Category Archives: Things I Do

I’m always chasing this idea of the perfect day. To have one perfect day in life, a day that could be lived over and over. This day wouldn’t be one where something big and momentous happened. In other words, your wedding day is not going to be the perfect day. It’s going to be great, but it’s also going be sweaty and nerve-wracking, and you will be wearing clothes that you absolutely cannot be clumsy and spill something on.

The perfect day also wouldn’t be one where everything goes right. Like a lazy Sunday where your baseball team wins the game, and later dinner turns out exactly as planned, the potatoes not overcooked, the steak just right. It would be a very good day, but very good days are not perfect ones.

The perfect day would be one so perfect it could happen again and again, and it would always play out flawlessly and never fail you. Like a motor that always starts without a hiccup. Like a round smooth stone that fits between your thumb and forefinger. Like the way your father used to pour a can of soda to the very rim of the glass, without the foam not even once spilling over.

When I was a kid, I used to hate those essay questions they gave you in school that asked to describe the best day of your life. To me, the best day would have to be a perfect one. And I knew then it hadn’t happened, and I know now that it never will.

Still, the beach is the kind of the place where you can chase the perfect day. Where you can walk around with bare feet and listen to the ocean waves break on the shore. Where you can breathe in the salt air and coconut lotion. And where you can look out on forever or just to where the ocean meets the sky. Whichever comes first.

For the Memorial Day weekend, the wife and I went to the beach. Or perhaps since I’m a Maryland native—and since I’ve been chided about this—more correctly I should say we went down to the ocean—if not to chase the perfect day, then only to chase a little bit of that mid-August heat. The forecast had called for temperatures in the 90s.

Going down to the ocean is a rite of summer around here. I’ve already written at length on my love for Ocean City, Maryland here, here, here, here, here, here, here, AND here.

And this particular weekend, I accomplished a rare feat. Something big. After many years of going down to the ocean, I’ve earned many related life merit badges and accolades, and this is another one to add to my very long and distinguished list:

1986: I rode in the Haunted House with my eyes open for the first time.

1990: I dug a big hole in the sand. Very big. Like I could fit my little sister in it big.

1994: I bought my first Beatles t-shirt on the boardwalk and felt very hip.

1999: I went to the Ocean for Senior Week with high school friends and was busted by the cops for carrying a case of beer. The cops promptly apologized seconds later upon realizing that case of beer was actually a BOARD GAME. We were dreadfully uncool.

2007: I took the then-girlfriend to the beach for the first time. Her experience with Ocean City was limited, and we had only been dating three months at this point. Of course it was under the pretense that this was just a fun beach weekend together, but secretly I was seeing whether she could hang with lying in the sun for hours, staying in cheap sketchy motels, getting in some hot arcade action, going on boardwalk junk food binges, and taking a whooping in mini-golf.

Or maybe she beat me. Either way, she could hang.

2010: I proposed to the wife. She said yes of course. For the most part, she was still that girl who could hang with arcades and mini-golf. Everything except the whole sketchy motel thing. Geez, one little centipede in our bed at the Safari Motel on 13th, and she holds it over my head FOR LIFE.

And now…

2012: I finally beat the system. I stuck it to the man.

Allow me to explain.

Marty’s Playland is my favorite arcade of the four on the Ocean City boardwalk. It has the latest in arcade games and amusements, but it also has tons of vintage games and pinball machines. While you may not find straight-up classics like Donkey Kong and Galaga anymore, you can still find a 1992 Jaleco Arm Champs II tucked into a corner somewhere next to a Zoltar machine.

However my favorite games have always been the ones that pump out tickets which you can redeem for prizes.

It’s like gambling for children, and I was hooked at a young age. I’m still hooked now, and I’m thirty one, even if I’m now smart enough to compare the money spent playing games to the value of the prizes. You’ll figure out rather quickly the whole thing is a big swindle. A scam. It’s less like gambling and more like indentured servitude.

