Borders on Ridiculous

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I harbored this lewd and slightly literate fantasy that I would engage in a chance meeting with a comely, brown-haired young woman in a Borders Books & Music store. We would chat awkwardly about Dave Eggers or what-have-you, have awkward sex at her apartment where that print of the fairy in the canoe in the lagoon that every girl has would be hanging on the wall, and we'd eventually marry and have children with mild-to-moderate asthma and scoliosis.

I wrote a personal essay about this little fixation of mine that got published in an e-journal and, years later, it got me fired from an English subsitute gig at a girls' Catholic school. And I never did find that pretty brown-haired girl in the stacks at Borders. She found me, and it was on J-Date. Turns out you can't pre-write your own love story after all.

Unless you've been living under a strung-out, Chinese prostitute's immediate family for the past month, you've probably heard that Borders is bankrupt. That fact alone is pretty startling, if you think about Borders's meteoric rise to brick-and-mortar dominance over the past twenty-or-so years. The tremendous success of Borders in the 1990's is equally amazing considering the fact that probably two thirds of this country is basically illiterate, including a significant portion of the Commonwealth I call home. I guess that's why they don't just sell books, they also sell DVDs, CDs, stationery, Moleskines, pens, Lindor truffles, coffee, coffee cake, bags, calendars, stuffed animals, greeting cards, and basically anything else they can think of to prevent themselves from going up in a puff of smoke.

Speaking of which...

What the fuck is up with this?

Now, you know me. I'm about as pure as the driven snow when it comes to illicit substances such as alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, speed, meth, Ready Rock, Big 8, Deeda, Candy Raver, Hippie Crack, New Jack Swing, E-tard, Coco snow, and Fizzies, but I was, frankly, surprised to see such an abundance of grow-it-yourself guides concerning at-home production of pot.

At Borders.

In suburban, southeastern Pennsylvania.

Where moms wear diamond-encrusted tennis bracelets and drive Lexus SUVs.

I mean, the books just went on and on. It was like a bad "Cheech and Chong" joke. But I repeat myself.

As I scanned the shelves of the (I swear) Horticulture Section at Borders this past Sunday, I began to think about why Borders is sinking. Sure, e-readers and Tablets are making stand-alone book stores, peddling paper wares obsolete, no doubt. But I couldn't help but wonder if Borders had maybe been guilty of misjudging their clientele. Perhaps some market analysis is in order, if only for this one location. After all, this isn't San Francisco, for Christ's sake. It's hard for me to picture my elementary school friends' moms sending us off to the park to play so that they could secretly adjust the heat lamps shining on their hashish gardens, carefully thumbing through "The Best of Ask Ed: Your Marijuana Questions Answered" [Paperback] to see just how much water those guldern things need for maximum return.

It's possible, of course, that I live in a neighborhood that is positively a'flutter with marijuana production, and I'm just blissfully unaware of what is going on around me. I mean, back in high school, a friend of mine opened her bedroom closet one day to show me some pot she was growing under some crudely-fashioned lamps. I was immediately panic-stricken. Part of me wanted to dime on her, because I am, at heart, a narc. Part of me wanted to sleep with her, because she was (and is) from Bangladesh and was (and is) wickedly gorgeous. My friend was, I assumed, the neighborhood anomaly. Most people don't have weed in their closet, I reasoned with myself. And, if they do, I reason today, they're probably not the kind of people who would go to Borders Books & Music and plunk down $21.95 (minus 10% with a Borders Rewards Card!) for hot tips on how to make your leaves larger. I don't know. I guess I'm just disheartened about the state of things. I don't really give a shit that Borders is going out of business. I just kind of long for the days when it was a safe haven for lonely schelps trolling for moderately attractive, educated life-mates, not hapless, hackey-sack-playing, DIY drug-fucks.


Maybe I'm naive. Maybe I'm a prude. But one thing is for sure-- no matter what it looks like, I definitely wasn't high when I took that last picture.

Fucking. Stoned.

Hahaha. You thought this was going to be a post about me using marijuana. See? You don't really know me at all.

Do you?

