Observations for July 26th, 2009

This guy and I, we like to observe shit.

1) Fred Meyer has a checkout aisle marked “family friendly,” nestled in right next to the express “12 items of less” aisles. I was interested to see what made one checkout aisle more friendly toward families than any other – is the checker in a family friendly aisle not a convicted sex offender? – so I peeked into the aisle to investigate. As it turns out, the “family friendly” aisle has no tabloid magazines with pictures of Britney’s liposuction or Jon and Kate’s recent marital pandemonium. Honestly, I think “family friendly” isn’t a broad enough term for a checkout aisle devoid of trumped up celebrity gossip. “Intelligence friendly aisle.” “People friendly aisle.” “Friendly aisle.”

2) On more than one occasion, while driving up and down MLK Boulevard at night, I’ve run into crime scenes where the Portland Police have blocked off all four lanes, forcing me to take a convoluted detour through sidestreets. This never once happened to me in Salem, and while I’m sure more people get shot in Portland than in Salem, I spent ten years in Salem versus maybe a year of actually living in Portland (as opposed to Eugene). This leads me to believe that while in small towns like Salem people are courteous enough to get murdered on sidewalks or in their homes, where their body will be of relatively little public burden, Portland city-slickers callously get shot in the middle of the street as a final act of defiance.

3) I feel as though in the grand scheme of things, the mosquito may have served a purpose at some point, but that purpose is now long gone. Jurassic Park was made possible by the notion that mosquitoes who had sucked dinosaur blood would get trapped in amber and preserved into the 20^th century to better facilitate the creation of velociraptors for fun and profit. Fine, good, great – that movie came out like 16 years ago. The mosquito has served its purpose as a plot device for a great movie about dinosaurs; I’d like it if they’d stop stinging me and go extinct already.

4) I’ve never been able to lock something and just walk away from it worry-free. I can step out of the house and watch myself lock the door, making the mental note that, yes, the door has been locked, but by the time I’m two blocks away I’m already asking, “Are you sure you locked the front door? Because, y’know, maybe you didn’t. Maybe you turned the key and you thought you heard the bolt go, but actually you accidentally turned it the wrong way, so the door is still unlocked, and crackheads will come in and steal all your shit. You should go back and check while you still have shit in there. Those crackheads be fast. Go back and check. Go back and check. Go back and check.” But no – I power through it. I drive to wherever I’m going and try to carry on with my day. But as soon as I’m out of sight of the car, I’m already asking, “Are you sure you locked the car?”

5) As much as I hate to admit it, I think that deep down in my subconscious, I actually think that I can trick my lactose intolerance by sneaking uncultured dairy products when it isn’t looking. For example, I’ve recently taken up drinking some Bailey’s Irish Cream with seltzer on those special occasions when Diet Coke just isn’t special enough. The first two times, it was larks – it was creamy and delicious and proved that there was a sort of alcohol I liked. But then, the other night, was the third time, and about half an hour afterwards I paid the price for a good long time, as though my body was saying, “Oh, yeah! You thought you could sneak all that cream by me? You think I’d just process it by accident? We call that hubris, asshole!” As usual, I learned my lesson and swore off uncultured dairy products like cream and milk. But give it six months. Sooner or later, my large intestine will let its guard down, and then bring on the milkshakes.

6) Speaking of milkshakes, Carl’s still hasn’t given me my job back, even though they’d told me I’d get it back, which was why I didn’t apply anywhere else during spring break and thus could find no other jobs when they pulled the rug out from under me this summer. Back when I worked there, I used the name “Carl’s” in order to protect the restaurant’s identity in case I ever wrote about something really raunchy going on in the kitchen. However, they’ve pissed me off and I choose now to strip them of that anonymity: The restaurant was called Mike’s Drive-In, a three-restaurant burger chain located exclusively in the Portland Metro area. Good food but dishonest middle management.

7) While I wholeheartedly agree that both the Democrats and Republicans are full of shit, I’ve noticed that some Libertarians can be awfully self-righteous about how they and they alone recognize the truth and beauty of the free market and individual liberties.

8) Things Mike Whitman has stolen from me over the past year and a half: MIT mug given to me by my aunt and uncle, the equivalent of roughly 14 cans of soda and three bags of chips (by way of sneaking sips and bites when I’m not looking), and one University of Oregon hooded sweatshirt. I had lost track of the sweatshirt after using it to wrap up a bottle of cheap rum to smuggle it into the journalism school (it’s cool, it was for Writers), and had thought it was lost until six months later when I met Mike for lunch and found him sitting there wearing it. It took about ten minutes’ worth of argument before I convinced him that the sweatshirt was mine. Joke’s on him, though – yesterday I snagged one of his University of Oregon sweatshirts, albeit from 1995.

Truman Capps is highly observant.