The Story of the Split Saddle Massage Chair

Seeking to impress my girlfriend by breaking with my deliberative ways (don’t say indecisive), I hit the buy button within a single month of discovering MHP Massage’s Berkeley Split Saddle Massage Chair. It’s a chair made not for receiving massages but for administering them, and at $200 it was priced well below the competition. As the name suggests, the seat is shaped somewhat like a horse saddle, but split down the middle, to avoid pressuring the perineum (known in medical circles as “the gooch”).

The box arrived several days later. I assembled the chair in minutes and then gleefully scooted myself around our study’s hardwood floor on the unexpectedly smooth casters. The seat raised and lowered easily, and I noted how strong and upright I felt. It was equally comfortable at standard sitting height or raised up so that I could straddle it from a half-standing position at my standing desk. I sent a video hyping it to my friends and tried to imagine what my life would look like in my new era of quintupled productivity and perfect Gokhalean spinal alignment.

And for the first few days, it was great. My posture really was better, I felt more alert and stable; sitting was more active and less muscle-liquefying. But I couldn’t blind myself to it forever: My right nut went numb whenever I sat on it. Numbness of that sort is the result of compression of the perineal nerve, the very thing I was trying to avoid with the split saddle. In denial, I tried to find other explanations. Was it my pants? I switched to athletic shorts. No improvement. Perhaps if I arranged…things just so before sitting…Again, no dice.

But dreams die hard, and I wasn’t going to let a small wrinkle like that get in between me and perfect posture. I paraded our apartment’s collection of pillows and cushions over to the chair and sought some combination that would maintain the chair’s posture-enhancing properties while eliminating the unfortunate numbness. None of them worked—they were all too lumpy, or slid around too much, or just made the numbness worse. It was time to face the music: I didn’t own the right pillow. So I went online and ordered a donut pillow of the sort used by those with hemorrhoids. With hands trembling with fear and hope, I placed it on top of my saddle chair and sat down on it. Did it slip? It didn’t slip. Did I go numb? I didn’t go numb. Was there another problem with it? Of course there was. The added height made the backrest misaligned with my back, and I ended up slouching worse than in any other office chair. Defeated, I began the process of returning the chair.

MHP Massage sold the chair both through Amazon and its own website, and when ordering, I opted to order directly from them to support their business. But while Amazon featured free returns if unused (which I considered the chair to essentially be), MHP charged a 20% restocking fee, and I would have to pay for return shipping. Schemers and scammers! I thought. I emailed them explaining my reason for ordering from them and asking them to honor the return policy on Amazon. Elaine wrote back and said that I would have to pay for the return shipping, but they would waive the restocking fee if the chair was unused. The game was on.

I checked UPS, USPS, and Fedex, and none would ship the chair back to Sacramento for less than $90. At nearly half of the price of the chair, this wasn’t going to cut it. I emailed Elaine asking her if MHP would send me a shipping label and deduct it from my return (she had earlier told me that their shipping cost was $40). She agreed.

Now I had to convince them that the chair was unused to prevent them robbing me of another $40. The first step in their malicious plan was to make the chair fiendishly hard to take apart. After half an hour of struggling and watching their YouTube video, I managed to get the seat off of the seat post. That was the easy part. The other end of the seat post was jammed into a ring at the center of the chair base, with the tip of the post sticking out just below the bottom of the chair base with the casters removed. No amount of yanking and swearing would dislodge it. I balanced the post on a piece of wood and jumped on the base; this just sent me falling sideways. I laid a piece of wood over the base and hammered away at it. The post didn’t slip a millimeter. I turned the whole thing upside down and suspended it in the cavity of my washing machine and repeated the wood-and-hammer trick, this time on the bottom of the seat post itself. Again, not a millimeter.

It was at this point that I stopped to consider the neoliberal homo economicus view of the situation: rather than struggle for who knew how much longer to take this chair apart in order to return it, shouldn’t I just work a few more hours, earn the amount I was going to get refunded, and wash my hands of the whole thing? Maybe, but I didn’t particularly want to do work work on my Saturday, and besides, it would feel like a defeat to, after all that, email MHP to say that I wouldn’t be returning the chair after all and then post it for free on Craigslist because I couldn’t take it apart.

So I resumed my efforts. Some YouTube videos showed success with the obvious combination of WD-40 and a rubber mallet, so I trudged down to Ace to buy them. I sprayed the WD-40 onto the post and once more hung the assembly over my washing machine to bang on it with the mallet. This time, it slipped out.

Everything was disassembled, and now I just had to make sure all the parts were clean and get them into their original packaging to complete my restocking fee coup. As you may have guessed by the general trend of these efforts, this was easier said than done. WD-40 had run into all the crevices of the chair base, and just when I thought I had gotten it all, I would feel another run of cold grease and have to bring out the rag again. The white-accented casters had accumulated a surprising amount of dust and hair in the week that I had used the chair, and I meticulously wiped each one of them down. I wiped down the fabric of the chair and cleaned the smudged fingerprints off all the metal.

But it was the seat post that, even this far in, threatened to blow up the whole operation. The post was slightly extended and wouldn’t fit back in the box it came in. I tried to compress it by hand, but my arms were no match for the hydraulic cylinder inside. I grabbed the piece of wood I had been hammering on, balanced it on top of the post, and sat on it. I glided smoothly down, and, feeling satisfied with myself, slid the post into the box. It was still too long! I tried it again. Same result. I realized that when I tilted off of the seat post, there was still enough pressure on the button on top to give the hydraulic assembly movement but not enough weight to keep it compressed, and in that moment it was expanding. I tried it once more, this time placing the post upside down with the button on the slab of wood. It held.

As I pulled the foam sleeves over the chair parts, the sleeves ripping and splitting and me not being able to do anything about it, I felt that solid sense of earnedness that comes with accomplishing anything physical. But I also noticed that I cared much less than I did before if I got the restocking fee waived or not. While I had before cast it as a punitive measure, something the assholes who sold me the chair were tacking on to get some money out of my return, going through the process of cleaning it up to make it like new again made me appreciate just how much work it took. The chair was only so cheap to begin with because the cost of the return processing labor wasn’t baked into the price, and it now struck me as a completely reasonable fee to charge.

A week later, I got an email from Paypal. MHP had refunded me the whole amount. I wrote Elaine to say thank you.

Greece – Arrival

Matthew and I touched down at the Athens International Airport around 5 PM. The runway stretched between the terminal and a small range of dry mountains and stepping down the stairs and onto the tarmac put me in mind of Anita Ekberg’s deplaning in La Dolce Vita, minus the fawning papparazzi.
We took a 40€ taxi to the apartment where Alec was waiting for us in bad but improving condition. He had flown to meet us there from Cambodia, where he had spent the last several months working at an orphanage and developing an endless series of medical complications. Cambodia gave him one last kiss goodbye and when we found him he had just secured his first sleep in two days after being tormented by his infected toe and a 30-hour insomniatic sneezing attack. So he was in a bad way.
The apartment was beautiful, dark woods and book cases and couches and chairs draped with colorful patterned sheets and outside the living room a humongous balcony overrun with cacti and succulents. Somehow when Alec met our host it had emerged that she was a follower of Osho, the cult leader of recent Wild Wild Country fame.
Alec was feeling okay enough to walk around and so we headed out into the evening and quickly came upon the Olympic Stadium, continued on through a very lovely park which we later learned was the National Gardens, on through a book fair, white tents on either side of a wide walkway, almost everything in Greek, very crowded, beautiful people (girls) everywhere, and came out the other end to a crowd massing around a stage in front of a yellow classical looking building with “ΖΑΓΓΙΟΝ” lettered across its front. There were a lady and boy selling roasted corn on the cob and another cart with “ΠΟΠΚΟΡΝ.” On stage a man and woman in their thirties engaged the crowd, the woman sometimes in Portuguese, and there was a tent bedecked in small Brazilian flags.

We sat on some marble steps behind the crowd going down and away from the plaza area with all the action and looking over a green lawn with a fountain at the end of it that lit up and gushed water at three points with indiscernible logic and which otherwise lay silent and dark. We discussed if the bright star high and to the right of the moon was Venus, landed on Jupiter, the names even if Roman sounding especially potent given our setting; talked about the ethics of vegetarianism, and it was all very nice. There was a group of Greek girls talking next to us and we asked them where we should go to eat but as they pointed us away from our hotel we ignored their suggestion and walked back past the stadium and eventually found TAVERNA ——-. We shared bread with tzatziki, roasted eggplant, fried zucchini, fried cheese, and sautéed “mountain greens” and it was very lovely out on the patio with white plastered walls around us and citrus trees growing against them and the vine-dripping pergola overhead and the breeze coming through and blowing up the the plastic crepe table covering so that we kept strategically repositioning our water glasses and pitcher and spare chair to pin it down. The tzatziki was amazing for the quality of the yogurt, the best I’ve ever had, firm peaks for days, and remained the best yogurt we would have on the entire trip and thus in my life except for two days later when we returned to the same taverna.

