Why I Will Never Buy Sushi at Walgreens

Why I Will Never Buy Sushi at Walgreens:

Reflections on Modern Retail and the Disgusting Human Body

A new flagship Walgreens just opened near my office in Downtown Crossing, Boston.  For a long time, a huge Borders store was the anchor tenant for the area.  I’m not usually much of a booster of big box chain stores, but when the Borders chain closed (riding the wave towards new preferences in media consumption and general illiteracy), I was sad.  If you’ve received a card or present from me in the past decade, it came from the Downtown Crossing Borders.  After Borders closed, there was lots of buzz about what exciting new development would take its place.  A bar and restaurant complex?  A combination theater / bowling alley?  A concert hall that could kick off the Downtown Crossing social and cultural renaissance? 

No. A Walgreens.  To be fair, it’s a really big, really nice Walgreens.  A flagship store.  You’re not supposed to go there to shop so much as to have a retail experience.  They’re marketing a lifestyle. 

There’s a sushi bar at the new Walgreens.  It looks fine.  Pretty nice and sleek, actually.  There was nothing overtly disturbing-looking about the sushi itself.  But still.  I will never, ever buy Walgreens Sushi.  If I were relaxing in my office lunchroom some afternoon, dipping a piece of kappa maki roll in my soy sauce and wasabi, someone would inevitably say, “hey, that looks good, where’d you get it?  From that new raw bar down on State Street?”  And then I’d have to say, “no, Walgreens.”  And that’s just not right. 

I can’t quite put my finger on why the idea of Walgreens sushi feels so very wrong.  Maybe it has something to do with the general nature of a drugstore.  The flagship Walgreens has three-story-high ceilings and beautiful stonework and great lighting.  They sell Boston souvenirs and small appliances and fro-yo and craft beers.  And there’s even a little museum in a former bank vault in the back about the history of downtown.  The whole experience is supposed to feel fresh and fun and vibrant.  And it sort of does.  But still, when you get right down to it, Walgreens is a drugstore.  And drugstores sell remedies for physical human conditions.  And if you think the human body is a miraculous thing of beauty, you’ve been reading too many magazines.  The human body is horrible, terrifying and disgusting.   

One of the most traumatic things that has ever happened to me was to have to spend almost two hours in the aisles of a CVS.  I had decided, the day after the mayor declared a flu epidemic in the city of Boston, to go to CVS to get a flu shot.  There were about a billion hacking, sniffling people there doing the same thing.  I had to wait in a long, slow line in one aisle to check in, a long, slow line in a second aisle to pay, and a long, slow line in a third aisle to get the actual shot.  During the whole wait, there was nothing to do but thoroughly, meticulously observe every detail of every product on every shelf. 

Usually when you go to a drugstore, it’s because you have one specific ailment and one discrete corresponding item to pick up.  But to be in the atypical position of having to confront all personal care products at the same time is just absolutely horrifying.  There’s a product for everything: Rashes, funguses, ingrown toenails and hairs, boils;  The inability to crap;  The inability not to crap;  Indigestion, too much burping, too much farting; Dandruff, cracked skin, oily skin; Hair sprouting from inappropriate orifices.  And all of that is before you get anywhere near the genital regions and all of their concomitant warts, yeasts, itching, chafing, leaking, oozing and hemorrhaging. 

A drugstore experience like mine is not easily forgotten.  I’m carrying some baggage.  The new Walgreens may be pristine and immaculate and new, but it’s a drugstore nonetheless.  When I wandered in for the first time the memories all came flooding back.  Which doesn’t do much to stimulate one’s appetite.  Everything has its place.  Humans need products to help mitigate their inherent repulsiveness.  So there are stores for that.  And humans need and like to eat.  So there are restaurants for that.  But those two places should be separate and distinct.  They say “don’t shit where you eat.”  They should also say “don’t buy Vagisil and FungiCure where you eat.”  And that, in a nutshell, is why I will never buy sushi at Walgreens.

The Boston Marathon Bombing - Good and Evil and the World we Live In

When something horrible happens, like the bombing at the Boston Marathon, really, all we can do is to keep on doing whatever it is that we do.  I’ve lived in Boston for 13 years.  And what I like to do is to run and to write.  So I thought I’d share my thoughts about what happened last Monday.

What’s good in the world

Running, to me, is a distillation of all that’s good in the world.  In the past six years, I’ve run 15 marathons and logged about 40 miles almost every week.  Running has become the center point of my life.  It is my hobby, my drug, my religion.  It is the reason I travel, the way I socialize and my reason for getting out of bed in the morning.  When I run, I feel physically and mentally invigorated.  If I run in the morning, everything I encounter during my day is just better.  Running is simple and easy and natural.  All you need is a pair of shoes.  All you have to do is walk out the door and go.  Instructional running books mostly try to teach you to shed your adult inhibitions and run like a five year-old.

And a marathon, to me, is everything good running has to offer, times ten.  It’s a travel destination, a way to explore a new place and to become fast friends with strangers.  It’s a competition, but without any of the chest thumping and machismo of most sports.  The only adversary is gravity, wind and your own physical and psychological limitations.  It takes a lot of hard preparation, but anyone can do it.  If you go out and run, and then run a little more and a little more again, you can do a marathon.

