I’m still settling back into my non-traveling routine — i.e., the one that does not involve sitting behind the wheel of a rented Chrysler 300 for hours at a stretch while a never-ending montage of Midwestern novelty unspools on the other side of the windshield — and a proper recap of my trip is going to take a while to compose. But I worry my Loyal Readers may suffer if they have to wait too long without any Simple Tricks and Nonsense to occupy their minds, so here’s a little tidbit I ran across just before I left… allow me to present the ultimate Halloween accessory, the Rick Springfield Costume Wig!

Available from EveryCostume.com, the Rick Springfield wig is described thusly:

Knock’ em dead and show Jessie’s girl that you’re the one she wants. The Rick Springfield Costume Wig features black, wavy hair with messy bangs. This 80s singer shag is chin length and features thick, full hair. Made of synthetic hair fiber, this men’s costume wig is ideal for your 80’s character or rockband singer costume. One size fits most adults.

I guess your place in pop-cultural history is secure when ironic hipsters can buy a cheap nylon copy of your signature hair style, eh?

One of the dirty little secrets of the car-collecting world is that a sizable percentage of the antique and exotic automobiles you see running around are not, in fact, the real thing. They’re reproductions, “kit cars” consisting of a replica body made of fiberglass or, in some cases, aluminum, which is then mounted to a frame from a much more common vehicle. For example, fake Ferraris are usually Corvettes beneath their flashy exteriors. The reason for kit cars is obvious: either the originals cost too much for average mortals who nevertheless want to own one, or there just aren’t enough of the originals around to meet the demand. That’s the case for the Shelby Cobra, which was manufactured in very small numbers, as well as for the early-1930s Ford coupes that are still favored by hot-rod builders (think ZZ Top’s Eliminator car), but which are pretty hard to find these days because of time and attrition.

Unfortunately, the kits can be pretty expensive, too. So imagine you’re a guy living in a small town in northern Utah for whom even a kit car is out of the question, but who still desperately wants to own a Lamborghini Countach. Maybe you’re a big fan of The Cannonball Run, or maybe your secret fantasy was always to be a 1980s coke dealer in a baggy Armani suit with a skinny neon tie. Who knows? What would you do to realize your desire?

Well, if you had access to a welder and a stack of sheet metal, you might try building your own. And if you did, the result might end up looking something like this:

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I learned something yesterday afternoon that’s been eating at me a little, and I want to talk about it here. However, I am reluctant to name names, because I’m not sure there’s anything to be gained from making too big a fuss about this matter, which means this entry is going to be a little… vague. Sorry about that. I hope you’ll bear with me.

There’s this place I know that’s very unique and very scenic, and it makes a nice destination for a Sunday afternoon drive. The place has an interesting history as well; it was quite an endeavor to bring it here to Utah and get it into its current condition. The Girlfriend and I first visited this place a couple years ago, when it was novel and exciting. I took a lot of photos that day, and seeing as how it’s the 21st century and all, I posted several of them to my Flickr photostream. And then I pretty well forgot about them.

Yesterday, Anne and I returned to this place with her parents, and we saw that the owners are now offering a commemorative book for sale. I flipped through the sample copy, thinking it was nicely done, if a bit expensive for what you’re getting. Then, toward the back, I ran across something that looked very familiar. I asked Anne if she saw what I thought I saw, and she agreed with my suspicion. I should’ve asked to speak with a manager right then and there, but her parents were already out the door, and I tend to be pretty non-confrontational in person. So I waited until we got home and then I fired up Flickr and confirmed what Anne and I both already knew.

I’d seen one of my own photos in that book. There was no doubt. It was my photo… The owners of this place that I’ve supported and enjoyed and enthused about right here on this blog ganked my bloody photo without my permission and stuck it in their $55 coffee-table book and are making money from it. And the more I think about the situation, the more it bugs me. I even had a Creative Commons copyright on the picture, all rights reserved; fat lot of good that did me, eh?

The irony here is that if the people behind this had bothered to contact me, I would’ve given them the picture for free. I don’t have any aspirations to make money with my photography. It’s strictly a hobby for me. But it’s the principle of the thing, you know? My photos, like the words I string together here on this blog, are my work, representing my creativity and my skills (such as they are), and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want some credit for them. I didn’t have the chance to pore over every page of the book, but I’m willing to bet my name isn’t anywhere in it. I know photos get passed around the Internet without attribution all the time. Hell, I’m guilty myself of stealing things and reposting them here on Simple Tricks. But I’m not profiting from those little acts of piracy, am I? I think publishing somebody’s work in a book that you’re selling at a considerable mark-up is kind of a different animal.

The question is, what am I going to do about it? I don’t have the money or the stomach for a lawsuit. As I said, I don’t want to make that big a fuss out of this. But I also don’t want it to pass without any mention either. It’s bullshit, and somebody owes me an apology at the least, if not my bloody contributor’s credit. All I know is, my affection for this particular place has taken a major hit, thanks to the dishonesty of the sneaky bastards who own it. The gall, the sheer gall of what they did…

Arg. Reason # 34,567 why life in the 21st Century sucks…

So, I’m standing on a street corner in downtown Salt Lake yesterday waiting for the light to change, when this grubby, hipster-y looking guy carrying a suspiciously bulging gym bag steps up to me and says, “Hey, man, would you have any interest in buying — ”

I took a quick step to the left and braced myself for something uncomfortable.

