Bullshit

As I write this, it’s snowing in Hoboken, like really snowing, not the usual two inch snowfall that everyone pretends is real snow. Global warming is real, y’all; when I was kid we had a lot more snow in these parts, and a lot more sticky snow that was around for weeks and weeks. I can recall the blackening snow drifts of my youth with … well, not exactly affection, but a kind of weird nostalgia, the way you’ll remember a bully from grammar school and hope they got the therapy they obviously needed and had that long talk with their father they obviously needed.

In my town, like most, homeowners are legally responsible for clearing snow from their sidewalks, and you can tell a lot about a person by how they approach this. Some folks are up three hours before the storm ends, and pretty much shovel constantly all day. Some folks clear their entire sidewalk, some folks leave a narrow Moria-like path that one person can barely fit on, causing many awkward dances during the day. Some folks wait until the evening hours to see if someone else will kindly shovel their sidewalks, and some folks don’t do it at all, allowing their sidewalks to transform into a slip-n-slide of packed-down ice.

Me, I’m an expert.

Dig Dug Ain’t Got Nothin’ On Me

I don’t say that lightly. The house where I grew up in Jersey City is located on a corner, and the lot included a driveway. My parents were enthusiastic believers that idle hands made your children intolerable, and also enthusiastic believers that the whole reason you had children was to assign them chores you didn’t want to do. So when it snowed, my brother Yan and I were required and expected to shovel the front porch, the porch steps, the sidewalk in front and on the side of the house, and the entire driveway just in case we had to drive to the emergency room, or flee an invading army, or Dad got a hankering for a Whopper. This was easily several hours of work, every time it snowed.

We tried to half-ass it, of course, but our mother was a tough supervisor, and we had Mr. Clean. Mr. Clean was an early retiree living off one of those legendary pensions you read about in romance novels and urban fantasies, and Mr. Clean didn’t have a whole lot to do. So he dedicated himself to cleaning up our neighborhood and complaining. If we’d had an HOA, Mr. Clean would have been the self-appointed enforcer.

If you did a shitty job shoveling your sidewalk, Mr. Clean would passive-aggressively finish the job behind you, and lord help you if he caught up with you. That meant an excruciatingly long lecture on how to properly shovel your sidewalk. It didn’t matter that I was 12 years old, Mr. Clean wanted to express his general disappointment in my character and work ethic (in this he channeled my dear Nanny, who also regarded me not so much as a grandson as an example of modern parenting, which is to say bad parenting), and he would do so at length.

As a result, I became the greatest snow shoveling machine ever known. Not to evade my parents’ punishments, or because of any kind of shame (to this day I am unfamiliar with the emotion), but to evade Mr. Clean’s lectures.

Today my house is exactly 12 feet wide. I don’t have a driveway — I don’t even own a car. My snow shoveling duties take about 20 minutes on a bad day, and I don’t even break a sweat. While my neighbors scowl and pant, I churn through that snow like John Henry driving steel, and then for fun I shovel my neighbors’ sidewalks as well. Because no matter how much snow I shovel it will never be as much as I handled as a kid … and because I can still hear Mr. Clean’s sharp, whiny voice coming up behind me (he’s still alive, and still living in my old neighborhood, he must be about 110 years old but apparently he still shovels the snow, and yes that exact sentence will undoubtedly be used to describe me someday).

The way things are going, the day is coming when I won’t have to shovel snow at all. The good news is that this will likely coincide with me discovering that I am the proud owner of waterfront property. HUZZAH!

HOLY CRAP it’s December 20th.

As I write this, I’m gearing up for the slow disaster that is socializing over the holidays. Some of you may have a different experience — there are always those weirdos who actually enjoy the holidays and seeing “people” — but I’m all Bah! Humbug! all the way through. Instead of some thoughtful look back on the year or some schmaltzy story about Xmas miracles and he like, here is a ridiculous anecdote from my largely misspent youth.

When I came home from college in the middle of my freshman year, a group of old high school friends had a little party. My friend drove us there in an old-school wood-paneled station wagon I call The Boat. The Boat was huge, which allowed him to transport like eight of us at once, and being a car owned by a broke-ass 18-year old it was a celebration of deferred maintenance. Most notably, its tires, which were so bald they had become tires only in the theoretical sense. There was like a molecule’s-width of rubber between us and oblivion, but no one cared as we navigate the steep, hilly ass-end of the Jersey City Heights, known locally as the Western Slope.

As we arrived, it began to snow, and being unsullied youth (or at least only partially-sullied) this was greeted with joy and excitement. Several hours later, we emerged and some of us were slightly impaired, and miraculously I was not one of them for reason that are lost to time and more successful evenings out. Whatever the reason for my sobriety, I was handed the keys to The Boat and charged with getting us all home.

