Pollinated Tesla Pants:
Sometimes I think about things too much, and other times too little. The secret to success in life, I expect, is knowing when to do one or the other, when to think about things a lot, and when to think about things a little.
I think I've got it all reversed because I spend a lot of time thinking about things like social interactions on the drive in to work and in the parking garage, and very little time thinking about things like the color of the suit I just bought or whether it's a good idea to turn the car off there in the parking lot instead of leaving the car on until it gets to where it needs to be.
I've got to try to reverse that, I think, or I'll end up... wherever it is that people who spend too much time thinking about the wrong kinds of things and not enough time thinking about the right kinds of things end up. Then again, maybe that's already happened; maybe where I am right now is the end product of 40 years of not thinking enough about some things (like career choices) and too much about other things (Cylons.) If so, then maybe I don't need to change at all, which is good, or bad, depending.
It could be good, if I didn't need to change, because then I could continue to get a little angry at the woman who held the door for me in the parking garage this morning. I had every right to be angry with her, too, and every right to decide that not only was she wrong for holding the door open for me but also that this, her holding the door open the way she did, was the end product of a civilization in which we've all but given up interacting with each other in any kind of normal way, although I'm not really sure what I mean by that. Something about the Internet, I'm sure; the Internet in some way is to blame for the woman holding the door for me this morning, which she should not have done because it made my whole walk into work awkward.
I park my car on the far wall of the garage every morning, whenever I can, across from the stairwell. I do that even if there are other spots open closer to the door, because if I don't park in more or less the same spot every morning, I get disoriented and lost at the end of the day and can't find my car. Sometimes, I have to park a level or two up or down, and I'll walk to where I usually park and then realize my mistake and have to retrace my steps and try to remember where it was that I parked. "Remembering where we parked" is a skill that natural selection ought to be breeding into the human race by now, if Darwin was right. It's been what, a hundred years since cars were invented, and before that, we rode horses, which also kind of had to be parked, too, so there've been maybe 400 years of using things to get around, things that can be parked in one place and then forgotten about. I wouldn't be surprised if cowboys, a little buzzed from sarsaparilla, came out of the saloon in the Old West, and looked around and thought "Now, where did I leave Ol' Paint?" Despite that lengthy period of having to remember where we left the horse we rode in on, though, humanity shows no signs of adapting to the new reality, and instead, comes up with insufficient solutions that only create more problems, like the "Doofy The Duck" people I will never forget.
The "Doofy The Duck" people were foreigners who were next to us in the monorail line at Walt Disney World when we went there on vacation when I was 12. That vacation had a lot of memorable moments, including the Cantaloupe Fight and Katie being pushed through a window and the Doofy The Duck people, people who I clearly remember now, 28 years later. When I was 12, I would have been in sixth grade. I remember almost nothing of sixth grade. But I remember the "Doofy The Duck" people. There was an author who wrote about a character who feared that when he was an old man and all his memories were gone but a few, he would only remember a certain kind of smell. I don't recall offhand the author or the book or the character or even the smell, (and googling "a certain kind of smell" probably puts me on a weird list that I don't want to be on, but I can't take it back now) but I do recall his worry about that, and I worry about the same thing, sometimes, that when I'm 80 years old or 90 or 100, I won't be able to remember the Story Of The Babies! That Is Only Mine, which I want never to forget, but I will remember the "Doofy the Duck" people.
When you go to Walt Disney World, at least back then, you could only get into the park by taking the monorail from the parking lot, and that was how you got back to your spot, too. The parking lots were divided up by characters and letters: Mickey Mouse A, or Goofy E, or Pluto K. It was necessary to remember where you parked and get off the monorail at the right point or you might be lost in Disney Parking Limbo forever, maybe, a lost soul surviving on the remnants of cotton candy and Mickey-Mouse-Ear-shaped-ice-cream-pops. We were with my mom, who remembered perfectly where we had parked, and we were standing next to the group of foreigners who did not remember perfectly, or at all, where they had parked. They debated, in their funny foreign accents, talking English amongst themselves.
