Double Fault

The easiest thing to do is to take your time and getting something right the first time. This is especially so when no one is expecting you to do anything. You're acting on nothing but your own impatience. This happens to me often. It's an overreaction to the fear that I won't do the thing at all. I'm susceptible to paralysis by analysis, and so the grapes can die on the vine while I try to get them just right. Sometimes I run them out there prematurely.

Sometimes, against all odds, the thing I hurry out actually is in good shape, but it's really the exception. What happens more often is that I see some unacceptable mistake (which is perhaps unacceptable only in my mind), and I have to fix it. The trouble is that I am now so flustered that I feel I must rush out a correction. This has the effect of introducing a flaw even worse than was there already into the thing I'm doing.

Change From Within

As time passes, I get more and more tired of holding things back. We all learn to keep much of what we think to ourselves for various reasons. Not every thought merits being shared, for one thing. For another, many thoughts we have would be hurtful to people, and so we spare their feelings by maintaining our silence. More so than many, I decline to say what's on my mind, or at least to say it to the person I want. I'll find someone else to say it to.

More and more, though, I find myself becoming more candid. I now say things in this blog that I probably would not have, both because fewer than ever are reading it and because I have less and less time and energy to get very clever with my posts. About all I can do now is say things plainly and hope there is no trouble from it. To date there has been no trouble, probably because no one particularly is reading.

Dictated But Not Read

There is a tray in the lobby of my apartment building that is sporadically stocked with complimentary fruit. It's usually something like oranges, or, more likely, apples. Upon noticing as I was heading out the other night that there were some apples on the tray, I paused. I wasn't exactly hungry, and to the extent that I was, apples were not what would sate me. I grabbed one apple and then considered that I was about to be with some four or some people, each of whom could theoretically want an apple.

I started to grab four apples, but stopped myself out of concern that I was abusing the privilege so kindly (if inconsistently) extended to us by the building management (who, incidentally, can well manage to absorb the loss on account of their ever increasing rent). I put back all of the apples but one, which I offered to the friend who was waiting outside to pick me up. She declined the offer, leaving me rather at a loss.

No, Thanks

On Sunday the Emmys were held, and if I know anything about it I have my aggressively live-tweeting friends to be thankful for. If they were content to live in the moment, I'm sure I'd be ignorant of the whole thing now. Certainly I was content to be ignorant of it. There aren't very many shows that I have made any effort to watch with regularity. This has really always been the case, with the exception of the stretch of time during which I had cable and a DVR.

Not only did people issue a real-time comment on every single thing that drew their attention (instead of, I assume, speaking to the friends at least some of them must have been watching the broadcast with), they did so almost invariably with a negative slant. I find it rather puzzling that someone would dislike a show so much and, instead of turning it off, just growing angrier and angrier. I guess I don't get people.

Don Quixote

Yesterday was not a very happy message, I have to admit. I believe in being positive, but that's just not always there. Being genuine is as important as being positive, and it may be more so. Today is not going to be any better than yesterday, but I really hope tomorrow is. Anyway, my mind is on something that happened at the start of the weekend. I'd had a little bourbon, and that was almost certainly a contributing factor to what follows here.

I was online admiring some of the finds on a Facebook group dedicated to the collecting of VHS specifically in the horror genre. Not everybody is completely faithful to those parameters, and so someone posted a picture of a vinyl record they found at a Goodwill. The guy explained that it was priced at 25 dollars, but that he peeled off the price sticker and managed to pay only a dollar. I was offended.

I Weep

Some people are very dumb. Obviously dumb people, which is to say the people whose appearance and manner of speaking spell out how dumb they are, are not the ones we have to worry about. Like the cartoonish racists of movies like "The Help", the cartoonish idiots are not the ones who represent the worst of the problem. It's the ones that seem smart but are dumb at the core who we have to worry about.

A fine litmus test can be found in the form of satirical news articles. I remember when I first discovered there was such a thing as "The Onion". The Onion is a fake newspaper and website filled with articles that tell falsehoods in order to shed light on some kind of truth. That's what comedy does, in a way. It helps to unearth truth, or to neutralize what is painful in life. It does that with things that are, on the surface, lies.

Negative Thoughts

I generally have faith in the ultimate resolution of mysteries. What we don't know we someday will, I always feel. It may take so much time that we ourselves will never know, but surely those who succeed us will know, or those who succeed them will. That's not entirely satisfying I admit, but I take some comfort in knowing that eventually answers come and, in the event of injustice, justice comes in some form or another.

There are many famous mysteries that endure presently, some of them being injustices at the same time. They never found DB Cooper, the famed airline hijacker. They never ever figured out who poisoned the Tylenols- an evil act responsible for today's tamper-proof containers. That's a frightening thing when you figure that the responsible party could easily still be out there and probably is no better balanced mentally today than they were then.

