I’m having one of those grinding, despair-inducing weeks that consist of little more than proofreading, restless and unsatisfying sleep, and numbly shoveling food into my mouth without tasting it. Late nights, impossible deadlines, not enough hands around the agency to manage the volume of work, neglected chores and personal projects at home, and the bleak feeling that I’ve somehow lost sight of whatever my “real” life was supposed to be… you get the idea.
At times like this, when daydreams of walking away from everything and hitting the open road with nothing but a dufflebag at my side like Bill Bixby in The Incredible Hulk are occurring more and more frequently — like, every 45 seconds or so — I can’t help but wonder how in the hell people with families can tolerate the demands of the modern workplace. I know many of my coworkers have spouses and kids. If I’m feeling antsy about missing out on the life part of the work-life balance, what sort of torment are they enduring?

In any event, my agenda is crowded enough that I may not manage to get a Friday Evening Video up today, and I really doubt that I’ll be managing anything of actual substance for awhile, either. And yes, I am deeply frustrated by that, thanks for asking.

In the meantime, let’s all take a moment to enjoy a vintage photo of the lovely Bettie Page, shall we?

I ducked out of my office for a few minutes this afternoon to grab a sandwich, and while I was walking the mean streets of Salt Lake City, I happened to encounter a guy who is sadly all too exemplary of people’s fashion sense these days.
He had a full beard, but a shaved head, so his sideburns rose up alongside his ears and then just… stopped. He wore an Army-surplus field jacket; knee-length cut-off jeans with frayed leg openings; and black athletic shoes with what appeared to be black Lycra leggings, or possibly pantyhose. And he didn’t appear to be homeless, either. He was striding along as happily and confidently as any runway model.
Now… I have an allergy to neckties, I don’t even own a suit, and I’ve long maintained that I was lucky to be born well after that era when men couldn’t leave the house without a hat. But there are days when I really wish I saw fewer people who looked like my chrome-domed-but-bearded friend and more who looked like this:

Whatever happened to elegance, people? Or dignity? Or just plain looking in the mirror before you leave the house? I think I’m going to go watch North by Northwest now and try to drive the image of those weirdly freestanding sideburns from my head…

My power went out this morning at 7 a.m.

I was awake at the time, more or less — my alarm had sounded 15 minutes earlier and I was indulging in my usual routine of bashing the snooze button half a dozen times before I finally get up, wishing all the while that the idiots who design these things would give me a full five minutes in between bashings instead of only three — and I heard the ceiling fan and the furnace fall silent.

Now, the power used to go out all the time when I was a kid. My hometown was pretty far out in the sticks back then, before the suburban sprawl creeping outward from metro Salt Lake finally caught up to us, and I guess we only had a single set of transmission lines coming into town across the far and wide desert, or some damn thing, because any time the wind blew, something would short out somewhere and we’d be in the dark for a few hours. I used to think it was fun, actually. I can’t remember ever being afraid of the dark, and having to use candles struck me as a neat change from the usual routine.

To be honest, I still don’t mind the occasional outage, although given how much of my work and entertainment now revolves around electronic gadgets, I tend to get bored more quickly than I did when I was a kid. Even so, I was completely unprepared for just how truly, alarmingly inconvenient it is to lack electricity during the hour when I’m getting ready for work.

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To the worthless lump of failed humanity whose obnoxious children ruined my dinner at Sizzler the other night, the guy who sat at a table with all the adults of your extended clan, obliviously stuffing your soft, quivering jowls with all-you-can-eat shrimp while your noisy little brats went unsupervised in a nearby booth and generally behaved (and sounded) as if they were playing on a jungle gym in some open-air playground about a mile away from civilization:

You suck.

No, seriously, you do.

