One evening a few years back, The Girlfriend and I went downtown to see the lights at Temple Square.

I should probably explain for my out-of-state readers that Temple Square is the geographic heart of both Salt Lake City and the LDS faith. Practically the first thing the Mormon pioneers did when they arrived in this valley in 1847 was to pick a spot on which to build their temple. The early settlement, then the city that rose from that, and eventually the layout of the entire valley radiated outward from that one place. Today, the original temple grounds, which include the temple itself and several other buildings surrounded by a high stone wall, comprise an entire city block, Temple Square. And every fall, the church begins decorating the grounds — as well as several adjoining properties — with literally millions of Christmas lights. The switch is thrown over Thanksgiving weekend, and the lights stay on every night until New Year’s Eve. It’s an amazingly beautiful spectacle. And best of all, it’s open to the public, regardless of faith, and it’s absolutely free to get in. I doubt if there’s anyone in this valley who hasn’t experienced it at least once, and most everyone I know goes every year.

The particular visit I’m thinking of was on a bitterly cold night just before Christmas Eve. Anne and I were reasonably comfortable in heavy coats and the long underwear we’d bought for our Yellowstone snowmobiling weekend, but our exposed faces still tingled painfully in the frigid air. We were surrounded by hordes of similarly dressed people, all looking like chubby little marshmallow men (and marshmallow women and children) in their layered clothing, all of them buzzing happily about holiday parties, shopping left to do, and the other lighthearted things people talk about this time of year.

Not one of them was paying the slightest attention to the man seated on a mud-encrusted five-gallon bucket in front of the diner on the corner just south of Temple Square.

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Hope you all found something nice under your tree!

As a bit of an Anglophile and an unrepentant nostalgic, I’ve been bummed in recent years to learn that the iconic red telephone box is fast disappearing from the British landscape. The culprit is, of course, advancing technology — who needs a public phone anymore when everyone is carrying a personal one in their pockets? American phone booths are an endangered species as well, but they don’t carry the same weight of cultural symbolism as their UK counterparts; I doubt anyone identifies an American-style booth with America itself, while, to many people around the world, the red phone box fairly shouts “Great Britain.”

One of the many highlights of my visit to England in 1993 — one of the experiences that drove home the fact that, yes, I was really there, in another country for the first time in my life — was encountering one of those familiar boxes I’d seen so many times in movies and television programs, seeing it standing there on the street fulfilling its function, not a tourist attraction but simply a part of somebody’s everyday life. The thought of them heading for the scrapheap of history brings an inevitable pang.

Fortunately, there are efforts afoot to save at least some of them. British Telecom (BT) has instituted an “adopt-a-kiosk” program that allows communities to buy the boxes for a nominal sum (all of one pound) and then use them for whatever purpose they wish. Some towns elect to keep them functional, with a working pay phone; others have turned them into “street art” or touristy photo spots. But the best idea I’ve run across yet was one small village’s inspired decision to repurpose their local phone box as a tiny lending library. As I understand it, it’s an informal, community-driven operation in which the residents donate books they have read and take ones they haven’t, so the inventory is constantly changing. (I guess it would actually be more accurate to call it a book exchange, rather than a library.) The box has room for about 100 books, as well as CDs and DVDs. The village now has a valuable community resource, the citizens are fully involved, and a little bit of history is still standing. And that’s what I call cool.

Wish this sort of thing happened more often here at home.

Credit where it’s due: I first read about this on Boing Boing. And there’s a more detailed article about the Adopt-a-Kiosk program here.

…but this is pretty much how things look around the Bennion Compound right now:

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So I guess you’d call that a successful Mass Consumption Day, right? Hope yours was as well…

After I finally got out of work last night, I was standing on the TRAX platform at the Gallivan Plaza stop, the heart of what little activity there is on downtown Main Street following the end of the business day. I was waiting with a dozen or so fellow commuters and passing the time by watching pedestrians across the street. That particular block is a rich environment for people-watching; there are always a few homeless folks around, and usually a mob of scruffy teen and twentysomethings who seem to have nothing better to do than sit on the big planter boxes in front of Sam Weller’s and be obnoxious. You also see a lot of beautiful people along that stretch of sidewalk, thanks to a popular nearby club called Keys on Main, and the interactions between the clubgoers and the miscreants are often pretty entertaining.

The street show on this particular evening starred a young woman, a redhead dressed in the shortest miniskirt I’ve ever seen outside an Austin Powers movie. And if that wasn’t enough to grab the attention of any heterosexual male with a pulse, she was also wearing thigh-high, patent-leather, lace-up, platform-souled boots that made her legs look about 175 feet long. Think of Julia Roberts strutting down Rodeo Drive in that scene from Pretty Woman and you’ll get the idea.

As noteworthy as the woman herself may have been, though, what really made me smile was the reaction she was getting from, well, everybody. I guess she was killing time waiting for Keys to open or something, because she walked from the club down to the corner and back several times. And every time she did, the heads of every man on the block — including, I’m not too proud to admit, my own — very obviously turned to follow her.

It was like watching a slow-motion tennis match.

In yet another sign that I worry too damn much, I started thinking yesterday afternoon that people might not get what I was trying to say in my “Cool Quiet, and Time to Think” entry, and hurt feelings could result. So I went back and added an addendum to try and clear the air. Problem solved, right?

