Heroin, Satan, and Derek Jeter: Together At Last

Hi, well I haven’t blogged you like a hurricane or even a 5-10 mile per hour gusty wind lately so I thought, “What better way to spend Lincoln’s or Washington’s birthday than by blogging nonsensical unsolicited opinions that no one will or should care about?”. In 2014 isn’t that even more American than staving off the British Empire or freeing the slaves?     

And on this most patriotic of days, what better topic than Hollywood celebrities? Let’s be honest: Hollywood is the only city in America that matters. Our movies and TV shows are our Number 1 export. (iPhones are technically an import). Detroit? A cesspool that you should probably drive a Honda through just so you know you won’t break down before reaching the exit ramp. Washington? A swamp full of swamp things. New York? The finance capital of the world: i.e., a glorified horse track full of parasites trying to make money off the innovation of others. Hollywood IS America. Hollywood stars are our true kings and queens, our ambassadors to the world, our trend setters, our bright beacon of hope and dreams in the “buy two and get the third 1/2 off” workaday reality of our lives!

Philip Seymour Hoffman. Oh for God’s sake. Granted, I saw The Master and I was so thoroughly depressed and creeped out I kind of wanted a bag of heroin myself. The guy was a great actor but you have to wonder if you can seemingly constantly play depressed guys and not get a little depressed. At some point is that all you get offered? Like, “This character seems borderline suicidal and tormented by deep, unsolvable existential riddles---get Phil Hoffman’s agent on the phone pronto!”. 

Wait, I’m sorry…..I was just assuming there were psychological factors that might influence people to become junkies. Like Kurt Cobain—another smack devotee who seemed terribly depressed. Luckily I’ve watched enough Dr. Drew to know this is wrong. Philip Seymour Hoffman had an illness. There was nothing volitional whatsoever about his heroin addiction. We might as well judge a cancer patient, a schizophrenic, or a hedge fund manager for being the way they are.

Sometimes I miss the old Dr. Drew from MTV’s Loveline when he was just offering highly professional, clinical advice to women complaining of painful sex due to their clitoris ring or guys complaining that real sex just didn’t quite measure up to the pure magic that is masturbation.

So, okay, it may be an illness if we look at it from a certain angle. Heroin is capable of making biochemical changes in the brain and a person so afflicted can therefore be labeled as suffering from an illness—and therefore must be shielded from our judgment. But could we also say this: Adam and Eve are sufferers of the illness of apple addiction so they should have been treated clinically on Eden Rehab, not banished from paradise and forced to deal with a fratricidal maniac of a son and the knowledge of spawning the whole “my screwed up parents messed everything up my life” mentality?

But, as with so many things, Satan is the answer. (Letting people think I’m a Satanist can’t hurt my blog hits so let’s just stick with that. Sex and Satan sell!). The devil himself may offer the key to sailing through the Scylla of harsh judgment and the Charybdis of clinical determinism. (If Sting can reference Scylla and Charybdis in The Police’s Wrapped Around Your Finger, why can’t I? Then again….Sting may not be a good starting point for any argument that one is not in fact a pseudo-intellectual twit, is it?). 

The problem with the illness argument is that while it explains the continuing use of heroin, it doesn’t seem to adequately explain why someone chose to do heroin in the first place. Are there innate biochemical processes in the brain that compelled the star of Capote and Boogie Nights to do heroin? I think I have trouble really buying that myself. But possibly what happened is he was at a big party—say the Magnolia world premiere or an American Buffalo opening night after-party—and someone offered him heroin. Kind of like Satan went out of his way to offer Eve the apple. Of course the serpent not only offered it, but he made a sales pitch: eat this and you will be like God! Maybe a heroin marketing agent told him, “Do this and you will SEE God!”.

So is it an illness to succumb to temptation? Is it biochemistry? I can’t believe it is. One can resist temptation…..but can we judge it? I say we can only judge it if a) we’ve been at parties where someone offered heroin and we politely declined, or b) we’ve stood naked in a pre-civilized paradise when a talking snake offered us a sweet fruit. I, personally, have never had either life experience, but would I have acted wisely if I had been tempted? I’d like to think so---but I used to go to parties and get way too drunk and I can’t say with 100 percent certainty that I would have made the smart choice. I might have thought, “Well, can William S. Burroughs, Lou Reed, Kurt Cobain, Lane Staley and God’s first power couple ALL be wrong?”. Only the good die young and temptation is the path all the cool kids choose! So maybe I would have gotten hooked too and ended up with this illness Dr. Drew and Pat Robertson talk about so much.  

In other news, Derek Jeter announced he’s retiring after this year. Can we make a new rule? You’re not allowed to announce you’re retiring until you’re actually retiring. I mean get ready for a season full of farewells. It’s going to be truly sickening. “Oh you sound like a bitter Red Sox fan?”. Bitter? Bitter about three World Series titles in the last decade? I don’t THINK so, mi amigo. Derek Jeter is a classy guy. He’s a winner. He always says the right thing. He’s a gamer. He gets it. He brings his lunch pail to work every day. He likes to get his uniform dirty. Every father and mother would love to have a son just like Derek Jeter. Global diamond production would quintuple if Derek Jeter decided to switch to a high fiber diet.

But that’s just the problem, isn’t it? Derek Jeter is so aggressively bland it’s almost shocking in its dimensions. I almost want to believe he’s being oddly subversive and we haven’t caught onto the joke. Like, “I’m so good at baseball and so good looking that I can act like a half human, half robot hybrid for two decades and you will love me all the more for it. Women will want me, men will want to be me, and John Sterling will want all of the above”. Derek Jeter is an assault on the very notion of personality and individuality. He’s a blank slate that we can write on ourselves! He’s a human Etch A Sketch. It surpasses the bounds of my imagination to understand just how content with the universe, just how comfortable in one’s ability to inside-out fastballs to right field for base hits, just how absolutely positive one must be that the female race is assigned a phone number for the express purpose of one day giving it to us that one would feel no need to even attempt to develop a personality. If Martians zeroed in their anthropological study of humans on #2 from the New York Yankees, he, she, or it would conclude that a personality is a consolation prize we give ourselves after the Santa Clause of life brings us coal for Christmas but it’s a useless decoration when we have more stocking stuffers than we know what to do with. Personality developing, blog writing lost souls must pretend they are not actors reading off a pre-written, audience tested script like everyone else. These sad fools actually imagine they are the script (or blog) writers themselves! Derek Jeter proves otherwise. Jete is a living rebuttal to those who don’t think we should take things one game at a time, stay within ourselves, and stay focused on what’s best for the ballclub. And who knows? Maybe somewhere deep down beneath that cool, calm, impenetrable layer of class and sportsmanship there is a complex, tortured, brilliant, creative soul silently screaming to get out if only Susan Waldman will hit the right buttons during her next Spring Training interview live from Legends’ Field. We will never know. But do we want to know? Do we even want our athletes to be people or mere archetypes of idealized People? Numbers and blank slates only? Baby faced, double play turning Rorschach ink blots?