This should have been an easy enough task, except for the steep hills of the Western Slope. The snow combined with The Boat’s bald tires made getting up those hills a Herculean chore, and within minutes I was leaning forward, head pounding, knuckles white on the wheel as I skidded and shimmied my way up the hills. Luckily, it being Xmas Eve there were no other cars around, so I was able to take my time and coax The Boat up the hills with patience while my passengers mocked me, sang songs, mocked me, and mocked me.

When I’d gotten us back to level ground, I was cheered, and I felt that exuberant overconfidence that sometimes follows minor victories. I steered us towards Kennedy Boulevard, a wide four-lane artery, and hit the gas. As we approached the intersection through the blowing snow, the light turned yellow, and instead of doing anything even remotely sane I gave it more gas, and then attempted to effect a left turn as we sailed through the light.

At this point, the Boat’s tires became less than theoretical and the car entered into a beautiful, graceful spin.

What I’ll never forget is how slow it was. The Boat started to turn left and never stopped turning, and we spun around and around the empty road three or four times in eerie quiet before coming to a gentle, easy rest. We sat for a moment, wind and snow blowing around us, everyone stunned.

With the blank confidence of youth, I turned the wheel, eased on the gas, and steered us back into the correct lane. We drove the rest of the way in silence. At the time it was just a thing that happened. Today, I recognize it as one of many moments when I died in an alternative universe and spawned new timelines. I think of it every time the holidays roll around and I wonder if this is the year Karma catches up to me.

And on that note: Happy holidays!

As my blog has become a barren wasteland of Detained chapters and … nothing else, I thought I’d start a new series of posts here called ME, A WELL-KNOWN IDIOT. Because if age has given me anything resembling the gift of wisdom¹, it comes in the form of an increasingly horrified knowledge of my own stupidity.

There was a time when I imagined myself smart. If you knew me between the ages of 14 and 35, you are probably nodding bitterly to yourself. I once had the jaunty, Dunning–Kruger-esque confidence of the true moron², because I was praised a lot as a child and my brother, Yan, has the physical skills of a box³. These two factors certainly gave me confidence — terrible, misplaced confidence. Especially when it came to any sort of physical task, because I was pretty used to outclassing Yan without breaking a sweat. And also because for a brief period of my childhood I’d been the fastest kid on my block. I took on all comers in a footrace, and I beat them all, bubba⁴.

When my wife and I bought our house, like most men I instantly imagined myself the master of my domain. This meant that whenever I encountered minor repairs to be done, I’d tackle them myself. I was not going to be one of those people who farmed out home repairs to strangers, like a sucker. Also too we had just bought a goddamn house, so money was in short supply, because buying a house is like alchemically transforming all of your money into wood and sheetrock, which, as it turns out, you can’t easily exchange for goods and services⁵.

Having made a long-term bet on the stability of Western Civilization which seems like an increasingly bad bet (ha ha it’s fine IT’S FINE), I immediately patrolled my new domain, knocking on walls in search of secret passages. It’s remarkable how little time you get to spend in a house before and during the buying process. We’d decided to buy this place after approximately 15 seconds:

REALTOR: This is … a house.

ME: Look! A skylight!

THE DUCHESS: Sold! Take our monies (dumps fifty million pennies on the floor).

Once you put in an offer on a house you don’t actually own it, so you can’t just wander over any time you like. Access is limited. You get to ave a home inspection done (usually), and we did. But our home inspection went like this:

INSPECTOR: This is … a house. Appears to not be actively collapsing. I’ll test for radon, but you should be good to go.

US: Should we worry about that hellgate in the crawlspace?

INSPECTOR: … there’s a crawlspace?⁶

So there I am wandering my new kingdom, and I notice the windows in our bedroom are pretty old, and the sills are very soft and obviously rotted. In fact, I push several holes into them without really trying hard. Since the immediate months after buying a house leave you selling blood and dancing for nickels⁷, this is where I transform into Professor Big Brain and decide that I will effect a temporary repair instead of paying the scandalous demands of the window installing mafia for new windows. I had rotten wood. Rip it out, replace it with something. What would be better than wood putty?

MOAR PUTTY

Anyone even casually familiar with my idiocy knows where this is going. Like Jerry Seinfeld shaving his chest hair, once I started carving out the rotten wood and replacing it with putty, I very soon no longer had window sills. I had gelatinous rectangles of putty that would certainly never harden. Current Jeff cannot explain the thinking of Past Jeff in this scenario⁸ — whatever thinking was happening was certainly magical in nature, and involved that putty somehow solidifying into something durable and wood-like.

