Trivial Pursuits

The New York Times crossword puzzle took up 70% of my laptop battery as it sat idle this morning, so you can blame the shitty essay you are about to read on my recent obsession with this idle pastime. I could have used this time to work out some difficulties I’m having with a Scarlatti sonata. I could have worked out at the gym a few minutes more in a vain attempt to hold off my almost-certain heart failure as a result of a life spent in the pork aisle of the butcher shop. They say that an addiction is anything you can’t stop doing. Tomorrow I will not do the crossword puzzle to prove how strong and addiction-free I am.

But I did the damn puzzle again today and I can’t get that time back. I can go home and recharge my laptop but those 30-40 minutes of puzzle solving are gone forever and all that I have to show for it is some red ink on a bit of newsprint—and I’m still three clues short of finishing. Some people justify doing crossword puzzles because they say that they are exercising their brains. If that is true then puzzles are the moral equivalent of wearing spandex tights with leg warmers and doing some retarded jazzercise class instead of just going out for a bike ride—which is the physical fitness moral equivalent of reading a Shakespeare play.

I can picture Domenico Scarlatti sitting down at his piano every morning with a cup of coffee and some staff paper cranking out sonatas like other people do crossword puzzles. He wrote over 500 sonatas for piano. Every one of his works that I have heard or learned to play has been a delight. Almost all of Scarlatti’s sonatas are written in one or two movements and vary in difficulty from those suited for novices to the musical equivalent of the Sunday Times crossword puzzle.

These essays that I write take about the same amount of time to compose as it takes me to do the crossword. The same amount of time it takes me to drink a cup of coffee. As much as I love music I'm not compelled to write music. This may be due to the fact that I am a late-comer to the world of music. I would like to have more training but I personally know many professional musicians who have less formal training than I and who have never let that get in the way of their pursuit of what they love.

For the past several months my piano and I haven’t exactly been on speaking terms. We live in the same apartment but we haven’t had much interaction. I think that I get discouraged because I’m not a very good player which makes about as much sense as not studying French because I don’t speak it perfectly. I have recently turned over yet another new leaf and I have started practicing diligently. Whenever I do sit down at my piano to play I can never understand why I ever stop playing. I love playing and I’m not that bad.

In the time it takes me to do a crossword puzzle I can dust off a Bach Goldberg Variation that I learned before and return that piece to my repertoire. A Scarlatti sonata in A Major is one of my favorite pieces to play and even after many months of neglect my fingers find the right keys—most of the right keys. Sometimes I lapse on this point but I have always felt that what I lack in musical talent I can make up for in determination.

Robothon 2004

Imagine going back 250 years in time with your laptop computer and showing Voltaire how to do research on the internet. As earth-shattering as that experience would be for the French titan of the Enlightenment I can think of something that would have a more profound effect on modern day scientists. Star Trek never ventured to put forth an episode dealing with the phenomena of which I am thinking. That would be too far-fetched even for the dorky new Star Trek. Technology has made tremendous strides in the past 50 years but this development isn’t even on the horizon. Robots will never teach gym class.

Think about it. You can get a PhD through a correspondence course. There are books on tape, video instructional methods for just about everything, but you cannot replace a gym teacher with a machine. I think back on the mind-numbingly complex tasks performed by my seventh grade gym teacher, Mr. Piles. First, he had to ascertain what season of the year it was to know the corresponding ball to throw out into the prison yard. After that he had to sit in his chair and read the sports section of the paper and whatever comics his mind was capable of absorbing. Do you really think that you could program some machine to do that?

I mention this because I am sitting at the Seattle Center watching Robothon 2004, a robotics festival for the whole family--assuming that your whole family is made up entirely of middle-aged, white males with bad haircuts. I fall into that category myself so I have to write this essay in a hurry and get the hell out of here before somebody sees me.

I can’t knock these guys too much because without a bunch of dorks who spend their Sundays indoors jerking off at a robotics festival, I wouldn’t have this wonderful laptop computer. If left to the likes of my underachieving ilk, civilization wouldn’t have paper, let alone a pen to write with. This is the division of labor that is necessary to build an advanced society. You have the people who create the technology that makes all of our lives easier and more fulfilling, and the people like me who make fun of those other people because they wear sandals with socks. Both elements of society are of equal importance and without one of them the world would be an uncivilized hellhole.

The world also needs gym teachers; not to teach us about physical education but to teach us about natural selection. Why bother teaching kids about evolution in biology class when they just spent the previous hour in gym learning first-hand about survival of the fittest? After an hour of playing tackle football against kids who have been held back for the past three years in the seventh grade, the concept of a benevolent deity is going to be a pretty tough sell, and you can forget about creationism. The flip side of the adage, “There are no atheists in the foxhole,” says that there are no seventh graders who still believe in God after having the wind knocked out of them by a kid named Butch Taylor who outweighs them by fifty pounds. Butch can also legally drive a car.

