Bike Fear

Dear J-

There’s a scene in Finding Nemo (we have been finding him a lot lately) where the overprotective father Marlin, having passed through the jellyfish forest twice to save his friend Dory, wakes up on the back of the sea turtle Crush (himself channeling the spirit of Jeff Spicoli).  After a brief conversation, Crush advises that he “has serious thrill isssues, dude,” referring to the game he and Dory played to pass through the jellyfish forest.  Yesterday a bicyclist was killed at an intersection I ride through twice a day, and today I drove to the vanpool despite my incomplete understanding of what happened.

The scene:  Genesee and Governor, where Genesee runs north-south and Governor east-west; both are substantial arterials in suburban neighborhoods, and Genesee has the added distinction of being the only connector from Clairemont, where I live, to points north when you’re riding a bicycle (the other choices for cars all involve freeway driving); our vanpool picks up at the east end of Governor, where it runs into I-805.  Genesse is the lone surface street passing through San Clemente Canyon.  The bicyclst, Mr. Freeman, was coming south on Genesse and wanted to make a left (east on Governor); he crossed out of the bike lane to presumably assume a stance on the right edge of the left turn lanes, where he was hit from behind by a police car — significantly, the cruiser was responding to another accident without lights and siren.  So what happened?  Mr. Freeman apparently did everything right in terms of visibility — wearing a vest, but perhaps he didn’t check behind him as he was cutting across traffic; the cruiser was  going under the limit (45 MPH), and preliminary photos of the bike indicate that it was struck from the side.  It was just after 7 AM, and so darkness wasn’t a factor either.

More significantly for me, perhaps, is the fact that these were actions that I’ve taken — that I take — when I’m on the bike:  I come west on Governor and hang a left to head south on Genesse, crossing over lanes of traffic near the cars that are already stopped for the light, thinking that traffic coming up from behind will surely slow for the stopped cars.  Yet it’s unavoidable — because Genesse is the only way to home, because it’s such a major intersection (two lanes of traffic plus protected left turn lanes and right turn pullouts — each street is six lanes wide at the intersection), you have to find some way to make it work.  And now I’m scared that what I thought were acceptable tradeoffs and common practice are fatal risks; I couldn’t find a solution in time this morning to justify the bike.

Mike

Outback Look

Dear J-

We passed a new Subaru Outback the other day; as a current Subaru owner I have a bit of a vested interest in seeing what the mothership comes up with, but it’s been nothing but disappointment lately, and doubly so with this latest iteration in the Legacy/Outback (Lancaster) line, now Subaru’s oldest nameplate.  If you remember the Legacy rolled out twenty years ago with a mission:  change the perception of Subaru worldwide from an unsophisticated farmer’s utility car to a marque that could compete with Toyota, Nissan, and Honda.  The engineers at Fuji Heavy Industries sweated the details that counted — noise/vibration/harshness were cut down, power was way up with the modern DOHC EJ22 design, and styling was no longer polarizing.

For some, that may have been the most important step:  Subies were no longer cars to avoid being seen in; succeeding generations continued to refine the shape, but in this latest iteration, they’ve broken with past trends, and not for the better.  Subaru’s unique flat-4 engine allows for a low cowl (once they figured out a better place to put the spare tire — though it’s a charming quirk of those lo-these-many-years-ago Leones), but the new Legacy has needlessly puffed up the cowl in an attempt to capture the so-called crossover market.  The whole car reeks of pneumatics and silicone injected strategically strictly for size’s sake; the greenhouse has shrunk, the beltline is needlessly tall.

Let’s take a moment to consider what we’ve done to ourselves in the name of Baby Boomers’ anathema to the term “station wagon” which no doubt conjured up memories of interminable road trips through dusty roads and dreary scenery:  instead we’ve been forced into SUVs (Thursday night, I’m picking up figgy from day care and there’s a neighbor having a birthday party; the lot was filled with Expeditions and Suburbans, with the odd spicy Lexus thrown in for good conspicuous measure), which are wagons on stilts and the trendy term of the moment, crossovers.  Crossovers are SUVs based on car platforms instead of on a truck frame, so they’re … wagons based on cars, and therefore they’re station wagons.  Oh, but for the sake of vanity, give them capabilities no one asked for so that we can support the Children’s Stuff Manufacturing Organization (a division of Big Plastic) and haul around child-care devices your parents never needed.  I swear that when the Outback rolled by I was ready to ridicule it as a ridiculous Venza, son of Aztek, but then I saw the Pleaides sign and grew very sad that I’d have to scratch Subaru off the list of cars that got it.

