The Left Turn Incident

One hallmark of being a guy is getting into pointless competitions for absolutely no reason whatsoever. For example, in the sixth grade some of my classmates would occasionally get into contests at school to see who could stand around outside in the dead of winter the longest without a jacket on. Unsurprisingly, no females were ever involved in these battles of will.

Now, while I’m generally able to fight off my own personal Neanderthalic (#NewWord) side, in terms of not getting involved in pointless competitions, there still are times when I just can’t help myself. Case in point: I was driving home from work recently. I was heading south on the freeway, minding my own business, and hoping that the Oak Ridge Boys would come on the radio. I took my exit and pulled up to the stoplight. I was the first car in line. I was going to turn left and go east, over the freeway. Now, at this intersection there are two left turn lanes, of which I was in the far right. I did this because the other one takes you into the left lane of the overpass, which is always backed up with people turning left to head north onto the freeway. Confused? Maybe a hastily made diagram will help.

 

At this point everything was going fine. However, as I was waiting for the light to turn green, a car pulled up next to me in the far left turn lane. I glanced over to make sure it wasn’t somebody cool, like Little Jimmie Dickens, but unfortunately it wasn’t. Instead, it was an incredibly smug-looking man whom I immediately knew had evil lurking in his heart. He was driving a sporty car and had on sunglasses meant not only for eye protection, but also to look cool, which meant that he hadn’t just pulled up next to me on accident. No, he knew exactly what he was doing! His intentions were obvious: When the light turned green, he was going to beat me off the line, race into the left lane of the overpass, and then merge into the right lane in front of me, narrowly missing out on the backed up traffic and thus asserting his dominance over me. It would look something like this:

 

This man obviously didn’t consider me much of a threat, which was why he’d chosen to pull up next to me instead of behind me. It was probably because of my car, which is a conservative-looking machine I affectionately refer to as the GrandpaMobile.

Now, before we go any further, you may be wondering how I knew this was the man’s plan. Well, let’s just say that it’s a guy thing, something instinctive, something almost primitive, and it was crystal clear to me that he’d just thrown down a gauntlet and was essentially taunting me, as if he was saying, “I’ll bet I get over this overpass before you, wimp!”

And so it was, as they say, on like Donkey Kong. (At least I think they say that.)

Now, logic and safety dictated that I just let this man execute his plan and beat me over the overpass. However, logic and safety had been thrown out of the window as part of the implicit challenge he’d laid down before me. I took a deep breath and readied myself, my eyes focused intently on the stop light in front of me. This was going to be close…

The light turned green.

Sure enough, Evil Guy was instantly out of the gate and accelerating at an unnecessarily high rate, verifying all of my suspicions as to his wickedness. The GrandpaMobile, however, responded in kind to my own prodding. I had a wider turn to make, but I didn’t have to beat him, I just had to stay even with him. Using my peripheral vision, I saw that I was staying neck and neck with him, and I smiled. Evil Guy was running out of time, because there were cars backed up in his lane due to motorists waiting to turn left onto the northbound freeway ramp.

Moments later, Evil Guy braked, let me move ahead, and swung in behind me. Chalk one up for the GrandpaMobile. I’d won!!!!

After some mental celebration, I reverted back into a sensible human being and all is currently well. However, I know that the need for pointless competition within me has only been suppressed momentarily, and not fully extinguished. When will it rear its ugly head again? What crazy situation will I wind up in when it does? And most importantly, will I be able to make cool diagrams of it afterwards? Only time will tell…

Traffic Report

Maybe it’s because I’m from a small town with no stoplights and where stop signs are more of a suggestion than anything else, but I just don’t understand the radio traffic reports here in the Twin Cities.

Here’s my issue: These traffic reports are about 98% identical to each other from one day to the next, since the same roads are always bogged down at the same times, regardless of the day. It’s not like things are going to change from Monday to Tuesday, yet it’s still considered big news that needs to be reported when 94 westbound at the Lowry Hill Tunnel is moving slow in the afternoon. Well, duh! It’s moved slow there every single working day afternoon over the past decade, and probably even longer than that! Are there really people out there who find this information useful? (“Maybe traffic will be light at the Lowry Hill Tunnel today, even though I’ve never actually seen it happen and instead always have to sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic hoping that nobody notices I’m picking my nose! I’d better listen to find out! Dang! It’s backed up! Who’d have guessed? Well, maybe tomorrow!”)

