Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening to Vomit PBR into a Bush
Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night Without a Double-Breasted Peacoat.
I Know Why The Caged Bird Tattoo Sings
Do Not Stand at my 5th Floor Bed-Stuy Walkup and Weep
No Man’s Mustache is an Island
All That is Gold Feather Earrings Does Not Glitter
Oh Captain Hat! My Captain Hat!
“In Flanders Field” Check-in on Foursquare
Two things I love are Japan and winter. Neither is easy.
My first trip was in the mid 90’s, to Toyama, a small industrial city on the opposite side of the main island of Honshu from Tokyo. I was there three weeks. My brain almost exploded.
I remember looking out the window as we touched down thinking “Oh look, they have streets and Hondas and KFCs. It all looks the same as home. How hard can this be?” Answer: very hard. Because everything in Japan, especially outside the major cities, is all Japanese. Japan is, like, everywhere in that country. It’s sort of inescapable, all the Japan in Japan. Go figure.
All that Japan everywhere made getting anything done reliant on bending to unique structures and expectations. The equipment we were using was similar, but not the same. The cultural structure of teams and the communication in and between them was impossible to easily navigate for a novice. Even getting materials (this was a building project) was a challenge, but also hilarious as their main supply outlet (sort of like Home Depot but more industrial-focused) was called “Happy Beaver.” My point is whatever it was I had to do in a given day needed to be adjusted to account for the “Japan Factor.” Even those Hondas drove on the opposite side of the road and those KFCs were considered (at the time) to be nice sit-down restaurants, the kind of place you would take your spouse on a night out.
This is how I feel right now, how a lot of us feel, I think at the tail end of this epic winter. We’re doing all the same stuff we normally do; commuting to work, getting kids to school, walking the dog, trying to get our jobs done and the shopping and the laundry and the rest of it all taken care of, but the conditions are taking a piece of the action wherever we go. It’s hard to adjust to the idea we now live in what is, essentially, a giant strip mine for snow with huge pieces of excavation equipment rolling around everywhere all the time. It’s difficult to get into your head that traveling from downtown to East Gloucester and back can take as long as getting to Boston. It’s tiring. It wears on you.
We’re at the point where it’s not an emergency anymore, this is just day-to-day life. It’s just normal to see people and cars sharing the lanes of the narrow, busy streets, inching out because you can’t see around corners, knowing that public transportation is no longer reliable or how parking is an epic challenge and walking anywhere is a death-defying process. And we’re just going on with the full knowledge it’s going to snow again, probably a couple more times. That’s just life in the new reality.
It’s the same feeling I remember having after another long day of failing to get across to the the crane operator what we were trying to do for about four hours. I was lying in my micro-scale hotel room drinking my next in the series of large cans of Asahi beer from the vending machine in the hall outside (there were benefits) and listening to the BBC World Service on my small Grundig shortwave (this was pre-Internet). I was thinking, “I just want shit to be normal again. I just want to order what I think is a pizza and not get a flat rice pancake with a pile of what looks like moldy beans on top with two french toast sticks jutting out of it. I just want to get on a train and know that it’s going to wind up somewhere I’m trying to go, not take me to an otherworldly seaside park with these weird exposed tree-roots everywhere and that strange aquarium with tanks of little fish that swam through hoops.”
people were crowded around this fish like it was Cher
In retrospect, that first experience was incredible. I still dream about it, especially that particular day where I got lost and gave up on what I thought I was going to get done and just wandered around. However, at the time it was profoundly stressful and exhausting.
But man, those little fish. Those thing were cool.
Every once in a while a character and and actor blend together to be bigger than the two alone. Spock, as played by Leonard Nimoy, was just such a character. We didn’t know it before Star Trek, but we needed a role to explain to us what a “person” (he couldn’t be fully human) who favored logic over intuition would be like.
As played by Nimoy we learned he had ethics., loyalty, affection and even humor.
No one did more for nerds growing up in the 70s and 80s than Nimoy and Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. Together they showed us what technological optimism is like. In a landscape of post-apocalyptic storytelling where humanity had just given the fuck up on itself, Star Trek stood alone to say “We’re going to get through this.”
I still believe. Because of them, I still do.
Live long, Prosper.
Not the Head of School at some precious academy for entitled rich bastards
On February 17 of this year Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, an adult managing an unprecedented crisis only months into his first term, had to tell fellow adult residents of his city to stop acting like dipshit high school students. It seems folks were jumping out of second story windows into snowdrifts that could, under their placid and inviting surfaces, contain hazards like parking meters, bike racks and the frozen corpse of Keytar Bear, leading to unnecessary injuries requiring responses from Boston’s already taxed emergency services.
“I’m asking people to stop their nonsense right now. These are adults jumping out windows…It’s a foolish thing to do and you could kill yourself. We’re asking people to act responsibly in the city of Boston. This isn’t Loon Mountain, this is the city of Boston, where we’re trying to remove snow off of the street and it becomes very dangerous. And the last thing we want to do is respond to an emergency call where somebody jumped out of the window because they thought it was a funny thing to do.”
Good for the Mayor that while the public transit system was devolving into collection of random frozen parts with no mechanical relationship to each other and the streets became impassable to all but Thiakol brand tracked vehicles, he took the time out to drop the hammer on “Snow Bros” who are truly a scourge on our city any amount of precipitation, or for that matter lava from a newly formed volcano rising out the intersection of Stuart and Dartmouth streets in Copley could ever hope to match.
We hope the Mayor keeps up reminding dudes named Justin what not to do. It’s a public service and he should name a cabinet-level official to oversee. Until then, The Clam would like to offer some additional points Mayor Walsh should remind us (especially the ones wearing boat shoes) not to do:
– Shots of Fireball
– Vape
– Extraneously pluralize the name of defunct business chains (Caldor’s, Lechmere’s, etc).
– Wear your hat backwards.
– Snowboard down Boylston while chugging a Mountain Dew Code Red
– Mansplain
– Mushrooms
– Hope
…because I fell asleep with my laptop open.
Turns out it’s a busy time for Clam editors. But we are actually working behind the scenes on some projects you’ll get to see soon.
Sorry about the post (not really, it’s free entertainment), but you’ll get one tomorrow.
I need a nap.
