Rule Number 9: Don't make mountains out of molehills...and the other maternal slogan greatest hits
I have an absurdly good memory about some things, although this usually doesn't help me. Sure I can talk your ears off about the revolving door band theorem behind Queens of the Stone Age or the artistic merit of American Pie, but this usually does more destruction to my image than good. One of the things that I've never forgotten, though, are the sayings that my mother used to badger into my head as a child. How about a quick tracklist, while we're at it.
Ellen Bill's Motherly Slogans - The Greatest Hits
1.Don't beat a dead horse - All greatest hits records need to start with a classic. And I was damn good as a child at beating a topic until it eventually had an aneurysm and had to be taken to the overripe subject hospital. Much like I did with that metaphor.
2. Watch your door - Because seriously, when you get out of a car...watch it.
3. You aren't doing anything stupid, right? - And as any son knows, this isn't really a question that has a right answer.
4. You can't always get what you want, Travis - I still don't think I've learned this one...
5. Don't make mountains out of molehills
Alright, so this is a Greatest Hits work in progress, but it got me to my main point, which is that I am an absolute legend at taking minute details and turning them into catastrophes. Like my mother, I'm a perfectionist and a bit of a control freak. Hence the repetition of "you can't always get what you want." I really didn't (and often still don't) understand that concept. And really, why should I? This is America dammit. We pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and claim all that is ours! Ronald Reagan baby!
Just kidding. In any case, inability to let things go and move on is much less becoming on a person when he's in college, in his twenties, and a business major. At a certain age people are supposed to learn to let the little things go and focus on the big picture. However, I'm better at creating invisible checklists in my head of all the times that a person or situation has wronged me. Eventually, the smallest detail can send this thesis of grievances snowballing into flat out stupid destruction. Ever had somebody erupt over an innocuous tone in your voice or a strange look. I'm that guy. I believe everything is pregnant with meaning and symbolism and that perhaps if I remember every detail, I'll be able to piece it all together into something perfect. The problem is, of course, that not everything has meaning. In fact, most things do not have an intentional meaning behind them. The way that I merge through traffic doesn't seem to me like it should be important to the passengers in the vehicle, but that is how I've treated life for a long time. Simply put, I cannot let things go, and this is wrong.
Two weeks ago, my ex-girlfriend Jenna passed away after a long bout with cancer. She was an incredible human being, and I was devastated over the time I had spent on trivial crap that I could have spent reconnecting with her. Of course, it also put a lot of other things from my semester into perspective. The minute details that I tend to complain about disappeared for a little while, and I saw the big picture. At the time, though, I knew that this transcendent understanding couldn't last forever. I wrote a lyric to a new song that said "I was a fool to think our youth was so invincible, and I'll be a fool again this time next month." It only took two weeks. I found myself snapping about little things and complaining about minutia less than a month after I had supposedly sworn out of my hyper-controlling ways.
Unfortunately, this blog doesn't have a happy ending. I mainly posted it because I was doing it again yesterday, and I woke up pretty frustrated about my inability to deal with my Achilles Heel. By this point, I've realized that you can't change people to the point where their major battles simply disappear. This is something that will always plague me, just like other things plague other people. Those slogans that your mother tells you as a child are important though. They're meant to be roadblocks to help you find your difficulties, and then weave through them. As it happens, my mom had to say either "don't make mountains out of molehills" or "don't sweat the small stuff" more than any other childhood slogan. And although this looks like it may be an incurable disease for me, I know that with that memory I can do my best to treat it.
Earlier this week I made a joke that my exorbitant complaints were like global warming. Everyone knows it exists by now, though it can't be stopped immediately. I need some sort of Kyoto Protocol to slowly diminish my impact on the world. From what I hear, the UN's working on it.
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
In Honor of National Novel Writing Month
Last year, I did a project for a semester which was loosely entitled "write a fucking novel you idiot." And I wrote a 50,000 word novella for my non-violence class which has now been sitting on my shelf half-edited and half-scorned. In any case, I've been dragged into the phenomena of National Novel Writing Month yet again (this time with more emphasis on the month portion, as I only have around 12,000 words starting the month) with the hope that now that I've done it once, this time will be a lot easier. That is far from the truth. In any case, I wanted to encourage other people to attempt to do this with me, even if you don't get to the 50,000 words by the end of the month. And I wanted to share the first couple pages of this years novel, which I've entitled Ferguson's Convenience Grocery. I hope you enjoy!
Drip, drip, drip. The pipes in the bathroom were faulty, and with every splash of water against the inside of an already mildewing cabinet, I could hear dollars passing from my wallet, sales that were never made. The Chinese water torture of capitalism was inflicting itself on my modest apartment, with a thin layer of plywood protecting the uncovered linoleum from the ugly rusted water that wove like the Euphrates through my bathroom fixtures. Ride the Tiger, or the Tiber, or however the saying went. Leaking or plugged, I was still sitting on my bed with a gun in my hand hoping that enough dollars and cents would amass for me to finally overcome the urge to pull the trigger. A plumber wasn’t an option; I didn’t make enough money to pay somebody else to fix my pipes, and given my godawful mechanical knowledge, I was a long shot to figure it out myself. Somehow, the price of a pack of bullets and a split second of courage seemed far less than what it would take to fix the leak. Fortune favors the bold whispered the steel between my lips. I wasn’t born to be bold.