I’ve never run the Boston Marathon.  I’m too slow to qualify, too squeamish about asking for money to get a charity bib and too rule-following to be a bandit.  I’ll do it someday.  But I watch it every single year.  My favorite place to watch is just past the finish line.  I like to watch the expression on the runners’ faces the moment they stop running.  In one instant, they shift from almost unbearable pain and exertion to complete euphoria.  There is virtually nothing in the world that makes me misty.  But I often lose my breath and get teary looking into the eyes of some anonymous Joe slowing to a walk after crossing the finish line, who I don’t know and who I will probably never see again. 

Our friends Bob and his wife, Barb, from Colorado, stayed with us this year for the marathon.  Leslie and I got Bob all set up – walked him through the expo, drove him along some of the course, made him a pasta dinner, dropped him off in the morning at the bus staging ground and sent him off with some nip-guards, Gu, a throw-away sweatshirt and wishes for a great race.  Leslie and Barb studied the course map, plotted out places to watch and cross-referenced them with Bob’s expected pace  to make sure they would have time to get from place to place to see Bob a few times during the race. 

At dinner the night before the race, we were joined by Heather and Gail from New Zealand.  They were 50 and 70 and had run 15 and 33 marathons. Barb and Bob have been friends with Leslie since they were kids.  Heather and Gail were perfect strangers.  They were acquaintances of neighbors, looking for a meal the night before a marathon.  We were happy to have them.  That’s just how it works.

Marathon Monday

I was tracking six runners during the marathon – Bob, Heather and Gail, my friend Shawn from Ithaca, my morning running buddy Tim, and Wendy, a Canadian lawyer I had met at a business breakfast the week before the race.  I left my office at around noon to go down to my usual spot past the finish line.  I had to be back at my office for a call and left the finish line half an hour before the first explosion.  Bob finished the race, picked up his medal and bag and found Leslie, Barb and Leslie’s friend Daryl at the family meeting area.  They were walking towards the T when they heard the loud explosions.

Then everything went berserk.  No need to recap the details; the whole world saw it on TV.  We tracked down all the runners and spectators we knew.  They were all fine.  We all met back at our house.  For the next four days, like everyone, I stayed glued to my computer monitoring news, Facebook, Twitter and e-mail.  It was heart-warming to get messages of concern from what seemed like every person I had ever met. 

You can’t spend too much time worrying about how things could have been different.  If my call at work hadn’t been pushed up an hour, I probably would have hung around longer at the finish line.  If one of the people killed by the bomb had seen a better spot ten feet away, they would probably still be around today.  But that’s how it works.  There are a thousand different paths you can take every second of every day.  But of the infinite possibilities, every life is just one single unfolding of events.  There’s no looking back. 

What’s Evil in the World and What do we Do About it All

Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev did something so incomprehensibly horrible, it’s hard even to process.  If the evil behind the marathon bombings lies in these two individuals, then we’ve accomplished everything we need to – capture or kill them.  The precision with which the police and military machine was able to identify and catch the two bombers was hard to fathom.  It took three days to find photos of them, five hours to identify them and 29 hours to kill and capture them.  I’m not a big military booster, but I was floored by how effectively the police and military were able to complete the task that had to be done. 

But if you look one slight bit below the surface and start thinking about what makes people do the things they do, things start to get a whole lot more complicated.  To say that every person is a manifestation of the influences that surround him, and of whatever happenstance circumstances happen to show up on the scene is not just a hippy-dippy, bleeding heart new age Buddhist mantra, it’s a reality.  We got the guys, but the guys are just symptoms of a disease.  And it’s my opinion, for better or for worse, that the disease is not something for which there will ever be a cure. 

The rote platitudes our leaders are obligated to spew – justice will be served; evil will be conquered; the spirit of our community will never be repressed – don’t resonate with me.  And while I understand the need and desire of some to show solidarity and demonstrate to the world that we will carry on as always, those kinds of sentiments don’t move me. 

Tomorrow’s terrorists will unfortunately not be deterred by seeing today’s terrorists brought to justice.  And they will not feel defeated by knowing that they have not broken our will.  So what do I think? Just keep on keepin’ on, I guess.   And what do we do?  If everyone got more cuddles, would that rid the world of evil.  No, but it would be a small step in the right direction.  The elements of good and evil are out there in the world.  Some of us are lucky enough to be born in a good time and place with good families and positive networks and somehow manage to absorb some critical mass of all that is positive.  And some of us just aren’t.  Some of us will absorb all that is evil.  I don’t think there will ever be an end to the terrible, incomprehensible atrocities that people commit. 

So there’s good and bad.  And we can each decide on any given day which we think has a leg up. Tragedies will strike and individuals will do horrible things.  I will keep running.  Boston will stay strong and proud.  And the universe will continue to unfold in whatever way it will. We’ve all gotta keep doing our thing and try, when we can, to enjoy the ride. 

That’s what I think of Marathon Monday and that’s what I think of the world.  