I remember wondering, at the time, why they talked English instead of whatever their native language was, and I wondered that at other times when I thought of the Doofy The Duck people -- they were clearly foreigners, why speak English among themselves? It came to me one day, a few years ago, why they did that: they were hoping someone would butt in and correct them.
And they needed correcting because after a few moments of debate, they settled on where they had parked: Doofy The Duck 5. They resolved their debate by all agreeing that they were definitely in Doofy The Duck 5, and we all listened to that debate and we all separately thought No, you didn't. But not one of us spoke up to tell them There's no "Doofy the Duck" and it wouldn't be number 5.
So they're probably still there, and humanity has still not, 28 years later, progressed into any sort of ability to remember where we parked. Instead, we've come up with devices that are meant to help us, like the little panic-button on the key chain that makes your horn honk when you hit it. When we bought Vuey, the salesman showed us that and, in what has to be the most unusual sales tactic ever, said "If you were to be accosted in a parking lot, if someone tries to attack you, you know what you do?"
"What?" I asked, wondering where he thought we would be driving. Who gets accosted in a Madison, Wisconsin parking lot? But I wanted to know what I should do.
"You hit this button," and he pointed to the red panic button with the trumpet symbol on it, "And you throw the keys somewhere," he said. I just stared at him, while Sweetie, I'm sure, mentally vowed never to let us drive anywhere in case we were attacked in a parking lot. Realizing that we didn't get it, the salesman said "That way, the person attacking you can't just grab the keys and shut off the panic button!"
So we would be attacked and mugged and raped and killed, while the horn was blaring. But we bought the car anyway, and I secretly kind of wanted someone in the parking lot to attack us, so that I could hit the panic button and throw the keys and say to him "Ha! Now you can't grab the keys and shut off the panic button!" I haven't had that opportunity yet, but I have hit the panic button on average twice a day, entirely by accident. I put the keys in my pocket and my Idea Notebook bumps the button, or I clutch it in my hand and brush against the hair-trigger panic button and the horn honks. Sometimes, I'll bump the button in my garage and start the horn honking and I'll think maybe I should throw the keys just for practice. But if I couldn't find them Sweetie would be really mad.
The panic button and remote-horn-honk is humanity's answer to our failure to evolve into organisms that can remember where we parked. But it doesn't work. When we went to a Brewers game a few years back, I decided to pay no real attention to where we parked other than to note the general direction. I parked the car and locked it and we went in and we watched the game and then we came out and it was dark. Dad was with us, and he said "Where did we park?" and I pointed and said "Over there," and when asked what row, I said "It doesn't matter. I'll just hit the horn button and we'll find the car." We walked towards the area of the parking lot where Vuey was located, more or less, and as we neared that section, I heard not one, not two, but about fifty horns going off as everyone did what I had done and we all wandered around trying to find our cars, each of which looked and sounded a lot like all the other cars that were honking their horns in the parking lot.
That's why I always park in the same spot, and then walk across the parking garage to get to the door. I was only about halfway across it this morning when I noticed that the lady was standing there holding the door for me. The distance I had to travel was at least 3 or 4 seconds' worth of walking, and 3 or 4 seconds is a long time when a total stranger is standing there going obviously out of her own way to hold the door for me, completely unnecessarily holding the door for me, and forcing me to speed up to cover the distance in two seconds.
"Thanks," I mumbled, and she nodded and then started up the stairs... slowly. More slowly than I take the stairs. So after hurrying to get to the door she didn't need to hold for me, I was now obliged to slow down to go up the stairs behind her, because there wasn't enough room to brush past her and that seemed like it might be rude, so I shuffled up the stairs behind her to the outer door, which she held again, and I had to thank her again, all of which was not polite, but instead completely irrelevant because if she'd just gone about her business in the first place I would have not had to hurry, then slow, and she would never have had to hold the door for me twice.