Mike

Three Days

Dear J-

The more unwieldy the camera, the fewer pictures I end up taking; today more true than ever, as I spent three hours hauling figgy around the canyons of the Zoo for the second day (as well as I know some paths, I’m still pretty weak on the geography surrounding the gorilla and aviaries — I managed to hit both today, but I’m not completely sure how), this time geared out to the teeth with lenses that stayed safely tucked away. It’s not a question of putting her down and leaving her to her own devices any more; she is as likely to slip through the barriers as to wander away now.

She keeps changing the rules as we go; while yesterday there was no nap, today I let her sleep in the car after coming home, but she woke up after half an hour — inconsolably tired — and after asking her what she wanted for lunch (nap! NAP!), she resumed the nap after the lucid intermission and I never got quite untracked from that. I tried to get her interested in other activities — she helped me pick up leaves on Friday, but not today. Instead with the blankets unrolled, she crawled in compliantly and crashed down for a couple of hours; perhaps the illness passes in decreasing cycles.

Try it this way, then: how can seventy-two hours leave me so exhausted, and with a figgy that isn’t at 100% energy? I withdraw into sullen silence as the days wear on, but subtlety is lost on a toddler; I’d hoped to be past my impatience by now, but I’m still stuck in the same frustration loop as ten, twenty, thirty years ago. Is it something buried in your genetics, or is it a behavior I can change?

Mike

Zoo Rules

Dear J-

A few trips ago, we kept seeing apologetic signs at the Zoo talking about the new hippo — he had angry cracks on his back, which the signs explained was because he was having trouble fitting in with the rest of the family unit. It reminds me a little of when we first brought Oliver home with Bean — both dogs thought they were dominant, but the squabble a week later sorted things out pretty well; however, the new hippo has since been taken off-exhibit and we haven’t seen him much lately. It’s hard to reconcile the docile side they show — whenever we see them, they’re always in the same corner, soaking with only their nostrils above water, nearly as inert as the rocks nearby — with the violence you know they can muster.

The Zoo’s reached a slow point again, off-season and so even on the weekend, the crowds weren’t thick around the most charismatic animals; our favorite routes were all flowing freely along. Whenever we go, there’s always a few people we keep seeing over and over again, especially when the visitors are relatively sparse; once you’re on certain paths, after all, you keep running into the same folks — there aren’t that many branches. So you end up with the choice of either cooperating or fighting; either rivals or fellows, but no choices in between.

Funny that we should believe that ourselves so far above animal emotions and yet here we are feeding rivalries for silly reasons: jockey for position, see the most animals, get in line first; how can we continue to push our personal agendas on our days off? Quiet moments are rare enough that we shouldn’t seek to introduce conflict — point out the animals to others, take your turn and move along without resentment.

Mike

Sick Day

Dear J-

The long day today turned out to be started when I got up as normal — well, really last night when we noticed figgy’s fever — and thought of ways to justify heading off to work (the fever isn’t as bad now, how bad can it be, they really need me) and for roughly five hours this morning, I thought we were overreacting; she was as crazy as ever, and helped pick up leaves around the yard as I spoke to the nurse, telling me that the first day would probably be the most logy. The press have done their job well, and I read H1N1 into the simplest of symptoms; based on the low-grade signs I have, though, it’s probably the regular flu (I got a shot a few weeks ago at work).

Since that time, though, it’s been a long ride on the stress train, spiking a high fever and wanting only to nap — it was nostalgic at first (hooray, a nap again!) and then increasingly worrisome. As the day wore on with our little lump of coal burning up under blankets (Tylenol helped, but it seemed to wear off every three hours, and you can’t give it more often than every four), as the shadows grew long and my imagination spiraled out of control, I just sort of shut down and shut out.