For instance, there was a Wii console available as a prize choice for just fourteen thousand tickets. Assume a single quarter nets you three tickets on average. And yet, this isn’t even a likely assumption considering a lot of games can cost fifty cents to a dollar a piece, and it’s also entirely possible to get less than three tickets. It’s possible to get nothing. And sure, occasionally you might score 10-20 tickets. Even more rare, you might hit larger jackpots of 50-100 tickets and beyond, but you’ll also have to pay more quarters just to have a single chance at winning them.

Still, let’s assume three tickets a quarter. To get fourteen thousand tickets for the Wii, you’d have to spend around $1200. To look at this in one perspective, a Wii retails for $99. To look at it in another, if your parents gave you a crisp twenty dollar bill (and that’s being generous and you’d probably have to split it with your sister) to play the arcade games every summer vacation, you’d still need about five childhoods to earn fourteen thousand tickets.

You could save your tickets your entire life, into your ripe old 70s, at which point the Wii will be so outdated, there will be no way to hook it into your space-age television that beams out of your eyeball. You’ll have to get the eyeball-to-RCA converter cable at Radioshack, which will somehow still exist and be in business, even though no one has any idea how.

$1200 is a 12x markup on the $99 Wii, but it’s actually one of the lowest markups you’ll find on the prizes.

Take for example, these polyresin pirate figures:

I cashed in fifty-four tickets EACH for these pirates, or approximately $4.50 a pirate. Yes, you’re looking at $18 worth of polyresin pirates. Which was totally worth it because LOOK AT THEM. Except at wholesale cost, these things are worth about eight cents a piece, meaning I paid a 56x markup for these dudes. That makes the $1200 Wii seem like a goddamn basement bargain.

Or take this bloody finger tip, which wholesales for one cent:

I paid one dollar worth of tickets for it, or a 100x markup. But again, totally worth it because LOOK AT IT.

Of course, none of this fuzzy arcade math is the point of the arcade. The point is to have fun, to blow money because you’re on vacation, and to chase that big ticket jackpot. And if not to chase, then to at least hope the game severely malfunctions and it vomits out all its tickets by accident. Dream big.

Except, I beat the system.

This is the Rambo Weapons Pack for the sold-separately Rambo figures released by Coleco in in 1986. Mint on the card. I couldn’t believe it was there, hanging on the peg hook casually and in the wild, in 2012. Even more so, I couldn’t believe it was only marked at 45 tickets.

They probably found some leftover box of them hidden in the back, shrugged, and decided to put them out there. I love how random it is. I love the idea that I could potentially choose the same prize in 2012 that I might have chosen twenty-six years ago.

At a 10x markup, this should have cost a few hundred tickets. But I guess they figured no kids would want some twenty-six year old random weapons pack for an obsolete action figure line that they’d never heard of. In some ways, it’s the equivalent of buying a Wii in 2052.

This pack goes for about five bucks on eBay, and at just forty-five tickets, I snagged the weapons pack for roughly $3.75. Which means I profited. I won. I beat the man. I won at Marty’s Playland. I won at life. Like proposals and centipedes, this can only happen once.

And you know what? It feels damn great, even if I have no Rambo or General Warhawk figures to use these weapons. And too bad Radio Shack doesn’t sell them. Then again, I’m not really sure what they sell.

The other day I went to the doctor and found out I have a leaky heart valve. Don’t worry Mom, it’s not going to kill me. It’s a benign condition. The worst thing that happens after being diagnosed with a leaky heart valve is the freaking out that you have a leaky heart valve. You obsess and convince yourself that you can feel the leaking. And then you think, great, you’d be one of those otherwise-healthy people who suddenly drops dead after riding Epcot’s Mission:Space or after running a twenty-six mile marathon due to some vague “heart condition.”

And then you tell the doctor, “I rode on Mission:Space when I was there on my honeymoon in September, and I didn’t die. So that’s how I know my heart is fine. Right? Right?”

