Monthly Archives: August 2023

The Mall: It’s Only Up from Here!

I read a report this week about how the mall was “coming back, baby” and I’d like to take a moment to refute that.

worm eye view of escalator
Photo by Dan Gold on Unsplash

I went to the mall last week, a thing I used to love but now fills me with unimaginable sadness.  This mall was recently sold, which would lead one to believe that it was about to transform into a beautiful butterfly. Instead, there’s a tattoo parlor, carnival food in the food court and at least 3 kids on BMX bicycles. I used to beg to go to this place.

It was the first place I ever had Taco Bell, which was a magical sit down restaurant somehow always covered in shredded lettuce, but never quite dirty. I drank many a Dr Pepper out of a plastic Batman cup there. The 1989 Batman movie transformed my brain in a number of ways, but the most unexpected has to be my love of the cinnamon twist, which debuted in a fun paper pouch with a Batman logo on them. To this day, purchasing cinnamon twists is the only type of gambling I partake in. For just $2, you get to see if you won a dessert.

I purchased a grilled cheese dipping taco from what now passes as the mall Taco Bell. I was impressed when the girl taking my order managed to do so without stopping her TikTok scroll and even more impressed that they actually had an up-to-date menu. I had gotten a grilled cheese dipping taco at another local Taco Bell and it was an absolute mess, so I wanted to try another location before writing the whole thing off (judging new fast food items is very important to me). Though I wasn’t impressed with the extra $1.50 tacked on as mall premium pricing, the taco came out quick, napalm hot and not overly messy. They run a tight, if sinking, ship there.

While I was there, I figured I should wander. The former Record Town is still standing, now as an FYE. I did not go in because there is no one else in there and somehow FYE corporate still thinks human interaction is something people want from the mall. Visiting an FYE is essentially like visiting an old friend now on life support, surrounded by Funko Pops that are 1-2 months away from becoming the nicest items in the dumpster. No, I do not think I’ll be getting your loyalty card. Look at your business. There’s no loyalty here. Loyalty is dead.

And for the record, my current estimate is that Funko Pops represent about 30% of mall inventory.

Having not satisfied my hunger with a single taco. I also got some Buffalo Wild Wings to go. The wings were small and dry, and there was not enough flavor on them to really impact the taste, but the dust of the Desert Heat Wings did somehow manage to make my fingers itch for about 24 hours.

I would have checked in on the Spirit Halloween currently possessing the old H&M, but the escalator was roped off and walking halfway across the mall to access the staircase seemed like a lot of work at the time. One used to be able to use the escalator in Sears to ascend, but Sears has become a spirit in status, if not name. Still, I was able to see that the H&M left a fancy vinyl “Goodbye and Thank You!” decal over one of it’s windows, which is a step up from the 8.5”x11” piece of paper on the plywood boarding up the Macy’s that says “Hey, maybe try the internet?”

I thought the big draw of the mall was a Christmas Tree Shop. I didn’t go in there because it’s the type of store where an old lady will fight you over curtains, but it certainly looked open. However I just looked up Christmas Tree Shops so I could give a better explanation of it than “crap store” and I just learned they closed all their stores on August 12th. It is very possible that it now stands as a trap for lost souls and all who enter are doomed to wander the aisles of b-stock home goods forever. Or it’s filled with rats eating expired popcorn, who knows?

Thus there remains one anchor store: JC Penney. I believe you could live in JC Penney for at least a month before anyone even noticed you, let alone asked you to leave. There are other people and employees in the store, they just do not care about what you’re doing. JC Penney exists for a venture capital ghoul to make money through some byzantine rent scheme, so everything else that goes on there is surplus to requirements. Sometimes they have nice shirts though.

There actually is one very nice store in the mall. They sell all the old action figures I went to the mall to get back when it was thriving. It is right next to the now closed secondary market sneaker place and around the corner from the previously mentioned tattoo place currently taking up residence in what used to be a Champs Sports. I would have spent more time looking around there, but the mall was actively draining my will to live.

Or maybe I see a little too much of myself in the mall. Way past expiration, but persisting regardless, filled with useless crap as the architecture slowly fails. I think in this example my pancreas is the Christmas Tree Shop and my lungs are—surprisingly—JC Penney. The mall has more pinball machines than I do though, so it’s got that on me.

