Shopping trips make me hate America

Before embarking on this anecdote about a night in my life, I want to reference a graduation speech by David Foster Wallace. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html  The daily grind/shopping section is particularly relevant and hits on the nose the absolute soul-sucking activity of having to go and get shit and not caring that you have turned everyone around you into an obstacle to your perfect life.

My night began by finding out our maid of honor will not be able to make it to the wedding due to what some call “ongoing operations” in Afghanistan. Fiance was devastated by the thought of losing her best and perhaps only friend besides me. After properly being there for her through the tears, we decided that I wouldn’t finish the basement last night, but would just go get some supplies. Two stops would suffice – Home Depot and the grocery store.

I pulled a piece of loose paint off the stoop and headed to Home Depot to get some outdoor paint and enough sealer to finish the basement. And since the sealer wasn’t quite matching the rest of the basement walls in whiteness even though it’s the same shit the previous owner used, I thought I would look into getting some paint to cover the sealer. The shopping trip from hell begins:

First I had to convince the paint mixer that a quart would be more than enough paint for three stoops and two other tiny spots on the house. Probably about 10 square feet all together. He wanted to sell me a gallon.

Then as the paint mixed I went off to find basement wall paint. A guy who looked sort of stonerish asked if I could use some help. He was clearly bored with his job of putting paint cans in stacks. I said I’m looking for basement wall paint. He directed me to the water sealant.

“I’ve got some of this, but is there paint to put over it?”

He looked at me confused. I continued.

“I have put two coats of this on the walls, and you can still sort of see through it. The can says you can put some paint on over the top to finish it.”

He pointed to the basement floor paint, which isn’t what I wanted. I now wanted him to stop helping me, but remained polite.

“OK. I think I’ll just look around a bit. Thank you for your help!”

He sort of ambled away. I looked at paint scrapers, trying to find a cheap plastic one that wasn’t too big.

“What you looking for?”

He was back! I explained I wanted a plastic paint scraper, but all I could see were packs of three, which was more than I needed. He pointed to the metal ones, which were 3 times the cost. I balked. He pointed to a plastic paint scraper that was the size of a Bob Ross paint pallet, but there were no happy trees swaying in the breeze in my head.

“I think I need something a bit more versatile.” I said. Fiance found this statement highly amusing when I later recounted the story.

So I got a metal scraper, picked up my mixed paint and said fuck it to looking for a latex wall paint because I simply did not want to have the dude try to help me again. I went searching at the far end of the store to figure out how much gutters would be to put up, and looked at drain spouts for 10 minutes wishing now that someone would ask to help me.

No one did.

So on to the check out.

Home Depot has a bank of four self check out counters, but I have yet to have them work right. This time I thought might be the first, since everything in the cart had a barcode. How wrong I was.

The girl that is the actual check out person said she would be over to help me as soon as the second thing I scanned didn’t work. “The mixed cans don’t work as well in these,” she said. She used her hand scanner, but it wouldn’t enter the price. She started to say things like “are you sure it isn’t up there?” until she finally figured out that she was using the wrong hand scanner.

So then I pay and am walking out to the car. I see an older woman and her cane-using mother walking the same direction and guess that they are parked next to me. I scoot to the car and practically throw the stuff in the trunk, but it’s too late and the cane woman is slowly getting into the car, which is fine. What isn’t fine is the part where the car was running, and she spent the next five minutes sitting there with her car door open so I couldn’t get into my car. Five fucking minutes of me leaning against my trunk and trying not to think horrible things about how easy it would be to grab her cane and beat her car door shut with it. I wanted to go and shut her door, but I’m an intimidating guy and didn’t want to get rape whistled or something, which is a real fear of mine from watching too many hilarious misunderstandings in sitcoms.

So I get out of there and finally get to Cashwise, where the adventure continues. I had five items to get, including some Ben and Jerry’s ice cream as requested by the Fiance to help with the Afghanistan emotions. I get to the frozen aisle and there is no one there except a woman with a shopping cart full of her groceries and young son and her husband. They are debating what ice cream to get, and her cart is sitting right in front of the Ben and Jerry’s door. Dammit! I go and get some garlic bread thinking they would be done. But I ended up standing there another five minutes as this woman looked through every fucking coupon in her fist full of coupons to find the right one. Politely waiting on the outside, but wanting to take her cart and shove it away inside.

Got the Ben and Jerrys and headed to the checkout, which was crazy busy. The self checkout counters were less so, and I got in the line with a couple who was nearly done scanning their items.

Pause here to insert how much I hate people who use the self check out when they have a cart overflowing with groceries. For some reason, I believe that self check out should be reserved for those without 100 items to scan.

I watched the next line over as three people pulled up, scanned their items, paid and left as the couple in front of me struggled to get Pert shampoo to scan, then gather up change between them to pay for the groceries – CHANGE!!!

I spent entirely too much time in lines, and even though it was nice to see a TSA agent waiting in a line at the grocery store, it wasn’t worth it. And it’s hard not to think about Fiance’s best friend going off to fight for our right to hate the miserable existence of daily life and waiting in shopping lines and dealing with overly helpful or non-existent employees while watching other people struggle to pay for food with change and have to spend 5 minutes finding a coupon to make ice cream affordable and perhaps help bring a bit of sunshine to this ridiculous world where jobs are still scarce despite recovered profits and growth in the corporate sector and you just want to take a dump on the grocery scanner as a statement but don’t want to spend a night in jail, although that’s becoming more tempting every day you don’t hear from the 30 resumes you sent out last week. And that sort of run on sentence is what goes through my head every minute I spend shopping which is why I wear headphones to keep the podcasts going and keep out the demons. 