But is he really that? Imageless? Guys who say they don’t care about image almost always have an image even if the image is having no image. Kurt Cobain used to claim that, as opposed to those shallow hair metal guys of the 80’s, he was just about the music! Last night Palladia showed a Nirvana show from 1991 and I was reminded that Kurt wore sweaters during concerts. If a punk rocker wearing a Cardigan on stage isn’t fostering an image I don’t know what is. Likewise Jeter may have actively sought praise more than he’s ever let on. In one of his most famous plays he dove into the stands to catch a foul pop against the Red Sox in 2004. This was the oddest play I’ve ever seen in my life. It really looked like it was not necessary for him to dive so aggressively into the stands after catching it. Pokey Reese of the Red Sox had made a similar play earlier in the game that did require him to go into the stands. It looked an awful lot like Jeter was consciously trying to top him—i.e., Derek was FISHING for praise later on. So maybe his eternal blandness just stems from being so desperately in need of love and worship that he won’t risk sullying that in any way with an even slightly offhand, eccentric remark? But why have I devoted paragraphs to the least interesting man on earth?

In further news—and to inexplicably reference Kurt Cobain for the third time in this gripping and thought provoking blog---what else can I say? Everyone is gay. A football player from Missouri came out as gay. So did actress Ellen Page. In both causes they are being lauded for their courage. In one case, they deserve it. The football guy, that is. A movie star? Sort of. But many people in Hollywood are either very liberal or very gay so I’m not sure it’s that big of a deal. Yes, she could risk losing out on roles because producers are worried about selling tickets to people in Iowa who have been told the Bible is anti-gay, pro-river of blood so they’re sticking with that story, but maybe gay rumors had already done that and she has been eclipsed by the likes of Jennifer Lawrence and Rooney Mara as the “spunky independent girl with a vulnerable side” anyway. So if that’s the case, there is probably little risk.

But I’m actually a little sad that Juno is a lesbian! And don’t give me that, “You do realize that Juno was a movie and she was an actress playing a fictional role, don’t you?”. Way to be a concrete thinker! We can’t help it: we do link our perceptions of actors and actresses in real life with the roles they play. Possibly it would have happened anyway as he reached middle age—a time of life when absolutely no one wanted to see him dancing in tighty whities to Bob Seger hits--- but Tom Cruise’s box office numbers seemed to sink the more he started to seem like a midlife crisis suffering, cradle robbing, couch jumping Scientologist. But this is inevitable. Even if actors think they entirely inhabiting characters, they are always doing so with the same voice, the same face, etc. So we can never TOTALLY separate the actor from the role even if we’re only linking them subconsciously. Like whenever Scarface comes on TV---which is to say, every day---in the back of my mind I sort of think, “Wow. What HAPPENED to Michael Corleone? He appears to have developed a Cuban accent, he’s started dropping way more F-bombs, and he started wearing much brighter clothing”. Michael Corleone and Tony Montana are as different as two (gangsters) can be. In real life Tony would have been as irrelevant to Michael as Fredo was at the end of Godfather II after he found out he had gotten in league with Hyman Roth. He wouldn’t have even let Tony clean his pool at his Lake Tahoe compound. Yet filtered through the movies, they are linked by the voice and face of Al Pacino. So they kind of are the same and not the same at the same time. If that makes any sense—which it probably doesn’t.

So yes, to SOME degree we have in fact learned that Juno is a lesbian. She doesn’t really love Paulie Bleeker! Or Michael Cera. Juno was sort of a masterpiece, I thought, because it was actually surprising. Most multi-plex movies don’t even try. Chuck Klosterman—a very funny writer—wrote a short story in which he his fictional alter-ego was on the verge of being fired as a newspaper movie critic because he gave every single movie 2 ½ stars. I thought this was hilarious because, honestly, as a regular moviegoer I’d say that’s exactly the rating 99 percent of movies should get. Just good enough to be mildly entertaining, but without any pesky risk taking which could potentially dampen audience word of mouth in Des Moines or Singapore. That’s the “artistic” goal of filmmakers today. (Who aren’t even using film anymore now that movie theaters are finally all digital).

Anyway, back to Juno. It was kind of a thriller in disguise. Thrillers, of course, are so often based on a “twist”. This trend exploded in the 90’s: Tyler Durden in Fight Club was a figment of Ed Norton’s schizophrenic imagination! The kid in The Sixth Sense “sees dead people” because Bruce Willis is dead! The Usual Suspects’ Kevin Spacey is Kaiser Soze!! Those twists were great….these days they are usually lame and derivative. So unlike this blog.  

But Juno did the same thing. Make a movie about an accidental teen pregnancy, make the girl an ultra-hipster (with a tomboy and……fine, maybe slightly lesbian vibe), and make her insist she doesn’t give a damn about the kid who impregnated her. She was just bored one night. THEN let him go to the prom with another girl and watch her fold her hand as soon as he plays this Jealousy Card and tell him she’s in love with him and make the end of the movie about that! They sing a duet together on her front porch right before the screen fades to black! Unlike every conventional romantic comedy ever made, the “love story” that this movie ended up being came as a genuine surprise, a twist that miraculously worked.

And of course NOT casting a blonde girly girl made it work all the more. And NOT casting a manly man with smoldering charisma made it work further still. This was the greatest male fantasy movie of all time! Be a shy, nerdy kid who still proceeds to impregnate this super cute girl after a mere one time of having unprotected sex (the virility of this kid!) and despite all her attempts to resist your charms, have her break down and confess her undying love to you!

But she likes girls.

Damnit, Hollywood. You have failed me for the last time. I preferred the illusion of Ellen Page who sort of seemed like she could be gay but wasn’t and so there’s this weird, uncategorizable thing about her to the one who is actually gay. I don’t see it as a moral issue one way or the other, but it make her more……again, categorizable. Like, “Oh, now I get it. Slap that label on her and move on”. It’s not quite Derek Jeter bland, predictable categorizeability (not a word but it should be) but closer than before.