Ha, no! You obviously don’t know me as well as you believe. Because today I’ve been thinking that no one really goes back to a blog entry they’ve already read, and perhaps there’s someone out there right now who read that thing before I got the addendum written and is even now sitting in a funk somewhere, getting angrier and/or more depressed with every passing minute because they think I don’t want to hang out with them. Which most assuredly is not true. But how is this person to know that since they haven’t gone back and re-read that ego-busting, anti-social, curmudgeonly, leave-me-alone rant to see the bit where I say, “it’s not you, it’s me?”

So, in the interest of soothing my own conscience as well as any potentially ruffled feathers, I now present, in its entirety… the addendum:

[Addendum: It occurs to me that my various loved ones and friends could possibly misinterpret the “social engagements = obligations” remark above. So, to be clear, I am not complaining about the time I spend with people or their desire to spend time with me. These are good things in my life that I have no wish to give up or change. My frustration basically stems from a lousy work/life balance. I have a good job that I like, but my office’s long business hours, coupled with the time I spend commuting, place me home on most nights somewhere between 7:00 and 7:30. After I eat dinner, I have maybe an hour in which to try and be productive before my brain completely fogs over, and most nights productivity doesn’t happen anyway for one reason or another. So I end up feeling more-or-less constant pressure to get caught up, and guilt because I’m leaving too many things undone or half-finished… and me being me, I tend to beat myself up for not doing a better job of managing it all better. And then it’s time for bed and — lately, at least — a really lousy night’s sleep, and then it’s up and at ’em to repeat the whole cycle over again. I’ve been keeping this schedule for over four years now, and it’s starting to really grate. You wouldn’t think working a mere hour or two later than most everyone else would make that much of a difference, but it absolutely does. Social activities are virtually impossible on a work night, and my body — never a paragon of athleticism, I must admit — has gone completely to hell because any kind of exercise regimen is just too damn hard to squeeze into an already tight schedule.

 

Basically, I’m tired of getting home so late and never managing to accomplish anything, night after night after night. I’m tired of not having a life. I know everyone says or feels that to one degree or another… but I personally feel it very keenly. It’s not healthy, either physically or psychologically. And lately the situation has been exacerbated by a lot of other things — my birthday, the problems with my car, the realization that certain ambitions are becoming more unlikely to pan out and that I’m not the man I used to think I was going to be — and, well, I just need to scream once in a while. Thoreau never imagined blogs, or he might have written that “quiet desperation” line differently… ]

Interestingly enough, I’m writing the comments which surround this copy block at 6:08 on a Friday night in the middle of a deathly silent cube farm. Yep, you guessed it, I’m stuck late at work again, waiting around for other people to do their jobs so I can do mine. Meanwhile, my stomach is rumbling, it’s getting dark outside, and The Girlfriend is at home waiting for me.

Point proven.

Sigh.

I started thinking a couple weeks ago about what, if anything, I wanted to write here on the blog regarding my 40th birthday (which was Tuesday, in case anyone is compiling a dossier). I’ve tried not to be a drag about it, but if you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably picked up on the fact that I’m not too happy about reaching this particular milestone. My reasons are pretty unremarkable, even cliche’d, mid-life crisis stuff, which means they’re probably utterly pathetic and boring to anyone who isn’t me. So I won’t bother to elaborate on them, beyond simply saying that I’ve been struggling for a while with a nagging sense that I’ve wasted a lot of time, energy, and money on unimportant crap instead of forging the life I used to think would somehow just happen. I realize that nobody’s life turns out the way you imagine it will when you’re a child or a teenager or even a college student, but it seems like a lot of folks at least end up in the right ballpark, even if they’re not actually pitching the game. I don’t feel like I have, and I know I’ve got no one to blame but myself. And that’s not an easy thing to admit or accept. Even worse, I’m afraid I may have missed the window of opportunity, passed my peak without even realizing it had arrived, and now a lot of what I’ve always wanted simply isn’t going to be possible.

But I said I wasn’t going to bore you all with that stuff, and honestly, I’m not nearly as concerned with it now, two days after the calendar page turned over, as I was earlier in the summer. My depression and angst seemed to peak last week sometime, and I was actually in a pretty good mood on my birthday itself. For this, I thank my friends and loved ones, who all realized I was having a hard time and did their very best to cheer me up. My coworker friend Diane surprised me with brownies and some nifty Bettie Page collectibles on Monday. My former coworker friend Amber surprised me with an Amazon gift card. Then there was the flood of good wishes from my various acquaintances on Facebook (I’ve been somewhat dubious of the sincerity of social networking “friendship,” but I have to admit that each wall posting from old coworkers and classmates gave me a genuine boost). Anne, my lovely Girlfriend, was wonderful, of course, as were my parents. Anne’s and my friends Dave and Sarah brought me a delicious homemade cheesecake.

And then there was the “present” I received from my old buddy Cheno. I don’t know how funny this will be to anyone who doesn’t know “The Dudes” — i.e., the guys I worked with at the multiplex way back in the day, who are still somehow, improbably, my friends — but it cracked me up:

In case you don’t know what I look like, I’m the dashing bearded guy in the middle…