The Joy of Ichiro

“Ichiro changes your mind about what is possible,” was what Raul Ibañez had to say after Ibañez tied a major league record with six hits in the Mariners 16-6 rout over the Angels in Anaheim. Ibañez seemed to wave off the importance of his stellar performance to pay tribute to his Japanese teammate—a very Ichiro thing to do. Ichiro had four hits of his own and needs only ten hits in ten games to tie George Sisler’s record of 257 hits in a single season, a record which has stood since 1920. Ichiro has ten more games to break what has to be one of the longest standing records in professional sports.

Ten games to get ten hits is all but a shoe-in for the first Japanese position player in Major League Baseball. Two days ago Ichiro’s prospects seemed anything but possible. After a tough series with Oakland the Mariners right fielder needed 21 hits, an uphill battle at best. 11 hits later along with two intentional walks in 13 at-bats and now it’s a much different picture. He went from almost written-off to almost a sure thing in three games, not that I have ever stopped believing that Ichiro can do just about anything on the field.

Back at the beginning of the season when Mariner’s manager Bob Melvin coached Ichiro to look at more pitches and take more balls, he was all but dismissed by a lot of fans. While batting .290 people were saying that pitchers had figured him out. After the All-Star break Ichiro went back to hitting his way and his way is now .374 and rising. He also has 35 stolen bases to compliment the fact that he is one of the best right fielders in baseball.

To go along with the fact that he is one of the best players in baseball, I would say that he is undoubtedly the coolest guy on the field. His cool signature shirt sleeve tug that he does before every pitch would be annoying for anyone but the best hitter in the game. On Ichiro’s first road trip to Oakland after he joined the Mariner’s in 2000 some fans threw coins at him in the outfield. After the game reporters asked him about the unruly behavior and he said that he thought the coins had fallen out of the sky. Now opposing fans study him like a book, a really good book. After a hitting clinic he put on against the Chicago White Sox last month, the opposing fans gave Ichiro a standing ovation after he reached first safely for the fifth consecutive time that evening. Standing on the bag taking off his batting elbow pad, Ichiro looked around in confusion as to what all the hubbub was about.

About all Ichiro has said about the possibility of breaking Sisler’s 84 year old record is that it was a different game back then. He still speaks little and always through an interpreter even though you just know the guy probably has as good a command over English as he does over a high fastball. Ichiro doesn’t talk trash and what is more refreshing is that he doesn’t spew out a lot of phony false modesty. What he does best of all is get hits.

He gets hits in a way that is probably revolutionizing the way children look at hitting. He is right handed but bats left to get him closer to first base at the end of his variety of swings. Ichiro’s repertoire of swings includes a golf shot which was made famous while he was still playing in Japan. He actually hit a ball that the pitcher had bounced in the dirt in front of the plate. He has a ferociously fast slugging swing that he rarely pulls out. He uses it as a sort of statement. When Ichiro faced National League pitching ace Kevin Brown for the first time he hit a home run on the first pitch Brown delivered. Somehow you knew that that wasn’t an accident. A lot of Ichiro’s swings look like delicate tennis backhands. In the first at bat of the 2000 All-Star game held in Seattle, Ichiro beat Randy Johnson to first base—the first time I had seen a runner beat the pitcher covering first base. Johnson shook his head in disbelief.

What I have always admired most about Ichiro is the fact that he only is 5’9” (my height) and 160 pounds (I have 20 pounds on him) yet he is one of the best players in the game; this in an era of almost daily reports of steroid use. I was a small kid and I could never hit well. I wish that I had Ichiro as an example when I was a kid. We always just tried to hit the ball as hard as we could. It was always the bigger, fatter kids who hit the ball over the fence, Ichiro has taught us that it’s OK to dribble the ball down the line and beat the throw to first.

When Ichiro does break the season hits record he won’t talk trash, he won’t mumble something awkward, phony, and modest—à la Barry Bonds—just expect something you don’t get in sports much in this era. Ichiro embodies something that I haven’t even heard anyone mention since I was a kid playing sports and now it seems almost quaint and corny. It’s called sportsmanship. Remember that?

If I Were a Rich Man

What would you do with one million dollars? If I had a million bucks I’d phone the pay number to get the last fucking clues to today’s NY Times crossword puzzle. I need a four letter word for lost and it begins with an ‘A,’ and what was the name of the skipper on Gilligan’s Island? If you want my opinion I think pop culture references in the Times crossword puzzle suck. The phone call is only $1.20 but I would never call unless I had a million dollars. What sort of pathetic loser would call a crossword puzzle help line? That’s sort of cheating, isn’t it? Only a millionaire would be a big enough loser to pay for clues to a crossword puzzle. Rich people are all cheaters anyway.

So what I’m saying is that I would feel too stupid to call the crossword puzzle help line even if I had a million dollars. So tell me what good is a million bucks? It’s not worth the paper it’s printed on if I can’t finish this puzzle today.