The best comparison might be, oddly enough, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Clearly he is not gay. A guy who rose to fame injecting steroids in his buttocks, flexing for photo shoots, wearing skintight speedos, waxing his body, and rubbing baby oil all over himself is CLEARLY all man. But like Ellen Page in Juno, Arnold’s success as an action star stemmed from his contradictions. Whether by instinct or carefully thought out strategy (okay, probably the former) Arnold understood the Teddy Roosevelt method of action star acting: speak softly and carry a big stick. Too many action stars not only punch guys in the face, shoot them in the forehead, toss them out 50^th  floor office windows, but they ACT LIKE JERKS ABOUT IT. Arnold? Always impeccable manners. Always soft spoken. A gentle giant. Take even his famous scene from The Terminator: a guy gives him lip, doesn’t give him the answer he’s looking for, so he calmly, quietly says, “I’ll be back”. Then he gets in his car and drives it through the (conveniently) all glass front enclosure of the building. Then he’s back. He had just informed him—out of courtesy—that he could expect to see him back real soon. What a nice guy. He never resorted to name calling or giving him the evil eye. I mean does he LOOK like Steven Seagull? Arnold could wreak havoc and destroy entire armies, cities, alien races, barbarian tribes, or whatever the situation called for but he had impeccable table manners! He was a droll, at times multi-lingual Derek Jeter with far more longball ability.

So actually the real life image-shattering move for Arnold wasn’t really him sleeping with his maid. Okay, that was not cool. But his action star image existed on a separate plane entirely from issues of marital fidelity one way or the other. No, the image shatterer would be if Arnold was caught on camera loudly insulting a DMV worker who had just told he had been standing in the wrong line for the past 85 minutes and needed to get in the back of the correct line or if he was seen stomping his feet on the ground after being told by a Genius he should have bought Apple Care if he had wanted his iPhone’s shattered screen fixed free of charge. THAT would have flown directly in the face of his movie image. So thank you Arnold for sleeping with your maid, your fans owe you a debt of gratitude.

Wait, that came out wrong.

Man, we’ve covered a lot of ground today. I hardly know how to wrap things up but I’ll try: heroin is a forbidden poppy that is bad for you in the long run but makes you feel awesome at the time, Derek Jeter is good for you but also flavorless like Brussels sprouts, Juno shows us we can never trust a girl named after a Roman goddess when she tells us she loves us, and sometimes you just prefer a down to earth gal with a mop over these prissy Kennedy clan members in their pants suits.  

Or something like that.  

You're Not Disabled, You Just Can't Think Of Anything Good To Do

Hi. Can I tell you about my day? I got up, went to my ridiculous full time job, I came home, I laced on my sneakers and I ran four miles. (As a sidenote—the winter really made me forget how hard running is before you get into that awesome July running shape).

Now I’m writing my world renowned blog. I don’t know if it’s the best blog on the Internet, but I will confidently state it’s the best blog with a title referencing a song by The Scorpions. I’ll take it.

Anyway, here is the punchline to my description of my day: I’m disabled. Yep. “But…..you said you work a full time job? And you ran four miles? You’re not disabled!”.

But I am.

The government says I am and they are always right. I am legally blind. Under social security disability rules, I meet listing 2.02A for central visual acuity worse than 20/200 in my better eye with correction. (Technically they call it the “best” eye which I believe is grammatically incorrect unless they are assuming one has three eyes…….wait………is there a dirty joke there? Maybe a huge Third Eye Blind fan?). My acuity is 20/300. So I’m legally blind. To paraphrase another blind guy, signed, sealed, and delivered I’m yours. Get your stamp and mark “DISABLED” on me. I just had an idea…..I’ve always sworn I would never get a tattoo but a DISABLED tattoo might be pretty sweet….

But here’s the thing. I’m not disabled. No, I’m not going in circles, there’s a logical thread here! I work a full time job. I run. Now I didn’t drive to and from work—I got a ride in the morning, took the bus home in the afternoon. But does that make me disabled? Don’t be silly. The experts have been stumped.

But to add to the randomness of it all, if I had been born a few years earlier, I would not have been born legally blind according to the government. They widened the definition of legal blindness in—I think—1969. Must have been all those Woodstock acid tripping casualties or something.

But it gets even crazier. I work as a Vocational Disability Examiner for Social Security. Everyone tells me they are disabled. Most cases I tell them they are not. So someone the government believes is disabled and unable to work works in a job for the government telling people who say they are disabled and unable to work that they are not diabled and able to work. The world is one wacky place.

Point is there is a very, very, very thin line between the disabled and the non-disabled. Even our decisions are…..a bit subjective. I read a claim this week in which a person already on benefits had been denied on his initial claim because the psych consultant thought his drug use muddied the water so much that his schizophrenic symptoms couldn’t be proven to be caused by his diagnosed schizophrenia. On the appeal, the next psych consultant who reviewed it believed that in fact his schizophrenia trumped any negative impact of his drug use. Which comes first: the chicken or the egg? That conundrum regularly separates the disabled from the non-disabled among us.

Why should anyone care? I don’t know. But disability is skyrocketing in America. The number of people on disability is about 14 million and growing. Welfare was "reformed" by essentially converting being poor into a disability. Now the whole world thinks they are disabled. Parents file for their kids saying they are disabled by their asthma and ADHD. This is the reformed brave new world we live in. People learn to believe they are disabled because it's the difference between feeding their kids or not in many cases. Do you think that might be a disincentive for poor parents to make every human effort to encourage their kids to succeed? The government will never reward them for that. I'm not saying it's an active conspiracy to keep poor kids down and discouraged, but if it was we couldn't possibly have arranged it better. People say to me, “How do you deal with all those people trying to scam the system?”. I say, “You don’t understand, for every scam artist there seems to be ten people who genuinely believe everything they say! America is becoming Disabilitypalooza but Perry Farrell didn’t organize it so it’s not nearly as cool!”.

But me, I've strayed from the true path and I hardly believe in disability anymore. I’ve become radicalized. Don’t read any further if you can’t handle the shocking truth! If you don't believe Plymouth Rock landed on you, this might not be your cup of tea. Disability is the opiate of the masses! That’s right, move over religion, there’s a new sherrif in town and it’s name is disability. As long as poor people or those with any health issues believe they are disabled, then the problem can’t be society. It can’t be discrimination against them. It can’t be people using their supposed disability for their own financial or political gains, it can’t be classroom size disparities, etc. If they are disabled it’s no one’s fault. The term disability almost takes on Biblical proportions. Since none of us are Jesus and can make the dumb speak, the blind see, or the lame walk, then there’s nothing to be done. Disability may be the enemy to change and reform and evening the scales as far as they can possibly be evened. Fatalism is the enemy of progress and evolution and is there anything more fatalistic than the very concept of disability?   

