I turned on the TV today at around noon, expecting to see some singer who's owned by the same company that owns the company that broadcasts the Super Bowl, and I expected to hear her singing a version of the National Anthem specially arranged to accomodate two commercial breaks midway through. And instead I saw an infomercial for one of those electrical-stimulation devices, the kind that Americans buy and strap around their waists to get killer abs, and which South American secret police strap around their suspects' crotches to get confessions.

The Iditarod begins on March 2; the mandatory Mushers' Meeting – when mushers are advised of the condition of the trail, warned of special hazards such as recent moose sightings, and notified of any rule changes – is February 28th. Red Sox pitchers and catchers report for spring training on February 15; opening day for the Sox is April Fools' Day, when they'll be hosting the Orioles. In Academy Awards news, nominations will be announced on February 12. The awards telecast is on March 24.

So look, it's not like I'm one of those people who isn't aware of stuff that's goin' on. Still, the New England Patriots (my hometown team, whose stadium I drive past a couple of times a month) is in the Super Bowl. And as late as a few days ago, I, uh, thought the game was next Sunday.

I mean, you know, Same Planet, Different Worlds, eh?

 

"OK, so you're all out of work, in the middle of a recession, no less," I said to a man whom I'd known for about seven years, "But what about me? Come March, I won't be able to go look for DVDs after I've bought comic books and had a leisurely 90-minute lunch!"

It wasn't the most insensitive thing I've ever said to anyone. Whoah, nellie, no. But the Top Ten items in that category were all the results of long sessions of focused, bitter thought and ultimately were works of exceedingly fine rewriting and craftsmanship. Hell, #3 on the list involved tipping a waiter $10 to say "That's a lovely ring; is it an antique?" to a co-worker I was lunching with. I had a line ready to go which (with eleven simple words) would kneecap his self-esteem and simultaneously pull down the pants of three generations of his matriarchy and spank them all with a giant fish, metaphorically speaking. And when you're setting out to spank someone's matriarchy, ten dollars for a proper setup is a real bargain.

So the bit about my slight inconvenience being a bigger problem than someone keeping a roof over their head isn't in the record books. But I'm rather proud of today's effort all the same. It was an ad-lib, you see. No preparation at all; I mean, either you have one of those knacks for improvisation or not. The phrase "Well, I'm sorry to say that after 15 years in business, we're closing up shop" was still ringing in my ears and bango, I had just the thing to say, packaged and ready to ship. I'm really in awe of my creative ability sometimes. "How do I work this magic?" I goggled just last week, barely distracted by the savage beating being administered to me by that cab driver. I did make a point of leaving a business card in the backseat (along with various bits of DNA evidence), so that in the coming weeks when he realizes that his wife does look like either (a) a primate that's had bits of fur shaved off or (b) a reptile that's had bits of fur pasted on, well, he'll be able to email me and concede the point like a man.

Back to the DVD store. This was Sight & Sound in Waltham, Massachusetts, which opened up shop sometime in the late Eighties as one of New England's premier destinations for laserdiscs. For eons, Sight & Sound was my film library. They rented absolutely everything. Lots of video places have a special section that caters to highfalutin' longhair ultraübermegahyper film geeks, but usually it's like that one area in an office complex that's designated for Smokers. It's not so much there for our comfort and convenience as to herd us all together and keep us out of the way where we won't disturb the others.

Sight & Sound was a movie-lover's resource. It catered to people who watched movies and read movies and talked movies. If you'd read that George Lucas drew inspiration for "Star Wars" from Kurasawa's "The Hidden Fortress," you went to the store and dagnabbit, they had "The Hidden Fortress" for rent. If you saw one of the "Thin Man" movies on late-night TV and liked it, you went to Sight & Sound and naturally they had every single movie in the series. To them, "silent comedians" didn't mean Robert Downey in "Chaplin." It meant Chaplin shorts and Keaton shorts and Lloyd shorts and Langdon, too; if the right person was on shift, he'd even ask if you'd seen "Mr. Hulot's Holiday" or anything else with Jacques Tati.