We paid for dinner and returned to our apartment, Alec in one room with the big bed and Matthew and I in the other. Matthew and I were still on East Coast time and we woke up at 5 and Alec heard us and got up too and we all meditated together and then Matthew and I went out for a walk while Alec tried to catch some more sleep.

There was a giant fort up on a hill and we angled roughly toward that, through the National Gardens again, winding through colorful pavestone streets and then climbing steps up the hill past cafes just putting out their chairs and chalkboard signs until we reached a point where the road fizzled out and there were just serpentine foot paths that we thought might have been private but a cafe owner waved us onto one and we continued to climb. Along the stone paths and roads there were dozens of stray cats happily picking at cat food that someone had left out for them. This was our first taste of the endearing stray cats and dogs of Greece which were defined by their near-universal friendliness.

The path took us up to the wrought-iron fencing bearing warnings of surveillance cameras that protected the vertically towering stone walls of the fort that served as the lodestar for our wanderings. We followed the fence for a ways and finally came to a sign indicating that this mysterious structure was in fact the Akropolis. We hadn’t been able to see what was on top of it from our vantage point. Perhaps it should have been obvious but I liked the adventure of not knowing and not consulting a map to tell us.
We wove our way back down the hill, working against the wakening crowd of tourists, jostled through Monastiraki Square with its restaurants offering 10€ omelettes and Full English breakfasts, found six dogs to be closed and finally recognized Cafe Beneth as the chain cafe that Matthew’s Greek friend had recommended. The counter boy was very friendly and helped us order our coffees and pastries and orange juices and we ate them under the tent on the sidewalk. The sidewalk space was empty except for one middle-aged Greek man and Matthew chose the table right next to him to avoid the direct breeze of the large floor fan. The Greek man was joined later by two friends, they all seemed very affable as they talked, and the tables behind us were occupied briefly by a group of older Americans.

When we finished our food we each picked something to write about that was going on behind the back of the other. Behind Matthew, separated from us by a short plexiglass screen, a small ring of semi-grizzled Greeks smoked cigarettes and watched the battery of screens of the Bet Cafe showing BCC World News, Formula One, an infomercial about vacuum cleaners, and the others flashing Keno boards from the Bet Cafe. The vibes were very different on the two patios, everyone at Veneti there with friends and at the Bet Cafe the crowd sat alone, smoking cigarettes, watching the screens. I wrote about this and then we read our narratives to each other and talked until until Alec found us.
As a group we climbed back up to the Akropolis and went inside. Like many grand tourist objects, the ruins invoked in me simultaneous feelings of intellectual awe and emotional apathy. Here was history! Here was culture! Think of the work to drag the stone up the hill, to erect the columns, to lay the roof…think of the omnipresence that the pantheon of the old gods and heroes, honored here with marble devotion, had in the minds of the ancient Greeks that walked on these very stone steps!…but then also, there was nothing new, I had seen a thousand pictures of the things I was looking at, which the informational placards revealed to be largely replicas now anyway, and there were the throngs of people to sidestep, and it all felt dead and distant from the lives of anyone walking the Earth today. Much better to see it from below, lit up in gold and lightning dancing in the sky behind it, as we did from the rooftop of our hostel during a subsequent stay in Athens.

Leaving the Akropolis we found a street musician sitting playing guitar in a doorway off some stairs leading back down to Monastiraki. We sat and listened to him and chatted in between songs. His name was Guylo, he came from Kinshasa and he had a fascinating way of making a rattling sound with his mouth interspersed with his singing. Small groups of tourists joined for a song or two so at the peak he had an audience of eight people or so. We gave him some money and when he was finished we continued down the hill and sought out a spot to eat.

After lunch was the National Archaeological Museum. It was a long walk to get there, made longer by some glitches in Alec’s favorite navigational app and some additional glitches in my own route setting. While walking we talked about technology and society and the trade offs between the personal convenience of customized search results and the larger societal drawbacks of a fragmenting shared reference body of knowledge. We walked along a main road and passed several fine-looking government buildings and then turned into some side streets and found riot police casually hanging out on the sidewalk with riot shields and wire-encased riot buses parked alongside them. This we found out later was Exarchia, a neighborhood with a healthy portion of anarchists and other youth who thrill at the chance for a good riot and also home to some very hip yet unassuming bookstores, record shops, cafes, and bars. It is also the neighborhood housing the National Archaeological Museum and thus the riot police guarding the moat of cast-off stonework separating the museum from the street.
We went inside, bought our tickets, studied bronze armor and swords and ancient ceramics and then rooms full of intricate gold work, display after display, again I had a similar sense as at the Akropolis, I was aware of a significance contained in all of it but damned if I knew a thing about the techniques used to make any of it or the objects’ place in the histories of arts and crafts. Gold has a transcendent effect though; whenever you are presented with it, and more so with ornaments and figurines and jewelry, no matter where you are from or how material or a-material your disposition, you know immediately that you are looking at something of value, that people prized that thing greatly, and still prize it today, and there is no questioning its place in the glass cabinets showcasing the prizes of a country’s past.

There were two exhibits that I most enjoyed; one was a temporary installation drawings some choice pieces from the different galleries into a contemplation on the nature of beauty and its interpretations across the thousands of years of Greek history, tracing the depiction of the human form in its art from generic archetypes to stoic and noble renderings of mythological men and finally, the exhibit’s culmination, to the anonymous bronze head that carries woven into its strong features all the thoughts and worries and mental chatter of a man living in time and in space that happened to be 1st Century BC Delos but could just as easily have been the one from which I’m writing this or the one in which you’re now reading it.
The second collection that struck me was the Egyptian one. Not so much for the sarcophagi and other tomb artifacts, which were impressive but to my eye at least nothing different from the ones I’d seen at the Pergamon in Berlin, but for the fascinating description of the “disappearing wax” method of bronze statue making and then again for a series on ancient timepieces and the astounding complexity they exhibited. I guess I am somewhat of an engineer after all.
One last story that sticks with me: There is a giant 5th-century bronze of Zeus with his arms outstretched as he prepares to launch a now-missing lightning bolt that was recovered from the seafloor almost a century ago. Apparently it attracts lots of museum-goers wanting to replicate its pose in front of it and there is an attendant positioned nearby at all times to shout down anyone making moves in this attempt. The ludicrous thing to me is that you are allowed to take a picture in front of it, just not if you are striking the pose. Alec and Matthew relayed watching an attendant lay down this injunction to a couple of people while they were in that room and of course I wanted nothing more at that point than to sprint up, strike a pose faster than the attendant could do anything about and then run out or let them escort us out of the museum which we were then done with, but my two companions talked me out of it.
So we left the museum still in the good graces of the guardians of Greek archaeology and headed back out into the warm, dry air of Athens.

 

Fifty-Dollar Dog

Photo courtesy Michael Gil, flickr

Clay and I walk through the tall grass to behind where Ben is standing on the pond bank waving at the stars with one of the girls who came out with us, who’s a full head taller than him.  ‘See how they, look, see how they, they twinkle?’  His idea of romantic moonlit talk, apparently.  His accent is thick as molasses, more hick than drawl.

Clay and I hiss laughter to each other and walk up to them.  ‘What the hell are you talking about Ben?’ Clay says.  Ben turns to look at us, surprised.

‘The stars, they twinkle, see?’ he repeats.  He knows we’re amused at something but he’s not sure about what.  We laugh some more, and he joins in.  ‘Oh, y’all laughing at me again?’

Clay and Ben grew up together in the Georgia countryside, along with Griffin, Jake, and Caleb, on whose uncle’s land in the Appalachian foothills we’re spending the weekend, with more firearms, trucks, whiskey, beer, axe-throwing, and Vienna sausages than could ever be considered healthy.  August has just started, a strange feeling for those of us who graduated college in May and for the first time in four years aren’t returning to classes.

It’s been the sort of weekend where death seems to linger closer than usual, waiting for a chance to blow in through the trees and take someone.  I don’t know if everyone senses it, or just me.  I’m the outsider here, the guest invited to join the childhood gang and try to keep up with them as they do what they always do.  I’m being tested, in ways conscious and unconscious, and the group dynamics are visible to me in a way that’s so transparent that it makes it hard to behave naturally.

I am therefore heartened by Ben’s presence.  While he has a fine-enough character, the one adjective that constantly screams to be applied to him is thick-skulled, owing not just to his limited mental faculties but also to the shape of his head, which even under his thin mop of shaggy hair and camo Mossy Oak visor gives the remarkable impression that it’s at least an inch thick all the way around.  Ben is undeniably the group stooge, truly loved but also truly laughed at.  He plays the role with surprising grace; while I normally assume that most people who find themselves playing the fool secretly resent the embarrassment, I’m unable to decipher any hints in his demeanor to suggest he’s the least bit offended by the jokes he plays the butt of.