Can I give another example I just thought of? I have a friend who works as a counselor in a mental health clinic in a poor area. She once said she often felt disillusioned because, “They (as in patients) don’t want to get better”. She wants to help them get better, but they just want to be disabled, collect their benefits and go on their way. The counselor in question…..is blind. Totally blind. So again, what makes someone disabled? Is it simply the desire to get better or not get better? And are the benefits hungry folks trying to suck the system dry or are they just demoralized—and is that what actually makes them disabled if they are disabled at all?

Okay, the above paragraph is not the whole story. Are people who are mentally retarded simply limited by their own self-doubts? No. Is a 55 year old who worked construction his whole life before suffering a stroke and being left in a wheelchair simply lacking in ambition or can the fact that he is a paraplegic combined with his age and lack of training for sedentary jobs be definited as a disability—in the objective reality sense of the word? Yes. I’m  not going to claim disabiily is a myth—as much as I would love to. I'm also not claiming the government should stop taking care of those who can't take care of themselves (the job market itself is disabled and can never serve an entire population of our size no matter what) but maybe it should be a simple means test like it used to be instead of making people grovel for money by proving they are disabled. Might that be having actually far worse psychological effects on us as a society?

But I think I am going to claim this: believing too much in disability is not compassionate; it’s the opposite of compassion. Compassion can be a very tricky thing because many people do genuinely love serving others. Selfless altruism does seem to activate all kinds of dopamine in many people’s brains. And I’m not knocking that in any way. But many times services to others can risk becoming counter-productive just as clinging parents can be counter-productive. Are clinging parents ever consciously trying to harm their children? Probably not, it’s just that they love being there for there kids so much that they can’t stand having to accept that what their kids might need most is to not need them as much.

And along similar lines—and speaking of Jesus—there’s something else about human psychology. Here is his parable of the lost sheep:

"Which of you men, if you had one hundred sheep, and lost one of them, wouldn't leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one that was lost, until he found it? When he has found it, he carries it on his shoulders, rejoicing. When he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, 'Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost!' I tell you that even so there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents, than over ninety-nine righteous people who need no repentance."

—       Luke 15:3-7, World English Bible

So…….possibly Jesus was just using this a marketing tool to ex-convicts. “Don’t worry, you are eligible to buy this product too! Act now because supplies are limited!”. But there is something interesting he suggests: that we love the lost sheep more than the sheep that are never lost precisely because they get lost. Disabled people are sort of modern day lost sheep. We love them in similar ways. Look at all the roles that win Oscars—trophy hoisting actors are always playing people with speech impediments, Cerebral Palsy, autism, schizophrenia, serial killers, etc. (Don’t think being a serial killer is a disability? Didn’t you know it’s only a symptom of Antisocial Personality Disorder? Please get with the program).   

But what if something else is true? What if many people who are lost sheep or would-be lost sheep consciously or subconsciously believe Jesus is correct: that the lost sheep is more valued and beloved than the ones who are already in the flock and stick within the flock forever? In some cases, they become rebels and possibly change society. But in other cases, they might passively embrace being a lost sheep a little too much. Jesus don't want me for a sunbeam, but don't expect me to cry for all the reasons we have to die. And possibly these lost sheep will indeed be loved all the more for it, but maybe not. And even if they are, they are lost! They can’t necessarily participate in the flow of life if they cling to such a status. They might be less likely to have careers, kids, a dog, a ping pong table, etc.   

I’m meandering quite a bit here and I’m too tired to pull all this together more neatly—what with my hard work serving the fibromyalgia suffering public and my amazing athletic endeavors. Possibly I’m really talking about myself. Even if I say I reject the notion of being disabled, that I suspect such labels are often designed to help those serving rather than those being served (mainly in the form of creating social service and legal jobs to deal with serving or adjudicating claims for the massive ocean of people in line to become disabled), and even if I say my full time job proves that the experts are idiots………has there always been a tiny part of me that has felt slightly disabled? Not because I really am, but because I learned early that society defines someone who is legally blind as disabled and might I have internalized that to some degree? I don’t know. If I ever do write a book, as people often encourage me to do, I think I’m going to write probably a fictionalized account roughly inspired by the mixed up, early to mid 20’s version of me—when I was in my prime Lost Sheep phase. But it would be the opposite of an “overcoming a disability” story, rather it would be about overcoming the false label of being disabled and the distorted perceptions of ourselves that can result from it.   

The moral of the story……is I shouldn’t write blogs when I’m tired on a Wednesday. And also it’s important to be a staunch skeptic when it comes to disability! It’s not conservatism to be this way, it’s not trying to sweep people’s problems under the rug, it’s taking seriously the notion that labels and perceptions create realities, and well-meaning labels—those applied to us and those we apply to ourselves—can often harm us far more than anything about us that created the label in the first place. Or, to put it another way, avoid the scenario described by Eddie Vedder in that song from Pearl Jam’s first album…..

“She seems to be stronger;

But what they want her to be is weak.

She’s been diagnosed by some stupid FUCK.

And mommy agrees!”.  

….of course Eddie seemed to enjoy wearing the crown of thorns long after he was a rich and famous rock star with girls fainting over him. So who the hell knows? 

  

Incident On Asylum Street

Hi. Last night I went to see Bruce Springsteen at the XL Center in Hartford. Bruce is the hardest working 63 year old man in show business. A 3 hour and 25 minute set by my watch. He is always amazing but as a hard core fan, any show that features Kitty’s Back, Point Blank, and a full band version of Incident On 57th Street breaks the scales on the awesomeness meter.


But it was more interesting than just that. I had forgotten to order a ticket when they went on sale so I decided to try my ace in the hole: visually impaired seating. I’m visually impaired so why not? The younger me would have scoffed at such things and wondered if that constituted a form of playing the victim but the world is built on preferential treatment so why shouldn’t I take advantage too when I can?