That made me feel better, though, that I could be angry at her, because then I could get past my feelings that I'd insulted another driver on my way into work and maybe started off his or her week on a bad note. That happened when I got to the part of my commute every morning where I usually get frustrated, the part where I have to drive through the University of Wisconsin campus. Most of the time, the UW appears to have as its main goal not the winnowing and sifting of intelligence, but the shifting of traffic patterns. Lanes are closed off at random and there are copious amounts of construction going on that, combined with lemming-like suicidal college students randomly crossing the street makes that part of the drive annoying.
I've learned that the best possible way to get through the campus is to get into the middle of the three lanes that are usually open. Doing that avoids the lane closures that happen on the outer lanes, and avoids people slowing down to turn left or right, and gives at least a fighting chance of hitting the brakes when a student darts into the road. So I always, at the first stoplight near campus, try to get into the middle lane.
Today, I was following a car that I'd been behind most of the way in, a car that was doing pretty good driving and not annoying me the way most people I run into in a given day annoy me merely by existing, and I was actually a little grateful to the driver of the car ahead of me. He/she hadn't turned left, had done a little above the speed limit, hadn't stopped at the yellow lights, hadn't hit his/her brakes every time I took my eyes off the road to flip the song on my iPod to something better -- he/she had been doing pretty well and by the time we hit campus, I was feeling something of a bond with him/her. We were two drivers who knew how to get to work, me and him/her.
Then, at the light where I always change to the middle, there was another car already in the middle lane. It was just the three of us: the new car, me, and him/her my Traffic Buddy. I had to make a split-second decision: Trust Traffic Buddy? Or go with what works and switch lanes?
Well, I switched, but I felt bad about it. I pulled into the middle lane, leaving Traffic Buddy all alone in the left lane, and I wanted to communicate to him/her, somehow, maybe through Morse Code with my horn, that it wasn't anything personal, that it was just that the middle lane was better in campus. It didn't even help when a half-mile down the road the left lane was closed off with no warning and Traffic Buddy had to wait for us to pass. I felt disloyal, like I'd broken a bond of trust between us, and felt bad all the way into work until the lady held the door for me and made me angry at her, instead and things were better because while I might be disloyal, at least I didn't force people to speed up and slow down.
You can see, then, that I do a lot of thinking and considering. I just never seem to do it at the right time and about the right things. I could have, in retrospect, done a lot more considering and thinking Saturday morning, instead, when took Mr F and Mr Bunches with me to buy a new suit and had to stop first to try to rescue The Boy's car.
The Boy's car was stranded in the parking lot of his job, undriveable, because he'd broken the key off in the ignition the night before. It didn't surprise me at all that he'd done that. It surprised me that it took him this long to do that. The Boy drives Bluey these days, and Bluey's ignition key is slightly bent, which means sometimes it's hard to start Bluey. I counsel The Boy to be patient and calm at those times. "Don't get all mad," I tell him. "Just be calm and try the key again. Forcing it and getting enraged doesn't help." But The Boy likes to get enraged, and so we can see him often go out to start Bluey, opening the door and sitting down and trying the key, then trying it again, harder, then throwing his head back theatrically and snorting, then hitting the steering wheel, then trying the key again harder, then shaking the car back and forth so that it rocks, then trying the key again, harder, and so on. Sometimes, he's about one step away from turning green and doubling in size and hurling the car through the house, which he must have been pretty close to on Friday night when he called home at 10 p.m. and said he needed a ride because the key had broken off in the ignition and he couldn't start Bluey.