My Friend Jill – Zen Master of the Upper East Side

(Jill’s apartment on 78^th and 3^rd.  Not the living room. Not some of the apartment. All of it)

My friend Jill has the smallest apartment I have ever seen.  She bought it ten years ago.  It’s in an upscale part of Manhattan – 78^th and 3^rd on the Upper East Side – in a nice building with a doorman.  Not that I haven’t seen plenty of tiny New York apartments.  I have lots of friends and family who live in New York and I understand that amenities that are standard in the rest of the normal universe – like windows in a bedroom or a sink in a bathroom – are not things you take for granted in New York.  I also read the New York Times – a paper whose mission is 50% to provide Pulitzer prize-winning national and international news reporting and 50% to discuss how hard it is to find an apartment in New York.  And I understand New York pricing considerations.  Unless you work in finance, are independently wealthy or have stolen your dead grandmother’s identity and are squatting in her rent-controlled apartment, your New York apartment will not be more than 750 square feet.  I have just enough etiquette training that I didn’t come right out and ask Jill how much she paid for her place (although not enough etiquette to stop me from doing my research for this penetrating exposé by showing up uninvited to girls’ night at Jill’s place, drinking all her white wine and taking off without helping to clean anything up).  But my guess is that if she were willing to move to some middle America exburb, she could trade in her place for a 6,000 square foot mcmansion with a four car garage and a hockey rink in the basement. 

You can see Jill’s apartment in the pictures above.  Those aren’t pictures of Jill’s living room or a part of her apartment.  That’s the whole thing.  The hallway that leads to the bathroom has a galley kitchen with a mini-‘fridge.  And there are two closets.  When the couch is folded out, the room becomes the bedroom.  When there is food on the coffee table, it’s a dining room.  When friends are crashed out all over the floor in sleeping bags, it’s the guest suite. 

But what’s most shocking about Jill’s apartment is not its size, but the complete and utter lack of stuff.  Jill has what she calls a “total lack of crap” policy in her life “with anyone, anything, and everything.”  The entirety of her possessions are as follows: 1 couch with a fold-out bed; 1 glass coffee table; 1 end table; 1 bureau; 1 TV bolted to the wall; 1 nice Oriental rug; 3 pictures; 1 desk; 1 office chair; and 1 laptop computer.  She has clothes, 30 pairs of shoes and some cleaning supplies in the closet.  That’s it. 

In her own way, Jill lives the life of a Buddhist monk.  And not in the sort of backed-in philosophical justification kind of way that some people adopt when they find themselves with no stuff and nowhere nice to live (i.e., Am I a sort of down-on-my-luck slacker?  Au contraire.  I’m a monk!  Buddhism, man, that’s the ticket!).  Jill’s also not your average pot-smoking, Himalaya-climbing Western Zen convert.  She’s a highly educated, world traveling successful professional.  She works for the London School of Economics.  She’s as rational as they come. Her choice of lifestyle is thoroughly thought-out and purposeful.  Jill does not see a need to hang onto a single possession that is not mission critical for her life.  And she’s ruthless about getting rid of any object that doesn’t fit the bill.  I grilled Jill the entire time I was at her place about the specifics.  D: “What about magazines?” J: “I have several subscriptions and I keep the current issue of each.  When a new one arrives, the old one gets tossed.”  D: “Christmas cards?” J: “I read each one, appreciate the nice thought, and put it in the recycling bin.”  D: “How about toilet paper.  Any back-up?” J: “Yes, plenty.  I buy the big bulk packs.  They’re in the closet.”  D: “What about a power charger for a BlackBerry that died five years ago, you know, just in case?” J: “I think that’s your own pathology, Dan.”   

Here is the clincher, proof positive that Jill has taken minimalist living to a level that virtually no other mere mortal could ever hope to achieve: Jill has in her apartment exactly one pen.  Which makes perfect sense if you think about it.  As Jill will tell you, if you live alone, you can only write one thing at a time.  Why would you ever need two pens, much less the 500 or 1,000 that you find in a typical house? 

Whatever the origin of Jill’s philosophy, being free of possessions is very much in keeping with the Buddhist concept of living in the moment.  The past is gone and the future will never arrive.  And most possessions are reminders of the past or tools we think we’ll need later. 

Jill focuses relentlessly on the physical items she needs and purges all others.  Whatever question you can throw her way about how she lives, she can respond with a clear and confident answer.  With one exception.  There’s one thing I nailed her on.  Ice.  Jill’s half size mini fridge doesn’t have a freezer, so she can’t produce ice in-house.  Crafting a nice cocktail means going down the street to a deli to buy a bag of ice.  When I pointed out to Jill that she lives in one of the nicest neighborhoods in maybe the single most “premium” city in the country and doesn’t have ice, and that even people living in the most decrepit trailers in the poorest backwaters of Appalachia can usually make their own ice, Jill said, reluctantly, “yeah, that’s a problem.” 

Anyway, despite the ice issue, Jill’s got a good thing going on and, in her unique way, is very inspiring.  I don’t think I’ll ever be able to achieve quite her level of material discipline, but I’m making an effort.  The week after I visited Jill, when getting ready to check out of a hotel room, I did my usual survey – making sure I had packed everything and tossing the pen from the hotel room in my bag.  I don’t remember ever being explicitly taught this, but I always thought that people had an almost Biblical obligation to steal pens from hotel rooms.  But no longer.  From that moment forward, I channeled my inner-Jill and vowed not to bring any more pens into my home.  I can’t bring myself to toss out the 995 pens I already have (what if I can’t find a pen?  What if they’re all out of ink?), but it’s a start.   

Zen masters sometimes show up in mysterious places.  People travel the world to seek their advice.  But if you’re looking for inspiration, before shipping off to India or Tibet, swing by Jill’s place on 3^rd Ave. in Manhattan and take a look. 