I was thinking about the scene in Monty Python's "The Life of Brian" recently where John Cleese presides over the stoning of an elderly, spindly little man for the crime of blaspheming-- in this case, saying "Jehovah." Of course, because it's Monty Python, John Cleese's character ends up getting mercilessly stoned by a bunch of men dressed as women wearing fake beards pretending to be men (you following this?) and, as they say in the world of MPFC, "Well that was all good fun, and we all had a jolly good laugh."

Pondering this scene got me thinking about stoning. A while ago, when I was delusional and thought that what I wrote on here mattered a nanodamn and that, if I could change just one person that was akin to changing the world, I wrote a half-way serious post about that woman that they were going to stone in the Middle East for infidelity. I don't know what the hell happened to her, but I'm willing to bet that, whatever it was, it had little to do with my blog. And I'm okay with that.

Stoning is a shockingly economical way to execute somebody, and I'm not sure that it shouldn't be re-examined in the Western hemisphere-- if we're still going to entertain the notion of state-run terminal justice. Ooh-- I like that-- "Terminal Justice." I think I would buy a CD by a band called "Terminal Justice." Do people buy CDs anymore? I'm not sure I exactly know what normal people do. I work in a mental hospital after all, and that skews all kinds of lines.

It skewers them, too. Which is another relatively cheap way to kill someone-- if you happen to know where very large skewers that can penetrate chest cavities/skulls may be located.

Still, I think stoning's the way to go, if you're on a budget-- which, let's face it, most states are these days. N'yah mean? Look at Camden-- they just laid off all those police officers and firefighters. Feel free to disagree with me (it's a pretty popular pastime amongst immediate family members) New Jersey sounds like a state that ought to be considering stoning.

If you think about it-- stoning is ingenious. No money spent on new technologies. No reliance on electricity or firearms or pharmecutical companies-- and green?! Oh, is it green! Especially if the stone has moss on it. But seriously, kids-- no waste! You use what's right there on the ground in front of you, and after a quick spritz with the garden hose (obviously with sprinkler-head attachment to conserve water) those rocks are ready to roll once again!

You can even feed the prisoner stone soup for his last meal!

Fucking. Genius.

So, yeah. Stoning. Awesome and such. There are people in this world who need to be stoned, and, even though I am not a real big proponent of mind-altering substances, there are definitely people in this world who need to get stoned. You see the diff, of course, jawohl? You know who I mean in the latter category, right? Those insidious, tightly-wound, Type-A people who walk briskly wherever they're going, even though they may very well have no place in particular to go. They're always checking their watches and tapping their feet and fixing themselves in the mirror and worrying. Worrying about what others are thinking, worrying about what they're thinking, worrying that people aren't thinking of them, worrying that people are thinking of them. Picking their cuticles. Biting their cuticles. Flicking their palms with their fingers. Fretting. Holding in their urine and their poodie for a more... opportune time. They use words like "opportune" and, incongruously, "poodie," often in the same sentence. They've got white hairs, and wrinkles. They're a frigging mess.

They're... me?

People always say that they'd love to see me stoned. I know they mean "on drugs" and not "pelted mercilessly with rocks," and, although it annoys me to no end when people comment that I would be funnier/better/calmer/more or less... whatever on drugs, I'm at least comforted by the fact that they don't want to see me lying dead on the floor with more dents in my head than on the front fender of a 1987 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham.

Yup. People often say they'd like to see me stoned, primarily because they think it'd be a laugh riot. Nobody ever says that they'd like to see me with no trousers on, though. Thing is-- that'd probably be a lot funnier.

Second Clementine

We spend a lot of time in our lives trying to tame paper tigers, fighting windmills and chasing dragons.

We're pretty stupid that way, I guess.

They say that part of the biggest clusterfuck about drugs is that, the first time you try a lot of the hard shit, the high is so unfuckingbelievable that the track-marked motherdrugger spends the remainder of his or her natural life using to try to replicate the intensity of that first line, or that first hit. And that's the problem: it's never going to be that good again.

Ever have a car that was as awesomsauce as your first car? No. Neither have I. And, for two years, I drove around in Herbie, the Love Bug.


Um, yeah. Seriously, that's a picture of my car. And even that wasn't as cool (at least, in my head) as my first car. Which is just another example of there being serious issues with my brain.

