Tag Archives: life

In Attendance

Creative non-fiction, Humor, Life and Other Existential Problems, Parenting, ,

Also, a Coat

The coat is brown, puffy, and goes to my ankles. Add a messy bun and I look like the poo emoji.

I needed the coat a few weeks ago because it was freezing and my daughter had a regional middle school choir concert at a high school gym.

Middle school choir concerts are my favorite form of civic optimism. Kids collaborate to make something beautiful despite puberty actively sabotaging their vocal cords, all so an audience can briefly believe we belong to one another. This is where hope lives, even if the venue smells like feet.

Parental love has historically forced humanity into far worse circumstances than this, even on a cold Thursday evening.

So into the coat I went, looking and feeling like a baked potato.

My husband, daughter, and I arrived at the high school to find the gym entrance guarded by a teenage usher who held back the restless audience with all the authority of a traffic cone. The kids went to warm up while families packed the lobby. Everyone talked about how busy and tired they were. The tiredest people who have ever busied. As if to illustrate the point, an exhausted toddler lay starfished on the floor, wailing in the Hall of Interminable Waiting.

Five minutes before the show, the poor usher stepped aside and the crowd surged. Someone behind me decided I was an obstacle to their getting exactly as bad a seat as everyone else, and they shoved me. Mercifully my enormous coat absorbed the blow.

Anyway, we easily found seats, as did literally everyone else. My coat’s protective puffiness had been deployed for naught.

A few parents from our kid’s school came over to chat (“Hi! How are you?” “Tired and busy.” “Same.”) and then disappeared into bleachers on one of the three designated walls.

I folded my coat behind me, exhaled, and assumed that for the rest of the evening, the worst thing that could happen was that 50-100% of my butt cheeks might fall asleep.

Along the fourth wall were the rows of choir kids in school shirts and venue-appropriate shoes, clutching folders and ready to be taken seriously while delighting us.

The program started. The choirs took us on a world tour: “Tottoyo” from the Caribbean. The Russian folk song “Kalinka.” An arrangement of “Dies Irae” to liven up the joint.

When not singing, the kids sat attentive and appreciative of the other groups.

And for three glorious minutes, I thought maybe humanity has a chance.

However, another performance unfolded behind us, where a delegation of moms and dads sat. No idea who they were, but they clearly knew each other well enough to narrate the entire concert. Before, after, and during the songs. They declared “winners,” opined on which song “lost them,” and critiqued soloists. They laughed out of delight, but sometimes they laughed in that other way, too. One mom casually sang along to the songs she knew, and she knew quite a few of them. Then she complained about the audience’s bad etiquette when they clapped for soloists in the middle of a piece.

(Reminder: the universe will always choose to deploy irony in a high school gym.)

The singers were too far away to hear the chatter. My husband and I were too close not to.

But no one else seemed bothered – except possibly the person on the other side of my husband, who sat up straighter and straighter as the evening wore on, like her sense of decency was trying to escape through the top of her head before she did something regrettable.

Maybe the talking was the kind of thing you’re supposed to let slide. I reminded myself that no one had crowned me Queen of the Gym Bleachers, Sovereign of Decorum.

My shoulders crept toward my ears with familiar fury. Oh, hello, lifelong training to quell my irritation rather than risk being socially punished for noticing poor behavior.

I tried to listen to the kids, but the conversations behind me kept pulling my focus.

And then, my notably easygoing and also deaf in one ear husband shushed them.

He shushed them. Again and again.

I mean, they ignored him, BUT STILL.

After the final song, my husband and I performed a traditional Midwestern Passive Aggressive Two-Step.

1. Stare down Sing-Along Mom and her friends and say, “These kids deserved a better audience.”

2. Flee.

We found our daughter near the doors, eager to tell us all the behind-the-scenes details.

I nodded along, overheating in my coat, listening to her version of the night where everyone made space for one another.

We told her we were glad we were there.

What Dangles From Your Trailer Hitch (Encore Post)

Humor, Life and Other Existential Problems, , , ,

Bringing back a favorite from the archives, lightly edited for your pleasure.

Every great civilization eventually signals the exact moment it gives up. (See: bread and circuses; phrenology; Gérard Depardieu.)

I encountered what may be our surrender point at a red light.

