Halfwit and All Man Read online

  Ads do. There's always an air of festivity and celebration around a holiday, any holiday. And the sheer good-natured joy of the occasion is enhanced by wonderful bargains. Advertisers are such happy people, it seems any day might be a holiday for them to celebrate, a reason for a sale.

  Each Sunday they show me such pretty people, so many amazing things I need to own or eat, give me so many chances to win, and try to save me so very much money that I find it hard to understand why I should be so lucky. All I can do is try to hold up my end, try to buy as many of the things they want me to as I can.

  Managerial Launderage

  Although I enjoy writing, it is not my profession. Rather, what I consider to be my calling, my vocation, my raison d'etre, is low-level government bureaucracy. And I'm very good at it. I've found that the skills I've developed in my work often can be successfully applied to other parts of my life.

  This fact became strikingly clear to me when a coworker was unable to accomplish one of her duties, and responsibility for weekly launderage fell to me. In a matter of only two days I managed to wash and dry three loads of laundry and provide complete documentation for the Household Files.

  Any project must be approached methodically, and all projects can be accomplished by following these steps:

  GOALSETTING. Inventory your clean clothing and make a list of what you accomplish. For instance, on examining my sock drawer I discovered I had one sock remaining, left over from previous launderage and saved for future reallocation to a pair. I would need socks tomorrow. Also, I had no jeans to wear. Clean socks and jeans were on my goals list.

  PRIORITIZATION. Simply having goals is not enough. The goals must be targeted and arranged in order of the importance of their accomplishment. Socks and jeans must be laundered, but jeans take longer to line-dry; therefore, they must be laundered first if they are to dry in time. A copy of this priority list (typed and dated) went into the Launderage folder of the Household Files.

  RESEARCH. All information on the subject must be considered. Instructions for detergent, bleach, fabric softener, and operation instructions for the machine are attached to their respective packages and should be included in the Launderage Folder. All the little tags sewn into each piece of clothing also have to be read and considered.

  CYA. This is an acronym for Cover Your wAsh. It means get enough supporting documentation so that if something goes wrong, you can't be blamed. It may mean dialing every 800 number you can find on all the packages (the numbers, date and time will appear on your phone bill even though you will not be charged). Unfortunately, I neglected this step, and a difficulty arose about the turquoise sweater being washed with the white crepe pants from Paris, for which I was unjustly blamed.

  The best documentation has someone else's signature on it. Acquire this by writing to the manufacturers of the products you use (their addresses are on the containers) and ask for complete instructions for utilizing their fine products under all conditions. You often get them, along with a charming letter explaining, "This is all we know how to do with out product." This letter will be signed, and you will have someone to point to and say: "Even the manufacturer didn't know that would happen." This documentation must be included in the Launderage Folder.

  This is generally the point where work has to actually start being done, and therefore the time I usually delegate the task to someone else. But in this case I was pretty much stuck with having to do launderage, so I include the following steps in case you have a similar misfortune.

  PREPARATION. You can't simply do a task as complex as launderage. The clothes must be sorted by color, fabric, and delicacy, and the piles must be small enough to maintain the best water: clothes: soap ratio. Then the pockets must be inspected for old Kleenexes, cigarette packaging, gum wrappage, and spare change. Then you can begin launderage, always bearing in mind your prioritized goals.

  But now I had a difficulty. Having put in a day's work planning, it was 9:30 at night and too late to do any launderage. I had to wait until the next morning wearing one sock and dirty jeans for launderage, and even then the turquoise sweater bled into the white crepe pants from Paris. Interested parties may peruse the Household Files.

  Random Acts of Senseless Benevolence

  Several years ago when I was about two and a half feet tall my father took me along to visit a friend of his. I don't remember how, but at one point I was walking alone across the guy's back yard.

  The man's two dogs came running across the yard at me, barking and snarling. They stopped inches from my face and continued barking until their owner whistled them off.