Gérard Depardieu is a Douche, and You are a Slave Owner

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Since the presidential election, I’ve been in a blissful state of media blackout.  Immediately after it was confirmed that Barry was going to serve another four years, the focus of all news turned to the fiscal cliff.  One of the main ingredients in the fiscal cliff stew was the question of who should pay how much in taxes.  Concerned citizens seemed generally to concur that the rich should pay more.  And so the discussion turned to what constitutes being rich.  The threshold annual family income number that initially got tossed around was $250,000.  Then we all had to decide whether that was right.  And then I started hearing a sentiment over and over again that made me start to lose my shit, and, ultimately, just tune out all media.  The sentiment was some incarnation of, “well yes, I make $250k but I’m not rich.” 

In the end, that point of view prevailed.  The bottom line of what our elected officials decided is that rich means having annual income of $400,000 for an individual or $450,000 for married taxpayers filing together.  The tax those folks will have to pay on amounts over the threshold has increased from 35% to 39.6%.  A hardly-scraping-by middle class individual who makes $350,000 a year won’t have to pay any more in federal taxes.   

Almost nobody thinks they’re rich.  For a big-city-living couple with a few kids and a $250k annual income, once checks are written for private school, the mortgage, two car leases and the other standard bla bla bla things you need to live in the modern world, there’s hardly enough left over for a winter trip to Florida. At the end of the day, $250k makes you feel like you’re just scraping by.  What word would people living that use to describe their lifestyle?  The one I hear over and over is “comfortable.”

Rich seems to mean having a vacation home and a yacht and flying on a private jet.  How did that come to be?  How is it that people who make 100 times more than the vast majority of everyone living on earth don’t feel like they’re rich?  I blame TV.  I know, I tend to blame everything on TV.  To be more specific, I blame TV ads, which are a by-product of the whole consumption-based economy that can only survive if the masses are brainwashed into thinking that buying more and more and more stuff will make them happier, more interesting, better looking and (for part of the population) better equipped to please their wives in bed.  During any given holiday season NFL game, once you strip away the light beer ads, it seems like about 80% of all remaining ads are for BMWs, Mercedeses, Audis and Lexuses.  I’m positive that the average football watcher does not drive one of those brands of car, but the economics of luxury car ads must be that if one in 10,000 people is moved to buy one, it’s worth the spend.  If a by-product is that 9,999 other people start subtly, imperceptibly to believe that every average Joe watching football drives a BMW, and that having to slum it in a Nissan means that they’re just getting by, well that’s an issue for someone else to meditate on. 

So let’s do a little deconstructing of the idea of living a “comfortable” life.  To be comfortable, you have to be able to afford to heat your house.  Which means you have a house.  And a heater.  If a kid is sick or a friend comes to town to visit, you can take an afternoon off from work.  If you’ve had a real grueling stretch at work and you really need to just get away for a few days, you can motor up to some cozy but unpretentious B&B and read a book for a weekend.  That all seems real average, middle of the road.  But I propose this: that it’s not.  And that perhaps we all need to recalibrate and appreciate that what “comfortable” very often means is “compared to almost everyone who has lived anywhere on Earth at any time in history, filthy, stinking, parasitic capitalist-ly in your face RICH.”     

Here’s another way I would frame it.  A comfortable life is a life lived in the front of house.  Back of house is the grungy part of a restaurant where all the hard work gets done to make the patrons in the front of house – the dining room – feel calm and well cared for.  And if things are working the way they’re supposed to, back of house is completely invisible.  This analogy applies to almost everything that makes a comfortable life possible.  In particular, everything that is manufactured.  The astonishingly successful Wal-Martification of the world has us all convinced that we have a god given right to everyday low priced $29.99 DVD players.  Every once in a while there is some spectacularly horrific event – a sweatshop fire, a photo of suicide prevention nets surrounding a factory dormitory, whatever – that causes the curtain to be pulled back and us to have to confront the fact that the special sauce that goes into the cheap merchandise that is the backbone of our comfortable existence is, essentially, slavery.

It’s not legal anymore to own a person and we’re very proud as a nation to have overcome our grizzly past where you once could.  We believe in freedom.  But if freedom means that, no, nobody holds legal title to your body, but the only choice you’re free to make is between earning $1,000 a year building iPhone parts and starving, it starts to seem like we may not have made so much progress after all.  If you live in the front of house, even if you never see the back of house domestic and international network of invisible slaves that makes it possible for you to be “comfortable” you’re not absolved from being a slave owner.

OK, that’s all pretty damning.  But, more importantly, what does Gérard Depardieu have to do with all this?  Well even in my attempt at a media black-out, some news creeped in.  When I get to work every morning, I have to 1) pass by a huge TV in the lobby that always seems to be on the 24 hour Jim Cramer Mad Money Financial Screaming Heads McNews Network and then 2) get into an elevator with a small screen that broadcasts the most aptly named network in history – Captivate – which streams idiot tidbits and survey results about office life and celebrity news. 

The celebrity news I was enlightened with last week was that Gérard Depardieu had become a Russian citizen so that he wouldn’t have to pay the newly-raised French income tax on annual income of over one million Euros.  He was so disgusted with President Hollande’s plan to pillage the rich in France that he upped and moved.  So it turns out that being righteous about being rich is not unique to US capitalists.  Something about a famous movie star pulling a stunt like this made me even more nauseated than when I hear the same crap from some twenty-something banker type.  Actors who happen to be one of the one in ten million who make it and manage to become rich have done so based on support from the unwashed masses.  Their fortunes come from all the poor peasants who have managed to squirrel away a few Shekels to buy two hours of silver screen escapism from their squalid workaday lives.  For a successful actor like that to effectively say to the huddled masses that he deserves to foot even less of the bill for the infrastructure of a civil first world society is beyond despicable.  That, in my book, buys Mr. Depardieu the title of King Douchebag or, as they say in France, Maître du Sac à Douche. 