They rented their share of gawdawful crap, too. I think if they hadn't, the Video Retailers' Association would have come in the middle of the night and painted a blood-red "eject" symbol on their door or something. But the Adam Sandler and Pauly Short movies performed the same function as the dusty Baby Ruth bars did in a little storefront near my old neighborhood: it was just the stuff they kept up front in case anyone wandered in by accident. Their bread-and-butter regular customers came in looking for hard drugs.

So it was explained to me like this: the couple who actually owns the store are old and want to retire. They transitioned from laserdisc to DVD early enough that they were still making money, but the DVD business is increasingly being taken over by stores like Best Buy, who are willing to accept razor-thin margins just to get all that traffic through their stores. Plus, Sight & Sound's proprietors own the building. So they can make easy money from the comfort of a houseboat in sunny climes by shutting the store and renting the space instead.

Oh, well.

Existing inventory is being slashed, and I was happy to sweep up an armful of half-price discs. The staff had also uncovered a large cache of Laser Karaoke discs while emptying out the basement, so I felt that the least I could do was add my robust baritone to the staff's rendition of "Son Of A Preacher Man" as my purchases were rung up.

Dash it, though. This sort of messes up my Wednesdays. Waltham has a great comic-book shop, a great DVD store, and an authentic Worcester-style diner within two miles of each other. A club sandwich to feed the soul, and mass-media to alternatively feed and starve my neurons. Worse, I really have no Plan "B" for video. One by one, my sources for decent movie rentals have dried up, until I'm left with a million places to rent "Deuce Bigelow, Male Gigolo" and not one shop with a copy of "Tampopo."

There was a time when I didn't really understand how NetFlix – the rent-by-mail DVD service – stayed in business. Well, life sucks and people change.

"Start Each Day The JERRY LEWIS Way!"

Yes, ladies and gentlemen! The secret to happiness, in one easily-digested over-simplified aphorism! Soon to become an Oprah's Book Club Selection!

Why was I down in the dumps earlier this year? Because I wasn't letting the legendary Actor-Director-Producer-Humanitarian be my guide!

"Wait a minute!" I suddenly burst out, sitting ramrod-straight in my chair, disrupting a bowl of Cheez Doodles because such was the force of the revelation. "Jerry Lewis isn't better than me! Jerry Lewis doesn't deserve a nicer lifestyle than I do! What has Jerry Lewis done for this world through his works which I haven't matched or, nay, even exceeded by never having done anything as Gawd-awful as some of the other crap he's done?" I shouted.

And then I picked myself up out of the doldrums and bought a boatload of new underpants at Wal•Mart.

(For which I apologize; but the place where, historically, I've always bought underpants has gone out of business and as a result, I've no idea where else one might fo for Fruit Of The Looms. Normally I only go to Wal•Mart when a friend of mine insists that s/he wants to get a tattoo. The best cure for that sort of impulse is to show them how goofy they'll look when they're forty or fifty years old and sportin' a Frazetta Death Dealer figure across their shoulders.)

Thus, each morning for the past two weeks I've gone to my underwear drawer, retrieved a brand-new pair of underpants, discarded the plastic wrapper and cardboard insert, and begun the day like Jerry Lewis. Among the many revelations found within the (very fine and very highly recommended) JL biography "The King Of Comedy" is the information that he puts on a brand-new set of undies and a brand-new pair of socks every morning, and throws them away when he's done with 'em.

Naturally, though, I intend to launder and re-use them, thus underscoring the fact that no matter how much of a superstar I've become, I still haven't lost touch with The Common Man.

But My God, what luxury. Try it. Replacing all of your underwear is like dressing yourself the morning after Laundry Day, only a thousand times better. After you break open a new package and put on brand-new underthings whose elastics are functioning at the very top of their engineering specifications, I mean, you might as well just put your jammies back on and go back to bed. The day just isn't going to get any better than this…so why expose yourself to potential heartbreak?