  They may have been Dobermans or Labradors, I don't remember. All I remember is standing very still, large pointed teeth, bad dog breath, barking directly in my ears, and the fact that each time they barked, dog spit hit me on my face, my hair, and my shoulders. I don't think I wet myself.

  Later I remember the man talking about it. He said, "Not much point in having watchdogs, if they're not trained," and "People have to learn early the way life is." I think the last comment was directed at me as an early person.

  I remember being struck that he was not a nice man and that as a friend he would probably be a bad influence on my father. In spite of that, my father eventually grew up to be a nice guy.

  While I was growing up I kept hearing that stuff about learning early the way life was. It never made a whole lot of sense to me, but people kept saying it. My father was in the military and a few of the kids I played with had to stand up when an adult entered a room and "sir" him if it was a man or "ma'am" her if it was a woman. They had to learn discipline and respect for authority early so they would be prepared for the way life was.

  Jump forward now a few years to the present. I rent a house with a small front yard. We have one tree and an old woman with her old dog for a neighbor. She would walk her dog twice a day and her dog would poop next to my tree twice a day. The piles accumulated and began to irritate me. There were several things I could do. I could shoot her and her dog; this happens occasionally and is the way life is. I could yell and cuss at her. I could sue her. I could set out water-filled jugs on the grass--the universal sign you don't want dogs to mess your yard, but a bit self-defeating because it just give the dogs more targets to aim for.

  Instead, I did something different. I said hello to her as she passed. We talked about the heat, her life, my life, and my wife's roses. Her dog pooped by my tree. But later that evening the pile was gone; it had been moved from my crabgrass to the gutter. Ever since then we've said hello and talked about the heat and our her life and my life, and there has been no dog poop on my lawn. She carries a little shovel when she walks her dog. I never asked her to.

  Since then I've tried to elaborate on this technique. I commit random acts of senseless benevolence. If a kid is walking by and looks flushed with the heat, I suggest a drink of water from the hose and maybe some wet hair as well. I occasionally make very small loans to people. They sometimes pay me back. I smile at strangers, and they're often not offended. I've volunteered to do favors for people I don't like--not to confuse them (it does), but just to try something different. And something different does happen.

  I'm not very good at this stuff, and certainly not too consistent, but something very much like an idea has come out of all this. I may be wrong, but if people stopped flogging away at the way life is, and at any given moment treated people the way life could be, then maybe life wouldn't be the way it is.

  Yuppies On The Skids

  The signs are starting to appear.

  --Parked on a street downtown: a car with a coathanger stuck in the hole where the radio aerial was broken off, and with a piece of cardboard cut to size and taped down to block out the broken right rear window. Commonplace? Hardly. This is a BMW.

  --In a doorway: standing amid the empty 12 oz bottles of port and muscatel is a similar bottle, but the label reads, "White Zin."

  --In the gutter: a pair of Vuar
net sunglasses, one lens broken, the earpiece held to the frame with a thick wrapping of tape.

  Yuppies are losing their jobs. Without money they begin the long skid down, losing first their tans and muscle tone, then eventually their homes. Unable to cope, they move their shattered lives onto the streets.

  The revolution in machine intelligence is now reaching into the ranks of middle management. The new computers and programs capable of rudimentary independent thought can easily duplicate the work of most pastel-collar employees. Soon businesses will be staffed only by secretaries to answer the phones and type the letters, keypunchers to input the data into the various decision-making programs, and upper-level managers to lock and unlock the doors.

  Earnings profiles may change, but habits don't change. Manufacturers realize the Yuppie market remains, however downscaled, and are racing to fill the low-income Yup market with new products. As mentioned, a large Modesto winemaker has anticipated this social change and is producing a line of wine for the New Displaced. Current production extends only to 12 oz. bottles of screw-top white zinfandel, but if demand matches market projections, the line will be expanded to include a Merlot and a Johannesburg Riesling for a full complement of red, white, and blush wines to fill alley cellars.

