A Surplus of the Obvious
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The Penny Mother
Fri Oct. 12, 2007 —
All copper is drawn to the Statue of Liberty, for she is the Penny Mother. The pilings under the Liberty Island ferry pier are covered in pennies that have leapt from the pockets of tourists, scuba divers, and bloated murder victims awaiting discovery in the Hudson. Every penny that we saw creeping toward a sewer grate on Manhattan Island was in mid-migration, and every wish made at a fountain launched a pilgrimage to the hem of her moss-green robes.
From the instant they are mined her children are pulled toward her. On the island that she calls home, should you choose to visit, you will find a monument to her personal magnetism. The monument is a rock that would seem quite unremarkable if it weren’t atop a pedestal on an otherwise featureless and well-manicured lawn. A plaque declares its origin to be Norwegian, its birthplace the same earth that produced the Lady’s own garments over a century ago. Can you imagine the longing that pulled this boulder from a decades-idle mine, the aching of its veins as it began its journey? Had the sailors on board the Norwegian freighter not had the the foresight to line the bulkheads with spare mattresses and blankets, they all might have ended up at the bottom of the Atlantic — first the ore through the hole it ripped in the hull, followed by the ship herself. But we know this was not the case. The Norwegians were rewarded for their ingenuity with a leisurely glide to the New World, and the engines were only stoked to navigate around the occasional iceberg or sea-turtle that drifted between their vessel and their destination.
It had been hard not to think about death on the way to New York. My wife is afraid of flying. I told her once that her fear was irrational and she replied that an airplane crash would involve pain and be followed in most cases by death, and that it is quite rational to fear either of these things. I’m a pretty good flyer myself, but the fears of the people you love, even the irrational fears, tend to be contagious. We wheeled over Woodlawn Cemetery, low enough to count the rows without quite being able to make out the individual monuments. And then we watched the blue-grey blur of the harbour beneath us for more than a little too long before it became the asphalt runway. And finally, on the ground and in retrospect, my preoccupation seemed more than trite, yet less than juvenile.
Still, a sombre mood loomed over our vacation, as it was a vacation postponed. This was the trip that the four of us, including my wife and two friends from England, had planned to take not quite two years earlier. Our plans were quite advanced, to the point of a car being packed and sandwiches half-prepared on a warm Tuesday morning in September. But then at the last possible moment they changed, and instead we watched the news for eight hours or so — my wife, for the first few, with butter-knife still in hand — until we could watch no more, and we piled into the car to head off in an entirely different direction under a blue and silent sky.
Only two killings that we knew of occurred while we were in New York. Councilman James Davis was shot by political rival Othniel Askew on the council chamber balcony at City Hall on the afternoon of our arrival, and Askew was felled shortly thereafter by a police officer firing from the chamber floor. We unpacked in our hotel room to the sound of Mayor Bloomberg’s subsequent press conference, which played on the community cable channel at regular intervals through the day and into the evening. But by evening we had left our room for the anonymity of the crowded Manhattan streets.
Much of our vacation involved the city that we remembered. Our younger, fitter travelling companions led us on a frenzied and unremitting exploration of stores and museums in late-July air so moist and hot that cool, conditioned air tumbling out of an open shop door would slow our frenetic pace to a dreamy shuffle. We milled around a location shoot for a popular television series on Mulberry, and were descended upon by a six-man international speed-feeding team at a nearby restaurant who only relented when we started sending back entire courses that we hadn’t ordered. We snapped pictures of each other on the Staten Island ferry while Manhattan unfolded behind us like a child’s pop-up book.
But part of our visit was not to the city that I remembered, as if I had been reunited with an old friend and was trying not to notice a recent scar. Legislation had been passed that year banning smoking in bars, and in contrast to my experience in Toronto from a few years earlier, New Yorkers offered little resistance. I expressed surprise to one of our hosts, and he replied simply, “I guess there wasn’t much fight left.” I stepped outside for a cigarette, and saw a flag that had become tangled in the razor wire garnishing the construction site next door. I climbed onto a bench and took a picture over the heads of the crowd, but when I looked at the shot later it didn’t say anything that I wanted it to say.
Travelling is the opposite of dreams in some ways. In dreams you meet people you know, and you know who they are in spite of the fact that their faces may may be completely different. When you travel, you see faces that only look familiar, but are really the faces of strangers. New York is even less like my dreams now; I want to see family in those faces, to claim that I am drawn to her because I am one of her children. But that isn’t true either.
