balding angrily

The plan was that this blog was going to be my gateway to happiness, a distraction from my job. Instead it pointed out that that distraction was really, really distracting. And I got a slap on the wrist for it. Then months and months crawled by with me struggling to maintain interest in this side project. And I found other distractions - a literature class, working out, eating better. Lately I’ve been concentrating on finishing a graduate school application.

All this to say, I acknowledge that Balding Angrily is struggling to maintain life. For the two people that may be reading this, thank you for sticking around, and I haven’t given up. I see a future for BA, possibly as a very specific kind of gay porn website - bald men with twisted, red faces. Though that kind of porn is readily available, my porn would really, really focus on the bald and the angry. Just like the foot fetish websites feature pictures taken from the ground level with foreshortened legs and humongous feet, mine would feature pictures taken from above the veiny, hairless foreheads of my models.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from all of us here at Balding Angrily Central. Here is my final Christmas thought for you:

Saturday night Jerry and I had ice cream shakes because of this review. My favorite part:

Grilled Jalapeño Relish: Hey, Pickle Relish!

Pickle Relish: Yeah?

Grilled Jalapeño Relish: Fuck you.

Verdict: Great shakes. Jerry had a cake batter shake and I had a brownie/dulce de leche shake. His was better.

Hot Dog Server: Made with real cake batter.

Jerry: Mmmm. Wait. It doesn’t have raw eggs in it right?

Hot Dog Server: No raw eggs.

Jerry: (Laughing though no one else is): Good! Hate to get the salmonella!

Hot Dog Server:…

Me: Your transformation into your dad is almost complete. When you start wearing the belt line of your Wranglers around the midpoint of your butt cheeks, you’ll have crossed over.

Gimme-gimme _more. Gimme _more. Gimme-gimme _MORE.

Say what you want about this week’s Britney/VMA/Chris Crocker hubub; her robots can create an insidious brain-worm. Given this particular one is tied to a moment of infamy, I say she’s already made her comeback.

Chicago is…

It’s New York City without the people spitting on you. It’s my new favorite city. We stayed near Rush and State, the center of the hip-and-cool-party-people night-life. The weather was beautiful. Birds were singing, police gave out candy instead of tickets, and pan-handlers smelled like flowers. When we got back, I was ready to pack everything and move up there.

We had a waiter that told racist jokes. We had a cabby that got all scrunchy when we wanted to pay with a credit card. We had a tour guide that took us aside and told us in a hushed voice all the latest hot gossip about Frank Lloyd Wright. Jen-An regaled us with poop stories. Owen didn’t know how to lay on the beach and waste away. He got flustered and had to “do something.” I met some fellow Filmspotters, and ate a Mediterranean mound of chicken wrapped in phyllo. We got in-room massages in which I learned that my hands and forearms are the most intimate places on my body a person can touch.

And we ate Riesens along with lots and lots of other good foods.

There are real punch-lines in life, and unfortunately the punch-line of this story is this. I yelled at a stranger, “Because you’re fat and ugly!” I’m not proud of it. And it’s not funny. And it speaks volumes about my character.

Yesterday my sister, Jerry, and I had come back from a day of shopping and movie watching. She was obsessed with taking a picture of a stuffed monkey next to a placard outside our building. I was having none of it. I was feeling ornery, so I stood by the elevator watching the two of them fiddle. Then I was feeling strange and I put my hands at my waist like Superman. Then I was feeling extra strange and I put hands on my ribs like Superman if he were wearing an Empire waist.

While I was experimenting with my midsection, a guy came up behind me. I walked away because I was embarrassed by my heretofore private waist-play. I heard the guy let out a sigh and say in a passive-aggressive loud-whisper, “Jeez. Just standing there…” I ignored him and started walking toward my sister and Jerry. I reached the other side of the lobby and heard him say to our concierge, “I mean he was just standing there. And he didn’t push the button.”

Because there are few things that drive me more crazy than a passive-aggressive loud-whisper, I snapped. I turned back and yelled at him, “You have two able-bodied hands! You could have pushed the button!” (I have a theory that words crowd in the backs of mouths in repose. In times of stress, they flee out. Some words are pushy and quick, escaping before other words. Apparently able-bodied is one of those.)

