Éireann go Brách

Before continuing with my entry, I should apologize for the recent paucity of updates. Over the last two weeks I have been forced to frantically assemble a final report for a grant so that it could be submitted to the federal granting agency by our April 1st deadline. I’ve spent hours carefully crafting an evaluation strategy, devising statistical analyses that elegantly balance explanatory power with simplicity, and writing all of this in a final report whose prose I like to think is reminiscent of Gore Vidal – conversational yet informative. Unfortunately, no one will ever read it. Some bureaucrat will check to make sure it has been submitted, note that it was received, and immediately put it in a file that will next be opened by archeologists long after the collapse of our civilization. (Future Archeologist: this society seemed to pray to a god named “ANOVA.” No new knowledge could be obtained unless ANOVA(1) deemed it significant.) Such is my life.

Normally pissing away two weeks into the black hole of research would annoy me to no end, but not today. Today I am too excited by my upcoming trip to Ireland to be upset.

The trip to Ireland was born out of desperation last December. My lovely wife informed me that she wanted me to get her something other than jewelry for Christmas. I was shocked and dismayed by her request. Personally, I thought we had a good gift routine down. Megan and I would agree on some dollar amount we would each spend on one another for Christmas. Then she would buy me some piece of electronics/kitchen accessory/assortment of guy stuff and I would buy her some piece of jewelry. We would both spend about twice what we had agreed upon because getting the perfect gift for the one that we loved was more important than groceries or rent or other trivialities. We’d both be taken aback by our partner’s generosity and she usually cried. It all seemed to work fine to me.

Not this year. This year had to be different. With jewelry off the table, I was a bit lost. My decade of experience with women had turned me into a relatively good jewelry buyer. I was familiar with the norms of jewelry shopping. I could enter a jeweler’s place of business and conduct myself in a manner that was consistent with his or her expectations of a customer. I knew what questions to ask (is that a created emerald?), what questions were stupid (is it waterproof?), and how to politely say that I couldn’t afford that piece if I sold all of my worldly possessions including a kidney and part of my liver (I think she would prefer something a little more understated). I had no such relevant experience with the other things my wife likes. How do you buy a purse? What makes one purse better than another? Are big purses cool because they cost more or lame because they are mostly used by rich old ladies as shoulder-mounted doghouses for their mini schnauzers? Are they waterproof? Is waterproofing even a valid concern?

After some awkward encounters with salespersons unlucky enough to approach me in stores, I realized that I was not going to be able to manage this social situation by myself. Only further humiliation and befuddlement on the part of the sales community could possibly result from continuing my efforts. I had two options: bring in reinforcements or confine my search to items with which I had some familiarity. I chose the latter largely because I did not know of any purse, perfume, or makeup experts. This choice meant my wife’s gift had to relate to something I was good at doing/evaluating. Since I am not good at doing much of anything, my choices were limited. I could get her therapy, but I thought this an imprudent gift. I could buy her some sort of cooking thing, but I would be the one who ended up using it anyway. I am really adroit at finding coffee in unfamiliar neighborhoods, but I didn’t know how to convert this ability into a gift. Most of my other talents, like writing papers in unreasonably short periods of time and gambling, only benefit me. The only talent I had left was travel. I am, all things considered, a relatively good traveler and a grasped this idea like a drowning man clinging to driftwood.

Still we had the issue of the dollar amount. While it was generally considered acceptable to spend up to 200% of our agreed upon maximum, travel to most places my wife would want to go would far exceed this total. While the number one destination would have almost certainly been Madagascar, even a budget trip to Madagascar would have required approximately 4000% of our agreed upon maximum. Likewise, I would have liked to buy a trip to Tahiti, but this would have amounted to approximately 2000% of our agreed upon total. After a great deal of research I came upon two possible trips. Trip one was to Ecuador and would have required 300% of our budget for fabulously luxurious trip (Ecuador is very cheap). Trip two was to Ireland and would have required about 350% of our budget for a modest trip.

I eventually decided on the second trip since I was afraid Ecuador might be a bit rustic for my honey. When I gave it to her, she got confused and then cried so I guess it was a success. We are leaving two weeks from today and I can’t wait to get there. I just hope next year I can buy her jewelry again; otherwise Ecuador, here we come.


