to distraction

Busy, busy, busy. I’ve been spending the better part of the last two weeks in preparation for a huge motorcycle race this weekend. This is the racetrack’s most attended event of the year, and my running has turned to scrambling in these past few days as all the last-minute details are moved into place. Or pounded into place with the heel of my shoe. I do love t-shirts, and they have provided me no end of variety and comfort in their service as the bulk of my wardrobe for twenty-nine years, but if I see one more I’m gonna start tearing out fistfuls of my hair.

This morning I traveled the fifteen minutes to the Regions Bank in neighboring Oakwood, Georgia, for the purpose of converting a five thousand-dollar check into a plenitude of cash. Two thousand in ones, twelve hundred fives, and so on, all smaller denominations to be split as bank between the several remote store locations we set up at various strategic points around the track. Meanwhile, in a seemingly unrelated floorboard, a slick, smelly, oily something has been leaking from the hidden depths of the steering column in my car for many months, the source of or correction for which the most knowledgeable mechanics have been as yet unable to determine. The optimist in me says it’s cable lubricant; the paranoiac says it’s power steering fluid. Whatever it is, it’s ruined three pairs of pants and thereby inspired me to wear ratty towels draped over my shins whenever I drive. Several times I have walked halfway through a parking lot before noticing these cotton shinguards are still clinging to my feet, and now I try to be more careful about remembering to remove them when I stop, just as I was careful to do upon arrival at the aforementioned Regions branch today.

The bank wasn’t crowded, but it took a little while for the teller to gather the piles of notes I was requesting. I stood to the side while several other customers were processed, drumming my hands on the counter, waiting for his order to come from the vault. They gave me a big bag made of heavy cloth in which to carry the cash, like Scrooge MacDuck without the spats, and I felt more than a little conspicuous walking back out to the car. I began digging in my pocket for the keys, picturing a fast, clean getaway. But I couldn’t find the keys.

I was still walking, about to put the bag down and search with both hands, when I saw them, swaying slightly from side to side where they hung in the ignition. And while the optimist in me believes no one would want the several quarters, old blue yo-yo, Muddy Waters cassette, and Pez dispenser capped with a pointy-eared Yoda bust to be gained by violating the drippy interior of my chariot, the pessimist in me always locks the door. So I’m standing in the middle of a parking lot with a bag full of small unmarked bills, and I have locked my keys inside the car.

As luck would have it, the stoner in me left the hatchback open.

undue significance

7:53 PM – Nearing the end of a blissfully uneventful several hours, the body of my first day off from work in ages. I thought I might sit down for a portion of this time and write a real entry, something more intelligent than the half-assed throwoffs that have been all I can muster at the ends of recent twelve- and fourteen-hour shifts, but all I’ve done is lay around dormant all day, warming the sofa, and now the hour that my wife Holly returns home from her own work shift is fast approaching, when she’ll find that I’ve accomplished none of the tasks I’d planned to take down. Kitchen a disaster, dishes unwashed, trashcan overflowing and ditto the litterboxes (thank God the vacuum is broken or I’d never get it all done). And speaking of the cats (sort of), I’ve discovered that one or more of the ungrateful bastards has been mistaking my lp collection for a scratching post, inspiring me to grind their furry carcasses into chum with the garbage disposal. Fortunately for them, I don’t have the time. And unfortunately for you, here’s another half-assed throwoff.

About nine months ago the light in the ventilation hood over our stove went out. We used to leave this light on at night so that the aforementioned bastard cats could see their food and so, if Holly or I stumbled downstairs at 3am in desperate need of cookies & milk or something, we wouldn’t have to suffer the wicked glare of the overhead. Then, just as we came to depend on it, the blasted thing went out.

Like a good domesticated manchild, I attempted to change out the bulb and renew our nightlight. However, try as I might, I could not figure out how to get inside it. That seemingly innocent stove hood presented a maddening puzzle for which I could find no solution. After several days of poking and prying and cursing bruised fingertips, I finally gave up.

