Rick's April Tirade
The World Is My Obstacle Course
My friend Anne D. is continually amused by my ongoing battles with
the physical world. She watches incredulously as I struggle to open
a bag of corn chips; she snickers as I mutter imprecations at the
villain who designed the offending bag; she guffaws as I finally
manage to tear it open with my teeth and send half the chips scattering
to the four corners of the room.
I wasn't meant to exist in the physical world, her theory goes.
It's not my natural home, any more than Chattanooga would be a proper
home for a penguin or a utopian philosopher. Somewhere in my remote
past, she tells me, I opted for the intellectual realm over the
temporal one. So I shouldn't be surprised or exasperated by my inability
to open a bag of corn chips.
Still, it does exasperate me. I seem to be engaged in an endless
and unwinnable war with inanimate objects; the whole world is my
obstacle course. I'm in awe of pilots, skateboarders, seamstresses,
carpenters, circus acrobats and people who can snuff a candle with
their fingertips. I marvel at their ability to mesh so effortlessly
with their chosen objects, as if they were single highly-evolved
organisms. The skateboard follows its owner's feet into the air
without the aid of glue or ligaments, in utter contempt of gravity
and lesser life-forms. Meanwhile, I continue my struggles with bags
of corn chips.
For me, daily life is a comedy of minor mishaps and sight-gags.
My patron saint should be Oliver Hardy, gazing helplessly at the
camera after being caught in a cascade of malevolent kitchenware,
then blinking hard as one final pot clunks him on the head.
I try to detach a single paper towel, and the entire roll topples
into the sink. I innocently turn my house key in the lock, then
feel it snap like a popsicle stick. I add one more magazine to the
pile on my sofa, triggering an avalanche of paper that alarms my
cat. I pull my car registration sticker out of the envelope, only
to drop it at the foot of my coffee table and watch it vanish into
some uncharted gremlin-land, never again to be viewed by human eyes.
Sometimes I invite disaster through my own ignorance of the rules.
By any standard, placing a glass of wine on a sofa cushion, even
for a moment, even if the cushion is admirably firm and level, even
if the glass is three-quarters empty and the cat is nowhere in sight,
is a blatant infraction of universal law. Fred Astaire and a few
other chosen ones might have been able to get away with it in their
prime, but I'm not Fred Astaire; I'm not even Arthur Murray. Still,
I trust the sofa and the laws of physics to hold the glass upright,
and I'm always miffed when they fail to indulge me on such a minor
matter.
The malign forces that govern my world refuse to tolerate even
a minimal level of risk. When I remove a freshly broiled slab of
salmon from the toaster-oven, I generally balance the fish on a
spatula in one hand while transferring it to my dinner plate in
the other hand. It's a simple enough maneuver: the spatula is wide
enough and my hand is steady enough; we're not performing quadruple
bypass surgery here. Then, at the last second, some invisible imp
tilts the thing just enough -- probably one degree beyond the minimum
fish-flip angle -- to dump my succulent meal into the abyss of the
kitchen sink.
The petty-disaster gods seem positively perverse in their desire
to honk my proboscis. Example: I'll carefully arrange some grocery
bags on the front passenger seat of my car, drive home at a leisurely
clip, then slow down to negotiate the traffic bump at the entrance
to my parking lot. Am I home free? Am I permitted to complete the
two-minute journey with my equanimity and grocery bags intact? Of
course not. The demon-possessed bags WANT to topple onto the floor,
preferably upside-down so the contents can achieve a nearly perfect
state of randomness under the dashboard; the fact that I've slowed
to one mile an hour won't stop them. I've also learned that shouting
at the bags to stay in place won't always achieve the desired result;
the bags hear only what they want to hear.
I'm convinced that these so-called inanimate objects have a will,
a positive desire to torment their animated companions. How else
to explain shoelaces that come undone ten minutes after you've retied
them for the third time since breakfast? How else to explain soup
that creates a permanent path down your chin, no matter how many
times you dab it with your napkin? How else to explain bread falling
butter-side down four times out of five? Is it simple physics? Unlikely.
Black magic? Possibly. Active malevolence within the primitive mind
of the offending object? I'm beginning to think so. We need to guard
ourselves against surly shoelaces and evil toast.