  A manufacturer of vitrified clay products (up to now, sewer pipe) in Lincoln, California has developed what it hopes will be a big seller among the formerly affluent. It calls its product Brieveeta, and aims it at the do-it-yourself down-and-out Yuppie. Brieveeta is a large rectangular china crock with a lid, and it is sold with a package of inoculant for $16.99. Government surplus pasteurized processed cheese is rinsed in water to remove some of the excess salt, then rolled in the fungus inoculant. The cheese is put in the crock, covered, and kept cool for four months. At the end of that time something very much like an approximation of a runny French cheese is left in the crock. A reviewer from Food and Wine Mechanics tried the process and pronounced the product, "Actually a bit better than you'd expect."

  Probably the biggest-ticket item for this new market is the Beemer, a state-of-the-art German- engineered shopping cart. It is the cart for the status-conscious has-been. A basic Beemer runs $600, while one loaded with options can cost twice as much. It is advertised as "the last thing you buy before you move onto the streets."

  The basic model comes with magnesium-alloy wheels and tiny Michelin low-profile steel-belted radial tires. Front wheels are linked with a sway bar to prevent drift and fishtailing, and all models have four- wheel hydraulic disk brakes. For comfort the Beemer has an ergometric, leather-wrapped handle. Options include a Swiss cam-actuated aluminum can crusher, foglamps, a sound system and a solar package to recharge the batteries (needed to power some accessories.)

  Each of these products has one thing in common: the clear measure of quality needed to appeal to the Yuppie. Using any of them allows the owner to make the quiet statement, "However bad off I may be, I'm still better than you." They should sell well.

  Toxic 'Taters

  Bad news for potato eaters. You're killing yourselves. Well, maybe not killing. Maybe it's just nerve damage or a gradual impairment of internal organs-- ominous stuff like that. But potatoes are bad news, especially with the wrappers on.

  Which comes as no surprise to botanists (among other things, I'm a botanist.) Potatoes belong to the family Solanaceae, along with Deadly Nightshade and tobacco (two known killers), eggplant (definitely suspicious), tomatoes, and peppers. Parts of all these plants are poisonous, usually the parts that don't get eaten--the leaves and stems.

  Now it turns out that researchers at Cornell University have found that subterranean potato tubers--what non-researchers call potatoes--contain toxic glycoalkaloids (solanine and choconine, since you ask) that can cause human poisoning in large doses.

  "What is a large dose?" I don't know. Might be one particularly large potato with a lot of funky knobs and bumps on it, or maybe it takes a whole bagful to get a person writhing in pain. I can't know everything, and besides the point of this essay is to alarm rather than inform.

  The poison is usually concentrated in the potato skin. Remember all those times your mother said, "Eat the skin, that's where all the vitamins are?" Think about it, have you ever seen a vitamin in nature? I've taken them, they don't do anything they're supposed to-- cure colds, hangovers, make your eyesight better-- nothing. I don't even believe in vitamins, but I sure believe in poison. I think mothers have known a long time about these glycoalkaloids.

  Although the poison starts in the potato skin, IT MOVES WHEN YOU COOK IT. Cooking a potato with the skin on can cause up to 10 percent of this vegetable's venom to move to the adjoining flesh, so even if you peel it before you eat it, you still poison yourself. And if you eat it skin and all, you might just as well put a gun to your head and do it quicker.

  This is precisely the kind of scientific research this country needs. Potatoes are so widespread in the U.S. that it's impossible to estimate how much potato debilitation there may be. And millions of people worldwide have been eating potatoes for hundreds if not thousands of years. Just how many potato-related deaths have there been throughout history? Conversely, how many lives were saved by the potato blight in Ireland at the turn of the century?

  The tabloid newspapers will probably grab on to this research and blame all sorts of ills on the potato. I think it behooves the responsible journalist to insert a note of caution. The number of french fries teenagers eat are probably not responsible for their behavior. I know I was pretty weird as a teenager even without french fries. I blame my behavior on raging hormones and too many drugs; I'm sure today's youth are no different.