Things I Like

That dipping taco was actually pretty good.

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A Live Mic

black and gray microphone on microphone stand
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Back in March, I was asked to participate in a Cystic Fibrosis Foundation fundraiser. My initial response was essentially “are you sure?” but they replied with “yes”, so last week I gave the a short speech at the Connecticut’s Finest event. Here’s what I said:

I’m not supposed to be here, both in the way that I should be dead by now, but also in the way that my idea of a fancy meal is something from the limited time menu at Arby’s. Still, I’ve lived to an age where I shouldn’t eat at Arby’s every day, so here I am.

I turned 40 this year, which is mostly good news, depending on who you ask. By my current math 40 cf years translates to about 66 regular years. And even if the Social Security office does not recognize that as a valid reason to start my retirement early, it certainly feels like it’s been 66 years. Still, I was surprised at how much I wanted to be 40, even if that meant my early-20s financial plan of “put it all on a credit card, then die” has become a spectacular failure.

It took a lot of hard work and dedication to get me this far, but luckily most of that work was done by someone else. I’m not particularly skilled in genetics—to give you an idea of my skillset, when I was 9 years old I attempted to use a store bought jar of officially licensed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Mutagen Ooze to mutate an old sock I found by a dumpster—so while I did participate in a couple of research studies and I could lie to you and overstate the role I had in the development of certain landmark drugs, we’re all friends here so I can tell you that I let them give me experimental pills for $100 and a free breakfast.

Because for most of my adult life, I was a man who needed a free breakfast. I did not grow up poor, though I did spend multiple years in an apartment where–if one were truly dedicated–you could touch three walls at the same time. But when I turned 18 and the medical bills started to have my name on them instead of my mom’s, I decided to see what being poor was all about.

Now, this is a night of celebration, so I will not bore you with the details of the bad years. If you’re truly curious, I wrote a book about 10 years ago which, fair warning, is mostly swears. In lieu of an extended diatribe, I will offer this one word summary of the bad years: sucked.

Though I’ve never been accused of being an optimist, thanks to some tremendous advancements in treatments and medications—I’m personally on Trikafta—the years are better now. That’s not something I expected when I was 25 and coughing up blood because I thought I could try toughing things out when I got kicked off state insurance for making a stunning one thousand dollars in one month. And it may not have been something my parents expected when they took a more useless than normal 9 month old to the pediatrician and that baby used one of his two skills to somehow penetrate the doctor’s Rolex with a hot orange baby dump that—luckily—the doctor immediately recognized as a cf poop. But sometimes things go the way you think they will and sometimes you get lucky.

But that is not to say that these better years are cheap or easy. My day consists of roughly 30 pills, 3-5 injections, and 4 or so inhaled medications, enough that the FedEx man thinks I’m running a satellite pharmacy. Yes, you may have heard that life is a priceless gift, but cystic fibrosis has taught me that mine costs about $330k a year. At this point I’d like to give a shout out to Microsoft Excel for being just hard enough to use that my ability to remember keyboard shortcuts somehow became an insurance bearing career, though not enough of a career that I don’t occasionally dream about unloading just 1 week of cystic fibrosis drugs at market value. Seriously, that would be illegal, so definitely don’t come see me if you have $6000 and a curious mind.

Look, earnestness isn’t really something I have in my bag of tricks, so I’ve struggled with how to end this. My wife thought it might be nice to mention some of my non-cf related accomplishments before I go, though since that’s not really how my brain works, the best I’ve got for you is that I once did 9 revolutions in an industrial clothes dryer.

So in the end, I’ve decided to leave you with this:

When I was young, a lot of the things I loved vastly misrepresented the upside of being a mutant. Rather than the accelerated healing factor of Wolverine or the superhuman size and strength of the Toxic Avenger, I got the wrists of a velociraptor and lungs that sound like a haunted house. But as I see children with cf now and how the ongoing mission of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation has given so many of them “healthy body mass” and “high lung function”, I can honestly say I’m not bitter. Because cf has given me a gift those kids may never get. It hasn’t made me strong or brave, because if any other path were available to me, I probably would have taken it. But what it has given me is…

a convenient scapegoat for all my failures. And that ain’t nothing.

