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(continued)…

Imagine for a moment a thirty eight year old man with a full beard and balding hair dressed in a grey zip-up hoody with bulging pockets and too dirty blue jeans talking to a cute teenage girl about Pokemon cards. In television these situations end up on dateline on the internet they end up on pornhub. Neither situation was a good look for me, especially the latter, considering what I had in my pockets.

The clerk, Brenda, swiped my last item and said, “Do you have anything else?” She was looking at my pockets knowingly.

I didn’t have a real choice here. I couldn’t rob Walmart in broad daylight. All I could do was pull the condoms out of my pockets and dump them on the conveyor belt and try my hardest not to make eye contact with anyone. The girl stopped talking and stared at the condoms with a smirk. The woman behind her fell silent as well, her eyes probing me like she worked for ‘To catch a predator’. I fished back into my pocket for my ATM card, but when I pulled it out the card snagged on the inner lining of the pocket and fell to the ground.

Of course the girl picked it up.

“Tom, right?” She said, reading my name then proffering the card. My smile was more of  a wince. I thanked her and slid the card through the scanner. It didn’t work.

Brenda said, “These are the new style of cards. You have to stick them in the slot below the card reader.”

I was sweating now. I followed her instructions and got that wrong the first time too. She said, “let me show you.” Then flipped the card around and put it in the right way.

To say that everyone was watching me would be an exaggeration. I didn’t know if anyone was watching, because I refused to lift my eyes higher than my feet. Old guys buying condoms is bad enough without getting little girls involved. And she was still completely involved.

“So, you’re really into pokemon, Tom? Other things too I guess.” The girl said. Then the woman behind her came unglued.

The universe continues to lift its leg against the bark of my skin.

I am past the point of seeing things as merely coincidence. If that were the case than I would have to trump my daily life up to bad luck, which is,  for some, an unfortunate interpretation of coincidence. No, my situation is straight universal vengeance, yo.

It isn’t the kill me now variety. This is more like the frog in the pot sort of situation. Here is one example: I’ve been pulled over twice this month by the police. The latest stop was just a few minutes ago, capping off an all too terrible day. The first stop was for an illegal lane change. In other words, I moved from one lane to the other on a through street without using my turn signal. Tonight’s stop was a lot more obvious–He followed me from my house to Walmart and pulled me over just before I reached the store parking lot. I wasn’t speeding. Well, I did go 47 in a 45 for a moment, but it wasn’t even the reason he pulled me over. Apparently my tag was expired. Something he discovered after tailing two feet behind my car for, well, ever. He gave me a warning and then proceeded to explain the multitude of reasons he could’ve cited me and reminded me how grateful I should be.

I’m grateful–to an extent.

I’m tired of being pulled over. I am tired of tires blowing out on the road. I am tired of my dog strategically soiling my house and the cat strategically waking me up when she is just that bored. I am tired of overzealous parents who turn youth sports into the world series.

I’m just flat out tired.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have bought the Pokemon cards.

I mean, as a stand alone thing a grown man can buy Pokemon cards and not worry about too many awkward stares. Forgetting the fact that Pokemon is an international ‘card sport’ loved by millions, I could have been buying the cards as a gift to a kid. It lines up well. You put the cards on the little black mat and they glide magically to the tired lady with the blue vest that reads Brenda. You meet her small green eyes, smile, and fish for your credit card. She says something congenial, swipes your card pack over a laser scanner then offers to put it in a bag. You pay and the transaction is over. The key is buying the cards alone, which isn’t what I did.

I suppose there are a number of mitigating factors that led up to this particular jam. There was the kid sitting in the larger part of the shopping cart and treating a pack of toilet paper like bongos. There was his mother, fed up and overprotective. There was the girl, friendly and curious–nothing less than the fuse to this whole thing, and then there was me, nervous, hiding the one item I really didn’t want anyone to know I was buying.

She was standing next to me texting on her cell phone. She had on a hoodie and black jeans cut so short that I could see the bottom of her pockets against her legs. Behind her the boy had already launched into his second verse of something that vaguely sounded like Metallica trying to cover The Itsy Bitsy Spider. The old woman ahead of me was trying to write a check. Our clerk looked like she wanted to stab the lady with a pen. I sighed and rolled my neck. I was rocking forward to back, each pendulum swing ending with my eyes landing on my handful of useless junk, which was partioned  off from everyone else’s junk by a pair of plastic dividers. I had a bottle of bug spray, four packs of chewing gum, a can of Monster, two rolls of breath mints, a Snickers bar I’d picked up when I got to the checkout counter, and that damned pack of Pokemon cards. The item I was really here for was jammed in my pocket. I planned to pay for it, but I figured on waiting to add it to the pile until it was my turn to pay.