Later tonight theVet and I fought over inconsequential things: what to eat, where to go, when to order. We settled on pizza from our new favorite neighborhood haunt, and I went, as usual, to pick it up where I was told repeatedly by a drunk patron that the food was great (we would not be such consistent customers, otherwise). I confessed that I was distracted with a sick daughter at home, whereupon he whipped out a picture of his, proclaiming how great kids were and suggesting various strategies for icing down a fever as needed. It’s strange that confessing my worries to a stranger would make me feel better, but just being able to articulate helps, don’t you think?

Mike

Day by Day

Dear J-

If my life runs in annual cycles, then where we are — three weeks before Thanksgiving, still living off leftover candy, ominously dry air but cooler temperatures — has happened before.  I have no real sense of being a year farther along, though I have been watching a lot less sports (the Yankees as World Series champions does make me want to cut myself, though) and TV in general.  Am I turning into my parents or did they have it right all along?  My dad, for instance, was big on being early; “Give yourself a cushion,” he says, “just in case.”  You never know.

I keenly feel the lack of sleep making me lose consciousness minutes after starting the vanpool ride.  How wonderful life must be without alarms and fumbling in the dark with feats of dexterity made slow with fatigue; figgy goes to bed — not necessarily falling asleep right away — around 7:30 and rises with the sun ten or eleven hours later.  We can tell at night if she hasn’t had a nap, as she’ll go to bed, but only grudgingly (drama fills every moment of consciousess) and then conk out with a couple more thrashing motions.

I suppose that there’s no reason to expect that next year will be like last year, or the one before; it’s one of the problems with life lived day by day.  One step at a time, I’m counseled, and it works while grinding uphill on the bike:  one more, then one more crank after that, like magic eventually cresting the obstacle.  Yet without goals to look forward to, without something to keep you moving through the day, you’re stuck with letting each step be its own reward, and it’s not always just so.

Mike

Dear J-

Michael Jackson music is becoming available on the used market again; I remember reading tabloids (it’s all we had to read at the store — in decreasing order of believability:  Star, National Enquirer, and Weekly World News, which had an obsession with bat-human hybrids and Michelin-esque babies) trumpeting the wackiness that would lead him to buy the remains of Joseph Merrick and sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber.  I’m not claiming to be well-adjusted and mature by any means, but I always got a sense that he never quite outgrew the child star:  if you were insanely famous by the time you were five, but always working to keep that star rising, I’m pretty sure you’d never have a chance to grow far beyond.

The difference is how his fame sustained over years on end — unlike, say, child actors — which just postponed the inevitable, I suspect; I didn’t get Thriller, for instance, until last year, but my life has been richer for it.  Now I understand the accolades that I wouldn’t have been able to see if I’d only had Dangerous.  Talent brings fame; fame brings an entourage; he never had a chance without someone looking out for him.

I worry, sometimes, not that figgy will become inordinately famous or immensely talented, but that the discipline of little things doesn’t get imparted.  I have poor impulse control at times — funnel cake does not make a good mid-morning snack — and if she’s as perceptive as we suspect, she’s soaking up the examples we lead.  We already have to watch our language with the mimic in the house, and hauling the cats around is right out (having been given the little cat to bring inside once, she is now prone to grabbing them randomly inside the house); it only makes sense that her so-far favorite people should make sure she doesn’t miss a lesson.

Mike

Life Intrudes

Dear J-

I was at a comic book store on Sunday catching up on a few books from October — Crayon Shinchan vol. 9 and 20th Century Boys vol. 5 — when the store manager, gesturing at Shinnosuke, asked if this was the author who’d died recently.   I didn’t know; I’m not one to follow news much recently and the death of a mangaka, unless it’s one of tremendous international fame, isn’t likely to make the local San Diego paper, where I still get most of my news (I’m unable to stay up to 11, and lack the patience to mine the Internet for relevant articles besides those gadget blogs).