Thank you for your time!

(insert rapturous applause here)

It was my first time talking in front of an audience in at least 4 years, so my delivery was a little rusty, but the speech went over well enough for those that made it to the end. My favorite comment was from a gentleman who was working the door at the restaurant, a job which mostly consisted of “Thank you for coming, thank you, thank you for coming, etc.” until I walked out and he said “Nice story”. That was better than a five star review.

Things I Like

This week I spend a bunch of time listening to a song called “Crusaders” by the Swedish group Hollow. I stumbled upon this band back in the 90s when I was looking for more bands that sounded like Morgana Lefay (who I talked about last week). I used to spend a lot of time poking around Ultimate Metal Reviews at the time and was obsessed with the 30 second or so RealAudio clip they had posted of “Crusaders”. They gave the album a 9.2, making it their fourth best album of 1998, just ahead of Bruce Dickinson’s The Chemical Wedding—which is one of the greatest albums ever made—and just behind Judas Priest’s 98 Live Meltdown, which exists. The rest of Hollow’s Modern Cathedral album didn’t really stack up to “Crusaders” for me—I actually prefer the follow up album, “Architect of the Mind”, as did Ultimate Metal Reviews—but “Crusaders” still rules.

But really, this is just an excuse to post this Internet Archive link for Ultimate Metal Reviews, a site I probably spent an actual full year on in the days of 56kbps internet connections. Fun fact: at least one member of one band on the best of 1998 list has been charged with insurrection.

https://web.archive.org/web/19990203144828/http://www.metal-reviews.com/

When Even the Ice Cream Lets You Down

There is no food more depressing than disappointing ice cream. I say “disappointing” and not “bad”, because “bad” ice cream can be good, actually. The bar a >$1 Hoodsie cup has to clear to count as “good” is a lot lower than the bar a $5 scoop of premium handmade ice cream has to clear. And if the Hoodsie cup somehow stumbles—say if it’s missing the traditional wooden spoon—your day will go on. No guarantees on what happens when the gourmet ice cream disappoints.

ice cream cone
Photo by Mae Mu on Unsplash

The more astute amongst you have probably figured out by now that I had some disappointing ice cream recently. Ice cream is not a lifelong passion of mine. In my earlier years, I thought it was fine, but barring the occasional Blizzard from the Dairy Queen in the mall, I never really sought it out myself. Even when the ice cream man came around, I was more likely to hit up a snow cone than a waffle cone. But somewhere around my 30th birthday, I grew a real taste for Haagen-Dazs, probably because my cystic fibrosis related diabetes made it a forbidden treat. Fast forward about a decade and my late night weekend desserts are spent studying the scripture of the one true prophet, Tom Carvel.

But I also like new things, so my wife and I have taken to trying out different ice cream joints each week. We ended up at one this weekend that I will not name, but was not good. We should have known what to expect when on a decently warm Saturday night in August, we were the only ones in the place (by way of comparison, Carvel was white hot).

We had looked at the menu before going, our minds reeling with the truly impressive number of both hard and soft ice cream flavors. But, you know, “jack of all trades” and all that.

I stuck with the hard ice cream, because my heart knows the truth of soft ice cream: it was perfected by the king of kings, Tom Carvel. I had two scoops of Caramel Cinnamon Crunch ice cream, which was essentially ice cream with Cinnamon Toast Crunch and caramel swirls. My wife had the soft serve Tiramisu ice cream.

Before our arrival, we had wondered how they managed to have so many soft serve flavors. The answer was they used a machine that dispensed an unflavored base and then swirled some flavor into the ice cream after it was already in the cup. I will not pretend to know the intricacies of the chemistry of soft serve ice cream, but I can tell you how it doesn’t work. If the flavor isn’t in there by the time the cream hits the cup, just throw it out.

Before getting into my ice cream, I will add the caveat that I didn’t actually get to eat it until the next day. Part of the fun of diabetes is having to do a bunch of math before I eat if I want to have something carb-y and the numbers just didn’t add up on the first day. I wish they didn’t the next day either.