So I had an amazing seat in the front row on the side looking straight at the stage. The lights went down and I did what 99 percent of the arena did: I stood up. There were two people behind me sitting down and I saw them talking to the security guard. Oh no. The security guard went over and talked to a couple guys a few seats over from me—but they kept standing. I sat down for a couple slower songs but I stood up again. Pretty soon after a woman tapped me and said, “Can you sit down?” and the other pointed to the security guard. The one that spoke to me was a middle aged woman with what appeared to be an older gentleman. Okay, so they weren’t 22 or anything but….it’s still a rock show, right? It’s not a symphony. I’ve actually gone to one or two of those—and I sit like everyone else. So aren’t the sitters at rock shows the tourists in Rome who have to adapt to the habits of the Romans and not the other way around? So I pointed behind us and said, “Look at everyone else here. They are standing. I’ll sit for now but I’m going to stand up later”.


Granted, the people right next to me were sitting too. But again. 99 percent of the arena was standing! I was in the “special section” so maybe more sitters were to be expected. But even so, why sit? My life is centered around a central irony: I am a disabled person (according to the law and its definition of legal blindness at least) but I spend my life telling people who think they are disabled they are not disabled. They are told they can work by a guy who—according to the law—can’t work but works anyway and tells them to do likewise. No one said life is supposed to make sense. But I do believe that within certain boundaries and ratings along the Bell Curve, disability is an attitude. The world is a stage and we are players and to a large degree we are assigned parts in the play of life and we conform to those parts: we adopt the costumes, speech, habits, and even thoughts of a particular role. Many people are either told by others or by their own inner voice that they need to play the role of the disabled! So they do. But they don’t always have to! In my mind people not standing up at a loud, high energy rock show and insisting others not stand up either is letting the role have too much authority. It’s letting the play inform reality, not the reality inform the play. Disabled or not disabled, rich or poor, weak or strong, beautiful or ugly, we should all stand up! Who is with me?!!??


But it’s hard to deliver such a speech in the teeth of 120 decibels of raw rock power.


Later I heard them talking to the security guard again. He told them, “I can’t tell him to sit down. I could offer you seats farther back but you don’t want to take those seats?”. So that was it. Justice prevailed! The spirit of high energy rock and roll was preserved! Roll over Beethoven and tell Tchikovsky the news.


That’s not the end of the story.

Halfway through the show, Bruce played one of his classics Out In The Street and went, you know, out in the street. Or out in the crowd. The aforementioned middle aged woman behind me tapped me and said, “Can you move to the side so he can see my mom?”. I thought, “What?”. But I moved.


Then I saw Bruce coming RIGHT TOWARD ME. I tapped my lifelong hero on the back. (He was drenched in sweat). And said—of course----“Bruuuuce!”. He then stopped……at the row right behind me and told 16,000 of us, “This is Max’s mom”. And hugged her.



Oh my God.


It was an old lady??


And it was Mrs. Weinberg???


Oh my God.


Max Weinberg is of course the drummer of the E Street Band. The Mighty Max. Former bandleader of the Conan O’Brien Show. A national treasure! Bruce then unknowing drove the knife in when he added, “97 years old!”. Then he finished me off with, “97 yeard old!! And she’s at a rock show!”.


This could only happen to me.


Or George Costanza. But I actually think I might have out-Costanza'd Costanza here!

Oh and sure enough, here is the video to prove it…..


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flG_BzrpqZE


A couple songs later—my conscience actually causing excruciating pain—I leaned back and said to the woman I now knew was Max’s sister, “You should have told me you were the Weinbergs! I was just thinking it was a rock show so I should be able to stand”. She said, “Well, she doesn’t see very well”. I said, “Neither do I, actually”.


So maybe she didn’t think I was a total creep. I wasn’t 100 percent sure.


I also decided to try a compromise—which I should have thought of from the beginning—by standing--but in the aisle. The security guards didn’t say anything. So please let the record show that this poor old woman had a PERFECT view of the second half of the show!




I was feeling better until nearly the very end of the show. They left a little early—although until well after 11 PM. Bruce was right, that old girl could rock! As she was about to leave I saw the security guards rolling out…….wait for it………….a wheelchair. Why, God, why? I must have had a truly forlorn, guilt ridden look on my face. Max’s sister—I think—gave me a wave goodbye. Or was she waving to the security guards? Let’s go with the former. And Bruce and the band happened to be playing the song Bobby Jean—a song about a sad goodbye to someone. To me this poignant number will always have the elderly and wheelchair bound Mrs. Weinberg written all over it!


Now again……..this WAS a rock show. Have I mentioned that already? And I didn’t know she was in a wheelchair! (Although she stood when Bruce hugged her—maybe she just can’t walk long distances?). And as far as me confusing her for a man……it was dark. I have poor vision. As we age, men lose testosterone and women lose estrogen so we all start to look roughly the same. It’s not my fault I swear!

And since the meeting with Mrs. W was obviously a planned thing given her daughter's comment to me, maybe Max or Bruce go them their seats too? Why didn't they get them front row seats instead of 2nd row seats? It's Bruce's fault! That's my story.  

I feel this incident—should I call it Incident On Asylum Street?—has really brought me closer to the entire Weinberg family. For example, per Max’s Wikipedia page, Mrs. Weinberg is named Ruth. Max has three sisters named Patty, Abby, and Nancy. They are from Newark, NJ. I’m not going to lie to you, the Wienbergs and I have had our ups and downs, but our bond is even stronger for it! So Ruth, Patty or Abby or Nancy, I’m just bloggin’ one last time not to change your mind, but just say I miss you baby, good luck, goodbye!

Rage Against The Machine (Or Buy A New One)

Boys and girls, here at Blog You Like A Hurricane’s international headquarters we are absolutely committed to the truth. We ARE going to let our campaign for blog world domination be ruled by the fact checkers.   

With that in mind, it is my duty to report to you a very sad event which occurred this week which, some might say, completely pulls the rug out from under my entire epic blog from last week. But facts are stubborn things---even more stubborn than me.

You may recall I sang the praises of the HTC One X smartphone. It has zoom functionality which leaves the iPhone in the dust. It also has the clearest, sharpest, most drop dead gorgeous screen I’ve ever seen on a computerized device ever. But…..I took it from its charger on Wednesday morning and discovered the screen was black. I played around with it, restarted it a couple times and it worked for the rest of the day. Thank God that problem was over! But on Thursday morning the same exact Black Screen Of Death occurred. I tried everything and nothing worked. It had gotten colder at night. Please don't tell me my beautiful screen couldn't handle 50 degree weather.