So now what?  I’ve called you a slave owner and pointed out that there’s no way to live a modern life without standing mercilessly on the backs of the children of the world who work 16 hours a day do cobble together the Roomba you depend on.  And now I’m just going to leave you hanging?  No way.  I’ve got action items.  Follow these easy steps and you’re off the hook.  We’re good.

1) Boycott Gérard Depardieu.  If you feel the need to see a heart-warming rom com or a moving re-telling of an epic traditional French legend, go see something by another French actor like, well, I can’t think of any.  Maybe support Hugh Grant. 

2) If you ever make a statement to the effect of “something something something, but I’m not rich,” recall that the real translation of said statement is, “compared to almost all other human beings on earth, I am stinking, filthy, parasitic capitalist-ly in your face RICH.” 

3) Do not ever ever use the word “comfortable” / “uncomfortable” to describe a psychological or emotional state.  “Comfortable” means lying in a hammock sipping lemonade on a breezy summer afternoon.  Comfortable is not supposed to be the natural state of things.  Remember that your not-so-distant ancestors were happy playing with dirt and that the rest of the beasts on earth still have to worry about having their flesh ripped off by a lion while they’re still alive.  As we have discussed, “comfortable” also has the same meaning as “rich.”  See item #2 above. 

4) If you overhear someone else making statements like those described in aforementioned items 2 and 3 above, pay this blog forward and relay the message to the speaker.  They will almost surely appreciate being enlightened.  If not, have them call me. 

5) Pay your taxes, appreciate what you have, enjoy your life, and try not to shit all over the poor.  

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There are few things more disgusting than a parasitic

Front of House capitalist playing Back of House worker. 

“Ooh.  Look at me.  I can pass out chips just like a

$17,000 a year-making flight attendant!”

Appliances that Subvert the Will of God and Keep Kids Sober

Two cultural and consumer appliance phenomena recently caught my attention.  One is a stove design feature that helps orthodox Jews subvert the obvious intent of the Talmud.  And one is the newish phenomenon of kids lighting up concert arenas with their cell phones.  In their own ways, both of these developments are, at their core, just a little pathetic.

Leslie and I got a new stove last week.  A serious one.  Not some bush league thing.  It’s as big as a small car and cost almost as much.  Ten trillion BTUs.  It can boil water in 30 seconds.  It can do things I can’t even mention in writing.  But my favorite feature of all - the icing on the Thermador cake - is the “Access Phase” oven setting.  When the oven is in Access Phase mode, it turns itself on, then powers down for three minute intervals, then turns itself back on.  The purpose of this “unique cooking mode” is to “allow the Sabbath user access to the oven without effecting a change in the operation of the range.”  And the reason a person would want to use an oven without “effecting a change in its operation” is because “effecting a change in operation” is considered “work” under orthodox interpretation of the Talmud, and work on the Sabbath is prohibited.  The idea of being religious enough to think that God cares about the utter technical minutiae of your cooking habits while, at the same time, going so far out of your way to comply with what we lawyers like to call the “letter if not the spirit of the law” just blows me away.  Jews have no monopoly on coming up with creative ways to do whatever they want in violation of the clear intent of religious doctrines.  There are so many examples that I’m not even going to give more examples. 

If there is a God who keeps tabs on each of us, I have to wonder which is better: questioning whether God exists / not believing in God at all, and cooking your food whenever you feel like eating; or believing in God, reading His supposed rules about how He wants you to conduct your life, and then flagrantly violating them.  If you’re in the first group, and it turns out you’re wrong, and you meet God on judgment day, it seems plausible that he might nonetheless engage you in a little philosophical dialogue and consider your reasons for feeling the way you do.  But if you’re in the second group and you meet God, do you really think He would say “Wow, you’re right.  You sure got me.  I guess I should have drafted that provision more clearly.”  Or would He be more likely to say “What am I, a total fucking idiot?  You think I couldn’t see you doing exactly what I said you shouldn’t do?  Thought you’d get off on a technicality, Mr. First Year Law Student? The ol' ‘you told me to stop punching my little sister but you never said I couldn’t stab her in the eye with a pencil!’  Insult my intelligence.  Sorry asshole.  Hope you brought your flip-flops; I hear it’s pretty warm in HELL!” 

Similar to subverting the will of the almighty via pricey stove is the issue of pot smoking at shows.

One of the most disappointing developments of the past generation is the replacement, at rock concerts, of lighters with cell phones.  In the quaint old days of yore, there would always come a time at a show when the people in the crowd would take a break from their pot smoking, raise their lit lighters, engage their fellow travelers in a moment of solidarity and, by illuminating the sky with a warm glow, bestow upon the band a humble demonstration of love and appreciation.  Now they use cell phones.  As a technical matter, the light from a lighter is much mellower than the light from a cell phone.  It’s the difference between a glowing candle and a bank of fluorescent lights glaring down on a cubicle farm.  But the more profound issue is one of living in the moment (with maybe a little help from your lighter) versus simply serving as a conduit for posting an experience on the Internet (thanks to your cell phone). 