You see, the fact that your meager dreams evaporated years ago and your self-respect is dead and buried beneath that admittedly awe-inspiring paunch of yours does not absolve you from your parental responsibilities to actually, you know, parent. Yes, I know the only glimmer of pleasure you can strain from your gray and miserable life is the time spent discussing football stats with your equally corpulent brother-in-law over heaping plates of fried crustaceans. And I’m certain that your admirable ability to completely ignore the high-pitched squealings of your misbehaved progeny is an adaptive mechanism to protect what little intellectual capacity you may have remaining in that stupid round noggin of yours. But believe me, what you seem so adept at filtering out while you eat was unbelievably irritating to every other person in the damn restaurant. And as you’re the one who spawned the offending creatures, the responsibility for them irritating me ultimately falls on your ample and well-cushioned shoulders. So allow me to offer you some suggestions on how you should have handled the situation…

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Dear PYT:

While I don’t claim to be any kind of great sage, I have acquired a certain amount of wisdom in my four decades of life on this planet, and, in particular, in this valley. So believe me when I say that you would be much more comfortable during the frosty mornings of the final week of October if you were wearing a coat. I know it’s crucial that everyone on the train know that you buy your t-shirts at American Eagle, and of course you want to show off how this snug-fitting shirt cradles your toned and lean body, but when you’re hunched over and clutching your forearms in a vain effort to stay warm, we’re really not seeing your bodaciousness anyhow. And another thing… flip-flops? Really? Do you have any idea what a bunion is? Or a fallen arch? Because these decidedly non-bodacious defects are in your future if you continue wearing those stupid things everywhere you go. That’s assuming, of course, that you don’t end up with frostbite for being dumb enough to shuffle around in 37-degree weather with exposed toes.

I know, I know… I sound like your father. And we all know how totally uncool that is. But really… I lecture because I care.
Seriously, I think you’d really like this coat thing. Or even a sweatshirt. I’ll bet American Eagle carries sweatshirts. Go get yourself one and see if your day doesn’t improve about a million-fold…

Sincerely,
A concerned old curmudgeon

Saturday morning, thank God, after a week that seemed like it would never end while simultaneously feeling like there just wasn’t enough time for everything I needed to do. No doubt this sensation was brought on, at least in part, by an entire week of sleep disruptions: I had a couple of nights when I didn’t get to bed until well after midnight, then a couple more nights when I hit the rack at the usual time but couldn’t seem to stay asleep. On Wednesday, I had a particularly vivid and upsetting dream that took me several hours of daylight to shake off, and on Thursday I overslept, skipped both my shower and breakfast in an effort to get out of the house around the usual time, and I still missed my damn train. Then there was the day at the office when I was obligated to attend a two-hour, company-wide staff meeting that set me way behind on the day’s agenda, and I had to stay late two other evenings to finish up the loads for those days. In short, all my usual routines went down the crapper this week. And speaking of the crapper, I had an incident involving cat shit that should probably go undescribed, since it’s still breakfast-time for some of us. Well, it’s breakfast-time for me, anyhow. Let’s just say this feline excretory event didn’t help my frame of mind any.

The whole month has been like this, really. To be honest, things have been off-kilter ever since my birthday.

No, wait. Stop. Don’t go away. I promise this isn’t going to be another whiny lament about me having achieved A Certain Age, as the refined ladies of another era might have termed it. It’s simply an observation that life has been kinda screwy for the last several weeks.

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I just wasted an hour of a precious Friday off from work trying to buy concert tickets. Silly me, I thought ordering online would be quick and simple, not like those horrible old days when we had to actually leave the house and travel to some other physical location, whereupon we would conduct the transaction by the light of whale-oil lamps while we tried to ignore the woolly mammoths crashing around out in the parking lot.

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Usually when I hear that some bluenose bureaucrat is getting all uptight over something the average grown-up wouldn’t even notice, it’s happening right here in my own backyard. So imagine my surprise to learn that it isn’t Utah’s state liquor board that’s banned a particular brand of wine because its label features an image of a naked woman and a bicycle. No, it is in fact Alabama that has a problem with a century-old Art Nouveau illustration of a curiously nippleless nymph. The winemaker is naturally developing an ad campaign based on the ban, and I suspect that more people have seen the “offensive” label in the last 24 hours — because of the news coverage and blogs like mine — than would have in months or even years if the prudes had just kept their tut-tutting to themselves. The sorts who worry about this sort of thing never, ever learn the lesson that making a fuss only attracts more attention to the thing they don’t want people to see.