The next morning, I'd taken his half-a-key and gone to try to start the car, taking the Babies! with me because after we tried to start the car and avoid paying for a tow to the garage we were going to go get me a new suit and play at the Mall playground. I pulled up next to Bluey and left my car running, with Mr F and Mr Bunches strapped into their seats eating some S'More Crackers and wondering what Dad was up to this time, and I took The Boy's half-a-key and opened up his car --
-- which, I note for the record, had a giant plastic bag of bread in it--
and put the half-a-key in and it started right up, leaving me to sit there with The Boy's car running until Sweetie and The Boy could get there so he could drive it to the mechanic's and have the ignition fixed properly, time I spent singing "All I Want Is You" from the Juno soundtrack to Mr F, who didn't like sitting there and was getting upset. The only thing I could do to calm him down was to sing that song, or, rather, sing the first two lines of that song over and over, those being the only two lines he likes. Then I go bowm, b-bowm, b-b-b-bowm-bowm and make guitar sounds, then I do them over again. If I go on to sing the rest of the song, he gets upset. I think it's because in the video (which he likes to watch), after those two lines, the world goes all cartoon-y and Ellen Page walks around being hand-drawn, and Mr F may worry that if I sing more than the first two lines, that'll happen to us.
Once The Boy got there, he didn't believe that I'd just started it up so quickly. "It's true," I said. "I just put the key in and it started up with no problems."
"I tried that and it didn't work," said The Boy.
This is where I could've used some more thinking, because I said "Try it now. Turn it off and back on," and he got half of that done. He turned it off and took the key out and then put it back in and we couldn't get it started again for anything. We tried and tried, turning the key and then trying to use the screwdriver I'd brought to pry at it and then turning the key again and then twisting the wheel and also pushing in the brake (in case that did something, in case there was a secret code to starting Bluey, a cheat code that would start it up if you hit up up down down left right A) but nothing worked, so I ultimately had to tell him to call the tow truck after all.
I felt bad because we had gotten it started, so he could have driven it to the garage and saved on the tow, so I volunteered to pay half for the tow, which he appreciated. Later, I thought I maybe had spoken too quickly -- after all, he would have had to pay for the tow if I hadn't tried to start the car at all, right? So the fact that I started it and then had him shut it off and we couldn't start it left him exactly where he'd started out, so why should I pay for half the tow when he was no worse off than he'd been? But by then, he was gone with Sweetie and The Boys and I were in the suit department of JCPenneys, looking around at the various suits that were going to replace the last suit I bought at Penney's, the brown one.
The brown suit has nothing really wrong with it other than that it's getting a little tight -- no doubt it's shrinking -- and also that I hate it more than I hate any other clothing in my closet, because of the lining of the pants. I bought the brown suit for $69.99, marked down from $199.99, at Penney's, and congratulated myself on that day about being such a great shopper, getting a suit for $69.99. I bought the suit because it was low-priced, and on clearance, and I also bought it because I thought it was gray. I even told Sweetie that, when I got home, and she asked what suit I bought. I hadn't brought the suit home with me, because it needed a little alteration, which Penney's will do for 10 dollars, so I had to wait to get the suit. So Sweetie said "What kind of suit did you get?" and I said "A gray one," and told her about the price. Then, a week later, I went and picked up my gray suit and brought it home and only then, in the light of the living room, did Sweetie point out to me that the gray suit I'd bought was actually a brown suit.
It wasn't my fault, though -- the lighting in Penney's is weird. You go into the suit department and the normal spectrum doesn't apply. Everything is kind of blue/kind of gray/kind of black, and nothing looks brown. I would have sworn that there were no brown suits at Penney's, ever. I was tempted to wear my brown pants there just to see what color they turned when I walked into the Penney's suit department. It's like in that one Superman comic where Superman went to a planet with a red sun and then was blind and had no superpowers and had to be rescued by someone, maybe Supergirl, and all the colors were kind of off. Like that, only with less red suns and Superman, and more suits-of-ambiguous-coloration.