My most shameful quality is that I think ice cream tastes best with a plastic spoon. I’m not proud of the number of single use spoons I’ve used because it completes the experience, but each of us is a work in progress. But not even a cheap spoon could save the mixture in front of me. It was some kind of frozen milk contraption that tasted like it had been walked through a room that carried a vague sent of cinnamon. I recognized the soggy, chewy Cinnamon Toast Crunch pieces by look alone and I’ll be goddamned if I could taste any caramel. I paid $7 for roughly two scoops of this Invasion of the Ice Cream Snatchers replicant of a real dessert, so I continued to eat it even though each bite brought me ever so closer to running at the nearest wall as fast as I could in the vain hope that the impact would help me to forget. Luckily, I ran out of “ice cream” before I pulled a Wile E. Coyote on the living room wall.

I could only think of the famous Wonder Woman Ice Cream panel and wonder what would have become of our world if she tried this crap.

Things I Like

Sometimes when scrolling through the vast oceans of digital music available at the tap of a finger an old friend will break the surface.

I ended up listening to a ton of Morgana Lefay this week. They’re a Swedish band that plays a chunky, mid paced form of metal that I often see referred to as Power Metal, but that label doesn’t do justice to how aggressive they can be. Also, vocalist Charles Rytkönen is one of the best to ever do it.

They are one of a handful of bands that I discovered in the first heady days of file sharing, so the age and time that I discovered them makes me wholly unqualified to judge them objectively. That being said, I think they play metal in one of it’s purest forms. I often wondered why there weren’t more bands like them, but the Apple Music algorithm answered that for me: many have tried, most have failed. Turns out its real easy to make Kirkland brand Morgana Lefay music. There’s just something that sets the real thing apart.

For the record, the band I stumbled across back in the day was actually Lefay, which is a spinoff of Morgana Lefay that shares only a vocalist and a guitar player, but I kind of consider it all the same well anyway. If you’ve never heard them, give their 2005 comeback album Grand Materia a listen; the song “My Funeral is Calling” has been running through my head for the entire week. But I celebrate the whole catalog and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the absolute hours I’ve spent playing along the “Master of the Masquerade” of their Maleficium album.

The Baked Potato Festival

Baked potato - Wikipedia

I had to go to a vineyard for a Cystic Fibrosis Foundation function last week, which was fine even though I don’t drink and apparently asking for table grapes at a vineyard is essentially the same as taking a dump in a wine glass.

Anyway, the point of this is that on the way to the fancy part of Connecticut, I saw a carnival being set up. I love carnivals even if I don’t really get a chance to go to them anymore, but this one had a sign that had me ready to cancel all my weekend plans: Baked Potato and Roasted Corn Festival.

Absence is an unavoidable part of life and sometimes things leave a hole in your heart at a young age and you spend the rest of your life looking for some thing to bridge that gap. For me, there is a small hollow in my heart carved decades ago when the 1 Potato 2 left the local mall food court. In my childhood recollections I can see a row of microwaves and toppings as far as my eyes could see, stretching out over the horizon in a way that is probably more indicative of my height at the time rather than they way things actually were.

Subscribed

Still, my life long love of the baked potato was born in that corner storefront and the arrival of a D’Angelos Sandwich Shop that served the only sandwich that made me shit halfway through eating it only served to lionize the dear departed potatoes in my mind.

For a brief second, reading the “Baked Potato and Roasted Corn Festival” sign made me feel young again, hope fluttering in my heart that while things my never be like they were, perhaps they can at least be different instead of dead.

I could not wait to get home and tell my wife about this glorious festival of potatoes with toppings undreamt of by us mere mortals and perfectly seasoned elote. I must be getting soft in my age, because I let myself have this dream for longer than I should have, before finally looking up the Baked Potato and Roasted Corn Festival on the internet.

Turns out the person putting the letters on the sign took a little artistic license. It was merely a Potato and Corn festival and even that moniker was more playful than descriptive. A tractor pull and some racing pigs got higher billing than any food. In fact, the only mention of food was a promise of a variety of food trucks, with nary a mention of sour cream or chives.

We briefly considered going, but I thought the hope was worth more than the disappointment, so the Baked Potato and Roasted Corn Festival lives only in my heart for now.