That’s important for my situation, because it allows me easy access to that ever-important male-bonding rite of laughing at others.  I’m cautious not to make any jokes of my own for most of the first day, but as I grow more chummy with the rest of the crew and the whiskey gets lower in the bottle, I find myself joining in.  It’s not good of me, but it’s hard to resist the constant fodder Ben provides.

Later that night around the bonfire, Clay and I are once again hissing in tears as we listen to Ben explain something to Jake, who’s staring hard into the fire.  But while most of his stories are quite literally laughable in their idiocy, now and then he manages to spin out some Yogi Berra-esque grains of wisdom.  ‘Hey Ben, tell us the one about the time you made fifty dollars off a dog,’ Clay says to him once he’s finished whatever else he was rambling on about before.

Ben whips his head around to look at us with something approaching coyness plastered over his face.  ‘Oh, y’all wanna hear the one about the time I made fifty dollars off a dog?’

‘Yea, tell us that one.’

‘It’s true, I made fifty dollars outta ‘at dog.’

‘Yea well tell it.’

‘Let me tell y’all.’

‘So okay.’

‘So what happened was, my girlfriend’s birthday was coming up right, and so I went and got her a dog as a present, but before I could give it to her, she went and broke up with me.  So I took the dog and sold it to somebody for a hundred bucks, went to the liquor store and buy a bottle of whiskey and a case of beer and went home and drank it all.  Woke up the next morning, my heart was stiiilllll broken.’

If that’s not a true story, I don’t know what is.

Knowledge, Celebrity, Narcissism, and the Shattering of The Infinite

There is, by any accounting, too much to think about these days. According to IBM, collective humanity generates 2,500,000,000 gigabytes of data every 24 hours. 90% of the data in existence in the world has been generated in the last two years. Just as importantly, hyperconnectivity at speeds that would have been extreme even in science fiction fifty years ago has made accessing that data a routine procedure for even the most unresourceful layman. Want to see a high-resolution photograph of the far side of Pluto? Or know how many times the word ‘cucumber’ was used in newspapers in 1933? Or learn the ins-and-outs of industrial charcoal production? Google, google, google. The state of not knowing something has increasingly seems to us to be obsolete, unnatural even. The infinite has been stolen from God’s domain and opened up to us. And as it has, two powerful and violently contradictory forces raging within us have duly expanded into it.

The first is our agonizing self-awareness of our own minuscule station in the universe. It is now an intellectual sin to stop at any one answer, to be so naive as to assert an opinion wholly and with genuine conviction; the more we know, the further we seem to be from the truth. This holds in matters both mundane—management blogs are full of discussions of ‘paralysis by analysis’ in the workplace—and existential—our expansion of knowledge has contributed very little to our understanding of life’s most fundamental and spiritual questions, and if anything has increased our doubts and anxieties more than it has alleviated them.

Only a few hundred years ago, the sun, moon, stars, and the rest of the heavenly bodies circled us on fixed and well-understood tracks; now we spin alone in a cold corner of a mid-sized galaxy. Meanwhile, evolutionary biologists are hard at work trying to distill what Faulkner called ‘the old universal truths…love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice’ into neat formulas representing nothing more than the odds of reproductive success. Even the secrets of consciousness, of our very souls, maybe, will soon crack under the steady probe of empiricism.

The second, countering force to all that is our egos. Even as we mourn the erosion of the old truths and values that used to sit high on their pedestals, we congratulate ourselves on our remarkable abilities to erode and transform the world. And we are constant curators of monuments to our own magnificence. Always susceptible to self-puffery, our egos are positively drunk on the new attentions we’ve been heaping on ourselves, by the frequent appearances we make in our own photos and videos, by the witty comments that we dump into cyberspace, anxiously awaiting the tally of positive response to tell us how we measure up, how close we are to fame, secretly hoping that those were the ones that would catapult us to stardom, the whole world recognizing what we knew all along: that we have some unique and special insight into how things are going.

What happens when these two forces collide? From a cursory look at society, it would seem the second is winning out. According to The Economist’s review of David Brooks’ The Road to Character,

The proportion of American teenagers who believe themselves to be “very important” jumped from 12% in 1950 to 80% in 2005. On a test that asks subjects to agree or disagree with statements such as “I like to look at my body” and “Somebody should write a biography about me”, 93% of young Americans emerge as being more narcissistic than the average of 20 years ago.

Similarly, surveys and anecdotes suggest that Americans’ thirst for fame and celebrity is at an all-time high. From evidence such as this, Brooks argues that we are too into ourselves, and need to rediscover certain moral values like self-sacrifice and humility, and their concomitant joys, to overcome our rampant narcissism. I agree with him to a point, but I think that a large part of the newly widespread aspiration to fame and importance signals a lessening of the value we give to words like ‘important’ and ‘celebrity’, and not merely an increase in self-regard.

Celebrity used to be something other, a position occupied by people different than us, but now it is laid bare: everyone is the same, in their own special specialness, everyone is building their brand, curating followers. The difference between us and them is not mysterious or magical but just a matter of magnitude. ‘Importance’ and ‘celebrity’ are no longer special qualities, but a tally of clicks, of likes, of search engine rankings, a number of eyes watching. They are nothing more than commodities to be accumulated. Think how foolish and naive the swooning crowds from the fifties look as a star passes by, screaming, arms stretching, grasping, as if the magic dust of stardom could be transferred in a touch. We know better today: the correct response is to take a picture, to capture celebrity and make it your own expression of the world, already pre-vetted and approved by millions of @fans. Reaching celebrity, we now understand, is nothing more but the last step in a process of self-validation that begins with our first goo-gawing attempts to speak. We are special to the extent that we make ourselves special.

Once we come to understand ‘esteem’ and ‘regard’ as manipulable quantities, it is a small step to understand narcissism simply as technique for increasing them (No one will respect you if you don’t respect yourself, remember?). But here even critics of narcissism like Mr. Brooks seem to miss a deeper point: Brush past the self-adulation and self-congratulation, and all narcissism is rooted not in self-love but in crippling insecurity and despair. It is precisely when we are most unsure of ourselves that we turn our greatest attentions inward.

The Infinite has fallen to our level, and we have found it empty except for what we fill it with. And so we clutch to the last thing we have, rocking in the corner of a bright and noisy room with our arms wrapped around our legs, shouting.

Notes on the Alps, Berlin, Moving, and Eternity

Photo courtesy Boje Baader

It’s sentimental, but maybe the worst feeling for a writer is to feel absolutely nothing for something. That’s how it was when I arrived back in Berlin from holidaying in Bavaria; arrived back from friends and the prettiness of München and supreme awesomeness of the Alps, where we ascended over two kilometers to the 2,962 meter peak of Germany’s highest mountain, the Zugspitze, steeling our nerves for the final part to the outcropping with the golden cross where we clambered along the side of the cliff, gripping tight to the metal guide rope and fixing our eyes anywhere but the several hundred meters falling away from under us.

On the way back, Anouk took the train down and Heinz and Malte and I crossed a metal gate into Austria and suddenly found ourselves in a new type of beauty, green fields rising all the way up to the heavens around us and cows and deer grazing far off near the waterfall below us, at the outlet of the immense V carved out by glaciers over the past two million years. Everything was too beautiful to be believed until we made it to the uppermost building of the ski resort that hums through the winter, at which point the trail turned into a gravel road that declined at an approximately 70º angle for the last two hours, and the scenery around us, which normally would have been magnificent but compared to what he had just left behind was now much too normal, did little to take my mind off the grinding pain in the soles of my feet and in my knees.

We finally found Anouk reading on a bench by the gondola parking lot, sat down on the asphalt and sipped the Radlers she had bought for us. As we drove, a giant white ball of a moon rose over the mountains to our right and followed us home, waxing gibbous at 98% but as full as any moon I’ve ever seen. The next night we were joined by Anouk’s boyfriend, Max, and another quiet, squinty-eyed fellow from Utting whose name I can’t remember (‘I really can’t believe that dude doesn’t smoke weed,’ Heinz commented the next day) and ate barbeque and knocked out three crates of Bavarian beer while sitting at the table in Anouk’s garden. I was very funny, spinning yarns in great style, until I found myself lying on the couch inside demanding that somebody bring me some water, after which point my participation in the conversations dropped off precipitously.

After a Bavarian breakfast of pretzels and weiße würste the next day, we all got cleaned up and packed up and Anouk and Max took the car to Zurich to where Max’s brother was expecting his first child, and the three boys walked through Utting to the train station. The sun was one degree away from being too warm and as we walked through the clean, quiet streets with our backpacks cinched up around our waists it matched the feeling I had in my head of walking through a little village in the Italian countryside. We bought a group ticket to München and then disembarked at our separate stations, Malte to take the train to Frankfurt and Heinz and I each meeting a car-sharing driver to take us each to Hamburg and Berlin.

