partially responsible for the weapon that brings the entire human race to the brink of extinction. There is no innocence there.

But this is the child given the keys to the Universe. A child brings as much emotion to the first time he sticks his finger in his nose and discovers boogers as he does to the first time he sees fireflies in the summer evening. It is all so very amazing. To Richard Feynman, the discovery of how ants communicate with each other about spilled sugar was no less a joy than the quantum equations he worked on that bear his name, the joy of life in all of its abundance sharing just a bit of its hidden vocabulary to willing ears.

Everyone has this, but a lot of people sadly ignore it. A complete journey through the American Public Education System should always include the visit to the cemetery or local haunted house that will creep a kid out for weeks. The child learns that mysteries surround us, and there are always buried layers beneath the surfaces of the ordinary. But the complete journey through life should also include the realization that thumps in the dark are good spooky fun, but the real scary stuff is always right in front of us. Ghosts don’t kill; people do. The sadness of this, due to historical misconceptions that were poorly applied even when society may have justified such barbaric thoughts in whatever era, is compounded by the shear amount of information that should help us all understand each other a lot more than we do.

We are all in the same damned boat. Differences of opinion, method of dress, religion, sexuality, education, and so on mean absolutely nothing. We are all just trying to survive life as comfortably as possible. And there are so many simple joys, why bother trying to take someone else’s away?

I’ll never have an answer to that question. It is the flipside of the original question, what is life? They belong together because they both ask a question about human need, and they both can only be answered using words that won’t mean the same things to different people. And pondering either question is a lot like striking the head repeatedly with a piece of lumber. When you walk away with a headache, you wonder why you started the process in the first place.

Life holds the trump, however. In the reversal of the standard idea that the one bad thing one does will cancel out a dozen good things by that same person in the minds of those affected by the actions, life gives us joy, and the single memory of joy can outshine a lifetime of pure hell. The mind holds on to past joys, obsesses over current joys, and anticipates the joys of the future. With Pavlovian training, we should never play the lottery, enter a doomed relationship, grow attached to pets or people or things that will change or die. But programmed response is only a small part of life.

There is the symphony that cause tears to well up in the strongest man, the pain and euphoria of childbirth, the first awkward and restrained kiss of two future lovers, the satisfaction of sitting down to a Thanksgiving dinner with loved ones. And, hell, you might be the lucky one and hit the $10 million jackpot. Those two kids, sure, maybe they might straighten out and forge a strong, loving, and respectful relationship. And just having that cute, warm, black and white little cat on my lap draws off so much stress and worry. We learn, and we don’t. It’s understandable. We takes our chances in the game of life, and while there is only one result, all the fun is getting there.

It is wonderful to know that not only does my personal philosophy doom me to eternal damnation, but so does my computer. In this extraordinarily amusing article (Note: the original page is down as of 27 Apr 02. This link is a Text only copy I made, violating the spirit, if not the meat, of several copyright laws.), the good Dr. Richard Paley discovers the connection between Apple Computers and the satanic belief in Evolution. That link, of course, is Darwin.

Darwin, as most know the word, is the name of the scientist behind all our modern troubles thanks to the godless, secular education system that teaches our children about the satanic belief in Evolution. Darwin is also the core operating system in Mac OS X. Now Apple didn’t actually name that operating system Darwin, since its name is derived from the fact that it evolved off an older system called BSD, but that is something that Dr. Paley easily glosses over. Darwin, the operating system, is open-source, meaning that many programmers add to the development of the system, and that everyone can use these developments in their own ways, since no one actually owns it. Open-source, according to Dr. Paley, “is just another name for Communism.”

Communism. Satanic Communism. Right.

And Apple Computer is obviously tempting us to follow the path to destruction. The damned logo is a bitten apple, of which Dr. Paley knowingly winks to us, “Most Bible scholars think that it was more likely a fig…, but popular culture holds that it was an apple and it is this popular culture that the forces of Satan are trying to sway.” Dare I tell the good doctor that up to a couple of years ago the Apple logo was the colors of the rainbow, which are the same colors on the banners of godless homosexuals? He missed that one, but not the “secret code” to change permissions on files in order to read and write to them, where one opens up the Terminal application and types “chmod 666.”

Nevermind, please, that this is a Unix command that is 25 years old, and represents the permission for owner, group, and everyone to read and write to the file. Very few times would anyone ever have to do this, preferring to set permissions to 655, which would only give the owner of the file the permission to change it. Still, allowing anyone access to change a file is also Communism, so I guess his point is still valid.