Then, just a few weeks ago, I went into the kitchen for a drink. As I opened the cabinet to retrieve a glass, the corner of the cabinet door struck the hood, and lo and behold, the light came on. I was awestruck, then giddy—I gleefully ran over to the wall switch and turned off the overhead light just so I could better enjoy the hood’s gentle illumination. I got close, dared to switch it off, then on, then off and back on again. It worked perfectly. Holly won’t believe this, I thought, and switched it off one last time. My plan was to wait until she arrived home, bring her into the darkened kitchen, tell the story slowly and suspensefully, and then, at the moment of truth, click!, I’d share the magic.

Which is exactly what I did. I played it up to be the most wondrous of miracles, and then, as dramatically as possible, I reached for the switch. Click!

Nothing. The hood stayed as dark as the rest of the room, and it hasn’t worked again since.

You may be thinking what a pathetically uneventful life I must lead that such inconsequential nonsense excited me so, and you wouldn’t be wrong. Perhaps that’s the lesson I should be taking from the stove hood. I had thoughts of using the event as a metaphoric standby for years to come, applying it conveniently to any situation wherein I thought someone was trying too hard, etc. I’m bad about such stuff, tagging meaningless little incidents with undue symbolism or significance. Still can’t stop thinking about it, though.

Oh, and speaking of undue significance: there have been two earthquakes in Georgia over the past few weeks. Yeah, Georgia. The first was just outside Athens, where I live, and the other nearer Atlanta, about forty miles away. Both registered relatively high on the Richter scale (4.7 and 4.9, I believe), and both struck in the middle of the night. In neither instance did the earth’s grumblings manage to wake me up.

the bag bunny and Newman's Own Underwear

My morning drive to work winds forty miles through the picturesque North Georgia countryside. Thus far, it has been my favorite thing about this new job, entirely compensating for the fact that it cuts a two-hour chunk out of every day. It provides me a terrific vantage point from which to scan the local fields for crop circles, which to my knowledge have never appeared in this state and that, for lack of a more poetic turn of phrase, fascinate the crap out of me. The length of the trip, particularly when coupled with its rural backdrop, also offers the opportunity to catch other sights I might miss on a shorter, hastier journey.

For example, this morning I was trailing a pickup truck that held a large pet carrier in its bed. I kept seeing movement from within the carrier, but the movement seemed off-kilter, inexplicably rapid, and I couldn’t guess what sort of animal it might contain. I sped up, closing the gap between us in order to get a closer look. For all the world, there appeared to be a rabid bunny inside, bouncing wildly from surface to surface like a cartoon character who’s inadvertently set its own ass on fire. Finally I gained enough distance to discover that it wasn’t an animal at all but rather a plastic grocery bag the carrier held, being buffeted ‘American Beauty’-esque in the wind coming over the cab of the truck.

A strange coincidence this morning: the new job I’ve mentioned is as retail sales manager for Road Atlanta, which is a racetrack just outside Braselton. One of my primary duties in this position is to serve as manager for the track’s pro shop (which, consequently, is really just a glorified gift shop that also happens to sell flame-retardant suits and socks and underwear for drivers who I guess might’ve left them at home). This morning, I was standing at the front of the store, contemplating sending a friend who has a young child some toddler-sized something emblazoned with our logo. I picked up a legless onesie (which is a one-piece garment for the littluns, for those of you unhep to the child-rearing lingo) for closer examination and was instantly reminded of one of my favorite movies.

“Looks like the underwear Paul Newman wears in ‘The Sting’,” I said to myself.

Then I looked up through the big front window, and there was Paul Newman. He wore big amber-colored sunglasses and was walking briskly toward the gates that lead down to the pit area of the track. Questioning the office staff later, I learned that Mr. Newman is an avid race car driver and was here in Georgia today testing his car. I was hoping he’d come into the shop so I could ask him if he thought the onesie looked like his underwear from ‘The Sting’ too, but he never showed.

one sorry excuse for an entry

Wouldn’t it be great if the pizza delivery guy worked like the ice cream man and you could just flag the delivery car down when you wanted a pie? I swear I never want pizza more than when one of those marked cars drives past full of other people’s dinners. Maybe I’ll start my own roving oven. I could use an old step-van outfitted with a loudspeaker playing ‘That’s Amore’ or something and drive up and down Fraternity Row. Call it “Catch-As-Can Pan,” or “Sprinteroni,” maybe.

hope

They made it easy to miss. I wouldn’t have caught it myself had I not been zoning out at work, stuck tagging shirts and hats with a needle-tipped pricing gun for hour after hour until I was forced to give myself a break, to stop and relax for a moment or run the risk of sticking the needle through my finger in a momentary lapse of attention.