Unless, of course…

No. I don't want to make y'all angry and jealous.

Unless you…

Well, let me share with you a new little song I composed after the FedEx guy drove away this morning:

I got a new i-MAC!

I got a new i-MAC!

dum-dum-dum-dum i-MAC!

Hey that's my new i-MAC!

You sing this naturally and energetically, as though you were dancing in a conga line.

For additional effect, you may also sing it while actually dancing rhythmically around the house. Put lots of hip and shoulder into it. As the path of the one-man conga line wove its way into and out of the den, I noticed the goldfish exchanging confused looks – over the past five years they've come to accept that life as my Staff Goldfish rarely falls into a comfortable, predictable routine – but they were cool with it after concluding that whatever it was that I was up to, it probably wouldn't affect their getting their late-afternoon feeding.

Besides, tough beans on them if they were worried. After all,

Wicked cool new i-MAC!

Huh? Oh yeah, the i-MAC!

iMac, iMac, i-MAC!

et cetera.

 

"So little of what could happen does happen," Salvador Dali once complained. "Wouldn't it be nice if, just once, you went to a restaurant and instead of bringing you the dinner you ordered, the waiter brought you a flaming telephone book?"

I had a great couple of hours today. I had to run a couple of quick errands and was standing in the supermarket numbly trying to remember whether it's the crackers in the blue box with the white stripe that I like or if it's the ones in the white box with the red square when bang: someone assumed that I was a saxophonist.

Stereotypes about saxophonists are as damaging as any other stereotype, of course. Just because every year during the clamming season you'll read about yet another saxophonist who got indicted for raking seed-quahogs from a protected shoreline, or you've seen that Patrick Duffy movie that airs on Lifetime like every week, the one about the saxophonist who blew off an important gig because baby ducks needed to be rescued from a burning pet shop, hey, that's no reason to jump to any conclusions. I mean, being assumed to be a saxophonist is not in and of itself praise, nor is it scorn. So I didn't take it personally.

But wow, what an impact it made on the rest of my day. "Do you play the saxophone?" the lady had asked. And this was enough to keep my mind busy and entertained until sundown. "Do I give off a jazzman-ey sort of vibe?" I wondered. Perhaps she overheard me when I asked the guy in the apron "Where would I find crackers? Like, the bread aisle?" and she sensed something in my voice which betrayed great unplumbed deeps to my soul and an admirable weariness of the plastic norms of Society?

Or did she think I was a heroin addict who must be in some sort of prosperous line of work, given that (judging from my snappy leather jacket) my servitude to cold Lady "H" apparently wasn't sucking away my entire income?

"In any event," I thought, "why a saxophonist, specifically? Why not a keyboardist, or a vibraphonicary, if 'vibraphonicary' is indeed the word I'm looking for?"

It was great. All afternoon long, I had a nice little Question to play with. I didn't have to do any thinking whatsoever about where I was or what I was doing, not even while I was driving.

When I got home and caught my reflection in the hall mirror, the Answer finally came to me: it was all because I'm a colossal idiot.

See, this morning I was clearing out a box of junk and came across a badge holder that I'd acquired at some conference or another. It was a nice, stout, black strap which ended in a sturdy spring-hook – a dashed-handy accessory for all kinds of different gear – so I wanted to hang on to it. But I didn't know where to put it, so I just slung it around my neck temporarily so I could continue with my cleaning.

Forgot to take it off and left the house still wearing it. Yeah, now that I look at it, it does look like a saxophone neck cord.

OK, well, it was still a cool experience. I'm a better person for it. Instead of being uncomfortable around strangers, I shall now stride into those awkward and unfamiliar social situations with poise and confidence. Now I know exactly how to comport myself. "Excuse me," I'll say to the Archbishop, "but do you play the saxophone?"

His Eminence will thank me for it eventually, particularly if he has to sit through a High Mass later on that day.

Catch up on the many heroic banalities that I posted last month.

This page and its contents copyright © 2002 Andy Ihnatko.