1. Yes, I know that a joke about statistics is incredibly lame. Fuck off. (2)
2. Yes, I know footnoting a joke is even lamer. Fuck off again.

Why Corpro Media Sucks

Hey, do you know who Jeff Weise is? It is entirely possible that you do not despite his recent killing of 10 people on a Minnesota reservation. This event was the worst school shooting since Columbine and yet so far as the copro media was concerned it ranked behind continuing round-the-clock coverage of the single most pointless right-to-life fight in the history of the US and the Michael Jackson freakshow parade. People, Terry Schiavo doesn’t have a neocortex; she is dead whether or not she breaths for another 10 years.

The lack of attention paid to the slaughter of 5 innocent children highlights some uncomfortable questions about our news and our society at large. Does your life matter if you are not famous or white? Corpro media would seem to suggest that it does not. I promise you if this shooting had occurred in Grosse Point or involved the child of the “Country Crock” dude it would have resulted in special reports, 24 hour news coverage, and in-depth interviews with the school’s former principal’s second cousin’s wife concerning her impressions of the school‘s climate of diversity. As it was, the story didn’t even make the first segment of one of the Chicago nightly reports on the evening after it occurred. This isn’t an isolated incident either. A few months ago a colleague asked one of her client’s (who was a gang member) if he knew whether or not he had ever killed anyone. He said that he did not. When further questioned he revealed that he knew he had shot people, but no news organizations report on murders in his part of the city so he has no way of definitively knowing whether or not his victims died. Just to clarify, he wasn’t saying that they didn’t make the first page of the Trib; these crimes don’t find their way into the Tribune at all. On the other hand news about a serial rapist who preys on people from the wealthy Lincoln Park neighborhood frequently gets placed on the front page above the fold.

It doesn’t surprise me that the US remains afflicted with our worship of fame or latent racism; it does disappoint me that the tragic deaths of five children was not enough to overcome these failings for a brief moment in time. Even the flawed and ultimately exploitative attention of the infotainment empire would have been better than no attention at all. Sometimes the United States is a hard country to love.

I hate the gym

After 26 years of denial I am finally ready to admit the sad truth underlying my relative lack of physical fitness: I hate the gym. Everything about the gym is repulsive from the nasty carpet gyms insist upon installing in the locker room to the water fountain polluted by a gallon of some stupid fuck’s steroid-laced spit. I hate the tiny little towels that are only purchased by gyms and hobbits, and I hate the junk bond terms imposed by most gym’s contracts. Most of all, I hate “let’s get physical” by Olivia Newton John. The song is not about exercise, people, it is about SEX!. SHE DOESN’T WANT TO DO PILATES, SHE WANTS TO SCREW. SO PLEASE, FOR GOD’S SAKE, STOP PLAYING IT OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN IN THE AEROBICS STUDIO UNTIL THAT SICKNINGLY SWEET CHORUS GETS STUCK IN MY HEAD AND MAKES ME PRAY FOR DEATH WHILE I AM LYING IN BED KEPT FROM SLEEP BY THAT STUPID FUCKING SONG!

Ah, much better. I needed to vent. Seriously, though, I really find the gym obnoxious. I don’t think my reaction is caused only by the petty annoyances encountered in the gym but rather stems from a philosophical difference. The gym is a temple for those who find health fun. I do not find health fun. In fact I think there is a linear association between the amount of fun you can have doing something and its potential to cause you harm. For example, sharing some carrot sticks and protein drinks with a good friend is precious little fun. Make that some pizza and a bottle of Chianti and now we are talking fun. Transplant this action to some dive pizza restaurant located close to a survivalist compound in Michigan and throw in a half-breed wolf with a taste for cheese and you’ll have something to tell you grandkids about.