The doctor just laughs warmly and noncommittally and says he likes that ride with “that runaway train.” Then he sends you off to a dimly-lit room with someone named Donna where you will undress and be slathered with goo and be forcefully prodded with a magical heart-listening wand.

But first he asks, “what’s that runaway train called?”

“Thunder Mountain,” you say weakly.

My backwards bleeding heart is called mitral valve prolapse, and it actually explains why I’m so crazy. The uneven rushes of blood to the brain and nervous system causes anxiety and hair-trigger reactions. Which is me. So I’m a little neurotic. In fact, it’s one of my better qualities. People love neurotics. Every book and movie and album is always made by some neurotic with deeply-buried insecurity issues. Neuroticism sells as well as sex and Coca-Cola.

In other news, I’ve decided my new hobby is Legos. I have no idea if I’m doing it wrong by pluralizing Legos or if it’s only the singular Lego, which makes it sound like a cold-hearted and faceless empiric entity. But on a whim, I decided to buy an Alien Conquest UFO kit the other day after browsing the toy aisle at Target. I expected my wife to grimace when I came home and proudly announced my new idea for my next hobby, but instead she was excited. Apparently, they’re very therapeutic to crazy people.

“They’re a good focused activity for people with anxiety disorders,” she said in her therapist voice.

A-ha. See? It’s all connected.

So I feel like I’m eight years old or something, proudly declaring my new hobby, my next new thing. In fact the last time I played with Legos I was probably eight, and I was a very volatile eight-year-old. I blew through hobbies from dinosaurs to Shrinky-Dinks to looking at things under my microscope kit—things like food crumbs and grass blades and other important science stuff. Then there was the rock phase. Not rock-n-roll; actual rocks. Good rocks. Shiny and smooth ones.

As I grew up my hobbies became narrower, stubborn and set in their ways. Do adults even have hobbies? Well, the weird ones do—and it’s always the weird ones. When I think of adult hobbies, I think of stamp collecting, model glue, and train sets. And then I think of beards and suspenders. I don’t want to think about that anymore.

Maybe “interests” is a better word. Interests is that word we’re always using to sell ourselves to others—to new acquaintances, friends, potential significant others. My interests are music, collecting toys, writing, reading, football, and exercising. There. I think I perfected that just enough to make me seem well-rounded, somewhat quirky, and intelligent. I think a lot people would buy that package. Especially one that is as good-looking as myself. My wife bought it.

Of course, what these interests actually mean is I will dump hundreds of dollars on stereo equipment, fill our living room with a few hundred ratty old records, fill our basement with random figures and toys, and fill our bedroom with dozens of books stacked in haphazard piles. As for football, I will not only watch our game on Sundays, but all of the other games, too. Hours and hours, all day, every Sunday, for the next sixth months. Furthermore, I will read all the news stories talking about the games and follow fan forums of opposing teams and speak at dinner about how stupid other fans are. I will do my writing, but not nearly as much as I should because I will be too busy procrastinating and browsing stereo stuff online and still thinking about those stupid fans. Exercise? I was only saying that. I don’t really like it. At all.

Maybe “obsessions” is the best word. Like anyone, I have my obsessions. But really what I’m into is just eating pizza and watching movies and sleeping in bed. And that’s the key to finding love. You find someone you can do these mundane things with, without screaming at each other. If you find someone who likes the same pizza toppings, can sit through the same movies, and doesn’t kick and punch you in their sleep, that’s it. And if they do kick and punch, you can find a way to laugh about it the morning.

For the record, screaming at each other is perfectly normal in certain situations such as road trips, board games, and camping. However I’ve found it’s best if you never go camping. Ever.

I’ve promised my wife Legos will not become a new obsession. I will not browse the Lego fan forums or research rare kits on eBay. However, I’ve also promised I would watch that subtitled World War I French romance with her. Amazingly, every word in that description is somehow worse than the last.

