Feast or Famine

"Yeah, feed your Frankenstein," I replied to my friend while raising my eyebrows and slowly nodding my head. "No man, I said, 'Feast or famine,'" he corrected me. I had misunderstood his mumblings after several hours of driving. It was the second time in under an hour. The first confusion came when I relayed his directions via cell phone to take a soft left on Nolan Ryan Blvd when we were actually supposed to be turning on John Nolan Drive. Anyone could have made the same mistake.

Really, "Feast or Famine" versus "Feed your Frankenstein" isn't that big of a difference. It's like when I used to get to choose one candy item from the grocery store as a child. At a very young age I would take Skittles or Sprees so I could savor the individual pieces and really draw one package out over almost a week. At some point, however, I gave up on this attitude. I threw caution to the wind and began indulging in Caramello, which has only 5 pieces and goes quickly, but makes up for its brevity with a fleeting glimpse of truly living. Either way, you know, Feed your Frankenstein.

Fluorescent Lights

Someone told me that fluorescent lights don't actually produce light. He said they suck in darkness, which makes sense because they also suck the will to live right out of my body. Those long, skinny light tubes melt your brain and sap creativity. If you look at one long enough you'll go blind; it may take several years, but it'll happen. The old fluorescent lightbulbs contained mercury and every company threw them into landfills with the rest of their garbage. The mercury got into the groundwater and that's why today you can only eat a few fish a year out of some lakes or you risk turning into something that resembles the liquid metal Terminator. Anyway, I don't think fluorescent lights actually suck darkness, but I still don't like them very well.

The Great Depression

I will no longer accept The Great Depression as an acceptable excuse for any behavior. People need to understand that they can no longer bring up in conversation the experience of someone they know vicariously experiencing The Great Depression and relying on that shared experience as having an influence their lives. On a separate but related note, I will continue to listen to people who use the term "Hooverville".

Interpreting Dreams

It's never been easy for me to listen to people talk about their dreams. I understand that they're not looking for help interpreting dream symbols, and that they just need someone to listen, but that doesn't make the task any easier. I would be okay with hearing people's dreams if they kept the descriptions very brief. "I had a dream I punched you in the face and then made out with a car," would be an example of a brief dream description that I could tolerate. I would probably even be able to help the person interpret that dream if they needed help. The problem is that dreams are rarely that simple, and no one is good at describing dreams because you can never accurately capture the twisted vision that danced through your passed-out head after eating two bowls of ice cream and watching 28 Days Later. Everyone resorts to obscure metaphors of feeling that don't make sense, like they'll tell you it felt like being at a funeral in Epcot center, only no one was sad. And they desperately want you to understand how messed up it was; like if they can just share this one weird feeling, it won't seem so odd that it's running around their subconscious. I find it's best just to nod, and then tell them your dream about punching the car and then making out with their sister.

Marty McFly

I always took for granted that being called a "chicken" was a reasonable trigger to make Marty McFly crazy with rage. I also thought it was normal that the high school teachers wouldn't let him into the talent show because, as they said, "We're sorry. You're just too loud." Why wouldn't they just ask him to lower the volume and let him join the show?  Now that I'm thinking about it, it's also odd that guys like Marty and Doc Brown would be such good buddies.

Hawaiian Shirts

There was a phase in my life where I thought Hawaiian Shirts were really cool. I'm not proud of it, but I'm happy that I emerged from those years of my life without anything more than a couple pictures dogging me. It's a lot better than all the people who copied the barbed wire tattoo around Pamela Anderson's bicep or anyone with a neck tattoo. I don't think Hawaiian Shirts are cool anymore, but I have kind of a bad feeling about the mustache I just shaved off.

Hotdog Safety

I went to a three-day basketball camp when I was in about sixth grade where coaches served us hotdogs and a 12oz soda every day for lunch. The only things I remember about the camp were the lunches because most of the hotdogs had turned a light shade of green. When we told the coaches that the hotdogs were green, they reassured us that the food was safe. They said it had turned green because there were antibiotics growing on the hotdogs. Looking back, I think it's unlikely that they knew why the hotdogs were green, but even if it was because they were growing antibiotics, I still don't think they would necessarily be safe.

Wiring the Shop

The wiring in my old gear shop was a fickle monster. It worked well, but so many employees had laid new wires for stereos, cash registers, and alarm systems during their short tenure that no one knew which wires ran juice to each place. Thankfully the shop owner had a surefire system to figure things out. When we needed to change the wiring to block off a part of the building we were going to rent to a mosque, we would simply cut wires and then tested things to find out what wouldn't work. Losing the stereo really sucked, but it wasn't as bad as the alarm system we had to listen to until the company could be contacted to remotely shut it off.

Birthday Reminders

I signed up to receive birthday reminders from people on my email list several years ago. I checked the box for every person on my email contacts list to ask for their birthday--even the ones I knew only a little. These days it's like getting reminders that people I used know still exist. I've started looking them up via social networking sites when I get their birthday reminders, and it's proven pretty interesting. Most are married and pretty much everyone looks as though they've swelled in the face. The downside is that I now have to apply the same critical "years ago" lens to my Facebook page. That reminds me that I forgot to workout today.

State Fair Rides

I am not a fan of the State Fair. Last year I went for one night and rode The Zipper, which is a ride with hundreds of moving parts that's safety inspected and operated by 16-year-old carnies. I've never considered myself claustrophobic, but there's no other way to describe my feelings when the guy with several missing teeth and a shirt with a stretched-out neck closed The Zipper's door on me and my friend Nate. During the ride your birdcage-style stand-up enclosure spins you head over heels while going up and down on the arm of a spinning pinwheel. You spin 360 degrees on three axes, and the cage I was in was so tight that I had to turn my feet sideways because they were too big to fit facing forward. It got worse when all the change fell out of my pockets and rattled around my head for the remainder of the ride. It was easily the closest I've come to a fiery death.

Restaurant Confusion

You know how sometimes you're in a restaurant and you're like, "Oh hey, the guy in that room has the same shirt as me." Then you realized that there isn't another room and you're seeing a reflection of yourself in a mirror. It makes you feel kind of stupid, but that's a much better feeling than the times in restaurants where your very existence is called into question. It's rare, but today I thought, "Oh hey, there's a huge mirror here--Wait! Why can't I see my reflection?! Am I dead and don't know it?" Then it turned out there was another room and the place didn't have any big mirrors. It was kind of like the scene in Bladerunner where Decker realizes he might be a replicant, only, you know, the opposite. If you haven't seen Bladerunner I'm not sorry for ruining the end, that movie's about 30 years old.

King of the Surf Guitar

One of my friends gave me a copy of his Dick Dale two-disc Greatest Hits album before CD burning was widespread. The new technology left me with only one functional CD after I left Disc One in direct sunlight for too long, but I listened to the other disc a lot. The only things I knew about Dick Dale were that one of his songs was in the movie Pulp Fiction and that the top of my burned CD had "King of the Surf Guitar" written on it. So whenever Dick Dale would come up in conversation (which wasn't often in Minnesota) I would say, "King of the Surf Guitar" while nodding my head as if I had some special Dick Dale insight, and then I would let the other person do the rest of the talking. Friends of mine must have noticed a pattern, because after several years of this behavior one of them approached me and said, "So you know, I was listening to Dick Dale..." and I jumped in with "King of the Surf Guitar," in a confident voice, but my friend didn't keep talking. Instead he turned around and walked away; apparently he bet on the wrong side of whether I would say "King of the Surf Guitar" within 100 words after he mentioned Dick Dale's name.