Armchair Diseasing

A lot of the process of having a disease in America is people dictating to you how you should feel about it. A lot of the process of growing up—or me, at least—is letting that go.

I’m not letting go out of kindness or politeness or anything other than self interest. As someone who has made a late life shift into constantly talking about the ways my body betrays me, I have had to make peace with the fact that some people will just never understand the way I see things. Which is fine, right up until the part where they start telling me how I’m doing it wrong.

The danger of saying “yeah, sure” instead of “what the fuck are you talking about?” is that the other party starts to see your problem as being “solved”, but since they weren’t really helping anyway, it doesn’t really matter. I’m lucky in that people think I’m kind of a prick anyway, so I get away with a fair amount of “that doesn’t work for me, brother” and it doesn’t matter if they don’t recognize the AQI as a valid measurement, they think I’m just delusional and surly, which is fine, because it’s not untrue.

I hate to use specific names here because this shouldn’t be an airing of grievances, so I’ll just refer to T., who has known me for my entire life. T. is of the opinion that my attitude towards cf used to be “bad”, but I got over it and now I should stand as a shining example to the younger generation about the power of perseverance. I fully understand how T. came to this realization, because to them my “problems” solved themselves. Which is fine, I understand I’m in charge of my own business, but it’s a little galling to hear things like “you should have said something, we could have figured it out” when 90% of the things I said from the ages of 18-25 were “something” and it didn’t seem to break any ground. Which I need to stress, is not anyone’s fault save for the people who go out of their way to make sure American healthcare never quite live up to it’s potential, but even at this mellow age, I still get a little twitch when we start re-litigating the past into a fantasy story.

But again, the airing of grievances is not the point and I will grant that T. was right on one thing and it’s that I should try to pass some of my knowledge on. So…

Some people are never going to get it and there’s nothing you can do about that. You will probably not have a phrase or password that unlocks the secret door in their mind that grants them the understanding you feel is just beyond their grasp. And that’s okay, they may feel the same way about you.

Look I’m not a baseball player, so it seems to me that the process of hitting a home run is essentially getting under the ball and putting it over the fence. Why doesn’t every just do that every time? Because it is one thing to observe it and another thing when the ball is coming over the plate at 90 mph. Sometimes just making contact is enough and then you run as hard as you can and you’re still out. You never know until you’re the one at the plate.

Things I Like

I probably mentioned the Arrow Films Years of Lead box set previously, but I’ve bought a lot of movie boxsets over the last few months and we’re working through them at various rates, so I’m bouncing around a lot.

I’ve grown a real taste for Italian Crime Films in the last few months and I have to give Colt 38 Special Squad a recommendation if you like shockingly brutal violence and what appear to be wildly irresponsible car chases. There’s harsh quality to the film—no heroes, no happiness—that I think you only get when your country is going through an era known as the “years of lead”. I think Il Boss is still my favorite movie intro, but Colt 38 Special Squad is up there.

There and Back Again

I’ve been doing weekly writing over at https://canteatcantbreathe.substack.com for the last 20 or so weeks. The original plan was to move everything from this site over to that site, but I may have had slightly rosy hopes in regards to the actual discoverability of a Substack newsletter (it’s bad!).

I’m not killing the experiment yet, but I did just import all the Substack posts to this site and I’ll be cross posting here and there for the next few weeks while I figure out what the right venue is. If anything here looks weird, I’m blaming the Substack importer.

Eating Pizza on a Stakeout

After realizing I’d seen a paltry amount of William Friedkin’s filmography (for the record, The Exorcist, Jade, like half of Blue Chips, and maybe Bug, I don’t really remember), I finally got around to watching The French Connection the other night. It was as good as its reputation, especially since I’ve gained an old age appreciation for car chases. It also sparked a discussion with my wife about how good we’d be on a stakeout.

French Connection – trendy poster – Photowall

I actually thought I’d do pretty well, as I’m nosy and I like staring out windows, but there’s a scene where Gene Hackman eats a slice of pizza on the street and at that moment, I realized I was out.