Nope, I promise, it will just stay a hobby, the connecting together of perfectly-symmetrical plastic little bricks, shiny and smooth. And besides, my hobbies are fleeting and my patience is hair-trigger thin, and next week I shall tell you about something else.

You’re speeding down the highway at seventy miles per hour and a big fat hairy spider appears on your lap—and you’re not kidding—it is really hairy. It is about the size of a nickel, but when you tell the story later, it will be the size of quarter or possibly a half-dollar.

It’s a wolf spider with grey hairs that sprout profusely from each leg, all eight of them. He also has eight eyes arranged in three rows, but you are grateful you can’t actually see that. The abdomen is round and engorged. Engorged, by the way, is one of the grossest-sounding words in the English language, followed by ointment and moist. And gorgonzola. Although you have nothing against the cheese.

Just moments before, it had all been so different, a peaceful Sunday afternoon drive. You were singing along with the radio, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, by the Beach Boys. You should never attempt to sing with the high part, and in fact you should probably never attempt to sing. This is probably what caused the spider to appear in the first place, this primal screeching noise. He was probably taking a peaceful Sunday afternoon nap, snuggled in the upholstery of your car seat, when that howling awoke him and caused him to flee in fear.

Also the word upholstery. Yuck.

And so he appears, skittering across your lap nimbly. Forget coins. This thing is the size of your fist. And this is what to do when you’re speeding down the highway at seventy miles per hour and a big fat hairy spider appears on your lap:

First, do not slam on your brakes. It will only cause the driver in the car behind you to use profanity in the name of a) various holy figures, b) animals, c) your mother, and d) all of the above.

Second, do not count on your wife, sitting in the passenger seat, to save you. Instead, her response to your pleading “kill it, please find it and kill it!” will be screaming followed by a short round of hyperventilating. In other words, you are totally on your own.

Third, remember you are still driving.

The worst part will not be the actual spider crawling on your lap. The worst part is when he disappears after your wife temporarily pulls herself together long enough to limply toss her bottled water at your lap. It lands with a soft ping.

“Did you get him?” you ask, trying not to sound scared—because you’re not afraid of some dumb spider—although you do notice your voice comes out at least an octave higher.

“I don’t think so,” she says.

Great. Now he’s mad, yo. Now he’s somewhere. Planning his next move. His big fat hairy move.

“Can you look for him?”

“I can’t. I’m crying,” your wife says.

The next exit off the highway is a half-mile away, roughly six hundred miles away in angry-missing-spider-in-your-car length.

Your wife is now completely paralyzed in fear. You’ll have to find a way to break through to her. Try begging.

“CAN YOU PLEASE HELP ME. PLEASE.”

Her hand shaking, she meekly reaches over to grab the water bottle.

THERE HE IS.

Screaming, she blindly begins whacking at you and the spider. But he won’t die. He is like the big boss at the end of the video game.

“Is it dead?” you ask.

“I don’t know. I don’t see him.”

You were wrong. The worst part is not when the spider is missing. It’s when he goes missing the second time. You start to feel crawling sensations everywhere. Your leg. Your neck. Your head. And even though your wife is swearing the spider is on her now, don’t worry, she is only experiencing sympathy crawling sensations.

The rest stop exit is just ahead. Your plan is to pull off, safely and calmly come to a complete stop, proceed to unbuckle, open the door, and run around in circles until all the bad spider mojo is gone.

WAIT. THERE IT IS AGAIN! This time the wife raises the water bottle with the weight of fate her hands. She’s got an eye on him time. The target is secure.

WHACK.

“Got him,” she says with triumph. She’s done it. She’s beaten the game. The princess is in the castle and Elvis has left the building.

Finally, you will be wrong again. The worst part will be driving with a shriveled-up, dead hairy spider on your lap, as your wife withdraws back into frozen fear, refusing to pick it up with a napkin.