 

After work I biked down to the AT&T store. The guy agreed it was broken and he also agreed it showed no evidence of water damage. He then explained my two options: get in my car and drive to their warranty center located in beautiful Wallingford, CT. Or if, say, my car was in the shop, I could call their Warranty Hotline and have a new phone mailed to me in a few short days!

A few days? This was a real moment of clarity for me. A painful bit of self-realization. Telling me I can’t have a phone for a few days is like telling a junkie he can’t have heroin until Thursday. Come on AT LEAST offer me some methadone!

I'm proud to report I resisted the tempation to hold up a 7-Eleven to help pay for a brand new phone bought out of contract. Before I explain what I did, let me backtrack slightly. For the last several months my computer at work has been running poorly. Annoyingly enough, it hasn’t been running poorly enough to completely shut down or blow up, just poor enough to cause hassles and semi-regular interruptions of my work—last Tuesday morning, for example, it literally took me 45 minutes worth of shutting down and restarting and logging off and logging back on to get started on my work for the day. I’ve now complained enough that they are getting me a brand new computer and I’m still holding out hope for a 27 inch monitor which can largely negate my need for magnification software in the first place—as said software has been causing all the trouble even though it ran for years at work without major issues. Nothing is more stressful and demoralizing than having computer problems which go on--especially when you are the only one having them and the very reason you are having them is because you need “special” software. Needing to make that a focal point represents the very opposite of how I’ve tried to live my life: i.e., just like everyone else.

So in that context, my patience with phone problems as well was bound to be paper thin. I noticed that the AT@T store actually had my phone on display so the guy obviously could have gone back to the storeroom and replaced it. But he didn’t. So I called an audible and biked down to the Verizon store, transferred my account to them, got a new phone since they don't carry this particular HTC, and decided to just brace myself. I had only recently renewed my AT&T contract so I’m pretty sure I’m going to get absolutely raped with early termination fees. Even Senator Todd Akin will consider this a real rape.

Okay, that wasn’t a smart decision. But in my defense, I have been faced with TWO malfunctioning machines in recent months, the only two that I absolutely need to work: my work computer and my phone. Computers are amazing, but they are the most annoying things on earth when they stop working right.

The phone I got this time: the Samsung Galaxy SIII. This is the other high end Android phone that came out earlier this summer. The Galaxy is actually the more hyped of the two…..but it’s all about deeper advertising pockets since it’s just not quite as good as the HTC. Its screen is actually slightly bigger--4.8 inches to 4.7 inches—but it uses something called a Pentile display which differs from a traditional LCD display. How? I have no idea. It apparently borrows pixels for multiple colors instead of using specific pixels for specific colors---or something like that. But my eyes tell me it makes everything—including text--slightly less sharp.

So…….I face yet another crucial decision. As far as my AT&T account goes, the deed is done. But now that I’m back with Verizon, I have 14 days to decide if I want this phone. I’m not sure if I do or not. The less than beautiful screen just seems to highlight some annoying Android traits. At the top of the list: all those apps! My phone has 45 apps installed on it. Guess how many I actually downloaded? Three. What’s most annoying of all is you can’t delete them and THEY ARE ALWAYS RUNNING IN THE BACKGROUND. This drains your battery life for no reason. I guess you can power off every single time you aren’t using the phone, but that’s a pain. You can readjust the settings to disable apps or “force stop” them but this doesn’t seem to completely work. Or you can download an app that will help you force the other apps to stop running but in the process you’ve just created another app which has to run in the background to tell other apps to stop running in the background. It's kind of like solving your whiskey problem with vodka. The apps are like flies that keep getting in your house when you can’t even locate the hole in the screen they seem to be crawling in under! Okay, a maps app is cool. But do I need a latitude app as well?? What’s next? A sea level app? These apps will be key for me the next time I sail to Madagascar. My Application Manager tells me 16 apps are running as we speak. Why are they running? I have no clue! I’ve heard people complain Android phones are too complicated to use. I haven’t found that to be the case. You just have to get used to them. But my beef is they don’t give me enough control. If you want to pre-install a bunch of crap, that’s cool, but at least let me decide what I can delete and if I can’t delete them, at least let me stop them from running.     

And here is where I…..have to give Apple some credit. My Ipad has 20 pre-installed apps. My Ipod Touch has 22. Niether have the Phone app, so on an iPhone it’s what? 23 or 24? And the only 3rd party apps are Safari (which blows compared with Opera or Chrome)  and Youtube—which is apparently going away since Google owns Youtube and Google also owns Android so Google is standing in Apple’s path to world domination and they make a better door than a window. But as far as I can tell, Apple apps aren’t endlessly updating in the background like electronic bedbugs breeding behind your walls.  

And, truth be told, Apple’s stuff seems to be more reliable—possibly because of their extreme idiot proof "let's cut throught the bullshit" implicity. I had an iPhone 4 for two years and I did get it replaced once. It started acting strange…..but I had dropped it a few times. And the Apple Store did replace it on the spot instead of making me drive to Wallingford. During two major power outages last year, about the only things that still worked were my iPhone and iPad. I would not have retained my sanity without them.

HTC’s motto is Quietly Brilliant. And they are right. Their latest phone is amazing. Apple’s motto should be Loudly Reliable. The actual benefit of Apple’s stuff is the opposite of what their marketing says it is. Despite what they claim, none of their products are all that innovative. The new iPhone has a bigger screen. Cool…….except it’s still smaller than many Android screens. It has 4G LTE. Cool……except my phone already has that. They have 8 megapixel cameras. Can you see where this is going? My phone already has that. BUT…..there is a good chance it will be more reliable and have better battery life. So based on those rather boring considerations, it might in fact be as great as they claim.

Android is like that incredibly beautiful girl you become hopelessly smitten by until you get to know her better and start to have nagging doubts about whether coping with her high maintenance ways is worth it. What’s the old saying? “No matter how hot the operating system is, someone, somewhere is sick of her shit?”. Apple is the down to earth girl next door who doesn’t really turn any heads but you can trust her.

So what I’m trying to say is……I’ll see you in line for the new iPhone 5!

Actually that might not be possible. I just don't see myself camping out so I can talk to Siri the next morning. And the odds of finding any in stock before my 14 day return options expire seem slim. But besides…..their zoom function sucks!

But why has a smarphone become such a necessity to me when it’s clearly a luxury? Do any of us need portable computers in our pockets? I didn’t even get one until two years ago-I assumed the screens were too small for me to see and anyone who needed more than a cellphone was CLEARLY someone with issues. I didn’t realize the very high “pixel density” of these screens creates enough clarity to somewhat compensate for their lack of size. Size matters. But only so much.   