This was, in other words, a Close Encounters-mashed potatoes kind of freak out, with me muttering to myself as I kept discovering more rotten wood, into which I would stuff increasingly absurd amounts of putty.

When it became clear that moar putty was never going to solve this problem, we hired some professionals to come and replace our windows. And my comeuppance was swift. I went up to check how things were going and the crew foreman looked at me and smiled.

“You that put all that putty in there?” he asked.

I retreated in shame. Which has become a familiar and comfortable strategy for me. Hiding from the contractors the rest of the day, I had plenty of time to contemplate my failures and see where I’d led myself into trouble. Clearly, I hadn’t used enough putty. I vowed to never make that mistake again⁹.

I’m buying my first new computer in <checks notes> seven years. Another huge desktop for me, thanks; while I love phones and tablets and use cloud storage endlessly, I still love me some hardware, especially *upgradeable* hardware.

I tend to overdo my specs, in the sense that I am not nearly the power user I imagine I am, so my ridiculous CPU, L5, and GPU combo is probably 150% of what I might need. But this also means I expect to be able to use the computer for, well, seven years or so without feeling any lag. My old rig is just starting to feel a bit wonky, for example; I probably could get a few more useful years out of it.

I didn’t build my own because I’m lazy as hell, and also because my discipline when it comes to things like static electricity is … not good. When I was 20 I owned a delightful 1978 Chevy Nova, and one day decided to finally put a radio in. Instead of paying someone to do it, like a sucker, I did it myself, and managed to short out the entire electrical system. That’s-a-me when it comes to any sort of electricity. So ramming sticks of RAM into a motherboard is not my best option.

Besides, when I used to be a serious tinkerer, I lost years off my life due to incompetence.

The Black Screen of Nothingness

I realize most of my anecdotes are concerned with my incompetence, drunkenness, and general lack of capability and smarts, but that is such a deep well of material (it really is a wonder I’m not dead in some sort of bread-making accident, or perhaps drowned in a kid’s pool full of beer foam) I can’t resist.

Back in the late 1990s I became interested in how computers worked. Like, I woke up one day and realized these things were here to stay and so I wanted to understand them. I read a book on Assembly programming (no, really, I did), and I was astounded to discover that there were alternatives to Microsoft Windows, and you could set your computer up to dual boot between Windows and something else.

Theoretically.

I did some research. Back then Linux was essentially a box full of random parts, so I decided my best choice was BSD, because BSD was rumored to come on like 150 CDs with every possible application ready to be installed, including a bunch of window managers for the full GUI experience. All you had to do was literally reach into the Deep Magic of your hard drive and set it up to dual-boot. Which I would not recommend you try to do for the first time on your one and only computer, the computer you rely on for your Internet connection, word processing, and game playing. Because if you do, what happened to me might happen to you: I meticulously followed the instructions I’d printed out, rebooted my computer, and … nothing.

A black screen. Not even a complaint. Just … nothing. The computer turned on, saw what I had wrought, and just sat there, transformed by my buffoonery into the world’s worst space heater.

Oh, shit

Now, this was back in the Dark Ages. I didn’t have a smart phone or a tablet or even a second computer, so I had no access to the Internet. So all I could do was review my hard copies and try a few dozen emergency maneuvers to try and at least get back to zero. I suppose I could have gone out and found one of those old-school Internet Cafes or a library offering Internet access. Instead, I chose to stay up all night and stare into the void that my tiny 13-inch computer screen had recently become.

I eventually clawed my way back into control. I forget exactly what Master Boot Record magic I had to perform, but I did finally get the damn computer to dual-boot Windows and BSD. Which was a mixed blessing, because BSD Unix was not a user-friendly experience, and I didn’t get very far with it. But I did have the sense of having mastered the universe, which for me was and is a very rare experience. But back then I had a lot of time on my hands, being a single dude with very little ambition. These days I have to be more careful with my time — and my sanity.

Still, I like knowing that I have the power to completely ruin my evening, any time I wish.

FRIENDOS, I was not always the suave middle-aged man you know and love (er, tolerate?). I was, for a surprisingly long time, an idiot. For example, when I began my legitimate, legal drinking career (in contrast to my illegal minor-league drinking career) I had very little of what you might call taste. Was lite beer involved? So, so much.

Also: Jack and Cokes.

Look, life is a learning exercise. I will not pretend that I came out of the womb understanding music theory and appreciating good whiskey; you have to go through some wrong turns before you figure things out. What’s funny is that when I was young I learned to drink my whiskey straight because it was such a furtive experience — taking the time to mix a cocktail meant more exposure, more chances to get caught. When I found myself of legal age, however, I wasn’t quite ready to start ordering two fingers of rye, mainly because I’d never learned to pace myself. If you handed me two fingers of rye, ten seconds later I had an empty glass and I was ordering another.