Anyway, we're dreamers. We're thrill-seekers, and we're obsessed with replicating those first thrills of our lives. Remember your first kiss? Um, I do. Frequently. Sometimes my trousers are around my ankles when I'm remembering it. Sometimes not. You know-- depends.

Though I never really thought of myself as someone who chased dragons-- because I've never done drugs or consumed alcohol other than Shabbat wine or a sip of champagne-- I've recently realized that I do chase my own particular dragons, in my own particular way. Maybe this is why I've owned 10 cars in the space of approximately sixteen years. Here we go, in chronological order:

1966 Volkswagen Beetle
1990 Ford Crown Victoria, late of the Delaware State Police
1988 Volvo 240-DL
1994 Ford Taurus
1997 Ford Crown Victoria
2001 Chevrolet Impala
2001 Volkswagen New Beetle Turbo (Herbie replica pictured above)
2005 Ford Focus
2001 Chrysler PT Cruiser
2002 Volvo S-40 Turbo

Yeah, I'm a little embarrassed by that, but I also think it's fucking awesome. And, I can promise you that there will be a lot, lot more, and some of them will be pretty fucking crazy.

Trust me.

Fortunately, I'm not this way with women. My wife has often opined how lucky she is, and how lucky I am, that I am not as fickle.

But I don't think it's about being fickle, automotively speaking. I think it's about thrill-seeking. About dragon chasing. I'm always trying to replicate the excitement of getting into a "new" car for the first time. Because, really, there is no feeling in the world like it. And it doesn't have anything to do with "New Car Smell," because I've only owned a "brand new car" two times out of the ten.

I also chase the clementine dragon. If you eat clementines, you know what I'm talking about. You can't eat just one of those pert little orange bastards. They're just so fucking good. You eat one and you go, "Oh! Oh, that was so sweet and succulent and wet and refreshing, and..... small. How the hell can I not have another one?" And you have a second one.

And the second one tastes like shit.

This happened to me on Sunday. And, because I learn from my mistakes like a lobotomized housecat, it happened to me again last night. I brought a second clementine upstairs as I was thinking about a blog topic. I bit into it lustily, my oral cavity wet with the sensory memory of the first, glorious clementine I consumed about three minutes prior.

"Auuughghh!" I whined. "Fucking dis-gus-ting! Why is it that every time I go to have a second clementine, it inevitably tastes like a monkey's dick?" I asked, rhetorically and hypothetically, of course. I was about to put another piece of it in my mouth when Mrs. Apron, at her sewing machine, exclaimed,

"Don't eat more of it! Throw it in the disposal."

"But that's all the way downstairs!" I bitched.

"Then throw it in the trashcan here."

"But it'll rot in here!" I moaned. Jesus, can you imagine being married to me for even ten minutes?

I ended up going (all the way) downstairs and throwing it angrily into the disposal. The aftertaste is still befouling my mouth, even as I type. What I need, of course, are cookies.

The question is: how can I eat just seven?

Well, I Joined....

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Medicated

I'm not so much into taking medication. When my allergist diagnosed me with chronic asthma and put me on a "daily maintanence inhaler," I almost started to cry in his office. Fortunately, it's a pediatric allergy and pulmonology office, so he's probably used to seeing his patients cry.

I realize that lots of outwardly healthy-appearing people who aren't necessarily going to die in two weeks or are all crumpled up like a pretzel take daily medications, and it's no big deal. I know that these people exist, and I accept that-- I just didn't ever want to become one of them. In my days on the ambulance, I would transport patients whose lists of daily medications were longer than some bathroom reading.

My allergist noticed my slumped shoulders and crestfallen expression and he asked why I was upset.

"Well," I said, after a slightly wheezy sigh, "the idea of being shackled to this stupid, purple inhaler for the rest of my life kind of makes me really.... depressed."

His brow furrowed. I guess pediatric allergists aren't used to dealing with their patients' depression. They're also not accustomed to hearing sob stories about their financial woes, as few seven-year-old asthma sufferers in this affluent suburb have financial woes of their own.

But I did.

I went on to talk about how I'm paying out-of-pocket for my own insurance and how shitty it is and how I was working three or four jobs (I literally couldn't remember) and how we were saving up to buy a house at this point and on and on and on. He gave me an avuncular pat on the shoulder and told me about how, when he just got out of the Navy, he was penniless and basically totally fucked, though he didn't use that terminology (pediatrics, remember) and how it was no crime to be poor, though I suspect certain Republicans would disagree.