The great rock critic Lester Bangs once dreamed about having a basement with every album ever recorded in it. The thing is, Bangs’ basement now exists on the Internet. Nothing is rare and nothing is unknown. The digital world grows by the nanoseconds and milliseconds are obsolete. When I was a kid I used to try to think of the biggest number ever, but always puckered out somewhere after one hundred gajillion-billion-zillion-million. And one.

Bangs probably would have been freaked out if he knew his dream basement would become reality. The guy wrote an Elvis obituary wondering if the world could ever agree on love or Elvis or anything ever again. He spoke to an increasingly fragmenting culture back in 1977 when he wrote, “we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won’t bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you.”

Bangs couldn’t have foreseen that there’s something worse than no Elvis. There’s no John Lennon. There’s no Michael Jackson. There’s no record stores. And there’s nobody sitting around listening to records. We don’t sit down on the couch, have a drink with a friend, listen to side one of a record, flip it over, and listen to side two. We don’t remember the rules—that you can talk before the record and in between sides and during the crappy songs, but Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands requires full reverence.

There’s no reverence anymore. Instead, there’s earbuds and playlists and leave-me-the-hell-alone looks—which face it—you need on subways and buses.

Don’t mind me. I’m just being old and obsolete and living in the analog world. Digital music is codes. Ones and ohs. Numbers. One hundred gajillion-billion-zillion-million. It hurts my head. Analog means to use signals or information represented by a continuously variable physical quantity. See also, In a manner analogous to the variations in air pressure of the original sound. See also, Random variation.

On monoaural records, the fine print somewhere on the back cover always assures the buyer that “this is a high-fidelity recording, designed for the phonograph of today or tomorrow. Played on your present machine, it gives you the finest quality of reproduction. You can buy today, without fear of obsolescence in the future.”

I wish I came with that kind of disclaimer.

See also, A thing seen as comparable to another. Recently I found a secondhand bookstore tucked into the corner of an unsuspecting strip mall, next to a sushi place and a paint store. It was the kind of strip mall where it looks like it might be mobbed, but then you realize there’s actually tons of parking spots, and it’s just the lazy suburbanites hunting and scrapping over the first few rows. Being a competitive animal, or maybe just an asshole, I like to scan the closer spots to see if I can snipe one off. I’m not lazy, I just want to win. I have medals in getting good parking spaces, people. MEDALS.

Before even walking in, you can tell this is the perfect kind of bookstore, the kind roughly the size of a closet. At least a master bedroom closet. Old light bulbs with metal filaments give off an apricot glow. Musty wooden shelves press to the ceiling and loom over—or perhaps more accurately, hunch over, like old giants. And if you are quiet, and if you listen carefully, you’ll swear you hear those shelves breathing, the sounds of giants harrumphing over us mere mortals below.

This is the kind of place without hip kids in wool hats and lattes—but rather the kind with an inch of dust collecting on the shelves and maybe some cat hair, too. The kind of place with a girl behind the counter who could be anything between twenty-seven and forty-seven years old, reading a book, and that’s all she minds to do. If you have a question that’s not idiotic, she will be happy to answer it. But if you’re interrupting to ask where the Dean Koontz books are, you really shouldn’t be in this holy place.

And no, she also doesn’t know the name of that book by the name of that author you can’t remember.

And no, e-books. Just no.

She’s wearing a dowdy but comfy sweater and a no-fuss ponytail. I decide she’s definitely twenty-seven because the slouch neck of the sweater reveals the spaghetti strap of a tank top—and I decide she’s probably fun. A good time. Wild, in fact. You just know with those ones.