Now it is easy to make the leap of logic, since Apple is by nature “anti-Christian and cultish…, is it any wonder that they have decided to base their newest operating system on Darwinism? This just reaffirms the position that Darwinism is… spread through propaganda and subliminal trickery, not a science as its brainwashed followers would have us believe.”

Oh, Jesus. I’m brainwashed because I agree with a testable theory of science? I should have known. Come to think of it, I did have some doubts about Evolution back in high school until I started working for the school newspaper. That was when I first started following the dark path of desktop publishing on the Macintosh.

OS X, like every Unix system before uses processes called daemons, “ which is how Pagans write ‘demon,’ in case you were wondering. If I ever thought that Unix geeks were just too clever for themselves by putting inside-jokes and puns within their programs, I have just been fooling myself. The creators of Unix were Pagans and Idolaters. The heathens behind Darwin, the operating system, even came up with a little pagan logo “no doubt to influence children…. They’re not doing a very good job keeping their ties to the forces of darkness a secret, are they?”

Finally, the good doctor tells us, “The first personal computer sold by Apple was priced by Steve Jobs and his hippy friend Steve Wozniak at $666. Need we say more?” His clever use of the royal pronoun highlights the moral high ground that he and his fellow Christians can take. The actual price of the first Apple was $666.66, which has a couple of too many decimal places to fit in with the numerological equivalent of Emperor Nero’s name, but we can clearly see that this number was chosen for nefarious reasons.

I am so terribly lucky that Dr. Paley showed me the deep and diabolical link between Darwin and Darwin. Without him I might still believe that Darwin’s Theory of Evolution was sound science, and that any reference to him, which I previously took as appealing to the logical and scientific amongst us, actually leads to hell, or at least to my damned computer.

Update 05 May 02: Many folks are claiming that the essay that my response was based on was a hoax. It may be less than serious, and there is no doubt that Dr. Richard Paley was a figment of the actual authors imagination, but the arguments presented ring true. I’ve heard these arguments about evolution (but not Apple embracing the dark side!) when I was living in Florida. And I believe the author was not poking fun at Christianity as many have opined. The original pages have been taken down, and I do not know if the truth will ever be revealed because no one has come forward to admit writing them. I maintain the complete text of the article on my site, rather than the original web link, and I invite you to judge the veracity, not of the argument, but of the belief that lay behind it.

I love to hang around with real artists. Although I have some design ability, I’m just an apprentice amongst truly brilliant masters, so I settle instead for befriending and working with the talented. This is pretty much how I ended up in IT (Information Technologies e.g. the office computer geek). Much of today’s art is designed using a computer as the main tool, and I’m a bit better than decent at fixing these computers. This enables me to work in the fields that I love, design and art, and also allows me to seriously slack, since I don’t have to prove my artistic ability.

This sweet situation has allowed me to make some great friends, almost all of whom I’ve met on the job. I am proud to say that I know a terrific bunch of talented people, and should we ever get together and form our own company/commune (hint, hint), we’d be either a huge force in the art world, or establish a cult to rival Scientology.

So I had some high hopes when I first started working at Pinkhaus. This is a premier design house in Miami. I, of course, snuck in the backdoor as an IT guy, but the artists and designers there were responsible for corporate branding, which is how companies like to sell themselves to us consumers lately. The most recognized brand is Nike, but it goes beyond the familiar swish. Now when we say or hear, “Just do it,” we’re participating in a huge ad campaign that works by establishing a meme. A meme can be thought of a virus, in which it infects someone’s brain, stirs around for a bit, and then comes out to infect other people. In this essay, I’m spreading the Nike meme by quoting it. It is insidious and difficult to protect oneself from, which is why corporate branding is also referred to as viral marketing. This is a bit off topic, but it is included to share with the reader the enormous challenge of making an ad campaign work on this simple level that can spread like wildfire, but, of course, is unique and works with the company’s own mission. “Just do it,” will not work for a funeral home, but it is close to gold for Nike. And that is what the artists at Pinkhaus were challenged to do on a daily basis.

It was a great environment. Everyone there was quirky, including your humble narrator. It looked like an art studio should, concepts for designs littered on various tables, and all the artists had offices, not cubicles. Tchochkies and cool photographs were hung all over the walls. At any time, three separate streams of music could be heard blasting throughout the building. And everyone wore whatever they wanted, jeans, shorts, midriff-baring baby doll shirts. Sigh…. I was home.