Drugs are not a good thing.  At the end of the day, what with all the gang violence, addiction, depression, homelessness, and general degeneration into a drooling, lifeless puddle, it’s probably best to gravitate toward the straight and narrow.  But a little pot smoking at a show?  If nothing else, it does (I’m told) tend to make people focus and, you know, pay attention to the tunes. A cell phone - or more accurately, a personal broadcasting device that happens to have a phone attached - does the opposite.  It lets you transmit everything you’re doing real-time, a side effect of which is the inability to genuinely experience anything.  It’s ironic.  The more Facebook (or whatever newfangled app those youngsters today are using) updates you have showing fantastic-looking experiences your body has been present at, the fewer of those “experiences” you’re actually experiencing. 

I’ve read about a surprising trend in colleges - less drug and alcohol use based on a fear of video exposure.  Parents, administrators and expensive ad campaigns have been perennially useless in getting college kids to stop partying like college kids.  But the idea that any bender could easily end up on-line and stay with you literally for the rest of your life is apparently a real deterrent to kids’ toking themselves into oblivion. 

The trend away from living in the moment will be a tough one to counteract.  A concerted effort will have to be made.  Perhaps we’ll need a new parent group like MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving).  Maybe MAESS - Mothers Against Excessive Show Sobriety.  The idea would be to create a safe show environment for kids where they can briefly escape the all-encompassing gaze of the Internet and the now almost hard-wired need to broadcast every moment of life.  Everyone gets patted down at the gate.  Cell phones get confiscated and everyone is given a lighter and a small amount of weed.  It would take some adjusting, but maybe, just maybe, for a few hours, kids would re-learn the art of being present, enjoying the presence of people near them and being blown away by some burning, wicked 35 minute jam band riffs.

Technology can enhance many facets of life.   But an appliance is just a slave to its master, a tool to further whatever the brain behind the operations sets out to accomplish.  We all have to answer the same question Judge Smails posed to Danny Noonan – “do you stand for good or do you stand for bad.”  If your general inclination is to stomp all over the teachings of the Lord or trade all of life’s real experiences for a few morsels of cyber-fame, your stove and phone will be there to help lead you down the path.  Take control!  Fight for all that is just and good!  Don’t let your appliances lead you unto misery and destruction!  (But whatever you end up doing, send me a photo.)  

Denver, Boulder and Longmont - Busted Housing Developments, Beer and Subarus - A Little Something for Everyone

(the throne at Avery Brewing Company)

I made plans a while back to go to Colorado to catch up with two of my college study abroad buddies – Adrian and Harry – and spend a little quality / therapeutic time with my favorite aunt and uncle and cousins – Chuck, Diana, Ricky and Lyla.  A deal I was working on at work heated up the day before I was supposed to leave, and I thought I might have to call my trip off.  But the stars all aligned at the last minute and I was able to go.  As always, wherever I am, I try to sneak out each morning for a run. And I saw some good stuff in Denver, Boulder and Longmont – a little something for every taste.

Path-Breaking, Never-Been-Done-Before (at least for me) Morning Run #1: La Quinta Inn Denver Airport

I knew I would be getting into Denver late – 3AM east coast time – so I had reserved a room at the closest hotel to the airport I could find.  There’s a strip of hotels not far away that includes a Holiday Inn, a Holiday Inn Express, a Holiday Inn Suites, a Holiday Inn Extended Stay, a Holiday Inn Courtyard, a Holiday Inn Faux-French-Loire-Valley-Chateau, a Holiday Inn Evocative-of-a-Rustic-Historic-Rockefeller-Adirondak-Hunting-Lodge and a Holiday Inn Your Company-Has-Shipped-You-Off-For-So-Long-There’s-Almost-Zero-Chance-Your-Wife-Will-Not-Have-Decided-To-Leave-You-By-The-Time-You-Are-Finally-Allowed-To-Come-Back-Home.  Being the contrarian that I am, and always looking for places slightly off the beaten path (and, OK, fine, being enticed by the $80 a night price), I opted to stay at the La Quinta Inn Denver Airport. 

My room absolutely reeked of cigarette smoke.  I had no idea that you could still smoke in a hotel room anywhere in this country, but you apparently can in Colorado.  I don’t mind cigarette smoke.  In fact I honestly sort of like the smell of second hand smoke wafting off of a nice fresh Marlboro red.  But the smell of old, stale cigarette smoke that has so deeply permeated every fiber of a budget motel pillow that no amount of industrial disinfectant can make a dent in it is truly, seriously nauseating.  Anyway, it was late and I was too tired and lazy to go back to the front desk to ask for another room.  So I sucked it up and just went to bed. 

I set out the next morning to go for a run and see what was around the La Quinta.  But after less than a mile, after passing the last of the Holiday Inns and faux local sports bars, I realized there was nowhere to run.  Usually “nowhere to run” means “nowhere nice” or “nowhere interesting” or “nowhere meeting the exacting standards of the specific workout I was hoping to accomplish.”  But in this case “nowhere to run” meant that all the roads I went down literally dead-ended at crusty, bumpy, ankle-spraining fields.  One road led to a small, new subdivision that was obviously supposed to have become part of a much larger development.  There were four lane roads leading to the entrance with designated left turn lanes (but no roads to turn onto) and colorful banners with generic clip art photos of kids advertising “fun” and “school.”  But despite the sadly hopeful ads, it was obvious that a more truthful name for the complex would have been something like “World Economy Shit the Bed Meadows.”  I don’t know what a field of underwater mortgages smells like, but what it looks like is the wasteland behind the La Quinta. 