I mean, even though the information being dispensed is technically accurate, is there any point if everybody is already aware of it? It’s sort of like if the evening news always began like this: “Today, no work was accomplished at Capital Hill, since lawmakers were too busy drafting accusatory statements against one another and generally acting like spoiled children to actually do anything productive for the nation. Also, Joe Biden said something that will make Democrats wish he had an internal seven-second tape delay, and Rush Limbaugh yelled a lot.”

In my opinion, the traffic report could be streamlined dramatically simply by reporting only slowdowns that aren’t expected. For example, an entire report could go like this: “Traffic is slow in all of the usual spots, along with at a Holiday gas station in Plymouth, where an old lady appears to be circling around the pumps endlessly, not sure of which one to choose.”

Now that’s efficiency! Just get out the information that the listeners aren’t already aware of! Think of the saved time and the new opportunities to listen to other things, such as . . . um . . . the morning DJs who think they’re the most hilarious people on the face of the planet, at least based on the amount of airtime they spend laughing uncontrollably at their own jokes. Wait a minute. I think I’m beginning to finally understand the traffic reports. Scratch everything I just said.

Something Fishy

It wasn’t until about the third or fourth time watering my fish that I realized that what I consider to be normal might not necessarily be a universally shared viewpoint.

Let me back up a bit here. I own a small fish. I don’t know its gender, but I’ve just been assuming male, mainly because he doesn’t have a very large shoe collection. He also doesn’t have a name, as nothing has yet struck me as being worthy. However, to keep things from getting confusing, I’m going to refer to him here as “Swimmy.”

Swimmy is pretty much the ultimate pet. I don’t have to clean up after him. I don’t have to feed him. I don’t have to read him bedtime stories. I only have to occasionally water him. This is because he’s made out of plastic.

Those of you who keep up with this blog probably realize that I received Swimmy as a Christmas joke gift. He’s a toy that, when batteries are inserted into his chest cavity, automatically flips his tail back and forth when placed in water, thus propelling him randomly about.

Now, usually joke Christmas gifts don’t get much use besides their initial laugh factor, but I’ve made a concerted effort to give Swimmy a home, which consists of a little bowl of water. I’ve long since rendered his batteries unusable, however, since it just seems cruel to force him to continually swim around, solely for the amusement of others. Now he just floats in his little bowl on the top of my fridge, perfectly content with his life. He doesn’t eat. He doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t watch TV. He also probably wouldn’t scare away a burglar, but nobody’s perfect.

The only real problem with Swimmy isn’t even his fault; it’s chemistry’s. You see, as Swimmy floats about all day in his bowl, his water is very slowly evaporating. Eventually, perhaps once a week or so, I’ll look up and notice that Swimmy is huddled near the bottom of the bowl, which is now only filled to about quarter capacity. Swimmy will return my gaze with wide eyes, as if he’s saying, “A little help over here!”

So I have to water my fish frequently. It may seem strange, but what else are you going to do?

This makes me wonder if watering a fish is normal. I suppose that anybody with an open fishbowl might have to do it periodically, but probably not to the same extent as I. It’s not like I’ve ever heard the following in passing conversation: “Well, I’d love to stay longer, but I have to get home and water my fish.” Or: “Vacation was great! Unfortunately, we forgot to hire somebody to drop by and water the fish, so I guess we’re heading back to Toys ‘R Us to get another one!”

Personally, I don’t mind watering Swimmy. It’s way better than watering plants – which seem to die almost instantly when placed in the same living quarters as me – and in the end, I guess I don’t really care if it isn’t a normal thing to do or not.

The moral of the story? Well, I guess there really is none, except perhaps I need to get something to scare off burglars. Maybe a really big plastic fish…

Who Says You Shouldn't Smile Today?

As a reserved Finlander at heart, self-promotion doesn’t come easy to me. It just seems that you should do what you do and leave it at that. For example, seeing athletes who showboat anytime they do something halfway productive annoys me to no end, and politicians who do nothing but posture through the media is even worse. Heck, I sometimes feel dirty simply linking to this blog from my Facebook page. (“There goes that Curly again with his links! We get it, you have a blog! Now leave me alone!”)