A Listener

A thing happened the other day. A friend of mine and I were heading home from an improv show on the subway, and we were talking plenty. It's a given that with me involved, the conversation was loud and potentially objectionable. If you haven't gleaned this yet, let me say that I have been criticised by strangers multiple times for talking too loud on a city bus, where the standards are pretty generous. Anyway, this wasn't like that exactly.

This was not a case of someone being sorry that I spoke. It's more that I was sorry someone was glad that I spoke. It went like this: At some point, my friend told me he'd bought some Groupon voucher for a restaurant we'd been to. He explained that he paid ten dollars for a twenty dollar voucher, and my brain had a problem with that. "Why," I asked him, "didn't they just give you a ten dollar voucher for free?"

A Frustration

There's something that I've been reading a bit about that bugs me to death. Now, I'm not as political as I was when I was in college. At the time, I ate, breathed and slept politics, and I was rather liberal. My beliefs haven't exactly changed, but I do not expend the same amount of energy on it all as I used to. Maybe I've learned enough not to act as if I know so much, or I don't care to treat it like a game you score points in.

Anyway, there are things that maybe I would have been into that I am not now. There's this thing that apparently happens now. The idea is that you start a petition over something that you send off to the White House if you get enough names. If you get enough names, they have to respond to your petition. That's some kind of law, or agreement. That's all there is to it. I don't see that anything actually has to happen except that a reply is formulated and sent.

What's It To You?

In many respects I have grown more like my father over the years. I am no more handy with tools than I ever was, but in matters of opinion I have become closer to him. Growing up, it was common for me to declare that some notable figure had died, and as I would be under the impression that my father liked them and their work, I would expect that he would take a particular interest. He wouldn't, and his explanation would be, "I didn't know him".

I didn't get that then, but I think I do now. Other people find a lot of room in their hearts to mourn celebrities, but I don't. I also don't feel much for those same celebrities when they triumph. It is presently awards season, and many actors are being honored with nominations presently. Some of them will win and more will lose. Many more will not have had the opportunity, and those who are considered to have deserved it are said to have been snubbed.

Clear Thinking

I like to think of myself as a good critical thinker, although that may not be entirely true. At the very least, I have a healthy skepticism about what I read and see. Plenty of other people, friends included, don't give off that impression too much. When a rebellion breaks out in some oppressed country, they're inclined to assume that the rebels are good because they hate someone bad. I wonder whether the rebels might not be worse.

This thing happened the other day that really annoyed me. It wasn't on the same level as one of those things, but it still left me upset. There was that horrific massacre a few days ago, which made me despair for the prospect of more peaceful days. I would settle for more clear-headed thinking than we seem to get. I don't know why we look to celebrities for statements to make sense of such a tragedy, but we do.

Don't Bother

People say dumb things. I'm guilty of it myself all too often, so I'm really very credible on this subject. I like to think, though, that I and those I know are better than average about withholding stupid remarks. Others are often not so good on it. A prime example of that would be something someone known to a friend of mine. I don't know them myself, and so I decided that it was not for me to involve myself.

The Fresh & Easy grocery store chain is closing down. Started by the British chain Tesco, it was supposed to find a niche and, obviously, thrive. That hasn't panned out. I can only say that I went once and it was basically fine. I would not ever have relied on it heavily or primarily. In any event, while I'm more upset by the loss of jobs and tax revenue, others were genuinely fond of the chain, which I don't regard as the stupid thing.

Not This Time

Over the last few days, there's been a big fuss over the latest big lottery jackpot. It amounted to something like half a billion dollars, if I understand correctly. That's a lot of money, and so it's only natural that some hysteria would develop. I didn't buy a ticket, but then I couldn't have, as California does not have Powerball. I don't think I would have bought a ticket anyway, as it wasn't really on my radar, but I do typically buy one when it gets so big.

Two winners did emerge from the latest drawing, and I gather that one was some family in Maryland. the other is somebody in Arizona, my home state. I don't think that they have been named yet as of this writing, but that hasn't stopped people from claiming to be the winner. That brings me to my point. There's this guy on Facebook who purports to have the winning ticket. He further says that he will give a million dollars to a randomly selected person who shares the photo of him with the ticket.

A Couple Of Fools

Some people really drive me crazy. I get into these dark moods where I loathe everyone in the world and marvel that anyone ever got anywhere ever considering how dumb and contemptible they all are. These moods are as deep as can be, and it's generally best if I ride them out alone. If I'm among people or trying to do something, it can't help but come out badly. I just can't keep it to myself very easily at all.

