Tagged: Ed Garsten
Money…It’s What I Spend
I like money. Doesn’t have to be a fortune. It just has to be money. Bills or coins, I’m good with it as long as I can fold it, flip it, spend it, insert it in a vending machine or toss it on the table at a poker game.
But the world is turning against money. For instance, there’s a new self-serve store in our workplace that sells coffee, soft drinks and snacks. It’s handy. It’s a few steps from my office. But it doesn’t want my money. In the middle of the store is a counter and a cash register (I think that’s what they still call them) with instructions on how to pay. The first day I looked to see where to insert my bills and coins. There isn’t any place. You have to swipe a credit, debit or gift card. Anything with a magnetic stripe..not a picture of a president or imprint of a national memorial or even a buffalo.
I have no intention of charging a Diet Coke and a bag of Corn Nuts. First of all, when the bill came at the end of the month I could just hear my wife say, “Diet Coke and Corn Nuts? Are you 7?” Paying by cash not only is efficient, it saves me from a great deal of embarrassment.
Let’s say this practice of not using a tangible method of trade was a practice when Peter Minuit bought Manhattan from a tribe of Native Americans for 24 bucks worth of trinkets.
Minuit: “OK Chief, I’ve brought a big box of trinkets and Slim Jims worth 24 bucks. Now. I’lll take Manhattan.”
Chief: “Hold on Dutch boy. Keep your crap and give it to the Salvation Army. We run a trinketless society here. We only accept a wampum rub. You keep rubbing the wampus belt until you spend down all the beads. When you’re left with bare string, you’re tapped out.”
Minuit: “But I’m trying to hide this idiotic purchase from my wife. The last time I bought an island it turned out to be manatee that was just sleeping. When I tried to build a settlement, the big galoot swam away.”
Chief: “I understand. Mrs. Chief gets riled when I use my wampum rub to buy Clint Eastwood movies. Yeah. He’s that old. OK…I dig. I’ll take your beads and junk this one time…but don’t try the same thing to buy Staten Island.”
Sour Grapefruit League
For many years I’ve been terribly jealous of Major League Baseball players. Not because they get paid a jillion dollars to play a game, or that many of them have great hair or gorgeous girlfriends or wives. No, what I covet is a job that includes “spring training.”
It’s a great concept. Players spend six weeks or so in warm weather, practice a couple of hours a day, sit by the pool, play golf, and a bunch of games that don’t even count, before they even begin to get down to work for real.
Say, for instance, teams of white collar corporate drones need to get in ship shape for the brutal fall budget planning season for the year ahead. To do so, they spend six weeks in DC during cherry blossom season which lulls them into believing the world is fair. Then training cranks up with a full schedule of mock meetings with another companys’ controllers who are there to beef up their resolve to break the hearts of aspiring Directors by insisting on across the board 20 percent cuts…just for the sport of it. By the second week, cocky Millennials who showed up expecting to make the team even though they have no discernable skills or practical experience, will wash out once they find out that once you get hired, you have to actually do work.
C-Suite executives generally show up during the third week sporting artificial tans and obnoxious anecdotes about the Disney cruises they took in the off-season. But they’ll need to catch up quickly with two-a-day harassment workouts. You can’t just walk in the office after a two-month off-season and expect to effectively harass your staff.
Last to show up are members of the Board of Directors. Their regimen includes “backroom deal boot camp” and “boardroom coup playacting.” Despite it being the pre-season, there’s immense pressure to get in shape before the annual shareholders meeting where they must show how well they practiced their “I give a shit” looks when a shareholder offers a proposal.
Personally, I feel I could benefit from a reasonable off-season of, say 3 months while I lick my wounds from the last corporate bloodletting season, and a productive pre-season where I can effectively sharpen my political knives.
I’d be ready to roll with any idiot who blathers on about their latest pet project, and would even suggest negating a moronic policy decision…by way of the “midlevel-manager’s challenge.”
…and the winner…Isn’t!
I’m afraid I didn’t get to see any of the films nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, but was able to view incredibly cheap, but wildly entertaining alternate versions of those big budget movies that deserve some recognition.
My roster:
1-A young student who is incredibly clumsy is given a chance to play the drums in the school jazz band. Indeed, the band is so bad the students call it the Spazz Band. Our young drummer fits right in and repeatedly misses the cymbals with his drumsticks and ends up with deep cuts on his hands. The film’s title: “Whipgash.”