It takes at least 6 pills and an injection for me to have a slice of pizza, which is not an insurmountable task, but even after 40 years of taking pills and 10 years of injections, it’s still a pain in the ass. I have to consult a blood sugar graph before I eat, a process which has probably blown at least one fuse in the ol’ brain circuit, but luckily the missing fuses are all non-essential so far. Though my enjoyment of cheese went up about 200% when it became a food I don’t really need insulin for, so maybe I just blew a fuse in my cheese limiter.

To be fair, there was a point where I didn’t have or need the blood sugar graph, so if I think really hard, I can remember back to when I could have whatever snack whenever I wanted, but the 130 pound guy who used to carry a giant bottle of pills into any fast food restaurant within a 50 mile radius and eat until his stomach got stretch marks is buried somewhere in my now 180 pound frame.

I suppose that the act of getting older was going to curtail that one way or another, but one of the limited joys of cystic fibrosis was an unlimited diet and having to avoid snacks not because they’ll ruin my appetite but because I won’t be able to have any insulin with my dinner if I take some now is a truly bullshit way to live.

Plus I can’t just have street pizza like Gene Hackman.

Changing the Record

I ended up watching The French Connection because I saw a bunch of headlines about how the newly posted streaming version had a racial slur cut from it. I’m not sure exactly who made that decision—maybe Disney who currently owns the rights or perhaps it was made by Fox before they got there—but it’s funny that they cut an early slur but left at least two other slurs later in the film.

We should be in a world where the archival promise of the internet has reached it’s full potential, but we gave the keys to a bunch of corporations and they don’t give a shit about any of that.

I own a lot of movies on physical media, though I shouldn’t have to. I have no particular love for  blu-ray discs, to the point that my main way of watching them is by ripping them to a massive hard drive at full quality and streaming them from a server. I believe this is actually illegal, so if this ever shows up in court, I’m going to deny the hell out of it.

The thing is, the process of buying digital films doesn’t have to be bullshit, but it is, because someone feels like it makes the more money by licensing you a DRM ridden file instead of just letting you download the goddamn thing you want. But I understand that the golden age of movie ownership is over for most people, just as it is for music.

That doesn’t mean it’s good.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you I don’t enjoy streaming music, which puts a great chunk of recorded history right at your fingertips and lets me do stuff like listen to every Prince album in chronological order without taking out a personal loan. And while I think it’s obvious to anyone with any experience in the real world that this arrangement isn’t going to work out well for artists, occasionally the cracks show on the user side too.

I was listening to In Flames’ The Jester Race on Apple Music the other day. It’s an absolute masterpiece of melodic death metal that I’ve heard hundreds of times over the years. It’s one of those albums where every turn is hard coded into my brain. Which is why I found it so jarring when one of the songs was wrong on Apple Music.

Track 6, “Dead Eternity”, technically exists on the Apple Music version, but instead of the album track, it’s the (demo?) version from one of the re-releases of their earlier Subterranean ep. It’s still good, but it’s not as good as the album version and even has a different singer.

I know it sounds like that doesn’t matter much, but what if someone listens to The Jester Race for the first time and the version they listen to has one of it’s highest points sanded down? It’s such an unforced error. It’s not the first time I’ve run into something like this. It won’t be the last either. Because this stuff does not matter to whoever is counting the money. I get that. But that’s also why I’ve got a hard drive of ripped songs ready to go when someone figures out that getting rid of mid 90s metal albums will get them a hefty tax write off.

For the record, the most damaging error I found was about 5 years ago when pretty much every streaming service replaced the album version of Alice Cooper’s “Welcome to my Nightmare” with the shorter single version. The funniest one I saw was on the 2022 remaster of Coil’s The Ape of Naples, where the fourth song is shown as “Tripe Sun” in which one missing letter gives a meaning very different from the actual title “Triple Sun”.

Things I Like

It’s been a big week for me finally watching things people told me where really good. I can admit that I thought everyone was full of shit about Train to Busan, because nothing disappoints like a horror film that was reviewed at a festival, but 7 years later I stumbled across it on Shudder and I’ll be goddamned if it wasn’t a masterpiece. It’s able to increase tension in surprising and interesting ways while also not fumbling basic human emotions. Hell, I may even watch it again.