The girl said, “You know there’s a trick to getting the foil cards.”

I looked at her like she’d just spoken martian.

“I could show you.” And she reached past the no-go barrier and snatched up the card pack.\

Some Thoughts:

1. Out of time… I’ll actually continue this another time. Feels interesting.

Tevan Wright hated his name. He supposed it could’ve been worse. Most of the kids he knew from the block had even more exotic names like J’quan and Kennidie. That last one felt more like a misspelling than an actual choice. He’d recently confirmed that when he asked her mother why she chose the name and she said, “I wanted to name my girl after the greatest president I’ve ever known.” His own mother was party to such gaffes. She liked to tell him she named him after the love of her life, a 90’s R&B singer that looked more ‘black boy band’ than what he thought of as R&B. Anyhow, that man’s name was Tevin, a clever bastardization of Kevin, he supposed. Whatever the root, his own name sprouted from it a very unintelligent way.

 

Which is why he was changing his name to Tom. He stood deep in the queue at the Pinal County Courthouse pressed in close to people who stank of sweat and perfume. A hundred conversations in several different languages popped around him like chaffe. One stray question whistled his way and he acted like he didn’t hear it. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the speaker, a tall woman who looked a decade younger than his mother. She was staring at him with round, friendly eyes. He looked away, grateful for the comfort of a hooded sweatshirt. She bumped him ans said, “Did you hear me, young man?”

 

Tevan hunched his shoulders and tried to disappear deeper into his hoodie but the lady bumped him again. He didn’t respond again so she bumped him again and this time she said, “Boy, don’t be rude.”

 

He wondered if it would be ruder to respond to her with exactly what he wanted to say, but his mother raised him well enough not to test those scales…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Started free writing this while waiting for a tire change. I don’t know what it is or where it is going but the story comes around at some point to a conversation with the boy’s mom about changing his name and her lying about how she feels about it. He knows because she smiles when she lies and frowns when she doesn’t. Something about that simple lie detector compelled me to start writing about Tevan/Tom. Maybe I’ll continue.

Almost forgot to blog it out tonight. Close call too. As I was wandering off to the land of dreams I realized that I hadn’t put finger to keyboard. I delayed it, because I was in a seriously bad mood. See, as I was driving around tonight I realized that I was driving on a flat tire. I couldn’t for the life of me figure why my car was tugging so hard to the right. Apparently it had its reasons. Those reasons being a flat tire. I’m pissed about the tire, but I am more pissed about the fact that it has become a common ploy to demand that people buy these things in two.

Snopes chimed in on the debate as did other sites, pointing at the concept of tread wear as a leading cause for why you need to purchase two tires vs. one. I feel like I need to purchase 1 in terms of cash on hand, and maybe go a week before I put the other new tire in play. It is a difficult situation to have to think in these dimensions, but I know the dudes at the tire spot are gonna give me hassle.

The fact is, I have gremlins.

These terrible things manifest yearly and cause me no end of pain. Well, there is an end, but it usually takes a few weeks to a month. I often like to say it is followed by a magical period of blessed luck, but that isn’t real. The gremlins, on the other hand, are quite real. I don’t know how to stop them or if they can even be stopped. All I know is that I need to be careful over the next few weeks (gosh, how long has it been going on already?). Who knows what is going to happen next?

I’ll be called a racist after this one. It won’t be the first time. In fact, people who are extremely close to me have dropped the R-word on me more than once. I think that is a huge misnomer. I also think that it often follows me pointing out racial realities such as what I’m laying out right now. Today my concern is the end of white expansionism and the effect that it having on the idea of whiteness, moving it from a position of ubiquity closer to the feeling one has when the walls are closing in on you.

To understand my position you have to first grasp the concept that ‘white’ was never intended to be a catch all phrase. It was never meant to induce a feeling of fear or conjure images of polo shirts and khakis. It was, on the other hand, intend to be a safe word. It was intended to be reflective of a higher class and a limited order of individuals. White was a refuge–a reflection of the ‘Us’ side of us vs. them. Black, in contrast, had a more specific delineation, which I plan to discuss in another post. I have numerous points of evidence to support this. Basically, White was something to be proud of while other cultural labels were not. In my time studying sociology this is one of the things I found to be really interesting and eye opening. However, in the ten minutes I have to put this out I have to rely on one well known and very simple piece of evidence: The Irish.