Indeed, he had recently died under uncertain circumstances — there is some speculation that he committed suicide, which got me thinking again of motivations.  Although the manga he’s most famous for, Shinchan, isn’t as immediately recognizable as, say, Ranma or Dragon Ball Z, it’s gotten a fair following, and the anime used to show regularly on the Adult Swim rotation, which is where we were exposed to it.  And yet I can see where success was a trap:  there was no room for the characters to grow, no fleshed-out storylines (the last few books have been fairly weak, in fact, compared to the hilarity of the first ones); after a while the jokes would seem oddly familiar or the plots would grow more far-fetched.  And yet it’s all that people would expect from Usui:  more butt jokes, more outrageous situations, and you can do the same thing for only so long (with the exception of Garfield, perhaps, but I’m convinced that “Jim Davis” is some sort of obscure anagram for “the Devil”) without growing weary of it.

It’s not clear to me that that would have been sufficient reason, though, and we’ll never know the real reason with all this endless speculation.  How do you keep from being crushed by other folks’ expectations and perceptions?  People project their own expectations on performers and artists — see the joke about Pagliacci* — and without knowing their private lives, isn’t it unfair to judge someone just by the mask they keep by the front door?

Mike

* The joke, clearly predating modern pharmaceuticals:

A man goes to the doctor.  “Doctor,” he says, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.  I get up in the morning and all I want to do is cry; I’m horribly depressed and I can’t bear this life.”

Doctor to patient:  “Ah, I have the cure!  It is very simple:  the great clown, Pagliacci, is in town tonight, one night only.  Here’s some tickets, I’m sure you’ll have a good time and forget all your troubles!”

“Ay!  Doctor, I am Pagliacci!”

Dealer Drive

Dear J-

The two RX-8s I was keeping a casual eye on — over the weekend, one of them apparently got sold or withdrawn, and the other one jumped in price by 10%, which means probably that the dealership was offering them with the $5K cash on the hood Mazda had as a special closeout offer on 2009s.  Yet when I’d called them and asked about it, they claimed that there was no valid cash back offer; it only puts me in mind how much car shopping is a process much marred by the dealer.  Here in an age when manufacturer’s invoices and dealer margins are the first thing anyone researches, why has it been so difficult to change the image of the dealer from some rapacious, dishonnest guy you deal with because you have to, not because it’s a pleasure?

I remember the extravagant measures my dad would take in dealer negotiations:  physically walking out of deals, cross-shopping brands and dealers, all the while holding on to the invoice in his head in order to get the best deal.  For my part, in the five trips to the dealer (minimum) it took to get the right price on the right car, well, dealer lobbies are no fun for anyone under the age of sixteen:  even the appeal of sitting in new cars pales after a short period, but it was definitely a learning experience for me, that combative relationship.

I was five before my parents attempted to go car shopping with us; sometimes I wonder how figgy would react to running around a dealer’s lot, but it’s all useless speculation at this point, given that I’m not seriously looking, and don’t really need a newer car besides.  I understand that car sales staff are just trying to do their job — maximize dealer and personal profit — but it’s done at the expense of the buyers, and that makes it impossible to form anything but an adversaril stance; there is much genius in the way Saturn’s business model used to be — now, if it hadn’t taken them fifteen years to come out with compelling products, on the other hand …

Mike

Game Face

Dear J-

So it turns out that not only do I play only portable handheld games (so convenient to just shut the machine to put it into sleep mode), I only play games I’ve played before — I gave up on playing a new game (Rondo of Swords) in favor of Chrono Trigger, a game that I now own in three forms (original, PlayStation remake, and now DS port). If someone puts together a handheld with enough emulating power (it’s just a matter of time, given Moore’s Law) to let me play Shenmue and Panzer Dragoon Saga, I’m never buying a new game again.

Stephen King hates classic rock stations; they present a sanitized version of the past where there were no one-hit wonders or gimmicky songs, just a long string of top-40 anthems. Worse than that, their impenetrable lineup suffocates deserving unheard voices and bands (this is not unlike Mr. King’s own works, though; how much paper does that man move just by putting his name on the cover?) unless you’ve already reached sufficient popularity to be called classic. Wallowing in the past is entertaining for a while, but ultimately it doesn’t help us grow.

Most people have outgrown games after a while; it’s not something that preys on my mind in the mornings — it’s been years since there was a game that would get me out of bed early to put a little time in before work. With the current trend in retro games and reissues, companies keep chasing the same market, only slightly richer than we used to be as students; it’s a sound strategy yet without a true encouragement to grow beyond our comfort zone, I’m stuck with dwindling interest and stacks of unplayed discs.

Mike