Author: TheGentlemanAtLarge

Do the Thing.

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 3 Comments

It’s still January, and so while perhaps out of vogue  I think it’s still topical to talk about what I like to think of as one of our dumbest traditions. That New Year’s Eve is the shittiest holiday is well documented; it needs no further treatment here. I take offense instead at the annual pandemic of delusion that some folks like to call New Year’s Resolutions.

nye

Scott Fitzgerald gave us that “there are no second acts in American lives,” which, is pretty much what you’d expect to hear from a guy who spent his 20’s penning one of the finest examples of the English language and then drinking himself to death by 44. I certainly disagree with him, and don’t mean, by regarding New Year’s resolutions as the dumbest non-televised part of American culture, to disparage the notion that self improvement is possible or worthwhile. Instead I would look to Annie Dillard, who points out (what may be a tautology, engineers?) “that how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

I think that my distaste for the tradition can be summed up pretty fairly by an anecdote.

A guy I know was a smoker, and for reasons that will soon become clear I suspect that he still is. We worked together at a place that was sometimes emotionally trying, and I think that the habit started innocently as an excuse to sneak out into the quiet every hour or so. (I never picked up smoking, but did develop my own coping mechanism in which I would see how many dirty sounding but technically correct words I could sneak into official documents.) He insisted that he never smoked at home, and checked “non-smoker” on his health insurance. I think that he actually believed that he wasn’t addicted to cigarettes.

But some time in mid-December, he mentioned that he really aught to quit before it did become a habit, and let me know that his New Year’s Resolution would be to give up the cancer sticks once and for all.

“Why?” I asked him.
“Um, because they’re bad for you? And my wife would kill me if she knew.”
“Nono, why is that a New Year’s Resolution? Why not just quit now? Today? This afternoon. Here give me that pack. I’ll flush ’em.”

He recoiled and held that crumpled foil pack of Camel 1000s (or whatever) a little more dearly, and went on to explain that New Year’s Day (still weeks away) would be just fine, thank you very much.

New Year’s came and went, and well before MLK day, the guy was back out there sucking away, every hour on the hour, while I was inside still massaging correspondences to attorneys to make space for words like intercourse and ejaculate.

The point here, is that by focusing on the New Year or the ceremony of the Resolution, it takes focus away from the act, or series of acts, that form behavior. It’s a disturbance, a blip. And after a few days or weeks or even a month of adherence, once the day and the ceremony have passed, the behavior reverts to where it was. I drew a graph to help out:

chart

We should instead think of resolutions as inflection points in behavior, that are in no way required to ring in a new year and are certainly permissible on any of the other 364 days.

It’s easy (especially as a non-smoker) to look at my smoker friend and scoff, but if we’re honest with ourselves we all do the same thing. New Year’s Day being a few weeks away is not the only excuse to put put off addressing bad habits.

How often have you decided to cut back on eating out, as soon as you go to the grocery store and stock up? To start keeping a journal as soon as you get a few of the nice pens? Or to start exercising again tomorrow, because it’s already late and you just made dinner? Sure, maybe you went for a run today, but did you do all those stupid little exercises your PT prescribed?

Changing habitual behavior isn’t impossible, but it is hard work. Why not start right now?

Get Bent: an address to Hollywood in the 21st century

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 2 Comments
Those of you who have followed this blog for more than a month or two have probably figured out by now that my posting frequency is, by and large, a function of my ire. Things have been pretty quiet recently, what with the economy bouncing back, the stock market at record highs, and now with gas below two dollars a gallon, it’s a pretty good time to be a while male in America. I mean, there’s still the whole “France Thing,” and our fair capitol’s not entirely consistent stance vis-a-vis the relative location of money and mouths, which is, of course, not to mention those knuckleheads in Nigeria. Fortunately cool heads tend to prevail, and the tears in my eyes every morning while I read the daily news really are probably just a sinus thing.

I’ll be sure to redouble my echinacea supplements right away.