Not long ago, I ran across a quote by the author Dean Koontz, from an interview he gave, and it sums up my feelings quite well: “I love writing, but I dislike having written. So I keep promotion and publicity to a minimum.”

So, please understand how hard this is for me to do:

Yep, I’ve put together an ebook that's available on Amazon.com.

Now, if you do any sort of research on self-publishing, you’ll inevitably hear some variation of the following: “Once you’ve written your book, that’s when the real work begins!” What this means is that even if you’ve written the best book in the world - which I'm not claiming to have done, by the way - if you also don’t have an ambitious marketing plan then you're doomed to complete failure.

I’ve read where you should have three different plans of promotion for when you release your book, which could incorporate such things as Facebook, Twitter, contests, giveaways, paid reviews, etc. I’ve even read a suggestion that you start writing well-thought out online book reviews yourself, and then sign each with your name, followed by “author of,” along with the name of the book you’ve written.

As a reserved Finlander at heart, all I can say is that none of that will happen. In fact, this here is my entire marketing campaign, a single blog entry, linked to from my Facebook page. Shrewd? No, but anything more would be too much self-promotion, and if this results in me selling three books total - two to my mother - then so be it. Honestly, I’m only doing this because it was a fun project and I like the thought of one random person perhaps stumbling upon the book at some point in the future, purchasing it, and hopefully enjoying it. That’s the true extent of my ambitions. (Or to put it another way, this isn't my retirement plan. That will be taken care of by a future trip to Vegas.)

So, what about the book itself? Well, it’s a compilation of things I’ve written over the last ten years or so, all of it reedited and cleaned up. Some is from this very blog, some from well before then, and some brand new.

It consists of thirty short essays and a longer piece that details a trip to Isle Royale that I made with my longtime buddy Tom quite a few years ago. Of the essays, about a dozen have appeared before in this very blog, so be aware of this duplication, even though those pieces have been cleaned up and in some cases slightly lengthened. (I would like to heavily stress the term “cleaned up”. A lot of times my blog entries, while edited, still reflect the fact that they’re basically quick brain dumps from when the mood hit me. However, I’ve made certain that those included in the book have been re-edited thoroughly, so that the quality now stands clearly above the original versions. It wouldn’t be fair otherwise.)

The biggest thing to keep in mind here is that this is an ebook, available only at Amazon.com in the Kindle format. The book's product page is here, where you can view the first 10% of it as a preview. (Note: The Amazon previewer smushes everything together. In the real book, there are page breaks.)

I’m assuming there will be questions on this, so I’m going to include an FAQ beforehand, relying exclusively on my physic ability to predict what they would be:

FAQ

Q. So you’ve succumbed to commercialism, just like every other would-be author out there on the internet. Weren't you cool at one point?
A. No, I don't recall that ever being the case.

Q. I guess I don’t either, come to think of it.
A. That’s not a question, and we’re not getting into this again!

Q. What if I don’t have a Kindle, smart guy?
A. There are Kindle reader apps available for free here. I used one on my computer while creating the book, and it worked fine.

Q. What if I have an iPad?
A. There is a Kindle app you can download from the Apple Store that will allow you to read the book if purchased from Amazon.

Q. Didn’t you write a blog entry once saying that you liked printed books and ebooks were basically literary abominations?
A. Yes.

Q. And now you're putting out an ebook? How hypocritical is that?
A. Very hypocritical. However, creating an ebook is cheap, and I had no desire to sink any dollars into physical inventory that could sit on the shelves of a warehouse forever. So in the end, fiscal conservatism won out over my principles. Sue me.

Q. Do you want to thank anybody for helping in the creation of this book?
A. Yes, I do. Thanks to my friend Evelyn for creating the wonderful book cover. Check out her site here. Also, thanks to Tom for letting me use him as a character. You can follow his adventures here. Isle Royale was only a blip on his radar.

I guess that’s all I really have to say about this. If you do read the book, I sincerely hope you enjoy it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve had more than enough self-promotion for the day - and possibly the year. I think I’ll take about fifteen showers in a row, and then maybe I won’t feel so dirty about what I’ve done.