I’ve said goodbye to each of them many times since the first goodbye in New Zealand, and the fact that this was likely the last one for quite a long time now didn’t really resonate or seem quite real, and still doesn’t. That’s probably for the best though: there’s no sense aching over something you can’t change, and every meeting we have now feels like a bonus to me more than something I get used to and then lose again. Whenever we’re all gathered, some of our conversation naturally shifts to stories from our times together in New Zealand, but the last couple of times we’ve met I’ve been warmed by the observation that our friendship is grounded in something now that transcends any one place or time, which is the way it is with all true friends.

But as my ride slowly descended from the Bavarian hills into the glacial valley surrounding Berlin, something in me deflated. The sky wasn’t as blue, the landscape’s contours flattened out and my mind ran blankly across the fields skirting the highway with nothing to catch it. Tobias dropped me off near Frankfurter Allee and I chose to walk the twenty minutes or so home instead of taking the tram, and while the walk was fine I found the streets did nothing for me, they were neither good nor bad, just places I was familiar with but had never thought of as home, and the same when I got back to my flat, my room half-disassembled in preparation for moving out the next day, just a collection of temporary objects that had helped keep me comfortable for the last year but held no real significance.

I slept that night on my mattress directly on the floor, my bed slats already sold and the bed itself, the cheapest one from Ikea, standing vertical against the wall to keep it out of the way. In the morning I listed both of them on eBay Kleinanzeigen to give away and a couple hours later a nice young Spanish couple came and collected them. The rest of the day was too hot for moving but still I spent it shuttling back and forth on the U-Bahn and on the sidewalks, dripping sweat and my arms and shoulders screaming at me under the strain of whatever junk I kept shoving into the big blue Ikea bags.

But finally I was moved out, or so I thought, until a dispute with my former flatmate over whether or not I was obliged to paint my room threatened to turn into a full-blown war. But that too was resolved, and now there is nothing left of me there besides the rusty old three-speed I found in the backyard and used for a week after my first bike got stolen, and which is still chained to a wooden post near the trash bins because I couldn’t find the key until I was already back in Kreuzberg. Maybe I will go back and free it, but most likely it will remain someone else’s problem, though not a big one, as the one-euro-store lock could probably be destroyed with a nutcracker if you put your mind to it.

An odd symmetry has developed as far as my time in Berlin goes: I spent my first two rent-paying months in a tiny room in a three-bedroom apartment with a balcony in Kreuzberg, before moving to a larger but more sterile place in Friedrichshain, and I have now returned to yet another tiny room in a three-bedroom apartment with a balcony less than a fifteen-minute walk from my first place. Fortunately, the numb feeling has started to fade: from the resumption of goal-driven routine; from the newness of the new neighborhood and the neighborhood itself, its gentler patterns and sounds and smells and sights, groups of old Turkish men gathered quietly around tables on sidewalks replacing the screaming of drunken tourists outside Suß war Gestern; from the evening light rippling golden through the leaves in the tree tops in Görli outside my new office window; and also from yesterday’s rain that, if the forecasters are to be believed, heralded the end of the summer heat in Berlin.

Berlin is not a city made for the heat; it feels out of place here, and whenever it comes people do whatever they can to get out. It’s not like Bangkok, which would feel absolutely dead without the heat, activating the smells of garlic and chilis and the dust of mangy dogs and the piled produce and meats in the markets and half-burnt gas and oil from the two-stroke scooters whining by. Nor is it like Ayutthaya, where you can sit under the tent at Jintana’s and drink mango smoothies all day long, nor the African Savannah, where you can understand as in few other places that everything you ever thought you knew doesn’t mean shit the moment you step outside the walls of the jeep and you are instantly once again just another animal responding to the call of the sun.

Fear and Loathing Far from the Super Bowl

Belushi’s almost tempted me out, if for nothing more than an excuse to yell and drink bloody marys with a bunch of other Americans in the AM on a school night, but now that it’s all over I can say I’m better off for skipping last Sunday’s Super Bowl. Excuses abound this year for anyone looking to take a break from being a professional football fan, but my reasons have nothing to do with Ray Rice, Aaron Hernandez, Adrian Peterson, or the third of current players that the NFL’s own number-crunchers estimate will suffer from early-onset dementia.

The league’s response to all that has been the predictable dithering that follows any nasty scandal in an organization with several billion dollars of yearly revenues to protect: committees have been set up, investigators brought in, reports promised. Meanwhile, both Rice and Peterson are set to return to the NFL in 2015, and a federal judge overturned the league’s latest settlement with the Player’s Association over brain injuries for being too stingy. But all of the above has failed to stir me to much more than resigned indifference: anyone who has paid attention to a couple of public scandals before has learned not to bet against the money in these things, and anyone capable of helping to attract multi-billion dollar TV contracts and sponsorship deals will always have a welcome spot on the field.

The game of football itself features what I think are some of the best moments in all of sports. Nothing matches the beautiful suspense of a long ball arcing sixty yards through the air towards two world-class athletes sprinting down the sideline. A receiver leaping over the back of his defender to steal that ball out of the air is more exciting than most soccer goals I can remember seeing. In a world filled with postmodern hyperconsciousness and doubt, watching men so powerful and graceful that they seem almost superhuman impose their will on their physical surroundings is still a welcome delight. I have sobbed tears of joy exactly twice in my life, and only once sober, and that was while watching a football game[i]. But, brain injuries aside, professional football is under attack from the spiritual children of two of the games most dominant influences: a controlling impulse that led former defensive tackle Tom Keating to call the NFL ‘the last bastion of fascism in America’ and the NFL’s conception of football as a product first and game second.

Organized football has always been an incredibly top-down affair. The very nature of the game lends itself to authority: coordinating the full-speed movements of eleven men with different permissions and responsibilities is no easy task, and the start/stop game play makes a cool and calculating coach who can call plays from the sideline a more valuable asset than in any other sport. The game started as a way for Ivy League elites to demonstrate their manliness in the peacetime period following the Civil War, and when a mischievous fellow named Pop Warner led a ragtag group of American Indians to upset the working order, the Ivy League continuously amended the rules to shift the advantage right back to where they thought it belonged. The result today is a seventy-thousand-word rulebook (three times the length of FIFA’s) whose twelve-page enumeration of what constitutes a complete pass failed to appreciate the amazing athleticism Dez Bryant displayed in his nullified fourth-quarter catch against the Packers in this year’s Divisional playoff round. Instead of simplifying things and returning some discretion to the referees on the field, the NFL has shifted power upwards and created a central officiating command center in New York City that oversees every game. Technology has been similarly employed on the field, with in-helmet earpieces enhancing coaches’ power at the expense of players on the field (who can only listen, not talk back). Excessive legalism and the use of technology to dispense orders from the top gives the men pacing the halls of football’s upper administration almost total control of the game: authority increases with complexity.

But this impulse towards control has not been limited to on-the-field play; indeed, its biggest significance since the 1960s has been in the way it has complimented the game’s commoditization. As Hunter S. Thompson wrote after the 1973 Super Bowl,

Pro football’s meteoric success in the 1960s was directly attributable to its early marriage with network TV and a huge, coast-to-coast audience who ‘grew up’—in terms of their personal relationships with the game—with the idea that pro football was something that happened every Sunday on the tube. (Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl)

That the advent of network TV was an inexplicable factor in the NFL’s rise is now a well-rehearsed talking point, but often overlooked is how this distribution method solidified the perception of football as a product, with producers and consumers each with their own special relationships with the game. Consumers wanted a good show, and it was the producers’ job to give it to them, by any means necessary[ii]. True to football’s controlling instincts, the producer, i.e., the NFL, has responded to this challenge with micromanagement. On the field, this has mostly meant various rule changes to increase fan-friendly offense, and particularly passing.

The most noteworthy of these came following the 1993 season, when the NFL laid out a set of rule tweaks that drastically favored offenses. This overhaul is now looked to as a model when the NFL discusses changes to rules and officiating, as it has down several times since, most notably when it cracked down on physical coverage in the secondary before the 2008 season. The results speak for themselves: In the 1993 season, quarterbacks threw 517 passing touchdowns, 469 interceptions, and a total of 89,874 passing yards; in 2014, they threw 807 touchdowns, 450 interceptions, and 121,247 passing yards (That last figure has remained above 100,000 since 1999). Eight out of the top ten passer-rated quarterbacks in NFL history played after the 1994 rule changes. Prior to 2008, Dan Marino was the only quarterback ever to have even one 5,000-yard season; since then, there have been seven of them (quick math: that averages to one per season).