Yep, chronic head cold aside there’s a lot to be thankful for in this coddled first world life I lead, but here in the Center of the Universe we do have the burden of remembering that First World Problems are still, technically, problems. And these are the sorts of problems that were really chapping my ass when I walked out of the most recent installment of the Hunger Games earlier this week.

Ok so before I get started, full disclosure: I never read the books, and so I’m both unable and unwilling to go down that rabbit hole of discussing how well a film interpreted the work of the novelist.

I did have some thoughts about the story and the film as it stands alone. I like to think that I followed right along with the not-at-all subtle critique of Western foreign policy in the 21st century, and I chuckled a little that the story was crafted for consumption by a community that is most closely analogous to the antagonistic themes throughout.

Stanley Tucci acted circles around James Franco as they each sculpted a caricature of Ryan Seacrest.

In fact, the acting in the Hunger Games trilogy is, by and large, excellent. I do have a soft spot for Jennifer Lawrence, Philip Seymour Hoffman (RIP), Woody Harrelson, Stanley Tucci, and Donald Sutherland, and whoever cast these films pretty much pulled together my fantasy acting team for making fun of the government. There are a lot of really great things to be said about these movies, but my overarching takeaway here can be summed up pretty concisely:

Fuck you.

That’s right. Fuck you, Francis Lawrence. And fuck you too, David Yates. And especially fuck you Mr. Peter Jackson. There’s been a troubling trend recently of adapting popular books to film and dragging them out as long as humanly possible, over as many films as the dues paying public will shell out. What the fuck is that? The Hobbit over three movies? Are you kidding me? That was the shortest book, dick.

There must be a lot of pressure to extend these high-dollar film dynasties over as many iterations as the people will tolerate. And for good reason, I guess, because people keep paying to see them. But they come at the cost of telling a story. For instance, I could endorse spreading The Hobbit across a mini-series affair if the indefatigable Mr. Jackson had managed to use his many hundreds of minutes to develop characters and plot, rather than descending for hours at a time into a self-indulgent circle jerk of CGI fight scenes and pithy one liners. Those of us who have it scratch our cartoon violence itch over Hannah-Barbera cartoons and Fruit Loops on Saturday mornings, thank you very much.

By treating a movie like a syndicated television drama and curtailing the story arc with a cliffhanger, candidly teasing the viewer to come back next week, filmmakers are degrading the movie watching tradition. The theater should be a place where viewers can allow themselves to succumb wholly for a few hours to the discretion and folly of the director. Where artists can craft the arc of a story and unfurl a human drama or slapstick comedy or whimsical fantasy. Episodes of film cheapen the experience.

And don’t get me wrong, some stories need more than two or three hours to be told. Lonesome Dove was a triumph, and to fit Michael Corleone’s plight into a single go would have cheated Puzio’s legacy into a glossed over cartoon. But Simon Wincer rightly chose an appropriate venue, and Coppola found a balance of long and intermediate scale story arcs and created one of the greatest achievements of the medium.

When a feature film ceases to hide its role as anything other than a 120 minute trailer for the next edition the artists have given up the trade to the marketing department. I find myself forced to draw a line in the sand. So here are my terms:

I will pirate every major blockbuster film that I feel unnecessarily prolongs its existence over multiple iterations. I will encourage others to do so. I will also log onto both IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes and leave it shitty reviews, regardless of how I feel about it.

I’m not so naive as to think that this will make any difference at all. But we’re in a place and time where I think it’s worthwhile to protect our right to say “fuck you” when it feels right.

Maybe It’s My Eyes

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment
I have begun to believe, recently, that there must be some characteristic in my face, or perhaps in my posture, that yells in a tongue that I do not comprehend (otherwise I would stop yelling), “please rob me.” It certainly cannot be my wealth (current checking account balance: $38.17), or outward displays thereof (I accepted long ago that I cannot have nice things, as I tend to destroy them in the early weeks of ownership and in doing so, degrade their utility as a status symbol). And yet I keep getting sort of fruitlessly robbed, in a way that seems to leave all involved parties just sort of inconvenienced.