As in every office, however, there was a hierarchy that had little to do with actual position. The office politics weren’t different from any other place I’d worked, which quite surprised me. Everyone, individually, seemed so nice. The place was so relaxed. But there was this insidious need to pass the buck. No one and everyone were responsible for nothing and everything. Why were people so untrusting of each other? Eventually, I found out there was a mole. He caused dissent and strife just so he could look like the golden boy to the company’s president.

Deadlines can make anybody crack. Artists are always in a struggle to complete the best work they can in the quickest amount of time. There is a lot of stress there, and that can bring out the worst in the nicest, quirkiest artist, but this, alas, is human nature. Competition is at the heart of every design studio, too. Artists compete against other agencies, obviously, but they also compete amongst themselves and with themselves. This is not negative. Commercial artists embody the ideals of evolution or capitalism. With every generation of art projects, the bar is raised, a new standard is borne. All else withers and dies. Only the wiliest art, and artist, flourishes. So by their very nature, artists are competitive, but just as a son may unconsciously compete with his father, this competition is often constructive. And sometimes it is not.

Carlos embodied the not. His father figure in this case was the previously mentioned company president, although, I believe, this was a relationship of context, not genuine affection. Had Joel been a mere mortal artist, and Mark, let’s say, been the president, Carlos would have been sweetly kissing Mark’s ass while stabbing Joel in the back.

Allow me to clarify, Carlos was and is a fine artist. He is extremely talented. Unfortunately, he embodies the negative qualities that are deep within everyone. He is sniveling, traitorous, and quite paranoid.

To continue, my dealings with Carlos were fairly benign, and he, I’m sure, had no idea of the cascading effects it would have on me, because I fall into a crisis-triggering depressive state (or did fall—thanks Zoloft!). But he quickly turned from a cool-music-loving, quirky artist, who had just spent two weeks in Russia on a photo shoot, to someone I wouldn’t trust under any circumstance, no matter where he was. It began fairly early in my brief tenure at Pinkhaus.

Carlos had been back for a few days. I’d only been there for two months. Officially, I was temping, but in another month, Pinkhaus would hire me permanently. I worked hard at establishing myself as a go-to-guy, which is my coined phrase for, “If you have a problem, go see Jonathan.” It didn’t make a difference what the problem was; I’d try to help. Towards that end, I gave out my personal cell phone number, so anyone could contact me if something came up while I was out of the office.

One Sunday, very late into the afternoon, Vicky and I were out at a bookstore, and, as is my habit, I left my cell phone in the car, because I find it terrifically rude to be out in public and act as if others don’t exist. We were in the bookstore for about 45 minutes. Upon returning to the car, I noticed I had received two voice messages. They were two minutes apart, and were placed about 20 minutes before. Both were from Carlos. He was in dire straits apparently, because when he came into the studio, his computer wouldn’t start. He had surmised that the power went out sometime during the weekend, and now his battery backup was dead, because he left his computer on.

Tech hint #1 (in a series of 8 million): NEVER leave your computer workstation turned on overnight or, heaven forbid, the weekend. You risk data loss and file corruption, and unless your computer acts as server, all you are doing is wasting energy and reducing the life of your computer components. Most computers have a “sleep” mode, which puts them in low power mode without quitting programs, and this may be fine for short term absences, but it still draws electricity, and if the power goes out, like it did to poor Carlos, you will come back to work to find a seemingly dead computer.

Carlos was quick to discover what went wrong, but he was in a near panic to find a solution. I called Pinkhaus back, and dialed in to Carlos’s extension, but he didn’t pick up. I left him a voice mail telling him to just switch out the backup battery with another one. I then called back 15 minutes later, but Carlos still did not answer. I assumed he had gone home and would deal with the problem in the morning.

Monday came and with it I walked in to find Carlos working on his now-functional computer. I asked him what happened, and he explained. He told me that he used my supervisor’s battery backup, since she was on vacation. This was a fine solution, although I let Carlos know that all he really had to do was reset his own backup by switching it off and back on. He thanked me for my concern and for approaching him first thing in the morning, and we left it at that.

Or so I thought. A bit later, my conscientious supervisor called me up to ask me how everything was going. We exchanged anecdotes and just before we were about to finish our conversation, Carlos popped his head into my office and asked me to transfer my supervisor to him when I was through. My supervisor was the head of production so I thought nothing of it. “Suzanne,” I said to my supervisor, “Carlos would like to speak to you before you go.”