While fun and exercise are not necessarily mutually exclusive for me (hiking, rafting, and skydiving would all serve as both fun and exercise) I am largely denied any opportunity to engaging in potentially unhealthy exercise because I live in the frozen tundra known as Chicago. Thus, I am stuck with going to the gym or turning into one of those people who has to call the fire department to free himself from his house. The problem is that I clearly don’t belong in a gym. I am an obvious interloper in the world of the “runners’ high” and everyone knows it. My presence is disconcerting to both myself and the group who rightfully claims the gym as their natural environment. There needs to be an alternative gym, one with a coffee bar and desert selection, that is dedicated to those who only go to the gym because they have to. Smoking and drinking would both be encouraged as a way to keep the real gym people away, and there could be classes more relevant for the anti-gymrat like “smash the state cardioboxing” and “fleeing the fascists crosstraining.” Until such an anti-health utopia comes into creation, I guess I am stuck with my treadmill and that VILE PIECE OF SHIT C + C MUSIC FACTORY SONG. NOBODY WANTS TO SWEAT TILL THEY BLEED DUMBASS! THAT’S IS WHAT WE CALL HEMORAGING!

Sorry.

Coherent narrative is beyond me today

5 random thoughts

1. Maroon 5 is really boring. It isn’t like their songs are bad or anything, just painfully dull. They need to team up with Cyprus Hill or GWAR or something. That or dress like demonic leprechauns. Anything to rescue them from light FM.

2. Update on things Tyler will eat. Dryer sheets = Yes. Citrus fruit = no. Cucumber = no. McDonald’s Shamrock milkshake = yes.

3. Quite unintentionally the first two random thought are somewhat related to St. Patrick’s Day. How odd.

4. “No really, I’m not that drunk” invariably means you are that drunk. Don’t waste your breath.

5. Today I made a series of decisions that may keep a client in a place he doesn’t want to be against his will for several years. Authority kind of sucks.

A clean, well-lit toilet.

Few aspects of one’s environment are as important as a good bathroom. In addition to the obvious purpose they serve, bathrooms represent the only true privacy available to most of us. Cell phones and e-mail now penetrate every other traditional bastion of solitude; only the restroom stall remains beyond communication’s reach. If work has become too stressful or boring or demanding, one can always claim asylum in the porcelain palace. If your wife insists upon watching American Idol with the volume turned up to jet-engine-like levels and your dog will not stop trying to eat your latest copy of Esquire you can always retreat to the cool, calm surroundings of the bathroom. If you are eating out with friends and the one from New York begins his 20 minute exposition on the superiority of everyone and everything in his home city for the 10,000th time, you can always excuse yourself and wait him out in the bathroom. Bathrooms provide a sort of last resort for coping; when annoyance has brought you to the brink of madness, the bathroom is always there to give escape, solace, and peace. Going to the restroom is kind of like calling a “time-out” in life.

This is why having a quality bathroom is so important. A bathroom should invite you to linger. If a bathroom is dirty, dark, or otherwise uninviting people will not be able to derive the maximum possible benefit from their bathroom breaks and will return to their lives cranky. In stressful surroundings it is often the bathroom that prevents widespread conflict. Skeptical? Then look at the bathrooms at hospitals. Hospitals are terribly stressful environments in which highly egotistical professionals battle one another for control over their patients’ treatments and ultimately their lives. Serious work, but they are given exceptionally nice bathrooms. The standard issue hospital bathroom is now of the private room design with “hands-free” soap dispensers, paper towel dispensers, light switches, and trashcans. They are also exceptionally well-lit. Really, the only fault one can find in your standard hospital bathroom is a certain antiseptic quality that is entirely understandable given a hospital’s mission.

Still skeptical? Go to the bathrooms in a corporate law firm. Corporate law is again a terrifically stressful job in which even a little mistake could cost millions of dollars. Undeniably overwhelming but they have truly spectacular bathrooms. Corporate law bathrooms lack the scrupulous attention to cleanliness that characterizes hospital bathrooms, but they make up for it with a host of little luxuries. Automatic shoe shining machines, little bottles of cologne, and those really nice paper towels that almost feel like cloth help attorneys continue to protect The Man’s money without feeling too stressed out.