I guess that I could go see movies at night instead of being a cheapskate and only hitting the matinees. But there are too many loud, punk kids in the theater at night so a wheelbarrow full of cash wouldn’t help me there, either. And don’t tell me that if I was loaded I could buy the large popcorn. I don’t do popcorn at movies. It’s not that I’m grossed out by the “butter” that tastes like salted crank-case oil. I just hate it that you can only get the crank-case oil on the top handful of popcorn and the rest of it is bone dry. Tell me how you work that problem out, rich boy?

If I were a rich man I could always buy that fancy albacore canned tuna instead of the ghetto, lower grade stuff, but I don’t really like tuna much. I only buy it because it keeps forever just in case a hurricane hits Seattle or I come home drunk and hungry and there is absolutely nothing else to eat besides a can of tuna. If I come home drunk and hungry and there is absolutely nothing else to eat besides canned tuna I probably won’t give a shit if it is fancy albacore tuna or the low-grade crap. Being rich is turning out to be a lot less interesting than I thought.

I was waiting until I hit it big before I fixed my car radio but I broke down and took care of that. I didn’t want to miss any of the thrilling games of the dead-last Seattle Mariners. I guess with a million dollars I could get my car painted but what is the use? It will just get dinged-up being parked on the street. Even if I had a million dollars I wouldn’t piss it all away on a paint job for a car that is just going to get bumped repeatedly by soccer moms going to see the Space Needle.

I could finally pay the $11 and go to the top of the Space Needle after over five years of literally living in its shadow. Now it has sort of reached the point where I just want to be able to say that I’ve never been up to the top of the Space Needle. I think that I’ll save that experience for the end of my life. I’ll wait until the very end of my stay here on earth and then I’ll pay the $11 for the elevator ride, or whatever the price will be when adjusted for inflation. I’ll ride up, step out of the elevator, I’ll say, “Man, what a view,” and then I’ll croak. I think that I’ll be able to manage that without being a millionaire.

Superstore Haj

For the past few months I have been looking at a full-page ad for a huge electronics superstore that runs daily in the Seattle paper. The superstore lies somewhere out in suburbia. There is a map to the store in the ad. The map means nothing to me, as I have never been on that particular stretch of highway. It is in or near a city whose location I couldn’t say is north, south, east, or west of where I live in downtown Seattle. I have never been compelled to drive anywhere just to make a purchase. If I want something I walk or ride my bike downtown and buy it, but I kept looking at the ridiculously low prices in the superstore’s ad.

How could I sit idly by in my urban smugness while spindles of 100 recordable CD’s are being sold for under ten dollars? A five megapixel digital camera goes for $297! Who cares that I don’t know what the fuck a megapixel is, this is just too cheap to pass up. Laptop computers for $649 and software packages for $0, yes $0, after rebates.

On some days I simply ignored the ad. On other days I felt vulnerable, I felt that perhaps my laptop needed more umpf, more power, more memory; I had to have more something, damn it, and I didn’t want to pay a lot of money for it. My normally anti-consumerist façade withered under the daily onslaught of $24 wireless routers and 160 gigabyte hard drives for $59 (after rebates).

What held me back for so long was the frightening suburban address. I would have to go by car to trade my legal tender for obscenely low-priced electronic gadgets. I asked people around me if they had ever been to this strange and wonderful place in the suburbs. No one I talked to had actually been there but they all had second-hand accounts of wondrous purchases made by friends of friends, their lives made fuller and more meaningful by prices well below the suggested manufacturers’ retail. Fear of driving denied me the superstore’s low prices and insanely large selection. Fear of driving kept me huddled in my urban bunker of high prices and complete absence of mail-in rebates.

But what if I went with someone else, what if I used the buddy system to find this suburban Mecca of high tech wizardry? One intrepid bargain-hunter may be defeated by a maze of suburban freeways and interchanges but surely two college-educated shoppers could make it to the pot of gold at the end of this asphalt rainbow. I grabbed a thick wad of cash and drove out of my inner-city over-priced ghetto.

It was raining, so the traffic was more of a mess than usual, and it is usually awful. It was also the one day that the superstore didn’t run its full-page ad with the map so we had no idea where we were going. I was vectored in via cell phone by a superstore ground traffic controller. 45 minutes later the superstore appeared like a vision, a vision with plenty of free parking. As we walked inside we resisted the urge to high five each other. I was focused on one thing: An external hard drive for my music-gorged laptop.

A group of attractive young female employees welcomed us as we entered. I think they were the superstore solid gold dancers. I was directed to the external hard drives by one of the five thousand or so employees of the superstore. Within minutes of entering the superstore I had a 160 gig external hard drive under my arm; but why stop there?

To make this already too-long story shorter, let me cut to the end. As I walked around in electronic wonderland I realized that I had lived this long without the appliance under my arm and that I could live a little longer without it. I put the hard drive back on the shelf. With the $227 I saved by not buying the hard drive I bought a $10 toaster and a DVD of The Godfather. I watched the movie last night and the DVD is damaged. There is no fucking way I would ever go back to electronic Mecca to return the DVD so I’ll just write it off as learning a lesson about trying to save a few bucks by going to a soulless superstore in suburbia to shop. I haven’t used the toaster yet.