He showed me what he could do with his two able-bodied hands by flipping me a double-bird. The guard and concierge standing near got closer to us, ready to break up a brawl. I noticed and thought, “I am toast if this guy jumps me.” I blundered, responding with something like, “Don’t show me those!” or, “Yes, I see your hand work!”

He got in the elevator, which came in time to alleviate us of more blundering. As he turned into the elevator, he lobbed back at me, “I would invite you up to help me with my stuff. But you’d probably just stand there!” The doors were closing, and I shot back, “I wouldn’t want to come up because you’re fat and ugly!”

********************************************************************

I was in M.U.N. in my freshman year of high school. M.U.N., Model United Nations, was our school’s version of a debate team. We pretended like we were delegates, made speeches, resolutions, and went to conferences. I hated it. I do not articulate under pressure.

Yesterday’s post got me thinking about multi-culturalism, and I remembered a story. Jerry will like this story because it makes him look like something other than stinky. He taught me something rather profound. It started with sushi.

Before I met Jerry I considered myself adventurous with food. I had tried and liked both Indian and Ethiopian food. But I never learned to like sushi. So Jerry talked me into sushi one night.

I didn’t dislike it on my first experience, but it was a distinctly different way of experiencing tastes. I grew up with a Cassarole Mama; I’m used to blended, saucy foods. I shared this with Jerry. I said, “This is just strange. Not bad. Just different. It’s like there’s all these distinct tastes in my mouth, and they’re not mixing like I’m used to. They’re staying next to each other, but not informing one another. Well, not informing one another in the way I’m used to.” I’m sure I wasn’t that articulate, but that was the jist.

Jerry said, “That’s the neat part of sushi. It’s kind of an Eastern philosophy of food.”

He continued. “I went to a presentation on multi-culturalism one time. The speaker had this broad, accented voice. And he said, ‘The problem with you Americans is your concept of multi-culturalism. Look at your metaphor. The Melting Pot. You think multi-culturalism is this pot where all these races get thrown in and mixed around until you’re this…this marmalade.’ And with ‘marmalade’ he dragged it out like marmil-laaahd. ‘Everything is the same, and the tastes are diluted until it tastes like I don’t know what.’”

Here I imagine this speaker to have the voice of Robert Guillaume from The Lion King and with “marmil-laaahd” he waved his hands with their jointed fingers in front of Jerry’s face like two Kabuki fans.

Still quoting the speaker, Jerry said, “‘Look at the Eastern philosophy of multi-culturalism. Look at the Yin-Yang. The white and the black, they stay distinct. They exist next to each other, but they do not mix. But they also do not exist apart.’”

“‘Don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying separate but equal or that the races should be segregated. I’m saying, look at it like a mosaic. You have all these distinct colors, each brilliant on their own, and when they come together they make a sparkling thing.’”

I think about this whenever I think about issues of race. I also think about it whenever I eat sushi, which I now love. See, Jerry is very smart. And he’s a good teacher.

Now here’s a picture of him being a spastic dork in a hammock.

The teaser: Have you heard about the fire? No, not that one.

Monday, Jerry and I left our apartment together on our way to the underground garage. There are a pair of doors on our end of the hall that stay open with magnetic hold open devices. These magnets disengage in case of fire, allowing the doors to automatically close. This isolates our part of the building giving us a smoke-free escape. The doors do not lock closed, so they do not cut off our or anyone else’s hypothetical escape.

Balding Angrily: providing your fire and life safety lessons since 2006.

Our building is built in a very old part of town; some iteration of the building has been around since 1910. In the last 5 years they remodeled it for lofts. They did a spot-on job, but our electricity still has to travel through the ancient infrastructure that plagues this part of town. Consequently, we frequently have outages and surges and other creepy goings-on that cause our elevators to mysteriously stop working and our alarms to sound.

The first time we heard our fire alarm, we were sound asleep and we made our way sluggishly in the direction of the fire exit. After the fifth time, we just looked at the red box on the wall, asking each other, “Do you think we should do anything?” I held my shoes in my lazy-wristed hands and assumed a sneer until it went off.