The most diabolically perverse inanimate object I ever encountered
was the hood latch on our 1970 Pontiac LeMans. It's not a pretty
tale, but I feel compelled to tell it.
To appreciate the story, you have to understand something about
my life in those days. I was in my twenties, freshly sprung from
college and graduate school, intoxicated by the written word and
unable to make a dent in the world at large. Alternately underpaid
and unemployed, I lived at home with my parents and younger brother.
Those were the bad old days; like any maladjusted liberal arts
graduate, I was hopelessly unsuited to the business of making a
living. Worse yet, I was blocked on every front: professionally,
socially, creatively. My job situation ranged from bleak to intolerable.
I could barely hold a fifteen-minute conversation without breaking
into a sweat, which didn't make it easy to get a date. Writing was
sublime torture. Some days I'd advance by a single paragraph; other
days I'd actually retreat, having crossed out more than I had written.
My efforts began to resemble the struggle along the Western Front
during World War I -- all that bloodshed over a few yards of territory.
I dwelt almost entirely inside my head, just this side of certifiable,
alternating between dark despair and desperate grandiosity, cheered
only by my voracious reading, long walks, and occasional drives
through the open countryside. Landscapes, mental or physical, were
my deliverance from misery and paralysis.
The 1970 Pontiac LeMans was our secondary car, and I shared it
with my mother and brother. It was a fine car in most respects:
warm gold with a black vinyl roof, pleasing to the eye and dependable
on the road. In fact, I'd remember it with fondness today if it
hadn't been for the trick latch.
To open the hood, you had to pull the latch forward, down slightly
and up again in a single movement that disengaged the safety catch.
It required a deft and subtle touch or the safety catch would hold
and the hood would pop up a mere two or three inches. Then you'd
have to slam it shut and try again.
Nine times out of ten -- sometimes nineteen out of twenty -- the
hood simply refused to open for me. I'd slam it down, pull the latch
and hope for a jackpot -- then, rudely foiled, I'd slam it down
and pull again. And again and again. Before long, the latch and
I became sworn enemies. I hated it passionately for refusing to
yield, for making a savage mockery of my efforts, for implying that
I somehow didn't DESERVE to open the hood.
What made the trick latch even more exasperating was that my brother,
five years my junior and brimming with post-adolescent bravado,
could pop the thing with such blissful ease. After watching me struggle
for ten or fifteen tries, he'd stroll by the car, give the latch
a gentle stroke, and lo! -- up popped the hood. He wasn't obnoxious
about his gift; he acknowledged that it was a tricky maneuver, which
he delighted in demonstrating over and over again. My brother possessed
the secret latch-knowledge that was being withheld from me. Some
were born with innate mastery of the latch; others were destined
to sweat and struggle.
One night, at the mall, I emerged into the parking lot around closing
time and tried to start the car. It was a cold night and the engine
stalled repeatedly, so I went to the hood with the hope of opening
the choke from inside. I tried the hood latch once, twice, fifteen,
twenty times. It refused to pop. I tried it again, and again, and
again, muttering curses upon its illicit parentage with mounting
fury. Still it refused to grant me entrance.
The significance of the trick latch began to grow in my fevered
mind until it embodied everything that had mysteriously evaded me:
success, sex with nubile women, creative power, ease of accomplishment.
It was the Northwest Passage and the Rosetta Stone, the elusive
shortcut without which we're condemned to flap and flail our way
through life. It was admission to the circle of grace, the promise
of just rewards. It was the Holy Grail and Moby-Dick. It was nothing
less than the inscrutable mind of God separating the wheat from
the chaff, the blessed from the damned, the fit from the unfit,
the winners from the losers. This was one powerful and omniscient
little latch; it seemed woefully underemployed as a minor automotive
gadget.
By the time I finally popped the hood, my car was among the last
in the lot. I opened the choke, started the engine, ran it a few
minutes, closed the hood, drove home and never spoke to anyone about
the incident. I knew from that evening onward, as I had suspected
before, that success would never come to me without strenuous effort,
demoralizing defeats, frustration and exasperation -- that I was
essentially a Nixon rather than a Kennedy, except that I didn't
wear dark suits and black oxfords when I walked on the beach.