I went back to work, checking my email and deciding what I would have for lunch, and not three minutes go by when my phone extension rang again. It was Suzanne, and she asked me, “What happened yesterday?” I was not exactly sure what she meant, and when I ask here to clarify, I felt an odd emptiness grow in the pit of my gut.

“Carlos said he called you several times yesterday with an emergency, and that you never responded,” she said.

I have little patience with exaggeration, even though I tend to indulge in it once in a very small teensy little while, so my first reaction was indignation. Ridiculous, I told Suzanne, and I had the phone logs on my cell phone to prove it. I explained to her the situation as I saw it, telling her of the two times I called back with no response from Carlos, but Carlos told her that I took two hours to call back, and by that time Carlos left in disgust.

“Ah,” I thought, and eventually relayed to Suzanne, “why didn’t Carlos scold me this morning?” Why did he tell me everything was fine, and then run to tell my supervisor that I had dropped the ball? I was close to furious. He even had the nerve to have me transfer Suzanne to him so he could rat me out. What type of weasel was this guy?

Suzanne seemed to be diplomatic about the affair, but later on, when it was far too late, it occurred to me that she, too, was intimidated by Carlos, even though she was in a higher position and with the company for much longer. And she wasn’t the only one.

This caused the first crack to appear in my perfect job with the quirky artists. A couple of days later, my tire went flat as I drove to work, and I used it as an excuse to not go to work. I just couldn’t deal with the stress, the stress that was non-existent the week before. This, of course, was my own hang-up, and shouldn’t be pinned to Carlos. But I later learned that he did these things habitually, and his main purpose was to tarnish others. I had been trying to be the go-to-guy, and I could no longer achieve that status. Take that, new guy!

I didn’t even realize how much the incident affected me until I went to an emergency session with a therapist. Pinkhaus had noticed my decline, difficult not to when I wouldn’t show up for a couple of days without reason. They took the high road and decided to help me get help. I met my therapist and told him about my depression. He asked me about my triggers, which I wasn’t really too aware of. He had me think about it for a bit, and then I told him about the Carlos incident. No one can imagine my shock when my therapist told me that this was “not the first time I heard about that pussy.”

My therapist had strong words about Carlos. I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t. He recognized Carlos as a destructive ass-kisser who would do anything to ruin others in order to remain the chosen one. Carlos apparently had turned up in the nightmares of someone else at the office, but, of course, my therapist couldn’t tell me who. I was all a-shiver trying to guess who it could have been, but I never did find out. But the important point was Carlos had sent someone else into therapy.

I still feel that Carlos represented nothing more than the failure of humanity, and this is what depresses and disappoints me. I didn’t, and don’t, want to give him, personally, any power over my emotions. He and I only crossed wires once after, where I explained to him of a problem with the Pinkhaus computer network that I had finally diagnosed.

It was a chronic problem, but one that was so blindingly obvious, I ignored it for several weeks. I just couldn’t accept the potential solution, because it should have been taken care of several IT administrations ago. But it hadn’t, and I had inherited it. When I finally accepted the problem, the solution was obvious, but I thought I needed a simple piece of equipment to work on it, which would be sent to me overnight. That very day, Carlos couldn’t print a file, due to the network problem. He asked me to fix it, and I told him that I would, but not until tomorrow. He immediately went to yell at Suzanne. At least that time he approached me first. I still thought he was out of his mind, but by then I understood his methods, so I didn’t let it get under my skin. Instead, I worked on a solution without the small piece of equipment and fixed it well into the night. (A quick shout out to Lance at the Designory in California: Thanks, Lance! Couldn’t have done it without you!)

One of my very last days at Pinkhaus, a few people were in a meeting, Carlos and myself included. The meeting was to discuss the means to finish the Pinkhaus web site, which had been languishing for years. I’ve never been to a constructive meeting that had more than four people involved, and this was no different. Everyone there discussed points and ideas that were logical, straightforward, and entirely obvious. But it was good, I guess, to see that we were all on the same page. And then Carlos spoke. In his three-minute monologue he repackaged all the obvious points that had just been made by everyone else. He said nothing, and said it with less finesse. He was obviously blowing smoke just to be noticed. And when he finished, the room was silent for a few moments until Joel, the president, said, “Carlos has the right approach. Let’s follow his lead.”

Everything wrong about Pinkhaus came together right there with the entire room seriously nodding and silently, but strongly, agreeing. I was the only one who cracked a smile. Was I the only one who was aware of the circle jerk that just took place? No matter. There are some artist’s games I can’t play, and so I was soon shown the door.