” — a fax machine?”

Out of the dozens of possibilities that had zipped through my mind after the words “interest in buying,” I must confess that a fax machine was not one of them. Sad times are these, when young ruffians feel free to peddle such wares on our formerly respectable city streets…

A few days ago, I was half-listening to NPR’s Morning Edition as I drove to the train station to go to work… well, actually, I guess I was only one-third listening to it, as I was aware that they were interviewing some author but I couldn’t tell you his name or the title of his book, or really anything at all about the interview itself. Except for one idea that for some reason jumped up and grabbed me by the arm.

This mysterious, anonymous author said something about his belief that everyone has an internal age, a time in their life when they are their “most authentic self.” I remember him saying his own clock was set somewhere between 47 and 53 years old. Now, I don’t know what he was actually getting at because of that “only one-third listening” thing. And it’s kind of a confusing concept anyway. Does he mean that we have an actual chronological age at which our inherent personality traits and maturity levels “catch up” with the calendar and with society’s expectations of how a person that age is supposed to feel and act? Or does he mean we’re mentally stuck at a certain age regardless of our calendar age? Are those definitions really just the same thing and I’m parsing this too much? Probably.

In any event, I was thinking about this internal clock/authentic self thing over the weekend, wondering what it means and, of course, what my own internal clock might be set for. I know of at least one reader of this blog who would say that I’ve been going on 50-something for decades now (he’s told me so a number of times), and my mother has long maintained I was a 35 years old by the time I was seven. I understand why people say things like that. It’s because I tend to be overly serious, and I often express a fairly sour view of the world for a (relatively) young man. But honestly, I don’t see myself as psychologically middle-aged, in spite of what my hair- and waistlines are telling me. I don’t think my “authentic self” is 50 years old, or even 35. I’d say the real me is somewhere between 15 and 25.

I’m not speaking from nostalgia for bygone innocence or looking at my youth through rose-tinted glasses and thinking I was happier then than now, because I haven’t forgotten that I went through some rough times during that decade. But that was the period when my tastes and interests pretty well solidified (they’ve not changed a whole lot since then), and it was when I had the clearest idea of what I wanted to do with my life and who I wanted to be. My ambitions were the most coherent they’ve ever been (which probably isn’t saying much, but hey, everything’s relative), and I hadn’t yet begun to feel diminished through age and compromise and obligation. If that’s not the definition of authentic self, then I really don’t know what it is.

The sad thing is that my authentic 15-to-25-year-old self didn’t realize that he was living through the peak of so many aspects of his character. He always assumed that he — I — would become more confident as I got older, that things would become, if not easier then at least more clearly defined. It hasn’t quite worked that way, though. I won’t bore you all with some whiny confessional, but I will say that most of the time I feel like I’ve become less certain and more fragile with age, rather than stronger. Maybe that’s why I have so much sympathy for child actors, because I, too, feel like I peaked at the very beginning of my adult life and have been struggling ever since to figure out what to do with myself…

When it comes to spiritual matters, I’m what you might call a devout agnostic. I have no use for religion in my own life, but I don’t question the meaning and comfort it provides to a lot of other folks. I don’t know if there’s a god. I can easily imagine the universe coming into being all on its own. But that doesn’t mean that it did, which is a question I personally find unanswerable. And as for the question of whether human beings have an immortal soul and/or something to look forward to at the conclusion of this life, again, I’ve got nothing. Seems to me that it’s entirely plausible the thing we call “consciousness” is merely a function of the biochemical processes in our brains, and once those processes cease once and for all, everything that we are flickers away like a program derezzing in the movie Tron. But then it’s equally plausible to me that there is something more, since science assures us that matter and energy are interchangeable, nothing is ever really destroyed, and there are dimensions of existence we cannot perceive. I have a healthy enough ego that I certainly hope there’s an afterlife. As to what form it may take, who knows? I like to imagine we’ll be reunited with people who mattered to us, and maybe have a chance to put right the things we screwed up. I once suggested to a grieving friend that perhaps the best kind of afterlife would be nothing more than a re-creation of the time and place where we were most happy, a kind of substantiated, infinitely looping memory. But again, who knows? My personal philosophy about these things is probably best summed up by something Mr. Spock once said, “There are always possibilities.”

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For any Loyal Readers who’ve been waiting to hear how my buddy Jack did at Lotoja over the weekend, I’m sorry to announce that he had a rough time this year, battling a sinus infection that seriously impacted his performance. He finished the race in 14 hours and 12 minutes, his slowest performance out of the three years he’s ridden in this event. Still, he did finish, which is not an accomplishment to sneer at. I doubt I could get through the thing, even if I had an entire week in which to do it…

Does everybody remember that episode of M*A*S*H where the Army mistakenly declares Hawkeye dead, and he’s so fed up with everything that he decides to just go with it? In the episode’s climax, he delivers a little speech to BJ about how he just doesn’t care anymore. He says something to the effect of, “It doesn’t matter if I’m here or not. The wounded will just keep coming. Trapper went home and they keep coming. Henry got killed, and they keep coming.”

I know just how he feels. Yes, this is another complaint about work. Click away if you’ve gotten bored with those. I need to get this stuff off my chest, though, even if nobody is interested in reading it.

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