  Dangerous food is nothing new. I still remember as a kid when scientists discovered something I always knew: carrots are killers. Even as a child it was plain to me that any vegetable that came to a point was deadly.

  As more and more research is completed, it has become obvious that just about anything you eat will eventually kill you. At the moment, olive oil and buckwheat groats are the only things safe to swallow. Eat anything else, and--quickly or slowly--you'll die.

  Modern Corks

  It's two in the morning and I'm standing in the dark bathroom, nekkid as a baby bird and every bit as attractive (especially the knees), trying to get some aspirin.

  I know exactly where the aspirin bottle is--last shelf, next to the wall--and I have it in my hand. I also know that's embossed on the plastic cap: "Line up arrows and push off top." I don't have to turn on the light to know these things.

  We have a glowing daisy with a happy-face smile stuck in a bathroom outlet as a night light. I lean over to look for the arrows to line up and hit my head on the bathroom wall. I'm not awake yet. I find the arrow on the bottle, that's easy, then hit my head on the wall again. I keep looking for the arrow on the cap and losing my balance. Thud. . . thud. . . thud-- my head against the wall. Finally I just leave my head where it falls against the wall and look for the cap arrow in the night light's glow.

  It isn't there, of course. I try turning the cap a fraction of an inch at a time, then pushing at the top, turning then pushing, turning then pushing. The arrows never line up, the daisy never stops smiling. I consider biting its neck until it cracks. But violence never solved anything and I'd probably break my tooth rather than the plastic bottle. So I turn on the light. The little demons with the sharp pitchforks start flapping around my eyes and jabbing at them with their forks. After a few seconds they go away. I line up the arrows and take my aspirin.

  I turn out the light and walk into the edge of the bathroom door. I braille my way down the hallway, whacking the bedroom doorjamb with my little toe and nearly turning my ankle on a shoe that I saw when I got out of bed, but not now. My wife wakes up.

  "What are you doing?" she says.

  "Committing suicide with aspirin," I say. That seems to satisfy her, she goes back to sleep. I join there a few minutes later.

  It's important that we prot
ect children. We even have to protect the children who are not around and may never be around. So we put child-protective caps on everything. But as my dear old friend Mrs. Yournamehere of 1234 Maple Lane, Anytown, USA, said, "If I could push in the tabs and turn it at the same time, I wouldn't need arthritis medicine."

  The problem is that the only person with the patience to open most child-proof bottles is a child. No one is more clever or tenacious than a kid trying to get into some forbidden thing. To counter this problem, manufacturers have come up with containers that children can't get into because no one can get into them. They don't open even if you line up the arrows, push in the tabs, or lift while rotating the top. The individual foil wrapping beneath the cap is reinforced with Amarid (a synthetic fiber with 10 times the shear strength of steel) and won't tear.

  Insert a screwdriver in the slot of the spray paint can lid and twist while lifting. It won't open. They don't put the real instructions on how to get in the can on the lid ("Cut lid off with hacksaw near can") because many children can read these days. So I came right out and asked a ten year old: "How do I get in these containers?"

  He took a long draw on his cigarette and exhaled slowly, squinting off past the horizon. "Hammer," he said. "Hit anything enough times with a hammer, and it'll open." And it works!

  So when I do finally hammer and pry the lid off of anything, do you think I put it back on? Not if I can help it. If it has to have a lid, I get a new one from a bag of lids I bought at the hardware store. They call them "corks." They work just fine.

  Freeway Close

  Few people realize that the red rubber erasers on the tips of their pencils had their beginnings as automobile tires. This is just one example of the amazing bounty of our freeways.

  From its humble beginning as a quick way to get from Rancho Cordova to Arco Arena, our freeway system has evolved into a source of raw materials, a daily flea market, and a 24 hour farmer's market. Everyone has to periodically buy new tires for his car because they wear down. But where does the rubber go when it wears down?