I consider myself somewhat of an expert in bathrooms because I have been exposed to so many terrible examples of toilets and have seen the havoc they wreck upon the social fabric of the organizations involved. Take, for example, the bathrooms at Comiskey park. When they redesigned Comiskey park they converted to the dual-trough system of restroom design. For the unfamiliar, this design involves one giant urine trough and another circular cleaning trough that shoots water out of a pipe in the center of the structure. As you can imagine, this is a terribly uninviting bathroom design. Foreigners can’t even quite figure out how the hell to use the various apparatuses (I have personally seen a distinguished looking Asian man take a leak in the sink). Since the Comiskey redesign the White Sox attendance is down precipitously and the team hasn’t won jack shit. Coincidence? I think not.

An even clearer example of bathroom-related functional impairment can be provided by my former fraternity. My fraternity had what was certainly the single worst bathroom in North America. Every 20th or 30th time it was used the urinal in this bathroom would get stuck in super-flush mode and spew water all over the bathroom floor. In addition, one of the stalls was referred to as the “rainy stall” because another toilet on the floor above constantly leaked what we hoped was clean water onto the toilet below. Furthermore, ours was the only bathroom in the world that ran out of cold water. After about 3 seconds of using any of the fixtures the water temperature would go from tepid to boiling regardless of whether you had the hot or cold water running. This rendered the shower unusable for obvious reasons. These deficiencies were only the consistent problems. There were other, more episodic, issues. Like the roof falling down (this was probably somewhat related to rainy stall). I once had to rescue our chapter president and my roommate when a large piece of rotten drywall fell from the ceiling and trapped them in the toilet. Then there was the constantly flushing toilet. This doesn’t sound that bad until you realize we had one of those industrial tankless toilets that shot a highly pressurized stream of water in the bowl in order to flush. The sound was really annoyingly loud, and our water bill for the month in question rose by 1200%.

As you might surmise, our dilapidated bathroom began to affect our overall effectiveness as an organization. We became crankier and were unwilling to kiss a sufficient amount of national ass to stay on their good side. Eventually, we were reorganized (for a particularly funny reason that I will detail in a later entry). All this occurred because we didn’t care to linger in our bathroom for an appropriate amount of time.

The High Water Mark Continued

Dammit people.

I can’t actually be too lazy to keep up with the blog I started because I was too lazy to do my dissertation. Though a day late, the story continues now.

So after waking and introducing ourselves again to the person who urinated on our floor, we again divided into two groups to pursue entertainment during the daylight hours. One group (we’ll call them Team Bankruptcy) immediately left with Mr. Tilty for the tables. At this point our unofficial tally put Mr. Tilty approximately $1000 in the hole which was approximately $900 more than he could afford to lose and $1000 more than his fiancé would condone. A large part of his problem on this particular trip was the composition of Team Bankruptcy. His gambling friends were all people he met in high school while attending a tremendously expensive private school that catered to children of the exceptionally wealthy and uninvolved. This meant they were both rich and fucked up. The combination lent itself to some truly stupendously high-stakes gambling that made Mr. Tilty’s paltry $1000 seem like chicken shit. It is a well-known phenomenon in psychology. Outrageous behavior can seem normal provided that the social context is even more outrageous. This dynamic underlies binge drinking in college, the prices of souvenirs in tourist areas, and all of the Girls Gone Wild videos. Unfortunately for Mr. Tilty, this dynamic also seemed destined to underlie the cancellation of his honeymoon and his castration at the hands of an infuriated fiancé.

The other group of which I was a part (let’s call them Team Dumbass) retired to the pool to plot our next move. Ultimately we decided upon a stroll up the strip followed by the buffet at the Aladdin and a nightcap of a little bit of Studio 54. Our plan was to attempt to steal Mr. Tilty from Team Bankruptcy before going to the club and save him from a repeat of the previous night’s financial disaster. Every step of this plan was an unmitigated disaster. While walking down the strip we got distracted by a stage show at the Tropicana. This led to 2 hours of sketchy gambling. Our trip to the Aladdin was equally dumb. Most of the people in Team Dumbass were from San Francisco. Being young and from San Francisco they are incapable of undertaking any activity without some form of weed. Luckily for them, three separate member of the San Francisco crew brought some form of semi-legal ganja from the stoner motherland. After smoking some sort of bizarre weed/hash/tobacco combo they accompanied the rest of the team to the buffet and promptly ate enough food to render them comatose for the rest of the night.