The ISO 14000 Compliant Boneless Goat Roti
Fri Oct. 12, 2007 —
Like many people who are not involved in engineering or related fields, I am not as familiar with ISO standards as I might be otherwise. I occasionally see references to this or that ISO number on a product, or in technical documentation, or even, bafflingly, written on the side of a building in black characters several feet high. There was a time when, in my ignorance, I attributed such cryptic tagging to cabalistic behaviour, further evidence that a far-reaching conspiracy lurks just outside of my field of vision, that the physical world is slowly being infiltrated and altered beneath the surface, and that when finally the veil is lifted the vast difference between what once appeared and what now is will be imperceptible to the untrained eye.
As I have grown older, though, I have adopted a more casual “let them rule the world if they wish” attitude. Paradoxically, the more relaxed my attitude becomes, the more I find my thoughts turning to the societal benefits of the adoption of universal standards. While I cherish my individuality, I could certainly benefit from the adoption of ISO standards for socks, for example. Although like anyone with a modicum of foresight I always buy the same socks, I find that with repeated laundering my socks tend to deteriorate at markedly different rates, and what should be a simple procedure, to wit, picking two matching socks to wear in the morning, becomes quite a time-consuming, and often frustrating, logistical exercise.
A few weeks back I found myself craving a roti. I had a vivid memory of a delicious chicken and spinach roti that I ate once, and sought to re-live the experience as I suspected I was in the vicinity of the establishment from which I had purchased the roti that I remembered.
Inquiries were made, and my companion and I were directed not to the origin of that particular roti, but to a nearby restaurant whose fare was, we were assured, far superior. Perhaps I am too gullible; it’s possible that our ersatz restaurant guide was secretly in the employ of the new roti emporium. But the odds were slim, and in the absence of such a conflict of interest, what could our advisor possibly have to gain by thwarting my ambition?
Well, by design or accident, the roti that I ate that day bore not even a fleeting resemblance to my platonic roti. It tasted more East Indian than West Indian, and while I would be among the last people to disparage East Indian cuisine, suffered from a surfeit of tomato, and the sauce was further characterised by an excess of capsicum. It was at that moment that I realized the potential benefit of the ISO standard roti. Perhaps not a single roti standard, but an ISO West Indian roti, an ISO East Indian roti, ISO chicken, goat, boneless and boneful rotis – an entire category devoted to rotis in the updated ISO schedule. Uniformity, you see, is not the objective; merely consistency within a taxonomy.
When I found myself in an almost identical situation, precisely one week after that disappointing incident, I chose not to seek counsel from strangers, but instead pointed myself in the direction of the roti shop that I remembered, and walked for a solid 40 minutes only to find it closed on that day.
As a result, further to my suggestion regarding the ISO roti standard, I would like to propose that all retail establishments append a number between 0 and 127 to their names, corresponding to a binary representation of their days of operation, where the first digit represents Sunday. Bacchus Roti would be designated by the number 31, or 0011111, indicating that they are closed on Sunday and Monday.
Transistorsexual
Fri Oct. 12, 2007 —
The guy in the repair department said if it has to get sent back to Sweden for service it’s going to take forever, but he didn’t elaborate.
Psychosomatically
Fri Oct. 12, 2007 —
We weren’t allowed to have allergies when I was growing up, and so none of us did.
Of course I didn’t know we weren’t allowed to have them until I asked why none of us did; the rule wasn’t up on the wall in needlepoint. Another time I asked if we had any vitamins in the house. I was told we got our vitamins from our food.
A boy growing up in a six-person household devoid of allergies was bound to ask the question sooner or later, after it was proven that Gloria was not allergic to kidney beans, after Fonzie became allergic to girls for one tensely brilliant episode, after poor Vinnie Barbarino developed environmental hypersensitivity and had to live in a plastic bubble. Oh, the comedy, the suspense, the sneezing.
“So why aren’t any of us allergic?” I asked my mom.
“Because allergies aren’t allowed in this house,” she replied, and that was a good enough explanation for me.
I ran into a few allergic people in university. One classmate’s allergy to a particular family of grains prevented him from consuming beer – though thankfully the affliction did not prevent him from drinking Scotch. Another alarmed the drunken attendees at a weekend cottage getaway by consuming ground almonds in the form of a Sara Lee layer cake and going into anaphylactic shock in front of us. And then there was my friend Dave, who was allergic to pretty much everything.