This explosion in offensive productivity paved the way for some of the NFL’s most recent products, Fantasy Football and the NFL RedZone channel, which automatically takes viewers to teams in scoring position. By shifting consumers’ attention from whole games, these products implicitly endorse the idea that games are only valuable or ‘good’ inasmuch as they generate big plays and big stats. This has a certain logic to it, but it is also paradoxical: Big plays are exciting precisely because they are rare and hard to accomplish[iii]. Anyone who has played backyard football knows that there is nothing more boring than a game where every other play is a touchdown[iv]. And, as the importance of individual games diminishes, I care less about them, and thus care less about the plays that make them up. The thing I most admire about soccer is how it has, more than any other sport, stayed true to the idea that ‘the game’ is the indivisible unit of action around which everything else orbits.

But to pay attention to football now is to be embroiled to a media uproar over such mind-numbing minutiae as Marshawn Lynch refusing to give interviews (Who, in doing so, has become the most interesting player media-wise in the NFL today; when has a player ever said anything even remotely meaningful during a team press conference?), Colin Kaepernick wearing unsanctioned headphones, underinflated footballs (Why don’t teams’ offenses share the same ball, like any other sport??? And if they don’t, who cares how they’re inflated? The NFL has made it pretty clear that it wants to maximize offense, right?), and subjected to intense discussions about who to start on your Fantasy Football team and whether or not Dez Bryant moved his arms enough to fulfill something called the ‘process rule’. In a three-hour-long broadcast, there are only eleven minutes of actual game play. In short, I have to wade through so much that I don’t care about just to get to the part that I do care about that it’s just not worth it anymore.

Above all, football is an emotional game, and the emotions that give it its life blood have been sapped as the NFL has sought to regiment it. Once legal issues have reduced the game’s extreme violence and the thrill of the big play has been inflated away, the NFL will need something else to maintain people’s interest. Relinquishing some of the control that it has worked so hard to establish just might help, leaving room for some idiosyncrasies among the league’s many teams and restoring a little bit of the common touch to the rulebook. There is something wrong with a game when its administrators tell millions of fans that their working knowledge of what it means to catch something is wrong, due to some sub-clause in their rulebook. Sometimes, a catch is a catch.

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[i] It’s 2003, Week 17. I’m kneeling on the floor of my parents’ living room and watching the fourth-quarter clock tick down to nine seconds as the 3-12 Cardinals, trailing by five points and with nothing to play for except a chance to punch the 9-6 Vikings in the face and take away their Wild Card berth and hand it to the rival Packers, my team, scramble to line up on the Vikings’ 28-yard line. Cardinals quarterback Josh McCown snaps the ball with four seconds to go, escapes a sack and scrambles out to the right, and launches the ball down the sideline, where nondescript wideout Nate Poole snatches it in the end zone over the heads of two defenders to end the game. Struck by ecstatic lightning, I vault to my feet, sprint shrieking down the hall to my room, jump face down onto my bed, and gush the most intensely joyful tears that have ever been wept in the history of man.

[ii] Contrast this for a second with America’s erstwhile pastime: Baseball’s historical popularity stemmed from diverse factors, but perhaps the most enduring are the low barriers between those who play the sport and those who watch it. The biggest single play in baseball—a homerun—means a fan gets to keep a game ball. Clearly delineated actions and outcomes make it easy for any fan to keep his own scorecard, thus moving from the role of pure spectator to that of a participant. And consider the attire shared by player and fan: while the bills may have gotten flatter and wider, and the crowns may sport the logo of a team from another sport, baseball caps are still a staple of the American wardrobe. The literal fabric of the game is populist.

[iii] A three-point basket in basketball is exciting, but not even close to the same order of magnitude as a hail mary.

[iv] Which is why I always argue, when assembled with an odd number of players, for an all-time defensive player instead of an extra man on offense, and idea for which I usually receive little support.

Vicious Cycles: Strange musings about Weezy, Scott Stapp, and College Football

It was a week of surprises in the entertainment world…things that shouldn’t have ended did and things that should have pushed on into new chapters…Down in New Orleans, Lil Wayne announced that he is looking to leave Cash Money Records, signaling the end his partnership with Birdman that has been a fixture of Southern hip hop for so long that the prospect of its dissolution seems physically unnatural, at the same time that it was wholly inevitable. Lil Wayne hasn’t produced anything particularly compelling since 2009, serving more and more as a brand to be stamped lucratively on other artists’ tracks by way of short guest verses, and it was only a matter of time before his fade from center stage caused rifts between him and the mentor and record producer he refers to as his adopted father. Still, the separation is saddening in the same way that it’s saddening to see a beloved but ancient city landmark suddenly declared a safety hazard and knocked down with a wrecking ball.

…Which seems to be a good approximation of former Creed-frontman Scott Stapp’s life situation right now; my friend and fellow Stapp-news enthusiast Max Thorn directed me to a Gawker article documenting his claims to be broke and alternatively sleeping in a Holiday Inn and a truck, due to his bank accounts being mysteriously emptied by criminals or frozen by the IRS (he can’t seem to decide). Adding to the drama, Stapp reportedly sent his wife a series of bizarre texts, warning of such things as the imminent biological weapon delivery heading for Florida and the CIA’s likely involvement in Alcoholics Anonymous. While it seems unlikely that the $1.5 million advance paid to him by his record label last year suddenly evaporated, many veteran #StappWatchers assert that a relapse either into heavy drug use or good old-fashioned psychosis has almost certainly taken place. Either way, Stapp is making a convincing argument that his role as a source of barely-believable tragicomedy is far from expired.

Farther north, the SMU Mustang football team finally ended their thirteen-game losing streak with a fourth-quarter win over the UCONN Huskies. I switched over to the game after growing bored of watching TCU’s routing of Iowa State, and was well-rewarded by the close competition that comes when two poorly-disciplined teams with only two wins between them face off. But the most interesting part of the game was listening to Dave Ryan (play-by-play) and Corey Chavous (color) provide commentary. The duo seemed to share absolutely no professional rapport, and there was only one instance in the second half where I can recall them building on each other’s comments rather than simply trading airtime as they delivered their own monologues. If their styles are any reflection of their personalities, it isn’t hard to see why: Chavous was actually one of the most interesting commentators I’ve ever heard on a national broadcast, managing to explain in the short inter-play period exactly why, for example, a defensive back wasn’t responsible for a big run that went past him, where most announcers would have simply commented on the quality of the block that sent him to the ground. Ryan, meanwhile, seemed most comfortable with phrases like “It’s second-and-ten” and with reading off the stats that the production crew put on the screen.

To be fair, Chavous was a Pro Bowl safety with an eleven-year NFL career, while Ryan, as far as my research could inform me, didn’t even play college ball, so he may have been a little outmatched when it came to breaking down game footage. But listening to them, I was irked by the suspicion that Ryan stood the greater chance of ever becoming a big league football announcer. The same vibrancy that made Chavous so interesting to listen to could very well be unpalatable to a network looking for a prime time commentator: he lacks the standardized “TV accent” that is shared by just about every major network personality, and his commentary requires at least some mental investment from listeners; learning can’t be a completely passive process.

Ryan, on the other hand, is well-versed in the meaningless babble meant to fill airtime and remain offensive to no one, and it is hard to imagine him having any compunction about cutting short an explanation about the mechanics of a zone blitz in order to remind viewers of the wisdom of heading down to their local Ford dealership to check out the all new F-150. In short, he is an obedient part of the broadcasting system, and if he could just find a way to not be so devastatingly bland he would stand a fair chance of rising up the ranks. Until he does, though, he is well served by his current gigs covering PBA bowling tournaments and Major League Lacrosse games.

The Martin Chronicles, 3

The story continues from here

“Martin! Martin!” They were banging on the door to his office. He had no interest in going out and facing the smirking bastards outside; he would stay in here all day, pissing in the trashcan if he had to.

As it was, the choice wasn’t his. After a few minutes of knocking, Ms. Gretchen and George gave up on that method and simply unlocked the door with a spare key to find Martin sitting in his office chair with a cup of tea in one hand and a can of Lion Red in the other. A teapot sat on his desk alongside several crumpled red cans, and two more stood sweating in the purple plastic lunchbox that he always kept in the fridge, with a strip of masking tape labeled “Medications—Private” slapped across the side.

The two aggressors stared for a second and then Ms. Gretchen launched into him. “Martin! Look at yourself! You’re being ridiculous.”

Martin stared at one of the cans lying sideways on his desk. “Oh, am I, Ms. Gretchen? This whole thing was a big joke, eh, was that your idea? Punish me for taking some eggs, eh? Well, you’ve done it eh, you’ve got me good, but I think I’d rather just not go out for everyone to laugh about me now if you don’t mind, eh?”

“You really think Helena went to all this effort just to set you up? Come on now, the whole Garden Club has our name behind this festival. If it was a joke, the joke would be on all of us, right?”