The two chaps with the handgun got away with a Discman, which despite its sworn written assurances to the contrary skipped readily, and the real loss there was the 43 minute Carmina Burana techno remix that I had found on Napster and was listening to at the time of the relief of property. The Guatemalan ATM skimmers did manage to reduce my checking ledger to $1.49, but that only really means that they got like twenty bucks, and the bank paid me back for that anyway.

I guess over the years the TSA has stolen most of my dignity, but since the floor fell out of that currency in response the early 21st century “Terror Craze” I think that that hardly makes me special. No, I’ve been robbed a lot of times, but the perpetrators generally haven’t gotten away with much. Really, only one demographic of grifters really breaks this mould, and that demographic is cab drivers. Those guys have my number.

In Rome, once, a guy took me on two full loops around the city before “finding” the right street. Another time, after learning how hard hitchhiking can be for those 6-feet plus, I paid a cabbie like $400 for what I’m now pretty sure was technically human trafficking. That was  long night. Even here in the United States, I once got into a cab that happened to be black instead of yellow (but still smelled like cigarettes, Pine-Sol, and the black market sex trade), and wound up paying more than twice what my yellow car born companions did for the same ride.

So it should come as no surprise that I was more than a little bit incredulous when I was quoted a flat 10€ fare for the 5 minute ride from our hotel to the airport on our last day in Shannon, Ireland. I mean, they insisted that I didn’t need to schedule a particularly early ride, because the trip is “only 5 minutes.” Then they told me it’s $15 plus tip and there’s no bus, and they didn’t even crack a smile when they said it. In the end, of course, no amount of incredulity could do me any good, and I capitulated to the robbery. Looking back on my most recent trip to Europe, I can say that that was the best 10€ I spent in three weeks.

That early morning heralded the impending winter with a crispness in the air that had me wearing somewhere between four and seven shirts. The driver was a shorter, stocky man whose ruddy cheeks seems to flow directly from a high collared jacket, bypassing any semblance of a neck or jowls. He had one of those massive, sort of smashed-in noses that made me wonder if he could see his feet to tie his shoes in the morning. He wore boots with no laces.

“You’ll sit in the front with me,” he said after we’d loaded my bags into the back of his VW Transporter, with a not unkind brusqueness that left little room for deliberation. Approximately five minutes later, after I had paid him 10€ (plus tip), I rushed into the terminal to scrawl down as much of our conversation as I could before it was lost forever. It went something like this:

“I went to America once,” he told me, and before he knew of my midwestern roots, went on, “to Chicago. Lovely place. We stayed in Orland Park, did our drinking in Tinley Park. Orland Park is a monstrously large housing development, but has no bar. Tinley Park, though, is only a fifteen minute walk and has quite a nice one.”

I mentioned that I grew up near there, and was familiar with the area, as well as with the idea that some towns had no zoning appropriate for bars. He sort of nodded with the same affect that might go along with listening to a creationist question the theory of evolution while you have a vicious hangover: when you know they’re wrong, but it’s just not worth arguing. He went on:

“The one problem I have with America is that your fucking beer is shit. We finally found some microbrew that was good, but all that Budweiser, Miller, Coors, is shit.” I tried to defend the burgeoning craft beer culture here, but before I could put together a real spoken thought, he broadened his stance. “And your cider is shit too.”

While the driver didn’t seem particularly interested in comparing our disparate observations about my native land, he did seem to acknowledge that Tinley Park is not really Chicago, and was sure to mention that he had done some real city stuff. Namely, that they had “walked through the Brookfield Zoo when it was 105 fucking degrees!”

Naturally, the conversation turned eventually to food. “The pizza is delicious.”

Connoisseurs of midwestern gastronomy know that while Chicago Pizza is certainly its own genre, that every shop makes it a little differently, yielding strongly partisan feelings on the matter (I once saw a man get shivved by his date in an Antigua nightclub because he insisted that Pizzeria Duo was really the original). So naturally I asked him where they went.