I slogged out a few laps around the perimeter of the business travel motels and wandered back to the La Quinta.  I was mildly depressed, but only until I realized that the La Quinta breakfast nook where you get your free! included! breakfast included one of the make-your-own-waffle machines that I thought only existed at the luxurious-by-comparison Embassy Suites.  There’s a tap coming out of the wall that dispenses waffle batter (where does the batter come from? do municipalities entice prospective hotel developers by offering access to pre-installed, underground waffle batter lines?) and you fill up a cup with it and dump as much as you want onto a pre-heated waffle iron.  Wow.  Most average-sized American men who fasted for a day and put their minds to it could probably eat most of the $80 cost of the hotel room in waffles if they tried.  I don’t know how the La Quinta Inn stays in business.

If you’d like to experience this quintessentially American run the next time you’re in Denver, here is a link to a map of the route I took.

Path-Breaking, Never-Been-Done-Before (at least for me) Morning Run #2: Boulder

The stereotype of Boulder is that to live there you have to be either a Kenyan Olympian marathoner or a slightly beyond college-aged trustafarian snowboarder.  Turns out, it’s not a stereotype.  It’s absolutely true.  For a smallish city, real estate in Boulder is off the charts expensive.  Driving a car in Boulder, although technically legal, is highly frowned upon.  If you must absolutely drive, it should only be to get to a ski slope or X-treme mountain biking trail.  And, except for UPS trucks and yellow-iron construction equipment, every vehicle is an Audi Quattro or a Subaru Outback station wagon with a Thule something-or-other carrier on the roof.  It’s not uncommon to see people with dreadlocks, but they’re all white.  Other than the Kenyans, there are no black people in Boulder whatsoever. 

The general level of fitness in Boulder is just ridiculous.  Boulder ranks every year as the most fit city in the country.  Everyone does yoga.  I don’t know who even goes to yoga classes since everyone is a yoga instructor.  I saw a good sampling of fit Boulderites when I set off for my morning run on a beautiful gravel path that my friend Harry had recommended.  The main path, which runs parallel to the Rocky Mountain foothills and goes from the Dakota Ridge housing development almost all the way into downtown Boulder, is designed for your sort of run of the mill Boulder marathoner – the local version of a couch potato.  At regular intervals, the main path branches off into side paths that go straight up into the hills.  Those paths are for ultra-marathoners, ironmen and Olympic qualifier contenders.  Keep in mind that, with the altitude, most people who aren’t from Boulder have to stop to catch their breath a few times between lifting a magazine off of a rack and opening the front cover.  I clopped along the path at my usual diligent but solidly middle-of-the-pack pace and tried to focus on the amazing scenery.  But it was hard.  I was distracted by all the other runners who kept passing me.  Some were moving at a slightly faster clip than me.  Some zoomed by me so fast I’m not even definitively sure they were humans.  I did pass one guy, but it was because he was running with a dog that had dysentery or something and had to stop every 100 yards to shit.     

If you want to try to keep up with the natives, or just feel like lowering your self-esteem a little, here’s a link to a map of the route.

I spent a little time after my run feeling humiliated and inadequate, but not much.  Boulder also has lots of good beer, and my uncle and cousins wasted no time putting me on a borrowed mountain bike and taking me on a tour of local breweries.  Do they know me or what?  Naturally, Boulder has the most extensive network of designated bike paths I have ever seen.  It’s like a superhighway.  There are lanes and signs and on- and off-ramps.  And, of course, you can take them right to the door of all of the breweries.  You can apparently, for real, get a BUI ticket in Boulder, but we all made out OK.   

I found a little evidence suggesting that Boulderites share some pedestrian traits with the unwashed masses from the rest of the country.  There’s a strip club near the squeaky-clean Dakota Ridge development called the “Bus Stop.”  It’s one of those bar names like “The Office” or “The Library” that lets guys tell the other guys at the office on a Monday morning how they, hilariously, originally, fooled their wives, without technically lying, about where they were (although I guess you’d have to come up with a pretty complex story about why you spent 4 hours at a bus stop).

Path-Breaking, Never-Been-Done-Before (at least for me) Morning Run #2:  Longmont / Lagerman Reservoir

My last morning in Colorado started out at one of the best lodges anywhere in the country – Chuck and Diana’s house.  If you’re ever in the area, you simply must stay with them.  Since I was about 7 years old, Chuck and Diana have made it a personal mission to spoil me rotten whenever I visit.  I should probably be a little embarrassed about that at this point, now that my 40^th is within sight, but, hey, why try to fight it?  I don’t what the exact policies are for guests who are not blood relatives, but Chuck and Diana seem pretty flexible.  I only stayed for one night during this visit, but I’ve heard that it’s not uncommon for people stay at Chuck and Diana’s for 8 or 12 weeks at a time.  They’re awful generous that way. 

The route Chuck suggested for me is technically illegal.  It’s a path alongside an irrigation canal that runs north to south through a large stretch of Longmont.  The path is surrounded by barb wire fences and there are signs all over the place saying that if you get caught trespassing along the canal, the authorities have the right to drag you behind their truck, drown you in the water and/or bury you alive at the base of the foothills.  Anyway, Chuck said he was 80% sure no-one would bother me.  And he turned out to be right.  The run was beautiful.  Just me, all alone by my lonesome self and a bunch of birds, a mother and baby fox / coyote / wolf / lemur / caribou (I’m not entirely sure which; I’ve become a bit of a city guy over the years) and about a million prairie dogs.  I think prairie dogs are adorable.  People who live near them seem to think of them more like a cross between a rat and a noxious fungus. The landscape is Longmont is generally wide open and sparsely populated.  But it’s close enough to Boulder that, when I was leaving to go to the airport, I had to stop for a minute to let a pack of bikers who were taking part in a sprint triathlon  pass. 

