The Pee Zone

My cousin Chris wore multicolored hair, checkered tennis shoes, pink wristbands. I had a black knit cap snugged down to my eyebrows, five days of stubble, a black pea coat. We wandered a cavernous department store to kill time and (maybe) buy something.

“Now why do I get the feeling that if one of my fellow associates came around, they'd tell me to watch you guys?”

My cousin Chris and I looked up from our movie browsing to see the Electronics Department manager standing over us.

“It's an appearance thing,” the manager went on, “people look a certain way, everybody assumes they're trouble. I don't agree with it.”

“I have to do the same thing at my work,” Chris said. “Don't worry about it.” We were left with the feeling that we'd been subtly warned despite the benevolent tone—fine with us; we can deal with being watched. We love attention.

I spent a great deal of time in the chair aisle, unfolding chairs and stools into the middle of the aisle one at a time, using exaggerated facial expressions to indicate approval or displeasure. If anyone was watching us via camera, they know my taste in foldable chairs.

Finally we decided to grab a late-night meal—but when Chris and I attempted to move on to the grocery area, we found yellow rope blocking the way. Store associates walked the perimeter, which must have encompassed at least a dozen aisles. What was going on?

We soon realized that we weren't roped out, but in.

Chris noticed it first: in a central corridor between rows of aisles, no more than six inches from my right boot, there stretched an unbroken twenty-foot line of yellowish-brown pee.

Great. We were the only remaining customers in the Pee Zone. I hope we were being watched while we browsed, because that's the only way our good names could be preserved beyond doubt.

I guess that's what I get for dressing like the kind of guy who'd pee in a department store.

Delicious Apart, Terrible Together

Come February I’ll be tasting wines with some regional distributors in order to learn more about the mysterious drink and its many varieties.

Since wine is mostly aftertaste, it can be paired very effectively with food. Dinnertime wine choice is a complicated art; there are no “rules” but most people generally find that certain combinations work better than others.

For example, a dry white wine is delicious with carrot dill soup; the sourness of the wine contrasts and complements the ginger in the soup beautifully.

The same wine with a barbecued burger, though, would taste like nasty hooker ass—even though the wine and the burger would each taste great if consumed separately.

I first realized this principle of “Delicious apart, terrible together” at the age of five when, after an early-morning episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy, I added orange juice to my leftover Coco Puff milk. I gulped it down and immediately felt as though I could puke hard enough that the other end of my digestive tract would exert terrible suction and lodge the kitchen chair halfway up my asshole.

The experience forever destroyed my desire to combine liquids of any kind, which is why I grew up to be a blogger and barista instead of a high-grossing chemist.

Change Looms

For years I insisted that underwear, for men, was unnecessary. No Boxer Short Baron would ever grow fat on my hard-earned dollars. No sir. I thought I'd never be tempted, not by any loom's hedonistic fruits. Not even if spokesman Michael Jordan sheared the sheep personally and then slam-dunked the ball of liberated wool directly into my pants.

Just before the New Year, a simple law of the universe manifested. The law takes the form of a not-so-secret ancient equation:

Christmas + Grandma = Underwear

It had been years since I had last stepped into boxers. What was I thinking all that time? How did I endure the tough texture of denim jeans? When did commando-style become a way of life?

Lesson learned: we sometimes identify too strongly with ways of thinking that we haven't properly... well... thought out. It's too easy to fall into a pattern of behavior without questioning whether the pattern makes any sense whatsoever.

I am humbled—all those uncomfortable years, all that denim, the chafing endured for pride's sake, the awkward two-turn losses at strip poker.

Well, I was wrong.

And besides, a hot girl recently told me she loved guys in boxers.

But, uh. I swear. That had nothing to do with it.

14 Inches Deep

Here in Central Maine, Frosty the Snowman loves to bend us over and give it to us, hard, pretty consistently through the Winter months.

Yesterday, he gave us a full glistening fourteen inches. Not bad for a white boy, eh?

A brief voyage outside during the storm revealed that the "snow" was neither fluffy nor soft, but steely and sharp. The wind shoved the jagged little dagger-flakes between the buttons of my jacket, down my shirt collar, up my nose.

The roads were empty but the neighborhood pizzeria remained heroically open; it looked like the last remaining beacon of civilization among the shuttered and dark storefronts. Light spilled from the pizza place's windows onto the blank white expanse where the sidewalk used to be—

—and thank fucking God for snow like this, I thought. On any other day off, I would have felt like a slacker for neglecting laundry, failing to shop for clothes, forgetting to buy groceries. Thanks to the storm, though, a forty foot walk for pizza became an epic Herculean feat.

Given a choice between taking all of Frosty's fourteen inches or facing up to my own workaholic conscience, I prefer bending over.