Plus all these storms happened and luxury items became necessities. In the world of climate change, the future belongs to battery operated devices.

Well I’ll probably stick with my new, new phone. It’s just an emotional time for me right now. I’m just getting out of a two year relationship with Apple followed by a hot summer fling with HTC. I’m just not sure if I’m ready for a committed relationship with Samsung. I’ve been hurt before.

But if this thing acts up I will probably make another horrible financial decision and end up buying the iPhone 5 out of contract. Don’t make me do it!

                                              

 

 

A Convenient Truth

Hi. So lately I’ve been on a tech geek kick. This is very scary. As if being a tech geek wasn’t scary enough, there’s the added reality that a tech geek and his money are soon parted. But I think I’ve learned something important about technology and---dare I say it?---life itself.
 

Convenience is overrated.

Let’s talk about home computing. I own an IPad—a device that has first world decadence written all over it. “Honey, have you seen my IPad?” is surely not a question Jesus and his disciples could have ever foreseen. I also own a smartphone—an HTC One X. This thing blows away my old IPhone—bigger, clearer screen with retina display by Steve Jobs’ own definition (300+ pixels per inch). The new IPad and Macbook Pro, um, don’t have retina display by that definition. Apparently Apple’s braintrust interprets “retina display” with the same looseness and fluidity that John Edwards interprets “ethics”. The boys in Silicon Valley must have had a meeting and said, “Ah screw it! Let’s say 200 pixels per inch is retina display too and call it a day! No one will notice!”. My phone also has a zoom function which actually reformats the right margins to make the screen readable! Apple’s zoom functions about as well as the zoom on an ‘84 IBM: you can zoom to your heart’s content but good luck navigating around the screen. Apple just won a patent lawsuit against Samsung because, among others things, Samsung allegedly stole their zoom idea on smartphones. That’s like Paula Abdul suing Lindsey Lohan for stealing her idea to mix Xanax and Red Bull.

Anyway……with my hip, trendy mobile devices I decided to do something about my home computer. I had an old Dell PC—with a tower, a mediocre screen, a wired mouse and keyboard. A real eyesore. This thing scored zero on the Sex Appeal meter. Whenever I go to Barnes and Noble or Starbucks or It’s A Grind or Cosi or any other yuppie haven in West Hartford Center I always see people on their laptops. I’ve never been a fan of laptops but I decided it just might be because I have a hard time seeing the screen. I don’t like them but I want to like them. But I had a plan: get a Windows laptop which is compatible with screen magnification software unlike Macs or Macbooks (again, Apple, why do you hate blind people?). I saw they even make laptops with 17 inch screens and “full HD” 1080p screens. So this would be a piece of cake for me to see! I bought a really nice HP Envy—pretty close to the Windows equivalent of the Macbook Pro. It was a beautifully made, top of the line machine.

God, I hated it.

I returned it after two days to Best Buy for my money back. You might say I subconsciously KNEW I would hate it so I chose Best Buy over Amazon because returning it would be easier. Why does anyone like laptops?? If I was an ergonomics expert and I decided to design the perfect anti-ergonomic machine of death, could I do much better than a laptop computer? The keyboards……awful. The keys are paper thin and clumsy to type on, plus they are set far off from you to make room for the touchpad. Oh, let’s talk about that touchpad. I’ve heard turtles have watched people using touchpads and thought, “Geez, hurry up!”. Maybe experienced touchpad users develop lighting fast usage of it, but I can’t imagine how. I saw the movie We Bought A Zoo recently and there is a scene where Matt Damon is on his laptop---a Macbook, obviously, although a still less blatant product placement than the touching ending to the last Mission Impossible movie when Tom Cruise rewarded his daredevil crew for their hard work by giving them new IPhones!. Anyway, Matt Damon was considering deleting a picture of his widow because he knew he had to get over her. He starts to move the touchpad in the general direction of the “X” at the top of the screen. This scene lasts about 4 minutes. In the Director’s Cut I would guess it’s 9 minutes. You could have left the room, made popcorn, and came back and he would still JUST be getting to the moment of truth when he had to decide to delete or not to delete. (SPOILER: he doesn’t delete. He folds up his laptop--which of course demonstrates the Apple logo to all the audience. Another movie featuring graphic full frontal Apple logos). I guess what I’m trying to say is even Jason Bourne and Good Will Hunting are slow with a touchpad! I rest my case.  
 

And what about the screen angle? You always have to look down at it. Has anyone found a correlation between neck surgeries and laptop computers? My idea of health care reform: ban the laptop computer. I suspect we would save $395 billion per year. I know, I know: you can get a stand for the laptop and you can get a mouse to replace the touchpad. But once I started thinking about doing all that I had a realization: maybe I’m just trying to turn this thing into the desktop it will never be.
 

So I turned it in and bought a new desktop with a real mouse, real keyboard, and big screen. Again, I admit I was tempted to get the 27” iMac. I mean they are, like, white and shiny and stuff. But again, I wanted to have at least the security blanket of using screen magnification software since I read that many programs and websites default to small font especially with high resolution screens. So I did some research looking for the Windows equivalent to the Mac and, much to my shock and amazement, I bought another Dell. Dude, I was getting a Dell.
 

And I must say……the 27 inch screen with its 2560 x 1440 is awesome. By using the computer’s internal font and zoom adjustments I actually don’t need screen magnification after all! Where have these screens been all my life? I guess I won’t be able to write The Great American Novel from a chair in Starbucks while sipping a Double Mocha Cappuccino after all, but who cares?
 

But I’m STILL not sure if this is the perfect choice. Like the iMac, it’s a more modern All In One Desktop. The PC and screen are built together like on a laptop, and you just use a wireless mouse and a wireless keyboard (which I upgraded to a Logitech which lights up the keys—the coolest feature my HP Laptop had going for it). Less space, hardly any wires!
 

Except….I noticed something about this thing. If I stream videos for a fair amount of time, the fan kicks into overdrive and the top of the computer gets super hot. That can’t possibly be good, can it? Also……I don’t think I’m imaging this…..if I’ve been running it for a couple of hours it almost seems like the screen gets a bit less sharp. Apparently I’m not crazy because I read All In One’s are notorious for heating issues, poorer reliability, and, yes, even sometimes blurriness from overheating. Even the iMac apparently suffers from the same problems. It’s basically a very large laptop and, like a laptop, it’s not as reliable as a clunky old fashioned desktop.