I got way down the daisy-covered path on that one. Back to Monday. We came out of our apartment, and the double doors were closed. We hadn’t heard a fire alarm, so we assumed it was another one of those creepy instances of our building assuming a personality. As I reached to push open the door, Jerry jokingly said, “Wait! You’re supposed to feel the door first! Only after you know it’s safe are you supposed to open it!” I ignored him and went through; it was fine.

In the late afternoon, Owen called me at work and said, “Don’t worry. You’re place isn’t burnt down.” He tends to start off phone conversations with these kind of non-sequiters. If someone isn’t looking at me quizzically when the four of us are out, they’re looking at him quizzically; we share that tangerine-trees-and-marmalade-skies thought process of free association.

He explained that he was driving around our apartment and saw what the news termed a “column of smoke” near downtown. He checked to see it wasn’t our building and called me. Nice guy, right? Yeah, he is. Jen-An lucked out because she’s not half as nice.

After many hours I came home, and from our window you could see the warehouse that was on fire. It was still burning this morning, and I’m not convinced it’s out right now. In a sick way, I’m kind of sad that I can’t see the flames anymore. It was kind of fun to look out and shake my head at the thought of the smoke adding to Gore’s Gasses^TM.

Given that our electrical infrastructure is shoddy - given that Jerry and I are now immune to the alarm after so many false ones - given that the warehouses in our area are lighting up like Roman candles - given that our building is likely haunted - given that both Jerry and I have left the iron plugged in and on - given that we both get distracted by burly firemen - given all these things we are doomed to die of something fire related. And we don’t even have any kiddos to fight over our vast fortune when we do.

I wanted to conclude the Cols talk for the time being, even though she may come up in future stories.

She and Jerry had a running joke about her dad who passed away about a year or two before I met her. They always referred to him as “her/my dead daddy.” She never, ever got upset about this. She loved gallows humor or humor that crossed the boundaries of good taste. To give you an example, even though she was a practicing Catholic, she had a whole collection of sacrilegious nun dolls including a nun puppet with boxing gloves.

So we knew immediately after her death that she would approve of any laughter at the expense of her passing. Upon such a joke, someone in her huge group of left behind friends would say, “Cols is laughing her ass off right now.”

After four months, I wrote an email to Jerry to sell him on some architectural services. It was not sincere, as I was (as always) frustrated with my job. A little background: Jen-An is Jerry’s boss, and she had just moved out of her office. Jerry moved into it. This is my email to him:

I can’t talk to you right now unless it’s business related. As I have been made aware that I am lacking in my marketing abilities, I must ask you if the Human Resources Department of XYZ is looking for any interiors or architectural services.

Reliant Architects is a full-service architectural firm with an emphasis on the CLIENT. Say a head director in your department is moving to another office leaving her office to an undeserving underling. That undeserving underling will need to know how to use his new office effectively and efficiently.

We at Reliant Architects can and will meet your space planning needs.

Let’s suppose that there has been a recent tragic passing of a loved one. She will be greatly missed. She was an inspiration to all that met her. She has left a hole in the hearts of those closest to her.

She has also left a nice bit of office space for her department with which to contend. That valuable real estate, under the sensitive hands of Reliant Architects can be turned into USEFUL space for her department.

We at Reliant Architects understand your grief, and we also understand that there’s no use crying when a 10 x 15 area is up for grabs. We’ll get in there and turn it into something so spectacular that you’ll forget you even had a friend.

Reliant Architects IS Service.

Jerry forwarded the email to Jen-An; they laughed their asses off, and four years later, Jen-An sent it back to me. I had forgotten what exactly I’d written.

I just re-read the Cols post after a friend who knew Cols called it bittersweet. I really tried hard to take all the bitterness out of it.

When writing about a real-life situation that made me laugh or smile, it’s a real struggle to get you, the reader, to feel the humor, to get you to smile. See, I don’t hold with the “Aw, I guess you just had to be there” philosophy. I think it’s a failure of the writer if they can’t put their readers in a given situation.