There was a brief silence as Martin chewed on this latest suggestion. He looked up at the two people standing in the doorway. They seemed sincere, as well as he could tell. Then again, he had never been a great judge of people. Resignation settled onto his shoulders. What did it matter now anyway? He would be everyone’s fool whether he hid in the clubhouse or faced the crowd.

“Some of your mates have been looking for you, Martin. Why don’t you at least go out and say hello to them? I think they’ve been enjoying themselves in a similar manner to you.” George nodded at the beer cans on the desk.

Martin’s mates? That must be Tom and the gang from the pub. He didn’t think they would actually show up. For the first couple of weeks after he had started working at the Garden Club, Martin went down to the pub in the evening, as usual, to tell stories about his day and his coworkers, but then Martin had started to like some of the “geriatric farts”, as Tom insisted on calling them, and he started skipping the pub on his way home (he didn’t skip the beer though; a nice can or three of Lion Red on the couch in the evening always helped to unwind, local news or a reality show on the TV, and his non-beer hand invariably jammed in his pants). Now it seemed his shifting of alliances had been premature. Would they take him back after seeing him humiliated like this?

“Let’s go, Martin,” Ms. Gretchen said softly. “Just have a look at the turnout and say hello to a few folks. You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to.”

Martin sighed and pushed himself up from his seat. “Let me take a whizz first, eh?” he said, and shuffled past George and Ms. Gretchen and on into the toilet. He finished and joined them in the meeting room.

“Nothing to be down about now mate,” George said, patting his back. “There’s quite a good crowd out there, people really seem to be enjoying themselves.”

Martin harrumphed and followed them out the door. A light, misty rain had started to fall, just enough to make the cars and the asphalt shine. They crossed the brick patio to the deflowered rose garden.

“Hold on just a second,” Ms. Gretchen said when they were adjacent to the Garden Club tent. “There are a few people I’d like to introduce you to.”

Ms. Gretchen eased into a circle at the opposite end of the tent while Martin stood slump-shouldered next to George. He felt like a prisoner of war being paraded around the enemy camp on a leash. Ms. Gretchen made her way back across the tent with two professional-looking people in tow.

“Martin, I’d like you to meet Palex Waldbeeren, the owner of Waldbeeren Design,” Ms. Gretchen said, indicating a man about Martin’s age wearing crisp khakis, a sportshirt, and a waterproof Kathmandu jacket. “They were one of the festival’s main sponsors, as I’m sure you know.”

“I think we talked on the phone a few times before,” Palex said, yanking Martin’s hand up and down. “Bloody brilliant performance mate, really nice showing, yea?”

Martin gave Palex a puzzled look and Ms. Gretchen drew his attention to the second man she had brought over, who projected an air of easy authority despite his casual dress. “And this is Caleb Walker, town councilman for the Garden’s district.”

“Pleasure to meet you, Martin.” Caleb gave his hand a tight shake and let go. “Helena’s been telling us about all the work you’ve done. We were worried we were never going to get to meet you.”

“Ah, ye, well here I am,” Martin said, suddenly self-conscious of the Lion Red on his breath.

“Oh, here’s the photographer,” Ms. Gretchen pointed out. “Everyone smile!” They all posed for a quick picture and the photographer moved on. “We’ll leave you gentlemen be,” Ms. Gretchen said to Palex and Caleb, and gestured for Martin to follow her.

They walked along the row of tents around the perimeter. Ms. Gretchen cupped Martin’s elbow. “So what do you think, Martin? Not so bad now, is it?”

Martin looked around him. “Yea, I suppose not…” He still didn’t trust it all, but he had yet to catch anyone casting snickering glances his way. In fact, Ms. Gretchen and George appeared to be telling it to him pretty straight; there were quite a lot of people there, many sampling foods and buying crafts, some moving in small groups along the flower beds, pointing at this branch and that one, talking and laughing. Nobody seemed to be particularly bothered by the fact that there were no flowers.

“Marttiinn!” They were approaching the beer tent now, where Tom stood waving a bottle of beer raised high in the air, foam spilling down the sides. “Martin, get over here mate!”

“I’ll let you catch up with these fellows yourself,” Ms. Gretchen winked at him. “But don’t run too far, there are still some other people I want you to meet.” She wandered off to another tent and Martin walked over to accept the beer Tom was holding out to him.

“I guess those old farts had some good ideas after all, huh mate?” Tom said. “A roseless rose festival! Haha, that’s something else mate, that’s something else.”

“Well actually, there are roses here,” Martin pointed out. “Just, you know, no flowers eh?”

“So maybe they did get into your head a little bit still,” Tom laughed. “Anyways, cheers mate, jolly good to see ya!” They clinked beers and gulped down a couple cold sips. Cru and Edgar were locked in a swinging embrace at the far end of the bar. “Get over here!” Tom shouted over to them. “Come pay your respects to the man in charge, you disrespectful badgers!”

Cru’s eyes focused on Martin over Edgar’s shoulder and widened with delight. They grabbed their beers from the bar and stumbled over to Tom and Martin. “Hey hey! Never thought I’d see it! Martin, the gardener-in-chief!” Edgar doubled over in laughter. The four of them clinked beers again and took another drink. Martin wasn’t sure that they had visited much more than the beer tent since they had arrived, but hey, so long as everyone was happy…

Martin finished his beer with them and excused himself to wander around the rest of the festival. He ate one of Pat’s homemade pies and some of Mele’s sausages, tried on some scarves and gloves that were much too expensive, enjoyed another cup of tea with Albert and Suse.

“So, have you checked out the roses yet?” Albert asked him.

“Not really…didn’t seem like there was all that much to see, eh?”

“Ohh, I don’t know,” Suse smiled, “It’s kind of fun once you get into it. Let’s give it a try, shall we?”

They ambled along the edge of a mulched flowerbed. “So which one has better thorns?” Suse asked, gesturing between two bushes growing side by side. “Albert likes this one better, but I really prefer the color of these stubs.” Martin leaned in closer to examine them.

“Ah, I don’t know,” he chuckled, “I don’t really know much about roses, eh?”

“That’s alright, you don’t have to know anything about roses to have an opinion,” Albert urged him. “If you could only save one rose branch in the world, to keep for all time, which one would it be?”

Martin inspected the two bushes again. “Ah, I like this one here, I guess,” he said finally.

“You see!” Albert said triumphantly. “I told you that bush was prettier.”

“Oh, get over it,” Suse retorted. “I’ve already talked to several people today who couldn’t even fathom your branch.”

“I see it or it didn’t happen. Let’s carry on Martin, Suse can be a bit of a sore loser, don’t you think?”

Suse turned up her nose in playful offense and the three of them continued along, stopping for more debates, Martin getting more forceful in his opinions and Albert feigning outrage when the other two teamed up on him. They mingled with the other clumps of people performing their own tours of the flowerbeds and accepted their congratulations for a successful festival. Around two, the drizzle stopped and the clouds broke apart to show the bright blue sky above them. A brass band started playing and little kids led the dancing in front of the stage.

Martin stood to the side, watching the dancing, his hands on his hips through his jacket pockets so that the front was pulled back to display the Garden Club logo on his shirt underneath. Though the reasons for it were still far beyond him, he understood that the festival was quite a success. There was a loud holler from the beer tent and he looked over in time to see Tom bringing Edgar down with him as he slipped on a mud spot. Evidently they had been getting on fine without him.

Ms. Gretchen walked up to him with a familiar gleam in her eye. “So, are you happy that we dragged you out of that office now?” she asked.

He couldn’t say no.

The Martin Chronicles, 2

. . . continued from here

June 21: The day of the Wharangia Winter Rose Festival was finally upon them. Martin had been surprised the night before to find himself nervous. He had laid out his clothes for the day (new jeans from The Warehouse, a white button-down with “Wharangia Garden Club” embroidered on the chest pocket, his old khaki farmer’s coat, his newest pair of Hanes boxers, a pair of thick wool socks, and of course, the pair of just-too-big boots that Ms. Gretchen had given him) and triple-checked his alarm clock; when there was nothing else to prepare he sat on his couch with a couple Lion Reds and stared at the blank TV screen, eventually turned it on, then turned it off again, and finally went to bed. He had set his alarm for seven but got out of bed at six after a restless night of tossing about and getting tangled up in his sheets, full of feverish dreams of cancellations and rain delays.

Now, in the groggy dark of the early morning, there were no signs that anything was amiss. Martin heated up some water for his coffee and turned on the news. Road works on Highway 1 on the way to Auckland; local man arrested for stealing shopping carts; rain possible in the afternoon. Well, wasn’t that always the case, though?

The water boiled. Martin poured it in a mug and stirred in the coffee powder and cleared some space on the kitchen table. The box of Wheatbix was in its permanent position to the left of his chair. He ate his soggy breakfast with slow, forceful chomps as he listened to the rest of the morning’s top stories.