There are these people who will come out with some wisdom, and everyone but me will ooh and ah at it like it's some really brilliant philosophy that they've never heard before. The person who says it will sound like they just came up with it and no one ever could have conceived of it before. It sounds to me like some superficial platitude that might have been spouted by some empty-headed- college student who just discovered the same writers that everybody ever has had to read.

"No Fruit", Says The Peacock

Every two years, a substantial portion of the American television-watching audience belongs to NBC. This is more true for the Summer Games, it being the bigger event and its events more commonly being popular across the country. There's no alternative for us but to watch NBC's coverage, although I have read tantalizing accounts of the superior coverage that other nations enjoy. Perhaps they also complain, though. I wonder about that.

I never do find complaining to be very compelling. If worrying is the futile thing that we do when we're afraid, then complaining is the futile thing that we do when we're angry. If there were anything you could do, you'd be doing it instead of complaining, right? Even when there is something to do, many complain because doing it is in reality less appealing than the problem itself. I try to keep my complaints to myself, or at worst to unload them only on dear friends and loved ones who are tolerant.

The Lie

There are a lot of reasons to lie to someone. You might lie to impress someone, or to elicit sympathy. You might lie for personal gain in any number of forms, the reduction of one's taxes being a classic example. Those are obvious reasons behind which there is understandable logic, if not any other admirable virtues. I find that there are more unfathomable reasons for lying, and I wind up using those more than the other.

I will sometimes lie by omission, bluffing my way through a discussion of a film because I neglected at the very outset to declare that I had not seen it. In that, coming clean becomes harder the further you go, and yet there are no truly negative consequences to it. It really is not a rational act, but then there seem to be fewer of those all the time. I would hardly hope that we should turn the tide in the area of deceit before anything else.

A Trip

The other night, a couple friends and I were driving back home from a birthday celebration at some far-flung dive bar. It was some kind of a party, featuring the birthday girl in an awfully talented band, and there was more beside that to the credit of the evening. In any event, the ride home was a long one, and let's just say that I at least was still very much seized by "the party spirit". It made the ride somewhat more tolerable than it might have been under other circumstances.

The shotgun passenger had out her phone, and was playing songs to supplement what must have been a lackluster playlist on what I gather we now call "terrestrial radio". I was singing along to each one, whether  I was very confident about the lyrics or not. It would be fair to say that my vocal performances were distinguished more by their enthusiasm than by their successful execution. At the best of times, I think I must have a limited vocal range, but these were not the best of times.

What Do You Know?

I've been getting annoyed lately by talk of the old streetcar system that there used to be here in Los Angeles (and by extension those that used to exist in other American cities). I'll be online and see somebody I know has posted a map showing where the streetcars used to run. They'll be saying how we had this paradise of wonderful, extensive public transit, and then the villainous car companies ripped it all out and doomed us to gridlock.

I don't know how true that all is. I know a little about the streetcars and the stories about why they're gone, but not a lot. At least I admit my relative ignorance. You won't hear that from the romantics bemoaning the loss of something they never experienced personally. I wonder if it is as simple as the innocent public being robbed of something they wanted by evil General Motors. I'm inclined to doubt, so much do we hear about America's love affair with the car.

Sleep Like A Man

Accepted wisdom is frequently just unexamined wisdom. Generations of fathers have told family members reaching for the breadsticks or the tortilla chips at a restaurant that they are some kind of a scam that benefits the restaurant. There's no logical basis for thinking so. What could the restaurant gain from filling you up with cheap food and sending you home with your expensive entree in a box? Even if you left it behind, what do they get from it?

Still such saying persist. I cannot for the life of me fathom the meaning that lies in the old saying, 'sleeping like a baby'. I could get angry thinking about it (as in fact I did before sitting down to write this in a bid to defuse the fury). You're supposed to have slept like a baby if you did so deeply and without interruption, awaking fully refreshed. Which aspect of that is akin to any baby you've ever heard of, save for the terribly ill ones?

You First

When I used to live with my parents, my father would go hiking on nearby mountain trails often, and I would go with him. When I come home and we are all together, then he and I go hiking sometimes as we used to. The mountain preserve is in the middle of the metro area, and it is heavily trafficked by people on bicycles, horses and foot. Only rigorous adherence to protocol and very conscientious behavior could keep those groups from quarreling.

It doesn't go so well, really. One thing that would seem to help is a general air of politeness. When two hikers cross paths, it's common for a hearty 'hello' to be exchanged. It's nice to be nice, but it doesn't go so well, as I said. My natural inclination is to say hello and then receive their hello. Unfortunately, the reply often isn't forthcoming. I don't know what it costs some people to say hello (because it must cost them dearly), but for me it's free.