I say they made it easy to miss, but in truth, for me, they made it easier to find. When I read the newspaper, I look for the good stuff, the strange or uplifting, the offbeat and human interest tales. These do not constitute the bulk of most media, written or otherwise. On Tuesday, the day in question, I skipped through twelve solid pages of downbeat reportage — Iraq, Syria, SARS, school shootings, some dangerous chemical called perfluorooctanoic acid (which resides in Teflon cookware and Gore-Tex clothing and most everything else we own) under investigation by the EPA, and several full-page cries of clearance sales and storewide savings — before I found it, only three short columns, news from Bethesda, Maryland that the Human Genome Project is complete.

It’s been fifty years since James Watson and Francis Crick first discovered the structure of DNA, and now scientists have sequenced and produced a near-flawless map of the 3.1 billion units of DNA that comprise the human genome. In essence, this information is the beginning of the end of disease, all disease: cancer, AIDS, leukemia, meningitis, lupus, Alzheimer’s, on and on. The completion of this work, almost two years ahead of schedule and available in its entirety, for free, on public genetic databanks, means hope for all the hopeless. It changes everything.

But it isn’t front-page, top story news. Hope doesn’t sell papers. Just look at the way news ratings have skyrocketed over the course of the past month if you want proof.

They say no news is good news, but isn’t good news better?

back

Yeah, so I didn’t really offer much in the way of summing up the many months since my last entry in that ‘Perspective’ throw-off last night, and since the wife has fallen quietly asleep in the next room without the benefit of her goodnight kiss, I suppose I should use this time to try and put the intervening chronology in some sort of order.

The road has been rocky and full of holes between here and there, friends. As should be obvious by my use of the qualifier ‘wife,’ my sweet babboo and I did indeed tie the proverbial knot at last. It was a beautiful service, just fifteen or so of us standing down by the river, with my father joining our hands and helping us gently with our lines. Sadly, inexplicably, we lost the baby we were expecting, but I have to believe that it simply wasn’t time yet for Little Blindspot to burst onto the scene and save the world from certain destruction. The lady of the house lost her job, too, and has yet to find a replacement, which has left me to work two of my own on a seven-days-a-week schedule. Such is the life of two struggling college dropouts living under Murphy’s Martial Law.

Or, rather, was. Only this past Wednesday, sitting at a long conference room table in front of a window through which the light of grace shone, I got a new job. A GOOD new job, with a real live salary and benefits and everything. You’d almost think I was some kind of adult or something, huh? It doesn’t start for two more weeks, but if I can manage not to ruin it, this will be the gig that’ll carry us through my planned return to the hallowed halls of academia and our planned return to the endless waterslide of parenthood. Even the cats are happy.

Now if I could just start writing again. Something more than a few hasty paragraphs in this poor neglected diary, please. I’m not asking — I’m praying.

perspective

For the past several months, I've been working as a facilities manager at a church. This is a fancy way of saying I'm a janitor. It isn't quite that simple, but it's close enough. Most of my time is spent ridding the floors in the preschool building of their typical childlike droppings — cookie crumbs, Kool-aid splashes, soggy Crunchberries, crushed corn chips, and what must cumulatively have been eighty pounds of glitter by now, having missed its gluey mark and sifted down into the carpet like pixy dust. Funny how it seems the sweeter the mess, the easier it is to clean up. Damn, but they really should be teaching these kids how to flush the toilet.

Anyhow, one of my favorite fringe benefits of the gig has been snooping the stuff that appears on the walls of this same education building. Its upper level houses the church's Sunday school classrooms, and recently a white sheet of posterboard appeared in the fifth grade room which I feel casts an interesting perspective on the recent worldly madness. It reads:

THAT'S NOT FAIR!

— An old lady in Atlanta was digging through the garbage for food.

— I don't think the President has been treated fairly about Iraq.

— When people get more goldfish than me.