If you want to run with the prairie dogs and have a go at evading the Colorado water authorities, here’s a linkto a map of the route from Chuck and Diana’s.

So there you have it – three exciting, cross-cultural running adventures you can experience in Colorado.  Thanks to all of my hosts.  And thanks to the lady in the seat next to me on the flight home from Denver who was shamelessly reading this blog real-time as I was writing it, offering unsolicited edits and clarifications.  Sometimes you gotta just jump right in there and say your piece.   

Buddhism, Golf and Marketing - A Lethal Triumvirate

Last weekend was me and the guys' annual Florida golf trip. As is the case every year - with 4 guys staying in the same condo, playing 4 rounds of golf together, eating together and spending more or less every second of a long weekend together - we discussed just about every thought our four low-output minds could conjure up. About 85% of what we talked about related to the usual mix of unspeakable subjects you would expect from four guys alone on a vacation. But that left a good 15% chunk of heavy shit to tackle. The combination of two subjects - Buddhism and marketing - turned out to be a lethal mix that has left me devastated and virtually unable to venture out into the world.

One of the guys on the trip - we'll call him "Chris" to maintain his anonymity in the face of the omniscient corporate powers to which he is beholden - is a high level marketing guy, who was willing to explain candidly some of the dirty secrets of his industry. I was ranting about the subject of my last post - Target's ability to figure out when women are pregnant and starting their second trimesters, and hitting them with ads that are customized with baby stuff but sufficiently randomized that the women won't pick up on the fact that Target knows they are pregnant. It turns out that that kind of stuff is child's play, amateur hour. Any schlub can send out coupons and get a person to buy a few one-off products. The real marketing gold is to get your company so deeply permeated into a person's DNA that they but your stuff without even knowing why they want it.

Customer focus groups, it turns out, are interesting primarily because of how clueless and un-self-aware they reveal people as being. When asked why they buy one product over another one, people give what they think are truthful answers. They think they're conducting some kind of objective analysis about price and quality and utility, but they're wrong! How are their lies exposed? Through walking MRIs. When you hook a person up to a brain scan and a rack of other Star Trek-looking contraptions and have him walk down the aisle of a grocery store, you can see, real-time, how bonkers all of his subconscious mechanisms go when he comes across a certain product. Dilated pupils, goosebumps, raised arm hairs, increased heart rate, heavy breathing, slight perspiration and a moderate erection are not caused by comparison shopping for razor blades. They're the result of an emotional reaction based on a lifetime of internalization of ads. A person might honestly believe that he has decided that Gillette shaving cream is an objectively superior product, but his purchase is much more likely the result of him being slightly sexually aroused by the thought that buying it will make him just a little bit more like Roger Federer.

I told Chris that, since I think about this stuff a lot, I have to be at least slightly less susceptible to marketing than the average first world consumer. He thought that maybe I was partially correct, but only because I don't watch much TV - hours spent in front of the TV being the most strongly correlated factor in predicting how commercially brainwashable a person will be. But then he asked me why I thought I had bought the sunglasses, running watch, shorts and shoes I was wearing, the golf bag I was carrying, and the car I drove, and just like that, with one pointed, penetrating question, exposed me as being every bit as much of a clueless, gullible sucker as the rest of 'em.

And all the Buddhist principals I've been reading about recently - the refuge that's been helping in so many contexts - just made it worse. One of the central underpinnings of Buddhism - more specifically, the concept of Nirvana (or, in the words of Carl Spackler after having caddied for the Lama, "total consciousness") - is that, through breathing, concentration and focus, you can train yourself to see the true essence of things. But seeing the true essence of marketing and how deeply it penetrates your subconscious is enough to make you completely flip out. Once you've directed your focus towards marketing, what do you do when you discover you've been brainwashed all your life, and that your supposedly reasoned, autonomous actions are actually just rote responses to decades of calculated manipulation? Rip off all your name brand clothes and move to a monastery? Give up the whole Buddhist thing and just admit that Procter & Gamble is the undisputed winner?

Penelope Trunk, a very funny and insightful blogger, wrote an awesome piece about why, unless someone specifically asks her about it, she never talks about doing yoga. Her point is, nobody wants to hear about the wonderful, beautiful mental space you've managed to find for yourself through discipline, concentration and other self-righteous techniques like that. Completely true. I've touched upon this as well (reminder: please keep me posted about your debauchery so that I can keep tabs on what today's youngsters are up to). But in the case of outrageously effective marketing, I can say with some conviction that mindfulness should be thrown under the bus. Better to keep this element of consciousness locked up tightly in some distant mental box and get on with things. Next time you see me, compliment me on my stylish shades and cool watch. It'll make me feel great (and maybe a little aroused).

Here's Penelope Trunk's post about yoga:

http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2012/02/24/some-advice-about-taking-advice/

Here's my similar, old post about Buddhism:

http://danjanifesto.blogspot.com/2011/06/enlightenment-vs-methamphetamine-fueled.html

And while we're on the subject of marketing and razor blades, buy some stuff from this guy:

https://www.dollarshaveclub.com/