“I tried every fucking pizza they made,” he said with a vigor that at once gave me concern (he was captaining our vehicle at upwards of 120kph) and satisfaction that he had embraced the partisan anger that is canonical in Chicago pizza culture. But it didn’t stop there.

“And the ice cream!” He was really rolling, now. “You guys got flavors of ice cream I never even dreamed of! And on top of it, you got ‘Buy One Bucket: Get Two Buckets!’ deals everywhere. Un-fuckin-believable.”

The topic having come to food, he couldn’t help but assure himself that I had eaten the proper Irish foods. I don’t recall, now, exactly which meals I mentioned except that corned beef and cabbage was not among them and that he seemed satisfied. The only exception was the seafood chowder. I had that with every meal at which it was available (sometimes breakfast) until I found my other lactate threshold and spend 36 hours throwing up. The driver had strong feelings about chowder as well.

“A chowder shouldn’t have too many vegetables. Sure, some celery, a bit of onion, maybe even a tiny bit of carrot. But if there’s more veggies than fish, they’re fuckin’ cheatin’ ye.”

And there you have it.

Zen and the Art of Destroying a Rental Car

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment
Driving in Ireland is fun. Really fun. The most obvious and initially striking difference between driving on the island and most of the rest of the world is, of course, that cars utilize the left side of the road, and the driver’s seat is on the right (although improper) side of the car. This is at first, unnerving, and after only a week in-county we never did quite get the hang of which side of the car to approach when holding the keys, or from ineffectively glancing over our right shoulders when turning in that that direction. In fact, from the early moments in the rented Opel Something-or-Other the putative rule of thumb was more or less, “check every blind spot you can think of every time before doing anything especially turning left or right and you’re going to want a spotter if you need to parallel park it really is harder than it looks all backwards and everything.”

The novel fright of turning left in a five lane intersection in downtown Dublin by relying finally on motor-memory (despite having made the conscious decision not to make that mistake only seconds before entering the intersection and then once again as the turn was initiated) and finding yourself facing a row of headlights and unimpressed tour bus drivers and making a last minute correction only to nearly but not actually strike a cyclist  loses said novelty rather early on. Fortunately after only one or two faux pas your globetrotting Horans matched pace with the predictably steep learning curve and made it out of the city without incident (or at least with plausible deniability that there was any incident worth mentioning). Also, Rick Steves told us to be sure to spring for the full coverage insurance, so, you know, fuck it. In any event, the right improper side drive thing isn’t really that tricky to get the hang of, and only begins to explain why driving in Ireland is so much fun.

The baseline adrenal trickle that comes from driving in a foreign country stems from the same basic uncertainty and nervousness that accompanies all of those mundane activities that are taken for granted in home life when they are attempted abroad. A routine trip to the domestic grocery store incites only an astringent distaste for the fellow blurry-eyed shoppers and what seem like unnecessarily long lines due to understaffed checkers because Jon is on his break and the last thing we need is for those guys to unionize so they might as well get a break if that keeps them quiet and besides the line isn’t really that long except for when stuck behind that one morbidly obese lady with the ten-gallon perm and the one lurking curler still in and the five or so children but who’s only privy to the whereabouts of about three at any given time, who insists on checking the receipt line item by line item to make sure that all of the ten cent coupons she spent Sunday afternoon clipping over the din of her stories and her three accounted for children are accounted for themselves on paper to make sure she gets what’s right, even though you only have like one thing of Ballpark Franks and a six pack of beer and she has two whole carts of Jimmy Dean Breakfast Bowls Et Cetera and it really should have been a photo finish to see who got to the check line first but she had way more inertia and so out of self-preservation you got the heck out of the way and just let her go first (then the line gets sort of long). Those reassuring home life inconveniences pale in comparison to the fear and loathing that well and constrict a wayward diner’s breathing at the prospect of approaching an overwhelmed butcher’s counter over an inland sea of four-foot-tall local women in colorful regalia all pining for the finer cuts while Our Fair Foreigner only wants to get something that isn’t a kidney or a gall bladder or something and is thumbing dumbly through a phrase book but the stupid thing only has things like, “I’ll have what she’s having” and said Foreigner sure as shit isn’t about to pay for whatever it is that that lady right there just bought, that’s for sure (I mean, is it supposed to be that color?).

