A shopping trip

“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy and wealthy and wise,” said Franklin, Benjamin (In honor of the Olympics, names have been organized the Chinese way. This is, however, not an endorsement of the situations in Tibet or Taiwan or an approval of China's human rights record). Having performed a detailed cost/benefit analysis on the proposition, I can state with authority that health, wealth, and wisdom are not worth it. There are hours of the day when no one ought to be awake. Or, I should say, hours of the night; the day does not start until the sun is fully risen and is so high in the sky that no one can doubt its position.

Who are we to question the habits of the sun?

Alas, this very questioning - a capital offense in the Inca cultures - is what I was cruelly obliged to do one very early morning a few days ago. Sunflower Market had its grand opening. Sunflower Market! Fruits and vegetables! Fish and sushi! Healthfood! What self-respecting starving student could resist (insert snigger mark here)? So I rolled groggily out of bed, stared curiously for a minute at the power plug beneath my window, splashed water in my face (at least I think it was water), and stumbled down the stairs to the car. Yesterday's paper said there was to be a free bag of groceries for each of the first two hundred people at the doors, and I, according to my mom and grandparents, would be one of those people ("You will be one of those people, Chip!"). There was no time, a stern announcement warned, for coffee, breakfast, or even email before we took off down the road ("There is no time, Chip!"). This was a race. The morning air was dark and cool—like batman, but different—and the construction workers were barely starting work. Even the the streetlights seemed sleepy as they cast rays that were barely brighter than the sun. I yawned ("Chip, why are you yawning?"). The grand opening was not until seven. There was no way anyone else could be up this early.

Then we pulled up to the store's parking lot. Apparently, I had no idea how valuable groceries really are. The nearest empty parking space was about a mile from the store's doors. A crowd of hippies, yuppies, druggies, SDFs, urban outdoorsmen, vagrants and college professors extended from the doors to the nearest parking spot. And near the doors a troupe of cheerleaders chanted “Sunflower Market! Sunflower Market!” Mais oui, mais oui!Perhaps this trip wasn't a complete waste after all.

We parked our car and began elbowing our way through. I yawned again. Finally, we reached the entrance. “Is there a line to get in?” A yuppie gazed back at us mournfully. “No. The first two hundred people got here a long time ago.”

Obviously it was time to leave. We'd been beaten. Agincourt was over and we were the French. But the mom and grandparents begged to differ ("Chin up, Chip!"). They milled around happily with the other shoppers, drinking from little paper cups of free coffee, eating the free oranges piled outside and comparing Volvo stories.

Despite the fact that I was already outside, I needed air. I decided to go on a jog. Even exercise is better than certain situations. And it so happened that, after a quarter mile or so, I found something even better than exercise: McDonald’s. McDonald’s sells huge, greasy hunks of Southern-fried chicken in breakfast sandwiches, guaranteed to start your day the heavy, nauseated way. I used a cup of McDonald’s coffee to make the provisions palatable. There was nothing to make the coffee palatable.

There’s something about having chicken for breakfast—an uncouth, startling feeling that can only be compared to choking on a fishbone. Even if you’ve never choked on a fishbone, you can imagine what it feels like. (If you can't imagine, a demonstration can be arranged.) First, you notice that something has gone wrong in your throat. Something has jarred the comfortable, salivated muscles that you just used to savor a bite of food. Then, you realize that something has gone wrong in your stomach. It is in communication with the throat exactly the way married couples aren't, and evidently feels some empathy (same analogy). Finally, you jump in alarm as your stomach and throat combine forces to begin a revolt.

Like most revolutions, this one is motivated more by impulse than reason. If you’ve piled your plate high with fried strips of pork fat or bitten into the mound of melting, oozing sausage, eggs, and cheese that is called the McMuffin, you have done something very disgusting for the morning hour. It is only conventionally disgusting, however. It takes extra nerve and extra tastelessness to eat something that disturbingly disgusting. Or it takes a free coupon, which is what I had. Free chicken sandwiches are of course superior to free groceries.

After quelling the revolt, I returned to the store. Much to my chagrin, the cheerleaders were gone, but so were the crowds of people, and my family was ready to leave with several bags of fresh (though not free) produce. A shopping trip is a shopping trip, after all.

A Bottled Devil

I am sleeping deeply in all the blessed oblivion I have earned by long, late hours of watching movies. My dreams are as captivating as they are surreal; they even have butterflies in them. My blankets are warm, my mattress is soft, and my pillow is just cushy enough. In a word, I am in paradise.

Suddenly, every ounce of serenity is gone. In a magnificent jolt, my toes go taut, my hair raises, and my eyes spring wide open. On the table, not a foot from my bed, is a shrieking ghoul that I am powerless to stop. Shriek! Brinnnnngggg! It’s the kind of high-pitched cross between a wildcat’s scream and the cranking of broken machinery that every diabolical two-year-old longs for. It sounds exactly like (forgive me, gentle readers) a bottled devil.

Perhaps you have heard such phones. Sometimes, on more peaceful occasions, I like to daydream about maniac geniuses who sit around in antiseptic, sound-proof labs and concoct rings. I am sure there are some humane, intelligent, sensitive creatures among them. They are the ones who make sissy rings like “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” (Try saying that three times fast. Heck, try saying it one time slow!) or “Für Elise.” But there are other brawny giants who grin evil smiles through broken teeth, pull their ear-muffs tighter, and apply themselves gustily to creating instruments of torture.

“Well Todd, what do you think of this one?”

“I don’t know Bill. The little white rat in the box can still walk. Why don’t you add a few more jolts of that really dissonant tone?”