Though the specialist Dave saw for his particular brand of environmental hypersensitivity reportedly had at least one patient who subsisted entirely on mothers’ milk, Dave’s affliction stopped short of requiring that he be sealed hermetically. For a time it seemed his diet consisted entirely of rice cakes, cheese curd, and pears – pears because he was allergic to apples. He was deathly allergic to soy products; when a classmate noticed that he carried an AnaKit and inquired if it was for bee stings, he replied, “No, bean stings.” He was also allergic to a broad range of petroleum products, and being within 500 feet of fresh asphalt made him feel, as he told me once, “like peeling my skin off with a paring knife.”
And that put the lie to the idea of allergy sufferers being merely weak-willed.
Then, a few years later, in a motel room on the morning of a friend’s wedding, shortly after embarking on a prescribed course of antibiotics in the hopes of eliminating a persistent sinus infection, I developed an allergy to penicillin. The face that looked back at me in the bathroom mirror was covered in red splotches, and my skin tingled with that don’t-touch-me hypersensitivity that sometimes accompanies a high fever. I wondered briefly if room service would bring me a potato peeler.
It’s funny, what sticks in your head. Mom didn’t remember my question about allergies when I confessed my affliction, and rightly so. If I had kids I’m sure I’d be storing up a library of misinterpreted offhand comments in their tiny spongelike brains. She didn’t remember it because she wasn’t taking herself seriously when she said it, just as I shouldn’t have been. I hope she didn’t feel bad, in retrospect, imagining me trembling under the weight of such an unfair edict. She reassured me that she herself has been known to suffer from hayfever on occasion.
So first penicillin, and then after consulting with my physician, I sensitized myself almost immediately to sulfa. Anyone planning the perfect murder should be taking notes. In spite of it all, I still didn’t feel as vulnerable as – and could therefore still feel superior to – people who had nagging but essentially merely irritating reactions to ubiquitous everyday substances. Globules of penicillin didn’t float through the air on sunny summer days; sulfa capsules didn’t try to jump into my lap and lick my face. At the same time though, like the troopers in the peanut camp, getting caught unawares by a bad batch of mould meant certain death. And not satisfied with an allergy to the single most popular antibiotic on the earth, I had to strike the second line of defense off the list as well. And me without a Medic Alert bracelet. Witness life on the edge.
Now it’s a good twelve years later – a good weal-free and not particularly itchy, watery-eyed, or sneeze-punctuated twelve years, except for the occasional woofly wet-carboard-box sounds that I’m hearing in my left ear lately.
You know where this is heading. My doctor tells me it’s allergies. And you know when it’s plural, it’s not something noble, rare and life-threatening like bean stings. It’s seasonal.
And do you know what else? Since I found out, I’ve fallen prey to all the Brady Bunch allergy symptoms. My eyes are red, itchy and moist. I sneeze. I take antihistamines when I go to bed so that I don’t wake up covered in my own drool, and due to the likelihood of walking in on me wiping various facial orifices with a tissue many of my co-workers suspect I’m entrenched in an emotional crisis.
My problem doesn’t seem, to me, to stem from having suddenly developed allergies though. I think I suddenly got permission to have them.
The possibilities are almost endless
Fri Oct. 12, 2007 —
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that all things are possible, but I wouldn’t have thought it was possible to squirt oneself in the face with windshield washing fluid until I did it on the weekend. It’s easier than you’d think.
On Our Hearts A Log, Was The Blog
Fri Oct. 12, 2007 —
Back in the heady, rambunctious days of the Internet I recall reading an enthusiastic call to arms, or rather keys, that claimed the Web had the power to elevate everyone to the level of publisher. It’s an obvious glass-half-full analysis; the power that the web had was that of lowering the level of “publisher” to that of “everyone”. To wit, the blog. And here’s another one.
I promise not to tell you what I had for breakfast. I don’t have breakfast most days. But don’t assume that’s healthy just because I call myself “Doctor”. Because I’m not. A doctor.
Or healthy.
Lust for life
Fri Oct. 12, 2007 —
Dateline Savannah, GA: Midnight in the Garden Salad of Good and Evil.
Note to Tucker Carlson: Take it like a man
Fri Oct. 12, 2007 —
Give it up, Tucker. Jon Stewart hands you your lunch and you call the man a boor? What era are you from?