So mixing my liquor was a good strategy, and I started drinking Jack and Cokes because they were whiskey-adjacent and sweet, went down easy, but also diluted everything so I didn’t end up on the floor of whatever divey bar I was in.

Usually.

Skating Away on the Thin Ice of a New Day

The scene: I’m probably 25 years old. At the time I worked in publishing, and we had Summer Hours, which were kind of amazing. Every year during the summer you could opt to work an extra hour or two Monday through Thursday and then leave work at 2PM on Friday. It was awesome, and naturally everyone took the opportunity to head to the local dive bar and start their weekend at exactly 2:05PM. So I’m in a shithole bar that was probably called Mickey’s or Danny’s or something like that, drinking my Jack and Coke and bullshitting with my coworkers.

At some point, a few folks ordered a round of drinks but then mysteriously left the bar, so a trio of Jack and Cokes were left on the bar next to us, glistening and paid for. And a co-worker jokingly suggested I drink them quickly before the universe noticed its mistake and took them back. And I thought, gosh it would be hilarious if I did just that so I reached over and shotgunned all three in the space of about a minute.

It was kind of hilarious. For about thirty seconds.

I now suspect I know what it’s like to fall into a coma. As I crawled to the bathroom on what is probably the filthiest floor imaginable, the world receded from me and I swear I saw a shining light and possibly some form of Buddy Jesus grinning down at me, gesturing that my time had come. And I think it was Buddy Jesus holding my hair out of my eyes as I vomited several organs into the scabby toilet in that dive bar.

I emerged bug-eyed, the knees of my trousers damp. I collected my things without a word and walked out of there. My takeaway centered on the coke part of the Jack and Coke, and I swore to only take my liquor neat from that moment on.

Buddy Jesus rode with the bus with me all the way home. That guy is creepy AF.

I GREW up in Jersey City, New Jersey in the 1970s and 1980s. It’s funny; people who have never been to Jersey City in their lives will often assume that it must be a crime-ridden shithole — and especially so during the 1970s — simply because they hear the word ‘Jersey’ in there (twice, even!). Or because they’re racist asshats and Jersey City is very diverse, that is also a possibility, yes.

I am here to tell you that Jersey City was a great place to grow up. I was a pretty free-range kid, and roamed the streets at all hours and never once got abducted or knifed or forced to kill innocent tourists as part of an elaborate gang initiation rite.

Of course, I was a very soft, eyeglass-wearing child. It’s possible the gangs simply didn’t want me.

Anyways, none of this is to say that Jersey City was a paradise. It had (has) it’s bad areas, and I did have several brushes with crime during my formative years. I once got a brand new Huffy dirtbike for my birthday, and about three days later while I struggled to ride it ON TRAINING WHEELS two teenagers came over, casually pushed me off, and stole it. Once, when my friends and I were hanging out in a park about one block from my house, we were accosted by a group of older kids who made off with my one friend’s leather jacket. Shit happened. It’s a city, after all.

But I’m not here to talk about those minor brushes with crime. I’m here to talk about the most polite mugging ever.

Road to Nowhere

When I was maybe 12 or 13, my friend and I went to the 440 Mall, probably to see a movie and/or play video games at the huge arcade that once resided there. It’s weird to Present Day Jeff (aka Very Very Aged Jeff) how important malls were to Young Jeff; much energy and time was spent scheming on how to get to a mall and how to fund those excursions.

Coming home, my friend and I got on the wrong bus. By the time we realized we were going away from home, we were in an unfamiliar and kind of scary-looking section of town. We got off in a panic, got ourselves oriented, and began walking back to the bus depot through some pretty sketchy neighborhoods. This is when I experienced the most polite mugging of my life.

A group of older kids surrounded us and began walking with us and chatting us up. They offered us cigarettes, inquired after our health, and then calmly threw us up against a wall and began searching our pockets. To say I was petrified would be an understatement. I’d watched television. I knew how these muggings ended. I prepared for death.

I remember I had a Velcro wallet with a camouflage design, because I was 13 and Velcro wallets were cool.

The kids, upon discovering that we had nothing but pocket lint and dreams between us, helped us up, dusted us off, returned our Velcro wallets and told us, cheerfully, that we were lucky because we had nothing worth stealing. Then they happily offered us directions and waved as they walked off.

I’m not making any of that up. They almost made me feel cheerful about being robbed. What’s interesting to me is that my brushes with criminals have always been kind of weirdly polite, while my interactions with police have always been negative and stressful. Weird, that.