“Great idea. The fella can’t even open its eyes anymore!” Todd's evil laugh sits dead in the air like an insensitive remark.

You would think, in a day when cell phones are ubiquitous and new ring tones rarely cost more than seventy dollars or so apiece, that there would be no need to endure such aural agonies. After all, there's always a sissy tone available. But that, dear reader, would be an underestimation of human innovation. There are raving lunatics in the world who find every misery they deserve and heap it upon not only themselves, but their friends as well. They connive in back rooms and plot methods to torture the human ear. Yes, these misanthropes are a wretched lot, and you should do your best to avoid us. Yes, us.

Take, for example, me and a recent conference: I attend a conference with my parents and friends. The friends decide to do uncool things. The parents leave to watch boring workshops. I go to look at exciting vendor displays. The friends wouldn’t notice if I got eaten by a vendor monster, but the parents like to keep in touch. They call to check on me. I, having carefully set the phone’s mode to “normal,” ought to hear the ringer, but I don’t. They call again, I miss the call, and they conclude that I have been eaten by a vendor monster. Pretty soon I hear my name on the loudspeakers, on the list of casualties. Apparently, I am dead to the public address announcer.

So I do what any moron would do. I scroll through my ringtones and choose the loudest, most obnoxious ring I can find, one of those metallic nightmares that sound like a phone from the thirties. (People in the thirties must have been rather deaf, both as a cause and an effect of such ringtones.) Now when my phone rings, I feel like the frazzled executive in Spiderman 3 whose wife had a secretary vibrate his desk with a buzzer every time he got excited. A call comes in and—Brinnggg!—there is a bottled devil in my own pocket. I smile nonchalantly and check the caller ID. My friends gape wide-eyed and smooth their hair back down from its newly acquired upright posture. At this point, my friends would notice if I got eaten by a vendor monster. In fact, they would probably hold a party of celebration—provided the phone got eaten as well.

To Take Up Arms...

There is a time for everything, Solomon said, and so there must be a time for sleep. There must be, but but that doesn't make it easy to find. And about two evenings ago, it was more elusive for me than real estate on the moon.

It was just one of those nights. The kind that start two hours early, when your eyes begin to rebel against the light of day just as your boss is walking by full of energy that he is alarmingly ready to funnel into the gory task of setting you straight. The kind that won't completely kick in even two hours after they're supposed to, because those rebellious eyes have rechanneled their restlessness and sandpapered themselves into an insurrection against you in your weary hour of need. The kind that you must slog through despite the fact that you just watched a certain film about crystals and skulls and fiery ants that eat people alive, and every little itch on your skin is beginning to send tingles of terror and images of fiery red legs through your addled brain, and you are suddenly and strangely feeling more little itches than you thought possible just a few hours ago when your boss was glaring at you in the deliciously comfortable, air-conditioned facility.

That's how I felt, anyway, as I tossed and turned in a hot, sticky bed under hot, sticky covers trying to keep my hot, dry eyelids shut. Gradually I dozed off, feverishly reeling through fields of Martians and Aztecs and Soviet soldiers. The little itches continued in my dreams, magnified by the sincere belief that behind them were the malevolent little jaws of a hundred malevolent little army ants. My right arm, nestled safely behind my head, began to tingle with innumerable little needlepoints, and I could sense the poison at work. The dream grew louder and busier, until the jaws began to sound like Goliath playing a timpani (no hyperlink; just use your imagination).

Then I awoke, trembling and sweatier than ever, the crickets peacefully chirping outside and my heart racing wildly in a successful attempt to outpace their chirps by a factor of five to one. I tried to sleep again, but my mind was on autopilot at about 95 miles an hour, just like my car had been some time earlier. I put my head back on my lumpy pillow, and that was when I discovered my arm.

I say I discovered my arm, but the fact is that I discovered its absence. There was an awful itch on my nose, and I summoned my right finger to destroy it. Alas! My right finger had gone AWOL, along with my hand and biceps. My brain sent signals, but my muscles ignored them, and worse, the nerves wouldn't send back any reply. I reached around with my left arm and seized the delinquent appendage. It was cool, clammy, and limp, almost like a piece of dead meat or your two-year-old cousin when you have to carry him inside from a nap in his carseat and his lifeless, snoring mass seems to weigh ten times more than your barbells did at the gym earlier that day.

I lifted my carcass of an arm until I could see it. There was no mental connection between that thing and myself. For all I knew or cared, it could have been a hapless, five-pound bass or trout poisoned by CapeNature officials. Or it could have been the steaming lump of brisket that I had dropped on the driveway a while back. In the spirit of the unsettling occasion, I let this lump drop as well. It fell on my face with a thud which made me realize the gravity of the situation.

My arm was dead. I peered at it, in the dim light that an opalescent moon managed to smuggle around my window blinds, with a growing mixture of fear, surprise, and self-pity. "This is a sorry sight," I felt inclined to mummer. What could I do without a right arm? What would my boss say? What would my mother say? How would I type this post? I lifted the arm again several times and dropped it, with more curiosity than hope. Then, somewhere around the seventh try, I realized to my wonder that the ants had begun to arrive again. I dropped the arm several more times, and subsequently started pounding it with my left fist. The ants returned with a vengeance, tearing and devouring my lifeless flesh. With a supreme effort, I lifted the arm and curled my fingers. It was a fist of victory, and in a short time I was able to shake it defiantly at the ants themselves. Feeling the familiar blood course through my veins was such an exhilarating experience that it was almost worth the sleep it cost me the rest of the night.

Almost.