When he was finished, he put on his clothes, combed his hair and was out the door and scooting across the front seat of his old blue Nissan by just after seven. His was the only car in the Garden’s rough parking lot when he pulled in. He got out and walked around the glass-paneled Welcome Center to the Garden Club’s clubhouse, a boring, low-lying clapboard building with mud trails washing down its drab paint but redeemed by the well-kept flower beds that flanked it. Martin unlocked the front door with the key that Ms. Gretchen had given him and unlaced his boots on the mat inside. The front room ran the length of the building and held a slightly disordered ring of chairs that gave the constant impression of a meeting just concluded. Long white plastic tables leaned folded up against the short wall on the right side, which, like the other three walls, was adorned with pictures of past Garden Club events and picture-posters of famous gardens from around the world.

Martin crossed the room and passed into a stubby hallway that in turn gave way to a toilet on the right, a row of three offices if you followed it to the left, and a kitchen straight ahead, which he entered to make himself a cup of tea from its well-stocked reserves. The Garden Club members were fastidious keepers of tea time, which was always held in the kitchen, no matter how crowded it got. George was always keen for a good story over tea: the time the dog park gate got left open, say, or the one about the dairy farmer from near Otorohanga who thought he’d try his hand at shearing. Albert and Frank loved talking local politics and farm futures; Jan and Suse had a constant ear to the latest in road works.

Martin threw the tea bag in the compost and carried his mug to the second office off the hallway, where for the past two months he had worked at a small desk, calling potential sponsors, tent providers, catering companies, musical acts, and whichever other names were listed on the pieces of paper Ms. Gretchen handed him when she popped her head in from the office next door. For an hour or two each day, he shared it with other members of the club, but for the most part he had the space to himself. It was Martin’s first real work in years—the club paid him a small wage, which Ms. Gretchen always dispensed to him in cash with a wink and a sly smile. He topped this up from time to time with flower blossoms he clipped from the winter garden when nobody was looking—these fetched him a few nice dollars from restaurants around town. Martin always felt a little slimy stealing flowers, but hey, they all did it here and there eh, club privilege and all that?

Just as he sat down, Martin heard the front door slam and Frank’s voice hallooed through the empty house. He called out in reply and listened to Frank’s footsteps making their way through the meeting room, into the hallway, and then Frank himself appeared in the doorway. “Martin, first one here, eh! Already made a cup of tea? Good on ya! The rest should be here soon I reckon.” He disappeared to the kitchen to make his own morning cuppa.

Frank returned with his tea and sat down on the corner of Martin’s desk. “Think we’ll have any rain today?”

“Oh, I sure hope not,” Martin chuckled. “The news said maybe in the arvo though…”

“Never can tell this time of year. But hey, that’s what the tents are for, eh?”

“Mmm, yep, I guess so, hehe…”

They sat in silence for a moment.

“Mm, chilly in here,” Frank said. “You didn’t turn the heat on?”

“Ah, nah, I only got here a few minutes ago…I didn’t think we would be using the clubhouse today so I didn’t bother…”

“Say, Martin,” Frank said, setting his mug down and leaning slightly forward across the desk. “Why is it that you still call Helena by her last name?”

“Who, ah, Ms. Gretchen? Oh, I don’t know, I guess it’s just an old habit, eh?” Martin chuckled nervously. Sitting alone with Frank always made Martin uncomfortable and he avoided it whenever he could. Several weeks ago he had suggested that Ms. Gretchen was keen on Martin and then launched into a questionable story about being highschool sweethearts with her. Martin was relieved to hear the front door open again and several new voices enter the house.

As one, Ms. Gretchen, George, and Anna came through the hallway and peered in through the office door.

“Well, good morning, I hope you haven’t been working,” Ms. Gretchen greeted them.

“Hey, Helena, you know me better than that,” Frank chided. “But Martin, he was the first one here, I think he might have been working right through the night, I tell you.” Frank shot Martin a sly wink.

“Is that so, Martin? Well, why don’t we move to the kitchen and have some tea to warm us up before we go outside? The vendors should start showing up at eight.”

The clubhouse’s thin walls did little to hold out even a mild chill and the five of them watched their breath cloud up as they talked. While they were waiting for the kettles to boil they were joined by Albert and Suse and a couple minutes later by Kate and her husband Neal. They enjoyed their tea over restrained early-morning conversation and then split into work.

“Martin, can you help Frank and me set up the Garden Club tent?” George asked. The tent was in a bag in the storage room at the end of the hall, and Martin carried it as instructed to a prime patch of grass adjacent to the brick patio around the Welcome Center. There was plenty of commotion on the lawn now as vendors hustled back and forth between their vans and the tents lining the edge of the lawn. George and Frank and Martin pieced together the Garden Club tent and brought several tables out from the meeting room to display various brochures and books for sale on top of them, weighted down against the breeze by smooth river stones. Martin admired the program guide for the festival. Ms. Gretchen had insisted on sticking a big picture of him at the top of the center fold, with the caption, “A big thanks to our Assistant Festival Coordinator, Martin Prufrock!”

“Right!” Frank declared, slapping Martin on the back and jerking him back to the present. “That’s a fine looking tent, eh boys?”

“Can we get some help with these chocolates?” Anna asked as she staggered by with a stack of cardboard boxes in her arms.

“A quick hand over here!” someone shouted from beneath a collapsing tent.

Martin scrambled around, offering his assistance where it was needed, setting up displays and carrying goods for sale from the parking lot to the tents. There was barely half an hour left before the official start of the festival, and the preparations were growing more frenzied by the minute. Ms. Gretchen glided around the parking lot with a clipboard in hand, greeting vendors and shouting directions to the rest of the Garden Club. “Martin, can you lend these ladies a hand with their espresso machine? Suse, show these gentlemen to Spot 7, please? Can someone fetch a pitcher of water from the kitchen? Where are those electrical cords? Albert!”

At last, a peace rolled over the lawn. The vendors chatted with their neighbors or worried over last-minute perfections to their tents. Ms. Gretchen found Martin studying the scene from under the Garden Club canopy and invited him to walk around for a look at everything. “Oh, have you ever tried Mele’s sausages?” she pointed. “They are extraordinary. Make sure you taste one today… Mmm, and look at these jams!… Ah, local honey from the Johnson farm… Those pies smell delightful, Pat!” (and then, leaning close to Martin’s ear: “But Cindy Barker actually makes better ones!”). There were jadestone brooches and pua shell earrings, wood carvings, handmade knives, homemade chocolates and locally roasted coffee, exotic teas and spices, lotions and creams, manuka honey, possum-felt scarves, wool blankets, heirloom seeds and potted flowers and knitted socks, and the 2010 Wharangia community cookbook. Only one thing seemed to be missing.

“But Ms. Gretchen, where are the roses?”

“What do you mean, Martin? This is the rose garden—why, they’re all around us.” Ms. Gretchen gestured at the long, curving flower beds running through the lawn. Martin had barely noticed them; they were filled with nothing more than knobby sticks.

“Those sure don’t look like roses to me…” he protested.

“Well, Martin, it’s winter. Roses don’t bloom in the winter! That’s why this festival was such a crazy idea!”

Martin had an idea that a joke was being played, and experience had taught him to assume that if he didn’t know the butt of a joke, he was usually correct in assuming it was himself. “Ah, I don’t know, Ms. Gretchen…there must be some real roses here, eh?”

“These roses are perfectly real, Martin. It’s winter time, that’s the only difference.”

“Yea, but—” Martin felt a purer twitch of anger than he had felt in a while “—everyone knows a rose is a flower, eh? I just spent two months in that office, you know, making phone calls, and not for some bloody sticks, eh?”

“Martin, Martin, calm down, we’re all a part of this together now. Just wait for the people to show up, I think you’ll see it’s all going to turn out just fine.”

Martin stomped off to the clubhouse. He felt a fool. Bloody winter rose festival, his ass. He remembered now why he had quit working—it was full of disappointment and people taking advantage of you. Maybe that was the gleam he saw in Frank’s eye this morning: this whole thing was a big joke, with Martin at the end of it.

Read the rest here

Brief Sketches from the Life of Martin

Martin stood in front of the kidney beans, running his hand through hair that could be politely called thinning. He reached out for the store brand and examined the back: low sodium. He bent down to put it in his red shopping basket and caught sight of his feet. He was still wearing his house slippers. Martin sighed and picked up the basket. Where else had he gone today? The library. The pharmacy. The post office. His day sounded like a laundry list of his small town’s institutional pillars (the reasons, however, weren’t so dignified: a little bit of naughty picture viewing at the library; awkward attempts at flirting with the counter girl at the chemist’s; and he had completely forgotten the reason for his visit to the post office by the time he had arrived there, and had left with nothing accomplished).