Open letter to the F**ktard who cruised by the cabin on Saturday

Dear FT,

As Fiance and I were sitting outside enjoying the weather on Saturday at my family’s cabin, you cruised by in a pontoon with what I assume was your wife. You were assessing properties, and said to your companion that our cabin was “a waste of a good lot.” I’m not sure if you meant for us to hear that, but we did.

The cabin has been in the family for 80 to 100 years. There is no running water and we use an outhouse. No one in the family wishes to use the cabin in the winter, and it is too far away to become a commute possibility for anyone, so there is little point in updating it.

Beyond that, I have concern for your assessment of what makes a good cabin. There are all kinds of people in lake country. Most of them are rich and build some rather lavish monstrosities. That’s fine for them, and I appreciate different ways of living. We happen to appreciate a simpler lifestyle at the lake. No cable, no plumbing, curtains instead of doors for the bedrooms. We get a lot of reading done and board games played. It may not be the prettiest old building around, but it serves its purpose and we like it.

I know if my dad and uncle sold the property, the new owner would quickly demolish the building to build something new. That would be a shame.

I’m glad that there are some people that appreciate older houses. Our country doesn’t have a lot of history to begin with. I enjoy the character I get from living in a house made in 1929 and am glad that the owners before me kept those older attributes when possible.

Take a trip to Europe – any city will do. Walk around and marvel that many of the buildings around you were built before the pilgrims landed in America. For some reason, Europeans don’t think of old buildings as wastes of space, but something worth preserving. Just walking through a city, you can appreciate the long and wonderful history of space, something that’s difficult to get here in the Midwest, although there are some great places on the East Coast that also have a sense of history.

When we visit the lake for a couple weekends a year, it’s nice to look at the cupboards and know that they have been used by my great grandmother, the water pump that my siblings and I would take turns using to fill the drinking bucket, the outhouse filled with spiders that caused childhood nightmares. Memories and place connect with unseen and imagined history in older places in ways that are fascinating to some people, but not you.

Before you condemn a place because it isn’t made to your modern sensibilities, just take a moment to keep your spew-trap buttoned, bend over, and screw yourself.

Sincerely,

Fargo Jones

Comment boards are black holes of suck

My reporting days took place in the early days of the news/internet convergence, when papers put some of their news online. We had a part time guy who would come in and post the day’s stories and leave. The site was pretty simple.

I got out just in time.

The comment boards are now an expected feature of the online news experience. When the Forum shut them down for a brief time a few years ago, people went ballistic. They felt their rights to free speech were being taken away, rights that they didn’t have 5 years ago in this form. Rights that aren’t actually tied to any law, but try to tell them that this is just a service the Forum provides and they want you to die slowly with at least three crows working on your eyes.

The comment boards are where reason, community, and argument go to die. Continually. Every story, and every comment.

Every person who comments on these boards has a similar desire – to get someone to change their mind and see the world from his point of view. It’s like having the ability to speak to all the drivers around you while in your car and telling them how they are doing it wrong. At the same time, they are trying to do the same.

I have enjoyed reading the comment sections despite all this – in much the same way one enjoys watching reality television. It’s a verbal party with no accountability. The only reason to post to a comment board that will fulfill your need is if you are posting just to poke fun. Try to bring any logic or reason to the party and you will be going home with no one. I enjoy posting as dead horse, a character I bring out whenever the story topic or argument has been ground into dust, pissed on, and sun bleached – yet still somehow people are still trying to convince others to see things from their point of view.

The Fargo Forum comment section is populated by about two dozen regular posters. Each has been posting for years, but never have I seen any of them change their point of view based on someone else’s comments. Read long enough and each will be guilty of the same logical gymnastics they accuse others of. It can be disheartening to see such public verbal belief masturbation with nary an internet cop in sight. There are moderators for the site, but they’ve rarely laid down the law since the early days of the new area voices system. At a conference once, I heard the presenter talk about how the commenters on her site began to self-police, and after a while, they understood the community of commenters and were civil. I don’t see that happening on the Forum, but I can dream.

I try to remember that it’s always the same 24 people posting, which helps keep the despair over the Fargo/Moorhead area to a minimum. The other 175,000 people here really don’t give that much of a shit about these events. Comment boards are largely for the extremists. You can’t reason with an extremist. You don’t commune with an extremist. And you can’t argue with an extremist. It doesn’t work.

Another comment board area I frequently read is on avclub.com. Their commenters also have their faults – most commonly a sense of self-importance and judgmentalism that comes as part of the hipster douchebag package. But they are also pretty funny if you can look past the cynicism.

I have a lot of conflicting thoughts about comment boards, and I hoped that this blog would help to organize them. However, I feel rambling today. 

Since I began checking out twitter, I’ve strayed away from my heavier days of trolling the Forum comment boards. I think twitter is the next generation of comment boards. You can follow people as you see fit, don’t have to read crazy people that make you angry and aren't open to new ideas, you can follow the local news reporters, and can get a nice one-liner joke from any of your favorite comedians. Twitter has become the comment board of choice for any news topic of the day – and it never pulls you into a pit of depression over the future of mankind the way that the Forum comment boards can, unless you follow Justin Beiber fans, I suppose.