"Wait right here a minute," he said to me and he disappeared from the exam room. He came back a minute later, clutching an overflowing armful of samples of the new inhaler to which I had just been joined in matrimony. He looked like a young, skinny Santa Claus, just in from a training seminar at Astra Zeneca.

"Here," he said. "This should keep you for three months or so."

And then my eyes really did start to well up.

I'm surprised he didn't write me a psych referral right then and there. Everytime I've come back for a consult or a check-up, he would leave the room at the end of the visit and he would bring me more purple presents.

I still hate my fucking inhaler, but I am beginning to love my doctor.

------------

As any of you who take medication (regularly or otherwise) know, medicine does not always make you feel better. Sometimes, it has no effect at all-- like drinking coffee late at night for me. I can drink a huge mug of coffee and go to sleep soundly with no problem. Caffeine doesn't keep me up-- it's my neurotic Fran Dresher brain that won't shut the fuck up that keeps me awake. It offers up a maddening playlist of my parents dying, me rapidly aging, hardcore pornography, Gilbert & Sullivan patter songs, me transporting a bizarre array of patients, and, maybe once a year, Adolf Hitler and I running through a peach orchard, giggling, playing a game of tag.

I, of course, am "it."

Sometimes, medication does make you better, but only at the cost of making some other part of you feel much, much worse. Side-effects, they call them. Everything has side-effects. Sure, we can cure your erectile dysfunction, but make sure to contact your doctor if you develop rheumatic fever or the hanta virus. Buying a car has side-effects. Yes, the new four-banger from Tata Motors will provide you with economical transportation for only $2,200. The side-effect is that if you collide with so much as a golf or shopping cart, you're fucked.

I am currently taking an antibiotic that has a pretty mean side-effect. The drug is called Augmentin, and I mention it so that, when your well-meaning doctor prescribes it to you at some point in the future, maybe a little alarm will sound in your bird's nest and you will think to ask for something else. A cute little Z-Pak, perhaps.

This Augmentin motherfucker is currently plowing through my bowels the way newbies get serviced on their first day in the penitentiary. I have had nothing but liquid stools for two days now. This morning, I was positive that I had cleaned out my system, after unloading a mocha-hued gallon. Finally ready to begin my morning errand, I went to the ACME supermarket to pick up some groceries. I got into the car and turned the key and immediately went green. The choir of gremlins in my stomach told me that they would start singing a requiem if I tried to make it all the way home, so I pulled into a Genaurdi's supermarket and promptly shat my brains out in their bathroom. In the seven-or-so minutes I spent in that bathroom, five men came in and out and, each time one of them would come in, I would pucker up tight so I wouldn't have to be embarrassed by the sound of a small lake falling rapidly into the toilet bowl.

I couldn't believe it-- the bathroom was like a revolving door. I couldn't get a minute's straight flow on. I checked my watch. 8:23am. Who goes to the men's room at Genaurdi's at 8:23am? Was it some kind of drug lounge or homosexhub? These guys didn't seem the type, from what I could gauge from the crack in the stall wall. At least four out of the five of them washed their hands.

After I finished my new weight loss program in the lavatory, I decided to pick up some cases of Caffeine Free Diet Coke, my & Mrs. Apron's liquid drug-of-choice. I grabbed two twelve-packs and headed for the closest cash register, feeling the stomach choir preparing to sing again.

"Here. These," I said tersely as I plopped them on the counter. Did I have enough time to run back to the bathroom?

"Oh, sir," said the apron-bedecked clerk, "there's a special on these. Buy two cases, get two cases free."

"Um....." I stammered, starting to sweat. I was wearing my best pair of underroos, too........

"And a free 24-pack of Dasani water."

"Uh......" My brow was furrowed in anguish. Do I shit myself in the middle of Genaurdi's and score this fantastic bargain like a good Jew, or do I screw it, race home and possibly save my dignity/trousers/car interior.

"Yeah. I know. I don't care. Just this."

She looked at me like I was a total asshole, and, for that moment in time, I was. But it wasn't me talking.

The real asshole was in charge.