2-A actual seal, adopted by the crew of an aircraft carrier, ends up to be an incredibly effective assailant, showing uncommon speed and accuracy in biting the butts of Naval officers targeted by put upon Navy seamen. When the carrier reaches its home port, the seal finds it cannot put the fight against uptight officers behind it and attempts to enlist on a destroyer bound for Sausalito to fight Marin County vegans. The film’s title: “American Flipper.”
3-A washed up actor attempts to revive his career with a risky plan to stage non-stop reenactments of the duel that killed Alexander Hamilton. The film’s title: “Burr Man.”
4-The concierge of the most expensive hotel in Akron not only provides sexual services for the clientele, he kills them, then, in an act of extreme chivalry, embalms and buries his victims. The film’s title: “The Grand Put To Rest Hotel.”
5-The British intelligence agency hires a code breaker who speaks only in Morse Code. The man’s constant “dihs” and “dahs” get on everyone’s nerves even though he’s a genius at deciphering messages from the enemy. Sadly, he’s bounced from the service when it’s revealed he also knows all the words to “It’s a Small World After All” in Navajo. The film’s title: “The Irritation Game.”
You may not have heard of them…until this very moment. But I assure they’ll be on the film festival circuit in enlightened cities and towns around the world…that still have Blockbuster stores.
Office Spaced
I have no affection at all for offices. A person trying to woo me to his firm promised me a corner office. It was a generous gesture but I told him that under no circumstances would I accept a corner, or any other office. I ended up not taking the job anyway because I was an out-of-work journalist and I wasn’t quite ready to switch to something new. I also despised offices of any sort but loved newsrooms, which are, in effect, offices with just the right proportion of chaos, collaboration and profanity.
A couple of years ago as a sign of a promotion, I was ordered to move from my open cube to a closed office. “If I’m being promoted,” I asked, “why am I being placed in solitary confinement?” Alas, I now view the general prison population through a glass window. Sometimes it’s fun to have one of my co-workers on the “outside” play the game of “prison visitor” and place their hand on my window and I place mine opposite from the inside..just like in “Birdman of Alcatraz.”
Thanks to the Chicago Auto Show last week, I hadn’t’ seen my office or desk in 6 days…until today. I jangled my keys like the “office warden,” opened my door and breathed in the squalid stale air that could only be neutralized by brewing coffee and inhaling a box of Altoids.
For a brief moment I thought about tidying up the mess on my desk I left behind, but why bother? That would only make room for a new mess and I was already quite familiar with the desk-tritus on display, including the Post-it note with my computer password from 2009. I keep forgetting it. Damn passwords!
The sad part is I’ve now grown used to spending my workday holed up in my human Habitrail. There are all sorts of places to hide stuff I should have tossed years ago, I can make phone calls in private and I can engage in the guilty pleasure of watching the YouTube video of Katy Perry in her skimpy jungle outfit singing “Roar,” uh… during my lunch break…of course.
In fact, I think that tomorrow I’ll start the process of reforming. I won’t toss used Keurig pods under my desk and tell curious visitors they’re my dead pet mice, or rationalize a pile of randomly ordered file folders by calling my system “Anarchic Alphabetizing.”
I might even take down the sign on my door that warns potential visitors, “Where productivity comes to die.”
The Truth About Fiction
My scalp is getting a little red from all the head scratching I’ve been doing this week. NBC suspends its main anchor for basically making up the details of a story and the anchor is lambasted as a journalistic pariah.
The host of a program that is a completely fictional “newscast” announces his impending retirement and that news is greeted in many quarters as the end of our current civilization. 
So let’s think about that. Real newsguy lies: bad. Fake newsguy announces retirement: worse
Now Brian Williams has been a very successful guest on a number of comedy programs exhibiting a sharp sense of humor. But is has to stick in his craw that among a certain segment of the population, Jon Stewart’s fake newscast is their main source of news.
Maybe, just maybe, the funny, suspended NBC anchorman was simply attempting to swim in Jon Stewart’s pool figuring fake news is the way to go to build an audience.
Apparently, his employer didn’t see the humor, or the irony.