To be fair, traveling in a mostly English speaking country is much less intimidating than in a land where the tongue is alien, and since being admitted to the Euro Zone and especially after the tech boom of ’95-through-aught 8 — and let’s disregard what happened in aught 8 out of politeness — it’s probably fair to call Ireland a First World country. And a tourist friendly one at that. But with that said, the ante can’t help but get upped when the Traveler has some skin in the game, and I don’t mean by accidentally eating something that sort of felt like an artery and now he has the burden of going down to the tienda to look for some floss because whatever-it-is won’t come out from between molars fourteen and fifteen and he’s starting to think that it being an artery might be best case scenario. No, driving is a different thing, and while the prevailing advice for foreigners in Ireland, should one run over a child or something, is not to keep driving and “don’t stop for God’s sake because those people over there who just saw that will pull you out of the car and light you on fire with the gas you paid for, right there on the spot: judge, jury, and hangman, I shit you not just hit the gas and let the cops come find you,” the foreigner’s status quo is still somewhat unsettled and never entirely at ease.

Adding the very narrow asbestiform roads that wind through the countryside with no regard for sight lines through corners or intuitive route finding, the predominance of small and sporty (in comparison to a 2000 Ford Ranger with sloppy suspension and a wet/unimpressed pound dog as copilot) cars, and the relative unavailability of anything but a six speed manual transmission, well, it isn’t very difficult to see why the British and the Irish are so fond of their motorsports. And so through the stifled-but-not-really and ultimately infructuous gasps and well-meant-but-not-entirely-constructive criticism that seeped forward from the rear passenger section Opel’s cabin from our self-appointed driving supervisors (who politely declined any offer to try a hand at steering, when the opportunity was presented), my father and I set gaily about destroying a rental car.

After waiting for two or so hours through the constant assurances from a smiling but un-helpful Hertz attendant that our vehicle could be no more than, say, thirty minutes away, as the car that we were supposed to have received was carted away on one of those 8-car double-decker flatbed car-trailers with extensive cosmetic damage to the passenger side (of the car), we finally took possession of our eventually damningly spacious Opel Something-or-Other. Also the full coverage insurance and the additionally insured (Yours Truly). “Incident” is such a nebulous word, so in the interest of truth, if not transparency, I will say that we left Dublin without collision.

It was not until we found ourselves hugging the 3/2 lane tarmac that meandered through the Irish countryside like a long ribbon held against a stiff breeze that our chariot began to suffer. We learned early on that the impossibly dense hedgerows which served to dash any hope of knowing what lay around the hairpin corners to which we were wholly committed were left to be pruned by the cars themselves. When no traffic was incoming we would frequently find ourselves borrowing a score or two centimeters of the opposing lane. However, when confronted with oncoming cars and the remarkably frequent tour buses which drive what is left of Ireland’s economy, we were left with no recourse but to graze the encroaching flora. Such was the consistency of this sort of barter that we noticed the hedges bore an extra, waist-height indentation where the side mirrors of countless Opels before had torn at the still green frayed woody ends.

That sort of phenomenon explains the lion’s share of the damage, which I maintain may buff out. The plastic side mirror cover fell as an early victim to an unnaturally robust twig, and we spend most of the week with exposed red and while and yellow wires and an electric mirror than could only be manipulated by hand. This proved especially inconvenient because at about the same time the passenger side window began to decline to ascend. The party line is that this was not our fault, and that only very circumstantial evidence could insinuate our guilt. This was fixed halfway through the week by a different and friendly Hertz attendant who covered the electric window buttons with duct tape and asked us not to use them. Later, when we glanced off of a very well camouflaged stone wall at somewhere between sixty and seventy-five kph we hypothesized that we might have saved Hertz a great deal of money, and ourselves a great deal of time, by simply taking charge of the badly damaged car that was intended for our use on day one.