There were only two checkout lanes open, presenting him with an ulcer-inducing decision: take the queue with more people, but fewer items, or get behind the grandma stocking up for World War Three? Martin picked the longer queue; this proved to be a mistake. Someone in front of him was buying alcohol and the store manager had to be called over; he watched with dismay as the grandma finished counting her change and slowly wheeled her cart out the automatic doors. A third register opened, but his items were already on the belt and the cashier grabbed the person behind him to start the new queue. Eventually he made it to the front.

“Good afternoon!” gushed the cashier.

“Hello,” Martin said.

The cashier rapidly swiped his purchases and threw them into store-brand plastic bags, at ten cents apiece. “Payback card?” she asked.

“No.”

She hit a button and he swiped his debit card and punched in his PIN. “Your receipt?” she asked. He nodded and she threw it one of his bags. “Have a great day!”

Martin tried to return the cheer but only managed a small grunt. The other two queues had already been cleared and the extra cashier had gone back to whatever he had been doing before. Martin carried his bags to his old, pale blue Nissan and slid in through the passenger door. He had been meaning to get the driver’s door fixed for over a year now. He pulled into the roundabout and drove home.

His refrigerator was decorated with some old curled photographs of his family and a nice one of him milking the cows when he was only seven or eight or so. He barely cast them a glance as he opened the door and put in the milk and cheese and ham and mince meat. Everything else could wait. He fished the kidney beans out of the bag and opened the can with a steak knife. He drained the juice and forked them straight from the can to his mouth. When it was empty, he thought about what he was going to do.

This day was not all too different from most of Martin’s days. At least it wasn’t raining today—that had ruined his last pair of house slippers for good. Martin used to work at a bar, but the bar closed and now he was on the dole, as they called it (though he still topped up his living with odd schemes here and there; he was not completely without ambition).

Martin went to his bedroom and pulled his pipe out of the bedside drawer. There was still an untouched corner of green from the morning. “Just a quick hit before I get back to work,” Martin said to himself. He took two and the bowl was cashed. He placed it back in the drawer with the orange Bic, though he usually preferred green, but you couldn’t argue with a perfectly good lighter now, could you? Now, what was he doing? Oh yes! Thinking about what to do. Maybe he would try to collect some eggs—they usually traded for something decent down at the farmers’ market.

Nobody answered his knock at Ms. Gretchen’s. He peered into the windows and saw no signs of life. Well, what to do? He hadn’t come all this way for nothing. He carried on to the back of the house and let himself in to the chicken coop. Most of the hens inside ran out through the flap; an insolent rooster jabbed at his leg and he gave it a good kick, eliciting a loud angry caw before it escaped outside with the hens. Martin lifted up the clucking hen in the corner and plucked its warm eggs up and into his crate. The hen clucked a few more times in protest and then ran out through the flap. He repeated this process with the rest of the remaining chickens and ended up with just over two-dozen eggs.

He squinted as he stepped back out into the sunlight and closed the latch. When he turned around, Ms. Gretchen was standing there with a bucket of vegetable scraps.

“I thought that was your car, Martin. What are you doing here?”

Martin looked down at the tray of eggs in his hands. It was a rather stupid question. He shifted back and forth on his feet and glanced from side to side. “Ah, ye, umm, hello Ms. Gretchen, I just came to collect some eggs, and, ye, well you weren’t home see, so umm…”

Ms. Gretchen stared at him for a second and then started laughing. “You are an impatient one,” she scolded. “But I need some of those for a quiche I’m making tonight. How about you let me keep a dozen of those and we’ll call it even?”

Martin had been nodding the whole time she had been speaking. He opened his mouth to say something but couldn’t find any words so he just kept shaking his head up and down. “Yea, uh—yes Ms. Gretchen, that sounds like a fine idea, thank you very much,” he finally managed.

“Why don’t you come inside to sort those and I’ll fix you a cup of tea?” Ms. Gretchen led him around the house and paused below the front porch. “Look at these snapdragons, Martin, they’re quite lovely aren’t they? It’s so nice to have some color in these dratted rainy months, don’t you think?”

The flowers were very pretty, and Martin said so.

“You know, Ms. Gretchen continued up the steps, waving her hand as if to brush away a fly, “I started gardening when Lane passed away, just to give myself something to do, but I wish I had started twenty years earlier, I absolutely love it. Sorry, would you mind leaving your shoes at the—but why Martin, are you still in your house slippers?”

Martin looked down. So he was. He had forgotten to change out of them once more when he had gone home earlier. “Ah, ye, just trying to make the most of ‘em,” he grined bashfully.

Ms. Martin stared quizzically at him for a second and then burst into laughter. “I don’t know that I’ve ever met anyone so forgetful as you, Martin. But it won’t do for you to wear those around for the rest of the day. I’m sure I have a pair of Lane’s old boots that would fit you—what size are you? Remind me before you leave. Put those eggs down, I’ll get the tea started.”

Martin obligingly set the crate on the counter and took a seat at the kitchen table while Ms. Gretchen lit the stove with a camping lighter and filled up the kettle.

“I hope you’re okay with PG Tips,” she called from the pantry. “I had a wonderful jar of Assam that an old friend sent me from England but I’m afraid it’s all used up.”

“Oh yes, any tea is fine,” Martin said. And then, after a pause: “Say, Ms. Gretchen, could I maybe have a glass of water as well, if isn’t any trouble for you, that is?”

“Why, of course Martin. Let me just grab the biscuits.” Ms. Gretchen set the silver tray with the cups and milk and sugar and biscuits on the table and grabbed a glass from the stand-alone cupboard. “Do you take it with lemon?” she asked from the sink.

“Do I take what with lemon? Oh, water? Ah, no, regular is fine.”

Ms. Gretchen placed the glass on the table in front of Martin and was about to sit down when the kettle started whistling. “Oh my, we’re ready already.” She poured the hot water into the waiting teapot and set it on the table to steep. “So Martin, I’ve been thinking about something that I would like to get your opinion on.”

Martin tensed. He generally wasn’t too good at giving his opinion on matters. “Ah, okay?”

“Well, you know how Wharangia has a rose festival every spring, don’t you? But I was thinking—and I know it’s rather silly—that we could have two rose festivals this year. The usual one, of course, but one in the winter, too. The thing is, of course—oh, maybe I’m just a batty old woman, but I find the idea delightfully silly. A rose festival in the winter! Can you imagine?”

“I, uh, I do like roses,” Martin ventured.

“It would take some convincing at first, but I think with the right people behind it we could really make this a lot of fun. Where else in the world could you find such a thing? It could be something new that makes this town special. Now, I haven’t brought it up yet with the other garden club members, but we have a meeting next week and I plan to then. But tell me Martin, do you have plans for the last week of July?”

Martin pretended to think. He didn’t even have plans for tomorrow, and suspected Ms. Gretchen knew as much. “Umm, no…I just plan to be here, I think.”

“That’s wonderful! You see, I was thinking, if you’re not busy, maybe you would like to help organize it? If the rest of the garden club likes the idea, of course, but I think I can convince them. So what do you say?” Ms. Gretchen’s eyes shone brightly from across the table and Martin didn’t see how he had much choice of answers.

“Er, well, I suppose that’s a nice idea, if you think I can help, but I’m afraid I don’t know much about gardening, Ms. Gretchen.”

“Oh, not to worry!” You’ll learn as you go. And there will be plenty to do where you won’t need to know a thing about gardening anyway. My goodness—it’s time we took the tea bags out!” Ms. Gretchen removed the bags from the teapot and filled the cups. “Milk and sugar?”

“Yes, please.”

Ms. Gretchen continued to talk about her ideas for the rose festival and Martin’s possible roles in organizing it. When the tea was finished she transferred half the eggs that Martin had collected to another crate and got a jar of pumpkin chutney and a jar of orange marmalade out of her pantry and put them in a bag. “Here, take these with you too,” she told Martin. “I’ve got more than I could possibly eat in there.” She walked him to the door and remembered the shoes. “Oh—I almost forgot! Wait one moment, let me see what I can bring you.”

She came back with a pair of worn brown leather boots.   They were a little big but Martin didn’t want to say anything. A nice pair of thick socks and they’d be right. “Oh yes, perfect, Ms. Gretchen, thank you so much,” he said, scooping up his slippers with the hand not holding the bag (both his hands were holding the crate of eggs).

Ms. Gretchen waved him off from the porch. “I’ll be in touch soon. I’m so glad you’re helping out!”

Martin put his belongings in the back seat and then got in and scooted across to the driver’s seat. He didn’t understand exactly how he had just been roped into organizing a rose festival. Surely there were plenty of people in town better suited to the job than he was. Oh, well. he had a new pair of shoes and some jam, if only a dozen eggs. He drove home and nipped down to the pub to catch his mate Tom, but Tom wasn’t there so he talked with Stan the bartender over a pint and returned home.

to be continued . . . here