Of course neither Jon Stewart nor Brian Williams cannot even begin to compare their volume of fake news with the utter fiction spewed regularly, for the past 20 years, by Fox. It always remains in my memory that moron ex-weatherman Steve Douch-ey once declared ex Michigan Congressman David Bonior was bounced from office because of his liberal policies, when in fact, Bonior chose not to run for re-election.
It doesn’t matter, really. America has decided that fake news is much more palatable and believable than actual news.
So why jump on Brian Williams when he was simply tailoring his product to the prevailing winds of public preference?
Can it be too long before CBS decides to upgrade its long-running program to “60 Made-up Minutes”?
Perhaps ABC will change its Sunday morning talker to “This Imagined Week.”
I can even see my alma mater, CNN, put the execrable Don Lemon at the helm of “Altered States of the Union.”
Personally, I’m going to relax about the whole thing. I haven’t actually watched a television newscast in ages, mainly because I can glean fake news much more quickly on Twitter and Facebook or the Onion. Afterall, when you want fake news, you want it right away..and that’s the truth.
A Flyover on the Wall
It was somewhere over Iowa that I started paying attention to the screen in front of me showing my flight’s location. At what point, I wondered, did we enter “flyover” territory–the fairly arrogant term East/West coasters use for the area of the country between the coasts you wouldn’t think of actually landing, and, golly, find something worthy of their sophistication to do.
So having several hours to kill before landing in San Francisco I started thinking about the nation’s midsection and what I might have missed had I always flown over, and never landed in it.
Permit me a fond recollection that dates back to 1974. I had never seen the Mississippi River, or any place actually, west of Buffalo. My wife had seen it all. I had a week off from my $1.85/hour radio DJ job in Fulton, NY. This would be our first vacation since our wedding in September, 1973 and I asked my wife if we could drive to the Mighty Mississippi and back in a week. She assured me we could.
We hit the road and in short order I got my first glimpse of Ohio and the great city of Cleveland. I had hair that reflected the times and my age and the clerk at the first motel we attempted to stay in promptly refused me on the grounds that I looked like a creep.
After finding a more open-minded hotelier we hit Columbus, Cincinnati, and Louisville in short order. No money or time to do much so we quickly drove around Churchill Downs wondering what it would be like to attend the Kentucky Derby. From there we crossed into Indiana and became hopelessly lost. Somehow we ended up in Tell City, IN, then Hawesville, KY. A strong wind across the flat farmlands promptly blew my side view mirror off our awesome white Rambler. Eventually we found our way and the great Gateway Arch poked its apex over the horizon, providing a prominent trailmarker to our destination, and feeling almost weepy at seeing the Mississippi at last as we crossed into St. Louis.
We again faced the challenge of finding lodging, only this time it was due to a long parade of “no vacancy” signs. A room was finally secured at a high rise in suburban Clayton where we dumped our things and headed back to town to catch a Cardinals game in what was then, the modern, total ’70’s circle, Busch Stadium. They were playing the hated Reds and we saw Pete Rose, whom 16 years later, would slam me into a wall when I asked him a tough question just before he was bounced from baseball.
As I mentioned, we had little money, so we took the first tour of the Budweiser brewery the next morning and slurped as much free swill as we could before moving on to Illinois where we made surgical strikes in Springfield to see Abe Lincoln’s grave and Chicago where we drove around the Loop and headed back east.
We noticed the Kelloggs factory in Battle Creek, MI was an easy detour off the Indiana Toll road and guessed, correctly, they’d give us free cereal. Sure enough, “Request Packs” was given to us after a fascinating tour watching Corn Flakes made by mashing corn grits to smithereens between two gigantic rollers.
Then it was the home stretch back to Oswego, NY where we lived, via Detroit, Canada and Niagara Falls, where we pulled up to parking space, looked over at the falling water and got back in the car because we had no coins for the parking meters.
After a lifetime, to that point, of being a fairly sheltered New Yorker who thought the western border of the U.S. was the Hudson River and nothing north of the Catskill Mountains matter, it was a geographic and cultural coming of age for me. From that day on, I appreciated what lay between the coasts, the marvel of the Rocky’s, the kindness of the people, the variety of the vittles, and the cornucopia of customs and routines. As a reporter I covered everything from natural disasters, plane crashes, trials, politics, crimes, sports, most times meeting people who opened my eyes to points of view, to courage, to mystery, to incredible sadness and misery, music, humor, triumph and joy.
Flyover country? Not at all. That IS the country.
edLINES 