In the end I believe that it was primarily the low speed collisions that were our undoing. The full coverage insurance explicitly excluded damage to the wheels and tyres (sic), and through several attempts of mirror image parallel parking we did quite a number on the front passenger wheel. The tyre (sic) seemed ok. 

Partial Credit.

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 1 Comment
Today has found the intrepid Horan family wedged between two nights in a guest house near Dingle, Co. Kerry, on the southwestern coast of the island. With two nights in the same place, we are left with the ability to idle away an entire day, and brainstormed for amusements. This area is in the center of a quickly growing Irish surfing scene, and we thought that that would be fun. We found board and wetsuit rentals for 25 Euro, and had nearly pulled the trigger before consulting the surf report. Fortunately we hopped online and saw that it forecast a 23-25 foot swell. We decided that today was not our day to surf.

Harry and I instead decided to go for a stormy trail run on Mount Brandon. After a spartan breakfast that paired nicely with the Eastern Bloc hospitality afforded us by our Hungarian waitress, the two brothers set forth towards the trail head in the wind and the rain.

By the time we started the run, the storm had lifted slightly, and we managed to climb a rutted dirt road through dry set stone walls and bleating sheep. The clarity could not last, and before long we caught up with the ceiling. As though directed by some cosmic maestro, the trail exhibited a graceful diminuendo to make way for the 50 meter visibility that was settling in. We looked up into the haze to where a ravine petered to a runnel and back down to where a stone pillar stood as our last landmark before a sea of gray consumed the landscape. We discussed pressing further into the tempest before rationalizing that relative to the amount of exercise we had gotten in the previous week, this really was quite strenuous, and, that “we’re going to die out here.”

Harry sizes up the storm and looks for the trail.

We retreated to the car (elapsed run time: 13 minutes) before heading out for an out and back on the relative safety of the gravel country road. We accepted partial credit for our run ambitions.
Harry negotiates Drew Creek.

The rain continued on our drive back towards the guest house and as we were weaving through the outskirts of Ballydavid a silhouette emerged on the side of the road and indicated that it would like a ride. Never ones to to leave a stooping old man out in the rain, we slowed down, pulled over, and he crawled into the back seat.

We greeted him and were met with some indecipherable dialect of muddled speech, so addled by age and whiskey that after I posed that he may only speak Gaelic, Harry wondered if he was speaking anything at all. No matter, the man fastened his seat belt and we were off. We had made it only 100 meters before he indicated to us through insistent mumbling and gesticulation that we were going in the wrong direction.

I have not hitchhiked often, but my understanding of the process is that it is uncommon for the rider to inform the driver that he is going in precisely the wrong direction.

But the man seemed quite comfortable, and who were we to throw him back out in the weather? Besides, it was a layover day on the coast and raining. We headed back past where we’d picked him up, and started looking for where he might want to go. He indicated forward, mumbled to himself or his audience, and would  from time to time erupt laughing to some private joke. We continued driving through the narrow, twisting roads of rural Ireland and before long the lanes widened, the houses became more sparse, and we were headed towards the open road. I thought perhaps to Dublin, but Harry seemed to think we were headed more towards Galway.

Harry asked him where he was headed, although at this point we were fairly committed to driving until he indicated that we should stop. “A Laic,” we understood him to say. Harry looked for A Laic on the map, to no avail. “Can you show us where A Laic is?” Harry asked him, holding up the tourist map of the entire island. He responded only with another large grin and two thumbs up. We settled in for the long haul and hoped that we didn’t run out of fuel.

We never made it to Galway or Dublin. We found ourselves before long returning to Dingle by a route more direct than we knew. While it was quite in the opposite direction that we had intended at the time, we expected that it would save us some effort when we headed back in the afternoon. Before our new friend set off on foot into Dingle, we shook hands and snapped a quick photo.

We made it to Dingle!

Just as he turned a corner to disappear I had a revelation. “Best of luck, Alec!” we called to him. He hunched his shoulders more against the storm and turned silently out of sight.

#Trail