Anyway, the knowledge sobered me and cleared my head. I was ready
to move forward, a grizzled veteran of metaphysical combat.
When I finally landed a remunerative job and moved out of the house,
I bought my own car -- a used one, and fittingly (or perhaps stupidly)
another Pontiac LeMans. I made sure I tried the hood latch before
I bought it, and this one actually worked. I delighted in being
able to pop the hood at will.
As it turned out, this car was literally a disaster on wheels:
it needed an immediate valve job and a new transmission; it regularly
overheated for no apparent reason and the mechanics could never
figure out why. I had another mystery on my hands. But at least
I could trigger the hood latch.
My struggles with inanimate objects continue to this day, of course.
Computers have provided me with a vast new source of vexation, as
I tussle with error messages, buried menus, indecipherable icons,
quirky modems and mind-boggling user manuals. The universe makes
life difficult for those who aren't privy to its secrets, but I
intend to persist even if I never prevail. Nixon would be proud
of me.
On some level, I suppose I'll always be struggling to unlock the
elusive mystery of the latch. Meanwhile, I hope you'll excuse me
while I try to open a bag of corn chips. I've been writing for hours,
and I feel like wrestling with the physical world again.
Here's the complete archive of Rick Bayan's immortal tirades for your reading pleasure:
December 2002 — Hello, I Must Be Going
November 2002 — A Raving Moderate
August 2002 — Is Western Civilization Worth Saving?
July 2002 — To Scam or Be Scammed
June 2002 — I Read the News Today, Oh Boy
May 2002 — Speechophobia
April 2002 — Fanatics on Parade
March 2002 — The Prestige Gap: A Lament
February 2002 — On Becoming a Dullard
January 2002 — Art for Slackers
December 2001 — An Unsolicited Christmas Card
November 2001 — A Tale of Two Tribes
October 2001 — On the Fallen Towers
August 2001 — Why Do We Bother?
June 2001 — Notes from a Doomed Planet
May 2001 — The Museum of Discarded Names
April 2001 — Indecision
March 2001 — A Slight Case of Insanity
February 2001 — Letter to a Conscientious Critic
January 2001 — The Cynic's Inaugural Address
December 2000 — The 50th Tirade
November 2000 — Travel Advisory
October 2000 — Beyond Work
September 2000 — More Work
August 2000 — Work
July 2000 — The Doves' Nest
June 2000 — Great Affectations
May 2000 — Tale of a Virtual Village
April 2000 — The World Is My Obstacle Course
March 2000 — A Living Heck
February 2000 — On the Treachery
of Time
January 2000 — A Letter to the
Future
December 99 — Rare Bird
November 99 — Not Just Another
Obscure Ethnic Group
October 99 — Extinction Reconsidered
September 99 — Good Life, Bad
Life, Better Life
August 99 — Household Relics:
An Elegy
July 99 — A Meditation on Profanity
June 99 — In Praise of Sloth
May 99 — A Bug's Death
April 99 — Obligations!
March 99 — The Courage to Be Ordinary
February 99 — A Grave Story
January 99 — What's Left for
Men?
December 98 — On the Uses of
Friends
November 98 — A Cynic's Thanksgiving
October 98 — Grand Illusions
September 98 — Filth
August 98 — Will the Real God
Please Stand Up?
July 98 — Adventures in Downsizing
June 98 — Lady Longevity
May 98 — Uniquely Human, Uniquely
Clueless
April 98 — The Mathematics of Excess
March 98 — Humbuggery
February 98 — Love and the Single
Cynic
January 98 — By the Sweat of
Your Brow
December 97 — Is Suffering Unfashionable?
November 97 — The Tao of Housekeeping
October 97 — The Sensory Deprivation
Blues
September 97 — Down with Natural
Selection!
August 97 — Noise
July 97 — On Eating Our Fellow Creatures
June 97 — Trouble in Book-Land
May 97 — Interview with an Unemployable
Man
April 97 — The Cynic's Dream
March 97 — Inequalities
February 97 — Flesh and Mortality
January 97 — How to Be a Success
December 96 — Why I Can't Hate
Christmas
November 96 — How I Became a Cynic