However, one of the San Francisco members of Team Dumbass did not go gently into that good night. Though a friend who happened to be a chemistry Ph.D. student at a highly respected Bay area university he managed to acquire some very potent upper. In order to combat his fatigue, he took two.

The diminished Dumbasses then went to retrieve Mr. Tilty and stand in line at Studio 54. Unfortunately when we found Mr. Tilty he was wearing tennis shoes. Knowing this would not fly in a club as pretentious as Studio 54, we asked Mr. Tilty what he would like to do. Not surprisingly, he told us that he wanted to gamble.

This could not be allowed to occur. We had to come up with some sort of alternate plan fast. Luckily one of the Dumbasses who was not stoned came up with the idea of a strip club. As we were participating in a bachelor party, this seemed an entirely appropriate way to save what little remained in Mr. Tilty’s savings account. Of course, we couldn’t tell Mr. Tilty that we were going to a strip club; then he would have refused and insisted upon persisting in pursuing his lemming-like path of self-destruction. So we did what any honorable group of friends would do … we lied and told him the strip club was a casino.

At the strip club everything just got dumber. The group ordered bottle service which means you are given mixers and a bottle of liquor for the paltry sum of several hundred dollars. More important than the money, however, was the unfortunate fact that a group of sleep-deprived people who had been drinking fairly continuously for 24 hours now had an entire bottle of Jack Daniels to finish. While this was bad news for all of us, it was particularly bad news for our new speedy friend. We discovered something very important that day, passing out can be highly beneficial. Our speedy friend just kept getting more and more drunk but would not pass out because of the uppers he had taken. Eventually his behavior became too bizarre to continue in the strip club. He kept trying to steal this one dancer’s purse. Then he started pointing at other customers for no particular reason. Then he menaced another dancer with an ice scoop. Clearly he had to go.

And go we did … BACK TO THE CASINO. Oh no, we certainly couldn’t go back to sleep in the room. There was drunken, speedy gambling to be had. First Mr. Speedy sits at a pai gow poker table and tries to play blackjack. This doesn’t work and the dealer sends him to the BJ table. Now things get really weird. He sits down at the blackjack table muttering gibberish and immediately is on fire. He wins his first 5 hands all while being largely unable to count. It turns out conscious mediation of behavior deleteriously affects Mr. Speedy’s blackjack skill. He was amazing. At the end of the night he managed to go up $300 (and he started down $200).

The rest of the trip proceeded without incident and we were able to make our escape before the Flamingo was able to figure out all of the ways we had defiled their hotel.

So what does this have to do with a friend from high school’s website? I was looking on his blog the other day and encountered an entry talking about buying a house. This made me realize how much time has passed since I was actually a kid and how impossibly adult my world and the world of my contemporaries has become. I found it difficult to think of houses and marriages and children connected to the same group of people whom I last remember wearing fuzzy hats and terrifically unattractive plaid band uniforms. It highlighted for me how long it has been since I was that kid with a stupid hat and my own piece of tartan plaid. It was then I finally understood what bothered me about the Vegas trip: I wasn’t the subject of any of the stories. In the past I would have been. More accurately, in my youth I would have been.

If it has not already left entirely, it must be said that my youth is leaving me. I can pierce my tongue (I have) or get arrested at a protest (I might) and it will not change the incontrovertible fact that I am now and will forever be more of an adult than a child. I wasn’t part of the Vegas stories because I couldn’t be; there were wives and careers and dependent dogs at home to consider. The responsibility that comes with maturity killed the insouciance of youth forever, and I mourn its loss. I am reminded of a quote from Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. While writing about the decline of the ideals of the 60s, Thompson remarks that as he looks west out of Vegas he can just make out the high water mark where the wave of idealism broke and receded back into the sea. The high water mark I saw is far less profound yet equally powerful to me. As I looked out over the fountains at the Bellagio standing amongst a dozen drunken men in my suite at the Flamingo I saw the receding wave of my youth rushing ever faster back towards a sea of inevitable death