While stopped, I was running through my usual litany of Big Thoughts (Did I turn off the stove? Did I accidentally Reply All? Will humanity survive the inevitable collapse of late-stage capitalism masked by hyper-niche consumer trends?)when my attention landed on the truck in front of me.

No. Truck implies mere conveyance. This was an iron colossus. One perhaps called The Dominator. Or The Reckoning. Or The Doom Hauler.

Being a lusty all-American vehicle large enough to have its own microclimate should have sufficed, BUT…

dangling from the hitch by paracord was a set of Truck Nuts.

If you are fortunate enough to be unfamiliar, Truck Nuts (or Truck Nutz) are plastic or rubber decorative testicles that people attach to the back of their automobiles.

The vehicular huevos festooning the back of the  —  I dunno, GMC Rumble Thumper? —  bobbed with needless enthusiasm as the engine idled.

These ornamental knackers weren’t even high-quality plastic, just the brittle material of cheap children’s toys that cracks on impact or warps in the sun. Bright blue unapologetic vulgarity.

I stared. I didn’t want to, but like Medusa, these marbles demanded eye contact.

Two questions came to mind:

1. Who is driving this be-nutted behemoth?

2. Just…why?

Naturally, I started profiling the driver. Cargo shorts despite wind chill. Thinks taxes are theft, turn signals are for betas, refers to women as “females,” owns at least two Tapout shirts, and once tried to fight a locker in high school.

When the light turned green, I pulled up next to the…let’s go with Chevy Thunder Tusk…and looked.

Stone-faced. Sunglasses. Holding large iced coffee.

A woman.

A woman who, I could tell with just a glance, has strong opinions about butter boards and somehow manages to be unbothered and deeply furious at the same time.

The Windows 95 error sound pinged in my head.

Question 2 came back. “Just…why?”

Clearly, there’s demand. Like it or not, an entire Truck Nut industrial complex exists, operating, presumably, within the legal parameters of commerce. There are factories and machinery. There is an entire logistics chain ensuring that no motor vehicle in America need remain ball-free. And of course, there are actual adults waking up, pouring coffee into World’s Best Dad mugs, and heading to a job where they debate proper ball-to-bumper ratios.

There was undoubtedly a prototype. Wind tunnel tests. Torque calculations. PowerPoints on market scalability. Some guy insisting, “We’re revolutionizing the industry!”

Enormous vats of melted plastic were poured into molds, cooled, popped free, and sent to a quality control specialist probably named Earl, who gave each a light tug to ensure structural integrity.

Then and only then were shrink-wrapped pallets of these faux family jewels distributed to gas stations, online marketplaces, and that one hardware store where someone’s always grilling hot dogs in the parking lot.

A marketing team surely worked on branding. Tough Nuts for Tough Trucks! Don’t Be a Ball-less Hitch! Freedom isn’t Free — And These Are Only $24.99!

All of this resulted in the owner of the Ford Fee-Fi-Fo-Fummer in front of me slapping down actual money. After purchase, they knelt behind their truck and tied these orbs of virility into place.

I remind you we once wrote the Constitution, built Chicago (twice!), and sent humans to the moon.

I remind myself that I used to write about civic responsibility, democracy, and motherhood.

And yet, here we are.

Still, was there meaning in these petrochemical gonads? Irony? Prank? Postmodern critique of gender norms? Radical rejection of patriarchal tropes through appropriation of male genitalia?

The social contract as envisioned by Rousseau was not designed for this. Democracy, human rights, collective dignity? Yes. Plastic testicles on the back of a Toyota Titan Howler? Absolutely not.

Hobbes believed life without government was “nasty, brutish, and short.” I generally agree, but argue that life with government has somehow produced a scenario where I’m stuck in traffic behind a Jeep Inferno Stallion, eyeball-to-clangers.

I cannot point to the exact section of the social contract that discourages such a thing, but I assume it’s located in the part about not making public spaces unbearable for everyone else. Or maybe tucked into an addendum called “This Should Really Go Without Saying.”

But if the driver in front of me didn’t care about the affixed Truck Nuts on her Honda Oblivion Rover, then the entire framework of cultural semiotics disintegrates. They mean nothing.

And if they aren’t anything, nothing is. Everything just sways pointlessly.

Perhaps material offers meaning. After all, there is something grotesquely poetic about the fact that the fake gonads are plastic. Plastic is eternal.

