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.

Somewhat related to the previous entry (well, they both involve music, nostalgia, and grumpy old man-ism, at least), Lileks related a story today about his encounter at his local coffee house with one of those Damn Kids™ I’m always grumbling about. Here’s his comment about the young lady’s ignorance of “99 Luftballons,” the infectious ’80s classic about an accidental nuclear exchange (ah, the Cold War… those were the days!):

Kids today. No respect for kids of yesterday. Thing is, we were required to know every fargin’ thing about the 60s when we were coming up, being schooled in the ways of the Most Important Musical Genre Ever. You were required to nod at your elder and respect their sage ways, and thus I found myself in a few dorm rooms listening to peers explain why Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Reefer and Cocaine were incredible not just for their harmony and song-writing skills, but their ability to make music that [went] on longer than three minutes. To which you could only say: may all your girlfriends take “Love the One You’re With” to heart everytime you’re out of town.

Lileks’ real point here is, of course, less about the kids of today than his own resentment toward the ’60s — he strikes me as a man who is convinced that everything went Horribly Wrong long about 1967 and it’s only gotten worse since then; come to think of it, that’s not entirely incorrect, depending on how you look at it — but he touches on something I’ve considered myself from time to time, which is the way Boomer culture has always dominated the conversation and how people my age dealt with it, and more importantly (to me, anyhow) how that’s different from the way kids these days deal with my generation’s culture.

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DSC_0057, originally uploaded by jason.bennion.

Want to know how to ruin a beautiful springtime Sunday afternoon? How about having someone back into your Mustang and bugger up pretty much the entire passenger side? Yeah, that’ll do it…

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So, I met with my tax preparer this morning, and, well, the results weren’t pretty. Let’s just say that if I ever try to offer you financial advice, you’d be wise to simply smile, pat me on the head, and back away slowly.

Afterward, as if I hadn’t been demoralized enough by getting a thorough bitch-slapping from Uncle Sam, I headed over to Fashion Place Mall to buy a belt. I wasn’t looking for anything fancy or wanting to make a statement, I just needed something to hold up my pants. Should’ve been a snap, in and out in ten minutes, right? One would think so. One would be quite wrong.

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Be warned. The Girlfriend and I spotted Halloween decorations at Costco yesterday. Let me repeat that: Halloween decorations. In August. A full week before Labor Day. And not just any old rubber-bat or paper-skeleton-style Halloween decorations, but light-up inflatable lawn displays like those obnoxious things that have been so popular at Christmas time for the last couple of years. And they have an audio component, too, stereotypically spooky sounds like screams, blowing wind, creaking doors, and, of course, John Carpenter’s Halloween theme. Oy.

All Hallow’s Eve is my favorite holiday, but I don’t want to think about it this early, not before Labor Day, and ideally not before October 1st. I also don’t want to think about Christmas in September or Valentine’s Day in January. I have a theory that part of the reason why it seems like time moves so quickly these days and everybody’s so stressed and feeling like they just can’t catch up is because of crap like this. The retail industry seems to be increasingly out of sync with the actual seasons of the year, and thanks to their shopping “seasons,” we consumers are, too. You can’t buy a swimsuit in July because the back-to-school stuff is already on the shelves, and you can’t get a new coat during the deep-freeze days toward the end of January because the spring lines are coming out, and we’re expected to be worrying about Halloween before the pumpkins mature and Christmas while there’s still leaves on the trees. Basically, the sales pitches insist that we always be looking ahead instead of enjoying the now, and the time between the advance sales and the calendar seasons seems to grow wider and wider every year. It makes me crazy…

I was just standing in line over at the grocery store and I noticed that they had 2GB USB flash drives on sale there at the cash register, right alongside the gum and lip balm and all the impulse-buy crap that you usually see in the grocery store checkout lane. For a moment, I was charmed by this spectacle — how unspeakably science-fiction-y and cool is that you can now get computer memory devices at the same neighborhood store where my mom used to buy me Idaho Spud candy bars in the far-off days of childhood? (Well, technically it’s not the same neighborhood store — the grocer built himself a new and improved building about fifteen years ago — but you get what I mean.) And that buying these things isn’t any big deal? They’re not down a special aisle or kept locked behind the service counter or anything, they’re just hanging there with the ChapStick, as innocuous as disposable lighters and People magazine.

But then I noticed this thing was called the JetFlash Classic. Classic? I think not. The term “classic” is something usually reserved for objects that have stood the test of time and are widely seen as the apotheosis of that category of objects. Levi’s 501s are classic. A ’57 Chevy Bel Air is a classic. But a flash drive? How long have flash drives been around anyway? Has there ever been anything that qualifies as an iconic, perfected flash drive design? No, there have been dozens of different looks for flash drives since they became widely available just a short handful of years ago, and none of them had a look that I think anyone would call definitive. They can (and do) look like anything from suppositories to humping toy dogs. And do we even know that flash drives will still be around in another five or ten years, or will something else replace them and they’re destined to end up about as classic as five-inch flop disks? How the hell can you call anything “classic” under those conditions?

You can’t. It’s all about marketing and branding. I get so tired of marketing and branding and the way perfectly good language gets warped to sell things that would probably sell just fine without giving them labels they haven’t earned. Words matter, but people don’t believe they do… and that makes me sigh and grumble under my breath like all the other grumpy old men who’re pissed that the world doesn’t run according to their watches…

Okay, I’m officially tired of summer. That didn’t take long, did it? Blame a crowded, sweltering train ride into town this morning.

Of course, my sour mood wasn’t helped by the nicely dressed, very young man — did I mention he was very young? — who offered me his seat so I didn’t have to stand in the aisle. He insisted upon me taking his seat, actually, despite my polite refusals. I don’t quite understand his zeal considering that I am not (a) visibly disabled, (b) grotesquely overweight, or (c) all that old. I may have some gray in my beard, but give me a break, kid. Those Foundation for a Better Life PSAs are maybe a little too effective…