The High Water Mark

Those of you who have faithfully read my blog realize that I have yet to describe my recent, extra stupid, trip to Las Vegas. Until today I didn’t really understand why I found it so hard to chronicle. It was, after all, a trip very similar to a dozen trips I have taken before. We showed up, raged for 48 hours, and then departed. It wasn’t until I read another blog maintained by a contemporary of mine from high school that I came upon the reason for my reticence; this trip was different from those preceding it in a very important way. But first, the trip …

The excuse we had all marshaled to justify our trip to Vegas was the bachelor party of a college friend. I characterize this as an excuse since most of the people who attended the party were not actually invited to the wedding and hadn’t kept in close contact with the groom over the preceding 3 and ½ years. The real reason we convened in the great state of Nevada was a reunion of sorts. While it was certainly true that we intended to show our friend an appropriately good time before he married, we also wanted to see each other in some sort of neutral state from which we could be banished with few consequences in our future lives. (You may think I am exaggerating, but two of my college friends are no longer allowed to enter Canada. There was some unpleasantness at a casino in Windsor. They can never return.)

The plan was standard guerilla tourism. Descend en masse, engage in senseless acts of excess and absurdity, and leave before the authorities could fully appreciate the bizarre and depraved character of that which befell their city. Our home base for this operation was a suite at the Flamingo hotel. This room was clearly intended for two well-heeled Vegas travelers -- the sort who booked a suite because they enjoyed having a living area in their room to facilitate afternoon tea. The Flamingo’s first indication that our group had little in common with the elderly couple they hoped would be visiting came at check-in. We asked for four keys. The room sleeps two. The front desk noted this discrepancy and asked, “what exactly is going on here?” Now the really amusing part of this exchange isn’t that we were questioned within FIVE MINUTES OF OUR ARRIVAL regarding our sketchiness; it isn’t that the Flamingo was objecting to four people in their two person room when we would eventually have 14 staying there; the truly hilarious part of this exchange was that the person checking in had absolutely no idea what the front desk was referring to with their question. It didn’t even occur to us that it would be odd to ask for four keys when two people were checking in. On our sketch-dar (our inner sense of things that might be considered sketchy) this did not even register.

Most of Friday night was consumed with people arriving, meeting up with the others, and watching the groom lose tremendous amounts of money. This was to be expected because the groom is a terrible, yet enthusiastic gambler. He managed to max out his daily ATM withdrawals within an hour of his arrival and was talking about a “cash advance” by 10 PM on the first day.

It should be said that we did not decide the location of the bachelor party. The groom is our friend after all, and we wouldn’t have been able to live with ourselves if we had been responsible for his near certain financial demise. The groom insisted upon going to Vegas, and all we could do was try to limit his losses by distracting him with women and booze. We largely failed. At about 2 AM I ended up leaving the groom (let’s call him Mr. Tilty) and going with a group of more modest, yet skillful, gamblers to the Boardwalk casino so that we could be insulted by the surliest dealers on the strip. After three hours of abuse, a heated disagreement about addition with the dealer (2, 8, 4, 1, and 6 equals 21 not 22) , and a near fight with some jack-off from LA we left Boardwalk to find Mr. Tilty and a casino that was still willing to serve us drinks. And find Mr. Tilty we did. He was incoherently drunk at a $25 minimum bet table in the MGM Grand. In the 2 minutes it took us to walk to his table after we noticed him he lost $150. Mr. Tilty is not a rich man; he is a graduate student. There is no reason for Mr. Tilty to play at a $25 minimum bet table under any circumstances much less when he is trashed. We extracted him from the table and were treated to 15 minutes of pure gibberish about how he hadn’t done well at the tables. No shit Mr. Tilty! We just saw you hit an 18. There was some disturbing talk of a savings account and then we thought he said he was going to bed.

We decided to follow Mr. Tilty to “bed” a few hours later. We discovered upon entry into the room that nothing resembling a bed was available. Somehow in the course of the evening 14 people showed up in the room. One of these people (a friend of a friend’s brother) passed out several hours before the only person in the group who knew who he was went back to the room. He showed up at the Flamingo wearing a filthy, half tucked dress shirt, sneakers that had somehow shed their laces during the evening’s festivities, and a vacant drunken expresses. He mumbled something about a bachelor party and the people in the room considered this sufficient bona fides to let him sleep on a chair. Later that morning he stood up in the middle of the room and urinated on the floor because he mistakenly believed someone was in the bathroom. All in all, he made quite a first impression.