The brown suit, aside from not being gray, had another flaw, and that was that the lining of the pants actually seemed to radiate heat and stick to my legs. Whatever the lining of the pants is made of, it makes wearing that suit impossible if the ambient temperature is more than 20 degrees. Above that line, the suit traps heat in my body like a greenhouse and sticks to my legs and generates static electricity -- a lot of static electricity, making it not only uncomfortable but unsafe. I kept worrying that while I was driving I'd die of heat exhaustion, or that I'd short out the car while I was driving on the freeway, because just sitting generated static electricity. They were like Tesla pants. I didn't like to carry my iPod while wearing them for fear it would explode.
So a new suit was necessary and I had my gift card and some cash and the Babies! and I wandered through the Penney's suit department, initially hoping to buy a blue suit, but almost immediately realizing that again, I couldn't tell what colors any of the suits actually were. I'd look and see a rack of black suits and then as I walked by they appeared blue, but then when I tried them on, they were gray.
Ultimately, it didn't matter because my choice was more or less made for me by two factors in the suit I picked out. Factor One was that the suit I picked out was one of the few suits I liked that actually had both a jacket and pants that fit me. Most of the suits had jackets that were in the 36R range -- a 36 inch chest, which I haven't had in, well, ever. Those tiny jackets hung on the racks with pants that had unusual waist-and-length combinations: 28 inch waists and 40 inch-lengths, or 42-inch waists with 24 inch lengths. Apparently, only pear-shaped little people shop at Penney's suit department.
The Little Pear People don't buy blue suits, though: There were a few suits that maybe were kind of blue or might have still been blue when I got them out to regular light, blue suits that had a 46R or 48R jacket, but the pants they had were all 30-inch waists and 30-inch lengths, suits made for people with massive upper bodies and perfectly symmetrical lower halves.
So I had to eventually choose a suit that I think was black but might be gray (that was the exact description of it I gave to Sweetie later: I think it's black but it might be gray. It also, I added may have pin stripes. I wasn't sure about that.)
The Babies! were actually pretty patient during this process, I should add-- but I was bribing them with yellow corn pops and they were touching all the suits, so if you go shopping at that Penney's and it looks as though the suits have all been pollinated, I apologize.
The suit I picked out and bought was one of the few in the store that matched my dimensions pretty closely, but even if it hadn't, I might have bought it anyway, and hoped that I could get myself to fit into it with diet and exercise, because the suit I bought came with a vest. And not just any old vest, either: a black (or maybe gray, maybe with pinstripes) vest that had five or six buttons, meaning this was the pinnacle of suits: a three-piece suit, which I've always wanted.
A three-piece suit is necessary because it's only with the three-piece suit that I can really convey how hard I'm working. There's stages to being hard-working. I go in in the morning all buttoned up and with my tie pretty high up on my neck and my collar done. By the time I get my coffee, I've loosened the tie and top button -- ostensibly to show that I'm getting ready to dig into hard work (but in reality because all my collars are a little tight these days.)
By mid-morning, the tie is lower down and my sleeves are rolled up to my elbows. I am (in theory) working hard, so hard that I can't possibly tolerate sleeves being buttoned at the wrist. True hard work requires bare forearms.
But before I found my new maybe-black/maybe-gray suit, that was the hardest I could work. I couldn't work any harder than tie-loosened/sleeves rolled up.
Now, I can. Now, in the mid-afternoon, I will be able to unbutton my vest, like a banker in a 1930s movie who is sweating it out because the books don't balance and the government regulators are gonna be here soon, I will be able to open up the vest and lean on my arm and look pensive, and there will be no doubt that I am working extremely hard.
It was, then, a foregone conclusion that I would buy that suit. And while there may be some adjustments necessary, overall, to my life and how I think about things, I think we can all agree that I put the exact right amount of thought into that suit purchase.
Five Pages publishes a novel as I write it: Five pages at a time, each week day. Right now:
Up So Floating Many Bells Down: Sarah's fiance has drowned, and while she struggles to convince the world, and herself, that he was killed, her brother Dylan up and moves to Las Vegas to pursue a career as a photographer.
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Comments: 23
And, I usually remember where I park rather well.
Have A Great & Powerful Day W/J