On the other hand, I can’t hold a gun to your head and say, “Laugh, dammit! That’s funny shit!” I don’t have that kind of control, and I have to just let you come to a story on your own terms. And if you don’t laugh, that’s cool. Hopefully, you’ve still enjoyed the story. So I’m at peace with that struggle. I won’t stop struggling to make you smile, but I’ll never be hurt if you don’t.

Having said all that, I’m always surprised when I get a laugh at something I wrote because invariably its not at a place where I intended one. It’s when I turn a phrase that I didn’t even realize I was turning that Jerry goes, “that’s some funny shit right there.” And yes, Jerry is always my test-subject. God bless him.

That’s enough naval-gazing for now. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled program on Monday, unless someone forwards me another unicorn video this weekend.

Jen-An is unflappable. Colleen was not, but you could never tell what would set her off. Jerry, making breakfast-for-dinner, said to her, “Move it Cols. Or I’ll kick you in your pussy.”* This didn’t faze her. I looked into the cramped kitchen shocked, wondering if Cols would respond. She ignored him and kept doing what she was doing.

On the other hand, if you timed it right, you could get Colleen good.

She had her gall bladder removed, and Jerry and I visited her in the hospital. She wore a hospital dressing gown that showed off her behind to friends and family. We chatted and left.

Later, Jerry told me she was afraid I saw her behind. I hadn’t. Jerry said, “Look. She’s really embarrassed. You can’t bring this up with her.”

A week later she got out of the hospital, but the doctor told her she couldn’t laugh. She might rip out her stitches if she did. Asking Colleen not to laugh is like asking the sun not to shine. If the expression “peels of laughter” ever applied to anyone, it was Colleen. It was her trademark, her calling card - that and screaming/yelling at someone through her laughter.

Jerry, Collen, and I were walking from her apartment to the car underneath a mailbox hut, one of those central areas where residents retrieve their mail. Jerry and I were walking about ten paces ahead of her.

Jerry said, “Hurry up, Cols. You don’t want a pussy-kickin’, do ya?”

She looked at him with a stone face as if to say, “Is that all you got?”

“So, Cols,” I said, “Did you show anyone else your cooter? Or was it just me?  Did they have to shave it down to cut you open? Do you miss your gall bladder?”

Here she stopped underneath the mailbox hut, put her hand on the stucco wall at forehead level, and silently hit her head against the back of her hand. She didn’t laugh. I like to imagine that she was crying from the pain of holding the laughter in, but I can’t say.

Footnote

*For a long while someone getting “kicked in the pussy,” was our thing. A work associate deserved a kick in the pussy. Roommates needed a kick in the pussy. Richard Nixon would have been a better president if someone would have just given him a good, swift kick in the pussy. I should also add that this was before Anchorman and Will Ferrell’s infamous, “I’m going to kick you in the vagina.” In fact, I wonder if somehow Adam McKay or Ferrell got that from us.

Colleen was Jerry’s best friend for 9 years before he met me. She passed away unexpectedly on my birthday 4 years ago. It’s best that I don’t dwell on that.

I can’t profile her like I did with Jen-An and Owen because any attempt would turn out too shallow. All the people that I put down here turn into characters (or caricatures) for you to read about. I play with these characters at my whim.  The real people behind the characters tell me on a night out that I’m a jerk, that I’m unfair; we have a glass of wine and a dinner and we move on. These people: Jen-An, Owen, Pubic Hair Head, Jerry, Red-Haired Mom, et al. live outside my head, and as I write new stories about their characters, I’m confident that their real-life counterparts are living full lives, unaffected.

In contrast, Colleen is trapped in my head, bouncing against memories and emotions like a pinball. It’s really unfair to her. She ought to be given the same freedom to live outside any character I draw of her. She was a joyous, living human. Even that sentence is diminishing; she was more than joyous and living. She was all the conflicting things that humans are. The moment I write one thing that she was, I edit out all the other things, and that drives me crazy.

So, this post is my disclaimer. I had a hard time sleeping the other night trying to figure out the best way to introduce her to you, and I decided that it’s best to show this part, the hardest part, first. Then we can move to the good stuff, and you won’t have to ask why she’s always presented in the past tense.

And Cols, I’m going to get things wrong. I so badly wish you were here to yell at me when I do.