Glaciers will melt, cities will sink, and centuries from now when the Great Plains are waterfront property, an archaeologist —  probably also named Earl  —  will stumble upon slightly cracked, sun-bleached Truck Nuts. He’ll turn them in his hands and ask, “What god did these people worship?”

It’s not an unreasonable question. What else could they be other than an object of reverence? Is this who we are? Cheap, crass, oscillating as if to measure the time we have left before the entire country embraces hollow spectacle under the hazy guise of “I’m just asking questions”?

Or maybe we worship the in-your-face part.

The woman in the truck zipped off with the patriarchal baubles wobbling behind her, she and they blissfully unaware of my Big Thoughts.

I sat there, eating her proverbial dust, realizing two things:

  1. You cannot parody a culture that’s already doing it for you.
  2. At some point Truck Nuts will come factory-installed. Standard.

And only Earl will understand the horror.

Auld Lang Sigh

Creative non-fiction, Humor, Life and Other Existential Problems, Under 750, ,

I, Too, Have New Year’s Thoughts

EEveryone else seems to know how to do this.

Pop Quiz! In the above sentence, “this” refers to:

a) Navigating a Trader Joe’s parking lot without emotional or vehicular damage.

b) Leaving a voicemail (!) without a panic outro.

c) Loading the dishwasher without it provoking a weird fork argument with your spouse.

d) The New Year’s ritual of declaring goals, intentions, and a revised version of yourself.

The answer is D.

(Technically, “All of the above” applies to me, although for the record, I recently exited a TJ’s parking lot and only two people flipped me off. I also tumbled headfirst into a grocery cart corral, if you’d like a fun visual. But I digress.)

New Year’s goals are an annual ritual for deciding who we will become next. Broadly speaking, the available options appear to be: Do more of something. Do less of something. Be more yourself. Be less of whoever you’ve been.

I am not by nature a Grand Goals Person. I am a “Could These Goals Be Administered In A Single Daily Capsule?” Person. What I’m trying to say is that I’m in a stage of life where I forget that I set goals at all, never mind following through on the “actionable steps” required to achieve them. January rolls in, and I’m already behind on being aspirational and/or functional.

Predictably, I once again started January on decidedly WTF footing. I, too, want more and better (or less and better), and yes, Random Enthusiastic Person On The Internet, I understand that only I can make that happen.

Most New Year’s resolution advice assumes you have quiet to reflect, sufficient attention to make good (enough) choices, and enough solid ground to stand on while doing all that.

I am not on solid ground. I’m dog paddling through whatever swamp-adjacent mucky fuckery all this is. As such, I’m not doing anything other than scanning my surroundings and wondering how long we all can keep this up before stress-testing floating debris to see if we can comfortably nap on it.

Many of us are operating with severely depleted attention, and we’re absolutely fried due to what feels like oversubscription to the world. When attention thins, decision-making degrades.

Last year, I said I wanted to pay attention to where my attention was going – real genius stuff until I tried and immediately forgot what I was doing. Attention is what allows you to evaluate options well, and without it, every choice feels loud and wrong. I hate loud. I hate wrong. I especially hate loud and wrong.

This unsettled, flayed feeling is apparently the emotional launchpad for Grand Goals Setting.

But, I DID set goals.

Last year.

Just for posterity, here they are:

  • Let my inner weirdo become my outer weirdo.
  • Find more wonderlands: big cushions, warm chairs, fireplaces, and someone patting the seat next to them like, “Come. Sit. Stay a while.”
  • Work the phrase “everything went tits up” into more conversations.
  • Be like my dog: long walks, bursts of speed toward nothing, naps in the sun, and flappies (scientific term) to clear my head.
  • Read more. Write more. Read better. Write better.
  • I used to tell stories here. Real ones. Small ones. Messy, absurd ones. Somewhere along the way, I got stuck in broad magician-off-the-Strip tellings. No more. Back to real ones, with all the tits-up moments.
  • Schedule my damn flu shot.
  • Play.

I am not going to tell you which of these I accomplished.

Ok, yes, I will. I got my flu shot.

So for the sake of rest and attention, I will recycle that list.

This space, whatever it is, remains open for oddness and wonderlands. And for madly gripping joy, especially because it may be a floating debris pile to nap on to take a break from all the mad dog paddling.

And if things go tits up as we tumble into our grocery cart corrals in the Trader Joe’s parking lot – well, maybe we can figure out how to use them as flotation devices.