Then in the back, there’s a possible treasure hunt—the everything else section, where there are CDs, DVDs, VHS tapes, and best of all, vinyl records. I try to tip toe past the giants, skipping over their books, but I hear them sigh in disdain. I want to explain myself. You see, I just bought all these books last month that I already have no time to read. I swear, honestly, my bedside table has like six piles plus a few more on the floor. I’ve got to sleep in the same room as the books I’m currently reading, and right now, it’s an orgy. Look, honestly, I got them at a real bookstore, at the Borders before it went out of business. Thirty of ‘em, all glossy and virginal and smelling of ink and fresh pulp, sweeter than the smell of citrus.

I know, I should have gone more often. I should have bought more books before it closed. We all should have. It’s a shame, and it’s our fault, and we know it. Well, some of us do.

But it’s no use to plead with the giants. The won’t hear my case. They’re old and they’re grumpy, and they have wiser things to talk about. Theirs are conversations we cannot hear or understand, like a child playing on the floor under the table, while the adults smoke cigarettes and sip beers above, speaking in hushed and solemn tones. We long to be a part of it, to know what of it, but then we grow up and wish we could go back to not knowing. Wish we could go back to underneath the table, our secret fort, where the dog also watched guard, our trusty sidekick.

I miss my sidekick. Us mortals are too sensitive. Wound too easily. Take it all too personal. Man up now, suck it in and stand up straight. Rah rah, and all of that. Onward march then.

I make my way to the back, past the giants, past the girl, and also past an owlish man studying the rows of books in the military history section, which is labeled in handwritten scrawl on a piece of masking tape. The records sit in crates on the floor, in crates behind those crates, and in haphazardly stacked piles on top of the crates and the crates behind those. Hoo boy.

Right away I could see it wasn’t the usual thrift store fare in the crates, the stuff grandma doesn’t even listen to—the Herb Alberts, the Sing Alongs with Mitch, the banged up Christmas records. This was actual, honest-to-god rock and roll in here.

So I’m crouching and flipping through the crates, my knees starting to tingle and the lactic acid racking up in my calves. Suddenly the next LP I flip to is Sgt Pepper. As in Lonely Hearts Club Band. As in the Beatles. A nice clean, beauty of a copy, too. Usually that shit is snapped up and put eBay for a million dollars plus an additional billion dollars shipping. Or it’s placed behind some glass counter and marked up to fifty bucks, even if looks like it was ran over twice and wouldn’t be worth that much if Ringo sneezed on it.

Instead, here it was among the common and mortal records, in the $4 crate, although admittedly it was meekly marked as $10. This is the Beatles, after all. The book store owners weren’t fools. I bought it because I always buy multiple copies of Beatles records. I’m forever chasing after that one good clean copy without a speck of dust gunking the inner grooves. Gunk is reality in the analog world. But this one was pretty. There was no ringwear and the colors were vivid. The corners were sharp.

It wasn’t until I got home that I noticed the inside sleeve. Early Pepper copies came with a pink-swirl on the sleeve. It intrigued me enough to do some Googling. And make some phone calls. And have my friend pull out his “Field Guide to Beatles Records,” a book he swears he’s never “used in the field, whatever that means.” (LIES.)

I became sucked into a massive wormhole of arcane Beatles knowledge, a circle of hell in esotericism. There are differences in the copyright information printed in microprint on the back covers, which is the difference between common copies and rarer ones. If it has a MACLEN and NEMS copyright on the back, it’s a common copy.

But my copy only had the NEMS copyright.

To my horror, three hours of research passed. I began sweating at the thought of my wife walking in the door from work, and me having nothing ready for dinner because I became obsessed with the subtleties of copyright information on the back cover.

“But it doesn’t say MACLEN, honey!” is not a valid excuse.

SWEET CIRCLE OF HELL.

As it turns out my copy is one of the rarer first pressings, a copy in its condition worth $100-$200. That gives me hope, in a digital world where everyone has a computer in their pocket—that you can still stumble into a little closet of a bookstore and unsuspectingly find a rare Beatles record that someone else didn’t know about, not even yourself. Perhaps it’s something fated in the analog world: a bit of random variation, a speck of dust among the ones and ohs.