For the last five years I’ve worked as the full-time owner of a small grocery store somewhere in between the outskirts and civilization in my loathsome Zion. My parents used to run the shop, but they felt driving my grandfather’s Mercedes into a power generator to be a more cogent use of their God given talents. The story made the news for a day or two. The paper even ran an exposé a month later on why a happily married, modestly kept couple would commit suicide in such an unruly fashion. They even put on the clothes that they had worn to my christening. Wool and cotton sparked into an electrical inferno that caused a power outage at the local shopping mall for 38 minutes. 38 minutes of lost receipts and marketing ploys. What nerve they had.
In any case, the daily operations of Ferguson’s Convenience Grocery fell to me, a twenty-three year old high school drop-out who had spent most of his high school years snorting cocaine off of toilet seats and listening to Pearl Jam in an effort to fit in. We all dropped out together in solidarity and, well, the movement seems to have passed us by. It was a shame for the rest of them, and I doubt that any of them ever found a calling in life. As for me, my quiet life of cleaning a 500 square foot prison cell of brand name snack foods and birth control was about as close to a calling in life as I thought I’d ever find. The fact of the matter is, as soon as my parents decided to break the mold, so to speak, I knew that I had fallen into a fortuitous position in the Ferguson family. Whereas previously my goals in life had ranged between fucking my high school prom queen out of spite and buying a car so that I could drive to Mexico and never look back, I now had an actual purpose for being in Boston. I had inherited a family legacy of selling alcohol to minors, poking holes in the condoms of especially snooty teenage yuppies, and doctoring price tags so that we could actually charge upwards of forty cents more than the manufacturer had determined appropriate. Or, perhaps these were all modifications that I invented once I become the sole owner and operator of my 500 foot purgatory. I didn’t get a chance to interview the corpses on their managerial techniques.
In all aspects of its existence, Boston proved itself to be the perfect location for my operation. The general uproarious behavior of the population allowed my apathy towards anything other than my store to fill a niche that the city so badly needed covering. You see, when a group of people historically shifts to one end of the political, social, and economical spectra, it starts to wonder why people with different views aren’t forcing a different result. Thankfully for Boston, I’m here to fill the void. Just try to give me a 100 dollar bill in payment for your Snickers bar. Watch me tell you to fuck off with my finger on the trigger of a loaded pistol in case you decide to cause trouble. Still think your city is full of working class candor and collegiate pride? I’ve got another story for you to tell your psychiatrist on Monday morning.
Everyone hated winter on the East Coast. The entire city braved the snow by resting their lives on the win-loss record of the New England Patriots. I wasn’t a sports fan, but my store was. My parents had long ago placed Budweiser advertisements with quasi-lifesize Patriots helmets on them, a green football field in the background and the team’s schedule fighting for room between the grandiosity of the helmet and the grittiness of the chalky frozen gridiron behind it. Each year the beer manufacturer sent me a new poster; the images never changed, and the names and dates on the schedule were the sole reminder that a year had even passed. Blue and red streamers adorned the front of the store, weaving around capriciously inside of the decrepit structure and its barred windows. I had even added a touch recently which I feel would have made my parents particularly proud. Over the glass window of the malt liquor refrigerator, I had posted a special edition beer helmet poster, one which I had asked for specifically from the man on the phone in God Knows Where, Virginia where they take orders for all of America’s beautiful brewed poison. The sign stated “Be a team player, always use a designated driver,” and included the ever-important Patriots helmet and Budweiser logo. The irony, of course, and it was so fucking clever to me, God everyone would love it, was that the only people who ever purchase malt liquor are homeless people and college students. If that isn’t a group of rag tag team players already, then I don’t know who is.
This winter was particularly comedic, with inches more snowfall in a week’s time than most Bostonians are used to in a month. The streets were continuously filled with a collage of black pea coats, weathered leather jackets and puffy outerwear that enveloped ruddy-faced owners. All I had ever seen in twenty-three years in Boston was a change in jackets as fashions shifted in and out of commonality. Microfibers of various sorts were clouded by the gray façade of irony that even in the shittiest climate to found a heterogeneous community, Americans would find a way. There was a reason why these no-named patriots didn’t pack up their belongings and move to California. They still had something to prove. As for me…I just had a grocery store.