Damn! I might end up considering trying to sell this thing on E-Bay and crawling right back to an old school desktop—a super fast tower with a separate 27 inch high resolution monitor. (By the way, ever hear someone say, "Don't buy that! It's Chinese made crap!"? I just read the desktop maker with the best reliability ratings is Lenovo: a Chinese company). I retreated back into a less convenient and portable option than a laptop but maybe I didn’t retreat quite far enough. I could turn it off for a while if it gets super hot and turn it back on, but there’s a real irony when a more convenient All In One desktop actually forces such an inconvenient step.
 

And then there is music. Music sales are down, everyone is worried. What happened? Bands started sucking? Okay, in many, many cases I agree. But I have an additional theory: Mp3’s are ruining music. That’s not a new thought. Record companies panicked when free downloads started cutting into record sales. But maybe it’s purchased mp3’s from ITunes and Amazon as well. I made the mistake of actually buying a CD a few months ago! I felt about as dated as I would have if I had bought a pair of bell bottom jeans and a turtleneck. I went home and did a sound comparison. The much maligned, never very cool plastic CD won hands down. I realized I had fooled myself into thinking ITunes downloads sounded as good, but a direct comparison made me realize CD’s sound clearer and much more 3-dimensional. An mp3 is literally a crushed CD—crushed so that downloading an album won’t take up all of your phone or mp3 player’s space and thereby discourage you from downloading more music. In a way, music has come full circle: mp3’s blended, compressed, nearly mono sound somewhat resembles an AM radio station compared with the more FM sound of a CD..
 

No more sonic fast food for this writer! I bought a bunch more CD’s (wish I hadn’t ditched all my old ones) and a portable (I can’t believe I’m publicly admitting this) Sony CD player! Don’t worry—they still feature their miraculous G Protection anti-skipping technology! (My G protection? My AK. Know what I’m sayin’ homes?). I took it on a run with me……and it skipped. Maybe it doesn’t skip on mall walkers, but it skips when you run. And it nearly fell out of my pocket 78 times. No one ever said 1.4 megabytes per second, 16 bit music listening was a walk in the park.
 

So I devised a brilliant compromise: keep buying CD’s but “rip” them as .WAV files. These are similar to mp3’s but not compressed. They also take up much more space so using my phone to store them wasn’t an option. So…..I bought a 64 GB Ipod Touch. Damnit, Apple! You win again!
 

But I also decided to buy a home stereo system. I haven’t owned one in about 10 years. I used to have a monster Sony stereo—two gigantic speakers which were almost as tall as me with a subwoofer for maximum floor and window rattling bass to severely piss off the neighbors. But I ditched it for the convenience of mp3’s and my computer’s disc drive--I was told to love thy neighbor. But I came out of stereo retirement and bought a CD player which does nothing besides play a CD, a receiver which does nothing besides amplify the sound (and get a few radio stations), and two more modestly sized bookshelf speakers which do nothing besides play the music. Blissfully non-versatile. I also learned some important lessons about speaker wire. Wait, don’t stop reading—this will be gripping. it used to come pre-cut and pre-stripped. Now you have to do it all yourself. They obviously laid off the wire-cutters and wire strippers at the RCA factory. Welcome to the new business model. Also, they no longer use pure copper, but some sort of cost saving aluminum-copper combo. But of course that value is passed on to the consumer! Now back to our regularly scheduled programming…..
 

My new system sounds awesome. It’s the anti-smartphone. You can’t put it in your pocket and it does ONE thing. It’s a space hogging, non-versatile collection of parts and I love it. Now…do I go a step further in inconvenience and add a record player? There is that “warm”, “round”, “full” sound of analog every audiophile talks about. They are all sonic chubby chasers, I guess. (Apparently audiophiles also gushed about the crystal clear digital sound of CD’s back in 1983 so they are bigger flip-floppers than Mitt Romney). But I am tempted to relive my childhood when one magical Christmas Eve Santa placed a vinyl copy of Ozzy Osbourne’s Diary Of A Madman under our Christmas tree! (These days I heard Santa just downloads One Direction from the Itunes store. Dark days are upon us, for sure).

But musicians themselves embody a stubborn insistence on old, outdated, inconvenient technology. Most guitar players not only don't use digital amps, they don't even use solid state amps--kind of the bridge to the digital world it seems. They use vacuum tube amps: state of the art technology---in 1930. Stereos and TV's used to be made with tubes too but only guitar amps survive as a standard bearer of the old technology because, most agree, they sound better.
 

Kids, machines are a lot like people: give them one job to do and they just might do a great job at it. Give them multiple jobs and they might do all of them, but will they ever do any of them brilliantly or just passably? Will they be jacks of all trades but masters of none? A smartphone can take photos—but the best smartphone camera is 8 megapixels while an average stand-alone digital camera is in the double digits. Smartphones can play music—but they will never sound as good as a CD or a record. You can type on them—but you have to touch type: which is a bit like crawling after you’ve already learned to walk. You can watch videos—but they will never look as good as on a big screen TV or PC. I’m not sure if there is anything a smartphone does that you can legitimately say it does great except maybe tell time—but they destroy the coolness of a wristwatch. They also work as phones but lack the clumsy coolness of an old analog phone with its rotary dialing ability. You might say they were slow, but I say they were still faster than a laptop touchpad and didn’t make you want to punch something.     
 

Maybe smartphones are a symbol of our modern world where we try to do everything at once. I think our whole economy is in trouble because businesses and politicians seem to have taken the smartphone, All In One approach to managing everything. Businesses want to make profits on sales but they also want to not pay their employees as much—but if every business does the same, who will have the money to keep buying products and services at the same rates? Politicians want to grow the economy but they also don’t want to raise taxes---but how can you grow an economy when you’ve depleted your own education system in the name of lower taxes? You can do all these things at once—but can you have a society which is excelling or just functioning? Our economy today is like an mp3 player, not a home stereo system. You can opt for the convenience and “all in one” approach of a fast food restaurant, but can you expect to have long term health too? Trying to marry convenience and quality in every single aspect of life is a losing game! I say quality rules and convenience blows!

Well, I better wrap this up before my convenient, space saving, versatile All In Once 21^st Century PC blows up. If you want convenience, better make sure you have a good smoke alarm.  

PS--they will have to pry my smartphone from me with my cold, dead hands!