The four of us that arrived to the room last made a valiant effort to sleep in the hallway leading to the bathroom, but this effort was met with little success. I gave up at 9:30 AM when another person arrived.

I would like to continue this chronicle, but suddenly there are too many authority figures around my office. I guess I better look as though I am doing something productive for awhile. This story will continue tomorrow.

Developments on the Song Futures Market

I know I promised to detail my recent trip to Vegas, but today I have been distracted by another fantastically useless idea: a song futures market. I came upon this when listening to the radio the other day. While executing a particularly advanced piece of driving Kung Fu the radio station began to play Eve 6’s “Promise.” Generally speaking, I hate Eve 6 and would have immediately changed the station, but at the time I was wedged between a Lincoln Navigator and a garbage truck and I thought it prudent to attend to details other than music. By the time I freed myself it had occurred to me that “Promise” actually isn’t a terrible song. I remembered it as being yet another piece of post-grange alternative tripe in the late 90’s but by 2005 its chorus seemed kinda catchy and lyrics like “everybody wants a promise and a smile” didn’t annoy me as much as they used to. It was clear; the entertainment value of this song appreciated dramatically since its debut. Should it continue to make steady gains over the next few years it could become a song I would actually seek out.

As I thought more about this issue, I realized that most songs become more or less cool as time goes on. There needs to be some sort of secondary market to protect individuals from fluctuations in the coolness of their music. Too many otherwise cool individuals find themselves humiliated by their Motley Crue past or ill-advised opinions like “Nirvana really isn’t that musically talented.” One should be able to invest part of one’s “cool” social capital in a music options market. For a nominal decrease in one’s popularity individuals should be able to obtain the option to trade in their musical likes or dislikes at some sort of optimum value should the music appreciate or depreciate much faster than originally expected.

Here’s how it would work. My wife loved New Kids on the Block. Now she has to hide this fact for fear she will be ostracized by people who had cooler historical musical taste. If she had purchased a “sell” option on her NKOTB fandom it would have slightly reduced the amount of coolness she could have derived from being a fan in 1992, but in exchange she could now simply produce the option and let those around her know that it had been exercised in 1997 resulting in a net loss of only a few cool points by 2005.

Let’s look at the other scenario. Say you just couldn’t let go of hair bands in the early 90’s. When confronted with Jane’s Addiction you said something like, “Tesla could kick their ass any day of the week.” In 2005 this unwise opinion would likely end up a centerpiece of ridicule. However, if you had purchased a Buy option on Jane’s Addiction you could produce it and let others know you had exercised your rights to become a Jane’s Addiction fan at 1994 coolness levels upon the release of Tesla’s final album. The cool points lost would be minimal.

Since this is just too good/stupid of an idea for me to stop talking about it, here are some of my insider tips for the song futures market.

OutKast – Rose – I’m sorry. The writing is on the wall with this one. It sucks (or should I say it smells like poo poo poo). The only reason we all thought this was cool was because of the transitive property of cool. The people in OutKast are cool. The people in OutKast are responsible for this song. Ergo, this song is cool. Except it isn’t. No song that uses “poo-poo” as a euphemism for excrement can be. Get a sell option.

Counting Crows – The entire collection – I think I speak for everybody when I say that counting crows have been a bit of a disappointment recently. There first album was so good, and then … Shrek happened. However, even a lot of their latter songs possess a kind of haunting quality that hints at some songwriting skill. Counting Crows has the possibility of coming out with a truly great album one of these days. Dis them with caution and make sure you have a Buy option.

Franz Ferdinand – Take Me Out – This is a difficult one. Though the song is catchy, it really isn’t that interesting once you’ve heard it a thousand times. On the other hand, it is just creative enough to possibly belie a talented group of musicians who could continue to produce catchy songs for a long time. Hedge your bets either way on this one. If you are a fan, get a sell option; if you are a detractor, get a buy.

Hillary Duff/Lindsey Lohan/Jo Jo – Everything – You had better have a sell option or avoid these altogether. Being a fan of “teen pop sensations” is kinda like buying Argentinean junk bonds. Probably it’s a bad idea, but if it works out you will make a killing because nobody else is willing to take the risk.