Irish was separate from White for a long time. It wasn’t until the middle of the 1900’s that Irish people became classified as white. Even then the joining was a response to the understanding that these groups (Irish, German, Polish, French, Dutch, etc. all shared a common bond, look, and enemy). The joining of forces created the white diaspora and helped the super group remain the dominant racial force in the American system of stratification.

Yep, American. We created this sense of whiteness in ways that were not common elsewhere. In fact, in pockets of our country being Jewish is considered white whereas it is not considered so in several other countries. While the idea of white is not a purely American construct, it is reinforced by the white American diaspora, often at the expense of cultural individuality. In other words, we reduce people to white, black, hispanic, etc. and in doing so ignore the individual cultural history that formed that subsection of people. All of this brings me (belatedly) to my point:

There really aren’t that many more sub groups to add to the white category. Meanwhile, a host of ‘non-white’ ethnic groups are sprouting up and demanding notice. The result? It creates the illusion that whitehood is under attack. Is it though? Is it really? Or is the growth of other groups suddenly clouding the skies with forms of understanding and awareness different from what we had become used to from this particular hegemony. Moreover that hegemony is disappearing, replaced by something that looks a lot more diverse. It is no wonder the idea of whiteness seems under attack.

 

Ten minutes on the clock. Here we go.

So the Giants epically pooped the bed. 27-7 is a near mirror of the 27-0 thrashing last year under the same ‘black out’ conditions in Philly. The difference this year is that the Philly team is not as good and the Giants team is better. Apparently just not better enough tonight. I had a fairly interesting time watching the game–highs and lows and every emotion available to the roller coaster. I suppose I am a tried and true G-Fan now. Not that I haven’t been on this roller coaster since the age of 6. I was born into a city of Giants fans and, at first, I took the oppositional approach. I liked the Jets. I liked the Mets as well, hoping to will them into good fortune. There were millions like me, who apparently accomplished their goals in the 80’s because the Mets were legit. The Jets, not so much.

The Mets are in a position now where they could make the World Series but the Cubs–yes the CUBS!–stand in their way. While I don’t care about baseball all that much, I do care about my team and my city getting the accolades of success. I think a lot of fans function in the same way, becoming fans in order to find unity with the place they live. In that way we forge a certain solidarity in fandom. It can, of course go too far, which is what we see in LA and SF most of the time…

 

Now I’m just rambling…

On occasion I find the hardest thing to do is to get started, especially in regards to things I really don’t enjoy doing. In this case, I don’t want to grade. I don’t want to grade ever again if possible. Of course, that isn’t possible, so here I am blogging about what it takes to pick up the red pen and go to work.

I’m talking about the concept of activation energy. In scientific terms, this is the minimum amount of energy needed to start a reaction. In human terms, this is the minimum amount of energy needed to do something–often something you’d rather not do. It takes considerably less energy to climb the stairs, power up the ps4, and start playing Call of Duty than it does to do a single page of homework. It takes far less energy to turn a TV on than it does to shut it off. This is, of course, all mental gymnastics. The key is that start. How much does it take to just start doing the task you don’t (or even do) want to do?

For me the key factor isn’t even necessarily laziness as much as it is desire. There are just a ton of things I don’t want to do in life. I build schedules to ensnare the things I don’t want to do, locking myself into the tasks in the process. People smarter about these things than I am call what I am talking about discipline. I suppose I try to create discipline within my life (though often with little success). I suppose I could do that quite a bit more.

If I could just figure out the right amount of energy needed to activate, I believe I would be able to build a reward system that helped give me the needed push in order to activate faster, more regularly, and without the apparently requisite level of bitching that goes with performing mundane tasks.

1. Still clearly in that lull/funk where I am not able to generate new ideas. It is like a flu for writers. Too much emotional conflict lately. I feel like there is this swirl of emotions connected to the non-logical portions of my life, including the kids and their activities. I did get to watch their teams all win today–first time this season. I like the way they feel after.
2. I do not like how they act. How is it that the more tired a kid gets the more they become evil.
3. Another night punching keys one by one in order to squeeze out something coherent.
4. Little luck at it this time.

Some days it is a struggle to decide what I want to write about.

A lot of that stems from the stress of having so much going on in my life. Between the kids’ sports and the job and the writing there is little space for the mental downtime in which ideas and aspirations are cultivated. This isn’t to say I don’t make time for such things, but I don’t make time to just sit back and think and reflect everyday. So, I wind up with these days where I don’t have a whole lot to say about anything. Instead I watch the clock dwindle slowly towards mediocrity and hope that tomorrow there will be more words.

I suppose that makes me a writer.

Some Thoughts:

1. Mets v. Cubs in the NLCS? Yeah, thats baseball worth watching.