Drip, drip, drip. The pipes in the bathroom were faulty, and with every splash of water against the inside of an already mildewing cabinet, I could hear dollars passing from my wallet, sales that were never made. The Chinese water torture of capitalism was inflicting itself on my modest apartment, with a thin layer of plywood protecting the uncovered linoleum from the ugly rusted water that wove like the Euphrates through my bathroom fixtures. Ride the Tiger, or the Tiber, or however the saying went. Leaking or plugged, I was still sitting on my bed with a gun in my hand hoping that enough dollars and cents would amass for me to finally overcome the urge to pull the trigger. A plumber wasn’t an option; I didn’t make enough money to pay somebody else to fix my pipes, and given my godawful mechanical knowledge, I was a long shot to figure it out myself. Somehow, the price of a pack of bullets and a split second of courage seemed far less than what it would take to fix the leak. Fortune favors the bold whispered the steel between my lips. I wasn’t born to be bold.
For the last five years I’ve worked as the full-time owner of a small grocery store somewhere in between the outskirts and civilization in my loathsome Zion. My parents used to run the shop, but they felt driving my grandfather’s Mercedes into a power generator to be a more cogent use of their God given talents. The story made the news for a day or two. The paper even ran an exposé a month later on why a happily married, modestly kept couple would commit suicide in such an unruly fashion. They even put on the clothes that they had worn to my christening. Wool and cotton sparked into an electrical inferno that caused a power outage at the local shopping mall for 38 minutes. 38 minutes of lost receipts and marketing ploys. What nerve they had.
In any case, the daily operations of Ferguson’s Convenience Grocery fell to me, a twenty-three year old high school drop-out who had spent most of his high school years snorting cocaine off of toilet seats and listening to Pearl Jam in an effort to fit in. We all dropped out together in solidarity and, well, the movement seems to have passed us by. It was a shame for the rest of them, and I doubt that any of them ever found a calling in life. As for me, my quiet life of cleaning a 500 square foot prison cell of brand name snack foods and birth control was about as close to a calling in life as I thought I’d ever find. The fact of the matter is, as soon as my parents decided to break the mold, so to speak, I knew that I had fallen into a fortuitous position in the Ferguson family. Whereas previously my goals in life had ranged between fucking my high school prom queen out of spite and buying a car so that I could drive to Mexico and never look back, I now had an actual purpose for being in Boston. I had inherited a family legacy of selling alcohol to minors, poking holes in the condoms of especially snooty teenage yuppies, and doctoring price tags so that we could actually charge upwards of forty cents more than the manufacturer had determined appropriate. Or, perhaps these were all modifications that I invented once I become the sole owner and operator of my 500 foot purgatory. I didn’t get a chance to interview the corpses on their managerial techniques.
In all aspects of its existence, Boston proved itself to be the perfect location for my operation. The general uproarious behavior of the population allowed my apathy towards anything other than my store to fill a niche that the city so badly needed covering. You see, when a group of people historically shifts to one end of the political, social, and economical spectra, it starts to wonder why people with different views aren’t forcing a different result. Thankfully for Boston, I’m here to fill the void. Just try to give me a 100 dollar bill in payment for your Snickers bar. Watch me tell you to fuck off with my finger on the trigger of a loaded pistol in case you decide to cause trouble. Still think your city is full of working class candor and collegiate pride? I’ve got another story for you to tell your psychiatrist on Monday morning.
Everyone hated winter on the East Coast. The entire city braved the snow by resting their lives on the win-loss record of the New England Patriots. I wasn’t a sports fan, but my store was. My parents had long ago placed Budweiser advertisements with quasi-lifesize Patriots helmets on them, a green football field in the background and the team’s schedule fighting for room between the grandiosity of the helmet and the grittiness of the chalky frozen gridiron behind it. Each year the beer manufacturer sent me a new poster; the images never changed, and the names and dates on the schedule were the sole reminder that a year had even passed. Blue and red streamers adorned the front of the store, weaving around capriciously inside of the decrepit structure and its barred windows. I had even added a touch recently which I feel would have made my parents particularly proud. Over the glass window of the malt liquor refrigerator, I had posted a special edition beer helmet poster, one which I had asked for specifically from the man on the phone in God Knows Where, Virginia where they take orders for all of America’s beautiful brewed poison. The sign stated “Be a team player, always use a designated driver,” and included the ever-important Patriots helmet and Budweiser logo. The irony, of course, and it was so fucking clever to me, God everyone would love it, was that the only people who ever purchase malt liquor are homeless people and college students. If that isn’t a group of rag tag team players already, then I don’t know who is.
This winter was particularly comedic, with inches more snowfall in a week’s time than most Bostonians are used to in a month. The streets were continuously filled with a collage of black pea coats, weathered leather jackets and puffy outerwear that enveloped ruddy-faced owners. All I had ever seen in twenty-three years in Boston was a change in jackets as fashions shifted in and out of commonality. Microfibers of various sorts were clouded by the gray façade of irony that even in the shittiest climate to found a heterogeneous community, Americans would find a way. There was a reason why these no-named patriots didn’t pack up their belongings and move to California. They still had something to prove. As for me…I just had a grocery store.
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