Death Cab for Cutie – Transatlanticism – Awesome CD, but no one knows about it. Being a fan could be highly rewarding if anyone ever finds out that they exist, but otherwise your fandom will be greeted with an increasing number of blank stares from people who are cooler than you. Get a Sell option and curse the capricious nature of modern cool capitalism.

Please add to this list through the comments section. Remember, five minutes of advice could save you or someone you know from a lifetime of ridicule.

Chapter 3: The reckoning.

Howdy everyone,

I actually have a plethora of things that I could write about today. As I mentioned in the pathetically short post on Friday, someone in authority mistook me for a successful graduate student and gave me an internship. As long as they don’t discover their mistake before I can write an official letter of acceptance, they’ll be stuck with me. In addition I just arrived back from 52 waking hours in Las Vegas (5 sleeping) and there is much general stupidity to report. But before I get to all of this, I believe we have some unfinished business: the final chapter of Wash U guy.

Following my last encounter with Wash U guy I took a hiatus from psychoactive substances for about a year. I was applying to graduate school and trying to put together an EEG experiment so I really did not have and entire weekend I could sacrifice. Now I know some of you are saying that tripping does not take an entire weekend. It is true, the act of tripping does not. However, all of the associated waiting for dealers, organizing people, finally going to sleep, and then recovering from the after effects seemed to take me at least two days to accomplish. Thus, even if I were to indulge on a Friday night I would not expect to be able to do something else until Sunday afternoon. Given my personality at this stage in my life, two days represented an unacceptable level of commitment (I’ve held college majors for less time).

During this year-long period of abstinence, the legend of Wash U guy had made its way into our house mythology. We had noted that Wash U guy only two awkward appearances involved people at their most f’ed up and began to joke about his return. Whenever someone was tripping, intoxicated to the level of incoherence, or otherwise impaired we would joke that he was going to knock at the door.

I think you can see where this is going.

So, finally after I had finished my honors thesis, gotten into graduate school, and generally put my sh*t in order, I finally had some time to be stupid with my friends. Someone had some mushrooms again and asked if I wanted some. I said that I did, began to trip, and heard the front door open.

As was typical, someone shouted out, “oh F*ck, its Wash U guy.” We all laughed, and then we saw him in the bedroom door.

“Hey guys, I heard about your house getting reorganized. Can I have a beer?”

Frankly, I remember little of what happened then. I distinctly remember a very theatrical “NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!” echoing through my head, but I am not sure whether I screamed this, someone else bellowed it, or it was just part of a silent internal dialog. I know I offered to get one of my friends a drink and then hid in another bedroom for the remainder of his visit. I also know that was the last time I did any sort of psychedelic substances while an undergraduate. Wash U guy should have his own anti-drug commercial. Screw “this is your brain on drugs,” show kids their bedroom on Wash U guy and they’ll never touch drugs again.

Some of you are undoubtedly thinking that this story is bullshit. I don’t blame you. I would too. Let’s look at the statistics. First of all, we will ignore the time he found us tripping on dillo day. DD is a very popular time to both visit my college and to take drugs. Lets only consider the two other encounters since they were more truly random. There were approximately 50 weeks in between the two tripping incidents. Of course many of those would have been dumb weekends to trip or visit a college (i.e. summer, Christmas, finals week, etc.). Let’s be conservative and say that only 20 weekends were appropriate travel times/tripping weekends. This means that there are (20*19)/2 possible weekend pairs. According to my calculations, the probability of us randomly selecting the same two weekend is about 0.66%. That said, I assure you that Wash U guy is real. I couldn’t make this shit up.



PS -- In honor of Wash U guy, I wrote a song.

(to the tune of “Santa Clause is Coming to Town)

Oh, you better not trip
And don’t get high
Don’t candy flip, I’ll tell you why
Wash U guy is coming to town

He’ll show up uninvited
And act strange around your friends
He’ll fuck with all your mushroom vibes
And his visits never seem to end.

Oh, don’t do drugs
Say no to pot
Missouri’s too close, you might get caught
By Wash U guy who’s coming to town.